Speaker 1: I fell into the hands of corrupt detective. I was
Speaker 1: naive enough to believe that I would be able to
Speaker 1: just present all of my proof of actual innocence, that
Speaker 1: they would investigate adequately, and so that I wouldn't be
Speaker 1: going to prison because I was a good person. I
Speaker 1: hadn't anything wrong. In the back of your mind, you say, well,
Speaker 1: when we go to a hearing or we go to court,
Speaker 1: the truth will come out. The prosecution from day one
Speaker 1: knew I was innocent and let force testimony go uncorrected
Speaker 1: from the lower courts all the way up to United
Speaker 1: States Supreme Court. You have someone with a badge with
Speaker 1: ultimate and really, in that moment, unchecked authority. Don't presume
Speaker 1: that people are guilty when you see him on TV,
Speaker 1: because it may just be a dirty d a that
Speaker 1: is trying to rise upward. This is wrongful conviction. Welcome
Speaker 1: back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam Today's guest as
Speaker 1: someone fans of the show will recognize, jeff Deskovic. Jeffrey
Speaker 1: Deskovich spent more than a decade in prison for the
Speaker 1: rape and murder of a classmate. It was a crime
Speaker 1: he did not commit. A sixteen year old is arrested
Speaker 1: for rape and murder. He's grown by police and given
Speaker 1: a lie detector test, and eventually the police talk him
Speaker 1: into a false confession. Even though DNA did not link
Speaker 1: him to the crime. He sort of sixteen years in
Speaker 1: prison before new testing shows another man committed that crime.
Speaker 1: In January two thousand six, the Innocence Project convinced prosecutors
Speaker 1: to take another look at DNA evidence. New testing technology
Speaker 1: clear Deskovic of crime, identifying the real killer, and releasing
Speaker 1: Deskovic into a world you no longer new. Today, Deskovic
Speaker 1: is a free man. Jeff, welcome back to Wrongful Conviction.
Speaker 1: Thanks for how to make Jason's always a pleasure. And
Speaker 1: Jeff was here before with Amanda Knox and Jared Adams
Speaker 1: when we did a very special Wrongful Christmas where he
Speaker 1: spoke so eloquently about what it was like being locked
Speaker 1: up in a maximum security prison on the holidays when
Speaker 1: everyone else is out celebrating in the world's going on
Speaker 1: without you. But this time I'm really glad to have
Speaker 1: you here, Jeff, because your story is so important, and
Speaker 1: so I want to get right back into that you
Speaker 1: grew up in White Plains, No I grew up in
Speaker 1: Peakskill in Westchester County. My case happened in White Plains.
Speaker 1: That's the county court. People are going to scratch their
Speaker 1: heads or shake their heads when I say this. Right
Speaker 1: in your case, DNA evidence was presented at the trial
Speaker 1: that proved scientifically, with no doubt that you could not
Speaker 1: have been the perpetrator of the beating, rape and murder
Speaker 1: of the fifteen year old victim, Angela Correa. There is
Speaker 1: no way on God's green earth that you could have
Speaker 1: been the perpetrator, and yet you were convicted anyway. And
Speaker 1: that's what makes it's just I'm going to shake up
Speaker 1: the whole justice system and go, wait, that's not possible,
Speaker 1: it can't happen. And you were you were basically a
Speaker 1: child when this happened. I was. I was sixteen years
Speaker 1: old when I was arrested, and by the time the
Speaker 1: trial happened and I was wrongfully convicted, I was seventeen.
Speaker 1: So yes, I was a child, and I had very
Speaker 1: small awareness of what was going on, totally dependent on
Speaker 1: the lawyer, who was inept in a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: is fair to say that I was particularly vulnerable. It's
Speaker 1: such a tragic thing that happened to start with, And
Speaker 1: this was a young girl who was in your school.
Speaker 1: Were you in tenth grade at the time. I was,
Speaker 1: so you were in tenth grade. She was in tenth grade,
Speaker 1: and she was in two of my classes as a
Speaker 1: freshman and one as a sophomore. She was an immigrant
Speaker 1: from Columbia. She'd been in the country for about a
Speaker 1: year and a half. She lived a very very sheltered life,
Speaker 1: as I understand ended, in which she never went outside
Speaker 1: unless she was with her older sister or with her parents.
Speaker 1: And this one particular day, she received a assignment in
Speaker 1: her photography class to take some pictures of some foliage.
Speaker 1: The teacher assigned male students with the female students like
Speaker 1: a buddy system for you know, safety, and this male
Speaker 1: student who was assigned to her played hookey on the assignment.
Speaker 1: And so when Angela went to her house with her sister,
Speaker 1: her sister went to the restroom, and when she came
Speaker 1: back out, Angela decided to venture out on her own
Speaker 1: that one day to take the pictures, and unfortunately, that
Speaker 1: proved to be her last day. Unbelievable, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: really an incredible story. Like the one day this poor
Speaker 1: little girl decides to you be brave, right, right, so
Speaker 1: she ends up brutally beaten, raped and strangled, right, yes,
Speaker 1: And this must have caused pandemonium in the community. It
Speaker 1: absolutely did. There hadn't been a murder and big skill
Speaker 1: for about twenty years, and the whole city virtually shut down.
Speaker 1: I mean parents were coming right to the high school
Speaker 1: dropping their kids off and picking them up. There was
Speaker 1: repeated town hall meetings. The mayor and police were attending
Speaker 1: and giving safety tips, and people were vocalizing concerns and well, yeah,
Speaker 1: there was a monster on the loose exactly right, a
Speaker 1: real monster there was. And so yeah, as a parent,
Speaker 1: I would certainly be doing the same thing. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: let my kid out of my sight until this thing
Speaker 1: was resolved. So this creates, as we know, a lot
Speaker 1: of pressure right on law enforcement. They got to get
Speaker 1: this thing off their desks. Who knows what could happen, right,
Speaker 1: There's going to be articles written, there's gonna be TV,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be all that stuff. Right, when you have
Speaker 1: a high profile case, especially involving a child in a
Speaker 1: community where murder hasn't happened in twenty years, it's a
Speaker 1: pressure cooker. So how the hell did they end up
Speaker 1: picking on you? I didn't know you when you were sixteen,
Speaker 1: but I can imagine that you would be an extremely
Speaker 1: unlikely candidate for a brutal crime like this one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would. I would agree with that so well. When
Speaker 1: I was sixteen, I kind of lived a double life
Speaker 1: in a sense, in the sense that in school I
Speaker 1: was quiet, I was to myself. I was a little
Speaker 1: bit withdrawn because I wasn't really familiar with those kids
Speaker 1: and I didn't quite fit in with them. But after school,
Speaker 1: in the apartment building where I lived at, which coincidentally
Speaker 1: was right across the street from the high school, I
Speaker 1: was kind of like the life of the party. So
Speaker 1: myself and one other boy that lived there. I mean,
Speaker 1: there was a big group of kids that lived near
Speaker 1: complex and in the areas around it, and pretty much
Speaker 1: whatever I would suggest would mostly be what we would do.
Speaker 1: I mean, we would swim, we would play basketball, ride bikes,
Speaker 1: play Monopoly, video games, movies. We made up some game.
Speaker 1: We made up a game that was like baseball, except
Speaker 1: it was played with a tennis racket and a tennis ball,
Speaker 1: and the ball had to be thrown a certain way.
Speaker 1: And I was a different person there, you know. So
Speaker 1: the police story is that in the course of interviewing
Speaker 1: students from the high school, some of them told the police, Hey,
Speaker 1: you might want to talk to Jeff because he's quiet
Speaker 1: into himself. So originally the police looked at the victim's stepdad,
Speaker 1: who was married to the victim's mother, but at some
Speaker 1: point he realized that he was a suspect, and he
Speaker 1: hired a retired New York City detective to investigate the crime,
Speaker 1: and so that persuaded them to move off of him.
Speaker 1: Then they looked at another youth in the high school
Speaker 1: and they started using um interrogative tactics, which they would
Speaker 1: use on on me later on. But the difference is
Speaker 1: that he had a stepfather in the home, and so
Speaker 1: the stepfather went down to the police station and broke
Speaker 1: up the interrogation, and they initially wouldn't let him in
Speaker 1: the room, but he broke up the interrogation and he
Speaker 1: got his stepson an attorney, and so that was the
Speaker 1: end of that. I, on the other hand, didn't have
Speaker 1: a stepfather and in the home, so there wasn't anybody
Speaker 1: to intervene for me. It was just you and your mother.
Speaker 1: At the time, myself, my mother, and I lived with
Speaker 1: my grandmother, and then I had a younger brother. So
Speaker 1: the police story is that some of the kids in
Speaker 1: the school told them that they might want to talk
Speaker 1: to me, and the other their other theory as to
Speaker 1: why they focused in on me, they said that my
Speaker 1: emotional reaction to the victim having been murdered was disproportionate
Speaker 1: to what my actual relationship with there was, which was
Speaker 1: to say there was no relationship. I mean, I knew
Speaker 1: her names, she knew mine. We weren't even on a
Speaker 1: high by basis. So her being murdered it kind of
Speaker 1: struck me because that was really my first encounter with death.
Speaker 1: I thought that was something that happens that people at
Speaker 1: the end of life. I had a chance to briefly
Speaker 1: get to know the family. I went to the wig
Speaker 1: and people were invited back to their house to the
Speaker 1: carea household to have coffee and talk to the family,
Speaker 1: and there was cookies and stuff, and so I guess
Speaker 1: you could say, you might say I was kind of
Speaker 1: a a sensitive, sentimental type of person, so it kind
Speaker 1: of touched me a little by the way you might
Speaker 1: say you were a normal type of person right, And
Speaker 1: it always boggles my mind how these authority figures suddenly
Speaker 1: become experts, psychiatrists or psychologists, and we see it over
Speaker 1: and over again. He acted too sad, he didn't act
Speaker 1: sad enough, he was too upset, and not upset enough.
Speaker 1: He ran into the fire. He didn't. You know, there's
Speaker 1: all these cases where they that becomes a factor when
Speaker 1: it is it's ridiculous. Nobody knows how anyone is going
Speaker 1: to react in times of trauma. And I would say,
Speaker 1: like I said that, your reaction sounds to me like
Speaker 1: a sensitive person who is just experiencing something in their
Speaker 1: own community with somebody that's an innocent young girl. Of
Speaker 1: course you're upset. Yeah, I agree with a completely And
Speaker 1: I want to add that this really shook up the
Speaker 1: whole city to the point that free mental health counseling
Speaker 1: was offered to anybody in the city who wanted it.
Speaker 1: So this affected many people emotionally. Had you ever been
Speaker 1: in trouble before? No, never been in trouble, So so
Speaker 1: the cops at some point they come and pick you up.
Speaker 1: But your interrogation is really at the root of the
Speaker 1: entire problem, and it is it is a perfect example
Speaker 1: of everything that's wrong with interrogation techniques in this country
Speaker 1: even today. It is. There was a six week run
Speaker 1: up to that day, so I had interaction with the
Speaker 1: police from the time they initially intercepted me on my
Speaker 1: way to the high school up until the day of
Speaker 1: the course false confession, in which half the time they
Speaker 1: would talk to me as if I was a suspect,
Speaker 1: and then half the time they would talk to me
Speaker 1: pretending like they needed my help to solve the crime.
Speaker 1: They would say things like, the kids won't talk freely
Speaker 1: around us, but they will around you. Let us know
Speaker 1: if you hear any rumors. They made me the center
Speaker 1: of attention. They would ask me opinion questions and then exciting, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: congrat it was congratulate me in my opinions being correct.
Speaker 1: My fantasy childhood career was actually to be a cop.
Speaker 1: So this unexpected early opportunity to do this quasi police work.
Speaker 1: You know, it was part of how they pulled the
Speaker 1: wool over my eyes, along with my age, so that
Speaker 1: was sixteen. They used to buy pizza and listen. I
Speaker 1: grew up in a single parent household as well, as
Speaker 1: we mentioned, and that directly intersected with the good cop,
Speaker 1: bad cop routine, and then I started looking up to
Speaker 1: the cop who was pretending to be my friend as
Speaker 1: a father figure. Yeah exactly. I mean again, you're sixteen,
Speaker 1: so okay, so they're sort of sort of spinning this
Speaker 1: web and seducing you and trying to get you to
Speaker 1: say something that would be incriminating. Now we know that's
Speaker 1: what they were doing, right, Yeah exactly. And so finally
Speaker 1: at the end they told me that they received some
Speaker 1: new tip that was in the police file and they
Speaker 1: wanted to share that with me. But to do that,
Speaker 1: I would, uh, first have to take and pass a polygraph.
Speaker 1: So help us, to help you, to help us type
Speaker 1: of logic was employed. So instead of going to the
Speaker 1: school the next day, I instead went to the police
Speaker 1: station where I thought the polygraph was going to happen,
Speaker 1: because through the rumor mill of of the city I
Speaker 1: had heard that other people were had been polygraphed at
Speaker 1: the police station. But actually they drove me from Peak Skill,
Speaker 1: which was in Westchester County. They drove me forty minutes
Speaker 1: away out of county to the town of Brewster, which
Speaker 1: is in Putnam County. So they drove me to Brewster
Speaker 1: to this polygraph. His former Putnam County Sheriff's investigator, Daniel Stevens,
Speaker 1: and he was an officer, but he was dressed as
Speaker 1: a civilian and he never identified himself as as a cop,
Speaker 1: and he never read me my Miranda warning, so I
Speaker 1: thought that he was a civilian. M hm. So he
Speaker 1: gave me this manual to look at about how the
Speaker 1: polygraph works, and it had a lot of really big
Speaker 1: words in it that were beyond my comprehension, but I
Speaker 1: didn't care because I was there to help the police,
Speaker 1: so who cares what the thing says? So I thought.
Speaker 1: They put me into a small room and the polygraph
Speaker 1: is Stevens became like a virtual coffee dispenser. I mean,
Speaker 1: I must have drank six or seven cups, and no
Speaker 1: sooner would I put the cup down, and the cup
Speaker 1: would be halfway filled up, and you know, he's giving
Speaker 1: me another one. And it seems pretty clear in hindsight
Speaker 1: that the purpose of that was to make me nerve right,
Speaker 1: exactly right. So once he finished the coffee routine, then
Speaker 1: he straps me into the polygraph machine, which was fairly heavy.
Speaker 1: So you know, now I've kind of immobilized it's a
Speaker 1: very small room, and that's when he launches into his
Speaker 1: third degree tactics. So he invaded my personal space. He
Speaker 1: raised his voice at me. He kept asking me the
Speaker 1: same questions over and over again. And keep in mind
Speaker 1: that I'm not used to interacting with adult males and
Speaker 1: the way he's conducting himself, and he's kind of a
Speaker 1: mountain of a man and I'm sixteen, like maybe forty pounds,
Speaker 1: so can wet, you know. So it's really frightening. So
Speaker 1: each hour that goes by, my fears increasing in proportion
Speaker 1: to the time. So Stevens kept that up for about
Speaker 1: six or seven hours. Towards the end of the interrogation,
Speaker 1: that's when he said to me, I guess by then
Speaker 1: he was just um frustrated by not having been able
Speaker 1: to get me to confess to that point, he said,
Speaker 1: what do you mean you didn't do it? You just
Speaker 1: told me through the polygraph test results that you did.
Speaker 1: We just want you to verbally confirm it. So when
Speaker 1: he said that to me, that really shot my fear
Speaker 1: through the roof. And at that moment, the officer who
Speaker 1: was been pretending to be my friend, he came in
Speaker 1: the room and told me that the other officers were
Speaker 1: gonna harm me, that he was holding them off, but
Speaker 1: he couldn't do so any longer, that I had to
Speaker 1: help myself. And then he added that if I did
Speaker 1: as he as they wanted, that not only would they
Speaker 1: stop that they were doing, but that I could go
Speaker 1: home afterwards, that I was not going to be arrested.
Speaker 1: Being young, naive, frightened, sixteen years old in fear of
Speaker 1: my life because the fact that I didn't know where
Speaker 1: I was, and that I knew that nobody else did either,
Speaker 1: that loom very large in my mind. It's incredible. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's so it's total disorientation, right, I mean, I mean,
Speaker 1: and it's you know, it's diabolical. But if what you
Speaker 1: want is a false confession, this would be textbook this
Speaker 1: is the way to do it. Yeah. And then I
Speaker 1: was emotionally overwhelmed also, And then there's the push pull dynamic,
Speaker 1: you know, there's the possibility of harm. But then he's
Speaker 1: thrown me this false life preserver and I took out
Speaker 1: which he offered. I made up a story based on
Speaker 1: information which they had given me that day and in
Speaker 1: the six weeks run up to that day, and by
Speaker 1: the time it was all said and done, I had
Speaker 1: collapsed on the floor, curled up into a fetal position,
Speaker 1: h crying uncontrollably. Obviously I was arrested. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: the whole thing was a lie. It's like a fucking charade, right, Uh.
Speaker 1: And it was easy for them. I mean, the miracle
Speaker 1: is that you didn't confess sooner. Actually, And you know,
Speaker 1: it's interesting, Jeff, We know that false confessions happened typically
Speaker 1: much later like yours. And you were among the most
Speaker 1: vulnerable people that's ever been put into this position, being
Speaker 1: that you were alone, you had no way out, you
Speaker 1: had no way to get home. You were in tenth grade,
Speaker 1: I mean tenth grade. You don't know what the funk
Speaker 1: you're doing. When you're in tenth grade, you're just a child,
Speaker 1: and you had very real concern that you were going
Speaker 1: to be beaten up or worse. You know, the fact
Speaker 1: that you were able to hang on for you know,
Speaker 1: almost nine hours in this situation is a testament to
Speaker 1: your strength, even in this most terrifying situation that you
Speaker 1: found yourself in. So now you're expecting to go home
Speaker 1: because that's what they told you, but they lie again, Yes,
Speaker 1: and so you signed this piece of paper. No, let me.
Speaker 1: There was no sign confession. I never signed a confession,
Speaker 1: and there was no audio or video. It was just
Speaker 1: the CoP's word as to what happened. And as a
Speaker 1: result of that, when we got to court, they conveniently
Speaker 1: left out the threat and the false promise. Wow. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's actually strange, Jeff, that they wouldn't have just put
Speaker 1: a piece of paper in front of because at this
Speaker 1: point you would have signed anything. You would have said
Speaker 1: that you stole them Onna Lisa, Right, Yeah, sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, I mean whatever for opinion for a pound. Look, man,
Speaker 1: I already I already decided I wanted to get the
Speaker 1: hell out of here. Tell you what you want to
Speaker 1: want to say? Yeah, this is the next thing you
Speaker 1: want me to say. Come on, get me out of
Speaker 1: and make good on your end. Yeah you want this
Speaker 1: extra thing? Come on, you got it? Can you honor
Speaker 1: your word? Down? So now you're arrested, and now the
Speaker 1: nightmare really begins, right, because you're as unprepared for this
Speaker 1: situation as someone can be. Right, you have no experience
Speaker 1: with criminal justice. You're not a big guy, you're not
Speaker 1: a tough guy. You're not emotionally developed to a point
Speaker 1: that you could be in any way, you know, steal
Speaker 1: yourself with what's going on. You're not educated enough to
Speaker 1: understand the proceedings. You don't you don't have a family
Speaker 1: that's able to hire, for lack of a better word,
Speaker 1: of dream team to help you. And so arrested in
Speaker 1: and now you're held in jail. I am awaiting trial.
Speaker 1: I was in jail for by thirty five days, and
Speaker 1: then I got bailed out. I got bailed out. At
Speaker 1: the time, my mother was dating a business person, not
Speaker 1: Jack Occasion, who had a carpet store, Occasion Carpets, and
Speaker 1: he was willing to bail me out, which he was
Speaker 1: hammered in the newspaper for just the fact of bailing
Speaker 1: me out, and he lost quite a bit of customer
Speaker 1: as a result of doing. That's innocent until proven Kelpy right,
Speaker 1: so they say not so much. So so even he's
Speaker 1: tarred by this, yes, reputation that you have. And now
Speaker 1: you go home. You're not in school anymore, right, You've
Speaker 1: been kicked out of school. So yeah, they would not
Speaker 1: allow me to go back to school until the case
Speaker 1: was resolved. And you know, I naively thought you know
Speaker 1: when I got bailed at, I was gonna go back
Speaker 1: to my life, but there was no going back to
Speaker 1: it ever. So what did you do to stay in
Speaker 1: the house. I stayed in the house. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I was afraid to go out, to be frank with you,
Speaker 1: that was a pariah. And the parents of my former
Speaker 1: friends would not allow them to play with me. And
Speaker 1: even if they had, I doubt very many of them
Speaker 1: would have wanted to anyway, because they thought I was guilty,
Speaker 1: because that's what the headlines and everything else was saying.
Speaker 1: And I couldn't go to school, I couldn't do anything.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I just I stayed in my house. But
Speaker 1: that was only for a few weeks. Though I tried
Speaker 1: to kill myself. I felt my life was over, and
Speaker 1: I took an entire bottle of extra strength Title and
Speaker 1: all that had not been used, and I took every
Speaker 1: last pill and I went to sleep, and I intended
Speaker 1: to never wake up again. Well, I think I'm in
Speaker 1: to think about that. I didn't know that part of
Speaker 1: your story. Um And and Jeff and I've spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time together, but they've never shared those details
Speaker 1: with me. It's really, um hard to hard to deal
Speaker 1: with My point of mentioning that though, is that that
Speaker 1: resulted in my being involuntarily committed into a mental hospital
Speaker 1: for six months. So now the worst is still to come.
Speaker 1: But you've now gone through this crazy rapid decline from
Speaker 1: a happy, go lucky, goofy kid, not a care in
Speaker 1: the world except for maybe a test coming up right,
Speaker 1: or maybe you have a date or maybe a done
Speaker 1: or whatever. We know all the things you go through
Speaker 1: an adolescence two being locked in a terrible jail, then
Speaker 1: they basically being under house arrest, being ostracized by your
Speaker 1: friends and the whole community, being pillar read in the
Speaker 1: newspapers and the media, and now you're in a mental institution.
Speaker 1: And then the trial comes, and then the trial comes,
Speaker 1: and just before the trial, the results of the DNA
Speaker 1: tests comes back from the FBI laboratory, which shows that
Speaker 1: the semen found in the victim didn't match me because
Speaker 1: remember she was raped, because she was raped. Yes, And
Speaker 1: by the way, the lieutenant who oversaw everything in the
Speaker 1: layer that he penned to the FBI asking them to
Speaker 1: expedite the testing, he wrote in the letter that the
Speaker 1: DNA testing would either show my guilt or it would
Speaker 1: exonerate me. But when it came back and it didn't
Speaker 1: match me, my lawyer did try to get the indictment
Speaker 1: dismissed against me based on that, but the judge denied
Speaker 1: that motion. That that alone seems so just incomprehensible to me.
Speaker 1: I mean, that just doesn't make sense. The judge is impartial, right,
Speaker 1: we know the prosecutor has an agenda, but the judge
Speaker 1: is impartial. Yeah, I don't know, I don't understand. I
Speaker 1: mean I know that back then DNA wasn't it wasn't
Speaker 1: as um, it wasn't as well known. But to be clear,
Speaker 1: I mean, DNA started being used in the court system
Speaker 1: as early as and this we're on trial now in
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, so it's been around for three years. So
Speaker 1: while not in currency like now, it is not exactly
Speaker 1: totally unknown, right, and it's perfect. I mean, it's the
Speaker 1: Bowl standard. So your DNA doesn't match. This is an
Speaker 1: inconvenient truth for the authorities. And the judge allows this,
Speaker 1: this circus to go on. So you go to trial, yes,
Speaker 1: and at the trial was the DNA allowed to be introduced? Yes,
Speaker 1: it was. So again, how does it end up that
Speaker 1: you get convicted under these circumstances. Sure. So firstly, as
Speaker 1: I mentioned, the cops left the threatened false promise out
Speaker 1: of the story, so I mean the story is still
Speaker 1: there's a lot enough red flags pertaining to circumstances around
Speaker 1: the confession accord into a question, but the threatened false
Speaker 1: promise weren't there. So that's one factor. Another factor is
Speaker 1: there was prosecutorial misconduct and fraud by the medical examiner.
Speaker 1: So in order to answer the DNA evidence, the prosecutor
Speaker 1: got the medical examiner to commit fraud. So when an
Speaker 1: autopsy's done, there's written an audio notes which are taken
Speaker 1: contemporary neously as the findings are made. So it was
Speaker 1: only six months after doing that initial autopsy, and only
Speaker 1: after the DNA result didn't match me, that this medical
Speaker 1: examiner for the first time suddenly claimed he suddenly remembers right.
Speaker 1: Six months later and hundreds of autopsies later, he suddenly
Speaker 1: remembers that he found medical evidence to show that the
Speaker 1: victim had been sexually active, which is what opened the
Speaker 1: door for the prosecutor to argue that it didn't matter
Speaker 1: that the semen didn't come from me, that that didn't
Speaker 1: mean I was innocent. That just meant that she could
Speaker 1: have had consensual sex close enough to the murdering rate
Speaker 1: so as to explain away the DNA. But that still
Speaker 1: wouldn't explain it away. It would just explain that there
Speaker 1: would be a mixture, right, exactly right, So that doesn't
Speaker 1: make any sense. And also, let's just reflect for a
Speaker 1: moment on the other victim in this case, and there
Speaker 1: are more. It's not just you and Angela, it is not.
Speaker 1: Let's just reflect for a minute that the authorities were
Speaker 1: willing to go so low. They had to know that
Speaker 1: you were innocent, but they were so determined to convict
Speaker 1: an innocent boy because you're a boy, that they were
Speaker 1: willing to drag the reputation of a fifteen year old
Speaker 1: girl through the mud, right, and put her family through
Speaker 1: that whenever the indication that she was a girl who
Speaker 1: was like as as goody two shoes as you could be.
Speaker 1: You don't even leave the house by yourself until that
Speaker 1: one faithful day. I mean, it's so disgusting, right, this
Speaker 1: girl who deserves at least to have a reputation protected
Speaker 1: is dragged through the mud. It's just disgusting. Jeff, Let
Speaker 1: me ask you this because you've become an expert in
Speaker 1: criminal justice. You've accomplished so much since you've been home,
Speaker 1: in terms of your education, in terms your investigative skills,
Speaker 1: in terms of your advocacy. You are one of the
Speaker 1: top people in the state or dry state, or maybe
Speaker 1: even the country now in terms of your breadth of
Speaker 1: knowledge of how these things work. To your great credit.
Speaker 1: And there was no physical evidence connecting you to this crime. Right,
Speaker 1: is it possible for someone to beat, rape, and strangle
Speaker 1: someone and not leave any physical evidence at the clime scene.
Speaker 1: It's impossible. It's very very close to impossible. And just
Speaker 1: to delve into this a little bit more, one of
Speaker 1: my statements, I said that I hit the victim over
Speaker 1: the head with a gatorade bottle, because gatorade was made
Speaker 1: in glass bottles. But if you look at the types
Speaker 1: of injuries that the victim had on her head, a
Speaker 1: bottle would not be capable of making that type of injury.
Speaker 1: And on top of that, there was no broken glass
Speaker 1: at the crime scene. There was no shards of glass
Speaker 1: in the body. There's no relationship to the physical evidence
Speaker 1: and the statements in the confession at all. Right, So
Speaker 1: there was no physical evidence your confession stunk, yes, because
Speaker 1: you didn't know and there was DNA to prove that
Speaker 1: you didn't do it. Now they conspire somehow to drag
Speaker 1: this girl's reputation into the mud and in order to
Speaker 1: protect this false narrative that they've created. Right, But there's
Speaker 1: three other things that they did fighting the DNA. So
Speaker 1: taking his LAE a step further, the prosecutor then named
Speaker 1: another youth by name that he claimed probably had had
Speaker 1: sex with the victim, but he never had a DNA
Speaker 1: test to prove that, and he didn't even call him
Speaker 1: as a witness. He just made the unsupported argument to
Speaker 1: the jury. And then another thing was that I later
Speaker 1: learned through civil litigation that when the DNA didn't match me,
Speaker 1: the police went back out into the field and they
Speaker 1: interviewed seventeen witnesses who knew the victim in one capacity
Speaker 1: or another, and all of them told the police that
Speaker 1: there was no boyfriend, there was no consensual sex. But
Speaker 1: the cops never documented any of those interviews so that
Speaker 1: they didn't have to turn those over to my lawyer.
Speaker 1: And the third thing was that the police fabricated a
Speaker 1: eatement and attributed to me. They claimed that I said
Speaker 1: to them, speaking in the third person. They claimed that
Speaker 1: I said, well, I don't know if the perpetrator ejaculated
Speaker 1: or not, so that that word was not in my
Speaker 1: vocabulary as a sixteen year old. And we proved that
Speaker 1: in the police reports, where they referenced that they only
Speaker 1: came up with that after the DNA didn't match me.
Speaker 1: That was never in their early written reports of the interrogation.
Speaker 1: So they fabricated that to help the prosecutor against the DNA.
Speaker 1: You know, it's bothering me greatly. Aside from all of
Speaker 1: this right now, Jeff, is the idea that there must
Speaker 1: have been meetings right where they were like, oh, like
Speaker 1: at very different stages. Oh, the DNA doesn't match. Oh,
Speaker 1: the witnesses are not connecting any boyfriend. Oh. Everything that
Speaker 1: they had said was turning out to be not true. Right,
Speaker 1: All their theories were going up in smoke, And there
Speaker 1: must have been at some point sit downs where they
Speaker 1: got with the medical I don't know this. I can't
Speaker 1: prove it, but I'm guessing. Examiner testified at the at
Speaker 1: the that position in the lawsuit. He said that the
Speaker 1: day after the DNA didn't match me, he got a
Speaker 1: phone call from one of three people, and he said
Speaker 1: that they told him that the DNA didn't match being
Speaker 1: he had to come up with some kind of a
Speaker 1: theory by which the case against me could continue and
Speaker 1: a conviction could result. Unbelievable. I mean, it's it's unbelievable.
Speaker 1: I mean, I can't I can't fathom it. Um. So
Speaker 1: there you are a trial. So that's on the prosecution end,
Speaker 1: but I wanted the other part of how I got
Speaker 1: convicted was the public defender, who supposedly was the best
Speaker 1: lawyer in legally to Westchester. He was terrible. He very
Speaker 1: rarely met with me. Whenever I would try to explain
Speaker 1: to him that I was innocent and what happened in
Speaker 1: the interrogation room, he was always shutting me up. One
Speaker 1: time he told me he didn't care if I was
Speaker 1: guilty or innocent. He never explained to the jury the
Speaker 1: significance of the DNA not matching me. He never used
Speaker 1: the DNA to argue that this so called confession was
Speaker 1: coerced and false. When we hadn't decided if we were
Speaker 1: going to go with a bench trial or a jury trial,
Speaker 1: he came to me one day and told me that
Speaker 1: the trial judge came to him off the record and
Speaker 1: told him to pick a jury because he didn't want
Speaker 1: to be responsible for acquitting me. So my lawyer was
Speaker 1: supposed to put that on the record and asked the
Speaker 1: judge to recuse himself, because that's a prejudicial type of statement,
Speaker 1: and also suggests that the judges feeling public pressure, because
Speaker 1: again this is i'm a Virtually all of the coverage
Speaker 1: is guilt presumptive oriented. So additionally, my lawyer was not
Speaker 1: supposed to represent me because of a conflict of interest
Speaker 1: in that this other youth that the prosecution was falsely
Speaker 1: claiming had had sex with the victim was represented by
Speaker 1: another lawyer in legal aid, which meant that the defense
Speaker 1: couldn't ask him to give a DNA sample, the defense
Speaker 1: couldn't subpoena to him in order to explode the consensual
Speaker 1: sex theory. Because right and then, the best thing or
Speaker 1: worst thing of all, was when it was time to
Speaker 1: cross examine the medical examiner, whose fraud was so large
Speaker 1: in this case, he never even bothered to cross examine him.
Speaker 1: He stood up in open court and with a big
Speaker 1: smile on his face, as if him and the medical
Speaker 1: examiner were great friends from back in the day. He
Speaker 1: said to him, you're gonna be pleased to know that
Speaker 1: I don't have a single question for you. He never
Speaker 1: interviewed nor presented as a witness my alibi. I was
Speaker 1: actually playing whiffle ball when the crime happened, and he
Speaker 1: wouldn't allow me to testify at the pre trial hearing
Speaker 1: to put the threatened false promise on the record, and
Speaker 1: when it was time for the defense to try to
Speaker 1: put a case on he said to me that it
Speaker 1: wasn't his job to prove that I was innocence. It's
Speaker 1: up to the prosecution to prove that I was guilty,
Speaker 1: and he didn't think that that had happened, so added
Speaker 1: all up, I was wrongfully convicted of a murder and rape.
Speaker 1: It's it's unreal. I mean, this stuff goes on in America.
Speaker 1: It's just it's just insane. So you end up getting
Speaker 1: convicted and sentenced to fifteen to life. At the sentencing hearing,
Speaker 1: I begged the judge to overturn the verdict because I
Speaker 1: was innocent, and I referenced the DNA to support my contention,
Speaker 1: and he actually told me on the record, maybe you
Speaker 1: are innocent, conceding that there is a doubt, but the
Speaker 1: DNA doesn't doesn't match me. How could there not be
Speaker 1: a doubt? But you might think that he would step
Speaker 1: up for justice and overturn the conviction by reversing any
Speaker 1: number of rulings that he made against me in the
Speaker 1: course of the trial. But he didn't do that. He
Speaker 1: took the easy, politically expedient way out, which was to
Speaker 1: sentence me to a term of imprisonment of fifty into life,
Speaker 1: fifteen years to life. Now you're only seventeen at this time,
Speaker 1: So this is basically that's an incomprehensible thing to face
Speaker 1: for anybody, but at least of all for a child.
Speaker 1: And then you end up in some of the worst
Speaker 1: prisons in America, and you go into these places unprepared
Speaker 1: in every imaginable way, and you go in under the
Speaker 1: worst possible circumstance, which is it's someone who has been
Speaker 1: convicted of raping and murdering a child. Exactly how did
Speaker 1: you survive in there? Jeff? Huh huh? How did you
Speaker 1: keep hope alive? All right? So, in terms of how
Speaker 1: to how I kept hope alive on definitely believe in
Speaker 1: God was one thing. Another thing was. I didn't look
Speaker 1: at it like I was doing fifteen into life. I
Speaker 1: thought I was just doing a year or two until
Speaker 1: the next appeal would be decided, which I was sure
Speaker 1: I was gonna win, because I knew I was innocent,
Speaker 1: and I still naively believed in the them. I found
Speaker 1: different things to throw myself into mentally. I used to
Speaker 1: go to the lawal library and learn about the law
Speaker 1: so I could feel a little bit empowered. I used
Speaker 1: to read nonfiction books. I would cut pictures of nature
Speaker 1: scenes out so I could look at them and travel
Speaker 1: there mentally. But I would play sports like ping pong
Speaker 1: or basketball or chess. I engaged in this elaborate delusion
Speaker 1: like if I was a professional player and so was
Speaker 1: the other person, and the people on the sidelines where
Speaker 1: the fans and But it was not like kids like
Speaker 1: fantasizing about being a professional athlete. This was more like
Speaker 1: my mind couldn't deal with being there anymore, and I
Speaker 1: had to get out of the prison mentally for a
Speaker 1: couple of hours by this elaborate uh delusion. Sometimes I
Speaker 1: listened to sports radio, but it wasn't listening to sports radio.
Speaker 1: It was a connection to the outside and I'm not
Speaker 1: going to the prison assignment in the morning. I'm going
Speaker 1: to work or I'm going to school. It's it's not
Speaker 1: the warden, it's the superintendent. And you try to it's
Speaker 1: normal that if you're gonna make a phone call, it's
Speaker 1: got to be collect or a strip search as the
Speaker 1: price for a visit, and you know, you try to
Speaker 1: normalize the madness in your own mind. I had to
Speaker 1: fight off feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, thoughts of giving up,
Speaker 1: suicidal ideations, thoughts of suicide came into my mind at times,
Speaker 1: and so this was as much a psychological thing that
Speaker 1: as it was physical. I mean I I didn't have
Speaker 1: the luxury of loose in my mind because I knew
Speaker 1: that especially when my appeals were over and exhausted, after
Speaker 1: I was in for eleven years and they no longer
Speaker 1: give you a lawyer, and the only way back into
Speaker 1: court is if you can find something new that wasn't
Speaker 1: known previously. So I started writing a countless number of
Speaker 1: letters trying to find a lawyer then investigator to take
Speaker 1: my case for free, because I didn't have any money
Speaker 1: to high a one right. And I want to point
Speaker 1: out a cruel irony here, Jeff, which is that for
Speaker 1: many of the clients of the innocence projects or other
Speaker 1: innocence organizations, the DNA is the silver bullet, right, And ultimately,
Speaker 1: when the DNA gets discovered, they get a new trial
Speaker 1: because it's new evidence. But you would represented the DNA.
Speaker 1: You would actually shot that arrow already, right, And so
Speaker 1: you're actually fucked because of the fact that the timing
Speaker 1: of it. It's so strange, you know that fact. I
Speaker 1: used to collect articles on exonerations and that used to
Speaker 1: grate on me though, Like all these people were going
Speaker 1: home because of the DNA, and I'm like, well, why
Speaker 1: do I have to be an exception? Uh, the DNA
Speaker 1: doesn't match me either. What does it matter when the
Speaker 1: result was actually obtained? I mean, it means the same thing. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: let's spend a moment talking about the actual perpetrator, because
Speaker 1: every time and I sound like a broken record when
Speaker 1: I say this, but every time that somebody like you
Speaker 1: gets convicted wrongfully, the actual perpetrator they stopped looking for him, right,
Speaker 1: the cases closed, And in this case, the consequences were
Speaker 1: very real, as they are in most cases when these
Speaker 1: things happen, Right, And I think that the the people
Speaker 1: that are responsible for your wrongful conviction, there's an argument
Speaker 1: to say that they are responsible for another tragedy that happened.
Speaker 1: Can you talk about that. I can, Yes, school teacher
Speaker 1: Patricia Morrison who also had a couple of kids. She
Speaker 1: was from Peak Skill and she was killed by the
Speaker 1: stame perpetrator, Stephen Cunningham. She was killed three and a
Speaker 1: half years later as a results of Cunningham being left
Speaker 1: free on the street while I was doing time for
Speaker 1: his crime. Now you say the real perpetrator, how do
Speaker 1: we know that here? Great, that's a great question. I
Speaker 1: am so glad you asked, because the DNA matched him
Speaker 1: because he got caught for the second murder, which resulted
Speaker 1: in his being incarcerated and having to give up a
Speaker 1: DNA sample which was put into the data bank. And
Speaker 1: so when I eventually got the further testing where the
Speaker 1: innocence projects help, it matched him. And then he subsequently
Speaker 1: confessed not just to the authorities, but also to a
Speaker 1: reporter on video camera in the prison visiting room. That
Speaker 1: video is available on it on the internet. So just
Speaker 1: to be clear, there's no coorced false confession there, and
Speaker 1: he played guilty in court. When did this happen? That
Speaker 1: happened that being caught for the original crime that happened
Speaker 1: twelve and a half years after he killed a second victim,
Speaker 1: So there was a point in time we were both
Speaker 1: concurrently in the same prison system, although not in the
Speaker 1: same prison. Wow. So Patricia Morrison, yes today, would be
Speaker 1: probably sitting around with her grandchildren, you know, probably be
Speaker 1: a retired school teacher by now, having a nice If
Speaker 1: her children would have grown up as they deserved too,
Speaker 1: as everyone deserved too, with their mother, the rest of
Speaker 1: her family wouldn't have gone through this horrendous loss. None
Speaker 1: of it had to happen, you know, except for the
Speaker 1: fact that they went on this crazy witch hunt to
Speaker 1: convict you, Jeffrey Deskovic, of a crime that they knew
Speaker 1: he didn't commit. It's um it's a it's a tragic,
Speaker 1: tragic byproduct of this horrible malfeasance coordinated in this case
Speaker 1: that resulted in you and during a nightmare that none
Speaker 1: of us who haven't been through it could ever imagine,
Speaker 1: you somehow or other managed to find this extra layer
Speaker 1: of of strength and courage to persevere, to not give up,
Speaker 1: and to ultimately win right and to and to be
Speaker 1: and to be vindicated. We've talked about some of the
Speaker 1: darkest moments that anyone could imagine. Is there a flip
Speaker 1: side to it? Was there a moment of joy ecstasy
Speaker 1: when you were finally vindicated and freed? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it was. It was a surreal moment. I have to say.
Speaker 1: The luncheon afterwards was surreal. And after that is where reality,
Speaker 1: you know, the reality hit the road, the retires hit
Speaker 1: the road, how you want to phrase it. It would
Speaker 1: be great to say there was this uh great party,
Speaker 1: this raucous party that lasted to the crack of dawn,
Speaker 1: But in reality, who was there to socialize or party with?
Speaker 1: I mean, I had long since lost track with my
Speaker 1: connection with my old friends and my extended family, and
Speaker 1: everybody was virtual stranger, even my immediate family very very
Speaker 1: limited visiting, so I couldn't relate to the people there.
Speaker 1: I felt out of place and I couldn't really communicate
Speaker 1: with them, And that's when a lot of my difficulties
Speaker 1: post exoneration started happening. You talked very beautifully about your
Speaker 1: mindset of being able to escape the walls by having
Speaker 1: these almost out of body experiences, these mental exercises that
Speaker 1: you put yourself through to transport yourself to a to
Speaker 1: a happier place. Were there any friendships that you developed
Speaker 1: in prison. Yeah, I would like to remember Exonory, Frank Sterling,
Speaker 1: Mike Roberts, and uh uh Sammy Swift. So those are
Speaker 1: the three people that I want to give a shout out. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: you came out into a world that had changed a lot.
Speaker 1: You literally had spent half of your life in prison.
Speaker 1: You were arrested when you were sixteen, and you were
Speaker 1: exonerated when you're thirty three. So all those years when
Speaker 1: everybody else was developing their career, getting their education, developing
Speaker 1: their social networks, their relationships, or even starting families, you
Speaker 1: were stuck in hell. Actually right, Yeah fair to say, yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly right, as well as everybody was, you know, incrementally
Speaker 1: adjusting as technology would come out. When I came out,
Speaker 1: I never saw a cell phone, GPS, uh, the Internet
Speaker 1: hadn't been invented, all these different ways of banking, culture
Speaker 1: had changed. I was totally a fish out of water.
Speaker 1: I didn't fit or belong anymore. You talked about the
Speaker 1: things that you did to survive in prison and the
Speaker 1: friendships that you developed the people who were able to
Speaker 1: be a support system for you and you for them.
Speaker 1: Is it as bad as everybody thinks it is. I
Speaker 1: want to give people an idea of what this experience
Speaker 1: is really like, because we don't do prison in America
Speaker 1: like they do in the rest of the Western world.
Speaker 1: We focus so much on punishment and basically in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways torture, where in other Western countries they
Speaker 1: focused on rehabilitation. Yeah. So I think that the image
Speaker 1: that a lot of people have in their mind, I
Speaker 1: think they over dramatized the gang thing, and they think
Speaker 1: that the that everyone just is raping each other all
Speaker 1: day every day. And I think that some of it
Speaker 1: is it's not as bad as they make it seem.
Speaker 1: But then in other ways it's much worse than what
Speaker 1: people imagine. I mean, there was three or four stabbings
Speaker 1: or cuttings every every day and Elmira where I was,
Speaker 1: and there was plenty of gang activity and lots of
Speaker 1: violence that didn't involve weapons. The guards were very disrespectful
Speaker 1: and most of them, not not all of them, they
Speaker 1: were very disrespectful and just you know, the medical care
Speaker 1: was terrible, the food was terrible, as well, um, so
Speaker 1: I would describe it as a NonStop obstacle course featuring
Speaker 1: the guards, civilians and inmates. All is obstacles to the
Speaker 1: main objective, which was to try to prove your innocence
Speaker 1: and regain your freedom. It was every day a living hell,
Speaker 1: without a doubt, to stay alive, to stay alive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: every time I left my cell, I never knew if
Speaker 1: I was gonna make it back. When I arrived in Elmira,
Speaker 1: the guards asked me, you want to go into protective
Speaker 1: custody because of you know, your charges and how young
Speaker 1: you are, and this increases the likely to be being
Speaker 1: a victim. And I asked him, well, well what's that
Speaker 1: and they explained to me, well, you know you would
Speaker 1: be in your cell like twenty three hours a day,
Speaker 1: and you know you wouldn't go to programs, but then again,
Speaker 1: nobody would be able to harm you. And I quickly
Speaker 1: on the spot, I made a decision, imagined making this decision,
Speaker 1: going down this line of reasoning. Right, it's seventeen years old.
Speaker 1: I just thought to myself, you know what, I'm already here.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to agree to make my time even worse.
Speaker 1: So I'm not taking this protective cause that I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go to general population. I'm gonna take my chances, and
Speaker 1: you know what if somebody kills me, well, I guess
Speaker 1: I don't have to worry about doing this life sentence
Speaker 1: that I've been given for a crime I didn't commit. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's unbelievable. So you come out, Jeff, finally exonerated.
Speaker 1: You've proven what you've known all along. But now you
Speaker 1: face a whole another set of obstacles. How did you
Speaker 1: transform yourself because at one point you were almost homeless? Correct, yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: I almost went to a homeless shelter. You know. I
Speaker 1: lost the temporary apartment that this religious community was putting
Speaker 1: me up in. Nobody would take me in. Thank god
Speaker 1: for Mercy College, which had given me a scholarship to
Speaker 1: finish the bachelor's degree because I was thirty credits short
Speaker 1: of that at the time that the former governor Patachi
Speaker 1: had cut the funding for that. So that made its
Speaker 1: way into the newspaper, and so Mercy College gave me
Speaker 1: the scholarship and the meal plan. And when I lost
Speaker 1: the housing, they allowed me to stay in the dorms.
Speaker 1: You know, I was never able to obtain gainful employment
Speaker 1: because I didn't understand the technology. All the potential employers
Speaker 1: wanted somebody who could hit the ground running rather than
Speaker 1: some little bit of patients and on the job training.
Speaker 1: I did get a job as a weekly columnists, but
Speaker 1: the problem was that it was a weekly newspaper, and
Speaker 1: so the only one that wanted one article a week.
Speaker 1: You know, I was making like two and fifty as
Speaker 1: an article, which is really good, but that was the
Speaker 1: only income I could count on per month when I
Speaker 1: started doing speaking engagements, but that's almost like being an
Speaker 1: actor or you only get paid if you get booked,
Speaker 1: and that wasn't consistent, so, you know, it was very
Speaker 1: tight financially. And then I had to deal with all
Speaker 1: these the psychological after effects of my experience and then
Speaker 1: the technology, and then just being just straight up lonely
Speaker 1: and depressed because there was no social circle that I
Speaker 1: had and I wasn't able to like make another one.
Speaker 1: You really were alone in the world in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways. But somehow or other, you have transformed yourself literally, figuratively, physically, mentally, spiritually,
Speaker 1: and I think everybody can learn from that. I have.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've learned a lot from hanging out with you,
Speaker 1: and we've had a lot of laughs over the last
Speaker 1: several years. But you're doing so much good stuff now
Speaker 1: and you're taking your experience and applying it in the
Speaker 1: real world in a way that's already having a very
Speaker 1: positive impact. And talk a little bit, Jeff about your
Speaker 1: education and your goals and what you're doing now with
Speaker 1: your foundation. You've been able to help exonerate other people.
Speaker 1: How incredible is that. I mean, that's got to be
Speaker 1: a storybook. It's it is. It's gone beside myself about that.
Speaker 1: It's incredible. No, I can see how you're lighting up
Speaker 1: right now talk about it. I've seen you around those guys,
Speaker 1: and it is the best feeling. It's why all of
Speaker 1: us in this movement to what we do, because it's
Speaker 1: an unbelievably great feeling to be able to see somebody
Speaker 1: like you, thanks to the help of the Inneces Project
Speaker 1: and other great organizations, be able to come out and
Speaker 1: and get your life back on track. Sure. So from
Speaker 1: finishing the bachelors at Mercy College, I then graduated the
Speaker 1: John J. College of Criminal Justice, got the master's degree
Speaker 1: with my master's thesis on rapha conviction courses and other reforms.
Speaker 1: And I'm in my second year now at the Elizabeth
Speaker 1: hop School of Law at Pace University. Wow. So in
Speaker 1: terms of my foundation, after being home or five years,
Speaker 1: very difficult five years. As we went over, I was
Speaker 1: able to receive some financial compensation, and I decided I
Speaker 1: wanted to go from being an individual advocate. I mean
Speaker 1: do I used to. I was doing presentations and doing
Speaker 1: media interviews and lobbying elected officials and going to legislative hearings.
Speaker 1: And it was part of the effort where we fought
Speaker 1: off capital punishment reinstatement efforts. In two thousand seven, in
Speaker 1: collaboration with New York was against the death penalty, and
Speaker 1: I was involved in the successful campaign repealing the death
Speaker 1: penalty in Connecticut. So doing all of that as an
Speaker 1: individual advocate and it wasn't enough. I wanted to get
Speaker 1: into the exoneration game. You know. I was tired of
Speaker 1: helping out on cases on the peripheral and I wanted
Speaker 1: to be more directly involved. So when I received some compensation, uh,
Speaker 1: I decided to take things to the next level, open
Speaker 1: and nonprofit. So I committed a million and a half
Speaker 1: dollars of that compensation and we opened the Jeffrey dusk
Speaker 1: Vic Fundation for Justice and our goal is to exonerate
Speaker 1: innocent people both in DNA and non DNA cases with
Speaker 1: with the policy change component to it. Our first exonoree
Speaker 1: was William Lopez, so we helped exonerate collaboratively along with
Speaker 1: his pre existing attorneys Richard Levitt and Ivan Schev's. We
Speaker 1: did the investigative work. It's kind of like a building
Speaker 1: is built in it's missing a section and we helped
Speaker 1: put the section in. So um Bill was in for
Speaker 1: twenty three and a half years in a run for
Speaker 1: conviction case in Brooklyn and uh so that was our
Speaker 1: first success. A second exoneration was William Haughey. That was
Speaker 1: totally in house rather than collaborative. So William Haughey did
Speaker 1: eight years and four months on an arson case in
Speaker 1: Putnam County. So the place that they brought me to
Speaker 1: for the polygraph was able to reach back there. It
Speaker 1: exonerate somebody. There's a little irony, a little extra satisfaction
Speaker 1: and full circle. Yeah. So he was in for eight
Speaker 1: years and four months. We were able to get four
Speaker 1: other innocent people out through other mean which turned out
Speaker 1: to be less than exoneration. So Lorenzo Johnson, that was
Speaker 1: a collaborative effort. We did some investigative work. We were
Speaker 1: able to convince the parole board in three other cases
Speaker 1: that our clients were innocent. So that's six people, and
Speaker 1: you know, we're part of the effort that we got
Speaker 1: the laws changed in New York on interrogation and i
Speaker 1: D reform, although they watered that down a bit, And
Speaker 1: we've been very close the last three years work in
Speaker 1: collaboration with the group it can happen to you, which
Speaker 1: is a coalition group with some an advisory board member
Speaker 1: of trying to pass the bill that would create a
Speaker 1: Commission on Prosecutor Conduct to an oversight board for prosecutors.
Speaker 1: So this is all amazing, amazing stuff. It is full
Speaker 1: circle in so many ways. Like most of the other
Speaker 1: exonures I talked to, you have committed yourself that selflessly
Speaker 1: and tirelessly to helping other people avoid the same faith
Speaker 1: that you went through. When you could just as easily
Speaker 1: be off doing whatever you want and no one would
Speaker 1: blame you. Right, you could be of a cationing, right,
Speaker 1: but instead you're channeling all your energy and your money,
Speaker 1: your personal money into helping others and that's um, that's
Speaker 1: just a beautiful, amazing thing. And it's one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why I love being around you, because you're just
Speaker 1: like a such a great positive influence on on everybody
Speaker 1: that you touch. So, Jeff, we have a tradition here
Speaker 1: at Wrongful Conviction, which is that at the end of
Speaker 1: the episode, I like to turn the mic over to
Speaker 1: you for closing thoughts, anything you want to share. I
Speaker 1: have a dream. Imagine if there were twenty five thousand
Speaker 1: people in the world who could afford three dollars a
Speaker 1: month on a recurring basis, who felt that it would
Speaker 1: be worth it to sacrifice to three dollars in order
Speaker 1: to play their part in helping to free wrongfully convicted people.
Speaker 1: That's a budget of close to a million dollars. If
Speaker 1: a person goes to Google and types in dusk of
Speaker 1: VIC Foundation, then Patreon, p H T R E O
Speaker 1: N a link will come up. If they click to that,
Speaker 1: everything is laid out there exactly how the money would
Speaker 1: go for lawyers, investigators, paralegals, other essential personnelity really having
Speaker 1: a robust entity. If we could have these type of
Speaker 1: results on basically a shoe string budget. Imagine if we
Speaker 1: really were Armed for Bear. I need people obviously who
Speaker 1: will be willing to part with the three dollars, but
Speaker 1: we also need people to help make the campaign go
Speaker 1: go viral. If we could somehow do we need volunteers
Speaker 1: to help do that. If we could somehow do that,
Speaker 1: I mean we could make a really big dent. I
Speaker 1: made the big contribution to the organization to give us
Speaker 1: our running start, and we had paid staff and we
Speaker 1: got some good results. Fundraising didn't go that well, and
Speaker 1: I had to convert things to where we're volunteer entity.
Speaker 1: Now we we have maybe four teen volunteers, which is great,
Speaker 1: but you need people to go full time as opposed
Speaker 1: to people who are fitting it in in between their
Speaker 1: paid work. Uh, you know, their their personal life. You know.
Speaker 1: It's great to bring lawyers into cases and connect people
Speaker 1: with that like we did with Andy Krievak and and
Speaker 1: and bring lawyers into do pro bono work after we've
Speaker 1: screened the case. And yeah, that's nice. But in a
Speaker 1: lot of the cases, work that could really be done
Speaker 1: in the course of six months is being done in
Speaker 1: two years because it's being done on the side as
Speaker 1: paid cases are done. So I really would love to
Speaker 1: be able to have a full time paid staff again.
Speaker 1: You know, my mission in life is to fight wrongful
Speaker 1: convictions and that's that's how it makes sense out of
Speaker 1: what happened to me. And with that, you know, I
Speaker 1: want to thank you for having me here. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think this podcast is an an awesome idea and
Speaker 1: we need to continue to raise awareness and uh, this
Speaker 1: is certainly one of the methods of doing that. So
Speaker 1: kudos Case and flower right back at you once again.
Speaker 1: I want to give the website. It's a desk of
Speaker 1: VIC dot org. That's d E. S K O v
Speaker 1: I C dot org. And go to the website, learn
Speaker 1: about the mission, get involved. You can help. Everybody can
Speaker 1: make a difference. It starts right here. So this has
Speaker 1: been an extraordinary experience for me, and I want to
Speaker 1: thank our amazing guest, Jeff Duskovic for sharing his experience,
Speaker 1: strength and wisdom. Don't forget to give us a fantastic
Speaker 1: review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps. And
Speaker 1: I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project and I
Speaker 1: really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important
Speaker 1: cause and helping to prevent future wrong for convictions. Go
Speaker 1: to Innocence Project dot org to learn how to donate
Speaker 1: and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team,
Speaker 1: Connor Hall and Kevin Wardis. The music on the show
Speaker 1: is by three time OSCAR nominate composer Jay Ralph. Be
Speaker 1: sure to follow oow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction
Speaker 1: and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with
Speaker 1: Jason Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
Speaker 1: and association with Signal Company Number one