April 30, 2026 • 44 mins
On August 8th, 1998, 25-year-old Kasey Schoen was shot and killed while sitting in his car in Indianapolis, IN. A few days later, a man approached officers and told them that he saw 22-year-old Leon Benson shoot the victim. A single eyewitness identified Leon as the shooter out of a photo lineup, despite the fact that he did not match the eyewitness's initial description of the shooter. Leon was ultimately sentenced to 60 years in prison for the murder, even though there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime and the main witness against him tried to recant their testimony.
Guest host, Kemba Smith, talks to Leon Benson and Lara Bazelon, Leon's attorney.
To learn more and get involved, please visit:
The Streets Don't Love You Back
Go to Die Jim Crow Records to support prison impacted musicians, including Leon Benson's (El Bently 448) album "Innocent Born Guilty".
https://kembasmithfoundation.org/
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
In the early morning hours of August eighth, nineteen ninety eight,
shots rang out in downtown Indianapolis. Casey Shane, a young
man who had been known to frequent a gay bar
in the area, was found dead in the driver's seat
of his truck. A young woman who was delivering newspapers
in the area witnessed the shooting. She described the gunman
(00:23):
to police as a dark skinned black man wearing a
black shirt and jogging pants with three white stripes down
the sides. Later, in a photo array and a live lineup,
she picked out Leon Benson. Leon lived a few blocks
from the shooting and was known to police as a
drug dealer. When Leon was arrested a week later, he
(00:48):
insisted he had nothing to do with the shooting. He'd
been in a building across the street that night and
dozens of people had seen him there. But at trial,
the young woman who had identified Leon from the lineup
did so again in front of a jury with convincing certainty.
She had seen the shooter with her own eyes, she
told the court, and she pointed at Leon Benson. But
(01:13):
this is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful conviction. I'm
kimbas Smith. Criminal justice advocate, formerly incarcerated individual, presidential clemency recipient,
(01:38):
and author and executive producer. And I'm sitting in today
for Jason Flahm, who is a good friend, longtime supporter,
and I'm excited today to be here with Leon Benson. Hi. Leon,
thanks for being on Wrongful Conviction.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Hey, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
And we also have us Laura Basilon from the University
of San Francis Go School of Law, where she is
the director of the Criminal, Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice
Clinic Programs.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Welcome, Laura.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
Thank you so much for having us.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
And thank you so much for your passion and the
work that you do. Leon. So what was most interesting
to me about your case was that during that particular
time when you are arrested in nineteen ninety eight, there
was this big, you know thing already with the war
on drugs, but there was an influx now black and
brown people going into the system. And so my case
(02:31):
was a drug case, a crack case. And so I
know with my case, the prosecution withheld discovery information and
just to read all the many errors that transpired with
your trial, it just really struck a chur with me,
and not to mention. I used to live in Indianapolis
as well, so I'm really excited to just dive in.
(02:53):
Can you tell us about your life before all of
this happened. You know, where you're from, where you grew up,
anything about your family life.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
You know, first and foremost, I'm from Flint, Michigan, and
I'm proud to say that. You know, Flint is a
blue collar community, you know, the underdog. You know, we
got that fighting spirit. I think I had a great childhood.
I mean I didn't know I was poor anything like that.
I was very creative growing up. I was able to
(03:24):
see a diverse crowd of people and culture at a
young age. And you know, I participated in sports, played basketball,
you know, things like that, you know, typical things of
a kid. So I did have an affinity for hip hop,
but I also started to have an affinity for you know,
the fast life, fast money, things like that. You know,
(03:47):
growing up, I was a typical kid who experienced gang violence,
experience street violence, things like that.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
You know.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
I eventually moved to Detroit when I was seventeen and
and love Detroit. You know, I made my bones in
Detroit very early. You know, fair feeling Puritan. You know,
at this point, it seems like a very typical urban background.
As I reflect back on my life, I see a
lot of things that could have been a lot better,
(04:18):
but they could have been a lot worse too, you know.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
And at the time that this incident happened, what was
going on in your life?
Speaker 3 (04:25):
In August eighth, for nineteen ninety eight, I was twenty
two years old, and at the time, what was happening
for me in my life? It was like, you know,
the the hip hop stuff that was going on with Tupac,
you know, in Bigie master P.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
You know, this was the backdrop.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
You know. I was in Indianapolis, Indiana. I had come
down there, not to sell drugs or anything like that.
I came down there as a professional painter, home renovator.
I was able to renovate like eighty homes before I
was laid off, and you know, unfortunately, you know, I
got back into the street life. So the area I
was in, it was a transit area in the near
(05:05):
downtown area Indianapolis. It was a lot going on. It
was very transit, very moving, and this was one of
the reasons that attracted me to this particular part of
the city of Indianapolis because it reminded me of Detroit and.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Flynt And this was also the neighborhood where the crime
took place. Laura, can you tell us something about the
area kind of set the stage for what happened that night?
Speaker 4 (05:27):
Indianapolis, the downtown part of it where this crime took place,
was fairly violent. It was known for a place where
you could buy and sell drugs, and as Leon also indicated,
was this interesting mix where this is the late nineties,
there was a lot of homophobia, and it was also
a place where people who were gay could go to bars,
(05:50):
including the Varsity Lounge and meet other people who were gay.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
The victim in the case was twenty five year old
Casey Shane. He was from Plainville, which was middle class
subourbon community about twenty miles outside of Indianapolis. What was
he doing downtown that night?
Speaker 4 (06:06):
Our operating theory has always been that Casey Shane was
there that night in that particular part of Indianapolis because
he had visited the Varsity Lounge, and we know he
had visited that bar in the past because witnesses had
identified him as being there, and there's fairly strong evidence
at this point to suggest that he was gay, but
(06:28):
also closeted for the reasons that you might expect, which
is that very very few people, even in extremely liberal places,
which Indianapolis was not, were out of the closet at
that point in time. And so our theory is that
he went out that night and went to the Varsity
and had a few drinks and maybe had an interaction
(06:48):
with someone there and then maybe arranged to meet them
a couple of blocks away, which is where the actual
crime itself occurred.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
With all of that, can you run downologically the night
of August eighth, nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Yeah, So it was a fairly ordinary night in that
Leon was hanging out at a place called the Priscilla Apartments,
which was also known as Little Vietnam.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
It was a building that I sow drugs out of,
and at this particular point of the night, I'd been
out there all day. So I came back to my
headquarters was this building, and I was in the back
of the buildings and by the steps, and I was
there with Timothy Gaither with a whole bunch of other people,
and you know, it was beer drinking, we smoking, and.
Speaker 4 (07:37):
Then around a little after three o'clock in the morning,
there was this sound of gunfire.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
And we heard shots like by pa and it was
like they were so close.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
And one of Leon's friends, Miss Shirley, who had just
gone outside, saw what they believed to be this black
pickup truck parked kind of idling outside across the street,
and there was a man in the truck in the
front seat who wasn't moving, and there was a man
on the sidewalk who had fired multiple times into the vehicle,
(08:12):
then walked away, walked back and fired again. And this
was just a completely shocking, seemingly out of nowhere shooting,
and from Leon's perspective, all he heard were the shots.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
You know, I stay in the back of the building
for maybe twenty.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Thirty minutes, so I left out that back part of
the door and went to my apartment that was also
in that direction, going like several blocks away, and he kind.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
Of went about his evening and then only later realized
that it was this young white man who was in
the neighborhood and this was a really big deal that
he had essentially been executed in his car, and the
police just came in kind of swarmed into the neighborhood
and essentially shut down business as usual there for a
while because they were extremely intent on finding someone to arrest.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
That went on about my business and it was a
parade of police, you know, later on that day, and
I didn't come back to the area for several days.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
I think there was a lot of pressure in this
case because the suspect who had been seen by witnesses
was black, the victim was white. I think that cross
racial nature put extra pressure on the police, and there
was just a lot of heat in the neighborhood in
the next couple of weeks, and a lot of, as
I said, pressure on the police to solve this crime
and really get someone in custody and charge them.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
So Leon was nowhere around he heard the shot. What
led to this investigation? How did they even connect Leon
to the case?
Speaker 4 (09:52):
Initially, the police were given leads that the person who
committed the shooting was a man named Joseph Webster, and
they had that information because there was talk in the
streets that it was Joseph Webster, and there was other information,
including from a man named Dakaria Fulton who had actually
witnessed the shooting, that Joseph Webster had committed that crime,
(10:14):
but it so happened that a young woman named Christy
Schmidt was there at the scene. She was a white woman.
Her reason for being in the neighborhood was that she
was delivering newspapers. So for your younger listeners back in
the day, you would put a quarter in a box,
you'd open the box and you would pull out a newspaper,
and Christy was the person who would stack those newspapers,
and that's what she was doing. She was in the
(10:35):
middle of doing that when she heard the shots and
she looked up and saw the shooter. And her initial
description she said, he never got into the light, and
recall it's very dark at three o'clock in the morning.
She was one hundred and fifty feet away, a full
block away, and according to the lead detective, a man
named Alan Jones, when she was given different mugshots to
look at, she was given Joseph Webster's mugshot, and she
(10:58):
said that it was not Joseph Webster, and then detective
Jones showed her a picture of Leon and Christy Schmidt
said that his face leapt off the page and that
she was certain that this was the person. That this
was the shooter, and when that happened, the entire trajectory
of the case changed.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
So you're saying this key witness pointed out Leon on
a lineup, despite having only seen the shooter in the
dark of night for a few seconds and from one
hundred and fifty feet away.
Speaker 4 (11:28):
And she said, initially to the detective on the scene,
Detective Leslie van Buskirk, he had a dark complexion. And
of course, as you can see all too clearly because
we're all looking at each other and these little zoom pictures,
Leon is very light complexed. There were a lot of
things that didn't make any sense about her description, which
also evolved and became increasingly specific and dramatic over time.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
And I want to point out too that study after
study has shown the unreliability of cross racial identification. They've
been found to be less accurate than just taking a
wild guess. So, Laura, was there anything else about the
photo identification or the lineup that seems sketchy.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
Yes, there's a lot of opaqueness around that. They never
recorded that interview. We have no idea what detective Jones
said to her. We don't know if suggestive language was used.
We don't know how many pictures she actually looked at.
She does not have a clear memory of that at
the time. And so once they had this woman as
their witness, they built the entire case around that, which
meant essentially that they developed tunnel vision, and it really
(12:31):
became about propping up her account and making everything revolve
around and reinforce what she was saying. And every time
they received a piece of information that pointed away from
Leon and toward Joseph Webster, they would bury it in
the file and not turn it over.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
And another thing, there was another witness who came forward
as well, a neighborhood guy named Donald Brooks who had
previously gotten into a beef with Leon, I think over
a drug deal gone sour. He told detective Jones that
the shooter was a guy named Detroit, which was Leon's nickname.
Donald Brooks later went back on a statement, but we'll
hear more about that later. Leon. All of this came
(13:09):
as a surprise to you because you were arrested on
the fourteenth of August, about a week after the shooting happened.
But originally you thought they were picking you up for
something else.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Right that day, I was still in my drug business
at the time. You know, my run in with authorities
was I got caught with possession of cocaine and so
I was on a misdemeanor probation charge. So when the
police rolled up on me and Shirley now sitting on
(13:39):
the stool, they said I had a warrant for possession
of cocaine and probation violation, and you know, I was
arrested for that. We went to the police station and
they tain me to the wall in the room.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
And I just fell asleep. I fell out.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
And then I was awakened. I don't know for how long.
It was cold as hell in there. And they came,
you know, Detective Jones and Van Buskirk, and it was
interrogate me.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
They told me like, hey, what do you know.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
About this murder? And instantly for me, I felt like
this is a game. I was nowhere around, no murder scene.
I got nothing to do with this stuff. I just
held my own But I thought it was a joke
that they had come to me about a murder, and
even saying that somebody'd seen me do it. It was laughable.
(14:33):
It was laughable. My biggest mistake was not asking for
a lawyer. You know, twenty twenty, hindsight is always there.
(14:59):
But you know, when I start to understand the law,
I realized that most people like me at the time,
you know, twenty two year old, uneducated. Of course, you know,
you had this notion that if you say, get a lawyer,
as if it's saying you guilty, you know, the system
say you're innocent, to proven guilty.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
But it was quite the opposite.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
For me.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
It was guilty and to proven innocent. So I didn't
know this at the time. So I'm volunteering my location
where I was at, and I find out later that
you know, the detective, you know, manipulated you know, this information.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
You know, he omitted.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
Out of forty people in the building, you only can
find two people who said they didn't see me.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
And I gave you at least ten twelve apartment numbers.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Of people that see me right right, and even worse,
even worse because I gave up that information. You know,
I wasn't thinking that people even in the building that
they had seen me that day would probably be like,
I don't want to get involved. I'm no, but I
didn't see nothing what you're talking about. And they was
right to feel like that you know at the time.
(16:11):
You know, so as bad as it sounds, you know,
a lot of us play this game with the system.
And I'm talking to my people that's out there, you know,
in the street life or whatnot. You know, on one hand,
we want to, you know, be out there doing our
thing in the dark, selling drugs, you know, moving the
things that we do. But then on the other hand,
we wanted to we still want to trust it. We
(16:33):
don't trust the police, but we want to trust the
police at the.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Same time, you know, come save me right, you know.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
And I was in that type of frame of mind
at that time, and honestly, as a citizen, whether whether
I was an accused drug dealer, accused murderer, accused robber,
or whatnot, the law in the system suposed to be impartial.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
And I was feeling like that, but that wasn't the case.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
But you did eventually hire a lawyer to represent you,
a man named Timothy Miller. How did he feel about
your chances?
Speaker 3 (17:09):
So he came to me and I gave him a
little run down. He's like, yeah, yeah, man, I already
know that. Man, we're going to get this case dismissed.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
You know, I just want twenty thousand.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
You might not have to pay the whole thing because
we'd get this dismissed. Just give me a five thousand
dollars retainer and you know we would go from there. Man, hey,
I absolutely believe you right.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
And then your trial was set for May of nineteen
ninety nine in Marion County Superior Court. So, Leon, what
were you actually feeling as the trial date was approaching?
Speaker 3 (17:39):
You know, I had a lot of different emotions. You know,
I was very nervous. I had never been to trial before,
so at this point, me feeling like it was laughable
was over with. I'm going to trial. I'm like, oh, man, oh,
they for real?
Speaker 2 (17:57):
You know.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
So the state had a couple of our witness says
Christy Smidt, who pitched you out of the lineup as
the shooter, and Donald Brooks, who had given your name
to the police. But at trial, Donald try to recant
a statement saying he didn't remember what he'd said to
the detective Jones, and he didn't remember seeing you near
the truck. And not only that, you knew that your
defense attorney had an acepisleeve, a man named Dakaria Fulton,
(18:21):
Laura can you tell us about Dakaria and why he
was so crucial to the defense.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
Basically, Leon, Joseph Webster, and Dakaria were all drug dealers
in this area. They didn't work together, but they also
weren't enemies. He didn't really have anything against anybody. He
just told Detective Jones exactly.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
What he saw.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
What had happened was, he was in his apartment a
couple of blocks away. He decided he wanted to go
smoke a blunt. He needed some rolling papers. He starts
walking towards the seven eleven and just by happenstance, he's
literally across the street and he looks and he sees
Casey Shane's park car, and he sees this man standing
by the car, and he watches this interaction go down,
(18:59):
and he's pretty close. He's much much closer than Christy
Schmidt ever was. And he recognizes the guy as Joseph
Webster because he's wearing these very distinct Adidas jogging pants
block with three white stripes down the side, but also
because he and Joseph Webster had run into each other
earlier that day, and Joseph Webster had been carrying a
gun and showed it to Takaria, who told Webster, you're
a fool. You need to put that gun away. And
(19:20):
so it was this very clear, strong identification from someone
who knew everyone new Leon, knew Joseph Webster and really
didn't have any skin in the game. And that statement
did get turned over to Timothy Miller.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Like a week before the first trial. You know, Timothy
Miller had finally given me the January nineteen ninety nine
discovery supplement, and in this it had Dakaria Fulton's statement,
and I looked, I'm like, oh, man, this guy's saying
he's seen it right.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
I'm like, man, look, hey, I'm not Finn go home, right.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
So I go back to the sale block and I'm
showing them. I'm like, look, man, I told ju man,
look they got the witness right there, like we giving
each other hog find Like, bro, man, you going home.
So I go to the first trial that Karl wasn't there.
Just the mere mention of him is what got a
hung jury. In my opinion, I was able to listen
from the hold and sell to the jury pool coming
(20:16):
out and them saying, you know, where's that other guy on?
Speaker 2 (20:20):
They mentioned him? But where is he at.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
In the first trial, the jury hung sex to sex,
so it was a split vert. There were six people
who did not think there was enough evidence to convict.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
I say this all the time that my trial wasn't
a trial really of Leon Benson, but it was a
trial of urban America against America, because everybody in my
trial was people who were from the streets, people of color,
and our challenge was these people in us.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
That's how I felt.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
It was a clear line drawn, and I got the
raff of a lie that energy.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
I felt some nasty energy in there. It was nasty.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
But when they came back and said a mistrial, I
wasn't necessarily relieved. I was glad not to hear a
guilty verdict, but I was figuring, like, oh, once we
get to Cary Fault, I'm out of here.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
So then there was a second trial about six weeks later,
in July of nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 4 (21:21):
There were some major differences though, between the first and
the second trial, and I think maybe the biggest one
was that in the first trial, Timothy Miller called a
guy named Tim Gaither who alibied Leon because he had
been sitting next to him inside the building when the
shots were fired, and so that really did establish an alibi,
and it's consistent with what Leon had always said. And
(21:42):
in the second trial, and we don't know why he
didn't call him. I think one of the things that
is completely frustrating and not explicable is that he never
called Fulton, not in the first trial and not in
the second trial. In the second trial, he also didn't
call Timothy Gaither and so Leon didn't have an alibi,
and once again he failed to meaningfully challenge Christy Schmid's identification,
(22:05):
and this time the jury came back with a guilty verdict.
It was chaos in the courtroom. Leon was crying out
for God to help him. His family was crying. The
judge had to admonish them. The other side of the
courtroom was cheering.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
You know, the Leon Benson was murdered in that courtroom
that day. That's what you witness. You witness a murder,
a legal linchen And I understand the victim's family, they
lost a loved one. He can never be returned. But
I was I was deeply hurt by the tears. Guilty
(22:47):
in a tear, you know, I started to feel and
empathize with a deep level of what slavery months looked like,
you know, back in the day.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Yeah, I say it.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
It was burnt. It was kind of burnt me. You know.
I went back to the hole and sell you know,
you know, I cried.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
I was like, damn, like this is real, Like I'm
not gonna see my kids.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
I was outcast, I was killed, and I.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Was buried with sixty one years of dirt to lie
in the tomb called prison.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
And I was shattered, you know, so much.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
So when I went to prison, I had what you
call delusions.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Of reprieve.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
Something good's gonna happen. God is gonna open up the
door and for me. You know, while I was sitting
in prison, I wore my coat and my boots in
my bunk.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
They say, man, why are you doing that? Because they
gonna come get me man and tripping. I was broken, right,
So that's the gist of it.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
But I see it also as just not losing hope,
Like you had to believe that you weren't going to
spend sixty some years in prison. So I'm really interested
in hearing because I did six and a half years,
and it breaks my heart to know that you spent
twenty five years in prison, and so I just want
(24:33):
to hear about your strength and how you spent your
time in prison, especially too of ten years. At that time,
I believe I read you were in solitary confinement. So
how did you keep yourself strong?
Speaker 3 (24:46):
So, you know, in order to see somebody at their
highest heights, you must know where they being that they
low was lows. When I explained to you why I
was that I was shattered. I could have gave up,
but you can never give up on yourself. And you
know when I came in, you know, I fought from
day one. I hit the law library. I learned how
to really read a case law and understand it. And
(25:11):
you know, I was eventually, you know, put on solitary
for participating in the prison riot that I didn't even
participate in. So I was left with the question why me?
And that question was answered, why not me? Why not me?
You know?
Speaker 2 (25:29):
So I had to get myself together.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
I had to eat, eat some spirit full, you know,
eat some knowledge ful you know, every day. And one
of the things that I learned when I was in
solitary was acceptance, right acceptance. I had to accept that
I was in that moment. Those circumstances, not the stance,
the situation, but the things that are circumscribed around it.
(25:53):
And once I started to accept that I got to
go through this process, I became more creative with the
tools around me. So my jail cell wasn't no longer
a jail cell. It wasn't solitary no more. It became solitude.
It became a university, It became a healing center for me.
It became, you know, a public speaking stage, you know,
(26:15):
to the other solitary prisoners, the other eleven. So I
did the best that I can do in there, and
I impacted guys. My best moments in there was when
I showed guys who were illiterate how to read, how
to write, right, when I gave somebody that was broken, man,
I put them back together and gave them real confidence
(26:36):
and healing. See, they didn't see that when we was
on the inside. When I had the mic, it don't matter.
I'm the coldest ever, and I said it on record
because I made them guys in their hope. That feel good,
That feel good. That's what I do it for it
right now?
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Right well, Leon, congratulations on your self growth while and
the shoe in solitary and then also your motivation for
you know, when you were in general population to try
to help lift other young brothers that were in the
system as well, and I'm sure you'll continue to do
so while you're home. Laura, I want to circle back
(27:16):
to you a little bit and talk about some things
that went wrong in Leon's trials, both of them. When
you reviewed this case, did you see any evidence of
ineffective counsel or prosecutor or misconduct, you know that kind
of thing.
Speaker 4 (27:30):
There was. There was a misconduct by the prosecutor, not
just by the police, and it was egregious in the
second trial. And that is also consistent with my experience,
which is that prosecutors tend to cross ethical and legal
lines when the case is very close and they're worried
that they're going to lose. And I think that's what
was going on with this prosecutor, whose name is Randall Head,
who later became a state legislator and is now prosecuting
(27:52):
people once again. But I think because the first trial
was so close and he almost lost, he was absolutely
determined that he was going to nail Leon this time,
and so he did this absolutely unlawful thing, which is
that when Donald Brooks, the second eyewitness, didn't say what
he wanted him to say, which is that he saw
LeAnn by the truck, and instead Donald Brooks started going
backwards and being contradictory to his initial statement to Detective Jones.
(28:17):
Rather than impeach him with the statement properly, he got
frustrated and he said, I want to read his entire
statement to Detective Jones into the record, all of it,
and this is a very long statement. It covered the
beef between Leon and Donald Brooks. It covered all kinds
of things that made Leon seem like a really bad
guy and were completely irrelevant. And then to compound what
(28:38):
he was doing, he said in closing argument that Donald
Brooks had gone sideways and backtracked because quote, snitches get stitches,
and that when Donald Brooks was in jail, he was
afraid for his life. He was afraid he was going
to be killed, and he implied not just that, but
that Leon or his family was going to kill him,
none of which was actually true. And what that's called
(29:01):
is basically evidence outside of the record, except it's not evidence.
It's a totally made up story. And he just injected
that into his closing argument. He made up a bunch
of facts once again to make Leon look like a terrible,
violent person, and Timothy Miller didn't object to any of
that either.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
And Laura, when you heard about Leon's case, what stood
out to you?
Speaker 4 (29:21):
There are really two reasons why my students and my
staff attorney and I took this case. And the first
one was that Leon has a very powerful advocate named
Shannon Coleman, who's a woman in Philadelphia who's really made
it her life's work to try to get people out
of prison who've been wrongfully convicted, and she reached out
and asked me to take the case. But the second
reason was that once I met Leon, it was just
(29:42):
so clear to me not only that he was innocent,
but just what a complete waste this was, because he's
such an amazing human being and has so much to
offer the world as an artist, as a thinker, as
a brother, as a partner, as a father, as a
member of the community. And the idea that Leon was
(30:03):
just going to be rotting in there was so horrifying
to me. It just I couldn't live with that, And
so I thought, you know what, this is a long shot,
but we're going to dig deep, We're going to do
everything we possibly can. And I felt like at the
end of the day, if after a few years and
we did everything we possibly could, I could live with that.
But what I couldn't live with was listening to Shannon
(30:23):
and meeting Leon and walking away.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Laura, you are a real one, and I'm sure Leon
and I can both say that we're grateful for a
tourneys like you that'll take the long shots. Now we
have to get to the events that led to Leon's
conviction being vacated. Can you tell us about that process.
Speaker 4 (30:42):
Leon's case was accepted for review by the Conviction Integrity
Unit of the Marion County Prosecutor's Office, which was a
new unit at the time, and I think maybe his
case was the first that was accepted and the co director,
Kelly Potter, was assigned to it. So we were really
lucky that we had a true partner in the prosecution,
(31:04):
the District Attorney Ryan Meers. He was very focused on
making sure not that the numbers were really high in
terms of convictions, but that the right people were being
convicted and that innocent people were not being convicted. And
so Ryan Mehers had assigned Kelly and her counterpart to
look back at cases where it seemed like maybe there
had been a mistake or multiple mistakes that were made.
(31:26):
And what was really tricky about Leon's case is that
many of the issues that we had been talking about
were what we call in the legal world litigated and lost,
meaning that they had been raised at other times after
Land was convicted and rejected. And that included the misconduct
that I described by the prosecutor. It included the failure
to call Dakaria Fulton, It included the failure to introduce
(31:49):
testimony about the perils of crossracial identification. All of those
issues had been raised and lost, and so we had
to find something new, and that was going to be
very very hard because almost a quarter of a century
had gone by, and it occurred to us ultimately that
maybe there was evidence that was provided by the original
people involved in the case as witnesses that had never
(32:10):
been turned over to Leon and his attorney, and so
that ended up being the key that really unlocked the
prison door, so to speak. In other words, we were
all in agreement that once this buried evidence surfaced, it
was really clear that the trial had been unfair and
unconstitutional because there's a rule, the Brady rule, that says
you have to turn that evidence over and had been violated.
(32:31):
And in addition to it being violated, it was very
clear that had it been followed, the jury would have
reached a different verdict.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
You mentioned evidence that was buried, What exactly was that
buried evidence and how did you dig it up?
Speaker 4 (32:45):
So what we did was Kelly, our partner on the
other side and the conviction Review Unit, she provided the
actual police file, which no one in the history of
the litigation had ever seen, including Leon, and so we
went through everything in that file, and then we compared
it to the documents that have been turned over to
Leon and Lo and behold pretty much every time Joseph
Webster came up as a suspect, whether it was through
(33:06):
multiple detailed crime stopper tips, or most crucially, a note
to Detective Jones from another detective citing three different people
who had either witnessed the murder or who he had
told he did. It was buried and Leon had never
gotten those things. So we went to see Detective Jones.
He had retired under difficult circumstances. He was older, ailing
(33:29):
and over a series of hours. Really towards the end
of this interview, he admitted that he had not turned
these documents over and that basically every time he wrote
something down or received something that was handwritten, including this
note saying my confidential informant saw Joseph Webster shoot the
(33:50):
white boy and the head, that note too, had not
been turned over. And so when we asked Detective Jones why,
he said, well, that was my work product. There is
really no such thing as police work product. They have
to turn over everything in their file to the district attorney.
And so once he said that, I remember, I just
had a physical sensation in my body, like I just
(34:12):
couldn't believe that he was saying what he was saying.
That's when I realized that in that moment, the case
was probably over. And then we came back and visited
him a few months later and he signed a declaration
basically saying what he had said to us initially, and
(34:33):
that was, in the end, the most powerful piece of
evidence that really broke the case completely apart. And that
was when I understood that that Leon was going to
be going home.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
And then on March eighth, twenty twenty three, Leon's conviction
was vacated by Judge Shatries Flowers.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
But I didn't know until March knife about eleven in
this and I was reading Jay Prince The Art of Respect.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
I was reading that and they called my name, and.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
You know, I left out and went there, and the
council was like, hey, you got immediate release, you know,
woo woo. So I did have a David Shappel moment, right,
I did kind of feel like man, woo tang, you know,
just slipping over my desk's right. So I just pumped
my fists and I went and got my property together
and everything, and I was on my.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Way down the walk like an hour later, you know
what I mean.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
So I threw on my all white, you know, I
threw my pair, my prayer shaw on. I get there
to the gate, and uh, you know, the first thing
when I opened up the door, it's like I was
blinded by the light, you know, I was being rebirthed.
And the first thing I did, you know, I iron
at the most High in which I called the most
High Yahweh. I said, Halleluyah barukata Yahuah, which means blessed
(35:57):
be the name Yahweh. That's what I did when I
got out. I see my sister Valerie, and I heard
my brother's voice, and I see my daughters, and I
seen all my people who looked at like angels to
me when they sat right there and they was looking
and I could hear the chant truth never dies, Truth
never dies. And what you would see if you ever
(36:17):
look at that footage, it's so authentic because I just
was in a moment. That's what you're seeing. That's the
core of me getting out of there. I laugh at
it when I see it too. It bring me joy.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
That's how joyful I was, you know, with that to
embrace the people who put in the.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
Time to believe me. You believe me, so now you
know I'm like a spiritual Muhammad Ali. I got the people,
ain't on telling them what I can do with the
people you believe.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
Me, Leon, All of that is just phenomenal and definitely
resonates within me. And I just think with your release
and what you're doing now, I'm wondering how many of
the boxes that you checked off with your goals of
once you come out, because it seems like in five months,
(37:07):
I'm sure you've checked off plenty. But tell us you know,
what are you doing with your time nowadays? At you're home?
Speaker 2 (37:13):
You know, I'm living here in Detroit, Michigan.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
I've been doing a lot of things because I was
practicing them, you know, on the inside. I was mentoring.
On the inside, I was teaching, creating programs, performing organizing events,
you know, things like that. One of my biggest highlights is,
you know, I dropped the album Innocent Born Guilty. I
recorded it on the inside. I don't want to tell
(37:38):
you how when where you know, yeah, you know, I
don't want to do that, but it was recorded inside.
It's a soundtrack of what I was feeling in different
times and whatnot. Beyond that, you know, I'm still active
in community involvement awareness. You know, every chance I get
(37:59):
you or I put a word in for at risk youth.
I connect with other organizations like organization Exigner Reads here
in Detroit. They definitely been huge with helping me re
enter the back in society. I've been you know, working
with the Streets Don't Love You Back, you know, these
other nonprofits.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Anything that I can do to.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
Bring awareness, you know, to Room for and conservations, to
any type of you know, discriminations or injustices in the world.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
Well, Leon, those are really wonderful organizations that are doing
great work. We'll put links to them in our bio
page so our listeners can show their support and also
let them know where they can check out your album,
which I thought was pretty dope by the way. So
again I feel so humbled and grateful to be able
to have this opportunity to be a guest host to
(38:50):
interview you both with wrong For convention podcasts, we always
close with closing arguments and so just really wanted to
know what the both of you all have to close with.
Speaker 4 (39:00):
I guess I have two kind of calls to action.
The first one is in in the time that it
took between our filing the petition for Lean to be
released in Leon's actual release, we did get increasingly uncertain
about whether this was actually going to work and whether
he was ever going to get out. And the truth
of the matter is it's a major decision by a
(39:23):
judge to overturn a conviction. We needed to respect that process.
I think Leon understood that better than we did. So
one thing I will say to lawyers out there is
listen to your clients. Sometimes oftentimes they know best And
the second thing I'll say is to the audience, because
any one of you could be selected to serve on
a jury, and it's maybe the most important thing that
(39:43):
you'll ever do, even though you don't realize it. What
I would ask that you do when you're on that
jury is really, really take your obligation seriously, whether it
is presuming somebody innocent, or holding the prosecution to their burden,
or understanding that your doubts are real. I think so often.
There was a juror on Leon's case who did have
(40:04):
a lot of doubts in the second trial, and she
felt sort of bullied and exhausted, and she got herself excused,
she left the jury, and then they convicted shortly after
with a replacement. And if she had just been able
to hang on a little longer, maybe the result would
have been different. She could have hung the jury again.
So I urge people, when you're in the minority and
you're battling against the majority. Maybe it's even eleven people
(40:24):
telling you you're wrong and you're crazy, and it's Friday
afternoon and they want to go home, Hang on, hang
on to your conviction, because you are the person standing
between this wrongfully accused person and a terrible injustice. And
so I would ask people when you're being selected for
a jury to be considerate, to be observant, and to
be strong.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
Well, I got two thoughts. I got one ounce of previncing.
This better than a town they cure. You know, do
the things I mean, as individuals as well as you
know public servants do to things in the now that
you can do to prevent having to go back right
(41:05):
with a ton of cure. So if you just come
with an ounce of prevention, let's just have harm reduction,
you know, in our lives as well as in our
public spaces. And the next thing is, you know, be
a part of the solution, not the problem. Don't let
your silence be the action that you know perpetuates injustice
(41:28):
in any form, let alone wrong for incarceration. It's so
many things that we can do as a society, as
individuals that can get the world out. Okay, maybe you didn't.
You don't want to get behind an innocence case. It
might take too long for you. Maybe you don't want
to get behind a particular movement. But what you can
do is small things. Sign a petition, leave a comment
(41:51):
of encouragement to somebody you know, sometimes show up at
a rally that's trying to you know, get humanity across
whereas being blocked. And one thing I wanted to say too,
this ain't my story.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
This Casey Shane's story.
Speaker 3 (42:11):
He was killed because he was closeted, and now because
he's dead, he don't have no voice.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
And you know.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
His story should get out because the biggest injustice now
is not me in prison anymore or the time that
I'm lost, but as an individual, you know, who was
a family member to others, was killed maybe for a
sexual preference. And you know, even though you know I'm
a head of sexual guy, I say I'm an ally
(42:43):
to the LGBTQ community because I'm being so considerate of
what they go through and some of those experiences I
don't fully understand. But one thing I do understand is
that we are all human. We perfectly imperfect. You know,
ay Elohim said we was perfect. We were made in
their image. You know that's something that to even look at,
(43:06):
you know, and taur Ross, so everything that's here is
supposed to be, you know, because it wouldn't be.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Thank you for listening to wrongful Conviction. You can listen
to this and all Lava for Good podcasts one week
early by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
I'd like to thank executive producers Jason Blam, Jeff Kempler,
and Kevin Bortis for inviting me to sit in today,
and thanks to our production team Connor Hall, Annie Chelsea,
(43:41):
Lyla Robinson and Kathleen Fink. The music in this production
was supplied by three time Oscar nominated composer Jay Ralph.
Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms
at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction, and you
can also follow me at Kenpasmith on Instagram or go
to my website Keimbosmith dot com and purchase my book
(44:04):
Post a Child, The Kembusmith Story. Wrongful Conviction is a
production of Loving for Good Podcasts in association with Signal
Company Number one
In the early morning hours of August eighth, nineteen ninety eight,
shots rang out in downtown Indianapolis. Casey Shane, a young
man who had been known to frequent a gay bar
in the area, was found dead in the driver's seat
of his truck. A young woman who was delivering newspapers
in the area witnessed the shooting. She described the gunman
(00:23):
to police as a dark skinned black man wearing a
black shirt and jogging pants with three white stripes down
the sides. Later, in a photo array and a live lineup,
she picked out Leon Benson. Leon lived a few blocks
from the shooting and was known to police as a
drug dealer. When Leon was arrested a week later, he
(00:48):
insisted he had nothing to do with the shooting. He'd
been in a building across the street that night and
dozens of people had seen him there. But at trial,
the young woman who had identified Leon from the lineup
did so again in front of a jury with convincing certainty.
She had seen the shooter with her own eyes, she
told the court, and she pointed at Leon Benson. But
(01:13):
this is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful conviction. I'm
kimbas Smith. Criminal justice advocate, formerly incarcerated individual, presidential clemency recipient,
(01:38):
and author and executive producer. And I'm sitting in today
for Jason Flahm, who is a good friend, longtime supporter,
and I'm excited today to be here with Leon Benson. Hi. Leon,
thanks for being on Wrongful Conviction.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Hey, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
And we also have us Laura Basilon from the University
of San Francis Go School of Law, where she is
the director of the Criminal, Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice
Clinic Programs.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Welcome, Laura.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
Thank you so much for having us.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
And thank you so much for your passion and the
work that you do. Leon. So what was most interesting
to me about your case was that during that particular
time when you are arrested in nineteen ninety eight, there
was this big, you know thing already with the war
on drugs, but there was an influx now black and
brown people going into the system. And so my case
(02:31):
was a drug case, a crack case. And so I
know with my case, the prosecution withheld discovery information and
just to read all the many errors that transpired with
your trial, it just really struck a chur with me,
and not to mention. I used to live in Indianapolis
as well, so I'm really excited to just dive in.
(02:53):
Can you tell us about your life before all of
this happened. You know, where you're from, where you grew up,
anything about your family life.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
You know, first and foremost, I'm from Flint, Michigan, and
I'm proud to say that. You know, Flint is a
blue collar community, you know, the underdog. You know, we
got that fighting spirit. I think I had a great childhood.
I mean I didn't know I was poor anything like that.
I was very creative growing up. I was able to
(03:24):
see a diverse crowd of people and culture at a
young age. And you know, I participated in sports, played basketball,
you know, things like that, you know, typical things of
a kid. So I did have an affinity for hip hop,
but I also started to have an affinity for you know,
the fast life, fast money, things like that. You know,
(03:47):
growing up, I was a typical kid who experienced gang violence,
experience street violence, things like that.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
You know.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
I eventually moved to Detroit when I was seventeen and
and love Detroit. You know, I made my bones in
Detroit very early. You know, fair feeling Puritan. You know,
at this point, it seems like a very typical urban background.
As I reflect back on my life, I see a
lot of things that could have been a lot better,
(04:18):
but they could have been a lot worse too, you know.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
And at the time that this incident happened, what was
going on in your life?
Speaker 3 (04:25):
In August eighth, for nineteen ninety eight, I was twenty
two years old, and at the time, what was happening
for me in my life? It was like, you know,
the the hip hop stuff that was going on with Tupac,
you know, in Bigie master P.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
You know, this was the backdrop.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
You know. I was in Indianapolis, Indiana. I had come
down there, not to sell drugs or anything like that.
I came down there as a professional painter, home renovator.
I was able to renovate like eighty homes before I
was laid off, and you know, unfortunately, you know, I
got back into the street life. So the area I
was in, it was a transit area in the near
(05:05):
downtown area Indianapolis. It was a lot going on. It
was very transit, very moving, and this was one of
the reasons that attracted me to this particular part of
the city of Indianapolis because it reminded me of Detroit and.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Flynt And this was also the neighborhood where the crime
took place. Laura, can you tell us something about the
area kind of set the stage for what happened that night?
Speaker 4 (05:27):
Indianapolis, the downtown part of it where this crime took place,
was fairly violent. It was known for a place where
you could buy and sell drugs, and as Leon also indicated,
was this interesting mix where this is the late nineties,
there was a lot of homophobia, and it was also
a place where people who were gay could go to bars,
(05:50):
including the Varsity Lounge and meet other people who were gay.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
The victim in the case was twenty five year old
Casey Shane. He was from Plainville, which was middle class
subourbon community about twenty miles outside of Indianapolis. What was
he doing downtown that night?
Speaker 4 (06:06):
Our operating theory has always been that Casey Shane was
there that night in that particular part of Indianapolis because
he had visited the Varsity Lounge, and we know he
had visited that bar in the past because witnesses had
identified him as being there, and there's fairly strong evidence
at this point to suggest that he was gay, but
(06:28):
also closeted for the reasons that you might expect, which
is that very very few people, even in extremely liberal places,
which Indianapolis was not, were out of the closet at
that point in time. And so our theory is that
he went out that night and went to the Varsity
and had a few drinks and maybe had an interaction
(06:48):
with someone there and then maybe arranged to meet them
a couple of blocks away, which is where the actual
crime itself occurred.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
With all of that, can you run downologically the night
of August eighth, nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Yeah, So it was a fairly ordinary night in that
Leon was hanging out at a place called the Priscilla Apartments,
which was also known as Little Vietnam.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
It was a building that I sow drugs out of,
and at this particular point of the night, I'd been
out there all day. So I came back to my
headquarters was this building, and I was in the back
of the buildings and by the steps, and I was
there with Timothy Gaither with a whole bunch of other people,
and you know, it was beer drinking, we smoking, and.
Speaker 4 (07:37):
Then around a little after three o'clock in the morning,
there was this sound of gunfire.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
And we heard shots like by pa and it was
like they were so close.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
And one of Leon's friends, Miss Shirley, who had just
gone outside, saw what they believed to be this black
pickup truck parked kind of idling outside across the street,
and there was a man in the truck in the
front seat who wasn't moving, and there was a man
on the sidewalk who had fired multiple times into the vehicle,
(08:12):
then walked away, walked back and fired again. And this
was just a completely shocking, seemingly out of nowhere shooting,
and from Leon's perspective, all he heard were the shots.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
You know, I stay in the back of the building
for maybe twenty.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Thirty minutes, so I left out that back part of
the door and went to my apartment that was also
in that direction, going like several blocks away, and he kind.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
Of went about his evening and then only later realized
that it was this young white man who was in
the neighborhood and this was a really big deal that
he had essentially been executed in his car, and the
police just came in kind of swarmed into the neighborhood
and essentially shut down business as usual there for a
while because they were extremely intent on finding someone to arrest.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
That went on about my business and it was a
parade of police, you know, later on that day, and
I didn't come back to the area for several days.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
I think there was a lot of pressure in this
case because the suspect who had been seen by witnesses
was black, the victim was white. I think that cross
racial nature put extra pressure on the police, and there
was just a lot of heat in the neighborhood in
the next couple of weeks, and a lot of, as
I said, pressure on the police to solve this crime
and really get someone in custody and charge them.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
So Leon was nowhere around he heard the shot. What
led to this investigation? How did they even connect Leon
to the case?
Speaker 4 (09:52):
Initially, the police were given leads that the person who
committed the shooting was a man named Joseph Webster, and
they had that information because there was talk in the
streets that it was Joseph Webster, and there was other information,
including from a man named Dakaria Fulton who had actually
witnessed the shooting, that Joseph Webster had committed that crime,
(10:14):
but it so happened that a young woman named Christy
Schmidt was there at the scene. She was a white woman.
Her reason for being in the neighborhood was that she
was delivering newspapers. So for your younger listeners back in
the day, you would put a quarter in a box,
you'd open the box and you would pull out a newspaper,
and Christy was the person who would stack those newspapers,
and that's what she was doing. She was in the
(10:35):
middle of doing that when she heard the shots and
she looked up and saw the shooter. And her initial
description she said, he never got into the light, and
recall it's very dark at three o'clock in the morning.
She was one hundred and fifty feet away, a full
block away, and according to the lead detective, a man
named Alan Jones, when she was given different mugshots to
look at, she was given Joseph Webster's mugshot, and she
(10:58):
said that it was not Joseph Webster, and then detective
Jones showed her a picture of Leon and Christy Schmidt
said that his face leapt off the page and that
she was certain that this was the person. That this
was the shooter, and when that happened, the entire trajectory
of the case changed.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
So you're saying this key witness pointed out Leon on
a lineup, despite having only seen the shooter in the
dark of night for a few seconds and from one
hundred and fifty feet away.
Speaker 4 (11:28):
And she said, initially to the detective on the scene,
Detective Leslie van Buskirk, he had a dark complexion. And
of course, as you can see all too clearly because
we're all looking at each other and these little zoom pictures,
Leon is very light complexed. There were a lot of
things that didn't make any sense about her description, which
also evolved and became increasingly specific and dramatic over time.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
And I want to point out too that study after
study has shown the unreliability of cross racial identification. They've
been found to be less accurate than just taking a
wild guess. So, Laura, was there anything else about the
photo identification or the lineup that seems sketchy.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
Yes, there's a lot of opaqueness around that. They never
recorded that interview. We have no idea what detective Jones
said to her. We don't know if suggestive language was used.
We don't know how many pictures she actually looked at.
She does not have a clear memory of that at
the time. And so once they had this woman as
their witness, they built the entire case around that, which
meant essentially that they developed tunnel vision, and it really
(12:31):
became about propping up her account and making everything revolve
around and reinforce what she was saying. And every time
they received a piece of information that pointed away from
Leon and toward Joseph Webster, they would bury it in
the file and not turn it over.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
And another thing, there was another witness who came forward
as well, a neighborhood guy named Donald Brooks who had
previously gotten into a beef with Leon, I think over
a drug deal gone sour. He told detective Jones that
the shooter was a guy named Detroit, which was Leon's nickname.
Donald Brooks later went back on a statement, but we'll
hear more about that later. Leon. All of this came
(13:09):
as a surprise to you because you were arrested on
the fourteenth of August, about a week after the shooting happened.
But originally you thought they were picking you up for
something else.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Right that day, I was still in my drug business
at the time. You know, my run in with authorities
was I got caught with possession of cocaine and so
I was on a misdemeanor probation charge. So when the
police rolled up on me and Shirley now sitting on
(13:39):
the stool, they said I had a warrant for possession
of cocaine and probation violation, and you know, I was
arrested for that. We went to the police station and
they tain me to the wall in the room.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
And I just fell asleep. I fell out.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
And then I was awakened. I don't know for how long.
It was cold as hell in there. And they came,
you know, Detective Jones and Van Buskirk, and it was
interrogate me.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
They told me like, hey, what do you know.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
About this murder? And instantly for me, I felt like
this is a game. I was nowhere around, no murder scene.
I got nothing to do with this stuff. I just
held my own But I thought it was a joke
that they had come to me about a murder, and
even saying that somebody'd seen me do it. It was laughable.
(14:33):
It was laughable. My biggest mistake was not asking for
a lawyer. You know, twenty twenty, hindsight is always there.
(14:59):
But you know, when I start to understand the law,
I realized that most people like me at the time,
you know, twenty two year old, uneducated. Of course, you know,
you had this notion that if you say, get a lawyer,
as if it's saying you guilty, you know, the system
say you're innocent, to proven guilty.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
But it was quite the opposite.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
For me.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
It was guilty and to proven innocent. So I didn't
know this at the time. So I'm volunteering my location
where I was at, and I find out later that
you know, the detective, you know, manipulated you know, this information.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
You know, he omitted.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
Out of forty people in the building, you only can
find two people who said they didn't see me.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
And I gave you at least ten twelve apartment numbers.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Of people that see me right right, and even worse,
even worse because I gave up that information. You know,
I wasn't thinking that people even in the building that
they had seen me that day would probably be like,
I don't want to get involved. I'm no, but I
didn't see nothing what you're talking about. And they was
right to feel like that you know at the time.
(16:11):
You know, so as bad as it sounds, you know,
a lot of us play this game with the system.
And I'm talking to my people that's out there, you know,
in the street life or whatnot. You know, on one hand,
we want to, you know, be out there doing our
thing in the dark, selling drugs, you know, moving the
things that we do. But then on the other hand,
we wanted to we still want to trust it. We
(16:33):
don't trust the police, but we want to trust the
police at the.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Same time, you know, come save me right, you know.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
And I was in that type of frame of mind
at that time, and honestly, as a citizen, whether whether
I was an accused drug dealer, accused murderer, accused robber,
or whatnot, the law in the system suposed to be impartial.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
And I was feeling like that, but that wasn't the case.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
But you did eventually hire a lawyer to represent you,
a man named Timothy Miller. How did he feel about
your chances?
Speaker 3 (17:09):
So he came to me and I gave him a
little run down. He's like, yeah, yeah, man, I already
know that. Man, we're going to get this case dismissed.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
You know, I just want twenty thousand.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
You might not have to pay the whole thing because
we'd get this dismissed. Just give me a five thousand
dollars retainer and you know we would go from there. Man, hey,
I absolutely believe you right.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
And then your trial was set for May of nineteen
ninety nine in Marion County Superior Court. So, Leon, what
were you actually feeling as the trial date was approaching?
Speaker 3 (17:39):
You know, I had a lot of different emotions. You know,
I was very nervous. I had never been to trial before,
so at this point, me feeling like it was laughable
was over with. I'm going to trial. I'm like, oh, man, oh,
they for real?
Speaker 2 (17:57):
You know.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
So the state had a couple of our witness says
Christy Smidt, who pitched you out of the lineup as
the shooter, and Donald Brooks, who had given your name
to the police. But at trial, Donald try to recant
a statement saying he didn't remember what he'd said to
the detective Jones, and he didn't remember seeing you near
the truck. And not only that, you knew that your
defense attorney had an acepisleeve, a man named Dakaria Fulton,
(18:21):
Laura can you tell us about Dakaria and why he
was so crucial to the defense.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
Basically, Leon, Joseph Webster, and Dakaria were all drug dealers
in this area. They didn't work together, but they also
weren't enemies. He didn't really have anything against anybody. He
just told Detective Jones exactly.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
What he saw.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
What had happened was, he was in his apartment a
couple of blocks away. He decided he wanted to go
smoke a blunt. He needed some rolling papers. He starts
walking towards the seven eleven and just by happenstance, he's
literally across the street and he looks and he sees
Casey Shane's park car, and he sees this man standing
by the car, and he watches this interaction go down,
(18:59):
and he's pretty close. He's much much closer than Christy
Schmidt ever was. And he recognizes the guy as Joseph
Webster because he's wearing these very distinct Adidas jogging pants
block with three white stripes down the side, but also
because he and Joseph Webster had run into each other
earlier that day, and Joseph Webster had been carrying a
gun and showed it to Takaria, who told Webster, you're
a fool. You need to put that gun away. And
(19:20):
so it was this very clear, strong identification from someone
who knew everyone new Leon, knew Joseph Webster and really
didn't have any skin in the game. And that statement
did get turned over to Timothy Miller.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Like a week before the first trial. You know, Timothy
Miller had finally given me the January nineteen ninety nine
discovery supplement, and in this it had Dakaria Fulton's statement,
and I looked, I'm like, oh, man, this guy's saying
he's seen it right.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
I'm like, man, look, hey, I'm not Finn go home, right.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
So I go back to the sale block and I'm
showing them. I'm like, look, man, I told ju man,
look they got the witness right there, like we giving
each other hog find Like, bro, man, you going home.
So I go to the first trial that Karl wasn't there.
Just the mere mention of him is what got a
hung jury. In my opinion, I was able to listen
from the hold and sell to the jury pool coming
(20:16):
out and them saying, you know, where's that other guy on?
Speaker 2 (20:20):
They mentioned him? But where is he at.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
In the first trial, the jury hung sex to sex,
so it was a split vert. There were six people
who did not think there was enough evidence to convict.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
I say this all the time that my trial wasn't
a trial really of Leon Benson, but it was a
trial of urban America against America, because everybody in my
trial was people who were from the streets, people of color,
and our challenge was these people in us.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
That's how I felt.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
It was a clear line drawn, and I got the
raff of a lie that energy.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
I felt some nasty energy in there. It was nasty.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
But when they came back and said a mistrial, I
wasn't necessarily relieved. I was glad not to hear a
guilty verdict, but I was figuring, like, oh, once we
get to Cary Fault, I'm out of here.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
So then there was a second trial about six weeks later,
in July of nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 4 (21:21):
There were some major differences though, between the first and
the second trial, and I think maybe the biggest one
was that in the first trial, Timothy Miller called a
guy named Tim Gaither who alibied Leon because he had
been sitting next to him inside the building when the
shots were fired, and so that really did establish an alibi,
and it's consistent with what Leon had always said. And
(21:42):
in the second trial, and we don't know why he
didn't call him. I think one of the things that
is completely frustrating and not explicable is that he never
called Fulton, not in the first trial and not in
the second trial. In the second trial, he also didn't
call Timothy Gaither and so Leon didn't have an alibi,
and once again he failed to meaningfully challenge Christy Schmid's identification,
(22:05):
and this time the jury came back with a guilty verdict.
It was chaos in the courtroom. Leon was crying out
for God to help him. His family was crying. The
judge had to admonish them. The other side of the
courtroom was cheering.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
You know, the Leon Benson was murdered in that courtroom
that day. That's what you witness. You witness a murder,
a legal linchen And I understand the victim's family, they
lost a loved one. He can never be returned. But
I was I was deeply hurt by the tears. Guilty
(22:47):
in a tear, you know, I started to feel and
empathize with a deep level of what slavery months looked like,
you know, back in the day.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Yeah, I say it.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
It was burnt. It was kind of burnt me. You know.
I went back to the hole and sell you know,
you know, I cried.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
I was like, damn, like this is real, Like I'm
not gonna see my kids.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
I was outcast, I was killed, and I.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Was buried with sixty one years of dirt to lie
in the tomb called prison.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
And I was shattered, you know, so much.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
So when I went to prison, I had what you
call delusions.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Of reprieve.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
Something good's gonna happen. God is gonna open up the
door and for me. You know, while I was sitting
in prison, I wore my coat and my boots in
my bunk.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
They say, man, why are you doing that? Because they
gonna come get me man and tripping. I was broken, right,
So that's the gist of it.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
But I see it also as just not losing hope,
Like you had to believe that you weren't going to
spend sixty some years in prison. So I'm really interested
in hearing because I did six and a half years,
and it breaks my heart to know that you spent
twenty five years in prison, and so I just want
(24:33):
to hear about your strength and how you spent your
time in prison, especially too of ten years. At that time,
I believe I read you were in solitary confinement. So
how did you keep yourself strong?
Speaker 3 (24:46):
So, you know, in order to see somebody at their
highest heights, you must know where they being that they
low was lows. When I explained to you why I
was that I was shattered. I could have gave up,
but you can never give up on yourself. And you
know when I came in, you know, I fought from
day one. I hit the law library. I learned how
to really read a case law and understand it. And
(25:11):
you know, I was eventually, you know, put on solitary
for participating in the prison riot that I didn't even
participate in. So I was left with the question why me?
And that question was answered, why not me? Why not me?
You know?
Speaker 2 (25:29):
So I had to get myself together.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
I had to eat, eat some spirit full, you know,
eat some knowledge ful you know, every day. And one
of the things that I learned when I was in
solitary was acceptance, right acceptance. I had to accept that
I was in that moment. Those circumstances, not the stance,
the situation, but the things that are circumscribed around it.
(25:53):
And once I started to accept that I got to
go through this process, I became more creative with the
tools around me. So my jail cell wasn't no longer
a jail cell. It wasn't solitary no more. It became solitude.
It became a university, It became a healing center for me.
It became, you know, a public speaking stage, you know,
(26:15):
to the other solitary prisoners, the other eleven. So I
did the best that I can do in there, and
I impacted guys. My best moments in there was when
I showed guys who were illiterate how to read, how
to write, right, when I gave somebody that was broken, man,
I put them back together and gave them real confidence
(26:36):
and healing. See, they didn't see that when we was
on the inside. When I had the mic, it don't matter.
I'm the coldest ever, and I said it on record
because I made them guys in their hope. That feel good,
That feel good. That's what I do it for it
right now?
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Right well, Leon, congratulations on your self growth while and
the shoe in solitary and then also your motivation for
you know, when you were in general population to try
to help lift other young brothers that were in the
system as well, and I'm sure you'll continue to do
so while you're home. Laura, I want to circle back
(27:16):
to you a little bit and talk about some things
that went wrong in Leon's trials, both of them. When
you reviewed this case, did you see any evidence of
ineffective counsel or prosecutor or misconduct, you know that kind
of thing.
Speaker 4 (27:30):
There was. There was a misconduct by the prosecutor, not
just by the police, and it was egregious in the
second trial. And that is also consistent with my experience,
which is that prosecutors tend to cross ethical and legal
lines when the case is very close and they're worried
that they're going to lose. And I think that's what
was going on with this prosecutor, whose name is Randall Head,
who later became a state legislator and is now prosecuting
(27:52):
people once again. But I think because the first trial
was so close and he almost lost, he was absolutely
determined that he was going to nail Leon this time,
and so he did this absolutely unlawful thing, which is
that when Donald Brooks, the second eyewitness, didn't say what
he wanted him to say, which is that he saw
LeAnn by the truck, and instead Donald Brooks started going
backwards and being contradictory to his initial statement to Detective Jones.
(28:17):
Rather than impeach him with the statement properly, he got
frustrated and he said, I want to read his entire
statement to Detective Jones into the record, all of it,
and this is a very long statement. It covered the
beef between Leon and Donald Brooks. It covered all kinds
of things that made Leon seem like a really bad
guy and were completely irrelevant. And then to compound what
(28:38):
he was doing, he said in closing argument that Donald
Brooks had gone sideways and backtracked because quote, snitches get stitches,
and that when Donald Brooks was in jail, he was
afraid for his life. He was afraid he was going
to be killed, and he implied not just that, but
that Leon or his family was going to kill him,
none of which was actually true. And what that's called
(29:01):
is basically evidence outside of the record, except it's not evidence.
It's a totally made up story. And he just injected
that into his closing argument. He made up a bunch
of facts once again to make Leon look like a terrible,
violent person, and Timothy Miller didn't object to any of
that either.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
And Laura, when you heard about Leon's case, what stood
out to you?
Speaker 4 (29:21):
There are really two reasons why my students and my
staff attorney and I took this case. And the first
one was that Leon has a very powerful advocate named
Shannon Coleman, who's a woman in Philadelphia who's really made
it her life's work to try to get people out
of prison who've been wrongfully convicted, and she reached out
and asked me to take the case. But the second
reason was that once I met Leon, it was just
(29:42):
so clear to me not only that he was innocent,
but just what a complete waste this was, because he's
such an amazing human being and has so much to
offer the world as an artist, as a thinker, as
a brother, as a partner, as a father, as a
member of the community. And the idea that Leon was
(30:03):
just going to be rotting in there was so horrifying
to me. It just I couldn't live with that, And
so I thought, you know what, this is a long shot,
but we're going to dig deep, We're going to do
everything we possibly can. And I felt like at the
end of the day, if after a few years and
we did everything we possibly could, I could live with that.
But what I couldn't live with was listening to Shannon
(30:23):
and meeting Leon and walking away.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Laura, you are a real one, and I'm sure Leon
and I can both say that we're grateful for a
tourneys like you that'll take the long shots. Now we
have to get to the events that led to Leon's
conviction being vacated. Can you tell us about that process.
Speaker 4 (30:42):
Leon's case was accepted for review by the Conviction Integrity
Unit of the Marion County Prosecutor's Office, which was a
new unit at the time, and I think maybe his
case was the first that was accepted and the co director,
Kelly Potter, was assigned to it. So we were really
lucky that we had a true partner in the prosecution,
(31:04):
the District Attorney Ryan Meers. He was very focused on
making sure not that the numbers were really high in
terms of convictions, but that the right people were being
convicted and that innocent people were not being convicted. And
so Ryan Mehers had assigned Kelly and her counterpart to
look back at cases where it seemed like maybe there
had been a mistake or multiple mistakes that were made.
(31:26):
And what was really tricky about Leon's case is that
many of the issues that we had been talking about
were what we call in the legal world litigated and lost,
meaning that they had been raised at other times after
Land was convicted and rejected. And that included the misconduct
that I described by the prosecutor. It included the failure
to call Dakaria Fulton, It included the failure to introduce
(31:49):
testimony about the perils of crossracial identification. All of those
issues had been raised and lost, and so we had
to find something new, and that was going to be
very very hard because almost a quarter of a century
had gone by, and it occurred to us ultimately that
maybe there was evidence that was provided by the original
people involved in the case as witnesses that had never
(32:10):
been turned over to Leon and his attorney, and so
that ended up being the key that really unlocked the
prison door, so to speak. In other words, we were
all in agreement that once this buried evidence surfaced, it
was really clear that the trial had been unfair and
unconstitutional because there's a rule, the Brady rule, that says
you have to turn that evidence over and had been violated.
(32:31):
And in addition to it being violated, it was very
clear that had it been followed, the jury would have
reached a different verdict.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
You mentioned evidence that was buried, What exactly was that
buried evidence and how did you dig it up?
Speaker 4 (32:45):
So what we did was Kelly, our partner on the
other side and the conviction Review Unit, she provided the
actual police file, which no one in the history of
the litigation had ever seen, including Leon, and so we
went through everything in that file, and then we compared
it to the documents that have been turned over to
Leon and Lo and behold pretty much every time Joseph
Webster came up as a suspect, whether it was through
(33:06):
multiple detailed crime stopper tips, or most crucially, a note
to Detective Jones from another detective citing three different people
who had either witnessed the murder or who he had
told he did. It was buried and Leon had never
gotten those things. So we went to see Detective Jones.
He had retired under difficult circumstances. He was older, ailing
(33:29):
and over a series of hours. Really towards the end
of this interview, he admitted that he had not turned
these documents over and that basically every time he wrote
something down or received something that was handwritten, including this
note saying my confidential informant saw Joseph Webster shoot the
(33:50):
white boy and the head, that note too, had not
been turned over. And so when we asked Detective Jones why,
he said, well, that was my work product. There is
really no such thing as police work product. They have
to turn over everything in their file to the district attorney.
And so once he said that, I remember, I just
had a physical sensation in my body, like I just
(34:12):
couldn't believe that he was saying what he was saying.
That's when I realized that in that moment, the case
was probably over. And then we came back and visited
him a few months later and he signed a declaration
basically saying what he had said to us initially, and
(34:33):
that was, in the end, the most powerful piece of
evidence that really broke the case completely apart. And that
was when I understood that that Leon was going to
be going home.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
And then on March eighth, twenty twenty three, Leon's conviction
was vacated by Judge Shatries Flowers.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
But I didn't know until March knife about eleven in
this and I was reading Jay Prince The Art of Respect.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
I was reading that and they called my name, and.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
You know, I left out and went there, and the
council was like, hey, you got immediate release, you know,
woo woo. So I did have a David Shappel moment, right,
I did kind of feel like man, woo tang, you know,
just slipping over my desk's right. So I just pumped
my fists and I went and got my property together
and everything, and I was on my.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Way down the walk like an hour later, you know
what I mean.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
So I threw on my all white, you know, I
threw my pair, my prayer shaw on. I get there
to the gate, and uh, you know, the first thing
when I opened up the door, it's like I was
blinded by the light, you know, I was being rebirthed.
And the first thing I did, you know, I iron
at the most High in which I called the most
High Yahweh. I said, Halleluyah barukata Yahuah, which means blessed
(35:57):
be the name Yahweh. That's what I did when I
got out. I see my sister Valerie, and I heard
my brother's voice, and I see my daughters, and I
seen all my people who looked at like angels to
me when they sat right there and they was looking
and I could hear the chant truth never dies, Truth
never dies. And what you would see if you ever
(36:17):
look at that footage, it's so authentic because I just
was in a moment. That's what you're seeing. That's the
core of me getting out of there. I laugh at
it when I see it too. It bring me joy.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
That's how joyful I was, you know, with that to
embrace the people who put in the.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
Time to believe me. You believe me, so now you
know I'm like a spiritual Muhammad Ali. I got the people,
ain't on telling them what I can do with the
people you believe.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
Me, Leon, All of that is just phenomenal and definitely
resonates within me. And I just think with your release
and what you're doing now, I'm wondering how many of
the boxes that you checked off with your goals of
once you come out, because it seems like in five months,
(37:07):
I'm sure you've checked off plenty. But tell us you know,
what are you doing with your time nowadays? At you're home?
Speaker 2 (37:13):
You know, I'm living here in Detroit, Michigan.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
I've been doing a lot of things because I was
practicing them, you know, on the inside. I was mentoring.
On the inside, I was teaching, creating programs, performing organizing events,
you know, things like that. One of my biggest highlights is,
you know, I dropped the album Innocent Born Guilty. I
recorded it on the inside. I don't want to tell
(37:38):
you how when where you know, yeah, you know, I
don't want to do that, but it was recorded inside.
It's a soundtrack of what I was feeling in different
times and whatnot. Beyond that, you know, I'm still active
in community involvement awareness. You know, every chance I get
(37:59):
you or I put a word in for at risk youth.
I connect with other organizations like organization Exigner Reads here
in Detroit. They definitely been huge with helping me re
enter the back in society. I've been you know, working
with the Streets Don't Love You Back, you know, these
other nonprofits.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Anything that I can do to.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
Bring awareness, you know, to Room for and conservations, to
any type of you know, discriminations or injustices in the world.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
Well, Leon, those are really wonderful organizations that are doing
great work. We'll put links to them in our bio
page so our listeners can show their support and also
let them know where they can check out your album,
which I thought was pretty dope by the way. So
again I feel so humbled and grateful to be able
to have this opportunity to be a guest host to
(38:50):
interview you both with wrong For convention podcasts, we always
close with closing arguments and so just really wanted to
know what the both of you all have to close with.
Speaker 4 (39:00):
I guess I have two kind of calls to action.
The first one is in in the time that it
took between our filing the petition for Lean to be
released in Leon's actual release, we did get increasingly uncertain
about whether this was actually going to work and whether
he was ever going to get out. And the truth
of the matter is it's a major decision by a
(39:23):
judge to overturn a conviction. We needed to respect that process.
I think Leon understood that better than we did. So
one thing I will say to lawyers out there is
listen to your clients. Sometimes oftentimes they know best And
the second thing I'll say is to the audience, because
any one of you could be selected to serve on
a jury, and it's maybe the most important thing that
(39:43):
you'll ever do, even though you don't realize it. What
I would ask that you do when you're on that
jury is really, really take your obligation seriously, whether it
is presuming somebody innocent, or holding the prosecution to their burden,
or understanding that your doubts are real. I think so often.
There was a juror on Leon's case who did have
(40:04):
a lot of doubts in the second trial, and she
felt sort of bullied and exhausted, and she got herself excused,
she left the jury, and then they convicted shortly after
with a replacement. And if she had just been able
to hang on a little longer, maybe the result would
have been different. She could have hung the jury again.
So I urge people, when you're in the minority and
you're battling against the majority. Maybe it's even eleven people
(40:24):
telling you you're wrong and you're crazy, and it's Friday
afternoon and they want to go home, Hang on, hang
on to your conviction, because you are the person standing
between this wrongfully accused person and a terrible injustice. And
so I would ask people when you're being selected for
a jury to be considerate, to be observant, and to
be strong.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
Well, I got two thoughts. I got one ounce of previncing.
This better than a town they cure. You know, do
the things I mean, as individuals as well as you
know public servants do to things in the now that
you can do to prevent having to go back right
(41:05):
with a ton of cure. So if you just come
with an ounce of prevention, let's just have harm reduction,
you know, in our lives as well as in our
public spaces. And the next thing is, you know, be
a part of the solution, not the problem. Don't let
your silence be the action that you know perpetuates injustice
(41:28):
in any form, let alone wrong for incarceration. It's so
many things that we can do as a society, as
individuals that can get the world out. Okay, maybe you didn't.
You don't want to get behind an innocence case. It
might take too long for you. Maybe you don't want
to get behind a particular movement. But what you can
do is small things. Sign a petition, leave a comment
(41:51):
of encouragement to somebody you know, sometimes show up at
a rally that's trying to you know, get humanity across
whereas being blocked. And one thing I wanted to say too,
this ain't my story.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
This Casey Shane's story.
Speaker 3 (42:11):
He was killed because he was closeted, and now because
he's dead, he don't have no voice.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
And you know.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
His story should get out because the biggest injustice now
is not me in prison anymore or the time that
I'm lost, but as an individual, you know, who was
a family member to others, was killed maybe for a
sexual preference. And you know, even though you know I'm
a head of sexual guy, I say I'm an ally
(42:43):
to the LGBTQ community because I'm being so considerate of
what they go through and some of those experiences I
don't fully understand. But one thing I do understand is
that we are all human. We perfectly imperfect. You know,
ay Elohim said we was perfect. We were made in
their image. You know that's something that to even look at,
(43:06):
you know, and taur Ross, so everything that's here is
supposed to be, you know, because it wouldn't be.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Thank you for listening to wrongful Conviction. You can listen
to this and all Lava for Good podcasts one week
early by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
I'd like to thank executive producers Jason Blam, Jeff Kempler,
and Kevin Bortis for inviting me to sit in today,
and thanks to our production team Connor Hall, Annie Chelsea,
(43:41):
Lyla Robinson and Kathleen Fink. The music in this production
was supplied by three time Oscar nominated composer Jay Ralph.
Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms
at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction, and you
can also follow me at Kenpasmith on Instagram or go
to my website Keimbosmith dot com and purchase my book
(44:04):
Post a Child, The Kembusmith Story. Wrongful Conviction is a
production of Loving for Good Podcasts in association with Signal
Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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