Speaker 1: Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I
Speaker 1: writer and I'm Steve Drissen. Last week, we told you
Speaker 1: the story of Robert Davis, a false confession case that
Speaker 1: happened in Virginia. Today, we're going to tell you about
Speaker 1: a case out of Chicago, the story of a violent
Speaker 1: and tragic crime that took the life of a young girl.
Speaker 1: But there's a larger reason why we want to talk
Speaker 1: about this case because of what it also took from
Speaker 1: not one, but five innocent teenage boys and from their
Speaker 1: families and communities. This case happened during what we now
Speaker 1: call the super Predator era, the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: The news media was saturated with stories of urban crime,
Speaker 1: drugs and gangs, and in particular, sensationalized stories about black
Speaker 1: and brown youth committing violent crimes in groups. This narrative
Speaker 1: is often associated with New York City. It drove the
Speaker 1: wrongful prosecution of the so called Central Park five Wolfpack,
Speaker 1: but it didn't stop there. Today we're going to tell
Speaker 1: you about a group of teenage boys whose false confessions
Speaker 1: transformed them into Chicago's own wolf pack. They're known as
Speaker 1: the Dicksmore five. You know, Chicago may be called the
Speaker 1: second City, but then when it comes to false confessions,
Speaker 1: we don't take a back seat to anybody, not New
Speaker 1: York or any other jurisdiction for that matter. We're home
Speaker 1: to more false confessions than any other city in the
Speaker 1: United States, were home to more juvenile false confessions. And
Speaker 1: we're also the home of more cases in which there
Speaker 1: are multiple false confessions. And over the years, the Center
Speaker 1: on Wrongful Convictions has obtained exonerations in many of these cases,
Speaker 1: all of which were from African American teenagers in the
Speaker 1: Chicago area. Marquette Park, four Uptown seven, Englewood four Dicksmore five.
Speaker 1: These numbers start to add up, and the thing is
Speaker 1: each one of these cases involved innocent African American teenagers
Speaker 1: in groups confessing to crimes they didn't commit. Of course,
Speaker 1: the most famous case like this was New York's Central
Speaker 1: Park five case. In April of nine, five teenage boys
Speaker 1: were charged with the sexual assault and the attempted murder
Speaker 1: of a female jogger in New York's Central Park. The
Speaker 1: boys falsely confessed to beating this woman with an inch
Speaker 1: of her life and leaving her in the Woods to die.
Speaker 1: The Central Park five confessions were driven by race wolfpacks.
Speaker 1: Wilding was a whole new language to describe groups of
Speaker 1: African American and Latino teenagers, and it created a level
Speaker 1: of fear in New York City and around the country
Speaker 1: that I had never seen before. So when we began
Speaker 1: to look at the dicks More case, the case of
Speaker 1: the Central Park five was ringing in my years. It
Speaker 1: was November of and fourteen year old Cattersa Matthews was
Speaker 1: in the eighth grade. She lived with her mom in
Speaker 1: Dicks Moore, a suburb on the south side of Chicago,
Speaker 1: surrounded by a tight knit extended family and community. Every
Speaker 1: day after school, Catteresa followed the same routine. She'd walk
Speaker 1: to her great grandmother's house, where she'd do her homework,
Speaker 1: talk on the phone, and do whatever fourteen year old
Speaker 1: girls do. After school, she was waiting until her mom
Speaker 1: came home from work to go back to her own house.
Speaker 1: Cattersa followed this routine religiously until November. When she doesn't
Speaker 1: show up at her great grandmother's house after school. Her
Speaker 1: family panics, They call the police and a search begins,
Speaker 1: but for three weeks there's no sign of Catresa until
Speaker 1: December eight. That's when Catteresa's body is found lying in
Speaker 1: a wooded field next to the Inner eight highway that
Speaker 1: runs through Dick's Moore. She's on her back, partially undressed,
Speaker 1: with her pants draped across her lower body. On her
Speaker 1: chest is a spent casing from a twenty five caliber bullet.
Speaker 1: She's been shot once in the mouth. Even though Catres
Speaker 1: had been missing for three weeks, the medical examiner concludes
Speaker 1: that she's been killed recently, right around the time her
Speaker 1: body's found. There are several reasons for this. For one thing,
Speaker 1: rigor mortis is present when she's found. That usually disappears
Speaker 1: about hours after death. Her body is also still bleeding
Speaker 1: when she's discovered, which she wouldn't expect if she had
Speaker 1: been killed much earlier. And also, when a body has
Speaker 1: been lying outside for a long time, there are usually
Speaker 1: signs like animal or insect bites. There's nothing like that here.
Speaker 1: And the medical examiner finds something else too, semen on
Speaker 1: Catres's body. She's been raped. This was an awful It's
Speaker 1: the worst. I mean, it's every parents nightmare to have
Speaker 1: this happened to their child. Know, when you think of
Speaker 1: a crime like this, you don't think of it as
Speaker 1: something that teenagers would do. Typically, teenage crimes are impulsive crimes.
Speaker 1: There's not a lot of planning or premeditation. They happen
Speaker 1: in the spur of the moment, but this crime clearly
Speaker 1: required some forethought. For eleven long months, the investigation into
Speaker 1: Catresa's death goes nowhere until fall, when a teenage boy
Speaker 1: tells police that he saw Catresa getting into a car
Speaker 1: with some friends around the time of her disappearance. Police
Speaker 1: decide to question those friends, starting with Robert Veal on October. Now,
Speaker 1: Robert's fourteen years old, but he has pretty severe intellectual
Speaker 1: limitations that make him think more like a five year old.
Speaker 1: He's questioned for hours without a parent or a lawyer
Speaker 1: presence off camera, and in the end he signs a
Speaker 1: confession prepared by his interrogator, and the story in this
Speaker 1: confession is brutal. Robert says he and four other African
Speaker 1: American teenage boys kidnapped a girl they knew from school.
Speaker 1: They gang raped her as she pleaded with them to stop,
Speaker 1: and then they shot her once in the mouth. It
Speaker 1: was a story of an animalistic group of black teenagers
Speaker 1: attacking their classmate for sport. The level of depravity in
Speaker 1: this story was so out of bounce that it made
Speaker 1: me question whether it was true. But it also had
Speaker 1: an eerily familiar ring to it, and for me, the
Speaker 1: significance was as I was seeing the same explanations in
Speaker 1: different cases, which made me begin to feel it like
Speaker 1: maybe there was a script that was getting passed around
Speaker 1: among Chicago police officers. Only hours after Robert Veale confesses,
Speaker 1: police bring in one of his supposed co perpetrators, fifteen
Speaker 1: year old Robert Taylor. He's a kid from a loving
Speaker 1: and protective vamily, but his parents didn't know he was
Speaker 1: at the police station being interrogated. Hours later, his signature
Speaker 1: appears on a confession too, and that confession tells a
Speaker 1: similarly vicious story. The same five African American teenagers lured
Speaker 1: Catrisa into a car, then raped her and shot her
Speaker 1: in a field. The super Predator Era was a period
Speaker 1: of pronounced moral panic in the United States that focused
Speaker 1: on young people, race, and crime. That's our colleague and friend,
Speaker 1: Perry Moriarty. She's a professor of law at the University
Speaker 1: of Minnesota and an expert on juvenile justice. And the
Speaker 1: era of the super predator. The front end marker is
Speaker 1: more than likely the Central Park five case that was
Speaker 1: April of nine, and that began on era when in
Speaker 1: the name of public safety, in the name of being
Speaker 1: tough on crime, law enforcement authorities dropped any pretense of
Speaker 1: treating children as children and prosecuted them as adults. If
Speaker 1: they were black and brown children, they were adultified, either
Speaker 1: by law or by connotation, and certainly by the media.
Speaker 1: A jogger murdered in New York Central Park. A little
Speaker 1: girl gunned down on her family's car in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: A judge has sentenced two boys for killing another child
Speaker 1: who refused to steal candy for them. There's a tidal
Speaker 1: wave of juvenile violent crime right over the horizon, and
Speaker 1: some who study it say the worst is yet to come.
Speaker 1: Terms like wilding, beast, chill, predatory. In New York City
Speaker 1: newspapers alone, the term wilding appeared a hundred fifty six
Speaker 1: times in articles over the eight years following the Central
Speaker 1: Park five arrests. To put it in perspective, just a
Speaker 1: few months after the Central Park five case, a large
Speaker 1: group of Italian and Irish, predominantly teenagers and Vincent Hurst
Speaker 1: Brooklyn chased down and killed a young black teenager named
Speaker 1: you step Hawkins. And the headlines did not say wilding,
Speaker 1: they did not say beasts Hill, They did not even
Speaker 1: say gang. They said a group of white teenagers. Now
Speaker 1: the police have two confessions that implicate the same five teenagers,
Speaker 1: but they're not done yet. Next up is Cheyenne Sharp,
Speaker 1: seventeen years old, the third supposed co perpetrator. He's questioned
Speaker 1: for nearly twenty four hours before he also confesses and
Speaker 1: implicates the other four. And it's the same brutal story,
Speaker 1: a group of African American teenage boys terrorizing their classmate
Speaker 1: for fun. Now you have to understand how these confessions
Speaker 1: are taken. These confessions are scripted, usually by a prosecutor
Speaker 1: from the States Attorney's office. Sometimes they're written by police officers,
Speaker 1: and these scripts contain a narrative, including character development. Kids
Speaker 1: are described as thugs, there's usually references to gang membership.
Speaker 1: Women are called bitches and hose. And the scriptwriter in
Speaker 1: these cases is doing two things. He's painting the suspects
Speaker 1: in a way that nobody can ever think of them
Speaker 1: as teenagers. And he's also painting them in a way
Speaker 1: that nobody, and that means nobody in the public and
Speaker 1: nobody on the jury can have an ounce of sympathy
Speaker 1: for them, And in doing so, he's making a script
Speaker 1: that is about as rock solid as a route to
Speaker 1: conviction as one can imagine. So far, the police have
Speaker 1: confessions from three of the Dicks Moore five, and within
Speaker 1: days they bring in the two remaining teenagers for questioning
Speaker 1: two brothers, seventeen year old James Harden and fifty year
Speaker 1: old Jonathan Barr. The boys are interrogated for hours, but
Speaker 1: their father had always told them never assign anything prepared
Speaker 1: by the police. Somehow a miracle they remember these words
Speaker 1: and they don't confess, but they're still named in the
Speaker 1: other three teenagers statements. So all five are on the
Speaker 1: hook in part because they were arresting and prosecuting kids
Speaker 1: in mass in groups. Law enforcement became very adept in
Speaker 1: that period at pitting kids against each other during the
Speaker 1: interrogation process and using kids against each other to extract
Speaker 1: false confessions. When you look at these cases of multiple
Speaker 1: false confessions, you see a similar pattern. First of all,
Speaker 1: the police usually start with the most vulnerable, most naive,
Speaker 1: most gullible of the suspects, and they focused in this
Speaker 1: case on Robert Field. He was the weak link. Then
Speaker 1: they get a confession from Robert Veal, and what do
Speaker 1: they do with that confession They use it as a
Speaker 1: battering ram to plow over all of the other defendants.
Speaker 1: This is how it works. The first suspect comes in
Speaker 1: and the police officers tell them that they know that
Speaker 1: he was involved in this crime, and nothing that suspect
Speaker 1: can say is going to change their mind. But they
Speaker 1: don't think he was the one who actually raped anybody
Speaker 1: or killed anybody. He was just a follower. The suspect
Speaker 1: is pressured into adopting a story in which he is
Speaker 1: a passive participant to the crime and which he fingers
Speaker 1: his co defendants as the more active participants. Then, once
Speaker 1: that suspect confesses, they bring that confession to the next
Speaker 1: in line and they go over the same thing again.
Speaker 1: We don't think you committed the crime. He's telling us
Speaker 1: that you committed the crime. We know you were there,
Speaker 1: but maybe you just held down her arm while they
Speaker 1: were raping and killing her. Each suspect is vying for
Speaker 1: the least culpable role, and at the end of the day.
Speaker 1: This is a very effective way to get confessions from
Speaker 1: multiple suspects. In this case, the dominoes are falling, and
Speaker 1: each one of them eventually agrees to a story in
Speaker 1: which James Harden is the one who actually places the
Speaker 1: gun inside Catresa's mouth and pulls the trigger. It's no
Speaker 1: coincidence that James is one of the last ones questioned here,
Speaker 1: That's right. And at the end of the day police
Speaker 1: got confessions from Robert Field, Robert Taylor, and Cheyenne Sharp,
Speaker 1: but they couldn't get James Harden and Jonathan Barr to confess.
Speaker 1: Based on the confessions, all five teenagers are charged with
Speaker 1: the assault and murder of Catresa, Matthews and the Dicks
Speaker 1: Moore five are transformed into Chicago's own wolfpack. Pretty soon, though,
Speaker 1: it becomes apparent that this case has major problems for starters.
Speaker 1: The teenagers versions of what happened are wildly inconsistent. They
Speaker 1: can't agree on how they met up with Cattersa, what
Speaker 1: the group did before they ended up in that field
Speaker 1: by the interstate, or who assaulted Cattersa, and in what order.
Speaker 1: In fact, one of the only things they do agree
Speaker 1: on was that Catresa had been murdered the day she
Speaker 1: disappeared November. But remember this was contradicted by the medical examiner,
Speaker 1: who determined that she had been killed three weeks later,
Speaker 1: around the time her body was found. And then here
Speaker 1: comes the biggest problem. After all five teenagers were charged
Speaker 1: but before trial, DNA testing from the seamen left on
Speaker 1: Cattersa's body excludes all five suspects. Instead, this DNA belongs
Speaker 1: to a single unidentified male. This is mc drop evidence,
Speaker 1: the kind of evidence that should have resulted in these
Speaker 1: cases being dismissed before trial. Exactly these confessions had been
Speaker 1: proven false. But instead of dropping its case, the state
Speaker 1: offers deals to two members of the Dicks Moore five,
Speaker 1: Cheyenne Sharpe and Robert Veal. If the boys agree to
Speaker 1: testify against their codefendants, they'll receive much shorter sentences. Cheyenne
Speaker 1: and Robert decide to take the deal, while the state
Speaker 1: moves forward with trials for the other three. And those trials,
Speaker 1: of course, are based on the stories told in the
Speaker 1: confessions despite the DNA you talk here about tunnel vision.
Speaker 1: This is what happens. The police officers lock into a story,
Speaker 1: they become invested in this notion of a gang rape,
Speaker 1: and they can't get out of that box exactly. And
Speaker 1: you see this when they have to deal with the
Speaker 1: DNA and the prosecutor addresses it during closing argument. And
Speaker 1: what does the prosecutor say. He explains the presence of
Speaker 1: DNA as the work of a necrophiliac. Now, see if
Speaker 1: this isn't exactly a household term. What is a necrophiliac?
Speaker 1: It's someone who has sex with dead bodies. I knew
Speaker 1: you know that this is officially the most batchet theory
Speaker 1: I think I've ever heard. By the way, I couldn't
Speaker 1: agree more So, let's get this straight. The theory here
Speaker 1: at the Dicksmore five trial was that five teenage boys
Speaker 1: sexually assault this victim. They don't leave a trace of
Speaker 1: themselves behind. Then here comes this wandering necrophiliac who comes
Speaker 1: across the body and decides to defile it. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've heard a lot of excuses for DNA and our time,
Speaker 1: but this one may take the prize. It's unbelievable that
Speaker 1: they would even present this to a jury. It's that insane.
Speaker 1: But you have to understand, in the context of a
Speaker 1: climate of fear, the irrational becomes rational now. In the
Speaker 1: opening statement in this case, the prosecutor said that these men,
Speaker 1: pointing at the five teenagers, these men came from a
Speaker 1: world where so called friends were turned into a pack
Speaker 1: of jackals hunting down their prey, and then they were
Speaker 1: done with it, killing it for sport jackals. Can you
Speaker 1: believe that this really is Chicago's own wolfpack? Again, it's
Speaker 1: a lot easier to fathom locking up a young beast,
Speaker 1: youll feral thing, than it is a child, which is
Speaker 1: in fact what we were doing. And when you talk
Speaker 1: about children as if they were animals, it becomes so
Speaker 1: much easier to throw away their lives, to just not
Speaker 1: worry about doing that last bit of DNA testing figure
Speaker 1: out whose DNA it was actually left Uncle Risa Matthew's body.
Speaker 1: It becomes easier to try them as adults. It becomes
Speaker 1: easier to sentence them to life sentences or even the
Speaker 1: death penalty. It becomes easier to just lock them up
Speaker 1: and throw away the key. The dehumanizing story embedded in
Speaker 1: these boys confessions, while it works, each that Dicks Moore
Speaker 1: five is convicted and the three who don't cut deals,
Speaker 1: Robert Taylor, Jonathan Barr and James Harden are sentenced to
Speaker 1: life in prison. Cheyenne Sharpe and Robert Veale serve their
Speaker 1: time and are eventually released with murder convictions on their records.
Speaker 1: But the other three language behind bars forgotten people, but
Speaker 1: they were not forgotten by their parents or their loved ones.
Speaker 1: You know, I'll never forget learning that Jonathan Barr and
Speaker 1: James Harden's dad would literally drive around with boxes full
Speaker 1: of files regarding their cases in his trunk, trying to
Speaker 1: get lawyers interested in taking his son's cases. And Robert
Speaker 1: Taylor's family did similar things. They would write letters and
Speaker 1: letters and letters to lawyers begging them for help. Finally,
Speaker 1: in two thousand and ten, we learned about the case
Speaker 1: of the Dicksmore five, our colleague Josh tepfur New, a
Speaker 1: public defender, and Jennifer Blagg, who had represented Robert Taylor
Speaker 1: on appeal. She referred the case to Josh and we
Speaker 1: agreed to take Robert's case. By this time, Robert was
Speaker 1: in his early thirties. That's right, he had served over
Speaker 1: fifteen years of his sentence. Robert Taylor grew up with
Speaker 1: his parents, sister, and brother in Harvey Illinois, right next
Speaker 1: to Dicks Moore. From day one, Robert's dad, a Navy vet,
Speaker 1: was his strongest defender. Robert Sor refused to be broken
Speaker 1: by the fact that his son had gone to prison
Speaker 1: because of the words he'd signed his name to. When
Speaker 1: the Center on Wrongful Convictions agreed to take Robert's case,
Speaker 1: his dad became a major presence in our lives. I
Speaker 1: can still remember the smell of his leather jacket when
Speaker 1: he hugged us and welcomed us to his family's struggle.
Speaker 1: Around the same time, organizations like the Innocence Project and
Speaker 1: Exoneration Project got involved in representing other members of the
Speaker 1: Dicks Moore five. Our collective first priority was identifying whose
Speaker 1: DNA had been left at the crime scene. We had
Speaker 1: a new tool called CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System,
Speaker 1: and over the time frame since the advent of DNA
Speaker 1: testing in the late nineteen eighties, that database had grown,
Speaker 1: and so the chances of finding the identity of the
Speaker 1: person who raped and killed KATRISA Matthews had grown exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean, let's remember for a moment that we're talking
Speaker 1: here about DNA that was taken from the semen left
Speaker 1: on a rape victim. You cannot ask for better evidence
Speaker 1: than that, And it's just sitting there forgotten. How can
Speaker 1: you not want to know whose DNA that was? Isn't
Speaker 1: that the most important question in this case had been
Speaker 1: sitting there unanswered for fifteen years. But where was it sitting?
Speaker 1: That was the first challenge. And after a year of searching,
Speaker 1: we found the DNA in some warehouse or in some trailer,
Speaker 1: and we then had to get permission from the court
Speaker 1: to test the DNA. We then sent the DNA off
Speaker 1: for testing to a lab, and we waited and the
Speaker 1: lab extracted a profile, and when that profile was extracted,
Speaker 1: it was run through the code AS database. A miracle
Speaker 1: of miracles. In March of two thousand and eleven, we
Speaker 1: got a hit and the hit was to a man,
Speaker 1: not a boy, a man named Willie Randolph. Now Willie
Speaker 1: Randolph was a troubled guy. He was much older than
Speaker 1: Catresa or the dicksmore five. When Catresa disappeared, he was
Speaker 1: thirty three years old, more than twice her age. Willie
Speaker 1: had been in and out of prison his entire adult
Speaker 1: life for all sorts of different offenses. In fact, he'd
Speaker 1: been paroled only a few months before Cattersa was killed
Speaker 1: to a house within a mile of where she lived,
Speaker 1: and Willie Randolph had previously been accused of rape in
Speaker 1: that very same field by the interstate where Catresa's body
Speaker 1: was found. This is a person with a history of
Speaker 1: these kinds of attacks, and his DNA and no one
Speaker 1: else's was present at the crime scene. Finally, it all
Speaker 1: made sense when we learned the identity of Willie Randolph,
Speaker 1: when we investigated his background, when we learned the history
Speaker 1: of abusing and sexually assaulting women, including young women, teenagers,
Speaker 1: we thought this case was over. We thought we were
Speaker 1: going to get these boys out tomorrow. Exactly, there's no
Speaker 1: relationship at all between Willie Randolph and any of the
Speaker 1: Dicks more five. He's not mentioned in any of their confessions.
Speaker 1: And why would there be a relationship. This is a
Speaker 1: man with a long history of violence in his record,
Speaker 1: and none of these boys had a history of violence. Right,
Speaker 1: He's twice their age. When they were growing up in
Speaker 1: the neighborhood. He was in prison. Willie Randolph as the
Speaker 1: guy who did this to Katrisa Matthews. The DNA proved
Speaker 1: it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Now we had
Speaker 1: to convince the prosecutors to do the right thing. But
Speaker 1: as incredible as it sounds, the state wouldn't let go
Speaker 1: of their necrophilia theory, and the case dragged on for months.
Speaker 1: You know, old habits die hard. The state actually suggested
Speaker 1: again and maybe Willie Randolph was their mystery necrophiliac. This
Speaker 1: is an unbelievable things. Still they're clinging to this theory
Speaker 1: that five teenage boys assaulted Gatrisa Matthews, left no trace
Speaker 1: of their DNA behind, and here comes Willie Randolph, the
Speaker 1: older man, the man of the history of assaults and
Speaker 1: violent crime and rape in that very field, and just
Speaker 1: happens to defile her body. It beggars belief. It still
Speaker 1: took six to seven months to investigate whether there was
Speaker 1: any link between Willie Randolph and any of the dicks
Speaker 1: more five, there wasn't one. Meanwhile, we were coming back
Speaker 1: to court every few weeks to get an update on
Speaker 1: the state's investigation and to ask the judge is today
Speaker 1: the day of exoneration? And for six long months we
Speaker 1: were disappointed. I remember coming home after those court dates
Speaker 1: and crying with frustration that I was able to go
Speaker 1: home Robert Taylor, our clients had to go back to
Speaker 1: a prison cell. Yeah, I remember pulling out my hair
Speaker 1: and I had hair back. That's where it all went.
Speaker 1: That's where it all went because we had the best
Speaker 1: possible evidence of their innocence, and not only were they
Speaker 1: refusing to clear our clients, Willie Randolph was on the street.
Speaker 1: He was out of prison on parole, and he could
Speaker 1: be doing this to somebody else. It was driving me
Speaker 1: crazy every time before we walked into that courtroom, I
Speaker 1: remember watching Roberts hold his whole body just just taught.
Speaker 1: His muscles would be tense, and you could see those
Speaker 1: twenty years of trauma that he had endured and the
Speaker 1: toll it had taken on him. He couldn't relax into
Speaker 1: the possibility that it was going to be his day
Speaker 1: that day, and it wasn't his day for months until
Speaker 1: it finally was November three, two thousand eleven, Robert Veale,
Speaker 1: Cheyenne Sharp, James Harden, Jonathan Barr, and Robert Taylor were exonerated.
Speaker 1: Their convictions were thrown out. Nearly twenty years to the
Speaker 1: day after Catresa matthews disappearance. The Dicks Moore five had
Speaker 1: wrongly served a total of more than fifty years in prison. Eventually,
Speaker 1: Willie Randolph was charged with the attack on Catresa Matthews
Speaker 1: based on DNA evidence. He's still awaiting trial today. We're
Speaker 1: proud to have helped free the Dicksmore five, but as
Speaker 1: our colleague Josh Tepford put it, this is not justice.
Speaker 1: Justice would have happened a long time ago. Hey, Robert, Stephen, Laura,
Speaker 1: good to hear your voice. What's going on with you
Speaker 1: these days, Roberts, I'm hanging in Now. How's your son doing?
Speaker 1: He's all right, I got you got to pick him
Speaker 1: up the school. Yeah, every day. Say what's your favorite
Speaker 1: thing to do with your son? Robert. You can't give
Speaker 1: those twenty years back to Robert, or to any of
Speaker 1: the Dicks more five or any of the guys were
Speaker 1: going to talk about on this podcast. You can't give
Speaker 1: that time back. But what you can do is make
Speaker 1: the years decades that they lost means something. One of
Speaker 1: the greatest tragedies in my opinion, and I've been teaching
Speaker 1: about the Central Park five case for years and to
Speaker 1: this day. When I introduced the case in my criminal
Speaker 1: law classes. The one thing that people don't know about
Speaker 1: the case is that the kids were innocent, so few
Speaker 1: people knew that, even after Matthias Reus confessed, even after
Speaker 1: these kids were let out of prison, even after they
Speaker 1: were compensated. It is the footnote in this story that
Speaker 1: gets lost in our collective consciousness. Maybe not anymore. Finally,
Speaker 1: there's attention being brought to who they actually were in
Speaker 1: what they suffered, and that's a big part of how
Speaker 1: Steve and I approach these cases. Right. It's about, of
Speaker 1: course getting them out of prison, fighting for them, opening
Speaker 1: up those doors, but it's also about telling the stories.
Speaker 1: It's about making it meaningful. It's about saying their name.
Speaker 1: It's about not forgetting what happened to them and changing
Speaker 1: it so it doesn't happen again. Like the Central Park five,
Speaker 1: the story of the Dicks Moore five is about convictions
Speaker 1: that were driven by prejudice rather than proof. But the
Speaker 1: injustices of the super Predator era were not just a
Speaker 1: New York City thing or a Chicago thing, and although
Speaker 1: we may want to think so, they're not even really
Speaker 1: a ninety nineties thing. In times of great fear or
Speaker 1: moral panic, prejudices can distort the search for the truth.
Speaker 1: Mistaken assumptions, faulty investigations, and flawed evidence are all still real,
Speaker 1: and they still cause wrongful convictions across the country. Every day.
Speaker 1: We tell these stories so that we can learn from them,
Speaker 1: so that one day there won't be any more Dicks.
Speaker 1: Moore fives to all the Dick's more five, but especially
Speaker 1: to our client and friend, Robert Taylor. You've endured years
Speaker 1: of injustice while remaining a pillar of strength and resilience.
Speaker 1: To you and your families, we wish you all the best.
Speaker 1: Thanks for letting us tell your story. Next week we'll
Speaker 1: tell you the story of a false confession out of Arkansas,
Speaker 1: or a twelve year old boy maintains his innocence in
Speaker 1: a murder case until police turn off the cameras. Wrongful Conviction,
Speaker 1: False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
Speaker 1: in association with Signal Company Number One. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: our executive producer Jason Flom and the team at Signal
Speaker 1: Company Number one Executive producer Kevin Wardace, Senior Producer and Pope,
Speaker 1: and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Our music
Speaker 1: was composed by j Ralph. You can follow me on
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