Speaker 1: On March twenty fourth, nineteen eighty four, five children and
Speaker 1: their mother, twenty eight year old Elva Lupercio, were killed
Speaker 1: in an apartment building fire. It was originally ruled accidental,
Speaker 1: but a fire captain who was unseen unofficially may have
Speaker 1: had some reservations about that finding. Then, in November nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty seven, a man named Dwayne Glasgow, who lived nearby
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighty four fire, was arrested for burglary and
Speaker 1: offered some information that back in nineteen eighty four, looking
Speaker 1: out an attic window, he had seen his old roommate
Speaker 1: James Kluppelberg walking back and forth to the building before
Speaker 1: the fire and later admitting to setting it. And then,
Speaker 1: in December nineteen eighty seven, while coincidentally reporting an unrelated arson,
Speaker 1: James Kloppelberg was questioned about the nineteen eighty four fire
Speaker 1: and allegedly gave an oral confession in January nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 1: Even though allegations of coercion shed doubt on the statement,
Speaker 1: testimony from Glasgow and the fire captain were enough to
Speaker 1: send James away for six natural life sentences plus fourteen years.
Speaker 1: But this is wrongful conviction Welcome back to wrongful Conviction.
Speaker 1: This is an arson case. I hate arson cases. I
Speaker 1: think it's one of the worst of all the junk sciences.
Speaker 1: It's also a torture case because the man we're going
Speaker 1: to be speaking to is just another victim of the
Speaker 1: torture crew in the Chicago PD under Lieutenant John Burge.
Speaker 1: And before I even introduce James Kloppelberg, I'm going to
Speaker 1: first reintroduce somebody who our listeners will probably recognize, Carl Leonard.
Speaker 1: Carl is an attorney at the Exoneration Project in Illinois.
Speaker 1: So Carl, welcome back to Wrongful Conviction.
Speaker 2: Thank you. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1: So James, I'm sorry. I think, like the city of Chicago, Illinois,
Speaker 1: the country, everybody owes you in a post and more.
Speaker 1: But I'm so glad you're here and I appreciate you
Speaker 1: being here with us today.
Speaker 3: My pleasure and thank you for having me. It's a
Speaker 3: true honor, James.
Speaker 1: Before we get into the awful occurrence that happened in
Speaker 1: Chicago that led to the deaths for which you were
Speaker 1: years later wrongfully convicted, your life wasn't easy from the beginning.
Speaker 1: Is that fair to say?
Speaker 3: Yes, that would be a fair representation. I had a
Speaker 3: low income childhood, so to speak, with three sisters and
Speaker 3: a brother and my mother. We moved around a lot.
Speaker 3: I think at one point, probably about once a year
Speaker 3: for like a decade ish or so. Growing up. I
Speaker 3: remember going to a lot of different schools, almost a
Speaker 3: different one every year, and things were tough, you know,
Speaker 3: as far as finances and everything. But for the most part,
Speaker 3: my mother always made sure there was food on the
Speaker 3: table and we were loved and taken care of.
Speaker 1: By the time James was eighteen years old, he had
Speaker 1: been married, and during a rough patch, he was temporarily
Speaker 1: staying with his friends Don Graymont and Dwayne Glasgow, who
Speaker 1: lived about four doors down from where this far I occurred.
Speaker 1: A few weeks later, the couple had their own troubles,
Speaker 1: along with two kids and another one on the way.
Speaker 3: On February sixteenth of eighty four, she gave birth to
Speaker 3: her third child and Dwayne took her to the hospital
Speaker 3: and I was staying over so I watched the other
Speaker 3: two children. I got a phone call from her that evening.
Speaker 3: He had not returned yet, and she asked if I
Speaker 3: was still looking for a place to stay. I said yeah.
Speaker 3: She said, well you can move into the bedroom up
Speaker 3: in the attic. You want to help me out with
Speaker 3: the bills, fine, whatever. I said, Well, what's he going
Speaker 3: to say about this? She said, I don't care. That's
Speaker 3: the catch. I want you to pack his stuff. I
Speaker 3: want him out. Apparently, while she was giving birth to
Speaker 3: his third child, he was in the waiting room with
Speaker 3: his girlfriend and a gym bag with some beer, kicking back,
Speaker 3: having a good time. The nurses told her what was
Speaker 3: going on, obviously, and so when he came home that evening,
Speaker 3: his stuff was packed and I told him there's the door.
Speaker 3: She basically dumped Dwayne because of things that weren't working
Speaker 3: out between the two of them. Me and down ended
Speaker 3: up starting a relationship.
Speaker 1: Somehow, this didn't cramp your friendship or theirs?
Speaker 3: Right, Well, that was the thing. A couple days before
Speaker 3: the fire, he had came back, knocking at the door,
Speaker 3: asked to talk to her. She came into the kitchen.
Speaker 3: She's like, he's got nowhere to go. Can he stay upstairs?
Speaker 3: I'm like, this is your house because by that time,
Speaker 3: obviously I'd moved downstairs. I said, this is your house
Speaker 3: if that's what you want. Fine, and so he was
Speaker 3: actually staying there in the upstairs where I was originally staying,
Speaker 3: and I was gone all day that day the fire occurred.
Speaker 3: I was at my ex wife's house taking care of
Speaker 3: things over there. Came home that night. They were him,
Speaker 3: his girlfriend and Dawn. They were fairly intoxicated, and several
Speaker 3: hours into the night, you know, me and Don had
Speaker 3: had some arguments, and I entered and left a few
Speaker 3: times to cool off, and came back in and we
Speaker 3: were sitting around the kitchen table talking and next thing
Speaker 3: we know, we see this fire. We got the kids
Speaker 3: out of the house, put them in my car. The
Speaker 3: fire went on for several hours.
Speaker 1: Carl, if you could take us back and explain what
Speaker 1: happened on that awful, awful night. This was back in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four, March twenty fourth. I mean, whether whether
Speaker 1: it was arson or not, we know that James had
Speaker 1: nothing to do with it. But this was a tragedy.
Speaker 2: It was a tragedy. It's an incredibly sad case. It
Speaker 2: happened early in the morning. There was an apartment building
Speaker 2: on the south side of Chicago. The first floor was vacant,
Speaker 2: and a fire started on that first floor and there
Speaker 2: was a family that lived upstairs. Seven people in the family,
Speaker 2: a husband and wife, five kids, and the fire unfortunately
Speaker 2: killed the mom and the children.
Speaker 1: Twenty eight year old Elva Lupercio and her five children Santos, Sonya, Cristo, Bell, Gadira,
Speaker 1: and Annabel, all of whom were living on the second floor,
Speaker 1: died and her husband managed to escape. His name was Santos,
Speaker 1: but he suffered a frash, furt skull, and severe burns.
Speaker 2: So just a terrible, terrible tragedy. At that time in Chicago,
Speaker 2: fires were investigated by the Chicago Police Department. It had
Speaker 2: a bomb and Arson unit which was in charge of
Speaker 2: investigating suspicious fires, and they did an investigation and concluded
Speaker 2: that the fire was most likely an accident.
Speaker 1: Testing for the presence of accelerants came up negative, closing
Speaker 1: the case as a tragic accident not a crime. Until
Speaker 1: November nineteen eighty seven when Dwayne Glasgow was arrested for burglary, theft,
Speaker 1: and violating probation, and he brought up the nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: four fire. According to Glasgow, he had watched through an
Speaker 1: attic window as James went back and forth to the
Speaker 1: building right before the fire, and that James later admitted
Speaker 1: to setting the blaze. Meanwhile, back in nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: now twenty two years old, James was a plumber and
Speaker 1: electrician while moonlighting as a security guard. He and his
Speaker 1: girlfriend Bonnie had plans to get married when in December
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty seven, coincidentally, a month after Glasgow's statement, James
Speaker 1: reported an actual arson. While working at his security job.
Speaker 3: One of the apartment complexes that I was assigned to,
Speaker 3: an automobile caught fire. I saw somebody running from the
Speaker 3: parking lot that night and a couple police detectives came
Speaker 3: to see me. I was at a job site and
Speaker 3: they said they needed me to look at mugshots. I said, sure,
Speaker 3: no problem, but it'll have to wait till I'm done.
Speaker 3: I'm in the middle of one of the worst winners
Speaker 3: Chicago had had and like forever, and I was thawing
Speaker 3: frozen pipes at this building. They informed me I was
Speaker 3: going with them one way or another. They took me
Speaker 3: to a leventh and State informed me that there was
Speaker 3: a witness that claims to have saw me start the
Speaker 3: automobile fires, but that he couldn't get down there for
Speaker 3: several hours because he was at work. If I wanted
Speaker 3: to go home, now, all I had to do was
Speaker 3: take a polygraph test proved that I didn't do it,
Speaker 3: and they'd let me go. I said, sure, no problem,
Speaker 3: let's go. They take me to another floor inside a
Speaker 3: dimly lit room. It soundproofed. A gentleman says he needs
Speaker 3: me to sign a waiver, and I was barely able
Speaker 3: to make out that it said that I was about
Speaker 3: to be questioned for a fire concerning six deaths in
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty four. I told the examiner that this is
Speaker 3: the wrong form, that this is not what I was
Speaker 3: here for. I said, I'm not signing that, and he
Speaker 3: stepped out of the room. The detective that brought me
Speaker 3: down burst into the room, threw me up against the wall,
Speaker 3: put a pair of handcuffs on me, drug me upstairs,
Speaker 3: and him and his partner then proceeded to beat me
Speaker 3: for next several hours.
Speaker 1: So you were one of the countless victims suspects, as
Speaker 1: well as some witnesses who were brutally tortured inside these
Speaker 1: Chicago ped torture chambers disguised as interrogations.
Speaker 3: Yes, they laid me face down on the ground while
Speaker 3: one of them pulled my cuffs my arms towards my shoulders.
Speaker 3: The other one proceeded to kidney shot me or continued
Speaker 3: to beat me in my lower back area until I
Speaker 3: started hemorrhaging blood through my urin. I was a urinated myself.
Speaker 3: There was a lot of blood in the urine at
Speaker 3: the time, and I uttered the words I did it,
Speaker 3: and they stopped the beating.
Speaker 1: I mean, you probably would have confessed a Kennedy assassination, truthfully.
Speaker 3: Yes. At one point they wanted me to sign a
Speaker 3: confession and also removed his weapon from his holster and
Speaker 3: said I was going to sign it or else, And
Speaker 3: I said, at that point he might as well just
Speaker 3: go ahead and pull the trigger, because signing it would
Speaker 3: be the same thing.
Speaker 1: Wrongful. Conviction has always given voice to innocent people in prison.
Speaker 1: Now we're expanding that voice to you. Call us at
Speaker 1: eight three three T seven for six sixty six and
Speaker 1: leave us a message. Tell us how these powerful, often
Speaker 1: tragic stories make you feel outraged, inspired, motivated. We want
Speaker 1: to know. We may even include your story in a
Speaker 1: future episode. Call us A three three two O seven
Speaker 1: for six six six.
Speaker 2: The way it works is after the police have gotten
Speaker 2: the soon to be defendant to the place where he
Speaker 2: or she is saying what they want them to say.
Speaker 2: They'll oftentimes rehearse it, and then they bring in the
Speaker 2: Felony Review States attorney who take a statement from them,
Speaker 2: and at the end they ask the person to sign,
Speaker 2: and then that's often the last time the soon to
Speaker 2: be defendant ever sees the outside of a jail cell.
Speaker 3: The state's attorney wanted to take my statement. I started
Speaker 3: to give him a statement basically saying I did it.
Speaker 3: I told him that I needed to talk to my
Speaker 3: then girlfriend. He allowed me to make a phone call
Speaker 3: to her. She made a three way phone call to
Speaker 3: my then attorney. I told him what was going on.
Speaker 3: He told me to put the state's attorney on the phone.
Speaker 3: They had a brief conversation. State's attorney slammed the phone down,
Speaker 3: went out to the hall, told the officers to process me,
Speaker 3: not to speak to me, not to touch me, and
Speaker 3: to get me out of there. A couple days after
Speaker 3: the beating on my intake, I was so badly beaten
Speaker 3: that the Cook County officers wouldn't turn a blind eye
Speaker 3: to it, and they actually documented all of my injuries.
Speaker 1: The state's attorney. I mean, he had to know that
Speaker 1: you had been tortured. There was no question, right, Carl,
Speaker 1: What do you think he was thinking at that point
Speaker 1: in time.
Speaker 2: I you know, I have no idea, but I think
Speaker 2: that the mechanism they use in Chicago in Cook County,
Speaker 2: I think is very unique, where we bring in an
Speaker 2: assistant state's attorney a prosecutor to take the actual statement,
Speaker 2: and I think the entire felony of view system is
Speaker 2: designed to sort of inoculate against allegations of torture and
Speaker 2: abuse by the time you get into court. Because there
Speaker 2: were so many people claiming a lot of them truthfully
Speaker 2: that their statement had been beaten out of them. You
Speaker 2: put a lawyer in the room who has a law
Speaker 2: license on the line, who can then come to court
Speaker 2: and say, look, I'm just a lawyer. I didn't see
Speaker 2: anything wrong, and I don't know what was going through
Speaker 2: this particular states attorney's mind, but it may have been
Speaker 2: there's no way I can go to court and say
Speaker 2: that nothing bad happened here, so I need to protect myself.
Speaker 1: Nevertheless, Cook County sought the indictment in January nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 3: The officer that presented the case for the state at
Speaker 3: the grand jury outright committed perjury. One of the jurors
Speaker 3: had asked him why I had done this at the
Speaker 3: completion of the state's presentation, and he replied that it
Speaker 3: was my pattern that when I got mad at my girlfriend,
Speaker 3: I went out and set fires. Another juror then asked,
Speaker 3: so he had been caught for this before, and he
Speaker 3: replied yes. The only problem is I had never so
Speaker 3: much as been questioned for an Argiston fire in my
Speaker 3: entire life, let alone caught or convicted.
Speaker 1: So on January twenty seventh, nineteen eighty eight, James, you
Speaker 1: had dieted on charges of arson and six counts of.
Speaker 3: Murder, actually eighteen counts of murder. Eighteen counts they charged
Speaker 3: me three times on each victim, along with seven counts
Speaker 3: of attempted murder. My entire indictment, I believe was around
Speaker 3: thirty one counts.
Speaker 1: But the well documented evidence of torture shed doubt on
Speaker 1: James's statement to officers and the state's attorney.
Speaker 3: When my lawyer put on a motion to suppress my
Speaker 3: statement due to the abuse, and the judge granted it
Speaker 3: because of the abuse was so blatant the state's attorney
Speaker 3: stood up and said, your honor, are you also suppressing
Speaker 3: what he told the state's attorney that night. The state's
Speaker 3: attorney didn't beat him, and I just sat there and
Speaker 3: I was just stunned into amazement that he swore up
Speaker 3: onside and down the other I wasn't beaten, And now
Speaker 3: he was basically conceding I was beaten, but that what
Speaker 3: I told the state's attorneys should be allowed in because
Speaker 3: he didn't beat me.
Speaker 1: Pretty freaking devious.
Speaker 3: Well, you have to keep in mind the judge that
Speaker 3: suppressed my confession got removed from my case after suppressing
Speaker 3: my confession because he went against the system.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Within two weeks of that, Judge Loretta Hall Morgan was
Speaker 3: assigned my case. And it didn't register really at the time,
Speaker 3: but the judge who was going to be sitting at
Speaker 3: this bench trial already knew about my confession because it
Speaker 3: was part of the record that it was suppressed.
Speaker 1: And this doomed bench trial finally began in July nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine.
Speaker 3: The state put on six witnesses, two people that they
Speaker 3: call life or death witnesses that said that we survived
Speaker 3: the fire and the family was alive when we went
Speaker 3: to sleep woke up to smoking fire. They didn't implicate
Speaker 3: me at all. They put on a medical examiner who
Speaker 3: said that in his opinion, the cause of death was
Speaker 3: smoking fire carbon monoxide poisoning, and that the manner of
Speaker 3: debt was homicide. When asked why he originally said there
Speaker 3: were accidents, he said that's because that's what he was
Speaker 3: told by the police, and that four years later the
Speaker 3: police told him that they wanted to charge somebody and
Speaker 3: he had to change his death certificates to homicide. They
Speaker 3: then brought a gentleman in from the Chicago Fire Department
Speaker 3: who was there that night as an observer who was
Speaker 3: training a class for a future fire investigating team that
Speaker 3: was going to take over fire investigations in Chicago, called Ofi.
Speaker 3: He testified that due to burn patterns, he was positive
Speaker 3: that this was an arson fire, but yet he told
Speaker 3: nobody for four years, and the reason that the state
Speaker 3: used him as a witness, in my opinion, is because
Speaker 3: he filed no reports, so there was nothing to impeach
Speaker 3: him with. Whereas the original officers who investigated the fire
Speaker 3: that said it was an accident, they would have had
Speaker 3: to have went back on their original report, and then
Speaker 3: they put on don Graymont, who was my girlfriend at
Speaker 3: the time, who told the truth that I had nothing
Speaker 3: to do with it. They then proceeded to impeach her
Speaker 3: with a grand jury statement that she made that after
Speaker 3: making it, she went to the Office of Maternal Affairs
Speaker 3: and said I was just forced to commit perjury in
Speaker 3: front of the grand jury. And then they brought Dwayne
Speaker 3: glasgow in, who gave the testimony that he gave in
Speaker 3: exchange for going home. The next day, my attorney presented
Speaker 3: no defense whatsoever. At the end of the state's case,
Speaker 3: he stood up. He asked for a directed verdict of
Speaker 3: not guilty. The judge said motion denied. He said, oh, well,
Speaker 3: the defense rests, and he sat down, and the judge
Speaker 3: said she was going to take a ten minute break
Speaker 3: to have closing arguments. She took a ten minute break,
Speaker 3: came out and found me guilty. My lawyer just sat there.
Speaker 1: No closing arguments.
Speaker 3: There were no closing arguments.
Speaker 1: Carl, help is he talking about no closing argument?
Speaker 2: It doesn't make any sense. So many things about James
Speaker 2: trial don't make any sense.
Speaker 3: Right. Well, what happened was, like I said, she took
Speaker 3: the break. We came back and I was expecting closing arguments,
Speaker 3: and she sat down and started reading her findings. And
Speaker 3: I'm looking at my attorney, like what's going on here?
Speaker 3: And he's like, don't worry about It'll be okay. And
Speaker 3: she said, as to counts like twenty five through thirty
Speaker 3: one or whatever it was, or twenty four through thirty one,
Speaker 3: those are the attempt counts, there's going to be a
Speaker 3: finding of not guilty because there's no evidence to indicate
Speaker 3: that the defendant intended to harm those individuals. As to
Speaker 3: the remainding counts in the indictment, there's a finding of guilty.
Speaker 3: I was, for want of a better word, I was
Speaker 3: just in shock. I mean, I couldn't believe that she
Speaker 3: had found me guilty. I was just dumbfounded at the
Speaker 3: fact that if a person was guilty of this crime,
Speaker 3: how could they have been not guilty of attempting to
Speaker 3: kill the people that jumped out the windows and lived,
Speaker 3: but guilty of killing the people that perished. It wasn't
Speaker 3: like this was a crime with a gun or a knife.
Speaker 3: Fire is indiscriminate. If I had set the fire, I
Speaker 3: would have intended harm on everybody. Apartment building, not just
Speaker 3: certain people. Her verdict held no sense to me whatsoever.
Speaker 3: And then she so nonchalantly after finding me guilty, she
Speaker 3: literally said the words, gentlemen, what's your pleasure? And it
Speaker 3: was at that point that the state's attorney stood up
Speaker 3: and said, your honor, at this time, we'll be asking
Speaker 3: for the death.
Speaker 1: Penalty, gentleman, what's your pleasure? That's what she said, what's
Speaker 1: your pleasure? As if this is some sort of sick game.
Speaker 1: I don't even have the right words for this. So
Speaker 1: they asked for the death penalty.
Speaker 3: The next step, you have to have a hearing. When
Speaker 3: it took me a couple of days to process what
Speaker 3: had happened, and somebody else who was incarcerated awaiting trial
Speaker 3: at the time, told me that I needed to get
Speaker 3: down to the jail's library, the law library, and speak
Speaker 3: to somebody down there because what was happening wasn't right.
Speaker 3: And that's when I found out a lot of things,
Speaker 3: you know. I found out that I was actually able
Speaker 3: to demand a jury for the death penalty phase because
Speaker 3: I didn't want her to make that decision.
Speaker 1: In case the story isn't crazy enough, there's a crazy
Speaker 1: footnote to this whole thing, which is that on October seventh,
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine, while you were waiting sentencing, you had
Speaker 1: walked out of the Cook County jail after bond records
Speaker 1: were altered to lower your bond from no bond to
Speaker 1: twenty five thousand dollars, and your mom posted twenty five
Speaker 1: hundred in cash, and then the jail officials discovered that
Speaker 1: a jail employee had been bribed with three thousand dollars
Speaker 1: to alter the record, and then you were arrested days
Speaker 1: later and brought back. What in the world again, I've
Speaker 1: never heard anything like this before.
Speaker 3: What you're speaking of hold some truth to it. I
Speaker 3: don't recall as to what my ex wife actually did
Speaker 3: for the jail official that altered the record, but nobody
Speaker 3: was listening to me. I was going to be put
Speaker 3: to death for something I did not do, and so yes,
Speaker 3: I bonded out. I was hoping that while out, I
Speaker 3: could probably get enough notoriety to the case to where
Speaker 3: people might look into it and see the errors that
Speaker 3: were committed. Technically, I was arrested, but I actually called
Speaker 3: them and told them where I was. They were making
Speaker 3: threats against my family that if I did not come back.
Speaker 3: They were going to take it out on them. So
Speaker 3: I called the state's attorney and told him where I was.
Speaker 3: It was not my proudest moment in all of this,
Speaker 3: but again, when somebody's talking about taking your life, and
Speaker 3: after what I had already been through with the beatings
Speaker 3: and everything and what I had seen happened to this point,
Speaker 3: I didn't know what else to do.
Speaker 1: James was back in Cook County Jail in November nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine, where he began all kinds of proceedings trying
Speaker 1: to save his own life, including demanding a new attorney
Speaker 1: and a new judge.
Speaker 3: When it came time for my sentencing, I had requested
Speaker 3: to remove my attorney because I did not feel that
Speaker 3: I was being represented in a manner to save my life.
Speaker 3: The judge denied the request, so I went to the
Speaker 3: Attorney Disciplinary Commission and said that I'd given my attorney
Speaker 3: a large amount of money to hire investigators and things
Speaker 3: like that, and he did nothing. He never came to
Speaker 3: see me, he never spoke to me, at which point
Speaker 3: my attorney notified the judge that he was under investigation
Speaker 3: by the commission and that she had to let him out.
Speaker 3: Of the case. She wasn't happy about it. At that point,
Speaker 3: I also moved to remove her as a judge because
Speaker 3: she was not giving me what I felt was a
Speaker 3: fair shake, so to speak. One of the things that
Speaker 3: I had alleged as to why my judge needed to
Speaker 3: be removed was because she had made a statement after
Speaker 3: the first day of trial. She had said something like,
Speaker 3: I start my vacation the day after tomorrow. This case
Speaker 3: is going to be done tomorrow regardless, or something like that.
Speaker 3: And I was just trying to build some type of
Speaker 3: a record for appeal of what was actually happening to me.
Speaker 3: And she finally, after that motion was denied, she finally
Speaker 3: appointed public defender. And that's when they found the evidence
Speaker 3: that Duayne committed perjury by saying he said he saw
Speaker 3: the back door of the building, that he saw me
Speaker 3: enter and leave the building. They obtained evidence that photographically
Speaker 3: shows it was impossible that he could not have seen
Speaker 3: the building. They tracked down people who used to live
Speaker 3: in the buildings from years ago that before that had said, now,
Speaker 3: there's no way you could see from point A to
Speaker 3: point B. And even faced with all of this, the
Speaker 3: judge refused to correct her mistake and emotion for a
Speaker 3: new trial.
Speaker 1: And here it was March twenty second, nineteen ninety when
Speaker 1: somehow James had escaped to death penalty.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the reason she rejected the whole premise of the
Speaker 3: death penalty was she wanted me out of her courtroom.
Speaker 3: Here we were almost eight months from my conviction and
Speaker 3: she still had been unable to sentence me because of
Speaker 3: court filings and things that I was trying to do
Speaker 3: to save my life. And she literally asked me what
Speaker 3: was it going to take to get me out of
Speaker 3: her courtroom? And I said I did not want to
Speaker 3: fight this from death row. She said, well, the only
Speaker 3: other sentence I can give you is natural life. The
Speaker 3: sad reality of it is, had I known then the
Speaker 3: things that I know now, I probably would have accepted
Speaker 3: the death penalty due to the fact that I think
Speaker 3: I would have been out sooner.
Speaker 1: Well, you would have been entitled to an attorney for
Speaker 1: post conviction, which you're only entitled too if you are
Speaker 1: sentenced to death. The judge rejected the death penals and
Speaker 1: sentence you to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Speaker 3: Six natural life sentences and three fourteen year sentences. I
Speaker 3: went to Joliette. I was there maybe four weeks at most,
Speaker 3: and then I was sent to Minard, where I spent
Speaker 3: the next ten years of my life. They called it
Speaker 3: pit for a reason because it was literally built into
Speaker 3: the side of of what was an old rock quarry.
Speaker 3: Finally winning a transfer out of that hell hole, I
Speaker 3: then did another four years, almost in jollyev before they
Speaker 3: closed it down. I was then transferred to State Bill.
Speaker 3: I did almost ten years there and was transferred back
Speaker 3: to Minard for my last eleven months, where I met
Speaker 3: Carl for the first time.
Speaker 1: Over the course of two long decades, James's direct appeals
Speaker 1: and his first post conviction petition were denied, and then
Speaker 1: when he was about to file a federal habeas the
Speaker 1: Exoneration Project got involved, filing a second post conviction petition
Speaker 1: in two thousand and nine, including expert testimony from a
Speaker 1: doctor Ogel disputing the fire captain's trial testimony that was
Speaker 1: based on an ancient and now debunked Arson investigation method.
Speaker 1: For clarity, listen to our coverage of Arson investigation on
Speaker 1: wrongful Conviction junk Science. We're going to have it linked
Speaker 1: in the episode description. The Exoneration Project was also able
Speaker 1: to bolster their expert with previously hidden exculpatory evidence.
Speaker 2: We haven't talked about that there is an alternate suspect
Speaker 2: that there's somebody else who was setting fires in that
Speaker 2: neighborhood at that time. Doing some research into media coverage
Speaker 2: of fires in the neighborhood at the time, law students
Speaker 2: Ashley Schumacher and Cadence Mertz uncovered a small neighborhood newspaper
Speaker 2: that had run an article with the headline something like,
Speaker 2: Who's starting these fires?
Speaker 1: Are amazing?
Speaker 2: The night before, if I remember correctly, that the fire
Speaker 2: at issue here, there was another fire that had happened,
Speaker 2: which the police. The same police investigated and determined that
Speaker 2: the fire was set by a woman who lived in
Speaker 2: that building, Isabel Ramos, because she was mad at her
Speaker 2: landlord about something, so she decided to burn the place down.
Speaker 2: And in the course of questioning her about that fire,
Speaker 2: they said, hey, what about that fire down the street?
Speaker 2: Did you start that one? And she said something. I
Speaker 2: don't know what her exact words were, but basically, I
Speaker 2: was really I set a lot of fires? How can
Speaker 2: I remember?
Speaker 3: They pulled the court file and her original confession from
Speaker 3: her trial was still sitting there in the court.
Speaker 2: File and none of this is disclosed to the defense
Speaker 2: before James trial, and we filed this petition. There was
Speaker 2: also a habeas petition which was in front of Judge
Speaker 2: Saint Eve here in Chicago, and she was not able
Speaker 2: to advance it because we had the pending state court matter.
Speaker 2: But there was an opinion entered by her agreeing to
Speaker 2: stay the habeas petition because she felt that there was
Speaker 2: potential merit to it. So in the state court we
Speaker 2: proceeded towards an evidentiary hearing to present the new evidence.
Speaker 3: In one of the little side note. After my evidentiary
Speaker 3: hearing was granted on April fifteenth of twenty ten, the
Speaker 3: state said they needed time to obtain an expert of
Speaker 3: their own to review the fire science evidence that Carl
Speaker 3: and Gale and everybody had put together with doctor Ogle.
Speaker 3: It wasn't until a few years after I was released
Speaker 3: that a document accidentally got turned over to my legal
Speaker 3: team that said that the state's attorney had, for a
Speaker 3: full year in their possession a report that basically said
Speaker 3: what doctor Ogle had said in his report for me,
Speaker 3: and they were steadily going to court telling the judge
Speaker 3: they needed more time because they couldn't find an expert
Speaker 3: to look at the evidence. So for an entire year
Speaker 3: they held me knowing that what was said by doctor
Speaker 3: Ogle was true, that this wasn't an arson fire.
Speaker 2: And right before we were supposed to have this hearing,
Speaker 2: the state determined that they would no longer oppose postconviction relief.
Speaker 3: They chose to act two weeks after don Graymont died,
Speaker 3: she was in hospice. They went to her room. My
Speaker 3: ex wife was there that day that they showed up
Speaker 3: and tried to get her to give a deathbed statement
Speaker 3: that I was actually guilty of this. Within two weeks
Speaker 3: of her passing is when my court date was that.
Speaker 3: Carl and Tara went into court that day and the
Speaker 3: state just said, nah, you can let him go now.
Speaker 3: But that's how unwilling they are to admit when they
Speaker 3: make a mistake.
Speaker 1: They went to her in the hospice. Yes, I don't
Speaker 1: let to say anymore, but I do know that finally,
Speaker 1: Circuit Court Judge Ricky Jones vacated all your convictions and
Speaker 1: the charges were dismissed. And on May thirty first of
Speaker 1: twenty twelve, after a quarter century in prison, you left prison.
Speaker 3: I met Carl for the first time on the day
Speaker 3: he came to pick me up, and it was one
Speaker 3: of the most surreal parts of my entire life because
Speaker 3: we walked out and Carl had told me how it
Speaker 3: was raining the whole way down there, and we walked
Speaker 3: out of prison and it stopped. It was the weirdest thing.
Speaker 2: I will never forget that day. James was the first
Speaker 2: person I was with when he walked out of prison
Speaker 2: after being exonerated, and it was really exciting to be
Speaker 2: part of that with James.
Speaker 3: Because of him handsome, extremely dedicated people. I have a
Speaker 3: new lease on life.
Speaker 1: And as I understand it, not that this dampened your
Speaker 1: mood as the rain was lifting, but you walked out
Speaker 1: with fourteen dollars and seventeen cents right, Well, it's.
Speaker 3: All I had on my prison account at the time,
Speaker 3: and because I was no longer a convicted felon, I
Speaker 3: was not entitled to all the benefits that he convicted
Speaker 3: felon would be given upon their release. Had Carl not
Speaker 3: come pick me up, I had no way to get
Speaker 3: back to Chicago because I wasn't even going to be
Speaker 3: afforded in a bus ticket, the opportunity for housing assistance.
Speaker 3: I mean, it was the exoneration project that put me
Speaker 3: up in a hotel. All the things that he convicted
Speaker 3: felon receives. I was afforded none of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they literally kicked you out the door. But the
Speaker 1: good news is that in May twenty and thirteen you
Speaker 1: filed the federal wrongful conviction lawsuit against the City of
Speaker 1: Chicago and the Chicago PD, And even in the case
Speaker 1: as egregious as yours, it took what almost five years
Speaker 1: to get compensated, right, Yeah, it.
Speaker 3: Was almost six years. But what was filed first was
Speaker 3: a stifficate of innocence request, because in Illinois you have
Speaker 3: to have one of those before you can move forward
Speaker 3: really doing anything, which meant not only did I have
Speaker 3: to prove that I wasn't guilty, but Carl and his
Speaker 3: team had to prove that I was actually innocent. So
Speaker 3: they obtained that for me. On August fifth of twenty
Speaker 3: and thirteen.
Speaker 2: After I contested hearing, the very same state that agreed
Speaker 2: that James was innocent enough to come home fought us
Speaker 2: on the certificate of innocence.
Speaker 1: Finally, you know, some daylight in this now almost thirty
Speaker 1: years by the time you were compensated. This long, long,
Speaker 1: dark chapter. So that is a happy ending. How's your
Speaker 1: life now? Understand when you came home, you were living
Speaker 1: nearby your son and daughter in law.
Speaker 3: It took me almost a year to find my first job.
Speaker 3: One of the worst moments of employment seeking came the
Speaker 3: now defunct Kmart Corporation. They were going to hire me
Speaker 3: to do maintenance in one of their warehouses in Illinois.
Speaker 3: When I got in there to fill out my paperwork,
Speaker 3: in the middle of it, the human resources woman asked
Speaker 3: me what happened to all this gap in my work history?
Speaker 3: I said, did you read my resume? Because my resume
Speaker 3: stated from the onset after being wrongfully convicted for twenty
Speaker 3: five years, I'm now re entering the workforce. She started
Speaker 3: reading it. She made some gasps and some oh mis.
Speaker 3: She got up, she left. She came back and she said,
Speaker 3: I'm really sorry to have wasted your time, but we
Speaker 3: don't hire convicted murderers. I said, but I was exonerated.
Speaker 3: I'm innocent, Yeah, but you were convicted. I'm like, but
Speaker 3: I didn't do it. She's like, but you were still convicted,
Speaker 3: so we can't hire you, and I just I mean,
Speaker 3: I was just stunned at that point. I was like, well,
Speaker 3: you know, I didn't know if this was ever going
Speaker 3: to end. To this day, I have no Social Security
Speaker 3: because I will there's no way for me to be
Speaker 3: out long enough to work long enough because of my
Speaker 3: age to qualify for Social Security. So when I can
Speaker 3: no longer work, I'm pretty well screwed because even though
Speaker 3: I did receive compensation, the money that I did walk
Speaker 3: away with, which was about two million dollars at the
Speaker 3: end of it, you know, is long gone. I do
Speaker 3: have my house thankfully that that's paid for in my vehicles,
Speaker 3: but when I get too old to work, I'm really
Speaker 3: not sure what's going to happen. If I'm being totally honest,
Speaker 3: if somebody wants to hear me speak, somebody wants to
Speaker 3: hear about my story, I'll go wherever, whenever to try
Speaker 3: to enlighten people and open their eyes to what has
Speaker 3: happened in the system. I am part of the program
Speaker 3: for the Police Training Institute that has been initiated in Illinois,
Speaker 3: where there is now a mandatory four hour class in
Speaker 3: Illinois for every police Academy class that goes through where
Speaker 3: an attorney and a couple xeneries and the project director
Speaker 3: go to each class and spend about four hours with
Speaker 3: the cadets. The class is on wrongful conviction, avoidance and Awareness,
Speaker 3: where we get to speak to these future police officers
Speaker 3: and hopefully open their minds to what can go wrong.
Speaker 1: Well, we'll have some way to contact you linked in
Speaker 1: the episode description for speaking engagements. And additionally, maybe what
Speaker 1: you were talking about earlier should be the call to
Speaker 1: action this week. We need to be building ramps, not walls,
Speaker 1: for folks like James to re enter society. We need
Speaker 1: legislation to provide xouneries with the same things that are
Speaker 1: available to paroleees. I mean, it's a no brainer, and
Speaker 1: I'm glad that we're bringing awareness to that once again.
Speaker 1: And with that we're going to move on to closing arguments.
Speaker 1: First of all, I want to thank you both for
Speaker 1: being here today and sharing this insane story. And with that,
Speaker 1: I'm going to turn my microphone off, kick back in
Speaker 1: my chair, and leave your microphones on for anything else
Speaker 1: you guys want to say, Let's start with you, Carl,
Speaker 1: because we always save our honored guest for last. You're
Speaker 1: an honored guests, Well, don't get me wrong, but our
Speaker 1: featured guest of course is James. So Carl over to
Speaker 1: you and then just hand the mic off to James
Speaker 1: and he'll take us off into the sunset.
Speaker 2: Well, first, just thank you for this show and all
Speaker 2: the work that you do to give people like James
Speaker 2: a voice, a voice that was taken from them for
Speaker 2: a very long time, and I think it's important that
Speaker 2: we get to hear their voices now. I think James
Speaker 2: has obviously not had an easy life before or after
Speaker 2: getting out of prison, but he's done an amazing amount
Speaker 2: of work to help himself and help those around him.
Speaker 2: He's advocated on behalf of initiatives to change laws in
Speaker 2: Illinois to avoid wrongful convictions in the first place, and
Speaker 2: not just in Illinois, He's worked on this in many states.
Speaker 2: So I'm glad that this episode will air so people
Speaker 2: can hear about James' story and not just the part
Speaker 2: of the story that's tragic about the fire and what
Speaker 2: happened to that family and what happened to James, but
Speaker 2: about who he is now. So I'm honored to have
Speaker 2: gotten to work with James. I'm honored that he's still
Speaker 2: someone that is in my life, who I see from
Speaker 2: time to time, who I text. He's a great guy,
Speaker 2: and I'm just I'm glad that he has this opportunity
Speaker 2: to tell his story.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Carl for that. I mean, you constantly downplay
Speaker 3: how important you are and the things that you do.
Speaker 3: That's enough but true to begin with. And you know,
Speaker 3: a lot of people talk about good people in this world.
Speaker 3: And when you start thinking of people like Carl Leonard
Speaker 3: and Tara Thompson and Gail Horn and John Lovy, the
Speaker 3: reasons that they do what they do, I like to
Speaker 3: call the right reasons because they save people. They save
Speaker 3: people in ways that we as average citizens don't think of.
Speaker 3: When we think of people saving people, we think of
Speaker 3: firemen and police officers and things like that. And who
Speaker 3: step in in the instant. You do it for the
Speaker 3: right reasons, and you do it selflessly, I mean with
Speaker 3: your family and the sacrifices that they make, because at
Speaker 3: the time that you're not spending with them, they're just
Speaker 3: as important and just as special. I have no idea
Speaker 3: how many hours of his life he gave to give
Speaker 3: me my life back, but it's a debt that no
Speaker 3: matter how many times he tells me, I don't owe
Speaker 3: him anything. I'll never be able to repay because I
Speaker 3: wouldn't be here talking to you guys if it was
Speaker 3: not for people like him and Tara and Gail, and
Speaker 3: I don't think that anybody realizes just how special these
Speaker 3: people are.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen
Speaker 1: to this and all the Lava for podcast one week
Speaker 1: early by subscribing to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 1: I want to thank our production team, Connor Hall and
Speaker 1: Kathleen Fink, as well as my fellow executive producers Jeff Kempler,
Speaker 1: Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Cliburn. The music in this production
Speaker 1: was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph.
Speaker 1: Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms
Speaker 1: at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can
Speaker 1: also follow me on Instagram at It's Jason Flamm. Wrongful
Speaker 1: Conviction is the production of Lava for Good Podcasts and
Speaker 1: association with Signal Company Number one