Speaker 1: With the police banging on the door open up. The
Speaker 1: choice to be in that lineup was the last choice
Speaker 1: I made as a free man.
Speaker 2: A year later, I ended up writing the system.
Speaker 1: I'm going to be one of those people who everyone
Speaker 1: in the world is going to think as a.
Speaker 3: Monster or suspect as a monster for the rest of
Speaker 3: my life, and I'm just going to have to come
Speaker 3: to peace with that.
Speaker 2: Somebody was able to look at my picture in the
Speaker 2: database and say that I was somewhere where I definitely wasn't.
Speaker 2: I overheard three of the jailers discussing what part they
Speaker 2: might have to play in my hanging. They had been
Speaker 2: told that two prison officers would have to participate in
Speaker 2: my execution.
Speaker 1: Now I walked back inside that prison for the last time. Man,
Speaker 1: all health broke news. But this is wrongful conviction. Welcome
Speaker 1: back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm. Today's guest is
Speaker 1: a dear friend of mine and an extraordinary person, Peter Pringle.
Speaker 3: Pringle was accused of participating in a murder of two
Speaker 3: police officers following a bank robbery in Ireland. After his conviction,
Speaker 3: he was sentenced to.
Speaker 2: Death by hanging and the police officer who had lied
Speaker 2: to get me convicted, was now a retired detective superintendent.
Speaker 2: He had been promoted up to the top.
Speaker 3: Just days before a noose was to be tied around
Speaker 3: his neck. Peter learned that Ireland's president had commuted his
Speaker 3: sends to forty years without parole.
Speaker 2: It faced the forty years, which wasn't the possibility for
Speaker 2: me at the time. I could kill myself, which at
Speaker 2: the time was a reasonable house.
Speaker 1: Peter, what an extraordinary story. So happy to have you here.
Speaker 1: You're also the first guest on Wrongful who's not born
Speaker 1: in America.
Speaker 2: Thank you. It's an honor to be here. Thank you
Speaker 2: very much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was just saying, it's exciting that you're here because,
Speaker 1: as I said, we're taking it international now, right. You're
Speaker 1: as Irish as Irish can be. So Peter, let's go
Speaker 1: back to the we're talking. This is a very interesting
Speaker 1: time right when things were going sort of crazy in
Speaker 1: your home country, right, So bring us back to what
Speaker 1: was give us the climate in there.
Speaker 2: What happened was in nineteen eighty there was a bank
Speaker 2: robbery in Ireland which the police serf was carried out
Speaker 2: by two three men rather and the getaway car traveling
Speaker 2: across country, small country roads, collided with a police car
Speaker 2: at a small crossroads.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well this is now the police version of events
Speaker 2: because it goes I wasn't there, so I really can't
Speaker 2: give you the I can give you what I think
Speaker 2: is the accurate event of what happened because of my
Speaker 2: later investigations. But there was the two cars collided, there
Speaker 2: was an exchange of going far and two police officers
Speaker 2: were killed, and the three raiders escaped across country, the
Speaker 2: three bank crappers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and where did this happen?
Speaker 2: In a town called Balhadrin and County ross Common in Ireland.
Speaker 1: But at the time you were far away.
Speaker 2: I was in a different region, different county altogether. That's it.
Speaker 1: That's an important detail.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So that evening one man was arrested not too
Speaker 2: far away and he had a bullet wound in his chest.
Speaker 2: And the following morning a second man was arrested and
Speaker 2: the third man escaped across country. And two days after
Speaker 2: the crime, a police officer managed to catch the man
Speaker 2: that were chasing, actually caught hold of him and was
Speaker 2: the only police officer to see the man with When
Speaker 2: the man wasn't wearing a mask, but the man struggled
Speaker 2: and got away from the police officer, ran away across
Speaker 2: the fields, stole a car and escaped again, and apparently
Speaker 2: he passed through the town where I was and got
Speaker 2: away again from the police. And twelve days after the crime,
Speaker 2: they arrested me and brought me in and framed me
Speaker 2: up for the crime I hadn't committed.
Speaker 1: Now, there was there's a backstory there too, right, there
Speaker 1: was a reason they wanted you. Right, you were known
Speaker 1: to the cops and you were a person that they
Speaker 1: would have liked to pin something on, and this was
Speaker 1: sort of a cond Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I was known in the context that I was
Speaker 2: a political activist. I'd been a political activist from the
Speaker 2: time I was sixteen years of age, and I'd been
Speaker 2: involved with the IRA, and I had been interned when
Speaker 2: I was eighteen years of age. From nineteen fifty seven
Speaker 2: to fifty nine, I was imprisoned in a prison camp
Speaker 2: on the Coral in Ireland without interment. It means that
Speaker 2: you're imprisoned without any charge or trial on suspicion. So
Speaker 2: they had this background. They classified me as a subversive
Speaker 2: so it was handy for them to get me off
Speaker 2: the streets. That's the way they saw it. But at
Speaker 2: the time at the crime happened, I had a very
Speaker 2: serious alcohol problem and I was on a binge. I
Speaker 2: was drinking. I had been drinking buddies for days and
Speaker 2: days and days. And then they told me that they
Speaker 2: thought the police might be looking for me. I said,
Speaker 2: what for what? So I decided, well, you know, I'd
Speaker 2: have to come off the drink and go and go
Speaker 2: to the police and find out what this is all about.
Speaker 2: But before that happened, I had come off to drink.
Speaker 2: But before I could go to them, they found me
Speaker 2: in the house of a friend and arrested me and
Speaker 2: took me in.
Speaker 1: They found you in the house of friends. So you
Speaker 1: were on this this binge. Yeah, knowing you you're you're
Speaker 1: someone who's prone to extremes.
Speaker 2: Right, some days I've been drinking.
Speaker 1: Twelve days of drinking. That's a lot of drinking. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I imagine this is this is not casual drinking,
Speaker 1: This is.
Speaker 2: No this is this was serious alcoholic drinking. Yes. And
Speaker 2: I've been a fisherman you see at sea, which probably
Speaker 2: saved me because when you go to see in a
Speaker 2: trawler you don't drink. There's not drinking a boat, and
Speaker 2: so I only drank when when I got ashore, which
Speaker 2: was a different story. And at the time of my arrest,
Speaker 2: I was a skipper of a boat carrying cargo out
Speaker 2: of the Arden Islands, which are three islands off the
Speaker 2: west coast of Ireland as Away off Galway Bay and
Speaker 2: habited islands. So my job was to carry different cargoes
Speaker 2: on the ship boat out of the islands of landed
Speaker 2: safety and bring the boat back safely. That was my
Speaker 2: job at the time.
Speaker 1: Now, just to give some context, Peter looks like the
Speaker 1: skipper of a boat. He's very tall and strong and
Speaker 1: very well built. I mean, he's got long flowing hair.
Speaker 1: You know, for someone like me who grew up in Manhattan,
Speaker 1: what would I know about skippers of boats? Right, we
Speaker 1: have rowboats in Central Park here. That's about it. But
Speaker 1: in any case, yes, he very much looks the part.
Speaker 1: So you were so this was your job at the time.
Speaker 2: That was my job, and as luck would have it,
Speaker 2: I took the day off work the day that the
Speaker 2: robbery happened and went on a binge and they used
Speaker 2: that against me as I had taken the day off
Speaker 2: work to go and commit the robbery hadn't happened. But anyway,
Speaker 2: when I was arrested and I was taken to the
Speaker 2: police station, there's a funny thing about that too, because
Speaker 2: after twelve days on drinking, you know, I was entering
Speaker 2: into detox because this was the first day I hadn't drank.
Speaker 2: And when they arrested me and took me into the
Speaker 2: police card, two detectives each side of me, I had
Speaker 2: to shiver it and they said I was shivering because
Speaker 2: of fear, because of killed skilled. I was shivering because
Speaker 2: I was after binge. But when they got me into
Speaker 2: the police station, they first thing they did was strip
Speaker 2: me naked and a team of detectives walked around and
Speaker 2: inspected my body, which I found to be very weird,
Speaker 2: and they all looked very disappointed, and I didn't know why.
Speaker 2: I later discovered they were disappointed because I didn't have
Speaker 2: a bullet wound. Because I remember the guy that they
Speaker 2: arrested had been shot told him that his friend had
Speaker 2: also been shot, so they were looking to see had
Speaker 2: I a bullet wound, And when I didn't have a
Speaker 2: bullet wound, that looked very disappointed. But that didn't stop
Speaker 2: them framing me up. So I was arrested at three
Speaker 2: o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, and at four o'clock they
Speaker 2: commenced interrogations and I was interrogated from four pm Saturday
Speaker 2: afternoon until four thirty am on Sunday morning.
Speaker 1: Twelve and a half hours.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was a break when I had a visit,
Speaker 2: two breaks when I had two short visits with my
Speaker 2: lawyers in the middle, but that was twelve hours.
Speaker 1: Basically, you and two detectors in the room had that may.
Speaker 2: And the team of detectives they were coming in relays
Speaker 2: of towo's and trees and interrogating and you know, with
Speaker 2: the occasional beating in the thrown in for good measure
Speaker 2: because two colleagues had been killed and they were very,
Speaker 2: very angry. And so then at four am in the morning,
Speaker 2: I was brought down into a dirty cell and put
Speaker 2: into a dirty cell, and a police officer was outside
Speaker 2: with a baton, and it's a solid door, and they
Speaker 2: closed the door and then he was outside banging on
Speaker 2: the metal door with his baton so that I couldn't
Speaker 2: fall asleep. And then at eight am they took me
Speaker 2: out of the cell and at eight thirty re commenced
Speaker 2: interrogations and I was interrogated from eight thirty am on
Speaker 2: Sunday morning right through until four thirty am on Monday morning.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's an twenty hours yeah.
Speaker 2: And during that day it's very interesting actually in the
Speaker 2: afternoon that was on the Sunday what we're known in
Speaker 2: Ireland as the Heavy Gang. These were the Serious Crime
Speaker 2: Squad who had a terrible reputation. They took over the
Speaker 2: police station and they allowed they let all the local
Speaker 2: police go off to a football match or something, and
Speaker 2: so the only people in the police station with me
Speaker 2: on Sunday afternoon were the Serious Crime Squad and Special Branch.
Speaker 2: And at one point in the afternoon I was being
Speaker 2: interrogated and they when they beat you, they make sure
Speaker 2: you have to leave mark so you get kidney punches.
Speaker 2: I'd be standing while they be questioning me, and one
Speaker 2: would come behind me with his pistol and you know,
Speaker 2: whack you in the kidneys, which is very very painful.
Speaker 2: And are they take their boots and rask them down
Speaker 2: along my shins, you know, along the shin bone, along
Speaker 2: the skin to tear the skin. Stuff like that. You
Speaker 2: wouldn't think about a stamp on your toes. These are big,
Speaker 2: heavy men, you know, and you're wearing a pair of
Speaker 2: canvas shoes that they've given me. And at one point
Speaker 2: that I knew I needed to break this was, you know,
Speaker 2: I knew I was. I was getting very tired of this.
Speaker 2: So I said I wanted to use the toilet, and
Speaker 2: they said you're not going to use the toilet. You're
Speaker 2: not going to use the toilet, you know, because they
Speaker 2: used fierce language, you know. And I waited a little
Speaker 2: while and then I said to the inspector who was
Speaker 2: conducting matters, I said, it's like this now, I said,
Speaker 2: if you don't have to use the toilet, I said,
Speaker 2: I'm going to pissl the floor here in this office.
Speaker 2: They went there and he said, well he would too,
Speaker 2: he would too to be you know. So with that
Speaker 2: they left the room and they called in two other
Speaker 2: detectives and they left the room, and after about ten minutes,
Speaker 2: they were told to take me out of the toilet.
Speaker 2: So the two detectors took me out. I was in front,
Speaker 2: walked out the door, down the corridor and turned right
Speaker 2: along a long corridor and about halfway down this corridor,
Speaker 2: there's an alcove to a staircase going stairs, waves going.
Speaker 1: Up, and the.
Speaker 2: Men's room was on the left, near the opposite that
Speaker 2: that's alcove. And at the end of the corridor, the
Speaker 2: door was open out onto the car park and the street.
Speaker 2: And I'm walking now, but you know, you can imagine
Speaker 2: I'm sort of hypertense because of all that's happening, and
Speaker 2: I'm walking down along the corridor, and I had the
Speaker 2: door open because they wanted me to make a run
Speaker 2: for it.
Speaker 1: So they could see you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And when I got just at this alcohol, a
Speaker 2: detective standing in the alcohol that I couldn't see, put
Speaker 2: his foot out to trip me. But I was so
Speaker 2: hypertense I saw it and I lift him. I stepped
Speaker 2: over his foot, and the detective behind me says, ah,
Speaker 2: you won't catch Peter like that. And with that, the
Speaker 2: guy that had tried to trip me says, I'll fucking
Speaker 2: catch him, he says, and he cocked a noosy submachine gun.
Speaker 2: He said, I'll kill the bastard. And I got on
Speaker 2: a merciful push in my back and I was propelled
Speaker 2: through the door of the men's room and up against
Speaker 2: the wall to the side, and the detective behind me,
Speaker 2: who was a Special Branch detective, shielded my body, put
Speaker 2: his hands up like that. She eded my body and
Speaker 2: said into my ears, say nothing, say nothing, Say nothing,
Speaker 2: and he said to his call he shut the door,
Speaker 2: and they shut the door, and there was a big
Speaker 2: for already going on out in the hallway. The guy
Speaker 2: with a gun was wanting to get at me. And
Speaker 2: the next thing we heard a torretive voice saying, what's
Speaker 2: going on here? And then hand me that weapon and
Speaker 2: then to somebody has take care of that weapon, and
Speaker 2: he says, you to my office. And I gather what
Speaker 2: happened to was as superintendent came in and saw what
Speaker 2: was going on, stopped it. But in the toilet, the
Speaker 2: detective that was protecting me still covered my back, covered
Speaker 2: me with his body, which is a very brave thing
Speaker 2: to do, because I thought the lunatic was going to
Speaker 2: shoot me. And then when everything had quite and down,
Speaker 2: he says to me, I need to have a pin
Speaker 2: out too, he says, after all that, and so that
Speaker 2: was it, and that was brought back and the interrogations continued.
Speaker 1: I mean, we've heard these stories from people who were
Speaker 1: wrongfully arrested and subjected to awful interrogations in America. And
Speaker 1: we don't really know much about the audience here because
Speaker 1: we haven't covered it in any detail what goes on overseas,
Speaker 1: but it sounds every bit as bad as anything that
Speaker 1: goes on in America. And of course we do know that,
Speaker 1: as you pointed out, when police officers are killed, they
Speaker 1: get crazy, they get into an irrational state, and they
Speaker 1: probably do things that they wouldn't normally.
Speaker 2: Do normally do that's correct.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you you were subject to I mean from
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to do the math, like almost forty
Speaker 1: hours of interrogation. That's far, and I'm guessing that there
Speaker 1: was well we know that you didn't get any sleep.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you weren't giving anything to eat.
Speaker 2: Well, no, they would bring along a cup of tea
Speaker 2: or something like that, you know, maybe a sandwich, you know.
Speaker 1: Right, so they okay, so at least you had that
Speaker 1: going for yourself. But that which is better than you
Speaker 1: would have thought based on the way they're treating you. Right,
Speaker 1: But then again, they like to do that, right, They
Speaker 1: like to pull you in a little bit and then
Speaker 1: put you back out and do that whole like psychological
Speaker 1: torture thing as well.
Speaker 2: Then when I was put into the cell down on
Speaker 2: Monday morning at four am on Monday morning, I was
Speaker 2: taken out again at eight o'clock and I was interrogated
Speaker 2: then til noon on Monday, and then I was taken
Speaker 2: on an armed desk card of police to Dublin and
Speaker 2: brought before the Special Criminal Court where I was charged
Speaker 2: with capital model and robbery.
Speaker 1: But you never confessed, absolutely not.
Speaker 2: I should tell you this one. My father was a policeman.
Speaker 2: My father had been a police officer.
Speaker 1: I don't know that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And at the time when I was a young man,
Speaker 2: and he knew of my involvement with the Republican movement,
Speaker 2: and he tried to talk me out of it, of course,
Speaker 2: and he said to me at one stage he said
Speaker 2: to me, if you're going to stay with these people
Speaker 2: that you're involved in now, he said, I want to
Speaker 2: tell you to give you some advice. He says, if
Speaker 2: you're ever arrested by that crowd. And I said, what crowd?
Speaker 2: He said, that crowd in the castle. Dublin Castle was
Speaker 2: the center for the Special Branch. And he was referring
Speaker 2: to a special branch. He said, if they deal with
Speaker 2: political matters. He says, if you're arrested, don't answer any questions.
Speaker 2: He said, give them me your name, address, and date
Speaker 2: of bert and say nothing else. And I said, why that,
Speaker 2: He says, because no matter what you say, they'll twist
Speaker 2: it and use it against you. So when I was arrested,
Speaker 2: and that was my policy when I had been arrested
Speaker 2: many times before, because if anything happened in the area
Speaker 2: that I was in, they would do a sort of
Speaker 2: round up the usual specs. Anything political happened, I didn't mean,
Speaker 2: and they'd pulled me in and they questioned me, and
Speaker 2: I'd say nothing, and they'd released me and that was
Speaker 2: the end of it. So I knew about the procedures
Speaker 2: when I was arrested. But they brought me before the
Speaker 2: Special Criminal Court which was established for the trial of
Speaker 2: political offenses, which is a tribunal of three judges, no jury,
Speaker 2: and there I was charged and remanded in custody to
Speaker 2: the maximum security prison where was put And in truth,
Speaker 2: when I got to the maximum security prison that evening
Speaker 2: on the Monday evening, and that was kind of interesting too,
Speaker 2: because when I was brought into what they call reception
Speaker 2: in the prison. I was stripped. Of course, they stripped
Speaker 2: her to you're going into the prison. And there was
Speaker 2: a senior chief officer what they call a chief officer there, Jaylor,
Speaker 2: and they handed me prison claus. I said them, They said,
Speaker 2: you have to put them on. You have to wear
Speaker 2: prison clothes. I said, no, I'm a political prisoner. I
Speaker 2: don't wear prison clothes. And they said, but after that's it. No,
Speaker 2: I said, I'm not wearing I want my own clothes back.
Speaker 2: And I said, if you don't give me my own clothes,
Speaker 2: I'll go naked. I did the respond to that, and
Speaker 2: I said, what well, some of them wanted to beat
Speaker 2: me up again, you see. I wanted to beat me up.
Speaker 2: And the chief said no, no, no, he said, are
Speaker 2: you serious. I said, of course, I'm serious. I said,
Speaker 2: I'm a political prisoner. I'm not wearing prison clothes. And
Speaker 2: he said, give me his fucking clothes. So I got
Speaker 2: my clothes and I was brought into the prison wing
Speaker 2: where I was where everybody else was not wearing their
Speaker 2: own clothes too, because it was a politic good wing,
Speaker 2: you see. And I was put into a cell. And
Speaker 2: I can tell you this much. I to get into
Speaker 2: that prison cell with a clean bed, even though it's
Speaker 2: a narrow, army type of bed. Take off my clothes
Speaker 2: and get into the bed and sleep. It was such
Speaker 2: a relief after forty eight harrowing hours and me I
Speaker 2: was detoxing during all this time that I was in
Speaker 2: the police station, and there I was. And then three
Speaker 2: months later I was given a copy of the Book
Speaker 2: of Evidence, and I saw in the book of evidence
Speaker 2: where one detective sergeant was claiming that on the Monday
Speaker 2: morning that would have been after thirty four hours of interrogation,
Speaker 2: I had supposedly suddenly blurted out these words. I know
Speaker 2: that you know I was involved, but on the advice
Speaker 2: of my solicitor, I'm saying nothing, and you'll have to
Speaker 2: and you'll have to prove it all the way. I'd
Speaker 2: never spoken those words, because, as I said, all I
Speaker 2: gave was my name addressed data bart and if I
Speaker 2: wanted to use the toilet, I said, I wanted to
Speaker 2: use the toilet.
Speaker 1: So for thirty four hours of them interrogating you and
Speaker 1: alternately beating you and switching people and going in and
Speaker 1: out and depriving you of sleep and everything else, all
Speaker 1: you gave them was your name.
Speaker 2: Address, and birth data bart and to say to them,
Speaker 2: I am innocent of what you're accusing me of.
Speaker 1: So your dad's advice really stuck with.
Speaker 2: You absolutely because he knew I mean, he was a
Speaker 2: police officer.
Speaker 1: Right, which is an iron ironic twist. It is a thing, right,
Speaker 1: the fact that your dad was a police officer and
Speaker 1: you end up being accused of killing two police officers
Speaker 1: and then tortured by police office. Yeah, it's very strange.
Speaker 1: Life is very strange, and your story is particularly insane.
Speaker 1: So and what an odd thing to just reflect for
Speaker 1: a second on the fact that you were just expressing
Speaker 1: how you felt the sense of relief and you almost
Speaker 1: sounded joyful at the idea that you were being put
Speaker 1: into a cell in a maximum security prison just because
Speaker 1: you had just been through this unbelievable ordeal.
Speaker 2: Because I was away from the RDEL, you see, right,
Speaker 2: I was safe from it. That's why I could relax.
Speaker 1: I know. But you got to understand, like for anyone
Speaker 1: else you know who's in society to hear that or
Speaker 1: me right now, to go to think of how that
Speaker 1: could be that you could actually feel happy about being
Speaker 1: an innocent person put into a tiny cell with a
Speaker 1: hard cut. But then again it was the best thing
Speaker 1: you had seen in at least forty eight hours. Yes, right,
Speaker 1: I could get some.
Speaker 2: Sleeps, so my mind didn't go to that fact that
Speaker 2: I was in the maximum security prisoner, that I was
Speaker 2: accused wrongly. That stage my exhaustion, all I wanted was rest.
Speaker 2: And then a funny thing happened the following morning. I
Speaker 2: woke up at seven o'clock in the following morning. The
Speaker 2: cell I was in was on the ground floor, and
Speaker 2: I woke up the following morning at seven o'clock to
Speaker 2: hear a voice outside the cell in the prison yard,
Speaker 2: outside the cell, screaming, Jesus help me, help me, help me. Oh,
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ helped me. Like I heard a scream, and
Speaker 2: I thought, oh my god, what's going on here? Because
Speaker 2: I didn't know. I thought maybe some prisoner was being
Speaker 2: battered or something. And then I heard other voice saying,
Speaker 2: come on, come on, come on here, the cut that down,
Speaker 2: come on, And there was a whole commercial going on
Speaker 2: outside in the prison yard, and I didn't know what
Speaker 2: it was. And I thought, really, I'm in a right
Speaker 2: hell hole here. This is a prisoner being battered.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It was only afterwards when the cell door opened I
Speaker 2: heard that actually it was a prison officer had had
Speaker 2: a nervous breakdown in the yard and they were trying
Speaker 2: to take him away.
Speaker 1: That was your first morning.
Speaker 2: That was my first morning experience in the maximum security prison.
Speaker 2: What was the name of the prison, Port Leasha prison?
Speaker 1: It was in the Midlands for at least so, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: welcome to Port Lisia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which it was. It's known colloquially as the Bark
Speaker 2: the Bark. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So at this point, had you already been sentenced?
Speaker 2: No, no, just accused.
Speaker 1: They've thrown you into this prison while you await your trial.
Speaker 2: That's right. And I was swing. There was no such
Speaker 2: thing as putting me in with other people and romand
Speaker 2: I was put in with people that had already been convicted.
Speaker 2: It was a politic good wing. So the way it
Speaker 2: worked there, in one way, it was a tough place
Speaker 2: to be.
Speaker 1: So let's go forward to the trial and the conviction,
Speaker 1: because there's so much more to your story. So the
Speaker 1: trial takes, how long does it take to get to
Speaker 1: the trial?
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, three months after I was arrested, I got
Speaker 2: a copy of the Book of Evidence and when I
Speaker 2: read the book of evidence, I saw where the detective
Speaker 2: sergeant was claiming that after thirty four hours of interrogation,
Speaker 2: I had suddenly blurted out these words that did I
Speaker 2: said to them already I know you know, yeah, which
Speaker 2: I never said. And the first time I came across
Speaker 2: these words was when I read the book of evidence,
Speaker 2: and that was the principal evidence against me.
Speaker 1: You're so called confession, my so called oral confession.
Speaker 2: So when we went to try, now the two other
Speaker 2: people had been arrested, the three of us were tried together, right,
Speaker 2: So the trial took twenty three court days over six weeks,
Speaker 2: and for the first twelve days of the trial, my
Speaker 2: name wasn't even mentioned, apart from the fact they charges
Speaker 2: were read out to me. After that, my name wasn't
Speaker 2: mentioned for twelve days. So I'm sitting in the dock.
Speaker 2: It's surreal as if I'm one of the audience, because
Speaker 2: they're talking about stuff about these other guys and nothing
Speaker 2: about me. And then after twelve days they went to
Speaker 2: my case, and when my case was then opened, they
Speaker 2: opened the case against me. The police officer who had
Speaker 2: captured the guy they were chasing, whom they claimed was me.
Speaker 2: Went in the witness box and he was asked to
Speaker 2: see the man again and he said, yes, he's in
Speaker 2: the court and can you point him out? And he said, yes,
Speaker 2: I'm sitting in the dock. So he pointed to a
Speaker 2: man in the public gallery, standing in the public gallery
Speaker 2: and he says, that's him standing up there. And it
Speaker 2: was really bizarre because all the public gallery in the
Speaker 2: court was packed, but all the people standing beside this
Speaker 2: man moved away from him and somehow found space, and
Speaker 2: he was left standing like this on his own, like
Speaker 2: something you can see in the movies, you know, And
Speaker 2: the whole courtroom started laughing. It seems so funny. But
Speaker 2: I was convicted. They never stopped that man, they never
Speaker 2: arrested him, they allowed him leave the court.
Speaker 1: Is it your belief that that was actually the guy?
Speaker 2: Oh well, the police officer who had caught him and
Speaker 2: spoke to him said that was actually the guy, and
Speaker 2: he had the and he knew I was in the dock.
Speaker 2: He knew I was the accused.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting and bizarre though we've seen this before,
Speaker 1: that the actual killer would come to the courtroom to
Speaker 1: watch the proceedings, right.
Speaker 2: Apparently he did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is a phenomenon that happened. It's so weird.
Speaker 2: And so he was allowed to leave the court. And
Speaker 2: I was convicted on the evidence of the detective sergeant
Speaker 2: that I had spoken those words I told you about
Speaker 2: that I never said, right, and that was the evidence
Speaker 2: of him which I was convicted.
Speaker 1: And sense death, did your attorney bring up the fact
Speaker 1: that the other defendant had said that you had?
Speaker 2: But he said to me afterwards that evening, he said
Speaker 2: to me, now I should explain the situation in the
Speaker 2: Special Priminent court. Not like in America, I the accused
Speaker 2: of not allowed to sit beside these lawyers. Okay, So
Speaker 2: you have the tribunal, the registrar, the solicitors, the barristers,
Speaker 2: the journalists, and then behind and are raised slightly elevated
Speaker 2: the dock. I'm sitting in the dock, So I am
Speaker 2: about I suppose I am about the equivalent of about
Speaker 2: six rows of seats behind my lawyers. And they're facing
Speaker 2: the opposite direction from me. They're facing the court as
Speaker 2: I am, so I can only see their backs, and
Speaker 2: I can't consult with them. And the only time I
Speaker 2: can consult with them is when the try that day
Speaker 2: is over. So when I raised the matter with my
Speaker 2: lwyers at the time, they told me, oh, well, you
Speaker 2: can't be convicted now, as the detective has said, the
Speaker 2: police officer has made that identification. There's no way you
Speaker 2: can be convicted. And I thought, okay, I knew nothing
Speaker 2: about the law at the time.
Speaker 1: Well it seems logical though, understand it says, yeah, the
Speaker 1: guy's here, there, he is, he is, and you're going okay, yeah, good.
Speaker 2: But the thing about it is, if that had happened
Speaker 2: in the North of Ireland, if my lawyers had been
Speaker 2: any good, they would have asked for a mistrial straight away.
Speaker 2: They would ask for dismissal straight away. But they didn't.
Speaker 2: And actually, my senior counsel, who didn't even turn around
Speaker 2: to look at this man, and didn't even turn around
Speaker 2: to look where the police officer pointed to, he said
Speaker 2: to the police officer, so you've identified the defendant as
Speaker 2: the man, and the police officer said yes. And then
Speaker 2: the prosecution council stood up and he said, in fairness
Speaker 2: to the accused, my lords, he said, I have to
Speaker 2: point out he said that this witness was shown a
Speaker 2: photograph of the accused before the trial and they're not
Speaker 2: allowed to do that, you see. So then that meant
Speaker 2: that his evidence was just allowed.
Speaker 1: Oh so his evidence of having pointed out the actual killer,
Speaker 1: who we believe is the actual killer, was disallowed because
Speaker 1: of that, but not your false confession. Were you able
Speaker 1: to testify in your defense?
Speaker 2: No, my lawyers said that no evidence against me, and
Speaker 2: that if I went into the witness box it would
Speaker 2: mitigate against me and that the state would put me apart.
Speaker 2: And I wasn't afraid to go into the witness box.
Speaker 2: In fact, I wanted to go into the witness box,
Speaker 2: but my lawyers misdirected me and said, no, there's no
Speaker 2: evidence against you, so there's no need for you to
Speaker 2: go into the witness box.
Speaker 1: So again another common factor that we see, well, a
Speaker 1: couple of common factors that we see in these wrongful convictions.
Speaker 1: You're a victim of police misconduct, prosecutorial misconduct, and incompetent
Speaker 1: defense attorneys, and ultimately you're convicted and sentenced to death.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about that moment, and then let's move forward
Speaker 1: to the craziness that happened on the eve of your execution.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, Well, when the case was over, when the
Speaker 2: prosecution case in the defense case was finished. The court
Speaker 2: reserved judgment to the following day, and we were brought
Speaker 2: back to the prison and to be brought up the
Speaker 2: following day to hear their judgment. When we were convicted
Speaker 2: and so.
Speaker 1: So you had been convicted in that sentence.
Speaker 2: No, I hadn't been convicted.
Speaker 1: Oh, so you had to go You had to go
Speaker 1: back to the prison and wait there, wonder.
Speaker 2: Off the court as to whether they were going to
Speaker 2: convict or not.
Speaker 1: That's a long night.
Speaker 2: And it was. It was pretty clear that they were
Speaker 2: going to convict the other two guys because there was
Speaker 2: evidence against them, but there was no The only evidence
Speaker 2: against me was this the word of this police officer,
Speaker 2: which I had disputed, and plus the fact that the
Speaker 2: other police officer had identified the actual culprit who was
Speaker 2: not me. So when we went up the following day, anyway,
Speaker 2: they convicted me and they sentenced me to death, and
Speaker 2: the sentence went like this. To preside member of the
Speaker 2: court said you should be taken from this court to
Speaker 2: the place in which you were last held. And this
Speaker 2: was now on the twenty seventh of November nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: and on the nineteen day of November and nine and
Speaker 2: the year of our Lord nineteen eighty you should be
Speaker 2: made to suffer debt by execution in the manner prescribed
Speaker 2: by law. And then and you're also sentenced to fifteen
Speaker 2: years imprisonment for the robbery. My inner response at the
Speaker 2: time was, this is crazy. If I'm going to be
Speaker 2: executed in three weeks time, I can't serve the fifteen years.
Speaker 2: And if I'm going to serve the fifteen years, I
Speaker 2: can't be executed three weeks time. That was the way
Speaker 2: my head was around the whole time. And then I
Speaker 2: was taken down underneath the courtroom to the cells. I
Speaker 2: was putting the cell, and then my lawyers come down
Speaker 2: to see me in this alcove that was there, and
Speaker 2: I was brought out to the alcohol to meet with
Speaker 2: my lawyers. But the senior lawyer hadn't yet come. And
Speaker 2: when he came in a few moments later and he
Speaker 2: came up to me, he was weeping. He was crying,
Speaker 2: he was in tears. And I found myself in this
Speaker 2: bizarre situation that I was standing up with my arm
Speaker 2: around his name is Sheamus Egan, the lawyer. My arm
Speaker 2: was around him, and I was saying it's okay, it's okay,
Speaker 2: don't worry, which we haven't appealed, don't worry. And he's
Speaker 2: crying his eyes out, and I think there was a
Speaker 2: this is weird good backwards, this is this is about face. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he should be consoling me and I, you know, whereas
Speaker 2: I'm consolting him. And so I was brought back to
Speaker 2: the prison. Now, when I was brought back to the prison,
Speaker 2: now I'm a sentence I condemned prisoner, right, so I'm
Speaker 2: put in a death cell. And at first actually didn't
Speaker 2: put me in a death cell. They put me in
Speaker 2: an isolation area. And they put me in an ordinary
Speaker 2: cell in an isolation area with two jailers in this
Speaker 2: stale saddle with me. And that night there was no
Speaker 2: sleep because these guys were sitting reading papers, rustling, talking,
Speaker 2: you know, and I couldn't get to sleep until eventually
Speaker 2: during the night I sat up and I said to him,
Speaker 2: and I said, now listen here to me, you guys,
Speaker 2: the chief has told me that in this situation that
Speaker 2: I'm in, I can have whatever jailer's I want with me.
Speaker 2: And unless you pair be totally quiet, I'm going to
Speaker 2: ask for you every night, and they went, oh jeez,
Speaker 2: don't do that, and they were as quite as lambs,
Speaker 2: and I got through the night.
Speaker 1: But then the follow that was a very good reverse
Speaker 1: psychology there. Yeah. Yeah, well it's almost it's sort of
Speaker 1: like an active rebellion, I guess in a certain way,
Speaker 1: and also and an element of controlling your own situation
Speaker 1: which is completely out of your control.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And then I protested the following day and they
Speaker 2: put us into a they created what they called the
Speaker 2: death cell, which was a larger cell, and the three
Speaker 2: condemned prisoners were put in there. And I hadn't bed
Speaker 2: down again in the wall.
Speaker 1: You and the other two the actual bankroppers, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you didn't know until that point, right.
Speaker 2: No, well I knew one of them previously because I
Speaker 2: knew him from drinking, okay, but otherwise I didn't know them.
Speaker 2: And of course it's often asked to me, why didn't
Speaker 2: they say you weren't with them? And the fact of
Speaker 2: the matter is each of them were conducting a defense
Speaker 2: of not guilty. They were pleading not guilty, and if
Speaker 2: they had said that I wasn't with them, that would
Speaker 2: prove that they were guilty. And the charge carried a
Speaker 2: mandatory death sentence.
Speaker 1: So they had nothing to lose.
Speaker 2: They weren't going They were just trying to save their
Speaker 2: own next and I understood that. But anyway, in that
Speaker 2: condemned self that I was in there on the twenty
Speaker 2: seventh of November and about a week before Christmas of
Speaker 2: that year in nineteen eighty, the way the rule was,
Speaker 2: the condemned prisoner wasn't allowed to speak to any of
Speaker 2: the prisoners, and the jailers were told not to speak
Speaker 2: the condemned prisoner for their own protection, because if a jailer,
Speaker 2: like a prison guard, gets to like a condemned prisoner,
Speaker 2: or have respect for a condemned prisoner, it would be
Speaker 2: very difficult for them to participate in cold bloodedly taking
Speaker 2: that person's life, which is logically true. But on this
Speaker 2: particular case, about a week before Christmas, I overheard three
Speaker 2: of the jailers discussing what part they might have to
Speaker 2: play in my hanging.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: They were sitting as cross as I am to you, Jason,
Speaker 2: and they were discussing, this is if I wasn't there,
Speaker 2: as if I wasn't a human being. They had been
Speaker 2: told that two prison officers would have to participate in
Speaker 2: my execution, and they were very concerned to know what
Speaker 2: bonus they would receive for doing this job, because of
Speaker 2: course it was outside of their normal work, and what
Speaker 2: role they would have to play. And the role they
Speaker 2: would have to play, they said, was that when my
Speaker 2: body would go down to the trap door of the gallows,
Speaker 2: there would be two prison officers underneath, and each one
Speaker 2: would have to pull on one of my legs to
Speaker 2: make sure my neck was broken.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm almost never at a loss for words,
Speaker 1: but I don't even know what to say about that.
Speaker 1: That's a whole note.
Speaker 2: Well, I didn't know what to say about it either,
Speaker 2: but I was already angry over what they had done
Speaker 2: to me. But this made me enraged, but in a
Speaker 2: funny kind of way, and if it's our kind of way,
Speaker 2: helped me because it forced me to face the reality
Speaker 2: straight in front of me. So I was likely to
Speaker 2: be hanged. How old were you at the time, forty one?
Speaker 2: And facing that reality, to my surprise, I discovered that
Speaker 2: I wasn't afraid to die, But what I was afraid
Speaker 2: of was that I might not be able to die
Speaker 2: with dignity. I was terribly afraid that they might succeed
Speaker 2: in taking away my human dignity, and I determined I
Speaker 2: wouldn't have let them do that. Now they had imprisoned
Speaker 2: me physically, but they couldn't imprison my mind, or my
Speaker 2: heart or my spirit. And so I determined that it
Speaker 2: was in those relements on myself I would exist while
Speaker 2: I was in that situation. And that's what I did.
Speaker 1: And the mind, the heart, and the spirit. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so you came within eleven days of being executed.
Speaker 2: That's correct. Well before that, my lawyer has made an
Speaker 2: application for leave to appeal, which put a stay on
Speaker 2: the execution. But then the appeal court refuse my application
Speaker 2: for leave to appeal, so I got no appeal, and
Speaker 2: they said a new day for my execution, which was
Speaker 2: the eighth of June nineteen eighty one. And about two
Speaker 2: weeks after the new date was set, my lawyer's going
Speaker 2: on to visit me in the prison and they wanted
Speaker 2: me to allow them to put in a plea for
Speaker 2: clemency on my behalf, and I refused. I said no way.
Speaker 2: And the senior counsel, the guy who had been crying
Speaker 2: after the trial, he was in tears again, you know,
Speaker 2: very emotional man, and he said, but they might hang you,
Speaker 2: Peter Well, I said, if they do, it wouldn't be
Speaker 2: the first innocent person they've hanged. But I will not
Speaker 2: plea for clemency for something I didn't do. And I
Speaker 2: actually asked for a piece of paper and I wrote,
Speaker 2: gave them written instructions to that effect, because I was
Speaker 2: afraid they would actually go and do it anyway. Oh.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: The reason they said this was that government cabinet had
Speaker 2: met and discussed whether I would be executed or not
Speaker 2: and couldn't come to an agreement about it. And they
Speaker 2: were concerned that the following week the cabinet was going
Speaker 2: to meet again and the cabinet might decide to execute me.
Speaker 2: So they went away very upset and I went back
Speaker 2: to my cell and the following week when the cabinet met,
Speaker 2: I later learned that the Prime ministers before any discussion
Speaker 2: would happen and said, we're not executing Pringle. It would
Speaker 2: be political suicide. And then they instructed the President to
Speaker 2: commute the sentence. And the President commuted sentence from debt
Speaker 2: to forty years penal servitude without any possibility of parole
Speaker 2: or omission. And I was put out into the general
Speaker 2: prison population where I could talk to people and I
Speaker 2: could exercise the yard.
Speaker 1: So it's almost like a I mean, better than being executed,
Speaker 1: I guess, but not by a whole lot, because essentially
Speaker 1: it's a death sentence. You're forty one years old, You've
Speaker 1: got forty years in prison. You're going to die in prison, right,
Speaker 1: that's right.
Speaker 2: But that's not what happened, no, because at the time
Speaker 2: I knew I had three options. You know, I could
Speaker 2: face the forty years, which wasn't the possibility for me
Speaker 2: at the time. I could kill myself, which at the
Speaker 2: time was a reasonable proposition, not let them refuse, to
Speaker 2: allow them to keep me for forty years. But then
Speaker 2: I realized if I did that, they'd say I had
Speaker 2: done it out of given a remorse. So I couldn't
Speaker 2: allow that. So I determined I was going to try
Speaker 2: and prove my innocence.
Speaker 1: And ultimately you did, yeah, fifteen years later. So let's
Speaker 1: walk through that because I want to get to the
Speaker 1: next phase of your life, which is so extraordinary.
Speaker 2: Well, I should also tell you that there was no
Speaker 2: law library in the prison.
Speaker 1: So how did you go about proving your innocence?
Speaker 2: I had a friend who worked in the university outside
Speaker 2: and she had access to the law library in the university,
Speaker 2: and I arranged with her to photocopy sections of law
Speaker 2: books and find out which were the best criminal law
Speaker 2: books and constitutional law books and photocopy sections of them.
Speaker 1: You had plenty of time to study.
Speaker 2: Well, then I couldn't study. You see, I left school
Speaker 2: when I was thirteen years of age, and I'd worked
Speaker 2: all my life, and I had no formal education, and
Speaker 2: my anger was such that I just.
Speaker 1: Couldn't the documents understandable.
Speaker 2: So I determined I had to try and learn how
Speaker 2: to relax. So I got a friend to leave me
Speaker 2: in a little book on yoga with illustrations of the postures,
Speaker 2: and I began to teach myself yoga in the cell
Speaker 2: on my own, and teach myself meditation. And as I
Speaker 2: mastered does two disciplines, my anger got less than I
Speaker 2: was able to study. And I spent my time studying.
Speaker 2: And then what happened was other guys in the prison
Speaker 2: would come to me with their documents, with their cases
Speaker 2: and asked me would I look at their cases? And
Speaker 2: I said, yeah, sure, and I would because it was
Speaker 2: helping them. Was also helping me, and so that's what
Speaker 2: I did most of my time in the jail. In
Speaker 2: the prison, I studied law as best I could, and eventually,
Speaker 2: in January of nineteen ninety two, I opened my own
Speaker 2: case on my own behalf in the High Court in
Speaker 2: Dublin under the Irish Constitution. Now I had no money,
Speaker 2: i'd know lawyers, so I had to prepare the case myself,
Speaker 2: file at myself and conduct the case myself, so which
Speaker 2: meant that they had to take me under armed escort
Speaker 2: of military and police up to the court where I
Speaker 2: represented myself against the top lawyers of the state. And
Speaker 2: the case ran from January nineteen ninety two until May
Speaker 2: of nineteen ninety five, when my conviction was overturned. But
Speaker 2: in July of nineteen ninety two I won an order
Speaker 2: for discovery in the High Court. And that's another I'll
Speaker 2: tell you. There's reams to this story that it's kind
Speaker 2: of important to say this one to you.
Speaker 1: One of the.
Speaker 2: Cars used in the crime had been stolen in Galway
Speaker 2: on the second of July. The crime happened the seventh.
Speaker 2: It was stolen on the second of July between eleven
Speaker 2: PM and eleven forty five pm from the car park
Speaker 2: of a hotel. Right, and the evidence of the stealing
Speaker 2: of that car was allowed into the trial because at
Speaker 2: court ruled that the stealing of the car formed part
Speaker 2: of the rest yestay of the offense, which meant that
Speaker 2: the person who stole the car had done the killing. Right. Okay,
Speaker 2: But on the date of the car of stolen. At
Speaker 2: the time the car of stolen, I was delivering four
Speaker 2: thousand concrete blocks on the Arden Islands with fifty more
Speaker 2: or more witnesses there. Now, I delivered the concrete blocker.
Speaker 2: But five years after I had been I was imprisoned.
Speaker 2: I got a letter from my former boss, the guy
Speaker 2: who owned a little company that owned the boat that
Speaker 2: I was skippering, asking me if i'd been paid for
Speaker 2: the delivery and for the blocks to the value of
Speaker 2: six hundred pounds, which I didn't know about because that
Speaker 2: wasn't my role. My role was simply to be the
Speaker 2: skipper to take the cargo out, and I didn't even
Speaker 2: know what a cost. I wrote back and told him that,
Speaker 2: and he said, no, we believe you, We understand that.
Speaker 2: But he said, the man that you delivered to has
Speaker 2: refused to pay his bill, and five years later, when
Speaker 2: they threatened court action to get the money, he told
Speaker 2: them that he had paid me the money because I'm imprisoned.
Speaker 2: You see, I'm in prison doing forty years for murderer
Speaker 2: catherin wor Than now robbery. So he was going to
Speaker 2: blame me. So I wrote him out of a letter
Speaker 2: saying that of course I'd never done it. And when
Speaker 2: the case came for court, the man never appeared in court,
Speaker 2: and the court ruled against him and accepted my account,
Speaker 2: and the matter was finished. But I went into the
Speaker 2: book of evidence, and I saw that my boss supposedly
Speaker 2: had made a statement in the book of evidence saying
Speaker 2: I sailed at eleven o'clock in the morning and come
Speaker 2: back at eleven o'clock that night, which would have meant
Speaker 2: I had the possibility of steed in the car okay,
Speaker 2: whereas I sailed at four o'clock in the afternoon and
Speaker 2: didn't get back to go with it till two am
Speaker 2: the following morning. Now I knew he had a computer,
Speaker 2: and I knew as a charge of the acountant he
Speaker 2: kept all records. So I wrote to him and said,
Speaker 2: if you a record of the sailing on that day,
Speaker 2: and he said he had you sailed at four o'clock
Speaker 2: in the afternoon and you got back at two am
Speaker 2: in the morning. So I wrote to him again, I said, well,
Speaker 2: then tell me this, Why did you make this statement,
Speaker 2: this false statement?
Speaker 1: What do you say?
Speaker 2: I never made a statement.
Speaker 1: Oh, they made it up.
Speaker 2: They made it up.
Speaker 1: He never made a stake your conviction.
Speaker 2: To try and keet me convicted. He never made a
Speaker 2: statement and he was never even asked to make a statement.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And so later, when I got a lot more discovery,
Speaker 2: I discovered there were actually twenty three prosecution witnesses in
Speaker 2: the case had never made any statements, although there were
Speaker 2: statements in the book of evidence attributed to them, and
Speaker 2: had he He told me that if he had been
Speaker 2: asked to make a statement, he would have told the truth.
Speaker 2: And had he been asked to make a statement and
Speaker 2: told the truth, I couldn't have been convicted. So I
Speaker 2: asked him, wuld he make an affidavit? Would he swear
Speaker 2: an Affidavid? At that and I drafted this and AFFI
Speaker 2: David sent it out to him. He got it notorized
Speaker 2: and swore and sent it back in to me. So
Speaker 2: when I appeared in the court and the High Court
Speaker 2: and looked for an order for discovery, and the lawyers
Speaker 2: for the state were saying, ah, he's only fishing. He
Speaker 2: hasn't got anything. I said, yes, I have, and I
Speaker 2: produced two copies of this affidavi and I said, I
Speaker 2: have here the sworn affidavit of a prosecution witness stating
Speaker 2: clearly that he not only did he not make a
Speaker 2: statement attributed to him, but he was never even asked
Speaker 2: to make a statement. And I offered it to the
Speaker 2: court and the judge wuldn't accept And I offered it
Speaker 2: the state lawyers and they wouldn't accept it, because of
Speaker 2: course they'd accepted it, they would have had to deal
Speaker 2: with it.
Speaker 1: But wouldn't the judge want to deal with it?
Speaker 2: You would think, no, no, no, I don't forget. He
Speaker 2: wasn't being I mean, he was looking at me as
Speaker 2: if I was a piece of dirt.
Speaker 1: So what happened there?
Speaker 2: So I won my order for discovery? And then when
Speaker 2: I got my order for discovery, didn't I get a
Speaker 2: photocopy of the notebook off the detective who had claimed
Speaker 2: I had spoken those words in a particular period of interrogation,
Speaker 2: and he has warned us on notes and that he
Speaker 2: had recorded the interrogation and recorded these words. And when
Speaker 2: I got his notebook, I saw in the notebook it's
Speaker 2: very clear he wrote the words in before the period
Speaker 2: of interrogation in which he claimed.
Speaker 1: I said, yeah, that's tricky.
Speaker 2: Well there's nothing against me, and they decided this was
Speaker 2: what they're going to do.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a very organized, it's very insidious, absolute,
Speaker 1: very coordinated. I mean, the lengths that they went to
Speaker 1: to get the conviction, to protect the conviction, to basically
Speaker 1: run rough shot over the truth are extraordinary to still
Speaker 1: at it.
Speaker 2: By the way, which I'll tell you about as we
Speaker 2: get on through this. But in January of nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 2: a human rights lawyer offered me his help. When I
Speaker 2: took it, we got a legal team, we went to
Speaker 2: the Court of Criminal Appeal on the new legislation, and
Speaker 2: the case ran from nineteen ninety four to nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 2: And the police officer who had lied to get me
Speaker 2: convicted was now a retired detective superintendent. He had been
Speaker 2: promoted up to the top. By the way, the cops
Speaker 2: who lied in the trial were all promoted, and the
Speaker 2: cop who saved my life and who refused to lie
Speaker 2: in the trial, was never promoted.
Speaker 1: Well, I am I not surprised. I mean, this is
Speaker 1: such a web of deceased absolutely lies and bad actors
Speaker 1: and everything else. So your convictions thrown out, your freed right,
Speaker 1: And then you told me a great story about your
Speaker 1: first stay on the outside, or your first was the
Speaker 1: first thing you did when you got out.
Speaker 2: Well, when I was released out of the special Court,
Speaker 2: out on the street, I was met with a plethora
Speaker 2: of media people with microphones and cameras and alls took
Speaker 2: my face, strong questions at me, and I didn't have
Speaker 2: time to sort of realize that I was free, if
Speaker 2: you know what I mean. I didn't have time to
Speaker 2: let it sink in. And then I was taken by
Speaker 2: my lawyer to the TV station, the national TV station
Speaker 2: where I was. We were interviewed for the news that evening,
Speaker 2: and then my friends organized a party. A bunch of
Speaker 2: people had set up a defense committee for me outside
Speaker 2: and they took a floor of a pub and organized
Speaker 2: a big party. And there was a huge, big party
Speaker 2: going on, and we went to that and that went
Speaker 2: on all that evening, and everybody got drunk except me.
Speaker 2: I wasn't drinking, and I stayed with two friends that
Speaker 2: night in their house, and the following morning, when I
Speaker 2: got up, I was the first one up. I went
Speaker 2: down to the kitchen and I went out to the
Speaker 2: back garden, which was a lovely long back garden, and
Speaker 2: the sunshine was a beautiful day. There were no big
Speaker 2: walls around me. There was flowers and trees and bushes.
Speaker 2: And I walked down the garden and at the bottom
Speaker 2: of the garden there was a big old apple tree,
Speaker 2: really big old narl. The other way they'd become gnarled
Speaker 2: apple tree. And I could hear in the distance the sound,
Speaker 2: the background noises of the city. But I went to
Speaker 2: this tree, and I stood with the tree, and I
Speaker 2: realized that and all the time I had been in jail,
Speaker 2: and all the time the trouble I had gone through,
Speaker 2: this tree was growing in this garden on its own,
Speaker 2: with nature, producing its fruit and shedding its leaves every year,
Speaker 2: year and year out, doing its own thing, and immune
Speaker 2: from the corruption, the greed, the rat race, the injustice,
Speaker 2: and everything else. And I put my arms around the
Speaker 2: trunk of the tree, and I wept, and I released
Speaker 2: And that's when I knew for certain I was free.
Speaker 2: That was in May nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 1: So that's twenty one years ago. And then another extraordinary
Speaker 1: thing happened in your life, right, which is something I'm
Speaker 1: very well aware of. Well, something or someone I should say, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, three years after I got out. And it
Speaker 2: was difficult times for a while after I got out,
Speaker 2: because it's very difficult to fit into society again when
Speaker 2: you're locked up. But I had yoga meditation and I
Speaker 2: used that and a little bit of prayer. And three
Speaker 2: years after, one day I got a phone call from
Speaker 2: an American lady who told me her name was Sunny
Speaker 2: Jacob's and she told me she was speaking at a
Speaker 2: meeting three days later where I was, and invited me
Speaker 2: to come and hear talk. And I said, what are
Speaker 2: you going to talk about? And she said the death
Speaker 2: penalty and I said, yes, I'm interested in that. I'll
Speaker 2: come along. And I brought two friends and I went
Speaker 2: long and it was a room above a public course.
Speaker 2: At one o'clock on a Friday, I went up to
Speaker 2: the room. There was nobody there, and after a few
Speaker 2: minutes the door opened to the fire side of the room,
Speaker 2: and this little woman walked in and I walked over
Speaker 2: to her and I said, you must be Sonny Jacobs,
Speaker 2: and she looked up at me with a big smile,
Speaker 2: and that's how we met. And I listened to her
Speaker 2: story and I was hugely emotionally upset by listening to it,
Speaker 2: and I knew I had to talk with her. And
Speaker 2: I said to her, I need to talk with you,
Speaker 2: and she said, got to be good. I need to
Speaker 2: talk with you too. But she said, I'm leaving in
Speaker 2: an hour. This was on a Friday, So where are
Speaker 2: you going? She says, I have to go to Cork
Speaker 2: for the annual General Meeting of Amnesty into an Irish
Speaker 2: section of Amnist International. I should be there at eight
Speaker 2: o'clock tomorrow evening. I said, stay over with me, I said,
Speaker 2: and I guarantee I'll get you down there.
Speaker 1: And so she went how far away was Cork?
Speaker 2: Four hours strive And she went to Mary Lawler, who
Speaker 2: was the General Secretary of Amnesty at the time, and
Speaker 2: asked Mary, because of course she was unsure about whether
Speaker 2: she should go with a stranger in the strange country.
Speaker 2: And Mary knew me and knew my story, and she said, oh,
Speaker 2: that's wonderful. Thank you, Peter. Yeah, yeah, great. So we
Speaker 2: transferred Sunday's case from her car into my audio loppy
Speaker 2: and she stayed in my house that night. In the
Speaker 2: following morning, we went to my friend on the Cafe
Speaker 2: and go away. We went to his place for breakfast.
Speaker 2: He asked us to come for breakfast and he said
Speaker 2: to me, are you driving her down the Cork? And
Speaker 2: I said yeah. He said, you can't go drive somebody
Speaker 2: to Cork and dot your lopy. He said here, and
Speaker 2: he reached his hand in his pocket and he gave
Speaker 2: me the keys of his Mercedes. He said, just get
Speaker 2: it back to me tomorrow morning. So I drove Sunny
Speaker 2: down the Cork in the Mercedes. We traveled in style.
Speaker 2: And as we were on the car fairly crossing the river,
Speaker 2: Shannon eating a pack lunch which he'd made up for us,
Speaker 2: she said to me, what's your interest in all of this?
Speaker 2: And I told her that I too had been wrongly
Speaker 2: convicted and sentenced to death. And she said, you got
Speaker 2: through very well. She said, how did you get through
Speaker 2: so easy so well? And I said, yoga and meditation.
Speaker 1: First of all. By the way, this is a hell
Speaker 1: of a first date, I got to give it up
Speaker 1: to you for a guy who had been in prison
Speaker 1: for fifteen years, you got game, okay, And so so
Speaker 1: that yeah, it's extraordinary, as I keep using that word
Speaker 1: because I don't know what else other words to use, the
Speaker 1: fact that Sonny, of course, had also been sentenced to
Speaker 1: that for a similar crime that happened a continent away,
Speaker 1: five six thousand miles from where you were charged and convicted.
Speaker 1: She was charged and convicted. Both of you were actually
Speaker 1: and absolutely innocent, and you served similar amounts of time
Speaker 1: in prison. She actually a little bit longer than you,
Speaker 1: and both of you had more in common than that, right,
Speaker 1: Both were were committed to a lifestyle of meditation and yoga.
Speaker 1: You're vegetarians, right. So it's sort of the universe organizing
Speaker 1: itself in a way that is.
Speaker 2: It was inevitable that we should come together.
Speaker 1: I think about serendipity as synchronisy what everyone calls metaphysics.
Speaker 1: And you drive her there, We drive her there, and.
Speaker 2: Now Amnesty had got us two rooms in a hotel
Speaker 2: across from the hotel where the convention was, and each
Speaker 2: of us lay on a bed separately, and for three
Speaker 2: and a half hours we discussed forgiveness. Well, that was
Speaker 2: the key forgiveness. And then I brought her back to
Speaker 2: her room and she said to me, would I call
Speaker 2: her when as I leave at six in the morning,
Speaker 2: Would I call her in the morning. I said yes,
Speaker 2: So on the morning, I knocked her door and she
Speaker 2: got up and we said goodbye to each other and
Speaker 2: we'd keep in touch. And I had got my friend's
Speaker 2: car and dropped back to go away.
Speaker 1: Did you guys kiss? Was there any physical interaction? Hold hands? Exactly?
Speaker 4: What happened was.
Speaker 1: A perfect gentleman.
Speaker 4: He said to me, I don't want you to think
Speaker 4: I'm not attracted to you, but I'm in a kind
Speaker 4: of a relationship, and I like to try to leave
Speaker 4: an honorable life. And that's what clicked in my mind,
Speaker 4: because at that point in my life I had no
Speaker 4: time for bs, you know, and so that impressed me.
Speaker 1: How long have you been out of prison? By this time,
Speaker 1: I was out three years? It's almost yeah, three years
Speaker 1: you were out.
Speaker 2: Oh he was out eight.
Speaker 1: Right, so you've been out sex and you've been three Okay, fine,
Speaker 1: that's nothing.
Speaker 2: But we joke and say, you see that she's five
Speaker 2: years older than me. Right, I got it five years
Speaker 2: out before.
Speaker 1: Me and anyway, okay, so then it was what happened.
Speaker 4: And then we hadn't made any arrangement, but when he
Speaker 4: got home he called me and that's when I knew
Speaker 4: that it had clicked for him too.
Speaker 1: So then you ultimately were married, which is my favorite
Speaker 1: part of the story actually.
Speaker 2: But what we'd actually did was about ten years ago.
Speaker 2: We decided that we were going to exchange vows for
Speaker 2: each other, and we bought two clatter rings and on
Speaker 2: the winter, so it's the shortest day of the year,
Speaker 2: because then he said we should do it on the
Speaker 2: shortest stay of the year because we don't want to
Speaker 2: have a long and ag we gave rings to each
Speaker 2: other in the morning, and we were engaged in the evening,
Speaker 2: and we went down to the seashore with our dogs
Speaker 2: and we exchanged vows on the seashore in the evening time,
Speaker 2: and the sun and the moon were both in the
Speaker 2: sky at the same time, which we thought was very auspicious.
Speaker 2: And then what happened. We were having some difficulty when
Speaker 2: we'd leave the country coming back because we're given to
Speaker 2: Sonny Hassel about whether she could come back into the
Speaker 2: country or not. And this was because she was with me,
Speaker 2: you see. So we decided we were going to get married.
Speaker 2: But getting married in Ireland is much more bureaucratically difficult
Speaker 2: than it is in America. And we found out that
Speaker 2: you could apply in New York and get a license
Speaker 2: and get married the next day. But we had no
Speaker 2: money to come to New York. So now at that stage,
Speaker 2: by the way, we were existing on my state pension,
Speaker 2: which is like very small. So the theater that had
Speaker 2: put on The Exonerated the film called contacted us. They
Speaker 2: were doing producers weekend and they wanted us to come
Speaker 2: and speak at two dinners that were hosting, and Sonny says, oh,
Speaker 2: we wanted to go to New York to get married,
Speaker 2: and they said, you're going to get married in New York,
Speaker 2: we'll host the wedding. So they hosted the wedding. They
Speaker 2: brought us to New York and they pull us open
Speaker 2: a hotel and they hosted the wedding. So there were
Speaker 2: about one hundred and twenty one hundred and thirty people
Speaker 2: at the wedding. We only knew six or seven of them,
Speaker 2: and none of our family were there. It was so funny,
Speaker 2: was hilarious. Brookshields, Amy Irving, Marlo Thomas, and Stockard Channing
Speaker 2: were at the wedding. They were four people actresses who
Speaker 2: had played Sonny.
Speaker 1: In the play The Extraordinary Play. Yeah, and Sunny's story
Speaker 1: is one of six that are profiled in this remarkable
Speaker 1: play in which so many incredible actresses have portrayed you.
Speaker 1: That's right, And so they showed up at the wedding.
Speaker 1: So you have this sort of celebrity wedding which adds
Speaker 1: a certain element of strangeness to the whole thing.
Speaker 2: And the best part of it was that when Sonny
Speaker 2: was asked do you take this man to be your
Speaker 2: awfully weathered husband, the four actresses step forward and said,
Speaker 2: with Sonny.
Speaker 1: We do hilarious, that's amazing, Oh my god, funny. So
Speaker 1: you may actually be married to five women at this point.
Speaker 1: Hard to say, and I'm not judging you. I'm just saying,
Speaker 1: so you might want to have somebody look into it.
Speaker 1: So there's a wonderful announcement if you google Peter Pringle
Speaker 1: and Sonny Jacob's wedding. My belief I can't prove this
Speaker 1: is that you're the only two Death Row exgneries who
Speaker 1: have ever been married after exonerations, because there are very
Speaker 1: few women who've been sentenced to death and even many
Speaker 1: fewer who have been exonerated, So you really hit the jackpot.
Speaker 1: And so I do want to put in a plug
Speaker 1: because now Sonny and Peter operate a phenomenal organization called
Speaker 1: the Sunny Sanctuary and it is sort of a haven
Speaker 1: or whatever you want to call it where they bring
Speaker 1: a new league exoner rated people over to the coast
Speaker 1: of Ireland and help them reintegrate, right this is probably
Speaker 1: the best word, and get their get their lives back,
Speaker 1: and get their their spirits back, so to speak.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, it's kind of healing from the inside out.
Speaker 2: We helped them to release the anger and busness that
Speaker 2: they carry over what was done to them.
Speaker 1: And paint the picture of the Sunny Sanctuary for people
Speaker 1: out there who can't really visualize.
Speaker 2: Okay, well we managed. We managed to rent a three
Speaker 2: bedroom house on fourteen acres on the side of a
Speaker 2: hill overlooking a lake and there's there's hazel woods down
Speaker 2: to the lake and each bedroom is on sweet so
Speaker 2: there's every person that comes has their own bathroom and toilet.
Speaker 1: And it's on the coast.
Speaker 2: It's four miles from the sea, but it's it's only
Speaker 2: just above the lake, and it's in a very it's
Speaker 2: at the end of the road. The nearest store is
Speaker 2: six miles away.
Speaker 1: There's more than a few animals there right, Oh.
Speaker 2: Yes, we have. Let us see now we have three
Speaker 2: cats and four dogs, four hens, and five goats and
Speaker 2: tree something like that. I jokingly call it the menagerie.
Speaker 2: Sometimes we milk the goats and Sunny processes the milk,
Speaker 2: and Sonny makes wonderful goat cheese, three different types of
Speaker 2: goat cheese. So we also have what they call a polytunnel,
Speaker 2: which is the equivalent of a greenhouse, where we grow
Speaker 2: around vegetables. So when people come to us, we feed
Speaker 2: them on an organic food and organic free range of eggs,
Speaker 2: and they have milk and cheese, homemade goat cheese, organic
Speaker 2: goat cheese.
Speaker 1: And do you teach them meditation yoga?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, we share with them. We don't conduct therapies
Speaker 2: as such. But what happens is that when they come
Speaker 2: at first, they will tell us what has happened to them,
Speaker 2: They release the things they need to release, and then
Speaker 2: we can share with them how we dealt with the
Speaker 2: issues that are causing them problems and opened the way
Speaker 2: for them to the realization that actually they're more than
Speaker 2: just an ex hoonay. They're not just a person who's
Speaker 2: been in prison. They're more than that. The fact that
Speaker 2: they were wrongfully in prison is just an episode in
Speaker 2: their life, and it's an episode they can put behind
Speaker 2: them now. It always travels with them, but they don't
Speaker 2: have to live in the past, and they have an
Speaker 2: opportunity of realizing themselves as full human beings. And we
Speaker 2: bring them out and socialize with our friends, and we
Speaker 2: go to events and to the theater, and so they
Speaker 2: get a chance to mingle with people as ordinary people.
Speaker 1: It's so inspiring to me and to many of us
Speaker 1: who work in the Innocence movement that a very large
Speaker 1: percentage of x honarees are driven to help others who
Speaker 1: have gone through a similar ordeal. And so it's I
Speaker 1: think the most powerful thing I've witnessed, and I always
Speaker 1: asked this question yesterday, is the coming together of gunaries
Speaker 1: and the sharing of the experiences and the healing that
Speaker 1: comes from that and from being with others who are
Speaker 1: the only people alive who can possibly begin to understand
Speaker 1: what you've been through even though every situation is unique
Speaker 1: and every story is unique, but still the experience is
Speaker 1: more similar than not. And it's so wonderfully inspiring to
Speaker 1: hear the stories, both of your stories and the fact
Speaker 1: that they're now one, and what you've done and how
Speaker 1: you've turned this unimaginable set of circumstances into such a
Speaker 1: force for positivity and change and good is something that
Speaker 1: I think everyone who's listening and so many others are
Speaker 1: going to be affected by, and it's inspiring me and
Speaker 1: so many others to want to do more and help more,
Speaker 1: or as many as we possibly can. I should say
Speaker 1: before we have to wrap this up, if any of
Speaker 1: you are listening now and haven't heard the Sunny Jacob's episode,
Speaker 1: I strongly encourage everyone to check out the Sunny Jacob's episode.
Speaker 1: But before we sign off, Peter, are there any last
Speaker 1: words that you'd like to share with the audience.
Speaker 2: Learn not to carry anger. Anger is a natural phenomenon.
Speaker 2: We get angry, I get angry, everybody gets angry, but
Speaker 2: don't hold it. Don't hold it, don't hate because hate
Speaker 2: consumes the hater, and anger consumes the angry person. That
Speaker 2: doesn't consume the person you're angry against and it damaged
Speaker 2: your health, let it go and try and be in
Speaker 2: the spirit of forgiveness, because that's where your real strength is.
Speaker 2: Our real strength is in the fact that we decided
Speaker 2: we would move towards healing and forgiveness and let go
Speaker 2: of all those negative emotions. And I wish everyone the best.
Speaker 1: Don't forget to give us a fantastic review wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. It really helps. And I'm a proud
Speaker 1: donor to the Innocence Project and I really hope you'll
Speaker 1: join me in supporting this very important cause and helping
Speaker 1: to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocence Project dot
Speaker 1: org to learn how to donate and get involved. I'd
Speaker 1: like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wartis.
Speaker 1: The music in the show is by three time OSCAR
Speaker 1: nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on
Speaker 1: Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast.
Speaker 1: Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm is a production of Lava
Speaker 1: for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company. Number one