Speaker 1: Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I writer,
Speaker 1: and I'm Steve Drisen. Today we'll bring you to Philadelphia
Speaker 1: for the story of Walter Ogron. Walter was sent to
Speaker 1: death row for a murder he didn't commit by an
Speaker 1: old school Philly justice system that was better known for injustice.
Speaker 1: Walter spent decades in prison until a new wave of
Speaker 1: reform minded prosecutors went looking for the truth behind his conviction.
Speaker 1: Walter's story gives Steve and me hope that real reform
Speaker 1: is really possible. So I was born and raised in Philadelphia,
Speaker 1: and a few years ago Laura and I took a
Speaker 1: trip there for work. I'm very proud of Philadelphia and
Speaker 1: I like to show off the city. And there was
Speaker 1: this place that I had to take Laura too. It's
Speaker 1: not Constitution Hall, okay, not the Liberty Bell. It's the
Speaker 1: Eastern State Penitentiary. So you drive me to downtown Philly
Speaker 1: and there's this rundown relic of a prison that's crumbling.
Speaker 1: It's covered in cobwebs. It's almost like a haunted house
Speaker 1: in the middle of downtown Philadelphia. It's not used any longer.
Speaker 1: It was built in eighteen twenty nine, but it's been
Speaker 1: preserved there as this incredible monument against mass incarceration. It's
Speaker 1: my favorite place to go because it fits the city's
Speaker 1: personality and history so well. This is the city with
Speaker 1: an unbelievable history of injustice, mass incarceration, and corruption within
Speaker 1: the criminal justice system. And this history of injustice it
Speaker 1: peaked when I was a child in the sixties and
Speaker 1: nineties seventies. This was the time when Frank Rizzo was
Speaker 1: the police chief and then he was the mayor. He
Speaker 1: controlled the city and he sent out a message that
Speaker 1: when police officers coerced confessions, he had their best, you know,
Speaker 1: just like Eastern State Penitentiary. Frank Rizzo has become the
Speaker 1: symbol for the heaviest of hands in the criminal justice system,
Speaker 1: for the way it can just come down on the
Speaker 1: backs of people, especially people without power. And that's exactly
Speaker 1: what we see in today's story, the story of Walter
Speaker 1: oh Grod. Today's story starts in northeast Philadelphia. It's a
Speaker 1: working class part of Philly. The side streets are lined
Speaker 1: with bungalows and the main drags are lined with discount
Speaker 1: big box stores. The northeast is an outlying area pretty
Speaker 1: far from downtown where the court houses and police department
Speaker 1: are found. It even tried to secede once from the
Speaker 1: rest of the city. But when it comes to criminal justice,
Speaker 1: the Northeast is Philadelphia through and through. It's a full
Speaker 1: participant in the city's policing machine. When our story starts
Speaker 1: in that machine was notoriously harsh and way too often
Speaker 1: couldn't deliver real justice. It's July and on one of
Speaker 1: Northeast Philly's side streets lived the family of a little girl,
Speaker 1: four year old Barbara Jeane Horn. On the twelfth of July.
Speaker 1: Barbara Jeane went missing sometime around two o'clock that afternoon.
Speaker 1: By five thirty, a neighbor peeked inside a discarded television
Speaker 1: box that was sitting outside on a curb next to
Speaker 1: some trash cans. Inside the box was Barbara Jeane, and
Speaker 1: she was dead. She was unclothed, her hair was wet,
Speaker 1: and she had been struck five times on the head.
Speaker 1: It was a horrendous crime. Police swarmed the block and
Speaker 1: found four eye witnesses who had seen a man earlier
Speaker 1: that afternoon dragging a cardboard boxed down the sidewalk the
Speaker 1: eyewitnesses all gave roughly the same description. They had seen
Speaker 1: a man with brown hair, around thirty years old, somewhere
Speaker 1: between five six and five nine, with a medium build.
Speaker 1: It was a pretty good description, but police weren't able
Speaker 1: to generate any real leads. After several months, Barbara Jean's
Speaker 1: murder was featured on the TV show Unsolved Mysteries and
Speaker 1: a police tip line was set up. Close to a
Speaker 1: thousand tips were phoned in, but police still couldn't solve
Speaker 1: the case after almost four years. In early the case
Speaker 1: was reassigned to a new group of Philly detectives, and
Speaker 1: these new cops seemed to have no difficulty picking a suspect,
Speaker 1: a twenty three year old man named Walter oh Grad.
Speaker 1: Walter was a round shoulders, thick glasses kind of guy
Speaker 1: who lived across the street from Barbara Jean's family. He
Speaker 1: was black haired, six ft one pounds, not exactly the short,
Speaker 1: slim man who had been seeing dragging that box. Walter
Speaker 1: had no criminal record at all, but he did have
Speaker 1: a record of profound learning disabilities over the years. Professionals
Speaker 1: who evaluated him used words like extreme dependency and social inadequacy.
Speaker 1: His teachers said that Walter was no troublemaker. He'd only
Speaker 1: ever get in trouble because he was in the wrong
Speaker 1: place at the wrong time. For Walter Ogra the wrong
Speaker 1: place at the wrong time was a Philadelphia interrogation room.
Speaker 1: On April that morning, police called Walter's house and left
Speaker 1: a message asking him to come in for questioning about
Speaker 1: Barbara Gine. He wasn't a suspect, they said, he was
Speaker 1: an informational witness. This happens all the time. But this
Speaker 1: is a ruse. There's already a plan of foot. Police
Speaker 1: officers don't view that person as a witness. They view
Speaker 1: that person as a suspect. It's a ruse because it
Speaker 1: creates a context in which the confession is going to
Speaker 1: be viewed as voluntary. He drove down to the police
Speaker 1: station on his own accord. We told him that the
Speaker 1: door is open and he can leave at any time
Speaker 1: that he wants. All of these tactics we see over
Speaker 1: and over again, and oftentimes it's the first step down
Speaker 1: the road to a false confession. Walter was be to
Speaker 1: help first chance he got. At about one thirty that afternoon,
Speaker 1: Walter drove himself to the Philadelphia Police administration building. It's
Speaker 1: an imposing, severe nineteen sixties era complex that Philadelphians call
Speaker 1: the Roundhouse. The confession was one of police officers main
Speaker 1: tools to solve cases that were still open. There were
Speaker 1: experts in breaking people, and the Roundhouses is where the
Speaker 1: breaking happened. It's the seat of police power in the city.
Speaker 1: Walter showed up to the Roundhouse ready to cooperate, but
Speaker 1: wiped out. He had just finished an eighteen hours shift
Speaker 1: driving a bakery truck around a three hundred mile delivery route,
Speaker 1: and he'd been awake for twelve hours. Before that, he
Speaker 1: had been up for like thirty hours. He was exhausted.
Speaker 1: He came into the interrogation room expecting to be providing
Speaker 1: information that was helpful to the police, and he got
Speaker 1: hit with an avalanche. At the Roundhouse, police put Walter
Speaker 1: into a back room where the table and chairs were
Speaker 1: bolted to the floor. That's where he'd face fourteen hours
Speaker 1: of interrogation. If you go without sleep for some period
Speaker 1: of time, it clouds your ability to make rational decisions
Speaker 1: and leads people to agree to things that they otherwise
Speaker 1: would never agree to. And Walter had cognitive disabilities too,
Speaker 1: so these twin issues made him an easy mark. Now,
Speaker 1: the interrogation wasn't recorded, so we have no objective record
Speaker 1: of what happened in the room. But Walter has given
Speaker 1: a very detailed account of the interrogation. So here we go.
Speaker 1: According to Walter, police started by asking where he'd been
Speaker 1: four years ago on the day Barbara Ghane disappeared. He
Speaker 1: went to work, he said. After he got home, he
Speaker 1: remembered seeing Barbara Jeane's stepfather going door to door looking
Speaker 1: for her. But these answers didn't seem to satisfy the police.
Speaker 1: Walter started to feel strange. Why were the cops so
Speaker 1: interested in him? He stood up tried to leave the room,
Speaker 1: but he says, his interrogators blocked the door. The police
Speaker 1: handcuffed Walter to the chair and started showing him photos
Speaker 1: of Barbara Jean's dead body in the cardboard box. We
Speaker 1: think you did this, they said. Walter says. Police told
Speaker 1: him witnesses had identified him as the perpetrator, even though
Speaker 1: no one actually had, and when Walter insisted he was innocent,
Speaker 1: the police told him he must be blocking memories of
Speaker 1: the murder. They wrote down a description of how they
Speaker 1: thought Walter had committed the crime. If you don't sign
Speaker 1: this confession, they said, we're going to take you downstairs
Speaker 1: and we're gonna put you in a cell with a
Speaker 1: bunch of black people. We're gonna tell them you killed
Speaker 1: a bunch of black children, and then we're going to
Speaker 1: see what happens, except, of course, they didn't use the
Speaker 1: word black. This is the old school police department, the
Speaker 1: department built by Frank Rizzo, who was an unabashed racist.
Speaker 1: I mean, when he ran for mayor, he would hand
Speaker 1: out buttons to his supporters that said vote white. It's
Speaker 1: no surprise in this context that Walter Ogrod's interrogation was
Speaker 1: saturated with racism. By three thirty in the morning, Walter
Speaker 1: had had enough. He signed each page of a sixteen
Speaker 1: page confession, all of which had been written out by
Speaker 1: the police. According to the confession, Walter lured Barbara Jean
Speaker 1: into his basement, where he tried to molest her. When
Speaker 1: she resisted, he flew into a rage and hit her
Speaker 1: on the head with a two foot long metal bar
Speaker 1: from his weight set. He rinsed off her body, hit
Speaker 1: her clothes in a crawl space, and put her in
Speaker 1: the cardboard box. It was a brutal statement enough to
Speaker 1: get Walter booked into jail and charged with murder, but
Speaker 1: by seven am, Walter was recanting. He called an a
Speaker 1: turn me from jail, totally distraught and said that police
Speaker 1: were telling him that he'd killed a little girl and
Speaker 1: had a mental block about it. Walter said he didn't
Speaker 1: do it. When the lawyer asked why he hadn't called earlier,
Speaker 1: Walter explained that he had requested a lawyer during the interrogation,
Speaker 1: but the police had said they'd have to put him
Speaker 1: in jail until the lawyer came, and in the meantime
Speaker 1: the inmates would kill him. That was more than enough
Speaker 1: to dissuade Walter. You might be asking yourself, how can
Speaker 1: they do that? Aren't they supposed to stop when a
Speaker 1: suspect asked for the right to counsel? And the answer
Speaker 1: to that question is yes. That's the one bright line
Speaker 1: rule of interrogation. Suspect asked for a lawyer, police officers
Speaker 1: shut up until a lawyer comes into the room. But
Speaker 1: they could get away with it because there's no recording
Speaker 1: of this transaction. Police officers are going to say he
Speaker 1: never asked for a lawyer, and in Philadelphia in a
Speaker 1: court of law. During this time, nobody's gonna believe Walter Obrod.
Speaker 1: Walter's trial for first degree murder began in October. The
Speaker 1: only evidence against him was his confession, and there was
Speaker 1: plenty of reason to disbelieve it. The confessional claimed that
Speaker 1: Walter had hidden Barbara Jean's clothes in his crawl space,
Speaker 1: but Walter's defense pointed out that no clothes had been
Speaker 1: found there. A psychiatrist testified about Walter's limitations and said
Speaker 1: the confession wasn't written in Walter's style of speaking, and
Speaker 1: when Walter took the stand to proclaim his own innocence,
Speaker 1: it was pretty clear the confession was written in words
Speaker 1: he'd never use. On November four, the jury announced its
Speaker 1: verdict not guilty. The jury acquitted Walter Obrad. Let's say
Speaker 1: that one more time. The jury found Walter not guilty.
Speaker 1: I mean, we almost never see this in confession cases.
Speaker 1: This is a rare event. It's like a total eclipse
Speaker 1: of the sun. For a moment, it looked like Walter
Speaker 1: was going home. But as soon as the acquittal was announced,
Speaker 1: one juror changed everything. He stood up and announced, I
Speaker 1: do not agree with the verdict, the courtroom erupted and
Speaker 1: the judge declared a mistrial. In the end, the jury
Speaker 1: had hung eleven in favor of acquittal, one in favor
Speaker 1: of conviction. After the trial, one of the eleven jurors
Speaker 1: who believed in Walter's innocence told the media that he
Speaker 1: saw gaping holes in the prosecution's case. I didn't put
Speaker 1: much stock in the confession, he said, I wanted to
Speaker 1: see evidence. Walter was retried in and this time the
Speaker 1: prosecutors filled the holes in their case. They had recruited
Speaker 1: a notorious jail house snitch, a man named John Hall,
Speaker 1: who was locked up in the same jail as Walter.
Speaker 1: Hall had a miles long track record of claiming to
Speaker 1: overhear other inmates confess to their crimes at least twelve
Speaker 1: different homicide cases. He told the authorities about these supposed
Speaker 1: confessions in exchange for benefits like reductions in his sentence.
Speaker 1: For his apparently priest like ability to hear confessions, Hall
Speaker 1: was nicknamed the Monseigneur. He would read newspaper articles about
Speaker 1: these stories and then claim that this suspect confessed to him,
Speaker 1: and he did it because he was getting something in return.
Speaker 1: He would get a cut in his sentence. He was
Speaker 1: a con man, he was a liar, and the fact
Speaker 1: that prosecutors were willing to use this man over and
Speaker 1: over again speaks volumes about this unholy alliance between police
Speaker 1: officers and prosecutors in Philadelphia. This partnership with such a
Speaker 1: prolific snitch had helped the Philly d A's office win
Speaker 1: a steady stream of convictions, But by the time of
Speaker 1: Walter Ogrod's second trial, the mons signor had accumulated such
Speaker 1: a reputation that even prosecutors realized he had no credibility left.
Speaker 1: The baggage around John Hall was so heavy that the
Speaker 1: prosecutors couldn't use him in this case. So what did
Speaker 1: Hall do? Hall trained another inmate in the details of
Speaker 1: Walter's story and used that inmate to be the snitch.
Speaker 1: He wasn't the only priest there to take confessions, that's right.
Speaker 1: He turned to jail and prison system in Pennsylvania into
Speaker 1: a seminary. For Walter's second trial, prosecutors got around their
Speaker 1: usual star witnesses credibility problem by calling a different inmate
Speaker 1: to testify. J. L. Chansky was an acolyte of John
Speaker 1: Hall and Jay was all too happy to take the
Speaker 1: monseigneur's place on the witness stand. At trial, Jay testified
Speaker 1: that Walter had confessed to him in jail. For good measure,
Speaker 1: Ja added a story about Walter describing what happened when
Speaker 1: his own mom asked if he'd killed Barbara Jeane. According
Speaker 1: to Jay, Walter told his mom, damn right, I did,
Speaker 1: and if you know what's best for you, you'll keep quiet.
Speaker 1: Believe it or not. This is enough. Based on Jay's
Speaker 1: snitch testimony and on the confession, Walter Ogrod was convicted
Speaker 1: of the murder of Barbara Jean Horn on October The
Speaker 1: next day, it took this jury less than ninety minutes
Speaker 1: to sentence Walter Ogrod to death and off Walter went
Speaker 1: to death row. Walter's case went through years of appeals
Speaker 1: to no avail. Eventually, a team of lawyers from the
Speaker 1: Federal Community Defender Office in Philadelphia, along with attorneys from
Speaker 1: a local law firm, began to reinvestigate Walter's case. In
Speaker 1: two thousand and eleven, they filed a post conviction petition
Speaker 1: with some blockbuster pieces of evidence attached. First, the petition
Speaker 1: took down the snitches. It included an affidavit from the
Speaker 1: monseigneur himself, John Hall, who said that his buddy J.
Speaker 1: Wil Chansky never really talked to Walter in any detail
Speaker 1: at all. Instead, the monsignor had told Jay what to
Speaker 1: say about Walter. The monsigneur finally had his come to
Speaker 1: Jesus moment, he admitted that he had lied about Walter Ogrod.
Speaker 1: After the monsignor died, his widow also submitted an affidavits
Speaker 1: spilling details about the snitch scheme. Turns out she was
Speaker 1: an accomplice in fabricating the Monsigneur's confessions. It was her
Speaker 1: newspaper research that served as the basis for his stories,
Speaker 1: but when it came to Walter's case, she couldn't find
Speaker 1: much information in the papers, so she wrote Walter a letter,
Speaker 1: pretending to be a stripper, asking for information about his case. Walter,
Speaker 1: of course, never confessed anything to her. The story of
Speaker 1: his guilt was all made up. As for Walter's confession,
Speaker 1: the lawyers pointed out that Barbara Jean didn't have the
Speaker 1: kind of skull fracture as you'd expect if she had
Speaker 1: actually been hit over the head with a weight bar
Speaker 1: The confession just didn't match the facts of the case,
Speaker 1: and it seemed there was a reason for that. The
Speaker 1: same officer who interrogated Walter had been implicated in at
Speaker 1: least two other false confession cases. One involved a man
Speaker 1: who confessed to raping a seventies seven year old woman,
Speaker 1: and another involved a man who confessed to killing a
Speaker 1: local businessman. For closing those cases, the Philly police gave
Speaker 1: this officer the nickname Detective Perfect. Thankfully, both of these
Speaker 1: wrongfully convicted men were later exonerated, and Detective Perfect record
Speaker 1: was deservedly tarnished. The detective who took Walter Ograd's confession
Speaker 1: was a golden boy in the Philadelphia Police Department, and
Speaker 1: he claimed to have a success rate in getting confessions
Speaker 1: to close cases. There's a great quote from a journalist
Speaker 1: who followed this case very closely, man named Tom Loewenstein,
Speaker 1: who said, you know, having a nine percent clearance rate
Speaker 1: for a homicide detective, it's kind of like Mark McGuire
Speaker 1: hitting seventy five home runs. You gotta ask, did he
Speaker 1: do it honestly? Exactly? When you see detectives claiming to
Speaker 1: have that high of a confession rate, you know there's
Speaker 1: a lot of false confessions In that mix, the post
Speaker 1: conviction lawyers had presented a pretty compelling case for Walter's innocence. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: seven years later in the courts still had not issued
Speaker 1: a ruling. But while Walter's case was stalled, Philadelphia began
Speaker 1: to change In the people of Philadelphia elected a new
Speaker 1: unlikely district attorney, Larry Krasner. Larry was a civil rights
Speaker 1: lawyer who made his name suing the Philadelphia police for misconduct.
Speaker 1: He was elected on a wave of neighborhood activism led
Speaker 1: by Philadelphians of color who were angry at the authorities
Speaker 1: for years of abuse and neglect. Larry Krasner quickly came
Speaker 1: to define a new vision of what it meant to
Speaker 1: be a prosecutor. He did not believe in the death penalty,
Speaker 1: he did not believe in knee jerk mass incarceration, and
Speaker 1: he did not believe in keeping innocent men and women
Speaker 1: in prison. Here's our friend Carrie Wood, who works in
Speaker 1: the part of Larry Krasner's office dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions.
Speaker 1: Before she joined his office, she was a wrongful conviction
Speaker 1: lawyer like us, who worked at the Ohio Innocence Project
Speaker 1: Larry Krasner was really thinking about the system differently and
Speaker 1: wanting to return to her role of truth seeker and
Speaker 1: representing the whole community, not just a particular swath of it.
Speaker 1: That was really something that made me change my mind
Speaker 1: about wanting to work in a d a's office. Carry
Speaker 1: has crossed over to the prosecution side with the goal
Speaker 1: of changing it, and we're pretty proud of her. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: one of the biggest roadblocks to getting justice were often
Speaker 1: secutor's offices. I thought that coming to a d a's office,
Speaker 1: I might actually be able to make a difference to
Speaker 1: right past wrongs and to use those past wrongs to
Speaker 1: point to practices that needed to change. After Carrie began
Speaker 1: working in the Philadelphia Conviction Integrity Unit, one of the
Speaker 1: first cases assigned to her with Walter oh Grod. Walter's
Speaker 1: attorneys had pointed out that Barbara Jane Horn didn't have
Speaker 1: any skull fractures, and Walter's initial confession was that he
Speaker 1: had a hit her over the head with a large
Speaker 1: weight bar. That was certainly something that sounded worth investigating.
Speaker 1: Carry and her colleagues dove into Walter's case and what
Speaker 1: they found was revealing. We began to identify documents that
Speaker 1: looked like they had not been turned over to defense
Speaker 1: counsel at the time of the original trial. One of
Speaker 1: the things that really jumped out at me was notes
Speaker 1: from the prosecutor about what the actual a cause of
Speaker 1: death was. In those notes, it says Barbara Jeane Horn
Speaker 1: had not died from a blow to the head. The
Speaker 1: most likely scenario was that she had been suffocated. So
Speaker 1: that particular note in the file, once we came across it,
Speaker 1: was a pretty big deal. The state had known all
Speaker 1: along that Walter's confession, which didn't mention smothering once, was
Speaker 1: not true, even as it sought to execute him. In fact,
Speaker 1: a new review of the autopsy revealed that whatever did
Speaker 1: strike barbar Jine in the head was lightweight and thin
Speaker 1: in profile. It definitely wasn't the heavy weight bar that
Speaker 1: Walter's confession described. That was enough for Carrie and the
Speaker 1: conviction Integrity Unit to do DNA testing on the liquid
Speaker 1: that the Morgue had used to wash Barbara Jane's body.
Speaker 1: What else can Barbara Jeane tell me about what happened
Speaker 1: to her that maybe was missed at the time. The
Speaker 1: result they found a full male DNA profile. That profile
Speaker 1: didn't match anyone in the state or national DNA databases,
Speaker 1: But one thing was clear. The DNA definitely did not
Speaker 1: belong to Walter Ogrod. And unlike in so many of
Speaker 1: the stories we tell on this podcast, these prosecutors understood
Speaker 1: what a DNA exclusion like this meant. It was undeniable
Speaker 1: proof that Walter had been wrongfully convicted. On February, Carrie
Speaker 1: and her team filed a motion to throw out Walter's conviction.
Speaker 1: The evidence used to convict him, she wrote, was false, unreliable,
Speaker 1: and incomplete. Instead, she stated Walter oh Grod was very
Speaker 1: likely innocent. For Walter to win exoneration and leave death row,
Speaker 1: though it wasn't enough for the d a's office to
Speaker 1: declare him innocent. The judge had to agree to exonerate
Speaker 1: him or Walter wasn't going anywhere. This judge was a
Speaker 1: former prosecutor herself. She'd tried homicide cases alongside another prosecutor
Speaker 1: who later became the judge who presided over Walter's conviction.
Speaker 1: These two judges epitomized Philadelphia's old Guard, both its harshness
Speaker 1: and its crony is um so in the office of
Speaker 1: Larry Krasner that new reformer d A declared Walter Ogrod innocent. Well,
Speaker 1: the case encountered some major resistance. Once we had concluded
Speaker 1: our investigation, we were originally scheduled to have a hearing
Speaker 1: in front of the judge, but unfortunately COVID happened. COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen hit Pennsylvania only a few weeks after prosecutors asked
Speaker 1: the court to throw out Walter's conviction. Court operations slowed
Speaker 1: way down. The judge had scheduled a March hearing on
Speaker 1: Walter's case, but halfway through March she canceled it. She
Speaker 1: was too busy. Her clerk informed Walter's lawyers, and Walter's
Speaker 1: case was no more important than any other. It is
Speaker 1: more important and then any other. This is a case
Speaker 1: where the district attorney is saying, we believe this man
Speaker 1: is innocent. That almost never happens. She put Walter's life
Speaker 1: at risk. Prisons are a petri dish for this virus.
Speaker 1: COVID should have been a reason for fast tracking this,
Speaker 1: not an excuse for delaying it. But while the judge
Speaker 1: was delaying the hearing, Walter oh Grad, then fifty five
Speaker 1: years old, was falling ill. According to his lawyers, Walter
Speaker 1: spiked a hundred and three degree temperature and developed breathing
Speaker 1: problems that made him feel like he was inhaling through
Speaker 1: a wet sponge. In mid March, Walter was isolated in
Speaker 1: his cell and left to battle his symptoms alone. The
Speaker 1: prison where Walter was was a huge hot spot for COVID.
Speaker 1: You become concerned that, well, you know, is this COVID?
Speaker 1: Will he die in prison before he is able to
Speaker 1: be exonerated. Walter's lawyer as were terrified that he wouldn't
Speaker 1: live to see freedom. On March nineteenth, they filed an
Speaker 1: emergency request to get him tested for COVID and treat
Speaker 1: it at an outside hospital. The d A agreed, but
Speaker 1: the judge again delayed ruling for days. This is not
Speaker 1: the time for a power struggle. Give the guy the
Speaker 1: fucking test. Oh yeah, there are other people who want
Speaker 1: to be tested to but nobody else has been locked
Speaker 1: up for two decades or more for a crime they
Speaker 1: didn't commit. Walter ended up fighting whatever virus he had
Speaker 1: in his cell alone. After many days of sickness, he recovered.
Speaker 1: Walter's health crisis had passed, But what about his freedom?
Speaker 1: Walter's lawyers kept pressing, They've begged the judge for ten
Speaker 1: minutes of her time. Gotta wait until June was the reply. Finally,
Speaker 1: June five rolled around. In true fashion, the court hearing
Speaker 1: on Walter's release unfolded virtually on zoom. Alter appeared in
Speaker 1: orange prison clothing at a disposable face mask. At the hearing,
Speaker 1: Prosecutor Carrie would tearfully apologized both to Barbara Jane's mother,
Speaker 1: Sharon Fahey, and to Walter. I spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time with Sharon and saw the huge impact that this
Speaker 1: case had in her life for decades, and worked really
Speaker 1: hard to see if I could answer the questions for her,
Speaker 1: and then came up short. One of the hardest things
Speaker 1: for me to do is to tell her that I
Speaker 1: wasn't sure if I was gonna be able to find
Speaker 1: the person that did her little girl, and that it
Speaker 1: was the mistakes of this office that resulted in that. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, you can't begin to fix anything until you
Speaker 1: identify or admit that you have a problem, you apologize
Speaker 1: for it, and you begin to work to make things better.
Speaker 1: And Carrie also had something to say to Walter, something
Speaker 1: so beautiful that I'm going to read it to you now.
Speaker 1: I am sorry it took twenty eight years for us
Speaker 1: to listen to what Barbara Jeane was trying to tell
Speaker 1: us that you are innocent and that the words on
Speaker 1: your statement of confession came from Philadelphia Police detectives and
Speaker 1: not you. Not only did this misconduct result in twenty
Speaker 1: eight years of your life being stolen, but you were
Speaker 1: also threatened with execution based on falsehoods. Having worked on
Speaker 1: a number of cases that have resulted in an exonerations
Speaker 1: even before I came to the office, one of the
Speaker 1: things that the innocent person had often commented on was
Speaker 1: did they ever apologize? And most often the answer was no.
Speaker 1: Someone who's innocent, it's the thing they most often wanted
Speaker 1: to hear. I did a lot of work to try
Speaker 1: to rectify what I could, but for the things that
Speaker 1: I couldn't fix, the had caused harm, of course, you apologize.
Speaker 1: It was finally enough, after months of delay, the judge
Speaker 1: granted the d a's motion to throw out Walter's conviction
Speaker 1: and death sentence. Walter Ogrod walked out of prison that
Speaker 1: same day, after spending almost three decades behind bars. You know,
Speaker 1: wrongful convictions don't make people safer. You just slowly try
Speaker 1: to push forward and improve things so that more wrongful
Speaker 1: convictions like Mr Ogrod's don't happen. It's really hard for
Speaker 1: people to admit mistakes, you know. The hope is that
Speaker 1: more folks will be willing to step up and say
Speaker 1: I got it wrong. What I tend to focus on
Speaker 1: is can identify a problem and how can I fix it?
Speaker 1: What can I do to fix this for Mr Ogrod?
Speaker 1: And then what can we do to make it better
Speaker 1: for the citizens of Philadelphia. That's why I do the
Speaker 1: work that I do. That's why I work in the SEIU.
Speaker 1: The truth is the single most important being a prosecutor
Speaker 1: needs to be concerned with, because without truth, there can
Speaker 1: be no justice. It takes a lot of courage to
Speaker 1: face the truth, especially one that means someone with power
Speaker 1: has to admit they made a mistake. These are the
Speaker 1: prosecutors that bring nobility to the profession. These are the
Speaker 1: prosecutors that place seeking justice ahead of preserving convictions. You know,
Speaker 1: the ghost of Frank Rizzo still haunts the city of Philadelphia.
Speaker 1: There was a statue of Frank Rizzo erected as a
Speaker 1: monument to the city's law enforcement. That statute was a
Speaker 1: symbol of injustice. It became a rallying point for all
Speaker 1: of the activists seeking change to policing in Philadelphia, and
Speaker 1: finally the Mayor of Philadelphia, using a crane, lifted it
Speaker 1: from its moorings and removed Rizzo's at that monument to
Speaker 1: the old, unjust ways of doing things came down just
Speaker 1: a few days before Walter Ogron walked out of prison.
Speaker 1: To me, it's this sort of final fitting end to
Speaker 1: a kind of policing and a kind of law enforcement
Speaker 1: that plagued Philadelphia for years. It's the sign that change
Speaker 1: is here now and hopefully that it will endure. Out
Speaker 1: with the old, in with the new. And that's the
Speaker 1: story of Walter Ogrod. Next week, we'll tell you about
Speaker 1: a California man named Ricky Davis who came home from
Speaker 1: a party to find his housemate had been murdered. The
Speaker 1: case went cold until fourteen years later, when detectives coerced
Speaker 1: Ricky's ex girlfriend into implicating him. Police thought they'd found
Speaker 1: the killer, but it took nineteen more years for this
Speaker 1: cold case to finally be solved. Right wrongful conviction, false confessions,
Speaker 1: is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association
Speaker 1: with Signal Company Number one Special thanks to our executive
Speaker 1: producers Jason Flom and Kevin Wardis. Our production team is
Speaker 1: headed by Senior producer and Pope, along with producers Josh
Speaker 1: Hammer and Jess Shane. Our show is mixed by Jeanie Montalvo.
Speaker 1: John Colbert is our intrepid intern. Our music was composed
Speaker 1: by j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or
Speaker 1: Twitter at Laura ni Writer and you can follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at s Drizzen. For more information on the show,
Speaker 1: visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com. Be sure to follow
Speaker 1: the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at
Speaker 1: Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction