Josh Dubin exposes systemic failures in wrongful convictions, like the Perlmutters’ $50M defamation win over a neighbor who stole DNA via q-tips and planted contaminated evidence, or Nelson Cruz’s 26-year imprisonment despite a recanted witness. He highlights racial bias in clemency—Michael Giles, a Black man serving 15 years for a self-defense shooting, was denied freedom by Governor DeSantis after strong bipartisan support—while criticizing prosecutors like Jack Campbell, who targeted minorities. Dubin’s push for psychedelic-assisted therapy, including ketamine and ayahuasca, reveals potential for trauma healing but clashes with legal and pharmaceutical resistance, suggesting alternatives to flawed authority systems may lie in rewiring minds rather than punishing them. [Automatically generated summary]
No, I was just thinking that the more you do this work, the more routine the stories would get, and you would start to see fact patterns and situations repeat.
But I'm starting to think the more you do it, the more nutty and bizarre it gets.
And you find yourself in these situations where you're like, that can't be.
You got to check that out.
So I have like multiple cases going on where I feel that way.
And they range from wrongful convictions to why was this person charged in the first place?
The world of wrongfully accused and wrongfully convicted people is one of the darkest worlds in the world because you're taking away a person's freedom.
Malcolm Gladwell just published a new book called Revenge or the Tipping Point.
And I'm only like 15 pages in.
And the way he starts it out is about, I think, he's going to come back to it at the end, but I think it's the opioid scandal.
He's leaving it blank until the end of the book about how when they testified, the executives of the company testified before Congress that they couldn't bring themselves to apologize or admit that they were wrong.
And they keep on using the words, our drug has been associated with, associated with addiction.
And it's almost this.
So I'm starting to think that this inability to admit fault, that you're wrong, that you're sorry, it transcends the legal system.
And, you know, I'm starting to believe that the cases where these cops are out to frame someone are far more, well,
maybe not far more, but they're less common than the cases where law enforcement's trying to do the right thing and a detective has a hunch and they just get to where they think they need to be on the evidence by following the hunch, which is often wrong.
Yeah, and people don't like to admit they're wrong ever, especially when it comes to something as crazy as a pharmaceutical drug company releasing some opioid that's going to kill a million people.
Like, they can't admit they're wrong.
They almost have to say things like associated with, especially during hearings.
And people that don't recognize that, they just believe that they're never wrong or that they want people to know they're never wrong or think they're never wrong.
So they just don't admit it and they just bury it deep inside.
He had a former crime scene analyst and some retired deputy chief of police from Toronto, because this guy's from Canada, come down and the former crime scene analyst sits at the deposition.
And they planned it all beforehand and they made sure that they did not handle paper that Ike Perlmutter would handle and they made sure that no one touched this water bottle that Lori Perlmutter was going to handle and they hand him this phony exhibit and they had it worked out before that they would only touch the bottom corner of it.
And they have.
They have a water bottle sitting in front of Lori Perlmutter and they ask questions about this dispute over the tennis center and you know, when they leave, it was treated like a crime scene and it was like some vigilante justice type of shit where they send all this stuff to an unaccredited lab,
who then sends it to an accredited lab and instead of waiting for the results to come in from this accredited lab, the unaccredited lab starts interpreting it and they're having pressure put on them by this man that ultimately accused Ike and Lori of being involved in this awful crime.
All right, so it doesn't make sense without context.
So here's what happens.
Ike Perlmutter is the former chairman of Marvel.
He's very reclusive by all accounts.
He and Lori don't have children and they live a very quiet life in Palm Beach.
He was an avid tennis player this is about 14 years ago avid tennis player and he became very friendly with the woman that was the tennis pro.
She was a single mother.
She would set him up with tennis games and he became friends with her so she sold real estate on the side.
I mean, this is like a fucking episode of like Seinfeld or curb your enthusiasm at the beginning, then it like goes off the rails and descends into the depths of hell.
So bear with me, okay.
So a man moves into, or a man had been living at, or moves into their neighborhood and he um becomes friends with this other couple who also sell real estate.
The wife sells real estate and apparently they approach the tennis pro and they're like we should team up on real estate and she's like, no, it's just my side hustle, i'm gonna do it alone.
So this guy from Canada writes this memo and in the memo there's all these accusations about this woman that she could go to federal prison and she's committing.
She could be.
You know that that there's bid rigging going on because they never sent her her um, they never sent her tennis pro contract out for bid.
He stands up for the people that he, you know, is friends with.
And he thought she was getting bullied.
So she sued the guy for defamation.
And Ike and another resident in this condo complex paid for her legal fees.
So about a year later, mail starts to arrive in this community and it is the most awful shit you have ever heard.
And it's accusing the Canadian guy of being a child molester, of being a murderer.
It's horrific, twisted, sick shit.
So it's about a year after this tennis center dispute, and there's misspelled Hebrew words and Jewish stars all over it.
So this guy thinks naturally that Ike and his wife are behind it, like they have nothing better to do.
All right.
So because he's so convinced that they did it and or that they were involved and he, you know, initially suspected that other people might be involved, this guy's going around and swabbing DNA off of with a q-tip, off of cars.
He's digging through trash in the condo community and he's like on this mission to collect people's DNA.
So he calls them to a deposition about the tennis center case and that's where this all went down.
So once they collect their DNA, this unaccredited lab claims that DNA taken off of the hate mail matches Lori Perlmutter's DNA from the water bottle at the deposition.
The problem was that this unaccredited lab didn't wait for the report from the accredited lab.
And that run of the DNA that this woman was relying on, the accredited lab discarded it because the man that actually did the testing contaminated the machine.
And he knew it, so he didn't rely on it.
So years and years and years go by and well after they knew that Lori had nothing to do with this.
In fact, in 2017, a man got arrested in Canada and he got arrested because a package got intercepted at Homeland at the border by Homeland Security and it had samples of the hate mail, latex gloves, you know, in the package.
And it was a former business associate of this Canadian guy and their relationship went sour.
And I thought the case was over.
You know, in 2019, I believe the guy gets arrested again and there's a detailed affidavit.
So it's clear that this man is responsible for it.
So in any event, in 2016, I believe it was 2016, there's an article in the fucking deal book in the New York Times saying that Lori Perlmutter DNA is on that hate mail.
And then there's another one in the Globe and Mail, which is a big Canadian paper.
So it was a defamation case against this guy and against this lawyer for a chub because Chubb helped this Chubb lawyer, federal insurance, also known as Chubb, helps him draw up the blueprints for collecting their DNA at the deposition.
So it was a super gratifying case.
We won a $50 million verdict and he was found liable for defamation, abusive process, which is abuse of the legal process.
And it's taken Ike and Lori all of these years to have their name restored in court.
And they'd kill me if I admitted it and it would be a violation of their confidence and my professional obligation, but they've spent an untold fortune.
And, you know, the case is important for forensic science because DNA is supposed to be the holy grail.
And you can't have private citizens running around trying to collect people's DNA without knowing what they're doing.
You could be leaning on someone and have good intentions to get results.
But if I told you or if I said to Jamie, here's my suspect, take a look at these fingerprints and tell me if they match him or her.
Or here's my suspect.
Here's their genetic profile.
Tell me if it matches.
You don't realize the, I mean, sometimes the error rate skyrockets by as much as 50% with fingerprints over 80%.
And fingerprint analysts will agree.
And they will say, yeah, I know that that happens.
And if someone tells me who the suspect is and only who the suspect is, and I'm comparing it, I think the error rate goes up, but not with me.
Not with me.
I mean, again, it's that phenomenon where you just can't think that you would be biased.
So, look, the case was super important because I think it reused, but beyond restoring their name, and, you know, it's the namesake of the center where we do this work.
It also preserves the integrity of forensic science and especially DNA, which is really one of the few super reliable forms of forensic science.
But even that, when put in the wrong hands, or if it's exposed to subjectivity and people's belief that they have the right person, it's vulnerable.
So what happens is when you're, I don't want to go too deep into DNA analysis, but it is actually interesting.
When you're conducting DNA testing, the manufacturer of the machine I think it's called the PowerPlex Plus, they ask you to run what's called a positive control and a negative control to make sure that the machine is correctly calibrated.
Because what it's doing through electrophoresis, it's shooting out what's called an electropharogram on the other end so that you're able to do what they what they what's referred to as calling alleles.
So you're recalling a chromosome pairing at a specific genetic marker, right?
So and they called them, there's various different loci or locations where there you either have two alleles or one.
You get one from your mom, one from your father, one from your mom, one from your dad.
And sometimes the one from your father might not show, but your mothers will show, but there'll be two alleles at most at a specific location.
So they want to make sure that the machine is working properly.
So the manufacturer has the lab analyst every time you do it run a positive control, meaning that you'll put a solution through the machine and it should on the other end give you very specific results.
And he accidentally pipetted or took the solution from her DNA mixture instead of from the positive control mixture and put that through the machine.
So when he was running the test, her DNA is already mixed in there.
But he realized he made a mistake.
So when he issued his report, he didn't rely on that run.
Because when I say run, it's another, you'll run the DNA on different occasions and sometimes on different dates because you want to make sure that your genetic profile will never change.
My genetic profile will never change.
So when you were looking at somebody's genetic profile, it should be consistent.
So when he saw that, wait a second, the first run of this doesn't match the second and third or the fourth, he realized he made a mistake.
But without having the lab analyst that's doing the interpretation, you know, weighing in on the results and you're antsy to get an answer and you're leaning on an unaccredited lab saying, interpret the results, interpret the results.
Money's no object.
There's an email that said that.
You know, instead of waiting, she relies on this run of the DNA.
And, you know, then what happens happen.
But at some point, this Canadian guy came to learn what actually happened and kept on going and kept on going and kept on going.
And there was evidence that he wanted hundreds of millions of dollars from my clients.
You know, I think what turned out to be a shitty situation for him because no doubt getting hate mail like that has to be disturbing and upsetting to the family.
That was his former, one of his former business colleagues who he had a vicious falling out with, and he kept it from everyone.
So I think that the inference, in my opinion, the inference is that at some point, and in fact, there's an allegation in the hate mail where it says you were involved in the murder of these two people.
He accuses this man in Canada months after the hate mail began to arrive of spreading that rumor.
So I believe that he knew it was him the whole time.
And at some point, I believe he was trying to shake the Perlmutters down.
He was some embattled, in my opinion, an embattled businessman in Canada.
He had like an executive recruiting company, but there was all sorts of public information out there that he worked on the Toronto Harbor Commission and then been involved in what the press called cloak and dagger campaigns where he was wasting public funds.
So, you know, he bragged about all the lawsuits he's been involved in.
So I think the jury saw through it.
And, you know, look, again, sometimes you become really close with your clients, and that's not always a great thing.
I'm guilty of that a lot.
But these are wonderful people, reclusive.
They give most of their money away to charity.
And to watch these people get dragged through the mud for over a decade.
And, you know, there was evidence in the case that this is interesting because I initially fought this.
On the day, the first day of jury selection, they had been invited to go to Mar-a-Lago and sit at the president's table for a Halloween party.
It was just prospective jurors filling out questionnaires.
So the defense, and it was really, I think, the attorneys for Chubb or for the lawyer that worked for Chubb wanted to introduce evidence.
They got photos of the party and they wanted to introduce this evidence.
And there was one day during the trial where they went to the White House because one of their close friends was appointed to be the ambassador for India.
And they used that against them during the trial.
And I fought it tooth and nail.
And then I finally said, you know what?
Fuck it.
I'm going to let it come in.
I stopped fighting it.
And I knew that the jurors on their questionnaire filled out who they publicly admired most and least.
Two of them wrote they admired the president the most.
One of them said they admire him the least.
So I really had to speak to that juror and say during my closing argument, you know, What they're doing here is they're trying to say that Lori Perlmutter's reputation doesn't matter, that she can't emote and suffer humiliation or public ridicule, and that you should disregard her because of who she's friends with, who she votes for,
the fact that her husband came here and literally with $200 in his pocket and, you know, ascended.
That's the weird paradox about success.
You know, you get there and people are like, oh, these fucking rich people, but these are like, they represent the best in all of us.
Lori Perlmutter, with her free time, started to work at the gift shop at NYU because she liked the feeling of selling flowers and little gifts to people that were going through terrible times.
And she ends up becoming a board member at NYU and they give $50 million to start the Perlmutter Cancer Center.
I mean, who among us wouldn't want to aspire to that?
And they were trying to say, but she doesn't matter.
At one point, she was asked the question, you know, because with defamation, your reputation is on the line, right?
And you have to argue reputational damage.
And they said, well, isn't your reputation bound up in your husband's?
And they said this to a jury of like four or five women.
And I thought, what a dumb fucking thing to say.
In my opinion, at least it was like.
And I was able to say to them during the closing, they're saying she doesn't matter and that she's not her own person.
Her reputation.
So it's like these little victories help restore my faith in the system.
Because if billionaires can get awarded $50 million, which is what they got awarded, I think that that's the jury saying her reputation mattered.
And not only did her reputation matter, but it mattered to the point where you can't just tear somebody down when you know the facts.
The center was born out of, at one point, I was offered this role to start a new post-conviction center.
Up until four years ago, five years ago, I did work at the Innocence Project.
And when I was offered this position at the same law school at Cardozo Law where the Innocence Project was born, they said, if you get that role, the Perlmutters, we're going to fund it for the first 10 years because we realize that if you're wrongfully accused in this country of a crime you didn't commit, if you don't have the resources to fight it like we did, that you're really in trouble.
And for them to have that kind of insight while going through this, you know, it's remarkable.
I'm indebted to them for life.
I mean, they've become like surrogate family to me.
But yeah, the center was born out of their experience in this case.
Look, I told you at the beginning that there's only been like a handful of cases where I was like, yeah, that can't be.
There's got to be something missing from that story that you're not telling me.
But watch this.
Two officers in 1998 were on patrol in New York City, in Brooklyn, on Pitkin Avenue.
Gunfire breaks out.
And literally, as they're rolling down the street, the gunfire breaks out.
One of the officers looks to his left and sees the muzzle flash of the gun that was used to kill this young man, Trevor Vieira.
He exits the patrol car, draws on the man, and says, drop the gun.
The guy's pointing the gun still that was used to shoot Trevor Vieira.
And there's a tense moment.
And this officer has testified that there was a 14-year-old girl in the area, or he otherwise would have just shot the guy.
So he literally catches the murderer with the gun smoking in his hand.
Well, I've used that expression over the past two decades.
Oh, it's the smoking gun.
This is the fucking smoking gun.
He finally drops the gun.
His name is Eduardo Rodriguez.
He's put in handcuffs.
And, you know, you get documents as you're going through the discovery process during post-conviction.
You get it from the prosecutor, from the police, and there's a radio call by a detective that says, perps in custody, contemporaneous with the arrest.
They arrest two men, one guy standing next to him and the guy that Eduardo Rodriguez shot the gun.
He's placed under arrest.
He's brought to the precinct.
And he's delivered into the arms of no other than one of the most corrupt, sadistic detectives to ever work homicide in Brooklyn, in my opinion, Louis Garcella.
No, why should that name sound familiar to you or to others?
Because Louis Garcella is the guy that framed Derek Hamilton, who's the deputy director of the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice at Cardozo.
Louis Scarcella and his partner, I think his name is Schimmel or Chimmel, Kimmel, C-H-M-I-L.
These guys were so notorious for framing people for murders they didn't commit that there have been 21 cases where people's convictions were vacated where they were the lead detectives.
21.
Derek's is one of them.
So Eduardo Rodriguez is delivered to the precinct, smoking gun in his hand, and a couple of hours later, he's brought to the home of Nelson Cruz, who was 17 years old at the time, 16, turning 17.
And it's the story of these cops that while he was in the precinct, that he was yelling and screaming and tearing the place up.
I didn't do it.
Nelson Cruz did it.
He shot him and ran and dropped the gun and I just picked it up.
The officer that arrested him never saw Nelson Cruz.
He didn't see someone shoot and drop a gun.
The story is literally ludicrous.
Nelson Cruz is arrested and charged with murder.
So when I heard the story, I was like, there's no fucking way that this is what happened.
You're leaving something out.
And I then read the trial transcript.
There's another guy that shows up at the precinct named Andre Bellinger.
And Andre Bellinger says, yeah, I saw Nelson Cruz do it too.
And he shows up at the precinct and he's told what kind of gun was used.
He's told that Nelson Cruz is the suspect.
And then he picks him out of a lineup after being told we're going to put Nelson Cruz in a lineup.
All three of those things are gross violations of investigatory practices, and this has been established for decades.
So this guy ends up put on trial and they somehow claim that they don't have they can't locate this guy that is saying that he witnessed the crime.
They can't locate him.
He's not around to be located.
So the person who had the gun in his hand that is shooting the gun, who they believe who says Nelson Cruz did it, at Nelson Cruz's trial, he's nowhere to be found.
Wouldn't you think that the prosecutors would put that man, Eduardo Rodriguez, on the stand so he could explain how he picked up the gun?
He could explain, what did you see?
You saw Nelson Cruz do this, and he ran and dropped the gun, and he's never put on the stand.
It's like a three-day trial.
The only person put on the stand that claimed to have been a witness is this guy, Andre Bellinger.
So, I mean, some people have like bad luck, shitty luck, or cataclysmic, fucking apocalyptically bad luck.
And Nelson Cruz just happens to have, you know, won that shit lottery.
Nelson Cruz ends up before a judge about eight years ago and about six years ago.
And it's a post-conviction hearing.
And this guy, Andre Bellinger, who claims that he watched Nelson Cruz do it, is outed as a liar.
There are eyewitnesses that were with him that night who said he wasn't at that murder scene.
He was like blocks away with me.
He was outed as a liar on so many different occasions, it becomes like it would become laughable if it wasn't so serious.
After these post-conviction proceedings, during which 20 some odd witnesses were called, the courtroom is packed on the day of the decision because the expectation amongst the press and in the legal community is Nelson Cruz is about to get exonerated.
This judge had exonerated people that had been investigated by Lewis Garsella.
And she's acting kind of weird and erratic.
And she rules against Nelson Cruz and contradicts herself on multiple occasions.
And this is in 2019.
And we later, or 2020, and we later learn she never takes the bench again.
And she resigns because she has advanced stage Alzheimer's disease.
I have an affidavit from an investigator that says her husband said that she had been suffering from these symptoms for years before.
There was a judicial complaint filed because she wasn't showing up to court.
There's a ProPublica article about it, about this whole debacle.
And, you know, it's stories like this.
And so the Pearl Mutter Center for Legal Justice is working on the case.
And, you know, thankfully, we're before the Conviction Integrity Unit in Brooklyn.
And it's led by a really special guy, Eric Gonzalez, who's the district attorney in Brooklyn.
And he listens to these cases.
He has a real conviction integrity unit.
So I'm hopeful that once we present the case to them, that we'll get him some relief.
But to think about, he was paroled in 2023.
He's a mess.
He walks around nervous.
He's got terrible anxiety and paranoid, wonderful guy, and he's so stone-cold innocent, and you just wonder how and why this shit can happen to someone.
And, you know, it's like the perfect constellation of like, you got these crooked detectives who have already been found to have ruined a bunch of people's lives.
You have the smoking gun found in the hand of the murderer who mysteriously disappears.
And if you're wondering, so why do they believe this guy?
How does he go to the precinct and he raises hell and says Nelson Cruz did and I picked up the gun, even though there's no evidence of that?
Because in order for me to expect that that would happen would be to defy logic as I know it in this world.
Because think about what happens.
If a municipality admits we did something horrible and it was a mistake and we did the wrong thing, there's going to be a civil rights lawsuit.
I mean, look, to Brooklyn's credit with this DA, they have done that and done the right thing.
But in terms of then going after the person that they think did it, you know, it's 2000 almost 26 and this crime happened in 1998.
It's 30 years later to be able to reassemble the witnesses and some of whom are probably dead or hard to find.
But it's very rare that once there's an exoneration and you're able to point to who the true killer is, very rare that law enforcement will go after the person that defense counsel has established actually did it.
Because if the defense counsel has ruled that this other guy is innocent and that the police officer did see the guy execute that person, how do you not try that person with murder?
Now you're stumbling into the how could that the how could that be of our legal justice system?
It just it doesn't happen.
I mean, Clementia Geary, who I've talked about before, who was exonerated from death row, you know, if there's any doubt about this phenomenon of children killing their parents, I think that that was laid to rest a few days ago.
It happens.
It happens a lot more than was recently publicized.
You know, the real killer was the daughter of her mother and her grandmother.
Clementia Geary gets, you know, charged, put on death row, and in the middle of his retrial, you know, she all but confessed on the stand to me.
They have her blood mixed with her mother's blood at the crime scene and in a trail leading to the bathroom where the killer cleaned up, she confessed on six or seven different occasions, not under duress, not to law enforcement, to various people around town.
She's roaming the streets.
The day that Clemente got exonerated, I said, you know, I think I might have quoted like Jim Morrison.
I was like, there's a killer on the roam and she's in Kentucky and you better go get her.
You know, and they were like, oh, objections.
You know, but yeah, it happens.
I mean, it's my belief that she's stone-cold guilty.
And they haven't gone after her.
And that happens a lot.
I mean, look, the word exoneration is thrown around, but it's like Derek's case is rare.
He was declared actually innocent.
Sometimes the conviction gets vacated.
Sometimes it, you know, they decide not to retry the person and agree to time served.
But you're pushing a massive boulder up a steep hill every time.
Like Nelson Cruz should not have to carry this weight around anymore.
He's had other lawyers that have done a great job representing him.
I mean, but it's, this is like, I'm past tears at this point.
I'm more like, we just got to keep going and keep fighting.
And when you get these little victories here and there, like we've had a few releases recently that were super encouraging, where you're able to get people a second chance, where you're able to, you know, get it to the point where they could, even though they didn't do it, plead guilty.
We just had a release.
She was actually my co-counsel in the Clementia Geary case, Mari Palmer, and her client pled guilty, but we believe he's innocent.
He did it to get out.
He had done 24 years and he'd had enough.
But for her to get it to the place where he could even plead guilty after serving all that time, you know, innocent people plead guilty all the time.
Because if you're doing post-conviction work, it's not just the wrongfully accused and convicted.
It's also, you know, we do clemency work, commutations and pardons.
You start to wade into the human mess and you see that like people have made mistakes and are worth a second chance.
What they do with it is up to them, but some of the stuff you can't explain.
Some of these prosecutions are political.
Look, I'm dealing with a case right now that's like at the intersection of wrongful conviction and what the fuck are we doing with our immigration policy in this country.
And I don't even want to mention his name because I don't want to, you know, or the state because I don't want to sacrifice the good work that we're doing to get him a public hearing.
But I can say this much.
This is a guy from Albania that came to this country in the early 70s and had to sit in a refugee camp in Italy for damn near a month under horrid conditions just to come here to try to live a life.
He's in his early 20s.
He's at a gas station.
He has a $100 bill for $5 gas.
He goes into the gas station.
The guy takes the $100 bill.
He doesn't have change.
He says, when you get $5, come back.
I'm going to hold on to this $100 bill.
And they get into an argument.
He won't give him back the $100 bill.
So he leaves and goes to get his brother.
And he tells his brother about it.
They return to the gas station.
They have a gun in the back seat of their car.
His brother tells him, you stay here.
I'm going to go in and try to talk some sense into this guy and get your money back and give him five bucks.
My client's sitting in the car and gunshots erupt.
He goes in the back seat, gets the gun, goes around to the side, comes into the gas station.
It comes into the, you know, the, you remember back in the 80s where you would go in to pay and it would be like a little front desk area.
And the gas station attendant is holding the gun and he looks to his left and his brother is bleeding out.
The gas station attendant had shot his brother in the stomach.
Still holding the gun shaking, he shoots him one time dead.
Shoots the gas station attendant dead.
His brother miraculously survives and he's put on trial for murder.
And he goes to trial the first time.
Remember, he's in his early 20s and it's a hung jury.
Most of them are in favor of acquittal.
Goes to trial a second time and gets convicted.
The judge must have seen that this was damn near as close to self-defense as it gets.
He got sentenced to like four to seven years.
He was out in just under four years.
He had become an accomplished boxer in prison.
He's lived the last 51 years of his life without so much as a traffic ticket.
He goes to New York, joins the union as a super for buildings.
He pays taxes, social security, pays into his pension, builds a life for himself, has five kids, eight grandchildren, and he's living in upstate New York.
Leaves the country a couple of years ago to go to Albania to see family, comes back and gets stopped at the border.
Somehow is not detained at the border, but they start removal proceedings on him.
This episode is brought to you by the farmer's dog.
Recipes, cooking methods, even portioning, it all makes a difference for your dog's health.
And the farmer's dog is pouring a ton of resources into new research studies.
They've also just started sponsoring a residency program at the University of Tennessee's College of Veterinary Medicine, which aims to contribute new research and help shape the future of pet health.
You can see their dedication to science-backed dog nutrition in their food.
Every recipe is developed by a team of board-certified veterinary nutritionists, and they offer tailored plans for dogs of all ages, sizes, and breeds.
They do all this on top of offering a high-quality product of real meat, fresh vegetables, and essential nutrients.
They even portion the food to your dog's specific caloric needs because keeping dogs at a healthy weight can help them live up to two and a half years longer.
Try the farmer's dog today and get 50% off your first box of fresh, healthy food.
They got into an argument, and he called, the attendant called him some slur against Albanians, and they started to argue, and he just shot him in the stomach.
This isn't even, it's not in dispute at all what happened.
And there's a law that if you committed a violent crime, you're removable.
But for 51 years, he was not removed from this country.
And he lived here as a green card holder, and he paid taxes, and he built a family and a life.
I think that that's the protectorate of Albania at this point.
Okay.
So, and to watch them, they went to one removal proceeding and the judge, I have the transcripts of the proceeding, and the judge is like saying to the prosecutors, at one point he said, what are you doing here?
He starts speaking Albanian to my client.
And look, I don't know immigration law that well.
I'm not an immigration lawyer, but I spoke to the immigration lawyer and he's like, look, I'm afraid that they're going to take him.
I mean, ICE is waiting outside courthouses.
And they're going to take this guy.
He's in his 70s, take him away from his family and his grandchildren.
So again, you don't just see these wrongful conviction cases.
You see cases that are like, this man has built a life.
And if you start to get beneath the surface and you see the pain and agony and fear that people are living, they're living it day to day.
We were able to get a delay into February for his removal proceedings.
So I'm now trying to get him pardoned.
Because if he gets pardoned, there's no basis upon which to remove him.
And, you know, we have a team at my center that's working on it.
And you want, these are the kind of people you want to fight for once you get to know them.
So there's like, I don't want to just tell nightmare after nightmare, but the reason why it's important, I think, for people to hear this is it's not just what you're seeing on TV or what you're hearing about.
I mean, what basis do we have to remove a grandfather who's lived here for 50 years and contributed to this society and paid his taxes and paid into Social Security and was part of a union and just like I'm looking for a flaw.
I really am.
I'm looking for like a reason for me not to like them and I just get drawn in more and more.
They're just wonderful people and these are the kinds of things that are like worth fighting for.
I think what's going on with ICE is one of the things that's going on with quotas for speeding tickets and things along those lines is that they have numbers that they want to achieve.
And they've openly talked about this, that they want to remove a certain amount of people per week.
And when they do that, I think everything's on the table.
Then they start showing up at Home Depot.
Instead of like looking for gangbangers, looking for criminals and cartel members, they go to whatever's easiest pickings so they can get numbers up.
Do you know Ed Calderon?
Do you know who he is?
He worked, he was a Mexican military guy who now is an American citizen, but he reports extensively on the cartels and just was telling me some horror stories about ICE raids.
And one of them was they took this guy who had been brought over here when he was a baby, but didn't have American citizenship.
It's sort of a black box, immigration, in terms of what the policy exactly is, and why do you want to continue this narrative that seems to be, again, more of a human rights issue than a political issue.
But do we want to be getting rid of 70-year-old men that really, I mean, I got to tell you, I have an older brother, and if someone had done something like that to him, I can't tell you I wouldn't have done the same fucking thing.
And, you know, I try not to wear this for my own mental health.
I'm trying to keep the empath in me in check a little bit more, because but sometimes it's difficult, like Nelson's case, this case that I'm talking about, and the only reason I'm not using names in that case is I don't want to alienate.
There's great people in the state that this happened in, which wasn't New York, that I think actually care and have shown that yeah, this is doesn't seem right, and we want to make sure that you get a public hearing.
I'm confident that we will before February and I like my chances if we do, because I think that the story he's worth pardoning, he's worth saving.
But you know, I don't, I don't understand, I mean, that's what I meant by this human mess.
It's like I wish there was a more transparent process of how and why people get pardons, certainly on the state and on the federal level.
So they start to weigh, and what's more destructive?
Who fucking knows?
Crack was pretty damn destructive.
And, you know, they, Spencer's been in prison for more than three decades.
And he would have been out if these nutty drug laws didn't exist and if they applied retroactively since they have been abolished.
And he's a guy that's sitting in there and I speak to and I start to lose hope.
I don't lose hope.
I start to feel his hopelessness over the phone because he should have been granted relief in the courts and he's someone that just really, really deserves to be out.
You know, and I have, there's a bunch of cases like that where we're trying so hard.
And you have to at the same time, at the same time, you express, you know, confidence in the people that are responsible for this stuff.
But you also want to make sure that you're not offending them by saying, look, I know you have a bunch of cases.
Emory Jones is another one.
I do a lot of work with Jay-Z's mom and Jay-Z.
He has a foundation.
I have one.
And we mentor college students together in the summer, pay for their last year of college.
And Emory is a childhood friend of Jay-Z's and has his full support.
Rock Nation, Jay-Z's company, they're behind him.
And he's another one that was convicted and spent decades in prison for some drug crime.
And he's come out and checked every box.
He's a mentor.
He's a pillar of the community.
He's done so many amazing things, but he's under the weight of this old conviction.
And he's denied job opportunities.
And, you know, you just got to keep pushing and keep fighting.
And hopefully your timing is right.
And you speak to the right person and you get good news one day.
But the odds are so the odds are so I don't want to say stacked against you, but yeah, it's who you know, who has influence at that particular time with the right person, the administration.
And look, that's the most, you know, the cop, Louis Garcella, he denies any, I mean, in the face of these 21 cases that have been vacated, he denies any wrongdoing.
Yeah, and you know, you know, one of the things that I'm thinking might be a good idea, because we can all go on the internet and look this shit up.
Like, if you look up Louis Garcella on the internet, I bet you there's a Wikipedia page that talks about his corruption and lists all the people.
We could all go on the internet.
One of the things that I think has been underused and I think should be part of people's calculus rather than reading a headline or listening to me or you or anyone is read the trial transcripts.
Make your own judgment.
I mean, I don't know what better way there is if you want to say, well, what actually happened?
What happened at this person's trial that you're and why do they deserve a second chance?
Listen, there's a dear friend of mine who runs an amazing organization called the Reform Alliance.
Her name is Jessica Jackson, fantastic lawyer.
And I mean, is in the bowels of the system fighting for change.
And right now, there's a bill that the president's own pollster, I forget the guy's name, has found that 80% of MAGA voters support this act.
It's called the SAPR Supervision Act.
And it's actually a system that rewards people for when they get out for doing the right thing.
So that if you want to make sure that you are, you know, when you get out, there are terms of your supervision.
How many times you check in with your parole or probation officer?
How often are you being subject to drug tests?
Is there an end in sight?
This act actually is a merit system.
And it's heavily supported by Republicans, by Democrats, by everyone in between.
And you would hope that something like that would get passed and get pushed through because the Saper Supervision Act is a way that we can reward people for doing the right thing and hold people accountable that aren't doing the right thing when they get out.
But your question about what happens to the cops or the prosecutors that do this, they have immunity.
It's one of the most frustrating things in the world is that most of the time, qualified immunity applies.
Well, listen, for those listeners that want to get involved in the process and actually make a difference, you got to get involved.
This isn't just like activists speak.
You can make a fucking difference.
The person that ends up in a position to actually exercise their executive authority, executive clemency, whether it's a governor or a president, you should be a little more invested.
I mean, I had this situation.
I gave this guy every benefit of the doubt.
And I thought I made a breakthrough.
And this is almost sadistic, I think.
And I'm sure I'll get a bunch of hate mail about this that I could really give a shit.
I went through this process with Governor DeSantis in Florida.
And I think he was actually fucking with me, to be honest with you.
And he listened to the case as a favor.
And there's a public hearing of the clemency board.
And this guy's name is Michael Giles.
And again, read the transcript.
As a matter of fact, I brought a passage to read here.
This is another mind bender.
This guy's in the Air Force.
He is in Tampa.
He ends up taking leave for the weekend and goes up from Tampa to Famu in Tallahassee.
Never been there before.
He has a firearm that he's licensed to carry.
He actually went into a police station to get his carry license.
Military guy, never been in trouble in his life.
Goes up to Tallahassee and a massive fight breaks out in this club where they're at.
Literally zero testimony that he has anything to do with this fight.
Fight spills out into the parking lot and it's being instigated by one guy.
And this guy that's instigating the fight was thrown out of the club and his own friends testified in the trial.
We were afraid he was going to hurt someone bad.
My client, Michael Giles, ends up in a car with the people he came there with waiting for the person that had the keys to the car to come out and emerge from this melee.
And this fight is going on all around him.
People testified they were petrified.
And he takes his gun and puts it in his pocket.
He's standing there, like on the outskirts of this fight after he gets out of the car and goes to look for his friend that has the keys to the car.
The car was left unlocked, but they couldn't leave because there was no ignition key.
And he gets sucker punched.
And the guy that punched him says, yeah, I looked for the first person I could.
Don't take it from me.
Here's what he said at the trial.
Here's what he said at the trial.
First of all, his friends are testifying.
This is from the trial, right?
That he was at, that this man was acting, quote, crazy, that they were afraid he was going to, quote, attack someone.
He was excited and acting crazy and talking and cursing and upset and agitated.
Were you concerned that he was going to attack someone?
Question.
Answer, yes, I was.
Or get in a fight?
Answer, yes, I was.
That's why I told him to leave.
And that's why he was told to leave the club because he was wanting to fight someone.
Isn't that correct?
Witnesses testify.
Question.
You saw Courtney Thrower.
This is the guy that punched my client.
Jump on the individual with the plaid shirt, didn't you?
The guy with the plaid shirt is my client.
Yes, I did.
Your testimony is Courtney Thrower leapt and attacked Mr. Giles from the front.
Yeah, I was.
That was the thing.
Courtney then leaps toward Mr. Giles and takes a swing at his face.
And it goes on and on and on.
That he took a running start, left his feet, and punched my client in the face.
And look, there's a melee going on.
So he's on the ground after getting punched.
And the person that punched him didn't hold back.
He was asked at the trial, question, Mr. Thrower, is it your testimony that you ran with your entire body to strike this person?
Answer, yes.
Question, so you at a full run or a sprint use the weight of your body to impact this person in the head?
Answer yes.
Question, was it your intention to knock him out?
Answer, yes, it was.
Question, and is there any doubt in your intention?
Answer no.
Question, had this person actually done anything to you at any time whatsoever?
Answer physically, directly, no.
Question, was it your intent to hurt this individual?
Answer, yes, that's normally what you do when you punch someone.
So on those facts, as my client is laying on the ground and there's a melee going on where people are getting punched and kicked, is he justified at that point to take his gun out and shoot in self-defense?
He shoots this guy in the leg and fragments of the bullet hit two other people.
That's the case.
That's it.
He is sentenced under Florida's mandatory minimum to 25 years in prison.
25 years.
He's been in for 15 years.
I have gone to visit him.
He is the only client that I've ever represented that has never got a ticket in prison.
What is a ticket?
You didn't listen to a corrections officer when they said get against the fucking wall.
You didn't have, you know, you didn't follow the rules.
You didn't do that.
Not a ticket.
So various powerful people that know the governor finally got him to listen.
Now, before I got involved in the case, the family was told that the governor was prepared to grant him clemency and traveled to Tallahassee the day that they thought he was going to get released and were told on that day the governor changed his mind.
So I knew this all going in.
I went and I appeared at a clemency hearing and I was as, what do they say?
You're the words escaping me.
When you're not subservient, but you're trying to articulate it the right way.
I mean, I was not only respectful, but, you know, I understood the gravity of what I was asking for.
This is a governor that has never granted clemency, commuted a sentence to someone that was currently incarcerated.
And, you know, he went through a laundry list of things that he would like me to do.
His parents live, Michael Giles' parents live, that's the name of my client, Michael Giles.
His parents live in Georgia.
Could you con the governor, could you get in touch with the state of Georgia?
I mean, this is all at a public hearing.
It's online.
And see if their governor has any problem with abiding by the terms of release?
You want me to contact the governor of, okay, submit a supervised release plan that is exhaustive and runs all the way through the term that he would serve out his incarceration so that he should be on supervised release for another 10 years.
Contact this one.
Contact that one.
I learned on good information that the governor was like, he'll never be able to get all that done.
I got it all done.
I had people help me, went to the governor, spoke to the governor in Georgia.
He said, yeah, of course, we'll abide by it.
There's something called the Interstate Compact.
States have to abide by each other's supervision requirements when someone goes from one state to another.
This had the support of John Ashcroft, Mike Mukit, right-wing Republicans that otherwise wouldn't support this sort of thing.
It was like I had a list of like 40 people, former U.S. attorneys.
It got so much that the head of the Florida Commission of Offender Review gave him a positive recommendation to get out.
Super rare.
The Attorney General was in support.
Everyone was in support.
A week before I was told we're going to grant him relief, they actually had me speaking to the prison to transport him up to the clemency hearing.
We were down to whether he would be able to change into a suit because at the public hearing, Governor DeSantis said, I want to actually look at him eye to eye.
And at the last second, for no fucking articulated reason, he said, you know what?
I've changed my mind.
That is brutal.
It's evil, in my opinion.
And it's precisely why, you know, sometimes the king has to show mercy.
And it's precisely why this guy is not very popular, I don't think.
And I ask this because it's relevant.
Does Michael Giles get prosecuted if he's not a tall black man?
I don't think so.
The prosecutor that prosecuted him, I'm not calling him anything.
I'm giving you the facts.
The prosecutor that prosecuted him went through a DOJ investigation because something was found in his office targeting Hispanic residents for harsher punishment.
A whistleblower took a photo of it.
It was a memo hanging over a water cooler.
It's all over the place.
It's all online.
You can read about it.
And he had to enter into some agreement with the Department of Justice.
Yeah, and so this whistleblower takes a picture of this and it leads to a DOJ investigation where he agrees, he apologizes publicly, and he agrees to go into some training program and have the prosecutors that work for him in a training program for racial sensitivity.
So you think, you know, I deal with the facts and I deal with what I see every day.
So should it beg the question, is Michael Giles getting charged with this crime under the facts as I just told you with the testimony that I just read to you?
And they said, well, he ran initially.
And when the police initially spoke to him, he didn't say he shot the gun.
He's a black man in America.
Later that night, he admitted it.
So what does it make a difference?
And what does it make a difference anyway?
The guy was attacked with a running start.
Someone leaves their feet and punches him in the face.
Isn't 15 years enough?
15 years?
He's had to go through.
I mean, you read the letters from his kids who have now grown up without him.
Your heart ends up in 50 million pieces.
And, you know, so a guy like Governor DeSantis, I think it's like there's no humanity there.
And, you know, the craziest part about it is that you never know who you'll meet and why this is all, to me, human rights issue.
The only person that gave me a sympathetic ear when I would go to Florida before I lived there, when I was still living in New York, and talk about clemency cases was Nikki Freed.
I think she was the commissioner of agriculture.
And she ran against DeSantis in the last governatorial election.
And she's like, the fascinating part about it is that this is like a woman that's dedicated herself to public service and she's a major marijuana advocate.
Legalizing marijuana has been her mission for so many years.
She's on the board of normal.
She'd be an awesome guest because she became super unpopular in Florida because of her stance on legalization of marijuana.
And, you know, she was attacked over it about how weed is a gateway drug somehow in the minds of, you know, people that don't get it, that it's some like pathway to heroin addiction.
And, you know, medicinal marijuana, you know, cannabis for healing, all of those things she's been a major advocate for.
And she told me, you're being strung along.
After she was out of office, she's now the head of the, I think she's the head of the Democratic Party for Florida.
Wonderful woman.
She's like, you're going to get strung along.
I said, no, watch, watch.
I'm going to be the first one to get clemency from someone in prison.
And he still can do it.
Why won't he?
Fuck knows.
And it's, you know, I have to talk to Michael's mom.
And I have to talk to him.
And it's like, you know, you run out of words.
And yeah, it's not just is this a dirty business, heartbreaking, you know?
And that's why you're able to do the kind of work you do, because you still are sensitive to this, and you still are empathetic, despite all the shit you've seen.
Well, I mean, look, I have to be, I don't think you're good.
I used to think that it was something to shrink from.
In other words, that because it becomes a heavy cross to bear when you start wearing other people's hurt and emotions.
And, you know, I've found myself sometimes inferring that people feel a certain way when they don't.
And I have to make sure that I'm careful about that.
I mean, my son Carter is like, he's 13.
He's going to be 14 in April.
And I sometimes feel like I have to be careful with the empathy because sometimes I'll be reliving some traumatic event from my childhood.
And I'll think, oh, he must feel this way at this point in time at 13.
And I'm imputing an emotion to him that isn't there.
And sometimes I'll do that with a client or their family.
And I've gotten better at it, but when you have to deliver hard news or bad news, because there's so many these exonerations, the commutations, the pardons, they're like each one of them is its own miracle.
Each one of them is, it's so hard, so hard to get it done.
I believe if it's rescheduled, what does that mean?
It could be prescribed now, you know, and it can be prescribed state by state.
Even in Texas, there's some medical uses.
I feel like it should be like alcohol.
I think you should be of a certain age to be able to use it.
And I think it's not for everybody.
I think that's important, that it isn't for everybody.
There are people that have very particularly vulnerable psychological states, mental constitutions, whether they have a history of mental illness or whatever, especially like high-dose marijuana.
You know, Alex Berenson wrote about this in a book called, I think it's called Tell Your Children.
And he highlights the instances of people that have schizophrenic breaks from high doses of THC.
And whether or not they would have had those schizophrenic breaks anyway, you know, we don't know.
There's a certain percentage of the population that's just schizophrenic.
What causes it?
We don't know.
Or we don't know clearly why something can cause it.
But you should be aware of those things.
You know, it's not for everybody.
I know a lot of people don't like it, but I know a lot of people who do.
A lot of people, it enhances their life.
It makes times more enjoyable, makes sex more enjoyable, and food more enjoyable, and fun times with friends.
It's like anything else.
You can abuse everything, including exercise.
I know a lot of people are addicted to exercise.
They overdo it.
And people take CrossFit classes and they go too hard and they wind up getting rhobdomyelosis.
So if you're saying, like, for people's benefit, like, if you're saying that marijuana should be illegal because it's dangerous, okay?
Dangerous, how?
When there's so many things that are, like, we talked about Tylenol, which I fully support Tylenol being legal.
You should be able to, if you're in pain, you can go get some Tylenol.
Cenaminophen fucking kills people.
You know, like I said, it's responsible for about 500 deaths a year.
And I was telling you about the COVID story.
This poor lady, she was hurting because she had COVID.
She kept taking Tylenol and didn't understand that you just, you can't, there's an amount you can take, and you should never take more than that.
And she had liver failure, and she fucking died, you know, of something that is, you know, it's horrible.
So, but I think you should be able to take Tylenol.
Just don't take enough to fucking kill you.
I think that should be the case with alcohol.
Same thing.
I'm for legalization of alcohol.
When you make things illegal, all you do is prop up illegal people to sell those things to people that want it.
There is a demand.
They will supply it.
You know, this is the situation that we live in in this country in regards to heroin, regards to cocaine, regards to so many different things.
They're being supplied, and they're being supplied, and you're propping up these illegal cartels, and these motherfuckers are killing people, and they make it ruthless.
It's ruthless.
And it's what happened during prohibition of alcohol in this country.
But, you know, the problem is when you all of a sudden make things legal that didn't used to be, that didn't used to be legal, you're going to have a bunch of people that abuse it.
They're going to say, oh, it's legal now.
Let's go.
And a bunch of people are going to do it that don't do it.
You'll have problems.
But you're taking the band-aid off.
You put a fucking band-aid on this country in the 1930s for something that doesn't hurt people.
But it's also, you can make and grow hemp that has no THC in it as well.
I believe it's, is it the female that contains THC and the male doesn't?
Anyway, point is, so he, they sponsor all the Reefer Madness films, you know, all those propaganda films of the 1930s.
They start printing these stories about blacks and Mexicans that are raping white women after they take this new illegal drug.
So they pass laws on this drug, not even really understanding that they're making the textile, they're making the commodity, hemp, illegal, or making it very difficult to regulate.
And so William Randolph Hearst gets together with Harry Anslinger and they do this.
They also take all their police officers and all the people that they had used to process prohibition of alcohol and go after alcohol, you know, illegal alcohol sales, and now they turn it to cannabis.
And that's we've been stuck in that same horseshit since the 1930s.
Man, one time I was on the platform at Penn Station and I started to like, you know, you get to that point when you're thinking about dying and we could talk death, dying, and we could say it and talk about it.
But I got to that point where that fifth dimensional wall crumbled and I was like, oh my God, I'm not going to exist one day.
And I started to have a panic attack where I had to leave and go up onto 8th Avenue and get some fresh air.
And I'm just like, at this stage, I can't, I would have to be like, so what kind of weed is this?
And how do you know?
And I don't want to interrogate someone that just wants to get me high.
If you don't get high a lot, and this is my message for everyone out there, if you go months and months and months without ever taking it, one hit, a small one.
And it also depends on like what kind of joint you have.
Like, there's crazy people.
Like in California, they'll sell you a joint that's like a $50 joint.
And this joint has Keith in it.
So it has all the resin, all the, you know, you have a grinder at the bottom of the grinder.
There's a filter and you have all this THC crystals.
They take those THC crystals and they put it inside with the marijuana and then they wrap the outside of the joint and they roll it in the THC crystal.
It's like it's on the outside of it and it's just a pathway to paranoia.
It's just a rocket ship to your inner monologue screaming in your ears.
I must have been in a great place at like 15, 16 years old because getting high back then and listening to Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and hearing the lyrics for the first time, being like, oh my God, someone else had that thought that I'm afraid to say.
You say profound things that aren't really profound.
There's benefit to it.
And I think that when you're young, also you don't have bills.
You don't have obligations.
You just have to go to school.
Your burden is so much lighter.
When you're an adult and you have a family and you have business and you have things you have to do all the time and you have conflicts and all the stuff that's in your life, like it could fuck with you.
But I think generally, like for a lot of people, not for everybody, but for a lot of people, those moments of paranoia of just dropping the veil, it's probably beneficial.
Oh, I think that, I think that in the long run, it opened the third eye of my mind at a time when, and fostered creativity and I think changed my perspective on the world, smoking that much weed.
I just got to a point where I was like, I can't parent on it.
And I remember a science teacher in high school telling me, you don't think that they can make a tire that doesn't wear?
And he told me the story about how all the big tire companies bought the patent for a tire that can't wear.
Right?
It has the same composition as same give and composition as rubber when it came to handling, but it was a material that doesn't wear.
And I just thought he was fucking crazy.
And now I believe that that's probably true.
It's probably locked in a vault somewhere because what would happen to Goodyear and Firestone and the rest of those tired.
You're telling me we can put a man on the moon and hear conversations behind the walls of the Kremlin, but we can't make a fucking tire that doesn't wear?
But the other one, the thing about tires is that a tire has to have a certain amount of softness to it in order for it to have traction.
When you have softness and then you have a rigid surface like asphalt, you're going to have some of that tire is going to rub off on that rigid surface because one is hard and one is soft.
Just like when you take a file and you rub wood, you're going to make sawdust.
The scientist teacher probably was right directionally that there are things like that where they would hide patents to certain things and hide certain compounds if they found out these compounds would compromise.
Like if you had something that people had to buy all the time, like light bulbs, here's a better example, light bulbs.
So there are light bulbs that have been in continuous use, like on continuously for 50, 60 years, and they don't burn out because these are the original light bulbs.
The original light bulbs, they made the filaments much more durable.
Then they realized, like, why would we do this?
Well, we could have these light bulbs just burn out, and then you have to get a new light bulb.
I think there is an addictive quality to marijuana, but I have a feeling it's same or similar to the addictive quality of a lot of other behavioral addictions.
But I guess my bigger question is, so with the advent of the quote-unquote super criminal, I think it was, who was it?
Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton that came up with this term or Biden.
I know he's a big supporter of that bill as a senator.
And, you know, without going down the rabbit hole of private prisons and the prison industrial complex, what bothers me about these old drug convictions that we were talking about earlier is it's just a perspective shift that somehow has in the psyche of America writ large that you hear cocaine or crack equals someone that should be locked away and forgotten about.
That was why I mentioned Spencer, Bowen, and other folks that I've mentioned, because I just, I feel like there's no, what's the right way to explain it?
There's no rhyme or reason to why we're leaving old people that have not much left locked up.
You know, and, you know, I don't, look, Larry Hoover is a good example.
Larry Hoover was pardoned or a sentence was commuted by President Trump.
And he was then put in, he was in the side of a fucking mountain for decades.
The man is 75 years old.
He's been in prison for over 50 years.
He has renounced gang life.
He has renounced any affiliation with it.
And then he was, his sentence is commuted and he's put in state custody on some old tenuous homicide charge where the person that actually pulled the trigger is out, has been out for like 30 years.
So Larry Hoover is sitting there in Colorado because he was in the side of that Supermax facility, the side of that mountain in Chicago.
So as soon as he was released from federal custody, he was taken into state custody.
And they didn't even take him from Colorado.
His state sentence is in Chicago where he could be at least closer to his family.
And Colorado state system said, we'll keep him here.
So he was transferred from federal to state custody.
So that's one that's just like, you know, there's one heartbreak to the next.
And look, I'm super, super, super careful.
You can help people with second chances.
You can't help them with what they do with it.
And I'm now at a point where I really want to think long and hard about what people do with their second chances.
And, you know, I just wouldn't get behind someone that I didn't think was I just it's an indictment of society that we have these disparate sentences that are doled out.
And a lot of it is driven by what is considered worse behavior.
Is it worse behavior that you sold cocaine or marijuana?
I guess the argument is that cocaine was more destructive, more addictive.
You could die from it.
Well, same thing with alcohol.
And alcohol is legal.
So I just don't, I have a hard time grappling with what is considered a controlled substance.
And then the problem is people would be profiting off of that.
And then so you'd have, instead of, you know, no one has a problem with Anheuser-Busch selling beer, right?
But meanwhile, there's alcoholics and it's going to ruin their life.
But if Anheuser-Busch all of a sudden started selling cocaine, the social stigma that's attached to it because of all the years of it being illegal would be a real problem.
We would have, like I said, it would be like ripping the band-aid off.
You're going to have a lot of problems initially for quite a while, I would imagine.
There's going to be a lot of people that do cocaine that would never do it previously because it was illegal.
But if they find out that there's, you can go to the cocaine store and buy a certain amount of cocaine and go do it.
But you also would be getting pure cocaine.
So you would be getting this experience that people have used way back to the fucking, you know, who knows what time.
I mean, there's Egyptian mummies that have tested positive for cocaine.
Yeah, I'm not advocating for it one way or another.
It just seems like anything that I've looked into and read about in countries that have legalized or decriminalized it at least, and you could get it and not have to worry about it being adulterated in some way.
It seems like the statistics are overwhelmingly pointing in one direction.
But those are smaller countries, you know, and that don't have the consumption problem that America has.
We uniquely love to consume drugs.
And we are propping up the cartel by doing that.
And, you know, if you want to go to war with the cartel, if you want to really stop the flood of illegal drugs in this country, unfortunately, one of the only ways to really do that accurately is to both stop them from bringing in illegal drugs and then give people access to legal, air quotes safer drugs seems like a it's a problem it's a you got Politically, it's a suicide.
Yeah, and I just, this has struck me more lately in dealing with these old drug cases where these people have spent decades and decades in prison and, you know, You hear them on the other end of the phone.
He's like, look, I was a kid.
I was in my 20s.
I'm 50.
I'm 60 years old.
Isn't it enough?
It's getting to the point where it's putative to the point of harmful and barbaric.
Where these guys did not need to assume the burden of being demonstrably innocent, but we were able to prove it.
And, you know, J.D. Tomlinson agreed to vacate their convictions.
And then when he left office, you know, a few weeks later, the new, the incoming, their equivalent of the district attorney overturned it, right?
Since coming on this show, J.D. Tomlinson has been under attack for a previous exoneration that he granted by this same sitting Lorain County prosecutor who just filed a 300-page brief saying that he committed fraud on the court and all kinds of nonsense over a crime that never happened.
And this is why he was so reluctant to ever speak to me in the first place because he knew he'd be targeted.
And they're trying to undo an exoneration for this poor woman that's already been exonerated.
And I thought, you know, I would talk about it publicly and say I trust him.
I made a presentation to this new prosecutor.
I got myself along with the Ohio Innocence Project public defenders.
I got a bar complaint filed against me by the original prosecutor for standing up to exonerate someone.
I was summarily dismissed in Ohio.
But, you know, and what, and the question becomes like, what can you do?
So Derek Hamilton and I are trying to, do we go to the city council and raise awareness?
Don't you care that you have a prosecutor that is seemingly more interested in settling personal scores and vendettas than he is about letting innocent people go free?
And I have this guy, you know, John Edwards, who's one of the Ohio 4.
And I feel like when I see him calling from prison, I'm running out of things to say to him.
Like, I'm so desperate for help.
And, you know, if anyone is living in Lorain, Ohio, or Elyria, I mean, you got to take a look at your local elected officials.
I mean, demand to know what happened in the Ohio 4 case.
I mean, we have it online.
You can read about it.
You could read the trial transcripts.
I just don't get why people can't let go and say, maybe I made a mistake.
Maybe I was wrong.
I mean, these guys are so demonstrably innocent where you have the person that claims he witnessed the whole thing, you know, came went to the FBI and said, I made the whole thing up.
The problem is, I think if they do admit it, someone's going to start digging into their past and they're going to find out these motherfuckers have been wrong a bunch of times.
One thing that's different about me and why I hang around Derek so much is I want his superpowers to rub off on me because I realize that if you don't get stay aggressive and keep the pressure on, the truth will eventually, what was the truth crushed to earth shall rise again?
Was that like an MLK quote?
I always think about that because at some point, at some point, the truth comes out.
It's a stubborn thing.
And whether it's old files of an old case and who you used to hang out with, and if you have photos sitting in a vault somewhere, whatever it is, it's going to come out.
And it just seems like you're doing so much more damage to hold on to these old beliefs rather than, and because one thing is for sure, I'm stubborn.
And I'm growing more stubborn as time goes by to, you have to have the resolve and the wherewithal that every time you get a no and every time you get rejected, you're like, all right, all right, I see you.
I'm going to get my beast on now and keep coming back.
And I'm going to bring people with me.
And we're going to make as much noise.
One thing that people don't like is to have the light on them.
And, you know, we now have the ability to do that, not only through this platform, but, you know, I was talking to someone before I came here today that works at the center.
And I said, you can't be afraid to speak to the press.
And I said, as long as, you know, you have some control, some control over what you're saying.
And then I like quickly stuffed the words back in my mouth.
And I said, forget about that.
You got to be very careful when speaking to the press because it gets edited and chopped up.
Yeah, and suffering sells and human tragedy sells.
And I would really love to be able to tell the triumphant stories that a prosecutor did the right thing on the front end, right?
On the front end rather than after 20, 30, 40, 50 years.
So, you know, all of these cases that we talk about, we're going to do something a little bit different is I'm going to set up a repository where people can go in and look at the public records.
No one's really ever done that.
This way you don't have to rely on my word, a headline, a clip from a video where, you know, there were people that started to consume the Ohio 4 case and are writing in and are saying, like, how are you letting this stand?
Eventually, enough drips of water fills the bucket and the bucket overflows.
And at some point, something's got to give, right?
I mean, we all believe in good over evil, but sometimes it doesn't work.
And is it for lack of trying or is it just the world's not fair?
I think it's both.
Well, you know, and I think there's a lot of people that have a lot of power that will keep good from winning because it would somehow or another derail their life or their career because they have done something evil.
But this is a sick, this is a sick trait that we possess as mammals, as humans.
Whether you're a safety patrol as a fourth or fifth grader or a bouncer outside of a club or a TSA agent, there's something about that authority, something about that power that people get drunk on.
Oh, and they get, they get, it's almost like it courses through their veins to the point where they're like, well, I like this.
I'm going to exert this.
And it's like, I just, I understand it, but I don't understand how at some point your conscience doesn't kick in and say, all right, devil on this shoulder, let's do the right thing.
Because I always feel like bound by some sort of social contract, right?
Well, you would have to completely rewire the way people think.
And there's ways to do that.
And all those ways are illegal.
That's where psychedelics comes in.
You know, it's one of the things I had a conversation with my friend Jesse Michaels the other day.
And one of the things I said is one of the things that's really interesting about psychedelics is there's no criminal cartel that sells them, even though they're illegal.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because they were given reparations.
And my experience with it up there is that there's a serious problem, especially in Western Canada with it.
But the reason I ask about it with psychedelics is that at probably the lowest point in my life, I was with you, and I remember you recommending ketamine therapy or thinking that might be something I should look into.
Yeah, so when I raised it with my therapist at the time, and she was like, the body of research on this is so overwhelming that I would be remiss if I told you, don't try it.
Something we should talk about and think about.
And, you know, it helped me tremendously in a way that very, very low dose, but it's like, you know, I mean, I thank you for even like suggesting it because it was something that I had always associated with like my roommate in college in the fetal position in his bed.
And I was like, yo, what's wrong with him?
And someone said, he's in a K-hole.
I was like, the fuck is that?
He's in a K-hole.
And it was always like, oh, man, I'm staying away from that.
He looks like he could expire any moment.
He was not a lighter shade of pale.
He was like translucent.
And I was like, but then, you know, under supervision.
So ayahuasca, so dimethyltryptamine, which is the active drug, the active compound, dimethyltryptamine exists in thousands of different plants.
It's in a bunch of different grasses and plants.
It's not orally active because your body produces something called monoamine oxidase.
Monoamine oxidase breaks down dimethyltryptamine in the gut.
So that if you consume things like these grasses or different plants that have high levels of dimethyltryptamine in it, your body breaks it down so it doesn't become active.
What ayahuasca is, is the one plant that contains dimethyltryptamine and another plant that contains harmine harmine, which is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
So you take the MAO inhibitor and then the dimethyltryptamine, they brew it all together and then you have a slow release orally active dimethyltramamine.
It takes a long time because it has to go through your digestive process.
It gets in your bloodstream.
You have this trip.
And, you know, when you're, you know, puking and shitting and all that stuff, it's like your body is like, whatever the fuck this is, it's not good.
But the result of it, the end of it, is this extremely impactful experience that leads many people to quit alcohol.
Many people quit cigarettes from it.
They quit destructive behavior.
They release trauma and learn to get over things that have happened in their life and move on.
You have these experiences where you are in contact with what seems like entities and incredibly wise, loving entities that connect you to nature and to the earth.
I think it stands for Eye Movement Desensitization EMDR.
Yeah.
I don't know what the R stands for.
But it is something that I mean, you have to go through a similar amount of suffering, and it's to deal with past traumas, eye movement, desensitization, and reprocessing.
All right.
So I went through this, and it helps you.
You could do it.
Sometimes you're doing it with your eyes, but you ever use flones?
You hold on to these two paddles the way I did it, and they're hooked up to this little transistor, this little box, and it's like it buzzes your hand.
You hold on to them and it'll buzz your hands no more than like the buzz of a cell phone in this rhythmic.
this rhythmic pattern.
And before you do it, you really set up what the trauma is.
So I went through months of trying to identify like what were the things from my childhood that were haunting me.
And once you do, you then relive those moments with this rhythmic buzzing.
And you do it again and again and again.
And after each session, which could last anywhere between a minute to 10 minutes, where your eyes are shut and you're getting this rhythmic pattern and you open your eyes and you explain what just happened.
But you start in that place.
You're 12.
And I have to tell you, it was one of the most painful, agonizing things I had ever done.
And it was the most religious experience I had ever had.
Because you're almost in a, you're almost in a trance-like state and your mind is going and you then explain what happened.
And it's almost like a guided daydream.
And then when you explain it, you then go back again and start.
And when I was first doing it, I was like, this is just torture.
It's just straight up torture.
But then you start to see an improvement in your mood and an improvement dealing with that particular.
And I learned more about myself, my childhood, my behaviors than I did doing any drug, any psychedelic, which I did in my youth.
And it sounds to me, I just had this revelation as you're talking about, like, you know, it's almost like you have to purge the pain.
You have to relive it almost in order to get rid of it.
And the theory behind EMDR, as I understand it, is that you don't have the same physiological response at recalling the trauma.
You know, you could think of something that happened to you 10 years ago and you can still get the heart palpitation and the adrenaline rush and the, you know, the other, whatever is being released in your body, whatever hormones get activated and it doesn't happen anymore.
I mean, it's the way that it was introduced to me was that my therapist did it with combat veterans who could get triggered by a grain of sand on the beach because they were in Desert Storm and spiral.
So I find it interesting because it seems like the same methodology is at play, but it's just a different way of getting there than such.
Well, there's other ways that they do it without the psychedelic drug that induces psychedelic experience like holotropic breathing.
What is that?
Put that into perplexity, young Jamie.
It's a particular style of breathing that allows you to achieve an altered state.
I don't want to misspeak on exactly how to do it.
It's an intense structured breathing technique designed to induce an altered, non-ordinary state of consciousness for emotional healing and self-exploration.
Typically involves prolonged, deep, rapid breathing while lying down accompanied by evocative music and guidance from a trained facilitator.
Developed in 1970 by psychiatrist Stanislav Groff and his wife Christina after LSD-assisted psychotherapy became restricted as a way to reach similar therapeutic states without drugs.
If you have money to bet on it, you're betting on the Olympic gold medalist who's a multiple-time heavyweight world champion, who's one of the greatest knockout artists in the history of the heavyweight division.
That's Anthony Joshua.
What's fun is you don't think Jake Paul can win.
And so the underdog rooter in you is like, well, let's see.
Let's order this.
Let's see.
I mean, the size difference is insane.
Anthony Joshua's 245 pounds was the weight limit that he had to reach.
He had to drop down to 245 pounds.
He's probably a little heavier, but that's normal for him.
That's fine.
It's not like he's going to be dehydrated or anything.
He weighed 243, and Jake Paul weighed 216.
So, I mean, that's a big gap.
It's a big gap in weight.
It's a big gap in experience.
I mean, you're talking about a guy who fought Usuk twice and wasn't stopped by Usuk, who's one of the greatest heavyweights, if not the greatest of all time, one of the greatest boxers of all time.
You're talking about a guy who beat Vladimir Klitschko again, fantastic, great.
You're talking about a guy who just knocked out Francis Ngano like it was nothing.
I mean, he's fucking dangerous.
Anthony Joshua is still in his prime.
He's still one of the best of the best.
And Jake Paul is a guy who's been fighting guys like Ben Askren and Tyron Woodley, who was a great MMA fighter, but, you know, fought Nate Diaz and had a tough fight with Nate Diaz.
And now he's going to fight Anthony fucking Joshua.
I mean, and that would probably just show that Jake Paul is legitimate in his ability to take a very difficult fight.
You know, that he's willing to not just fight guys that he could beat like Ben Askron, but fight guys that no experts picking him to beat Anthony Joshua.