Speaker 1: Pushkin. When I was a little kid, my father used
Speaker 1: to tell this story about when he was a young
Speaker 1: lawyer in New Orleans. It was one of those stories
Speaker 1: that sound a bit different to you as a grown
Speaker 1: up than as a child, but maybe all stories do anyway.
Speaker 1: In my father's telling, he just started at a law firm,
Speaker 1: and that firm had been hired by a big railroad company.
Speaker 1: The railroad was defending itself against one of its own employees.
Speaker 1: This poor worker had lost his arms in an accident
Speaker 1: for which the railroad was clearly responsible. My father's job
Speaker 1: was to minimize the amount of money that the railroad
Speaker 1: had to pay to the employee. My dad went hunting
Speaker 1: for a creative defense. I don't know where I got
Speaker 1: the idea, but the idea was that handicap people I
Speaker 1: can still work. That's my dad, Tom Lewis. His hunt
Speaker 1: for a creative defense led him to Nashville, Tennessee, where
Speaker 1: he found well, he actually found an expert who trained
Speaker 1: people with no arms to do lots of amazing things.
Speaker 1: This expert promised to show any jury that it wasn't
Speaker 1: a big deal at all to lose your arms. You
Speaker 1: could still do so much. My father was so impressed
Speaker 1: that he flew the guide in New Orleans and put
Speaker 1: him on a witness stand as an expert witness. And
Speaker 1: he said, oh, yes, he said, and then he started
Speaker 1: to give me exam that this is on the stand
Speaker 1: for example, says he. I deal with the man who
Speaker 1: had lost the use of his arms or hands, and
Speaker 1: we taught him to type with his toes. When I
Speaker 1: was a kid, my father used to really ham it up.
Speaker 1: He had rolled back in his chair and raised his
Speaker 1: feet high in the air. Because this expert was apparently
Speaker 1: truly enthusiastic about his expertise, my dad would lift his
Speaker 1: feet high over some imagine giant typewriter to show how
Speaker 1: ridiculously easy it was to type with your toes. The
Speaker 1: problem was it didn't really look easy, and it was
Speaker 1: apparent even to me in my naive state at that time,
Speaker 1: that that was not going over well with the jury
Speaker 1: and the railroad got cloverty. To my kid brain, this
Speaker 1: story had a couple of takeaways. Apart from the obvious
Speaker 1: one that my father wasn't cut out to help a
Speaker 1: railroad screw over a man who'd gotten hurt on the job,
Speaker 1: My biggest takeaway was how well our system of justice worked.
Speaker 1: The railroad was forced to fork over a huge pile
Speaker 1: of money, and the expert had helped the jury to
Speaker 1: see the truth, which is what experts are supposed to do. Right.
Speaker 1: I'm Michael Lewis, and this is against the rules My
Speaker 1: show about on fairness in American life. This season is
Speaker 1: all about experts, and today's show is all about a
Speaker 1: special kind of expert, maybe the most official kind, the
Speaker 1: expert witness. A decade ago, some law professors set out
Speaker 1: collecting data on all wrongful convictions in the United States,
Speaker 1: the National Registry of Exonerations they called their project. They
Speaker 1: only collected data going back to nineteen eighty nine, that
Speaker 1: was the first year that DNA analysis could offer definitive
Speaker 1: proof of a wrongful conviction. They've now counted more than
Speaker 1: three thousand wrongful convictions, three thousand people sent to prison
Speaker 1: when they should not have been, almost twenty seven thousand
Speaker 1: years spent behind bars, all by people who should never
Speaker 1: have been there in the first place. And that's obviously
Speaker 1: just the tiniest sliver of the problem. These were the
Speaker 1: people who were able to find people to help them.
Speaker 1: Even with this small sample, the law professors could see
Speaker 1: some patterns. The reasons why justice often miscarries in America,
Speaker 1: there were two big ones. The first reason isn't all
Speaker 1: that surprising the behavior of the police. They are intimidating
Speaker 1: and threatening suspects. They're intimidating and threatening witnesses. Simon Cole,
Speaker 1: a professor of criminology, Law and Society at ucu Arne,
Speaker 1: now runs the Exonerations Project. They're getting people to lie,
Speaker 1: they're hiding evidence, just a whole litany of kind of
Speaker 1: behaviors like that. The second reason for all the wrongful
Speaker 1: convictions was a bit less obvious, the expert witnesses who
Speaker 1: take the stand in trials and help the prosecution. In
Speaker 1: about a quarter of the wrongful convictions, the experts were
Speaker 1: at least partly responsible. The classic one is microscopic hair comparison,
Speaker 1: where it's kind of well understood now that you could
Speaker 1: say a person might be the source of a hair,
Speaker 1: but no one in the microscopic hair comparison discipline would
Speaker 1: ever say, now that a hair must come from one person,
Speaker 1: from you, Michael Lewis, and not from any other person.
Speaker 1: But at the trial they say something like the defendants
Speaker 1: the source of the hair. So they've greatly overstated the
Speaker 1: value of the evidence and what the evidence can do.
Speaker 1: People have been convicted and sentenced to life in prison
Speaker 1: or even death on the word of hair experts, bite
Speaker 1: mark experts, ballistic experts. Experts used to take the stand
Speaker 1: to claim with certainty that a fire was arson. Then
Speaker 1: actual science proved that the fire experts were almost always wrong.
Speaker 1: A bunch of people were convicted for setting fires that
Speaker 1: were not in fact set by anyone. It's not that
Speaker 1: the expert witnesses know nothing, is that they don't know
Speaker 1: nearly as much as they claim. The FBI pulled a
Speaker 1: bunch of its transcripts from its own experts and said,
Speaker 1: we're going to go through these transcripts and see if
Speaker 1: they testified erroneously. Again, it doesn't mean they made an
Speaker 1: error in the hair analysis. It doesn't mean the guy
Speaker 1: was innocent. It doesn't mean the hair wasn't from the guy.
Speaker 1: But did they overstate the testimony right? Yes, they did
Speaker 1: in ninety six percent of cases, right, every all the time.
Speaker 1: And this is the FBI. If they're experts are screwing
Speaker 1: up in this way, it's hard to imagine that most
Speaker 1: other experts aren't as well. It seems to be like
Speaker 1: across the board and these expertises that it's just a
Speaker 1: systematic overstatement of one's level of certainty. And I'll tell
Speaker 1: you why I think that is right. I think the
Speaker 1: lawyers try to make you do it. That's their job
Speaker 1: to get the expert to go as far as they
Speaker 1: can get them to go. I mean, they want the
Speaker 1: expert to say they're certain. Back in nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: the state of California passed a new law. More than
Speaker 1: thirty other states would go on to copy it. The
Speaker 1: new law allowed prosecutors to demand extra prison time for
Speaker 1: anyone convicted of a crime committed on behalf of a gang.
Speaker 1: If you robbed a gas station, you might get seven
Speaker 1: years in jail, unless you did it for a gang,
Speaker 1: in which case you might get twenty years. These so
Speaker 1: called gang enhancements affect roughly twelve thousand inmates just in
Speaker 1: California right now. Ninety two percent of these people serving
Speaker 1: extra time or Black or Latino, an amazing statistic. So
Speaker 1: for the past thirty years, American juries have had to
Speaker 1: decide not just whether a defendant is guilty or not guilty,
Speaker 1: they also have to decide gang member or not gang member?
Speaker 1: Did he rob the gas station for the gang or
Speaker 1: just to pay for his drug habit when he committed
Speaker 1: his crime, what exactly was going on inside his head?
Speaker 1: To figure it all out, courts have relied on a
Speaker 1: new kind of expert, the gang expert. For thirty years.
Speaker 1: That expert has almost always been a police officer, almost
Speaker 1: always a male police officer, and this officer almost always
Speaker 1: testifies that he's sure that whatever crime was committed was
Speaker 1: for the benefit of a gang. I don't know, Maybe
Speaker 1: it's just me, but I'd have thought it's at least
Speaker 1: possible to find someone out there with a clearer sense
Speaker 1: of the motives of the kids who wind up in gangs,
Speaker 1: someone who's actually had the experience. Okay, so we're gonna
Speaker 1: we're gonna get out of the car. Lja's gonna take
Speaker 1: our phone. All right, we're going that way, right, we're
Speaker 1: headed towards the overpath. It's actually not all that hard
Speaker 1: to find someone like that, someone who's actually had the experience.
Speaker 1: My producers did it in less than a day. So
Speaker 1: whose territory are we in now? You're still in Shelltown.
Speaker 1: Adam or Terra is a former gang member of San Diego, Shelltown,
Speaker 1: the thirty eighth Street branch. There are two branches of Shelltown,
Speaker 1: So you have Shelltowen, which is the neighborhood, ye, and
Speaker 1: then you have the two branches this thirty eighth Street
Speaker 1: and Gamma Street. So you're gonna see the Gang refeed,
Speaker 1: you're gonna see a lot of the Three eights, and
Speaker 1: then you're gonna see the GBS, which is Gamma Boys,
Speaker 1: and then Gamma Streets you see on the floor where
Speaker 1: you're walking. Yeah. Yeah, Adam lives in La now, but
Speaker 1: he's giving me a tour of his old neighborhood over FaceTime.
Speaker 1: I'm walking through a part of San Diego that some
Speaker 1: urban planner had once clearly hoped would be a park,
Speaker 1: but instead it's become a place people avoid at night.
Speaker 1: It's nestled beside a freeway overpass, and so there are
Speaker 1: lots of concrete surfaces and just about every inch of
Speaker 1: them is covered in graffiti. To me, it's just an
Speaker 1: incoherent mass of shapes and letters. To Adam, it's a language.
Speaker 1: You see the GBS right there, Uh gbs, Yeah, right there,
Speaker 1: it's GBS. Gamma Boys. That's the Gamma Boys all right, Yes,
Speaker 1: So if you keep walking and I'm probably are you
Speaker 1: going to see Youngster's name right there? Because I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure I saw it when I was there. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: there was that youngster. Youngster, that's the name of someone
Speaker 1: with a talent for spray painting, who Adam has taken
Speaker 1: an interest in. Why, I'll explain in a minute. For now,
Speaker 1: I just want you to listen to a guy who
Speaker 1: knows a lot teaching me a guy who knows nothing.
Speaker 1: And what's the ax over the end? Did someone try
Speaker 1: to ax it out? They put an X over the
Speaker 1: end because one of the rivals of Shoutown is National City.
Speaker 1: At an end, they put an X on it as
Speaker 1: a form of disrespect. God, there's so much meaning in
Speaker 1: this thing. And why is there an X on the
Speaker 1: bottom of the y that part? I don't know. I
Speaker 1: was walking down under the freeway into what amounted to
Speaker 1: the museum's main gallery. Adam was taking a trip down
Speaker 1: memory lane to a time when it was his name
Speaker 1: on these paintings, Perico. He signed himself little Parrot because
Speaker 1: his older brother was the big Parrot. So I started
Speaker 1: off with writing gang graffiti on the walls. Get it
Speaker 1: into some fizz fights. Up until about the age of fourteen,
Speaker 1: Adam would have defined the word gang. It's just the
Speaker 1: people he hung out with. He'd adored his ad but
Speaker 1: his dad had vanished when he was five. Shelltown was
Speaker 1: shockingly dangerous To keep safe, Adam stuck close to his
Speaker 1: older brother and his friends. Without them, he was likely
Speaker 1: to be robbed or beaten or worse. I was shot
Speaker 1: at a few times, and then when I got shot at,
Speaker 1: I realized this is very serious and I need a
Speaker 1: weapon that is more in line with what's going on
Speaker 1: in my life. And because of the violence became so intense,
Speaker 1: I started carrying a weapon, which was a pistol a gun.
Speaker 1: But his main activity for years was this graffiti. That
Speaker 1: was how you showed your devotion to the gang when
Speaker 1: you were a little kid, by painting the gang symbols
Speaker 1: all over the place. On days he was feeling reckless,
Speaker 1: Adam would sneak into the territory of rival gangs and
Speaker 1: paint on their walls. So tell me which you did
Speaker 1: that got you in trouble with the law. Okay, initially
Speaker 1: I got arrested for possession of marijuana at fourteen, vandalism,
Speaker 1: writing on the wall, gang graffiti, assault with the firearm
Speaker 1: on three people, and ultimately I committed a gang related
Speaker 1: murder when I was seventeen years old. Was it against
Speaker 1: the rival gang member? Yes, it was against the rival
Speaker 1: gang member. So some gang members included my older brother.
Speaker 1: We're in front of my house one evening, drinking, talking,
Speaker 1: shooting dice, typical hanging out, and a rival gang came
Speaker 1: and shot at them and hit a few people. My
Speaker 1: grandmother was home, my brother's wife, his child, his newborn
Speaker 1: daughter was home. So me and my rage I went
Speaker 1: looking for those rival gang members and I found one
Speaker 1: of them, and I am responsible for taking his life.
Speaker 1: Adam pled guilty to murder back in nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 1: His sentencing was complicated because he was still a miner.
Speaker 1: He remembers the system trying to figure out if there
Speaker 1: was any hope for him, and one of the psychological evaluations,
Speaker 1: the psychologist asked me, if you could do anything, if
Speaker 1: you could have any impact on the world, what would
Speaker 1: it be. And I remember telling them I would help
Speaker 1: address the ozone later because at the time that was
Speaker 1: a big problem in nineteen ninety one, and it really
Speaker 1: really threw him off because he was expecting something completely different,
Speaker 1: and he told me, like, you know what, we're really different.
Speaker 1: You are the average gang member, but at the same
Speaker 1: time you're not. Adam is still only seventeen years old.
Speaker 1: His lawyers argued that he should be released at the
Speaker 1: age of twenty five and given another chance, but he
Speaker 1: was tried as an adult and the fact that he
Speaker 1: had been in the gang probably didn't help his case.
Speaker 1: He wound up being sentenced to life in prison. Behind bars,
Speaker 1: he remained affiliated with his old gang, but more and
Speaker 1: more as an anthropologist of gang life than as a member.
Speaker 1: He learned everything he could about gang culture, gang sociology,
Speaker 1: gang law. He was a model p and in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: after twenty two years, Adam was released. He knew exactly
Speaker 1: what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
Speaker 1: He wanted to work with kids in gangs to help
Speaker 1: them avoid what had happened to him. He founded a
Speaker 1: nonprofit called the Juvenile Justice Advocates of California to work
Speaker 1: with kids who are already in trouble. He became known
Speaker 1: to social workers, and they'd asked him to speak to
Speaker 1: various groups about his experience. After one of these speeches,
Speaker 1: a member of the audience came up to him. She
Speaker 1: said she was a public defender. She wanted to tell
Speaker 1: him about a case she'd just been given. A twenty
Speaker 1: three year old San Diego man had been arrested for vandalism.
Speaker 1: By sheer coincidence, he was in the same gang that
Speaker 1: Adam had been in. Graffiti was usually a misdemeanor, but
Speaker 1: this guy had allegedly painted so many walls and buildings
Speaker 1: that he was being charged with a felony, and that
Speaker 1: meant the possibility the gang enhancement to his sentence. The
Speaker 1: guy's given name was Alejandro Loza, his street name was Youngster.
Speaker 1: They had pictures of him, and she was like, did
Speaker 1: one person do all this gang graffiti? And why would
Speaker 1: you know anything about that? Like that sound like something
Speaker 1: that like I don't know, an art connoisseur would determine,
Speaker 1: like this hand is different from this hand. How would
Speaker 1: you How would you know any more than anyone else?
Speaker 1: How much of the graffiti he did? Me personally, I
Speaker 1: would know because I was I did gang graffiti, so
Speaker 1: I recognize different lettering styles, different artists. Youngster's defense attorney
Speaker 1: wanted Adam to testify at trial as an expert at witness.
Speaker 1: She could see that Adam knew as much about San
Speaker 1: Diego's gang graffiti as a person could know. But Adam
Speaker 1: hadn't the fakest idea of himself as an official expert.
Speaker 1: How to sound like an expert, how to persuade others
Speaker 1: that he's an expert. It's prised him that he'd be
Speaker 1: invited into a courtroom except as a defendant. Like, what
Speaker 1: even were the rules about who got to take the stand?
Speaker 1: Adam would learn all that, and we will too after
Speaker 1: a break. There are kind of two distinct phases in
Speaker 1: kind of modern American legal history. Emily Shulman is an
Speaker 1: expert on expert witnesses. She also lectures at Harvard Law School.
Speaker 1: She's here for a very brief lesson on what qualifies
Speaker 1: as expertise in the court. For a surprisingly long time,
Speaker 1: there was one case, that Supreme Court case that governed
Speaker 1: evidence law, and that was called the Fry case. And
Speaker 1: so it was experts had to satisfy the Fried test.
Speaker 1: What was the Fried test? You know, boiled down to
Speaker 1: its essence, it really just said that expert witnesses could
Speaker 1: testify if what they were testifying to sort of their
Speaker 1: expertise was generally accepted in the scientific community. So it's
Speaker 1: related to science right from the beginning. That was it,
Speaker 1: That was the yardstick. So I can't be an expert
Speaker 1: on horoscopes. Not on horoscopes, No, not on horoscopes, but
Speaker 1: you could claim a scientific basis for all sorts of
Speaker 1: other stuff bite marks Arson. All you needed was a
Speaker 1: cluster of people in your field to agree that what
Speaker 1: you were doing with science. Handwriting analysis, for example, little
Speaker 1: cottage industries develop and you know, one handwriting experts as yeah,
Speaker 1: there is such a thing as handwriting expertise, and the
Speaker 1: others says, yeah, I agree with you, and you know,
Speaker 1: the next thing, you know, you have a little handwriting
Speaker 1: expert kind of community that is doing pretty well for itself.
Speaker 1: And there you have it. Under the cover of science.
Speaker 1: A lot of dubious experts got paid to serve as witnesses,
Speaker 1: and in criminal cases, these experts overwhelmingly serve the prosecution.
Speaker 1: That changed in nineteen ninety three when a mess of
Speaker 1: a case based on pseudoscience got appealed all the way
Speaker 1: to the Supreme Court. Ultimately, the Supreme Court said, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're no longer going to just kind of roll over
Speaker 1: in the face of scientific consensus, like, we have our
Speaker 1: own standards to uphold. And the kind of new view
Speaker 1: was that experts could testify if their testimony was going
Speaker 1: to be helpful to a jury and they were offering
Speaker 1: scientific or technical or some other kind of specialized knowledge
Speaker 1: to the jury. So now the trial judge decides who
Speaker 1: can be an expert. This, of course, just substitutes one
Speaker 1: problem for another. It's still a highly subjective process, but
Speaker 1: a telling process because the courtroom is the one place
Speaker 1: in American life that tries to be super precise about experts.
Speaker 1: An expert who lies on the stand can, in theory,
Speaker 1: go to jail. And yet even now the justice system
Speaker 1: has trouble figuring out some very basic things about experts. Okay, everyone,
Speaker 1: welcome to the first substantive part of the independent Fence
Speaker 1: at Gain Expert College at Loyal Law School. Sean Kennedy
Speaker 1: is a former public defender now an associate professor of
Speaker 1: law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. This is
Speaker 1: going to be expert witness, one on one, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to tell you how and why I believe every
Speaker 1: single one of you is ready right now to day
Speaker 1: to qualify as a forensic gang expert in a state
Speaker 1: and federal courts. In California, Sean's in a zoom box,
Speaker 1: and in a dozen other zoom boxes, a dozen former
Speaker 1: gang members watch Sean talk. He starts by explaining the problem,
Speaker 1: which they all more than understand. The cops who serve
Speaker 1: as gang experts often don't know much and never know
Speaker 1: as much as they claim to know. Peak absurdity came
Speaker 1: back in two thousand and sixteen in a case involving
Speaker 1: a man named Sanchez and led to what got called
Speaker 1: the Sanchez problem. And the Sanchez problem is a police
Speaker 1: gang expert case where the cop went up there and
Speaker 1: testified everything in this trial is all about the defendant
Speaker 1: did everything because it was for the benefit of the
Speaker 1: street game. But the cop had no interaction with the case.
Speaker 1: He didn't know the defendant. He didn't do any investigation,
Speaker 1: didn't do any preparation for his testimony. He just got
Speaker 1: up there and repeated what was on the police report
Speaker 1: and said, I'm an expert. After Sanchez, the California Supreme
Speaker 1: Court ruled that anyone who wanted to be a gang
Speaker 1: expert had to know something about the case, about the defendant,
Speaker 1: or at least about gangs. Hence Seawan Kennedy's training class.
Speaker 1: So we need some new experts. You are those experts.
Speaker 1: Shawn's held a bunch of these classes. This one's online
Speaker 1: and the students are all women. Shan lays out the
Speaker 1: stakes and then leads them into the meat of the course,
Speaker 1: a role playing game. So let's try it. Do I
Speaker 1: have anyone of our experts, buddy experts, who wants to
Speaker 1: qualify the way it would be done in court. Just
Speaker 1: just raise your hand, qualify, submit your credentials as an expert.
Speaker 1: There aren't any hands. I'm seeing some smiles, Jessica, you're ready.
Speaker 1: Let's give it a shot. All right, So you're on
Speaker 1: the stand, you have been called, you have stated your name,
Speaker 1: and you've been sworn in, and so I'm going to
Speaker 1: qualify you as an expert. Okay, could you tell us
Speaker 1: about your education? My education was I received a GD
Speaker 1: and I'm currently a college student. And I was I
Speaker 1: grew up in a gang infested neighborhood. Do you have
Speaker 1: any personal experience with gang involvement? Yes, I do. UM
Speaker 1: joined a gang and at seventeen I was arrested. What gang?
Speaker 1: What gang? I'm sorry, Um, do we have to say this.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, we're in court, that's the question. Sean's just
Speaker 1: being a lawyer. But their response is the opposite of
Speaker 1: the guy who taught people to type with their toes.
Speaker 1: They're not full of conviction or enthusiasm, and that makes sense.
Speaker 1: To testify is to violate the basic codes of the street.
Speaker 1: How did it feel, Jessica, I'm not comfortable with, you know,
Speaker 1: speaking to anybody who's in a position to to ask
Speaker 1: me a question like that's very uncomfortable. UM. I felt
Speaker 1: like I sensed you as as an attorney, and I
Speaker 1: don't I mean no disrespect to you shot, but from
Speaker 1: a white male in a suit, it just feels like
Speaker 1: it's coming led up or or somebody in authority figure. Yes,
Speaker 1: no disrespect taken. But when you were there, you were
Speaker 1: feeling the heat. And I'm your lawyer, I'm your friend,
Speaker 1: and I we're just talking about you know, your qualifications.
Speaker 1: We haven't even got into the substance of the matter,
Speaker 1: and you're feeling the heat. What's it going to feel
Speaker 1: like when the DA stands up and tries to make
Speaker 1: fun of you on cross examination? It's not rhetorical Sean's
Speaker 1: just getting a lot of blank stares here. I want
Speaker 1: you to understand this, Professor Kennedy. It's just that this
Speaker 1: is the first time that we're on this side. A
Speaker 1: lot of times, everything that a person has ever said
Speaker 1: in their life, especially being black or Latino, have allus
Speaker 1: been used as a weapon against us. So I don't
Speaker 1: want you when you hear Dominique or you can hear
Speaker 1: Jessica and they're kind of hesitant. It's not that they
Speaker 1: don't trust you, because they wouldn't even be in this
Speaker 1: process if they didn't trust us in the process. But
Speaker 1: it's just, you know, working through these things, working through
Speaker 1: these things, learning how to articulate these things. The Sanchez
Speaker 1: problem was about cops with no knowledge saying that they knew.
Speaker 1: This class is just the reverse people who actually know
Speaker 1: a lot and can't get it across because it's not
Speaker 1: just who knows, it's who's willing to say that they know.
Speaker 1: And it's not easy to say that you know when
Speaker 1: for your whole life you've been told not to say anything.
Speaker 1: Plus no one in power ever really thought you were
Speaker 1: worth asking. Can you please tell the court now what
Speaker 1: that experience is? My experiences I'm an inactive gang member.
Speaker 1: I was involved with Uh the um oh man, the
Speaker 1: it's kind of you get a little nervous. I'm sorry, Um,
Speaker 1: don't break, don't break character. We're in court. Just say
Speaker 1: how to feel. Oh my gosh, for like trial, you
Speaker 1: are on trial. You are on trial. Right, you're an expert. Okay.
Speaker 1: Is there a way we can do more um mock
Speaker 1: hearings like this because it was a little intimidating. Yeah, um.
Speaker 1: And I don't want to I don't want to feel
Speaker 1: like that, Like, I want to be able to articulate
Speaker 1: myself in a professional manner. I want to be able
Speaker 1: to address that in a way to where it sounds
Speaker 1: like I'm educated, where it sounds like I'm educated. She's
Speaker 1: not worried about what she knows. She's worried about how
Speaker 1: she seems to others. I thought, coming in, I mean
Speaker 1: just me, I thought, come in, they would know that
Speaker 1: they were experts. Marissa Harris works with Sean Kennedy at
Speaker 1: Loyola's Gang Expert College. It took about a full class
Speaker 1: until we got to the end of the first class
Speaker 1: for them to start typing in the chat box on
Speaker 1: Zoom or raising their hands to say, you know what,
Speaker 1: I could do this. I'm definitely an expert. I know
Speaker 1: everything you're talking about. I remember all of this. The
Speaker 1: people who have the lived experience should be the experts.
Speaker 1: They are the experts just there. You know, existence makes
Speaker 1: them experts, and so all they really need is some
Speaker 1: legal tools and you know, polishing, and they're the ones
Speaker 1: who should be in those chairs. It's all new. This training.
Speaker 1: People talk about structural racism. Here's a byproduct, structural expertise ism.
Speaker 1: It'll take months before any of these students get to
Speaker 1: a witness stand as an expert. But before this kind
Speaker 1: of training even existed, a few people were taking the
Speaker 1: stand anyway, and one of them was Adam Mortara. Against
Speaker 1: the rules. Will be right back. Let's go back to
Speaker 1: twenty and eighteen. A public defender had asked Adam Mortara
Speaker 1: to testify as a gang expert in the trial of
Speaker 1: Alejandra Loza aka Youngster. Adam really studied Youngster's work and
Speaker 1: his case file. The guy was not exactly a model citizen.
Speaker 1: He'd beaten someone up, he'd been arrested before, he had
Speaker 1: a drug problem. But his graffiti, to Adam's eye, the
Speaker 1: graffiti was really good. The tag that Youngster used though
Speaker 1: we looked pretty common. Adam kept pointing it out to
Speaker 1: me on our FaceTime tour. There it is right there,
Speaker 1: there's see now there's a version of youngster. You see
Speaker 1: the difference. There's a thirty eight under that, or it's
Speaker 1: not the same youngster because it's a different branch. Right,
Speaker 1: Youngster was from Gamma, Right, this guy is youngs and
Speaker 1: he's from thirty eight. The police had caught Alejandroloza tagging
Speaker 1: red handed, but they'd accused him of a lot more
Speaker 1: than they'd caught him doing. And when Adam compared the
Speaker 1: graffiti youngster was known to have done with the graffiti
Speaker 1: he was just suspected of having done, he noticed some differences.
Speaker 1: I mean, there was just a bunch of different ways
Speaker 1: of the name young or youngster or youngs. And what
Speaker 1: I was, what I believed was that it was really
Speaker 1: more than one youngster or youngs, that it was baby too,
Speaker 1: and what was older and what was younger. If I
Speaker 1: came in here with a cop and said explain all
Speaker 1: this to me, how well you think they do? They
Speaker 1: do pretty well? You think they do pretty well, They're
Speaker 1: not always they can decipher this stuff. They could, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they could, because it's pretty it's pretty basics. Nothing that
Speaker 1: I just sold you is complex at all. No, you're right,
Speaker 1: but but it means making some distinctions that um that
Speaker 1: people don't normally make. Yes, and it means actually, it
Speaker 1: means actually looking at it. It's funny because this is
Speaker 1: sort of background noise in American life that this this
Speaker 1: stuff is everywhere, and I'm just I'm kind of blind
Speaker 1: to it unless it's something that's just strikingly beautiful. I
Speaker 1: just think I was someone someone to face that highway.
Speaker 1: But that's not where that person is thinking. That person
Speaker 1: is thinking, I've actually communicated something pretty specific here, and
Speaker 1: some of its gang related and some of it's not.
Speaker 1: Some of it is by who it says it's by,
Speaker 1: and some of it's by some imitator. You can really
Speaker 1: see that, and you could tell some of the distinctions
Speaker 1: because you're actually interested. Now, law enforcement they see exactly
Speaker 1: what you see. They see the distinctions, but they don't
Speaker 1: say it's possible that it's more than one person. We're
Speaker 1: not going to say that. Let's just say it's this
Speaker 1: one person, so we could give him the felonine there
Speaker 1: was a bunch of graffiti signed Youngs or Youngster, but
Speaker 1: the script was different, and the changing names that was
Speaker 1: also weird. Adam knew that graffiti artists seldom changed their signatures.
Speaker 1: They wanted people to know exactly who had painted it.
Speaker 1: He also knew that the best gang graffiti artists always
Speaker 1: spawned imitators, and one way to acknowledge the master was
Speaker 1: to adopt a similar name. There was also a more
Speaker 1: subtle question of Youngster's motives, which prosecutors didn't even care
Speaker 1: to ask. Why had Alejandro Loza painted at all? It
Speaker 1: was gang graffiti? Even his defense lawyer admitted that much.
Speaker 1: But to Adam, graffiti wasn't just graffiti. Let's go down
Speaker 1: here so you can so I'll show you because I
Speaker 1: have a question about your own at tagging. Did you
Speaker 1: think of it as art? Did you think of it
Speaker 1: as something else? I thought of it as art. The
Speaker 1: world saw Youngster's work as gang graffiti, and that was that.
Speaker 1: But Youngster's art career was more interesting. He had a
Speaker 1: side hustle drawing people's portraits. He claimed he had no imagination,
Speaker 1: but he could capture perfectly in paint anything you put
Speaker 1: in front of him, right down to the last strand
Speaker 1: of hair. He reminded Adam just a little bit of
Speaker 1: his younger self. Okay, initially, obviously I was nervous, and
Speaker 1: you'd only been there once before, and that was when
Speaker 1: they put you in jail. Adam had never really thought
Speaker 1: of himself as an expert on anything, except perhaps on injustice,
Speaker 1: which had been woven into his existence since he was
Speaker 1: a little kid. I was fourteen years old when I
Speaker 1: first got arrested, and I wasn't treated like a child.
Speaker 1: I was treated like a criminal, and I had five
Speaker 1: dollars worth of marijuana. I was treated like I mean,
Speaker 1: I was handcuffed, I was put in a police car,
Speaker 1: I was taking a jail. I was booked, and my
Speaker 1: parents had to pick me up with my grandmother. You
Speaker 1: think about going to the courtroom, that's your memory. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So my memory is that courts have always been punitive.
Speaker 1: They've never been about any type of rehabilitation or justice
Speaker 1: or getting to the truth. It's always been punitive. But
Speaker 1: now he had to go to court to testify as
Speaker 1: an expert witness. I have no idea what to expect. Honestly,
Speaker 1: what do you decide to wear? I wore slacks, and
Speaker 1: I wore a collared, short sleeved shirt, which I do
Speaker 1: not recommend doing and I will not do again. Why's
Speaker 1: that because it's it's appropriate to wear a suit and
Speaker 1: tying the courtroom, right, And I realized that now and
Speaker 1: that's how I dressed now. But at the time I
Speaker 1: just wore slacks in a collared shirt. He's wearing the
Speaker 1: wrong clothes. He's nervous, and they aren't taking him seriously.
Speaker 1: You can see this in the court transcripts. When the
Speaker 1: judge tells the prosecutor that he's going to allow Adam
Speaker 1: to testify. The prosecutor replies, he's going to admit to
Speaker 1: being a murderer. And I'm not sure anything gets more
Speaker 1: prejudicial than that. He was asking me if I was
Speaker 1: if I got paid to be there, and initially I
Speaker 1: was like, how is that relevant? And I know what
Speaker 1: he's doing, but I felt uncomfortable talking about getting paid
Speaker 1: to be there, Like if I was doing someone a
Speaker 1: favor because they gave me money and I was not
Speaker 1: there to provide a service, And what would you say now? Now,
Speaker 1: I would say, I'm here as a professional as well
Speaker 1: as everyone else in his court. So I'm assuming everyone
Speaker 1: here is getting paid. To day, Adam understands that. Now, hell,
Speaker 1: the prosecutor got paid. But at Youngster's trial, Adam didn't
Speaker 1: think to point any of that out, and it put
Speaker 1: him back on his heels. The money he had been
Speaker 1: paid just hung in the air as an accusation. When
Speaker 1: you read the transcript from the trial, you're struck by
Speaker 1: a couple of other things. One is Adam's reticence. He
Speaker 1: doesn't insist on his expertise. He's just offering an opinion,
Speaker 1: the opinion of a convicted murderer who is being paid.
Speaker 1: The other thing is the confidence of the cop who
Speaker 1: testifies for the prosecution. The cop is totally sure that
Speaker 1: Youngster has painted everything he's accused of painting. No, I
Speaker 1: didn't think that they were going to let him go,
Speaker 1: even though you thought he was innocent, not of all
Speaker 1: of it, but of some of it. What mattered was
Speaker 1: the prosecution was going hard to get maximum conviction from
Speaker 1: maximum setting, and I knew that what was happening, And
Speaker 1: that's exactly what happened. In the end, the jury convicted
Speaker 1: Alejandroloza Youngster. The prosecution call for a gang enhanced sentence,
Speaker 1: and the judge sent him to prison for six years
Speaker 1: for graffiti, some of which was quite likely applied by copycats.
Speaker 1: The criminal justice system is designed that poor people and minorities,
Speaker 1: mainly blacks and Latinos, go through the system and end
Speaker 1: up in prison or jail. Injustice is not the case.
Speaker 1: No one's interested in justice, sadly. So here's a theory.
Speaker 1: The greater the inequality in any society, the more perverse
Speaker 1: the use of experts will be, because actual knowledge, actual
Speaker 1: expertise threatens those on the happy end of the inequality.
Speaker 1: The truth can be a weapon for anyone, so you
Speaker 1: can't just let anyone have it. Against the Rules is
Speaker 1: written and hosted by me Michael Lewis and produced by
Speaker 1: Catherine Gerardo and Lydia Jean Cott. Julia Barton is our editor,
Speaker 1: with additional editing by Audrey Dilling. Beth Johnson is our
Speaker 1: fact checker, and mil o'bell executive produces. Our music is
Speaker 1: created by John Evans and Matthias Bossi of Stellwagen Stempanette.
Speaker 1: We record our show at Berkeley Advanced Media Studios, expertly
Speaker 1: helmed by Tofa Ruth. Thanks also to Jacob Weisberg. Heather Fame,
Speaker 1: John Schnares, Carl mcgliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Morgan Rattner, Nicole Morano, Royston Besserve, Daniella Lakhan, Mary Beth Smith,
Speaker 1: Jason Gambrel, and a special thanks to Jason Roskowski and
Speaker 1: Julia Cott. Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries,
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