Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to a special episode of the War on Drugs,
Speaker 1: and we cooked up something really special for you guys today.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's a lot different than our previous episodes and I'm
Speaker 3: excited to kick this off. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Since we've concluded our last episode, me and Greg have met.
Speaker 5: Up in Atlanta, Clayton's hometown with a few of.
Speaker 1: Our fellow hosts from the Love of a Good podcast,
Speaker 1: you know, Jason Flohm from Wrongful Convictions, Gilbert King from
Speaker 1: Bone Valley.
Speaker 3: We all got together the iHeartMedia Offices and we did
Speaker 3: a live panel discussion along with our friends from the Stuff
Speaker 3: They Don't Want You To Know podcasts, Matthew, Frederick Van Bolan,
Speaker 3: Noel Brown.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I mean, as you can imagine, you get
Speaker 1: three four podcasts together, it's gonna be a lot of talking.
Speaker 6: It was really cool.
Speaker 3: We dug deep in kind of the intersection of the
Speaker 3: War on Drugs, Wrongful Convictions, and the criminal legal system
Speaker 3: at large, and we really figured out that there was
Speaker 3: a lot of synergy between our podcasts and got all
Speaker 3: gussied up, had a live audience. We had a lot
Speaker 3: to talk about it. It was an amaz time.
Speaker 6: No, it was dope.
Speaker 1: It was like Avengers team up a podcasts and we
Speaker 1: recorded the whole thing so then we could listen to
Speaker 1: it with all of you and with the listeners of
Speaker 1: Wrongful Convictions, Bone Valley and stuff.
Speaker 6: They don't want you to know podcasts.
Speaker 3: So much, Sadie Eye to Blast.
Speaker 6: Yeah, man, give it a listen. We hope you all
Speaker 6: enjoy it. Yeah, take care of y'all.
Speaker 7: Hello everyone, thank you so much for joining us tonight
Speaker 7: for this very very important conversation. It's presented by Lava
Speaker 7: for Good and iHeart Podcasts. We are here in the
Speaker 7: brand new iHeart Podcast Studios in Atlanta, Georgia to have
Speaker 7: this conversation. This is a multi podcast live event. We're
Speaker 7: gonna be speaking with some very important people and I
Speaker 7: just can't wait for you to hear. It's a conversation
Speaker 7: we're gonna have tonight about a decade's long war against
Speaker 7: a concept drugs, and it's about how that how that war,
Speaker 7: how the attempts to win that war corrupted and completely
Speaker 7: broke a legal system, and how that broken system affects
Speaker 7: the lives, the livelihoods, and the futures of everyone who's
Speaker 7: made to go through that system. So, without further Ado,
Speaker 7: I'm just gonna have our panelists come on out join
Speaker 7: us on stage and begin the conversation.
Speaker 4: Hey everyone, where are the guys from earlier?
Speaker 8: Thanks so much for coming. We're very excited.
Speaker 4: This is a truly unique collaboration with Lava for Good
Speaker 4: and iHeartMedia, and as our pal Matt mentioned, Noel Brown
Speaker 4: and me Ben Bollen, we host the show called Stuff
Speaker 4: They Don't Want You To Know, and today we're bringing
Speaker 4: together like an endgame Assembler's Avengers level assembly of some
Speaker 4: of the greatest minds in.
Speaker 8: The world of criminal justice reform and in the world
Speaker 8: of the war.
Speaker 4: On drugs, which affects every single one of us, regardless
Speaker 4: of circumstance. So we've got some great minds on stage here.
Speaker 4: Let's go ahead and start by introducing our guest. First directly,
Speaker 4: here we have Jason Flam. Jason, you are the creator
Speaker 4: and host of Wrongful Convictions. Additionally, you are a prominent
Speaker 4: criminal justice reform advocate. You are a founding board member
Speaker 4: of the Innocence Project, and wrong Bulk Convictions dives deep
Speaker 4: into some harrowing accounts of what happens when the justice
Speaker 4: system goes awry, or some would say works by Design right,
Speaker 4: and we just want to thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for having me. It's an honor to
Speaker 2: be here.
Speaker 9: I love being at iHeart such a great company, great place,
Speaker 9: and really excited to share some of these stories with
Speaker 9: your audience and get people.
Speaker 2: Better informed and more get them anger.
Speaker 9: Honestly, I want people to get angry and get involved,
Speaker 9: and that's what we're here for. And so, like I said,
Speaker 9: being out on your platform with your audience, it's really
Speaker 9: it's really exciting.
Speaker 10: Well, also here to help us a little bit with
Speaker 10: that informed anger that I think we're all going to
Speaker 10: participate in is Pulitzer Prize winning author Gilbert King.
Speaker 5: In addition, if that weren't.
Speaker 10: Enough being a Pulitzer Prize winning author, he's also the
Speaker 10: creator and the host of the Ambi Award, which is
Speaker 10: the thing they give out for podcasts now the Ambient
Speaker 10: Award winning podcast Bone Valley.
Speaker 5: In addition to being a.
Speaker 10: Prolific author and incredibly tenacious researcher, King's work on his
Speaker 10: book Devil in the Grove actually led to the exonerations
Speaker 10: of the wrongly accused men known as the Groveland Four.
Speaker 10: The podcast Bone Valley brings that same level of investigative
Speaker 10: rigor to the story of Leon Schofield.
Speaker 8: So, Gilbert, thank you so much for pleasure to be here.
Speaker 11: I'm really looking forward to joining this very promising and
Speaker 11: talented group of parents.
Speaker 8: And rounding out our experts.
Speaker 4: Today we have Clayton English and Greg glad Now, you
Speaker 4: guys are the co host and creators of the podcast called.
Speaker 8: The War on Drugs. War on Drugs.
Speaker 4: No, Clayton, A lot of people in the audience doubtlessly
Speaker 4: recognize you today. You are a prolific stand up comic,
Speaker 4: an actor, a writer, and you in your material you
Speaker 4: deal pretty often with concepts of the War on drugs
Speaker 4: and I think connect with people in a way that
Speaker 4: is entertaining but also powerful and educational. And so when
Speaker 4: when you and Greg joined up. But Greg, you are
Speaker 4: a huge criminal justice reform advocate. You are in the
Speaker 4: trenches working to refocus the legal system right to repurpose
Speaker 4: it as We're.
Speaker 8: Going to talk a lot about what that means.
Speaker 4: But we just want to thank you guys for coming
Speaker 4: on the show today as well.
Speaker 6: Oh thanks for having me. I appreciate it that intro
Speaker 6: was a little too good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they passed.
Speaker 8: Interesting, No stress just be perfect.
Speaker 3: Like how they didn't sit us next to each other too.
Speaker 3: I think it's like when the two kids in.
Speaker 5: The class had to separate.
Speaker 8: Yeah, no, it's better that way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we just didn't have in the budget. But but okay,
Speaker 4: so let's let's get into it right because we have
Speaker 4: a lot of stuff in our minds. It seems that
Speaker 4: no matter where you come from, no matter who you are,
Speaker 4: no matter what your personal feelings are, like, virtually everyone
Speaker 4: can agree that the US justice system has some serious issues.
Speaker 4: Like right now, as of January twenty twenty three, the
Speaker 4: US incarceration rate is one of the highest in the world.
Speaker 4: Right We're talking five hundred and five people incarcerated per
Speaker 4: one hundred thousand, and one of the big questions a
Speaker 4: lot of people have from the outside looking in without
Speaker 4: your expertise, is how did the US find itself in
Speaker 4: this situation? And Jason, is something you talked about quite
Speaker 4: a bit on wrongful conviction.
Speaker 8: Let's start with you. What's your take.
Speaker 9: Here, Well, we are the most incarcerated nation in the
Speaker 9: history of the world, and we lock our own citizens
Speaker 9: up at five times the rate of Western Europe, fourteen
Speaker 9: times the rate of Japan, we lock our black residents
Speaker 9: of America, black citis of America up at a rate
Speaker 9: that is higher per capita in South Africa during apartheid.
Speaker 2: So just sit on that for a second.
Speaker 9: Right, We have not too many statistics, I promise because
Speaker 9: this is not a college course, but we have twenty
Speaker 9: five percent of the world's prison population while we only
Speaker 9: have four point four percent of the overall population of
Speaker 9: the world.
Speaker 2: So that's crazy. But we also have thirty.
Speaker 9: Three percent of the world's female are in cells right
Speaker 9: now while we're sitting here. They're sitting in steel and
Speaker 9: concrete cages in the United States. So one out of
Speaker 9: every three women in the world in prison right now
Speaker 9: is in America. And America is not that big of
Speaker 9: a country when you think about it, right It's like
Speaker 9: I said, we're only like between four and five percent
Speaker 9: of the world's population. So it's it has a lot
Speaker 9: to do with the War on drugs, mandatory sentencing. I mean,
Speaker 9: we're going to get into it, but it's it's got
Speaker 9: to change. It doesn't make us safer, it actually makes
Speaker 9: us less safe. It's a failure across the board. It's
Speaker 9: a human rights disaster, and for some reason we feel
Speaker 9: inured to this idea that we're just going to treat
Speaker 9: our own people in such a barbaric way.
Speaker 2: But it's happening right now and it's we got to
Speaker 2: bring it out into the light. So that's what we're
Speaker 2: here for.
Speaker 4: Do you feel just a follow up here for the group,
Speaker 4: do you guys feel that this has been normalized in
Speaker 4: US society? And those those statistics are pretty shocking when
Speaker 4: you hear them, just.
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, it's definitely like everybody. Most people think that
Speaker 1: if you in jail, you're supposed to be there. Like
Speaker 1: we we were talking about how people look at court
Speaker 1: shows now like uh, the CSI's and the law and orders.
Speaker 1: They think anybody that's in that box getting questioned is guilty.
Speaker 1: So I think a lot of things are just people
Speaker 1: don't care to realize if it's not affecting you, if
Speaker 1: you don't have anybody close to you, that it's going
Speaker 1: through these things, and you think, okay, well, and then
Speaker 1: we vilify people on the news and the media makes
Speaker 1: things seem like, Okay, this is what's going on, this
Speaker 1: is why it's this way. People just accept it, But
Speaker 1: when you really look at it, and then we see
Speaker 1: it now things are starting to hit home for people,
Speaker 1: and you know, the suburb things that you would just
Speaker 1: look at, Oh well that only happens in the inner city,
Speaker 1: that only happens in urban areas. Now it's reaching you
Speaker 1: and now you're like, oh, okay, well maybe people need rehab,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 6: Maybe it's not you.
Speaker 1: Know, beat it out of 'em or put 'em in
Speaker 1: jail or you know.
Speaker 6: So yeah, that's just kind.
Speaker 10: Of I think you have on something really interesting talking
Speaker 10: about the cop shows and like the normalization you know
Speaker 10: who loves those cop shows cops because it's sort of
Speaker 10: this like fantasy world of like how the system operates,
Speaker 10: like in its best light that could possibly be and
Speaker 10: I've heard it called copagaina yeah, if there was a
Speaker 10: piece on it that I think we talked about on
Speaker 10: the podcast not too long ago, but to that point
Speaker 10: about perception, you know, on stuff that I want you
Speaker 10: to know. We hear from a lot of listeners who
Speaker 10: have various opinions on you know, the brokenness of the
Speaker 10: legal justice system, but they're all coming from kind of
Speaker 10: anecdotal places, places of like you know, observations based on
Speaker 10: someone they know or a story they've heard, and you
Speaker 10: don't always get it right when you're just looking at
Speaker 10: it from one side, and you know, you might have
Speaker 10: a piece of the puzzle, but you're not going to
Speaker 10: see the kind of holistic view of it. Greg, can
Speaker 10: you talk a little bit about, you know, what the
Speaker 10: average person needs to understand about the large some of
Speaker 10: the large and that's a very big question, but some
Speaker 10: of the larger rations at play here that maybe you're
Speaker 10: not going to get from just having a kind of
Speaker 10: anecdote or experiential you know, opinion on the brokenness of
Speaker 10: the legal system.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think one of the things that we need
Speaker 3: to know is that the criminal justice system is one
Speaker 3: of the is where the more they fail, the bigger
Speaker 3: they get to be, and they're actually used their failures
Speaker 3: to justify expanding So, you know, I see, like what happened,
Speaker 3: you know, after COVID, We saw you know, significant rise
Speaker 3: of violent crime. We saw you know, overdoses skyrocket into
Speaker 3: you know, the hundreds of thousands in the United States,
Speaker 3: and now lawmakers are utilizing those numbers and their failures
Speaker 3: to actually solve these problems over generations, to justify passing
Speaker 3: even tougher laws that were going to exacerbate this, So
Speaker 3: overdoses increase, Let's make penalties stronger, Let's do mandatory minimums
Speaker 3: for that violent crime is going up, Let's increase the penalties.
Speaker 2: It's like the penalties are already high. Guys, like, this
Speaker 2: is not working.
Speaker 3: And so you actually see a system that the more
Speaker 3: it fails, the more they're able to justify those failings
Speaker 3: with getting bigger. And I think that's something that we
Speaker 3: need to kind of like step back and look at
Speaker 3: it and go, guys, we've been doing this for how
Speaker 3: long on this drug war and drugs are getting stronger,
Speaker 3: they're getting cheaper, they're more prevalent, more people are dying.
Speaker 3: What metric are you describing that says success right now?
Speaker 3: But it's up to us. We need to vote, we
Speaker 3: need to talk, we need to get our voices out
Speaker 3: there as much as possible. And so, yeah, I think
Speaker 3: that's kind of an area that we need to start
Speaker 3: talking about, like what are you succeeding at?
Speaker 2: And it really is nothing Gilbert, and.
Speaker 10: Your investigations are anything that you'd like to add to
Speaker 10: this sort of the holistic view of what might be
Speaker 10: wrong and why people can understand that better.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I mean, I think we're sitting up here because
Speaker 11: of false narratives. False narratives have carried the day, whether
Speaker 11: it's war on drugs or whether it's these criminal justice cases,
Speaker 11: wrongful convictions.
Speaker 12: You know, I'll give you an example.
Speaker 11: I don't get into statistics, but in Florida, since the
Speaker 11: Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, I think one hundred
Speaker 11: people have been executed in the state of Florida. In
Speaker 11: that same time period, thirty one people sentenced to death
Speaker 11: row convicted sentence to death row have been fully exonerated
Speaker 11: by DNA. That means the wrong person was sentenced to death. Now,
Speaker 11: these are death penalty cases where you have a lot
Speaker 11: of eyes on these cases. These aren't just run of
Speaker 11: the mill felonies somewhere. This is one where the appellate
Speaker 11: process and the lawyering that happens around these cases is
Speaker 11: pretty extensive.
Speaker 12: And yet we're still getting it wrong that often. That
Speaker 12: tells you there's a serious problem.
Speaker 4: Let's go let's stay with you here for a second, because,
Speaker 4: as we said earlier, your work has done something powerful.
Speaker 4: It's led to exonerations, and it's due to the efforts
Speaker 4: and time you put in as a civilian, you know,
Speaker 4: not working in law enforcement yourself. What are some of
Speaker 4: your first hand observations. And this is very timely right
Speaker 4: now because the subject of Bone Valley is up for
Speaker 4: parole in just a few days, correct.
Speaker 11: Right, third big parole hearing. This will be his fourth
Speaker 11: parole hearing. Then, you know, this is the thing. He's
Speaker 11: served thirty five years in prison already on a twenty
Speaker 11: five to life.
Speaker 12: Sentence model inmate.
Speaker 11: But the reason that he's still being denied parole is
Speaker 11: because he refuses to admit and express remorse for a
Speaker 11: crime that he didn't commit.
Speaker 12: So that's being held against him.
Speaker 11: And he's been standing on a claim of innocence ever
Speaker 11: since he was arrested, and that's being used against him
Speaker 11: every step of the way he was This is I'm
Speaker 11: talking about a man named Leo Schofield who, after he
Speaker 11: was arrested.
Speaker 12: Didn't look like there was much of a case.
Speaker 11: The prosecutor came and offered him second degree murder, which
Speaker 11: in Florida at the time it would have been a
Speaker 11: twelve to seventeen year sentence.
Speaker 12: He would have probably served of those of that time
Speaker 12: three and a half years if he would admit it
Speaker 12: to it. Instead, he just chose to face.
Speaker 11: The death penalty because he was innocent and he was
Speaker 11: not going to take this plea because he felt it
Speaker 11: would dishonor his wife he was accused of killing, and
Speaker 11: so he did not take that plea and he's been
Speaker 11: in prison for thirty five years, and so this claim
Speaker 11: of innocence has been hurting his case.
Speaker 12: That shouldn't be the.
Speaker 5: Case, you know, a hundred percent Clayton.
Speaker 10: In your work, you know, you found kind of a
Speaker 10: universality or sort of a shared experience in your audience.
Speaker 10: And when you explore the war on drugs in particular,
Speaker 10: what kind of prompted you to explore that topic and
Speaker 10: explore that universality and the idea of the war on
Speaker 10: drugs quote unquote sort of affecting more than just the
Speaker 10: people who are being targeted or the people who are
Speaker 10: getting convicted. It's really a cultural kind of phenomenon and
Speaker 10: it's changed sort of attitudes, you know, in this country.
Speaker 1: Because I was getting harassed and I go to jail
Speaker 1: and then I did comedy and the only way to
Speaker 1: kind of deal with it was to talk about it.
Speaker 1: And I would just look at the hypocrisy of what
Speaker 1: happens sometimes, and I would bring up situations and just
Speaker 1: really realize, it's not about these drugs that are available.
Speaker 1: It's about it's not a world or walled people. You're
Speaker 1: the people are the ones getting crushed by the families
Speaker 1: getting messed up if you go to jail, like I'm
Speaker 1: and now that I'm able to talk to police and
Speaker 1: hear what they actually say, Like they have a saying
Speaker 1: you might beat the rat, but you're not gonna beat
Speaker 1: the ride, which is okay, cool, it might not go
Speaker 1: on to jail, but this night is over for you,
Speaker 1: probably gonna mess up you trying to go to work tomorrow,
Speaker 1: probably gonna lead to you getting fired. Now you can't pay.
Speaker 1: So it's an effect of you're saying you're trying to
Speaker 1: get drugs off the street, but if you didn't get
Speaker 1: them in a shipment that was in the tons, what
Speaker 1: is it doing when you got twenty dollars worth of
Speaker 1: weed from this person on the street or just things
Speaker 1: like that.
Speaker 6: And I've and like.
Speaker 1: You know, I mean, I joke about stuff, but it
Speaker 1: was things I was actually doing. Like I would be like,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to jail for weed. I don't keep
Speaker 1: more than I can eat on me. I see the
Speaker 1: police lights, I'm eating a whole blood sometimes and it's
Speaker 1: not even the police, it's a taxi. So you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, Like now, I don't know when I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be hi. But that was like that was like
Speaker 1: situations that actually happened, and then like I just take
Speaker 1: it to the stage because it I know that it's
Speaker 1: going to connect with people, because if you smoke, when
Speaker 1: you've been in that situation where you were high and
Speaker 1: you get pulled over and you're not high anymore.
Speaker 10: It's like such a low barrier of entry to getting
Speaker 10: you into the system, you know, and like then you're
Speaker 10: in the system, whether you did something egregious or something laughably,
Speaker 10: you know, minor, you're in it.
Speaker 5: And then you have to pay your way out of it.
Speaker 5: And maybe you can't afford to pay your.
Speaker 10: Way out of it, and maybe then it's sort of
Speaker 10: bankrupting you and causing problems with your family and leading
Speaker 10: to additional problems.
Speaker 4: But yeah, that's like that's a question that I think
Speaker 4: needs to occur more often for a lot of people.
Speaker 4: It's there is a victimization of people who are already
Speaker 4: disadvantaged and then demands placed upon them that would typically
Speaker 4: depend on privilege, right, Like who who gets arrested for
Speaker 4: twenty dollars worth of weed and then instantly has a lawyer?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 4: Not a lot of people. And this leads us something interesting.
Speaker 4: This one is for Greg. We'll start with you and
Speaker 4: then we'll go to the group. You mentioned something that
Speaker 4: I know you guys talk about a lot of more
Speaker 4: on drugs, which is the perception of the uptick.
Speaker 12: And violent crime.
Speaker 4: Right, And we hear this cyclically like throughout the years
Speaker 4: that there's an uptick and violent crime.
Speaker 8: Something must be done.
Speaker 4: We all agree there's a problem, no one agrees how
Speaker 4: to fix it. And you guys, Clayton, Greg, you guys
Speaker 4: have talked a lot about what solutions are. And Jason
Speaker 4: you've done this as well, like ineffective versus effective solutions?
Speaker 4: What does that mean to someone on the outside? How
Speaker 4: do you How does that play out in the real world?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, our response always is that sledgehammer on
Speaker 3: the back end that we want to increase penalties and
Speaker 3: we want to you know, really show you up, get
Speaker 3: that pound of flesh. And that's what gets your electorate happy.
Speaker 3: That's why people want to move that.
Speaker 4: It's like the stance of typical legislators.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, yeah, and so yeah, so you want to
Speaker 3: pass all these different laws and exacerbate these and you
Speaker 3: want to put police in these situations where they have
Speaker 3: to you know, arrest people and really get the arrest
Speaker 3: numbers up on drug crimes. I know, like I grew,
Speaker 3: I lived in Baltimore for a while and it was
Speaker 3: during kind of the o'maley times.
Speaker 2: That was a big thing.
Speaker 3: Let's increase the arrest that's going to show that we're
Speaker 3: really tough on it. Then you start thinking about it,
Speaker 3: and so you know you're saying, wow, we don't have
Speaker 3: enough police. Okay, so now you're wasting a bunch of
Speaker 3: time utilizing your police department to you know, essentially harass
Speaker 3: a bunch of people, like in the inner city to
Speaker 3: just get arrests on there. So that's taking a cop
Speaker 3: off the street. Now, that's putting that person in a
Speaker 3: worse position. And then they start becoming these habitual offenders
Speaker 3: because they have a bunch of drug arrests and things
Speaker 3: like that.
Speaker 2: And so that's the issue.
Speaker 3: So we always go on this back end or pound
Speaker 3: of flesh aspects instead of actually looking at what the
Speaker 3: root causes are and when you have something like COVID happen,
Speaker 3: or in two thousand and eight when the housing crisis happened,
Speaker 3: we saw both those situations where crime went up and
Speaker 3: also drug use grow significantly. It kind of really shows
Speaker 3: the rot of the foundation of our criminal justice system,
Speaker 3: how little we've invested in these other things, like the
Speaker 3: front end community servicing programs or addiction treatment especially. We
Speaker 3: have such a lack of knowledge societally and from a
Speaker 3: government standpoint about what addiction is and how to actually
Speaker 3: solve it. We addiction is so much about your social situation,
Speaker 3: that things going around you and losing those connections and
Speaker 3: trying to find that kind of fill something with that whole.
Speaker 3: And so then we throw people into a steel cage
Speaker 3: and tell them to get better. What do you think
Speaker 3: is going to happen to these people? And so this
Speaker 3: is what we continually do. And so this lack of
Speaker 3: front ends I think treatment, removing this from the criminal
Speaker 3: justice system, putting it as a healthcare issue, those are
Speaker 3: things that actually solve it. You know, it's kind of
Speaker 3: it's maddening when you know, we would talk to someone
Speaker 3: Johann Hari, we talked on the podcast It's great authors
Speaker 3: talk about what they've done in Switzerland and these amazing
Speaker 3: things and how crime and violent crime went down because
Speaker 3: you know, a lot of crime is really drug related
Speaker 3: from like the fundraising mechanisms to try to get a
Speaker 3: two hundred dollars heroin at it. We don't have a
Speaker 3: job all the things that come from that and all
Speaker 3: like kind of the turf wars and things like that
Speaker 3: that happen, and we talk about crime and crime and
Speaker 3: violent crime and there's ways to solve it, and we it's
Speaker 3: just not politically popular, so we don't care, and so.
Speaker 2: It's a little we ever. Yeah, I'll pause there and yeah.
Speaker 6: Sure, something of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 9: This episode is sponsored by Stand Together. Stand Together is
Speaker 9: a philanthropic community that partners with America's oldest change makers
Speaker 9: to tackle the root causes of our country's biggest problems.
Speaker 9: Like many others who experienced addiction, Scott Strode was using
Speaker 9: drugs and alcohol to the pain for him who was
Speaker 9: childhood trauma. In his early twenties, Scott was invited to
Speaker 9: a boxing gym by a friend and that's where he
Speaker 9: discovered the healing power of sport and community. In two
Speaker 9: thousand and six, Scott founded The Phoenix, a free, sober,
Speaker 9: active community that uses the transformative power of sport to
Speaker 9: help people treat and heal from addiction. Scott Strode is
Speaker 9: one of many entrepreneurs partnering with Stand Together to drive
Speaker 9: solutions in education, healthcare, poverty, and criminal justice. To learn more,
Speaker 9: is it Standogether dot org. Hi, I'm Jason Flamm, CEO
Speaker 9: and founder of Lava for Good podcasts, Home to Bone Valley,
Speaker 9: Wrongful Conviction, The War on Drugs, and many other great podcasts.
Speaker 9: Today we're asking you, our listeners, to take part in
Speaker 9: a survey. Your feedback is going to help inform how
Speaker 9: we make podcasts in the future. Your complete and candid
Speaker 9: answers will help us continue to bring you more insightful
Speaker 9: and inspiring stories about important topics that impact us all.
Speaker 9: So please go to Lava for Good dot com slash
Speaker 9: survey and participate today.
Speaker 2: Thank you for your support.
Speaker 4: We know that nothing occurs in a vacuum, and one
Speaker 4: of the things that Noel and Matt and I have
Speaker 4: explored in our years on our show is the systemic issues,
Speaker 4: the problem of the connective tissue and identifying that, and
Speaker 4: that's one of the things that we wanted to ask
Speaker 4: you guys about, what is the connective tissue between.
Speaker 8: War on drugs and wrongful conviction.
Speaker 4: How does the situation in one exacerbate, feed or create
Speaker 4: a feedback loop into the other, because it sure seems
Speaker 4: like a change in one reflects a change in the second.
Speaker 1: I'll give it to Red after this because he knows
Speaker 1: all the details and stuff, But for me just to see,
Speaker 1: like our Edwin Ruber's episode, we saw somebody that was
Speaker 1: in jail for drugs that did not get caught with drugs.
Speaker 1: And I think most people don't think that. They don't
Speaker 1: realize that there's people in jail for kilos of cocaine
Speaker 1: that they never had, never got caught in their possession,
Speaker 1: never had video footage of, never been seen with it,
Speaker 1: because because somebody in whatever organization they in entered into
Speaker 1: a deal with the with the Feds, and they take
Speaker 1: this person's.
Speaker 6: Word for whatever they say.
Speaker 1: So it's essentially somebody higher up that knows how the
Speaker 1: system works, using somebody as a pawn. And this guy
Speaker 1: didn't have a gun. He got a gun charge because
Speaker 1: they said that he didn't have any drugs in his house.
Speaker 1: He got charged with trafficking when it was.
Speaker 5: There's no checks and balances on stuff like that.
Speaker 12: How does that happen?
Speaker 6: Well, they take go ahead, Greg. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, I mean all these laws that we passed that
Speaker 3: are for the guys of public safety, mandatory minimums, conspiracy charges,
Speaker 3: truth and sentencing, all these things, they're all to make
Speaker 3: the system move faster and quicker and more efficient. And
Speaker 3: it all gets back to terrible incentives that we have
Speaker 3: because the more convictions that prosecutors get, that's the way.
Speaker 2: That they rise up.
Speaker 3: The more arrest that cops are able to get and
Speaker 3: get those convictions on there, that's how you rise up
Speaker 3: on this wants to be a good soldier. Grants from
Speaker 3: the federal government, a lot of them are based upon
Speaker 3: the amount of arrests that you're getting and the amount
Speaker 3: of drugs that you're coming in through there. And so
Speaker 3: it's all these horrible ascents that are under the guys of
Speaker 3: public safety. So conspiracy charges are absolutely terrible.
Speaker 2: We call it ghost dope.
Speaker 3: So Edwin Rubis was literally charged with thirty nine hundred
Speaker 3: kilos that were never discovered. A guy higher than him,
Speaker 3: and that more money was able to say that guy
Speaker 3: had it on him and then he's able to get
Speaker 3: it because there needs to be a body because you
Speaker 3: charge this much, you arrested someone doesn't really matter who
Speaker 3: goes down for this, like someone needs to because I
Speaker 3: need a conviction that we just move forward.
Speaker 2: So what happens all the time.
Speaker 3: That's where I see kind of that connection between what
Speaker 3: you do and you know, you talked about it earlier,
Speaker 3: were talking about death penalty cases where there are multiple procedures,
Speaker 3: tons of attorneys, all these evidence, all these definitely rules
Speaker 3: of procedure, and they screwed up how often with these
Speaker 3: let alone, you're run of the mill drug case or this,
Speaker 3: and so it's this massive every court system and every
Speaker 3: you ever sit in a court, it's all trioge.
Speaker 2: They're just triosh.
Speaker 3: And there's a public defender that just met you three
Speaker 3: minutes ago, looking through your case file and wants you
Speaker 3: just to plee out because he wants to get through
Speaker 3: this case because he has four hundred a year. There's
Speaker 3: a prosecute that's being overworked and has like two hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty cases a year and he wants these to
Speaker 3: move through.
Speaker 8: There's a judge that wants to get back and.
Speaker 3: Have cocktails at the the whatever club with his buddies,
Speaker 3: or on going to his golf Git. They need to
Speaker 3: move these through. No one wants you to actually go
Speaker 3: to trial. And when you do, man, are they going
Speaker 3: to come at you? Edwin went to trial. Edwin said,
Speaker 3: I didn't do anything that they're telling me of. There's
Speaker 3: no physical evidence. We when everyone's out of prison and
Speaker 3: you're going to be in there until at least twenty
Speaker 3: thirty three, this is how it goes. They punish you
Speaker 3: for exercising your right. So everything actually works as planned,
Speaker 3: and this is where you get those cloud our consequences
Speaker 3: of wrongful convictions where people are actually innocent or you
Speaker 3: just get hammered with it even if you've done something
Speaker 3: wrong by the letter of the law. And so it
Speaker 3: works exactly how it's supposed to. And the war on
Speaker 3: drugs is really exacerbate all this because of the massive
Speaker 3: amount of people that are just filing through our criminal
Speaker 3: justice system.
Speaker 9: And I think one more point on the police and
Speaker 9: the war on drugs and how that all plays out.
Speaker 9: It's important for people to recognize that in the past
Speaker 9: forty years Ish police have arrested they've made more pot
Speaker 9: arrest they've arrested more people for pot than all violent
Speaker 9: crimes combined.
Speaker 2: So when we think about it, and.
Speaker 9: This goes back to your question and how these two
Speaker 9: worlds collide, right, Wrongful convictions happen as frequently as they do,
Speaker 9: and they happen a lot. If you don't think it
Speaker 9: can happen to you, it can definitely happen to you.
Speaker 9: The fact is that because the system has created this churn, right,
Speaker 9: eleven million people going in and out of jail in
Speaker 9: America every year, and because it's some of the things
Speaker 9: that Greg just highlighted, you have a system that doesn't
Speaker 9: have time to worry about whether you actually did the
Speaker 9: crime or not. They have a saying in police and
Speaker 9: prosecutors offices, a body for a body, right, and this
Speaker 9: is just on murder cases, right, But there's a body,
Speaker 9: there's a dead body. They got to get it cleaned up.
Speaker 9: Especially if it's a smaller town, high profile case. You know,
Speaker 9: they got to clean it up. There's a lot of pressure.
Speaker 9: They got somebody, it doesn't matter, and then they get
Speaker 9: this tunnel vision. They start ignoring obvious signs that it
Speaker 9: wasn't the person that they're targeting, and they for reasons
Speaker 9: conscious and subconscious. They shut all that out and they
Speaker 9: just laser focus on the person who they've got in
Speaker 9: their sights, and that person goes down for the crime.
Speaker 9: They're probably poor, they're probably underrepresented, they're probably, as you said,
Speaker 9: represented by it. You know, in New Orleans public defenders
Speaker 9: are representing four hundred people for cases a year, right,
Speaker 9: and courts are closed on the weekends. I mean, I'm
Speaker 9: not a mathematician. That sounds like at least one and
Speaker 9: a half a day, right. So you know, a guy
Speaker 9: comes in and goes, oh, yeah, what are you charged
Speaker 9: with again?
Speaker 2: What was your name? Oh no, that's the other guy. Damn.
Speaker 9: Oh oh, my phone's ringing. You know, it's like and
Speaker 9: you're going and they go, I think you should plead guilty.
Speaker 9: You don't have been willing to offer you two years,
Speaker 9: but if you go to trial, he might hit you
Speaker 9: with We got a case we guy you actually call
Speaker 9: me named.
Speaker 2: Siah Johnson in Virginia.
Speaker 9: He was innocent and he was offered a plea of
Speaker 9: three years, turned it down, got one hundred and thirty
Speaker 9: seven years in prison. How can we say you're so
Speaker 9: dangerous that you have to be in prison for two
Speaker 9: life times. But also you're not that dangerous because three
Speaker 9: years of school, just like they did with Leo. Right,
Speaker 9: you're so dangerous, we're going to send you to death.
Speaker 9: When I said, well, it actually got life right. But
Speaker 9: the fact is we're going to threaten you with death.
Speaker 2: The life which was just a stroke of luck.
Speaker 9: Yeah, living death right, which sends you to living death,
Speaker 9: and it doesn't doesn't serve us as a society in
Speaker 9: any way. Not to mention the expense, you know, David Kim,
Speaker 9: who's right here, pointed out to me that the New
Speaker 9: York City Controller, Like, I'm going back to your city
Speaker 9: because where I'm from, But in New York City, it
Speaker 9: costs five hundred and sixty five thousand dollars a year
Speaker 9: to keep somebody in Riker's Island. At the same time,
Speaker 9: you can put them in the Ritz Carlton in a
Speaker 9: sweet you could send them with room service. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 9: Harvard to throw that in too, right into my house.
Speaker 9: That's what I'm saying, What did you do? I've stayed
Speaker 9: there to night. And at the same time you have
Speaker 9: you have organizations like Avenues for Justice that can take
Speaker 9: a kid who's experiencing their first serious interaction with the
Speaker 9: criminal legal system and take that kid and provide a
Speaker 9: holistic solution, and they are able to sometimes talk with
Speaker 9: prosecutors and judges and get them to turn the kid
Speaker 9: back over to them. They spent spent two or three
Speaker 9: years working with that kid, and the kids, ninety one
Speaker 9: percent of them, never have another interaction with the criminal
Speaker 9: justice system. They end up going to college instead of prison.
Speaker 9: So we know what works, but I don't know why
Speaker 9: we resist it so mightily. And if we were able
Speaker 9: to reduce the mass incarceration problem, then there would be
Speaker 9: time for people to actually have some of their rights
Speaker 9: and to actually we got to go back to those standards.
Speaker 9: I talk about this on the show on ronflk Bigshow
Speaker 9: all the time. We got to go back to because
Speaker 9: they're just words now, innocent until proven guilty. Everybody knows
Speaker 9: that right, everybody knows beyond a reasonable doubt. But it's
Speaker 9: out the window when you're just something to be processed.
Speaker 9: You're not a human being after you arrested. You're just
Speaker 9: somebody who needs to be processed into prison as quickly
Speaker 9: as possible so they can get to the next one.
Speaker 9: And it's I mean, that's that sounds it sounds pretty
Speaker 9: dead wrong.
Speaker 3: To me, and it is and if I can just
Speaker 3: and that's where the kind of the drug war gets
Speaker 3: on it.
Speaker 2: It really is a war.
Speaker 3: We looked so much into kind of the propaganda, and
Speaker 3: I know we all grew up in the times of
Speaker 3: like Dare and all these CBS news reports, and they
Speaker 3: made it look like they were like, you know, the
Speaker 3: villain from a war that you are fighting. And when
Speaker 3: you villainize people and you make them subhuman, you're able
Speaker 3: to do things to them like deprive them on constitutional right,
Speaker 3: send them to prison for a long time because they
Speaker 3: deserve it, because they are an enemy. And so you're
Speaker 3: able to do all these things because of this propaganda,
Speaker 3: like you said, to make them just less of a
Speaker 3: person very much.
Speaker 1: And you say it too, you always say, if it's
Speaker 1: a war, then you got to have casualty. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: what do you think the casualty is gonna be? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you mentioned it too. It mostly affects like poor people.
Speaker 1: And I have a thing I say, it's expensive being broke,
Speaker 1: like super expensive, just like even when I'm getting pulled over,
Speaker 1: it's because a lot of times it was because I
Speaker 1: had a.
Speaker 6: Rundown car tag lights out.
Speaker 1: Oh, you taped up the tag light and it would
Speaker 1: just be a reON. I would see weed be the
Speaker 1: reason for why they pulled me over. Oh we smelled marijuana.
Speaker 1: You smelled marijuana. I was going in the opposite direction
Speaker 1: you were going with both windows up. And I don't
Speaker 1: have any weed on me because I ate it already.
Speaker 6: How did you like? So?
Speaker 10: Yeah, you know, Jason, you're talking about some you know,
Speaker 10: positive things that can possibly change this system.
Speaker 5: But it sounds to me like these are generational things.
Speaker 10: These aren't These are you know, things that have to
Speaker 10: be changed through education, like of a whole other generation
Speaker 10: who will then maybe be in power.
Speaker 5: And actually enact those changes.
Speaker 10: Like can we look at a positive spin on this,
Speaker 10: Like we talk about criminal justice reform?
Speaker 5: What does that look like to all of you?
Speaker 10: And how is it as simple as just like legislation
Speaker 10: or is it a longer game than that.
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 9: We have to changed people's hearts and minds first, right,
Speaker 9: we have to change attitudes and perceptions. And you know, drugs,
Speaker 9: as we've talked about, are not the problem, right, Drugs?
Speaker 9: You know, at the Drug Policy Alliance on whose board
Speaker 9: I serve for over twenty years. We have a philosophy
Speaker 9: called harm reduction, right, which basically says, first you have
Speaker 9: to accept that drugs have always been and will always
Speaker 9: be a part of society.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 9: Cavemen did payote Little kids been around in a circle
Speaker 9: until they get dizzy because they like that feeling of
Speaker 9: being out of there, you know, like being a little goofy.
Speaker 2: Right, and you do it too, right. I say, I
Speaker 2: was a little worried, but I figured it'll be okay.
Speaker 9: But the you know, but the fact is we need
Speaker 9: to accept that and then start to say, okay, what
Speaker 9: can we do to reduce the amount of harms that
Speaker 9: drugs do to society. These guys made the great point
Speaker 9: on the War on Drugs podcast about how you can.
Speaker 2: Say one thing for the war rus. I think it
Speaker 2: was you, Clayton.
Speaker 9: We gave it a good try, right, one hundred years,
Speaker 9: a trillion dollars, and it's worse that it's ever been.
Speaker 9: I'd say, I mean, I'm not a genius, but I'd
Speaker 9: say that's a pretty great failure. And the fact is,
Speaker 9: so I think we do have to elect better, you know,
Speaker 9: people into office, right, who will you know see these
Speaker 9: changes through and the good news is. You know, when
Speaker 9: I started this, we were talking about earlier, when I
Speaker 9: started this work thirty years ago, and people are like,
Speaker 9: you're doing what like decriminalization, that's crazy mandatory sensing.
Speaker 2: What's that? I don't understand, blah blah blah.
Speaker 9: But now, but somebody put their arm around me, somebody
Speaker 9: who I thought was old and wise at the time,
Speaker 9: turns out he was and said, hey, kid, takes thirty
Speaker 9: years to change anything. And I was like, well, here
Speaker 9: it is. I was ninety three. It's thirty years later.
Speaker 9: And we you know, it used to be get cracked
Speaker 9: in the head by a cop for smoking a joint
Speaker 9: washing Square park and now you can buy it in
Speaker 9: the park, like from people who have a little booth
Speaker 9: set up right, and they got like a little rainbow
Speaker 9: flag or whatever.
Speaker 6: You Yeah, things are.
Speaker 2: Good, you know what I mean.
Speaker 9: And so and I also have to say because Clayton
Speaker 9: made that point before and growing up, I mean, I smoked.
Speaker 9: I kind of thought of myself as like the Jewish
Speaker 9: Bob Marley. I wanted to smoke as much weed as him, you.
Speaker 6: Know what I mean.
Speaker 9: And I had hair down like down hear and all
Speaker 9: the way around. I couldn't even see unless I look
Speaker 9: this way to see through the little slit in between.
Speaker 2: My hair and their style.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and I always smelled of weed and I because
Speaker 9: I started the morning, I mean half the time I
Speaker 9: was on fire, you know what I mean. And yet
Speaker 9: I never got arrested because I was white and I
Speaker 9: lived in a zip code where they didn't arrest kids
Speaker 9: like me for things like that. So that's one of
Speaker 9: the things that informs my work is that I don't
Speaker 9: like on fairness and it's totally unfair. I don't think
Speaker 9: anybody likes unfairness when they see it, but when it
Speaker 9: happens behind closed doors in police stations and prison cells
Speaker 9: and places like that, we don't see it, and we
Speaker 9: need to see it, and we need to see these
Speaker 9: people as just people. We're not perfect, you're not perfect.
Speaker 9: But I also didn't need to go to jail. I
Speaker 9: went to rehab and I ended up starting a business
Speaker 9: employing dozens of people, paying lots of taxes.
Speaker 4: This we're talking right about huge changes, shifts and paradigms,
Speaker 4: right see changes, and we your statistics constantly and we
Speaker 4: know I think the average person again will agree there's
Speaker 4: a problem, will not agree on the solutions often, and
Speaker 4: then they'll have the kind of party line. They'll say, like, oh, well,
Speaker 4: what I should do is just I should vote right,
Speaker 4: I should vote once every four years, I think, is
Speaker 4: how most people do it in the States. But when
Speaker 4: we talk about this, you know, Matt said something really
Speaker 4: beautiful earlier when he beautiful and horrifying when he said,
Speaker 4: you know this, the war on drugs affects you.
Speaker 8: And it's something I've heard all of us echo.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: It doesn't matter if you do or don't smoke weed
Speaker 4: or whatever, it somehow will affect you.
Speaker 9: Is the.
Speaker 8: Reverse of that true?
Speaker 4: Does that mean individuals can somehow affect the situation for
Speaker 4: the better? Can you affect the war on drugs? You
Speaker 4: affect wrong and full conviction as a civilian, as just
Speaker 4: a regular person like all like all of.
Speaker 1: Us, right, I didn't think you could before I did
Speaker 1: this podcast, really like, I just thought it was you know,
Speaker 1: it is what it is. You could say stuff and
Speaker 1: you could post online all you want, but it took
Speaker 1: somebody like Greg to be like, no, Like, if enough
Speaker 1: people make enough noise on this issue, then you can
Speaker 1: get the ball rolling on things. You said, what call
Speaker 1: your legislator three times.
Speaker 2: It does.
Speaker 6: People started getting it moving.
Speaker 3: It really does. Like if anyone's ever worked on the
Speaker 3: wallmaker's office, some of that. You get a couple of
Speaker 3: calls on the bill. I mean things, it goes nuts
Speaker 3: in the in the bility. They think people really care
Speaker 3: about it.
Speaker 10: You'd be surprised to know how few people actually do that.
Speaker 10: So when it happens, it's kind of alarming.
Speaker 6: It's probably my design too, Like you know what I'm saying, what's.
Speaker 5: The same with convoluted laws.
Speaker 10: I mean, like you're just not being able to drill
Speaker 10: down and fully understand. They make it that way, you know,
Speaker 10: to disempower people. But can you talk about the Eric andresuation.
Speaker 5: A little bit that you're involved in, Like I mean.
Speaker 10: That's I think a good example of like giving a
Speaker 10: megaphone to these types of injustices.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, So if you all don't know, I was.
Speaker 1: I have a lawsuit against Clayton County because I was
Speaker 1: harassed at the airport. Just try to give it to
Speaker 1: you long story short. I was go, this is past security.
Speaker 1: I'm at the airport. I'm getting on the flight to
Speaker 1: go to California. I'm getting on the jet bridge. This
Speaker 1: is the jet bridge. It kind of curves around. Two
Speaker 1: officers stop me. They don't stop anybody else. They asked me,
Speaker 1: can we search We're looking for people who have drugs
Speaker 1: and bla blah blah blah. And I'm like just trying
Speaker 1: to get on this flight, and in my head, I'm
Speaker 1: also thinking who takes drugs to Los Angeles? Like I
Speaker 1: think you need to be on the other flight when
Speaker 1: they come, because like it wouldn't make sense to me,
Speaker 1: But that later made sense. But they just, you know,
Speaker 1: doing a lot of small talk and searching. And when
Speaker 1: I got on the plane, I was thinking, Okay, they're
Speaker 1: going to come back on here and pull me off
Speaker 1: this plane. They're just waiting for everybody else to get
Speaker 1: on the flight, and then they're gonna take me to jail.
Speaker 1: I don't know what they're taking me to jail for.
Speaker 1: I didn't have anything, but I just remember thinking that,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to say something to the story this.
Speaker 1: I didn't, and I just kind of took it, took
Speaker 1: it on the chin. That's how most things happened with injustice.
Speaker 1: Are getting harassed, you just kind of ride with it.
Speaker 1: And then the same thing happened to Eric Andre. He
Speaker 1: talked about it on the Jimmy Kimmel Show, and I
Speaker 1: knew him, I've worked with him a few times, so
Speaker 1: I just reached out to him and I was like, hey,
Speaker 1: the same thing happened to me w and he was like, oh, okay.
Speaker 1: And then he reached out a few weeks later and
Speaker 1: said that he was gonna try to pursue, like l
Speaker 1: a lawsuit and if I wanted to be a part
Speaker 1: of it. And We've had other people that have joined in.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that we found was I
Speaker 1: think sixty seven percent of the people they stopped were
Speaker 1: people were like black people, and I think eighty percent
Speaker 1: were people of color.
Speaker 6: And they called it a.
Speaker 1: Drug in addiction program, and they took they stopped.
Speaker 6: They got three.
Speaker 1: Stops for drugs, ten grams of weed, a dude with
Speaker 1: some gummies, and somebody who had no uh prescription pills
Speaker 1: with no prescription And that was in eight months. But
Speaker 1: in that same eight months, they confiscated a million dollars
Speaker 1: from people getting on the plane of course. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: uh civil ascid forfeiture, yeah, which I yeah, and yeah.
Speaker 1: So basically they were taking money from people who didn't
Speaker 1: really and and it's a shakedown, cause if I wouldn't
Speaker 1: had money on me, they would have said, where'd you
Speaker 1: get this money from? We think it's drugs? Were charging
Speaker 1: the money s. Do you wanna get on this flight?
Speaker 1: You wanna argue with us, maybe go to jail, or
Speaker 1: you wanna get on this flight, then you could fly
Speaker 1: back here, get an attorney and try to figure out
Speaker 1: how to get this money back, which you won't, which
Speaker 1: you won't exactly. So yeah, what's happening now is basically
Speaker 1: they're uh, they're accusing, uh, they're saying that they're you know,
Speaker 1: there's no wrongdoing on their part, they're allowed to do it,
Speaker 1: and they're trying to get the case dismissed. But we've
Speaker 1: had more people that have joined the case and no
Speaker 1: money was taken from me or eric Andre. But now
Speaker 1: some of the people in the case are people who
Speaker 1: actually had their money seeds.
Speaker 10: You're talking about a more brazen version of what happens.
Speaker 10: And you already get put in the system in the
Speaker 10: first place, where you got to pay for those buy
Speaker 10: classes or whatever they might be. That's all third party
Speaker 10: you organizations that aren't governmental, they're just a company that's
Speaker 10: set up to take your money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think the way Atlanta Airport is set
Speaker 1: up is it's patrolled by Atlanta Police Department, but it's
Speaker 1: in Clayton County's jurisdiction. So what it looked like to
Speaker 1: me is they were just kind of using the airport
Speaker 1: as their own little piggybag and Okay, this person looks
Speaker 1: like they might have something. They were definitely profiling because
Speaker 1: they're like, Okay, who looks like they have something, And Okay,
Speaker 1: let's see if they have cash. And it was a
Speaker 1: lot of people that'd be like, well, why would someone
Speaker 1: have that much cash? And first of all, it's US currency.
Speaker 1: Second of all, this is Atlanta, this is a city.
Speaker 1: It's everything operates off cash. We got a big strip
Speaker 1: club industry, big nightlife industry. We've got I mean I
Speaker 1: get paid in.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I just think that somebody shouldn't have cash
Speaker 1: and that it should just be taken from that's ridiculous
Speaker 1: to me.
Speaker 3: Well, here comes back to like bad incentives within the
Speaker 3: drug wars that a significant amount of that revenue goes
Speaker 3: directly back to propitiatory law enforcement offices, and that's actually
Speaker 3: how they raise a lot of their resume for their
Speaker 3: operating budget. So the VIDOJ did a big, you know
Speaker 3: investigation first in Missouri after you know, they had up
Speaker 3: people there and what they found was like this one
Speaker 3: incident happened and then you know, things happened after that,
Speaker 3: but it was a lot of other foundational stuff where
Speaker 3: there's emails from the city council to the police chief saying,
Speaker 3: we need a ten percent increase in revenue.
Speaker 2: What are you going to do?
Speaker 3: And now they're harassing the community members and they're actually
Speaker 3: putting cops and like these spots where like they're having
Speaker 3: to harass to sent and finally when something happened, they're like,
Speaker 3: we've had enough, and like this is the things that
Speaker 3: start to happen. And so these horrible incentives and drug
Speaker 3: cases are the ones that bring in the quickest, easiest
Speaker 3: revenue when you're able to suspect drugs on it.
Speaker 2: So that's what happens.
Speaker 8: Yeah, what'd you call it? Ghost dope?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So that's that's another part of like what you're saying, Clayton,
Speaker 4: is this describing a situation where someone is able to
Speaker 4: fight back to seek redress for what's happening. And we
Speaker 4: see so many people, I think again targeted because it's
Speaker 4: known they it's assumed they will not have the means
Speaker 4: to survive the length of time it takes to fight
Speaker 4: the system.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: So with with this in mind, you know, we see
Speaker 4: again this is something that can affect everyone, like Jason,
Speaker 4: like you were saying, he said, And if you don't
Speaker 4: think it can happen to you, it can happen to you.
Speaker 4: And with this, like we've we've laid a lot of
Speaker 4: groundwork here and you guys, shows are such deep dives
Speaker 4: for firsthand knowledge like Bone Valley, wrongful conviction, War on drugs.
Speaker 8: I think no, I think we open it up to
Speaker 8: the audience.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's get some let's because we can't answer the questions,
Speaker 4: but these guys in the middle probably can't.
Speaker 9: So yeah, I want to just make one statement before
Speaker 9: we do that, on asset for for sure, because since
Speaker 9: twenty fourteen, this was first reported to Washington Post, police
Speaker 9: have stolen more money and property from civilians every year.
Speaker 2: Than all the robberies combined.
Speaker 9: And you can look that up. It's five billion to
Speaker 9: three and a half billion. And that was twenty fourteen
Speaker 9: and since then nothing's changed. And it's because of that
Speaker 9: because they don't have to prove a crime. They just
Speaker 9: take your money. They go, we think you might have
Speaker 9: been involved in some work.
Speaker 6: They don't even charge you with the crime.
Speaker 5: You don't need to arrested.
Speaker 2: No, there's no condotion requirement that you're.
Speaker 6: Pretty charging your money.
Speaker 3: The state of Georgia versus one hundred, one hundred and
Speaker 3: seven thousand dollars or in nineteen eighty five Corolla.
Speaker 8: There's no recourse.
Speaker 6: Well, you could challenge it.
Speaker 8: A lot of yeah, but a lot yeah.
Speaker 3: A lot of the forfeitures are such little money, and
Speaker 3: you'd be like a voucher or something, six hundred dollars
Speaker 3: from you, You're going to hire defense attorney for five
Speaker 3: grand to get your money. All these good default judgments
Speaker 3: most of the time anyway, don't. People don't challenge it,
Speaker 3: and it's a very low barrier. It's from unders of
Speaker 3: the evidence normally, which is like.
Speaker 8: How are you more likely than not? How are you
Speaker 8: getting to court when they take your car? Right?
Speaker 7: So, I just wanted to start opening everybody here being
Speaker 7: able to ask questions here with a question to you, guys,
Speaker 7: I've never had to hire an attorney for a criminal thing.
Speaker 7: I have no idea what that looks like. I have
Speaker 7: no idea how to do that. I probably don't have
Speaker 7: the money to hire the right attorney to get me
Speaker 7: out of something intense like this. Are there any resources
Speaker 7: out there for someone who has been arrested they can
Speaker 7: look for, like a pro bono attorney who would work
Speaker 7: on their behalf or is it we really just have
Speaker 7: to rely on the attorney that's assigned to us when
Speaker 7: we go to prison.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I'm sure you have. Yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 3: few and far between. There is some and even a
Speaker 3: public defender if you have financial means, if you're not
Speaker 3: a below a certain thing rushole. A lot of times
Speaker 3: they you know, they kind of really can't provide one
Speaker 3: to you either, and so it's tough. There's some law
Speaker 3: firms that do some pro boner work, you know, on
Speaker 3: that with criminal defense, but a lot of the times
Speaker 3: it's either the public defender or you kind of trying
Speaker 3: to figure out our scrape around.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's it's it's tough.
Speaker 3: I mean, public defense is one of the most underfunded
Speaker 3: systems that we have, and Sore already had a disadvantage
Speaker 3: going against the government, and then we underfund our public
Speaker 3: defense system pretty egregiously. There's federal lawsuits all across the
Speaker 3: country on that type of disparity.
Speaker 8: So yeah, you're yeah, good luck.
Speaker 2: That's why a lot of people play.
Speaker 6: I mean, yeah, that's what happens.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I'll just jump One of the things that you know,
Speaker 11: I hear a lot is that the post conviction process
Speaker 11: is so daunting that storytelling is actually one of the
Speaker 11: most effective ways to change the narrative.
Speaker 12: I mean, we're all up here because of false narratives.
Speaker 11: I mean, if you look at you know, Jason's how
Speaker 11: many how many people have you had on the program three?
Speaker 9: I think we're three hundred and sixty something episodes so far,
Speaker 9: and we will never stop making.
Speaker 12: The who's been exonerated?
Speaker 11: So a false narrative has brought them into prison for
Speaker 11: years until something happens and they're cleared.
Speaker 12: The War on drugs, you could look at that.
Speaker 11: As I remember this just like the demonization and the
Speaker 11: dehumanization of people and just scaring people into thinking that,
Speaker 11: you know, black people are going to have this crack
Speaker 11: mania and they're going to have superhuman strength. We need
Speaker 11: to protect it, we need to write stronger laws. I
Speaker 11: mean that was part of it too, and so these
Speaker 11: narratives that get built. I mean, I'll just tell you
Speaker 11: in the case with Leo Schofield, you know, at one
Speaker 11: point I've been working with him for several years and
Speaker 11: you know, we're kind of done with the investigation, and
Speaker 11: he said, you know, what do you think is going
Speaker 11: to happen to me? And I said, Leo, I don't
Speaker 11: know the post conviction process. I mean, it's so daunting.
Speaker 11: The only thing I can promise you. I can't promise
Speaker 11: that you're going to get out of prison because of
Speaker 11: this information, but I can promise you that we are
Speaker 11: changing the narrative of your story. And that's why these
Speaker 11: podcasts are so important, because as we can do the
Speaker 11: deep dive into a topic and actually show the truth.
Speaker 12: And I think that's why you see so.
Speaker 11: Many exonerations, because if you have the storytelling aspect, whether
Speaker 11: it's lawyers or writers or journalists who can come in
Speaker 11: and sort of expose this, it's really important. And it
Speaker 11: is a positive step because I have to be honest
Speaker 11: with the state of journalism right now is not that great.
Speaker 11: And so when you look at a lot of these
Speaker 11: communities that are having these crimes, a lot of times,
Speaker 11: the local reporters their biggest sources of the prosecutor and
Speaker 11: the police. They don't get the other side of the story,
Speaker 11: so they just kind of repeat the state narrative and
Speaker 11: that's how it just perpetuates and grows until some people
Speaker 11: like us can come in and look at.
Speaker 12: It from a different angle and hopefully change it.
Speaker 7: You guys are really fun at parties, aren't you?
Speaker 6: On those Ben's line?
Speaker 9: By the way, anyone, I hope somebody asks a question
Speaker 9: about bail reform by the way, just saying.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, hey, does anyone have a question about bail reform? Okay, okay,
Speaker 7: but really would anyone like to ask a question of
Speaker 7: the panel?
Speaker 12: Hi?
Speaker 13: I just want to say, I'm thankful for what you
Speaker 13: guys do, But what's a way that US citizens can
Speaker 13: really make a difference outside of the narrative? Because there
Speaker 13: is a larger crime that's more than the citizens. It's
Speaker 13: like the government, Like how do you come against that
Speaker 13: when you can sell weed now but you're not getting
Speaker 13: the people out that you got on petty crimes? Or
Speaker 13: like how do you come against a government that is
Speaker 13: backed by the NRA?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 13: Like so it's big companies that pay for the media,
Speaker 13: that pay for like how things get ran, and they're
Speaker 13: also behind the government.
Speaker 9: I think the first thing is to learn what's really
Speaker 9: going on. There's a fantastic newsletter called alex Copaganda Newsletter.
Speaker 2: You mentioned copaganda.
Speaker 9: It's alig alec Apostrophes Copaganda Newsletter, and that will give
Speaker 9: you a perspective on I think a lot of the
Speaker 9: questions that you're so properly raising. And thanks for that question,
Speaker 9: by the way, and yeah, and since nobody asked about
Speaker 9: bail reform, I'm just going to say, you know, back
Speaker 9: to the question that was posed a minute ago. You know,
Speaker 9: you better hope with your public defender that you're not
Speaker 9: in jail awaiting trial, because if you are, that creates
Speaker 9: a whole nother cascade of problems, right if you think
Speaker 9: about it. If you too poor to post bail, then
Speaker 9: you can't not only can't assist in your own defense,
Speaker 9: you can't meet with your attorney. They're not going to
Speaker 9: come to the jail to meet with you. They're busy,
Speaker 9: and you can't take care of your family. You can't
Speaker 9: go to your job, you can't do any of the
Speaker 9: things that you would be doing otherwise. Jails are generally
Speaker 9: more violent and dangerous than prisons. People think that's counterintuitive,
Speaker 9: but it's true. So you're subjected to the most horrible
Speaker 9: conditions and deprivation. And then on top of that, you
Speaker 9: don't see this on the TV shows, But if you're
Speaker 9: in on because you can't post bail and then you're
Speaker 9: being brought to trial, first of all, prosecutor can offer
Speaker 9: you listen, you're going to stay here for two three
Speaker 9: years before we get around to you unless you want
Speaker 9: to plead guilty and go home.
Speaker 2: So you got that pressure.
Speaker 9: But if you decide to go to trial, now, they
Speaker 9: wake you up around two in the morning, they don't
Speaker 9: feed you, They put you in a bay, they put
Speaker 9: you a waiting room, then they put you in a van.
Speaker 9: Then they take you to another jail in the courthouse
Speaker 9: and you're held there. You're also not fed. Then by
Speaker 9: the time you get into the courtroom you look half
Speaker 9: crazy because you're sleep deprived, you're starving, and also you've
Speaker 9: been subjected to the most brutal conditions imaginable for weeks, months,
Speaker 9: or years. Think about Khalif Brouder and that whole horrible story. Right,
Speaker 9: rest in peace, But so the bail reform. I just
Speaker 9: wanted to mention this because bail reform is so misunderstood
Speaker 9: and it's so important for people to understand it.
Speaker 2: It makes us much safer. And every study that's been.
Speaker 9: Done has shown that bail reform decreases the probability of
Speaker 9: the person who didn't go to jail pre trial committing
Speaker 9: a new crime dramatically. And it makes sense because I
Speaker 9: think you were talking about it before. If you do
Speaker 9: go to jail, your problem's just got a lot worse.
Speaker 9: Even if you're there for three days a week, you're
Speaker 9: losing all the things that Clayton talked about, and now
Speaker 9: you may not have a choice but to commit a
Speaker 9: crime if you want to eat, or if you want
Speaker 9: to feed your kids, or whatever it might be. So
Speaker 9: bail reform is one of the most successful policies that
Speaker 9: I've seen in my thirty years of doing this work.
Speaker 9: But politicians are trying to They'll take one case of
Speaker 9: somebody who got out on bail and when it hit
Speaker 9: you know, some old lady over the head at an ATM,
Speaker 9: and you know, they'll make that into a big thing,
Speaker 9: and of course the news will report that because it's
Speaker 9: better for clickbait. Right, nobody wants to report good news stories.
Speaker 9: No one wants to report the things that we're talking
Speaker 9: about now. But bail reform makes us safer and saves
Speaker 9: us huge amounts of money. Remember the five hundred and
Speaker 9: sixty five thousand dollars year to keep somebody in riker's
Speaker 9: ould who hasn't been convicted of a crime.
Speaker 4: So that is so then to that question, that's one
Speaker 4: of the things average person could do is maybe engage
Speaker 4: with their legislators about bail reform.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, yeah, and give a damn about your local elections.
Speaker 3: Like we can talk about president and they're all important,
Speaker 3: but your sheriff's elected, your district attorney's elected, a lot
Speaker 3: of judges are elected where you're at, Like, those are
Speaker 3: the people making the decisions. So you talk about bail reform, Yeah,
Speaker 3: you can be able to pass a law, but if
Speaker 3: you get a district attorney that says this is how
Speaker 3: we're going to handle our jails, or you get a
Speaker 3: sheriff that says that this is how we're going to
Speaker 3: handle our jails, or this is where we're going to
Speaker 3: prioritize resources, like those are the elections that don't get
Speaker 3: as much attention, particularly when they're not in a presidential cycle,
Speaker 3: like those are the ones you really need to care about.
Speaker 3: That's where you see that kind of systemic change happen
Speaker 3: in these areas. And so I know, and you know
Speaker 3: in Houston when they went through a lot of their
Speaker 3: their bail reform, stuff like that probably doesn't happen if
Speaker 3: there isn't certain actors and you know, within that that
Speaker 3: realm and things like that, and that's what really really
Speaker 3: matters to a lot.
Speaker 6: Of this stuff.
Speaker 3: You can have, I know, how many bills get passed.
Speaker 3: A good example this is onforfeiture in New Mexico banned
Speaker 3: criminal for civil forfeiture.
Speaker 5: It was only criminal city.
Speaker 8: If Albuquerque just.
Speaker 3: Had some folks there that were like, well, I guess
Speaker 3: it doesn't it doesn't apply to us. We're going to
Speaker 3: continue to do this, like all right, well there you go.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, they can have the best law in
Speaker 3: the books, but they'll be able to figure out a
Speaker 3: way to navigate around that.
Speaker 2: You can pass earn.
Speaker 3: Credits where you allow people to get her in credits
Speaker 3: in prison, but if you're a prison warrior, share doesn't
Speaker 3: want to give those out.
Speaker 2: Ain't gonna happen.
Speaker 3: So it really is that local, hyper local elections that
Speaker 3: really matter on the criminal justice level.
Speaker 14: So I wanted to talk about prosecutors in this process.
Speaker 14: You guys talked a little bit earlier about kind of
Speaker 14: the way things are perceived in the media, with you know,
Speaker 14: police and everything being kind of pro police. I think
Speaker 14: a lot of times there's also a perception that prosecutors
Speaker 14: everything they're doing is noble and good, and I think
Speaker 14: that's oftentimes the case. But I'm curious your perception about
Speaker 14: the concept of like prose prosecutorial misconduct, kind of the
Speaker 14: politics of play, the pressure there under to secure convictions,
Speaker 14: just kind of in broad terms of your thoughts on that.
Speaker 2: You've had a perspective on this, take it to like
Speaker 2: a micro level.
Speaker 11: I think one of the things that happens with prosecutors is,
Speaker 11: you know, their job is defined to their job is
Speaker 11: not to win convictions.
Speaker 12: It's to pursue justice.
Speaker 11: And so but you know, there's ego and career that
Speaker 11: gets involved in that, and so you know, you want
Speaker 11: to work your way up to be chief prosecutor or
Speaker 11: maybe a judge someday.
Speaker 12: You don't want, you know, a bunch of open cases
Speaker 12: or lost cases.
Speaker 11: And so I think what happens is it's like every
Speaker 11: other business in terms of capitalism. You know, you have
Speaker 11: prosecutors that are winning at all costs and they're willing
Speaker 11: to cut corners, and a lot of that is that
Speaker 11: what Jason just mentioned, that tunnel vision. That part of
Speaker 11: your story doesn't fit my narrative. So I'm not going there.
Speaker 11: I'm doing my narrative, and my narrative is this, and
Speaker 11: that's how they get caught up in this thing.
Speaker 12: And I've talked to a lot of prosecutors who have had.
Speaker 11: Wrongful convictions, and you know, they attribute it to tunnel
Speaker 11: vision and wanting to win the case, and so they
Speaker 11: end up making a lot of decisions that you know,
Speaker 11: cost people.
Speaker 12: Their lives basically, and they like to see themselves as
Speaker 12: very noble and they don't want to see themselves as
Speaker 12: somebody who's doing something.
Speaker 11: You know, frankly, there's no accountability for prosecutors. One of
Speaker 11: the things that you know, sometimes I sometimes ask prosecutors
Speaker 11: to talk to me about the cases, and they don't
Speaker 11: want to talk to me because they know I'm not
Speaker 11: doing the you know, the CSI type stuff.
Speaker 12: We're going to make them look like, how did you
Speaker 12: catch the bad guy? How'd you do it? What genius
Speaker 12: did you bring to the table for that.
Speaker 11: I'm asking questions about cases that went wrong, and you know,
Speaker 11: they don't always want.
Speaker 12: To talk to me.
Speaker 11: One of the things that is really disturbing about that
Speaker 11: is like they'll say, well, we don't do our cases.
Speaker 2: In the media.
Speaker 11: We do them in the court of law, where like
Speaker 11: all the integrity is apparently. You know, if a prosecutor
Speaker 11: screws up a case so badly and it gets overturned
Speaker 11: at a higher court and appellate court, the worst thing
Speaker 11: that ever happens to a prosecutors maybe he gets called
Speaker 11: out in the opinion of that court saying the prosecutor
Speaker 11: aired in withholding evidence that would have been exculpatory.
Speaker 12: And then he goes on and does to his next
Speaker 12: next case, next conviction.
Speaker 11: If I was withholding evidence, let's just say, like I
Speaker 11: had Leo confess to me, Schofield confessed to me, and
Speaker 11: I said, gee, that doesn't fit my narrative. I'm going
Speaker 11: to put that to the side and not tell people
Speaker 11: about that. And then later on it's discovered that I
Speaker 11: was withholding evidence.
Speaker 12: My books would be pulled from the shelves.
Speaker 11: I probably wouldn't get a chance to do another story
Speaker 11: because that would be seen as such such a horrific
Speaker 11: violation of integrity. And yet why is it that prosecutors
Speaker 11: can do that all the time and go on to
Speaker 11: the next cases, because there's zero accountability.
Speaker 12: And that's the thing I think that really needs to change.
Speaker 10: Couldn't you even be prosecuted yourself for withholding that kind
Speaker 10: of information?
Speaker 9: Yeah, as a centien like first obstruction, or as a
Speaker 9: defense lawyer, yeah, But as a prosecutor, you have absolute immunity.
Speaker 9: Think about those words, absolute immunity, so nothing you do
Speaker 9: can bounce back on you. And so then and you
Speaker 9: also have almost total power. And we know what power
Speaker 9: does to people, right, And I think there are people,
Speaker 9: I think there are cops that go into the job
Speaker 9: very idealistic, and then they change. The power does something
Speaker 9: to them, right, and the culture does something to them,
Speaker 9: and the train And then with prosecutors, they're human as well,
Speaker 9: and they some of them I think, go in, you know,
Speaker 9: very noble aspirations, but then they they become ambitious and
Speaker 9: when they go back I have the criminal defense lawyer
Speaker 9: that I know in California. Uh, Andrew Stein, he told
Speaker 9: me that he sometimes in his closing argument, he'll say
Speaker 9: to the jury when the prosecutor goes back to their
Speaker 9: office for you know, tonight, this afternoon, after they've finished
Speaker 9: the case, no one's gonna ask them, did you do
Speaker 9: justice today? They're gonna say, did you win? And that's
Speaker 9: what they want to do. They want to win, and
Speaker 9: it becomes a game. And the problem is they have
Speaker 9: the ability to mess with to mess with people's lives
Speaker 9: to an absolute extreme. And when they do that, in
Speaker 9: Prosecutorma's conduct is one of the leading causes. You'll hear
Speaker 9: it again and again on the Wrongful Convictions podcast. It's
Speaker 9: one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions. Polaves the
Speaker 9: Prosecutormi's contuct also lying forensic people, et cetera.
Speaker 2: But the fact is that.
Speaker 9: They're incentivized to do that, and they're given the power
Speaker 9: even with Brady violations like Brady is a Brady versus Maryland,
Speaker 9: very famous Supreme Court case which says that prosecutors must
Speaker 9: turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense, but they get
Speaker 9: to decide what they think is exculpatory. So the wolf
Speaker 9: is literally guarding the henhouse. And when they get like
Speaker 9: I said, they get set, they're just gonna go and
Speaker 9: they're going to And the last thing I'll say on
Speaker 9: the subject is we should all care about this because
Speaker 9: when prosecutors frame an innocent person for a crime, sometimes
Speaker 9: they knew, let's face it, they knew they didn't commit it.
Speaker 9: We don't like to think about that, but it's true,
Speaker 9: it happens. Listen to the podcast if you haven't already,
Speaker 9: you'll hear it.
Speaker 2: Again and again.
Speaker 9: They are actually acting in service of the actual perpetrator,
Speaker 9: right that those forces of police and prosecutorial power are
Speaker 9: focused on protecting the person who committed this heinous crime.
Speaker 9: Because almost by definition, when you lock up the innocent guy,
Speaker 9: you're letting the guilty person remain great, you're becoming an
Speaker 9: accomplice well or or worse.
Speaker 7: Guys, I just want to say thank you so much
Speaker 7: for this conversation. Uh it has been it's been like heavy, right,
Speaker 7: really heavy. This is serious stuff. But you guys know,
Speaker 7: you know what you're doing, and you're exploring this every
Speaker 7: day on your podcasts. So as you said, Jason, I
Speaker 7: think the best thing everybody can do here is subscribe.
Speaker 7: To these podcasts, to wrongful convictions, to the War on
Speaker 7: drugs and to Bone Valley and even stuff they don't
Speaker 7: want you to know. Yeah, you can subscribe to us too,
Speaker 7: that's fine.
Speaker 8: We're not above it.
Speaker 12: Yeah yeah, yeah, sure we.
Speaker 2: Talk about it's a good show. Check it out.
Speaker 7: But really, thank you, guys.
Speaker 12: I think we're gonna end the show now.
Speaker 5: Second incredible conversation.
Speaker 4: Thank you to Guiltful Clay, thank you, thank.
Speaker 8: You so much, in the
Speaker 6: In the tin, and then depend