Speaker 1: David Toles had always been a huge mystery for Lee Harris.
Speaker 1: During the trial back in nineteen ninety two, Tolls had
Speaker 1: been brought out as a last minute witness by the prosecution,
Speaker 1: and his testimony was earth shattering. He tells the jury
Speaker 1: that over a game of prison Blackjack, Lee had told
Speaker 1: him all about the Danea Fightler attack. Lee had bragged
Speaker 1: about wanting to have sex with Dana that summer night
Speaker 1: back in eighty nine, and when she refused, he had
Speaker 1: pulled her into an alleyway and shot her in the
Speaker 1: back of the head. In other words, Lee Harris had
Speaker 1: confessed it was like a bomb went off in that courtroom,
Speaker 1: but the only casualty was Lee, who had said he
Speaker 1: had never seen the man before in his life. Even so,
Speaker 1: it was tolls His testimony that ultimately sealed Lee's fate.
Speaker 1: So when Robert first started looking into Lee's case in
Speaker 1: two thousand and one, finding Tolls was his first order
Speaker 1: of business, and that he did, tracking him down in
Speaker 1: a Wisconsin prison, and in typical Robert fashion, direct to
Speaker 1: the point, he wrote to Toles asking for the truth,
Speaker 1: and to his surprise, he didn't just get a response,
Speaker 1: he received two pages worth. I know you won't ever
Speaker 1: be able to forgive me for what happened, wrote Tolls.
Speaker 1: He had been just twenty four when this all happened,
Speaker 1: and every year since had been pure hell. Robert had
Speaker 1: hoped that he could get Tolls to open up more,
Speaker 1: and what started it as one letter morphed into many.
Speaker 1: They turned into phone calls, each more frantic, more apologetic.
Speaker 1: But the crux of it all he alleged that the
Speaker 1: police had made him testify against Lee. Robert and Lee
Speaker 1: were floored Tolls could unlock everything for them, and for
Speaker 1: a time it was looking that way. Toles was sending
Speaker 1: vibes that he was ready to formally recant his testimony,
Speaker 1: but then ghosted them, leaving Robert and Lee with well
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of nothing. The letters he had sent
Speaker 1: were typed, unsigned and undated, meaningless in legal terms. For Lee,
Speaker 1: it was like another bomb going off, only this time
Speaker 1: it also claimed Robert as well. Still, Lee clung to
Speaker 1: the hope that Tolls his conscience would again get the
Speaker 1: better of him and he would finish what he'd started
Speaker 1: with Robert. Yet, whenever he checked in with the powers
Speaker 1: that be to see if Tolls had come out of
Speaker 1: the woodwork. They maintained nothing of that nature had ever
Speaker 1: been recorded. Meanwhile, the years piled until twenty sixteen, That
Speaker 1: is a whole fifteen years after Robert first made contact
Speaker 1: with David Toles. Robert had just received another delivery of
Speaker 1: Lee's old case paperwork and started making his way through
Speaker 1: dozens upon dozens of files. He has no idea what
Speaker 1: he's looking for or where to start. Then he sees it,
Speaker 1: a file name Tolls. He clicks on it, and there
Speaker 1: it is, in black and white, a formal recantation done
Speaker 1: in front of witnesses in two thousand and four. And
Speaker 1: when Robert starts reading Tolls is erratic communication. First the
Speaker 1: guilt and regret and then the vanishing act. It all
Speaker 1: makes sense. iHeart podcasts. I'm Daks Devlin Ross and this
Speaker 1: is Crying Wolf Episode four, The.
Speaker 2: Snitch prepaid collect call from an inmate.
Speaker 1: Robert is pacing up and down chain smoking. He's waiting
Speaker 1: to be connected to leave for their weekly check in.
Speaker 1: He's been waiting to tell him all about what he's
Speaker 1: discovered for days. He's been fantasizing about how he's going
Speaker 1: to tell him and how his friend will react. Finally
Speaker 1: it's time.
Speaker 2: You may stop the conversation.
Speaker 3: Now, I've had news to give you for almost a week.
Speaker 3: My friend, Yeah, are you sitting down?
Speaker 4: I'll click down.
Speaker 3: Remember in two thousand and four David Tolls Toll.
Speaker 1: He gets straight to the point that recantation from Tolls
Speaker 1: it does exist.
Speaker 3: After all, the safe attorney recorded it. The whole thing
Speaker 3: is on its way to you.
Speaker 4: It's recorded, so on, so on, so on.
Speaker 3: Let me get ahead of you. He tells him that
Speaker 3: he was taken down to a tunnel. He was showing
Speaker 3: pictures of you. He was showing pictures of the victim.
Speaker 3: He was asked if he knew you. He was instructed
Speaker 3: to get to know you. He practiced the story. What's
Speaker 3: all in there? He even mentions my letters. He says,
Speaker 3: I started hearing from people. He said, I want to
Speaker 3: do the right thing. When I read this thing, I
Speaker 3: start feeling sorry for David Tols.
Speaker 1: Robert quickly gets down to the tricky task of conveying
Speaker 1: to Lee as much detail as possible about what he's found.
Speaker 1: There's thirty three pages worth of transcript in only thirty
Speaker 1: minutes of call time.
Speaker 3: Interview with David Paul two thousand and four Norma in James, Wisconsin, and.
Speaker 1: He sets the scene. It's two thousand and four Rock
Speaker 1: County Jail, Wisconsin. Six people sit around at table. There's Tolls,
Speaker 1: of course, and his attorneys, someone from the Cook County
Speaker 1: State's Attorney's office, and two investigators from the FBI. Robert
Speaker 1: takes the role of David Toles, and he's taking it
Speaker 1: seriously from there.
Speaker 3: Holes Well, from what I remember, I was in mc
Speaker 3: Cook County jail, and this was in nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 1: Here's how it went down. It's nineteen eighty nine. Tolls
Speaker 1: is in jail waiting to be processed for burglary when
Speaker 1: he's approached by two plain closed police officers who take
Speaker 1: him aside.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I went to a room and I was sitting
Speaker 3: in there by myself for a while, and then they came
Speaker 3: up and showed me a photo. Rate Okay, who I remember?
Speaker 3: The last name Keen and Zulie, the names I never forget.
Speaker 1: That's right, Sergeant Thomas Keene In one, Detective Richard Zulei
Speaker 1: has sought out David Toles in jail. They put a
Speaker 1: picture on the table to show him. It's of Lee Harris.
Speaker 3: Have you ever known Lee Harris before, never seen him
Speaker 3: before in my life. So how did you know? Was
Speaker 3: Lee Harris by not in the end when they asked me, okay,
Speaker 3: at the time, he didn't know. I didn't know.
Speaker 1: Robert is getting into it, taking on all the roles
Speaker 1: of the people speaking.
Speaker 3: I told him I didn't know him, and he said, well,
Speaker 3: you don't want to get to know. That's one of
Speaker 3: exact words.
Speaker 1: I remember him being Lee Harris of course, And who
Speaker 1: exactly does Tolls? Thanks said this?
Speaker 3: Which one said that the headache sat one. What's his name, Zulie? Yeah,
Speaker 3: it could have been Zulie.
Speaker 1: Slowly but surely, Tolls paints a picture of how it
Speaker 1: all happened. First, the police beeed him a story about
Speaker 1: the knight Dana Fitler was murdered.
Speaker 3: He said, look, this gotta look professional. So when you
Speaker 3: get to where you're going, call this number.
Speaker 1: The number is a police precinct. He's to call with
Speaker 1: some new information about the Fightler case. And if it
Speaker 1: was going to look professional, it was going to take time.
Speaker 1: So over a period of months, two.
Speaker 3: Other individuals from the rehearsal, and it's still in my.
Speaker 1: Head, Tolds claims. Keen and Zuli help him rehearse his story.
Speaker 1: And this is how they want tolls to say. It
Speaker 1: went down okay. On the night of June eighteenth, nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine, Lee Harris is up in the Gold Coast
Speaker 1: with two other guys the sing.
Speaker 3: This woman had pulled her into a power and then
Speaker 3: she had supposedly been twenty on her and they drove
Speaker 3: her around with her and took her to a cash machine.
Speaker 3: When she couldn't get no more money. I think it
Speaker 3: was somewhere around one hundred dollars which she got hour
Speaker 3: or so whatever, they took her in and nailing Mister
Speaker 3: Harris was supposed to try half spected her. When she refused,
Speaker 3: she shot her in her head.
Speaker 1: There it is Lee Harris, once a mere witness to
Speaker 1: the crime, was now the main suspect, and his ultimate
Speaker 1: motive was raping Dana. When she refused, he and he
Speaker 1: alone murdered her in cold blood. That is the story
Speaker 1: told says was fed to him by the police. And
Speaker 1: there was more.
Speaker 3: It was more like they got for bragging about promotion.
Speaker 3: How they was going to get promotion, How it was
Speaker 3: gig now that they had a way of closing it,
Speaker 3: you know, Zuli and this other officer that was present
Speaker 3: with him. They had me handcuffed to a chair while
Speaker 3: they laughed and bragged about promotion.
Speaker 1: So, according to Toles, while he's handcuffed to a chair,
Speaker 1: Zulian companies celebrate their career come up. As for Tolls,
Speaker 1: he alleges that he was to repeat this information at
Speaker 1: trial or else.
Speaker 3: This is what I was rehearsed, saying that if I
Speaker 3: didn't do it, that the ball would come back down
Speaker 3: in my lap. I later had a gun called on
Speaker 3: me by a policeman in Chicago, which spook me in.
Speaker 3: After that, it was pressure put on me. I didn't
Speaker 3: feel like nobody else I could tell he had my
Speaker 3: life in the sands.
Speaker 1: David Toles was starting to look a whole lot more
Speaker 1: like a victim, like another lee. In fact, I.
Speaker 3: Didn't ask for none of this stuff that happened. I
Speaker 3: didn't ask for it. I don't know why I did
Speaker 3: it because it was my problem, and that's it. That's
Speaker 3: as far as that's as much as I'm going to
Speaker 3: read it.
Speaker 4: Okay, thank you, though, do you feel.
Speaker 3: Like you feel like you just took a hundred pounds ship?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you don't even know you don't even know what you'reing.
Speaker 3: Yet it's come full circle under persision. I know what
Speaker 3: happened here, you know, I know, I know it happened here.
Speaker 1: It's taken over twenty years, and now Lee finally understands
Speaker 1: what the hell happened at the trial back in ninety
Speaker 1: two where this so called confession of his came from.
Speaker 1: Who was behind it? And of all the people in
Speaker 1: the world, it's his friend, the Sally he once evicted,
Speaker 1: who found it.
Speaker 3: I've known Ai about just since Thursday, about seven o'clock
Speaker 3: at night. Really, yeah, I've been going crazy. I've been
Speaker 3: going in vain. I've been looking.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you ain't been amazing what I'm telling you all
Speaker 4: the long. I've never talked to nobody.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, You've been telling the truth. Man. Yeah, your goal.
Speaker 3: I'm so freaking excited. You have no idea. I mean,
Speaker 3: for the first time, man, I really really feel like
Speaker 3: we got.
Speaker 1: Some row, so much to talk about. But thirty minutes
Speaker 1: goes by in a blink. When it's holding a lifetime
Speaker 1: of questions.
Speaker 5: You have one minute left the.
Speaker 3: Docking and streaking exist. If I've been waiting a week
Speaker 3: to tell you about dying Wow, it's incredible.
Speaker 4: I'm a steady a double good nights. Wee.
Speaker 3: Wow, you're not gonna sleep, You're gonna think about I'm
Speaker 3: gonna Oh yeah, yeah, well I I.
Speaker 4: Strike it.
Speaker 3: Oh, I mean it's it's true. Man, You're not yelty.
Speaker 3: You're not yelty.
Speaker 6: Wow.
Speaker 3: So I mean.
Speaker 5: Thank you for using the curis goodbye.
Speaker 1: In order to understand why Tolls might have been as
Speaker 1: scared as he was, to understand how Lee came to
Speaker 1: give twenty two witness statements, yeah, to look beyond Detective
Speaker 1: Zuli to what was happening to black men and police
Speaker 1: precincts across Chicago at the time. It's one of American
Speaker 1: law enforcement's ugliest chapters. It's a narrow that few outside
Speaker 1: of Chicago and below a certain age even know exists,
Speaker 1: and one that those old enough to remember have likely
Speaker 1: wiped from their memories. To really make sense of it
Speaker 1: and put it into context, I needed to speak to
Speaker 1: someone who both knew all about Lee and had a
Speaker 1: lot of experience in this world. I meet the Chicago
Speaker 1: Criminal Justice Royalty and her cat Sonya Sodo Mayor named
Speaker 1: for the badass Supreme Court justice in her stunning twenty
Speaker 1: seventh floor apartment with jaw dropping and somewhat vertigo inducing
Speaker 1: views of Lake Michigan.
Speaker 3: Oh the views. I love it.
Speaker 6: So please come have a seat anywhere you know, make
Speaker 6: yourselves at home. Okay, my name is Andrea Lyon, and
Speaker 6: I'm a criminal defense lawyer. I'll start by dating myself.
Speaker 6: I am the first woman in the United States to
Speaker 6: ever try a death penalty case. So I'll tell you
Speaker 6: how old I am. I've been practicing almost forty eight
Speaker 6: years now. Like I said, it's almost forty nine.
Speaker 1: Andrea earned the nickname the Angel of Death Row for
Speaker 1: her trailblazing work overturning death penalty convictions. She was also
Speaker 1: the first woman to serve as lead attorney in a
Speaker 1: capital case. Across her illustrious career as a defense attorney,
Speaker 1: law school dean professor, and author, she has been a
Speaker 1: fierce and unapologetic champion for those in the margins, challenging
Speaker 1: a legal system that too often devours those without a voice.
Speaker 1: Back in nineteen eighty nine, she was the chief of
Speaker 1: the Homicide Task Force at the Cook County Public Defenders Office.
Speaker 1: In other words, anyone accused of a murderer in Chicago
Speaker 1: who could not afford a law would beginning to know her.
Speaker 1: So when newsbroke of Dana Phitler's murder, her intuition and
Speaker 1: experience told her to get ready. The crime was shocking,
Speaker 1: and she sympathized with the Fightler family, but her job
Speaker 1: was to also think about who would be accused and
Speaker 1: how they were going to be treated guilty or not.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's the quintessential death ponly case, right, you know,
Speaker 6: white girl, gold Coast, young attractive black males scene with her.
Speaker 6: I mean, as soon as I saw it, I'm.
Speaker 1: Like, fuck me.
Speaker 6: You know, it's going to be bad. If they catch someone,
Speaker 6: it's gonna be terrible.
Speaker 1: Andrea was under no illusions the media was poised to
Speaker 1: pounce on a classic race trope.
Speaker 6: The only way it would have died down as a
Speaker 6: story would be if it turned out that it was
Speaker 6: her white boyfriend who killed her. Then it would have
Speaker 6: died away. Why you say that, because then there's no
Speaker 6: racial angle to it, and it isn't something that's titillating
Speaker 6: to the public that you can frighten them with. Frightening
Speaker 6: people gets you headlines. Frightening people allows you to manipulate them.
Speaker 1: Andrea's crystal ball is spot on. A couple of months
Speaker 1: down the line, Lee is arrested and the case lands
Speaker 1: in her lap. Sure enough, the city is pushing for
Speaker 1: the death penalty, and she knows the case is going
Speaker 1: to be tough, so she selects one of her finest,
Speaker 1: Shelby Prussak, as lead counsel on the case. And because
Speaker 1: this is the kind of woman she is, she uses
Speaker 1: her vacation time to join Shelby in court for some
Speaker 1: added firepower. The trial starts in nineteen ninety two, over
Speaker 1: two years after Lee's initial arrest in purp Walk, in
Speaker 1: front of all the media. It begins with the win
Speaker 1: of sorts. The judge rules there's reasonable doubt and lifts
Speaker 1: the death penalty for Lee Harris. But then out of nowhere,
Speaker 1: the prosecution drops its bombshell confession from Lee via their witness,
Speaker 1: one David Toles.
Speaker 6: The Tolls jailhouse snitch testimony got revealed to us either
Speaker 6: right before or even maybe even during trial. I don't remember.
Speaker 6: It was very very close to when we tried the
Speaker 6: case that I do remember.
Speaker 1: The prosecutor leans all the way into the confession, dramatically
Speaker 1: comparing Lee to the Murderous Narrator and Edgar Allen Poe's
Speaker 1: The Telltale Heart. He paints a picture for the jury
Speaker 1: of Lee hearing Fightler's heartbeat getting louder each time he
Speaker 1: spoke with the police, boom boom, boom, until his guilty
Speaker 1: conscience became unbearable and made him confess to Tolls.
Speaker 6: This is what they do when they think they might
Speaker 6: lose a case. We believed that he was an informant.
Speaker 6: We asked about that. They denied it. That was a lie.
Speaker 6: And you know he put the lid on the case
Speaker 6: for them.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: See, here's the beautiful and twisted power of a confession.
Speaker 1: It's the silver bullet. That silence is all doubt, And
Speaker 1: if you're a police officer, it will save you a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of actual boots on the ground. Sorry, honey,
Speaker 1: I'm working laid again. Detective work.
Speaker 6: Confession is the easiest way to clear a case. You
Speaker 6: get promotions based on your clearance record, you get bonuses
Speaker 6: based on that, you get publicity based on that. Your
Speaker 6: fellow police officers admire it. You know, there's a culture
Speaker 6: in the Chicago Police Department that encourages closing cases in
Speaker 6: this way.
Speaker 1: Closing a case. It all sounds so unthreatening, but trust me,
Speaker 1: it's not ever heard of the name John Burge. I
Speaker 1: wish I could tell you he was a made up
Speaker 1: character from a slasher flick, but he was a very
Speaker 1: real and very sick man who once led a terror
Speaker 1: ring against black people across Chicago. Burge was a Vietnam
Speaker 1: combat vet who joined the Chicago Police Department following his
Speaker 1: discharge from the army in the nineteen seventies. From that
Speaker 1: point onward, he and many under his command tortured hundreds
Speaker 1: of confessions out of black men, using brutal interrogation tactics
Speaker 1: like Russian Roulette, suffocation, and racialized psychological abuse, tactics believed
Speaker 1: to have been learned during his time at war. Back
Speaker 1: in my investigative reporting days, I learned about Birge and
Speaker 1: his Midnight crew by way of the harrowing stories his
Speaker 1: victims told their lawyers at the People's Law Office in Chicago.
Speaker 1: Burgs was eventually caught and prosecuted, though not for his
Speaker 1: abuses for lying under oath, But even after he was
Speaker 1: removed from the force, the legacy of torture endured over
Speaker 1: the years. In her line of work, Andrea has seen
Speaker 1: and heard it all.
Speaker 6: I had a case where my client, after they got
Speaker 6: the confession from him, they had to put twenty seven
Speaker 6: stitches in the back of his head and do an
Speaker 6: operation on his testicles, and their explanation of how he
Speaker 6: got his injuries was after he confessed, he fell down
Speaker 6: the stairs, apparently hitting the back of his head and
Speaker 6: his dick at the same time, which I think seems unlikely.
Speaker 1: Stories like this one, and there are hundreds, helped cement
Speaker 1: Illinois's reputation as the false confession capital of America. According
Speaker 1: to the National Registry of Exonerations, thirty percent thirty of
Speaker 1: all US exonerations involving false confessions occurred in Illinois, and
Speaker 1: the overwhelming majority of those cases happened in Chicago. In
Speaker 1: almost every case, the accused asked the court to throw
Speaker 1: out their confession, but the judge said no. The result
Speaker 1: a system that either didn't care or didn't believe them,
Speaker 1: and so the officers kept at it, some perhaps even
Speaker 1: convincing themselves they were doing exactly what the system wanted. Today,
Speaker 1: many of the victims of this perverse culture have found
Speaker 1: a measure of justice millions of dollars have been paid
Speaker 1: out in compensation to exanarees. But back in nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: when Lee Harris was in police custody, when David Toles
Speaker 1: was being groomed as a snitch, people like John Burge
Speaker 1: were still high ranking members of the Chicago Police Department.
Speaker 6: Now, when all of these things about burg started to surface, finally,
Speaker 6: instead of taking action, instead of looking at all of
Speaker 6: his cases to see if they were false or not,
Speaker 6: they protected him. They defended him, They paid out judgments
Speaker 6: and cases that he did. They didn't do what they
Speaker 6: should have done, which was take them outside and tell
Speaker 6: them we don't do this. I know it's harder to
Speaker 6: clear a case without a confession, but so what.
Speaker 1: And then there's the very idea of confessing, who, in
Speaker 1: their right mine admits to a murder they didn't commit
Speaker 1: to most of us, it's unfathomable. But when that confession
Speaker 1: is tied to a black person, young, poor, and already
Speaker 1: criminalized in the public imagination, it suddenly becomes far easier
Speaker 1: to understand why so many of these individuals were convicted.
Speaker 1: The system didn't need proof, it just needed a believable story.
Speaker 6: There's a lot more public knowledge that there's such a
Speaker 6: thing as a false confession now than there was in
Speaker 6: nineteen eighty nine or nineteen ninety or nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 6: when people thought, you know, they could pull my fingernails out.
Speaker 6: I wouldn't confess, you know, I'm like, yeah, right, no,
Speaker 6: you would. I mean, you go to Airy two violent
Speaker 6: crimes at three in the morning. You're confessed to something
Speaker 6: just to be on the safe side. It is a
Speaker 6: very intimidating, frightening process. And you are very alone. And
Speaker 6: I don't just mean physically alone.
Speaker 1: I mean you are alone.
Speaker 6: You are against police officers, and once you start to
Speaker 6: give them what they want, it's very hard to stop.
Speaker 1: You mean hard for you to stop talking or hard
Speaker 1: to stop the process both. The false confession phenomenon is
Speaker 1: not just a case of some rogue officers turning sadistic
Speaker 1: in pursuit of promotions. According to Andrea, it's a product
Speaker 1: of the interrogation training that many police officers received. To
Speaker 1: this day.
Speaker 6: The read method is taught to almost every police department
Speaker 6: in the United States, and it tells you how to
Speaker 6: coerce a confession. It tells you don't use realistic words
Speaker 6: like rape or kill, say you know one thing led
Speaker 6: to another, or you know you weren't seeing straight. It
Speaker 6: tells them leave somebody in a room with nothing that
Speaker 6: they can wear off their tension with. So not a
Speaker 6: paper clip or a pen or anything. They're just there's
Speaker 6: nothing there.
Speaker 1: The method was first developed by John E. Reid in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties. By the nineteen seventies, it had become
Speaker 1: the go to interrogation approach in police departments across the
Speaker 1: United States. It replaced the outdated third degree think suspects
Speaker 1: being berated and confessing like an old cop movie's. Supporters
Speaker 1: of the method say it's just good policing, but its
Speaker 1: critics claim it's an express lane to false confessions, especially
Speaker 1: from young people and people with mental health challenges. I
Speaker 1: don't have to tell you which side of the isle
Speaker 1: Andrea sitting on.
Speaker 6: Every now and then in the book it drops a
Speaker 6: footnote to say, now, of course, only use these techniques
Speaker 6: on someone you know is guilty. Why does it say that,
Speaker 6: because they know they work on somebody who's innocent too.
Speaker 1: Before launching his interrogation empire, the late mister Reeve started
Speaker 1: out as a beat coop himself. I'll give you one
Speaker 1: guess who his employer was, Ding Ding Ding, the Chicago
Speaker 1: Police Department. Back at Lee's trial in nineteen ninety two,
Speaker 1: the jury has just heard dramatic testimony from David Tole
Speaker 1: saying Lee Harris had confessed to killing Dana Peitler, and
Speaker 1: as if that could not be topped, Toles tells the
Speaker 1: court that Lee had a sexual motive as.
Speaker 6: Well, which was, you know, let's just put every stereotype
Speaker 6: we possibly can into this case. Now we have him
Speaker 6: confessing to a sexual motive, and the prosecutor argued that strongly,
Speaker 6: and it appealed to the jury.
Speaker 1: At this point, Andrea and Shelby know their only chance
Speaker 1: is to somehow get through to the jury.
Speaker 6: Why would someone confess to a crime they didn't do
Speaker 6: is the question you have to answer. And it's a
Speaker 6: very hard question to answer because it doesn't feel viscerally
Speaker 6: like something a juror would do.
Speaker 1: And let's not beat around the bush. Of the twelve
Speaker 1: jurors that Lee faced, not a single black face was
Speaker 1: among them. He forget race. No one on the jury
Speaker 1: even had a lived experience comparable to Lise.
Speaker 6: Can the juror hear you, can the juror look at
Speaker 6: your client. See, there's things that we know doing this
Speaker 6: work that a jury doesn't necessarily know. It isn't in
Speaker 6: their you know, world Like, we know that somebody would
Speaker 6: say whatever needs to be said, who's really poor and
Speaker 6: is looking for housing, But that's not been the experience
Speaker 6: of any of our jurors. And we didn't get to
Speaker 6: talk to the jury about it very much at all
Speaker 6: except in opening and clothing. Right, it's not in their
Speaker 6: experience to understand that the police plant people in jails,
Speaker 6: and so because it wasn't in their worldview, and we
Speaker 6: were very limited in what we were allowed to question
Speaker 6: them about and what we were allowed to prove, it
Speaker 6: didn't make visceral sense to them, and that's why we lost.
Speaker 1: Today things have changed, Andrea can talk to jurors before
Speaker 1: going to court to explain things like this properly, so
Speaker 1: she knows the difference it can make.
Speaker 6: I had another innocent client with a twenty six page confession.
Speaker 6: I was able to talk to the jury about what
Speaker 6: makes up a false confession and get them to understand that,
Speaker 6: and I got an acquittal in forty five minutes. And
Speaker 6: it makes a big difference.
Speaker 1: But sadly this was just not an option for Lee.
Speaker 1: Back in nineteen ninety two, do you remember losing?
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, I mean I wasn't shocked, but got I
Speaker 6: hate innocent clients, you know. The funny thing is, I
Speaker 6: don't know if Shelby remembers this, but we're sitting with
Speaker 6: our client before they take them back, and we're both
Speaker 6: teared up, you know, and I say something about being
Speaker 6: sorry or whatever, and Lee puts his arm around me
Speaker 6: and says, I know you did everything you could to
Speaker 6: made it much much worse.
Speaker 1: Back in twenty sixteen, Robert is feeling pumped. Not only
Speaker 1: is he basking in his discovery of the Tolls recantation,
Speaker 1: he's excited to be earning some serious brownie points with
Speaker 1: Jennifer Black.
Speaker 3: This is it. What else do we need? This is
Speaker 3: the smoking gun, This is the slam dunk that we've
Speaker 3: been waiting for. I send it to Jennifer.
Speaker 7: Oh, my recantations are a diamond. Doesn't it means nothing?
Speaker 1: It's helpful.
Speaker 7: We need that to have happened to have a successful petition,
Speaker 7: but we won't win based on that. We have to
Speaker 7: have more.
Speaker 1: Jennifer is one hundred percent sure this is not enough.
Speaker 1: They need to prove definitively that Lee did not do it.
Speaker 1: Because one thing about recantations.
Speaker 7: That is a very prominent, strong thread that runs throughout
Speaker 7: criminal law, that with judges, with prosecutors, sometimes with me,
Speaker 7: you know that you can't trust people who we can't.
Speaker 7: They could do it because they're scared. They could do
Speaker 7: it because they live in the neighborhood. They could do
Speaker 7: it because somebody's threatening them. They could do it because
Speaker 7: the cops threaten them before and now they can tell
Speaker 7: the truth. They can do it because they're being paid.
Speaker 7: There's a lot of reasons to be suspicious of recantations.
Speaker 1: So if you're tracking, a false confession can send you
Speaker 1: to prison, but the moment that confession is retracted, that
Speaker 1: becomes suspect to they get you coming and going. Robert
Speaker 1: is not convinced. He can't quite accept it.
Speaker 7: My Robert, there's not going to be enough to do it,
Speaker 7: Like he's like, and he said, well, I mean this
Speaker 7: is huge, this is big. I'm like, it's really not.
Speaker 1: But Robert's been imagining the things he and Lee will
Speaker 1: do together on the outside. Jennifer ruggling to stay patient.
Speaker 1: She knows all too well where false hope can lead.
Speaker 8: Robert, what the fuck?
Speaker 7: Oh my god, you have got to stop. You've got
Speaker 7: to stop right like, this is not enough. It's going
Speaker 7: to take time. I'm going to do everything I can,
Speaker 7: and if we come across something that I think is
Speaker 7: going to be the silver bullet, I will drop everything.
Speaker 3: We will get it filed.
Speaker 7: But this is not.
Speaker 2: It prepaid collect call from an inmate, and.
Speaker 1: Fresh from the wake up call from Jennifer. Robert and
Speaker 1: Lee are licking their wounds.
Speaker 3: How are you? I'm will well, I'm doing fine.
Speaker 4: I get to back it and I read it.
Speaker 1: Lee has received the transcript of the Tolls recantation in prison.
Speaker 1: It had time to read it in peace and contemplate.
Speaker 1: He's thinking about what this all means, and not just
Speaker 1: for him.
Speaker 4: Because you know too much. I feel I feel bad
Speaker 4: for the fighter Familic.
Speaker 3: Now I feel bad for I feel bad for the
Speaker 3: Harris family.
Speaker 8: Oh well, I mean the Harris fathlic We we really
Speaker 8: feel bad about them. But you know, I feel bad
Speaker 8: about this because they don't they don't had them do
Speaker 8: all these years and then now there I have to
Speaker 8: go back to square at one two.
Speaker 1: The conversation quickly shifts the Detective Richard Zuley and the
Speaker 1: other police officers that David Tole says orchestrated the whole
Speaker 1: confession story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wonder sleep that night. That's just crazy. But
Speaker 3: they were getting emotions, they were getting promotions.
Speaker 4: And they got promotions just like just like he said,
Speaker 4: everybody got promoted.
Speaker 1: But as the men chat, there's another and even more
Speaker 1: painful picture forming in their minds.
Speaker 8: The problem, the thing, but the thing that bugged me,
Speaker 8: things really gets me, is howmould she be in charge
Speaker 8: of the charity units and she knew about us all along?
Speaker 3: Well, that's because it's called an integrity unit, doesn't mean
Speaker 3: it has integrity.
Speaker 4: True.
Speaker 1: Todays you see alongside David Toles and his attorney, alongside
Speaker 1: a couple of FBI investigators, the state's attorney had a
Speaker 1: representative in the room that day in two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: and this very person was, now, get this, the head
Speaker 1: of the conviction Integrity Unit, the body that was supposed
Speaker 1: to be reviewing old cases to see if innocent people
Speaker 1: were wrongly sent to prison. Surely, there's no way the
Speaker 1: state could have failed to find this document when it
Speaker 1: took rob seconds to find.
Speaker 3: So there's no doubt in my mind that the Cook
Speaker 3: County State Attorney's Office at this point. You know, before
Speaker 3: I was like eighty ninety percent sure. I'm just sure
Speaker 3: they know, they know, and I wonder, I wonder what
Speaker 3: political horses prevent them from doing the right thing.
Speaker 1: In other words, the state is known about the strong
Speaker 1: chance of leasing us in since two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: and they have seemingly done nothing. How do you square
Speaker 1: that when you've been behind bars for more than a
Speaker 1: quarter of a century and the state doesn't seem to care.
Speaker 8: Rob Sometimes I get fuck Street on television getting out
Speaker 8: and then if see gas here that I'll win every day.
Speaker 8: That defied all kinds of crazy stuff. And they're leaving
Speaker 8: out going.
Speaker 4: R and I'm out of ye I'm gonna leave, yeah.
Speaker 8: And I'm thinking about if I would have fed guilty,
Speaker 8: even though I wasn't guilty, I would have.
Speaker 4: Been out that. Now, that's the crazy part. If I
Speaker 4: would have said that video, they would have let me
Speaker 4: go and I would have been out. I would have
Speaker 4: been out that now.
Speaker 1: Crying Wolf is an iHeart and Clockwork Films podcast and
Speaker 1: association with Chalk and Blade. I'm your host, Dax Devlin
Speaker 1: Ross The series producer is Sarah Stolart's The senior producer
Speaker 1: is Laura Hyde. The series script is written by Me
Speaker 1: and by Sarah Stolarts. Bonus episodes are written and produced
Speaker 1: by Me Dax Devlin Ross. Our executive producers are Christina
Speaker 1: Everett for iHeart Podcasts, Naomi Harvey and Jamie Cohen for
Speaker 1: Clockwork Films, and Ruth Barnes and Jason Phipps for Chalk
Speaker 1: and Blade. Sound design is by Kenny Koziak and George
Speaker 1: dre bing Hicks. Our theme music is by Kenny Kuziak.
Speaker 1: Additional production support from Stephen Peyton.