Speaker 1: In May nineteen ninety three, three young Arkansas boys, Stevie Branch,
Speaker 1: Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore, went missing.
Speaker 2: Three little cub Scouts hog Tide and left in an
Speaker 2: Arkansas did.
Speaker 3: One of the most controversial legal cases in the state's history.
Speaker 3: A jury found the man guilty of murdering the eight
Speaker 3: year old boys back in nineteen ninety three, in what
Speaker 3: prosecutors at the time had called some sort of a
Speaker 3: Satanic ritual.
Speaker 2: Celebrities fighting for the teen's release claimed the kids were
Speaker 2: railroaded because of their mummets, dark clothes, and fascination.
Speaker 1: With the occult sticking killings that might have been part
Speaker 1: of a Satanic ritual.
Speaker 2: Convicted murderers Jason Baldwin, Jesse mss Kelly, and Damian Eccles
Speaker 2: are now free men.
Speaker 1: They spent seventeen years in prison for a crime that
Speaker 1: stunned Arkansas.
Speaker 2: So West Memphis three would be allowed to walk out
Speaker 2: of prison, but prosecutors agreed to sign off on the
Speaker 2: deal only if the defendants would plead guilty.
Speaker 4: A long time on death row for something that you
Speaker 4: insist you didn't do. There's always the possibility that the
Speaker 4: person that you're killing is aest.
Speaker 1: This is Wrongful Conviction. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction today.
Speaker 1: I have a special show for you, and I think
Speaker 1: it's going to be a real treat because with me,
Speaker 1: I have a guy who has done profound work in
Speaker 1: film dealing with wrongful convictions. I'm super excited to have
Speaker 1: him here to share some stories and some wisdom and
Speaker 1: his outlooks. So Joe Burlinger, Welcome to Wrongful Conviction.
Speaker 5: Jason.
Speaker 1: Thanks.
Speaker 5: I'm a big fan of the podcast and a fan
Speaker 5: of you, so I'm glad to be here. In fact,
Speaker 5: it amazes me that since I consider myself a music
Speaker 5: and wrongful conviction guy, and you're amazing music and wrongful
Speaker 5: conviction guy, I'm amazed. We haven't met until recently, which
Speaker 5: is why this podcast came to me. We shared a
Speaker 5: nice dinner together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we had dinner recently with Damian Eccles and Amanda
Speaker 1: Knox and so we really connected. And it's interesting because
Speaker 1: I do sort of music and justice. You do film
Speaker 1: music injustice. And the thing that you've been known for
Speaker 1: was your movie about the West, Memphis three, because it
Speaker 1: was such an important not only such an important documentary,
Speaker 1: but also such an important moment in the changing of
Speaker 1: the perception of the American public and the worldwide public
Speaker 1: as to how these things happen. And I'm interested to
Speaker 1: know how did you because you know, you and I
Speaker 1: both were in criminal justice reform before it was sort
Speaker 1: of a thing, right, I mean, we were early adopters,
Speaker 1: and I like to say we were in before it
Speaker 1: was cool, but that sounds ridiculous, but anyway, true. Listen,
Speaker 1: I'm glad it's cool because we need more and more people.
Speaker 5: We didn't have enough storytellers shining a light on injustice
Speaker 5: and activists trying to change this miserable system we have.
Speaker 1: No we need an army. And so you made this
Speaker 1: remarkable Paradise Lost trilogy that I'm holding in my hand
Speaker 1: right now, which which told the story of the three kids.
Speaker 1: And they were kids. They were teenagers, Damien Eccles, Jason Baldwin,
Speaker 1: and Jesse Miskally, who were persecuted, prosecuted, arrested, tried, convicted
Speaker 1: for one of the most gruesome and notorious triple murders
Speaker 1: in the history of the world. Yeah, from the three
Speaker 1: eight year old boys that went missing in West Memphis, Arkansas,
Speaker 1: out riding their bikes and turned up in a riverbank, tortured,
Speaker 1: brutally assaulted, sexually mutilated, and of course dead. And how
Speaker 1: did it come to be that? And we'll get into
Speaker 1: how the wrongful conviction happened, but how did you go
Speaker 1: from being a filmmaker to being this guy? And how
Speaker 1: were you made aware of this case and how did
Speaker 1: you get involved? And boy, it's a good thing you did,
Speaker 1: or Damien would have been executed by now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, it's amazing and thank you for all that.
Speaker 5: That's very kind of you to say, because you've also
Speaker 5: done amazing work, which I appreciate. You know, my first film,
Speaker 5: which I should say, Paradise Lost and Brothers Keeper were
Speaker 5: made with Bruce Sinofsky, who recently passed away. You know,
Speaker 5: so if I revert to the eyes, I always mean we.
Speaker 5: But you know, we had made Brothers Keeper, which there
Speaker 5: was no sense of social justice behind the making of
Speaker 5: that movie. That was purely an aesthetic exercise to push
Speaker 5: the documentary form a little further. You know, there was
Speaker 5: a handful of filmmakers in the late eighties early nineties
Speaker 5: that were looking to expand what it means to be
Speaker 5: a documentary. Errol Morris did it with thin blue line.
Speaker 5: But his contribution, besides the wrongful conviction aspect, was you know,
Speaker 5: pushing recreations to a whole new level. Michael Moore was
Speaker 5: pushing documentary by you know, the filmmaker as on camera curmudgeon,
Speaker 5: you know, crusading for a social cause. That was new.
Speaker 5: Morgan Spurlock then picked up that kind of thread in others.
Speaker 5: What we were trying to do with Brothers Keeper was
Speaker 5: simply by using a murder trial because it has perfect
Speaker 5: dramatic structure, to take the documentary and create a just
Speaker 5: a film that feels like a narrative film because of
Speaker 5: how it shot, how it's edited, how it looks, how
Speaker 5: it's structured, and to push the documentary form. I had
Speaker 5: no interest in social justice, no interest in wrongful I
Speaker 5: didn't even know wrongful convictions took place back then. I
Speaker 5: was very naive about the justice system. And Brother's Keeper
Speaker 5: was very successful. And so Sheila Evans from HBO came
Speaker 5: a calling. You know, the she was until very recently
Speaker 5: the head of documentaries at HBO for three decades. And
Speaker 5: if I had to pick one person responsible for expanding
Speaker 5: the form to what it is today, Sheila would be
Speaker 5: that woman, but she also likes salacious material, and so
Speaker 5: she read this story about three devil worshiping teens who
Speaker 5: were just been arrested for these horrible crimes, and she
Speaker 5: wanted a satanic kids killing kids movie because it seemed
Speaker 5: like that was the case. So one week after the
Speaker 5: arrests of the three. Of course, they weren't called the
Speaker 5: West Memphis Three back then, they were these rotten teenagers
Speaker 5: accused of these horrible crimes. We went down to West Memphis,
Speaker 5: Arkansas in June of ninety three, thinking we were making
Speaker 5: a film about kids killing kids. All the press was
Speaker 5: saying they were guilty Jesse miss Kelly's confession without any context.
Speaker 5: The multiple statements over time were reduced to a digestible
Speaker 5: paragraph without context, published in the local paper. So we
Speaker 5: thought there was a confession. You know, the prosecution and
Speaker 5: the police were saying at press conferences on a scale
Speaker 5: of one to ten, this is an eleven. I was
Speaker 5: going down as a filmmaker, coming off of a really
Speaker 5: great experience on my first film of pushing the form
Speaker 5: of documentary, but no idea of social justice.
Speaker 1: We go down.
Speaker 5: We embed with the families of the victims, mainly the
Speaker 5: trial is still seven months away. For the first three
Speaker 5: months of the project, we really spent time with the
Speaker 5: families of the victims, and of course they hated these
Speaker 5: guys and thought they were, you know, the devil, and
Speaker 5: we had no reason to believe otherwise.
Speaker 1: On season seven of Wrongful Conviction, on the fifth episode,
Speaker 1: I interviewed Damien eccles. Here's an excerpt. You were an outcast, right,
Speaker 1: and there were these very small minded people around who
Speaker 1: sort of came to this instinctual call it conclusion that
Speaker 1: it must be the weird kid, right, it must be
Speaker 1: the kid that wears black and listens to heavy metal.
Speaker 1: And this was during the Satanic Panic as well. Right
Speaker 1: back then, for those of you who are old enough
Speaker 1: to remember, in the early nineties, there was this very
Speaker 1: strange thing that was going on in America with rumors
Speaker 1: of Satanic cults and stuff like that. None of them
Speaker 1: turned out to be true. But that's beside the point.
Speaker 4: So what happened for me my entire life, The thing
Speaker 4: that has been most important to me, that I love
Speaker 4: the most, that my life always sort of revolved around,
Speaker 4: was Western hermeticism ceremonial magic. All the way back from
Speaker 4: when I was a child, But I lived in an
Speaker 4: incredibly right wing fundamentalist town where I mean there were
Speaker 4: places in this town where you come to a four
Speaker 4: corner step and on all four corners of the street
Speaker 4: will be churches.
Speaker 1: It was like Starbucks.
Speaker 4: Now, yeah, that's exactly what it was like. And if
Speaker 4: you didn't belong to, you know, one of these mainstream
Speaker 4: for that area, mainstream fundamentalist religions, you were automatically viewed
Speaker 4: as suspicious. You were Satanic. That's what they thought. And
Speaker 4: it didn't matter if you were a Buddhist or a
Speaker 4: Hindu or something like that. You're still satanic. You just
Speaker 4: don't know you're a Satanist. You're just being you know,
Speaker 4: tricked by the devil into thinking there's some other religion.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: The fact that I actually did love ceremonial magic, and
Speaker 4: that's been one of their things that you know, they
Speaker 4: harp on forever that that is Satanism. So that was
Speaker 4: a huge part of what made them focus on me
Speaker 4: as well. You know, that was what they thought made
Speaker 4: me a freak. They think, automatically, you're a Satanist. It
Speaker 4: would take a Satanist to commit a crime like this.
Speaker 4: Stick all those things together, and they didn't even look
Speaker 4: for anybody or anything else.
Speaker 1: So in this case, they focused on you. And then
Speaker 1: they had to find a way to get to you,
Speaker 1: right because there was no evidence connecting you no, So
Speaker 1: they found a way, and that way was Jesse Miskeally exactly.
Speaker 1: So they originally sort of tricked him into confessing and
Speaker 1: he immediately recanted after he confessed.
Speaker 4: Of somewhere between seventy and seventy two, and they interrogated him.
Speaker 4: I can't remember exactly how many hours it was, it
Speaker 4: was something like between twelve and fourteen hours. And they're
Speaker 4: tilling this guy who has an IQ that's way way
Speaker 4: below normal. They're telling him things like, you know, just
Speaker 4: tell us what we want to know and we'll let
Speaker 4: you go home. So they finally get this guy to confess,
Speaker 4: and he can't get anything about the crime scene right
Speaker 4: because he wasn't actually there, so he didn't know anything.
Speaker 4: They didn't care. The only thing they cared about was
Speaker 4: the fact that they got him to say yes.
Speaker 1: And we also know, Damian, that people who are most
Speaker 1: susceptible to this are adolescents. We now know that the
Speaker 1: human brain isn't fully formed until you're twenty five. He
Speaker 1: was sixteen, right seventeen, and with his low IQ, he
Speaker 1: was totally outmatched, overwhelmed, and probably after twelve to fourteen
Speaker 1: hours he would have confessed, do you know anything killing
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln? Exactly? I mean just to go home? So
Speaker 1: he implicated you and Jason. So Jason was sort of
Speaker 1: your one and best and pretty much only friend at
Speaker 1: the time, rightly, And he was just physical appearances, he
Speaker 1: didn't have the same stigma that you did, right. He
Speaker 1: was sort of just an average looking kid, very young looking,
Speaker 1: must have weighed a hundred pounds or less. Didn't look
Speaker 1: like a killer, right, But to them you did, exactly.
Speaker 1: And he got caught up in all.
Speaker 4: Of this too, yep, just because he knew me, right.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable. On season two of Wrongful Conviction, Episode eight, I
Speaker 1: interviewed Jason Baldwin. Here's what he had to say.
Speaker 6: And so when the police came, Honestly, it didn't really
Speaker 6: scare me or alarm me, because I figured they were
Speaker 6: going everywhere. I figured it was door to door, you know,
Speaker 6: that they were talking to everybody they could, you know,
Speaker 6: and to me that made sense, you know, that was logical.
Speaker 6: But what I didn't know that they were targeting us.
Speaker 1: So now everything goes completely haywire and you guys get arrested.
Speaker 6: Correct, They mugshot in me, but when they fingerprinted me,
Speaker 6: they didn't stop there. They took a fingerprint, they took
Speaker 6: an entire hand impression. They took my entire foot prints, right,
Speaker 6: and then they took me to the hospital and they
Speaker 6: took hair samples, they took saliva samples, they took blood samples.
Speaker 6: When they were taking these samples from me, it gave
Speaker 6: me hope because I thought, Okay, whoever committed this crime,
Speaker 6: they've left something for the police to compare my samples to, right,
Speaker 6: And so that's where my hope was. And now at
Speaker 6: this point, I had already been engaged with the police,
Speaker 6: and they had asked me, you know, questions and stuff,
Speaker 6: and I told them where I was at, and they
Speaker 6: absolutely refused the truth. They kept telling me, no, we've
Speaker 6: got another story. Your friend has told us that you
Speaker 6: have done this and that what you're telling us is
Speaker 6: not true. I'm like, well, who is this friend? And
Speaker 6: they refused to tell me. The boys' bodies were found
Speaker 6: May sixth, We were arrested. Jesse Muskelli gave the false
Speaker 6: confession on June third, so what many people have not
Speaker 6: really noticed it. On May the fifteenth, just a couple
Speaker 6: of weeks after the boys' bodies are found, Jesse went
Speaker 6: to the police with another friend because there was a
Speaker 6: tip line and a reward offered out for any information
Speaker 6: on who may have committed this crime. Now, Jesse did
Speaker 6: not know who committed his crime, but he wanted the
Speaker 6: reward money. He was imagining the brand new truck he
Speaker 6: could buy his father and things like that. So him
Speaker 6: and another kid out of his trailer park went to
Speaker 6: the police and said, there's this suspicious guy in the
Speaker 6: town that you know, you need to check out. And
Speaker 6: I don't know exactly what all he told them about
Speaker 6: this guy or whatever, but they ended up telling him, Jesse,
Speaker 6: you need to come back with a more believable story
Speaker 6: than that. Right, a few weeks go by, now they're
Speaker 6: saying they've got that believable story when he gives the
Speaker 6: false confession against Damian and me.
Speaker 5: Then we finally negotiated access. They were all in county
Speaker 5: jail awaiting trial, and somehow we taught you know, documentary
Speaker 5: was a little more naive in those days in terms
Speaker 5: of people's perceptions, and so we were able. I mean,
Speaker 5: one of the amazing things about Paradise Loss is just
Speaker 5: where we stuck our camera. I mean, we got tremendous access,
Speaker 5: which I don't think we'd ever get today, luckily for
Speaker 5: all involved. But we finally negotiated access to the West
Speaker 5: Memphis three and again they weren't called that then, and
Speaker 5: we did our first series of interviews, and I think
Speaker 5: I'm sitting down with killers, you know, horrible kids, wanting
Speaker 5: to understand how three teens could be so disaffected from
Speaker 5: life that they would they would do this horrible thing.
Speaker 5: There were some killings in the UK on railroad tracks
Speaker 5: just a few years before, you know, the Jamie Bolger
Speaker 5: case that actually I had tried to get access to
Speaker 5: and make a film about. So my head is kids
Speaker 5: killing kids, it's a trend, Let's make a film about it.
Speaker 5: Of course, the late eighties was the whole Satanic panic
Speaker 5: and satanic hysteria. I was a young filmmaker and you know,
Speaker 5: didn't have any reason to think that wasn't necessarily true.
Speaker 5: So I went into this project. In the great irony
Speaker 5: is that, you know, two decades and three films later,
Speaker 5: this crusade to get these guys out started off as
Speaker 5: let's make a film about these rotten punks. So we
Speaker 5: sit down, we do our first series of interviews. Honestly,
Speaker 5: Damien was a little hard to read. I look back now,
Speaker 5: Obviously he was in shock. He didn't believe he would
Speaker 5: actually be convicted. Not to be judgmental, I mean, Damien's
Speaker 5: a hero to me, who's gone through the most amazing journey,
Speaker 5: But that first interview I couldn't quite tell with him.
Speaker 5: But the person who really just whatever sense of tapping
Speaker 5: into something that I had at the time, it was
Speaker 5: talking to Jason Baldwin, where I just said, this doesn't
Speaker 5: add up four months before the trial, three months into
Speaker 5: being embedded in West Memphis, Arkansas, because we spent literally
Speaker 5: seven months camping out there before the trial started. And
Speaker 5: it's not like a light bulb went off and I said,
Speaker 5: oh my god, they're innocent. But something didn't seem right.
Speaker 5: And so I remember calling Sheila Evans, who, again, to
Speaker 5: her credit, she's an amazing catalyst for what documentary has become,
Speaker 5: but she also likes, you know, salacious subject matter, and
Speaker 5: she had sent me down, or sent us down to
Speaker 5: make a film about teen satanic killers. So I remember
Speaker 5: picking up the phone calling her to let her know
Speaker 5: that something. You know, I'm not sure these guys are guilty,
Speaker 5: and I'm not sure the film is what you think
Speaker 5: it's going to be a little trepidacious that she was
Speaker 5: going to cancel the project, but I felt I had
Speaker 5: to tell her. You know, we're like four months in
Speaker 5: and we've gathered enough information that these kids seem like
Speaker 5: they're the wrong guys had been picked up. I also
Speaker 5: created this incredible moral ambiguity because we had convinced the
Speaker 5: parents of the victims that we were here to tell
Speaker 5: their story, and they were utterly convinced of their guilt.
Speaker 5: But I called Sheila, and to her credit, she said, oh,
Speaker 5: that sounds even more interesting. Stick with it, because she
Speaker 5: couldn't pulled the plug.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 5: And it's the number one lesson. I mean, I'm not
Speaker 5: sure if there are filmmakers in your audience or whatever,
Speaker 5: but my number one lesson that I tell people about
Speaker 5: filmmaking is never, particularly in documentary, never lock into the
Speaker 5: preconceived idea of what you think your film is about,
Speaker 5: because you'll miss the story. If we had locked into
Speaker 5: teen Satan killers, and hadn't opened our eyes to the
Speaker 5: real story, we might have missed the story. But I
Speaker 5: never imagined that it would actually ever get to trial
Speaker 5: because I had faith in the justice system. I never
Speaker 5: imagined that evidence such as Metallica lyrics or Stephen King
Speaker 5: novels would be presented in a court of law in
Speaker 5: the United States of America as the main evidence, and
Speaker 5: that somebody could be convicted on literally no forensic evidence,
Speaker 5: no blood at the crime scene. I mean, you know,
Speaker 5: you know the details of this case, and.
Speaker 1: So yeah, but it's worth refreshing that we're.
Speaker 4: At the police station. The only thing. Every so often
Speaker 4: one of the cops would come in and say, are
Speaker 4: you ready to make your confession? Yet I would just
Speaker 4: stand there and look at them.
Speaker 1: They would leave.
Speaker 4: I stood there all night long until the next day
Speaker 4: they got me and took me into a courtroom. They
Speaker 4: tell me, you know, somebody's already confessed to this crime.
Speaker 4: They've implicated you. They're saying you were the ring leader
Speaker 4: of this. So now what you need to do is
Speaker 4: confess to this and say no, you weren't the ring
Speaker 4: leader they were. Try to put the blame back on
Speaker 4: them or you're gonna die because of this. I can't
Speaker 4: even figure out who the hell they're talking about, because
Speaker 4: I've only got one friend in the entire world, and
Speaker 4: that was Jason Baldwin. I knew it wasn't him because
Speaker 4: he was with me, and I knew he didn't do it.
Speaker 4: I knew he wasn't going to confess to something he
Speaker 4: hadn't done. So I didn't realize who it even was
Speaker 4: that had confessed until the next day. Whenever they take
Speaker 4: me into the courtroom, they say who it is, and
Speaker 4: they ask, you know, how do you plead all this
Speaker 4: sort of thing. They refuse to even read the confession
Speaker 4: in the courtroom. They asked me, did I want it read?
Speaker 4: I said yes, and they wouldn't read it even after
Speaker 4: they asked me and I said yes. Instead, they take
Speaker 4: me out of the courtroom into a janitor's closet with
Speaker 4: mops and brooms. They give me a transcript, a type
Speaker 4: transcript of this confession. When I started reading it, it's
Speaker 4: immediately obvious why they didn't want this thing or read
Speaker 4: in court. It made no sense whatsoever. You know, you're
Speaker 4: talking about this story that's like a Frankenstein patchwork thing
Speaker 4: that they've sewed together out of many statements made by
Speaker 4: somebody with an IQ of between seventy and seventy two.
Speaker 4: And what they would do is when he would confess
Speaker 4: to something and wouldn't get anything right, they would come
Speaker 4: back into the room and say, well, do you think
Speaker 4: maybe this could have happened? Or I mean, even more
Speaker 4: blatantly obvious. The first time they asked him when did
Speaker 4: the murders happen? And he says something like eight o'clock
Speaker 4: in the morning. Well, they knew that wasn't true because
Speaker 4: all three of the kids were in school. So gradually
Speaker 4: what they did was shape this thing to make it
Speaker 4: what they wanted it to be. That's why they didn't
Speaker 4: want it read in court.
Speaker 1: No, and they ignored obvious signs that pointed to at
Speaker 1: least one, arguably up to three other individuals. Yes, including
Speaker 1: there was a local restaurant, was it Bojangles or something?
Speaker 1: Was it Bojangles where the manager called the cops that
Speaker 1: night and said there was a guy covered in mud
Speaker 1: and blood that stumbled into the fast food place and
Speaker 1: went into the bathroom. And to their credit, the manager
Speaker 1: called up and a police officer came, but didn't investigate,
Speaker 1: and they ultimately collected evidence from that bathroom that he
Speaker 1: went into, which there was blood all over the place
Speaker 1: and mud, and they lost it. Yes, and there again
Speaker 1: were obvious signs. I mean the one I just talked about,
Speaker 1: the various signs pointing to the stepfather of one of
Speaker 1: the boys. I mean, this one kind of came with instructions,
Speaker 1: and I know that it's difficult. I'm not an anarchist.
Speaker 1: I believe we do need a system of law and order.
Speaker 1: I think there are a lot of very good police
Speaker 1: and judges and prosecutors out there. But in this case,
Speaker 1: it's a small town, high profile, complicated crime. Because the
Speaker 1: crime scene itself was a muddy riverbed, not the easiest
Speaker 1: place to collect evidence. It seemed to have been scrubbed
Speaker 1: to some degree. And then all the pressure you ran
Speaker 1: into the perfect storm.
Speaker 4: They put me in another sale where I would stay
Speaker 4: for almost the next year while I waited to go
Speaker 4: to trial. When we do go to trial, the evidence
Speaker 4: that they present again us as things like Stephen King books,
Speaker 4: the fact that we owned Metallica T shirts and albums,
Speaker 4: posters that were hanging on our walls, you know, things
Speaker 4: that were from like skateboarding magazines, ceremonial magic books. This
Speaker 4: is the evidence they had. The prosecutors tell the jury
Speaker 4: that these things are not only evidence that were guilty,
Speaker 4: but they're evidence that I don't even have a soul,
Speaker 4: that this is how evil I am.
Speaker 6: I was totally surprised when I went to trial and
Speaker 6: instead of the narration of the story revolving around evidence,
Speaker 6: the prosecutor John Fogerman and Brenton Davis were saying things
Speaker 6: like the crime scene was completely clean, there was absolutely
Speaker 6: no evidence, no physical evidence left behind, and this, in
Speaker 6: fact is evidence of satanic cult ritual activity.
Speaker 1: Because the devil fringed up the crime scene. Basically, when
Speaker 1: they put that guy in the stand who was testifying
Speaker 1: as an expert on Satanism and witchcraft and all, and
Speaker 1: the defense attorney quite rightly said to him, where did
Speaker 1: you get certified at this? And it turned out he
Speaker 1: had spent like an hour of doing some online something
Speaker 1: or whatever. It was ridicted. It was laughable, right, The
Speaker 1: fact that he was calling himself an expert was laughable.
Speaker 1: And that's one thing that I was like, well, the
Speaker 1: jury's got to hear that. And the other thing was
Speaker 1: when they had the doctor on the stand, right, it
Speaker 1: was like an orthopedic surgeon or something, and they were
Speaker 1: asking him about the way that the one boy had
Speaker 1: been mutilated, right, and we had the skin cut off
Speaker 1: his penis. I mean, he's really pretty disgusting even thinking
Speaker 1: about it now.
Speaker 6: We found out later was animals had actually started eating
Speaker 6: their bodies in the water that they were submerging. And
Speaker 6: so when the police pulled Jesse into the police station
Speaker 6: and they laid out the photos of the bodies, they
Speaker 6: had him make up a story for all the visible wounds.
Speaker 6: The calls and manner of the wounds were unknown. They
Speaker 6: didn't know that all these wounds were animal predation.
Speaker 1: If you remember when the jury went out, what did
Speaker 1: you think was going to happen?
Speaker 6: I sincerely believed that we would go home, they would
Speaker 6: find us not guilty, that they would be able to
Speaker 6: totally ignore all the flaming prejudicial stuff that the prosecution
Speaker 6: was bringing up about Satanism and everything, and look at
Speaker 6: the case for what it was and follow the evidence.
Speaker 6: So told all your life that the purpose of the
Speaker 6: judicial system is to find the truth, when really it's
Speaker 6: to get a conviction.
Speaker 4: They came back in they sentenced me to death three times.
Speaker 4: They sentenced me to die by lethal injection three times.
Speaker 4: They sentenced Jason to life in prison without parole. The
Speaker 4: other guy they sentenced to life plus forty years. They
Speaker 4: immediately take me from the courtroom to death Row, where
Speaker 4: I would not see Jason again. I saw him maybe
Speaker 4: twelve fifteen years later, for maybe twenty to thirty seconds.
Speaker 4: They used to bring other prisoners in to clean the barracks,
Speaker 4: and he was one of the prisoners they brought in
Speaker 4: one day to clean death Row. So he comes by
Speaker 4: my cell, mopping and sweeping. That was the first contact
Speaker 4: I'd had with him in like fifteen years by that point.
Speaker 1: It's truly mind boggling the whole thing, even by our standards,
Speaker 1: being entrenched in this work, you know, and you hear
Speaker 1: one fucked up story after another, but this one takes
Speaker 1: the King go. Yeah, you know. I talk a lot
Speaker 1: about the idea that when we willfully or accidentally you
Speaker 1: want to call it mistakenly, prosecute the wrong person and
Speaker 1: convict them, by definition, we stop looking for the right
Speaker 1: person exactly. And in this case, it sure seems like
Speaker 1: the prosecutors must have known that these guys didn't do it.
Speaker 1: At some point they realized that they had the wrong guys.
Speaker 1: Maybe it was around the time you did, maybe it
Speaker 1: was sooner, maybe it was later. But then you're left with,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, So, whoever this sick fuck is that
Speaker 1: did this terrible or whoever these people are that did this,
Speaker 1: they're amongst us. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, first of all, I do believe that during the
Speaker 5: trial and through the conviction, the authorities felt they had
Speaker 5: the right guy. And the reason that's scary is because
Speaker 5: of the utter and competence and the ability to fall
Speaker 5: victim to confirmation bias, to all sorts of problems within
Speaker 5: our system. I actually think that they felt they had
Speaker 5: the right people. What I find evil, the real evil
Speaker 5: in this case because a lot of that initial false
Speaker 5: conviction I attribute to human error, which is scary in
Speaker 5: some way scarier than a conspiracy. But it's the post
Speaker 5: conviction period where it became quite clear I think to
Speaker 5: everybody involved that these guys were innocent, and for people
Speaker 5: to hang on to their jobs, for people to not
Speaker 5: question things, you know, for the same judge Judge Burnett,
Speaker 5: who presided over the original trial, to be the post
Speaker 5: conviction appellate judge ruling whether he had reversible error in
Speaker 5: the original is absurd, and that's what the way it
Speaker 5: was for over a decade on that case. So the
Speaker 5: real evil in this case is the post conviction period
Speaker 5: where people cared more about their jobs. And you see
Speaker 5: that all the time. It's why there shouldn't be prosecutorial
Speaker 5: immunity and all sorts of other issues. But just getting
Speaker 5: back to my origin story, you know, in covering this story,
Speaker 5: I just still I didn't have the gene that I
Speaker 5: thought film could be used for social good until the
Speaker 5: final moments of Paradise Lost, which are the final moments
Speaker 5: of the trial where oh my god, they really have
Speaker 5: convicted this guy on no evidence. And you see in
Speaker 5: Paradise Laws in the movie, Jason has already been convicted
Speaker 5: halfway through the movie, and then the second half of
Speaker 5: the movie is focusing on Jason and Damien, and you
Speaker 5: see Damian being chained up and led off to death row.
Speaker 5: I mean we were in the room with him as
Speaker 5: he was being chained off and led off to death row,
Speaker 5: and Jason was being led off to life without parole
Speaker 5: sentences and they get escorted out of the room and
Speaker 5: Bruce and I look at each other like, oh my god,
Speaker 5: I cannot believe what we just witnessed. And that's when
Speaker 5: we vowed to do everything we could. And when the
Speaker 5: gene or the light bulb went off in my head
Speaker 5: where I realized that, yes, I'm sitting on all this
Speaker 5: footage that can help, and that film I think can
Speaker 5: be used for shining a light. And so I feel
Speaker 5: like I stumbled on to the criminal justice system as
Speaker 5: a place to place my focus. But seeing how easy
Speaker 5: it is for people to make mistakes, seeing how easy
Speaker 5: it is for somebody to be sent to death, this
Speaker 5: became my calling when I saw that zero evidence and
Speaker 5: Stephen King novels and Metallica lyrics can put you on
Speaker 5: death row.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, if that's the case, I mean when you
Speaker 1: add up all the Stephen King novels and all the
Speaker 1: Batallica records that would sold out, means there's tens of
Speaker 1: millions of serial killers out there that we should all
Speaker 1: be very scared crazy.
Speaker 5: And you know, he did have an affinity for Aleister
Speaker 5: Crowley and that was also introduced. But still, this is
Speaker 5: not forensic evidence. You know, there was no blood at
Speaker 5: the crime scene, no forensic evidence. I mean, it's just
Speaker 5: this is the worst case probably I've studied, you know,
Speaker 5: in all these years.
Speaker 1: So your film ultimately led to an amazing outpouring of
Speaker 1: support from people all over the world, regular people as
Speaker 1: well as people at the very top echelons of society.
Speaker 1: Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, Natalie Mains, Peter Jackson, amazing amazing
Speaker 1: people who became like, not casually involved, but deeply involved.
Speaker 1: And there's no separating that from the fact that it
Speaker 1: was a direct result of your movie, which had to
Speaker 1: feel good. But then how did it feel when finally,
Speaker 1: eighteen years later, these guys walked out of prison and
Speaker 1: knowing the role that you played in that, right.
Speaker 5: Well, and a lot of people played roles in it, right,
Speaker 5: That's the thing I mean this. I hope this doesn't
Speaker 5: sound falsely humble. I'm very proud of the films, and
Speaker 5: I think the film's definitely played a role. And I
Speaker 5: definitely think that we're the ones who said against all
Speaker 5: the other media, because every night there was a news
Speaker 5: report or story of these monstrous killers. It was so
Speaker 5: prejudicing everything, so we were truly the only media saying
Speaker 5: that they were innocent. I think the film attracted a
Speaker 5: lot of the attention, but it's the activism of tens
Speaker 5: of thousands of people and the well known people that
Speaker 5: got them out of prison. But that feels good. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's rare in one's career. You know, when you make documentaries,
Speaker 5: you hope to affect people in some way. When you're
Speaker 5: a storyteller in general, you want to affect people in
Speaker 5: some way, and to have that kind of tangible effect
Speaker 5: on the outcome of a case felt terrific, although I
Speaker 5: will say it was also very bittersweet because a it
Speaker 5: took way too long, you know, eighteen and a half years. Actually,
Speaker 5: with some cases that's on the low end of things, sadly,
Speaker 5: but still it took so long, and the attempts to
Speaker 5: deny DNA testing and the fact that the same judge
Speaker 5: remained on the case during the whole post conviction is
Speaker 5: just outrageous. And then the end result was the Alfred plea,
Speaker 5: where you know, Damien was not well on death row
Speaker 5: as we know, and you know, Jason had to really
Speaker 5: debate whether he wanted to take the deal because he
Speaker 5: wanted to keep fighting, and some evidence that Peter Jackson
Speaker 5: paid for was coming out and very helpful, which of
Speaker 5: course scared the prosecution, which is why they were even
Speaker 5: willing to do the Alfred plea. Should we explain what
Speaker 5: the Alfred plea is?
Speaker 1: Yeah, let me talk about it.
Speaker 5: Go ahead, Well, the Alfred plea is basically where you
Speaker 5: stand up in court. In this case, Damien and Jason
Speaker 5: and Jesse acknowledged that the prosecution has enough evidence to convict,
Speaker 5: but you maintain your innocence. You state that I am
Speaker 5: innocent of these charges, but I believe the state has
Speaker 5: enough evidence that a conviction could occur, So I plead
Speaker 5: guilty in exchange for time served. Is basically what happened.
Speaker 5: So the death sentence was vacated and turned into a
Speaker 5: first degree murder charge, and he was sentenced to life served,
Speaker 5: which allowed him to go out of the prison, and
Speaker 5: the life without parole sentences were vacated and turned into
Speaker 5: time served. That's you know, you can understand why somebody
Speaker 5: would accept that, especially if you're on death row. But
Speaker 5: it's so cowardly on the part of the State of Arkansas.
Speaker 5: Does anyone really believe that if the State of Arkansas
Speaker 5: had in a bi belief that these were teen child
Speaker 5: killers who sacrificed eight year olds to the devil in
Speaker 5: a Satanic ritual that they would allow them to walk
Speaker 5: free after eighteen years. Of course, not they know they're innocent,
Speaker 5: but they want to protect themselves from accountability.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 5: Some people have said, well, they want to also protect
Speaker 5: themselves from being sued for wrongful conviction, which you know,
Speaker 5: the average wrongful conviction case is worth a million dollars
Speaker 5: a year times eighteen years times three defendants, that's fifty
Speaker 5: four million dollars if I'm doing my math correctly or
Speaker 5: something like that. But they could have even signed, you know,
Speaker 5: a way that they won't sue for wrongful conviction. It's
Speaker 5: all about accountability, and that's how these things happen. That's
Speaker 5: why post conviction takes for so long. Nobody wants to
Speaker 5: be accountable. And I think it's so cowardly and disturbing
Speaker 5: that this is how these guys ended up free. I mean,
Speaker 5: I took Jason to both the Berlin Film Festival with
Speaker 5: Paradise Lost three and there's a great documentary festival in
Speaker 5: Amsterdam called IFA National Documentary Festival of Amsterdam, and both
Speaker 5: of those border crossings were fraught with delays and problems
Speaker 5: because in the computer it's Jason bald With convicted child killer.
Speaker 5: Jason wants to study law and become a lawyer. He
Speaker 5: can't do it because he's a convicted child killer. So
Speaker 5: yesfl great that the movie had an impact on people,
Speaker 5: and those people pushed and pushed until these guys were
Speaker 5: let out. But sad that it's the alphad plea and
Speaker 5: they're not fully exonerated.
Speaker 1: The alpha plea is such a it's like a Sophie's
Speaker 1: choice kind of thing. And we've had Oh god, I
Speaker 1: don't know how many people on Ralph conviction who have
Speaker 1: resorted to that. You know, they have so much leverage.
Speaker 1: When you're looking at the amount of time it will
Speaker 1: take to go back for another trial, Yeah, you're going
Speaker 1: to spend that time in prison awaiting that trial. If
Speaker 1: you're trying to with yourself in the shoes of someone
Speaker 1: who's face with that choice, if you know that you've
Speaker 1: already been framed once or gotten you know, convict, there's
Speaker 1: something he didn't do. However, it got to that once
Speaker 1: you would be hard pressed to risk the rest of
Speaker 1: your life in the system that has already yea.
Speaker 5: Damien was truly unhealthy and being abused by guards and
Speaker 5: that's ultimately why I think they're all heroes to me.
Speaker 5: But Jason Baldwin acted very heroically because he was ready
Speaker 5: to stay and fight and clear his name. But everyone
Speaker 5: felt that Damien's health was in such a state that
Speaker 5: to wait any longer might be detrimental, so he made
Speaker 5: that decision.
Speaker 1: That sentence. Jason, of all the eighty something episodes we've recorded, now,
Speaker 1: his was really like it was difficult to even hear
Speaker 1: the stories that he told. He's such an amazingly gentle,
Speaker 1: you know, soul, and you know he was what ninety
Speaker 1: hundred pounds back then, kid.
Speaker 5: Actually did well in school, And you're right, that was
Speaker 5: the vibe he was giving off. Was this sweet little
Speaker 5: boy talking to me about fishing and what he likes
Speaker 5: to do when he's not at school, and drawing. He
Speaker 5: was an avid drawer. And while he's talking to me,
Speaker 5: I'm looking at his tiny little wrists, because if you
Speaker 5: believe the prosecution story, it's Baldwin who wielded the serrated
Speaker 5: hunting knife that castrated the buyer's boy. And I'm talking
Speaker 5: to this sweet little kid and staring at his wrist
Speaker 5: and trying to imagine that this guy knifed these kids
Speaker 5: in the way that it was alleged, and I just
Speaker 5: found it incredible.
Speaker 1: Jason Baldwin on the show. It was an experience I'll
Speaker 1: never forget when this all came down. You were in
Speaker 1: tenth grade.
Speaker 6: Tenth grade.
Speaker 1: Tenth grade. Let's just reflect on that for a second.
Speaker 1: You're not even anywhere near being an adult in tenth grade.
Speaker 1: So then you end up getting sent to maximum security prison.
Speaker 6: Right when you first go to prison and you're not
Speaker 6: going to death row, you go to what's called a
Speaker 6: diagnostic unit, and that's where they evaluate you mentally and
Speaker 6: physically to determine what your parent unit in the department
Speaker 6: corrections will be. Because they have a myriad of prisons
Speaker 6: on various different old slave plantations in the South, and
Speaker 6: each of them are different and in different ways by
Speaker 6: age and your strength and things like that. And when
Speaker 6: I went to diagnostics, they saw me like you saw
Speaker 6: me as a small innocent kid, and a diagnostics they
Speaker 6: were like, we've got to send you to one of
Speaker 6: two places, Jason, or you're not gonna make it. PC
Speaker 6: Protective Custody or what's called SPU Suicide Prevention Unit and
Speaker 6: suicide Prevention Unit you will have your own cell. And
Speaker 6: you know, I looked at it like this. At the time,
Speaker 6: we didn't have very many people on our side. In fact,
Speaker 6: it was just us. And I'm thrust into this incredibly
Speaker 6: impossible situation. And I was escorted everywhere I went in
Speaker 6: the prison, and so I'd see the people in SPU
Speaker 6: going to chow and they'd be doing the thorizine shot
Speaker 6: because they're so heavily medicated. And I had a fear
Speaker 6: that if I acquiesced and let them put me in SPU,
Speaker 6: that they would forcefully medicate me and I would lose
Speaker 6: my mind and my ability to think and reason and
Speaker 6: to fight. And so I said, no, I can't do that.
Speaker 6: And as far as the PC protective custody, anybody knows
Speaker 6: if you are saying you are so weak that you
Speaker 6: need protection, that people are gonna see that and prey
Speaker 6: on you even more. And so I knew I had
Speaker 6: to some way, some fashion stand on my own two
Speaker 6: feet in there and earn everybody's respect from the inmates
Speaker 6: and guards a light and they said, well, you not
Speaker 6: going to one of these places. We're gonna have to
Speaker 6: send you to Barner. And at the time they would
Speaker 6: just shift all these guys from the Little Tucker unit
Speaker 6: to Barner and they were destroying the place. They said,
Speaker 6: it was just chaos and destruction and just incredibly violent place,
Speaker 6: and that's where they were going to have to send me.
Speaker 6: And I just told them that that's what you gotta do.
Speaker 6: You got to do it. And so they did eventually
Speaker 6: send me to Barner unit, and it was everything they
Speaker 6: said it was.
Speaker 1: How did you survive there?
Speaker 6: And you know, by the grace of God, you know,
Speaker 6: as you said, I guess, I'll say I was incredibly luckily,
Speaker 6: but I was incredibly blessed to I went in there.
Speaker 6: They opened up and mister Patten stepped out, and his
Speaker 6: clerk stepped out, and mister Panton says, in May Bowlin,
Speaker 6: I'm mister Patten, the classification officer. I'll be assigning you
Speaker 6: to your housing unit. And this is my clerk, Mojo.
Speaker 6: And they tell me you got to stand up for
Speaker 6: yourself in here or these people will just will run
Speaker 6: you over and turn you into a sex slave and
Speaker 6: all these horrible things and make you pay money for
Speaker 6: protection and stuff like that. And so they assign me
Speaker 6: to seven barracks and seven barracks at the Barner unit
Speaker 6: is in Take barracks. I walk down the hall and
Speaker 6: as I'm walking, I'm walking next to this barracks and
Speaker 6: it's got bulletproof glass three stories high, and these guys
Speaker 6: are beating on it.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 6: It's plexiglasses, got chicken wire in it, and there are
Speaker 6: sell bars on the inside of it going all the
Speaker 6: way up three stories. And I look and these guys
Speaker 6: are literally climbing this thing. They are climbing it above
Speaker 6: one Another're hanging on to the bars, looking at me,
Speaker 6: beating the glass and pointing at me. Because they've been
Speaker 6: watching the trial on TV and the hearings and stuff
Speaker 6: for an entire year. It's like a pep rally. Right,
Speaker 6: They're finally going to have their hands on me, right.
Speaker 6: And I get there and Sergeant Ivy's working the door
Speaker 6: and he tells me. He says, if you go in
Speaker 6: there and stand up for yourself, I got your back.
Speaker 6: If not, they got you. And I'm just holding the
Speaker 6: only thing I have is a bible, a couple of
Speaker 6: letters from a mom. That's it in a little paper bag.
Speaker 6: And they opened the door and put me in there,
Speaker 6: and next thing I know, somebody swings a fist at me.
Speaker 6: I ducked that one. The next one catches me and
Speaker 6: I'm fighting. Immediately the door opens back up, there's may sprayed.
Speaker 6: Sergeant Ivi's yanking people off of me. I'm on the
Speaker 6: ground and he says, are you ready to go to PC?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 6: Do you need to catch out? And the guys are hollering,
Speaker 6: catch out, bitch, catch out, oh, all these horrible things,
Speaker 6: you know, which catch out means to leave the barracks
Speaker 6: and to go and to protective custody. And like I said,
Speaker 6: you know, I knew I needed to earn these people's
Speaker 6: respect because I did not know how long I would
Speaker 6: be there. I know I'm innocent, but I don't know
Speaker 6: how long I'm going to be in this prison. And
Speaker 6: so I tell them no leave me. And next thing
Speaker 6: I know, we go from the dayroom tier downstairs. The
Speaker 6: guys like push all the racks up against the wall.
Speaker 6: They circle around us, and I'm fighting this guy. And
Speaker 6: then I'm fighting this guy and there's people hitting me
Speaker 6: from behind. So it's kind of orderly and fair, but
Speaker 6: then again it's kind of not. And so I fight
Speaker 6: the whole barracks that Friday. Everybody and then they call
Speaker 6: shower call, and the barracks next door, eight bricks, They
Speaker 6: call two barracks at a time to go to shower.
Speaker 6: The shower holds one hundred people. And so when I
Speaker 6: get there, I gotta fight all these guys from eight barracks.
Speaker 6: And so I fought all weekend. My whole face would
Speaker 6: swollen up, my fists were swoll up, my body was beat.
Speaker 6: And so I do this all weekend. I get into
Speaker 6: fights in the chowhau, even like because there's even other
Speaker 6: people from other barracks is wanting to get to me
Speaker 6: in the chow haw and stuff like that. Come Monday morning,
Speaker 6: I'm barely even able to walk, you know, and like
Speaker 6: the guys are like just pushing me and guiding me
Speaker 6: a bit and which way to go and stuff, because
Speaker 6: I can't even see even less than I normally do
Speaker 6: because my eyes and stuff are all swollen up. And
Speaker 6: I just remember thinking that whole weekend about this job
Speaker 6: out in the fields, whole squad. There's gonna be sunshine,
Speaker 6: there's gonna be a dawn, and I'm gonna get to
Speaker 6: witness that. I was just looking forward to that first dawn,
Speaker 6: You know that that Morning Air, and so there was
Speaker 6: a part of me, no matter how bad it was,
Speaker 6: I was just looking forward to that first dawn. I'm like,
Speaker 6: if I can make it to that, you know, if
Speaker 6: I can make it to that, that's something good.
Speaker 1: It's interesting. Fifteen twenty years ago, I was going around
Speaker 1: to different studios in Hollywood and saying, we should do
Speaker 1: a show that features these type of cases and shine
Speaker 1: a light on these injustices, and people were like, no,
Speaker 1: nobody wants that, you know, And now it seems like
Speaker 1: every other.
Speaker 5: Show you turn on I have several of them. Yeah,
Speaker 5: you do a wrong man on Stars. And I did
Speaker 5: a show for Discovery called Killing Richard Glossop, who another
Speaker 5: horrible case that I wish people would pay more attention to.
Speaker 1: Richard Glossops.
Speaker 5: And on Oklahoma's Death Row, the status tried to kill
Speaker 5: him three times. The last time they tried to kill him,
Speaker 5: the portal was in his arm and they were using
Speaker 5: the wrong execution drugs and the clock struck three, which
Speaker 5: is the appointed killing hour, and the family on the
Speaker 5: outside thought the stay had not come as it had
Speaker 5: several times before, crying and hugging, thinking that he had
Speaker 5: been killed, when in fact what was going on inside
Speaker 5: the death room was an argument between the state's attorney
Speaker 5: general and the head of prisons trying to figure out
Speaker 5: whether they should kill this guy because they had the
Speaker 5: wrong execution drugs and that fracas, and it's the second
Speaker 5: time there was the wrong execution drugs were being used.
Speaker 5: There's you know, there's a moratorium on executions in Oklahoma,
Speaker 5: and that's the only thing that's keeping Richard Glossop alive,
Speaker 5: as opposed to this bizarre story that the prosecution you know,
Speaker 5: has given as to why he deserves to be killed,
Speaker 5: which is completely bogus.
Speaker 1: The case of Richard Glossop came to my attention several
Speaker 1: years ago, and I felt like I'd been kicked in
Speaker 1: the stomach. I mean, let's talk about him, because they
Speaker 1: do need to bring more attention to it. Can you
Speaker 1: give us the capsule summary of this.
Speaker 5: There's not a long story to tell. It's Richard Glossip
Speaker 5: was the manager of a kind of a sleazy motel
Speaker 5: and he is accused of hiring the motel's janitor, who
Speaker 5: he had given a job to only a few months before,
Speaker 5: to kill the owner of the hotel so that he
Speaker 5: could take it over. The whole story on its face
Speaker 5: when you pick it apart, is ridiculous. The guy who
Speaker 5: actually did the killing is the junkie hotel janitor maintenance
Speaker 5: man named Justin Snead, and he was convicted of the murder,
Speaker 5: but you know, was not sentenced to death. He cut
Speaker 5: a deal, pointed a finger at his boss. There's zero evidence,
Speaker 5: zero corroboration. We did some forensic accounting or the defense
Speaker 5: attorney did some forensic accounting to show this idea of
Speaker 5: swindling and taking money is bogus. But conspiracy to murder
Speaker 5: hiring somebody to do a murder as a capital offense,
Speaker 5: and these guys wanted that notch on their belt. I'm convinced.
Speaker 5: I mean, there's just if you look at the evidence,
Speaker 5: there is none. It's just one of these cases where
Speaker 5: it's so bizarre. And this guy has been on it's
Speaker 5: been two years since I did the show. It's either
Speaker 5: thirty five days or thirty eight days prior to your execution.
Speaker 5: Your moved from one terrible cell in death row to
Speaker 5: your final cell where you're placed on death watch, where
Speaker 5: the lights are on twenty four seven. You now only
Speaker 5: have one meal a day. You are sleeping on a
Speaker 5: thin half inch excuse for a mattress instead of a
Speaker 5: real cot, and they're just trying to wear you down.
Speaker 5: And this poor guy has gone through this process three times.
Speaker 5: He's had the portal placed in his arm awaiting the
Speaker 5: lethal injection drugs. When they realized, oh, we have the
Speaker 5: wrong drugs. That's the only thing that has saved this guy.
Speaker 5: We're two mistakes by the prison. The first attempt to
Speaker 5: kill him, there was a stay because a new witness
Speaker 5: came along and the government dismissed it as being relevant.
Speaker 5: But that was the first day. The other two stays,
Speaker 5: the last two stays were because of botched execution. And
Speaker 5: there's just no evidence tying this guy to the murder.
Speaker 5: The convicted killer who confessed to doing it is serving
Speaker 5: a life sentence, whereas the guy who allegedly hired him
Speaker 5: for which the proof, is on death row under the
Speaker 5: most miserable conditions, you know. And this is where, like,
Speaker 5: my big thing is prosecutorial immunity. You know, on the
Speaker 5: one hand, it's been argued to me, well, prosecutors have
Speaker 5: to be immune from their actions because you know, in
Speaker 5: many places prosecutors are underpaid. You know, you wouldn't get
Speaker 5: good prosecutors to do their job if they were fearful
Speaker 5: of immunity. I get that on a certain level. And
Speaker 5: there's lots of great prosecutors, and not everyone's a bad guy,
Speaker 5: and not every CoP's a bad cop. And I'm like, like,
Speaker 5: you can't paint people with a broad stroke. But there's
Speaker 5: got to be a happy medium where willful withholding of evidence.
Speaker 5: Prosecutors have got to be held accountable and a lot
Speaker 5: of this shit would go away in my opinion. I mean,
Speaker 5: you know, Judge Janine Janine Piro, the Fox commentator, in
Speaker 5: the case of Jeffrey Dskovic, she fought DNA testing for
Speaker 5: a long time. You know, she went off to go
Speaker 5: run for office, and then her successor, janetd Fiori, said,
Speaker 5: of course, we'll test the DNA. The DNA was tested
Speaker 5: and it immediately pointed to another person.
Speaker 1: Season four of Romful Conviction, episode eight, Jeffrey Deskovic.
Speaker 7: And then the trial comes in. Just before the trial,
Speaker 7: the results of the DNA test comes back from the
Speaker 7: FBI laboratory, which shows that the seamen found and the
Speaker 7: victim didn't.
Speaker 1: Match me, right, because remember she was raped.
Speaker 7: She was raped, Yes, and by the way, the lieutenant
Speaker 7: who oversaw everything in the letter that he penned to
Speaker 7: the FBI asking them to expedite the testing. He wrote
Speaker 7: in the letter that the DNA testing would either show
Speaker 7: my guilt or it would exonerate me. But when it
Speaker 7: came back and it didn't match me, my lawyer did
Speaker 7: try to get the indictment dismissed against me based on that,
Speaker 7: but the judge denied that motion.
Speaker 1: That alone seems so just incomprehensible to me. I mean,
Speaker 1: the judge is impartial, right, we know the prosecutor has
Speaker 1: an agenda, but the judge's impartial. Yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't understand. I mean, I know that back then
Speaker 1: DNA wasn't it wasn't as well known.
Speaker 7: But to be clear, I mean, DNA started being used
Speaker 7: in the court system as early as nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 7: and this we're on trial now in nineteen ninety, so
Speaker 7: it's been around for three years. So while not in
Speaker 7: currency like now, it is not exactly totally unknown.
Speaker 1: Right, and it's perfect I mean right, it's the bold standard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so your DNA doesn't match. This is an inconvenient truth
Speaker 1: for the authorities and the judge allows this this circus
Speaker 1: to go on. Meanwhile, let's spend a moment talking about
Speaker 1: the actual perpetrator. Yes, because every time, and I sound
Speaker 1: like a broken record when I say this, but every
Speaker 1: time that somebody like you gets convicted wrongfully, the actual perpetrator,
Speaker 1: they stop looking for him. Right, the case is closed,
Speaker 1: And in this case, the consequences were very real.
Speaker 7: Yes, school teacher Patricia Morrison, who also had a couple
Speaker 7: of kids. She was from Peak Skill and she was
Speaker 7: killed by the stained perpetrator, Stephen Cunningham. She was killed
Speaker 7: three and a half years later as a result of
Speaker 7: Cunningham being left free on the street while I was
Speaker 7: doing time for his crime.
Speaker 1: Now you say, the real perpetrator, how do we know that?
Speaker 7: Well, here, great, that's a great question. I'm so glad
Speaker 7: you asked. Because the DNA matched him, because he got
Speaker 7: caught for the second murder Patricia Morrison, which resulted in
Speaker 7: his being incarcerated and having to give up a DNA
Speaker 7: sample which was put into the data bank. And so
Speaker 7: when I eventually got the further testing with the Innocence
Speaker 7: Projects help, it matched him. Then he subsequently confessed and
Speaker 7: he played guilty.
Speaker 1: In court when did this happen?
Speaker 7: That happened and a half years after he killed a
Speaker 7: second victim.
Speaker 1: Wow, So Patricia Morrison today would be probably a lot
Speaker 1: sitting around with her grandchildren, you know, probably be a
Speaker 1: retired school teacher by now having a nice life. Her
Speaker 1: children would have grown up as they deserve too, as
Speaker 1: everyone deserves to with their mother. The rest of her
Speaker 1: family wouldn't have gone through this horrendous loss. None of
Speaker 1: it had to happen except for the fact that they
Speaker 1: went on this crazy witch hunt to convict you, Jeffrey Deskovic,
Speaker 1: of a crime that they knew you didn't commit.
Speaker 5: So he was exonerated, got millions of dollars from Westchester
Speaker 5: County and Putnam County, which the taxpayers should be livid
Speaker 5: about that. You know, this case was allowed to happen,
Speaker 5: and the same thing in Damien's case. They were you know,
Speaker 5: the seven or eight years was spent with a guy
Speaker 5: on death row. Seven or eight years was spent fighting
Speaker 5: DNA testing because of the finality of judgment concept in
Speaker 5: our legal system, which is absurd.
Speaker 4: Years later they do DNA testing, find out that the
Speaker 4: DNA does not match me or the other two guys.
Speaker 4: They convicted. To this day, they still have not run
Speaker 4: that DNA through codis to see who it matches. They
Speaker 4: refuse to do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is so strange because in a case like this,
Speaker 1: especially in the small community, the people who are doing
Speaker 1: investigating live in that community. By definition, when you have
Speaker 1: somebody out there who's capable of this sort of pure evil,
Speaker 1: you would think, if for no other reason than purely
Speaker 1: selfish reasons, you would want to get that person off
Speaker 1: the street. But that's not what happened, and it happens
Speaker 1: too frequently that these various factors combine to result in
Speaker 1: a tragic outcome.
Speaker 4: And what people don't realize also, you know, just most
Speaker 4: people's knowledge of the legal system comes from watching TV,
Speaker 4: and it fosters this idea that these people, these judges,
Speaker 4: these prosecutors, these attorney generals, that they have these positions
Speaker 4: because there's somehow moral people. They're good people who are
Speaker 4: looking out for society. In actual fact, these are politicians,
Speaker 4: just like senators, just like congressmen. Their number one priority
Speaker 4: is winning that next election. So they are going to
Speaker 4: do for that next case exactly whatever the community is
Speaker 4: pressuring them to do. That's the way they're going to
Speaker 4: lean because they want to win the next election.
Speaker 5: The legal system should be about finding the truth and
Speaker 5: if there's reason to believe that somebody has a wrongful
Speaker 5: conviction claim, especially with the advent of DNA technology, which
Speaker 5: you know, that's a new that was a new thing.
Speaker 5: The fact that a prosecutor can fight DNA testing like
Speaker 5: they did in Damien's case for eight or nine years,
Speaker 5: like they did in Jeffrey Deskovic's case, which resulted in
Speaker 5: the death of another innocent human being, it's just outrageous.
Speaker 1: You know. And that's true too in the Central Park
Speaker 1: five case, where Linda Fairstein prosecuted those five kids even
Speaker 1: though she knew she had the evidence, she knew they
Speaker 1: didn't do it, and they had every reason to suspect
Speaker 1: that Matthias Rays was the actual killer. Ye and then
Speaker 1: he went out and raped three other ways and killed
Speaker 1: one of them in front of her kids. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like, I mean, I'm getting the shills just thinking
Speaker 1: about it, Like that is so bad and we should
Speaker 1: all want that to end, right.
Speaker 5: I'm telling you, If some tougher laws were passed about
Speaker 5: prosecutors being held accountable for their actions, I think a
Speaker 5: lot of the shit would end. It's about winning at
Speaker 5: all costs. It's not about the search for the truth.
Speaker 5: And again, I'm friends with a prosecutor. I know many
Speaker 5: good prosecutors. There's good guys out there, so I'm not
Speaker 5: saying every prosecutor is like that. But it's the system
Speaker 5: is human. It's the reason you cannot have a death
Speaker 5: penalty because the system is human and it's so easy.
Speaker 5: We see with Damien how an innocent person can be killed.
Speaker 5: And so I've spent a lot of times talking to
Speaker 5: the mothers of victims of violent crime, and they want vengeance.
Speaker 5: And I understand that desire to have vengeance, and I
Speaker 5: don't want to look a mother in the eye and
Speaker 5: say to her, you don't morally have the right to
Speaker 5: want the death of the killer of your child. We
Speaker 5: don't even have to get to that moral place because
Speaker 5: the death of one innocent person on death row, to me,
Speaker 5: means you can't have a death penalty because the system
Speaker 5: is fallible. It's run by human beings, some of whom
Speaker 5: want to win at all costs.
Speaker 1: No, that's the argument I have with anybody who's pro
Speaker 1: death penalty. I always say, Okay, what percentage of innocent people,
Speaker 1: are you okay with executing exactly ten percent? I mean,
Speaker 1: we know that of the people that have been exonerated
Speaker 1: from death row, there's proof that four percent of people
Speaker 1: that were on death row are innocent. But we don't
Speaker 1: know how many others were executed that were innocent as well,
Speaker 1: because most of those cases just literally die when that
Speaker 1: death takes place. No one goes and investigates those cases.
Speaker 1: I want to say too, there was one period of
Speaker 1: time where Harry Iconic Senior was the DA in New
Speaker 1: Orleans and he put eight people on death row and
Speaker 1: six of them were exonerated. I don't know whether the
Speaker 1: other two are innocent or guilty or what became of them,
Speaker 1: but that was a pretty scary time right there. And
Speaker 1: there was that amazing sixty minutes piece where another prosecutor
Speaker 1: from New Orleans actually came forward and with tears and
Speaker 1: said that you know, he feels terrible to this day
Speaker 1: about a guy that he put on death row that
Speaker 1: he knew was innocent, and he withheld the evidence, and
Speaker 1: he talks about his sort of perverse motives and it's
Speaker 1: just not a thing, Like the death penalty is not
Speaker 1: a thing and just a slight divergence. You know, when
Speaker 1: you said earlier that the typical exunery get a million
Speaker 1: dollars a year, the typical exignery actually gets nothing, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, some of them get paid, but even then
Speaker 1: it varies wildly from whether they get paid thousands of
Speaker 1: dollars or tens of thousands, or in the rare case
Speaker 1: like Jeffrey Dskobic, they actually did manage to get millions
Speaker 1: of dollars, but those are rare. You have to prove
Speaker 1: civil rights violations. And I'll never forget. There was a
Speaker 1: guy who I actually was friendly with. He's gone now,
Speaker 1: but he was sentenced to death in Louisiana and came
Speaker 1: within days of being executed before somebody found with a
Speaker 1: microscope and some brilliant scientific research was able to prove
Speaker 1: with DNA that he was innocent, and he was exonerated
Speaker 1: and freed, and he was awarded fourteen and a half
Speaker 1: million dollars, and the state of Louisiana a pealed all
Speaker 1: the way to the US Supreme Court, and the Supreme
Speaker 1: Court overturned the award five to four. He had proven
Speaker 1: that they had willfully prosecuted him while knowing that he
Speaker 1: was innocent, and the Supreme Court made some bizarre ruling
Speaker 1: that it wasn't the responsibility of the prosecutors to train
Speaker 1: the younger prosecutors, that they had to turn over culpatory evidence,
Speaker 1: and that he had to prove a pattern of misconduct.
Speaker 1: You know, it was just totally nuts. And he wrote
Speaker 1: an op ed in the New York Times where he said,
Speaker 1: I don't understand why the prosecutor who tried to kill me,
Speaker 1: knowing I was innocent, wouldn't be charged with attempted murder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, rest in peace. He was a He was
Speaker 1: a wonderful guy. And what you know, I had breakfast
Speaker 1: with him actually within days of the time the Supreme
Speaker 1: Court overturned his award and he got nothing. I was
Speaker 1: happy to be alive. And I'm glad you said what
Speaker 1: you said, Joe, because I also believe believe that I
Speaker 1: still believe in in people. I still believe in in
Speaker 1: prosecutors and police, and I believe in a system of laws.
Speaker 1: And I think that the large majority of people in
Speaker 1: our system are good people. I think most of the
Speaker 1: judges are good, but the ones that are bad, we
Speaker 1: should all want to get rid of them, because they
Speaker 1: do such terrible damage that they do damage to the
Speaker 1: reputation of the profession as a whole as well. And
Speaker 1: these stories are real, These are real people, right, Richard Glossip.
Speaker 1: It's unimaginable. And I'm glad you brought that up too,
Speaker 1: because what the fuck kind of sense does it make
Speaker 1: that before they execute you, they go through this torture,
Speaker 1: like literal torture. And you know, there was a guy
Speaker 1: in Virginia whose case I've been involved with, and thankfully
Speaker 1: we were able to prevent his execution because he's innocent,
Speaker 1: guy ning Me Bontelugus. And during the process of you know,
Speaker 1: working through his case, I learned that they have a
Speaker 1: practice in the Commonwealth of Virginia where I think it's
Speaker 1: fifteen days or three weeks before your execution, move you
Speaker 1: to another cell where you have none of your books,
Speaker 1: You have basically nothing. The lights are on, like you said,
Speaker 1: the whole time, and they come and check on you
Speaker 1: every fifteen minutes, So they wake you up every fifteen
Speaker 1: minutes and go, hey, just want to make sure Joe
Speaker 1: everything okay in there, Like I just want to you know,
Speaker 1: like what what I mean.
Speaker 5: Well, who came up with that well, I think they're
Speaker 5: trying to wear you down.
Speaker 2: So why so you just.
Speaker 5: Accept your death so that you don't make a scene
Speaker 5: for the witnesses who are experiencing it.
Speaker 1: Is that what it is?
Speaker 5: I don't know, I mean, and no one's told me that,
Speaker 5: but I just feel like they're just trying to wear
Speaker 5: you down so you don't fight back. And Glossop told
Speaker 5: me himself, like he was so tired that, you know,
Speaker 5: he was accepting of his fate even though he knew
Speaker 5: it was wrong, you know, and if it wasn't for
Speaker 5: the wrong drug, he'd be gone.
Speaker 1: It's so incredibly troubling because like, why, just why you
Speaker 1: got the guy you wanted, You got the actual killer.
Speaker 1: You guys did your job right, It's done. What do
Speaker 1: you need the extra body for what? And there's so
Speaker 1: many richer glossops. I mean.
Speaker 5: The other weird and hard dynamic is that the family
Speaker 5: of the victim in that case believes the glossip is guilty.
Speaker 5: And for years, the families of the West Memphis three, sorry,
Speaker 5: the families of the victims, the parents of Michael Moore,
Speaker 5: Christopher Byers, and Stevie Branch thought we were horrible people,
Speaker 5: just Hollywood elites, and so funny when them called the
Speaker 5: Hollywood elite. I live an hour north of Manhattan, and
Speaker 5: A you know that as far away from Hollywood as possible,
Speaker 5: but you know that somehow Hollywood elites conspire to get
Speaker 5: these devil worshippers out of prison. For years, they hated us,
Speaker 5: call us names. And that's painful because you don't want
Speaker 5: to as makers of these things. You want to shine
Speaker 5: a light on the truth, but you don't want to
Speaker 5: cause the family's pain. And that's the disservice that these
Speaker 5: police officials and prosecutors who maintain this facade of righteousness,
Speaker 5: that's the damage they inflict on the family family members
Speaker 5: because a there's no justice because the real killers are
Speaker 5: running free. And secondly, the healing process. You know, we're
Speaker 5: both parents, and I can't imagine, you know, anything worse
Speaker 5: than losing a child. And there's no closure for losing
Speaker 5: a child, but there certainly can be finality to the experience,
Speaker 5: and your healing process is predicated on knowing justice has
Speaker 5: been served. And so we came along and upset the
Speaker 5: apple cart by coming out with a film that's saying, hey, everything,
Speaker 5: the police and prosecution and all your ten thousand meetings
Speaker 5: with these people is wrong, and you're putting these families
Speaker 5: through a double tragedy. And for years they hated our
Speaker 5: guts and two of the three families came to accept
Speaker 5: our point of view by the end of the Second
Speaker 5: Paradise Loss, but even at by the time of the
Speaker 5: Third Paradise Loss, which came out in twenty eleven and
Speaker 5: coincided with their release. One of the families. You know,
Speaker 5: the movie was nominated for an Academy Award and some
Speaker 5: other prizes, and I mention that only because these families
Speaker 5: took the time to write to the Academy and to
Speaker 5: the Director's Guild and every place that had nominated us
Speaker 5: for a prize, to say that these films are works
Speaker 5: of fiction, that we manipulated them, we lied to them,
Speaker 5: that the West Memphis Three are guilty, and I look,
Speaker 5: I have even though they hate us, I have endless
Speaker 5: reservoirs of sympathy for them, because again, going through this
Speaker 5: experience is every parent's worst nightmare. And then to be
Speaker 5: victimized by the system again because the police and the
Speaker 5: prosecution have lied to them. That's the other part that
Speaker 5: people don't really think about, is what happens to the
Speaker 5: victims when the truth is just not the truth.
Speaker 1: Who do you think killed those kids?
Speaker 5: Oh, I don't want to do. I don't want to
Speaker 5: do to somebody else what I think was done to Damien.
Speaker 5: What I do know is that the case needs to
Speaker 5: be reopened. That we all know that no sane prosecutor
Speaker 5: would knowingly let convicted teen Satanist child killers out into
Speaker 5: the real world if they had any kind of belief
Speaker 5: that they were guilty. If they did, because the argument
Speaker 5: in Arkansas amongst some of these officials is there was
Speaker 5: so much pressure from Johnny Depp and Eddie Vedder and
Speaker 5: Peter Jackson. Well, shame on you. You're going to let
Speaker 5: a convicted child killer who you believe is capable of
Speaker 5: castrating little boys in a Satanic ritual. You're going to
Speaker 5: let them out after eighteen years because Johnny Depp said
Speaker 5: to So if that's true, shame on you. And if
Speaker 5: you don't believe that, and they're actually innocent, as we
Speaker 5: all know, then shame on you for sticking with this
Speaker 5: Alfred plea and not looking into the case. As we
Speaker 5: all know, there's some evidence that points very directly to
Speaker 5: one of the stepfathers. I don't want to say he's
Speaker 5: guilty or not, but a competent authority needs to look
Speaker 5: into this, and they refuse to because they're hiding behind
Speaker 5: the Alfred plea. And that's the crime here. I mean,
Speaker 5: there are some simple abuses that I think could easily
Speaker 5: be remedied. One is prosecutorial accountability. There's way too much
Speaker 5: misconduct that needs to be arrested, and I think finding
Speaker 5: the balance between making it so scary that a prosecutor
Speaker 5: doesn't even want to take the job, which I understand,
Speaker 5: versus like just wilful withholding of evidence for example, it
Speaker 5: just needs to be stopped. The other thing is that
Speaker 5: people get a vested interest in staying on a case forever.
Speaker 5: Prosecutors stay on a case. Judges in some states like
Speaker 5: Arkansas are allowed to stay on the case if something
Speaker 5: is up for review. The original people should be out
Speaker 5: of the picture immediately. I mean, it just doesn't make
Speaker 5: sense to me. One of the cases that the Supreme
Speaker 5: Court finally is going to hear is the Curtis Flowers case,
Speaker 5: and we profiled Curtis Flowers. I mean, he's a guy.
Speaker 5: I think it's totally innocent, and we profiled that case
Speaker 5: on a show I do call wrong Man, and the
Speaker 5: guy has been tried. He's the most tried inmate in
Speaker 5: the history of American jurisprudence. Jurisprudence is that he said, yes,
Speaker 5: that's right, I'm better at filmmaking than vocabulary. He's been
Speaker 5: tried six times and each time it's the same prosecutor,
Speaker 5: and they keep affirming his conviction again, circumstantial evidence and
Speaker 5: so many holes in that case. And thankfully the Supreme
Speaker 5: Court a few weeks ago said they're going to hear
Speaker 5: the case again. But even the Supreme Court hearing the case,
Speaker 5: if it's a good result and the state appeal is
Speaker 5: overturned by the Supreme Court, then it gets remanded back
Speaker 5: to you know, to the state to determine if they're
Speaker 5: going to try him a seventh time, which is absurd,
Speaker 5: and it's the same prosecutor.
Speaker 1: It's like crazy, right, the taxpayer dollars that are being
Speaker 1: expended on this if, I mean, it's probably the least
Speaker 1: important aspect of it, but it's still a remarkable amount
Speaker 1: of time and energy and resources being devoted to persecuting
Speaker 1: this one guy, Curtis Flowers, who was convicted of murdering
Speaker 1: four people in a furniture store in Mississippi.
Speaker 5: Mississippi, four white people. He's a black man. And you
Speaker 5: know that's the other huge problem, as I don't need
Speaker 5: to tell anyone that the extreme racial inequities in our system,
Speaker 5: you know.
Speaker 1: So we don't have a ton of time left. I
Speaker 1: do want to ask you what do you think about
Speaker 1: the role of media in the criminal justice debate? Right now?
Speaker 1: And then I have one more question for you before
Speaker 1: we go to final thoughts.
Speaker 5: Sure, you know, I think one size does not fit all.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of irresponsible reporting. I mean, we saw
Speaker 5: in the Amanda Knox case that reporters were horrible in
Speaker 5: festering the image of Foxy Noxy and making her seem
Speaker 5: guilty and really did her a disservice in her case.
Speaker 5: And same thing with Eccholes. I mean, you know, the
Speaker 5: local media down there was just fanning the flames of
Speaker 5: the monster of the daily headline and the daily news report.
Speaker 5: So there's a lot of irresponsible reporting. There's a lot
Speaker 5: of true crime And I hate that phrase again because
Speaker 5: it somehow implies like I'm considered a true crime filmmaker.
Speaker 5: I'd rather not be known as a true crime filmmaker,
Speaker 5: you know, I'm a filmmaker who's involved in the criminal
Speaker 5: justice system. Prime implies that you're wallowing in the misery
Speaker 5: of others, you know, for entertainment purposes, and that's the
Speaker 5: last thing I'm doing. But some of that stuff on
Speaker 5: some of these networks does that. So I think the
Speaker 5: role of smart, talented storytellers who are shining a light
Speaker 5: on criminal justice abuse has never been more important. First
Speaker 5: of all, for the first time and because of the
Speaker 5: last couple of years, with the advent of streaming and
Speaker 5: the growing popularity of documentary in general. You know, when
Speaker 5: I started making films twenty five years ago, if you
Speaker 5: didn't sell your documentary to PBS or HBO, you weren't
Speaker 5: selling your documentary. And now there's just you know, unscripted
Speaker 5: series were never heard of. I mean, that was just
Speaker 5: not even a concept. And with that also has come,
Speaker 5: you know, the blurring of the line between entertainment and
Speaker 5: news at networks has become so blurry that certain stories
Speaker 5: aren't covered. You know, the networks are owned by a
Speaker 5: handful of corporations after all, and I like all the
Speaker 5: companies I work with, but there are certain stories that
Speaker 5: they won't cover for fear of offending advertise. I'm not
Speaker 5: just talking in the criminal justice round, but there's certain
Speaker 5: stories that either they won't rate, you know, in other words,
Speaker 5: the audience won't be big enough, or they'll offend certain advertisers.
Speaker 5: So today in twenty nineteen, also because of the demise
Speaker 5: of print journalism because of the Internet, you know, newspapers
Speaker 5: have been gutted. You know, I think the independent documentarians.
Speaker 1: Are doing some of the most.
Speaker 5: Robust social justice reporting, and so that kind of filmmaking
Speaker 5: couldn't be more important and more timely. But it's hard
Speaker 5: to paint it all with the same brush because there's
Speaker 5: a lot of horrible reporting and irresponsible reporting. But generally
Speaker 5: I think it's a good thing.
Speaker 1: For people that are listening now and who are hearing
Speaker 1: the amazing story of how you sort of almost accidentally
Speaker 1: got involved in this or serendipitously got involved in its
Speaker 1: work and then ended up having an outsize impact. I know,
Speaker 1: for me, more than ever, I'm getting increase from people.
Speaker 1: How do I help? What do I do? I want
Speaker 1: to be involved? I want to do something. I listen
Speaker 1: to your show or I saw something on TV, or
Speaker 1: I came to an Innocence Project event, and what would
Speaker 1: you tell people that are listening now that want to
Speaker 1: get involved. What's the best way for them to, you know,
Speaker 1: make a difference someone who's not you know, isn't a
Speaker 1: rich person, but it's someone who has a heart and
Speaker 1: who hears about Richard Glossip or hears about so many
Speaker 1: of the other people Yvonne Tellegous or Rob will who
Speaker 1: I recently visited on Death Throw in Texas, who is
Speaker 1: innocent as could be. What do you tell these people?
Speaker 5: I mean, first of all is awareness. You know, I myself,
Speaker 5: before I got involved in this accidentally went because I
Speaker 5: was making a film about something else.
Speaker 1: I thought.
Speaker 5: I had a basic belief that the system works, and
Speaker 5: it works sometimes, but it often fails miserably. So just
Speaker 5: having that basic understanding and awareness is helpful and little
Speaker 5: actions add up to a lot. Again, not saying anything
Speaker 5: discourteous about Johnny Depp or Eddie Vedder or Natalie Mains,
Speaker 5: those guys were amazing. Those names wrote checks and did
Speaker 5: things and did concerts. But what really made the difference,
Speaker 5: in my opinion, really what made a difference in that
Speaker 5: case were tens of thousands of regular people who saw
Speaker 5: paradise lost, who did not have an outsized wallet. But
Speaker 5: until the local politicians and prosecutors are politicians and many
Speaker 5: municipalities they are elected officials. They didn't start taking the
Speaker 5: case seriously until the local population took the case seriously.
Speaker 5: And what made the local population take the case seriously
Speaker 5: is tens of thousands of people who banded together on
Speaker 5: this website called Free the West Memphis II went down
Speaker 5: religiously to every action, every appeal, every hearing. There were
Speaker 5: thousands of regular people from all walks of life who
Speaker 5: chose to take their vacation in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to hold
Speaker 5: up a sign and have their voices heard. At the
Speaker 5: end of the day, a lot of these people who
Speaker 5: hold positions of power, who have this unique power to
Speaker 5: take your liberty away, often unjustly, often justly. Again, I
Speaker 5: don't think every prosecutor is a bad guy, but they
Speaker 5: are elected officials for the most part. And people should
Speaker 5: wake up. And if you live in Oklahoma, pay attention
Speaker 5: to the Richard Glossop case. I mean, there's sadly there's
Speaker 5: a case, and there's a wrongful conviction case. Yet probably
Speaker 5: in every state and just little actions and awareness I
Speaker 5: think go a long way. You don't have to write
Speaker 5: a big check.
Speaker 1: So I guess start by watching learning more. Watch The
Speaker 1: Wrong Man.
Speaker 5: You can stream on Amazon.
Speaker 1: Watch An Innocent Man, the amazing documentary about the book
Speaker 1: that John Grisham wrote about these cases in Ada, Oklahoma,
Speaker 1: and go to Frerobwill dot org. Is there a Richard glossopside.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there is if.
Speaker 5: You google Richard Glossip and why I'm drawing a blank
Speaker 5: what the website is, But just google Richard Glossip and
Speaker 5: you'll you'll find a lot of supporters. There's a guy
Speaker 5: named Don Knight in Colorado who's running that case. He's
Speaker 5: the tireless, thankless defense attorney who is really is doing
Speaker 5: amazing work. So Don Knight in Colorado is a good
Speaker 5: guy to be in touch with if you feel you
Speaker 5: have something significant to offer, or just be.
Speaker 1: Aware and one minute speed round. First of all, I
Speaker 1: want to thank you for this has been fun coming
Speaker 1: Joe Berlinger, amazing filmmaker and advocate for the wrongfully convicted,
Speaker 1: and I'm looking forward to doing more work with you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: me too. And like I said, let's take the last
Speaker 1: minute or two. Any final thoughts that you have, if
Speaker 1: you have any.
Speaker 5: You know, we have a criminal justice system sorely in
Speaker 5: need to reform, and I think it's the number one issue.
Speaker 5: The thing we hold most dear as Americans, the thing
Speaker 5: that's set us apart is our personal liberty, and a
Speaker 5: prosecutor has the unique power to take that personal liberty
Speaker 5: away without accountability. And I think it's time to hold
Speaker 5: those people who have the power to take our liberty
Speaker 5: away to be held accountable to a higher standard. And
Speaker 5: I think a lot of these problems would go away.
Speaker 5: But there's all sorts of problems in our criminal justice system,
Speaker 5: and people should be aware of it because it really
Speaker 5: needs addressing. I mean, a whole generation has been locked
Speaker 5: away over horrible drug laws. I mean, we can go
Speaker 5: on and on and on. You know, we have five
Speaker 5: percent of the world's population and twenty five percent of
Speaker 5: the world's prison population, more than Russia and China combined.
Speaker 5: That's disturbing and goes against who we think we are
Speaker 5: as Americans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we locked black people up at six times the
Speaker 1: rate of South Africa the height of apartheid. It's all
Speaker 1: a national shame and a disgrace. But absolutely, yeah, please
Speaker 1: do get involved. Keep listening. We appreciate you being here
Speaker 1: with us. And when you're on a jury, we need
Speaker 1: everybody to show up serve because it's just your felom
Speaker 1: human being who's up there, and they may be the
Speaker 1: next Damien Echols. So thanks again for listening. This is
Speaker 1: Wrongful Conviction. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps. And I'm
Speaker 1: a proud donor to the Innocence Project and I really
Speaker 1: hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause
Speaker 1: and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocenceproject
Speaker 1: dot org to learn how to donate and get involved.
Speaker 1: I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and
Speaker 1: Kevin Wartis. The music in the show is by three
Speaker 1: time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow
Speaker 1: us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at
Speaker 1: Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm is a
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Speaker 1: Company Number one