January 8, 2020 • 51 mins
At 1:15 AM on November 2nd, 1987, an Ada, Oklahoma woman felt a gun at the back of her head as she unlocked her door. She was robbed, burglarized, and raped by an otherwise nondescript black assailant who had a gold tooth. While filming a Crime Stoppers video about the incident, Detective Jeff Crosby approached bystander Perry Lott. Noticing his gold tooth, Perry was brought in for questioning and a line up despite his alibi. With all the other men in the line up wearing foil to simulate a gold tooth, Perry was identified as the attacker. In absence of any other evidence beyond the eyewitness identification, Mr Lott was convicted and sentenced to 300 years in prison. After 25 years of appeals and parole hearings, the Innocence Project was able to test the 1987 rape kit for Perry’s DNA, ultimately excluding him as the perpetrator.
This interview was recorded at an art gallery opening for Rob Will, another innocent man currently on death row in Texas and features Perry Lott and Eric Cullen, the private investigator who conducted the interview with the victim alongside Detective Jeff Crosby where she recanted her eyewitness identification. After 30 years in prison, Perry Lott agreed to a sentence modification in the form of time served rather than risking his fate on the Oklahoman authorities’ willingness to accept the facts in this case. He is currently on lifetime probation and fighting to clear his good name.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
On November two, that one am in Ada, Oklahoma. The
victim felt a gun at the back of her head
as she unlocked the door to her home. She was
pushed inside, robbed and raped by a black man who
was described as between five seven and six two, wearing
a hat and jacket and perhaps a gold tooth. Detectives
filmed the Crime Stoppers reenactment video about the robbery and rape,
(00:23):
and they approached Perry Lott, who was parked nearby. While
they asked him a few questions about his whereabouts during
the incident, they noticed that he had a gold tooth,
and Perry, a bit of a ladies man, explained that
he was in the area to see his girlfriend, but
had been with his fiancee from three thirty pm on
November one through six thirty am the following morning. Despite
(00:44):
his alibi, police brought him in for further questioning. There
they put him into a lineup and the rest of
the men were given get this gold foil from a
nearby florist to simulate having a gold tooth. The victim
not surprisingly identified Perry lot that in there as her attacker.
A rape kid had been done the morning the incident,
(01:04):
but DNA technology was not yet available to exclude Mr
Lott as it later would, and Perry Lott tragically was
sentenced to three hundred years for rape, robbery, burglary, and
making a bomb threat related to the incident. In this episode,
which was recorded at an art show opening featuring the
work of an innocent man on death row in Texas,
(01:26):
rob Will, we interviewed Perry Lott and Eric Collin, the
private investigator that was originally tasked with taking Perry's DNA swap,
only to end up becoming one of his fiercest and
most loyal advocates. This is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to
(01:50):
wrongful conviction. We have two incredible gentlemen in the studio
with me today, and the studio is not even a studio,
but I'll tell you more about that later. Um. First
of all, I'll save the best for last. We have
Eric Cullen, private investigator who has played an active role
in more reversals now that I can count on probably
both hands. It's great to have you here. Welcome to
(02:12):
the show. Thank you, good to be here. And with
Eric is a gentleman who he was instrumental in helping
to free an individual who served three decades thirty one
years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. D
n A proved it. Perry, welcome to show. I'm really
(02:32):
honored to have you here. Greetings, Jason. Is very exciting
to be here. And also I've been looking forward to
this for for some months now. That's awesome. And after
thirty one years in prison, this is your first first
emper It's very exciting. We can call this the exclusive
interview with very a lot. Yeah, Perry, let's go back
to the beginning. First of all, your case took place
(02:52):
in Ada, Oklahoma, and Ada has become synonymous with wrongful
convictions because John Grisha exposed the fact that there were
six wrongful convictions in the space of just over a
year in this tiny town, and those were profiled in
his book An Innocent Manner. Four of them were and
you happen to fall into that town not knowing that
(03:14):
it was, I mean a trap. And you were a
young man at the time, twenty four years old. Twenty
four years old, you still look pretty young for what
it's worth, thank you old and didn't know it. And
in this case, um, it has a lot of the
common factors that we see in wrongful conviction cases. Of course,
(03:35):
as the most common factor, I witness misidentification across racial
I witness miss identification, which we know are even more
unreliable than same race. Uh. And those are notoriously unreliable,
and they played a factor in the higher percentage of
wrongful conviction cases than anything else. So let's go back
to when this happened and how it happened. Because you
(03:56):
were teaching school at the time, right and aid in Wisconsin.
And in six around Christmas time, I get a call
from an old girlfriend in a Toka, Oklahoma, and I
was between jobs, you know, feeling kind of bad about
my surroundings, seen a lot of negativity that I didn't
want to get involved with. So relocating Oklahoma was my option,
(04:19):
my best option, and that's what I did. I went
to Oklahoma, ended up in a Toka, worked there for
a couple of weeks, found a better job in Ada,
and moved to Ada. And that was the beginning of
my sorrows. That's a very eloquent way of putting it.
And Eric, I want to turn to you for a second,
so can you take us back to this case. And
(04:41):
this is a horrible crime. The local woman in Ada
had her home broken into after one in the morning.
The assailant pushed her into her house, stole money from
her purse, and did unspeakable things to her. Yeah, so
the victor always contended to police and testified it trial
that she received several prank calls at her home, harassing calls,
(05:05):
I think she might have stated. Then she goes to work,
which is basically across the street to a restaurant she
managed called Arby's Um. There she works her complete shift
or just about her complete shift, and she claims that
a bomb threat was levied by the same voice that
(05:25):
had been calling her harassing her at her home all day.
That was a sign like a horror movie, right right,
And so she clears her store, calls the police, no bomb.
They go ahead and close the store down, and she
claims again that the same caller calls the store again
and asked why she closed the store down. I told
(05:47):
you I was going to blow the place up if
you didn't close the store down. Of course, the building
never blew up. That's what she contended all the way
through trial. Then she goes at approximately one one thirty
home back across the street. That's where She testified that
one black male had pushed her in her home, put
(06:10):
a condom on and raped her and then took upwards
of two from her purse. And then she also claims,
of course she lost deposit receipts from the Arvy's close
out cash too right, and he did other disgusting things.
It was a picture of her daughter in the house
that he apparently uh had sort of did sexual things
(06:34):
to the photograph and like very very bizarre character. Whoever
this guy was correct, That's what she testified to Perry.
Did you know anything about this crime? He is a
small community, didn't get the word get around. I did
not know anything about the crime when I was first
approached by Officer Crosby. I was in that area of
(06:55):
the crime scene, but I had no idea of crime
had been committed. I had no idea who this woman was.
Then remember that name Crosby, everyone who's listening, because that's
going to be a crazy development as we go on
with this story. So in this case, we know that
the eyewitness misidentification was not inadvertence, right, it wasn't. It
(07:15):
wasn't an accident, and she was steered is probably too
light of a word. To describe how they ended up
convincing her to identify you. And we know that the
mind is not a camera. I think a lot of
people think that you see something, you recognize, that you
remember it. That's not the way it works at all.
And of course, again in the cross racial situation, it's
(07:36):
even more prone to mistakes. But the victim had described
that her assailant had a cold tooth or half a
gold tooth, right, that's what they say. Personally, I don't
believe she ever mentioned the gold tooth in her initial
description of her assailant, mainly because of this. I've seen
(07:58):
the police report where the victim it was a description
at the very end was a goal to flag it
had been added on. She wasn't able to identify his
his hair color or type because he hated and he
wore a jacket and things like that. And her description
was so general that she said that it was just
a black mail between five seven and six too. That
(08:21):
describes most people, right, That describes entirely to hold black
community mostly. Yeah, how did it get from there to
where Perry ends up in the lineup? He had an
alibi on top of everything else, a very solid alibi right,
They didn't care about that. No. How they landed on
Perry was they were doing a recreation of the crime
(08:45):
for a show called Crime Stoppers down there at the
time they would run on unsolved crimes or you know,
fresh crimes even and they were filming that day and
Perry had been in the neighborhood visiting someone just to
block away. He goes, was turned the corner and sees
his camera crews up there, and he stops on the
side of the road to watch. Detective Crosby goes and
(09:07):
approaches Perry at the car, notices the gold tooth and
it's all downhill from there. Yes, you voluntarily went into
the police station, and I imagine when you went in
there you probably thought, well, I mean, I'm just going
in and tell them what I know and go home. Yes, sir, uh,
like I said, Mr Crosby came and approached me that night.
(09:28):
They questioned me for hours at the police station, search
my car, search my home, took me back to the
police station, released me with the words you can go home,
but don't leave town. So I went home and my
fiance was there, and evidently they had questioned her while
(09:50):
they were questioning me. And we had a lot of tizzy,
a little bit of a spat because I just recently
came to her home from Wisconsin, and now she's hearing that, Hey,
your boyfriend might be a rapist, you know, so of
course she's going to be on age somewhat. That next morning,
(10:10):
at work, I was approached by Crosbie again, would you
mind helping us out? You need to need you to
be in a lineup, like you know, I'm just doing
what any average citizen would do, doing what my dad
had always taught me to do, is obey the police, cooperate,
don't get disrespectful. So I'll go to the police station
(10:31):
with them and participate in his lineup, right, And then
it's almost comical to think that they had They said,
there's nothing funny about it. They took the other men
that they put in lineup and put aluminum foil because
I have to simulate a gold tooth in their mouth.
But you were the only one that actually had a
gold tooth. Plus they had you say the words that
she said she had heard. And uh, after the lineup,
(10:54):
he comes with a shit eating green on his face. Yeah. Uh,
she picked you out and said what she picked me yeah,
she picked you, and I'm you know, right there. I'm
just in a whirlpool of confusion. So I'm in the
(11:15):
city jail for a couple of weeks, you know, screaming, Hey,
I didn't do this, you guys making a mistake. Nobody
heard that, nobody wanted to hear that. They moved me
across the street to the county jail, and I stayed
there for a couple of months. At least. The quarter
pointed attorney never came to see me. I never knew
(11:37):
who I was until just right before time for appearances
in court. His name was Frank Baber and uh me
being so naive since I didn't do this, I'm thinking
this has been easiest flipping over a pancake to get
me out of this situation. There's so much that he
allowed to go on that I now know he should
(11:59):
have been object think it's like, hey, are you on
my side or you on their side? That's what I
was thinking in my head because at the time, even
being totally unaware of what the law says, you get
a feeling as a defendant if someone is vigorously trying
(12:21):
to defend you. I didn't get that feeling It sounds
like it was more processing you than defending you. Processing
that's right. Did you hold out any hope that they
were going to find you innocent or were I had
always thought they would find me innocent because I knew
that they had no evidence of me doing anything. I
knew that I had not done anything. I'm thinking that
(12:44):
this is going all the way up into picking the jury,
and you guys still think I did this. How can
you think I did this? What I did not know
at the time was that I witness testimony was considered evidence.
That's what out me. I'm sitting there thinking, Okay, where's
the rick kit, where's the fingerprints, where's the picture that
(13:07):
you say was taken out of the home, Where's the
money that you say was missing? I was flat broke
at the time. Hell, when they searched my house, they
found a twenty dollar bill that my fiance had hidden
in her dresser and it floated to the floor. Now
I asked Jeff Crosby, I said, can I have that?
And he says, yeah, you can have that. So I
(13:28):
picked up that twenty dollar bill and put it in
my pocket. I didn't know better. So I ended up
in prison and the trial lasted all of eight hours.
Eight hours. The trial lasted less than a working day,
(13:50):
and you were sentenced to three hundred years consecutive sentences,
four charges, four different sentences, one hundred fifty and fifty
for rape, robbery, burglary, and bomb threatening three hundred years.
It's such a it's such a preposterous concept. I mean,
(14:11):
just the idea that we even do that in this country.
Here you hear these sentences a thousand years and Oklahoma's
notorious for these and again I'm not minimizing the nature
of the crime, but Jesus Christ um Anyway, an interesting
side note, um free trial. I think it's interested that
back to how they were doing things in pot to
(14:32):
Taluk County, Aida, Williamson and Fritz were in jail with
Parish Well and Williamson and Fritz were two of the
men that were profiled in the John Grisham the only
nonfiction book that John has ever written, That's The Innocent Man.
And John told me John was on wrangful conviction. He
said that when he wrote that book he had to
(14:52):
write it as nonfiction. He says, because when I write fiction,
I have to make it believable. And he goes the story,
the audience is not going to follow along, gonna lose
my readers because this doesn't make any logical sense. And
Williamson and Fritz such an unbelievably tragic case of two
men wrongly convicted and one of whom lost his mind
in prison and just months after he was released ended up.
(15:14):
Dad really really sad, and he had been a elkland
A's pitching prospect. He had had his life ahead of him.
And the whole thing is a tragedy on top of
a tragedy. Not to mention that there was no justice
for the victim, which was a rape and murder case.
Um and I want to go back to this, um uh,
witness identification. If you, the listener, end up on a
(15:35):
jury and you have a Perry Lot in front of you,
you're in a criminal case and there's no evidence except
eye witness identification. You should keep this in mind. And
I'm quoting from the amazing book Convicting the Innocent by
Brandon Garrett, which is sort of like the Bible of
wrongful conviction causes and practices that lead to them. He
(15:58):
said that many DNA exoner ration cases involving mistaken eye
witnesses involved the use of suggestive identification procedures. A study
of the first two DNA exonerations revealed that an incredible
eight percent of the mistaken witness exonerations involved either factors
that are known to affect the reliability of the identification,
(16:19):
some suggestiveness and the identification procedure, or both, and in
this case it was both. So the jury comes in.
It was the most surreal moment of my life. When
the jury came back and they found me guilty, all
I could do was stare in the space. I was
just sitting there in shock. And when they started reading
(16:43):
off the terms one years, one hundred years, I was paralyzed,
wondering what how can they be allowed to count more
than a person can actually leave? If I die in prison,
you're still gonna make me do time? What you know?
I mean, It's like you said, it just don't make
(17:03):
sense to give a person more time than a lifespan,
you know what I mean? In case you come back
to life, maybe they want to back back and I
don't know, and then you have to come back to
life at least a couple of times and still live
a long life. Who thing is ridiculous. I had a
discussion with Eric just last night. I said, you know,
they should take the sentence and portion of the trial
(17:25):
out of the jury's hands because they are citizens. They
get emotional, they're angry when they get the details of
these crimes. Whether it's uh coherst or whether it's fabricated
or whether it's just plain fact. These people have emotional
(17:45):
attachments to that, and that's why they give people these
exponential amounts of time when you know, a hundred years
is enough to see a person die in prison, but
you want to go overkilled and even the just breaking
it down to the granular level, just the idea that
they send you to fifty years for robbery and the
robbery was a dred and twenty dollars, right or whatever
(18:07):
it was like that, I mean in fifty for the
bomb threat. Additional fifty the bomb threat as well. Yeah,
and we know, of course that these threats went on
and there were other cases after Perry was arrested and
convicted where whoever the actual perpetrator was continued with the
same memo, which should be not even a red flag,
should be a flashing red light where they go, hold up,
(18:28):
this is we got, We're bucked up, you know what
I mean. But that's not what happened. So so you
get take into prison, yes, prison life. After sitting in
the counter jail for four or five months, you're kind
of glad to go to prison. So it's it's a
real misstep thing in the mind. You know. It's like
(18:49):
they say, the eyes will play tricks on you. After
a certain amount of time with the traumatic situation or
unfamiliar situation, the mind will start playing tricks on YouTube.
You hear things, you see things, you imagine things. So
once I did get in the d OC system, I
(19:10):
was glad to have a bed. I was glad to
have fresh clothes, a shower, movement of the things you
don't get into counter jail. So that took a lot
of pressure off of what I was going through at
the time. Then I think most people don't realize, but
I hear from so many of the exonorees that the
(19:31):
jails are worse than the prisons, And it's actually logical
when you think about it. I think people theory were jail.
They think of like the classic thing in the movies
where it's like a country place and it ain't like
Barney and Andy like that. So you know like that,
it's true all over the country and jails it's just
a powder kick because everybody is in the cell together.
There's no recreation, there's no education, there's no release of anything,
(19:52):
there's no outdoors, there's nothing. So and as you said,
no clean clothes. I mean, it's really and it's designed
to break people. And I actually make them confessed the
crimes they didn't commit just to go home. These places
are dirty, their incubators of disease. They wouldn't worsh it
on my worst ending. A lot of informant jail house
and snitch stuff comes out of that environment too. And
(20:14):
now you went to the prison and you're sentenced to
well life because three hundred years, you know you weren't
going to live that long. It's a miracle you lived
through this whole experience in the first place. It surely is.
I went in at twenty four years old, waited three
or four years for the direct appeal once that was affirmed,
(20:35):
and had no idea how the hell they affirmed that
affirmed your conviction. How do you do that with the
facts all laid out. I should have been home after
three or four I knew enough about law to know
that what the jury says is what the jury says. However,
that's what the appeal processes for correct directify with the
(20:58):
jury in the courtroom allowed that should never been allowed.
When I was affirmed, I knew that I had a
war on my hands. I had to become my own
attorney because my family could not afford to help me.
They were so far away in Wisconsin. I was basically
(21:21):
by myself against this eight. I like to point out
to people when I talked to them about this, when
it says a lot versus eight, it's just like Oklahoma
versus Texas, you're at war. I had to learn as
(21:41):
quick as possible, as much as possible about what avenues
is going to get me set free, because now I
am here and it doesn't have a back door. Well,
(22:14):
once I got to about twelve fifteen years in, I
started losing it. I started losing hope. I started thinking
I just might die in here. And two thousand two
was the first time I went up for parole. Nothing changed,
And two thousand and five I had a near death
(22:36):
experience with staff infection. That's why I am partially disabled now.
Staff infection had gotten into my system. I didn't even
know what staff was, so it lingered in my body,
actually got into my blood and mercered and attached to
(22:56):
my spinal cord in my neck and day it was
eating through the vertebrae in my net, exposed a few nerves,
and uh, I'm lucky to be alive. So two thousand
five hours hospitalized. So they skipped over my parole hearing. Yes, yes,
(23:19):
they totally skipped over my parole hearing. So I had
to wait until two thousand and eight. That was probably
the only time I ever considered dying in prison, And uh,
that was two thousand five. Between two thousand five and
two thousand eight, I saw and I sensed that I
(23:40):
wasn't ever gonna be released by this parole board because
they probably wanted you to admit gil right. I wrote
a letter thinking that if I admit to this crime,
they just maybe give me some relief, because in prison,
you are under the impression that they want some kind
of remorse, they want some kind of confession. They want
(24:04):
to see you broke down, especially when you've been claiming
to be innocent. So I'm thinking I'm gonna give them
what they want. I'm going to manipulate my way out
of here. That's after so many years of being in
you start thinking like this, well, the truth isn't working,
so now I'm gonna lie and see if that will
do anything. Well. Between two thousand and eight and two
thousand and eleven, the Innocence Project took my case. The
(24:28):
first thing I did was told my attorneys, hey, look,
we got an issue. I've already confessed to these crimes.
I didn't do them, but I confessed to him trying
to manipulate and got the letters retracted and we explained
why I did that. It was kind of like a duress,
and that was probably the last time I had given
(24:50):
up hope. But prior to that, I had already started
feeling like it's hopeless against this. There's no way I'm
going to be able to I mean, I have done
a stack of brief like this on my case and
good good law work, pros a lit again law work,
and nothing ever worked. I said, damn, you know the
(25:12):
law is written. Why aren't you guys giving me some relief?
Why aren't you actually paying attention to the laws That
very everything in the law says that I should be
getting some kind of relief from the state. You guys
never really proved anything here. Why am I in prison?
What connection do you have other than this high witness testimony?
(25:36):
Being denied so many times was detrimental because when you
feel like you have no hope of ever reaching anybody
with the truth, you become something different. And if you
don't have good people around you too help you get
your mind right, you're going to become part of that
(25:57):
prison and you're never gonna leave. It's kind of like
the saut Shank for diption where the guy says, these
walls do something to you. They do. Yeah, that movie
had a profound effect on me and so many other people. Um,
nobody's listening. The Innocence Project gets involved, that's obviously a
huge development. That's the only time I regained hope. Yep.
(26:19):
Actually I took my hands off the wheel when I knew.
When you hear the word Innocence Project in prison, you
know you've got the kind of help you need. That
place is synonymous with God when you're an innocent person.
The Innocence Project, when you hear that name, you you
you know you're going home. Wow, that's heavy. Um, that's
(26:42):
great to hear having been there myself for six years. Um,
it's amazing. I've never heard it put that way before,
but it's it's great to hear. That obviously means a lot.
So innce this project gets involved, how did you get
involved there and how did you help to resolve this?
And how the hell is he here instead of serving
another two D seventy something years, uh, two D sixty
(27:05):
eight to be exact. That's my champion right there, man.
So I UM, I was working on some other post
conviction cases and UM Karen Thompson had reached out to
me on a referral from some lawyers that I was
working with on those cases. So in two thousand thirteen,
(27:25):
Karen wanted me to simply go meet Perry at Dick
Connor in prison and take his DNA sample and and
then of course to get that sample to sell Mark,
which is who the Innocence Project uses to test their
DNA right the DNA lab very fast day. They're the
best sel Mark. And in the meantime Karen win hadn't
assigned me some other duties. One of those things was
(27:48):
to find an alternate suspect and find an individual who
actually did this. Well, I spent a lot of time
doing that and doing my own covert methods of obtaining DNA,
such as posing as somebody from the casino with you know,
to pull this guy's trash that I thought, you know,
(28:09):
I've done it, and he's a the casino guy, show
up the gift guard. Hey like this envelope. We actually
went that far, you know, tested it in the whole
bit and a gift card trick. That's good, yeah, yeah,
and so but it was very disheartening. Uh, this guy's
been acquitted of two rapes I think one one dismissal
and one to quit, all within this somewhat of a
(28:31):
similar m A and man, we were pretty confident it
was him, and of course a little heartbroken to find
out it was. And but then again, we don't want
to be part of wrongfully accusing people either, So we
moved on from this this guy, and so we continue
to move along the whole time, though in the mean meantime,
(28:52):
Karen is constantly trying to get the d A from
Potadak County. Who's this guy that's been there since the
Williamson frit fought no Ward days. They're just so stuck,
I mean, in their ways and Karen trying to budge
him just to cooperate. Well, let's at least let my
investigator interview this victim. And so, long story short, Finally
(29:17):
Detective Crosby, who's still there as well, finds the victim
and it was agreed upon that he and I would
go interview her together. And this is where ship gets real.
He gets real real. So tell us about that. Yeah,
so we agreed that he would go first and I
(29:38):
wouldn't interrupt him, and I would go last and he
wouldn't interrupt me. We get in there, the victim says
that going along with a whole bit, everything's the same,
nothing's really changed today as I sit here, and and
then at some point, um, of course we've been in
the room. I've done it. No telling how many interviews
(29:59):
have individuals, from defendants to suspects. You just get the
body language. Part two you can't really read in the transcript.
I could see something change in her body language that
was very much in line, and the energy was that
she was ready to get this off of chess and
tired of carrying this around. And in fact in the
transcript you can read in there he actually asked her
(30:20):
if she's okay. During his questioning of her, it was
really light, you know, and she had to get a
drink of water. Her mouth was dry, and she stuttering
things like that. And then it was my turn. And
then in the beginning of my interview with her, she
was definitive that it was still Parring. She was definitive
that it was his voice and that that voice is
(30:42):
what carried her through her certainty it was Parry. And
then the best thing I had to do, and I've
done this many times, was and again I knew she
had other things to say. Okay, well I'm ready. Is
that all you have now? Yeah? Okay, well I'm okay.
(31:03):
Well let's wrap it up. I appreciate your time, and
this has been tough. And then she tells me more
I do that about three times. She ends up telling
me that she IDN'TI fied Perry on a hunch, that
on a hunch that she did not receive multiple calls
(31:26):
that day at her home, that she only received one
call at the Arby's at her work, that there were
two men there, not one, and the Kuda gral was
is that it wasn't even his voice. So this was
(31:47):
I see you smiling on. I mean, that was a
Eureka moment for you, absolutely, and I was so stunned
that I didn't even realize she had said the A
and two men in the interview as we sat there
as this was unraveling, and at this point, Detective Crosby
(32:07):
starts to interrupt, interject and sway her, even to the
point of telling her that deep into her confession, so
to speak, that he still thinks that Perry's the guy
that did that to her. Her story totally flipped when
(32:28):
Eric got in front of her read the transcripts attached
to post conviction relief filing. I mean, um, you could
see I was ready to leave her home three times,
and she wasn't ready for me to leave. She wanted
to She wanted to get this off her chest, right,
And then then then things start to really roll. And
then so, at what point did you know you were
(32:48):
going home? And I said, the Innocence Project took my
case in two thousand and eleven, and it was a
couple of years after that fourteen when you got involved,
when they came and got my DNA inside the prison.
I think that was the moment I knew I was
going home. Eric can you just explain the DNA findings
(33:11):
in this case and how they impacted the outcome. Yes,
so there were two contributors found in the victims canal
her the rape kit done in her ex husband was
generous enough to to meet with me and allowed me
to collect his denna as well, And that was one
of the matches. The other match is still unknown. I
(33:35):
have my thoughts on who it is as I sit here,
But Perry was excluded, that didn't do it. Those are
the magic words. Perry was excluded. Karen and I are
obviously very excited, the projects excited, but Ada being Ada,
(33:56):
this none of this was good enough. That still wasn't
good that they're still gonna fight it. They're still gonna
fight the DNA, They're still gonna fight basically confession from
the victim. And then so they're forcing us the state
all the way to a post conviction relief hearing, and
so July nine that that was one of what would
probably be two to three hearings. Jeff Crosby is slated
(34:20):
to testify on July nine, and of course I'll let
Perry tell the audience tell you what would happened on
the ninth, But on the seventh, unbeknownst to Perry and
the team, Detutive Crosby had taken his own life. So
(34:40):
two days before the Saturday and Sunday, I was appearing
in court that Monday. So I mean, obviously we will
never know, but do you have any theory as to
why he did that? I mean, the timing is not coincidental,
that would be the only thought. I'm an investigator, a
lot of fan of coincidence, so I didn't find it
coincidental at all. He was getting ready to get chopped
(35:03):
up on the stand on Monday. I think people at
home are probably wondering, why in the world, with d
n A scientifically proving that Perry had nothing to do
(35:27):
with this crime, and with the victim herself recanting her testimony,
and with no evidence whatsoever connecting him to it, why
is he on probation. Well, first off, that was something
that Perry had to discuss with his two attorneys at
the time. I wasn't part of that conversation, but I
(35:49):
know enough that I can speak about it. The risk
out of that county because it's a district judge, so
that here's this, they transition to a new d A.
But it's still the same type of mindset in that county.
So the risk, with all of this being put before
a judge of still losing was still there, believe it
or not, And so Perry and his attorneys had to
(36:13):
decide do we want to take that risk or do
you want to go home today and live to find
another day. In almost any other circumstance anywhere else, you
would just put this up in front of the judge,
put your evidence you're hearing on. Judge takes some time
for finding the facts in law, and you get your
ruling of actual innocence. It makes no sense, and it
truly is a sophie's choice. I'd spent now twentysothing years,
(36:37):
twenty five years or so wondering how the hel do
these people got me in prison and how come I
can't get myself out of this. Karen helped me figure
that out by helping me see that all of the
things that we think should go right, when other people
in power don't want to to go right, they had
(36:59):
the power to make it go wrong. So she kept
asking me, she said, how do you do it? How
do you do it? And it's talking about keeping a
smile and a good attitude with all of this other stuff.
How are you always in such a good mood? I said,
It's just I love people. I cannot let this situation
(37:22):
change me. A matter of fact, that's one of the
things that I decided that that when I told you
I was sitting at the defendant table and shock, I
knew at that moment I had to remain in that
state of mind of who I was. I had to
really get a tight grip on my identity and hold
(37:44):
on to that for dear life, because I knew that
this experience was going to do everything in its power
to make me something I was not beginning with a rapist.
Never in my life would I even considered attacking a
woman when you can you know pretty much, I've called
(38:05):
myself a player black back in them days, you know
you you don't. Back in them days when you got
it like I had it, you didn't have to take
anything from a woman. You could ask, and you ask
with a certain amount of finess. I'm not saying, you
know you have to say anything else. You got it.
(38:27):
You get the impression I'm trying to make, So you know,
the thing is, uh, I will always appreciate Karen in
my life because she helped me understand something I never
could figure out in twenty five years, is how am
I doing this? What is it that keeping me bolstered?
(38:47):
And I realized it was a mixture of family, church,
good friends around me that had their mind on right.
As she says, finally, after she had worked on my
case a little while, she said, Mr Lott, I think
I got you figured out. I said, oh yeah, we'll
tell me. She said, I know how you do it.
(39:09):
And this is after I've been disabled. And I said,
oh yeah, what do you think? She said, you do
it one step at a time, day by day. And
the lights came on up in my head. I said, damn,
you got it figured out. Now. That's when I knew
I was going home by continually walking day by day,
one day at a time, and one step at a time. Said.
(39:32):
At that time, I was taking a little bitty baby steps.
The disability I had, I was prognosed to never walk again,
to never get out of the bed again. But I
struggled and struggled, and I began walking and a little
bitty baby steps, and then I started really pushing myself.
(39:53):
I can take a full stride now with just a
little bit of pain. And back in that time, I
could a little bitty baby stuff like that and it
would hurt like hell. That's how it is. You know, Well,
you answer the question. Before I asked that, I was
gonna ask whether you're better, and I don't have to
ask that anymore. Um penitentiary will do two things to
a person that will make them better or to make
(40:16):
them better. And it's a choice that you have to
make before you go in that institution, before we go
to what I call our closing arguments, and I'll explain
to you what that is. Just talk a little bit
about what you're doing now, because you're actually working with
this guy, right awesome. Yes, Eric approached me about a
(40:37):
job and I said, well, man, the time to think
about it. I was disabled, not really confident in my abilities,
not knowing that I had abilities. A couple of months
went Bias said hey, I need to answer, that's okay,
And he told me that I could earn so much money,
which is like twice as much as I would get
(40:59):
on disability. And I didn't feel right on disability anyway.
So when I had the job opportunity, I wanted to
jump at it, but I was hesitant because of my
state of mind. You know, what can I do? I'm
thirty years missing in action, no record of work history,
no record of medical history. I didn't know I had
(41:21):
any ability at all. So when Eric offered me the job,
I said, don't give me time to think about that,
and I'm just trying to figure out a way to
tell them new and eventually, man he made an argument
with me, is I couldn't deny that I could probably
do this job in prison. I did this for twenty
(41:42):
five years trying to get out of prison. I call
it calming the records. You know how they have a
rape kit and they comb the pubics. They're looking for
whatever doesn't belong in those pubics. When I calmed the records,
I looked word for word, line for line, looking for
what doesn't belong here or it's missing from here. And
it's a skill that you develop without knowing that you're
(42:06):
actually developing it. You know, because when you work on
your own case daily for twenty five years, you don't
realize it, but you grow old and you grow knowledge
of the law and how it should be applied. Perry
works for another five of one C three Another Chance
Justice Project, and then we work on rowful convictions and
(42:28):
excessive sentencing and some commutation there. But my private firm
is calling an associates. Perry is employed through the project,
calling an associates. Yeah, we should. You should shout that
out a little bit. And of course, one of my
favorite human beings who has also been on the show,
Michelle Murphy, I served twenty years, was exonerated with DNA,
(42:49):
the only female DNA's honor read from Oklahoma. Encourage people
to listen to that episode. It's an incredible episode of
rawful conviction with Michelle Murphy. But show she's working with
you as well, so you have Yeah, I mean it's
actually perfectly logical. You're taking people who have actually the
most profound experience and the most knowledge from having to
out of necessity, having to do all this research to
(43:11):
get themselves free and to help others inside penitentiary. So
you've got to You've got the dream team with Perry
and Michelle. I love it, you know, um so um,
you know I always say on the show, you know,
I'm happy you're here, but I'm sorry you're here. I mean,
I'm sorry you had to go through what you had
to go through to get here. But it means an
(43:31):
awful lot that you came in and came to New York,
all the way from Oklahoma to share your incredible story,
your spirit, your wisdom, your outlook. We got the whole
Perry lot when I found out I was going to
be here that I just wanted to see you again. Man, Well,
what can I say? I'm just about to melt into
a puddle over here, whereas the old saying goes knocked
(43:54):
me down with a feather. Um. One of the reasons
why today's episode is unique is be because we are
recording this in the middle of an art exhibit by
an innocent man on death row in Texas, a guy
named Rob Will who has created this remarkable collection of
work from his tiny cell. I can't not mention that
(44:18):
it's um sort of a heavy day as well, because
as we sit here, Texas is probably in the process
in the last couple hours before they carry out another
execution of an innocent man. Larry Swerringin is going to
be executed today, almost certainly in spite of evidence of
his actual innocence. So um, we'll just have a moment
(44:41):
of silence for Larry. Okay, so this is the part
of the show. Um where again, uh, this is my
favorite part the show. I think it's a lot of
(45:01):
people's favorite part of the show. We get feedback online, etcetera.
Where um, I get to once again thank you to
outstanding freedom fighters for coming and being on rawful conviction
with me. Um. Eric, I know we'll be doing more
of these in the future, and we're working together on
various cases. And I'm a huge fan of your work.
(45:23):
I think you're one of the top people in the
country at what you do, and UM, we need more
of you. So Eric Clin, thank you again for being
here my pleasure. And Perry again, I thank you before.
I'll thank you again, and I'm looking forward to working
with you in the future and spending more time together.
And now, like I said, this is what we call
(45:43):
closing arguments. So this is where I get to turn
my microphone off. I kind of kicked back rock back
in my chair and just listen and turn the microphones
over to you for your closing thoughts. I call it
closing arguments. Was really closing thoughts on anything you want
to say, anything we may have left out, or anything
at all. And again we'll save the best for last.
(46:04):
No offense there. But the start of the show is
Perry So but but first, um, Eric, you're closing thoughts.
Perry's case is just a shining example. Again you covered
it of the eyewitness identification problem. It's also a shining
example of why Oklahoma is number one in incarcerating African
(46:26):
American males in the world. And then of course on
the side twenty eight years in a row for females,
which is a whole another topic. But there's no surprise
as to why we're here. When you hear Perry's story,
when you hear Michelle's story, when you hear Williamson frets,
all these different ones from Oklahoma, it's horrifying. Um. I
think we're at a point now where it's it's becoming
(46:48):
bipartisan this issue, you know. I think the eyes are open,
and you'd have to be a real fool to say
that abound for conviction zn't exists now. We're just several
years ago it wasn't quite there. That's what my closing,
Earn would be, And I would add one other thing.
We're not done with Peri's case. We're gonna work on
(47:08):
this till we get him fully exonerated. Erry. Yes, sir,
uh I heard you called me to star on the show. Well,
you guys are the stars of my show. You know,
without you guys in my life, I would probably be
dead in prison, still in prison. So I want to
(47:31):
thank you and honor you for that and your audience.
I want to honor you for being attentive. And I
want to admonish everyone under the sound of my voice
to get involved with this awareness, to get involved with
the injustice, the police brutality. The only way evil like
this prevails us. When good people say nothing, a lot
(47:55):
of people will see crime and close their windows, closed
their doors, turn their back. And that's why we're in
the state that we're in right now. We have to
be courageous enough to say I saw this. I want
to say something and the truth, you know, of being
(48:15):
in prison for thirty one years, I came out very
battle weary, uh, not too much confidence in my abilities.
As I said before, overwhelmed with the stimulus of the
free world. I still right now today have not cooked
my own first meal. After being out of prison for
(48:37):
it a year and some months. I don't have the
confidence to cook a meal. I don't really go into
big shopping malls anymore. There's too many choices. I'm not
used to that. I am enjoying the freedom of going
(48:57):
back and forth under certain limits, being on parole or probation.
But it feels good to be able to go here
and there without having to ask permission. So to speak.
Life is good, man, and it's getting better. You know,
I have a whole lot to be thankful for, even
though this misfortune happened to me and took away a
(49:20):
lot of my life. I tell people all the time,
I got a whole lot more yesterday's than I do tomorrow.
So I'm gonna make the most of it. And all
I really want to do now is just be the
best me that I can be, not only for myself
before anyone who's watching me, because someone's always watching, and
(49:41):
you never know what they're gonna pick up from you,
So I do my best to just be the best
example I can. I'm not perfect. I have a ways
to go. I'm not perfect, but I'm pretty close to it.
That's a joke, no, but honestly, you know, my heart
goes out to the youth of America. You know, the violence,
(50:05):
the games, the influences find other things to spend your
time with. I really don't want to be preachy, but
these are the things I've learned in the heart. Way
you know is ask questions, don't take anyone's word, find
your own truth, seek clarity, you know, just be true
(50:28):
to yourself. S very important. Thank you all for listening.
Thank you everyone at home. Don't forget to give us
(50:54):
a fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps.
And I'm a proud owner to the Innocence Project and
I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very
important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go
to Inness project dot org to learn how to donate
and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team,
Connor Hall and Kevin Wardis. The music on the show
(51:17):
is by three time OSCAR nominate composer Jay Ralph. Be
sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and
on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason
Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in
association with Signal Company Number one
On November two, that one am in Ada, Oklahoma. The
victim felt a gun at the back of her head
as she unlocked the door to her home. She was
pushed inside, robbed and raped by a black man who
was described as between five seven and six two, wearing
a hat and jacket and perhaps a gold tooth. Detectives
filmed the Crime Stoppers reenactment video about the robbery and rape,
(00:23):
and they approached Perry Lott, who was parked nearby. While
they asked him a few questions about his whereabouts during
the incident, they noticed that he had a gold tooth,
and Perry, a bit of a ladies man, explained that
he was in the area to see his girlfriend, but
had been with his fiancee from three thirty pm on
November one through six thirty am the following morning. Despite
(00:44):
his alibi, police brought him in for further questioning. There
they put him into a lineup and the rest of
the men were given get this gold foil from a
nearby florist to simulate having a gold tooth. The victim
not surprisingly identified Perry lot that in there as her attacker.
A rape kid had been done the morning the incident,
(01:04):
but DNA technology was not yet available to exclude Mr
Lott as it later would, and Perry Lott tragically was
sentenced to three hundred years for rape, robbery, burglary, and
making a bomb threat related to the incident. In this episode,
which was recorded at an art show opening featuring the
work of an innocent man on death row in Texas,
(01:26):
rob Will, we interviewed Perry Lott and Eric Collin, the
private investigator that was originally tasked with taking Perry's DNA swap,
only to end up becoming one of his fiercest and
most loyal advocates. This is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to
(01:50):
wrongful conviction. We have two incredible gentlemen in the studio
with me today, and the studio is not even a studio,
but I'll tell you more about that later. Um. First
of all, I'll save the best for last. We have
Eric Cullen, private investigator who has played an active role
in more reversals now that I can count on probably
both hands. It's great to have you here. Welcome to
(02:12):
the show. Thank you, good to be here. And with
Eric is a gentleman who he was instrumental in helping
to free an individual who served three decades thirty one
years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. D
n A proved it. Perry, welcome to show. I'm really
(02:32):
honored to have you here. Greetings, Jason. Is very exciting
to be here. And also I've been looking forward to
this for for some months now. That's awesome. And after
thirty one years in prison, this is your first first
emper It's very exciting. We can call this the exclusive
interview with very a lot. Yeah, Perry, let's go back
to the beginning. First of all, your case took place
(02:52):
in Ada, Oklahoma, and Ada has become synonymous with wrongful
convictions because John Grisha exposed the fact that there were
six wrongful convictions in the space of just over a
year in this tiny town, and those were profiled in
his book An Innocent Manner. Four of them were and
you happen to fall into that town not knowing that
(03:14):
it was, I mean a trap. And you were a
young man at the time, twenty four years old. Twenty
four years old, you still look pretty young for what
it's worth, thank you old and didn't know it. And
in this case, um, it has a lot of the
common factors that we see in wrongful conviction cases. Of course,
(03:35):
as the most common factor, I witness misidentification across racial
I witness miss identification, which we know are even more
unreliable than same race. Uh. And those are notoriously unreliable,
and they played a factor in the higher percentage of
wrongful conviction cases than anything else. So let's go back
to when this happened and how it happened. Because you
(03:56):
were teaching school at the time, right and aid in Wisconsin.
And in six around Christmas time, I get a call
from an old girlfriend in a Toka, Oklahoma, and I
was between jobs, you know, feeling kind of bad about
my surroundings, seen a lot of negativity that I didn't
want to get involved with. So relocating Oklahoma was my option,
(04:19):
my best option, and that's what I did. I went
to Oklahoma, ended up in a Toka, worked there for
a couple of weeks, found a better job in Ada,
and moved to Ada. And that was the beginning of
my sorrows. That's a very eloquent way of putting it.
And Eric, I want to turn to you for a second,
so can you take us back to this case. And
(04:41):
this is a horrible crime. The local woman in Ada
had her home broken into after one in the morning.
The assailant pushed her into her house, stole money from
her purse, and did unspeakable things to her. Yeah, so
the victor always contended to police and testified it trial
that she received several prank calls at her home, harassing calls,
(05:05):
I think she might have stated. Then she goes to work,
which is basically across the street to a restaurant she
managed called Arby's Um. There she works her complete shift
or just about her complete shift, and she claims that
a bomb threat was levied by the same voice that
(05:25):
had been calling her harassing her at her home all day.
That was a sign like a horror movie, right right,
And so she clears her store, calls the police, no bomb.
They go ahead and close the store down, and she
claims again that the same caller calls the store again
and asked why she closed the store down. I told
(05:47):
you I was going to blow the place up if
you didn't close the store down. Of course, the building
never blew up. That's what she contended all the way
through trial. Then she goes at approximately one one thirty
home back across the street. That's where She testified that
one black male had pushed her in her home, put
(06:10):
a condom on and raped her and then took upwards
of two from her purse. And then she also claims,
of course she lost deposit receipts from the Arvy's close
out cash too right, and he did other disgusting things.
It was a picture of her daughter in the house
that he apparently uh had sort of did sexual things
(06:34):
to the photograph and like very very bizarre character. Whoever
this guy was correct, That's what she testified to Perry.
Did you know anything about this crime? He is a
small community, didn't get the word get around. I did
not know anything about the crime when I was first
approached by Officer Crosby. I was in that area of
(06:55):
the crime scene, but I had no idea of crime
had been committed. I had no idea who this woman was.
Then remember that name Crosby, everyone who's listening, because that's
going to be a crazy development as we go on
with this story. So in this case, we know that
the eyewitness misidentification was not inadvertence, right, it wasn't. It
(07:15):
wasn't an accident, and she was steered is probably too
light of a word. To describe how they ended up
convincing her to identify you. And we know that the
mind is not a camera. I think a lot of
people think that you see something, you recognize, that you
remember it. That's not the way it works at all.
And of course, again in the cross racial situation, it's
(07:36):
even more prone to mistakes. But the victim had described
that her assailant had a cold tooth or half a
gold tooth, right, that's what they say. Personally, I don't
believe she ever mentioned the gold tooth in her initial
description of her assailant, mainly because of this. I've seen
(07:58):
the police report where the victim it was a description
at the very end was a goal to flag it
had been added on. She wasn't able to identify his
his hair color or type because he hated and he
wore a jacket and things like that. And her description
was so general that she said that it was just
a black mail between five seven and six too. That
(08:21):
describes most people, right, That describes entirely to hold black
community mostly. Yeah, how did it get from there to
where Perry ends up in the lineup? He had an
alibi on top of everything else, a very solid alibi right,
They didn't care about that. No. How they landed on
Perry was they were doing a recreation of the crime
(08:45):
for a show called Crime Stoppers down there at the
time they would run on unsolved crimes or you know,
fresh crimes even and they were filming that day and
Perry had been in the neighborhood visiting someone just to
block away. He goes, was turned the corner and sees
his camera crews up there, and he stops on the
side of the road to watch. Detective Crosby goes and
(09:07):
approaches Perry at the car, notices the gold tooth and
it's all downhill from there. Yes, you voluntarily went into
the police station, and I imagine when you went in
there you probably thought, well, I mean, I'm just going
in and tell them what I know and go home. Yes, sir, uh,
like I said, Mr Crosby came and approached me that night.
(09:28):
They questioned me for hours at the police station, search
my car, search my home, took me back to the
police station, released me with the words you can go home,
but don't leave town. So I went home and my
fiance was there, and evidently they had questioned her while
(09:50):
they were questioning me. And we had a lot of tizzy,
a little bit of a spat because I just recently
came to her home from Wisconsin, and now she's hearing that, Hey,
your boyfriend might be a rapist, you know, so of
course she's going to be on age somewhat. That next morning,
(10:10):
at work, I was approached by Crosbie again, would you
mind helping us out? You need to need you to
be in a lineup, like you know, I'm just doing
what any average citizen would do, doing what my dad
had always taught me to do, is obey the police, cooperate,
don't get disrespectful. So I'll go to the police station
(10:31):
with them and participate in his lineup, right, And then
it's almost comical to think that they had They said,
there's nothing funny about it. They took the other men
that they put in lineup and put aluminum foil because
I have to simulate a gold tooth in their mouth.
But you were the only one that actually had a
gold tooth. Plus they had you say the words that
she said she had heard. And uh, after the lineup,
(10:54):
he comes with a shit eating green on his face. Yeah. Uh,
she picked you out and said what she picked me yeah,
she picked you, and I'm you know, right there. I'm
just in a whirlpool of confusion. So I'm in the
(11:15):
city jail for a couple of weeks, you know, screaming, Hey,
I didn't do this, you guys making a mistake. Nobody
heard that, nobody wanted to hear that. They moved me
across the street to the county jail, and I stayed
there for a couple of months. At least. The quarter
pointed attorney never came to see me. I never knew
(11:37):
who I was until just right before time for appearances
in court. His name was Frank Baber and uh me
being so naive since I didn't do this, I'm thinking
this has been easiest flipping over a pancake to get
me out of this situation. There's so much that he
allowed to go on that I now know he should
(11:59):
have been object think it's like, hey, are you on
my side or you on their side? That's what I
was thinking in my head because at the time, even
being totally unaware of what the law says, you get
a feeling as a defendant if someone is vigorously trying
(12:21):
to defend you. I didn't get that feeling It sounds
like it was more processing you than defending you. Processing
that's right. Did you hold out any hope that they
were going to find you innocent or were I had
always thought they would find me innocent because I knew
that they had no evidence of me doing anything. I
knew that I had not done anything. I'm thinking that
(12:44):
this is going all the way up into picking the jury,
and you guys still think I did this. How can
you think I did this? What I did not know
at the time was that I witness testimony was considered evidence.
That's what out me. I'm sitting there thinking, Okay, where's
the rick kit, where's the fingerprints, where's the picture that
(13:07):
you say was taken out of the home, Where's the
money that you say was missing? I was flat broke
at the time. Hell, when they searched my house, they
found a twenty dollar bill that my fiance had hidden
in her dresser and it floated to the floor. Now
I asked Jeff Crosby, I said, can I have that?
And he says, yeah, you can have that. So I
(13:28):
picked up that twenty dollar bill and put it in
my pocket. I didn't know better. So I ended up
in prison and the trial lasted all of eight hours.
Eight hours. The trial lasted less than a working day,
(13:50):
and you were sentenced to three hundred years consecutive sentences,
four charges, four different sentences, one hundred fifty and fifty
for rape, robbery, burglary, and bomb threatening three hundred years.
It's such a it's such a preposterous concept. I mean,
(14:11):
just the idea that we even do that in this country.
Here you hear these sentences a thousand years and Oklahoma's
notorious for these and again I'm not minimizing the nature
of the crime, but Jesus Christ um Anyway, an interesting
side note, um free trial. I think it's interested that
back to how they were doing things in pot to
(14:32):
Taluk County, Aida, Williamson and Fritz were in jail with
Parish Well and Williamson and Fritz were two of the
men that were profiled in the John Grisham the only
nonfiction book that John has ever written, That's The Innocent Man.
And John told me John was on wrangful conviction. He
said that when he wrote that book he had to
(14:52):
write it as nonfiction. He says, because when I write fiction,
I have to make it believable. And he goes the story,
the audience is not going to follow along, gonna lose
my readers because this doesn't make any logical sense. And
Williamson and Fritz such an unbelievably tragic case of two
men wrongly convicted and one of whom lost his mind
in prison and just months after he was released ended up.
(15:14):
Dad really really sad, and he had been a elkland
A's pitching prospect. He had had his life ahead of him.
And the whole thing is a tragedy on top of
a tragedy. Not to mention that there was no justice
for the victim, which was a rape and murder case.
Um and I want to go back to this, um uh,
witness identification. If you, the listener, end up on a
(15:35):
jury and you have a Perry Lot in front of you,
you're in a criminal case and there's no evidence except
eye witness identification. You should keep this in mind. And
I'm quoting from the amazing book Convicting the Innocent by
Brandon Garrett, which is sort of like the Bible of
wrongful conviction causes and practices that lead to them. He
(15:58):
said that many DNA exoner ration cases involving mistaken eye
witnesses involved the use of suggestive identification procedures. A study
of the first two DNA exonerations revealed that an incredible
eight percent of the mistaken witness exonerations involved either factors
that are known to affect the reliability of the identification,
(16:19):
some suggestiveness and the identification procedure, or both, and in
this case it was both. So the jury comes in.
It was the most surreal moment of my life. When
the jury came back and they found me guilty, all
I could do was stare in the space. I was
just sitting there in shock. And when they started reading
(16:43):
off the terms one years, one hundred years, I was paralyzed,
wondering what how can they be allowed to count more
than a person can actually leave? If I die in prison,
you're still gonna make me do time? What you know?
I mean, It's like you said, it just don't make
(17:03):
sense to give a person more time than a lifespan,
you know what I mean? In case you come back
to life, maybe they want to back back and I
don't know, and then you have to come back to
life at least a couple of times and still live
a long life. Who thing is ridiculous. I had a
discussion with Eric just last night. I said, you know,
they should take the sentence and portion of the trial
(17:25):
out of the jury's hands because they are citizens. They
get emotional, they're angry when they get the details of
these crimes. Whether it's uh coherst or whether it's fabricated
or whether it's just plain fact. These people have emotional
(17:45):
attachments to that, and that's why they give people these
exponential amounts of time when you know, a hundred years
is enough to see a person die in prison, but
you want to go overkilled and even the just breaking
it down to the granular level, just the idea that
they send you to fifty years for robbery and the
robbery was a dred and twenty dollars, right or whatever
(18:07):
it was like that, I mean in fifty for the
bomb threat. Additional fifty the bomb threat as well. Yeah,
and we know, of course that these threats went on
and there were other cases after Perry was arrested and
convicted where whoever the actual perpetrator was continued with the
same memo, which should be not even a red flag,
should be a flashing red light where they go, hold up,
(18:28):
this is we got, We're bucked up, you know what
I mean. But that's not what happened. So so you
get take into prison, yes, prison life. After sitting in
the counter jail for four or five months, you're kind
of glad to go to prison. So it's it's a
real misstep thing in the mind. You know. It's like
(18:49):
they say, the eyes will play tricks on you. After
a certain amount of time with the traumatic situation or
unfamiliar situation, the mind will start playing tricks on YouTube.
You hear things, you see things, you imagine things. So
once I did get in the d OC system, I
(19:10):
was glad to have a bed. I was glad to
have fresh clothes, a shower, movement of the things you
don't get into counter jail. So that took a lot
of pressure off of what I was going through at
the time. Then I think most people don't realize, but
I hear from so many of the exonorees that the
(19:31):
jails are worse than the prisons, And it's actually logical
when you think about it. I think people theory were jail.
They think of like the classic thing in the movies
where it's like a country place and it ain't like
Barney and Andy like that. So you know like that,
it's true all over the country and jails it's just
a powder kick because everybody is in the cell together.
There's no recreation, there's no education, there's no release of anything,
(19:52):
there's no outdoors, there's nothing. So and as you said,
no clean clothes. I mean, it's really and it's designed
to break people. And I actually make them confessed the
crimes they didn't commit just to go home. These places
are dirty, their incubators of disease. They wouldn't worsh it
on my worst ending. A lot of informant jail house
and snitch stuff comes out of that environment too. And
(20:14):
now you went to the prison and you're sentenced to
well life because three hundred years, you know you weren't
going to live that long. It's a miracle you lived
through this whole experience in the first place. It surely is.
I went in at twenty four years old, waited three
or four years for the direct appeal once that was affirmed,
(20:35):
and had no idea how the hell they affirmed that
affirmed your conviction. How do you do that with the
facts all laid out. I should have been home after
three or four I knew enough about law to know
that what the jury says is what the jury says. However,
that's what the appeal processes for correct directify with the
(20:58):
jury in the courtroom allowed that should never been allowed.
When I was affirmed, I knew that I had a
war on my hands. I had to become my own
attorney because my family could not afford to help me.
They were so far away in Wisconsin. I was basically
(21:21):
by myself against this eight. I like to point out
to people when I talked to them about this, when
it says a lot versus eight, it's just like Oklahoma
versus Texas, you're at war. I had to learn as
(21:41):
quick as possible, as much as possible about what avenues
is going to get me set free, because now I
am here and it doesn't have a back door. Well,
(22:14):
once I got to about twelve fifteen years in, I
started losing it. I started losing hope. I started thinking
I just might die in here. And two thousand two
was the first time I went up for parole. Nothing changed,
And two thousand and five I had a near death
(22:36):
experience with staff infection. That's why I am partially disabled now.
Staff infection had gotten into my system. I didn't even
know what staff was, so it lingered in my body,
actually got into my blood and mercered and attached to
(22:56):
my spinal cord in my neck and day it was
eating through the vertebrae in my net, exposed a few nerves,
and uh, I'm lucky to be alive. So two thousand
five hours hospitalized. So they skipped over my parole hearing. Yes, yes,
(23:19):
they totally skipped over my parole hearing. So I had
to wait until two thousand and eight. That was probably
the only time I ever considered dying in prison, And uh,
that was two thousand five. Between two thousand five and
two thousand eight, I saw and I sensed that I
(23:40):
wasn't ever gonna be released by this parole board because
they probably wanted you to admit gil right. I wrote
a letter thinking that if I admit to this crime,
they just maybe give me some relief, because in prison,
you are under the impression that they want some kind
of remorse, they want some kind of confession. They want
(24:04):
to see you broke down, especially when you've been claiming
to be innocent. So I'm thinking I'm gonna give them
what they want. I'm going to manipulate my way out
of here. That's after so many years of being in
you start thinking like this, well, the truth isn't working,
so now I'm gonna lie and see if that will
do anything. Well. Between two thousand and eight and two
thousand and eleven, the Innocence Project took my case. The
(24:28):
first thing I did was told my attorneys, hey, look,
we got an issue. I've already confessed to these crimes.
I didn't do them, but I confessed to him trying
to manipulate and got the letters retracted and we explained
why I did that. It was kind of like a duress,
and that was probably the last time I had given
(24:50):
up hope. But prior to that, I had already started
feeling like it's hopeless against this. There's no way I'm
going to be able to I mean, I have done
a stack of brief like this on my case and
good good law work, pros a lit again law work,
and nothing ever worked. I said, damn, you know the
(25:12):
law is written. Why aren't you guys giving me some relief?
Why aren't you actually paying attention to the laws That
very everything in the law says that I should be
getting some kind of relief from the state. You guys
never really proved anything here. Why am I in prison?
What connection do you have other than this high witness testimony?
(25:36):
Being denied so many times was detrimental because when you
feel like you have no hope of ever reaching anybody
with the truth, you become something different. And if you
don't have good people around you too help you get
your mind right, you're going to become part of that
(25:57):
prison and you're never gonna leave. It's kind of like
the saut Shank for diption where the guy says, these
walls do something to you. They do. Yeah, that movie
had a profound effect on me and so many other people. Um,
nobody's listening. The Innocence Project gets involved, that's obviously a
huge development. That's the only time I regained hope. Yep.
(26:19):
Actually I took my hands off the wheel when I knew.
When you hear the word Innocence Project in prison, you
know you've got the kind of help you need. That
place is synonymous with God when you're an innocent person.
The Innocence Project, when you hear that name, you you
you know you're going home. Wow, that's heavy. Um, that's
(26:42):
great to hear having been there myself for six years. Um,
it's amazing. I've never heard it put that way before,
but it's it's great to hear. That obviously means a lot.
So innce this project gets involved, how did you get
involved there and how did you help to resolve this?
And how the hell is he here instead of serving
another two D seventy something years, uh, two D sixty
(27:05):
eight to be exact. That's my champion right there, man.
So I UM, I was working on some other post
conviction cases and UM Karen Thompson had reached out to
me on a referral from some lawyers that I was
working with on those cases. So in two thousand thirteen,
(27:25):
Karen wanted me to simply go meet Perry at Dick
Connor in prison and take his DNA sample and and
then of course to get that sample to sell Mark,
which is who the Innocence Project uses to test their
DNA right the DNA lab very fast day. They're the
best sel Mark. And in the meantime Karen win hadn't
assigned me some other duties. One of those things was
(27:48):
to find an alternate suspect and find an individual who
actually did this. Well, I spent a lot of time
doing that and doing my own covert methods of obtaining DNA,
such as posing as somebody from the casino with you know,
to pull this guy's trash that I thought, you know,
(28:09):
I've done it, and he's a the casino guy, show
up the gift guard. Hey like this envelope. We actually
went that far, you know, tested it in the whole
bit and a gift card trick. That's good, yeah, yeah,
and so but it was very disheartening. Uh, this guy's
been acquitted of two rapes I think one one dismissal
and one to quit, all within this somewhat of a
(28:31):
similar m A and man, we were pretty confident it
was him, and of course a little heartbroken to find
out it was. And but then again, we don't want
to be part of wrongfully accusing people either, So we
moved on from this this guy, and so we continue
to move along the whole time, though in the mean meantime,
(28:52):
Karen is constantly trying to get the d A from
Potadak County. Who's this guy that's been there since the
Williamson frit fought no Ward days. They're just so stuck,
I mean, in their ways and Karen trying to budge
him just to cooperate. Well, let's at least let my
investigator interview this victim. And so, long story short, Finally
(29:17):
Detective Crosby, who's still there as well, finds the victim
and it was agreed upon that he and I would
go interview her together. And this is where ship gets real.
He gets real real. So tell us about that. Yeah,
so we agreed that he would go first and I
(29:38):
wouldn't interrupt him, and I would go last and he
wouldn't interrupt me. We get in there, the victim says
that going along with a whole bit, everything's the same,
nothing's really changed today as I sit here, and and
then at some point, um, of course we've been in
the room. I've done it. No telling how many interviews
(29:59):
have individuals, from defendants to suspects. You just get the
body language. Part two you can't really read in the transcript.
I could see something change in her body language that
was very much in line, and the energy was that
she was ready to get this off of chess and
tired of carrying this around. And in fact in the
transcript you can read in there he actually asked her
(30:20):
if she's okay. During his questioning of her, it was
really light, you know, and she had to get a
drink of water. Her mouth was dry, and she stuttering
things like that. And then it was my turn. And
then in the beginning of my interview with her, she
was definitive that it was still Parring. She was definitive
that it was his voice and that that voice is
(30:42):
what carried her through her certainty it was Parry. And
then the best thing I had to do, and I've
done this many times, was and again I knew she
had other things to say. Okay, well I'm ready. Is
that all you have now? Yeah? Okay, well I'm okay.
(31:03):
Well let's wrap it up. I appreciate your time, and
this has been tough. And then she tells me more
I do that about three times. She ends up telling
me that she IDN'TI fied Perry on a hunch, that
on a hunch that she did not receive multiple calls
(31:26):
that day at her home, that she only received one
call at the Arby's at her work, that there were
two men there, not one, and the Kuda gral was
is that it wasn't even his voice. So this was
(31:47):
I see you smiling on. I mean, that was a
Eureka moment for you, absolutely, and I was so stunned
that I didn't even realize she had said the A
and two men in the interview as we sat there
as this was unraveling, and at this point, Detective Crosby
(32:07):
starts to interrupt, interject and sway her, even to the
point of telling her that deep into her confession, so
to speak, that he still thinks that Perry's the guy
that did that to her. Her story totally flipped when
(32:28):
Eric got in front of her read the transcripts attached
to post conviction relief filing. I mean, um, you could
see I was ready to leave her home three times,
and she wasn't ready for me to leave. She wanted
to She wanted to get this off her chest, right,
And then then then things start to really roll. And
then so, at what point did you know you were
(32:48):
going home? And I said, the Innocence Project took my
case in two thousand and eleven, and it was a
couple of years after that fourteen when you got involved,
when they came and got my DNA inside the prison.
I think that was the moment I knew I was
going home. Eric can you just explain the DNA findings
(33:11):
in this case and how they impacted the outcome. Yes,
so there were two contributors found in the victims canal
her the rape kit done in her ex husband was
generous enough to to meet with me and allowed me
to collect his denna as well, And that was one
of the matches. The other match is still unknown. I
(33:35):
have my thoughts on who it is as I sit here,
But Perry was excluded, that didn't do it. Those are
the magic words. Perry was excluded. Karen and I are
obviously very excited, the projects excited, but Ada being Ada,
(33:56):
this none of this was good enough. That still wasn't
good that they're still gonna fight it. They're still gonna
fight the DNA, They're still gonna fight basically confession from
the victim. And then so they're forcing us the state
all the way to a post conviction relief hearing, and
so July nine that that was one of what would
probably be two to three hearings. Jeff Crosby is slated
(34:20):
to testify on July nine, and of course I'll let
Perry tell the audience tell you what would happened on
the ninth, But on the seventh, unbeknownst to Perry and
the team, Detutive Crosby had taken his own life. So
(34:40):
two days before the Saturday and Sunday, I was appearing
in court that Monday. So I mean, obviously we will
never know, but do you have any theory as to
why he did that? I mean, the timing is not coincidental,
that would be the only thought. I'm an investigator, a
lot of fan of coincidence, so I didn't find it
coincidental at all. He was getting ready to get chopped
(35:03):
up on the stand on Monday. I think people at
home are probably wondering, why in the world, with d
n A scientifically proving that Perry had nothing to do
(35:27):
with this crime, and with the victim herself recanting her testimony,
and with no evidence whatsoever connecting him to it, why
is he on probation. Well, first off, that was something
that Perry had to discuss with his two attorneys at
the time. I wasn't part of that conversation, but I
(35:49):
know enough that I can speak about it. The risk
out of that county because it's a district judge, so
that here's this, they transition to a new d A.
But it's still the same type of mindset in that county.
So the risk, with all of this being put before
a judge of still losing was still there, believe it
or not, And so Perry and his attorneys had to
(36:13):
decide do we want to take that risk or do
you want to go home today and live to find
another day. In almost any other circumstance anywhere else, you
would just put this up in front of the judge,
put your evidence you're hearing on. Judge takes some time
for finding the facts in law, and you get your
ruling of actual innocence. It makes no sense, and it
truly is a sophie's choice. I'd spent now twentysothing years,
(36:37):
twenty five years or so wondering how the hel do
these people got me in prison and how come I
can't get myself out of this. Karen helped me figure
that out by helping me see that all of the
things that we think should go right, when other people
in power don't want to to go right, they had
(36:59):
the power to make it go wrong. So she kept
asking me, she said, how do you do it? How
do you do it? And it's talking about keeping a
smile and a good attitude with all of this other stuff.
How are you always in such a good mood? I said,
It's just I love people. I cannot let this situation
(37:22):
change me. A matter of fact, that's one of the
things that I decided that that when I told you
I was sitting at the defendant table and shock, I
knew at that moment I had to remain in that
state of mind of who I was. I had to
really get a tight grip on my identity and hold
(37:44):
on to that for dear life, because I knew that
this experience was going to do everything in its power
to make me something I was not beginning with a rapist.
Never in my life would I even considered attacking a
woman when you can you know pretty much, I've called
(38:05):
myself a player black back in them days, you know
you you don't. Back in them days when you got
it like I had it, you didn't have to take
anything from a woman. You could ask, and you ask
with a certain amount of finess. I'm not saying, you
know you have to say anything else. You got it.
(38:27):
You get the impression I'm trying to make, So you know,
the thing is, uh, I will always appreciate Karen in
my life because she helped me understand something I never
could figure out in twenty five years, is how am
I doing this? What is it that keeping me bolstered?
(38:47):
And I realized it was a mixture of family, church,
good friends around me that had their mind on right.
As she says, finally, after she had worked on my
case a little while, she said, Mr Lott, I think
I got you figured out. I said, oh yeah, we'll
tell me. She said, I know how you do it.
(39:09):
And this is after I've been disabled. And I said,
oh yeah, what do you think? She said, you do
it one step at a time, day by day. And
the lights came on up in my head. I said, damn,
you got it figured out. Now. That's when I knew
I was going home by continually walking day by day,
one day at a time, and one step at a time. Said.
(39:32):
At that time, I was taking a little bitty baby steps.
The disability I had, I was prognosed to never walk again,
to never get out of the bed again. But I
struggled and struggled, and I began walking and a little
bitty baby steps, and then I started really pushing myself.
(39:53):
I can take a full stride now with just a
little bit of pain. And back in that time, I
could a little bitty baby stuff like that and it
would hurt like hell. That's how it is. You know, Well,
you answer the question. Before I asked that, I was
gonna ask whether you're better, and I don't have to
ask that anymore. Um penitentiary will do two things to
a person that will make them better or to make
(40:16):
them better. And it's a choice that you have to
make before you go in that institution, before we go
to what I call our closing arguments, and I'll explain
to you what that is. Just talk a little bit
about what you're doing now, because you're actually working with
this guy, right awesome. Yes, Eric approached me about a
(40:37):
job and I said, well, man, the time to think
about it. I was disabled, not really confident in my abilities,
not knowing that I had abilities. A couple of months
went Bias said hey, I need to answer, that's okay,
And he told me that I could earn so much money,
which is like twice as much as I would get
(40:59):
on disability. And I didn't feel right on disability anyway.
So when I had the job opportunity, I wanted to
jump at it, but I was hesitant because of my
state of mind. You know, what can I do? I'm
thirty years missing in action, no record of work history,
no record of medical history. I didn't know I had
(41:21):
any ability at all. So when Eric offered me the job,
I said, don't give me time to think about that,
and I'm just trying to figure out a way to
tell them new and eventually, man he made an argument
with me, is I couldn't deny that I could probably
do this job in prison. I did this for twenty
(41:42):
five years trying to get out of prison. I call
it calming the records. You know how they have a
rape kit and they comb the pubics. They're looking for
whatever doesn't belong in those pubics. When I calmed the records,
I looked word for word, line for line, looking for
what doesn't belong here or it's missing from here. And
it's a skill that you develop without knowing that you're
(42:06):
actually developing it. You know, because when you work on
your own case daily for twenty five years, you don't
realize it, but you grow old and you grow knowledge
of the law and how it should be applied. Perry
works for another five of one C three Another Chance
Justice Project, and then we work on rowful convictions and
(42:28):
excessive sentencing and some commutation there. But my private firm
is calling an associates. Perry is employed through the project,
calling an associates. Yeah, we should. You should shout that
out a little bit. And of course, one of my
favorite human beings who has also been on the show,
Michelle Murphy, I served twenty years, was exonerated with DNA,
(42:49):
the only female DNA's honor read from Oklahoma. Encourage people
to listen to that episode. It's an incredible episode of
rawful conviction with Michelle Murphy. But show she's working with
you as well, so you have Yeah, I mean it's
actually perfectly logical. You're taking people who have actually the
most profound experience and the most knowledge from having to
out of necessity, having to do all this research to
(43:11):
get themselves free and to help others inside penitentiary. So
you've got to You've got the dream team with Perry
and Michelle. I love it, you know, um so um,
you know I always say on the show, you know,
I'm happy you're here, but I'm sorry you're here. I mean,
I'm sorry you had to go through what you had
to go through to get here. But it means an
(43:31):
awful lot that you came in and came to New York,
all the way from Oklahoma to share your incredible story,
your spirit, your wisdom, your outlook. We got the whole
Perry lot when I found out I was going to
be here that I just wanted to see you again. Man, Well,
what can I say? I'm just about to melt into
a puddle over here, whereas the old saying goes knocked
(43:54):
me down with a feather. Um. One of the reasons
why today's episode is unique is be because we are
recording this in the middle of an art exhibit by
an innocent man on death row in Texas, a guy
named Rob Will who has created this remarkable collection of
work from his tiny cell. I can't not mention that
(44:18):
it's um sort of a heavy day as well, because
as we sit here, Texas is probably in the process
in the last couple hours before they carry out another
execution of an innocent man. Larry Swerringin is going to
be executed today, almost certainly in spite of evidence of
his actual innocence. So um, we'll just have a moment
(44:41):
of silence for Larry. Okay, so this is the part
of the show. Um where again, uh, this is my
favorite part the show. I think it's a lot of
(45:01):
people's favorite part of the show. We get feedback online, etcetera.
Where um, I get to once again thank you to
outstanding freedom fighters for coming and being on rawful conviction
with me. Um. Eric, I know we'll be doing more
of these in the future, and we're working together on
various cases. And I'm a huge fan of your work.
(45:23):
I think you're one of the top people in the
country at what you do, and UM, we need more
of you. So Eric Clin, thank you again for being
here my pleasure. And Perry again, I thank you before.
I'll thank you again, and I'm looking forward to working
with you in the future and spending more time together.
And now, like I said, this is what we call
(45:43):
closing arguments. So this is where I get to turn
my microphone off. I kind of kicked back rock back
in my chair and just listen and turn the microphones
over to you for your closing thoughts. I call it
closing arguments. Was really closing thoughts on anything you want
to say, anything we may have left out, or anything
at all. And again we'll save the best for last.
(46:04):
No offense there. But the start of the show is
Perry So but but first, um, Eric, you're closing thoughts.
Perry's case is just a shining example. Again you covered
it of the eyewitness identification problem. It's also a shining
example of why Oklahoma is number one in incarcerating African
(46:26):
American males in the world. And then of course on
the side twenty eight years in a row for females,
which is a whole another topic. But there's no surprise
as to why we're here. When you hear Perry's story,
when you hear Michelle's story, when you hear Williamson frets,
all these different ones from Oklahoma, it's horrifying. Um. I
think we're at a point now where it's it's becoming
(46:48):
bipartisan this issue, you know. I think the eyes are open,
and you'd have to be a real fool to say
that abound for conviction zn't exists now. We're just several
years ago it wasn't quite there. That's what my closing,
Earn would be, And I would add one other thing.
We're not done with Peri's case. We're gonna work on
(47:08):
this till we get him fully exonerated. Erry. Yes, sir,
uh I heard you called me to star on the show. Well,
you guys are the stars of my show. You know,
without you guys in my life, I would probably be
dead in prison, still in prison. So I want to
(47:31):
thank you and honor you for that and your audience.
I want to honor you for being attentive. And I
want to admonish everyone under the sound of my voice
to get involved with this awareness, to get involved with
the injustice, the police brutality. The only way evil like
this prevails us. When good people say nothing, a lot
(47:55):
of people will see crime and close their windows, closed
their doors, turn their back. And that's why we're in
the state that we're in right now. We have to
be courageous enough to say I saw this. I want
to say something and the truth, you know, of being
(48:15):
in prison for thirty one years, I came out very
battle weary, uh, not too much confidence in my abilities.
As I said before, overwhelmed with the stimulus of the
free world. I still right now today have not cooked
my own first meal. After being out of prison for
(48:37):
it a year and some months. I don't have the
confidence to cook a meal. I don't really go into
big shopping malls anymore. There's too many choices. I'm not
used to that. I am enjoying the freedom of going
(48:57):
back and forth under certain limits, being on parole or probation.
But it feels good to be able to go here
and there without having to ask permission. So to speak.
Life is good, man, and it's getting better. You know,
I have a whole lot to be thankful for, even
though this misfortune happened to me and took away a
(49:20):
lot of my life. I tell people all the time,
I got a whole lot more yesterday's than I do tomorrow.
So I'm gonna make the most of it. And all
I really want to do now is just be the
best me that I can be, not only for myself
before anyone who's watching me, because someone's always watching, and
(49:41):
you never know what they're gonna pick up from you,
So I do my best to just be the best
example I can. I'm not perfect. I have a ways
to go. I'm not perfect, but I'm pretty close to it.
That's a joke, no, but honestly, you know, my heart
goes out to the youth of America. You know, the violence,
(50:05):
the games, the influences find other things to spend your
time with. I really don't want to be preachy, but
these are the things I've learned in the heart. Way
you know is ask questions, don't take anyone's word, find
your own truth, seek clarity, you know, just be true
(50:28):
to yourself. S very important. Thank you all for listening.
Thank you everyone at home. Don't forget to give us
(50:54):
a fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps.
And I'm a proud owner to the Innocence Project and
I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very
important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go
to Inness project dot org to learn how to donate
and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team,
Connor Hall and Kevin Wardis. The music on the show
(51:17):
is by three time OSCAR nominate composer Jay Ralph. Be
sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and
on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason
Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in
association with Signal Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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