Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Laura and I writer. I am here
Speaker 1: with an update on a case we shared with you
Speaker 1: back in season two about Walter Ogrod. He's a Philadelphia
Speaker 1: man who is wrongly convicted because of the dirty tactics
Speaker 1: used by the infamous Philadelphia Police. For decades, the Philly
Speaker 1: Police to use brutality, lies, and corruption to rack up convictions,
Speaker 1: and as we now know, many of those were innocent people.
Speaker 1: But recently there's been an effort to right some of
Speaker 1: those wrongs. In the last two elections, the city voted
Speaker 1: for District Attorney Larry Krasner, who's committed to reforming the
Speaker 1: police department and letting innocent people out of prison. He
Speaker 1: established a Conviction Integrity Unit, which has accomplished more than
Speaker 1: twenty exonerations since it was formed in twenty eighteen. We've
Speaker 1: featured some of those stories on wrongful conviction, and the
Speaker 1: good work of Larry Krasner and the Philadelphia CiU continues.
Speaker 1: In February twenty twenty three, a young woman named India
Speaker 1: Spelman was exonerated after spending thirteen years behind bars. That
Speaker 1: makes her the first black woman exonerated in Philadelphia. Exoneration
Speaker 1: stories like Walter's and like India's, remind us we need
Speaker 1: big reforms to our system. To do that, we need
Speaker 1: brave attorneys and politicians who are willing to confront the
Speaker 1: old ways of doing things. That's why your voice matters,
Speaker 1: why your vote matters, because together we can support the
Speaker 1: changes that will bring real justice to the legal system.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions.
Speaker 2: I'm Laura and I writer, and I'm Steve Drison.
Speaker 1: Today we'll bring you to Philadelphia for the story of
Speaker 1: Walter Ogrod. Walter was sent to death row for a
Speaker 1: murder who didn't commit by an old school Philly justice
Speaker 1: system that was better known for injustice. Walter spent decades
Speaker 1: in prison until a new wave of reform minded esecutors
Speaker 1: went looking for the truth behind his conviction. Walter's story
Speaker 1: gives step and me hope that real reform is really possible.
Speaker 2: So I was born and raised in Philadelphia, and a
Speaker 2: few years ago Laura and I took a trip there
Speaker 2: for work. I'm very proud of Philadelphia and I like
Speaker 2: to show off the city. And there was this place
Speaker 2: that I had to take Laura to. It's not Constitution.
Speaker 1: Hall, Okay, not the Liberty Bell.
Speaker 2: It's the Eastern State Penitentiary.
Speaker 1: So you drive me to downtown Philly and there's this
Speaker 1: rundown relic of a prison that's crumbling. It's covered in cobwebs.
Speaker 1: It's almost like a haunted house in the middle of
Speaker 1: downtown Philadelphia. It's not used any longer.
Speaker 2: It was built in eighteen twenty nine.
Speaker 1: But it's been preserved there as this incredible monuments against
Speaker 1: mass incarceration.
Speaker 2: It's my favorite place to go because it fits the
Speaker 2: city's personality and history so well. This is the city
Speaker 2: with an unbelievable history of injustice, mass incarceration, and corruption
Speaker 2: within the criminal justice system. And this history of injustice
Speaker 2: it peaked when I was a child in the sixties
Speaker 2: and nineteen seventies. This was the time when Frank Rizzo
Speaker 2: was the police chief and then he was the mayor.
Speaker 2: He controlled the city and he sent out a message
Speaker 2: that when police officers coerced confessions, he had their backs.
Speaker 1: You know, just like Eastern State Penitentiary. Frank Rizzo has
Speaker 1: become the symbol for the heaviest of hands in the
Speaker 1: criminal justice system, for the way it can just come
Speaker 1: down on the backs of people, especially people without power,
Speaker 1: and that's exactly what we see in today's story, the
Speaker 1: story of Walter Ogrod. Today's story starts in Northeast Philadelphia.
Speaker 1: It's a working class part of Philly. The side streets
Speaker 1: are lined with bungalows and the main drags are lined
Speaker 1: with discount big box stores. The northeast is an outlying
Speaker 1: area pretty far from downtown, where the courthouses and police
Speaker 1: department are found. It even tried to secede once from
Speaker 1: the rest of the city. But when it comes to
Speaker 1: criminal justice, the Northeast is Philadelphia through and through. It's
Speaker 1: a full participant in the city's policing machine. When our
Speaker 1: story starts in nineteen eighty eight, that machine was notoriously
Speaker 1: harsh and way too often couldn't deliver real justice. It's
Speaker 1: July nineteen eighty eight, and on one of Northeast Phillies'
Speaker 1: side streets lived the family of a little girl, four
Speaker 1: year old Barbara Jean Horn. On the twelfth of July,
Speaker 1: Barbara Jane went missing sometime around two o'clock that afternoon.
Speaker 1: By five point thirty, a neighbor peeked inside a discarded
Speaker 1: television box that was sitting outside on a curb next
Speaker 1: to some trash cans. Inside the box was Barbara Jane,
Speaker 1: and she was dead. She was unclothed, her hair was wet,
Speaker 1: and she'd been struck five times on the head. It
Speaker 1: was a horrendous crime. Police swarmed the block and found
Speaker 1: four eye witnesses who'd seen a man earlier that afternoon
Speaker 1: dragging a cardboard box down the sidewalk. The eyewitnesses all
Speaker 1: gave roughly the same description. They'd seen a man with
Speaker 1: brown hair, around thirty years old, somewhere between five six
Speaker 1: and five nine, with a medium build. It was a
Speaker 1: pretty good description, but police weren't able to generate any
Speaker 1: real leads. After several months, Barba Jeane's murder was featured
Speaker 1: on the TV show Unsolved Mysteries and a police tip
Speaker 1: line was set up. Close to a thousand tips were
Speaker 1: phoned in, but police still couldn't solve the case after
Speaker 1: almost four years. In early nineteen ninety two, 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 Ogrod. Walter
Speaker 1: was a round shoulder's thick glasses kind of guy who
Speaker 1: lived across the street from Barbara Jean's family. He was
Speaker 1: black haired, six foot one, two hundred and twenty pounds,
Speaker 1: not exactly the short, slim man who'd been seen dragging
Speaker 1: that box. Walter had no criminal record at all, but
Speaker 1: he did have a record of profound learning disabilities over
Speaker 1: the years. Professionals who evaluated him used words like extreme
Speaker 1: dependency and social inadequacy. His teachers said that Walter was
Speaker 1: no troublemaker. He'd only ever get in trouble because he
Speaker 1: was in the wrong place at the wrong time. For
Speaker 1: Walter Ogrod, the wrong place at the wrong time was
Speaker 1: a Philadelphia interrogation room on April fifth, nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 1: That morning, police called Walter's house and left a message
Speaker 1: asking him to come in for questioning about Barbara Jean.
Speaker 1: He wasn't a suspect, they said, he was an informational witness.
Speaker 2: This happens all the time. But this is a ruse.
Speaker 2: There's all already a plan a foot. Police officers don't
Speaker 2: view that person as a witness. They view that person
Speaker 2: as a suspect. It's a ruse because it creates a
Speaker 2: context in which the confession is going to be viewed
Speaker 2: as voluntary. He drove down to the police station on
Speaker 2: his own accord. We told him that the door is
Speaker 2: open and he can leave at any time that he wants.
Speaker 2: All of these tactics we see over and over again,
Speaker 2: and oftentimes it's the first step down the road to
Speaker 2: a false confession.
Speaker 1: Walter was happy to help first chance he got. At
Speaker 1: about one point thirty that afternoon, Walter drove himself to
Speaker 1: the Philadelphia Police Administration Building. It's an imposing, severe nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties era complex that Philadelphians call the Roundhouse.
Speaker 2: The confession was one of police officer's main tools to
Speaker 2: solve cases that were still open.
Speaker 1: There were experts in breaking people, and the Roundhouse is
Speaker 1: where the breaking happened.
Speaker 2: 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 hour 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 2: Had been up for like thirty hours. He was exhausted.
Speaker 2: He came into the interrogation room expecting to be providing
Speaker 2: information that was helpful to the police, and he got
Speaker 2: hit with an avalanche.
Speaker 1: At the roundhouse, police put Walter into a back room
Speaker 1: where the table and chairs were bolted to the floor.
Speaker 1: That's where he'd face fourteen hours of interrogation.
Speaker 2: If you go without sleep for some period of time,
Speaker 2: it clouds your ability to make rational decisions and leads
Speaker 2: people to agree to things that they otherwise would never
Speaker 2: agreed to. And Walter had cognitive disabilities too, so these
Speaker 2: twin issues made him an easy mark.
Speaker 1: Now, the interrogation wasn't recorded, so we have no objective
Speaker 1: record of what happened in the room. But Walter has
Speaker 1: given a very detailed account of the interrogation. So here
Speaker 1: we go. According to Walter, a police started by asking
Speaker 1: where he'd been four years ago on the day Barbara
Speaker 1: Jean disappeared. He went to work, he said. After he
Speaker 1: got home he remembered seeing Barbara Jean's stepfather going door
Speaker 1: to door looking for her. But these answers didn't seem
Speaker 1: to satisfy the police. Walter started to feel strange. Why
Speaker 1: were the cops so interested in him? He stood up
Speaker 1: tried to leave the room, but he says his interrogators
Speaker 1: blocked the door. The police handcuffed Walter to the chair
Speaker 1: and started showing him photos of Barbara Jean's dead body
Speaker 1: in the cardboard box. We think you did this, they said.
Speaker 1: Walter says. Police told him witnesses had identified him as
Speaker 1: the perpetrator, even though no one actually had, and when
Speaker 1: Walter insisted he was innocent, the police told him he
Speaker 1: must be blocking memories of the murder. They wrote down
Speaker 1: a description of how they thought Walter had committed the crime.
Speaker 1: If you don't sign this confession, they said, we're going
Speaker 1: to take you downstairs and we're going to put you
Speaker 1: in a cell with a bunch of black people. We're
Speaker 1: going to tell them you killed a bunch of black children,
Speaker 1: and then we're going to see what happens. Except, of course,
Speaker 1: they didn't use the word black.
Speaker 2: This is the old school police department, the department built
Speaker 2: by Frank Rizzo, who was an unabashed racist. I mean,
Speaker 2: when he ran for mayor, he would hand out buttons
Speaker 2: to his supporters that said vote white. It's no surprise
Speaker 2: in this context that Walter Ogrod's interrogation was saturated with racism.
Speaker 1: By three point thirty in the morning, Walter had had enough.
Speaker 1: He signed each page of a sixteen page confession, all
Speaker 1: of which had been written out by the police. According
Speaker 1: to the confession, Walter lured Barbara Jean into his basement,
Speaker 1: where he tried to molest her. When she resisted, he
Speaker 1: flew into a rage and hit her on the head
Speaker 1: with a two foot long metal bar from his weight set.
Speaker 1: He rinsed off her body, hid her clothes in a
Speaker 1: crawl space, and put her in the cardboard box. It
Speaker 1: was a brutal statement enough to get Walter booked into
Speaker 1: jail and charged with murder, but by seven a m.
Speaker 1: Walter was recanting. He called an attorney from jail totally
Speaker 1: distraught and said that police were telling him that he'd
Speaker 1: killed a little girl and had a mental block about it.
Speaker 1: Walter said he didn't do it. When the lawyer asked
Speaker 1: why he hadn't called earlier, Walter explained that he had
Speaker 1: requested a lawyer during the interrogation, but the police had
Speaker 1: said they'd have to put him in jail until the
Speaker 1: lawyer came, and in the meantime the inmates would kill him.
Speaker 1: That was more than enough to dissuade Walter.
Speaker 2: You might be asking yourself, how can they do that?
Speaker 2: Aren't they supposed to stop when a suspect asked for
Speaker 2: the right to counsel? And the answer to that question
Speaker 2: is yes. That's the one bright line rule of interrogation.
Speaker 2: Suspect asks for a lawyer, police officers shut up until
Speaker 2: a lawyer comes into the room. But they could get
Speaker 2: away with it because there's no recording of this transaction.
Speaker 2: Police officers are going to say he never asked for
Speaker 2: a lawyer. And in Philadelphia, in a court of law
Speaker 2: during this time, nobody's gonna believe Walter.
Speaker 1: Ogrid Walter's trial for first degree murder began in October
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three. The only evidence against him was his confession,
Speaker 1: and there was plenty of reason to disbelieve it. The
Speaker 1: confession claimed that Walter had hidden Barber Jean's clothes in
Speaker 1: his crawl space, but Walter's defense pointed out that no
Speaker 1: clothes had been found there. A psychiatrist testified about Walter's
Speaker 1: limitations and said the confession wasn't written in Walter's style
Speaker 1: of speaking, and when Walter took the stand to proclaim
Speaker 1: his own innocence, it was pretty clear the confession was
Speaker 1: written in words he'd never use. On November fourth, nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety three, the jury announced its verdict not guilty.
Speaker 2: The jury acquitted Walter Ograd.
Speaker 1: Let's say that one more time. The jury found Walter
Speaker 1: not guilty. I mean, we almost never see this in
Speaker 1: confession cases.
Speaker 2: This is a rare event. It's like a total eclipse
Speaker 2: of the sun.
Speaker 1: For a moment, it looked like Walter was going home.
Speaker 1: But as soon as the acquittal was announced, one juror
Speaker 1: changed everything. He stood up and announced, I do not
Speaker 1: agree with the verdict. The courtroom erupted and the judge
Speaker 1: declared a mistrial. In the end, the jury had hung
Speaker 1: eleven in favor of acquittal, one in favor of conviction.
Speaker 1: After the trial, one of the eleven jurors who believed
Speaker 1: in Walter's innocence told the media that he saw gaping
Speaker 1: holes in the prosecution's case. I didn't put much stock
Speaker 1: in the confession, he said, I wanted to see evidence.
Speaker 1: Walter was retried in nineteen ninety six, and this time
Speaker 1: the prosecutors filled the holes in their case. They had
Speaker 1: recruited a notorious jailhouse 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 in at least
Speaker 1: twelve different homicide cases. He told the authorities about these
Speaker 1: supposed confessions in exchange for benefits like reductions in his sentence.
Speaker 1: For his apparently priestlike ability to hear confessions, Hall was
Speaker 1: nicknamed the Monseigneur.
Speaker 2: He would read newspaper articles about these stories and then
Speaker 2: claim that this suspect confus to him, and he did
Speaker 2: it because he was getting something in return. He would
Speaker 2: get a cut in his sentence. He was a con man,
Speaker 2: he was a liar, and the fact that prosecutors were
Speaker 2: willing to use this man over and over again speaks
Speaker 2: volumes about this unholy alliance between police officers and prosecutors
Speaker 2: in Philadelphia.
Speaker 1: This partnership with such a prolific snitch had helped the
Speaker 1: Philly DA's office win a steady stream of convictions, but
Speaker 1: by the time of Walter Ogrod's second trial, the Monseignor
Speaker 1: had accumulated such a reputation that even prosecutors realized he
Speaker 1: had no credibility.
Speaker 2: Left the baggage around John Hall was so heavy that
Speaker 2: the prosecutors couldn't use him in this case. So what
Speaker 2: did Hall do? Hall trained another inmate in the details
Speaker 2: of Walter's story and used that inmate to be the snitch.
Speaker 1: He wasn't the only priest there to take confessions.
Speaker 2: That's right. He turned the jail and prison system in
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania into a seminary.
Speaker 1: For Walter's second trial, prosecutors got around their usual star
Speaker 1: witnesses credibility problem by calling a different inmate to testify.
Speaker 1: Ja Wolchansky was an acolyte of John Hall, and Jay
Speaker 1: was all too happy to take the monseignor's place on
Speaker 1: the witness stand. At trial, Jay testified that Walter had
Speaker 1: confessed to him in jail. For good measure, Jay added
Speaker 1: a story about Walter, describing what happened when his own
Speaker 1: mom asked if he'd killed Barbara Jean. According to Jay,
Speaker 1: Walter told his mom, damn right, I did, and if
Speaker 1: you know what's best for you, you'll keep quiet, believe it
Speaker 1: or not. This is enough. Based on Jay's snitch testimony
Speaker 1: and on the confession, Walter Ogrod was convicted of the
Speaker 1: murder of Barbara jen Horn on October eighth, nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 1: The next day, it took this jury less than ninety
Speaker 1: minutes to sentence Walter Ogrod to death and off Walter
Speaker 1: went to death row. Walter's case went through years of
Speaker 1: appeals to no avail. Eventually, a team of lawyers from
Speaker 1: the Federal Community Defender Office in Philadelphia, along with attorneys
Speaker 1: from a local law firm, began to reinvestigate Walter's case.
Speaker 1: In twenty eleven, they filed a post conviction petition with
Speaker 1: some blockbuster pieces of evidence attached. First, the petition took
Speaker 1: down the snitches. It included an affidavit from the monseigneur himself,
Speaker 1: John Hall, who said that his buddy Jay Wolchansky never
Speaker 1: really talked to Walter in any detail at all. Instead,
Speaker 1: the Monseigneur had told Jay what to say about Walter.
Speaker 2: The Monseigneur finally had his come to Jesus moment, he
Speaker 2: admitted that he had lied about Walter Ogrod.
Speaker 1: After the Monseigneur died, his widow also submitted an affidavit's
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: that much information in the papers, so she wrote Walter
Speaker 1: a letter, pretending to be a stripper, asking for information
Speaker 1: about his case. Walter, of course, never confessed anything to her.
Speaker 1: The story of his guilt was all made up. As
Speaker 1: for Walter's confession, the lawyers pointed out that Barbara Jean
Speaker 1: didn't have the kind of skull fractures you'd expect if
Speaker 1: she had actually been hit over the head with a
Speaker 1: weight bar. The confession just didn't match the facts of
Speaker 1: the case, and it seemed there was a reason for that.
Speaker 1: The same officer who interrogated Walter had been implicated in
Speaker 1: at least two other false confession cases. One involved a
Speaker 1: man who'd confessed to raping a seventy seven year old woman,
Speaker 1: and another involved a man who confessed to killing a
Speaker 1: local businessman. Were 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 Perfects record
Speaker 1: was deservedly tarnished.
Speaker 2: The detective who took Walter Ograd's confession. Was a golden
Speaker 2: boy in the Philadelphia Police department, and he claimed to
Speaker 2: have a ninety five percent success rate in getting confessions
Speaker 2: to close cases.
Speaker 1: There's a great quote from a journalist who followed this
Speaker 1: case very closely, man named Tom Lowenstein, who said, you know,
Speaker 1: having a ninety five percent clearance rate for a homicide
Speaker 1: detective is kind of like Mark maguire hitting seventy five
Speaker 1: home runs. You got to ask, did he do it?
Speaker 1: Honestly exactly?
Speaker 2: When you see detectives claiming to have that high of
Speaker 2: a confession rate, you know there's a lot of false
Speaker 2: confessions in that mix.
Speaker 1: The post conviction lawyers had presented a pretty compelling case
Speaker 1: for Walter's innocent. Nonetheless, seven years later, in twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: the court still had not issued a ruling. But while
Speaker 1: Walter's case was stalled, Philadelphia began to change. In twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: the people of Philadelphia elected a new unlikely district attorney,
Speaker 1: Larry Krasner. Larry was a civil rights lawyer who made
Speaker 1: his name suing the Philadelphia police for misconduct. He was
Speaker 1: elected on a wave of neighborhood activism led by Philadelphians
Speaker 1: of color who were angry at the authorities for years
Speaker 1: of abuse and neglect. Larry Krasner quickly came to define
Speaker 1: a new vision of what it meant to be a prosecutor.
Speaker 1: He did not believe in the death penalty, he did
Speaker 1: not believe in knee jerk mass incarceration, and he did
Speaker 1: not believe in keeping innocent men and women in prison.
Speaker 1: Here's our friend Carrie Wood, who works in the part
Speaker 1: of Larry Krasner's office dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions. Before
Speaker 1: she joined his office, she he was a wrongful conviction
Speaker 1: lawyer like us who worked at the Ohio Innocence Project.
Speaker 3: Larry Krasner was really thinking about the system differently and
Speaker 3: wanting to return to a role of truth seeker and
Speaker 3: representing the whole community, not just a particular swath of it.
Speaker 3: That was really something that made me change my mind
Speaker 3: about wanting to work in a DA's office.
Speaker 1: Carrie has crossed over to the prosecution side with the
Speaker 1: goal of changing it, and we're pretty proud of her.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, one of the biggest roadblocks to getting justice were
Speaker 3: often prosecutors' offices. I thought that coming to a DA's office,
Speaker 3: I might actually be able to make a difference to
Speaker 3: right past wrongs and to use those past wrongs to
Speaker 3: point to practices that needed to change.
Speaker 1: After Carrie began working in the Philadelphia Conviction Integrity Unit,
Speaker 1: one of the first cases assigned to her with Walter Ogrod.
Speaker 3: Walter's attorneys had pointed out that Barbara Jean Horne didn't
Speaker 3: have any skull fractures, and Walter's initial confession was that
Speaker 3: he had a hit her over the head with a
Speaker 3: large weight bar. That was certainly something that sounded worth investigating.
Speaker 1: Carrie and her colleagues dove into Walter's case, and what
Speaker 1: they found was revealing.
Speaker 3: We began to identify documents that looked like they had
Speaker 3: not been turned over to defense counsel at the time
Speaker 3: of the original trial. One of the things that really
Speaker 3: jumped out at me was notes from the prosecutor about
Speaker 3: what the actual true cause of death was. In those notes,
Speaker 3: it says Barbara Jane Horn had not died from a
Speaker 3: blow to the head. The most likely scenario was that
Speaker 3: she had been suffocated. So that particular note in the file,
Speaker 3: once we came across it was a pretty big deal.
Speaker 1: The state had known all along that Walter's confession, which
Speaker 1: didn't mention smothering once, was not true, even as it
Speaker 1: sought to execute him. In fact, a new review of
Speaker 1: the autopsy revealed that whatever did strike Barbaraging in the
Speaker 1: head was light weight and thin in profile. It definitely
Speaker 1: wasn't the heavy weight bar that Walter's confession described. That
Speaker 1: was enough for Carrie and the Conviction Integrity Unit to
Speaker 1: do DNA testing on the liquid that the Morgue had
Speaker 1: used to wash Barbera Jane's body.
Speaker 3: What else can Barbara Jane tell me about what happened
Speaker 3: to her that maybe was missed at the time.
Speaker 1: The result they found a full male DNA profile. That
Speaker 1: profile 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 twenty eighth,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, Carrie and her team filed a motion to
Speaker 1: throw out Walter's conveytion. The evidence used to convict him,
Speaker 1: she wrote, was false, unreliable, and incomplete. Instead, she stated
Speaker 1: Walter Ogrod was very likely innocent. For Walter to win
Speaker 1: exoneration and leave death row, though it wasn't enough for
Speaker 1: the DA's office to declare him innocent, the judge had
Speaker 1: to agree to exonerate him or Walter wasn't going anywhere.
Speaker 1: This judge was a former prosecutor herself. She'd tried homicide
Speaker 1: cases alongside another prosecutor who later became the judge who
Speaker 1: presided over Walter's conviction. These two judges epitomized Philadelphia's old Guard,
Speaker 1: both its harshness and its cronyism. So when the office
Speaker 1: of Larry Krasner, that new reformer DA, declared Walter Ogrod innocent, well,
Speaker 1: the case encountered some major resistance.
Speaker 3: Once we had concluded our investigation, we were originally scheduled
Speaker 3: to have a hearing in front of the judge, but
Speaker 3: unfortunately COVID happened.
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen hit Pennsylvania only a few weeks after prosecutors
Speaker 1: asked the court to throw out Walter's conviction. Court operations
Speaker 1: slowed way down. The judge had scheduled a March twenty
Speaker 1: seventh hearing on Walter's case, but halfway through March she
Speaker 1: canceled it. She was too busy. Her clerk informed Walter's lawyers,
Speaker 1: and Walter's case was no more important than any other.
Speaker 2: It is more important than any other. This is a
Speaker 2: case where the district attorney is saying, we believe this
Speaker 2: man is innocent. That almost never happens. She put Walter's
Speaker 2: life at risk. Prisons are a petri dish for this virus.
Speaker 2: COVID should have been a reason for fast tracking this,
Speaker 2: not an excuse for delaying it.
Speaker 1: But while the judge was delaying the hearing, Walter Ogrod,
Speaker 1: then fifty five years old, was falling ill. According to
Speaker 1: his lawyers, Walter spiked one hundred and three degree temperature
Speaker 1: and developed breathing problems that made him feel like he
Speaker 1: was inhaling through a wet sponge. In mid March, Walter
Speaker 1: was isolated in his cell and left to battle his
Speaker 1: symptoms alone.
Speaker 3: The prison where Walter was was a huge hotspot for COVID.
Speaker 3: You become concerned that, well, you know, is this COVID?
Speaker 3: Will he die in prison before he is able to
Speaker 3: be exonerated.
Speaker 1: Walter's lawyers were terrified that he wouldn't live to see freedom.
Speaker 1: On March nineteenth, they filed an emergency request to get
Speaker 1: him tested for COVID and treated at an outside hospital.
Speaker 1: The DA agreed, but the judge again delayed ruling for days.
Speaker 2: This is not the time for a power struggle. Give
Speaker 2: the guy the fucking test. Oh yeah, there are other
Speaker 2: people who want to be tested too, but nobody else
Speaker 2: has been locked up for two decades or more for
Speaker 2: a crime they didn't commit.
Speaker 1: Walter ended up fighting whatever virus he had in his
Speaker 1: cell alone. After many days of sickness, he recovered. Walter's
Speaker 1: health crisis had passed, But what about his freedom? Walter's
Speaker 1: lawyers kept pressing. They begged the judge for ten minutes
Speaker 1: of her time. Got to wait until June was the reply. Finally,
Speaker 1: June fifth rolled around. In true twenty twenty fashion, the
Speaker 1: court hearing on Walter's release unfolded virtually on zoom. Walter
Speaker 1: appeared in orange prison clothing and a disposable face mask.
Speaker 1: At the hearing. Prosecutor Carrie Wood tearfully apologized both to
Speaker 1: Barbara Jean's mother, Sharon Fahee and to Walter.
Speaker 3: I spent a lot of time with Sharon and saw
Speaker 3: the huge impact that this case had on her life
Speaker 3: for decades, and worked really hard to see if I
Speaker 3: could answer the question for her, and then came up short.
Speaker 3: One of the hardest things for me to do is
Speaker 3: to tell her that I wasn't sure if I was
Speaker 3: going to be able to find the person that did
Speaker 3: to her little girl, and that it was the mistakes
Speaker 3: of this office that resulted in that. You know, you
Speaker 3: can't begin to fix anything until you identify or admit
Speaker 3: that you have a problem, you apologize for it, and
Speaker 3: 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 Jean was trying to tell us.
Speaker 1: That you are innocent, and that the words on your
Speaker 1: statement of concession came from Philadelphia police detectives and not you.
Speaker 1: Not only did this misconduct result in twenty eight years
Speaker 1: of your life being stolen, but you were also threatened
Speaker 1: with execution based on falsehoods.
Speaker 3: Having worked on a number of cases that have a
Speaker 3: result exonerations. Even before I came to the office, one
Speaker 3: of the things that the innocent person had often commented
Speaker 3: on was did they ever apologize? And most often the
Speaker 3: answer was no. Someone who's innocent, it's the thing they
Speaker 3: most often wanted to hear. I did a lot of
Speaker 3: work to try to rectify what I could, but for
Speaker 3: the things that I couldn't fix that had caused harm,
Speaker 3: of course you apologize.
Speaker 1: It was finally enough, after months of delay, the judge
Speaker 1: granted the DA's motion to throw out Walter's conviction and
Speaker 1: death sentence. Walter Ogrod walked out of prison that same day,
Speaker 1: after spending almost three decades behind bars.
Speaker 3: You know, wrongful convictions don't make people safer. You just
Speaker 3: slowly tried to push forward and improve things so that
Speaker 3: more wrongful convictions like mister o'crod's don't happen. It's really
Speaker 3: hard for people to admit mistakes. The hope is that
Speaker 3: more folks will be willing to step up and say
Speaker 3: I got it wrong. What I tend to focus on
Speaker 3: is can to identify a problem and how can I
Speaker 3: fix it? What can I do to fix this? For
Speaker 3: mister Ogrod and then what can we do to make
Speaker 3: it better for the citizens of Philadelphia. That's why I
Speaker 3: do the work that I do. That's why I work
Speaker 3: in a CiU.
Speaker 2: The truth is the single most important thing a prosecutor
Speaker 2: needs to be concerned with, because without truth, there can
Speaker 2: be no justice.
Speaker 1: It takes a lot of courage to face the truth,
Speaker 1: especially when that means someone with power has to admit
Speaker 1: they made a mistake.
Speaker 2: These are the prosecutors that bring nobility to the profession.
Speaker 2: These are the prosecutors that place seeking justice ahead of
Speaker 2: preserving convictions. You know, the ghost of Frank Rizzo still
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 2: That statute was a symbol of injustice. It became a
Speaker 2: rallying point for all of the activists seeking change to
Speaker 2: policing in Philadelphia, and finally, the Mayor of Philadelphia, using
Speaker 2: a crane, lifted it from its moorings and removed Rizzo's statute.
Speaker 1: That monument to the old, unjust ways of doing things
Speaker 1: came down just a few days before Walter Ogerrod walked
Speaker 1: out of prison.
Speaker 2: To me It's this sort of final fitting end to
Speaker 2: a kind of policing and a kind of law enforcement
Speaker 2: that plagued Philadelphia for years. It's the sign that change
Speaker 2: is here now and hopefully it will endure.
Speaker 1: Out with the old, in with the new. Wrongful Conviction
Speaker 1: False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
Speaker 1: in association with Signal Company Number one Special thanks to
Speaker 1: our executive producers Jason Flamm and Kevin Wardis. Our production
Speaker 1: team is headed by Senior producer and Pope, along with
Speaker 1: producers Joshi Hammer and Jess Shane. Our show is mixed
Speaker 1: by Genie Montalvo. John Colbert is our intrepid intern. Our
Speaker 1: music was composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow me
Speaker 1: on Instagram or Twitter at Laura and I Wrider, and
Speaker 1: you can follow.
Speaker 2: Me on Twitter at s Drizzen.
Speaker 1: For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast
Speaker 1: dot com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram
Speaker 1: at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and
Speaker 1: on Twitter at wrong Conviction