Jeffrey Deskovic details his wrongful conviction at 17 for the 1989 rape and murder of Angela Carrera, resulting from coercive interrogation tactics, a false confession, and ignored DNA evidence excluding him. After spending 16 years in maximum security, he was exonerated in 2006 via Stephen Cunningham's DNA match but faced severe PTSD and social stigma. Following five years of litigation securing $24 million, Deskovic founded the Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice, which has freed 11 others and pushed for legislative reforms addressing false confessions and forensic fraud to prevent future injustices. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Sheltered Life and Wrongful Conviction00:02:06
You ready to go?
Let's do it.
Thanks for doing this, man.
I appreciate you coming down.
Absolutely.
Thanks for bringing me down here.
I'm excited, man.
Obviously, you're wildly successful.
You're flying me in for this.
You're a pound, man.
Thanks for coming.
I really appreciate it.
You got it.
Your story is fascinating, and I think it's incomprehensible to people to understand what you went through at such a young age, at the age of 16.
For people who don't know, why don't you just give me a brief background on what happened to you when you were 16?
I was arrested at the age of 16 for a murder and rape that I did not commit, and ultimately I was wrongfully convicted of that.
So my wrongful conviction, which happened at the age of 17, was caused by coerced false confession, prosecutorial misconduct, fraud by the medical examiner, terrible public defender.
I lost even though the DNA didn't match me.
I was given a 15-to-life sentence because I had been charged as an adult.
And I then spent 16 years in a men's maximum security prison from age 17 to 32, losing seven appeals, getting turned down for parole because I maintained my innocence, going through that, and then ultimately being exonerated through further DNA testing, which identified the actual perpetrator.
Fast forward to today, and I'm an attorney now.
I've been cleared, and I have a nonprofit organization, the Jeffrey Descobri Foundation for Justice, which has freed 11 people.
passed three laws aimed at preventing wrongful conviction.
I'm an advisory board member of the group.
It could happen to you.
And we passed another six laws.
Currently, we have 17 cases and we're working on policy changes in New York, Pennsylvania, and California.
It's fascinating.
It's unbelievable what you've been through and how common that this is in the judicial system in the United States, people getting wrongfully convicted.
So what was the story of the girl who was, I think she moved from Columbia to New York?
Passing Laws to Prevent Mistakes00:05:06
Yeah.
And she was in a high school with you?
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, Angela Carrera was her name.
She moved from Columbia.
She was living, as I understood it, she was living a very sheltered life.
She was in the country for about a year and a half.
And, you know, ultimately she was, you know, she went missing on November 15th, 1989, and her body was found a couple of days later on November 17th, 1989, and, you know, she had been raped and murdered.
And how old was she?
She was 15 years old.
15 years old.
And you guys were friends in high school, right?
We were not.
I knew her name.
She knew mine.
She was in a couple of classes as a freshman, one as a sophomore.
That was it.
I think in two years, I think I briefly spoke to her twice.
So we were not even really on a high by basis.
Now, did you guys interact at all?
Was it just randomly passing by?
You met her a couple times, but you didn't really talk to her much.
Yeah, it was the latter.
Like you said, by coincidence or by school schedule, she happened to be in two of my classes as a freshman, one as a sophomore.
Like I said, I briefly spoke with her twice.
One time was.
I passed a note to her on behalf of a male classmate who was interested in her and he was kind of nervous to approach, so he asked me to pass it to her.
And that was really it.
So the day she went missing in 1989, I believe it was, right?
Yes, it was.
Yeah, November 15th, 1989.
So the day she went missing, where were you at?
What was going on?
What was that day like?
It was just like any other day in terms of the school day.
After school, I had a friend named Jason.
He lived nearby where I lived at.
And we had developed a rather innovative way of playing one-on-one in wiffle ball.
And so I played wiffle ball with him that day and had dinner at his house.
And around, I would say around 8 or 9 o'clock, I left his house on my bike and I drove down the hill about like less than 10 minutes away and got to my house.
And that's what I was doing that day.
And I think that day when she left her house and she went to like a popular hangout area in the woods in mid-afternoon, I believe it was.
Yes.
So let me give some backstory.
So Angela was in a photography class.
and the teacher had assigned the whole class, including her, to take pictures of some foliage.
So after school, she went back to her house with her older sister.
The teacher had assigned a buddy system for the protection of the students, like a male student was matched up with a female student.
And so she went back to her house.
Her sister went to the bathroom.
When she came back out, Angela wasn't there.
She left on her own.
So she went to the park to take pictures of the foliage, and the male student uh played hooky on the assignment so he never showed up.
So she was taking pictures on this.
Um, there's a path between Hillcrest and Peekskill, New York, at Hillcrest condominiums and and well, there's Hillcrest Condom yeah, there's the, the Hillcrest school, and then there's condominiums and there's like a woods and a macadam path that uh links the two, and so she went down onto the path, which is not that far away from this wooded area called um, which is called the pit, which you know kids, teenage kids used to drink at and used to used to make out.
That wasn't very far from off of the path.
So she's on this path with heavy woods taking pictures, and she comes across Stephen Cunningham, who's a drug addict and who's high, and he sees her, he attacks her, murders and rapes her.
This guy was smoking crack, I think it was.
That is correct.
And how old was he?
At the time of the crime, he was 29 years old.
And so, you know, Angela was 15, and at the time I was 16.
I never saw him a day of my life.
It was just kind of like a random encounter.
It was just unfortunate that she came across him at that time.
And, you know, that's what gave the occasion for him to attack her and, you know, do what he did.
So he attacked her.
Obviously, he murdered her.
At what point did she get reported missing?
And how long after that did they discover the body?
Yeah, I think that she got reported missing later, like early evening, that late afternoon, early evening.
She got reported missing.
You know, it was even ran in the local.
There was a local paper then called the Evening Star.
It was a daily newspaper, a Gannett paper.
And they ran a story, teen missing, had her picture and everything.
And, you know, and then a couple of days later, they ran a follow up story.
You know, her body had been found, you know, naked from the waist down.
Right.
Yeah.
They found her body.
And obviously, she had been beaten.
I think she had a lot of head trauma.
That's right.
They found a bludgeon wound on her head that was like an inch deep.
And they said a Gatorade bottle or something?
Well, the Gatorade bottle comes in later.
The Missing Teen and Local News00:15:49
So, yeah, I'll get into that.
I know what you're getting at, though.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, she had like a deep head wound in the back.
And so, you know, that was.
So, the medical examiner, I mean, he kind of flip flops a little bit.
I mean, in one hand, he says, well, the wound on the top of the head, that's what killed her.
But then he also says, well, either that or strangulation.
Okay.
So, he can't really determine which of those two things actually is what caused the death.
But both of them occurred to her.
We're going to get to the Gatorade bottle after.
Okay.
And so the people investigating this, is it just the local police department?
It's just the local Peekskill Police Department, yes.
And there had been very few murders in Peekskill overall.
So, you know, their inexperience, I think, was definitely a factor.
Not a common thing to happen at that town.
Not a common thing to happen at that town, no.
So in the course of the police investigation, they interview a lot of students from the high school.
And some of the students wind up telling the police that they might want to speak with me because I didn't quite fit in with them.
Like the kids were like a year older than me my first year.
So let me hold on a minute here.
Let me start again because I'm skipping things.
Take your time.
Sure.
So my first year in the high school, the kids were like a year older than me.
I skipped first grade, and so that caught up to me in high school.
And so, you know, the kids were a little bit older than me, and I really wasn't into drinking and going to parties and chasing girls and playing organized sports.
And plus, I didn't know them.
Like I grew up next to the high school, but I had my own set of, I went to Catholic school from grades two through eight.
And then I had a lot of friends after school.
So my after school life was different than my grade school life.
So I was kind of popular after school.
There was a lot of kids that lived in that apartment complex and whatever I would suggest would be what we would do.
We're going to ride bikes.
We're going to the movies.
We're playing Monopoly.
We're playing video games, football, all type of things.
But it was all basketball, all kind of unorganized things.
But that was after school.
And in school, that was a different crowd, a different set of kids.
So I didn't quite.
I was kind of quiet there too.
And I wanted to go to public school for high school, not another Catholic school, because I really wanted to go to school with the kids in the neighborhood that I was playing with.
And so, you know, I purposely failed the entrance exam on the Catholic high school for where my mother wanted me to go to.
Oh, really?
So I thought, because I wanted to go to Peekskill High School, and she didn't want me to.
So I failed the exam on purpose, and I go to Peekskill High School.
And to my surprise, I don't find the kids that I'm playing with in a neighborhood these are all kids that are like a year older than me because I skipped school.
I mean, I skipped a grade.
So you know, I was kind of, I was definitely picked on, for sure, and my grades really suffered a lot, and you know so much so that I had to go to summer school.
But I knew that if I went to summer school in order to pass, I was going to be stuck with the same kids again next year, and so I decided not to go to summer school, and so I did not go to summer school, purposely to get left back, to get held back, to held back, so I get.
So now you're with kids your own age, now i'm with kids my own age.
So things did get better some that way.
But then at the same time, these are still different kids.
I was not in any of the classes with the kids from the neighborhood.
These were other kids, the same age as me, but other kids.
So I still didn't quite fit in.
I wouldn't say I was really picked on anymore, but I still didn't quite fully fit in.
So I was still relatively quiet and to myself.
So in the course of the police investigation, the police interviewed many students from the high school, and some of the kids told the police that they might want to speak with me.
because I didn't quite fit in.
So this is what the police said originally put me on their radar.
An additional factor is that I was a sensitive teenager.
This was my real first brush with death, and I had an emotional reaction to that.
And the police thought that it was suspicious that I would have an emotional reaction to the death of a classmate that, as I've described earlier, that I barely knew.
How did you originally find out about her death?
I found out originally through reading the newspaper, the follow up article on November 17th.
And then, you know, there was also, you know, an announcement in the school loudspeaker, you know, on wake and funeral details and that thing.
And everybody was talking about it.
It was a huge thing.
It was a huge thing in Peekskill.
Yeah.
I mean, the whole city kind of shut down in a way.
I mean, parents were, you know, concerned with their own safety, safety of their children.
They were bringing kids to the high school and then bringing them straight back, you know, picking them up, bringing them straight back home.
There were town hall meetings that were held periodically.
Updates on investigation, safety tips, that kind of thing.
So everybody was talking about it.
So the police thought that this emotional reaction that I had was suspicious, like it was some sort of outward sign for something that I was sorry I did.
How are you being emotional?
What were you doing that was making them think that you were emotional?
No, I cried.
I definitely cried.
I mean, many people, many people, it affected me.
I don't think I was that.
In a way, I don't think I was that different than the rest of the people in the city.
I mean, a lot of people were emotional.
A lot of people cried.
A lot of people went to multiple wake sessions.
I mean, that was kind of commonplace, so much so that there was free mental health services offered to anyone in the city that wanted it.
That's how badly it kind of shook everybody up.
But we have these two reasons that I've just laid out why I'm on the police radar.
And then there's a third thing, which is that the Peacegill Police, they got a psychological profile from the NYPD, so they turned to a more experienced police department.
You know and look, give us this profile.
What type of person should we be looking for?
You know what were their characteristics, and so I had the misfortune of matching this profile.
I mean, this profile said, well, it's um, you know, likely somebody that likely, someone that knew her, someone that was a loner, very likely somebody in the high school.
Well, that fits me so type of reinforcing factor.
So for a next six weeks, the police play this cat and mouse game with me, in which half the time they speak to me like I'm a suspect and when they would push too hard and I would want to, they would get me frightened and I'd want to get away from them.
They would then switch it up.
And you know, Jeff is this junior detective helper theme was developed so before I was a teenager, the career that I fantasized about having when I grew up was, I wanted to be a cop.
I mean, I grew up the cop cop cops were our friends, they protected us.
You know, they were definitely the good guys and people you could trust, and I wanted to have that career when I, when I grew up, I fantasized about that.
And another thing about my background is I came from a single-parent household.
My father was never involved in my life in any aspect.
And that also will intersect with this police tactics that I'm going to explain to you.
You never met your father?
Well, I met him for the first time after I was released.
Oh, wow.
So I met him at 33.
So, yeah, so I never had any interaction with him.
And the police were aware of this?
Yeah, the police became aware of it, just like they became, you know they were aware that.
You know I had wanted to be a cop when I grew up.
That was what I thought about, you know, when I was in my teenage years.
Then I switched and I wanted to like be a lawyer, but but still the idea of wanting to be a cop before that was something they were aware of and that was still kind of like part of inside me some.
So I was vulnerable to this.
Uh, Jeff is junior detective helper tactic.
So they would say things like kids won't talk freely around us, but they will around you.
Let us know if you hear anything.
Stop in from time to time.
They would ask me questions and, you know, opinion.
They asked me opinion questions and then congratulate me that my opinions were correct.
They made me feel important.
What kind of opinions would they try to get from you?
They asked me, well, what route do you think that she took going from her house to the park?
And so I just thought about, well, I know where her house is situated.
I know where the park is.
This is the most logical route that she would take.
And then another thing would be they told me her keys were missing.
And then they asked me to speculate, well, what kind of keys do you think that she probably had?
Separate from that, they told me there was a cassette, her cassette tape, her Walkman was found, but the Walkman tape was missing.
So when they asked me, well, what kind of keychain?
So I'm thinking, well, she's an immigrant, her keys are missing.
Probably a I love New York type of keychain would be.
So they're just asking me these opinions.
And they're saying, they're using the word opinion.
What do you think in your opinion?
And as far as I'm concerned, I'm just having a normal, conversation with them.
You know, my speculations and my opinions are, no, they're just playing psychological games with you.
They're playing psychological games with me and, in addition to that, a further game is that they're playing good cop, bad cop.
One officer pretending uh is the more, is pretending to be my friend, like like you know, and uh you know, and the other one is is the bad cop.
So they were keeping me off balance that way, and and and in time, I began to look at the cop who is pretending to be my friend like as as, like an adult, a positive adult male role model in lieu of my father, mm-hmm.
So that goes on for about six weeks.
And in the course of that, they're giving me details about one time they brought me to the crime scene and the lieutenant who oversaw everything, he's telling me the three different scenes at the crime scene.
There's three different scenes at the overall crime scene where different things happen.
Like the scene where she was first attacked and then she was dragged.
Correct, yeah.
There's a scene where she was first attacked, the area where she was raped.
Then there's another area where another area where, you know, she was dragged.
So he tells me this, and then he's just asking me to, you know, then confirm that, you know, and then later on, where I'm at the police station after that, and then the detective was pretending to be my friend, he asked me to draw a map of the area where you think everything happened at.
Well, you guys just told me earlier where you think everything happened at.
So I'm just regurgitating what, you know, what you're saying.
And when I was at the crime scene, you know, the detective said to me, you know, her body was found over here.
And it almost, this is when he was building off what the lieutenant said.
He says, well, her body was found over here and there was leaves on top of it.
It was almost like somebody was, you know, trying.
There's a contrast.
On one hand, she had been attacked, murdered, and raped.
But on the other hand, after that, there's like an attempt to try to protect her body from the elements by putting leaves on top of it.
So he tells me that at the scene.
And then when we're at the police station later with this map thing, and, you know, and then he's, I'm just repeating stuff that they're saying is what I'm.
Get is what i'm getting at just as a microcosm of the many interactions that I had with the police over those six weeks.
So they wind up taking a blood sample from me and they said that they were going to send it for Dna testing and that this was one way that I could be ruled out as a suspect.
So I gave them a sample of my blood.
Then later they tell me that there's some new information has come into the police file and they want to.
They want to share that with me, and that's going to allow me to be more helpful to them.
First, though, I'm going to have to take and pass a polygraph.
So the next day, rather than report to the high school, I instead went to the police station for this test where I had heard to the rumor mill that other people had been tested at.
And instead, they drove me to the town of Brewster, which is in Putnam County.
So it's 40 minutes away by car.
So there's three cops that come with me from Peekskill, the two detectives and the lieutenant.
But the bad cop and the lieutenant, they're in one car.
They put me in the car by myself.
what the cop was pretending to be my friend.
So another example of another psychological game that they're playing.
You know, and throughout this process, they periodically, they periodically, do they have you like restrained?
No, I'm not restrained at this point.
No.
And they're periodically, they're periodically reading me my rights, but I'm a 16 year old.
I don't understand what, you know, what they're saying.
And every time they read anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law, I'm thinking to myself, you know, my mind goes to like a civil court.
I'm thinking, court, what are you talking about?
We're not going to court, you know, and that was all further obscured by the fact that they're playing this game overall, that they're pretending like, you know, they need my help to solve the crime.
Jeff is this junior detective helper.
So they drove me to Brewster, 40 minutes away by car, which now means I'm not able to leave on my own.
I'm totally dependent upon the police.
It's a school day, so my mother and grandmother, they think that I'm in school.
So they don't call around looking for me.
They have no idea that anything is wrong.
They have no clue what you're doing.
They have no clue what I'm doing.
No.
Do they have any idea of you, like, working with the police for the weeks prior?
No.
No, they don't.
My mother knew that I interacted with the police once, and then she didn't want me to interact with them anymore.
Oh, okay.
So you didn't tell her?
Right.
So I didn't tell her.
I mean, look, I'm at 16.
I mean, that's the age where kids are, you know, they push back on the authority of their parents and, you know, try to get independence.
And, you know, we're all smarter than our parents anyway.
I didn't do anything.
They're telling me, you know, so what can possibly happen?
They're telling me I need my, they need my help to solve the crime.
The cops are our friends.
I don't think you know what you're talking about.
Let me just, you know, so that was kind of like the dynamic that was going on.
And, you know, they knew that my mother didn't want me to interact with them, but I'm 16 years old, so I'm allowed to waive my rights and speak to the police without parental permission.
So I get to the place, and since I'm driven there, I don't know where I'm at.
I'm totally dependent upon the police now.
So there's a Putnam County Sheriff.
The polygraph is a Putnam County Sheriff's investigator, Daniel Stevens.
And he's dressed like a civilian.
And he never identifies himself as law enforcement.
He never reads me my rights.
And so we go to the waiting area, and he gives me a four-page brochure which explains how the polygraph worked.
But it had a lot of big words in it, which I didn't understand.
But then I figured, well, what does it matter?
I'm here to help the police.
Let's just get on with it.
And they don't give me anything to eat the entire time I'm there.
Then from there, they bring me to another small area where the polygraphist gives me countless cups of coffee.
But by the way, I'm going to need something to drink.
Fear of Ink and Unlawful Interrogation00:06:51
I can't get enough drink without time.
Can I get your water?
Yeah, please.
That would be great.
Liquid Death.
Yeah, it's interesting.
It's an interesting brand.
Yeah, they sponsor us.
Perfect for this conversation.
Yeah, I would agree.
I would agree.
So he gives me countless cups of coffee.
It seems fairly clear the purpose of giving me the coffee is to get me nervous.
And then he attaches his polygraph machine to me.
And then he launches into his third-degree tactic.
So he invades my personal space.
He raises his voice at me.
He asks me the same questions over and over again.
And as you know, I'm really I'm not used to talking to adult males because, as I mentioned, my father was never involved in my life.
And, you know, I didn't spend very much time with my like uncles or other male members of my family.
So I'm not I'm really not used to communicating with an adult male, much less somebody who's carrying on in the ferocious manner that he is.
So each hour that goes by.
My fear is increasing in proportion to the time and he keeps us up for like six and a half to seven hours Towards the end.
Yeah, that's a really long time.
Oh, I'm attached to this machine And so he winds up saying at the end I guess he was exasperated by that point That he hadn't gotten me to confess yet and he says what do you mean you didn't do it?
You just told me through the polygraph test result that you did I Just want you to verbally confirm this And when he said that to me, that really shot my fear through the roof.
And at that point, the officer who had been pretending to be my friend, he comes in the room, the other cop leaves, he comes in the room, Dr. McTark comes in the room, and he says, he tells me that the other officers are going to harm me, he's been holding them off, but he can't do so any longer, that I have to help myself.
Then he says to me, just tell them what they want to hear, you can go home afterwards, you're not going to be arrested.
So being young, naive, frightened, 16 years old, not thinking about the long term, instead being concerned with my own safety in the moment, I was in fear in my life.
The fact that I didn't know where I was and that nobody else knew where I was either loomed quite large in my mind.
I was overwhelmed emotionally and psychologically.
There's this push-pull effect.
On one hand, there's the possibility of harm, and on the other, there's this false life preserver that he threw me.
And so I took the out, which he offered.
And I made up a story based on the information that he had given me in the course of the investigation.
By the time it was all said and done, I had collapsed on the floor in a fetal position crying uncontrollably, and obviously I was arrested.
Tying back to the Gatorade bottle, one of the statements that I made in the course of the false confession was I said that I hit her over the head with a Gatorade bottle.
But as we're going to see a little bit later in the story, you know, a Gatorade bottle, at that time, Gatorade bottles were made of glass.
And there's no way that a Gatorade bottle would have been able to inflict the type of wounds that this medical examiner testified she had to on her head.
And then in addition, there was no like shattered glass.
There was no shards of grass in the body either.
So it like the story just doesn't like make any sense.
Right.
At what point did you, was this the point that you finally realized that you were getting swindled by the cops?
No, this happens a little bit later.
So let me tell you about that.
So what, so I mean, you're going through all this interrogation, you're hooked up to a polygraph and these you're, you're saying that you're, the amount of fear that you have is insurmountable.
Yes, what is that fear of?
I thought that I I, I was, it was fear of my safety.
I I, I thought that they might kill me there.
I don't, I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know where i'm at.
I'm, i'm in the middle of someplace where I don't know where i'm at.
And you know, I have these adults that are, that are questioning me, that are putting pressure on me.
So at this point, you obviously have lost trust in them, right?
Yes, I have.
Definitely.
Obviously, I've lost trust in them.
Yes.
To which, up to that point, you trusted them like they were helping you and you were helping them?
Right.
Yes.
Okay.
Yes.
And then again, the cop who's then pretending, you know, my last hope, my last best hope, this friend, right, this detective who's pretending to be my friend, he tells me that they're going to harm me.
He's telling me that they're going to harm me and that he can't stop them any longer.
So that fear, you know, is buttressed by this objective, this outside factor is what I'm getting.
It's not all just going in my head.
It's external.
It's external also.
And the way that he's, you know, he's in my face when I'm being questioned.
I'm in a chair and he's this mountain of a man.
And, you know, like he's within a couple of feet of my face and he's raised, his voice is raised and he's asking me the same questions.
So it's all of those things in totality.
Right.
So after that, after I gave this confession, I'm on the floor, I'm crying uncontrollably.
They finally get me to stop crying.
Then I'm given something to eat afterwards.
Then.
And then it's time to go back to the police station and they say they're going to take me back to the police station and we're going to share some pizza.
And that's when they put me in the handcuffs.
And I said, well, why are you putting me in handcuffs?
You just told me that I'm not going to be arrested.
So the lieutenant said, oh, this is just safety.
So I didn't question it past that.
So they put me in the car.
I'm handcuffed behind.
And then they bring me to the police station.
And the cop was pretending to be my friend and the lieutenant.
They disappear.
But the bad cop, Detective Levine, he's he's still there, but I'm interrupted as I'm eating pizza.
I'm interrupted by this uniformed police officer who's periodically carrying out different aspects of processing.
And so he winds up eventually putting ink on my fingers to do the fingerprints.
And I remember that really pissed me off.
And so I looked at this other detective and I said, you know, what is he doing?
You know, I've got ink all over my fingers.
I'm over here trying to eat pizza and I've got ink on my fingers now.
And he says, well, he has a right to do that.
And I said, well, what do you mean he has a right to do that?
And I was told that I wasn't going to be arrested.
And that's when he said to me, oh, you are being charged with the crime.
And at that moment, I realized I'd been swindled.
And I remember being angry.
DNA Exclusion and Trial Irregularities00:14:42
I remember also being like dumbfounded and stunned.
And, you know, I couldn't, you know, I didn't know what the hell was going to happen from that point forward.
It felt like an out of control feeling.
That's why it all kind of like sunk in.
Did they.
During all of this, it's like they were grooming you to be their perfect suspect.
Do you think from the onset that they were trying to just frame you?
Or do you think that they, did they believe that you could have been the actual murderer?
Or do you think that they knew from the onset that we just need to find somebody to pin this on?
I think that they just, from the outset, they just thought that they just needed to find somebody to pin this on.
Let me tell you why.
So, firstly, the whole false confession, there was no videotape, there was no audio tape, there's no signed confession.
It's just the cop's word for it.
So, when they come to court that's crazy.
I agree.
And when we came to court, they left the threat and false promise out of their testimony.
But let me I mean, the reasons I think that it was not a good faith error is because look, when the DNA didn't match, the DNA, before I go to trial, the results of a DNA test result come in from the FBI lab.
The DNA doesn't match me.
And rather than acknowledge they made a mistake, they continue to prosecute full speed ahead.
So in his letter to the FBI asking them to the prosecutor?
The lieutenant, the police lieutenant.
The lieutenant, okay.
Yeah, yeah, Lieutenant Tumolo.
So he writes a letter to the FBI asking them to expedite the DNA testing.
Because the county at that point is not able to do the DNA.
Only the FBI does that.
Right, yeah, at that time.
At that time, yes.
So he says to them in his letter that the test results, you know, are either going to confirm my guilt.
or else it's going to exonerate me.
But when the results don't match me, you know, the case kept going.
He said after the fact, after I was exonerated years later, he says that he claims that, you know, he had concerns and he went to the prosecutor, but that was all he did.
Like he didn't go to the prosecutor supervisor.
He didn't go to the district attorney.
You know, he didn't go to the attorney general.
He didn't go to the FBI.
He didn't do anything.
He just sat back and let everything happen.
So that's one aspect of why I say that.
And another thing.
Is another aspect of it is that when the DNA didn't match me, the police went back out into the field and they interviewed 17 witnesses who knew Angela in one capacity or another.
And all of them told the police that she didn't have any friends, that she didn't have any boyfriend, rather, that she didn't have any boyfriend, that there was no consensual sex.
Because that's what they were trying to use that excuse for the other.
So for the DNA not matching me.
They tested the semen that was on her.
That's right.
Yes, they tested the semen, it didn't match me, and then that's when the medical examiner says, in his theory, he comes up with this the day after the DNA doesn't match me.
He says that he remembered that he forgot to document medical evidence that he said showed that the victim had been sexually active.
So that opens the door for the prosecutor to argue, aha, this is how the DNA doesn't match you, and yet you still murdered and raped her.
How could they possibly have medical evidence?
Is considered medical evidence that she was sexually active?
Well, he claims that he saw perforations of her hymen on medical slides.
That's what the medical examiner says.
But wouldn't that be from the rape?
Yeah, it would have been.
Not only that, but if there was a consensual sex and then I murdered and raped her after that, that means that there would have been seminal fluid from at least two people there.
Right.
Not one.
Right.
Okay.
So taking it a step further, he mentions another youth by name that he claims had slept with the victim.
But he didn't try to prove that.
He never had a DNA test performed to prove that.
He never called him as a witness.
He just made the unsupported argument to the jury.
But what I'm trying to get to is in that context, when they're trying to support this consensual sex theory, the police went back into the field and interviewed 17 witnesses who knew the victim in one capacity or another, and all of them told the police, you didn't have a boyfriend, there's no consensual sex.
The police purposely did not document any of those witness interviews.
And so that way there was nothing they didn't have to turn that over to my attorney.
So I'm all speaking to the issue of whether or not I think this is a good faith error or not.
That's what I'm bringing this in for.
Additionally, wasn't there also pubic hair found on her of African-American descent?
Yes, there was.
There was pubic hairs found in and around the body that were determined to be Negroid and of Mongoloid origin.
And I'm Caucasian.
I'm white.
So again, the prosecutor argues by inference, he says, oh, this must have come from the Vietnamese medical examiner and his African-American assistant.
So I've learned since then that when pubic hair?
There was pubic and head hairs, both.
Okay.
Yes.
So he's saying that he's just saying the word hairs, but he's referring to both, but he's not saying pubic hairs.
He's saying head.
If he would have said pubic hairs, you're right.
That's like really crazy.
Would you get naked with the body?
I mean, what?
We got another issue here.
Right.
But he just says hairs to try to encompass everything.
But the hair expert, I learned later, the hair expert, Dr. Peter DeForest, says, well, if that's your explanation, get me the hairs from the medical examiner.
Right.
Let me do the actual comparison.
Right.
But he was never given any of the, he was never provided with any of the hairs.
And one more thing on the police level, which is that not content with having forced the confession out of me with his illegal tax.
But they also tried to help the prosecutor get around the DNA exclusion, also.
So they fabricated a statement and attributed it to me.
What I mean is they claimed that I told them that I didn't know if the perpetrator ejaculated or not.
And that word was not in my vocabulary as a 16-year-old.
And when you look at their police reports, that statement and their write-up of the confession.
That statement doesn't appear in their early write-ups about the confession.
It only appears in their write-ups after the DNA doesn't match me.
So it seems clear that they came up with that in order to help the prosecutor get it around the DNA exclusion.
So there's a DNA test result and all the stuff that's taken place before the trial that I've just mentioned to you.
So in terms of the trial itself, you know, I couldn't afford an attorney.
My family couldn't afford an attorney.
We went with Westchester County Legal Aid.
So the public defender I had assigned to me was Peter Rinserow, and he supposedly was their best trial lawyer.
So he essentially didn't defend me.
He rarely met with me when he would meet with me, and I'd try to explain to him that I was innocent and what happened in the interrogation room.
He was always shutting me up.
One time he told me he didn't care if I was guilty or innocent.
He never interviewed my alibi.
I told him I was playing wiffle ball with Jason.
He never interviewed or called as a witness my alibi.
He never explains to the jury the significance of the DNA not matching me.
He never uses that to challenge the confession and argue that the confession is coerced or false.
Speaking of the confession, sometimes he's arguing to the jury the confession never happened.
Other times he's arguing that it happened but that it was coerced.
And still other times he was saying that it happened but it was false.
So by adopting this throw mud against the wall type of he had to have been standing there with no credibility at all in front of the jury.
And when it was time to cross-examine this medical examiner, you know, it would have, it's obviously would have been important to attack his credibility because he's the one who came up with this consensual sex thing.
But instead, he stood up in open court and with a big smile on his face, like if him and the medical examiner were great friends from back in the day, said to him, You're going to be pleased to know that I don't have a single question for you.
Now, the last thing is that I wanted to testify at the trial so that I could put the threat and false promise on the record.
So when you defend a case where there's a false confession, you have to answer that confession.
To explain that confession, you have to disprove that confession in as many ways as you can.
You bring it all together in your closing argument.
But he didn't do any of that.
He wouldn't allow me to testify there either.
So, all those things, I got a terrible defense.
There were a couple of other irregularities about the trial, but you want to ask me something first?
Do you think the lawyer was just incompetent, or do you think that he was working with the other side?
I kind of feel he was working with the other side because, I mean, some of these mistakes, I mean, even like a third-year law student would know not to do that.
And when I've met with defense lawyers in Westchester that know my story and I've had lunch with them, they've often asked me, well, who was your trial lawyer?
And when I mention his name to them, they're quite surprised because they've tried cases with and against him, and they thought that he was pretty good.
So he's still practicing today?
No, he retired now.
He retired now.
So here's the other irregularities that happened at the trial.
So firstly, the polygraph results, they're not admissible in court because it's not scientific.
In fact, even like intelligence agents in the field, they're trained to beat the polygraph, right?
So it's not scientific.
And the whole premise of the polygraph, by the way, is that when somebody, the theory is that if somebody lies, you'll get nervous.
Your nervousness will result in an increased pulse rate, and it's the pulse rate that's actually measured by the machine.
Right.
People can control that.
People can control that.
Yeah.
So because of that, polygraph test results are not.
are not admissible in court.
Right.
So despite that general rule, this judge comes up with this backdoor rule where he says that because the confession happened while I was attached to the polygraph, he lets the polygraphist repeatedly tell the jury that I failed the polygraph while prohibiting my attorney from questioning him about the methods that he used to arrive at his opinions.
So that was one irregularity.
That was definitely prejudicial against me.
Second thing is that the victim's clothes, including the bra, the jury asked to see it.
That correlated to one of the statements that was coerced out of me, in which I said that I ripped her bra off.
The jury asked to see the bra.
And that's important because some bras, the way that they're designed, you can't rip them off of a body.
So the jury asked to see the bra.
And that's when the judge said that the evidence, including the victim's clothes, including the bra, had been left in the courtroom over the weekend and that apparently the janitors thought that it was garbage.
And so they threw it out and that the bra is not available anymore.
And he substituted a photo in which he said you can almost see the bra in the photo.
He substituted that with the actual bra.
That's wild.
Right.
He refused to declare a mistrial.
He refused to strike any testimony pertaining to the bra.
And the last thing was that on the third day of the jury deliberations, they sent out a note asking, well, if we don't, if we can't come up with a verdict, are we going to be sequestered over the Christmas holiday?
And the judge said yes.
And so I've learned since then that at that point, it was 11-01 for a conviction.
There was one holdout juror who thought that I was innocent.
But he said that they were all pressuring him.
And he also said that when they sent out the note and we got the answer back, that the pressure ratcheted up and that nobody wanted to be there over the Christmas holiday.
And so based on that, he switched his vote, even though he was not convinced that I was guilty.
And so when you add all those things up, you know, I guess it's not that surprising that I was found guilty.
I mean, I never forget the day I was found guilty.
I mean, it felt like I was kind of in like a nightmarish alternative reality because to my way of thinking, at least up until that point in time, I thought that only guilty people were convicted.
But they said what they did and I was taken into custody.
I remember just sitting there kind of stunned.
I couldn't believe my own hearing.
I mean, the first three charges that they read, I was found not guilty of.
And then the fourth count they read, then they said guilty.
And I mean, well, wait a minute.
I mean, that can't be right.
Did I miss something?
Did I miss the word not?
You know.
But I heard that then they read guilty and then guilty.
So I was kind of like in a stunned disbelief.
I was kind of beside myself, wow what, what were you?
Where were your parents during this whole trial?
Were they or your mother, your mother rather?
Was she there?
Yeah, my mother, my mother was in the courtroom and and um, and so was my aunt, Janet.
Yeah, and when they read that you, they sentenced you to 15 years.
Stunned by the Fourth Count Guilty00:09:16
Was it 15?
15 in life?
I was, it was.
Yeah, I was sentenced to 15 to life.
Well, that was when I was convicted.
I went back.
You come back to court After that, a different proceeding for the sentencing.
Okay.
Yeah, so I remember the day of the sentencing that, well, I mean, my mother and aunt couldn't believe it either.
I mean, they totally believed in the system.
They thought that I was, you know, going to be found.
So did they believe that you were the murderer at that point?
No, they did not.
They did not.
No, they did not.
No, they believed that I was innocent.
So on the day of the sentencing, I begged the judge to overturn the verdict because I was innocent, and I referenced the DNA to support my contention.
Judge Colabella actually told me on the record, he said, maybe you are innocent.
But you would think that he would overturn the conviction then, right?
But instead he took, which he could have done by reversing any number of the procedural rulings he'd made against me in the course of the trial, including the throwing out of the evidence issue that I went into a minute ago.
But instead he took the easy way out.
he gave me a 15 in life sentence.
So I had been charged as an adult, tried as an adult, and I was therefore sentenced as an adult, and I was sent to a men's maximum security prison.
So my sentence was 15 in life, and what that means is you have to do 15 years minimum before you then see the parole board.
And the life part of it means that there was never going to come a point in time where they were legally obligated to release me.
It was just going to be up to their discretion.
Wow.
Yes.
A maximum security?
I was sent to a maximum security prison for 17 years old.
At 17 years old.
Yeah, very dangerous, very frightening.
And I'm there with fully formed adults, many of whom are guilty of very serious violent crimes.
And I'm 17 years old.
And, you know, I'm from the suburbs.
I don't think I've been in very many fights to that point.
And I'm there with grown men.
And then I have this, you know, bullseye on my back because I'm convicted of rape along with a murder.
And there's a vigilante mentality towards people who convicted of sex offenses.
So very frightening and dangerous situation.
How far away was this prison from where you were?
So it was the Almeria Correctional Facility, and it was four, four and a half hours away from Peekskill.
Okay.
And during that whole process of being incarcerated, like going through the processing and all that, like what was that experience like for you?
And actually getting there and staying there for the first time?
Yeah.
Well, it was very frightening.
I remember being, you know, having on hand. cuffs and a chain around my waist and having my legs fastened together and fastened to the legs of the prisoner on the bus next to me.
I remember how large the prison wall loomed and how menacing the barbed wire appeared.
Yet the wheels of the bus kept turning, bringing me closer and closer to and eventually into, you know, the prison.
As I walked down the cell gallery, there were a lot of prisoners there whose arms were as big as my legs.
So, you know, it's it was really frightening, just as was the fact that I was entering a facility where the guards were in charge rather than the civilians.
And that in and of itself was kind of like a frightening prospect, frightening reality as well.
But I would describe prison as a nonstop obstacle course featuring the guards, other civilians, and other prisoners as obstacles to the main objective, which is to overturn the conviction and regain my freedom.
You know, I had to keep fighting off feelings of hopelessness, hopelessness, thoughts of giving up, suicidal ideation.
It was very hard to adjust to being in the cell.
So Elmira gave us recreation at night, but like every other night.
So the nights we didn't have recreation, I would be in the cell from like about 5.20 forward.
I mean, you know, just go out for dinner and then be in the cell from 5.20 afterwards.
So it took a couple of years for me to just get used to being in the cell.
I mean, I just tried to sleep the time away.
I mean, in time, I came up with other things to do while I was in the cell.
I came up with other coping patterns.
But people have asked me a lot, like, you know, how did I deal with being in prison?
What kept me going?
So it was belief in God was one thing.
And another thing was that in my mind, I was kind of living from appeal to appeal.
Like I didn't focus that I had a 15-to-life sentence.
I was just trying to make it to the next year or two where I was, you know, for the next appeal to be decided, which I was sure that I was going to win because I knew I was innocent and I still believed in the system.
I used to go to the law library and learning the law kind of gave a sense of comfort and empowerment.
I would collect articles about other people who were exonerated and I used that as motivation to keep going.
In 1997, Elmira Correctional Facility let us purchase televisions.
So I purchased a TV and I had the television in a cell.
I mean, for the most part, it stayed off because I was doing legal work and writing letters, looking for help.
But I did watch certain programs.
Um, like each week, and so, uh I, that was part of the coping process.
But the other thing was that, you know, I kind of engaged in a delusion there, like when I would watch certain programs, like each week, like I would pretend like uh, I was visiting with friends because I was having very few visitors.
My mother was the only person who consistently came to see me, but and but um, you know, she would cancel visits a lot and there would be, there would be uh, as the years went on, I saw her less and less.
The last five, six years I was lucky if I saw her once every six months.
What was the total amount of time you were in there?
16 years.
So you were in there for a full 16 years?
I was, yeah.
Did prison change you as a human?
Well, yeah, it did.
Yeah, in the sense, I mean, it's common for there to be psychological after effects of being incarcerated.
What aspects of it changed you?
I don't like to hope because if you hope, then you can be let down and then you can be hurt.
So there's that.
I don't like processes where whether I'm going to be allowed to do something or not that I want to do is somehow going to be in the hands of somebody else.
So because I'm used to just being disappointed.
I mean, think about, you know, when I was in the hands of my defense attorney and then, you know, I guess we'll get into it after.
But in the course of being incarcerated, I mean, I lost seven appeals.
I mean, so, you know, I definitely would like to get into that a little bit after.
But, you know, being let down in the appeals and then you know, writing letters for four years once my appeals were over, trying to find someone to take my case for free so I could find some new evidence.
Those are all disappointments.
Going to the parole board and, you know, walking around the prison the next three days thinking I had somehow defied the odds and that I'd be going home only to learn that I would not, which is how I wound up doing 16 years off of a 15-a-life sentence.
You know, all those, even down to a minor level, if I had to ask a guard for one thing or another that I was, you know, supposed to have or entitled to.
you know, just having that as a short shrift type of thing.
So all those, all the sum total of that is what I'm getting at when I'm saying I don't, you know, I don't like putting decision in people's hands.
I'm used to disappointment.
So I think it changed me in that aspect of things.
And, you know, I like to, I don't have, like to have a lot of things going on at the same time.
And I like things to be orderly and linear and logical.
And if they don't, then they feel kind of like an out of control feeling.
And, you know, and that kind of, again, ties back to, What happened to me, like when I lost in federal court, I lost because my attorney was given the wrong information by the court clerk, which resulted in my paperwork arriving four days too late, which the court thought was more important.
The district attorney at the time, Janine Pirro, her office asked the court, just rule that he's late and just dismiss this case without looking at the rest of the issues.
And that's what the court did.
And then I challenged that decision.
Three times I challenged and went to federal court, the Court of Appeals, on the issue of whether that was the correct ruling to time bar me and where future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, she upheld her and her colleague Rosemary Puller, they upheld that ruling.
And then I asked to re-argue it in front of them and they denied the re-argument and the U.S. Supreme Court denied me.
So my point in mentioning that is, you know, I know how like one minor thing can snowball and speedball into something really big that has a catastrophic result at the end.
Coping with Prison Rites of Passage00:05:21
So I still kind of have that in my mind a little bit.
So I feel like it affected me that way.
Certainly in terms of my social life, it kind of knocked the train off of the rails.
I mean, as I described before, you know, I had a rather large social circle as a kid prior to everything happening to me.
And, you know, when I got arrested, I lost touch with everybody except for like one of my friends.
Friends and you know he stayed in touch with me for about five years before we lost contact.
But my point is that I don't feel like I've really recovered socially in terms of being able to build like a new social network of, you know, associates and activity partners and friends.
That that's, that's what I'm trying to say.
That's another way that it kind of that's another way that it kind of impacted me.
But look, I don't, I don't think all of it was was well certainly, I mean it had a lot.
I went through a lot of stages of development as a I mean, you were a kid.
I was a kid.
You were growing up.
Yes, and I did that in prison.
Yes, you're right.
And I guess my point that I'm trying to make now is that as a 32-year-old, I had to do things, you know, rites of passage and things that normally would have been done much earlier.
So I had never, I didn't have, I didn't have, I didn't have a driver's license.
I had never lived alone before.
I never went shopping.
I had never wrote a check.
I had never had to balance a budget.
So those were, those were things that I had to do much later.
So, I think that was a particular challenge at reintegrating.
The thing that I've noticed about people that I've talked to that spend a lot of time in prison is, you know, most all of them that I've talked to, they went in much later in life.
And what they describe is this reflected, how they have to reflect on their lives once they get in there.
Like, when you're in a cell and you're alone for, especially even like a lot of these people that I've talked to, they spent time in the shoe.
The one thing that they describe is the amount of self reflection that has to go into that, like reflecting on all the decisions they've made throughout their lives and what they've done and writing and working through the thoughts and the decisions that they've made throughout their lives.
Because most of them were guilty and they have committed crimes and they've worked themselves, they've worked their way mentally through that.
So I'm wondering for someone as young as yourself, A, you're innocent, you actually didn't commit the crime, B, you're so young, you hadn't been through that much already.
Like you hadn't had many life experiences.
So it must have been so much different for somebody like you.
Yeah, it definitely was different because, like, look, I met a lot of prisoners, like you said, you know, and they said to me, look, you know, I did what I did.
You know, I got caught.
I was wrong.
I'm not going to cry about it.
I'm just make the best of it and try to go home as quickly as I can.
But for me, I could never get to that place because, as you correctly point out, you know, I was innocent.
So, you know, I could never get there.
So the experience of doing time while you were, while innocent, I think is much different than the experience of, doing time while you were guilty.
And then again, you know, just as you're mentioning, you know, just doing that, you know, while being young, I think made it especially difficult.
Like, I remember one of the correction officers said to me when I arrived at Elmira, they said to me, well, do you want to go to protective custody?
And I'm like, well, what's that?
Well, that's if you feel that your life's in danger.
You know, the only way we could really protect you is if you go to protective custody.
And what that would involve is that.
You would be in the cell 23 hours a day out of 24.
You know, you would go to the recreation area by yourself.
You'd use the phone by yourself.
And, you know, you wouldn't be able to go to school or go to any programs.
But on the other hand, you would be safe.
And, you know, I couldn't deal with being in the cell as it was, much less agreeing to be in there 23 hours a day for, like, you know what, the next, however long I was going to be with it, the next 15 years.
So as a 17-year-old, I remember thinking that.
And here was my line of reasoning.
Imagine going through this.
Line of reasoning and coming out with this conclusion at that age.
I remember thinking to myself, you know, I can't believe I'm here.
I can't believe I've been found guilty of a crime I didn't commit.
I can't believe I'm in prison.
I'm not going to make things worse by going to protective custody.
So, you know, I'm going to go to a general population and take my chances.
And if somebody kills me, well, then I guess I don't need to worry about doing the rest of this life sentence.
Right.
Right.
It's brutal.
That is.
I think also in terms of coping with being in prison, a few things.
So I didn't really have the luxury of losing my mind because I knew that nobody was coming to my rescue.
So I knew at least no one that I knew.
And so I was going to have to try to find somebody that I didn't know before and hope that that person could become a champion for me and try to build the bridge between me and the necessary legal help.
that I needed as I had read it happen in other cases.
And so to do that, I knew that I was going to have to hold it together to maximize my chances of doing that.
Holding Together in Solitary Confinement00:02:06
So that was another aspect of it.
And another aspect, psychologically, the utilization of euphemisms.
So I'm not going to my prison assignment in the morning or the afternoon.
I'm going to school or I'm going to work.
It's not the prison warden.
It's the superintendent.
It's not the guards.
It's the correction officers.
So those things.
Then from 1998 to 2006, I read three or four books, nonfiction books a week.
So I kept my mind going.
Kept my mind going while I was in.
And lastly, when I played sports, and I wrote about this in an op-ed that Sports Illustrated published.
When I would play basketball, ping pong, and chess, I engaged in this elaborate delusion, like if I was a professional player and so were the other people.
But it wasn't like kids fooling around on a playground.
This was like this was a defense mechanism.
Like I needed to get out of the prison for a couple of hours.
So I engaged in this delusion that way.
And so all of those things were factors.
I mean, when I would listen to sports talk radio, for example, it was not listening to sports talk radio.
This was like a lifeline to the outside.
And in that context, you know, I'm just considering, you know, that I had very little contact with the outside.
I mean, my brother was three and a half years younger than me.
He came to see me three times in 16 years.
Not at all.
in the last decade.
My mother was my only consistent visitor, but like I said, last five, six years, I would see her once every like six months.
A couple of sets of aunts and uncles that would come, but then they would disappear for three years, and then it would keep going.
So I had very little contact to the outside.
So for most intents and purposes, though not literal, I did the time by myself.
And I said that to say this last point, that I also, I placed an ad in the paper looking for a pen pal.
I put it in the ad in the small paper called the Sacramento Bee.
Seeking a Pen Pal Outside Walls00:09:26
I picked that paper because one of the other inmates had suggested that to me.
So I had placed ads in some local papers looking for just hungry and desperate for contact with the outside.
And again, hoping that from Pen Pal, maybe the champion, to ultimately legal help.
I had all that in my head at the same time.
But I got in trouble a couple of times of placing those ads in local papers.
So some of the guards saw it and I got in trouble for that.
So I thought, well, this paper out in Sacramento, it's not likely that anybody here is going to see.
So somebody wrote me.
This guy named Scott wrote me, and so I felt like this pen pal showed up just in the nick of time.
And, like, I was asking this stranger that I didn't know from anywhere.
I was asking him, look, do you think I should quit?
Do you think I should, you know, quit this?
And do you think I should just, you know, go ahead and kill myself?
I'm just get out.
I'm never going to get out of here any other kind of way.
So that was, he was another factor in surviving that.
And lastly, there was another prisoner there named Frank Sterling who was also innocent.
We used to get together once every six weeks in the yard, and half the conversation would be about morale and continuing to go forward.
And the other part, we would be like a brainstorm session about what was the next tactic to do for us to try to overturn the conviction and regain our freedom.
And I believed in Frank's innocence because it was a similar false confession case, and an alternative suspect confessed to four different people.
And ultimately, he was exonerated two years by DNA, a couple of years after I am.
Wow.
So I said that to say, like, I wasn't just some naive kid in prison.
Believing that someone else was innocent.
I mean, he actually was.
That's insane.
Did you have to join any gangs in prison to keep yourself safe?
Because I know a lot of people have to do that.
Yeah, people that don't join gangs typically have to go through a lot of adversity right well, I think that that's more of a southern thing than it is um than that it is more up north, but really yeah like, maybe more like you know in, like I know like Alabama, maybe in Mississippi, or maybe like in Texas not so much like that, it's not.
I didn't find it to be like that in in New York, Okay, so like there wasn't any segregation as far as like like, like Neo-Nazis and then like the black people and the Mexicans, they would all have their own kind of like.
Well, there were gangs in the prison.
I mean, I wouldn't say it was racially segregated, it was not, but having so it's not like what you're saying, but at the same time, You know, there were there were definitely gangs I mean, you know one of the there was like the bloods which were made up of almost the blacks and then there was the Crips also and then there were you know there was Spanish gangs also there was the Latin Kings there was the Dominicans there was the La Familia And yeah, you did have like, you know, some of the whites that were there, the supremacists that were there.
So did they approach you and try to get you to join them?
No, that didn't happen to me.
You know, while I was in prison, no, I didn't experience that.
But look, throughout the years, there were definitely times when I got beat up for sure.
And, you know, in my mid-20s, I mean, here and there, I'd come up with the win here and there.
But for the most part, look, I'm this.
white dude from the suburbs that had three or four fights in my life.
I mean, what do you think I'm going to, who do you think?
You think I'm going to defeat people that are running from the street, that are fully formed adults, that are many of them are, you know, that was a tough one.
I mean, did you focus on transforming yourself into like more of like a tough guy?
No, I didn't do that.
I didn't go that route.
So there were some old timers that kind of put me under their wing.
And, you know, and so I picked up on different survival tactics.
So like I would mind my business.
You know, I would never, you know, I wouldn't open the doors like, you know, borrowing or asking anybody for anything.
I never got involved in a conversation about what was going to be.
watched on the television or when I was in my cell, like I wouldn't like talk out outside of the gate, you know, which, yeah, right.
So, I mean, so those things and, you know, I just, there's certain things you can do to try to minimize things.
I wouldn't say that everything is like totally in your hands.
It never is.
But if you do certain things, then you, if you avoid certain things, then you can minimize.
You mentioned something about something in a weight room or dumbbells were dropped on you or something.
Right, right, right.
So, all right.
So in 1997, I was in a Shawangunk Correctional Facility, which is like, considered to be like a maxi-max type thing, like one of the more secure prisons.
Recall that it had been, you know, that the vigilante mentality towards people convicted of sex offenses.
So Shawangunk, there was very, there wasn't a lot.
It was a maxi-max, so it was dangerous in terms of the collection of prisoners.
But at the same time, there was very little violence or anything that was happening there.
And it was facility that was relatively close to the city as compared to many of the other facilities that were further up north.
And so, By there being very little that was happening, it actually made it more dangerous because the normal respect that would go on in other prisons didn't really go on there.
So everyone was a smaller prison.
Everyone was kind of like on top of each other, like into each other's business.
There wasn't a lot that was going on.
So some of the prisoners went to the law library and they looked up my case because they wanted to know what I was in prison for.
And they saw, and in the court opinions, they always give like a factual background of the case.
And so they saw I was there for a sex offense and they made copies of the case and they, you know, passing it out to people and stapling it up on the bulletin board.
So everybody got like hostile.
For the most part, most people were hostile.
The ones that were not, you know, they really didn't want to get involved into the thing.
Look, man, I don't agree with what people are saying, but look, I'm trying to go home, man.
I don't got time to get involved in this other problems regarding you.
So, you know, people didn't want to be around me.
So it was getting more and more hostile there.
And it got to the point that.
You know, there were four people out of everyone that really distinguished themselves.
And it got to the point, like, I see I was letting things go.
I was breaking prison survival rules.
I was letting things go that I really shouldn't have been letting go.
Like people were saying, shooting indirects and direct statements at me.
And I was letting things go because being passive.
Yeah, I was being passive, what I should not have been.
Right.
Right.
And part of that was because they were all much bigger than me.
But then also, you know, this was the one time that I had a paid attorney.
People came in the picture that my mother didn't know previously.
And everybody put in a manageable amount of money.
So I had a private attorney.
And my point is that I thought that was going to make a difference in the court.
So I'm thinking I can't fight these people with my hands.
I'm going to have to use a weapon or something.
But then it would be just my luck that I would, you know, that I would be found, that I would beat the case that I'm wrongfully imprisoned for.
But I will not be able to go home because I caught another case while in prison.
So that all was part of letting things go, being more passive.
And finally it got to the point that, you know, it seemed clear to me that these guys were going to come and try to stab me.
That just seemed like that was imminent.
And so, you know, rather than waiting for that, you know, I took the fight to them.
So I snuck a 10-pound weight paint out from the small yard.
I put it in this net bag that you're supposed to use for laundry.
And I swung it at this guy.
But the issue is that like, I didn't want to, like, kill anybody.
I didn't want to cause some kind of permanent injury.
So I didn't swing the thing all that hard.
I took a lot off of it more than what I should.
So I hit him.
He went flying, but it didn't really do that much.
You understand?
And then from there, they formed, like, a circle around us, and we're fighting, and he's, like, the fan.
Are you, like, multiple people that you were with?
You weren't alone?
No, I'm saying this happened in the day room area where there's, like, a television and chairs to sit down at.
Oh, so you just ran up on him and swung it?
He walked by me, and I swung the damn thing.
Thing, but I didn't swing it, I didn't.
I took too much off of it because I had a concern for him but also for me.
I didn't want to kill him, I didn't want to catch a case, so right.
So so it hits him, it doesn't do all that much.
So they people, people like form like a circle around us and he's like the fan favorite and we're fighting with our hands but, like you know, he's overpowering me, right?
And so this weight plate up, they start cheering for him.
Like you know, use the weight plate, use the weight plate right, um?
So this weight plate is at the foot up.
So there was, there was um, There were a couple of other people that, you know, had told me that, you know, that I had been hanging out with, and they said, look, you know, you got to stop letting all this stuff go.
You know, we can't step up for you.
You got to do the first thing and we'll come right in behind you, you know.
And so this weight, as I'm getting my rear end kicked, well, where the hell's the help at, right?
You said you're going to, you know, but the weight plate is at the foot of this guy.
So he runs over to try to get it.
I didn't try to stop him because I figured, well, they're not going to let him pick the weight plate up, right?
Except they did.
And so he starts swinging that thing at me, and I'm blocking a lot of it, but I'm not perfect.
And so I got hit multiple times on the side of my head with a weight plate.
I still have scars.
Violence Over a Weight Plate Fight00:04:18
I don't know if you can see.
I still have scars from here and here on my hands.
Jesus.
You know, so.
So how big was it?
Do you know how much weight was it?
Was it a 10-pound weight plate?
It was a 10-pound weight plate.
Fuck.
We get sent to the outside hospital and everything.
And, you know, the outside hospital says that I'm supposed to be put in the.
Prison hospital, and I go back, not in the SHU, you know, just for observation.
But instead, they put me in the SHU, you know, anyway.
So this was one of my lowest points.
Yeah, no matter what happens, if you're involved in a fight, whether you win or get your ass kicked, you're going to the shoe.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, depending on where it happens at.
Yes.
Yeah, definitely.
And what I was saying, this was my lowest point in this.
Imagine this.
So I'm in the shoe.
I'm here because I'm proactively defending myself against people.
That were going to come to stab me because, as far as they're concerned, i'm a rapist.
And while i'm there, I get the decision from the federal court saying that i've lost because the court clerk gave my lawyer the wrong information on the filing procedure, so my petition arrived four days late.
Wow yeah, that's dark.
That's a dark day.
Yeah, it really really was.
You know and I want to just take a second here and this Kind of the reasons why I kind of like this podcast a lot, because we're not trying to get everything into a 20 minute, half hour, even hour long segment.
We go longer than that.
I want to just take a second here to describe my experience in the shoe.
Yes.
Okay.
So the light is on all the time.
Okay.
And there's no clock.
You can't see the clock.
So, and you can't see the outside.
So I never have, I never had, I never have any idea of what time of the day it was.
With the one, the one clue is if there's breakfast items on the tray, the food tray, then I would know it's roughly breakfast time.
It's around 7, 7 30.
But other than that, no clock.
The lights on all the time.
There's a lot of noise.
There's very little property you have in your cell.
All your cosmetics and hygienic items, those are all put in a locker with your name on it, locked up.
And when you go to take a shower, then you can have access to it.
You can have the clothes that you have on, one change of clothes, and that's it.
There's no privacy at all.
It's just a big gate.
But at the same time, you can't see anybody because there's all these cells.
Like this is my cell here.
All these cells go down.
You can't see anybody either.
So you're is there anybody in there with you or are you by yourself?
I'm by myself.
Okay.
They send a mental health worker around periodically to check on everybody.
But the mental health professional, he's talking to you outside of your cell.
So there's no confidentiality.
Everybody can hear anything.
You know, they do send books around and I'm reading it.
But after like three, four days, you know, the books are read already.
It's another week to go.
You try sleeping some of the time away, but then you kind of get slept out.
You can't sleep anymore.
You know, then you have another like two, maybe three days left.
So that was very difficult.
You can't, you're not allowed to go to the commissary and purchase food items.
You can't eat anything that's there that like the items you've purchased.
You're just dependent upon the food from the state.
So the guards, the correction officers are the ones that are coming around and putting the food on your tray.
And so if there were a couple of times where I was asleep and I got up while they were feeding the prisoner on the cell next to me, they had just passed by my cell.
And they didn't wake me up or anything.
They refused to give me anything to eat.
They told me to be awake next time.
Wow.
Yeah, so there was that part of it.
Anytime you go anywhere in the shoe, they handcuff you first.
And I remember when they would bring me to recreation with the handcuffs on.
They'd bring me outside.
And you can't see the night.
And you're just there by yourself with a pull-up part in it.
I really disliked being in handcuffs a lot.
A pull-up bar?
Waiting Years for DNA Exoneration00:08:34
Yeah.
Were you working out?
Well, I did work out some, but there was just a pull-up bar in the area.
But I'm just trying to say it wasn't really anything to do, is what I'm saying.
I know what you're saying.
So in time, I just decided, you know, when they would ask me, are you going to recreation?
I would just say no, because it wasn't worth the aggravation.
The recreation they were going to give me was not worth the aggravation of being put in the handcuffs, is what I'm getting at.
So within a short amount of time, I just sort of refusing to go to recreation.
They say, are you going to recreation?
And I would say, no.
How much time did you spend in the shoe altogether?
Altogether, 28 days.
28 days.
Jesus.
So at what point did you start to see a light at the end of the tunnel?
Yeah.
Like was there, I know you talked about the Innocence Project.
They wouldn't work with you in the beginning?
Yes.
They wouldn't work with me at the beginning.
So they're an organization in Manhattan that works to free wrongfully convicted prisoners across the country in cases where DNA testing can show innocence and in which no prior testing had been conducted.
So the problem is that in my case, the DNA already had been, the testing had been done.
So their model would be they take cases, do the testing, and then present the evidence into court, introduce as newly discovered evidence.
That was not an option for me because the jury already knew that.
So that wouldn't have been anything new.
So they would not work with me.
They took about a year to decide that.
They had never before saw a case where the DNA excluded somebody, and yet there was a conviction.
So my appeals are all over after about 11 years.
We're in 2001 now.
And the only way back into your court once your appeals are over, when your appeals are over, they don't give you an attorney any longer either.
So the only way back into court at that point is if you can find, there's either a change in law or if you can find some previously unknown evidence of innocence.
So I didn't have any money to hire an investigator or an attorney.
So hence the need to embark on this letter writing campaign.
So I wrote letters for four years looking for help, rarely getting any answers other than the occasional no.
Eventually, one of the letters that I wrote to a woman who had wrote her memoirs from when she was a prison warden, Tekla Miller, she wrote a book called The Warden Wore Pink.
And that was one book.
So at the end, I wrote everyone I could think of.
At one point, I was just going to the general library to look for ideas on who to write the next letter for.
And there was a book called Chicken Soup For The Prisoner's Soul, which I saw had had contact info in the back of the book for like half the author, so hence I borrowed it, and one of the had chapters of many different books, including uh, Warden War Pink.
So I wrote her and care the publishing company.
Somebody from the publishing company uh, sent the letter instead to Claudia Whitman, who's an investigator, and she wrote me right away and she had never.
She was convinced of my innocence based on the Dna, so she we brainstormed together.
She tried to get people to take my case and one of her ideas was the winning one.
She said, why don't you write the innocence project again?
And I wouldn't have thought to write them because I got that response from them before.
But she said, look, DNA texting has evolutionized.
They have the DNA database now.
So the prior denial is irrelevant.
So just write them again.
So I wouldn't have thought to write them again.
But it was kind of out of idea, so I wrote them.
And she also lobbied them from outside the organization.
She got other people to, other respected legal professionals also to write them letters.
And then I got lucky that one of the intake workers, Maggie Taylor, who's not an attorney, when the Innocence Project declined to take my case again, she represented it two more times.
Wow.
The third time is what she pushed it across.
She suggested that, you know, they use the DNA data bank, which was an idea I gave her.
So once they agreed to take my case, that's when I started getting some light across the tunnel.
My darkest time was after I got turned down for parole because, remember, I lost all the appeals.
I wrote letters for four years I didn't get any response and said I went to the parole board and then I got turned down, so that that that was the, that was the.
That extra year was it was the darkest time period.
I would say the first six months of that.
Then, when I was in communication with the Innocence Project, when they finally agreed to take the case, that's when I started having, that's when I started having some some hope.
So what changed?
Once they finally agreed to take the case and you mentioned there the, the whole DNA DNA data bank had been created.
That's what changed.
So now there was something they could do with the DNA to Constitutes something new.
And had, so the man who actually committed this crime, who had raped and murdered that girl.
Yes.
Had he been arrested at this point or was he still free?
He had been arrested.
So Stephen Cunningham had was killed a second victim three and a half years later after killing Angel Correa, the victim in my case.
So he had strangled to death his girlfriend's sister.
So at that time, VCRs were still kind of like expensive.
He was trying to steal her VCR.
She walked in on him and she would not agree to let him take the VCR to sell it to buy money for drugs.
And so he strangled her.
And so he was in prison for doing that.
So for about, so there was a time period of about 12 and a half years where we were both in the prison system at the same time.
Never in the same prison, but in the prison, overall prison system.
Do you think that when, during your whole trial process, he was aware of it?
Yeah, I really do.
It was, you know, it was every time I went to court, it was a big, it was a major media moment.
Really?
It was.
And virtually all the articles were written from a guilt presumptive oriented perspective.
You know, people were talking about, in fact, I knew so.
I've met, since I've been out, I've met somebody that used to get high with him.
No way.
Yeah.
And they said that sometimes that they talked about the murder and the trial and the case.
So I knew that he knew about it, even though he says he didn't.
Is he still alive?
He is.
He is still alive.
Have you ever talked to him?
No, I have not talked to him.
Why would you want to?
I mean, I can't even imagine.
Right.
Well, yeah, I mean, the closest I came was I was a few feet away from him during the deposition and the lawsuit.
But I want to go back to DNA and I'll come back to him.
Yeah, yeah, sorry.
We got off track.
Okay, sure.
So they took the crime scene DNA evidence.
So I have the incidents project representing me.
So that was the first thing.
The second thing that Jeanine Pirro had left off, who had blocked all the testing, she left.
office and her successor was willing to let me get the testing.
So that was the second key.
The third thing is we got lucky that his DNA was in the data bank.
So they took the DNA, put it in the DNA data bank, and it matched him.
Because his DNA was there because he killed second victim.
And confronted with that, he admitted he was the person who committed the crime.
So on September 22nd, 2006, the conviction was overturned and I was released.
I went back to court.
November 2nd, 2006, at which point all the charges were dismissed against me on actual innocence grounds.
And Stephen Cunningham was subsequently arrested and convicted of the crime.
Wasn't he already in prison, though?
He was already in prison, but they still charged him with the murder that he had done.
So he went back to court?
Yeah, he went back to court.
Yeah, he was still in prison, but he went back to court.
Yes, and he was sentenced to an additional 20 years.
What was that like for you when they read when they found the DNA and it matched him and you started going, okay, this is going to be a process of being released back into the free world.
Sure.
So I found out that I was going home the day before I went home.
So my wow.
Yeah.
So my attorney came to see me.
So they opened my cell.
I'll take a second or two because, again, this is a longer podcast.
Racing Thoughts Before Release Day00:03:39
So they general rule of thumb, the guards open your cell.
You're supposed to go down and, you know, see why they opened your cell, see what's going on, right?
So they open my cell and I stick my head out and look down there and the guard just yells, Visit!
And I'm like, well, that doesn't make sense.
Who else come to see me?
So I went down there and had him double check and call the visiting room, confirm, yeah, I have a visit.
So then I run back to my cell and get a shirt.
I had like a routine.
Most prisoners do.
We have like a visit shirt, like a shirt we keep really nice just for that because that's the closest we're going to come to making a public appearance.
Yeah, you've got to make a good impression.
Right, exactly.
So I'm hurrying up.
The visiting room is quite a distance from my cell because I don't want to get caught in the count.
If I don't get into the visiting room by like 5 to 11, I'm going to be stuck.
They're going to do the count and I'm not going to be able to get in the visiting room for another two hours.
So I'm hurrying up.
So as I'm hurrying up, I'm buttoning my shirt.
As I'm her and I'm thinking to myself well, who the hell came to see me?
So when I get in there, there's this woman and she's, she's waving to me like this and I wait, I don't recognize her and but I just I wave back and I think well, you know, maybe she's mistaking me for somebody else, or maybe she knows me from the visiting room, like you know, in Elmira.
So I asked the guard who, who came to see me?
And the guard looks at me like I'm nuts and you know, and and she says that person.
And she said well, don't you know who came to see you?
And I, and you know, and I and I just I Lied to her and just said well, yeah, of course.
Of course sure, I know I didn't want her to cancel the visit, you know.
So I walked over to this woman and she says to me, you know, she identifies herself as Nina Morrison, who's you know, my attorney at the Innocence Project.
And She says, you know the the, the items have been tested and so like, my antennas are already up for anything out of the ordinary, because I've already had experiences with out of the ordinary and it with disastrous results, like when when the, When the wrong information was given to my attorney and everything.
You remember the technicality we covered.
So I'm on the lookout for anything amiss is what I'm getting at.
And when she said the items were tested, you know, that was something that kind of set off those alarms.
And I said to her, what do you mean the items have been tested?
They're not supposed to have been tested for another month.
And she said, well, the district attorney pulled some strings and got the lab to expedite the testing a little bit faster.
And, you know, the results match the actual perpetrator.
You're going home tomorrow.
And I said, no, I'm not.
And when she said, you're going home tomorrow.
And I said, no, I'm not.
And the third time she said, no, you really are.
You're going home tomorrow.
And I again said, no, I'm not.
So I had this like three and a half hours of like a mental paralysis.
So my mind starts racing.
All these thoughts start coming into my head.
One thought after another.
And one thought has nothing to do with the other.
And none of it has anything to do with what she just told me.
So she's sitting there like literally holding my hand and articulating all these things that are going through my mind, you know, and she's not responding.
She's just listening to all this madness and periodically she breaks in and says, are you ready to talk about tomorrow?
And i'm like no no no, let's just get that away from me.
No, we're not talk, i'm not.
We're not talking about tomorrow, not going home, not entertaining that, don't play with me like that.
Walking Toward the Court Verdict00:02:16
No, and and so I go back to the rants again, and this and that, and every now and then the same sequence happens and finally, Towards the end, she says, look, there's only like a half hour left in the visit.
We've been here all day, and there's a ton of things to do with the media.
I also have to get your sizes for your clothing sizes and everything, you know, so you can get a suit for your appearance in court.
And that's what made it real.
And then I felt better for about five minutes.
And then a different thought came in my head.
The fear that popped into my head was that something was going to happen.
Between that day and the next.
And the district attorney was going to change her mind, and then they were going to do what they always did, which was fight me and win.
So that was how I learned that I was going to be released the next day.
Wow.
And when you finally got released, what was that like going back into the real world after 16 years?
Had the world, I mean, I'm sure like technology had advanced, you know, phones.
Had evolved, you know, sure.
So I, I get up to, was the iphone out?
Yet it would.
No, it was, it was, it was not.
No okay, so I get up to leave.
I'm going to explain all of that to you.
Great, great question.
So I get up to leave, the court's finished, I get up to leave and then kind of like the enormity of the moment hit me, kind of like a ton of bricks, you know, and I sat back down and you know, my attorneys are talking to me but i'm kind of hearing them and then not hearing them, and eventually the bailiffs just kind of like clear the whole court out.
And so after about 20 minutes, I I just kind of felt ready.
So I got up and I put, as I put, one step in front of the other, walking towards the end of the court, and no one's stopping me.
With each step it kind of like gets more real.
And then there was this uh bailiff, who's um standing up and she's trying to be professional, but you know she, I can see the water's running, and I looked up and made eye contact with her and um, you know, and she says good luck and I said thank you.
So I go outside.
I remember the sky was blue, the sun was out.
Surviving a Changed World After Prison00:03:48
I didn't see a cloud anywhere.
You know, many members of the Innocence Project and also Cardozo Law School, which they've been affiliated with, you know, they're all like clapping because, you know, you survived, you overcame the system, you know.
And I go to this press conference, and when it's finally my turn to speak after, you know, Nina and Barry Sheck spoke, my first words were, you know, is this really happening?
Like I couldn't believe that I was still actually there.
I thought I was just still in the prison.
You know, it was all just a dream and I'm going to wake back up and see the cell bars and the prison walls and everything.
And I spoke there for three and a half, maybe like two and a half hours, just doing an off-the-cuff presentation.
Like everything I'd ever wanted to say in 16 years but could never get anyone to hear me about came out.
And just when I thought I was wrapping up, a different thought came out.
So that was that day.
And then from there, the other thing I'll mention about that day and then I'll go to the overall.
I went to my aunt's house because my mother had moved away.
So I went to my aunt's house and we're sitting around this table.
I remember sitting around the table and this other family member that hadn't been able to get to the court came over and they're all sitting around and they're having coffee and cookies and they're talking about what happened.
And I just remember feeling out of place.
I remember not being able to relate to them.
And so I just went outside to just sit down.
In Elmira, they would always close the yard when it was dark.
And I wanted to be able to just sit outside and stay outside.
So I did that.
So that and taking a bath for the first time in 16 years was kind of like the highlights.
I mean, I'd like to say we had a raucous party that lasted to the crack of dawn, but in reality, you know, I had lost track with everybody.
But in terms of the overall, I mean, the world was much different when I was released than when it was before I originally was incarcerated.
I mean, cell phones, GPS, internet, these different methods of banking that didn't exist.
Culture was different.
neighborhoods, houses, buildings, other structures were changed.
There were just enough of them left to be familiar, but then quite a lot changed.
So it felt like I was.
What year was it?
The year was 2006, and I had gotten convicted and therefore incarcerated.
I'm pretty sure the iPhone 1 came out that year, which is crazy.
Yeah.
Well, I remember I was.
From 89 to the iPhone 1.
That is a long time.
Right.
Well, I remember I was at this luncheon.
And my lawyer came up to me and said to me, well, this reporter who hadn't been able to come wants to speak to you.
He's doing a story.
Can you speak to him on the cell phone?
So he hands me his phone.
I said, yeah, I'll speak to him.
I hands me the phone.
And I say to him, well, where are the holes at in the phone?
Where am I supposed to speak at?
So, all right.
So those things, the culture and then the culture and then neighborhood.
So it felt like I was a parallel world.
Definitely the social stigma, for sure.
You know, very few people questioned my innocence because, you know, the actual perpetrator had been arrested and convicted.
And even there was a report that four experts commissioned by the district attorney studied my case and issued the report breaking down all the different junctures where the system broke down.
So from all that, few people questioned my innocence.
But it was more on the stigmatic level.
Well, you were in prison for 16 years, yes, but wrongfully, yes, but you were there for 16 years.
So how much of that rubbed off on you?
Settling and Funding Policy Work00:14:48
Is it safe to be alone someplace with you?
So that's definitely an obstacle.
I went to see mental health professionals.
I used to go like four times a week for like six years.
It's common for people to have post-traumatic stress disorder related symptoms, panic attacks, anxiety, feeling of processing things at a slower speed, feeling of having been frozen in time.
Like I was released when I was 32, but I felt like I was 17 because that was the year I was.
I was when I was last free.
So dealing with it was the psychological aspect of that.
Then also I was released with nothing.
I did eventually get compensated, but that took five years.
But they just released me with nothing.
And so I struggled financially.
I was always passed over for gainful employment.
I did catch on as a weekly columnist for the Westchester Guardian, but they only wanted one article a week.
And I was making money doing speaking engagements.
But that also is not a consistent process.
You only get paid when you get booked.
So my point is that I had very few opportunities to have income coming in.
So trying to get jobs and stuff.
Trying to get jobs.
This was all on your background.
It was on my background in the sense that, well, it was not.
So I didn't have a rap sheet anymore.
So it's a remove from my rap sheet.
But if people Google it, it's still on my background.
And I didn't hide it either.
It was still the stigma.
Yes.
And then also, it seemed like all the would-be employers, they wanted somebody who could hit the ground running.
you know, rather than being patient and doing some on-the-job training.
So that was another aspect.
And then also I had to catch up with the technology, and that was another factor.
So it was difficult to have income, and I did bounce around from place to place.
I didn't have stability of housing, and at one point I was just a couple of weeks away from being in a homeless shelter.
But then Mercy College, they had agreed to give me a scholarship.
So it had made it into one of the articles from the journal, and it was a human interest item that I had gotten the GED and the associate's degree.
And I was a year away from the bachelor's at the time that funding was cut for college education for prisoners.
So there was a dean, Dean Alkin from Mercy College, and she lined up a scholarship for me.
And so they allowed me to finish the degree.
And when I was a couple of weeks, when I lost the temporary housing and I was a couple of weeks away from the homeless shelter, they allowed me to live.
They agreed to allow me to live on campus.
So that's how I avoided the homeless shelter and they gave me the meal plan as well.
So, yeah, so that was all, those were all very difficult times.
It was very lonely, very, very lonely as well.
You know, again, it was very awkward when I would meet up with my extended family because they had never.
Come to see me or come to see me very sporadically.
So it was hard to relate to them also.
And all of my friends from the neighborhood had all long since moved away.
So I lost track from them.
Now, 16 years for nothing, they had to pay you, right?
Yes.
How did that process work?
Does that happen with everyone who gets wrongfully convicted?
It does not.
There's some states that do not have compensation.
And it's a weird thing too because.
Like, what is enough money for throwing away 16 years of your life and spending it that way?
Like, if you were before this happened and they said, Hey, you want to get paid X amount of dollars to do 16 years in prison, like, would this be enough to do 16 years?
Absolutely not.
The answer would be absolutely not.
Right.
Exactly.
It would be no.
Or if you were to ask that prosecutor the same question or that judge, like, how much money would it take for you to do 16 years in prison?
I guarantee you it would be way more than anyone gets paid.
Right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Sure.
I dare say that very few, if any, people. would accept any amount of money.
Right.
I mean, I don't even think someone would accept a billion dollars to do 16 years.
Right.
What's money?
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, it's, you know, just to concretize a little bit more, you know, I miss, you know, I didn't graduate high school.
I didn't go to LeProm.
You know, births, deaths, weddings, rites of passage, you know, all of those things were part of the loss that I experienced.
So not everybody gets compensated.
So there's 12 states right now that do not. get compensation.
Which states?
So one of them is Pennsylvania.
So there's a coalition group called It Can Happen to You, which I'm a part of.
I have a nonprofit organization, the Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice.
So after five years of this difficulty, I eventually got compensated.
In terms of what the process was, I interviewed a few different lawyers, and I ultimately settled on one law firm.
They took the case on contingency, meaning they didn't get paid unless I get paid.
So they filed lawsuit in state court, and they also filed one in federal court.
After five years, the state settled with me, and then three of the defendants settled with me in a federal court, and then I went to trial against the polygraphists, and I won there also.
So in five years, I got some compensation.
While all that difficulty time period was happening, I was also an individual advocate.
So I was writing, I was speaking, I was regularly meeting with elected officials, and I was trading privacy for awareness, so doing media interviews.
So I did that for about five years.
You know, I wanted to be involved in freeing people, but I was only able to do that nibbling on the edges.
So there were some cases where people were fighting wrongful conviction cases, and I wrote about it in the newspaper where I was a columnist.
Sometimes the lawyers would say, look, will you come to court so the judges can see you for whatever visual effect that'll have?
Maybe if they see you're there supporting my client, they'll pay just a little bit more attention to this one, you know, instead of the normal rubber stamp denying.
So I would do that.
Similar to that, I would let them put my name in a press release to get more media attention than would otherwise be the case.
sometimes I would help pack the court.
You know, encourage other people to show up just so the judge would see, hey, people are watching this one.
It's a little bit harder.
Sweep it under the rug.
But all that stuff is kind of like nibbling on the edges.
So when I was compensated, I wanted to go to the next level.
And so I took some of the money.
How hard, I mean, how long did the fight take?
Like, was it actually, did you have to fight for it?
Yeah, I had to fight for it.
Sure.
It took five years before I got anything.
Yes.
And who were you going against?
Yes.
All right.
So in the compensation case in the state, that was going against the attorney general represents the state in that.
And in the federal lawsuit, here's what I was going against.
So it was City of Peekskill because it was their police officers who helped coerce the confession out of me and didn't document the witness interviews.
And then it was also Westchester County because it was their medical examiner who did the fraud.
It was Westchester County Legal Aid for deficient representation.
And then it was also Putnam County because it was their polygraphist.
So I settled with the three of them.
And in the federal lawsuit, I thought I considered the polygraphist, Daniel Stevens, to be one of the worst of the lot because until he stepped in, the Peekskill police were not able to coerce a confession out of me.
And if they never did, then the fraud by the medical examiner wouldn't have happened, the prosecutorial misconduct wouldn't have happened, and I would have never then been a file on the public defender's caseload.
So I consider him to be the worst of the lot.
So I went to trial against him.
And I won.
So that took an additional three years.
So all told against him as an individual?
Well, well, was he actually was he present or was it no?
He was present.
No, he was present.
So you sue I sued him as well as the individual cops, all the people as an individual, but also the municipality that they work for.
Yeah, exactly.
So at the end of the day, that's that's only really style points.
Did these guys you can keep this up just for so long, right?
But you're suing them individually.
In reality, at the end, when I went to the, to the, it was time of the jury to deliberate.
You know you, you have to drop them individually and just keep going against the municipality, because the danger is that if the jury holds them responsible individually but not the municipality that they're working for, you know they're not, you're gonna, you don't have money, they don't have money right, okay.
So uh, so I did, I did uh, I did win a jury verdict against, against him.
So I took uh, a million and a half dollars from that and I started uh, Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation FOR Justice, which had the mission of freeing.
You know, I wanted to continue the education and policy work, but I wanted to be wanted to be able to try to free people.
You know I want stop nibbling on the edges, let's just do this directly.
So you know, I had like in-house like attorney investigator, paralegal.
You only got a million and a half.
No no, I said I committed a million and a half.
I didn't get a million, I got a lot more than that, I.
But how much did you get?
Yeah, so total yeah, I'm gonna.
Yeah, I'll explain.
So it was, so I'm paid it.
I know you have to pay lawyers.
No yes, okay.
So Between the state and the federal, there was about $24 million paid.
Total.
Total.
Obviously, when it all shakes out, it's going to be less.
It's going to be less.
So in reality, as a plaintiff, you keep 55% to 60% because the lawyers get a third.
You have to pay the expenses and everything.
So from that money, I took $1 million and a half from that to start the organization.
Okay, gotcha.
Because this is a way of reaching back to free people similar.
Jesus Christ, man.
It's crazy to think that.
I mean, it's you have to look at it both ways.
Like, it's unfortunate you had to go through everything that you did, and it's a nightmare what you had to go through at such a young age.
But the fact that you, even though that wasn't nearly enough, you should have got a thousand times more than that, you know, it's something.
And it gave you kind of like a springboard to get into where you're at now.
100%.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It really did.
You know, while I was doing that advocacy work, I told you I got the scholarship and I got the bachelor's and then I got the master's degree from John Jay College.
My thesis is written on wrongful conviction cause and reform.
Started the foundation.
And in total, we've gotten 11 people home that were wrongfully imprisoned.
helped pass three laws aimed at preventing wrongful conviction.
I'm an advisory board member of the coalition group.
It could happen to you.
And we passed another six laws, five of them in New York.
We passed one in Pennsylvania.
So we're doing work now in New York, PA, California.
I'd like to get into that for a second in a minute.
But at some point, I became not satisfied with sitting in the front row of the courtroom.
I wanted to be able to sit at the defense table.
I wanted to be able to represent some of the clients, make some of the arguments.
Hence going to law school, and I'm, as we sit here I'm, you know, I'm an attorney.
I've been an attorney for the last couple of years.
Wow, what happened to the medical examiner?
What happened to the prosecutor?
What happened to the guy who did the polygraph?
Are those guys in jail?
No, they're not in jail.
They were never.
They were never arrested.
There was never any real consequences for them.
The most that could be said would be, well.
When I brought the lawsuit, the medical examiner suddenly retired, And two weeks before I emerged, the prosecutor suddenly retired.
And ironically, of all places, he then moved to Florida, you know, just to get away from the media storm of it.
But nobody was ever arrested.
Nobody was ever held accountable civilly.
And even I brought the lawsuit and everything, like, you know, the municipalities that they work for is what paid.
They never paid anything.
They never got in trouble in any sense of anything.
And that is something that definitely bothers me some, even to this day.
In other words, they cut a check and nothing really changed.
The system didn't change.
Right.
Correct.
Yeah.
Wow.
Speaking of system changing, I would like to discuss a little bit about what I'm up to now, including the policy work.
Absolutely.
Okay.
So I'd mentioned I'm an attorney.
So the foundation as a whole, we have 17 cases going.
I'm involved in five or six of them as co-counsel.
We're pursuing policy changes.
So here's what we have going on in New York.
So when the law changed in 2017, as a result of my colleagues and myself pushing the legislature to mandate videotaping of interrogations, when the law came out, it came out watered down.
And so they made exceptions for sex offenses, drug cases, and murder cases.
And that really makes no sense because those are the cases where we need it the most.
That's what happened to me.
So right now, so the foundation, we do our policy work through the coalition group.
It could happen to you.
And the policy work that we're doing now, we're trying to get rid of those exceptions.
So that's one initiative in New York.
Another thing in New York is there's what's called the Youth Interrogation Act.
And so that's a bill that says that it recognizes that people who are 16 and 17 years old, like I was, we don't understand our rights.
So an attorney would have to explain our rights to us prior to being able to waive the rights and speak to the police.
So there's that.
And then there's a police deception bill.
which would prohibit the police from using deception in the course of interrogations, recognizing that deception is inherently coercive.
So those are three things in New York.
Another one is called the Challenging Wrongful Convictions Act.
So in a nutshell, the reason I had to write letters for four years is because you don't have a right to an attorney in a post-conviction proceeding.
So the Challenging Wrongful Convictions Act would give people an attorney to do the investigation and file the motion.
And it would also recognize that sometimes innocent people plead guilty.
It's been estimated that 10% of people who are arrested plead guilty.
So the way that it is now, if so I have a client now, Omar Clark, and Omar was wrongfully convicted of an attempted rape in Erie County, New York.
Innocent People Pleading Guilty00:03:28
We're litigating the case now.
So he was incarcerated, pre-trial detention, pending his trial, for between six to eight months.
And he kept telling his attorney what witness to speak to, protesting his innocence.
The attorney never spoke to the witness, never did any other investigation, and kept telling Omar, you're going to be found guilty of a rape.
You're going to get 25 years.
So why don't you just take the seven-year offer?
And on the eve of trial, he was scared and had no confidence in his attorney, and he pled guilty.
Subsequent to that, he has a new attorney that's representing him, and then I entered the case as co-counsel.
And so a ton of new evidence has come up towards his innocence.
We're not allowed to argue in court that he's innocent.
We have to argue because he pled guilty.
We have to argue that he had ineffective assistance to counsel.
Inadequate investigation.
Here's what would have become up otherwise.
You know, and this is but this.
That's crazy to have to jump through those hoops.
So so the challenging wrongful convictions Act would allow people to make an actual innocence claim, a newly discovered evidence claim, even if you've pled guilty.
Why is the system set up to to where so many people I think it's like high 90 of people take pleas and don't actually fight their case in in in situations like this, like that is the system.
That's the way it works.
Why is it like that?
Is it because of lack of resources?
I think it's lack of resources.
Yes, I think it's lack of resources.
And many people even estimate it higher 95, 97, 98.
I've seen these different percentages.
I think it is lack of resources.
I mean, literally, if everybody would insist on exercising their right to a trial, the whole system would grind to a halt.
So it's just.
It costs too much money, right?
It would be.
Well, I don't know that it would cost too much money.
I think that it's more money than what society is willing to pay.
But the other thing, though, I want to mention, though, one of the reasons why it's.
One of the reasons why the average length of wrongful incarceration, at least in the DNA case, is 14 years is because there's a couple of tensions in the system.
So one of them is finality of conviction versus accuracy, meaning the competing ideas that, look, you had your day in court, you lost, you know, how long are we going to keep going through this?
So in a way, having a finality, we can't keep going through this all the time.
So in a way, finality makes sense in a way.
But what good is a final conclusion if that conclusion is not accurate.
So I think whenever there's an objective reason to revisit something, it should be.
But then another thing is what I'll call proceduralism versus substance of justice.
So why should it have mattered if my petition arrived four days late?
You know, shouldn't it have been, well, am I innocent?
Am I guilty?
Are my legal arguments correct or are they not?
Rather than the court deciding my case that four days, being late four days, a lateness caused by the court clerk was the key thing.
So I feel like a lot of judges are not willing to overturn convictions they're thinking about.
And they're thinking about, well, we're undoing all the time and money that went into something in the first place.
So sadly, a lot of times, whether or not a case can receive justice or not is not whether the defendant has the facts or law on their side.
It's instead whether something's going to be rubber stamped, denied or not.
Corruption Behind Wrongful Convictions00:16:06
So those issues in New York that I mentioned, a couple of parole issues.
So what's called fair and timely parole.
So when I went to the parole board, You know, just they were in the habit, they both.
Ultimately they denied me because I maintained my innocence and also, You know, they rubber stamp denied because I was charged with a violent crime.
There's a lot of, a lot of people are just denied, no matter what type of rehabilitation they can show.
They're denied anyway just by nature of the crime.
But that's really counterproductive because, first of all, the nature of the crime is something that can never change, That was known before the first day in prison was solved, and that's almost a complete abandonment of any idea of a belief in rehabilitation.
So fair and timely parole would mean that the parole board would have to cite an additional factor in denying parole beyond that, not based solely on that, as what happened to me, a companion bill called elder parole.
So, you know, according to the Department of Corrections, when you're 55 years old, you're considered to be elderly just because of the impact of being in prison has on the body.
So anyone who is 55 and has served 15 years minimum would be guaranteed a parole board appearance, not a release, but an appearance, just to be considered whether you could demonstrate rehabilitation or not.
So those are the things I'm working on in New York.
We did pass the Commission on Prosecutor Conduct.
So the first in the country, an independent commission designed to investigate and review allegations of prosecutor misconduct, recognizing that that's a cause of wrongful conviction that runs through many of the cases and that, you know, the prosecutors have almost no oversight.
So we passed that, trying to get the legislature now to pick the people that are going to serve on their commission.
So we got the governor to put $1.75 million in the state budget for the commission, and we passed it.
But we need the commissions to be named so it can start doing its work.
That's in New York.
In Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania is one of the 12 states, along with New Mexico being another one, that does not, they don't compensate people there.
So the coalition group could happen to you.
We have our Pennsylvania chapter.
So I'm active in our Pennsylvania, New York, and California chapter.
So we're working on a PA as we're building support.
for exonerate compensation.
And, you know, when we're past that, the next thing is we try to, I will try to export that oversight of the prosecutors to Pennsylvania.
In California, we're working on trying to get that oversight for the prosecutors.
So that's what's going on on the policy front.
And we talked about changes.
And in this next year alone, we could possibly free between two to 11 people in terms of the 17 cases that are active.
But the challenge now, I would say my biggest challenge in running the nonprofit organization, you know, is, you know, My network of people that have given capacity is limited because I was in prison for the last 16 years as opposed to making it in business over 10, 15, 20 years.
How long have you been out now?
I've been out for 16 years.
Yeah, so we finally reached the equilibrium point.
But my point is I found it hard to raise money.
And so we're at our saturation point right now.
I mean, we might have 17 cases that we're working on, but there's another seven cases that are approved but waiting.
You know, and it's just like we would like to be able to do policy work, do something on the federal level and enter a few other states where advocates are waiting for us to come in the field, such as like Florida.
I know a bunch of people here.
There's actually a Florida Southern chapter.
There's a Florida Southern College chapter of the Deskovic Foundation here in Florida.
But they're gathering documents.
There's a guy who just got exonerated down here in Tampa, I think.
Yeah, is that a gentleman?
Clemente Aguiar, are you talking about?
Or?
There was another person that just in Tampa got exonerated.
Yeah, but there's definitely people who've been exonerated here in Florida.
And Florida, by the way, since we're talking about Florida, I mean, terrible provision down here when it comes to compensation.
So Florida has what's referred to as the clean hands provision.
And what that means is that anyone who's been exonerated, if they have been convicted of a crime prior to their wrongful conviction or if they get in trouble afterwards, they would not be eligible for compensation.
Really?
Yes.
Yeah.
So that's, so, I mean, a lot of things.
It seems so stupid.
It is.
That's something that definitely.
I mean, great for protecting the state, but.
Right.
But, yeah, but the state really should be compensating people who've been wrongfully imprisoned.
I mean, I look at my life before the five years of hell of my first five years of freedom compared to my life afterwards, like night and day.
And so the idea that people who've been wrongfully imprisoned aren't compensated, you know, it just seems so unjust.
It just seems so unfair to me.
I mean, any other unrelated conduct is irrelevant.
I know Stark, there's a prison called Stark a couple hours north of here, which there's a death row there.
And I know there's a number of people each year that get exonerated that are on death row.
Right.
I met somebody in New York, Clemente Aguirre, a Floridian resident who did spend time on death row here in Florida before he was exonerated.
Robert Dubois did like 35 years.
Robert Dubois.
Yeah, yeah.
That's the guy who I was thinking.
Yeah, I think he did like 35 years, but he hasn't been compensated because there's a prior conviction before that, that he had before that.
So, I mean, these are real people.
And, yeah, the death penalty obviously risks the execution of innocent people.
And then keep in mind that most people who, most of us, we get wrongfully convicted in the first place because we can't afford a good attorney and experts in investigation.
So now all those factors are at work in a death penalty case, except that there's now a clock.
There's a clock involved now because when your appeals are over and you're not in court anymore, the state goes ahead and carries out the execution.
I remember reading in the New York Times that there was an estimation that maybe like 4 or 5% of the people on death row nationally were innocent.
I have to ask you, what if.
What if there was a 4% crash rate of airplanes?
Right.
Do you think we'd keep flying them up there and just taking the chance?
I mean, I think we'd ground the damn thing, figure out what's causing it, make all necessary changes, and then cautiously.
So applying that same lens and line of reasoning when it comes to the death penalty, when it comes to wrongful convictions in general, it bothers me to no end that the causes of wrongful conviction are known.
prosecutorial misconduct, misidentifications caused, wrongful convictions, 75% of the cases, lying informants, 15%, bad lawyering.
It's not unusual for one public defender to represent 100 people at the same time.
The uneven financial playing field in terms of the budget between the public defender and the district attorney's office.
So having an even playing field so experts and investigators and manpower, equal pay for both sides so the best talent doesn't go to one side or into private practice.
We think about that.
and junk science and forensic fraud, which that was in the false confessions.
I mean, some of these things, the bad lying, false confession, forensic fraud, all happened in my case.
So my point in saying all of this is that the causes of wrongful conviction are known, but we don't see all the states and the federal government enact legislative reforms to address all of these concerns.
You know, like having the prosecutorial commission is known, having better identification procedures.
Those are already identified by social scientists backed up by data.
We know that in terms of false confessions, videotaping interrogations from beginning to end, camera focusing on both people, not having the deception, having rights explained to youth.
You know, we know what will false confession expert testimony.
We know what changes, the changes that we need to address these deficiencies.
Are known, but these are not enacted and codified into law.
And so now today, right now, here today, we're lulled into a false sense of security.
We're so advanced technology right, and we have dna testing.
This could never happen.
Now, right?
Well yeah, it can.
Dna is only around in five to twelve percent of all serious felony cases, so most cases cannot be resolved through dna, not 88% of them in the best case scenario.
So all those deficiencies that have led to wrongful convictions in the past are still out there.
Those deficiencies still exist now as a whole.
So this could happen now just like it did before.
That's why I think getting funding for organizations that are doing this work and trying to expand the donor base, we need more people to step forward.
And this needs to be you know, this is a really big problem.
You know, wrongful convictions is a really big problem, but I don't feel it gets enough attention from the, you know, as far as the private sphere and, you know, people putting a ton of money into justice reform.
I feel like mass incarceration is kind of stealing a lot of the oxygen out of the room.
And, you know, funders need to think about organizations doing wrongful conviction and work.
And we need to think also, I mean, if politicians of both political parties, you know, they raise, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in what they refer to as small dollar donors.
But, you know, why isn't that done for organizations freeing people, doing policy work?
Why isn't the government, why isn't this a huge priority for the government?
You know, let's make the justice system more accurate.
You know, per the National Registry of Exoneration, you know, more than 3,100 exonerations just from 1989 forward have happened across the country.
You know, and think about, you know, we don't know, we don't know how many people are wrongfully in prison.
We can only count the exonerations, because if we could count the people who are not exonerated but wrongfully convicted, then we could get to them, we could help them, we could release them right, you know.
So I kind of believe it's kind of like a like an iceberg thing.
You know where the part that you see above the surface is, you know, is a fraction of the bigger, of the bigger hole.
You know there's different estimates, 5% 2.5% 1, half a percent.
You know, I think that all those estimations are lower.
I now, at this point, now there's been, I want to say, about 21 people that I did time with that were exonerated, either before me or after me.
That's in 16 years.
So I think, and again, you can't count it, I think the percentage is between 15 to 20%.
You know, the anecdotal data seems to be 15 to 20% of of the inmate population are innocent.
That would be my estimation.
Right, okay.
You know, look, the anecdotal data seems to be flowing my way.
It seems like every week we're seeing one or two people that are exonerated.
But when you think about all the wrongful conviction causes, when one bad actor is, like in New York, we had this detective named Scarsella in Brooklyn.
And at this point, it's between like 13 to 17 cases that he worked on people have been exonerated from.
Just using it as an example of how one bad actor can influence scores of cases.
In Illinois, Mass Exoneration Day, they had 18 people who were exonerated, former Detective Guevara and his crew.
And one day 18 people exonerated that they worked on, another day 15 and they're still doing it, using that as examples again one person affecting many cases when you look at jurisdictions where a different district attorney takes office and has a real conviction review unit where they're proactively looking for people who are innocent, um Dallas, Craig Watkins more, more than 40 people were exonerated in eight years through his unit.
Uh, Ken Thompson, the da in Brooklyn before he passed away, 23 people exonerated two and a half years.
Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, you know, more than 20 people exonerated.
But most places don't have those units where they're real.
But my point in all of this is if all that stuff was done across the board, how many more people would we get that would be discovered to have been wrongfully convicted?
So all that in support of my non-scientific statement, I think is 15 to 20% anecdotally.
But even if it is just half a percent, when you think about, was it 2.3, 2.4 million people enmeshed in the justice system one way or another, any figure you want to put on that divide.
That's still quite a lot of people.
That's still quite a lot of people, is what my point is.
Yeah.
And then, you know, you have general, I think, human nature of a lot of people, too.
Like a lot of these prosecutors and a lot of these police, you know, they just want to climb the ladder in the bureaucracy, right?
They just like people like Robert Mueller, for example, that just want promotions.
They want to move up to the next level and they want to get as many convictions as possible as fast as they possibly can so they can make more money.
I mean, greed is, you know, big.
Greed is a huge factor.
And then.
You know, combined with the fact that there's this just, it's this entire giant machine of the prison system in the United States, it's just this big machine, and there's automatically going to be a huge bycatch.
You're going to, a lot of people are going to fall in between the cracks, a lot of innocent people, because, you know, I don't know what the stats are, but I know we have more people incarcerated per capita than any place else on earth.
Right.
So, unless I feel like it's got to be more of like, you got to go back to the foundation of the system.
And how it's built to sort of fix this problem.
Because it's not, we're not trying to fix the problem.
We're not trying to find a cure for it.
We're not trying to find a cure to eliminating crime or murders or the drug problem.
It's just, it's become an industry that makes money.
And the people that are involved get corrupted one way or another.
And it's, you know, money's involved and careers are involved.
And I think that sort of casts a large shadow over everything else.
And then also, a lot of these people that are getting convicted are not celebrities.
They're people that nobody knows.
So that's why nobody gives a shit.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
I definitely agree with that too.
And a lot of the people that are arrested, I mean, these are people typically on the bottom rung of socioeconomic status wise and not having very many resources as well.
So the people most vulnerable.
Overcoming a Profit-Driven Justice System00:09:24
To that least able to defend.
How many people?
I mean?
How many people um uh, putting the guilt or innocence aside for a minute but just how many people have the resources of an Oj Simpson, for example, to have that type of legal team, experts and investigators and everything else?
If people had an Oj type defense, I mean, how many you know with that much resources?
How many people, as opposed to you, know somebody that's just working with a public defender that you know you're.
You're very rarely meeting with you, not a lot of time spent on the case, not vigorously defending, defending cases.
That's another big problem I have, you know, with a death row, a death penalty.
I don't think we're ever going to see anybody rich.
You think we're ever going to see anybody rich on death row?
No, no, absolutely not.
Right.
So just, yeah, just to bring that up.
Yeah, it's unfortunate.
It's part of the whole quote unquote prison industrial complex that, you know, it's part of a bigger thing that it's impossible to get the reins around.
Sure.
You know, one of the questions that I'm asked by a lot is people ask me, you know, are you angry?
I get that question semi-frequently.
And my answer is this, is, you know, I'm not angry.
You know, I want to enjoy my life as much as I can.
And I don't think I can do that while being angry or bitter at the same time.
I feel like I've lost so much already as is.
Why would I want to, in effect, give over the rest of my life?
If I was to be angry or bitter, it's not like I would be negatively impacting any of the people involved in what happened.
I would really be the only loser in that scenario.
I do make sense of everything that happened to me in a kaleidoscopic manner.
I found my purpose in the world, which is to fight wrongful conviction, free people in the same position I was in, prevent what happened to me from other people, hence the policy work.
And secondarily, some of the other humane things that I witnessed while I was and subjected to and that I was witnessed while I was in prison.
Things like, you know, the verbal abuse from the guards to the prisoner, the prisoner and prisoner violence, the people, so many people over-sentenced, the terrible medical care in prison, the way the food is, lack of college education for prisoners, vocational trades being obsolete, compassionate release, where if someone's been determined to be terminally ill, that they could be released so that they could die with a little bit of dignity with their family.
in a normal environment.
And what I saw while I was in prison, I mean, often by the time the bureaucracy made a decision and they were released, they died like one or two days later.
And sometimes the decision came down after somebody had already passed away.
So all of those, just the indifference.
I firmly believe that any rehabilitation that happens in prison is despite the system.
It's overcoming the system rather than because of it.
And I think that that's I think that's backwards.
And I've mentioned all of that to say, hence my secondary interest in general justice reform.
I think that prisons should be humane.
No one is saying, I'm not saying anyway, that people who are guilty shouldn't be sent to prison, that they shouldn't be punished.
I think the sentence should fit the crime.
And the punishment is supposed to be the loss of your freedom.
It's not supposed to be that you're going to be mistreated and treated like an animal.
or worse, while there.
So hence wanting to fight for the secondary justice reform issues.
And so I look at everything like that and the vehicle that allows me to not be angry is I do this work and I take that energy that I feel and I channel it into the advocacy work and I have some inner peace that way.
Yeah, why dwell on the past?
Why dwell on the negative?
The more you think about that stuff, the more you torture yourself and you punish yourself even more.
Right, exactly, yeah.
The only one that suffers is you.
That's right.
If that's the mindset that you have.
100%.
Yeah, yeah, it is.
It is, for sure.
Well, Jeff, thank you so much for doing this, man.
Sure.
A couple of quick things.
And I just, if people, if the audience has enjoyed the interview and they would like to hear a little bit more about me, there is a documentary short. available on Amazon Prime called Conviction.
It was produced by Gia Wirtz, so that's available on Amazon Prime.
It's got gotten into more than 20 film festivals.
It's won a number of awards, so if people want to see more about me, they can certainly check that out.
I'd like to give a brief shout-out to Restorative Justice International.
I sit on their Global Advisory Council.
I advise them on wrongful conviction issues.
So as an organization, Issues come up policy-wise in the legislature, they think about what position they're going to take.
And so my role in that is I lay out an issue.
I try to keep my opinion out of it so they can understand the issue.
And then I give them what my opinion is also.
And then they decide as a whole what position as an organization they're going to take.
And they often interview candidates running on a justice reform plank.
So I do enjoy working with them.
I want to conclude by saying that I think that the wind is at our back.
I feel like there's so much work left to be done, so many laws to be changed, so many people to be freed, and yet we have the momentum.
It's kind of like an exciting time in history right now in terms of these issues because it does seem like every year more organizations pop up that are doing innocence work.
There's more individual attorneys.
Getting involved in this.
So, I want to encourage listeners if you are an attorney, think about doing at least one pro bono wrongful conviction case.
So, there is that, you know, documentaries and docuseries and podcasts and blog talk radio and written blogs.
So many different people are fascinated by the subject, man.
They are.
And I just want to encourage people to keep thinking and getting involved into that.
So many different careers.
I mean, within a nonprofit setting, whether it's grant writing, public relations, social media, websites, fundraising on the reintegrative side, social work, psychologists, lots of ways to get involved is my point beyond just being an investigator or being an attorney.
And look, the fight against wrongful conviction is about justice and action.
It's not against the cops or the prosecutors.
Definitely against them when they're rogue, when they break laws, when they run over constitutional rights, state rights, unethical things.
Yeah, against all of them.
Okay, no, it's not a few bad apples, though you'd like us to think that.
It's far more than that.
Nonetheless, it's not everybody in all those positions.
So people in those professions, when they do their job in an ethical, legal manner, I have no issues with them.
So I do want to mention that.
And I'd like to put my website out if I can do that.
www.deskovic.org, D-E-S-K-O-V-I-C.
You can follow me on social media.
I'm on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn.
Foundation has a Patreon page as well if you'd like to get involved.
Lots of people out there still to free.
And I hope some people have listened to me today and feel inspired.
Reach out.
You can email me through the website.
Definitely we need to get more resources in so that we can work on still more cases and try to bring policy changes because I really, at the end of the day, I see wrongful conviction as it's not a New York problem.
It's not an American problem.
I mean, it is, but larger than that, this is really a worldwide problem.
I mean, if we have this many deficiencies in the U.S. where we're advanced technologically, especially as considered versus a third world country, I mean, what's going on in those countries where their system, we've got this many problems here.
You know what's going on over there where they're not as advanced so I really see wrongful conviction as a worldwide issue and My wild dream would be that one day we would have not only a chapter of the foundation in each state, but ultimately in each country So well, it's a wonderful thing what you're doing man, and I appreciate you for doing everything in your capacity to get the word out and sharing your story with us today.
A Worldwide Dream for Reform00:00:21
All right.
Well, thank you so much for having me sharing the platform and By all means, send me the link when this comes out, each of them, and I'll definitely do my part to promote this on social media.
So wonderful platform, and thanks so much for reaching out as well.