Part 4 of We Shouldn't Name Anything for John Stennis The trial has ended. We start the aftermath. The Kemper Trio are due to be murdered by racists as fast as possible. We take a look at the legal landscape of the time, and then have to take a quick detour as it turns out things are actually WORSE now in many ways. Don't believe me? What if I told you the Supreme Court ruled that being innocent is not a good enough reason for the state to not kill you? What if I told you that happened in 1993 not 1893? You'd probably say "I'm a pretty well-informed person so I already know you're talking about Herrera v. Collins." To which I'd say... ok but I'm going to tell you about it anyway. Content warning: this episodes contains mention of horrendous racial violence. Feel free to email us at lydia@seriouspod.com or thomas@seriouspod.com! Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress Green Eminem will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
This is the fourth episode in the series on fucking everything.
I don't know.
On, I guess, Brown v. Mississippi, kind of.
I'm Thomas.
That's Lydia.
How you doing?
Feeling pretty good.
Ready to dive more into this horrible man and all the things he's been involved with.
Who the hell are you talking about?
I don't even know what you're talking about.
Oh, Stennis!
Stennis!
Yeah, that's loosely related to what we're doing.
So when we last left off, we finished the trial, essentially.
We did.
And I had promised that as shitty as that was, and boy did it suck, that we were going to start getting into the more inspiring end of things.
Well, I might've lied because there's so much that I want to talk about for this part that that inspiring stuff might have to wait until the next episode.
Gotta hang tight.
We'll see.
This might end up being more like the Empire Strikes Back kind of thing where it's like, yeah, no, things...
Things are a little bit even worse, yeah, but I promise it's coming.
Maybe in the next part.
Is it more Cliff Dial or are we done with that?
For now, we're done with that guy for now.
Great question though.
OK, so again, make sure you listen to the previous episodes.
But yeah, the trial got awful.
We went through it all.
I read so much of the testimony.
I didn't go through the jury instructions.
There wasn't much there, but that's the process of both sides kind of ask like, hey, can you tell them this kind of thing?
And, you know, they reject most of the ones that the defendants wanted them to say.
Of course.
Yep.
I think there's like one that was like, hey, if Confession is coerced, then you don't have to whatever, it didn't matter, because the jury still said they're black, so they're guilty, essentially.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know what exactly their thinking was, but I'm making an educated guess that it was something like they're black, so therefore they're guilty.
Mm-hmm.
Or, hold on, or it could have been they're black, therefore I don't even care, so... Might as well.
Yeah, like, because these people are fucking awful.
Yeah.
So, do you remember the lawyer, I'm sorry, I'm quizzing you to make sure you stay involved.
There were four lawyers, right?
There were.
There was one not horrible one.
I do not remember his name.
Clark, his name's Clark.
I'm normally so good at stuff like that.
I know, I was just giving you an opportunity to shine.
Oh boy.
But anyway, this is all proof that I have not told Lydia any of this.
Yeah, that's true.
Over a month, he hasn't been talking to me.
At all.
How are the kids doing?
They okay?
Yeah.
How's your parents?
We're doing all right.
We miss you.
Oh boy.
So Clark, I don't want to go like too crazy with the hero worship of Clark, but I think this was maybe a good dude.
The book and some of the quotes I'm seeing, I don't know if any of it was like, oh, after the fact kind of thing, retroactive, but fucking, it's not like any of these people live that much longer.
It's not like any of the people involved here live to like the 1990s, you know, and then in the benefit of hindsight, we're like, well, I was always on the side of, or even like the fucking 60s.
These people, it's the 30s and they're all already old.
The people we're talking about so far.
Time is ticking for them.
Yeah, this is a generation of people born during when slavery still existed.
But Clark, I gotta say, I think he ends up being a pretty cool dude.
I don't think he was the best lawyer, but I think within his means, he saw this Trial.
He saw this trial and I think it genuinely affected him.
There's, you know, letters, there's stuff with his wife.
His wife ends up being pretty fucking cool too.
But I think he had his mind changed.
He went in, I think he even admitted, look, I went into this thinking these are some guilty people.
Three other lawyers For sure, we're like, who gives a shit?
They're black, so they're guilty kind of thing.
Like, the three other lawyers defending them did a shit job, obviously.
Clark, I think, tried a little, but was like, eh.
But by the time all was said and done, he seems to have been genuinely affected by this travesty of justice.
And there's some complaints that I just wrote down that he had from the book.
Again, this book is amazing.
I'm shouting that out.
A Scottsboro Case in Mississippi by Richard C. Kortner.
No idea if he's alive or not, but either way, ohm of it for this because it's amazing.
So Clark was, these are some of the things he was either noticing or coming to terms with, with this.
He said the judge just totally rushed them, which yeah, I fucking believe it.
I mean, on one hand you could be like, oh, that's your excuse for sucking.
But no, like they were ready to be hanged within a week of the guy's body was barely fucking cold.
The murder victim had been dead a week and they were ready to hang.
So yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say they rushed.
The defense quite a bit.
There was one point, I didn't totally understand it, but there was one point where Cliff Dial attempted to like enter into a room that they were in at an inappropriate time and like, it seemed like Clark was saying he was intimidating the defendants, you know, and fucking A. And here's a quote, Yank had his neck all scarred up with a ring around it that could be observed clear across the courtroom.
Oh God.
This is Clark kind of, again, they got no time to plan, I think, ahead very much.
It was very rushed, and so I think he's maybe not noticing these things until the trial's underway, kind of thing.
And then here's a long quote about what happened after.
This is fucking, Jesus, okay.
Quote, immediately after Judge Sturdivant, by the way, slight pin in him for later.
I can't believe how much, this must be like a small fucking town or something, because everything comes back.
But anyway, had pronounced the sentence upon Brown, Shields, and Ellington, They were hurriedly escorted back to Meridian.
The result was, Clark pointed out, there was no opportunity to make a motion for a new trial.
It being dark on the night of April 6th, no money was in the hands of anybody to pay for going down there to Meridian to visit them or have any talk with them and without their having been brought back or given any opportunity to make a motion for a new trial or confer with counsel about making one.
Indeed, on the morning of 7th April, Clark said, Judge Sturtevant signed the minutes of the trial and adjourned the court for the term.
Oh, my God.
Thus, effectively preventing any motion for a new trial from being made.
So she's like, oh, yeah, kill those guys.
Bye.
Out for the summer.
I'm on vacation.
School's out.
Yeah.
I'm going to go do probably some other racist things during my summer.
So we're in a bad situation right now, clearly.
And any more further work for these poor black condemned to die men would have to be done basically without pay.
There's no money.
I already told you that the judge was like, I'm not even paying you for the work you did do.
Absolutely ridiculous.
The other three lawyers had no interest.
There was one lawyer that was like, all right, you can put my name on something if you appeal.
The other three, not helping.
So like give Clark credit.
He wants to still help.
Yeah.
He could have washed his hands of the whole thing.
But he wants to help.
And believe you me, this is nothing but bad for him and his reputation.
Like, there's nothing in it for him.
And I think it's really important to recognize these people in history.
Can you think of a harder time to stand up for what's right than in 1934 in fucking Mississippi?
Yeah.
So people like this, I find genuinely inspiring.
Like it is so cool.
And again, it'll be a recurring theme, but if we're going to name fucking anything after anyone, it should be one of the people who got it fucking right.
Or by the way, some of the people of color who got absolutely hosed.
One or the other.
But not, oh, well, sure, he was a total fucking racist, but you know, man of his time.
Well, really?
Because Clark was also in this time.
Yeah.
Weird that man of his time only kind of is used one way.
Clark, I'm sure it wasn't a perfect guy or anything, but like he was affected by this awful miscarriage of justice.
And he, without him, we're done.
Like there's not, that's the end of the line.
And to bolster the point about, like, this is not fucking good for him, there was another lawyer that the book had a quote from, last name Riley.
I don't know who it was, but it says it's one of the state's leading criminal lawyers.
And he, I guess, was writing to Mrs. Clark, and he said her husband was, quote, too valuable and greatly needed in Mississippi public affairs to be permitted to sacrifice his life for three Negroes, end quote.
So that's kind of the time and place.
That's the atmosphere that he's in.
But despite all of that, he appeals and he contacts the NAACP.
And I've mentioned that before, pretty new at that point.
I mentioned the bit of the tension over the actual Scottsboro case.
So the NAACP isn't in great shape.
And by the way, another reminder, we're in 1934.
Nobody's in great shape.
We're in the depression.
Depression, yeah.
So he's contacting the NAACP to be like, hey, can I get any money to help these people?
Here's the situation.
This is what we got to do.
And they're like, we don't have any money.
Like they're trying, but nobody has any money.
They also have, you know, there's plenty of fucking instances of black people being railroaded for them to worry about.
So, but they're trying.
So credit to Clark for trying, but he makes a big mistake in the appeal.
So he does do the appeal.
I give him credit.
Donated his time.
Somehow, I think, maybe he got a little bit of money from the NAACP for costs, but, you know, not much.
But he makes a big mistake.
He didn't challenge based on the U.S.
Constitution.
He just challenged based on, like, kind of state issues.
And that matters because you can't, once you appeal up the chain, you have to have already, like, brought stuff up, you know?
Like, there comes a point in the process where You're not allowed to bring up new stuff.
It's like, well, if you didn't raise it, then you don't get it.
That's why they object a lot, even though it gets... It's just for the record.
Yeah, it's in the record.
And you'd be like, see, we brought this up and blah, blah, blah.
So not great.
That's a bit of a challenge.
So not the best lawyer, perhaps.
But again, he was doing the right thing and he was instrumental.
And so now I want to talk about this is where I thought I was going to get to the inspiring part of the story.
This is a little bit inspiring.
But I wanted to look at the legal landscape here.
And then that led me down another fucking rabbit trail.
And so now we're doing that.
When will you learn?
Plus a bonus thing that's just, I cannot even fucking, oh man.
I branched out so much.
It is a story I have to tell.
I am really excited to tell it because it could be its own fucking deep.
I could have done my own series on this one story.
I'm going to try to squeeze it in.
I honestly don't know how long it'll take.
But first things first, let's do the current precedent that they're dealing with in this environment in 1934.
Oh, another thing, by the way, before I get to that, just another reason why this isn't a great situation, as if we needed more.
Remember how I talked about the Scottsboro case?
Mm-hmm.
And the fact that, like, even though that went, like, pretty well in the Supreme Court, does it really fucking matter for the people, for the defendants?
Yeah.
Not exactly.
And there's another thing, which is, once that trial was over, they were slated to hang, like, immediately.
Every time there's an appeal, that gets pushed off.
That's kind of how the law works.
Sometimes it makes sense.
It's like, oh, there's an appeal.
So, but other times it's like, I've seen cases where it's like, oh, there's a, you know, minor like notification error.
So we'll kill this person next week.
It's just stuff like that.
They're like, God, I cannot believe that we do this even today.
That's a modern thing.
Oh, you're gonna die this week?
Oh, whoops, we didn't send an email about it to some- one of the lawyers.
Alright, we'll give you a week and then you die next week.
It's just stuff- the law- the legal system is just the fucking worst.
The killing machine's not working today, so I guess you've bought yourself another week.
Yeah, well, I guess my point is like...
It's that, but it's also like totally mundane stuff, too, where it's like, oh, OK, well, push that off a week for some random paper reason, you know, like just not very weird.
But with this, obviously, these racist shits want to kill these black men.
And every time it's appealed, there's a delay.
And every time it's appealed, it's reported in the fucking paper.
So an appeal could literally kill these men.
Like it's.
Riling up everybody.
It's purely a question of what's happening that day.
What's the energy like?
Is there something else going on?
This is a very touch-and-go situation.
Is it hot?
The weather makes people crazy.
It could be.
I feel like the newspaper has quite a lot of power in that particular dynamic, that newspaper, Meridian whatever that I kept quoting.
So they are in danger.
Like this isn't like, oh, they'll be fine for 30 years while we appeal our way.
It's like, maybe, or at any moment, they could be killed by a mob of angry white racists.
So they're in constant danger, I'll just say.
Back to that legal discussion.
So remember, I've talked about the dynamic of like, we don't have all our rights.
I say we.
People in this time did not have all the rights that you and I would think we'd have in this situation because of that interaction between like states and federalism.
Like not everything's been incorporated to the states.
There's quite a lot that we're not sure.
And that's still being felt out.
And one big problem here is there's some bad precedent kind of regarding this exact fucking thing.
There's a case called the Lofton case, and I'll just quote from the book here.
The Mississippi Supreme Court pointed out in the Lofton case that no request was made of the trial court to exclude the confessions after the introduction of testimony which it has now claimed tended to show that the confessions were inadmissible.
In the introduction of his proof on the merits, the Court continued, the appellant offered testimony which it has now claimed tended to show that the confessions were made under the influence of hope or fear, but after the introduction of this testimony, no motion was made to exclude the confessions.
If, as contended, this testimony tended to show that the confessions weren't admissible, the court committed no error in not excluding them in the absence of a request to do so.
So you didn't file the right form kind of thing?
Ooh, that's a great way of putting it.
Precisely.
That kind of bullshit.
You didn't do it at the right time.
And, okay, we get a little bit of hope in this one.
Because I want to point out, the people doing the right thing at this time I find genuinely inspiring.
There was one judge.
In this Mississippi Supreme Court, who dissented.
And he dissented in this, and he had another dissent we'll talk about later, that yes, you're just writing dissents, meaning you're losing, but the dissents... But it's still a voice.
Yeah, and in this specific case, not this one I'm about to read, but a later dissent we'll get to, was quoted up and down the Supreme Court decision.
And it was quoted in newspapers.
So making that noise, making your voice, not just going along with it, not just saying, well, I'm going to lose anyway, so fucking whatever.
No, making your voice heard at this time, which does not come without risk, made a huge difference.
And so there's this Judge Anderson person.
This person is talking about the Lofton case.
They're dissenting in the Lofton case.
And in this case, oh boy, this case, not great, not great.
This isn't as bad as what we've already covered.
But once again, just reminding you, we are dealing with a horrible time where there may be references to racial violence and other awful stuff.
So another content note on that.
But this episode actually doesn't include as much of that stuff.
But this Lofton case was a confession made, quote, with his hands tied behind him in the presence of 25 to 75 white people who had gathered around him, some with guns.
Still quoting here.
Imagine a negro making a voluntary confession of the crime of murder under such circumstances and surroundings.
So this was very clearly, and that's end quote, this is very clearly a confession made in the context of a fucking lynch mob.
Yeah.
And then they say, ah, look, he confessed, but then they decided to do the legal lynch mob, you know, which is also what we saw here with our three Well, when you can make it happen in like three days, then yeah, I mean.
And so this one judge is like, this is not a fucking, this is not, are you telling me that because they didn't fill out the right form, as you said, you know, that this is fine?
But yes, that is what they were telling him.
That's nuts.
You needed to make the objection at the right time.
You didn't make it at the exact correct time.
You didn't ask us to do this, so, yeah.
Not even, again, I'm just, to clarify, going one better, even if you asked, you might have asked at the wrong point in the trial.
If you had asked later, apparently, then it might have been fine.
Although, who fucking knows with these people, like.
They would have found another reason, yeah.
Yeah, but that's the legalese kind of reason they found.
Sure.
Sticking to procedure to find a way.
Isn't it?
That's another thing.
That's a theme of this episode.
Well, procedure.
We can't just rule based on what our heart wants.
There's a procedure here.
There's a lot of that.
The theme of this episode might be the legal system being a piece of shit.
And it's actually almost completely made up in order to do what powerful white people want.
I mean, I'm saying it strongly, but honestly, not that strongly.
Yeah.
So Clark has made his appeal, and our same Judge Anderson, once again, unfortunately, he's dissenting, so the appeal loses.
Lost again, yeah.
But he makes a similar vigorous dissent.
Here's some of his dissent about this.
And again, this dissent got picked up a little bit, got reported on.
The evidence produced at trial, he argued, showed without any substantial conflict that the Kemper trio were driven to confess their guilt by the most brutal and unmerciful whippings and beatings at the hands of persons who doubtless thought they were guilty.
And if the confessions of Brown, Shields, and Ellington had been excluded as they properly should have been, Anderson asserted, the evidence was wholly insufficient to sustain the conviction.
Contrary to the conclusion of the majority of his colleagues, Anderson, and I'm quoting the book by the way, that's also quoting Anderson, Anderson contended that even Judge Sturtevant's initial ruling admitting the confessions as evidence at the trial had been erroneous since the Kemper County Sheriff had admitted during the preliminary inquiry regarding the admissibility of the confessions that Henry Shields had entered the room limping and had stated that he had been strapped so hard that he could not sit down.
Right.
Even Adcock's testimony at the preliminary inquiry, Anderson therefore argued, was insufficient to demonstrate that the Kemper Trio's confessions had been free and voluntary beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty, end quote.
And he goes on later to say, and this ends up being quoted a lot, I think even in the Supreme Court case, quote, in some quarters, That line in particular got picked up a while ago.
So you've got one human being.
And I, gosh, it's so crazy.
I have felt like in, Our situation in today's world with Trumpers and fascism and all that's happening.
Often it feels like, how are we just going about our lives with that?
And I mean, that's kind of always how it's been.
This guy is just one of the justices in this state Supreme Court, and he's still fucking microwaving lunches in the break room.
It's the 30s, but you know, doing the equivalent of cracking open a can of beans.
I don't know, what did they eat in the 30s?
Around the, you know, the office campfire.
I hope the judge is eating a little bit better than that.
Beans are great.
Are you kidding me?
I want to go have some now.
I don't know what they're eating.
But anyway, point is, there's still the idea that it's like, OK, my co-workers here are cool with just the torture of black people and of innocent black people to make them die.
They are cool with that.
I, for one, am of a different persuasion.
Yeah.
And then they just go about their day.
But we're forced into that all the time.
Maybe not to that degree nowadays, obviously, but honestly, some issues get close to this.
When we had to go through the whole children in cages thing, it's like, yeah, okay, some number of people around us are just cool with that.
And it's going to get worse, by the way.
All that stuff, if Trump comes back, it will turn more like this than not this.
It will turn into, hey, which people do we know that are cool with fucking camps?
It's going to get to that degree if we let it happen.
I guess it was educational realizing like, oh, it's kind of always been like this, unfortunately.
There's always just been this element of the population And that they were in the majority for a long time, maybe up until including now on some things.
But anyway, so Clark loses on this technicality.
And just to spell it out, the ruling is up.
Well, you did object initially and you said, hey, this shouldn't be whatever.
But later on, when there was more testimony that showed That these were coerced confessions.
You didn't object again then.
That's literally what we're talking about.
Wow.
And so that's where I thought to myself, boy, that sure sounds insane, doesn't it?
We have made so much progress.
We're a better society.
There's no way anything like that could still exist now.
And then I realized, oh, fuck.
Wait a minute.
Didn't the Supreme Court rule?
I just had a memory in my head.
I was like, didn't the Supreme Court rule that innocence wasn't a good enough reason To not be murdered by the state.
Wasn't that Scalia?
Scalia was involved.
So what I did was I remembered that.
I looked up some things.
I realized, oh shit, new deep dive, everybody.
We're getting in our time machine.
We're fast forwarding.
Because I came across, I looked that up.
I'm going to give you a little bit about that.
Cool.
But also there's another case that I came across that I was slightly familiar with, but I hadn't followed through to its conclusion.
And I have to tell you this fucking story.
I just, I have to tell you it.
But now is where obviously I have to issue a different content warning, because while we're not talking about, you know, horrible racist violence in the 30s, I'm going to discuss some death penalty cases.
And death penalty cases, even obviously if the people are innocent, possibly, the crime is always fucking horrible.
Yeah.
The crime is pretty much always the worst thing you've heard of.
And so I'm going to discuss some of those things a little bit for these cases.
But those are the cases that are death penalty cases.
So I can't really talk about that without talking about those awful things.
And unfortunately, the main one is really just sad and horrible.
But let's first talk about that case that you remembered involves Scalia, and I would have said that he wrote the majority opinion on it.
Turns out he didn't.
Okay.
So that's what you and I kind of misremembered.
Shazam, you know.
I think it's because he's the only... Same thing.
Yeah.
It actually...
Sinbad actually wrote the majority opinion.
It was actually Sinbad.
So you're right.
That's a great call out.
You really are contributing to this episode.
Thank you so much.
So Sinbad writes for the majority.
No.
So I went back and found that case, which is Herrera v. Collins.
That's the case, 1993.
And I think the reason we just associate it with Scalia is he was kind of the most prominent person involved that we still kind of care about, because everybody else is dead or we don't care about.
So like, the main, the opinion was fucking Rehnquist, who fucking sucked.
I don't know much about him, but like, obviously he sucked.
And the opinion, I think it was 6-3, so Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor, also sucked, not quite as much, but sucked.
Scalia, obviously.
Kennedy.
He gave us gay marriage, but he also decided that innocence isn't enough.
He was an enigma.
Yeah, that guy.
Better to have him than another Scalia or Thomas, obviously, but what a weirdo.
And speaking of Thomas, fucking Thomas.
So those people.
That tracks.
And the dissent, which was quite vigorous, once again, the dissent was like, are we fucking kidding us?
What is happening?
Like a Sonia Sotomayor kind of style.
Oh, not as good because Sonia Sotomayor hot take is the best justice we've ever had.
I think she's the greatest.
She's deserving of the reputation that RBG didn't deserve, honestly.
Yeah.
When you look at her actual work, she did some good things, but also some really not good things.
And so the dissent was Blackmun, Stevens, and Souter.
They were not fans of this.
And I went through this, again, not a law show, not a lawyer, but I wanted to make sure I was getting this right.
Because I've heard this cited as, yeah, innocence, not enough to get you off a death row.
And I read the case, I read the opinion, and they talked a lot about like, well, this guy isn't innocent.
I'm sure I have lawyers listening.
This is me, a non-lawyer grappling through this.
Don't worry.
I think I got to the right place.
But I'm thinking, is this actually kind of misreported a little bit?
Like, is it that they said, Well, this guy isn't innocent, so kind of fuck this or you know what I mean?
Sandra Day O'Connor, for example, was like, this person just isn't innocent.
So as to the complaint of, oh, are we going to execute an innocent man?
Like, well, he wasn't.
So no.
And I'm kind of thinking like, okay, was it more just that?
I heard you sigh.
Yeah.
This guy wasn't innocent.
We can't know for sure, but like it reeks of bullshit.
He killed two state troopers.
And his claim to innocence was that his brother who had died, after he died, they're like, here's an affidavit saying he did it.
And it's like, okay.
This wasn't a case of like, oh, he wasn't even there.
No, he was there.
His fingerprint's there.
He was definitely there.
Very clear that he was at least involved.
It's possible.
And it's kind of weird.
It's so much I was already getting into.
The brother alleged in this note, and actually it's an affidavit from the attorney of the brother.
So like, it's not just the brother, but like, I don't know.
It doesn't, he was at the very least part of this plot to kill these two state troopers.
I don't believe in the death penalty, so I'm not saying that means he should die.
Yeah.
Making that very clear, but like, he was quite guilty.
But it's about the precedent that's being set.
Of course, I'm getting to that.
Okay.
Just to talk about this specific thing I was going to say, though, that's kind of odd, is the brother alleged that the four of them, I think it was, were involved in a conspiracy.
And he was like, yeah, I killed them because we were all doing some sort of drug trafficking thing, like the cops were in on it.
And their story is that that's why they killed him because of some, you know, something gone bad or double crime.
I don't know.
I was already 11 Inceptions deep into a deep dive and I was like, I better not start reading this because then we're going to do 19 parts.
But I saw that that was his stated kind of reason.
I thought that was like, wow, that's an interesting Yeah, like dirty cops kind of thing.
And it might have been.
Like, honestly, that might have been true.
I will believe any cop is dirty because I don't like cops and I think they're all dirty.
So I believe that.
I believe everybody.
But I also know that you shouldn't kill people and these people killed these cops.
And so there was a part of me that was like, okay, I saw that.
I'm like, well, this guy definitely fucking did it.
He admitted to one of the murders anyway and was like, well, I didn't kill this other one.
And like, there are plenty to believe me.
There's plenty of innocent people on death row.
This didn't seem to be one of them.
Like I was like, all right.
So was this a case of the conservatives on the court being like, yeah, fuck this guy.
He's a cop killer.
Like obviously conservatives are not going to be fans of that.
Did they just say like, nah, fuck this guy.
You know, and then it kind of got overblown.
But no, no, I did some more research and it's like, no, no.
Yes, they also said, fuck this guy.
He's not innocent.
But that didn't matter.
Whether or not he was innocent didn't matter to the case.
As we often see in legally stuff, it could have been anything.
The rule that got set forth in Herrera v. Collins was innocence is not good enough.
I still was like struggling with this.
I was like, how could you not be a Batman villain and rule this way?
You know, like.
How could anyone who thinks they're a human rule this way?
I couldn't help it.
I was like, I have to understand what the fuck this is.
I think I finally grappled with it, which is what Sandra Day O'Connor was saying.
And particularly her thing, it just jumped out at me.
Not that she's the main, you know, baddie here, but like her, her language jumped out at me was he's not innocent.
As I said, but what she means is something slightly different.
She means the very definition of guilty.
Is you are guilty if you've gone through a constitutionally sound process and been found guilty.
Right.
And so for her, and I guess the rest of the fucking ghouls who ruled this way, it almost doesn't matter the fact in itself of guilt or innocence.
What matters is, okay, did they follow all the rules in the trial?
Right.
And, you know, there's something to be said for that.
Like, yeah, okay, you're admitting that, like, you do have to have a process, and as long as it followed all the constitutional rules, then we're going to have to trust it.
You had a fair shake.
Yeah, like, I sort of get that, but we're talking about life and death.
Yeah.
There was a time around this time, 80s and 90s, the tough on crime era, there was also this perception, which I'm sure you'll be familiar with, that, hey, death penalty stuff just takes too long.
They have endless appeals, you know, they never actually get killed.
And yeah, it's like, there is some truth to that.
But like, that was a complaint.
Yeah.
That's a problem.
Yeah.
And the justices here were like, there needs to be finality.
And if you have gone through A trial and they aren't saying I'm giving these devils their due.
They are saying like, hey, if there was something wrong with the trial, different story.
If you found out there was evidence withheld, if you found out, you know, any of those things like incompetent counsel, you find out that now parenthetical when those things happen, they also just still kill the person.
But like, according to the logic of this, they're like, it's not about that.
It's purely about, and the way I was able to understand it in my mind, what the rule was here is, let's say you have person A and person B, and they're both black, because it's the death penalty.
And they're both in probably fucking Texas or something.
I'm just going with stats.
They're like Texas, Louisiana, I don't know.
They're in one of the shit states that is racist the most.
And let's say they're both innocent black men.
Let's say person A, let's say both of them, there's evidence, I don't know what this would be, but newly discovered evidence of like, oh shit, they're innocent.
Like, let's just say, whatever, a safe is open somewhere and it can, oh shit, there's something nobody could have had at that time, but it's like pretty different, it's video footage.
That's like, oh, they were totally innocent.
Yeah, let's just say that for fun.
Let's say these are two found guilty on death row people.
They have exhausted, this is important, they've exhausted all their appeals.
So they've tried already to do all the appeal stuff and they haven't, they've had no success.
And then someone discovers some found footage somewhere that's of both of them not doing the crime or something.
Yeah.
If person A had had any defect in his trial that led to that, like if there's anything where you could say like, well, You know, it was Brady violation, meaning the state should have known or turned over this tape or something like that.
Or you could say, well, maybe the counsel was incompetent because they should have known where this footage was in some way.
If you have any complaint like this, then by the logic of this case, that person can appeal.
Because that thing, that defect, led to that evidence.
Right.
But if you don't, fuck you, you're dead.
Yeah.
Which, to me, is still fucking insane.
Yeah.
It is as bad as you and I had heard.
You know, like, I wanted to make sure.
I really want to get things right, just in general.
Like, I want to make sure I'm being accurate with things.
No, no, this case, 1993, Herrera v. Collins, is exactly what I just said.
So, provided you've exhausted your other appeals, doesn't matter what is discovered.
Doesn't matter what it is, just ironclad proof that no one could have had, as long as there was no defect in your trial that could be pointed to as a constitutional problem.
No, sorry.
That was the luck of the draw.
The conservative attitude is like, yeah, well, you know, you had, it's been 10 years or something probably by this point, because you've exhausted all your appeals.
Yeah.
You know, like, all right, it's been long enough, like fucking.
How much longer would you live anyway?
There really is all over the languages.
We need some finality to this process.
It can't go on forever.
Because it's really annoying.
Yeah, I know.
Pin in that!
Pin in that for my main story that I haven't got.
We're 40-something minutes in, or whatever we're in, and I haven't even gotten to my main story.
But this is important precedent for the main story.
Sure.
So, yeah, it's that bad.
That way of thinking to me is insane.
There's nothing less justice-oriented in my mind than, like, when I think of, like, what is justice?
Just getting all lofty and high-minded.
Literally, it's that.
It's like, oh, Newly discovered evidence that someone's completely innocent.
You know what justice is?
Well, fuck, let that person out of fucking jail that they've been in for decades.
And restitution.
Yeah, well, set that aside, because we suck at that, too.
Yeah, we do.
They'll be like, oh, you've been imprisoned in horrible conditions for 20 years.
Here's 100 bucks.
Yeah, we'll give you $10,000, you know?
That's about right.
Yeah.
Even setting that aside, just the pure amount of, God, the more we talk, it's like, God, our system sucks so bad on so many levels.
And so that way of thinking of like, you know, we need finality.
The family needs to know.
What?
They need to know that they executed an innocent person?
Is that better?
Imagine person A and person B that I just talked about.
They're both dead.
Sorry, one of them's dead, one of them's not, because under this theory.
Right.
Again, setting aside that based on very real precedent, this is not me exaggerating, they would find some other reason to kill this person.
There's so many shadow docket rulings that we don't even talk about that's like, ah, rejected, go die, and then they die.
So they would find some other fucking way.
Oh yeah, all the death penalty stuff is Shadow Document.
Pretty much all of them.
Yep.
But set that aside.
We'll even take them at their word that no, okay, if there was this thingy, they would be able to be let go.
But we need that finality for the other guy.
What is that doing?
Yeah.
The family, in those circumstances, one family is like, well shit, we didn't have the right person and now that person's not dead.
The other family is like, Well, we had the wrong person, but we got to kill someone, so we're happy.
Like, is that wha- Is that better?
And I mean, like, I've never been affiliated with horrendous crime or anything like that, right?
That we know of.
Yeah, that we know of.
So I don't pretend to know what it's like to be a family member of a victim of something so terrible.
But for me, I would imagine I would not feel okay unless, like, I had closure.
And what closure would mean is getting it right.
Yeah, and I think that... And also, I wouldn't want to kill them, personally, but... I know, but... I'm very anti-death penalty.
Yeah, I think that is the psychological... I think... Psychologically, what I think is happening is...
These conservatives are of the opinion that actually they're all just guilty.
I think that's really what it is.
Yeah, they're probably just fucking guilty.
Yeah, they'll find some reason why they're like, oh.
They've done something, I'm sure.
I didn't do it.
No, I think they literally think they're pretty much 100% accurate, which is nuts.
But I think that's what it is, because I know I just made that comparison of like, oh, we killed somebody, so we're happy.
But if we brought this to real life, let's be honest, The odds are that the family would probably be like, no, we got the right guy, we killed him.
Even with ironclad evidence that he was innocent, because psychology.
Like, that's just what happens, unfortunately.
I would hope that it wouldn't.
I would like to think that if it were me, that definitely wouldn't happen.
But like, that's usually how it goes.
You know, a bunch of us fucking bleeding hearts are like, hey, this guy was probably innocent.
And then the family's like, no, we definitely got the right one, he's dead.
Like, that's usually how it goes.
And so I think that's just kind of the mindset we're dealing with here.
But importantly, they set a rule that, like, it doesn't even matter.
Like, even if he's 1 million percent innocent, if he's out of his appeals, then sorry, he's out of his appeals, which is fucking insane.
And that should have been the end of the Supreme Court.
Should have been, in a just world, in a just country, we'd be like, well, fuck everybody on the You know, all the people who voted for that, we'll kill them or something.
We'll get rid of them.
Exile them.
Because, you know, we're against death penalty here.
Us.
The proletariat that I'm talking about.
The imaginary people that I'm talking about.
But, you know, they're not allowed to be justices anymore.
They're not doing any justicing anymore.
No more justicing.
Let's get real humans in there.
In a just society, this would have been disqualifying.
But there's so many reasons why that's not how it goes.
Billions of reasons.
There's a tension span.
The having to work within a system because not having a system would probably be worse, honestly.
All kinds of things.
Anyway, I was going to go down from there, a rabbit hole of, hey, look how we're still just as bad because here's all these death penalty cases where innocent people were killed.
And I looked at a few and I want to say a couple of things.
For one, this is a tough thing to look at because you're often dealing with The worst crimes, as I said.
And there's no way to know for sure.
For a lot of these...
Like, for example, I went on one website, because I was like, oh, I'm going to find some of these, you know, whatever notable cases of probably innocent men getting executed.
I was going to talk about them.
And so I go to one of those sites.
Okay.
It wasn't the Innocence Project.
It was at deathpenaltyinfo.org.
And it seemed to be one of these innocence causes.
Not the Innocence Project.
I want to make very clear it's not that one.
So I go to this website and I start clicking through the like, oh, here's this executed, but possibly innocent.
And I was like, this is what I was looking for.
I'm going to use some of these examples.
I go through three of them and they're guilty.
Like this, it frustrated me because you read the little blurb they have on their website and it's like, yeah, here's all these problems with the case.
And I was like, awesome, cool.
And then I go check literally anywhere else.
And it's like, whoa, that was pretty misleading.
Like, okay, yeah, there's a few problems if you zoom in on this one thing.
And then it'll be like, he did admit to all the other murders.
And you're like, what the fuck?
Okay.
You know, like there's, it was kind of almost that bad, honestly.
And so that frustrated me.
I just wanted to point that out.
Cause like, I think that there are no doubt many innocent people already killed and on death row.
But I just don't like, that just bothered me.
Like, I wish there was at least some, a little bit more honest.
This is one random org.
I don't know who this is.
But like, yeah, there's doubt here.
That's the thing about life and death and the death penalty.
There can't be any doubt.
There should be no doubt at all.
If you're going to have it, which you shouldn't, you better at least make it so this is ironclad.
And the way I think people, because just the way humans work, like when you get invested in a cause, You know, I think it's why a lot of people really think that Adnan didn't do it.
Like, you get swept up and you're like, no, they didn't do it.
You only tunnel vision on the things that mean they didn't do it.
And it's one thing to say, oh, there may have been problems with the case.
It's another to say, like, these people were probably innocent.
It's like, I didn't go through all of them, but I clicked on The three of them that I did in a row, and they were all like, that guy's not innocent, sorry, he's not.
One guy was, it was so bad.
It was like, their blurb was like, so all about how he was innocent.
And then I read just the Wikipedia even, and it was like, this guy was known as the fucking something strangler, the Scranton strangler, not really.
But no, he's awful, like he literally was raping and murdering the elderly.
And it was like, yeah, there were certain issues with the case, but it was like multiple places and times where he, oh, he got out here and then he murdered, you know, three more elderly people.
And then it was like, yeah, OK.
Yeah, there might have been doubt on one of them.
But like, come on, this guy was a serial killer of the elderly and they were trying to make it like he was innocent.
And I just I couldn't I can't help it.
I had to call that out.
I don't like that.
Yeah, I mean, because your opinion is be genuine in your defense of this person, that it's perfectly fine for them to say that the death penalty is inappropriate because of this issue in the case.
But it's this whole thing where they've constructed an entirely different reality.
Yeah.
That just does not make sense.
To elaborate a little more, too, I think that we need to be careful because, for the third time, I'll say, these cases are awful.
These crimes are awful.
And the crimes happened.
Yeah.
We can all agree on that.
Except for a couple of cases where the crime actually didn't happen and someone still was killed for it.
That actually has happened, or they're still on death row, I forget.
But yeah, our system sucks.
But like, for the most part, these were elderly people who were literally raped and killed.
These were horrible, like some of the worst crimes.
And we're already dealing with a high stakes thing.
We're trying to convince anyone else's heart.
Trying to convince people on the other side of this issue who are going to be like, are you kidding me?
Look at this 80 year old woman who was murdered in this way.
Anything that's trying to be us, like, well, yeah, he killed five of them.
But, like, he might not have killed... Come on.
Like, I'm not gonna argue in that manner.
I might argue in, like, if there's a procedural problem or something, you know, but... So, anyway.
Or the philosophy of the death penalty in general.
Yeah, and that just bothered me.
Like, that just rubbed me the wrong way.
I think that we need to take these crimes very seriously because they are horrible.
They are very horrible crimes.
But it's a hard thing.
It is a very difficult thing that we deal with in the messy reality of humanity, which is, what if you're 80% certain that someone did a horrible thing?
You know?
Yeah.
It's so hard.
And I'm not talking about if you're the executioner.
I mean, just say you meet someone tomorrow for some reason, and it's like, yeah, there's a 50% chance They did the worst crime you can even think of.
And these are, again, they're horrible.
I can't, I hate how bad people are to each other.
It's awful.
Or he's blamed for it and he didn't do it.
And it's like, God, I don't, I get why people have to jump to either side of that.
Like people have to go, no, he's totally innocent.
Or no, I fucking did it, fucking fry him.
Yeah, everything in the middle is really hard to grapple with.
How do you act like, well, I'm just going to split the difference there.
I'm going to treat him half like he's the worst torturer in the world.
Yeah.
And half like he's not just like a guy, half like he's the most beset upon victim of the justice system.
You know, like that's the extreme we're dealing with.
We're dealing with, are you literally the worst person or are you having a horrible thing done to you?
In which case, like we should be paying you money.
Yeah.
And having that uncertainty is so hard.
It's really hard for humans to deal with.
And I myself, just reading these things where you're like, I know that probability wise, many of these people, even some percent, I don't know what the percentage, some percentage are innocent people.
That means they are sitting there for a crime they didn't, they may be killed by the state with a bunch of people cheering the state on.
For something they didn't do.
And then that, that elicits all these responses, like, oh my God, like emotional responses of like, I can't, that's horrible, the empathy, the all that.
And then you see some of the evidence and you're like, God, or they did it.
And therefore, you feel, you think about those emotions you just had and you're like, Oh, did I just identify with a person who was raping and murdering the elderly or killed a kid or, you know, like, what does that say about me?
It's so hard to be in that space of uncertainty.
But in terms of the justice system, you have to, the justice system needs to look at this in a different way.
If there's any doubt, in my opinion, this is my philosophical opinion.
You cannot kill somebody when they're killing somebody is final.
You don't get to unkill them.
Yep.
You can't have any doubt.
Furthermore, there are some of these cases where even if they're guilty, they should be let go or at least not killed or whatever because of like something like a Brady violation.
Where that means the state withheld evidence that might have been exculpatory.
And just to make that argument, if you don't do that, then what is the incentive for the state not to just fake evidence all the time?
Or to, if not fake evidence, to hide evidence?
If you don't give any incentive, any disincentive, then you're just telling a bunch of bloodthirsty fucking conservatives, because that's always who's prosecutors and cops and all that, you're telling them, hey, go nuts.
Hide all the evidence you want, do whatever you want, because if, you know, if you're caught, they'll be like, well, the guy's still guilty, so kill him.
So there's no downside for them.
And you see some cases where the state has custody of really bad evidence for their case, you know, evidence that the person is innocent, And they sit on it and then Thomas and fucking Alito and whoever and the majority finds a way to be like, yeah, but still who cares?
Yeah.
And then what's what is going to be the inevitable result on it?
No matter how mad we can be at the person who probably maybe they still did it.
Or maybe there's a case where they definitely still did it.
If you can look at that and say, well, the state literally Withheld evidence?
Well, I'm sorry, then they get off.
That's the only way you will get these assholes to not do that.
The only way you will get a more just system is by saying, hey, if you mess up at all, if you do anything wrong, you're the fucking state.
That matters.
You don't just get to be an asshole, which is unfortunately, this is pie in the sky thinking this is not real.
But like, that's how it should work in my book.
The country that we live in.
Yeah, like that's how some people, some progressive people who have gotten in the system a little, would want it to work, who we should encourage more.
More on that later.
But like, yeah, if you skirt the system in any way, and there's, you can argue about the line, because there are things where it's like, oh, you fucking, you didn't capitalize his name on that form.
Like, okay, yeah, yeah, I get it.
There's some level of like, you made a mistake.
If it was genuinely a mistake, you don't want to murder it to get off scot-free for some innocent mistake.
No, it's the substantive stuff.
Yeah, but you can evaluate that.
That's all within the judgment.
That's what the system is for, ideally, is to, you have a jury or somebody or a judge or somebody try to make those judgment calls of like, this seems like it was malicious, this seems like it wasn't malicious and wouldn't have mattered.
Yeah, exactly.
So therefore, you know.
And what the reality of the system is, is that that doesn't exist anymore.
Virtually nothing is that.
Everything is, eh, not a big deal, wouldn't have proven innocence anyway.
Like, that's how it gets interpreted now.
And it's it's sickening and it's horrible.
And I realized we've gone on so long that I think I'm going to have to take a break here and go to a part two on this.
Because the next thing I'm going to launch into is very long.
So otherwise, we'd be here for three hours.
I don't know how long this thing's gonna be.
We'll see.
But in the next part, I'm going to talk about a case that I just Some of you may recognize, but you might not know everything that happened.
And when I read this, I couldn't even, man, there is some amazing reporting that went into this.
There's some activism, there's some stuff, but there's also a lot of tragedy.
Again, this is a death penalty case.
So the underlying facts, awful.
So it's not going to be fun.
I'm not going to say it's fun, but it is something that I need to tell the story and you're going to want to hear it.
And it's a modern thing.
This just happened recently.
So this was what I came to on this deep dive where I was like, fuck, I have to tell the story.
It's relevant now.
And it's about how we're not any better than Mississippi in 1934.
So that next time on Where There's Love.
My butt is comfy.
So you are good to do three minutes.
Alright, I've given my wife a glass or two of wine, so things may get loose.
