Speaker 1: I fell into the hands of a corrupt detective.
Speaker 2: I was naive enough to believe that I would be
Speaker 2: able to just present all of my proof of actual innocence,
Speaker 2: that they would investigate adequately, and so that I wouldn't
Speaker 2: be going to prison because I was a good person.
Speaker 2: I hadn't done anything wrong.
Speaker 1: In the back of your mind, you say, well, when
Speaker 1: we go to a hearing or we go to court,
Speaker 1: the truth will come out. The prosecution from day one
Speaker 1: knew I was innocent and let forced testimony go uncorrected
Speaker 1: from the lower courts all the way up to the
Speaker 1: United States Supreme Court.
Speaker 3: You have someone with a badge with ultimate and really,
Speaker 3: in that moment, unchecked authority.
Speaker 2: Don't presume that people are guilty when you see them
Speaker 2: on TV, because it may just be a dirty da
Speaker 2: that is trying to rise upward.
Speaker 4: This is wrongful conviction.
Speaker 3: Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flomm. Today's guest
Speaker 3: as someone fans of the show will recognize, jeff Dskovic.
Speaker 5: Jeffrey Deskovich spent more than a decade in prison for
Speaker 5: the rape and murder of a classmate. It was a
Speaker 5: crime he did not commit.
Speaker 6: A sixteen year old is arrested for rape and murder.
Speaker 6: He's grown by police and given a lie detector test,
Speaker 6: and eventually the police talk him into a false confession.
Speaker 6: Even though DNA did not link him to the crime.
Speaker 6: He served sixteen years in prison before new testing shows
Speaker 6: another man committed that crime.
Speaker 5: In January two thousand and six, the Innocence Project convinced
Speaker 5: prosecutors to take another look at DNA evidence. New testing
Speaker 5: technology cleared Dskovic of the nineteen eighty nine crime, identifying
Speaker 5: the real killer and releasing Dskovic into a world he
Speaker 5: no longer knew. Today, Deskovic is a free man.
Speaker 4: Jeff, welcome back to Wrongful Conviction.
Speaker 7: Thanks for having me, Jason. It's always a pleasure.
Speaker 3: And Jeff was here before with Amanda Knox and jareded
Speaker 3: Adams when we did a very special Wrongful Christmas where
Speaker 3: he spoke so eloquently about what it was like being
Speaker 3: locked up in a maximum security prison on the holidays
Speaker 3: when everyone else is out celebrating in the world's going
Speaker 3: on without you. But this time I'm really glad to
Speaker 3: have you here, Jeff, because your story is so important
Speaker 3: and so I want to get right back into that
Speaker 3: you grew up in White Plains.
Speaker 7: No, I grew up in Peakskill in west Chester County.
Speaker 7: My case happened in White Plains. That's the county court.
Speaker 3: People are going to scratch their heads or shake their
Speaker 3: heads when I say this. Right, in your case, DNA
Speaker 3: evidence was presented at the trial that proved scientifically, with
Speaker 3: no doubt that you could not have been the perpetrator
Speaker 3: of the beating, rape and murder of the fifteen year
Speaker 3: old victim, Angela Correa. There is no way on God's
Speaker 3: green earth that you could have been the perpetrator, and
Speaker 3: yet you were convicted anyway. And that's what makes it
Speaker 3: just I want to shake up the whole justice system
Speaker 3: and go, wait, that's not possible. It can't happen. And
Speaker 3: you were basically a child when this happened.
Speaker 7: I was. I was sixteen years old when I was arrested,
Speaker 7: and by the time the trial happened and I was
Speaker 7: wrongfully convicted, I was seventeen. So yes, I was a child,
Speaker 7: and I had very small awareness of what was going on,
Speaker 7: totally dependent on the lawyer, who was inept. In a
Speaker 7: lot of ways, It's fair to say that I was
Speaker 7: particularly vulnerable it's.
Speaker 3: Such a tragic thing that happened to start with. And
Speaker 3: this was a young girl who was in your school.
Speaker 3: Were you in tenth grade at the time. I was,
Speaker 3: so you were in tenth grade. She was in tenth grade.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: She was in two of my classes as a freshman
Speaker 7: and one as a sophomore. She was an immigrant from Columbia.
Speaker 7: She'd been in the country for about a year and
Speaker 7: a half. She lived a very very sheltered life, as
Speaker 7: I understand, in which she never went outside unless she
Speaker 7: was with her older sister or with her parents. And
Speaker 7: this one particular day, she received a assignment in her
Speaker 7: photography class to take some pictures of some foliage. The
Speaker 7: teacher assigned male students with the female students. You're like
Speaker 7: a buddy system for you know, safety, And this male
Speaker 7: student who was assigned to her played hooky on the assignment.
Speaker 7: And so when Angela went to her house with her sister,
Speaker 7: her sister went to the restroom, and when she came
Speaker 7: back out, Angela decided to venture out on her own
Speaker 7: that one day to take the pictures, and unfortunately, that
Speaker 7: proved to be her last day.
Speaker 4: It's unbelievable.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's really an incredible story, right, the one
Speaker 3: day this poor little girl decides to you know, be brave,
Speaker 3: right right, So she ends up brutally beaten, raped and strangled, right, yes,
Speaker 3: And this must have caused pandemonium in the community.
Speaker 7: It absolutely did. There hadn't been a murder and big
Speaker 7: skill for about twenty years, and the whole city virtually
Speaker 7: shut down. I mean parents were coming right to the
Speaker 7: high school dropping their kids off and picking them up.
Speaker 7: There was repeated town hall meetings, a mayor and police
Speaker 7: were attending and giving safety tips, and people were vocalizing concerns.
Speaker 3: And well, yeah, there was a monster on the loose
Speaker 3: exactly right, a real monster there was. And so yeah,
Speaker 3: as a parent, I would certainly be doing the same thing.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't let my kid out of my sight until
Speaker 3: this thing was resolved. So this creates, as we know,
Speaker 3: a lot of pressure right on law enforcement. They got
Speaker 3: to get this thing off their desks. Who knows what
Speaker 3: could happen, right, There's going to be articles written, there's
Speaker 3: going to be TV, there's going to be all that stuff.
Speaker 3: Right when you have a high profile case, especially involving
Speaker 3: a child in a community where murder hasn't happened in
Speaker 3: twenty years. It's a pressure cooker, So how the hell
Speaker 3: did they end up picking on you. I didn't know
Speaker 3: you when you were sixteen, but I can imagine that
Speaker 3: you would be an extremely unlikely candidate for a brutal
Speaker 3: crime like this one.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I would agree with that so well. When I
Speaker 7: was sixteen, I kind of lived a double life in
Speaker 7: a sense, in the sense that in school I was quiet,
Speaker 7: I was to myself. I was a little bit withdrawn
Speaker 7: because I wasn't really familiar with those kids and I
Speaker 7: didn't quite fit in with them. But after school, in
Speaker 7: the apartment building where I lived at, which coincidentally was
Speaker 7: right across the street from the high school, I was
Speaker 7: kind of like the life of the party. So myself
Speaker 7: and one other boy that lived there, I mean, there
Speaker 7: was a big group of kids that lived near complex
Speaker 7: and in the areas around it, and pretty much whatever
Speaker 7: I would suggest would mostly be what we would do.
Speaker 7: I mean, we would swim, we would play basketball, ride bikes,
Speaker 7: play Monopoly, video games, movies. We made up some games.
Speaker 7: We made up a game that was like baseball, except
Speaker 7: it was played with a tennis racket and a tennis ball,
Speaker 7: and the ball had to be thrown a certain way,
Speaker 7: and I was a different person there. So the police
Speaker 7: story is that in the course of interviewing students from
Speaker 7: the high school, some of them told the police, Hey,
Speaker 7: you might want to talk to Jeff because he's quiet
Speaker 7: and to himself. So originally the police looked at the
Speaker 7: victim's stepdad, who was married to the victim's mother, but
Speaker 7: at some point he realized that he was a suspect,
Speaker 7: and he hired a retired New York City detective to
Speaker 7: investigate the crime, and so that persuaded them to move
Speaker 7: off of him. Then they looked at another youth in
Speaker 7: the high school and they started using interrogative tactics, which
Speaker 7: they would use on me later on. But the difference
Speaker 7: is that he had a stepfather in the home, and
Speaker 7: so the stepfather went down to the police station and
Speaker 7: broke up the interrogation, and they initially wouldn't let him
Speaker 7: in the room, but he broke up the interrogation and
Speaker 7: he got his steps on an attorney, and so that
Speaker 7: was the end of that. I, on the other hand,
Speaker 7: didn't have a step father in the home, so there
Speaker 7: wasn't anybody to intervene for me.
Speaker 4: It was just you and your mother at the.
Speaker 7: Time, myself, my mother, and I lived with my grandmother
Speaker 7: and then I had a younger brother. So the police
Speaker 7: story is that some of the kids in the school
Speaker 7: told them that they might want to talk to me,
Speaker 7: and their other theory as to why they focused it
Speaker 7: on me, they said that my emotional reaction to the
Speaker 7: victim having been murdered was disproportionate to what my actual
Speaker 7: relationship with there was, which was to say there was
Speaker 7: no relationship. I mean, I knew her name, she knew mine.
Speaker 7: We weren't even on a high by basis. So her
Speaker 7: being murdered it kind of struck me because that was
Speaker 7: really my first encounter with death. I thought that was
Speaker 7: something that happens to people at the end of life.
Speaker 7: I had a chance to briefly get to know the family.
Speaker 7: I went to the wick and people were invited back
Speaker 7: to their house, to the Korea household, to have coffee
Speaker 7: and talk to the family, and there was cookies and stuff,
Speaker 7: and so I guess you could say, you might say
Speaker 7: I was kind of a sensitive, sentimental type of person,
Speaker 7: and so it kind of touched me.
Speaker 3: A little by the way you might say you were
Speaker 3: a normal type of person, right, And it always boggles
Speaker 3: my mind how these authority figures suddenly become expert psychiatrists
Speaker 3: or psychologists, and we see it over and over again.
Speaker 3: He acted too sad, he didn't act sad enough, he
Speaker 3: was too upset, not upset enough. He ran into the fire,
Speaker 3: he didn't. You know, there's all these cases where that
Speaker 3: becomes a factor. When it is it's ridiculous. Nobody knows
Speaker 3: how anyone is going to react in times of trauma.
Speaker 3: And I would say, like I said that, your reaction
Speaker 3: sounds to me like a sensitive person who is just
Speaker 3: experiencing something in their own community with somebody that's an
Speaker 3: innocent young girl.
Speaker 4: Of course you're upset.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I agree with you completely, you know, And I
Speaker 7: want to add that this really shook up the whole
Speaker 7: city to the point that free mental health counseling was
Speaker 7: offered to anybody in the city who wanted it. So
Speaker 7: this affected many people emotionally.
Speaker 3: Had you ever been in trouble before, No, never been
Speaker 3: in trouble. So the cops at some point they come
Speaker 3: and pick you up. But your interrogation is really at
Speaker 3: the root of the entire problem, and it is it
Speaker 3: is a perfect example of everything that's wrong with interrogation
Speaker 3: techniques in this country even today.
Speaker 7: It is. There was a six week run up to
Speaker 7: that day, so I had an interaction with the police
Speaker 7: from the time they initially intercepted me on my way
Speaker 7: to the high school up until the day of the
Speaker 7: Cours false confession, which half the time they would talk
Speaker 7: to me as if I was a suspect, and then
Speaker 7: half the time they would talk to me pretending like
Speaker 7: they needed my help to solve the crime. They would
Speaker 7: say things like, the kids won't talk freely around us,
Speaker 7: but they will around you. Let us know if you
Speaker 7: hear any rumors. They made me the center of attention.
Speaker 7: They would ask me opinion questions and then it's exciting, right, yeah,
Speaker 7: congrat It was congratulate made my opinions being correct. My
Speaker 7: fantasy childhood career was actually to be a cop. So
Speaker 7: this unexpected early opportunity to do this quasi police work,
Speaker 7: you know, was part of how they pulled the wool
Speaker 7: over my eyes, along with my age, so that was sixteen.
Speaker 7: They used to buy pizza and listen, I grew up
Speaker 7: in a single parent household as well, as we mentioned,
Speaker 7: and that directly intersected with a good cop, bad cop routine,
Speaker 7: and then I started looking up to the cop who
Speaker 7: was pretending to.
Speaker 4: Be my friend as a father figure.
Speaker 7: As a father figure, yeah exactly.
Speaker 3: I mean again, you were sixteen, so okay, so they're
Speaker 3: sort of sort of spinning this web and seducing you
Speaker 3: and trying to get you to say something that would
Speaker 3: be incriminating. Now we know that's what they were doing, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly. And so finally at the end, they told
Speaker 7: me that they received some new tip that was in
Speaker 7: the police file and they wanted to share that with me,
Speaker 7: but to do that I would first have to take
Speaker 7: and pass a polygraph. So help us, to help you,
Speaker 7: to help us type of logic was employed. So instead
Speaker 7: of going to the school the next day, I instead
Speaker 7: went to the police station where I thought the polygraph
Speaker 7: was gonna happen, because through the rumor mill of the
Speaker 7: city I had heard that other people had been polygraphed
Speaker 7: at the police station. But actually they drove me from Peakskill,
Speaker 7: which was in Westchester County. They drove me forty minutes
Speaker 7: away out of county to the town of Brewster, which
Speaker 7: is in Putnam County. So they drove me to Brewster
Speaker 7: to this polygraph as former Putnam County Sheriff's investigator Daniel Stevens,
Speaker 7: and he was an officer, but he was dressed as
Speaker 7: a civilian, and he never identified himself as a cop,
Speaker 7: and he never read me my Miranda warning, so I
Speaker 7: thought that he was a civilian. So he gave me
Speaker 7: this manual to look at about how the polygraph works,
Speaker 7: and it had a lot of really big words in
Speaker 7: it that were beyond my comprehension, but I didn't care
Speaker 7: because I was there to help the police, so who
Speaker 7: cares what the thing says, or so I thought. They
Speaker 7: put me into a small room and the polygraph is.
Speaker 7: Stevens became like a virtual coffee dispenser. I mean, I
Speaker 7: must have drank six or seven cups, and no sooner
Speaker 7: would I put the cup down than the cup would
Speaker 7: be halfway filled up. And you know, he's giving me
Speaker 7: another one. And it seems pretty clear in hindsight that
Speaker 7: the purpose of that was to get your nervous, make
Speaker 7: me nerve right, exactly right. So once he finished the
Speaker 7: coffee routine, then he straps me into the polygraph machine,
Speaker 7: which was fairly heavy, so you know, now I'm kind
Speaker 7: of immobilized. It's a very small room, and that's when
Speaker 7: he launches into his third degree tactics. So he invaded
Speaker 7: my personal space. He raised his voice at me. He
Speaker 7: kept asking me the same questions over and over again.
Speaker 7: And keep in mind that I'm not used to interacting
Speaker 7: with adult males and the way he's conducting himself, and
Speaker 7: he's kind of a mountain of a man, and I'm sixteen,
Speaker 7: like maybe one hundred and forty pounds, so can wet,
Speaker 7: you know. So it's really frightening. So each hour that
Speaker 7: goes by, my fear is increasing in proportion to the time.
Speaker 7: So Stevens kept that up for about six or seven hours.
Speaker 7: Towards the end of the interrogation, that's when he said
Speaker 7: to me, I guess by then he was just frustrated
Speaker 7: by not having been able to get me to confess
Speaker 7: to that point, he said, what do you mean you
Speaker 7: didn't do it? You just told me through the polygraph
Speaker 7: test results that you did. We just want you to
Speaker 7: verbally confirm it. So when he said that to me,
Speaker 7: that really shot my fear through the roof. And at
Speaker 7: that moment, the officer who was I've been pretending to
Speaker 7: be my friend. He came in the room and told
Speaker 7: me that the other officers were going to harm me,
Speaker 7: that he was holding them off, but he couldn't do
Speaker 7: so any longer, that I had to help myself. And
Speaker 7: then he added that if I did as he as
Speaker 7: they wanted, that not only would they stop what they
Speaker 7: were doing, but that I could go home afterwards, that
Speaker 7: I was not going to be arrested. Being young, naive,
Speaker 7: frightened sixteen years old in fear of my life because
Speaker 7: the fact that I didn't know where I was, and
Speaker 7: that I knew that nobody else did either, that loomed
Speaker 7: very large in my mind.
Speaker 4: It's incredible.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's total disorientation, right, I mean, yes, I mean,
Speaker 3: and it's you.
Speaker 4: Know, it's diabolical.
Speaker 3: But if what you want is a false confession, this
Speaker 3: would be the way to do it.
Speaker 7: Textbook, this is the way to do it. Yeah. And
Speaker 7: then I was emotionally overwhelmed also, and then there's the
Speaker 7: push pull dynamic, you know, there's the possibility of harm.
Speaker 7: But then he's thrown me this false life preserver and
Speaker 7: I took out which he offered. I made up a
Speaker 7: story based on information which they had given me that
Speaker 7: day and in the six weeks run up to that day,
Speaker 7: and by the time it was all said and done,
Speaker 7: I had collapsed on the floor, curled up into a
Speaker 7: fetal position, crying uncontrollably. Obviously I was arrested.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, the whole thing was a lie. It's
Speaker 3: like a fucking charade, right, And it was easy for them.
Speaker 3: I mean, the miracle is that you didn't confess sooner. Actually,
Speaker 3: And you know, it's interesting, Jeff, We know that false
Speaker 3: confessions happened typically much later like yours, and you were
Speaker 3: among the most vulnerable people that's ever been put into
Speaker 3: this position, being that you were alone, you had no
Speaker 3: way out, you had no way to get home. You
Speaker 3: were in tenth grade, I mean tenth grade. You don't
Speaker 3: know what the fuck you're doing. When you're in tenth grade.
Speaker 3: You're just a child, and you had a very real
Speaker 3: concern that you were going to be beaten up or worse.
Speaker 4: Right, you know, the fact that you were able to.
Speaker 3: Hang on for you know, almost nine hours in this
Speaker 3: situation is a testament to your strength, even in this
Speaker 3: most terrifying situation that you found yourself in. So now
Speaker 3: you're expecting to go home because that's what they told you. Yes,
Speaker 3: but they lied again. Yes, and so you signed this
Speaker 3: piece of paper.
Speaker 7: No. Let mean there was no sign confession. I never
Speaker 7: signed a confession, and there was no audio or video tap.
Speaker 7: It was just the cops word as to what happened.
Speaker 7: And as a result of that, when we got to court,
Speaker 7: they conveniently left out the threat and the false promise.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's actually strange, Jef, that they wouldn't have
Speaker 3: just put a piece of paper in front of you,
Speaker 3: because at this point you would have signed anything.
Speaker 4: You would have said that you stole the mona.
Speaker 7: Lisa, Right, Yeah, sure, yeah, of course, I mean whatever
Speaker 7: opinion for a pound. Look, man, I ready decide. I
Speaker 7: wanted to get the hell out of here. Tell you
Speaker 7: what you want to say. Yeah, this is the next
Speaker 7: thing you want me to say. Come on, get me
Speaker 7: out of you make good on your end? Yeah you
Speaker 7: want this extra thing? Come on, you got it? Can
Speaker 7: you honor your word? Down?
Speaker 3: So now you're arrested and the nightmare really begins, right,
Speaker 3: because you're as unprepared for this situation as someone can be. Right,
Speaker 3: you have no experience with criminal justice. You're not a
Speaker 3: big guy. You're not a tough guy. You're not emotionally
Speaker 3: developed to a point that you could be in any way,
Speaker 3: you know, steal yourself for what's going on. You're not
Speaker 3: educated enough to understand the proceedings. You don't have a
Speaker 3: family that's able to hire, for lack of a better word,
Speaker 3: a dream team to help you, and so arrested in
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety and now you're held in jail.
Speaker 4: I am a waiting trial.
Speaker 7: I was in jail for like thirty five days, and
Speaker 7: then I got bailed out. I got bailed out. At
Speaker 7: the time, my mother was dating a business person, Jack Ecashan,
Speaker 7: who had a carpet store, Acusian Carpets, and he was
Speaker 7: willing to bail me out, which he was hammered in
Speaker 7: the newspaper for just the fact of bailing me out,
Speaker 7: and he lost quite a bit of customer as a
Speaker 7: result of doing that.
Speaker 4: Well, that's innocent until proven guilty, right.
Speaker 7: So they say not so much.
Speaker 3: So much so even he's tard by this, yes, reputation
Speaker 3: that you have. And now you go home. You're not
Speaker 3: in school anymore, right, You've been kicked out of schools.
Speaker 7: So yeah, they would not allow me to go back
Speaker 7: to school until the case was resolved. And you know,
Speaker 7: I naively thought, you know, when I got bailed at,
Speaker 7: I was going to go back to my life. But
Speaker 7: there was no going back to it ever.
Speaker 4: So what did you do? Just stay in the house.
Speaker 7: I stayed in the house. Yeah, I mean I was
Speaker 7: afraid to go out, to be frank with you, that
Speaker 7: was a pariah. And the parents of my former friends
Speaker 7: would not allow them to play with me, of course,
Speaker 7: and even if they had, I doubt very many of
Speaker 7: them would have wanted to anyway, because they thought I
Speaker 7: was guilty, because that's what the headlines and everything else
Speaker 7: was saying. And I couldn't go to school, I couldn't
Speaker 7: do anything. So yeah, I just I stayed in my house.
Speaker 7: But that was only for a few weeks. Though I
Speaker 7: tried to kill myself. I felt my life was over.
Speaker 7: And I took an entire bottle of extra strength Title
Speaker 7: and all that had not been used, and I took
Speaker 7: every last pill and I went to sleep, and I
Speaker 7: intended to never wake up again.
Speaker 4: Wow, take them inte to think about that. I didn't
Speaker 4: know that part of your story.
Speaker 3: And Jeff and I've spent a lot of time together
Speaker 3: but they've never shared those details with me.
Speaker 4: It's really hard, hard to deal with.
Speaker 7: My point of mentioning that though, is that that resulted
Speaker 7: in my being involuntarily committed into a mental hospital for
Speaker 7: six months.
Speaker 3: So now the worst is still to come. But you've
Speaker 3: now gone through this crazy rapid decline from a happy,
Speaker 3: go lucky, goofy kid, not a care in the world
Speaker 3: except for maybe a test coming up right, right, or
Speaker 3: maybe you have a date or maybe you don't or whatever.
Speaker 3: You know, all the things you go through in adolescents,
Speaker 3: to being locked in a terrible jail basically being under
Speaker 3: house arrest, being ostracized by your friends and the whole community,
Speaker 3: being pilloried in the newspapers and the media, and now
Speaker 3: you're in a mental institution, and then the trial comes, and.
Speaker 7: Then the trial comes in just before the trial, the
Speaker 7: results of the DNA test comes back from the FBI laboratory,
Speaker 7: which shows that the seamen found in the victim didn't
Speaker 7: match me.
Speaker 4: Right, because remember she was raped, because.
Speaker 7: She was raped. Yes, And by the way, the lieutenant
Speaker 7: who oversaw everything in the letter that he penned to
Speaker 7: the FBI asking them to expedite the testing, he wrote
Speaker 7: in the letter that the DNA testing would either show
Speaker 7: my guilt or it would exonerate me. But when it
Speaker 7: came back and it didn't match me, my lawyer did
Speaker 7: try to get the indictment dismissed against me based on that,
Speaker 7: but the judge denied that motion.
Speaker 3: That alone seems so just incomprehensible to me. I mean,
Speaker 3: that just doesn't make sense. The judge is impartial, right,
Speaker 3: we know the prosecutor has an agenda, but the judge
Speaker 3: is impartial.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know, I don't understand.
Speaker 3: I mean, I know that back then DNA wasn't it
Speaker 3: wasn't as it wasn't.
Speaker 7: As well known. But to be clear, I mean, DNA
Speaker 7: started being used in the court system as early as
Speaker 7: nineteen eighty seven, and this we're on trial now in
Speaker 7: nineteen ninety, so it's been around for three years. So
Speaker 7: while not in currency like now, it is not exactly
Speaker 7: totally unknown.
Speaker 4: Right, and it's perfect I mean.
Speaker 7: Right, it's the gold standard.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so your DNA doesn't match. This is an inconvenient
Speaker 3: truth for the authorities, and the judge allows this, this
Speaker 3: circus to go on. So you go to trial, yes,
Speaker 3: and at the trial was the DNA allowed to be introduced, Yes,
Speaker 3: it was.
Speaker 4: So again, how does it end up that you get
Speaker 4: convicted under these circumstances?
Speaker 7: Sure? So, firstly, as I mentioned, the the cops left
Speaker 7: the threatned false promise out of the story, So I
Speaker 7: mean the story is still there's a lot enough red
Speaker 7: flags pertaining to circumstances around the confession that called into
Speaker 7: a question, but the threatned false promise weren't there. So
Speaker 7: that's one factor. Another factor is there was prosecutorial misconduct
Speaker 7: and fraud by the medical examiner. So in order to
Speaker 7: answer the DNA evidence, the prosecutor got the medical examiner
Speaker 7: to commit fraud. So when an autopsy's done, there's written
Speaker 7: in audio notes which are taken contemporaneously as the findings
Speaker 7: are made. So it was only six months after doing
Speaker 7: that initial autopsy, and only after the DNA result didn't
Speaker 7: match me, that this medical examiner for the first time
Speaker 7: suddenly claimed he suddenly remembers right. Six months later and
Speaker 7: hundreds of autopsies later, he suddenly remembers that he found
Speaker 7: medical evidence to show that the victim had been sexually active,
Speaker 7: which is what opened the door for the prosecutor to
Speaker 7: argue that it didn't matter that the seamen didn't come
Speaker 7: from me. That that didn't mean I was innocent. That
Speaker 7: just meant that she could have had consensual sex close
Speaker 7: enough to the murder and rape so as to explain
Speaker 7: away the DNA.
Speaker 3: But that still wouldn't explain it away. It would just
Speaker 3: explain that there would be a mixture, right, exactly right,
Speaker 3: So that doesn't make any sense. And also, let's just
Speaker 3: reflect for a moment on the other victim in this case,
Speaker 3: and there are more right, Yes, it's not just you
Speaker 3: and Angela, it is not. Let's just reflect for a
Speaker 3: minute that the authorities were willing to go so low.
Speaker 3: They had to know that you were innocent. Yeah, they
Speaker 3: were so determined to convict an innocent boy because you
Speaker 3: were a boy, yes, that they were willing to drag
Speaker 3: the reputation of a fifteen year old girl, yes, through
Speaker 3: the mud, right, and put her family through that whenever
Speaker 3: indication that she was a girl who was like as
Speaker 3: goody two shoes as you could be. You couldn't even
Speaker 3: leave the house by yourself until that one faithful day.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's so disgusting, right, this girl who deserves
Speaker 3: at least to have her reputation protected is dragged.
Speaker 4: Through the mud. It's just disgusting.
Speaker 7: Jeff.
Speaker 3: Let me ask you this, because you've become an expert
Speaker 3: in criminal justice. You've accomplished so much since you've been home,
Speaker 3: in terms of your education, in terms of investigative skills,
Speaker 3: in terms of your advocacy. You are one of the
Speaker 3: top people in the state or dry state, or maybe
Speaker 3: even the country now in terms of your breadth of
Speaker 3: knowledge of how these things work. To your great credit,
Speaker 3: And there was no physical evidence connecting you to this crime, right, correct?
Speaker 3: Is it possible for someone to beat, rape, and strangle
Speaker 3: someone and not leave any physical evidence at the crime scene.
Speaker 4: No, it's impossible.
Speaker 7: It's very very close to impossible. And just to delve
Speaker 7: into this a little bit more, one of my statements,
Speaker 7: I said that I hit the victim over the head
Speaker 7: with a gatorade bottle, because gatorade was made in glass bottles.
Speaker 7: But if you look at the types of injuries that
Speaker 7: the victim had on her head, a bottle would not
Speaker 7: be capable of making that type of injury. And on
Speaker 7: top of that, there was no broken glass at the
Speaker 7: crime scene. There was no shards of glass in the body.
Speaker 7: There's no relationship to the physical evidence and the statements
Speaker 7: in the confession at all.
Speaker 3: Right, so there was no physical evidence. No, your confession stunk, yes,
Speaker 3: because you didn't know, right, and there was DNA to
Speaker 3: prove that you didn't do it. Now they conspire somehow
Speaker 3: to drag this girl's reputation into the mud, and in
Speaker 3: order to protect this false narrative that they've created.
Speaker 7: Right, But there's three other things that they did fighting
Speaker 7: the DNA. So taking his law a step further, the
Speaker 7: prosecutor then named another youth by name that he claimed
Speaker 7: probably had had sex with the victim, but he never
Speaker 7: had a DNA test to prove that, and he didn't
Speaker 7: even call him as a witness. He just made the
Speaker 7: unsupported argument to the jury. And then another thing was
Speaker 7: that I later learned through civil litigation that when the
Speaker 7: DNA didn't match me, the police went back out into
Speaker 7: the field and they interviewed seventeen witnesses who knew the
Speaker 7: victim in one capacity or another, and all of them
Speaker 7: told the police that there was no boyfriend, there was
Speaker 7: no consensual sex. But the cops never documented any of
Speaker 7: those interviews so that they didn't have to turn those
Speaker 7: over to my lawyer. And the third thing was that
Speaker 7: the police fabricated and attributed to me. They claimed that
Speaker 7: I said to them speaking in the third person. They
Speaker 7: claimed that I said, well, I don't know if the
Speaker 7: perpetrator ejaculated or not, so that word was not in
Speaker 7: my vocabulary as a sixteen year old, And we proved
Speaker 7: that in the police reports, where they referenced that they
Speaker 7: only came up with that after the DNA didn't match me.
Speaker 7: That was never in their early written reports of the interrogation.
Speaker 7: So they fabricated that to help the prosecutor against the DNA.
Speaker 3: You know what's bothering me greatly Aside from all of
Speaker 3: this right now, Jeff, is the idea that there must
Speaker 3: have been meetings right where they were like, uh oh,
Speaker 3: like at various different stages. Oh, the DNA doesn't match. Oh,
Speaker 3: the witnesses are not connecting any boyfriend.
Speaker 4: Oh.
Speaker 3: Everything that they had said was turning out to be
Speaker 3: not true.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: All their theories were going up in smoke, and there
Speaker 3: must have been at some point sit downs where they
Speaker 3: got with the medical EGA.
Speaker 4: I don't know this, I can't prove it, but I'm guessing.
Speaker 7: Examiner testified at that position in the lawsuit. He said
Speaker 7: that the day after the DNA didn't match me, he
Speaker 7: got a phone call from one of three people, and
Speaker 7: he said that they told him that the DNA didn't
Speaker 7: match me, and he had to come up with some
Speaker 7: kind of a theory by which the case against me
Speaker 7: could continue and a conviction could result.
Speaker 3: Unbelievable, I mean, it's unbelievable. I mean, I can't I
Speaker 3: can't fathom it.
Speaker 4: So there you are a trial.
Speaker 7: So that's on the prosecution end, But I want to
Speaker 7: the other part of how I got convicted was the
Speaker 7: public defender, who supposedly was the best lawyer in Legal
Speaker 7: Aid of Westchester. He was terrible. He very rarely met
Speaker 7: with me. Whenever I would try to explain to him
Speaker 7: that I was innocent and what happened in the interrogation room,
Speaker 7: he was always shutting me up. One time he told
Speaker 7: me he didn't care if I was guilty or innocent.
Speaker 7: He never explained to the jury the significance of the
Speaker 7: DNA not matching me. He never used the DNA to
Speaker 7: argue that this so called confession was coerced and false.
Speaker 7: When we hadn't decided if we were going to go
Speaker 7: with a bench trial or a jury trial. He came
Speaker 7: to me one day and told me that the trial
Speaker 7: judge came to him off the record and told him
Speaker 7: to pick a jury because he didn't want to be
Speaker 7: responsible for acquitting me. So my lawyer was supposed to
Speaker 7: put that on the record and asked the judge to
Speaker 7: accuse himself, because that's a prejudicial type of statement. It
Speaker 7: also suggests that the judge is feeling public pressure, because again,
Speaker 7: virtually all of the coverage is guilt presumptive oriented. So additionally,
Speaker 7: my lawyer was not supposed to represent me because of
Speaker 7: a conflict of interest in that this other youth that
Speaker 7: the prosecution was falsely claiming had had sex with the
Speaker 7: victim was represented by another lawyer in legal eight, which
Speaker 7: meant that the defense couldn't ask him to give a
Speaker 7: DNA sample, The defense couldn't subpoena him in order to
Speaker 7: explode the consensual sex theory. Because right and then, the
Speaker 7: best thing or worst thing of all, was when it
Speaker 7: was time to cross examine the medical examiner whose fraud
Speaker 7: was so large in this case, he never even bothered
Speaker 7: to cross examine him. He stood up in open court
Speaker 7: and with a big smile on his face, as if
Speaker 7: him and the medical examiner were great friends from back
Speaker 7: in the day. He said to him, you're going to
Speaker 7: be pleased to know that I don't have a single
Speaker 7: question for you.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 7: He never interviewed nor presented as a witness my alibi.
Speaker 7: I was actually playing wiffle ball when the crime happened,
Speaker 7: and he wouldn't allow me to testify at the pre
Speaker 7: trial hearing to put the threatned false promise on the record,
Speaker 7: And when it was time for the defense to try
Speaker 7: to put a case on he said to me that
Speaker 7: it wasn't his job to prove that I was innocent.
Speaker 7: It's up to the prosecution to prove that I was guilty,
Speaker 7: and he didn't think that that had happened, so added
Speaker 7: all up, I was wrongfully convicted of a murder and rape.
Speaker 3: It's unreal. I mean, this stuff goes on in America.
Speaker 3: It's just it's just insane. So you end up getting
Speaker 3: convicted and sentenced.
Speaker 7: To fifteen to life. At the sentencing hearing, I begged
Speaker 7: the judge to overturn the verdict because I was innocent,
Speaker 7: and I referenced the DNA to support my contention, and
Speaker 7: he actually told me on the record, maybe you are innocent,
Speaker 7: conceding that there is a doubt, but the DNA doesn't
Speaker 7: match me. How could there not be a doubt? But
Speaker 7: you might think that he would step up for justice
Speaker 7: and overturn the conviction by reversing any number of rulings
Speaker 7: that he made against me in the course of the trial.
Speaker 7: But he didn't do that. He took the easy and
Speaker 7: politically expedient way out, which was to sentence me to
Speaker 7: a term of imprisonment of fifteen to life.
Speaker 3: Fifteen years to life. Now you're only seventeen at this time,
Speaker 3: so this is basically that's an incomprehensible thing to face
Speaker 3: for anybody, but at least of all for a child.
Speaker 3: And then you end up in some of the worst
Speaker 3: prisons in America, and you go into these places unprepared
Speaker 3: in every imaginable way, and you go in under the
Speaker 3: worst possible circumstance, which is it's someone who's been convicted
Speaker 3: of raping and murdering a child.
Speaker 7: Exactly, how the fuck.
Speaker 4: Did you survive in there? Jeff? How did you keep
Speaker 4: hope alive?
Speaker 7: All right? So, in terms of how how I kept
Speaker 7: hope alive, definitely belief in God was one thing. Another
Speaker 7: thing was I didn't look at it like I was
Speaker 7: doing fifteen to life. I thought I was just doing
Speaker 7: a year or two until the next appeal would be decided,
Speaker 7: which I was sure I was going to win, because
Speaker 7: I knew I was innocent, and I still naively believed
Speaker 7: in this. I found different things to throw myself into mentally.
Speaker 7: I used to go to the law library and learn
Speaker 7: about the laws so I could feel a little bit empowered.
Speaker 7: I used to read nonfiction books. I would cut pictures
Speaker 7: of nature scenes out so I could look at them
Speaker 7: and travel there mentally. But I would play sports like
Speaker 7: ping pong or basketball or chess. I engaged in this
Speaker 7: elaborate delusion, like if I was a professional player and
Speaker 7: so was the other person, and the people on the
Speaker 7: sidelines were the fans. But it was not like kids
Speaker 7: like fantasizing about being a professional athlete. This was more
Speaker 7: like my mind couldn't deal with being there anymore, and
Speaker 7: I had to get out of the prison mentally for
Speaker 7: a couple of hours. By this elaborate delusion. Sometimes I'd
Speaker 7: listen to sports radio, but it wasn't listening to sports radio.
Speaker 7: It was a connection to the outside, and I'm not
Speaker 7: going to the prison assignment in the morning. I'm going
Speaker 7: to work or I'm going to school. It's not the warden,
Speaker 7: it's the superintendent. And you try to it's normal that
Speaker 7: if you're going to make a phone call, it's got
Speaker 7: to be collect or a strip search as the price
Speaker 7: for a visit, and you tried to normalize the madness
Speaker 7: in your own mind. I had to fight off feelings
Speaker 7: of hopelessness, helplessness, thoughts of giving up, suicidal ideations, thoughts
Speaker 7: of suicide came into my mind at times, and so
Speaker 7: this was as much a psychological thing as it was physical.
Speaker 7: I mean, I didn't have the luxury of loosing my
Speaker 7: mind because I knew that, especially when my peals were
Speaker 7: over and exhausted. After I was in for eleven years,
Speaker 7: and they no longer give you a lawyer, and the
Speaker 7: only way back into court is if you can find
Speaker 7: something new that wasn't known previously. So I started writing
Speaker 7: a countless number of letters trying to find a lawyer
Speaker 7: and to investigator to take my case for free, because
Speaker 7: I didn't have any money to hige right.
Speaker 3: And I want to point out a cruel irony here, Jeff,
Speaker 3: which is that for many of the clients of the
Speaker 3: innocence projects or other innocence organizations, the DNA is a
Speaker 3: silver bullet, right, And ultimately, when the DNA gets discovered,
Speaker 3: they get a new trial because it's new evidence. But
Speaker 3: you would already presented the DNA. You would actually shot
Speaker 3: that arrow already, right, And so you're actually fucked because
Speaker 3: of the fact that your timing of it.
Speaker 4: It's so strange, you know that fact.
Speaker 7: See. I used to collect articles on exonerations and that
Speaker 7: used to grate on me though, like all these people
Speaker 7: were going home because of the DNA, and I'm like, well,
Speaker 7: why do I have to be an exception? The DNA
Speaker 7: doesn't match me either. What does it matter when the
Speaker 7: result was actually obtained? I mean, it means the same thing.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, let's spend a moment talking about.
Speaker 4: The actual perpetrator.
Speaker 3: Yes, because every time and I sound like a broken
Speaker 3: record when I say this, but every time that somebody
Speaker 3: like you gets convicted wrongfully, the actual perpetrator, they stopped
Speaker 3: looking for him.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: The case is closed, And in this case, the consequences
Speaker 3: were very real, as they are in most cases when
Speaker 3: these things happen. Right, and I think that the people
Speaker 3: that are responsible for your wrongful conviction, there's an argument
Speaker 3: to say that they are responsible for another tragedy that happen.
Speaker 4: Can you talk about that.
Speaker 7: I can. Yeah, school teacher Patricia Morrison who also had
Speaker 7: a couple of kids. She was from Peak Skill and
Speaker 7: she was killed by the stayed perpetrator, Stephen Cunningham. She
Speaker 7: was killed three and a half years later as a
Speaker 7: result of Cunningham being left free on the street while
Speaker 7: I was doing time for his crime.
Speaker 4: Now you say the real perpetrator, how do we know that?
Speaker 7: Well, here, great, that's a great question. I'm so glad
Speaker 7: you asked. Because the DNA matched him because he got
Speaker 7: caught for the second murder, which resulted in his being
Speaker 7: incarcerated and having to give up a DNA sample which
Speaker 7: was put into the data bank. And so when I
Speaker 7: eventually got the further testing with the Innocence Projects help,
Speaker 7: it matched him. Then he subsequently confessed not just to
Speaker 7: the authorities, but also to a reporter on video camera
Speaker 7: in the prison visiting room. That video is available on
Speaker 7: the internet. So, just to be clear, there's no coerced
Speaker 7: false confession there an he played guilty in court.
Speaker 4: When did this happen?
Speaker 7: That happened that him being caught for the original crime
Speaker 7: that happened twelve and a half years after he killed
Speaker 7: a second victim, So there was a point in time
Speaker 7: we were both concurrently in the same prison system, although
Speaker 7: not in the same prison.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: So Patricia Morrison, yes today, would be probably lost sitting
Speaker 3: around with her grandchildren, you know, probably be a retired
Speaker 3: school teacher by now having a nice life. Her children
Speaker 3: would have grown up as they deserve too, as everyone
Speaker 3: deserves to with their mother. The rest of her family
Speaker 3: wouldn't have gone through this horrendous loss.
Speaker 4: And none of it had to happen, you.
Speaker 3: Know, except for the fact that they went on this
Speaker 3: crazy witch hunt to convict you, Jeffrey Deskovic, of a.
Speaker 4: Crime that they knew you didn't commit.
Speaker 3: It's a tragic, tragic byproduct of this horrible malfeasance coordinated
Speaker 3: in this case that resulted in you enduring the nightmare
Speaker 3: that none of us who haven't been through it could
Speaker 3: ever imagine. You, somehow or other, managed to find this
Speaker 3: extra layer of strength and courage to persevere, to not
Speaker 3: give up, and to ultimately win right to be and
Speaker 3: to be vindicated. Correct, We've talked about some of the
Speaker 3: darkest moments that anyone could imagine.
Speaker 4: Is there a flip side to it? Was there a.
Speaker 3: Moment of joy ecstasy when you were finally vindicated and freed?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean it was. It was a surreal moment.
Speaker 7: I have to say. The luncheon afterwards was surreal. And
Speaker 7: after that is where reality, you know, the reality hit
Speaker 7: the road, the retires hit the road. How do you
Speaker 7: want to phrase it. It'd be great to say there
Speaker 7: was this great party, this raucous party that lasted to
Speaker 7: the crack of dawn, But in reality, who was there
Speaker 7: to socialize or party with? I mean, I had long
Speaker 7: since lost track with my connection with my old friends
Speaker 7: and my extended family, and everybody was virtual stranger, even
Speaker 7: my immediate family very very limited visiting, so I couldn't
Speaker 7: relate to the people there. I felt out of place
Speaker 7: and I couldn't really communicate with them, and that's when
Speaker 7: a lot of my difficulties post exoneration started happening.
Speaker 3: You talked very beautifully about your mindset of being able
Speaker 3: to escape the walls by having these almost out of
Speaker 3: body experiences, these mental exercises that you put yourself through
Speaker 3: to transport yourself to a happier place. Were there any
Speaker 3: friendships that you developed in prison?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I would like to remember Exgonnery, Frank Sterling, Mike Roberts,
Speaker 7: and Sammy Swift. So those are the three people that
Speaker 7: I want to give a shout out.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, you came out into a world that had
Speaker 3: changed a lot. You literally had spent half of your
Speaker 3: life in prison. You were arrested when you were sixteen
Speaker 3: and you were exonerated when you were thirty three. So
Speaker 3: all those years when everybody else was developing their career,
Speaker 3: getting their education, developing their social networks, their relationships, or
Speaker 3: even starting families, you were stuck in hell.
Speaker 7: Actually right, Yeah fair to say, yeah, exactly right, as
Speaker 7: well as everybody was, you know, incrementally adjusting as technology
Speaker 7: would come out. When I came out, I never saw
Speaker 7: a cell phone, GPS, the Internet hadn't been invented, all
Speaker 7: these different ways of banking, culture had changed. I was
Speaker 7: totally a fish out of water. I didn't fit or
Speaker 7: belong anymore.
Speaker 3: You talked about the things that you did to survive
Speaker 3: in prison and the friendships that you developed, the people
Speaker 3: who were able to be a support system for you
Speaker 3: and you for them. Is it as bad as everybody
Speaker 3: thinks it is. I want to give people an idea
Speaker 3: of what this experience is really like, because we don't
Speaker 3: do prison in America like they do in the rest
Speaker 3: of the Western world. We focus so much on punishment
Speaker 3: and basically in a lot of ways, torture, where in
Speaker 3: other Western countries they focus on rehabilitation.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so I think that the image that a lot
Speaker 7: of people have in their mind, I think they overdramatized
Speaker 7: the gang thing, and they think that that everyone just
Speaker 7: is raping each other all day, every day. And I
Speaker 7: think that some of it is it's not as bad
Speaker 7: as they make it seem. But then in other ways
Speaker 7: it's much worse than what people imagine. I mean, there
Speaker 7: was three or four stabbings or cuttings every every day
Speaker 7: in Helmira where I was, and there was plenty of
Speaker 7: gang activity and lots of violence that didn't involve weapons.
Speaker 7: The guards were very disrespectful, and most of them, not
Speaker 7: not all of them, they were very disrespectful and just
Speaker 7: you know, the medical care was terrible. The food was
Speaker 7: terrible as well. So I would describe it as a
Speaker 7: NonStop obstacle course, featuring the guards, civilians and inmates. All
Speaker 7: is obstacles to the main objective, which was to try
Speaker 7: to prove your innocence and regain your freedom. It was
Speaker 7: every day a living hell without a doubt, and to
Speaker 7: stay alive, to stay alive. Yeah, every time I left
Speaker 7: my cell, I never knew if I was gonna make
Speaker 7: it back. When I arrived in Elmira, the guards asked me,
Speaker 7: you want to go into protective custody because of you
Speaker 7: know your charges and how young you are, and this
Speaker 7: increases the likely of you being a victim. And I
Speaker 7: asked them, well, well what's that and they explained to me, well,
Speaker 7: you know you would be in your cell like twenty
Speaker 7: three hours a day, and you know you wouldn't go
Speaker 7: to programs, but then again, nobody would be able to
Speaker 7: harm you. And I quickly, on the spot, I made
Speaker 7: the decision. Imagine making this decision, going down this line
Speaker 7: of reasoning, right at seventeen years old. I just thought
Speaker 7: to myself, you know what, I'm already here. I'm not
Speaker 7: going to agree to make my time even worse. So
Speaker 7: I'm not taking this protective custody. I'm going to go
Speaker 7: to general population. I'm going to take my chances, and
Speaker 7: you know what if somebody kills me, well, I guess
Speaker 7: I don't have to worry about doing this life sentence
Speaker 7: that I've been given for a crime I didn't commit.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, it's unbelievable. So you come out, Jeff,
Speaker 3: finally exonerated. You've proven what you've known all along. But
Speaker 3: now you face a whole other.
Speaker 4: Set of obstacles.
Speaker 3: How did you transform yourself because at one point you
Speaker 3: were almost homeless?
Speaker 7: Correct, yes, exactly. I almost went to a homeless shelter.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 7: I lost the temporary apartment that this religious community was
Speaker 7: putting me up in. Nobody would take me in. Thank
Speaker 7: god for Mercy College, which had given me a scholarship
Speaker 7: to finish the bachelor's degree because I was thirty credits
Speaker 7: short of that at the time that former governor of
Speaker 7: Attack he had cut the funding for that. So that
Speaker 7: made its way into the newspaper, and so Mercy College
Speaker 7: gave me the scholarship and the meal plan. And when
Speaker 7: I lost the housing, they allowed me to stay in
Speaker 7: the dorms. You know, I was never able to obtain
Speaker 7: gainful employment because I didn't understand the technology. All the
Speaker 7: potential employers wanted somebody who could hit the ground running
Speaker 7: rather than some little bit of patience on the job training.
Speaker 7: I did get a job as a weekly columnist, but
Speaker 7: the problem was that it was a weekly newspaper, and
Speaker 7: so they only wanted one article a week. You know.
Speaker 7: I was making like two and fifty as an article,
Speaker 7: which is really good, but that was the only income
Speaker 7: I could count on per month while I started doing
Speaker 7: speaking engagements, but that's almost like being an actor or
Speaker 7: you only get paid if you get booked, and that
Speaker 7: wasn't consistent, so, you know, it was very tight financially,
Speaker 7: and then I had to deal with all these the
Speaker 7: psychological after effects of my experience and then the technology,
Speaker 7: and then just being just straight up lonely and depressed
Speaker 7: because there was no social circle that I had and
Speaker 7: I wasn't able to make another one.
Speaker 3: You really were alone in the world in a lot
Speaker 3: of ways. But somehow or other, you have transformed yourself
Speaker 3: literally figuratively, physically, mentally, spiritually, and I think everybody can
Speaker 3: learn from that.
Speaker 6: I have.
Speaker 3: I mean, I've learned a lot from hanging out with you,
Speaker 3: and we've had a lot of laughs over the last
Speaker 3: several years. But you're doing so much good stuff now
Speaker 3: and you're taking your experience and applying it in the
Speaker 3: real world in a way that's already having a very
Speaker 3: positive impact.
Speaker 4: And talk a little.
Speaker 3: Bit, Jeff about your education and your goals and what
Speaker 3: you're doing now with your foundation. You've been able to
Speaker 3: help exonerate other people. How incredible is that. I mean,
Speaker 3: that's got to be a it is.
Speaker 7: A story book. It is. It's beside myself about that.
Speaker 7: It's incredible.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 3: I can see how you're lighting up right now, talk
Speaker 3: about it. I've seen you around those guys, and it
Speaker 3: is the best feeling. It's why all of us in
Speaker 3: this movement through what we do, because it's an unbelievably
Speaker 3: great feeling to be able to see somebody like you,
Speaker 3: thanks to the help of the Innis Project and other
Speaker 3: great organizations, be able to come out and get your
Speaker 3: life back on track.
Speaker 7: Sure. So from finishing the bachelor's at Mercy College, I
Speaker 7: then graduated with John Jay College of Criminal Justice, got
Speaker 7: the master's degree with my master's thesis on raful Conviction
Speaker 7: Courses and other Reforms, and I'm in my second year
Speaker 7: now at the Elizabeth Hopp School of Law at Pace University.
Speaker 7: So in terms of my foundation, after being home for
Speaker 7: five years, very difficult five years, as we've went over,
Speaker 7: I was able to receive some financial compensation and I
Speaker 7: decided I wanted to go from being an individual advocate.
Speaker 7: I mean do I used to. I was doing presentations
Speaker 7: and doing media interviews and lobbying elected officials and going
Speaker 7: to legislative hearings. And it was part of the effort
Speaker 7: where we fought off capital punishment reinstatement efforts in two
Speaker 7: thousand and seven in collaboration with New Yorkers against the
Speaker 7: death penalty, and I was involved in the successful campaign
Speaker 7: repealing the death penalty in Connecticut. So doing all of
Speaker 7: that as an individual advocate and it wasn't enough. I
Speaker 7: wanted to get into the exoneration game. You know. I
Speaker 7: was tired of helping out on cases on the peripheral
Speaker 7: and I wanted to be more directly involved. So when
Speaker 7: I received some compensation, I decided to take things to
Speaker 7: the next level open a nonprofit. So I committed a
Speaker 7: million and a half dollars of that compensation and we
Speaker 7: opened a Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice, and our goal
Speaker 7: is to exonerate innocent people both in DNA and non
Speaker 7: DNA cases with the policy change component to it. Our
Speaker 7: first ex honery was William Lopez, so we helped exonerate
Speaker 7: collaboratively along with his pre existing attorneys, Richard Levitt and
Speaker 7: Yvon Shefvers. We did the investigative work. It's kind of
Speaker 7: like a building is built and it's missing a section
Speaker 7: and we helped put the section in. So Bill was
Speaker 7: in for twenty three and a half years in a
Speaker 7: wrongful conviction case in Brooklyn, and so that was our
Speaker 7: first success. A second exoneration was William Hahey. That was
Speaker 7: totally in house, traveling, collaborative. So William Hawhey did eight
Speaker 7: years and four months on an arson case in Putnam County.
Speaker 7: So the place that they brought me to for the polygraph,
Speaker 7: I was able to reach back there. It exonerates somebody there.
Speaker 7: It's a little irony, little extra satisfaction, full circle. Yeah.
Speaker 7: So he was in for eight years. In four months,
Speaker 7: we were able to get four other innocent people out
Speaker 7: through other means, which turned out to be less than
Speaker 7: an exoneration. So Lorenzo Johnson, that was a collaborative effort.
Speaker 7: We did some investigative work. We were able to convince
Speaker 7: the parole board in three other cases that our clients
Speaker 7: were innocent. So that's six people, and you know, we're
Speaker 7: part of the effort that we got the laws changed
Speaker 7: in New York on interrogation and on d reform, although
Speaker 7: they watered that down a bit. And we've been very
Speaker 7: close the last three years working collaboration with the group
Speaker 7: It Can Happen to You, which is a coalition group
Speaker 7: which I'm an advisory board member of trying to pass
Speaker 7: a bill that would create a Commission on Prosecutor Conducts
Speaker 7: to an oversight board for prosecutors.
Speaker 3: So this is all amazing, amazing stuff. It is full
Speaker 3: circle in so many ways. Like most of the other
Speaker 3: exigneries I talked to, you have committed yourself selplessly and
Speaker 3: tirelessly to helping other people avoid the same faith that
Speaker 3: you went through when you could just as easily be
Speaker 3: off doing whatever you want and no one would blame you, right,
Speaker 3: you could be off avctioning, right, But instead you're channeling
Speaker 3: all your energy and your money, your personal money, into
Speaker 3: helping others. And that's that's just a beautiful, amazing thing,
Speaker 3: and it's one of the reasons why I love being
Speaker 3: around you because you're just like a such a great
Speaker 3: positive influence on everybody that you touch. So, Jeff, we
Speaker 3: have a tradition here at Wrongful Conviction, which is that
Speaker 3: at the end of the episode, I like to turn
Speaker 3: the mic over to you for closing thoughts, anything you
Speaker 3: want to share.
Speaker 7: I have a dream. Imagine if there were twenty five
Speaker 7: thousand people in the world who could afford three dollars
Speaker 7: a month on a recurring basis, who felt that it
Speaker 7: would be worth it to sacrifice the three dollars in
Speaker 7: order to play their part in helping to free wrongfully
Speaker 7: convicted people. That's a budget of close to a million dollars.
Speaker 7: If a person goes to Google and types in Deskovic Foundation,
Speaker 7: then Patreon, pht R, e O N A link will
Speaker 7: come up. If they click to that, everything is laid
Speaker 7: out there exactly how the money would go for lawyers, investigators, paralegals,
Speaker 7: other essential personnel to really having a robust entity. If
Speaker 7: we could have these type of results on basically a
Speaker 7: shoe string budget, imagine if we really were armed for bear.
Speaker 7: I need people, obviously who will be willing to part
Speaker 7: with the three dollars, but we also need people to
Speaker 7: help make the campaign go viral. If we could somehow
Speaker 7: do we need volunteers to help do that. If we
Speaker 7: could somehow do that, I mean we could make a
Speaker 7: really big dent. I made the big contribution to the
Speaker 7: organization to give us a running start. We had paid
Speaker 7: staff and we got some good results. Fundraising didn't go
Speaker 7: that well and I had to convert things to where
Speaker 7: we're volunteer entity. Now we have maybe fourteen volunteers, which
Speaker 7: is great, but you need people to go full time
Speaker 7: as opposed to people who are fitting it in in
Speaker 7: between their paid work, you know, their their personal life.
Speaker 7: You know, it's great to bring lawyers into cases and
Speaker 7: connect people with that like we did with Andy Kreevac,
Speaker 7: and bring lawyers into do pro bono work after we've
Speaker 7: screened the case, and yeah, that's nice. But in a
Speaker 7: lot of cases, work that could really be done in
Speaker 7: the course of six months is being done in two
Speaker 7: years because it's being done on the side as paid
Speaker 7: cases are done. So I really would love to be
Speaker 7: able to have a full time paid staff again. You know,
Speaker 7: my mission in life is to fight wrongful convictions, and
Speaker 7: that's that's how it makes sense out of what happened
Speaker 7: to me. And with that, you know, I want to
Speaker 7: thank you for having me here. And you know, I
Speaker 7: think this podcast is an awesome idea and we need
Speaker 7: to continue to raise awareness and this is certainly one
Speaker 7: of the methods of doing that. So kudos Case and.
Speaker 3: Flown right back at you once again. I want to
Speaker 3: give the website. It's a Deskavic dot org.
Speaker 4: That's d e.
Speaker 3: Skovic dot org and go to the website, learn about
Speaker 3: the mission, get involved. You can help. Everybody can make
Speaker 3: a difference. It starts right here. So this has been
Speaker 3: an extraordinary experience for me, and I want to thank
Speaker 3: our amazing guest, Jeff Deskovic, for sharing his experience, strength
Speaker 3: and wisdom. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review
Speaker 3: wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 4: It really helps.
Speaker 3: And I'm a proud donor to the Ennosis Project and
Speaker 3: I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very
Speaker 3: important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go
Speaker 3: to Innocenceproject dot org to learn how to donate and
Speaker 3: get involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor
Speaker 3: Hall and Kevin Wartis. The music in the show is
Speaker 3: by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph.
Speaker 7: Be sure to.
Speaker 3: Follow hellow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on
Speaker 3: Facebook at Wrongful Conviction podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm
Speaker 3: is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association
Speaker 3: with Signal Company Number one