Speaker 1: Last time we talked about the West Memphis Three, we
Speaker 1: interviewed documentarian Joe Burlinger about his experience filming the victim's
Speaker 1: families and the three suspected killers before and during the trial,
Speaker 1: and how his realization of their innocence changed the direction
Speaker 1: of his life's work. To add greater context in our episode,
Speaker 1: we edited in excerpts from our previous interviews with Jason
Speaker 1: Baldwin and Damian Eccles of the West Memphis Three, who
Speaker 1: to recap, had been released on an Alfred plea along
Speaker 1: with Jesse Miskale, were all excluded from some crime scene
Speaker 1: evidence by later DNA testing, and one hair sample also
Speaker 1: included one of the victim's stepfathers, but the West Memphis
Speaker 1: Three are still fighting to clear their names. A twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one Arkansas law allowed for new DNA testing with
Speaker 1: more modern methodologies, and when they sought this testing, the
Speaker 1: state represented in court that all crime scene evidence had
Speaker 1: been destroyed, But in the same year a box belonging
Speaker 1: to the West Memphis Police Department was located and it
Speaker 1: held some missing evidence from their case, including the shoelaces
Speaker 1: that had been used to bind the three young victims,
Speaker 1: as well as a hare that might match the long
Speaker 1: ignored alternative suspect from the po Jangles restaurant twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1: Denial of further testing was reversed in twenty twenty four,
Speaker 1: and after additional proceedings, testing is finally going to move forward,
Speaker 1: hopefully towards the real perpetrator or perpetrators of this horrible crime. Now,
Speaker 1: without any further ado, here's our interview mashup with Joe
Speaker 1: Burlinger and the West Memphis Three.
Speaker 2: In May nineteen ninety three, three young Arkansas boys Stevie Branch,
Speaker 2: Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore went missing.
Speaker 3: Three little cub scouts, hog tied and left in an
Speaker 3: Arkansas dis one.
Speaker 4: Of the most controversial legal cases in the state's history,
Speaker 4: they found the man guilty of murdering the eight year
Speaker 4: old boys back in nineteen ninety three, in what prosecutors
Speaker 4: at the time had called some sort of a satanic ritual.
Speaker 3: Celebrities fighting for the teen's release claimed the kids were
Speaker 3: railroaded because of their mumllets, dark clothes, and fascination with.
Speaker 1: The occult sticking killings that might have been part of
Speaker 1: a satanic ritual. Convicted murderers Jason Baldwin, Jesse mss Kelly,
Speaker 1: and Damian Eccles are now free men.
Speaker 3: They spent seventeen years in prison for a crime that
Speaker 3: stunned dark and so West Memphis three would be allowed
Speaker 3: to walk out of prison, but prosecutors agreed to sign
Speaker 3: off on the deal only if the defendants would plead guilty.
Speaker 5: A long time on death row for something that you
Speaker 5: insist you didn't do. There's always the possibility that the
Speaker 5: person that you're killing is asking this is wrongful conviction.
Speaker 2: Hey y'all, it's Maggie. I'm here to tell you about
Speaker 2: a new show I've been working on for the past
Speaker 2: two years called Graves County. And it's an investigative series
Speaker 2: about the murder of a young mom in Kentucky and
Speaker 2: just how far our legal system will go in order
Speaker 2: to find someone to blame. Here is the trailer for
Speaker 2: Graves County.
Speaker 1: All I know is what I've been told, and that's
Speaker 1: a half truth is a whole live.
Speaker 2: For almost a decade, the murder of an eighteen year
Speaker 2: old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky,
Speaker 2: went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a
Speaker 2: handful of girls came forward with a story.
Speaker 6: I'm telling you, we know, we know a story that
Speaker 6: law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got
Speaker 6: the Citizen Investigator on national TV.
Speaker 4: Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give
Speaker 4: justice to Jessica Current.
Speaker 2: My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer winning journalist producer,
Speaker 2: and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that
Speaker 2: easy to find.
Speaker 3: I did not know her, and I did not kill
Speaker 3: her or raid or burn or any of that other
Speaker 3: stuff that y'all said it.
Speaker 6: They literally made me say that I took a match
Speaker 6: and struck and threw it on her. They made me
Speaker 6: say that I'm pore guests on her.
Speaker 2: From LoVa for Good. This is Graves County, a show
Speaker 2: about just how far our legal system will go in
Speaker 2: order to find someone to blame Marka.
Speaker 7: Y'all gotta work the hell up.
Speaker 8: Bad things happens to good people in small towns.
Speaker 2: Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley Feed starting
Speaker 2: September seventeenth, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever
Speaker 2: you get your podcasts, and to binge. The entire season
Speaker 2: ad free subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction today. I have a special
Speaker 1: show for you, and I think it's going to be
Speaker 1: a real treat because with me, I have a guy
Speaker 1: who has done profound work in film dealing with wrongful convictions.
Speaker 1: I'm super excited to have him here to share some
Speaker 1: stories and some wisdom and his outlooks. So Joe Burlinger,
Speaker 1: Welcome to Wrongful Conviction.
Speaker 7: Jason.
Speaker 1: Thanks.
Speaker 7: I'm a big fan of the podcast and a fan
Speaker 7: of you, so I'm glad to be here. In fact,
Speaker 7: it amazes me that since I consider myself a music
Speaker 7: and wrongful conviction guy and you're amazing music and wrongful
Speaker 7: conviction guy, I'm amazed. We haven't met until recently, which
Speaker 7: is why this podcast came to be. We shared a
Speaker 7: nice dinner together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we had dinner recently with Damian Eccles and Amanda
Speaker 1: Knox and so we really connected. And it's interesting because
Speaker 1: I do sort of music and justice. You do film
Speaker 1: music injustice. And the thing that you've been known for
Speaker 1: is your movie about the West, Memphis three, because it
Speaker 1: was such an important not only such an important documentary,
Speaker 1: but also such an important moment in the changing of
Speaker 1: the perception of the American public and the worldwide public
Speaker 1: as to how these things happen. And I'm interested to
Speaker 1: know how did you because you know, you and I
Speaker 1: both were in criminal justice reform before it was sort
Speaker 1: of a thing, right, I mean, we were early adopters,
Speaker 1: and I like to say we were before it was cool,
Speaker 1: but that sounds ridiculous, but anyway, true. Listen, I'm glad
Speaker 1: it's cool because we need more and more people.
Speaker 7: We didn't have enough storytellers shining a light on injustice
Speaker 7: and activists trying to change this miserable system we have.
Speaker 1: No we need an army. And so you made this
Speaker 1: remarkable Paradise Lost trilogy that I'm holding in my hand
Speaker 1: right now, which told the story of the three kids.
Speaker 1: And they were kids. They were teenagers, Damian Eccles, Jason Baldwin,
Speaker 1: and Jesse Miss who were persecuted, prosecuted, arrested, tried, convicted
Speaker 1: for one of the most gruesome and notorious triple murders
Speaker 1: in the history of the world. Yeah, from the three
Speaker 1: eight year old boys that went missing in West Memphis, Arkansas,
Speaker 1: out riding their bikes and turned up in a riverbank, tortured,
Speaker 1: brutally assaulted, sexually mutilated, and of course dead. And how
Speaker 1: did it come to be that? And we'll get into
Speaker 1: how the wrong conviction happened, but how did you go
Speaker 1: from being a filmmaker to being this guy? And how
Speaker 1: were you made aware of this case? And how did
Speaker 1: you get involved? And boy, it's a good thing you did,
Speaker 1: or Damien would have been executed by now.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you know, it's amazing and thank you for all that.
Speaker 7: That's very kind of you to say, because you've also
Speaker 7: done amazing work, which I appreciate. You know, my first film,
Speaker 7: which I should say, Paradise Lost and Brothers Keeper were
Speaker 7: made with Bruce Sinofsky, who recently passed away. You know,
Speaker 7: so if I revert to the eyes, I always mean we.
Speaker 7: But you know we had made Brothers Keeper, which there
Speaker 7: was no sense of social justice behind the making of
Speaker 7: that movie. That was purely an aesthetic exercise to push
Speaker 7: the documentary form a little further. You know, there was
Speaker 7: a handful of filmmakers in the late eighties early nineties
Speaker 7: that were looking to expand what it means to be
Speaker 7: a documentary. Errol Morris did it with thin Blue Line.
Speaker 7: But his contribution, besides the wrongful conviction aspect, was you know,
Speaker 7: pushing recreations to a whole new level. Michael Moore was
Speaker 7: pushing documentary by you know, the filmmaker as on camera curmudgeon,
Speaker 7: you know, crusading for a social cause. That was new.
Speaker 7: Morgan Spurlock then picked up that kind of thread in others.
Speaker 7: What we were trying to do with Brothers Keeper was
Speaker 7: simply by using a murder trial because it has perfect
Speaker 7: dramatic structure. Is to take the documentary and create a
Speaker 7: just a film that feels like a narrative film because
Speaker 7: of how it shot, how it's edited, how it looks,
Speaker 7: how it structured, and to push the documentary form. I
Speaker 7: had no interest in social justice, no interest in wrongful
Speaker 7: I didn't even know wrongful convictions took place back then.
Speaker 7: I was very naive about the justice system. And Brother's
Speaker 7: Keeper was very successful. And so Sheila Nevians from HBO
Speaker 7: came a calling. You know, she was until very recently
Speaker 7: the head of documentaries at HBO for three decades. And
Speaker 7: if I had to pick one person responsible for expanding
Speaker 7: the form to what it is today, Sheila would be
Speaker 7: that woman. But she also likes salacious material, and so
Speaker 7: she read this story about three devil worshiping teens who
Speaker 7: were just been arrested for these horrible crimes, and she
Speaker 7: wanted a satanic kids killing kids movie because it seemed
Speaker 7: like that was the case. So one week after the
Speaker 7: arrests of the three. Of course they weren't called the
Speaker 7: West Memphis three back then, they were these rotten teenagers
Speaker 7: accused of these horrible crimes. We went down to West Memphis, Arkansas,
Speaker 7: in June of ninety three, thinking we were making a
Speaker 7: film about kids killing kids. All the press was saying
Speaker 7: they were guilty Jesse miss Kelly's confession without any context.
Speaker 7: The multiple statements over time were reduced to a digestible
Speaker 7: paragraph without context, published in the local paper. So we
Speaker 7: thought there was a confession. You know, the prosecution and
Speaker 7: the police were saying at press conferences on a scale
Speaker 7: of one to ten, this is an eleven. I was
Speaker 7: going down as a filmmaker, coming off of a really
Speaker 7: great experience on my first film of pushing the form
Speaker 7: of documentary, but no idea of social justice.
Speaker 1: We go down.
Speaker 7: We embed with the families of the victims. Mainly the
Speaker 7: trial is still seven months away. For the first three
Speaker 7: months of the project, we really spent time with the
Speaker 7: families of the victims, and of course they hated these
Speaker 7: guys and thought they were, you know, the devil, and
Speaker 7: we had no reason to believe otherwise.
Speaker 1: On season seven of Wrongful Conviction, on the fifth episode,
Speaker 1: I interviewed Damien eccles. Here's an excerpt. We were an outcast, right,
Speaker 1: and there were these very small minded people around who
Speaker 1: sort of came to this instinctual call it conclusion that
Speaker 1: it must be the weird kid, right, it must be
Speaker 1: the kid that wears black and listens to heavy metal.
Speaker 1: And this was during the Satanic Panic as well. Right
Speaker 1: back then, for those of you who are old enough
Speaker 1: to remember, in the early nineties, there was this very
Speaker 1: strange thing that was going on in America with rumors
Speaker 1: of Satanic cults and stuff like that. None of them
Speaker 1: turned out to be true. But that's beside the point.
Speaker 5: So what happened for me my entire life, The thing
Speaker 5: that has been most important to me, that I love
Speaker 5: the most, that my life always sort of revolved around,
Speaker 5: was Western hermeticism ceremonial magic. All the way back from
Speaker 5: when I was a child but I lived in an
Speaker 5: incredibly right wing fundamentalist town where I mean, there were
Speaker 5: places in this town where you come to a four
Speaker 5: corner stop and on all four corners of the street
Speaker 5: will be churches.
Speaker 1: It's like Starbucks.
Speaker 5: Now, yeah, that's exactly what it was like. And if
Speaker 5: you didn't belong to, you know, one of these mainstream
Speaker 5: for that area, mainstream fundamentalist religions, you were automatically.
Speaker 1: Viewed as suspicious.
Speaker 5: You were Satanic.
Speaker 1: That's what they thought.
Speaker 5: And it didn't matter if you were a Buddhist or
Speaker 5: a Hindu or something like that. You're still satanic. You
Speaker 5: just don't know you're a Satanist. You're just being tricked
Speaker 5: by the devil into thinking there's some other religion.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 5: The fact that I actually did love ceremonial magic, and
Speaker 5: that's been one of their things that you know, they
Speaker 5: harp on forever that that is Satanism. So that was
Speaker 5: a huge part of what made them focus on me
Speaker 5: as well. You know, that was what they thought made
Speaker 5: me a freak. They think, automatically, you're a Satanist. It
Speaker 5: would take a Satanist to commit a crime like this.
Speaker 5: Stick all those things together and they didn't even look
Speaker 5: for anybody or anything else.
Speaker 1: So in this case, they focused on you, and then
Speaker 1: they had to find a way to get to you,
Speaker 1: right because there was no evidence connecting you, no, So
Speaker 1: they found a way, and that way was Jesse Mscally exactly.
Speaker 1: So they originally sort of tricked into confessing and he
Speaker 1: immediately recanted after he confessed.
Speaker 5: Of somewhere between seventy and seventy two, and they interrogated him.
Speaker 5: I can't remember exactly how many hours it was. It
Speaker 5: was something like between twelve and fourteen hours. And they're
Speaker 5: tilling this guy who has an IQ that's way way
Speaker 5: below normal. They're telling him things like, you know, just
Speaker 5: tell us what we want to know and we'll let
Speaker 5: you go home. So they finally get this guy to confess,
Speaker 5: and he can't get anything about the crime scene, right
Speaker 5: because he wasn't actually there, so he didn't know anything.
Speaker 1: They didn't care.
Speaker 5: The only thing they cared about was the fact that
Speaker 5: they got him to say yes.
Speaker 1: And we also know, Damien, that people who are most
Speaker 1: susceptible to this are adolescents. We now know that the
Speaker 1: human brain isn't fully formed until you're twenty five. He
Speaker 1: was sixteen, right seventeen, and with his low IQ, he
Speaker 1: was totally outmatched, overwhelmed, and probably after twelve to fourteen
Speaker 1: hours he would have confessed to know anything killing Abraham
Speaker 1: Lincoln exactly, I mean, just to go home. So he
Speaker 1: implicated you and Jason. So Jason was sort of your
Speaker 1: one and best and pretty much only friend at the time, right,
Speaker 1: And he was just physical appearances, he didn't have the
Speaker 1: same stigma that you did, right. He was sort of
Speaker 1: just an average looking kid, very young looking, must have
Speaker 1: weighed one hundred pounds or less. Didn't look like a killer, right,
Speaker 1: But to them you did exactly. And he got caught
Speaker 1: up in all of this too, yep, just because he
Speaker 1: knew me, right, unbelievable. On season two of Wrongful Conviction,
Speaker 1: Episode eight, I interviewed Jason Baldwin. Here's what he had
Speaker 1: to say.
Speaker 9: And so when the police came, honestly, it didn't really
Speaker 9: scare me or alarm me, because I figured they were
Speaker 9: going everywhere. I figured it was door to door, you know,
Speaker 9: that they were talking to everybody they could, you know,
Speaker 9: And to me that made sense, you know, that was logical.
Speaker 9: But what I didn't know that they were targeting us.
Speaker 1: So now everything goes completely haywire and you guys get arrested.
Speaker 9: Correct, They mugshot in me, But when they fingerprinted me,
Speaker 9: they didn't stop there. They took a fingerprint, They took
Speaker 9: an entire hand impression. They took my entire footprints, right,
Speaker 9: and then they took me to the hospital and they
Speaker 9: took hair samples, they took saliva samples, they took blood samples.
Speaker 9: When they were taking these samples from me, it gave
Speaker 9: me hope because I thought, Okay, whoever committed this crime,
Speaker 9: they've left something for the police to compare my samples to, right,
Speaker 9: and so that's where my hope was. And now at
Speaker 9: this point I had already been engaged with the police,
Speaker 9: and they had asked me, you know, questions and stuff,
Speaker 9: and I told them where I was at, and they
Speaker 9: absolutely refused the truth. They kept telling me, no, we've
Speaker 9: got another story. Your friend has told us that you
Speaker 9: have done this and that what you're telling us is
Speaker 9: not true. I'm like, well, who is this friend? And
Speaker 9: they refused to tell me. The boys' bodies were found
Speaker 9: May the sixth, we were arrested. Jesse Muskelli gave the
Speaker 9: false confession on June third, But what many people have
Speaker 9: not really noticed it. On May the fifteenth, just a
Speaker 9: couple of weeks after the boys' bodies were found, Jesse
Speaker 9: went to the police with another friend because there was
Speaker 9: a tip line and a reward offered out for any
Speaker 9: information on who may have committed this crime. Now, Jesse
Speaker 9: did not know who committed his crime, but he wanted
Speaker 9: the reward money. He was imagining the brand new truck
Speaker 9: he could buy his father and things like that. So
Speaker 9: him and another kid out of his trailer park went
Speaker 9: to the police and said, there's this suspicious guy in
Speaker 9: the town that you know, you need to check out.
Speaker 9: And I don't know exactly what all he told them
Speaker 9: about this guy or whatever, but they ended up telling him, Jesse,
Speaker 9: you need to come back with a more believable story
Speaker 9: than that. Right, a few weeks go by, now they're
Speaker 9: saying they've got that believable story when he gives the
Speaker 9: false confession against Damian on me.
Speaker 7: Then we finally negotiated access. They were all in county
Speaker 7: jail awaiting trial, and somehow we taught you know, documentary
Speaker 7: was a little more naive in those days in terms
Speaker 7: of people's perceptions, and so we were able. I mean,
Speaker 7: one of the amazing things about Paradise losses just where
Speaker 7: we stuck our camera. I mean, we got tremendous access,
Speaker 7: which I don't think we'd ever get today, luckily for
Speaker 7: all involved. But we finally negotiated access to the West
Speaker 7: Memphis three and again they weren't called that then, and
Speaker 7: we did our first series of interviews, and I think
Speaker 7: I'm sitting down with killers, you know, horrible kids, wanting
Speaker 7: to understand how three teens could be so disaffected from
Speaker 7: life that they would they would do this horrible thing.
Speaker 7: There were some killings in the UK on railroad tracks
Speaker 7: just a few years before, you know, the Jamie Bolger
Speaker 7: case that actually I had tried to get access to
Speaker 7: and make a film about. So my head is kids
Speaker 7: killing kids, it's a trend, let's make a film about it.
Speaker 7: Of course, the late eighties was the whole Satanic panic
Speaker 7: and Satanic hysteria. I was a young filmmaker and you know,
Speaker 7: didn't have any reason to think that wasn't necessarily true.
Speaker 7: So I went into this project. In the great irony
Speaker 7: is that, you know, two decades and three films later,
Speaker 7: this crusade to get these guys out. Started off as
Speaker 7: let's make a film about these rotten punks. So we
Speaker 7: sit down, we do our first series of interviews. Honestly,
Speaker 7: Damien was a little hard to read. I look back now,
Speaker 7: Obviously he was in shock. He didn't believe he would
Speaker 7: actually be convicted. Not to be judgmental, I mean, Damien's
Speaker 7: a hero to me, who's gone through the most amazing journey.
Speaker 7: But that first interview I couldn't quite tell with him.
Speaker 7: But the person who really just whatever sense of tapping
Speaker 7: into something that I had at the time. It was
Speaker 7: talking to Jason Baldwin where I just said, this doesn't
Speaker 7: add up four months before the trial, three months into
Speaker 7: being embedded in West Memphis, Arkansas, because we spent literally
Speaker 7: seven months camping out there before the trial started. And
Speaker 7: it's not like a light bulb went off and I said,
Speaker 7: oh my god, they're innocent. But something didn't seem right.
Speaker 7: And so I remember calling Sheila Evans, who, again, to
Speaker 7: her credit, she's an amazing catalyst for what documentary has become,
Speaker 7: but she also likes, you know, salacious subject matter. And
Speaker 7: she had sent me down, or sent us down to
Speaker 7: make a film about teen Satanic Killers. So I remember
Speaker 7: picking up the phone calling her to let her know
Speaker 7: that something. You know, I'm not sure these guys are guilty,
Speaker 7: and I'm not sure the film is what you think
Speaker 7: it's going to be a little trepidacious that she was
Speaker 7: going to cancel the project, but I felt I had
Speaker 7: to tell her. You know, we're like four months in
Speaker 7: and we've gathered enough information that these kids seem like
Speaker 7: they're the wrong guys had been picked up. I also
Speaker 7: created this incredible moral ambiguity because we had convinced the
Speaker 7: parents of the victims that we were here to tell
Speaker 7: their story, and they were utterly convinced of their guilt.
Speaker 7: But I called Sheila, and to her credit, she said, oh,
Speaker 7: that sounds even more interesting. Stick with it, because she
Speaker 7: couldn't pulled the plug.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 7: And it's the number one lesson. I mean, I'm not
Speaker 7: sure if there are filmmakers in the in your audience
Speaker 7: or whatever, but my number one lesson that I tell
Speaker 7: people about filmmaking is never, particularly in documentary, never lock
Speaker 7: into the preconceived idea of what you think your film
Speaker 7: is about, because you'll miss the story. If we had
Speaker 7: locked into teen Satan Killers, and hadn't opened our eyes
Speaker 7: to the real story, we might have missed the story.
Speaker 7: But I never imagined that it would actually ever get
Speaker 7: to trial because I had faith in the justice system.
Speaker 7: I never imagined that evidence such as Metallica lyrics or
Speaker 7: Stephen King novels would be presented in a court of
Speaker 7: law in the United States of America as the main evidence,
Speaker 7: and that somebody could be convicted on literally no forensic evidence,
Speaker 7: no blood at the crime scene. I mean, you know,
Speaker 7: you know the details of this case, and.
Speaker 1: So yeah, but it's worth refreshing that.
Speaker 5: We're at the police station. The only thing. Every so
Speaker 5: often one of the cops would come in and say,
Speaker 5: are you ready to make your confession? Yet I would
Speaker 5: just stand there and look at them.
Speaker 1: They would leave.
Speaker 5: I stood there all night long until the next day
Speaker 5: they got me and took me into a courtroom. They
Speaker 5: tell me, you know, somebody's already confessed to this crime.
Speaker 5: They've implicated you, saying you were the ring leader of this.
Speaker 5: So now what you need to do is confess to
Speaker 5: this and say no, you weren't the ring leader they were.
Speaker 5: Try to put the blame back on them, or you're
Speaker 5: going to die because of this. I can't even figure
Speaker 5: out who the hell they're talking about because I've only
Speaker 5: got one friend in the entire world, and that was
Speaker 5: Jason Baldwin. I knew it wasn't him because he was
Speaker 5: with me, and I knew he didn't do it. I
Speaker 5: knew he wasn't going to confess to something he hadn't done.
Speaker 5: So I didn't realize who it even was that had
Speaker 5: confessed until the next day. Whenever they take me into
Speaker 5: the courtroom, they say who it is, and they ask,
Speaker 5: you know, how do you plead all this sort of thing.
Speaker 5: They refuse to even read the confession in the courtroom.
Speaker 5: They asked me, did I want it read? I said yes,
Speaker 5: and they wouldn't read it even after they asked me
Speaker 5: and I said yes. Instead, they take me out of
Speaker 5: the courtroom into a janitor's closet with mops and brooms.
Speaker 5: They give me a transcript, a type transcript of this confession.
Speaker 5: When I started reading it, it's immediately obvious why they
Speaker 5: didn't want this thing or read in court. It made
Speaker 5: no sense whatsoever. You know, you're talking about this story
Speaker 5: that's like a Frankenstein patchwork thing that they've so did
Speaker 5: together out of many statements made by somebody with an
Speaker 5: IQ of between seventy and seventy two. And what they
Speaker 5: would do is when he would confess to something and
Speaker 5: wouldn't get anything right, they would come back into the
Speaker 5: room and say, well, do you think maybe this could
Speaker 5: have happened? Or I mean even more blatantly obvious. The
Speaker 5: first time they asked him when did the murders happen?
Speaker 5: And he says something like eight o'clock in the morning. Well,
Speaker 5: they knew that wasn't true because all three of the
Speaker 5: kids were in school. So gradually what they did was
Speaker 5: shape this thing to make it what they wanted it
Speaker 5: to be. That's why they didn't want it read in court.
Speaker 1: No, and they ignored obvious signs that pointed to at
Speaker 1: least one, arguably up to three other individuals. Yes, including
Speaker 1: there was a local restaurant, was it Bojangles or something?
Speaker 1: Was a Bojangles where the manager called the cops that
Speaker 1: night and said there was a guy covered in mud
Speaker 1: and blood that stumbled into the fast food place and
Speaker 1: went into the bathroom. And to their credit, the manager
Speaker 1: called up and a police officer came but didn't investigate,
Speaker 1: and they ultimately collected evidence from that bathroom that he
Speaker 1: went into, which there was blood all over the place
Speaker 1: and mud, and they lost it. Yes, and there again
Speaker 1: were obvious signs. I mean the one I just talked about,
Speaker 1: the various signs pointing to the stepfather of one of
Speaker 1: the boys. I mean, this one kind of came with instructions,
Speaker 1: and I know that it's difficult. I'm not an anarchist.
Speaker 1: I believe we do need a system of law and order.
Speaker 1: I think there are a lot of very good police
Speaker 1: and judges and prosecutors out there. But in this case,
Speaker 1: it's a small town, high profile, complicated crime. Because the
Speaker 1: crime scene itself was a muddy riverbed, not the easiest
Speaker 1: place to collect evidence. It seemed to have been scrubbed
Speaker 1: to some degree. And then all the pressure you ran
Speaker 1: into the perfect storm.
Speaker 5: They put me in another sale where I would stay
Speaker 5: for almost the next year while I waited to go
Speaker 5: to trial. When we do go to trial, the evidence
Speaker 5: that they present against us is things like Stephen King books,
Speaker 5: the fact that we owned Metallica T shirts and albums,
Speaker 5: posters that were hanging on our wall, you know, things
Speaker 5: that were from like skateboarding magazines, ceremonial magic books. This
Speaker 5: is the evidence they had. That the prosecutors tell the
Speaker 5: jury that these things are not only evidence that were guilty,
Speaker 5: but their evidence that I don't even have a soul,
Speaker 5: that this is how evil I am.
Speaker 9: I was totally surprised when I went to trial and
Speaker 9: instead of the narration of the story revolving around evidence,
Speaker 9: the prosecutor John Fogeman and Brenton Davis were saying things
Speaker 9: like the crime scene was completely clean, there was absolutely
Speaker 9: no evidence, no physical evidence left behind, and this, in
Speaker 9: fact is evidence of Satanic cult ritual activity.
Speaker 1: Because the devil faned up the crime scene. Basically, when
Speaker 1: they put that guy in the stand who was testifying
Speaker 1: as an expert on Satanism and witchcraft and all, and
Speaker 1: the defense attorney quite rightly said to him, where did
Speaker 1: you get certified at this? And it turned out he
Speaker 1: had spent like an hour doing some online something or whatever.
Speaker 1: It was ridiculed. It was laughable, right, The fact that
Speaker 1: he was called himself an expert was laughable. And that's
Speaker 1: one thing that I was like, well, the jury's got
Speaker 1: to hear that. And the other thing was when they
Speaker 1: had the doctor on the stand, right, it was like
Speaker 1: orthopedic surgeon or something, and they were asking him about
Speaker 1: the way that the one boy had been mutilated, right,
Speaker 1: and we had the skin cut off his penis. I mean,
Speaker 1: he's really pretty disgusting even thinking about it now. Now.
Speaker 9: We found out later was animals had actually started eating
Speaker 9: their bodies in the water that they were submerging. And
Speaker 9: so when the police pulled Jesse into the police station
Speaker 9: and they laid out the photos of the bodies, they
Speaker 9: had him make up a story for all the visible wounds.
Speaker 9: The calls and manner of the wounds were unknown. They
Speaker 9: didn't know that all these wounds were animal predation.
Speaker 1: If you remember when the jury went out, what did
Speaker 1: you think was going to happen?
Speaker 9: I sincerely believed that we would go home, they would
Speaker 9: find us not guilty, that they would be able to
Speaker 9: totally ignore all the flaming prejudicial stuff that the prosecution
Speaker 9: was bringing up about Satanism and everything, and look at
Speaker 9: the case for what it was and follow the evidence.
Speaker 9: So told all your life that the purpose of the
Speaker 9: judicial system is to find the truth, when really it's
Speaker 9: to get a conviction.
Speaker 5: They came back in they sentenced me to death three times.
Speaker 5: They sentenced me to die by lethal injection three times.
Speaker 5: They sentenced Jason to life in prison without parole. The
Speaker 5: other guy they sentenced to life plus forty years. They
Speaker 5: immediately take me from the courtroom to death Row, where
Speaker 5: I would not see Jason again. I saw him maybe
Speaker 5: twelve fifteen years later, for maybe twenty to thirty seconds.
Speaker 5: They used to bring other prisoners in to clean the barracks,
Speaker 5: and he was one of the prisoners they brought in
Speaker 5: one day to clean death row. So he comes by
Speaker 5: mysell mopping and sweeping. That was the first contact I'd
Speaker 5: had with him in like fifteen years by that point.
Speaker 1: It's truly mind boggling the whole thing, even by our standards,
Speaker 1: being entrenched in this work, you know, and you hear
Speaker 1: one fuck up story after another, but this one takes
Speaker 1: the King go, yeah, you know. I talk a lot
Speaker 1: about the idea that when we willfully or accidentally, want
Speaker 1: to call it mistakenly, prosecute the wrong person and convict them,
Speaker 1: by definition, we stop looking for the right person exactly.
Speaker 1: And in this case, it sure seems like the prosecutors
Speaker 1: must have known that these guys didn't do it. At
Speaker 1: some point they realized that they had the wrong guys.
Speaker 1: Maybe it was around the time you did, maybe it
Speaker 1: was sooner, may it was later. But then you're left with,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, So, whoever this sick fuck is that
Speaker 1: did this terrible, or whoever these people are that did this,
Speaker 1: they're amongst us. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Well, first of all, I do believe that during the
Speaker 7: trial and through the conviction, the authorities felt they had
Speaker 7: the right guy. And the reason that's scary is because
Speaker 7: of the utter incompetence and the ability to fall victim
Speaker 7: to confirmation bias, to all sorts of problems within our system.
Speaker 7: I actually think that they felt they had the right people.
Speaker 7: What I find evil, the real evil in this case
Speaker 7: because a lot of that initial false conviction I attribute
Speaker 7: to human error, which is scary in some way scarier
Speaker 7: than a conspiracy. But it's the post conviction period where
Speaker 7: it became quite clear, I think to everybody involved that
Speaker 7: these guys were innocent, and for people to hang on
Speaker 7: to their jobs, for people to not question things, you know,
Speaker 7: for the same judge Judge Burnett, who presided over the
Speaker 7: original trial, to be the post conviction appellate judge ruling
Speaker 7: whether he had reversible error in the original is absurd,
Speaker 7: and that's what the way it was for over a
Speaker 7: decade on that case. So the real evil in this
Speaker 7: case is the post conviction period where people cared more
Speaker 7: about their jobs. And you see that all the time.
Speaker 7: It's why there shouldn't be prosecutorial immunity and all sorts
Speaker 7: of other issues. But just getting back to my origin story,
Speaker 7: you know, in covering this story, I just still I
Speaker 7: didn't have the gene that I thought film could be
Speaker 7: used for social good until the final moments of Paradise Lost,
Speaker 7: which are the final moments of the trial where oh
Speaker 7: my god, they really have convicted this guy on no evidence.
Speaker 7: And you see in Paradise Laws in the movie, Jason
Speaker 7: has already been convicted halfway through the movie, and then
Speaker 7: the second half of the movie is focusing on Jason
Speaker 7: and Damien, and you see Damien being chained up and
Speaker 7: led off to death row. I mean, we were in
Speaker 7: the room with him as he was being chained off
Speaker 7: and led off to death row, and Jason was being
Speaker 7: led off to life without parole sentences and they get
Speaker 7: escorted out of the room, and Bruce and I look
Speaker 7: at each other like, oh my god, I cannot believe
Speaker 7: what we just witnessed. And that's when we vowed to
Speaker 7: do everything we could. And when the gene or the
Speaker 7: light bulb went off in my head where I realized that, yes,
Speaker 7: I'm sitting on all this footage that can help, and
Speaker 7: that film I think can be used for shining a light.
Speaker 7: And so I feel like I stumbled on to the
Speaker 7: criminal justice system as a place to place my f focus.
Speaker 7: But seeing how easy it is for people to make mistakes,
Speaker 7: seeing how easy it is for somebody to be sent
Speaker 7: to death, this became my calling when I saw that
Speaker 7: zero evidence and Stephen King novels and Metallica lyrics can
Speaker 7: put you on death row.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, if that's the case, I mean when you
Speaker 1: add up all the Stephen King novels and all the
Speaker 1: Batallica records that would sold out, means there's tens of
Speaker 1: millions of serial killers out there that we should all
Speaker 1: be very scared crazy.
Speaker 7: And you know, he did have an affinity for Aleister
Speaker 7: Crowley and that was also introduced. But still, this is
Speaker 7: not forensic evidence. You know, there was no blood at
Speaker 7: the crime scene, no forensic evidence. I mean, it's just
Speaker 7: this is the worst case probably I've studied, you know,
Speaker 7: in all these years.
Speaker 1: So your film ultimately led to an amazing outpouring of
Speaker 1: support from people all over the world, regular people as
Speaker 1: well as people at the very top echelons of society.
Speaker 1: Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, Natalie Maine to Peter Jackson. Amazing,
Speaker 1: amazing people who became like, not casually involved, but deeply involved.
Speaker 1: And there's no separating that from the fact that it
Speaker 1: was a direct result of your movie, which had to
Speaker 1: feel good. But then how did it feel when finally,
Speaker 1: eighteen years later, these guys walked out of prison and
Speaker 1: knowing the role that you played in that, right, well,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people played roles in it, right,
Speaker 1: That's the thing I mean this. I hope this doesn't
Speaker 1: sound falsely humble. I'm very proud of the films, and
Speaker 1: I think the film's definitely played a role. And I
Speaker 1: definitely think that we're the ones who said against all
Speaker 1: the other media, because every night there was a news
Speaker 1: report or story of these monstrous killers. It was so
Speaker 1: prejudicing everything, so we were truly the only media saying
Speaker 1: that they were innocent. I think the film attracted a
Speaker 1: lot of the attention, but it's the activism of tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of people and the well known people that
Speaker 1: got them out of prison.
Speaker 7: But that feels good. I mean, it's rare in one's career.
Speaker 7: You know, when you make documentaries, you hope to affect
Speaker 7: people in some way. When you're a storyteller in general,
Speaker 7: you want to affect people in some way, and to
Speaker 7: have that kind of tangible effect on the outcome of
Speaker 7: a case felt terrific, although I will say it was
Speaker 7: also very bittersweet because a it took way too long,
Speaker 7: you know, eighteen and a half years. Actually, with some
Speaker 7: cases that's on the low end of things, sadly, but
Speaker 7: still it took so long, and the attempts to deny
Speaker 7: DNA testing and the fact that the same judge remained
Speaker 7: on the case during the whole post conviction is just outrageous.
Speaker 7: And then the end result was the Alfred plea, where
Speaker 7: you know, Damien was not well on death row as
Speaker 7: we know, and you know, Jason had to really debate
Speaker 7: whether he wanted to take the deal because he wanted
Speaker 7: to keep fighting, and some evidence that Peter Jackson paid
Speaker 7: for was coming out and very helpful, which of course
Speaker 7: scared the prosecution, which is why they were even willing
Speaker 7: to do the Alfred plea. Should we explain what the
Speaker 7: Alfred plea is?
Speaker 1: Yeah, let me talk about it. Go ahead.
Speaker 7: Well, the Alfred plea is basically where you stand up
Speaker 7: in court. In this case, Damien and Jason and Jesse
Speaker 7: acknowledged that the prosecution has enough evidence to convict, but
Speaker 7: you maintain your innocence. You state that I am innocent
Speaker 7: of these charges, but I believe the state has enough
Speaker 7: evidence that a conviction could occur, So I plead guilty
Speaker 7: in exchange for time served. Is basically what happened. So
Speaker 7: the death sentence was vacated and turned into a first
Speaker 7: degree murder charge, and he was sentenced to life served,
Speaker 7: which allowed him to go out of the prison, and
Speaker 7: the life without parole sentences were vacated and turned into
Speaker 7: time served. That's you know, you can understand why somebody
Speaker 7: would accept that, especially if you're on death row. But
Speaker 7: it's so cowardly on the part of the State of Arkansas.
Speaker 7: Does anyone really believe that if the State of Arkansas
Speaker 7: had an abiding belief that these were teen child killers
Speaker 7: who sacrificed eight year olds to the devil in a
Speaker 7: satanic ritual that they would allow them to walk free
Speaker 7: after eighteen years. Of course not they know they're innocent,
Speaker 7: but they want to protect themselves from accountability.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 7: Some people have said, well, they want to also protect
Speaker 7: themselves from being sued for wrongful conviction, which you know,
Speaker 7: the average wrongful conviction case is worth a million dollars
Speaker 7: a year. Times eighteen years times three defendants, that's fifty
Speaker 7: four million dollars if I'm doing my math correctly or
Speaker 7: something like that. But they could have even signed, you know,
Speaker 7: a way that they won't sue for wrongful conviction. It's
Speaker 7: all about accountability, and that's how these things happen. That's
Speaker 7: why post conviction takes for so long. Nobody wants to
Speaker 7: be accountable. And I think it's so cowardly and disturbing
Speaker 7: that this is how these guys ended up free. I mean,
Speaker 7: I took Jason to both the Berlin Film Festival with
Speaker 7: Paradise Lost three and there's a great documentary festival in
Speaker 7: Amsterdam called IFA International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam, and both
Speaker 7: of those border crossings were fraught with delays and problems
Speaker 7: because as in the computer, it's Jason Bald with convicted
Speaker 7: child killer. Jason wants to study law and become a lawyer.
Speaker 7: He can't do it because he's a convicted child killer.
Speaker 7: So yesfl great that the movie had an impact on people,
Speaker 7: and those people pushed and pushed until these guys were
Speaker 7: let out. But sad that it's the alphad plea and
Speaker 7: they're not fully exonerated.
Speaker 1: The alpha plea is such a it's like a Sophie's
Speaker 1: choice kind of thing. And we've had Oh god, I
Speaker 1: don't know how many people on Ralph conviction who have
Speaker 1: resorted to that. You know, they have so much leverage
Speaker 1: when you're looking at the amount of time it will
Speaker 1: take to go back for another trial, Yeah, you're going
Speaker 1: to spend that time in prison awaiting that trial. If
Speaker 1: you're trying to put yourself in the shoes of someone
Speaker 1: who's face with that choice, If you know that you've
Speaker 1: already been framed once or gotten you know, convicted, he
Speaker 1: didn't do however it got to that once, you would
Speaker 1: be hard pressed to risk the rest of your life
Speaker 1: in the system that has already.
Speaker 7: Ye, Damien was truly unhealthy and being abused by guards.
Speaker 7: And that's ultimately why I think they're all heroes to me.
Speaker 7: But Jason Baldwin acted very heroically because he was ready
Speaker 7: to stay and fight and clear his name. But everyone
Speaker 7: felt that Damien's health was in such a state that
Speaker 7: to wait any longer might be detrimental, so he made
Speaker 7: that decision a death sentence.
Speaker 1: Jason. Of all the eighty something episodes we recorded, now,
Speaker 1: his was really like it was difficult to even hear
Speaker 1: the stories that he told. He's such an amazingly gentle,
Speaker 1: you know, soul, and you know he was what ninety
Speaker 1: one hundred pounds back then, right, actually did well.
Speaker 7: In school, And you're right. That was the vibe he
Speaker 7: was giving off. Was this sweet little boy talking to
Speaker 7: me about phishing and what he likes to do when
Speaker 7: he's not at school and drawing. He was an avid drawer.
Speaker 7: And while he's talking to me, I'm looking at his
Speaker 7: tiny little wrists, because if you believe the prosecution story,
Speaker 7: it's Baldwin who wielded the serrated hunting knife that castrated
Speaker 7: the buyer's boy. And I'm talking to the sweet little
Speaker 7: kid and staring at his wrist and trying to imagine
Speaker 7: that this guy knifed these kids in the way that
Speaker 7: it was alleged, and I just found it incredible.
Speaker 1: Jason Baldwin on the show. It was an experience I'll
Speaker 1: never forget when this all came down. You were in
Speaker 1: tenth grade.
Speaker 9: Tenth grade.
Speaker 1: Tenth grade. Let's just reflect on that for a second.
Speaker 1: You're not even anywhere near being an adult in tenth grade.
Speaker 1: So then you end up getting sent to maximum security prison.
Speaker 9: Right when you first go to prison and you're not
Speaker 9: going to death row, you go to what's called a
Speaker 9: diagnostic unit, and that's where they evaluate you mentally and
Speaker 9: physically to determine what your parent unit in the department
Speaker 9: corrections will be. Because they have a myriad of prisons
Speaker 9: on various different old slave plantations in the South, and
Speaker 9: each of them are different and in different ways by
Speaker 9: age and your strength and things like that. And when
Speaker 9: I went to diagnostics, they saw me like you saw
Speaker 9: me as a small innocent kid, and a diagnostics they
Speaker 9: were like, we've got to send you to one of
Speaker 9: two places, Jason, or you're not gonna make it PC
Speaker 9: Protective custody or what's called SPU Suicide Prevention Unit and
Speaker 9: suicide prevention unit. You will have your own cell. And
Speaker 9: you know, I looked at it like this. At the time,
Speaker 9: we didn't have very many people on our side. In fact,
Speaker 9: it was just us. And I'm thrust into this incredibly
Speaker 9: impossible situation. And I was escorted everywhere I went in
Speaker 9: the prison, and so I'd see the people in SPU
Speaker 9: going to chow and they'd be doing the thorizine shuffle
Speaker 9: because they're so heavily medicated. And I had a fear
Speaker 9: that if I acquiesced and let them put me in SPU,
Speaker 9: that they would forcefully make me and I would lose
Speaker 9: my mind and my ability to think and reason and
Speaker 9: to fight. And so I said, no, I can't do that.
Speaker 9: And as far as the PC protective custody, anybody knows
Speaker 9: if you are saying you are so weak that you
Speaker 9: need protection, that people are gonna see that and prey
Speaker 9: on you even more. And so I knew I had
Speaker 9: to some way, some fashion stand on my own two
Speaker 9: feet in there and earn everybody's respect from the inmates
Speaker 9: and guards a light and they said, well, you not
Speaker 9: going to one of these places. We're gonna have to
Speaker 9: send you to Barner. And at the time they had
Speaker 9: just shipped all these guys from the Little Tucker Unit
Speaker 9: to Barner and they were destroying the place. They said,
Speaker 9: it was just chaos and destruction and just incredibly violent place,
Speaker 9: and that's where they were going to have to send me.
Speaker 9: And I just told them that that's what you got
Speaker 9: to do. You got to do it. And so they
Speaker 9: did eventually send me to Barner Unit, and it was
Speaker 9: everything they said it was.
Speaker 1: How did you survive there?
Speaker 9: And you know, by the grace of God, you know,
Speaker 9: as you said, I guess, I'll say I was incredibly luckily,
Speaker 9: but I was incredibly blessed to I went in there,
Speaker 9: they opened up and mister Patten stepped out, and his
Speaker 9: clerk stepped out, and mister Panton says, in May Bowlin,
Speaker 9: I'm mister Patten, the classification officer. I'll be assigning you
Speaker 9: to your housing unit. And this is my clerk, Mojo.
Speaker 9: And they tell me you got to stand up for
Speaker 9: yourself in here or these people just will run you
Speaker 9: over and turn you into a sex slave and all
Speaker 9: these horrible things and make you pay money for protection
Speaker 9: and stuff like that. And so they assign me to
Speaker 9: seven barracks, and seven barracks at the Barner unit is
Speaker 9: in take barracks. I walk down the hall and as
Speaker 9: I'm walking, I'm walking next to this barracks and it's
Speaker 9: got bulletproof glass three stories high, and these guys are
Speaker 9: beating on it. Right, it's plexiglass, it's got chicken wire
Speaker 9: in it, and there are sell bars on the inside
Speaker 9: of it, going all the way up three stories. And
Speaker 9: I look and these guys are literally climbing this thing.
Speaker 9: They are climbing it above one another're hanging on to
Speaker 9: the bars, looking at me, beating the glass and pointing
Speaker 9: at me. Because they've been watching the trial on TV
Speaker 9: and the hearings and stuff for an entire year. It's
Speaker 9: like a pep rally. Right, They're finally going to have
Speaker 9: their hands on me.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 9: And I get there and Sergeant Ivy's working the door
Speaker 9: and he tells me, He says, if you go in
Speaker 9: there and stand up for yourself, I got your back.
Speaker 9: If not, they got you. And I'm just holding the
Speaker 9: only thing I have is a bible, a couple of
Speaker 9: letters from a mom. That's it in a little paper bag.
Speaker 9: And they opened the door and put me in there,
Speaker 9: and next thing I know, somebody swings a fist at me.
Speaker 9: I duck that one. The next one catches me and
Speaker 9: I'm fighting. Immediately the door opens back up, there's may sprayed.
Speaker 9: Sergeant Ivy's yeanking people off of me. I'm on the
Speaker 9: ground and he says, are you ready to go to PC?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 9: You need to catch out, and the guys are hollering,
Speaker 9: catch out, bitch, catch out, O all these horrible things,
Speaker 9: you know, which catch out means to leave the barracks
Speaker 9: and to go and to protective custody. And like I said,
Speaker 9: you know, I knew I needed to earn these people's
Speaker 9: respect because I did not know how long I would
Speaker 9: be there. I know I'm innocent, but I don't know
Speaker 9: how long I'm going to be in this prison. And
Speaker 9: so I tell them no leave me. And next thing
Speaker 9: I know, we go from the dayroom tier downstairs of
Speaker 9: guys like push all the racks up against the wall.
Speaker 9: They circle around us, and I'm fighting this guy. And
Speaker 9: then I'm fighting this guy and there's people hitting me
Speaker 9: from behind. So it's kind of orderly and fair, but
Speaker 9: then again it's kind of not. And so I fight
Speaker 9: the whole barracks that Friday, everybody, and then they call
Speaker 9: shower call and the barracks next door eight bricks. They
Speaker 9: call two barracks at a time to go to shower.
Speaker 9: The shower holds one hundred people, and so when I
Speaker 9: get there, I gotta fight all these guys from eight barracks.
Speaker 9: And so I fought all weekend. My whole face would
Speaker 9: swollen up, my fists were swoll up, my body was
Speaker 9: beat And so I do this all weekend. I get
Speaker 9: into fights in the chowhau even like because there's even
Speaker 9: other people from other barracks is wanting to get to
Speaker 9: me in the chow haw and stuff like that. Come
Speaker 9: Monday morning, I'm barely even able to walk, you know,
Speaker 9: and like the guys are like just pushing me and
Speaker 9: guiding me a bit and which way to go and stuff,
Speaker 9: because I can't even see even less than I normally
Speaker 9: do because my eyes and stuff are all swollen up.
Speaker 9: And I just remember thinking that whole weekend about this
Speaker 9: job out in the fields, whole squad. There's gonna be sunshine,
Speaker 9: there's gonna be a dawn, and I'm gonna get to
Speaker 9: witness that. I was just looking forward to that first dawn,
Speaker 9: you know, that morning air. And so there was a
Speaker 9: part of me just no matter how bad it was,
Speaker 9: I was just looking forward to that first dawn. I'm like,
Speaker 9: if I can make it to that, you know, if
Speaker 9: I can make it to that, that's something good.
Speaker 1: It's interesting. Fifteen to twenty years ago, I was going
Speaker 1: around to different studios in Hollywood and saying, we should
Speaker 1: do a show that features these type of cases and
Speaker 1: shine a light on these injustices. And people were like, no,
Speaker 1: nobody wants that, you know, And now it seems like
Speaker 1: every other show you turn.
Speaker 7: On I have several of them. Yeah you do ye
Speaker 7: a wrong man on Stars. And I did a show
Speaker 7: for Discovery called Killing Richard Glossop, who another horrible case
Speaker 7: that I wish people would pay more attention to.
Speaker 1: Richard Glossops.
Speaker 7: And on Oklahoma's death Row, the status tried to kill
Speaker 7: him three times. The last time they tried to kill him,
Speaker 7: the portal was in his arm and they were using
Speaker 7: the wrong execution drugs and the clock struck three, which
Speaker 7: is the appointed killing hour, and the family on the
Speaker 7: outside thought the stay had not come as it had
Speaker 7: several times before, crying and hugging, thinking that he had
Speaker 7: been killed, when in fact, what was going on inside
Speaker 7: the death room was an argu between the state's attorney
Speaker 7: general and the head of prisons trying to figure out
Speaker 7: whether they should kill this guy because he had the
Speaker 7: wrong execution drugs and that fracas, and it's the second
Speaker 7: time there was the wrong execution drugs were being used.
Speaker 7: There's you know, there's a moratorium on executions in Oklahoma.
Speaker 7: That's the only thing that's keeping Richard Glossop alive, as
Speaker 7: opposed to this bizarre story that the prosecution, you know,
Speaker 7: has given as to why he deserves to be killed,
Speaker 7: which is completely bogus.
Speaker 1: The case of Richard Glossop came to my attention several
Speaker 1: years ago, and I felt like I'd been kicked in
Speaker 1: the stomach. I mean, let's talk about him, because they
Speaker 1: do need to bring more attention to it. Can you
Speaker 1: give us the capsule summary of this.
Speaker 7: There's not a long story to tell. It's Richard Glossop
Speaker 7: was the manager of a kind of a sleazy motel,
Speaker 7: and he is accused of hiring the motel's janitor, who
Speaker 7: he had given a job to only a few months before,
Speaker 7: to kill the owner of the hotel that he could
Speaker 7: take it over. The whole story on its face when
Speaker 7: you pick it apart is ridiculous. The guy who actually
Speaker 7: did the killing is the junkie hotel janitor maintenance man
Speaker 7: named Justin Snead, and he was convicted of the murder,
Speaker 7: but you know, was not sentenced to death. He cut
Speaker 7: a deal, pointed a finger at his boss. There's zero evidence,
Speaker 7: zero corroboration. We did some forensic accounting or the defense
Speaker 7: attorney did some forensic accounting to show this idea of
Speaker 7: swindling and taking money is bogus. But conspiracy to murder
Speaker 7: hiring somebody to do a murder as a capital offense,
Speaker 7: and these guys wanted that notch on their belt. I'm convinced.
Speaker 7: I mean, there's just if you look at the evidence,
Speaker 7: there is none. It's just one of these cases where
Speaker 7: it's so bizarre. And this guy has been on it's
Speaker 7: been two years since I did the show. It's either
Speaker 7: thirty five days or thirty eight days prior to your execution,
Speaker 7: your move from one terrible cell in death row to
Speaker 7: your final cell where you're placed on death watch, where
Speaker 7: the lights are on twenty four seven. You now only
Speaker 7: have one meal a day. You are sleeping on a
Speaker 7: thin like half inch excuse for a mattress instead of
Speaker 7: a real cot and they're just trying to wear you down.
Speaker 7: And this poor guy has gone through this process three times.
Speaker 7: He's had the portal placed in his arm awaiting the
Speaker 7: lethal injection drugs. When they realized, oh, we have the
Speaker 7: wrong drugs. That's the only thing that has saved this guy.
Speaker 7: We're two mistakes by the prison. The first attempt to
Speaker 7: kill him, there was a stay because a new witness
Speaker 7: came along and the government dismissed it as being relevant.
Speaker 7: But that was the first day. The other two stays,
Speaker 7: the last two stays were because of botched execution. And
Speaker 7: there's just no evidence tying this guy to the murder.
Speaker 7: The convicted killer who confessed to doing it is serving
Speaker 7: a life sentence, whereas the guy who allegedly hired him
Speaker 7: for which there's snow proof, is on death row under
Speaker 7: the most miserable conditions.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 7: And this is where my big thing is prosecutorial immunity.
Speaker 7: You know, on the one hand, it's been argued to me, well,
Speaker 7: prosecutors have to be immune from their actions because you know,
Speaker 7: in many places prosecutors are underpaid. You know, you wouldn't
Speaker 7: get good prosecutors to do their job if they were
Speaker 7: fearful of immunity. I get that on a certain level.
Speaker 7: And there's lots of great prosecutors and not everyone's a
Speaker 7: bad guy, and not every CoP's a bad cop. And
Speaker 7: I'm like, like, you can't paint people with a broad stroke.
Speaker 7: But there's got to be a happy medium where willful
Speaker 7: withholding of evidence. Prosecutors have got to be held accountable
Speaker 7: and a lot of this shit would go away in
Speaker 7: my opinion. I mean, you know, Judge Janine Janine Piro,
Speaker 7: the Fox commentator in the case of Jeffrey Dskovic, she
Speaker 7: fought DNA testing for a long time. You know, she
Speaker 7: went off to go run for office, and then her successor, Janetdfiori, said,
Speaker 7: of course, we'll test the DNA. The DNA was tested
Speaker 7: and it immediately pointed to another person.
Speaker 1: Season four of Romful Conviction, Episode eight, Jeffrey Deskovic.
Speaker 8: And then the trial comes in. Just before the trial,
Speaker 8: the results of the DNA test comes back from the
Speaker 8: FBI laboratory, which shows that the seamen found and the
Speaker 8: victim didn't.
Speaker 1: Match me, right, because remember she was raped.
Speaker 8: She was raped, yes, And by the way, the lieutenant
Speaker 8: who oversaw everything. In the letter that he penned to
Speaker 8: the FBI asking them to expedite the testing. He wrote
Speaker 8: in the letter that the DNA testing would either show
Speaker 8: my guilt or it would exonerate me. But when it
Speaker 8: came back and it didn't match me, my lawyer did
Speaker 8: try to get the indictment dismissed against me based on that,
Speaker 8: but the judge denied that motion.
Speaker 1: That alone seems so just incomprehensible to me. I mean,
Speaker 1: the judge is impartial, right, we know the prosecutor has
Speaker 1: an agenda, but the judge's impartial. Yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't understand. You know that back then DNA wasn't
Speaker 1: it wasn't as well known.
Speaker 8: But to be clear, I mean, DNA started being used
Speaker 8: in the court system as early as nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 8: and this we're on trial now in nineteen ninety, so
Speaker 8: it's been around for three years. So while not in
Speaker 8: currency like now, it is not exactly totally unknown.
Speaker 1: Right, and it's perfect I mean.
Speaker 8: Right, it's the gold standard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so your DNA doesn't match. This is an inconvenient
Speaker 1: truth for the authorities, and the judge allows this. This
Speaker 1: circus to go on. Meanwhile, let's spend a moment talking
Speaker 1: about the actual perpetrator. Yes, because every time, and I
Speaker 1: sound like a broken record when I say this, but
Speaker 1: every time that somebody like you gets convicted wrongfully, the
Speaker 1: actual perpetrator, they stop looking for him. Right, the case
Speaker 1: is closed, And in this case, the consequences were very real.
Speaker 8: Yes, school teacher Patricia Morrison who had a couple of kids.
Speaker 8: She was from Peak Skill, and she was killed by
Speaker 8: the stained perpetrator, Stephen Cunningham. She was killed three and
Speaker 8: a half years later as a result of Cunningham being
Speaker 8: left free on the street while I was doing time
Speaker 8: for his crime.
Speaker 1: Now you say, the real perpetrator, how do we know that?
Speaker 8: Well, here, great, that's a great question. I'm so glad
Speaker 8: you asked. Because the DNA matched him, because he got
Speaker 8: caught for the second murder Patricia Morrison, which resulted in
Speaker 8: his being incarcerated and having to give up a DNA
Speaker 8: sample which was put into the data bank. And so
Speaker 8: when I eventually got the further testing with the Innocence
Speaker 8: Projects help, it matched him. Then he subsequently confessed and
Speaker 8: he played guilty in court.
Speaker 1: When did this happen that happened.
Speaker 8: Twelve and a half years after he killed a second victim.
Speaker 1: Well, so, Patricia Morrison, yes, today would be probably a
Speaker 1: LUs sitting around with her grandchildren, you know, probably be
Speaker 1: a retired school teacher by now having a nice life.
Speaker 1: Her children would have grown up as they deserve too,
Speaker 1: as everyone deserves to with their mother. The rest of
Speaker 1: her family wouldn't have gone through this horrendous loss. None
Speaker 1: of it had to happen except for the fact that
Speaker 1: they went on this crazy witch hunt to convict you,
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Deskovic, of a crime that they knew you didn't commit.
Speaker 7: So he was exonerated, got millions of dollars from Westchester
Speaker 7: County and Putnam County, which the taxpayers should be livid
Speaker 7: about that. You know, this case was allowed to happen,
Speaker 7: and the same thing in Damien's case. They were you know,
Speaker 7: the seven or eight years was spent with a guy
Speaker 7: on death row. Seven or eight years was spent fighting
Speaker 7: DNA testing because of the finality of judgment concept in
Speaker 7: our legal system, which is absurd.
Speaker 5: Years later they do DNA testing, find out that the
Speaker 5: DNA does not match me or the other two guys
Speaker 5: they convicted to this they still have not run that
Speaker 5: DNA through CODIS to see who it matches. They refuse
Speaker 5: to do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is so strange because in a case like this,
Speaker 1: especially in the small community, the people who are doing
Speaker 1: investigating live in that community. By definition, When you have
Speaker 1: somebody out there who's capable of this sort of pure evil,
Speaker 1: you would think, if for no other reason than purely
Speaker 1: selfish reasons, you would want to get that person off
Speaker 1: the street. But that's not what happened, and it happens
Speaker 1: too frequently that these various factors combine to result in
Speaker 1: a tragic outcome.
Speaker 5: And what people don't realize also, you know, just most
Speaker 5: people's knowledge of the legal system comes from watching TV,
Speaker 5: and it fosters this idea that these people, these judges,
Speaker 5: these prosecutors, these attorney generals, that they have these positions
Speaker 5: because there's somehow moral people. They're good people who are
Speaker 5: looking out for society. In actual fact, these are politicians,
Speaker 5: just like senators, just like congressmen. Their number one priority
Speaker 5: is winning that next election. So they are going to
Speaker 5: do or that next case exactly whatever the community is
Speaker 5: pressuring them to do. That's the way they're going to
Speaker 5: lean because they want to win the next election.
Speaker 7: The legal system should be about finding the truth and
Speaker 7: if there's reason to believe that somebody has a wrongful
Speaker 7: conviction claim, especially with the advent of DNA technology, which
Speaker 7: you know, that's a new that was a new thing.
Speaker 7: The fact that a prosecutor can fight DNA testing like
Speaker 7: they did in Damien's case for eight or nine years,
Speaker 7: like they did in Jeffrey Dskovic's case, which resulted in
Speaker 7: the death of another innocent human being, it's just outrageous.
Speaker 1: You know. And that's true too in the Central Park
Speaker 1: five case, where Linda Fairstein prosecuted those five kids even
Speaker 1: though she knew she had the evidence, she knew they
Speaker 1: didn't do it, and they had every reason to suspect
Speaker 1: that Matthias Rays was the actual killer. Ye, and then
Speaker 1: he went out and raped three other women and killed
Speaker 1: one of them in front of her kids. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like, I mean, I'm getting the shells just thinking
Speaker 1: about it. Like that is so bad and we should
Speaker 1: all want that to end, right.
Speaker 7: I'm telling you, If some tougher laws were passed about
Speaker 7: prosecutors being held accountable for their actions, I think a
Speaker 7: lot of the shit would end, it's about winning at
Speaker 7: all costs. It's not about the search for the truth.
Speaker 7: And again, I'm friends with a prosecutor. I know many
Speaker 7: good prosecutors. There's good guys out there, so I'm not
Speaker 7: saying every prosecutor is like that. But it's the system
Speaker 7: is human. It's the reason you cannot have a death
Speaker 7: penalty because the system is human and it's so easy.
Speaker 7: We see with Damien how an innocent person can be killed.
Speaker 7: And so I've spent a lot of times talking to
Speaker 7: the mothers of victims of violent crime, and they want vengeance.
Speaker 7: And I understand that desire to have vengeance. And I
Speaker 7: don't want to look a mother in the eye and
Speaker 7: say to her, you don't morally have the right to
Speaker 7: want the death of the killer of your child. But
Speaker 7: we don't even have to get to that moral place
Speaker 7: because the death of one innocent person on death row,
Speaker 7: to me, means you can can't have a death penalty
Speaker 7: because the system is fallible. It's run by human beings,
Speaker 7: some of whom want to win at all costs.
Speaker 1: No, that's the argument I have with anybody who's pro
Speaker 1: death penalty. I always say, okay, what percentage of innocent people,
Speaker 1: Are you okay with executive exactly ten percent? I mean,
Speaker 1: we know that of the people that have been exonerated
Speaker 1: from death row, there's proof that four percent of people
Speaker 1: that were on death row are innocent. But we don't
Speaker 1: know how many others were executed that were innocent as well,
Speaker 1: because most of those cases just literally die when that
Speaker 1: death takes place. No one goes and investigates those cases.
Speaker 1: I want to say too, there was one period of
Speaker 1: time where Harry Conic Senior was theda in New Orleans
Speaker 1: and he put eight people on death row, and six
Speaker 1: of them were exonerated. I don't know whether the other
Speaker 1: two are innocent or guilty or what became of them,
Speaker 1: but that was a pretty scary time right there. And
Speaker 1: there was that amazing sixty minutes piece where another prosecutor
Speaker 1: from New Orleans actually came forward and with tears and
Speaker 1: said that you know, he feels terrible to this day
Speaker 1: about a guy that he put on death row that
Speaker 1: he knew was innocent, and he witheld the evidence, and
Speaker 1: he talks about his sort of perverse motives and it's
Speaker 1: just not a thing, like the death penalty is not
Speaker 1: a thing, and just a slight divergence. You know, when
Speaker 1: you said earlier that the typical exonnery gets a million
Speaker 1: dollars a year, the typical exunery actually gets nothing, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, some of them get paid, but even then
Speaker 1: it varies wildly from whether they get paid thousands of
Speaker 1: dollars or tens of thousands, or in the rare case
Speaker 1: like Jeffrey Eskobic, they actually did manage to get millions
Speaker 1: of dollars. But those are rare. You have to prove
Speaker 1: civil rights violations. And I'll never forget there was a
Speaker 1: guy who actually was friendly with he's gone now, but
Speaker 1: he was sentenced to death in Louisiana and came within
Speaker 1: days of being executed before somebody found with a microscope
Speaker 1: and some brilliant scientific research was able to prove with
Speaker 1: DNA that he was innocent, and he was exonerated and freed,
Speaker 1: and he was awarded fourteen and a half million dollars,
Speaker 1: and the State of Louisiana appealed all the way to
Speaker 1: the US Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court overturned the
Speaker 1: award five to four. He had proven that they had
Speaker 1: willfully prosecuted him while knowing that he was innocent, and
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court made some bizarre ruling that it wasn't
Speaker 1: the responsibility of the prosecutors to train the younger prosecutors,
Speaker 1: that they had to turn over culpatory evidence, and that
Speaker 1: he had to prove a pattern of misconduct. You know,
Speaker 1: it was just totally nuts. And he wrote an op
Speaker 1: ed in the New York Times where he said, I
Speaker 1: don't understand why the prosecutor who tried to kill me,
Speaker 1: knowing I was innocent, wouldn't be charged with attempted murder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, rest in peace. He was a wonderful guy.
Speaker 1: And what you know, I had breakfast with him actually
Speaker 1: within days of the time the Supreme Court overturned his
Speaker 1: award and he got nothing. I was happy to be alive.
Speaker 1: And I'm glad you said what you said, Joe, because
Speaker 1: I also believed that. I still believe in in people.
Speaker 1: I still believe in in prosecutors and police, and I
Speaker 1: believe in a system of laws. And I think that
Speaker 1: the the large majority of people in our system are
Speaker 1: good people. I think most of the judges are good.
Speaker 1: But the ones that are bad, we should all want
Speaker 1: to get rid of them because they do such terrible
Speaker 1: damage that they do damage to the reputation of the
Speaker 1: profession as a whole as well. And these stories are real,
Speaker 1: These are real people, right, Richard Glossip. It's unimaginable, And
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought that up too, because what the
Speaker 1: fuck kind of sense does it make that before they
Speaker 1: execute you, they go through this torture, like literal torture.
Speaker 1: And you know, there was a guy in Virginia whose
Speaker 1: case I've been involved with, and thankfully we were able
Speaker 1: to prevent his execution because he's innocent, guy Naman Bontelugus.
Speaker 1: And during the process of you know, working through his case,
Speaker 1: I learned that they have a practice in the Commonwealth
Speaker 1: of Virginia where I think it's fifteen days or three
Speaker 1: weeks before your execution, they move you to another cell
Speaker 1: where you to have none of your books. You have
Speaker 1: basically nothing. The lights are on, like you said, the
Speaker 1: whole time, and they come and check on you every
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes, So they wake you up every fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: and go, hey, just want to make sure Joe everything
Speaker 1: okay in there, Like I just want to you know,
Speaker 1: like what what I mean, Well, who came up with that?
Speaker 7: Well, I think they're trying to wear you down. So
Speaker 7: why so you just accept your death so that you
Speaker 7: don't make a scene for the witnesses who are experiencing it.
Speaker 1: Is that what it is?
Speaker 7: I don't know, I mean, and no one's told me that,
Speaker 7: but I just feel like they're just trying to wear
Speaker 7: you down so you don't fight back. And Glossop told
Speaker 7: me himself, like he was so tired that, you know,
Speaker 7: he was accepting of his fate even though he knew
Speaker 7: it was wrong, you know, and if it wasn't for
Speaker 7: the wrong drug, he'd be gone.
Speaker 1: It's so incredibly troubling because like, why just why you
Speaker 1: got the guy you wanted, you got the actual killer.
Speaker 1: You guys did your job right, It's done. What do
Speaker 1: you need the extra body for what? And there's so
Speaker 1: many richer Glossops out there, I mean.
Speaker 7: The other weird and hard dynamic is that the family
Speaker 7: of the victim in that case believes the Golossip is guilty.
Speaker 7: And for years, the families of the West Memphis Three, sorry,
Speaker 7: the families of the victims, the parents of Michael Moore,
Speaker 7: Christopher Buyers, and Stevie branch It thought we were horrible people,
Speaker 7: just Hollywood elites, and so funny when I don't call
Speaker 7: the Hollywood elite. I live an hour north of Manhattan,
Speaker 7: and you know that as far away from Hollywood as possible,
Speaker 7: But you know that somehow Hollywood elites conspire to get
Speaker 7: these devil worshipers out of prison. For years, they hated us,
Speaker 7: call us names, and that's painful because you don't want
Speaker 7: to as makers of these things. You want to shine
Speaker 7: a light on the truth, but you don't want to
Speaker 7: cause the famili's pain. And that's the disservice that these
Speaker 7: police officials and prosecutors who maintain this facade of righteousness,
Speaker 7: that's the damage they inflict on the family members because
Speaker 7: a there's no justice because the real killers are running free.
Speaker 7: And secondly, the healing process. You know, we're both parents
Speaker 7: and I can't imagine, you know, anything worse than losing
Speaker 7: a child, and there's no closure for losing a child,
Speaker 7: but there certainly can be finality to the experience, and
Speaker 7: your healing process is predicated on knowing justice has been served.
Speaker 7: And so we came along and upset the apple cart
Speaker 7: by coming out with a film that's saying, hey, everything,
Speaker 7: the police and prosecution and all your ten thousand meetings
Speaker 7: with these people is wrong, and you're putting these families
Speaker 7: through a double tragedy. And for years they hated our guts,
Speaker 7: and two of the three families came to accept our
Speaker 7: point of view by the end of the Second Paradise Loss,
Speaker 7: but even by the time of the Third Paradise Loss,
Speaker 7: which came out in twenty eleven and coincided with their release.
Speaker 7: One of the families. You know, the movie was nominated
Speaker 7: for an Academy Award and some other prizes. And I
Speaker 7: mentioned that only because these families took the time to
Speaker 7: write to the Academy and to the Director's Guild and
Speaker 7: every place that had nominated us for a prize, to
Speaker 7: say that these films are works of fiction, that we
Speaker 7: manipulated them, we lied to them, that the West Memphis
Speaker 7: Three are guilty. And I look, I have, even though
Speaker 7: they hate us, I have endless reservoirs of sympathy for them,
Speaker 7: because again, going through this experience is every parent's worst nightmare,
Speaker 7: and then to be victimized by the system again because
Speaker 7: the police and the prosecution have lied to them. That's
Speaker 7: the other part that people don't really think about, is
Speaker 7: what happens to the victims when the truth is just
Speaker 7: not the truth.
Speaker 1: Who do you think killed those kids?
Speaker 7: Oh, I don't want to do. I don't want to
Speaker 7: do to somebody else what I think was done to Damien.
Speaker 7: What I do know is that the case needs to
Speaker 7: be reopened. That we all know that no sane prosecutor
Speaker 7: would knowingly let convicted teen Satanist child killers out into
Speaker 7: the real world if they had any kind of belief
Speaker 7: that they were guilty. If they did, because the argus
Speaker 7: been in Arkansas amongst some of these officials is there
Speaker 7: was so much pressure from Johnny Depp and Eddie Vedder
Speaker 7: and Peter Jackson. Well, shame on you. You're gonna let a
Speaker 7: convicted child killer who you believe is capable of castrating
Speaker 7: little boys in a Satanic ritual. You're going to let
Speaker 7: them out after eighteen years because Johnny Depp said to
Speaker 7: So if that's true, shame on you. And if you
Speaker 7: don't believe that and they're actually innocent, as we all know,
Speaker 7: then shame on you for sticking with this Alfred plea
Speaker 7: and not looking into the case. As we all know,
Speaker 7: there's some evidence that points very directly to one of
Speaker 7: the stepfathers. I don't want to say he's guilty or not,
Speaker 7: but a competent authority needs to look into this, and
Speaker 7: they refuse to because they're hiding behind the Alfred plea.
Speaker 7: And that's the crime here. I mean, there are some
Speaker 7: simple abuses that I think could easily be remedied. One
Speaker 7: is prosecutorial accountability. There's way too much misconduct that needs
Speaker 7: to be arrested, and I think finding the balance between
Speaker 7: making it so scary that a prosecutor doesn't even want
Speaker 7: to take the job, which I understand, versus like just
Speaker 7: wilful withholding of evidence for example, it just needs to
Speaker 7: be stopped. The other thing is that people get a
Speaker 7: vested interest in staying on a case forever. Prosecutors stay
Speaker 7: on a case. Judges in some states like Arkansas are
Speaker 7: allowed to stay on the case if something is up
Speaker 7: for review. The original people should be out of the
Speaker 7: picture immediately. I mean, it just doesn't make sense to me.
Speaker 7: One of the cases that the Supreme Court finally is
Speaker 7: going to hear is the Curtis Flowers case, and we
Speaker 7: profiled Curtis Flowers. I mean, he's the guy I think
Speaker 7: is totally innocent, and we profiled that case on a
Speaker 7: show I do call wrong Man, and the guy has
Speaker 7: been tried. He's the most tried inmate in the history
Speaker 7: of American jurisprudence. Jurisprudence.
Speaker 1: He said, yes, that's right.
Speaker 7: I'm better at filmmaking than vocabulary. He's been tried six
Speaker 7: times and each time it's the same prosecutor, and they
Speaker 7: keep affirming his conviction again, circumstantial evidence and so many
Speaker 7: holes in that case. And thankfully the Supreme Court a
Speaker 7: few weeks ago said they're going to hear the case again.
Speaker 7: But even the Supreme Court hearing the case, if it's
Speaker 7: a good result and the state appeal is overturned by
Speaker 7: the Supreme Court, then it gets remanded back to you know,
Speaker 7: to the state to determine if they're going to try
Speaker 7: him a seventh time, which is absurd, and it's the
Speaker 7: same prosecutor.
Speaker 1: It's like crazy, right, the taxpayer dollars that are being
Speaker 1: expended on this if, I mean, it's probably the least
Speaker 1: important aspect of it, but it's still a remarkable amount
Speaker 1: of time and energy and resources being devoted to persecuting
Speaker 1: this one guy, Curtis Flowers, who was convicted of murdering
Speaker 1: four people in a furniture store in Mississippi.
Speaker 7: Mississippi, four white people. He's a black man. And you
Speaker 7: know that's the other huge problem, as I don't need
Speaker 7: to tell anyone that the extreme racial inequity is in
Speaker 7: our system, you know.
Speaker 1: So we don't have a ton of time left. I
Speaker 1: do want to ask you what do you think about
Speaker 1: the role of media in the criminal justice debate? Right now?
Speaker 1: And then I have one more question for you before
Speaker 1: we go to final thoughts.
Speaker 7: Sure, you know, I think one size does not fit all.
Speaker 7: There's a lot of irresponsible reporting. I mean, we saw
Speaker 7: in the Amanda Knox case that reporters were horrible in
Speaker 7: festering the image of Foxy Noxy and making her seem
Speaker 7: guilty and really did her a disservice in her case.
Speaker 7: And same thing with Echoles. I mean, you know, the
Speaker 7: local media down there was just fanning the flames of
Speaker 7: the monster of the daily headline and the daily news report.
Speaker 7: So there's a lot of irresponsible reporting. There's a lot
Speaker 7: of true crime And I hate that phrase again because
Speaker 7: it somehow implies like I'm considered a true crime filmmaker.
Speaker 7: I'd rather not be known as a true crime filmmaker,
Speaker 7: you know, I'm a filmmaker who's involved in the criminal
Speaker 7: justice system. True crime implies that you're wallowing in the
Speaker 7: misery of others, you know, for entertainment purposes, and that's
Speaker 7: the last thing I'm doing. But some of that stuff
Speaker 7: on some of the networks does that. So I think
Speaker 7: the role of smart, talented storytellers who are shining a
Speaker 7: light on criminal justice abuse has never been more important.
Speaker 7: First of all, for the first time because of the
Speaker 7: last couple of years, with the advent of streaming and
Speaker 7: the growing popularity of documentary in general. You know, when
Speaker 7: I started making films twenty five years ago, if you
Speaker 7: didn't sell your documentary to PBS or HBO, you weren't
Speaker 7: selling your documentary. And now there's just you know, unscripted
Speaker 7: series were never heard of. I mean, that was just
Speaker 7: not even a concept. And with that also has come,
Speaker 7: you know, the blurring of the line between entertainment and
Speaker 7: news at networks has become so blurry that certain stories
Speaker 7: aren't covered. You know, the networks are owned by a
Speaker 7: handful of corporations after all, and I like all the
Speaker 7: companies I work with, but there are certain stories that
Speaker 7: they won't cover for fear of offending advertise. I'm not
Speaker 7: just talking in the criminal justice realm, but there's certain
Speaker 7: stories that either they won't rate, you know, in other words,
Speaker 7: the audience won't be big enough, or they'll offend certain advertisers.
Speaker 7: So today in twenty nineteen, also because of the demise
Speaker 7: of print journalism because of the Internet, you know, newspapers
Speaker 7: have been gutted. You know, I think the independent documentarians
Speaker 7: are doing some of the most robust social justice reporting,
Speaker 7: and so that kind of filmmaking couldn't be more important
Speaker 7: and more timely. But it's hard to paint it all
Speaker 7: with the same brush because there's a lot of horrible
Speaker 7: reporting and irresponsible reporting. But generally I think it's a
Speaker 7: good thing.
Speaker 1: For people that are listening now and who are hearing
Speaker 1: the amazing story of how you sort of almost accidentally
Speaker 1: got involved in this or serendipitously got involved in this
Speaker 1: work and then ended up having an outsize impact. I know,
Speaker 1: for me, more than ever, I'm getting increase from people.
Speaker 1: How do I help? What do I do? I want
Speaker 1: to be involved? I want to do something. I listen
Speaker 1: to your show, or I saw some a TV or
Speaker 1: I came to an Innocence Project event, And what would
Speaker 1: you tell people that are listening now that want to
Speaker 1: get involved, What's what's the best way for them to,
Speaker 1: you know, make a difference. Someone who's not you know,
Speaker 1: isn't a rich person, but it's someone who has a
Speaker 1: heart and who hears about Richard Glossip or hears about
Speaker 1: so many of the other people Yvonne Tellegus or Rob
Speaker 1: will who I recently visited on death row in Texas,
Speaker 1: who's as innocent as as could be. What do you
Speaker 1: tell these people?
Speaker 7: I mean, first of all is awareness. You know, I myself,
Speaker 7: before I got involved in this accidentally went because I
Speaker 7: was making a film about something else. I thought I
Speaker 7: had a basic belief that the system works, and it
Speaker 7: works sometimes, but it often fails miserably. So just having
Speaker 7: that basic understanding and awareness is helpful and little actions
Speaker 7: add up to a lot. Again, not saying anything discourteous
Speaker 7: about Johnny Depp or Eddie Vedder or Natalie Mains, those
Speaker 7: guys were amazing. Those names wrote checks and did things
Speaker 7: and did concerts. But what really made the difference, in
Speaker 7: my opinion, really what made a difference in that case
Speaker 7: were tens of thousands of regular people who saw paradise loss,
Speaker 7: who did not have an outsized wallet. But until the
Speaker 7: local politicians and prosecutors are politicians in many municipalities, they
Speaker 7: are elected officials. They didn't start taking the case seriously
Speaker 7: until the local population took the case seriously. And what
Speaker 7: made the local population take the case seriously is tens
Speaker 7: of thousands of people who banded together on this website
Speaker 7: called Free the West Memphis III. Went down religiously to
Speaker 7: every action, every appeal, every hearing. There were thousands of
Speaker 7: regular people from all walks of life who chose to
Speaker 7: take their vacation in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to hold up a
Speaker 7: sign and have their voices heard. At the end of
Speaker 7: the day, a lot of these people who hold positions
Speaker 7: of power, who have this unique power to take your
Speaker 7: liberty away, often unjustly, often justly. Again, I don't think
Speaker 7: every prosecutor is a bad guy, but they are elected
Speaker 7: officials for the most part, and people should wake up
Speaker 7: and if you live in Oklahoma, pay attention to the
Speaker 7: Richard Glossop case.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's.
Speaker 7: Sadly there's a case, and there's a wrongful conviction case.
Speaker 7: Yet probably in every state and just little actions and
Speaker 7: awareness I think go a long way. You don't have
Speaker 7: to write a big check.
Speaker 1: So I guess start by watching learning more. Watch The Wrong.
Speaker 7: Man you can stream on Amazon.
Speaker 1: Watch An Innocent Man, the amazing documentary about the book
Speaker 1: that John Grisham wrote about these cases in Ada, Oklahoma,
Speaker 1: and go to free Robwill dot org. Is there a
Speaker 1: Richard glossupside.
Speaker 7: I'm sure there is if you google Richard glossop and
Speaker 7: why I'm drawing a blank what the website is, But
Speaker 7: just google Richard Glossip and you'll find a lot of supporters.
Speaker 7: There's a guy named Don Knight in Colorado who's running
Speaker 7: that case. He's the tireless, thankless defense attorney who is
Speaker 7: really is doing amazing work. So Don Knight in Colorado
Speaker 7: is a good guy to be in touch with if
Speaker 7: you feel you have something significant to offer, or just
Speaker 7: be aware.
Speaker 1: And one minute speed round. First of all, I want
Speaker 1: to thank you for this has been fun coming Joe Berlinger,
Speaker 1: amazing filmmaker and advocate for the wrongfully convicted, and I'm
Speaker 1: looking forward to doing more work with you. Yeah, me too,
Speaker 1: And like I said, let's sake the last minute or
Speaker 1: two any final thoughts that you have, if you have any.
Speaker 7: You know, we have a criminal justice system sorely in
Speaker 7: need to reform, and I think it's the number one issue.
Speaker 7: The thing we hold most dear as Americans. The thing
Speaker 7: that's set us apart is our personal liberty, and a
Speaker 7: prosecutor has the unique power to take that personal liberty
Speaker 7: away without accountability. And I think it's time to hold
Speaker 7: those people who have the power to take our liberty
Speaker 7: away to be held accountable to a higher standard. And
Speaker 7: I think a lot of these problems would go away.
Speaker 7: But there's all sorts of problems in our criminal jobs
Speaker 7: to system, and people should be aware of it because
Speaker 7: it really needs addressing. I mean, a whole generation has
Speaker 7: been locked away over horrible drug laws. I mean, we
Speaker 7: can go on and on and on. You know, we
Speaker 7: have five percent of the world's population and twenty five
Speaker 7: percent of the world's prison population, more than Russia and
Speaker 7: China combined. That's disturbing and goes against who we think
Speaker 7: we are as Americans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we locked black people up at six times the
Speaker 1: rate of South Africa the height of apartheid. It's all
Speaker 1: a national shame and a disgrace. But absolutely yeah, please
Speaker 1: do get involved, keep listening. We appreciate you being here
Speaker 1: with us. And when you're on a jury, we need
Speaker 1: everybody to show up serve because it's just your fellow
Speaker 1: human being who's up there, and they may be the
Speaker 1: next Damien Echols. So thanks again for listening. This is
Speaker 1: wrongful Connection. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps. And I'm
Speaker 1: a proud donor to the Innocence Project and I really
Speaker 1: hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause
Speaker 1: and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocence
Speaker 1: Project dot org to learn how to donate and get involved.
Speaker 1: I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and
Speaker 1: Kevin Wartis. The music in the show is by three
Speaker 1: time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow
Speaker 1: us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at
Speaker 1: Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm is a
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Speaker 1: Company Number one