Speaker 1: Of all the hundreds of Axonorees that I've had the
Speaker 1: privilege to meet, none have touched my heart anymore profoundly
Speaker 1: than Marty tank Cliff. And his case is profiled, by
Speaker 1: the way, in one of the most incredible books I've
Speaker 1: ever read. It's called A Criminal Injustice, A True Crime,
Speaker 1: a False Confession, and the Fight to Free Marty Tankliff.
Speaker 1: It's by Richard Firstman and J. Saw Peter. It reads
Speaker 1: like a John Grisham novel, but it's all true. Marty
Speaker 1: is an incredible human. Since his episode originally aired on
Speaker 1: November seven, sixteen, a number of amazing developments of habit
Speaker 1: in Marty's life. He received in two thousand eighteen and
Speaker 1: ten million dollars settlement, which, by the way, you can
Speaker 1: put another zero on it, still wouldn't make up for
Speaker 1: what he went through. Marty passed the Bar exam, and
Speaker 1: he's pursuing a career as an attorney, advocating criminal justice
Speaker 1: reform and fighting to right wrongful convictions. And if that
Speaker 1: wasn't enough for you, Marty is now a professor at
Speaker 1: Georgetown University, leading a class with Professor Mark Howard that
Speaker 1: is helping to resolve wrong for conviction cases. They already
Speaker 1: had their first win in the case of Valentino Dixon,
Speaker 1: who's been on my show, Marty tank Cliff a profile encourage,
Speaker 1: an unbelievable story that you have to hear, So please
Speaker 1: listen to my interview with Marty tank Cliffe. I came
Speaker 1: from a beautiful neighborhood, had a beautiful life. I went
Speaker 1: to sleep because September seven was the first day of
Speaker 1: my high school year. I was gonna be a senior
Speaker 1: at twenty two, I was set to start college. I
Speaker 1: woke up and my life was never the same again.
Speaker 1: Cops came out with guns drawn, and I never saw
Speaker 1: freedom ever ever since after that. It's like Roach Motta.
Speaker 1: Once you get in, you and I caett now this
Speaker 1: is wrongful conviction. With Jason Flamm. I'm very excited today
Speaker 1: because I have two people who I consider heroes of
Speaker 1: mine for different sets of reasons, on the show. Marty
Speaker 1: tank Cliff is here today. Marty is an exonoree who
Speaker 1: was wrongfully convicted of murdering his parents, um, which I
Speaker 1: get the chills just hearing myself say that. UM. And
Speaker 1: he's going to share his remarkable story of going through
Speaker 1: what could be considered one of the most traumatic experiences
Speaker 1: that any human being could ever endure, and his subsequent
Speaker 1: triumph post exoneration. You will be amazed at at what
Speaker 1: he's been able to accomplish and overcome. We also have
Speaker 1: today Saul Casson, and I'm gonna embarrass all a little
Speaker 1: bit by reading part of his resume, because it's quite extraordinary.
Speaker 1: Saul is a is a true hero of the innocence movement. Uh.
Speaker 1: He's a just English professor of psychology at John J
Speaker 1: College of Criminal Justice in New York and Massachusetts professor
Speaker 1: emeritus at Williams College. He's received his PhD at the
Speaker 1: University of Connecticut. Moreover, I saw pioneered in the eighties
Speaker 1: the scientific study of false confessions by introducing a taxonomy
Speaker 1: that distinguished between three types of false confessions, voluntary, compliant,
Speaker 1: and internalized that is universally accepted today. He has recently
Speaker 1: studied forensic confirmation biases and the impact that confessions have
Speaker 1: on judges, juries, lay witnesses, forensic science examiners, and the
Speaker 1: plea bargaining process. He is widely considered the foremost expert
Speaker 1: on false confessions. So welcome both of you. Thanks for
Speaker 1: coming in and joining us today. Um, Marty, let's start
Speaker 1: with you. So let's go back to you grew up
Speaker 1: in Long Island. I grew up in an efflam area
Speaker 1: of called Beltian, New York, which is a little hamlet
Speaker 1: and portraits in New York north Shore, Suffolk County. Um.
Speaker 1: I was lived in a kind of a wonderful area.
Speaker 1: I went to porttres in high school, where the norm
Speaker 1: was we drove nice cars, we went on boats. Um.
Speaker 1: And what happened to me was not something myself or
Speaker 1: anyone in my neighborhood could have ever imagined. No, no
Speaker 1: one could imagine it. Um. You had a happy childhood,
Speaker 1: a nuclear family, right, you and your sister. Your parents idyllic,
Speaker 1: A little bit more idyllic because I was adopted, so
Speaker 1: my parents were older. So a lot of what we
Speaker 1: did growing up, my father lived vicariously through me because
Speaker 1: he didn't have a very good childhood. So you know,
Speaker 1: we had the boats, the a t v s, We
Speaker 1: traveled a lot, so it was very It was a
Speaker 1: great childhood. And he was the bagel king, right he
Speaker 1: What he did was is my father was an entrepreneur
Speaker 1: who invested with Jerry Stewarman, who was then known as
Speaker 1: the bagel King of Long Island. Right, So everything's fine,
Speaker 1: everything's good until one really terrible, fateful day. And let's
Speaker 1: talk about that, um. And we're gonna get to you
Speaker 1: saw in a minute when we get into the deeper
Speaker 1: issues surrounding what happened to Marty Um. But first I
Speaker 1: want to set the stage. So you're you're at home, right,
Speaker 1: typical day, you wake up in the morning, walk us
Speaker 1: through this. Let me give you a little background. My
Speaker 1: father was partners with Jerry Struman, had invested over a
Speaker 1: half million dollars with Jerry and his bagel stores and horses,
Speaker 1: and in the summer of their relationship significantly deteriorated. What
Speaker 1: I later learned was is that we believe my father
Speaker 1: learned what Jerry's business was really about. Um. Jerry's son, Todd,
Speaker 1: was a drug dealer, and we believe my father kind
Speaker 1: of realized that the bagel businesses may have been a
Speaker 1: money wandering operation for Todd's drug dealing business. And we're
Speaker 1: talking hard drugs, hard drugs. Todd was arrested, went to
Speaker 1: prison for possession of cocaine, marijuana, and other drugs, and
Speaker 1: he of time in New York State prisons. Um. But
Speaker 1: my father was a tough older man. Nothing would stop him.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that he was involved with
Speaker 1: was is there was a weekly poker game, and on
Speaker 1: September six was his night to hold the weekly poker game.
Speaker 1: And one of the members at that game was Jerry Struman.
Speaker 1: And my father was the type of man it didn't matter,
Speaker 1: you know, how much threatening Jerry Struman did. And there
Speaker 1: were threats. We later learned about two weeks before September six,
Speaker 1: Jerry Struman threatened to cut my father's tongue out. Um.
Speaker 1: And it got so bad that my father was even
Speaker 1: looking into buying a shotgun because he was fearful. Right,
Speaker 1: So it seems crazy that he would still allow him
Speaker 1: into his house. But as he said, your dad was
Speaker 1: a tough guy. He didn't really fear anyone. And now
Speaker 1: we've set the stage. There's the poker game, right, there's
Speaker 1: obviously it's a tense environment, right with the two of
Speaker 1: him in the room. Um. And but you went to sleep.
Speaker 1: I went to sleep because September seven, who is the
Speaker 1: first day of my high school year. You were gonna
Speaker 1: be a senior. I was gonna be a senior, right.
Speaker 1: And I woke up and my life was never the
Speaker 1: same again. So you woke up in the morning, and
Speaker 1: the situation was that I woke up that morning, UM,
Speaker 1: noticed that the lights were on in my house. The
Speaker 1: house wasn't locked up. UM. Walked through the house and
Speaker 1: were upstairs. It's a ranch house. It's a very long
Speaker 1: ranch house. Where the bedrooms were in one end of
Speaker 1: the house. UM, where the card game was was in
Speaker 1: the complete opposite end of the house. Right, So you
Speaker 1: wouldn't have heard any would have heard anything. UM. And
Speaker 1: I discovered my father who was still sitting in his
Speaker 1: office chair. UM. And he was alive. UM. And he
Speaker 1: was bleeding, bleeding profusely. Yes, UM, And what you do?
Speaker 1: I called nine one one, UM, and I followed their
Speaker 1: instructions and eventually law enforcement showed up. Right. They told
Speaker 1: you to wrap them as best you could, gave you
Speaker 1: some medical tips whatever, try to stop the bleeding. That
Speaker 1: kind of stuff, right, UM, And within a shure a
Speaker 1: period of time, law enforcement showed up at the house.
Speaker 1: Where's your mom? I ended up My mother was actually
Speaker 1: in her bedroom. Cops come and immediately they removed me
Speaker 1: from the house. Um, And what what I kind of
Speaker 1: can say now is that the process of questioning me,
Speaker 1: trying to find out what happened started almost immediately. Even
Speaker 1: when I had family members show up that morning, there
Speaker 1: was this immediate separation. Um. I was told consistently I
Speaker 1: was being taken to the hospital. Unfortunately I was never
Speaker 1: taken to the hospital. I ended up being taken to
Speaker 1: police headquarters. So they took you to police headquarters because
Speaker 1: and obviously this whole sort of pattern is emerging right
Speaker 1: where they wanted to They had an agenda. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean you know at that day, I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: When I was seventeen years old, my father was the
Speaker 1: police commissioner of our little community. I was raised to
Speaker 1: trust law enforcement, believe in them. Law enforcement wouldn't lie
Speaker 1: to you, they wouldn't deceive you. Unfortunately, that's everything that
Speaker 1: they did that morning. Right, And you're in an extremely
Speaker 1: fragile state, and you need help, right, you need someone
Speaker 1: to help you. You're seventeen years old, right, I mean
Speaker 1: it's uh and and still a child, basically still a child.
Speaker 1: And every time a family member showed up or friends
Speaker 1: showed up, they were ripped away again that morning. So
Speaker 1: when my brother in law showed up. He was ripped away.
Speaker 1: When my godfather, who was also the family attorney, showed up,
Speaker 1: I saw him. He never saw me. But McCready, who
Speaker 1: was the lead detective. His name is Kay James McCready
Speaker 1: was the lead detective on the case, ran to him
Speaker 1: and basically told him I was already on the way
Speaker 1: to the hospital. I wasn't at the house, even though
Speaker 1: I was at the house. Right. So there's a pattern
Speaker 1: of deception and and maneuvers that are disingenuous at best,
Speaker 1: let's say. But the fact is, at this point, were
Speaker 1: you aware that your mom had been killed? Um? So
Speaker 1: you're in a state of total shock panic. How can
Speaker 1: you even describe it? Words can't describe it. I mean, people,
Speaker 1: it's you were close to your parents. I they were
Speaker 1: my parents, I mean, to do everything I was not
Speaker 1: before I was born. They're the parents, the only parents
Speaker 1: I ever knew. Um, they have the most amazing childhood.
Speaker 1: I mean there was nothing I didn't have growing up. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, people used to joke that I was a
Speaker 1: spoiled kid, and I was, but my father instill amazing
Speaker 1: work values in me. I was working since I was
Speaker 1: probably eleven or twelve years old. Um, but I traveled
Speaker 1: with my with my parents. I mean, I did everything
Speaker 1: with them. So let's get to the the derogation and
Speaker 1: the false confession in prison and the whole Saturday you
Speaker 1: used to ended up serving six thousand and three and
Speaker 1: in thirty eight days, which is about seventeen and a
Speaker 1: half years. What I tell people, as I said, imagine,
Speaker 1: you know, seventeen years. What you know, from the time
Speaker 1: you're born to the time you're seventeen, losing the entire period,
Speaker 1: we're losing your tire, twenties, your thirties, from seven to well,
Speaker 1: you know, the first few years you don't even know
Speaker 1: what's going on. But the fact is from seventeen to
Speaker 1: thirty four, that's when you're building your life. That's really
Speaker 1: you know, those are the formative years for anybody to
Speaker 1: establish relationships. Uh, you know, both personal, sexual, business, Uh, college,
Speaker 1: all that stuff out the window. So let's I mean,
Speaker 1: you're obviously very familiar with Mary's case. You've known Marty
Speaker 1: since all right, Oh, you've known of each other, he has.
Speaker 1: He started writing letters to me from prison right at
Speaker 1: ninety three. What were you doing? I was a professor
Speaker 1: Williams College, studying the psychology of false confessions. I had
Speaker 1: just become interested in false confessions, and I was doing
Speaker 1: some research and publishing that research. How did you get
Speaker 1: interested in it? Actually? I got interested because I came
Speaker 1: out of graduate school and social psychology interested in how
Speaker 1: juries make decisions. And after collecting some initial data for
Speaker 1: the first several months of a post s talk I
Speaker 1: was at the University of Kansas, UH, it became clear
Speaker 1: to me that every time I had a case in
Speaker 1: which there was a confess, shouldn't evidence all variability of
Speaker 1: juror's responses dropped out? Everybody voted guilty. Confession evidence was
Speaker 1: perfect in the minds of the average juror. It's is
Speaker 1: it the most powerful evidentiary tool that there is? Yes?
Speaker 1: And Trump's d n A or I mean, we've seen cases, uh,
Speaker 1: and you've obviously seen so many of them in which
Speaker 1: a jury is presented at the same time with a
Speaker 1: false confession and d n A that proves scientifically, without
Speaker 1: any doubt that it could not have been the person
Speaker 1: who gave the confession. And they will choose which one
Speaker 1: they will choose. They will they will vote guilty on
Speaker 1: the basis of that confession, and they will explain away.
Speaker 1: They will find ways to explain away the d n A. Right,
Speaker 1: so you're presented with a thing that shows I mean
Speaker 1: because in a violent crime, if there's physical contact, then
Speaker 1: there's blood, and there's the if it's a rape, if
Speaker 1: there's an assault, if there's a stabbing, there's d n A.
Speaker 1: And if your DNA is not there, you weren't there.
Speaker 1: Nobody's ever been able to figure out how to people
Speaker 1: and not be there. At the same there are cases
Speaker 1: on record we're not only the DNA exclude the confessor
Speaker 1: at the point of trial, but it identified the perpetrator
Speaker 1: and still the confessor was convicted. Right, So people can
Speaker 1: and I know this too from my own experience, it's
Speaker 1: very very difficult for people to wrap them in. Mine
Speaker 1: is anecdotal um, but it's very hard for people to
Speaker 1: wrap around the idea of anybody would confess. We know
Speaker 1: that with juveniles it's much more common because they're more
Speaker 1: impressionble and in many cases they can be actually coaxed
Speaker 1: into or coerced into believing that they actually did it.
Speaker 1: Is that right, which is really another level of go
Speaker 1: go into any audience of late people and ask the question,
Speaker 1: would you ever confess to a serious crime you didn't commit?
Speaker 1: Not a single hand will go up. Short of sometimes
Speaker 1: you get an occasional hand it will go up and
Speaker 1: someone will say, well, if you had a gun to
Speaker 1: my head. But short of that, uh, no normal person
Speaker 1: of sound mind would confess to a crime they didn't commit.
Speaker 1: And people use that personal belief about themselves as the
Speaker 1: frame of reference. And so it's very, very unlikely that
Speaker 1: you can get people easily to believe that an innocent
Speaker 1: person was induced to confess to something they didn't do,
Speaker 1: and not just something the highest stakes crime in the system, murder. Right,
Speaker 1: So let's talk about this as it relates specifically to
Speaker 1: what happened with Marty in the interrogation room. So here's
Speaker 1: Marty in a state of as we talked about, in
Speaker 1: a state of panic and shock and grief and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, just spinning right. And as we discuss, he's
Speaker 1: still a child, um. And the fact is a teenager,
Speaker 1: a young teenager, um. And so what happened? I mean,
Speaker 1: how did you know? Because his confession it's different than
Speaker 1: any of the other ones I've studied, right, because it
Speaker 1: may or may not have ever even actually happened. Right,
Speaker 1: Usually they actually get somebody to say something on video,
Speaker 1: or they'll get a written statement or something. But in
Speaker 1: Marty's case, it's much more. It's it's much more highly nuanced,
Speaker 1: isn't it? Yes? And in Marty's a something that almost
Speaker 1: all of these cases have in common. You've got to
Speaker 1: ask yourself the first question, why did Marty, seventeen year old,
Speaker 1: without a criminal record, without a history of violence, with
Speaker 1: good parents and good relationships in an affluent community, why
Speaker 1: would Marty kill his parents in a brutal way, in
Speaker 1: a brutal in the in the most brutal of ways.
Speaker 1: And you have to ask yourself the question, how in
Speaker 1: God's name did he become their suspect? Well, we haven't
Speaker 1: talked about that, but Marty, your parents were beaten to death?
Speaker 1: Is that right? There was a bludgeon instrument uh and
Speaker 1: a knife um and to this day neither one has
Speaker 1: been discovered. And there was some forensic evidence which I
Speaker 1: can talk about. There was glove prints, so whoever did
Speaker 1: do this, we're wearing gloves um that they still haven't
Speaker 1: found the gloves. So, I mean, there's all these little
Speaker 1: things that actually the jury was aware of, but as
Speaker 1: you said, they chose just to ignore. So yeah, so
Speaker 1: we should believe that you killed your parents in the
Speaker 1: most vicious way at night and then went to sleep
Speaker 1: and then wait until the morning, then called nine one one,
Speaker 1: and you know, most people said, well, you know he
Speaker 1: did it for the money, because they thought my parents
Speaker 1: were affluent. The way the wills were structured, I would
Speaker 1: have gotten everything. Um. And we later learned that law
Speaker 1: enforcement never really understood the way the wills. They never
Speaker 1: looked into the way the wills were structured. But the
Speaker 1: way the wills were structured was that I wasn't going
Speaker 1: to benefit financially until I was twenty five and I
Speaker 1: was seventeen. So you know, as one of my aunts said,
Speaker 1: what was he supposed to do from sevent live on
Speaker 1: the streets. So Marty's in the interrogation room, we know
Speaker 1: that they have misled, is it not probably a nice
Speaker 1: way to put it? His uh, his family guardian at
Speaker 1: this point, right, your godfather, who was also the only
Speaker 1: lawyer that was available to you at this time. They
Speaker 1: kind of mislike everybody though. I mean I had other
Speaker 1: cousins and aunts and uncles who were at the hospitals,
Speaker 1: and they were live to too. They were told, Marty's
Speaker 1: on the way to the hospital. Mary's on the way
Speaker 1: to the hospital. Right. So they're basically doing everything they
Speaker 1: can to prevent you from having any responsible guardian or
Speaker 1: legal representative from being there to be able to help you,
Speaker 1: uh in in the situation, to be able to that
Speaker 1: might be able to stand in the way of them
Speaker 1: getting the conviction that they wanted, regardless of truth. They
Speaker 1: weren't after the truth. There was no truth seeking here.
Speaker 1: I mean, you have a man who was business partners
Speaker 1: with my father, half a million dollars involved, was there
Speaker 1: the night before. My father also had in the weeks prior,
Speaker 1: had demanded he had two notes fifty dollars. Back in
Speaker 1: the days after the murders, Jerry Steerman cleaned out a
Speaker 1: joint bank account. He faked his death, He fled to California.
Speaker 1: He had a hair weave back then, and he went
Speaker 1: to a club that he wasn't a member from um.
Speaker 1: He had five or six different aliases at that moment um.
Speaker 1: But law enforcement never considered a suspect. And every time
Speaker 1: I tell people, you know, the average person would say, well,
Speaker 1: how is he not a suspect. I mean, you could
Speaker 1: have stopped that. He faked his own death right there.
Speaker 1: If this was a TV show, people are changing the channel.
Speaker 1: They're like, okay, this is done. I don't need to
Speaker 1: watch them. I said, this is our guy. We got him.
Speaker 1: So there he is in the interrogation room, alone, alone,
Speaker 1: not street wise, never been in trouble before. I never
Speaker 1: had to worry about how do you behave when you
Speaker 1: get picked up by police? Couldn't he have just said no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no no no. I mean, how could what happened in
Speaker 1: his brain? And what I can tell you very simply
Speaker 1: what happened in his brain? He had done nothing wrong.
Speaker 1: And the funny thing about innocent, innocent people is even
Speaker 1: if even if they had read him as Miranda rights,
Speaker 1: he would have waved those rights. He would have waived
Speaker 1: those rights. And he did nothing wrong. He did nothing wrong,
Speaker 1: So why would he worry about whether he had nothing
Speaker 1: nothing to hide? He had nothing wrong, and so Miranda
Speaker 1: becomes not a safeguard that's particularly effective at this point.
Speaker 1: He is now, and keep in mind, they've got him
Speaker 1: in police headquarters. The whole family is with his father,
Speaker 1: who is dying but still alive, in the hospital. That's
Speaker 1: where Marty wants to be. If you're looking for, what
Speaker 1: is it to incentivize him to cooperate so that he
Speaker 1: can get out of there and get to the hospital.
Speaker 1: That'says incentive. He wants to be at the hospital. So
Speaker 1: he's already in a state where he's motivated to cooperate.
Speaker 1: And they started asking him questions about what he saw,
Speaker 1: how he saw it, what had happened, and he gives
Speaker 1: them answers, and the answers are consistent. They don't believe him.
Speaker 1: They tell him they don't believe him. They asked for
Speaker 1: the story to be told again, and he was asleep.
Speaker 1: He woke up, he went down the hall, he found him.
Speaker 1: He called nine one one, he held the towel, he
Speaker 1: called instructions. Actually, not only did any do anything wrong,
Speaker 1: he did anything right exactly. And they're searching for inconsistencies,
Speaker 1: and they're calling him a liar and they're not believing
Speaker 1: the story that he keeps telling over and over again,
Speaker 1: and then they switch gears at some point. Now keep
Speaker 1: in mind, I'm presenting this as if it's a chronology,
Speaker 1: But I have no idea, nobody has any idea. What
Speaker 1: really happened because they didn't record the process. That's that
Speaker 1: we have. The Innocence Projects have been advocating for it
Speaker 1: for years. Every interrogation should be recorded. There's no reason
Speaker 1: why shouldn't be, and every reason why it should be
Speaker 1: if in fact, what we're looking for is the truth exam.
Speaker 1: And this raises a very important and too often invisible
Speaker 1: point about the Innocence Project and the innocence community and
Speaker 1: the concern about innocence and wrongful convictions. If your concern
Speaker 1: is law and order, this should concern you because from
Speaker 1: a law and order standpoint, every time you get a
Speaker 1: confession from an innocent person and that person is then
Speaker 1: prosecuted and convicted, there is a criminal creating new victims
Speaker 1: out there, and that is on them. And we do
Speaker 1: know from our exonerations uh and the studies that we've
Speaker 1: done that in a very large percentage of the cases
Speaker 1: in which we've exonerated the innocent person and identified the
Speaker 1: actual perpetrator, that perpetrator has gone on to commit other
Speaker 1: heinous crimes that had law enforcement acted properly and done
Speaker 1: their job, that that person would have been in prison
Speaker 1: appropriately and those other victims never would have had to
Speaker 1: suffer and and often it turns out often that suspect
Speaker 1: that that suspect turned criminal was in the crosshairs of
Speaker 1: police at the time. But once you take a confession,
Speaker 1: and this is what some of the research shows, once
Speaker 1: police take a confession, they engage a process of tunnel vision.
Speaker 1: They shut down the case. What the innocent person doesn't realize,
Speaker 1: because one of the odd things about innocent people confessing
Speaker 1: is sometimes they get so stressed out and so worn down.
Speaker 1: They get to a point where they think, Okay, what
Speaker 1: do I gotta do to get out of here? And
Speaker 1: in the back of their mind they're thinking, you know what,
Speaker 1: I didn't do anything wrong. When they get to do
Speaker 1: the investigation, when they get other evidence, they'll see I
Speaker 1: didn't do this. So where do I sign to get
Speaker 1: myself out of a bad situation with the promise impossible?
Speaker 1: And and and they have in their head the promise
Speaker 1: of a future exoneration because after all, they did nothing wrong.
Speaker 1: What the innocent person in that situation thinking that way
Speaker 1: doesn't realize is their confession doesn't open the case, it
Speaker 1: closes the case. In Marty's case, here he is Marty
Speaker 1: didn't actually really confess, did he well, we again, we
Speaker 1: don't fully know what happened. Here's here's the story as
Speaker 1: I understand it from from the evidence that's available. They
Speaker 1: break him down, they bring him in. He wants to
Speaker 1: be at the hospital, and it's clear that the only
Speaker 1: exit for that to happen is for him to cooperate.
Speaker 1: But it still doesn't work, and they're they're challenging every denial.
Speaker 1: But then they shift gears, and they shift gears toward
Speaker 1: a procedure now where they start to lie about the evidence. Now,
Speaker 1: the average American doesn't know this. The average American doesn't
Speaker 1: realize that in the United States, police are allowed to
Speaker 1: bring in a suspect and lie about the evidence. They're
Speaker 1: allowed to say to the suspect, we have your fingerprints
Speaker 1: on the murder weapon, even if that's not true. What
Speaker 1: happened in Marty's case is they bring him in, they say, well,
Speaker 1: you know, it appears that your mother was in a
Speaker 1: struggle and there's hair in her grasp and it turns
Speaker 1: out it's your hair. We did the analysis. That's your hair,
Speaker 1: and that confused Marty wasn't true, but he got confused
Speaker 1: as to how that was possible. And then because it
Speaker 1: was such a bloody scene. It was too bloody scenes.
Speaker 1: It just wasn't enough blood on Marty to account for that. Uh.
Speaker 1: They suggested to him that he had showered before calling.
Speaker 1: He said, no, I didn't use the shower. They came
Speaker 1: back and said, well, we did a humidity test in
Speaker 1: your bathroom and we found that the shower had been
Speaker 1: used that morning. A humidity test. I don't believe, even
Speaker 1: on c side, they've given us a humidity test um
Speaker 1: and he's in something of a twilight zone. And so
Speaker 1: now now they have delivered two lies, and then the
Speaker 1: detective delivers the ultimate lie. He leaves the room. There
Speaker 1: are two detectives and they're the lead detective. MacCready leaves
Speaker 1: the room. Stage is a phone call and comes back
Speaker 1: and comes back to deliver the news to Marty. Marty,
Speaker 1: I've got good news and I got bad news. I
Speaker 1: just spoke to the folks at the hospital. The good
Speaker 1: news is your father has come out of his coma.
Speaker 1: He's regained consciousness. The bad news is he said you
Speaker 1: did it. Now think about this from sick. It's insane.
Speaker 1: You've got a seventeen year old and you're now delivering
Speaker 1: one lie. After another, culminating in a lie that to Marty,
Speaker 1: the person he trusts most in his life has just
Speaker 1: said he committed this crime. And not only did Marty
Speaker 1: of course, had no choice but to believe that that evidence,
Speaker 1: because he doesn't believe police would lie to him. Certainly,
Speaker 1: not like that. Even McCready's partner said he believed it.
Speaker 1: That is, McCready's partner believed that presentation. So what choice
Speaker 1: does Marty have now but to wonder, how is it
Speaker 1: possible that they have this kind of objective evidence. My
Speaker 1: father doesn't lie, he said, and that lie just broke
Speaker 1: Marty down. Marty said, my father doesn't lie, which they
Speaker 1: then took to me. So maybe this is true, Maybe
Speaker 1: I actually did this. Marty has almost no cognitive choice
Speaker 1: but to accept that information because he's got two things right.
Speaker 1: His father doesn't lie and the cops don't lie. Right,
Speaker 1: These are the two things that he believes exactly. So
Speaker 1: those things lead to one conclusion, one conclusion, I must
Speaker 1: have done it. And so where does the conversation turn.
Speaker 1: It turns in the direction of, well, how can you
Speaker 1: explain the fact that I don't think I did it,
Speaker 1: I don't remember having done it. And yet there's all
Speaker 1: this unimpeachable objective evidence of my guilt. How is that possible?
Speaker 1: And the conversation turns to memory consciousness, the possibility of
Speaker 1: sleepwalking and doing it without awareness the next morning, waking
Speaker 1: up and having not realized what had happened. Now, there
Speaker 1: are different categories, different types of false confessions. One of
Speaker 1: those types is it's It's not the most common type
Speaker 1: by any means, but it happens. The first time I
Speaker 1: laid eyes on one, it shocked me. I've now seen
Speaker 1: several of them, and the script is always the same.
Speaker 1: It this is the internalized false confession, where not only
Speaker 1: do the police use stress tactics to break a suspect
Speaker 1: down to to give a compliant confession and to agree
Speaker 1: to sign the statement, but they actually get the suspect
Speaker 1: to believe he committed this crime. They actually confused the
Speaker 1: suspect enough so that they don't even trust their own
Speaker 1: memory anymore. Because you've handed them this objective evidence, they
Speaker 1: somehow need to reconcile that evidence with what they can't remember.
Speaker 1: And what happened in Marty's cases, like you see, happens
Speaker 1: in a number of these cases. They start to talk
Speaker 1: about memory and consciousness and generate theories from Marty to
Speaker 1: explain how come you don't remember doing this. So we
Speaker 1: know that that was the nature of the conversation. We
Speaker 1: know that for some degree of transient time, Marty became
Speaker 1: confused about even his own innocence. And this goes back
Speaker 1: to what we're talking about before, which is that the
Speaker 1: it all is the perfect storm, because had Marty had
Speaker 1: a guardian or a lawyer in the room, they would
Speaker 1: have certainly said to a Marty, they can they're lying,
Speaker 1: they can be lying to you, and we can be
Speaker 1: making this up right. But there's no grown up there.
Speaker 1: There's nobody there to protect you in the situation in
Speaker 1: life in which you most protection. Now, we should stop
Speaker 1: to realize something about this tactic. As pernicious as it sounds,
Speaker 1: people should know that it's lawful that. In nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: the U. S. Supreme Court addressed that in a in
Speaker 1: a case they address the issue of our police allowed
Speaker 1: to deceive a suspect about the evidence, and they concluded that, yes,
Speaker 1: that that tactic does not put an innocent person at risk. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, the courts need to revisit that issue. Lying
Speaker 1: about evidence, and there is now ample research, actual cases,
Speaker 1: laboratory studies, field studies. We now know and one hundred
Speaker 1: plus years of basic psychology tells us when you lie
Speaker 1: to people about evidence, when you lie to people about reality,
Speaker 1: you can change their perceptions, you can change their memories,
Speaker 1: you can change just about every aspect of their cognitive function.
Speaker 1: What happened to Marty is psychologically very understandable. It is
Speaker 1: when you when you take all these things into into it,
Speaker 1: it is his confession was a handwritten statement, handwritten by
Speaker 1: the detective that I can tell you summarize everything I
Speaker 1: know about the case file is inaccurate as a description
Speaker 1: of the crime. It doesn't complete itself. It's actually ends
Speaker 1: in mid sense, and it is unsigned. Now people do
Speaker 1: a double take when they hear, what do you mean?
Speaker 1: It was unsigned? This confession, the so called confession, was
Speaker 1: written by the detective and not signed by Marty. And
Speaker 1: yet that allegation of that confession is the one and
Speaker 1: only piece of evidence that he was that was used
Speaker 1: to convict him. People need to become better consumers of
Speaker 1: confession evidence. They need to understand also that because there's
Speaker 1: a misconception. The misconception is this I'd know a false
Speaker 1: confession if I saw one. No, you wouldn't. We've done
Speaker 1: those studies. We've done that research. We've taken true confessions
Speaker 1: false confessions. People can't tell the difference. Cops can't tell
Speaker 1: the difference. Let's go back for one moment the trial.
Speaker 1: You want to go back to the trial. I want
Speaker 1: to go back to the trial because I remember seeing
Speaker 1: that picture of your face at the moment of conviction,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know the the amount of pain that's
Speaker 1: in that picture is Um, you feel like you're in
Speaker 1: the shoes of that person. You're at trial. You still
Speaker 1: believe that justice is going to be at trial? Still
Speaker 1: believe it. I mean, this is what the lawyers are
Speaker 1: telling me. The system works. Um, I was innocent. I
Speaker 1: testified on my own behalf. And you know, this was
Speaker 1: a long trial. It was probably about ten to twelve
Speaker 1: weeks long. What's interesting about my case is that you know,
Speaker 1: it was my penetra murdered and my entire family supported me.
Speaker 1: And that's what made this case very difficult, because many
Speaker 1: prosecutors said it was the most difficult case they had
Speaker 1: to prosecute because the victims family and the defense family
Speaker 1: were the same family. And I can't tell you how
Speaker 1: often my family would say, don't you see there's something
Speaker 1: wrong here, you know, with the with the victims family
Speaker 1: and with the defendant's family, and we know morning senencent
Speaker 1: and we believe in mourning, you know, but you're just
Speaker 1: you just don't care. And what enforcement didn't care? Back then?
Speaker 1: They just were focused on me and that was it.
Speaker 1: So you're a trial. All the testimony has been heard
Speaker 1: ten of twelve. We trials a long trial. Everyone's fatigued
Speaker 1: by this point, nobody more than you. The deliberations wasn't
Speaker 1: a one day, two day, three days. This was eight days.
Speaker 1: Torture prosecuses has tried me with intentional murder and depraved
Speaker 1: indifference murder. So when we got called back in, the
Speaker 1: first verdict that was read was not guilty, and that
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, the second one was guilty. The
Speaker 1: one thing I vividly remember is the walk after they
Speaker 1: read the guilty verdicts over to the county. Jaikes, I
Speaker 1: have these tunnel systems, and I remember just I felt
Speaker 1: like I was being led like a dog because I
Speaker 1: was just listening. And I remember getting to the property
Speaker 1: room and I remember the property or mosting, what are
Speaker 1: you doing here, Marty? And I go why else would
Speaker 1: I be here? And then everything else went blank for
Speaker 1: about the next six or seven days. But I remember
Speaker 1: that moment and it was just this level of shock
Speaker 1: between the both of us that he's looking at me,
Speaker 1: going you could have been guilty, and I kind of said, well,
Speaker 1: why else would I be standing here in front of
Speaker 1: you at the property room. The most common story about
Speaker 1: innocent people when they hear their guilty verdict red is
Speaker 1: they're shocked. Even if they're the only person in the
Speaker 1: courtroom who's shocked, they're shocked they expected to be acquitted. Marty,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about this for a minute. And
Speaker 1: now you're thrown into this environment. You're in maximum security prison.
Speaker 1: Is that right? Yeah? I was went from Downstack Correctional Facility,
Speaker 1: which is a reception facility, to over In correctional facility,
Speaker 1: which is another maximum security facility. Um. And you know,
Speaker 1: people think when you went from it was in four prisons.
Speaker 1: Primarily everyone was a maximum security facility. Everyone as hell, um,
Speaker 1: and everyone everyone at this all as you Basically every
Speaker 1: day it's a fight for your life because you never
Speaker 1: know a maximum security facilities. What could happen, whether it
Speaker 1: be the gang's going to war with each other, the
Speaker 1: officers taking you know there are aggression out on you,
Speaker 1: or just the random attacks that occur just for no
Speaker 1: reason whatsoever. Right, I mean, we know that people are
Speaker 1: being killed every day in prisons in America. UM, sometimes
Speaker 1: by guards. Even absolutely for me as stranger that sounds
Speaker 1: is when I went through downstair, which was a reception facility.
Speaker 1: My case was very high profile, so prisoners knew about
Speaker 1: the case. Guards knew about the case. UM. And I
Speaker 1: had a guy come up to me and he'silicit. He goes,
Speaker 1: if you want to survive, he says, don't do drugs,
Speaker 1: don't get involid drugs, don't get involved homosexuality, don't get
Speaker 1: involved in gambling, um, gangs, he said. And work your
Speaker 1: way into the college program or the law library. He said.
Speaker 1: You're innocent, he said, And one of the hardest things
Speaker 1: is once you're innocent, is getting out, he said. But
Speaker 1: you'll figure out a way to do it. But work
Speaker 1: yourself into the law library. The prisoners were really the
Speaker 1: best judges of character because the guys who were career criminals,
Speaker 1: they knew who were innocent who weren't um and very
Speaker 1: early on even the guards. I mean, to this day,
Speaker 1: I am still in touch with some prison guards who
Speaker 1: saw that I was innocent, and you know, I found
Speaker 1: it years later at Oban Correctionously, there was one guard
Speaker 1: who actually used to quot unquote look out for me,
Speaker 1: make sure I was okay, because he knew I was innocent.
Speaker 1: So now we're six thousand, three hundred something days into
Speaker 1: this horrible Kafka esque trip through the maximum security prison
Speaker 1: system of New York State. Um, and you are now
Speaker 1: at a point where you know you have a new
Speaker 1: hearing coming up. Right. My lawyers said, okay, what's never
Speaker 1: been done here before? And we started a full investigation.
Speaker 1: And that's when I started looking for private investigators and
Speaker 1: ended up hiring Jason Peter. And one of the things
Speaker 1: that Jay said to me was, if you're innocent, hired me.
Speaker 1: If you're guilty, don't. I said, I'm in it, sent
Speaker 1: I'll hire you. I just find the truth giant. And
Speaker 1: it took years. Um, it took years for him to
Speaker 1: track down people. But what he did was whenever when
Speaker 1: nobody else did, who benefited financially for my conviction Stewarman.
Speaker 1: So you started with the Stewman's and just started branching
Speaker 1: out UH and the ended up finding the individual bay
Speaker 1: name of Glenna Harris, who was the getaway driver. UM
Speaker 1: for people we've identified as the murderers, you were sentenced
Speaker 1: to fifty years to life, fifty years of My first
Speaker 1: opportunity to appear to parole board was so we're in
Speaker 1: so would have been my first chance for release. Don't
Speaker 1: forget to give us a fantastic review. Wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts, it really helps. And I'm a proud donor
Speaker 1: to the Innocence Project and I really hope you'll join
Speaker 1: me in supporting this very important cause and helping to
Speaker 1: prevent future wrong for victions. Go to Innocence Project dot
Speaker 1: org to learn how to donate and get involved. I'd
Speaker 1: like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Awardis.
Speaker 1: The music on the show is by three time OSCAR
Speaker 1: nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on
Speaker 1: Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast.
Speaker 1: Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm is a production of Lava
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