Speaker 1: Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I
Speaker 1: writer and I'm Steve Drissen. Today we'll tell you about
Speaker 1: a Michigan murder case with an unusual suspect, a small
Speaker 1: town police officer named Ray McCann. After Ray helped investigate
Speaker 1: the disappearance of a little girl, he was wrongfully accused
Speaker 1: of her murder, cops turned on one of their own
Speaker 1: in one of the worst cases of tunnel vision we've seen.
Speaker 1: In pursuit of their only suspect, police turn raised whole
Speaker 1: life into an interrogation room. One of the things we've
Speaker 1: tried to do this season is to show that you
Speaker 1: don't need a full confession in order to bring charges
Speaker 1: against somebody. A false admission that implicates you in the crime,
Speaker 1: or a false statement effect a lie in this case,
Speaker 1: could bring the weight of the system down against an
Speaker 1: innocent person. And all of that stems from what happens
Speaker 1: in the interrogation room. Police have so much power over
Speaker 1: what you say in the interrogation room and the way
Speaker 1: in which what you say can be used against you
Speaker 1: in courts. It's that power and the misuse of that
Speaker 1: power that's what Ray mccannn's case is all about We've
Speaker 1: seen tunnel vision in other cases, but I've never seen
Speaker 1: tunnel vision that was this extreme, this long standing, and
Speaker 1: that included coercion both in and outside of the interrogation room.
Speaker 1: You have the police officers lying, right. The police officers
Speaker 1: don't get charged. It's Ray who gets charged. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is asymmetric warfare, right. And it becomes even more
Speaker 1: asymmetrical when they charge him with perjury. Ray McCann a
Speaker 1: reserve police officer who all he wanted to do was
Speaker 1: assist police. All he wanted to do was to be
Speaker 1: a police officer. They ran him over like a truck.
Speaker 1: Today's story starts in Constantine, Michigan, a small town of
Speaker 1: two thousand people in the southern corner of the state.
Speaker 1: Constantine is an old fashioned dairy farming community, the kind
Speaker 1: of place that looks like time stopped a half century ago.
Speaker 1: The town's historic main street is lined with shops that
Speaker 1: have been kept immaculate for decades. Annual events like the
Speaker 1: car show and barbecue cook off are marked on everyone's calendar.
Speaker 1: But in the autumn of two thousand seven, this Michigan
Speaker 1: town was hit by a crime that no one could
Speaker 1: have expected. It was November eight, fourty five in the afternoon,
Speaker 1: only an hour before sunset. Eleven year old Jodi Perick
Speaker 1: left her friend's house on her bike and headed for
Speaker 1: dinner at home a half mile away. But when Joe
Speaker 1: he didn't arrive on time, her mom called the police,
Speaker 1: and words spread fast. As the sun went down and
Speaker 1: temperatures plummeted too, it seemed like the whole town was
Speaker 1: out searching for Jody. Joining the search was Ray mccahan,
Speaker 1: a forty year old family man born and raised in Constantine.
Speaker 1: Ray was a reserve police officer who hoped one day
Speaker 1: to join the Michigan State Police. He wasn't a full
Speaker 1: fledged cop, but he was allowed to carry a badge
Speaker 1: and do basic police work like making traffic stops and
Speaker 1: searching for missing people. In this particular missing person case,
Speaker 1: Ray's son was good friends with Jody, so Ray didn't
Speaker 1: have to be asked twice to help look for her.
Speaker 1: Along with many of his neighbors, Ray threw on a
Speaker 1: coat and went out to look for Jody. He searched
Speaker 1: high and low at the baseball field, at the Dollar General,
Speaker 1: even at a local riverside, walking trail called the Tumble
Speaker 1: Damn Path. Others searched elsewhere, but no luck for anyone,
Speaker 1: no Jody. Around ten thirty at night, Ray met up
Speaker 1: with Jody's mom to talk about where they should look next.
Speaker 1: That's when Ray McCann asked if anyone had searched the cemetery.
Speaker 1: No one had, so Jody's mom headed that way, followed
Speaker 1: by Ray in another car. The cemetery is where they
Speaker 1: found Jody. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death.
Speaker 1: Her bike was lying next to her on the ground.
Speaker 1: Jody's mom bent down tried to embrace her daughter's body,
Speaker 1: but Ray knew this was a crime scene that shouldn't
Speaker 1: be disturbed. He gently guided her away from Jody's body
Speaker 1: and sat her down in her car. The police arrived
Speaker 1: quickly at the scene, but as they hunted for leeds,
Speaker 1: they locked almost immediately onto Ray McCann as a suspect
Speaker 1: because Ray had been the person who suggested searching the cemetery.
Speaker 1: Based on that coincidence, police questioned Ray that night. He
Speaker 1: adamantly denied involvement in this horrible crime. Somehow, though reserve off,
Speaker 1: Sir Ray McCann became the sole suspect, the only person
Speaker 1: police focused on for the next five years. When someone
Speaker 1: discovers a body, they're gonna be a person of interest
Speaker 1: in a police investigation because of their proximity to the crime.
Speaker 1: It's a basis for wanting to question somebody about what
Speaker 1: they were doing on the evening in question. But they
Speaker 1: focused on him as the sole and exclusive suspect, and
Speaker 1: they did so because they grew desperate. This is a
Speaker 1: crime that is absolutely devastating to this community, and police
Speaker 1: did everything in their power to close that vice on Ray. Now,
Speaker 1: it's not like there was any evidence against Ray. Police
Speaker 1: compared raised DNA to the DNA left on Jody's body,
Speaker 1: but it didn't match. No physical evidence implicated him, and
Speaker 1: no eyewitnesses had identified him. But as Jody's murder sat
Speaker 1: unsolved for years, pressure escalated on the authorities to come
Speaker 1: up with a culprit. After a new police chief was
Speaker 1: elected in new investigators were assigned to the case, and
Speaker 1: they immediately doubled down on prime suspect Ray mccan. Over
Speaker 1: the next few years, police interrogated Ray more than twenty times.
Speaker 1: Again and again, police asked him to describe what he
Speaker 1: did on the night of Jody's disappearance, where he searched
Speaker 1: who he talked to. During these interrogations, police gradually but
Speaker 1: relentlessly upped the anti The evidence against you is insurmountable.
Speaker 1: They told him, we know scientifically you touched her body,
Speaker 1: oh annointed on your people, whatever, and think that now,
Speaker 1: that was a lie. But these kinds of lies can
Speaker 1: be extremely coercive, even on a cop, even on someone
Speaker 1: like Ray mccan. You guys couldn't do what you're talking
Speaker 1: to talk to talking, But you know what I did
Speaker 1: my job that I I wish I knew what happened
Speaker 1: or because then I guess we would be having this conversation.
Speaker 1: The way they questioned Ray was for one purpose, and
Speaker 1: one purpose only, to get him to give them information
Speaker 1: that they could use to charge him with this product.
Speaker 1: And Ray called them out about that too, over and
Speaker 1: over again. I don't know what you're trying to give me.
Speaker 1: Confess somebody didn't have no power and now you guys
Speaker 1: are doing That's the thing. He knew exactly what they
Speaker 1: were doing. He's a cop. You wanted me to admit
Speaker 1: to something I didn't do. I'm not gonna do it.
Speaker 1: I confessionally I can't give you. I didn't find or
Speaker 1: didn't put it there, didn't I did. But the more
Speaker 1: Ray insisted on his innocence, the more police became obsessed
Speaker 1: with proving him guilty. Here's the really twisted thing. Their
Speaker 1: obsession began to spread beyond the interrogation room. They blamed
Speaker 1: Ray for Jody's death in the local media, ruin his reputation,
Speaker 1: and they viciously attacked his personal life. Police tracked down
Speaker 1: Rai's friends and relatives and worked to turn them against him.
Speaker 1: Police told Ray's family that physical evidence d n A
Speaker 1: proved he had killed Jody, even though that wasn't true,
Speaker 1: and they went even further for no clear reason. They
Speaker 1: told Ray's wife that he had been unfaithful. They falsely
Speaker 1: told Ray's teenage son, the one who had been friends
Speaker 1: with Jody when he was younger, that his dad was
Speaker 1: a drug addict. They also told the boy that his
Speaker 1: dad was visiting online chat rooms the worst kind I
Speaker 1: guess that these cops could imagine. Just listen to this.
Speaker 1: The computer shows activity in a chat room regularly of
Speaker 1: gain nature homosexual behavior, talking about how this man on
Speaker 1: man sexual encounter is going to go, and then how
Speaker 1: it did go There's been no signs of any of
Speaker 1: that personally, for anything, I haven't seen anything like that.
Speaker 1: Is there any part of you at all that questions
Speaker 1: your dad's sexuality or of what you're saying is absolutely
Speaker 1: honest to God true? I can tell you that it
Speaker 1: is your computer. I took it off there and then, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course it's going to make me question it. None
Speaker 1: of this was honest to God true. The cops were
Speaker 1: lying again, and that's bad enough, but the fact that
Speaker 1: they equated visiting gay chat rooms with raping and killing
Speaker 1: an eleven year old girl, I'm sorry, but that's beyond
Speaker 1: offensive in any event. Until Ray confessed, police were hell
Speaker 1: bent on taking his life apart peace by peace, and
Speaker 1: I guess this. Cops thought that telling Ray's teenage son
Speaker 1: that his dad was gay would be a good way
Speaker 1: to accomplish that. Their purpose was to make life for
Speaker 1: Ray McCann in Constantine, Michigan unendurable, to make his life
Speaker 1: so miserable and so painful that they could bring him
Speaker 1: to a place where he could conf s to killing
Speaker 1: Jodie Park. Despite all this, years go by and Ray
Speaker 1: doesn't confess. Finally, the cops had to plan. They'll file
Speaker 1: charges against Ray and see if that gets him to
Speaker 1: admit guilt. An officer is caught saying as much during
Speaker 1: a taped interview with Ray's wife. He's going to have
Speaker 1: to be charged, The officer says, he'll get so scared
Speaker 1: he'll talk. It may just come to that. At a
Speaker 1: certain point in time, they should have realized that Ray
Speaker 1: had nothing to do with this, and there were all
Speaker 1: kinds of reasons for them to believe that, beginning with
Speaker 1: the DNA evidence, but they didn't care one bit about Ray.
Speaker 1: This was the first time that I had seen tunnel
Speaker 1: vision so take over law enforcement officers that they were
Speaker 1: willing to sacrifice the life of another officer to close
Speaker 1: a case. Now, the police didn't have any evidence against
Speaker 1: Ray that would allow them to charge him with murder,
Speaker 1: so they came up with a different plan and different charges.
Speaker 1: In police served Ray McCann with an investigative subpoena requiring
Speaker 1: him to answer questions yet again about the night Jody
Speaker 1: disappeared five years earlier because of the subpoena, though this
Speaker 1: time Ray had to give answers under oath. Ray did
Speaker 1: bring a lawyer with him. By this point in time,
Speaker 1: Ray's reputation in the community was so damaged, so tarnished.
Speaker 1: He couldn't go anywhere without people looking at him as
Speaker 1: if he had killed Jody Parrock. So the lawyer advised
Speaker 1: him to go in and talk to the authorities as
Speaker 1: a way to maybe put an end to this. The
Speaker 1: police's subpoena strategy worked. It did put an end to
Speaker 1: the harassment, but not the end Ray had hoped for.
Speaker 1: After the interview, on July sevente, two thousand fourteen, prosecutors
Speaker 1: accused Ray McCann of lying under oath and charged him
Speaker 1: with five counts of perjury. He was arrested and thrown
Speaker 1: into the local jail. So did Ray McCann lie under oath?
Speaker 1: Four of the five perjury charges were based on incredibly
Speaker 1: minor inconsistencies between the details Ray remembered about the night
Speaker 1: Jodie died five years earlier and the details that other
Speaker 1: people remembered. You know, what stands out to me in
Speaker 1: this story is how a completely innocent man who is
Speaker 1: just out trying to help got caught up in this
Speaker 1: web of lies that was spun by the detectives. It's
Speaker 1: unbelievable that that could have happened and frightening. That's Ken Colker,
Speaker 1: a journalist based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He's been covering
Speaker 1: Ray McCann's case for years. I'm an investigative reporter, so
Speaker 1: my job is to just sniff around and look for
Speaker 1: things that seem wrong. You know, the perjury charges seemed
Speaker 1: totally unfounded. I mean, if somebody asked me what I
Speaker 1: had for lunch, I might say Taco bell, but maybe
Speaker 1: it wasn't. Is that really a lie? Here's one example
Speaker 1: of what Ray was charged with under oath. Ray McCann
Speaker 1: said that at one point while he was searching, he
Speaker 1: saw Jody's mom with a blonde haired kid, and he
Speaker 1: thought Jody had been found. He testified that he said
Speaker 1: to Jody's mom, oh good, you found her. Now. Everyone
Speaker 1: agreed that a local seventh grader with blonde hair named
Speaker 1: Katie was with Jody's mom during the search, but Jodie's
Speaker 1: mom couldn't remember whether five years earlier, Ray had said,
Speaker 1: oh good, you found her. One of these perjury charges
Speaker 1: was based on this so called discrepancy. Here's another example.
Speaker 1: Police told Ray they found his d n A on
Speaker 1: Jody's body, even though that was a lie. In a
Speaker 1: desperate attempt to provide some explanation, Ray made a us.
Speaker 1: He thought back to the moment he and Jody's mom
Speaker 1: discovered her little girl's body. He remembered guiding Jody's mom
Speaker 1: away and helping her sit down in her car. Maybe
Speaker 1: sometime later the mother had been grieving over her daughter's body.
Speaker 1: He said, maybe his DNA had been transferred from Jody's
Speaker 1: mom to the little girl. But five years after the fact,
Speaker 1: Jody's mom didn't remember Ray pulling her away, or taking
Speaker 1: her to the car, or much of anything else from
Speaker 1: that terrible moment. So the cops charged Ray with another
Speaker 1: count of perjury. What's interesting is that Ray McCann was
Speaker 1: a reserve police officer, and for some reason they turned
Speaker 1: on him. That's the suspect they're focused on. So they're
Speaker 1: just hammering and hammering and telling him far more lies
Speaker 1: than they claim he told them. Raise history as a
Speaker 1: police officer may have offered him some protection against a
Speaker 1: false confession, but it couldn't protect him against another weapon
Speaker 1: in the police officers arsenal, the weapon of perjury. In
Speaker 1: race case, they turned a series of inconsistencies in his
Speaker 1: statements over a five year period into perjurious. Wise, the
Speaker 1: penalties for perjury in Michigan are extreme, and they charged
Speaker 1: him with five counts of perjury. So under investigative subpoena,
Speaker 1: especially in a murder case, telling a lot of police
Speaker 1: is actually punishable by up to life in prison. The
Speaker 1: punishment is as bad as if you committed the crime.
Speaker 1: Four of those five charges were based on ridiculous inconsistencies,
Speaker 1: like the ones we've talked about. The fifth charge, though,
Speaker 1: was different. The fifth charge was based on raised sworn
Speaker 1: statement that he had searched for Jody near that riverside
Speaker 1: walking trail, the tumble Damn Path. They claimed, well, that's
Speaker 1: a lie, because we've got video showing that nobody went
Speaker 1: to the tumble Damn that time of night. We don't
Speaker 1: see your car, we don't see your headlights or whatever.
Speaker 1: There was a video camera on this nearby creamery that
Speaker 1: supposedly was aimed right at the tumble dam And the
Speaker 1: quote unquote lie that they got him on was the
Speaker 1: fact that he said he was at the tumble Damn,
Speaker 1: but the surveillance video proved he wasn't there. Police claimed
Speaker 1: that video proved Ray was lying. In fact, an officer
Speaker 1: even took the stand at Ray's first court hearing and
Speaker 1: swore that this video proved Ray had committed perjury. For
Speaker 1: his part, Ray couldn't figure it out. He knew he'd
Speaker 1: gone to the tumble Dam path that night to search
Speaker 1: for Jody. But his trial approached and five possible life
Speaker 1: sentences loomed, Ray finally broke. He didn't confess to killing Jody. Instead,
Speaker 1: on March twenty two, fifteen, he pled no contest to
Speaker 1: that fifth perjury charge. No contest plea is an admission
Speaker 1: that the state has sufficient evidence against you to convict you,
Speaker 1: so as a matter of law, it's treated within this
Speaker 1: system just as any other guilty plea would be treated.
Speaker 1: For that plea of no contest to perjury, Ray received
Speaker 1: a sentence of twenty months in prison. In exchange, the
Speaker 1: state dropped the other four charges. They hadn't gotten Ray
Speaker 1: for murder, but they had gotten him for something, and
Speaker 1: I guess that was good enough. Fast forward five months
Speaker 1: after Ray entered his plea to August two thousand, fifteen,
Speaker 1: Ray was in prison serving his perjury sentence, and every
Speaker 1: day was horrific. He was a suspected child rapist and killer.
Speaker 1: And he talked about you know what other prisoners due
Speaker 1: to child rapists and killers. He got dragged off of
Speaker 1: his bunk one night, got smashed over the head with
Speaker 1: what he thinks was a padlock, and somebody tried to
Speaker 1: gouge his eyes out. I mean, that's what happened to
Speaker 1: the support in prison. While Ray suffered, there was a development.
Speaker 1: A man named Daniel Furlong, who lived one town over
Speaker 1: from Constantine, lured a ten year old girl into his
Speaker 1: garage and attacked her. She escaped, thank god, and was
Speaker 1: able to lead police to furlong store. They arrested him
Speaker 1: and took his DNA and what did it match the
Speaker 1: DNA left eight years earlier on Jodi Parick's body. Police
Speaker 1: questioned Daniel Furlong on October eighteenth, two thousand fifteen, and
Speaker 1: he admitted that he'd raped and killed Jody. Forlong used
Speaker 1: to live in Constantine, a few blocks away from the
Speaker 1: Parrot family. When he saw Jody riding by on her bike,
Speaker 1: he lured her into his garage just like the other girl.
Speaker 1: That's where he assaulted and killed Jody. And he did
Speaker 1: it all alone. Furlong told investigators he didn't know Ray McCann.
Speaker 1: We saw the videotape of police interviewed Daniel for a
Speaker 1: long and they were a lot nicer to him than
Speaker 1: they were to Ray McCann. They asked for long. So
Speaker 1: what did you think when you saw that in a
Speaker 1: newspaper that they were focusing on Ray McCann, And he thought, well,
Speaker 1: I'm in the clear. So, in other words, the fact
Speaker 1: that the police had pursued this wrongful prosecution of Ray
Speaker 1: made Furlong feel enough comfort to strike again, and that
Speaker 1: blew me away. It was crystal clear Ray McCann was
Speaker 1: never involved in Jody's disappearance. All he did was trying
Speaker 1: to help a distraught mom find her missing kid. The
Speaker 1: police's suspicions about Ray had been wrong from the start.
Speaker 1: In November two thousand fifteen, Daniel Furlong pled guilty to
Speaker 1: killing Jody Parrock by himself and received a sentence of
Speaker 1: thirty to sixty years, But the state wasn't ready to
Speaker 1: exonerate Ray McCann, not yet. Ray had been convicted of perjury,
Speaker 1: and the state insisted that even if Ray hadn't committed murder,
Speaker 1: he had still lied under oath. I started in this
Speaker 1: case because we were doing stories about the real killer
Speaker 1: who confessed and was getting sentenced to prison, and nobody
Speaker 1: was talking about what happened to Ray McCann. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: what about this guy who had nothing to do with it.
Speaker 1: In December two thousand fifteen, Ray was paroled from a
Speaker 1: Michigan prison after serving his sentence. He was still a
Speaker 1: convicted felon, a perjurer in the eyes of the law.
Speaker 1: It was right around that time that his case came
Speaker 1: across Steve's desk. Ray had been out of prison for
Speaker 1: a few months. He was having a hard time reintegrating
Speaker 1: back in the community. The police officers were still suggesting
Speaker 1: to the general public that he knew things about this
Speaker 1: crime and he had spent twenty months locked up for
Speaker 1: something he didn't do. Thank god for Ken Colker for
Speaker 1: taking the interest to tell this story about Ray, because
Speaker 1: if it wasn't for him, I never would have known
Speaker 1: about the case. I had seemed the work done by
Speaker 1: the Center for Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern End. I just
Speaker 1: reached out to Stephen said, here's an interesting case. I
Speaker 1: was so angry at what these law enforcement officers had
Speaker 1: done to Ray, and so I called up to Michigan
Speaker 1: Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School, and
Speaker 1: I said, will you work on this case with me?
Speaker 1: The legal team's task was to prove Ray innocence of
Speaker 1: the only perjury charge he'd been convicted of. That was
Speaker 1: the charge where the police had sworn under oath that
Speaker 1: they had a surveillance tape showing the Tumble Damn Path,
Speaker 1: a video that they said proved Ray had lied about
Speaker 1: going there to search for Jody Well. Ken Colker got
Speaker 1: ahold of a copy of that videotape. I remember going
Speaker 1: down to Ray McCann's home in meeting Stephen Drisen down there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was like a could have been a scene in
Speaker 1: a movie, actually standing around this dining room table with
Speaker 1: my laptop open watching this video that would eventually lead
Speaker 1: to Ray McCann's case being dismissed. What we saw was
Speaker 1: that you couldn't see anything from the camera footage. It
Speaker 1: was simply too dark to make out what kinds of
Speaker 1: cars were on the street, whether there were any people
Speaker 1: on the street. You couldn't see the tumble Dawn Path
Speaker 1: at all, let alone who was walking on it. So
Speaker 1: the legal team actually went to the creamery, the business
Speaker 1: that had taken the surveillance video, and looked at their
Speaker 1: security camera. The creamery owner assured them that the camera
Speaker 1: hadn't been moved since the night of Jody's disappearance. The
Speaker 1: video camera wasn't even aimed at the damn The surveillance
Speaker 1: camera that they claimed showed he wasn't there was aimed elsewhere.
Speaker 1: I wish I'd have been the one that noticed that.
Speaker 1: Under no circumstances could the creamery camera footage have proven
Speaker 1: at Ray was not at the tumbled damn path. The
Speaker 1: whole damn thing was made up. It was a lie.
Speaker 1: The video was essentially worthless as evidence. This video certainly
Speaker 1: didn't prove that Ray McCann had lied under oath. Instead,
Speaker 1: what it proved was that the police were the ones
Speaker 1: who had lied. In order to convict him. Ray's wish
Speaker 1: had come true. He needed to have some kind of
Speaker 1: evidence to demonstrate that he didn't lie at all, but
Speaker 1: that the police officers were lying, and that camera footage
Speaker 1: proved it. Based on that video, Ray's attorneys filed emotion
Speaker 1: for relief, and on December seventh, two thousand seventeen, the
Speaker 1: court throughout Ray's perjury conviction. Ray McCann was innocent of
Speaker 1: the murder and innocent of perjury. He was exonerated. The
Speaker 1: prosecutor decided not to fight it and to allow the
Speaker 1: judge to dismiss the case. And I just felt great
Speaker 1: for Ray. Mean, you can't take away the twenty months
Speaker 1: that he spent in prison, but you know, at least
Speaker 1: he was able to clear his name. That was the
Speaker 1: end of Ray McCann's legal ordeal. But what happened to
Speaker 1: the officers who lied to convict him? Okay, Steve, So
Speaker 1: I'm really hoping you're going to tell us that after
Speaker 1: Ray was exonerated, these cops were tried for perjury. I
Speaker 1: wish I could tell you that. But nothing has happened
Speaker 1: to these police officers. The prosecutor eventually ended up losing
Speaker 1: in his next election, but these police officers have never
Speaker 1: faced any consequences. They were the ones who lied, not Ray.
Speaker 1: They were the ones who should have gone down for perjury.
Speaker 1: That's the ultimate irony here. And what about Ray McCann.
Speaker 1: What's life like for him now? In many ways, it's
Speaker 1: still really hard. And they took a lot away from
Speaker 1: this guy. He barely tossed to one of his sons.
Speaker 1: This wife divorced him, the he missed the birth of
Speaker 1: a grandchild. I'm sure there are people in that town
Speaker 1: who still think Ray McCann had something to do with it.
Speaker 1: And so, you know, his name is, in some people's eyes,
Speaker 1: is still mud and constantine. The only thing Ray McCann
Speaker 1: ever wanted was to find the killer of Jodie Parrock,
Speaker 1: and that's been accomplished. Now raise free to put his
Speaker 1: life back together as best he can. Ray. Yeah, Hey, Ray,
Speaker 1: it's Laura. How are you doing pretty good? So you're
Speaker 1: living up north in Michigan. You've got snow on the
Speaker 1: ground yet, Yeah, actually just got some yesterday. I want
Speaker 1: to go cut some woods and stuff, and all a
Speaker 1: sudden just started coming down. Tell me about your your wife, Ray,
Speaker 1: I am delighted to hear that you're married. Yeah. We
Speaker 1: got married in um April twelve. I actually on my
Speaker 1: dad's birthday in two thousand eighteen. Well that's a beautiful
Speaker 1: way to honor your dad. How did you meet your wife?
Speaker 1: We worked together. If she caught my eye right away,
Speaker 1: you must have caught her I too, Yeah, I must
Speaker 1: have done something right. We were actually in southwest Michigan
Speaker 1: there for a while, and we made a decision to
Speaker 1: start a new life somewhere else because it just, you know,
Speaker 1: it was hard for me. It's been going a lot
Speaker 1: better since we made the move up here. It really
Speaker 1: has I struggle at times, you know, I met that
Speaker 1: I go through a lot of depression. My wife knows
Speaker 1: I go through that, and she's there for me. I
Speaker 1: am so thankful to my daughter Ashley. She wasn't with
Speaker 1: me the whole time this was going on and still
Speaker 1: lives with me. And I just love you know, the grandkids.
Speaker 1: They keep it busy, that's for sure. You're a good man,
Speaker 1: right and a survivor, Steve, and I are with you
Speaker 1: all the way. One of the jobs that we, as
Speaker 1: innocent lawyers have is to try to tell the story
Speaker 1: of our clients in a way that can bring them
Speaker 1: back some measure of their reputation, to tell the story
Speaker 1: in a way that makes it abundantly clear that Ray
Speaker 1: McCann is innocent. We can't undo the trauma that Ray experienced,
Speaker 1: but at least we can establish that he never committed
Speaker 1: the crime he was accused of. In fact, a crime
Speaker 1: was committed against him. One of the arguments against allowing
Speaker 1: police officers to lie during interrogations is that it creates
Speaker 1: a culture in which lying is acceptable not only during interrogations,
Speaker 1: but when police officers come into court and testify about cases,
Speaker 1: and that may very well have been what happened here.
Speaker 1: You're allowed to lie to get a confession, why not
Speaker 1: lie to get a conviction. It's one of the strongest
Speaker 1: arguments for banning deception during police interrogations. When you allow
Speaker 1: police to lie, that sends a message that truthfulness is
Speaker 1: not essential to the task of enforcing the law, and
Speaker 1: of course it is. It's vital. And that's the story
Speaker 1: of Ray McCann. Join us next week when we take
Speaker 1: you to Aida, Oklahoma to tell you about Tommy Ward.
Speaker 1: After detectives learned about a strange dream he had, Tommy
Speaker 1: was accused of a local woman's murder and found himself
Speaker 1: on death row. Tommy remains behind bars to this day,
Speaker 1: but a team of lawyers, including our Center on Wrongful Convictions,
Speaker 1: is fighting to end Tommy's nightmare. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions
Speaker 1: is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association
Speaker 1: with Signal Company Number one Special thanks to our executive
Speaker 1: producers Jason Flam and Kevin Wardis. Our production team is
Speaker 1: headed by Senior producer and Pope, along with producers Josh
Speaker 1: Hammer and Jess Shane. Our show is mixed by Jeanie Montalvo.
Speaker 1: John Colbert is our intrepid intern. Our music was composed
Speaker 1: by j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or
Speaker 1: Twitter at Laura ni Rider and you can follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at s Driven. For more information on the show,
Speaker 1: visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com. Be sure to follow
Speaker 1: the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at
Speaker 1: Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction