Speaker 1: Pushkin. I think the fear of journalists is always that
Speaker 1: we parachute into these realms that we actually don't know
Speaker 1: very much about, and that we're going to get something wrong.
Speaker 1: And so I remember I reached out to you with
Speaker 1: my fingers crossed that you would basically agree to be
Speaker 1: a consultant on this, and I'm super grateful that you
Speaker 1: agreed to it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, I was really glad to do it and really
Speaker 2: excited about how the story turned out.
Speaker 1: But James, you and I this is not our first collaboration, No,
Speaker 1: it's not. We actually had a far more stressful collaboration,
Speaker 1: which was little league flag football where we went to
Speaker 1: the Super Bowl.
Speaker 2: We did we almost made it. We were like two
Speaker 2: minutes away from being the New Haven area and under champs.
Speaker 1: I'm talking here with James Foreman Junior. He's a former
Speaker 1: public defender who now teaches at the Yale Law School,
Speaker 1: and also he's my friend. We even coached our kids
Speaker 1: flag football team together. I really trust James, and so
Speaker 1: I brought him on to be our legal consultant for
Speaker 1: The Nameless Man. He listened to each episode in draft
Speaker 1: form and gave us great notes that I think made
Speaker 1: this series much stronger. We had some really good conversations,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to keep that going. So one day
Speaker 1: we sat down at the Yale Porvus Center for Teaching
Speaker 1: and Learning to discuss his reactions to the series. The
Speaker 1: first thing that I wanted to talk to James about
Speaker 1: was the one guy I really wanted to talk to
Speaker 1: and couldn't, Craig Peterson. I want to talk about Craig
Speaker 1: because these agents pursue this. Right, they drive up to Vermont,
Speaker 1: they say, you know, we believe you were involved with this.
Speaker 1: He he denies this. He says, I don't know what
Speaker 1: you're talking about. He then, about a year and a
Speaker 1: half later, calls them. They have a subpoena ready for him, saying,
Speaker 1: we're gonna we want you to testify. You you are
Speaker 1: going to be required to testify by this subpoena in
Speaker 1: this grand jury looking into the into this murder that
Speaker 1: we believed happened. And at that point there's this pivotal
Speaker 1: moment and this whole thing where he asks for immunity
Speaker 1: and confesses. How do you wrap your head around that
Speaker 1: sequence of events?
Speaker 2: I mean, there's so many things about that part of
Speaker 2: the story that are you know, unusual. I mean, it's
Speaker 2: unusual for somebody to confess under so little pressure. Uh,
Speaker 2: you know, what you've outlined was, you know, relatively mild.
Speaker 2: But then the immunity part is the part that just
Speaker 2: I mean, the first time you told me about it,
Speaker 2: I had like seventeen different questions because I've never seen
Speaker 2: anything like it. Normally, you would want to have more
Speaker 2: corroboration of what Craig is saying before you're going to
Speaker 2: grant him immunity, because maybe Craig is more involved than
Speaker 2: he's letting on. And so I was surprised by how
Speaker 2: early it came. The whole process of immunity is normally
Speaker 2: just much more formalized, and you know, things are different
Speaker 2: in different jurisdictions and practices are different everywhere, but particularly
Speaker 2: as this was a federal prosecutor, it was that I
Speaker 2: think was particularly surprising how informal the process was.
Speaker 1: We're getting ahead of ourselves a little bit. But it's
Speaker 1: on the topic of Craig, and this is a question
Speaker 1: I asked Scott Duffy to the FBI agent, how does
Speaker 1: it sit with you that Craig never faces prosecution.
Speaker 2: I'm not a huge fan of him. Not being prosecuted,
Speaker 2: although I don't think that most people who are prosecuted
Speaker 2: need to go to prison, and those that do to
Speaker 2: go to prison, I don't typically think need to go
Speaker 2: for very long. I like to separate my views of
Speaker 2: prison from my views of prosecution, and I know it's
Speaker 2: hard to do because in our society they're so closely
Speaker 2: linked because we don't have other forms of accountability.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, I'm trying to wrap my head around that, Like,
Speaker 1: are you suggesting he'd be prosecuted and then just have
Speaker 1: like a very short criminal sentence and then have that
Speaker 1: on his record.
Speaker 2: Yes, or some version thereof what I'm really drawn to,
Speaker 2: which is in some ways is beyond the scope of
Speaker 2: the podcast in one sense and the system that we in.
Speaker 2: But I'm very drawn to models of restorative justice. So
Speaker 2: I'm very drawn to the idea that what we really
Speaker 2: want to be thinking about is identifying harm and trying
Speaker 2: to remedy and respect and recognize that harm. Right now,
Speaker 2: what we do is, we, you know, identify people that
Speaker 2: we label as criminals, and we prosecute and typically we
Speaker 2: incarcerate them. People who are victims of crime often are
Speaker 2: desperate to know why did you do this, Why my child,
Speaker 2: my brother, my grandson, And how do you feel about
Speaker 2: what you've done, the harm that you've caused? Like, we
Speaker 2: could have very different models where people are called to account,
Speaker 2: where people who have committed harm have an opportunity to
Speaker 2: really dwell in the pain that they've caused and look
Speaker 2: directly in the eyes of people who they've hurt or
Speaker 2: family members of people who they've hurt if it's a homicide,
Speaker 2: and acknowledge that pain and apologize. And I would like
Speaker 2: to see what that might look like in a case
Speaker 2: like this, And I would want to see what the
Speaker 2: how the Wood family would feel about that.
Speaker 1: That's there's a bunch to unpack there. But the first
Speaker 1: thought that occurs to me is, in this situation, you've
Speaker 1: got an You've got a kind of unusual or interesting
Speaker 1: situation because you have theory. We have two perpetrators of
Speaker 1: the crime, the guy that pulled the trigger and the
Speaker 1: guy that.
Speaker 2: Drove the car.
Speaker 1: The guy that drove the car is admitting to doing it,
Speaker 1: and according to Carmen Leinberger is expressing to her deep
Speaker 1: remorse during the grand jury, and she said, remorse to
Speaker 1: his soul.
Speaker 2: What if he were sitting in their living room, telling
Speaker 2: them that how would they how would they feel? And
Speaker 2: they might also want to be involved in it with
Speaker 2: him in a conversation about well, what could he do
Speaker 2: to make amends? I mean saying you're sorry, looking somebody
Speaker 2: in the eye, looking that family in the eye. That's
Speaker 2: a courageous thing. That's a good start, right looking at them,
Speaker 2: saying here's what I did, Here's why I did it,
Speaker 2: Here's what put me in that driver's seat that night,
Speaker 2: Here's how I feel about having testified. And I know
Speaker 2: that all those things are they're so small compared to
Speaker 2: the harm that I cause. So I'm not asking to
Speaker 2: be a hero, far from it. But I do want
Speaker 2: you to understand that I have taken some steps. Now
Speaker 2: can we be in dialogue about what else I could do?
Speaker 2: When you do restorative justice conferences, the kinds of ideas
Speaker 2: that come from the families of victims are much broader
Speaker 2: than what the criminal justice system says, right, which is
Speaker 2: basically either like incarceration or probation or conviction on your
Speaker 2: record for life. As you said, a lot of times,
Speaker 2: people even they don't want that, that doesn't make them
Speaker 2: feel whole. But I bet there are other things that
Speaker 2: could come which would at least begin to start to
Speaker 2: fill the whole that will never be filled.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it occurs to me that in talking to you,
Speaker 1: the Wood family, who is the one that was most
Speaker 1: profoundly impacted by this, they never had that. And when
Speaker 1: I think about that, that seems kind of crazy.
Speaker 2: That's our system. It's it's completely crazy. And just to
Speaker 2: be clear, like that could yet be rectified. Right, all
Speaker 2: these people that we're talking about are still alive. I mean,
Speaker 2: I've seen situations where, you know, victims would go with
Speaker 2: Craig and they would go and they would speak about
Speaker 2: the perils of white supremacy and the perils of getting
Speaker 2: drawn into that kind of lifestyle. Right, they would speak
Speaker 2: to people who maybe were in some ways at risk
Speaker 2: of going down that path. I teach a class that
Speaker 2: has law students and incarcerated students studying the criminal legal
Speaker 2: system together. When we talk about sentencing, one of the
Speaker 2: things that my incarcerated students talk about all the time
Speaker 2: is how the law prohibits them from having any contact
Speaker 2: with the victim. In many cases, they talk about how
Speaker 2: they've been locked up for years and they have wanted
Speaker 2: to say some version of I'm sorry, but in like
Speaker 2: in a deep, complex, nuanced way that tells their story
Speaker 2: and really conveys that they've wanted to write letters to
Speaker 2: people so that they can know how sorry they are,
Speaker 2: they can know how every day that they're locked up
Speaker 2: they think about the pain that they caused. They can't
Speaker 2: do that in our system, they're prohibited from doing it.
Speaker 2: And so there's just so and again you can understand
Speaker 2: why a system might say, well, you know, you can't
Speaker 2: have contact because they're worried that the contact won't be
Speaker 2: of the form that I just described. But this is,
Speaker 2: in a lot of ways, you know, a tragic example
Speaker 2: of our system making choices that sometimes that there's a
Speaker 2: rational that you can understand why we got here, but
Speaker 2: it then leads to all of these horrific outcomes.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, we live in a system where it
Speaker 1: seems like the only metric for justice is days, months,
Speaker 1: years of punishment, like that's whether justice was served or not.
Speaker 2: Yep, And in fact I'm guilty of it.
Speaker 1: When when I asked Scott about the Scott DeFi how
Speaker 1: do you feel? Or even the question I posed to you,
Speaker 1: Craig walked free. I think the presumption is the only
Speaker 1: reckoning that can occur here is incarceration. And this leads
Speaker 1: to this other thing, which is that in this case
Speaker 1: you had a lot of good people advocating and motivated
Speaker 1: by a desire to help first find the Wood family,
Speaker 1: to identify the victim, and then to do.
Speaker 2: Right by them.
Speaker 1: This is what Scott and Terry are motivated by.
Speaker 2: They want to.
Speaker 1: Put Tom Geibison away, and so everything is focused on
Speaker 1: that Tom does spend time in jail, and then when
Speaker 1: he gets out, no one calls the family to tell
Speaker 1: them that he's been released.
Speaker 2: That was one of the most difficult parts of this
Speaker 2: podcast to listen to for me, because to me, it's
Speaker 2: just a reminder of how, you know, prison and punishment
Speaker 2: centered our system is, but not victims centered. We justify
Speaker 2: the prison and the punishment in the name of caring
Speaker 2: about victims, but we don't do these basic, just decent
Speaker 2: things that you would want to do for our family,
Speaker 2: particularly where for so long this case was uninvestigated and
Speaker 2: unprosecuted and unpunished. I just I just thought, to me,
Speaker 2: it just exemplified so many of the things that are
Speaker 2: wrong with our system.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because when we had this conversation initially, and
Speaker 1: I said, Tom, Tom got seven years. Your reaction was,
Speaker 1: if I recall, was something about seven years is a
Speaker 1: good chunk of time, Like you didn't think that was
Speaker 1: the injustice?
Speaker 2: No, no, But I think my views on that are,
Speaker 2: you know, they're informed by how horrible I know that
Speaker 2: prison is. They're informed by this earlier conversation that we
Speaker 2: were just having, which is that I don't want to
Speaker 2: live in a system which met measures the value of
Speaker 2: a victim, the worth of the victim only by the
Speaker 2: number of years that the person gets for harming them.
Speaker 2: And so I guess for me, as somebody who thinks
Speaker 2: we should have dramatically shorter sentences across the board, I
Speaker 2: you know, I work hard to try to put that
Speaker 2: into practice. Now I don't. I'm not gonna lie like
Speaker 2: there's you know, I have cases too where you know,
Speaker 2: my first reaction is, you know, lock them up for life.
Speaker 2: But then what I try to do is temper that.
Speaker 2: And so in this case, it seemed based on the
Speaker 2: evidence that he was guilty, and I wanted him to
Speaker 2: be convicted. But wanting somebody to be convicted right identified
Speaker 2: as the person who did this is different from wanting
Speaker 2: them to spend the rest of their life in a dungeon.
Speaker 2: And that difference I tried to hold on to.
Speaker 1: You say you were hoping for a conviction, but where
Speaker 1: did you think this was going? Based on what you
Speaker 1: heard from our recreation of the trial.
Speaker 2: I thought that the defense lawyer did a good job.
Speaker 2: What I liked about the defense attorney was how passionate
Speaker 2: he was. One of the many problems we have in
Speaker 2: our system is that sometimes defense lawyers don't have either
Speaker 2: the expertise, or the resources or the commitment. So he
Speaker 2: seemed to have all of those things, and so it
Speaker 2: felt to me like a robust defense, which I want
Speaker 2: to happen in every case. But to me, as the
Speaker 2: evidence came in, and of course it was you know, Craig,
Speaker 2: but also yes, that to me was crucial. Those I
Speaker 2: remember when you first introduced those witnesses into the story,
Speaker 2: I thought, oh, those, that is a damning fact. The
Speaker 2: reason why those two witnesses were so important, I thought,
Speaker 2: is that they didn't have a motive to fabricate. And
Speaker 2: that's always the key thing. There's basically right, two kinds
Speaker 2: of defenses that you can put forward. One is they're mistaken.
Speaker 2: And the second is they're lying. The defense that they're
Speaker 2: lying is typically always a more powerful defense. But to
Speaker 2: make the claim that they're lying, you have to have
Speaker 2: a motive to fabricate why are they lying. And I
Speaker 2: never thought that the defense in this case had an
Speaker 2: adequate explanation for why they would be lying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, his line of argument was they were scorned lovers.
Speaker 1: In other words, you know, he cheated on them or
Speaker 1: broke up with them, or but that would be quite
Speaker 1: a grudge, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a grudge. And then two separately that was
Speaker 2: too independently decide to take out their grudge in the
Speaker 2: same way by going to court and testifying from somebody
Speaker 2: from all these years ago who had a history of violence.
Speaker 2: Testifying in a trial is not an easy matter. Testifying
Speaker 2: in a homicide trial is especially not an easy matter.
Speaker 2: Testifying in a homicide trial against somebody who had a
Speaker 2: history of violence in the way that Tom did. This
Speaker 2: is not something you do lightly. So it was not
Speaker 2: enough for me of a motive to fabricate. And is
Speaker 2: why I remember thinking, Okay, well, maybe Craig has some motive.
Speaker 2: Maybe the jury would think that Craig had some motive
Speaker 2: but when you're there. The good news is you're there
Speaker 2: so you can testify everything that happened. The bad news is,
Speaker 2: by your own account, you're an accomplice to murder. And
Speaker 2: so if you're willing to kill somebody for no reason,
Speaker 2: you might be willing to lie in court right And
Speaker 2: so him by himself to me was never going to
Speaker 2: be enough. But the two independent girlfriends with no motive
Speaker 2: that I found plausible was what made me think that
Speaker 2: Tom was guilty. The evidence was, I think, strong, but limited,
Speaker 2: and so the jury wanted to ask a lot of
Speaker 2: hard questions about whether it matched up exactly, and you know,
Speaker 2: they landed where they landed.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back with more from my conversation with
Speaker 1: James Forman Jr. I want to talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about you, because you've had an interesting career. Before you
Speaker 1: were a professor here at Yale, you were a public
Speaker 1: defender and I guess was it an interview that you
Speaker 1: had where you were kind of up for considering a
Speaker 1: position as a prosecutor. You want to tell us about that.
Speaker 2: I remember this conversation really well to this day. So
Speaker 2: I was working as a law clerk at the time,
Speaker 2: so I was working for Justice O'Connor, and I was
Speaker 2: trying to decide on my first real job after law school,
Speaker 2: and I had applied to the Public Defender's Office in Washington,
Speaker 2: d C. And I'd also applied to work for the
Speaker 2: criminal section of the Civil Rights Division of the Department
Speaker 2: of Justice. What they do is they prosecute police brutality cases,
Speaker 2: so you know, police officers who use excessive force, and
Speaker 2: then they also prosecute, you know, cross burnings or other
Speaker 2: forms of hate crimes. And that was the position that
Speaker 2: I was interviewing for, and that job had a lot
Speaker 2: of appeal to me because I was looking at this
Speaker 2: through a civil rights and a racial justice lens. And
Speaker 2: I remember interviewing with and I won't mention her name,
Speaker 2: but she was had been a public defender herself, and
Speaker 2: she it came up in conversation that I was thinking
Speaker 2: about taking a job as a public defender. And as
Speaker 2: soon as I said that, I could see her sort
Speaker 2: of connect in a particular way, and she said, all right, James,
Speaker 2: I want you to really imagine, you know, the following situation.
Speaker 2: You're the prosecutor in a case and it's up for sentencing,
Speaker 2: and our office has told you, here's the sentence you
Speaker 2: need to ask for, and it's a certain period of incarceration.
Speaker 2: And the defense lawyer stands up, and the defense lawyer
Speaker 2: starts to make the case to the judge about his
Speaker 2: client's background, and he says to the judge, you know,
Speaker 2: your honor, my client was abused and abandoned as a child.
Speaker 2: My client had disabilities and special needs that were never
Speaker 2: recognized by the school system. So he fell further and
Speaker 2: further and further behind. His parents were addicted to drugs.
Speaker 2: Now as a teenager, he's lost and he feels like
Speaker 2: he has nowhere to turn. And there's a group of
Speaker 2: people that take him in and they say, we'll be
Speaker 2: your family. You can be one of us. But there's
Speaker 2: a catch, right, The catch to be one of us
Speaker 2: is you have to go commit this crime. You have
Speaker 2: to spray swastika on a church, or you have to
Speaker 2: throw a mothtop cocktail through the window. And he agrees
Speaker 2: to do it, and he does it because he wants
Speaker 2: to be accepted, he wants to be respected, he wants
Speaker 2: to find some validation somewhere. And the lawyer is turning
Speaker 2: to the judge and saying, so don't do what the
Speaker 2: Department of Justice is asking. Don't do what mister Foreman
Speaker 2: is asking. Don't put this young man in prison. Give
Speaker 2: him an opportunity, give him a second chance, understand all
Speaker 2: of the constraints and the limitations and the unfairness that
Speaker 2: put him in this place where he would do something wrong.
Speaker 2: And she looks at me and she says, Okay, now
Speaker 2: you've got to respond. Are you going to be prepared
Speaker 2: to listen to a story like that and still ask
Speaker 2: for this long sentence? And I looked at her, and
Speaker 2: I knew that the answer at that moment was no.
Speaker 2: I don't think that I could do that. And I
Speaker 2: even knew what she was doing. She was saying to me, Look,
Speaker 2: the people we prosecute. You might think of them as
Speaker 2: a person who's committed a hate crime, and they are.
Speaker 2: They are. But most of those people there's a story
Speaker 2: for how they became the defenders. They weren't born full
Speaker 2: of hate. They were taught that, and in many cases
Speaker 2: they overcame their natural reluctance to do something like that,
Speaker 2: to cause that kind of harm to somebody else, because
Speaker 2: of the context, because of the situation they were in,
Speaker 2: because of the life's circumstances. They have been dealt because
Speaker 2: the family that they didn't have that they needed, because
Speaker 2: of the way the system had abandoned them. That's their
Speaker 2: story too, And if you're going to be a prosecutor
Speaker 2: in this section, you have to understand that those stories
Speaker 2: are real, and you still, even in the face of that,
Speaker 2: have to be prepared to ask for this person to
Speaker 2: be locked up. It was probably the most important interview
Speaker 2: that I've ever had in my life. I will be
Speaker 2: forever grateful to her for being so honest with me
Speaker 2: because I knew in that moment I couldn't do it,
Speaker 2: and I left the office. I turned down the job offer,
Speaker 2: and that's I attribute the fact of my becoming a
Speaker 2: public defender to that conversation.
Speaker 1: Well, I have to say, I remember, I had heard
Speaker 1: you tell this story once before, and I've thought about
Speaker 1: it so many times over the course of working on
Speaker 1: this podcast. When I heard the cold hard facts of
Speaker 1: the case, two white teenagers get in a car drive
Speaker 1: to Philadelphia, and if the press execution is going to
Speaker 1: be believed, murder this innocent man in point blank range.
Speaker 1: The first sight is like, what kind of depravity, what
Speaker 1: kind of monsters? Would do something like this, and I think,
Speaker 1: and honestly, it wasn't until I heard you talk about
Speaker 1: this story that I even began to think that there
Speaker 1: was this other narrative, not that it's any means justified
Speaker 1: or to apologize for it, but that there's this other
Speaker 1: narrative that one could actually look at and see some
Speaker 1: humanity in.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, I mean from the very first time you
Speaker 2: told me about the case and you gave me just
Speaker 2: those facts of two white teenagers drive Philadelphia kill somebody,
Speaker 2: my mind immediately went to what happened in their life
Speaker 2: to have them be in that car, driving to a
Speaker 2: city they don't know, to shoot somebody who they don't know,
Speaker 2: because aren't born ready to do that.
Speaker 1: I keep thinking back to your point about what if
Speaker 1: it would have been the split verdict, but also there
Speaker 1: was a chance for Craig to express his remorse, and
Speaker 1: whether that might not have made it feel like half
Speaker 1: justice to the family at the time. I want to talk,
Speaker 1: I want to about the Wood family, but I have
Speaker 1: one more thing that I want to ask about. This
Speaker 1: is something that I've been thinking of. When they were
Speaker 1: connecting the crime to the victim, they took that list
Speaker 1: of the particulars, the five particulars, the race, the nature
Speaker 1: of the wound, single shot to head, the thirty eight caliber,
Speaker 1: and they looked over the unsolved murders in Philadelphia at
Speaker 1: the time. A thought that's always nagged me at the
Speaker 1: back of my brain is should they have looked at
Speaker 1: the quote unquote solved murders? And I don't know, but
Speaker 1: you maybe can brite some context because if my sense
Speaker 1: is that there have been some wrongful convictions that have
Speaker 1: come out of Philadelphia, right.
Speaker 2: For sure, I mean everywhere, but you know, Philadelphia is
Speaker 2: one of the jurisdictions that has people actually who got
Speaker 2: sentenced to death who have been exonerated. Right, So, yes,
Speaker 2: absolutely there have been exonerations in Philadelphia. You know, at
Speaker 2: such a good point. I'm kind of embarrassed that you
Speaker 2: thought of it and I didn't, because I think that's right.
Speaker 2: Of course, there's no incentive for them to do that
Speaker 2: because that kind of case would be, you know, virtually
Speaker 2: impossible for them to bring because now they are right
Speaker 2: they have somebody who got convicted of it. If they
Speaker 2: found a case that matched this in all these ways
Speaker 2: that we just described, then that would mean either Craig's
Speaker 2: lying or mistaken and the girlfriends are wrong, and that
Speaker 2: this prosecution shouldn't hold or that the previous one was wrong.
Speaker 2: And but they absolutely if they found that, they would
Speaker 2: not have gone through with a prosecution of Tom. So
Speaker 2: that would have been the end of that.
Speaker 1: But I see what your point is that I hadn't
Speaker 1: thought of, which is that there's no incentive to do that,
Speaker 1: because that if you're from if you're looking from the
Speaker 1: law enforce and perspective that's solved, you don't want to
Speaker 1: take anything out of the solved case if you don't
Speaker 1: have to write no.
Speaker 2: I mean when I was back when I was a
Speaker 2: public defender. You know, it's now been eclipsed by you know,
Speaker 2: the Wire. But David Simon's first grade television show was
Speaker 2: The Homicide.
Speaker 1: I know you're a fan of the show.
Speaker 2: I love this show so much. I probably brought I
Speaker 2: guess I've brought it up before. But in homicide they
Speaker 2: write the names of the victims, you know, in chalk
Speaker 2: and if you're a homicide investigator and there's you have
Speaker 2: a bunch of names on that list on that chalkboard.
Speaker 2: I mean, when you walk in every morning, it's like
Speaker 2: a badge of shame, right, because there's all these unsolved
Speaker 2: names and then they take them off when they solve it, right,
Speaker 2: they erase them, and you don't want to have any names.
Speaker 2: So once they're erased, as these cases would have been, right,
Speaker 2: this would be a solved case. Nobody, no investigator, nobody's
Speaker 2: looking at it. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: Talk to me about what your reactions were, thoughts were.
Speaker 1: Once you've had a chance to spend some time with
Speaker 1: the Wood family around's two brothers and his niece.
Speaker 2: In some ways, that was my favorite part of the story.
Speaker 2: What I found so distinctive about the story the way
Speaker 2: you told it was the role that the Wood family
Speaker 2: played in the narrative and their fullness and their humanity,
Speaker 2: and the way that just came f forward, like the
Speaker 2: richness of who they were as a family. They're both
Speaker 2: individual stories and then they're collective, you know, hearing them
Speaker 2: together and the laughter. I would dream of living in
Speaker 2: a world where I could tell you, well, you need
Speaker 2: to cut that, because we've just like heard this story
Speaker 2: over and over and over again. But black families are
Speaker 2: often not portrayed in the light in which you portrayed
Speaker 2: the Wood family, and in particular, Black families that have
Speaker 2: been victimized, like victimized by crime or victimized by the
Speaker 2: criminal justice system often can be kind of rendered in
Speaker 2: a very kind of flat way, a very sort of
Speaker 2: a set of stereotypes. It's like, oh, we know, we
Speaker 2: know what this story is going to be. They fit
Speaker 2: into a stock set of characters. And what I really
Speaker 2: loved about the family is the way they just didn't
Speaker 2: the way they were they were human. And again you
Speaker 2: might be like, well, why is that such a big deal,
Speaker 2: But my answer is it is such a big deal.
Speaker 2: And I think that, you know, I think that Black
Speaker 2: listeners especially will pick that up. You know, we'll we'll,
Speaker 2: we'll hear that family, the way they interact, the way
Speaker 2: they love each other, the way they love Aroan and
Speaker 2: are going to be are going to be lifted up
Speaker 2: by it on top of everything else that you know,
Speaker 2: the podcast is all about.
Speaker 1: Well, I appreciate that. And I have to be honest,
Speaker 1: I didn't do much. Sometimes as an interview you have
Speaker 1: to work really hard to draw out I didn't have
Speaker 1: to do that. They just had this warmth, like we
Speaker 1: set up in this room and the laughter was really
Speaker 1: it was right off the bat, we were joking about football.
Speaker 1: They were just lovely, warm people, and you know there's
Speaker 1: some hard stuff in there, like Tyrone the younger brother,
Speaker 1: talking about just matter of factly that after his brother's
Speaker 1: death he fell into alcoholism and talking, you know, but
Speaker 1: talking about it in a way that was very like honest,
Speaker 1: and then how we kind of pulled himself out of that.
Speaker 1: You know, Michael the middle brother, when we were talking
Speaker 1: about the restorative justice, I was thinking about him because
Speaker 1: you know, as you probably recall, he had this moment
Speaker 1: where he had a relative come to him at the
Speaker 1: funeral and say, you must forgive the man that did
Speaker 1: this to your brother. And Michael and I were talking
Speaker 1: about this, like how do you do that? Initially at
Speaker 1: least when you have no idea, Like how do you
Speaker 1: forgive you know, a blank face? And then I just
Speaker 1: have to say it was like deeply moving to me
Speaker 1: when he got to the trial and he looked at
Speaker 1: Tom Guybison and he said he felt certain that this
Speaker 1: was the man that killed his brother, and he said
Speaker 1: I had forgiven him. Yeah, James, this has been great.
Speaker 1: I really I really appreciate you sharing this experience with
Speaker 1: me and giving me your insights, and yeah, it means a.
Speaker 2: Lot due you didn't ask me your your your money
Speaker 2: question all.
Speaker 1: I got to the hail Mary.
Speaker 2: I'm waiting for the hail Mary. I had something I
Speaker 2: wanted to say. I was going to bring it up.
Speaker 1: Hey, it's it's fourth down. The Bills are on their
Speaker 1: own five yard line. What is a question that I
Speaker 1: didn't ask that I should have asked.
Speaker 2: I wanted to just mention something that I mentioned. I
Speaker 2: think it was the first thing that I said in
Speaker 2: our first conversation, or it was very very early on
Speaker 2: about why I thought this story was so important and
Speaker 2: why I was drawn to it from the beginning. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it's that there is such a long history of
Speaker 2: kind of under enforcement and under protection in black communities.
Speaker 2: And so when we think about discrimination in the criminal
Speaker 2: justice system today, as we sit here now in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four, right, our minds are very drawn to the
Speaker 2: idea of over policing and over punishment and over prosecution, right,
Speaker 2: and stopping frisk, and excessive sentences and unfair imposition of
Speaker 2: the death penalty. Right. But there's a whole nother part
Speaker 2: of the story of discrimination in the system, which is
Speaker 2: crimes against black victims not being investigated and not being prosecuted,
Speaker 2: not being taken seriously by society. So the first time
Speaker 2: you told me about this case and you said you
Speaker 2: know that it was going to be there was a
Speaker 2: black man that was shot in Philadelphia and perpetrators are
Speaker 2: not brought to justice, I thought, oh, good, this is
Speaker 2: it is very important to have to lift up stories
Speaker 2: like this as well. And that's the last thing that
Speaker 2: I want to say, is that And this is in
Speaker 2: some ways connected back to what I was telling you
Speaker 2: when I couldn't decide if I was going to be
Speaker 2: the prosecutor for hate crimes or if I was going
Speaker 2: to be a public defender. In my mind, they are
Speaker 2: two sides of the same coin, right, And so in
Speaker 2: my mind, it really is the fact that what they
Speaker 2: have in common is that we are not taking black
Speaker 2: life seriously enough. And so what that means is we
Speaker 2: don't take it seriously enough to protect it in the
Speaker 2: first instance, and then if somebody is put on trial
Speaker 2: or if somebody is facing sentencing, we don't see that
Speaker 2: life as capable of redemption. And so in both cases
Speaker 2: it leads to again on the one hand, either under
Speaker 2: protection or on the other hand over punishment, and I
Speaker 2: think that this story that you're telling is a really
Speaker 2: important reminder for listeners that that part of the unfairness
Speaker 2: and the discrimination in the system remains.
Speaker 1: James Foreman Jr. Is the Skelly Right Professor of Law
Speaker 1: at the l Law School. I recommend you check out
Speaker 1: his book, Locking Up Our Own and his next book
Speaker 1: will be out on July ninth. It's called Dismantling Mass Incarceration,
Speaker 1: a Handbook for Change. Thank you to the yl Poor
Speaker 1: Vous Center for Teaching and Learning, where we recorded this conversation.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced by Amy Gains McQuaid. Our editor
Speaker 1: is Karen Chakerji. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Our
Speaker 1: show art was designed by Sean Carney. Original scoring in
Speaker 1: our theme was composed by the This episode was mastered
Speaker 1: by Sarah Bruguer. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and Greta Cone.
Speaker 1: I'm Jake Calpern