August 12, 2020 • 43 mins
DNA evidence, post-conviction victories, and life after prison.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
If you will place your left hand on the Bible
and raise your right hand, and please repeat after me,
and I do solemnly swear, then titled action find the
defendant guilty of the prime It makes no sense, it
doesn't fit. If it doesn't fit, you must equit. We
all took the same of of office. We're all bound
(00:23):
by that common commitment to support and defend the Constitution,
to bear true faith in allegiance to the same that
you faithfully discharge the duties of our office. Do you
solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you are about
to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth. From Tenderfoot TV and I Heart Radio,
this is sworn. I'm your host, Philip Holloway, m d N.
(00:52):
A kind of changed everything. It was the game changer
because for the first time in history we had really
definitive proof of innocence, although I'm gonna say the second
time in history. I always tell my students DNA cases
aren't the best cases. The best cases are murder cases
where the victim shows up alive later on, and there's
(01:12):
there's been ten of those documented in history of the
United States. But short of the victims showing up alive
and DNA cases, it gets very difficult to win these cases.
But here's what I've seen happen over the last twenty
years is DNA opened the door to make believers out
of judges that hey, innocent people are falling through the cracks.
(01:44):
Let's face it, Exoneration cases in the United States aren't
exactly commonplace. According to the United States Department of Justice,
there were just under one and a half million people
in prison by the end of two thousand eighteen, but
as of May, there have only been two thousand, six
(02:05):
hundred exonerations, and a lot of those exonerations have happened
very recently. This is because of things like advancement in
DNA and other technology. DNA has been a very helpful
tool in providing evidence of innocence for wrongly incarcerated people.
But as the California Innocence Project director Justin Brooks said
(02:27):
at the beginning, DNA has done more than simply providing evidence.
It's opened the door to the idea that people are
in fact in jail for crimes that they did not commit.
Judges eyes are now more open, Judges are now more
willing to consider that wrongful evidence is real, and to
(02:50):
hear wrongful conviction cases even if there is not DNA
evidence to clear them. Here's Amelia Maxfield, forensic science specialists
for the Pennsylvania Innocence Project. Before there was DNA evidence,
no one even believes that the system got it wrong
or could get it wrong. So it's definitely been the
(03:10):
catalyst for many exonerations and for kind of the innocence
movement as a whole. If there's any way for us
to go back and test evidence it was found at
the crime scene to try to identify the true perpetrator,
will do that. That's kind of the easiest, removes straightforward
way to get back into court if you have new
(03:30):
evidence of an alternate perpetrator from a DNA analysis. Even
though courts today are more likely than ever before to
hear claims of actual innocence, there are still a lot
of roadblocks along the way, especially in the way that
evidence is tested and stored when that evidence might contain
d N A. There's the first hurdle of even getting
(03:53):
access to the evidence. Evidence is kept in the custody
of the state. It may or may not have been
stored properly. It may or may not have been retained
at all. There was a widespread evidence destruction order issued
in the city of Philadelphia twenty years ago because there
was like a maggot infestation of evidence. Years worth of
(04:13):
potentially exculpatory DNA evidence was just destroyed because it wasn't
properly stored. We've had some counties where we've gone to
look for evidence it was just stored in the courthouse basement,
and then there was a flood, and then the evidence
is gone. And then there's a second hurdle of getting
access to testing. You have to get an order from
the court, and different states have different standards in order
(04:36):
to be eligible for DNA testing. A reasonable DA who
has a post conviction case from the eighties or nineties
where DNA testing was never done and the evidence still exists,
many of them will take the tact that we think
they should, which is, you know, we have the evidence,
why not just test it and it'll either confirmed the
conviction was right, or it'll show that the conviction was wrong,
(04:56):
and then we'll go from there. It's just fair and
just to test the evidence. Then you have the cost barrier,
so DNA testing is extremely expensive. Even simple DNA testing
runs you in the multiple thousands of dollars. Most states
have statutes written in such a way that the state
will pay for DNA testing either if you meet a
(05:17):
certain higher legal standard or if you agree for the
testing to be done at the state's lab. We just
don't trust some of the state labs, or they don't
have the capacity to do the testing that we want.
They don't have the technology we need. We're often looking
for small amounts of touch DNA found on specific items
and they don't have the ability to do that type
of testing. Getting the evidence in front of the court
(05:40):
and having them understand what it means and agree that
it is exculpatory is kind of the final hurdle. It's
amazing how many times when you have a rape and
murder case and you finally test the DNA and it
exonerates your client. It's not his DNA, it's someone else's DNA.
Then all of a sudden, for the first time, the
state comes back with the theory that there was a
(06:02):
second person there, that your client is still involved in
the murder, but a second person also raped the victim,
and that's never been a theory before. Amelia says, they
haven't actually had that many successful DNA exonerations. In fact,
it's been the minority of the Pennsylvania Innocence Projects exoneration cases.
(06:22):
Most of our clients have been exonerated based on new
evidence in the form of new witnesses coming forward, or
witnesses were chanting their testimony, or you know, finding something
in the homicide file, or ineffective assistance of trial counsel.
We also try to get new opinions based on modern
science in cases where a forensic science was used that
(06:44):
may be outdated, if we can get an analyst who's
been properly trained to look at a discipline and tell
us whether what was done was valid or not. There's
something like two thousand exonerations total, and only three hundred
of those involved DNA. There was a whole bunch of
(07:05):
people in Texas whose convictions were overturned because there was
misconduct by a specific officer involved in their case. So
those are all exonerations, but they're not DNA generations. A
friend of mine, Michelle Tiegel, is a criminal lawyer who
works in Texas. Michelle has lots of experience working in
(07:25):
both small towns and big cities, and I asked her
about some of the issues that she sees in her
post conviction practice. You would think it's just, oh, well,
we know this is now faulty science, so we're just
going to get him out. But there's so much more
to it than that, and our systems are procedural beasts.
(07:46):
Oftentimes lawyers have to really put their heads together and
then often really try and convince prosecutors to work with
them and trying to find a way to remedy and
fix what has happened. Meaning you know that someone's been
wrongfully convicted on faulty science. But Michelle says that even
if you do get a prosecutor to play ball, there
(08:07):
are still a lot of challenges. In Texas, there are
certain timelines that you have, and then there are of
course different issues that you can file what's called a
writ to basically get your case back before the trial
quarter back before one of the higher courts in that
jurisdiction based on new evidence or new science. But then
(08:29):
there are all these procedural what I would call hurdles.
You have to get a certain standard of evidence or
a certain type of testimony or a certain type of testing,
and then it has to be presented to the right
you know, decision maker, whatever court that may be in
that jurisdiction, and then those decisions are never moved and
usually made quickly. There's often tons of briefing and paperwork
(08:53):
that comes behind that to convince whoever the decision maker
is that this is accurate, and you have to get
x often to back that up experts that normally would
not be cheap, but that you're often begging to work
for free to try to help free someone who was
convicted on faulty science. And it's it's kind of begging
all the way down the line, is what post conviction
(09:15):
lawyers have to do. I mean, I commend them for it,
because it is often thankless work and they spend years
on it. I was involved in a capital murder case
years ago, a man named Ed Graff who was originally convicted,
and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which is the
highest criminal appellate court in Texas, reversed his conviction, but
(09:37):
they remanded it. And what that means is is that
they just sent it back to the trial court. They
didn't say he was innocent, they did not exonerate him,
but they said the science was bad. But we're gonna
send this case back to either be resolved by the
d a's office through a plea bargain or tried to
a jury. And we ultimately tried that case to a
(10:00):
jury with all new science, different experts, and you know,
there were a lot of witnesses, of course from a
nineteen eighty capital murder case that we're no longer alive,
and that became a tricky thing. What we wanted them
to do, what we would have rather them done in
that case, was just to exonerate our client, but they
(10:21):
instead reversed the conviction and said, we're not actually going
to call him actually innocent. We're going to say that
there was a flaw in this science and a problem
and we know that now, and so we're going to
send the rest back to be heard by jury or
decided by the d A. Michelle says, the jury deliberated
for about two whole days. When a jury's out a while,
(10:44):
you start, especially as a defense lawyer, thanking somebody in
there's fighting for my client. They're not just willing to,
you know, say guilty and let's send him away for life.
We hadn't really had many conversations or plea bargain negotiations
because we we believed our client was innocent. During the
course of the jury being out for two days, we
(11:05):
started having some of those conversations and and as a
criminal defense lawyer, anytime an offer is communicated, whether you
want your client to take it or not, you have
to communicate it. That's not something that's negotiable or that
we have discretion on. We also started looking at the
parole laws because this was a man who had already
served over twenty years in a Texas prison for the
(11:28):
conviction that had been obtained in the nineteen eighties. We
determined that if he pled guilty to anything less than
a life sentence, based on old parole laws, he would
immediately be released, meaning the d A, the judge, the
Texas Department of Criminal Justice, they would have no control.
It was a mandatory release on anything less than a
(11:51):
life sentence. Because of the time he had already served.
He ended up taking a plea bargain offer of less
than a life sentence. He pled guilty while the jury
was still out, so we didn't get a verdict. The
d a's office actually and this ended up being kind
of a little bit of a Snapho, but the d
a's office in McLennan County did not know about that
(12:14):
parole law and immediately went to the media and said
that they would contest him ever being released and he
wouldn't get out on parole, and we kind of just
left it at that. Eventually, the media and everyone caught
onto it, and what I said was and I got
some you know, it wasn't a popular thing to say,
(12:34):
but I stand by it. Is. My job is to
explain a lot of my client. The d a's job
is to know the law himself or herself. It's not
my job to explain it to them. And unfortunately they
didn't know the law in that situation. And so my
client is out now and I'm glad for that because
I think he should be personally. But that was kind
(12:57):
of a I guess you could say a technical procedural
when for that man m M. I think there's this
(13:21):
misconception from television shows that make the news that DNA
is some sort of a magic bullet for the criminal
justice system. DNA has been and continues to be a
fantastic tool. It's used to get to the bottom of
the question of who committed a crime, but there are
many cases or situations where DNA evidence might not be
(13:43):
available or even applicable. For the rest of the episode,
we're going to play for you parts of the interviews
with the four exonorees we spoke to about their exoneration
processes and their release from prison. Although these are four
or unique individual cases, they are all very difficult experiences,
(14:04):
and there are some commonalities across the board, including the
amount of time and effort that it took to prove
their innocence, the challenges they faced in rejoining society, and
the continued effects of their time in prison. Here's William Dillon,
the exonoree we spoke with in the episode on Scent Dogs.
(14:27):
When I got out, I was despaired with the fact
that they hadn't caught who actually committed the crime. And
that's what really bothered me more than anything. Some people saying, oh,
you're free now here is great, and then some people
look at well, this guy could be a massive mascular
and all that it was bothering me internally in my heart.
And when they finally came through and got the DNA
(14:49):
on this guy and then a confession to this guy,
and I ended up getting compensated and everything. I felt
a lot better through the process. I was able to heal.
I feel that that's helped me a lot. In the
journey forward. You may recall that William was arrested for
a murder when he offered to help with the police investigation.
(15:12):
After being subject to intense interrogation, irresponsible use of a
forensic dog, and faulty eyewitness testimony, William served twenty seven
years of a life sentence for a crime he did
not commit. When I was indicted for murder, there was
an anonymous phone call by a woman that said you
(15:33):
have the wrong person. That these two guys were the
ones involved in the crime. At that same time, the
chief investigator was the one that came to get me
from the car. He just wrote it down in the
file and didn't look into it well. It ended up
being thirty years later that those two guys were the
ones that were involved in the crime, as well as
two other juveniles. They did DNA on a shirt that
(15:56):
gets the killer left in the truck of the man
that was supposed to identify me that night, which my
lawyer was gonna have me try on at the trial.
It's a good thing I didn't. The one whose DNA
they got on the shirt, he denied any involvement. He
was in Chicago. DNA was taken thirty years later for
domestic violence. He was seventeen at the time of the murder.
(16:19):
The second guy had been living on the streets, and
he confessed that FORUM had committed the crime. And even
then the police still tried to put me in their crew,
saying wasn't dealing, there wasn't involved, And the guy that
when living on the street says, no, he was not
involved at all. My parents never believe I was actually
innocent of the crime. People ask me to you to
(16:41):
forgive them. Of course I do. When you're manipulated by
a power and a justice system that is supposed to
be the last of the line, is supposed to be
the true sense of justice, the true sense of what's
going on, at least as closest we can get it.
And you know as an individual of being the one
being attacked, and you know that witnesses in your case
(17:01):
have been manipulated by people that are using this power
and authority. I can forgive anybody that has been manipulated.
I can't forgive those that did the manipulating. I think
it really didn't matter to them about justice. I keep
saying all the time that you know, maybe it was
one or two, but in the basic senses of it
is is all of them. They were all down with
(17:21):
the count. Probably one or two that started the ball rolling,
and then everybody just followed on end. Could have been
somebody that just trying to shine up the stars and
get another conviction down the road. Another guy gone down
the road, who cares. My life didn't matter to imperiod.
They destroyed my life completely, they really did. They just
didn't know it would come back to buy them. William
says that when the day of his exoneration finally came,
(17:45):
he felt at least some sense of peace. I can't
even begin to tell you that I felt like it
was being carried down those steps. It was such an
amazing feeling. It was gratifying more than you know, the
sense of being found innocent or known to be innocent,
(18:07):
or just to be released from the hell that I
had been in. It was just a very very happy thing.
But at the same time, there was huge hurtles to overcome,
and technology had completely changed. People had phones in their pockets, computers.
When I went to prison. The phones were on the
wall and NASA had the computers. Everything was just extremely fast.
(18:30):
Information was everywhere. It was a hurdle, but at the
same time I was figured it was out to me,
So I just dove into it as much as I could,
and I just took ahold of it and learned as
much as I could as fast as I could information wise,
And it's not that complicated. You have to really get
in and want to get it. I think the biggest
hurdle for me was shopping with so many selections as perplexing.
(18:51):
I would go look for a bar so going there
and to be so many choices, I'd have to walk
out because I just get this overwhelming feeling and have
to leave. A simple as that sounds, that's that was
probably the biggest dilemma that I had. The reason why
I came on here today is I want to let
your listeners know that what you see on TV is
not the real thing. That is not the criminal justice system.
(19:14):
Those are actors acting. The real criminal justice system is
a horrific place, and it doesn't matter if you're right
or wrong, you will end up getting turned upside down.
It's like I tell everybody all the time. One minute
I was a passing here in a vehicle, the next minute,
I'm on a freeway fast ride to prison with a
life sentence. And it can happen to anyone, anywhere, at
(19:35):
any time. This is not to support say that we
don't need the police and the justice system. I've been
in those places where these people in these places are
absolute maniacs. We need the police, but the justice system
itself needs to be corrected. There needs to be a
secondary overlook of cases. And I understand it's costly and
(19:58):
it does this in there, but the problem is that
these people were allowed to push this wagon without him
any factual evidence to it. Does it prove this doesn't
prove that. It's hard to say, but my point is
with some oversight, some of this will be slowed down.
Here's the perspective of Bill Richards. A few episodes ago,
(20:18):
we heard the story of how he was wrongfully incarcerated
for the murder of his wife and served twenty three
years in prison the California Innostance Project. It was the
best thing for me. I was on a level four
yard and sent Noah prison to hard core yard that
the guy was working with us talking to him about it,
(20:39):
and he was innocent. He gave me the address for
the Innocence Project, which you just opened up at that time.
So I wrote them a letter and they sent me
back a questionnaire, and I sent them a bunch of
information that I had that I had written myself, like
about sixty pages of documentation of perjury and stuff by
the police. So they came down to students and then
(21:00):
viewed me, and you know, they did the investigation and
they were instrumental in picking up the case because you know,
they get a couple of thousand cases a year people
asking for help. Built a couple of years from the
actually sign on to represent me because they have to investigate.
You know, they need to know you're really innocent, and
is there anything to work with. The Innocence Project probably
(21:21):
spent sixteen years working on the case to get me out.
You know, I stay in touch with other people. There's
a woman whose husband is in prison in Missouri. Her
husband is represented by the Missouri Innocence Project, and she's
always trying to raise money and get a private lawyer.
And I told you you couldn't possibly pay private lawyer
to do with the projects. Do this is what they do.
(21:44):
It's what they know how to do. Get fundraisers. I
don't even want to consider how much money, just in
expenses it costs to get me out of prison. You
could never do that with a private attorney unless you're
thinking rich. Bill recalled all the evidence that they telephone
and the Innocence Project found which suggested he was in
fact innocent. I'm trying to think there's DNA and a
(22:07):
murder weapon. It was exactly the places where their experts
of the killers DNA would be. They are considerable other things.
There's also planet evidence. There was a point, after being
in Jeez almost twenty years when that technicality came into play.
A court had already rolled at the evidence pointed unerringly
the innocence and he didn't have half the evidence we
(22:29):
have now, and they used technicality and the higher courts
just ignored, said well, we're not going to look at that.
At that point, I thought I lost. That's the first
time I gave up. When the California Innocence Project was
working on William's case, they encountered a technicality in case
law that would not let them submit new expert testimony.
They fought that technicality and it has since been removed
(22:52):
by the California legislature. Technicality was that expert witnesses could
not recancer testimony or new expert witnesses cannot be considered
because their testimonies only an opinion. But that's what the
jury here is. I don't care if it's DNA, whatever
it is, and expert testifies to it. It was such
(23:14):
a bad thing that they've done this, as so many
other people, and I think my case stood out because
I've already had a rule of innocence that the legislature
introduced a bill to change the law to say, this
is totally ridiculous. You've got evidence of innocence and you
can't use it. I think there's only fourteen people in
the whole legislature that didn't vote for it. So it
(23:34):
was very well received. And when that came, we went
back to court and I got out on the evidence
unanimously in the Californy Supreme Court. But that's look another
seven years. It's like being dropped on an alien planet
because nothing is the same. And I was only in
twenty three years and I look at these guys get
(23:55):
out after forty It's a completely different world technology. That's
why I say I'm catching up on computers. I'm way
behind on them, and they're smarter than I am, you
know so, And I think they fight me half the time.
Society is different, people are different. Money isn't even the same.
Not to mention, everything costs three to four times what
(24:15):
it did before the line of work I did. There's
almost none of it around anymore, and they're surely not
hiring a guy that's almost seventy years old to do it.
I think it would be easy to find something that
wasn't changed, because everything changes. And of course I'm not
a young man anymore, and that doesn't help, you know,
(24:36):
my mind, I'm still a young man, because for some reason,
your mind when you go through this doesn't And I've
talked to others honories that they still picture them. So
I still ficture myself as forty. I look in the Maratha,
Oh my god, who's at I drive down the street
I used to live on, and I don't recognize it
because the trees are so big. Young trees have been planted,
(24:58):
just a little almost saplings now go by there the
two ft in diameter and there's a canopy over the
road to me, this was overnight to me. This was
I was this guy here and this is the life.
And now you're dropping out here in and everything has
changed and I haven't been there to change with it,
(25:21):
you know, because that's it. When you're inside, you don't
change with the world. You're isolated away from it. Bill
is now involved in a civil lawsuit against the police
officers who went after him. He could not talk about
that case very much since it is owngoing litigation, but
he and his legal team say that they have found
proof that evidence was planted that resulted in his conviction.
(25:46):
One of the attorneys she's looked through the records and found,
wait a minute, this evidence turned up ten days after
the autopsy. So that is a major part of where
we're going after them today is we have valid evidence
that planted evidence to incriminate me. I'm hoping we get
some sort of settlement. I don't have any family at
my age. I mean, I don't need it money unfortunately,
(26:10):
but I do have a living trust. If the cancer
gets to me before the civil action has done, all
the money will go to St. Jude's Wanted Warrior Project,
child refuge innocience projects. If I can't do some good
to somebody else for what they did to me. Since
(26:46):
I've been out, been merrit twice, I guess you could
say I'm being the true American person now days. Calvin
Johnson was the first d NA AS honoree from the
state of Georgia back in nine when we heard about
his case a few episodes ago. He was convicted by
(27:07):
an all white jury using inconclusive blood and faulty forensic
hair evidence. At the same time, he was declared not
guilty on a similar case by a diverse jury because
there was overwhelming proof of innocence. He was finally exonerated
after the evidence in the first case was sent to
(27:28):
a lab for DNA testing. He's been out of prison
for twenty years now, but he's faced major setbacks once
they set him free. I mean, when you get desonerated,
you come out with nothing. You don't get the little
twenty five dollars to say that Georgia mc gee. You
you don't get closed that they might give you. You
can't get into any of the programs that they may have,
(27:51):
and they just toss you all. You're like a baby
and you need HILP. If you were in prison, and
you will die, Betty. Now, guess what, you don't having
the medical benefits. At a hard time getting the driver
license because I didn't have a car. So I had
a Runner car and I got there to the test.
I got in the runner car to do the driver
tests and they walked out him and they tell me
(28:12):
and say, hey, you can't take the tests in the
runner car. I get out of the car and I
walked to the car behind me, two complete stranger, and said, hey,
excuse me, sir. I said, they won't let me take
the test in my car because it's a Runner car.
Said can I use your car? And he said yeah.
So I asked him and say kind I had this
a couple of minutes to get familiar because I ain't
(28:34):
been out of prison. But two weeks I took the
test and I passed. That's an obstacle. The obstacle is
a little simple stuff. You go to the gas station.
Guess what it's self served. When I went to prison,
people would come out and they would pump your gas
and wash your windows. We didn't have self serves. I'm
standing there at the pump, looking around, hoping nobody staring
(28:56):
at me. Don't I didn't know what to do. I
was a very to ask anybody. I went to get
my own apartment. He said, Mr Johnson, you don't have
bad credit. You just don't have any credit. They want
to try to try to charge me, like triple the
deposit something. So I got upset. I remember going to
(29:17):
getting all these newspaper articles where they had been getting
out of prison and going back to that office. I
laid these articles across the desk and said, now, look,
this is why I don't have any credit. I've been
locked up for sixteen years. I've been punished for a
crime I didn't commit. Now out here in this world,
you're trying to punish me even more, and it's not fair.
And so I guess what. They went ahead and they
(29:40):
read with the department under the normal amount of depositive
people normally pay. But these are the challenges. I do
have a job that I've been at for the last
twenty years, which is really fortunate. I've been working with Martha,
which is Metropolitan, a lot of rappertricive authority. They're like
a big kid. Sometimes it was what with Giant train said,
(30:02):
but but I love it. I can't retire now. I'm
still hanging around. I'm pretty healthy, I feel good, So
why retire Now that I'm working and I'm actually giving
a paycheck, I mean like, wow, hey, it's great. Finally
we're going to hear from Joe Das another Exonoree we
spoke to earlier this season. Joe has been very involved
(30:25):
in the work of restorative justice and emotional healing since
he left prison, not only for himself but for others
who have been wronged by the criminal justice system. Almost
on a weekly basis, there's another man or woman who
has been falsely accused who's getting out through one way
or another. And this wasn't so common before DNA. A
(30:48):
matter of fact, I sat in the same prison from
the six years with the man who was also innocent.
I didn't know he was innocent, and he didn't know
I was innocent until we saw each other twenty seven
team or at the Innocent's Conference, and we're looking at
each other. Damn, you were innocent too. And for all
my brothers and sisters that are sitting in some sort
(31:09):
of compliment anywhere, not only in the nation, but throughout
the globe, all I can say to you is never
give up. Always continue to fight, never never give up.
Joe says that after finishing his time, he was determined
to clear his name. So once I get out, I
(31:31):
remember that I had been told by the a c O.
You go to the public defenders office. I went to
the public defenders office. They told me the same thing again.
Can't help you. Go back to your trial attorney. Finally,
I said, well, I don't have the choice. I have
to go to the devil and convicted me. I went
back to the district attorney, called him and told him listen,
I am out now assured you that I did not
commit this crime. And now that you guys had DNA tests,
(31:53):
I want to come give you my blood. I want
you to test so you can see that I did
not commit it. You don't have to trust my side
of the story because I wasn't there. You weren't there.
So I'll tell you what. Why don't you let science
prove it for you. I showed up at the DA's office.
He has an investigator show up, and the first question
out of the investigators of mouth is well, what do
(32:14):
you hope to accomplish with this? I assured him, listen,
the only thing I want to do is clear my name.
There's no way in the world you guys are gonna
be able to return my years to me. Finally, he
returned my call one day and tells me, listen, the
d a's office paid for this DNA test and it's
inconclusive and that's it. Nothing else we can do. My
wife and I were always sitting around, brainstorming, throwing ideas around,
(32:37):
what can we do, What can we do? What can
we do? My wife says, what kind of other evidence
was there? And that's when it dawned at me. There
was a slipper. When the guy ran off, he lost
one of his slippers, I said, son of a gun.
When my appeals had exhausted, they destroyed all the evidence
so that slipper was no longer there. Somehow or another.
(32:58):
They have to preserve evidence, because in this case, I
was out of evidence to preserve. But Joe held out
and continued finding. Finally, after ten long years, he got
his exoneration. Thankfully, they had so many reformer, retired settles
ap D investigators who were able to talk and realize,
oh wait a minute, we had put together a task
(33:21):
force to try to find that guy. We never did
you mean somebody actually set in prison for those crimes.
The local district attorney recognized what had gone wrong in
Joe's case, so he started to use Joe's case to
train other prosecutors and police departments on how to improve
their investigative processes. I'm in all of the district attorney
(33:46):
and the positive changes that he's working towards that district,
the trades offices, night and day from what it was
way back when I was wrongly convicting. The general public
isn't to where they see people on TV. Oh, this
person just got out. This person got tens of millions
of dollars. That is a very small minority that gets
those millions of dollars. And I can assure you right now,
(34:08):
I don't care how many tens of millions of dollars
a lot of these agonies receive from the state, from
the county, and the majority of them are able to
get that much. Are the ones who are able to
prove prosebratorial misconduct, which is extremely, extremely difficult to prove.
Those few men and women who get that money are
walking zombies. A lot of them. You may see them
(34:28):
on a TV show, you may interview them on a podcast.
Do not look at the exterior facade, because I've had
people tell me what you look okay, you speak well,
you must be okay. I said, don't you ever ever
read a book by its cover, because you don't know
what PTSD I have to endure and live with for
the rest of my life. On top of dealing with PTSD,
(34:53):
Joe has also had struggles adapting to civilian life. The
first thing was even trying to get a job. Because
I wasn't exonerated directly from prison. I had to come
out and do three years of Pearl. For three years.
I was so paranoid. I was so concerned that I
would be framed again by these cops. So everywhere I went,
(35:17):
every step I took, I kept a journal, talk about paranoia,
talk about being super hyper vigilar. I couldn't even shop
in the stores, you know, without these people getting too
close to me with a shopping cart, touching me with
a shopping cart, like turn around, ready to kill people.
What the hell are you doing so close to me?
(35:39):
Add to that, they put me up on that sex
offender and registry. Think about my children not being able
to play with kids in the neighborhood. Think about some
kids riding their bikes too close to me, and their
parents or grandparents done enough to them, come on, come on,
come on, and taking them home because they were afraid
they think that I'm some sort of a monster. The
opportunity cost that I lost of earning an education, of
(36:02):
earning a living, of being able to contribute to social security.
Fortunately took a lot of weekend and night courses and
I was able to get into into corporate America and
earn a better living. There's not a data goes by
that this doesn't affect me in one way or another.
I don't have the capacity to concentrate like I used to.
(36:24):
I don't have the capacity to exercise the emotional intelligence
that I used to her that I could have been
able to work on it on a daily basis. Joe
says he eventually found people to talk about his situation,
including Jennifer Thompson. Jennifer was once attacked and identified the
wrong person out of the lineup. She later fixed that
(36:46):
misidentification and she started her own foundation called Healing Justice
for people who were Wrongfully incarcerated. The circles that she
holds revolve around restorative justice and believe me, I have
spent I don't know how much money on therapist. But
it wasn't until I sat in a restorative justice circle
and I saw the magic in it. Because I could
(37:06):
now sit in a circle in the fire as they
call it, what other axonorees who have been through what
I've been through. And we sat there and we shed
tears for a whole weekend. I walked away a million
pounds lighter. When an exonore is exonerated, people think, well,
I don't I don't know that individual. There's nothing that
(37:26):
I can do for that person. Of course you can.
We all have some sort of gift that we were
born with that we can share with another human being.
We all have some kind of influence, whether you can
give a person a coat, a pair of shoes, an
opportunity of a job, mentoring. You know, you may be retired,
(37:48):
you may not have the financial means to give a
person anything you can mentor the person. Believe me, I
don't know of any man or woman stepping out of
prison who is going to turn down I and from anybody.
If you can ever serve as a bridge just to
even refer that person to somebody else, If you don't
have the means or the influence do so, because you
(38:11):
never know what a little act of kindness can do
for another individual. As I mentioned at the beginning of
this episode, exonerations are extremely rare. These men are incredibly
unfortunate to have been put into these situations in the
first place. They unfairly lost so many years of their lives.
(38:33):
But in at least one way, they are lucky that
lawyers and innocence projects and conviction integrity units were eventually
able to look at their cases, consider evidence of their
actual innocence, and take some action. So many cases in
the United States do not have that type of evidence
or support. Criminal cases often boiled down to one person's
(38:56):
word against another. As they say, you can't prove a negative.
It's so much harder to find evidence that something did
not happen than it is to find evidence that something
did happen. As William Dylon mentioned, he did not have
an alibi for the day of the murder because he
wasn't doing anything really remarkable. The day that William did
(39:18):
not commit the murder, He did not know that he
would be needing to keep track of where he was
and what he was doing. There is a reason that
innocent until proven guilty is a basic tenant of the
United States criminal justice system. The right to make the
state prove someone's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is a
foundational principle of our system of justice. However, the way
(39:43):
our system is set up is that people simply watching
the news and people who eventually become jurors simply assume
that someone is guilty merely because they are arrested. In
other words, the system is supposed to operate on a
innocent until proven guilty base sys, but in reality it
works just the other way. People generally consider that someone
(40:06):
is guilty unless they can somehow prove themselves to be innocent.
The system gravitates towards finality, and appellate courts can be
hesitant to reverse a conviction even when errors have occurred
at trial. It's fair to say that once a jury
has found someone guilty, it is extremely difficult to undo
(40:26):
that decision through the traditional appellate process or through an exoneration.
If you have a message for these axonorees, or, like
Joe said, anyone still incarcerated around the globe, give us
a call at four zero four for one zero zero
four for one next time on Sworn. I think a
(40:50):
lot of people don't think about this, but I do
a lot of work with prison inmates. When you have
a mandatory minimum where there's no parole, and you take
away hope from a prison and made of getting out,
you create a very very scary prison system. If you
sentence people to twenty five years to life without parole,
they are going to go into prison and commit more
crimes because they're never going to get out, and they
(41:11):
have no hope of every getting out, and they know
they're never gonna get out. What are you gonna do
to him? Sworn is a production of Tenderfoot TV and
I Heart Radio. Our lead producer is Christina Dana. Executive
producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright for Tenderfoot TV,
(41:32):
Matt Frederick and Alex Williams for I Heart Radio, and
myself Philip Holloway. Additional production by Trevor Young, Mason Lindsay,
Mike Rooney, Jamie Albright, and Halle Beadall. Original music and
sound designed by Makeup and Vanity Set. Our theme song
is Blood in the Water by Layup. Show art and
(41:52):
design is by Trevor Eisler, editing by Christina Dana, mixing
and mastering by Mike Rooney and Cooper Skinner. Special thanks
to the team at I Heart Radio from U t
a or In Rosenbound and Grace Royer, Ryan Nord and
Matthew Papa from the Nord Group back Media and Marketing
(42:14):
and Station sixteen. I'd also like to extend a very
personal and special thanks to all of our contributors and
guests who have helped to make all of these episodes possible.
You can find Sworn on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
Sworn podcast and follow me your host, Philip Holloway on
Twitter at phil Holloway e s Q. Our website is
(42:38):
sworn podcast dot com, and you can check out other
Tenderfoot TV podcasts at www dot tenderfoot dot tv. If
you have questions or comments, you can email us at
Sworn at Tenderfoot dot tv or leave us a voicemail
at four zero four for one zero zero four one.
(43:01):
As always, thanks for listening. H
If you will place your left hand on the Bible
and raise your right hand, and please repeat after me,
and I do solemnly swear, then titled action find the
defendant guilty of the prime It makes no sense, it
doesn't fit. If it doesn't fit, you must equit. We
all took the same of of office. We're all bound
(00:23):
by that common commitment to support and defend the Constitution,
to bear true faith in allegiance to the same that
you faithfully discharge the duties of our office. Do you
solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you are about
to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth. From Tenderfoot TV and I Heart Radio,
this is sworn. I'm your host, Philip Holloway, m d N.
(00:52):
A kind of changed everything. It was the game changer
because for the first time in history we had really
definitive proof of innocence, although I'm gonna say the second
time in history. I always tell my students DNA cases
aren't the best cases. The best cases are murder cases
where the victim shows up alive later on, and there's
(01:12):
there's been ten of those documented in history of the
United States. But short of the victims showing up alive
and DNA cases, it gets very difficult to win these cases.
But here's what I've seen happen over the last twenty
years is DNA opened the door to make believers out
of judges that hey, innocent people are falling through the cracks.
(01:44):
Let's face it, Exoneration cases in the United States aren't
exactly commonplace. According to the United States Department of Justice,
there were just under one and a half million people
in prison by the end of two thousand eighteen, but
as of May, there have only been two thousand, six
(02:05):
hundred exonerations, and a lot of those exonerations have happened
very recently. This is because of things like advancement in
DNA and other technology. DNA has been a very helpful
tool in providing evidence of innocence for wrongly incarcerated people.
But as the California Innocence Project director Justin Brooks said
(02:27):
at the beginning, DNA has done more than simply providing evidence.
It's opened the door to the idea that people are
in fact in jail for crimes that they did not commit.
Judges eyes are now more open, Judges are now more
willing to consider that wrongful evidence is real, and to
(02:50):
hear wrongful conviction cases even if there is not DNA
evidence to clear them. Here's Amelia Maxfield, forensic science specialists
for the Pennsylvania Innocence Project. Before there was DNA evidence,
no one even believes that the system got it wrong
or could get it wrong. So it's definitely been the
(03:10):
catalyst for many exonerations and for kind of the innocence
movement as a whole. If there's any way for us
to go back and test evidence it was found at
the crime scene to try to identify the true perpetrator,
will do that. That's kind of the easiest, removes straightforward
way to get back into court if you have new
(03:30):
evidence of an alternate perpetrator from a DNA analysis. Even
though courts today are more likely than ever before to
hear claims of actual innocence, there are still a lot
of roadblocks along the way, especially in the way that
evidence is tested and stored when that evidence might contain
d N A. There's the first hurdle of even getting
(03:53):
access to the evidence. Evidence is kept in the custody
of the state. It may or may not have been
stored properly. It may or may not have been retained
at all. There was a widespread evidence destruction order issued
in the city of Philadelphia twenty years ago because there
was like a maggot infestation of evidence. Years worth of
(04:13):
potentially exculpatory DNA evidence was just destroyed because it wasn't
properly stored. We've had some counties where we've gone to
look for evidence it was just stored in the courthouse basement,
and then there was a flood, and then the evidence
is gone. And then there's a second hurdle of getting
access to testing. You have to get an order from
the court, and different states have different standards in order
(04:36):
to be eligible for DNA testing. A reasonable DA who
has a post conviction case from the eighties or nineties
where DNA testing was never done and the evidence still exists,
many of them will take the tact that we think
they should, which is, you know, we have the evidence,
why not just test it and it'll either confirmed the
conviction was right, or it'll show that the conviction was wrong,
(04:56):
and then we'll go from there. It's just fair and
just to test the evidence. Then you have the cost barrier,
so DNA testing is extremely expensive. Even simple DNA testing
runs you in the multiple thousands of dollars. Most states
have statutes written in such a way that the state
will pay for DNA testing either if you meet a
(05:17):
certain higher legal standard or if you agree for the
testing to be done at the state's lab. We just
don't trust some of the state labs, or they don't
have the capacity to do the testing that we want.
They don't have the technology we need. We're often looking
for small amounts of touch DNA found on specific items
and they don't have the ability to do that type
of testing. Getting the evidence in front of the court
(05:40):
and having them understand what it means and agree that
it is exculpatory is kind of the final hurdle. It's
amazing how many times when you have a rape and
murder case and you finally test the DNA and it
exonerates your client. It's not his DNA, it's someone else's DNA.
Then all of a sudden, for the first time, the
state comes back with the theory that there was a
(06:02):
second person there, that your client is still involved in
the murder, but a second person also raped the victim,
and that's never been a theory before. Amelia says, they
haven't actually had that many successful DNA exonerations. In fact,
it's been the minority of the Pennsylvania Innocence Projects exoneration cases.
(06:22):
Most of our clients have been exonerated based on new
evidence in the form of new witnesses coming forward, or
witnesses were chanting their testimony, or you know, finding something
in the homicide file, or ineffective assistance of trial counsel.
We also try to get new opinions based on modern
science in cases where a forensic science was used that
(06:44):
may be outdated, if we can get an analyst who's
been properly trained to look at a discipline and tell
us whether what was done was valid or not. There's
something like two thousand exonerations total, and only three hundred
of those involved DNA. There was a whole bunch of
(07:05):
people in Texas whose convictions were overturned because there was
misconduct by a specific officer involved in their case. So
those are all exonerations, but they're not DNA generations. A
friend of mine, Michelle Tiegel, is a criminal lawyer who
works in Texas. Michelle has lots of experience working in
(07:25):
both small towns and big cities, and I asked her
about some of the issues that she sees in her
post conviction practice. You would think it's just, oh, well,
we know this is now faulty science, so we're just
going to get him out. But there's so much more
to it than that, and our systems are procedural beasts.
(07:46):
Oftentimes lawyers have to really put their heads together and
then often really try and convince prosecutors to work with
them and trying to find a way to remedy and
fix what has happened. Meaning you know that someone's been
wrongfully convicted on faulty science. But Michelle says that even
if you do get a prosecutor to play ball, there
(08:07):
are still a lot of challenges. In Texas, there are
certain timelines that you have, and then there are of
course different issues that you can file what's called a
writ to basically get your case back before the trial
quarter back before one of the higher courts in that
jurisdiction based on new evidence or new science. But then
(08:29):
there are all these procedural what I would call hurdles.
You have to get a certain standard of evidence or
a certain type of testimony or a certain type of testing,
and then it has to be presented to the right
you know, decision maker, whatever court that may be in
that jurisdiction, and then those decisions are never moved and
usually made quickly. There's often tons of briefing and paperwork
(08:53):
that comes behind that to convince whoever the decision maker
is that this is accurate, and you have to get
x often to back that up experts that normally would
not be cheap, but that you're often begging to work
for free to try to help free someone who was
convicted on faulty science. And it's it's kind of begging
all the way down the line, is what post conviction
(09:15):
lawyers have to do. I mean, I commend them for it,
because it is often thankless work and they spend years
on it. I was involved in a capital murder case
years ago, a man named Ed Graff who was originally convicted,
and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which is the
highest criminal appellate court in Texas, reversed his conviction, but
(09:37):
they remanded it. And what that means is is that
they just sent it back to the trial court. They
didn't say he was innocent, they did not exonerate him,
but they said the science was bad. But we're gonna
send this case back to either be resolved by the
d a's office through a plea bargain or tried to
a jury. And we ultimately tried that case to a
(10:00):
jury with all new science, different experts, and you know,
there were a lot of witnesses, of course from a
nineteen eighty capital murder case that we're no longer alive,
and that became a tricky thing. What we wanted them
to do, what we would have rather them done in
that case, was just to exonerate our client, but they
(10:21):
instead reversed the conviction and said, we're not actually going
to call him actually innocent. We're going to say that
there was a flaw in this science and a problem
and we know that now, and so we're going to
send the rest back to be heard by jury or
decided by the d A. Michelle says, the jury deliberated
for about two whole days. When a jury's out a while,
(10:44):
you start, especially as a defense lawyer, thanking somebody in
there's fighting for my client. They're not just willing to,
you know, say guilty and let's send him away for life.
We hadn't really had many conversations or plea bargain negotiations
because we we believed our client was innocent. During the
course of the jury being out for two days, we
(11:05):
started having some of those conversations and and as a
criminal defense lawyer, anytime an offer is communicated, whether you
want your client to take it or not, you have
to communicate it. That's not something that's negotiable or that
we have discretion on. We also started looking at the
parole laws because this was a man who had already
served over twenty years in a Texas prison for the
(11:28):
conviction that had been obtained in the nineteen eighties. We
determined that if he pled guilty to anything less than
a life sentence, based on old parole laws, he would
immediately be released, meaning the d A, the judge, the
Texas Department of Criminal Justice, they would have no control.
It was a mandatory release on anything less than a
(11:51):
life sentence. Because of the time he had already served.
He ended up taking a plea bargain offer of less
than a life sentence. He pled guilty while the jury
was still out, so we didn't get a verdict. The
d a's office actually and this ended up being kind
of a little bit of a Snapho, but the d
a's office in McLennan County did not know about that
(12:14):
parole law and immediately went to the media and said
that they would contest him ever being released and he
wouldn't get out on parole, and we kind of just
left it at that. Eventually, the media and everyone caught
onto it, and what I said was and I got
some you know, it wasn't a popular thing to say,
(12:34):
but I stand by it. Is. My job is to
explain a lot of my client. The d a's job
is to know the law himself or herself. It's not
my job to explain it to them. And unfortunately they
didn't know the law in that situation. And so my
client is out now and I'm glad for that because
I think he should be personally. But that was kind
(12:57):
of a I guess you could say a technical procedural
when for that man m M. I think there's this
(13:21):
misconception from television shows that make the news that DNA
is some sort of a magic bullet for the criminal
justice system. DNA has been and continues to be a
fantastic tool. It's used to get to the bottom of
the question of who committed a crime, but there are
many cases or situations where DNA evidence might not be
(13:43):
available or even applicable. For the rest of the episode,
we're going to play for you parts of the interviews
with the four exonorees we spoke to about their exoneration
processes and their release from prison. Although these are four
or unique individual cases, they are all very difficult experiences,
(14:04):
and there are some commonalities across the board, including the
amount of time and effort that it took to prove
their innocence, the challenges they faced in rejoining society, and
the continued effects of their time in prison. Here's William Dillon,
the exonoree we spoke with in the episode on Scent Dogs.
(14:27):
When I got out, I was despaired with the fact
that they hadn't caught who actually committed the crime. And
that's what really bothered me more than anything. Some people saying, oh,
you're free now here is great, and then some people
look at well, this guy could be a massive mascular
and all that it was bothering me internally in my heart.
And when they finally came through and got the DNA
(14:49):
on this guy and then a confession to this guy,
and I ended up getting compensated and everything. I felt
a lot better through the process. I was able to heal.
I feel that that's helped me a lot. In the
journey forward. You may recall that William was arrested for
a murder when he offered to help with the police investigation.
(15:12):
After being subject to intense interrogation, irresponsible use of a
forensic dog, and faulty eyewitness testimony, William served twenty seven
years of a life sentence for a crime he did
not commit. When I was indicted for murder, there was
an anonymous phone call by a woman that said you
(15:33):
have the wrong person. That these two guys were the
ones involved in the crime. At that same time, the
chief investigator was the one that came to get me
from the car. He just wrote it down in the
file and didn't look into it well. It ended up
being thirty years later that those two guys were the
ones that were involved in the crime, as well as
two other juveniles. They did DNA on a shirt that
(15:56):
gets the killer left in the truck of the man
that was supposed to identify me that night, which my
lawyer was gonna have me try on at the trial.
It's a good thing I didn't. The one whose DNA
they got on the shirt, he denied any involvement. He
was in Chicago. DNA was taken thirty years later for
domestic violence. He was seventeen at the time of the murder.
(16:19):
The second guy had been living on the streets, and
he confessed that FORUM had committed the crime. And even
then the police still tried to put me in their crew,
saying wasn't dealing, there wasn't involved, And the guy that
when living on the street says, no, he was not
involved at all. My parents never believe I was actually
innocent of the crime. People ask me to you to
(16:41):
forgive them. Of course I do. When you're manipulated by
a power and a justice system that is supposed to
be the last of the line, is supposed to be
the true sense of justice, the true sense of what's
going on, at least as closest we can get it.
And you know as an individual of being the one
being attacked, and you know that witnesses in your case
(17:01):
have been manipulated by people that are using this power
and authority. I can forgive anybody that has been manipulated.
I can't forgive those that did the manipulating. I think
it really didn't matter to them about justice. I keep
saying all the time that you know, maybe it was
one or two, but in the basic senses of it
is is all of them. They were all down with
(17:21):
the count. Probably one or two that started the ball rolling,
and then everybody just followed on end. Could have been
somebody that just trying to shine up the stars and
get another conviction down the road. Another guy gone down
the road, who cares. My life didn't matter to imperiod.
They destroyed my life completely, they really did. They just
didn't know it would come back to buy them. William
says that when the day of his exoneration finally came,
(17:45):
he felt at least some sense of peace. I can't
even begin to tell you that I felt like it
was being carried down those steps. It was such an
amazing feeling. It was gratifying more than you know, the
sense of being found innocent or known to be innocent,
(18:07):
or just to be released from the hell that I
had been in. It was just a very very happy thing.
But at the same time, there was huge hurtles to overcome,
and technology had completely changed. People had phones in their pockets, computers.
When I went to prison. The phones were on the
wall and NASA had the computers. Everything was just extremely fast.
(18:30):
Information was everywhere. It was a hurdle, but at the
same time I was figured it was out to me,
So I just dove into it as much as I could,
and I just took ahold of it and learned as
much as I could as fast as I could information wise,
And it's not that complicated. You have to really get
in and want to get it. I think the biggest
hurdle for me was shopping with so many selections as perplexing.
(18:51):
I would go look for a bar so going there
and to be so many choices, I'd have to walk
out because I just get this overwhelming feeling and have
to leave. A simple as that sounds, that's that was
probably the biggest dilemma that I had. The reason why
I came on here today is I want to let
your listeners know that what you see on TV is
not the real thing. That is not the criminal justice system.
(19:14):
Those are actors acting. The real criminal justice system is
a horrific place, and it doesn't matter if you're right
or wrong, you will end up getting turned upside down.
It's like I tell everybody all the time. One minute
I was a passing here in a vehicle, the next minute,
I'm on a freeway fast ride to prison with a
life sentence. And it can happen to anyone, anywhere, at
(19:35):
any time. This is not to support say that we
don't need the police and the justice system. I've been
in those places where these people in these places are
absolute maniacs. We need the police, but the justice system
itself needs to be corrected. There needs to be a
secondary overlook of cases. And I understand it's costly and
(19:58):
it does this in there, but the problem is that
these people were allowed to push this wagon without him
any factual evidence to it. Does it prove this doesn't
prove that. It's hard to say, but my point is
with some oversight, some of this will be slowed down.
Here's the perspective of Bill Richards. A few episodes ago,
(20:18):
we heard the story of how he was wrongfully incarcerated
for the murder of his wife and served twenty three
years in prison the California Innostance Project. It was the
best thing for me. I was on a level four
yard and sent Noah prison to hard core yard that
the guy was working with us talking to him about it,
(20:39):
and he was innocent. He gave me the address for
the Innocence Project, which you just opened up at that time.
So I wrote them a letter and they sent me
back a questionnaire, and I sent them a bunch of
information that I had that I had written myself, like
about sixty pages of documentation of perjury and stuff by
the police. So they came down to students and then
(21:00):
viewed me, and you know, they did the investigation and
they were instrumental in picking up the case because you know,
they get a couple of thousand cases a year people
asking for help. Built a couple of years from the
actually sign on to represent me because they have to investigate.
You know, they need to know you're really innocent, and
is there anything to work with. The Innocence Project probably
(21:21):
spent sixteen years working on the case to get me out.
You know, I stay in touch with other people. There's
a woman whose husband is in prison in Missouri. Her
husband is represented by the Missouri Innocence Project, and she's
always trying to raise money and get a private lawyer.
And I told you you couldn't possibly pay private lawyer
to do with the projects. Do this is what they do.
(21:44):
It's what they know how to do. Get fundraisers. I
don't even want to consider how much money, just in
expenses it costs to get me out of prison. You
could never do that with a private attorney unless you're
thinking rich. Bill recalled all the evidence that they telephone
and the Innocence Project found which suggested he was in
fact innocent. I'm trying to think there's DNA and a
(22:07):
murder weapon. It was exactly the places where their experts
of the killers DNA would be. They are considerable other things.
There's also planet evidence. There was a point, after being
in Jeez almost twenty years when that technicality came into play.
A court had already rolled at the evidence pointed unerringly
the innocence and he didn't have half the evidence we
(22:29):
have now, and they used technicality and the higher courts
just ignored, said well, we're not going to look at that.
At that point, I thought I lost. That's the first
time I gave up. When the California Innocence Project was
working on William's case, they encountered a technicality in case
law that would not let them submit new expert testimony.
They fought that technicality and it has since been removed
(22:52):
by the California legislature. Technicality was that expert witnesses could
not recancer testimony or new expert witnesses cannot be considered
because their testimonies only an opinion. But that's what the
jury here is. I don't care if it's DNA, whatever
it is, and expert testifies to it. It was such
(23:14):
a bad thing that they've done this, as so many
other people, and I think my case stood out because
I've already had a rule of innocence that the legislature
introduced a bill to change the law to say, this
is totally ridiculous. You've got evidence of innocence and you
can't use it. I think there's only fourteen people in
the whole legislature that didn't vote for it. So it
(23:34):
was very well received. And when that came, we went
back to court and I got out on the evidence
unanimously in the Californy Supreme Court. But that's look another
seven years. It's like being dropped on an alien planet
because nothing is the same. And I was only in
twenty three years and I look at these guys get
(23:55):
out after forty It's a completely different world technology. That's
why I say I'm catching up on computers. I'm way
behind on them, and they're smarter than I am, you
know so, And I think they fight me half the time.
Society is different, people are different. Money isn't even the same.
Not to mention, everything costs three to four times what
(24:15):
it did before the line of work I did. There's
almost none of it around anymore, and they're surely not
hiring a guy that's almost seventy years old to do it.
I think it would be easy to find something that
wasn't changed, because everything changes. And of course I'm not
a young man anymore, and that doesn't help, you know,
(24:36):
my mind, I'm still a young man, because for some reason,
your mind when you go through this doesn't And I've
talked to others honories that they still picture them. So
I still ficture myself as forty. I look in the Maratha,
Oh my god, who's at I drive down the street
I used to live on, and I don't recognize it
because the trees are so big. Young trees have been planted,
(24:58):
just a little almost saplings now go by there the
two ft in diameter and there's a canopy over the
road to me, this was overnight to me. This was
I was this guy here and this is the life.
And now you're dropping out here in and everything has
changed and I haven't been there to change with it,
(25:21):
you know, because that's it. When you're inside, you don't
change with the world. You're isolated away from it. Bill
is now involved in a civil lawsuit against the police
officers who went after him. He could not talk about
that case very much since it is owngoing litigation, but
he and his legal team say that they have found
proof that evidence was planted that resulted in his conviction.
(25:46):
One of the attorneys she's looked through the records and found,
wait a minute, this evidence turned up ten days after
the autopsy. So that is a major part of where
we're going after them today is we have valid evidence
that planted evidence to incriminate me. I'm hoping we get
some sort of settlement. I don't have any family at
my age. I mean, I don't need it money unfortunately,
(26:10):
but I do have a living trust. If the cancer
gets to me before the civil action has done, all
the money will go to St. Jude's Wanted Warrior Project,
child refuge innocience projects. If I can't do some good
to somebody else for what they did to me. Since
(26:46):
I've been out, been merrit twice, I guess you could
say I'm being the true American person now days. Calvin
Johnson was the first d NA AS honoree from the
state of Georgia back in nine when we heard about
his case a few episodes ago. He was convicted by
(27:07):
an all white jury using inconclusive blood and faulty forensic
hair evidence. At the same time, he was declared not
guilty on a similar case by a diverse jury because
there was overwhelming proof of innocence. He was finally exonerated
after the evidence in the first case was sent to
(27:28):
a lab for DNA testing. He's been out of prison
for twenty years now, but he's faced major setbacks once
they set him free. I mean, when you get desonerated,
you come out with nothing. You don't get the little
twenty five dollars to say that Georgia mc gee. You
you don't get closed that they might give you. You
can't get into any of the programs that they may have,
(27:51):
and they just toss you all. You're like a baby
and you need HILP. If you were in prison, and
you will die, Betty. Now, guess what, you don't having
the medical benefits. At a hard time getting the driver
license because I didn't have a car. So I had
a Runner car and I got there to the test.
I got in the runner car to do the driver
tests and they walked out him and they tell me
(28:12):
and say, hey, you can't take the tests in the
runner car. I get out of the car and I
walked to the car behind me, two complete stranger, and said, hey,
excuse me, sir. I said, they won't let me take
the test in my car because it's a Runner car.
Said can I use your car? And he said yeah.
So I asked him and say kind I had this
a couple of minutes to get familiar because I ain't
(28:34):
been out of prison. But two weeks I took the
test and I passed. That's an obstacle. The obstacle is
a little simple stuff. You go to the gas station.
Guess what it's self served. When I went to prison,
people would come out and they would pump your gas
and wash your windows. We didn't have self serves. I'm
standing there at the pump, looking around, hoping nobody staring
(28:56):
at me. Don't I didn't know what to do. I
was a very to ask anybody. I went to get
my own apartment. He said, Mr Johnson, you don't have
bad credit. You just don't have any credit. They want
to try to try to charge me, like triple the
deposit something. So I got upset. I remember going to
(29:17):
getting all these newspaper articles where they had been getting
out of prison and going back to that office. I
laid these articles across the desk and said, now, look,
this is why I don't have any credit. I've been
locked up for sixteen years. I've been punished for a
crime I didn't commit. Now out here in this world,
you're trying to punish me even more, and it's not fair.
And so I guess what. They went ahead and they
(29:40):
read with the department under the normal amount of depositive
people normally pay. But these are the challenges. I do
have a job that I've been at for the last
twenty years, which is really fortunate. I've been working with Martha,
which is Metropolitan, a lot of rappertricive authority. They're like
a big kid. Sometimes it was what with Giant train said,
(30:02):
but but I love it. I can't retire now. I'm
still hanging around. I'm pretty healthy, I feel good, So
why retire Now that I'm working and I'm actually giving
a paycheck, I mean like, wow, hey, it's great. Finally
we're going to hear from Joe Das another Exonoree we
spoke to earlier this season. Joe has been very involved
(30:25):
in the work of restorative justice and emotional healing since
he left prison, not only for himself but for others
who have been wronged by the criminal justice system. Almost
on a weekly basis, there's another man or woman who
has been falsely accused who's getting out through one way
or another. And this wasn't so common before DNA. A
(30:48):
matter of fact, I sat in the same prison from
the six years with the man who was also innocent.
I didn't know he was innocent, and he didn't know
I was innocent until we saw each other twenty seven
team or at the Innocent's Conference, and we're looking at
each other. Damn, you were innocent too. And for all
my brothers and sisters that are sitting in some sort
(31:09):
of compliment anywhere, not only in the nation, but throughout
the globe, all I can say to you is never
give up. Always continue to fight, never never give up.
Joe says that after finishing his time, he was determined
to clear his name. So once I get out, I
(31:31):
remember that I had been told by the a c O.
You go to the public defenders office. I went to
the public defenders office. They told me the same thing again.
Can't help you. Go back to your trial attorney. Finally,
I said, well, I don't have the choice. I have
to go to the devil and convicted me. I went
back to the district attorney, called him and told him listen,
I am out now assured you that I did not
commit this crime. And now that you guys had DNA tests,
(31:53):
I want to come give you my blood. I want
you to test so you can see that I did
not commit it. You don't have to trust my side
of the story because I wasn't there. You weren't there.
So I'll tell you what. Why don't you let science
prove it for you. I showed up at the DA's office.
He has an investigator show up, and the first question
out of the investigators of mouth is well, what do
(32:14):
you hope to accomplish with this? I assured him, listen,
the only thing I want to do is clear my name.
There's no way in the world you guys are gonna
be able to return my years to me. Finally, he
returned my call one day and tells me, listen, the
d a's office paid for this DNA test and it's
inconclusive and that's it. Nothing else we can do. My
wife and I were always sitting around, brainstorming, throwing ideas around,
(32:37):
what can we do, What can we do? What can
we do? My wife says, what kind of other evidence
was there? And that's when it dawned at me. There
was a slipper. When the guy ran off, he lost
one of his slippers, I said, son of a gun.
When my appeals had exhausted, they destroyed all the evidence
so that slipper was no longer there. Somehow or another.
(32:58):
They have to preserve evidence, because in this case, I
was out of evidence to preserve. But Joe held out
and continued finding. Finally, after ten long years, he got
his exoneration. Thankfully, they had so many reformer, retired settles
ap D investigators who were able to talk and realize,
oh wait a minute, we had put together a task
(33:21):
force to try to find that guy. We never did
you mean somebody actually set in prison for those crimes.
The local district attorney recognized what had gone wrong in
Joe's case, so he started to use Joe's case to
train other prosecutors and police departments on how to improve
their investigative processes. I'm in all of the district attorney
(33:46):
and the positive changes that he's working towards that district,
the trades offices, night and day from what it was
way back when I was wrongly convicting. The general public
isn't to where they see people on TV. Oh, this
person just got out. This person got tens of millions
of dollars. That is a very small minority that gets
those millions of dollars. And I can assure you right now,
(34:08):
I don't care how many tens of millions of dollars
a lot of these agonies receive from the state, from
the county, and the majority of them are able to
get that much. Are the ones who are able to
prove prosebratorial misconduct, which is extremely, extremely difficult to prove.
Those few men and women who get that money are
walking zombies. A lot of them. You may see them
(34:28):
on a TV show, you may interview them on a podcast.
Do not look at the exterior facade, because I've had
people tell me what you look okay, you speak well,
you must be okay. I said, don't you ever ever
read a book by its cover, because you don't know
what PTSD I have to endure and live with for
the rest of my life. On top of dealing with PTSD,
(34:53):
Joe has also had struggles adapting to civilian life. The
first thing was even trying to get a job. Because
I wasn't exonerated directly from prison. I had to come
out and do three years of Pearl. For three years.
I was so paranoid. I was so concerned that I
would be framed again by these cops. So everywhere I went,
(35:17):
every step I took, I kept a journal, talk about paranoia,
talk about being super hyper vigilar. I couldn't even shop
in the stores, you know, without these people getting too
close to me with a shopping cart, touching me with
a shopping cart, like turn around, ready to kill people.
What the hell are you doing so close to me?
(35:39):
Add to that, they put me up on that sex
offender and registry. Think about my children not being able
to play with kids in the neighborhood. Think about some
kids riding their bikes too close to me, and their
parents or grandparents done enough to them, come on, come on,
come on, and taking them home because they were afraid
they think that I'm some sort of a monster. The
opportunity cost that I lost of earning an education, of
(36:02):
earning a living, of being able to contribute to social security.
Fortunately took a lot of weekend and night courses and
I was able to get into into corporate America and
earn a better living. There's not a data goes by
that this doesn't affect me in one way or another.
I don't have the capacity to concentrate like I used to.
(36:24):
I don't have the capacity to exercise the emotional intelligence
that I used to her that I could have been
able to work on it on a daily basis. Joe
says he eventually found people to talk about his situation,
including Jennifer Thompson. Jennifer was once attacked and identified the
wrong person out of the lineup. She later fixed that
(36:46):
misidentification and she started her own foundation called Healing Justice
for people who were Wrongfully incarcerated. The circles that she
holds revolve around restorative justice and believe me, I have
spent I don't know how much money on therapist. But
it wasn't until I sat in a restorative justice circle
and I saw the magic in it. Because I could
(37:06):
now sit in a circle in the fire as they
call it, what other axonorees who have been through what
I've been through. And we sat there and we shed
tears for a whole weekend. I walked away a million
pounds lighter. When an exonore is exonerated, people think, well,
I don't I don't know that individual. There's nothing that
(37:26):
I can do for that person. Of course you can.
We all have some sort of gift that we were
born with that we can share with another human being.
We all have some kind of influence, whether you can
give a person a coat, a pair of shoes, an
opportunity of a job, mentoring. You know, you may be retired,
(37:48):
you may not have the financial means to give a
person anything you can mentor the person. Believe me, I
don't know of any man or woman stepping out of
prison who is going to turn down I and from anybody.
If you can ever serve as a bridge just to
even refer that person to somebody else, If you don't
have the means or the influence do so, because you
(38:11):
never know what a little act of kindness can do
for another individual. As I mentioned at the beginning of
this episode, exonerations are extremely rare. These men are incredibly
unfortunate to have been put into these situations in the
first place. They unfairly lost so many years of their lives.
(38:33):
But in at least one way, they are lucky that
lawyers and innocence projects and conviction integrity units were eventually
able to look at their cases, consider evidence of their
actual innocence, and take some action. So many cases in
the United States do not have that type of evidence
or support. Criminal cases often boiled down to one person's
(38:56):
word against another. As they say, you can't prove a negative.
It's so much harder to find evidence that something did
not happen than it is to find evidence that something
did happen. As William Dylon mentioned, he did not have
an alibi for the day of the murder because he
wasn't doing anything really remarkable. The day that William did
(39:18):
not commit the murder, He did not know that he
would be needing to keep track of where he was
and what he was doing. There is a reason that
innocent until proven guilty is a basic tenant of the
United States criminal justice system. The right to make the
state prove someone's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is a
foundational principle of our system of justice. However, the way
(39:43):
our system is set up is that people simply watching
the news and people who eventually become jurors simply assume
that someone is guilty merely because they are arrested. In
other words, the system is supposed to operate on a
innocent until proven guilty base sys, but in reality it
works just the other way. People generally consider that someone
(40:06):
is guilty unless they can somehow prove themselves to be innocent.
The system gravitates towards finality, and appellate courts can be
hesitant to reverse a conviction even when errors have occurred
at trial. It's fair to say that once a jury
has found someone guilty, it is extremely difficult to undo
(40:26):
that decision through the traditional appellate process or through an exoneration.
If you have a message for these axonorees, or, like
Joe said, anyone still incarcerated around the globe, give us
a call at four zero four for one zero zero
four for one next time on Sworn. I think a
(40:50):
lot of people don't think about this, but I do
a lot of work with prison inmates. When you have
a mandatory minimum where there's no parole, and you take
away hope from a prison and made of getting out,
you create a very very scary prison system. If you
sentence people to twenty five years to life without parole,
they are going to go into prison and commit more
crimes because they're never going to get out, and they
(41:11):
have no hope of every getting out, and they know
they're never gonna get out. What are you gonna do
to him? Sworn is a production of Tenderfoot TV and
I Heart Radio. Our lead producer is Christina Dana. Executive
producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright for Tenderfoot TV,
(41:32):
Matt Frederick and Alex Williams for I Heart Radio, and
myself Philip Holloway. Additional production by Trevor Young, Mason Lindsay,
Mike Rooney, Jamie Albright, and Halle Beadall. Original music and
sound designed by Makeup and Vanity Set. Our theme song
is Blood in the Water by Layup. Show art and
(41:52):
design is by Trevor Eisler, editing by Christina Dana, mixing
and mastering by Mike Rooney and Cooper Skinner. Special thanks
to the team at I Heart Radio from U t
a or In Rosenbound and Grace Royer, Ryan Nord and
Matthew Papa from the Nord Group back Media and Marketing
(42:14):
and Station sixteen. I'd also like to extend a very
personal and special thanks to all of our contributors and
guests who have helped to make all of these episodes possible.
You can find Sworn on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
Sworn podcast and follow me your host, Philip Holloway on
Twitter at phil Holloway e s Q. Our website is
(42:38):
sworn podcast dot com, and you can check out other
Tenderfoot TV podcasts at www dot tenderfoot dot tv. If
you have questions or comments, you can email us at
Sworn at Tenderfoot dot tv or leave us a voicemail
at four zero four for one zero zero four one.
(43:01):
As always, thanks for listening. H
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