Derek Hamilton has been regarded by the New Yorker as the most prolific jailhouse lawyer that ever lived. He s single-handedly responsible for freeing probably over 100 people, including himself. He spent three decades in jail for murder that he didn t commit. He was framed by one of the most horrific corrupt cops in the city of New York s history, sown by the name of Scarcella. But more than that, he s become known as one the biggest and most effective criminal justice reform advocates in the country. And now he s on the verge of starting a new Criminal Justice Reform Center that s being funded by someone that I ve talked about quite a bit on this show. And that s Jay-Z. And instead of taking that settlement and resting on his laurels, and doing whatever, which would have been understandable, but are the words like reform around the criminal justice system? This man is a tornado of violence that leaves a wake of opportunity. And, instead of leaving destruction in its wake, he leaves opportunity. So maybe it was the wrong analogy, but I ve never witnessed anything like it. I mean, so maybe the tornado was a miracle. -Jon Hamm. - SNYDER DANCE - JOSH MILLER - THE MOST EFFECTFUL PERSON I HAVE EVER MEETED - DEREK HANDSOME - SONGS WITH JAY-Z - BECAUSE HE'S A MOST IMPORTANT TO ME AND THE FUTURE OF A MAN AND A FABULOUS FEMALE - ETC. - JAMES KELLY BONUS EPISODE - PODCAST WITH JAMES HAYES AND JOSH MCDOKE - FAST RYAN AND JAY WELCOME IN AVAILABLE - TALKING ABOUT HIS FAST AND OTHER THAN THAT'S DOUBLES AND A VOCABULARY AND A PEDCAST AND A DUMMY DANCE AND A THING THAT MAKES ME THIEVING A DOUBLE THING AND A BOUGHER THIEPROODS THAT SHE'S MAKING ME SOMETHING BETTER THAN ME AND A JUICING ME THOTTER AND A LOT MORE THAN A THIRD THING THOOSES THOOTER AND A PLACE THOO AND A KEEPING ME SOMODY ELIE VOTED IN A VOTING IN A DIFFERENCE AND A YELLING ME OUT OF A BEDCAST?
00:03:31.000So this summer, I had five college students that were coming to work with me on innocence cases.
00:03:39.000And I said, you know, I need somebody that can really connect with these people.
00:03:45.000Because I have sympathy for the way they grew up, for the conditions that they were born into, for the opportunities that they didn't have.
00:03:54.000But I can't empathize because I'm white.
00:03:58.000So I thought of Derek, and I had met Derek about five years ago.
00:04:06.000After he had been out for only six years and Derek was the first person on my mind that could mentor these students and I Asked him if he would join me in helping mentor them through this seven-week program working with me on a case and Over the past seven weeks were this close to freeing I think?
00:04:47.000So when he picks up the phone and calls a district attorney of Queens, they take his call right away.
00:04:54.000He calls the head of a conviction integrity unit that's involved in re-reviewing cases.
00:04:58.000He's got such deep respect, and people in high places have such admiration for him because of what he was able to overcome in not only helping himself, but helping free others.
00:05:17.000And instead of taking that settlement and resting on his laurels and doing whatever, which would have been understandable, he's dedicated his life to helping get people out of jail.
00:05:30.000And not only that, to helping reform the criminal justice system.
00:05:33.000But these are words like reform the criminal justice system.
00:06:40.000Derek is going to be my deputy director.
00:06:43.000And I mean, I'll let him tell his story.
00:06:46.000But when you hear what he's been through and what he's overcome and what he has done since, he's not a force.
00:06:55.000Words aren't adequate to describe who this man is and what he's overcome and what he's been through.
00:07:01.000I was trying to suck an ounce of his mental energy on the ride over here from Houston.
00:07:09.000Just trying to understand how he summons the strength, because I'm trying to use it and apply it in my own life.
00:07:15.000So it's just, I'm not going to cry yet.
00:07:19.000I usually wait till hour two, but it's just amazing to me the way the universe aligned for us to come together and for him to be next to me today and for your listeners and you to hear his story is just an honor.
00:07:33.000Well, it's an honor to meet you, Derek, especially after such high praise.
00:08:14.000The police had an identification of their car.
00:08:17.000They called the guy in and he somehow told them he rented me the car and that I was the one that bought the car back and told him that I had committed the crime and that I had shot the guy by accident.
00:08:30.000And that was my first real experience with the criminal justice system because it was a murder.
00:08:41.000So, you know, what was amazing to me is, number one, nobody would have gave me their car at 17 years old.
00:08:48.000Any cop would have known that this guy wouldn't have gave me his car.
00:08:52.000But they arrested me, and they charged me with murder.
00:08:56.000And I was convicted by a jury because they admitted grand jury testimony of a witness who came before the court and said, I've never seen this guy at all.
00:09:06.000The police made me lie in the grand jury and say that I've seen this guy.
00:09:12.000I'm not going to get up there and purge myself.
00:09:14.000The judge told the prosecutor that day that they were dismissing the case, that if they don't get another witness, this case is going out of here.
00:09:22.000The judge's name was Lombardo back then.
00:09:23.000This was 1983. I went back to Rikers Island that day.
00:09:27.000We came back the next day, and the judge said that he thought about this all night, and he felt that the only person would benefit from this witness not testifying would be me.
00:09:38.000Therefore, he was going to allow the prosecutor to admit their grand jury testimony as evidence-in-chief at my trial, and I would forfeit my right to confront the witness and let the jury hear the truth that she never saw the crime.
00:09:53.000The lawyer that I had at the time, Candace Kurtz, said, look, young man, get your head out your ass, and you better read these cases, and you better see what's going on like they railroad you.
00:10:02.000She took the stand and told the judge what the witness told her, and I was convicted.
00:10:07.000I was sentenced to 25 years of life, and it was at that moment that I know that I had to study law, that I had to really dig deep in the books, and I did it.
00:10:16.000New York State, thank God, had A law library.
00:10:22.000And I spent the next five and six years working on my case.
00:10:26.000In 1987, the appellate division in that case found that the judge had no evidence whatsoever that me or anybody acting on my behalf had threatened this witness, did anything improper.
00:11:19.000They brought a witness in by the name of Jew Smith, who said that she was present at the murder when her boyfriend was killed, that I was a gunman, had a gun in my hand, and I shot this individual several times with this gun.
00:11:31.000But her original statement to the police said she wasn't there.
00:12:31.000And she admitted that she never saw the crime, that the detective Lewis Garcella told her what happened and told her that if she didn't get up here and say that I committed the crime, she was going to jail.
00:12:54.000The judge ruled a year later that, again, he felt that I was, he said there was a common thread of string that I manipulated this evidence.
00:13:06.000The detective came in and said exactly what the witness said, that she told him she didn't see the crime, that she was beat up and took to the precinct and told she was going to jail.
00:13:15.000And had that jury heard that, there'd have been different results.
00:13:18.000At the trial, they told the jury that her first statement was the most important statement in this case, and that when the police arrived on the scene, she didn't hesitate.
00:13:25.000She said, Derek Hamilton, somebody I know my entire life committed the crime, which wasn't true.
00:13:30.000In fact, she said the truth, which she didn't see the crime, that she was somewhere else.
00:13:37.000I filed numerous post-conviction motions after post-conviction motions.
00:13:41.000Every time the judge gave me a hearing, every time he said he can throw the case out, every time he said he was troubled by this conviction, the prosecutor would come in and tell him I'm a bad guy, that this is not somebody you want to release, that, you know, they put imagined harms and make a judge think that I was the most terrible person in the world.
00:13:56.000And he would deny the motion every single time.
00:13:59.000You know, I filed numerous motions, numerous post convictions.
00:14:02.000I did everything you could imagine to prove my innocence, but to no avail.
00:14:07.000I began going to parole board around 2009. It was a very traumatic experience for me because at that time, the parole board wanted me to admit guilt, and I wasn't going to do that.
00:14:17.000I'm not going to come in and say I killed somebody I didn't kill.
00:14:21.000And I had to challenge them and fight them for two years.
00:14:25.000And then my family went out and protest, and we got a Daily News article put out that said that I would be free if the court would just basically give me justice.
00:14:33.000If they just give this guy a fair shot, he'd be home.
00:14:35.000So it changed the mentality of the parole board.
00:14:38.000They look at all of my evidence, and they said, you know, based on the evidence that you presented here, we believe in your innocence.
00:14:44.000Like, this evidence speaks for itself.
00:16:46.000And, you know, 20 was exonerated so far, those guys.
00:16:49.000And I was exonerated in 2015. In 2014, for the first time in New York history, the appellate division's second department ruled in my case that a free-standing actual innocence claim can be recognized under post-conviction motion.
00:17:04.000And they said that anybody that's innocent, the courts could no longer procedurally bar you.
00:17:08.000They got to reach the merits of your contentions.
00:17:10.000They just can't say, well, you should have raised this before, or your lawyer failed to do this before, or you should have did—you got to reach the merits of it.
00:21:55.000But he don't remember anything, of course.
00:21:57.000Selectively, he don't remember anything.
00:21:58.000It just shows you, you know, he's been written about a lot.
00:22:03.000Scarcella, there have been scores of articles out there about him because he was exposed.
00:22:08.000And this is not an indictment of all police that are amazing cops.
00:22:12.000But a couple of bad eggs that let the power get to their head, a couple of rogue cops, they don't just destroy a life.
00:22:22.000They destroy, you know, it's a ripple.
00:22:25.000One, you know, if you, like, Derek and I were at Sing Sing visiting one of our clients, this guy Bruce Bryant, and, you know, it's the brothers, the sisters, the family, and then you start to multiply that out and the ripple effect of how it affects these families.
00:26:31.000How is there no law that, first of all, eliminates the statute of limitations when someone puts someone in jail for the rest of their fucking life and also treats something like that as organized crime?
00:27:19.000And if you don't start paying attention to the people that we are putting in positions of power, it is human nature that this will keep happening.
00:27:27.000As the mammals that we are, we're hardwired to abuse power.
00:28:01.000We have to be careful about who we put into power.
00:28:04.000And once you start putting people in power that will do just the right thing, not the popular thing, but the right thing, laws like that can get changed.
00:30:12.000This is a hypothetical, because the guy signed a letter, along with a bunch of other state and district attorneys, saying if you pass an abortion law...
00:30:21.000I don't think it's a good use of our resources to prosecute people that might be the victims of rape, you know, who are doctors who are trying to help the victims of rape.
00:30:33.000I think it clogs up the system and they have their rationale for it.
00:30:37.000But there had never been a case brought before him yet.
00:30:40.000Now, why did Ron DeSantis do that, in my opinion?
00:30:43.000He did that because he knows abortion is a hot-button issue.
00:30:46.000And if he goes down there and removes this guy, he becomes a hero for it.
00:32:04.000We are not going to prosecute according to state law.
00:32:09.000We're going to prosecute according to this county ordinance.
00:32:13.000If Ron DeSantis gave a shit about state attorneys not prosecuting crimes, don't you think he would have been right there and said, what the fuck is this?
00:32:23.000You're not prosecuting according to state law?
00:32:27.000You're not fit to be a state attorney.
00:33:38.000He threw a tissy fit over the fact that I was wearing a mask at the height of the pandemic because my son has type 1 diabetes, and it wasn't known yet whether I could get it, pass it to him, and...
00:33:52.000Instead of meeting with me, turned his back on me and walked out.
00:33:55.000He cancels clemency routinely in Florida.
00:34:38.000I'm not going to vote that person into power.
00:34:41.000There are judges that get elected in the state of Florida, some that have ruined the lives of my clients.
00:34:47.000You know, and they continually get elected because we vote along party lines instead of using our minds.
00:34:52.000And, you know, Derek and I were talking about it on the way here.
00:34:55.000Like, what is it that prevents people from saying, you know what, I'm going to do something.
00:35:02.000Instead of talk about it on Instagram or post about it or bitch about it at a cocktail party, what prevents people from saying, you know what?
00:35:42.000I feel like there's not enough time in the day to get things done.
00:35:46.000And you start to see the fruits of your labor when you get the wind at your back and you start making change happen.
00:35:53.000And I just think people feel like, well, politicians, that's for someone else.
00:35:57.000Or being a leader, that's for someone else.
00:35:59.000A lot of it is just sort of getting out there and making it happen or else we're just going to be in this It's amazing when some people get their back up against the wall,
00:36:22.000That is so inspiring to me that someone who gets put in a terrible situation instead of woe is me and complaining, you went out and you changed the course of the history of your life.
00:36:39.000I mean, I've heard similar stories of people becoming jailhouse lawyers, but I'm always inspired by that, and I'm always inspired by the human spirit that someone can, despite the odds, despite the way it feels, despite the inclination to lean towards despair,
00:37:54.000I grew up in Bevis-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
00:37:57.000And I couldn't fight physically, so I know I had to arm myself mentally with enough intelligence to be able to take on a judge, to take on a prosecutor, to take on my defense attorney if they was wrong.
00:38:08.000When I went in that courtroom, I wanted to make sure, even though you was railroading me, that wreck it, and that's what got me out of prison, the wreck it.
00:38:48.000And they always believed that you're guilty because the prosecutor, lawyers, judges, a lot of them in the same, Democratic Party in New York City, they're all amongst party lines, they all hang out together.
00:39:04.000And I knew for a fact that if I didn't stand up and throw punches back the only way that I could, through the law, that I would have stayed in prison the rest of my life.
00:39:12.000What was the process like of learning law?
00:39:15.000Like, did someone guide you through it?
00:40:16.000And he just told me, you got to know procedure, that prosecutors beat you on procedure, that they don't want to go to the merits of your claim.
00:40:24.000If they can get the judge to get you out of here without hearing the merits, they're going to do that.
00:40:27.000So I had to master procedure, and I only did that by reading.
00:40:30.000I did 10 years in special housing unit.
00:40:33.000And all I did was study in Special Housing Unit.
00:40:35.000Amongst the banging and the craziness, I just read books every single day.
00:40:39.000They would bring you two books from the law library, and I would read them from front to back.
00:40:44.000Well, wait, can you explain for the listeners, and for, I think Joe knows now, but what that means to be in the Special Housing Unit?
00:40:52.000A special housing unit is, some call it the whole, some call it punitive segregation.
00:40:57.000But you are in a very small box of a cell for 23 and sometimes 24 hours a day.
00:41:04.000You're around a bunch of mentally ill prisoners who throw feces and urine on you.
00:44:00.000So, I mean, the criminal justice system is broken.
00:44:03.000We've got to fix it, as you said, even to waive the statute of limitations to hold people accountable, to hold prosecutors accountable, to change the level of amendment.
00:44:12.000I mean, everybody, look, if you can go after Donald Trump, Right?
00:44:15.000Then you can go after prosecutors and cops.
00:44:17.000You can't tell me that you can go after Trump today for things that you said he did as a president, but you can let Scarcella get away, you can let the prosecutors get away, and you want me to say that that's okay?
00:44:31.000It's just incredible to me that they would be willing, just because they want to keep this guy as a snitch, that they will go out and convict an innocent person.
00:44:40.000How does a person get so jaded That they're willing and don't care about putting innocent people behind bars.
00:44:50.000I mean, is their idea that everybody's guilty of something, so it's okay?
00:44:53.000Like, what's the mindset that allows a cop to do something like that?
00:44:58.000The way the system is designed, right?
00:45:06.000Judges on based on how fast the case moved to the system.
00:45:09.000So if you're going to pat me on my back as a cop and say, good job done, and there's nobody investigating to see whether or not you did a great job, prosecutors are supposed to investigate any case that cops bring before them.
00:45:45.000They're rhetorical, but they're the same questions that I hear from people that hear these stories.
00:45:50.000And it's almost like your defense mechanism as a human being doesn't want to let you believe that that could be.
00:45:57.000Because you're taught as a kid, cops are here to serve and protect you.
00:46:03.000Prosecutors are here to get the bad guys.
00:46:06.000What's woven in here and that we're not really, we're addressing it without addressing it, is that the racism that runs rampant in our system is a very big part of this.
00:46:23.000A lot of white cops, whether subconsciously or consciously, think the black guy or the brown guy, the Latin guy did it.
00:46:32.000There is a huge, that's one, you know, it's a messy stew.
00:46:37.000There's one part of it, a large part of it, I'm sure, is what you just said.
00:46:41.000It's you do not see the human cost that a prosecution of a human being leaves in its wake.
00:46:51.000And these prosecutors get accolades for convictions, and it is a game.
00:47:47.000It's, you know, every adjective that you can pull, it's a nightmare for her.
00:47:53.000And you asked me a question that I think you asked it, you articulated on the podcast and you and I were texting about it, which is that, you know, this happens here.
00:48:04.000And yes, she's getting attention because she's in Russia.
00:48:19.000So I went down a bit of a rabbit hole.
00:48:23.000And I said, you know, there's got to be some...
00:48:28.000There has to be someone that has studied the disparity between the sentences that black men and women get for marijuana possession or marijuana convictions versus white people.
00:48:47.000And Derek found a study that I have with me.
00:48:50.000And when I read it, I kept on saying, this is unbelievable.
00:48:56.000It was commissioned by the ACLU from 2010 to 2018. And they examined this from every angle.
00:49:05.000They took the crystal ball and they turned it around, and then they turned it over, and then they looked at the inside of it.
00:49:13.000They looked at it from every angle, okay?
00:49:15.000Did the decriminalization of marijuana reduce the number of arrests overall?
00:50:28.000You know, and you cannot look at these statistics and not be outraged and say, okay, we have a problem here in this country.
00:50:37.000Our criminal justicism is infected by racism.
00:50:42.000It doesn't just stay in one segment of society.
00:50:45.000They looked at the arrest rate, right?
00:50:48.000The black-white ratio in table six of this report from 2010 to 2018. The arrest per 100,000 may go down, but black people get arrested in this country for marijuana possession in the same scenario,
00:51:10.000I brought it because I wanted to leave it with you, and they went down to states with the highest black arrest rates for marijuana possession.
00:51:19.000States with the largest increases in racial disparities.
00:51:23.000I mean, a lot of this shit is happening in the South.
00:51:28.000They're being brutalized by our criminal justice system.
00:51:31.000And unless people are willing to wake up to that fact, I mean, we're in 2022. Yes.
00:51:39.000Marijuana is legal in many states, decriminalized in many others.
00:51:43.000And so getting back to DeSantis, I'm not beating up on him.
00:51:47.000If you really cared about removing a state attorney and you want to, you know, do something right, you know, decriminalize it in the entire state.
00:51:56.000How many people, you know, well, imagine this.
00:52:07.000You know, everybody has that person that is just an asshole at work and is always telling on people and causing a fucking problem and looking to be difficult.
00:52:42.000Commute the sentence of this innocent man, James Daly, who I know is innocent.
00:52:46.000I was just there to say, just hold the hearing and let me show you, as Derek said, the merits.
00:52:51.000Let me just show you the merits of the case.
00:52:54.000The only person that would meet with me on the clemency board and hear me out is a woman that's running for governor in Florida named Nikki Fried.
00:53:01.000She's the fucking commissioner of agriculture.
00:53:42.000She's a commissioner of agriculture and she's not a politician.
00:53:45.000The thing that bothers me is that when you look at racial disparities In marijuana possession arrests, you know, what's happening in the South in this country, Pickens County, Georgia, the arrest rate for black people caught possessing marijuana,
00:54:04.000you're 97 times more likely to get arrested if you're black possessing marijuana.
00:54:09.000The face that you just made is what happened in my fucking heart when I read it.
00:54:14.000You know, in Illinois, people wonder that, you know, like it's like a popular thing for white people to say is like when they're in social circles where they don't think anyone's listening, fucking black people are killing each other in Chicago, right?
00:54:29.000Well, you know, in Tazewell County, Illinois, you're 43 times more likely to be arrested if you're black and caught with weed than if you're white.
00:56:05.000I had an 18B lawyer, which is a county lawyer one time, come to me on a motion that I made, pro se, and say, the judge told me that he's going to deny your motion no matter what we do.
00:56:47.000And if you're poor, you don't have a chance.
00:56:49.000And there's also racial disparity that's clearly written in the law when it comes to the difference between the way they recognize crack cocaine versus regular cocaine.
00:56:59.000There's a far greater sentence for crack cocaine.
00:57:02.000But if you talk to an actual person who understands the effects of the drug, like Dr. Carl Hart, he will tell you it is exactly the same drug.
00:57:12.000It's the same drug, but the conviction, what you get if you get convicted for crack cocaine, like you would probably know this better than I, it's far greater sentence, far more likely to be convicted, far greater sentence, and it directly impacts impoverished communities.
00:57:31.000Thank you, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden and a whole score of other Democrats.
00:58:27.000We got five college students who would never have got this opportunity Just wouldn't have got this opportunity to sit there if they weren't part of Jay Z's scholarship and his mom Gloria Carter was just a wonderful woman and this woman Donya Diaz and said let's see what happens when we give people an opportunity and I watched five college juniors that are going into their senior year of college some of them shy and timid some of them who were in intimidated
00:58:57.000by the notion that they would be working on a legal case Start to realize, like, this guy Bruce Bryant, and if people that are interested should go to Free Bruce Bryant, there's a clemency petition for him.
00:59:11.000I can't talk too much about his innocence case, but he has been called by the press the poster child for clemency in New York.
00:59:19.000There's stunning evidence of his innocence.
00:59:23.000They quickly got to the main facts of the case and were able to start solving it.
00:59:59.000And they started to find inconsistencies in the testimony of people that claimed they saw him, didn't see him.
01:00:06.000And, you know, really, it was like a stunning reminder to me that if we just give people the opportunity, Derek was forced into the opportunity.
01:00:44.000It's that there's some voice in the darkness that you'll never meet them, you'll never see them, but they can criticize you and get under your skin and call you names and say nasty shit about you.
01:01:14.000And being able to distinguish between anger and And the recognition or the realization, I'll never be able to confront this person.
01:01:25.000It's just a voice out there that is sick in the head, obviously, and is trying to get a reaction out of me.
01:01:32.000And Derek was telling me how it forced him into patience.
01:01:36.000And it forced him to be able to develop the skill at drowning out the background noise.
01:01:44.000Because to me, it must be annoying because I'm always asking him questions like, how did you do it?
01:01:52.000It's the same thing you were getting at.
01:01:54.000How do you summon the strength to be able to overcome?
01:01:57.000And if people like him can overcome, people that were born into the worst circumstances, born into a poor background, a system built against him, you know, if we just start changing that paradigm...
01:02:12.000Don't we want everyone around us to succeed and have the same chance that we have?
01:02:18.000It's hard to not sound corny about it, but I always tell people that...
01:02:26.000I've heard criticisms of you, Joe, before, and I say to people, you have no fucking clue who this man is.
01:02:33.000You know how rare it is to come across a human being that wants other people to do well?
01:02:40.000We're almost hardwired to want to tear each other down because of our insecurities.
01:02:45.000You genuinely want to see people do well.
01:02:47.000And it's like, I was telling Derek that about you.
01:02:50.000It's like, he genuinely wants to see people do well.
01:02:55.000And, you know, if he's not an inspiring example of what we can all aspire to and overcome and doesn't open some eyes to say, you know, if I just give someone a chance, they can do it.
01:03:21.000The more people do well, the better you'll do.
01:03:23.000But that's a competitor's understanding of the nature of the circle that you surround yourself in.
01:03:30.000You should always be around people that are killing it, because then you want to kill it.
01:03:35.000You should always be around people that are kind and people that are generous because you know that feeling you get when you go, God damn, what a fucking great guy.
01:03:46.000The person that only wants to be the man and wants everything for themselves and wants to be selfish and cut everybody down, that's a lonely, sad fucking person.
01:04:04.000It's great for everyone else too though.
01:04:07.000It's like there's a selfishness in it because I genuinely love the feeling when I can help people.
01:04:14.000I genuinely love the feeling of whether it's helping people express themselves on a podcast or elevate a comedian's career or just help someone out that I know needs some help.
01:04:38.000We're a community as a country, and we're a community as a world.
01:04:41.000And if we don't look at it that way, we're always going to be stuck in this lonely, sad position where you think of the world as your enemy.
01:05:44.000And again, that's for all the people that if you can get a hold of this, if you're in prison and you're hearing this, you can be like Derek.
01:05:52.000Everyone can figure there's a path that you can be a better person.
01:05:57.000There's a path that you can be more educated, more understanding, more compassionate.
01:06:02.000There's a path for everybody to be a better person.
01:06:04.000How did you get over the anger though?
01:06:06.000That's what I don't understand, like how you nod.
01:06:16.000My passion is a direct line of that anger.
01:06:21.000You know, one of the things we know, and I'm going to say we, and I'm talking about it as black people, right?
01:06:25.000We believe that the system was designed the way that it is.
01:06:28.000That it didn't happen by happenstance, right?
01:06:30.000So when you know that, you work to change the system.
01:06:33.000I work to change the system so that my kids will get a better opportunity, their kids will get a better opportunity, and that we can together gel as human beings.
01:06:41.000If I don't do the work, what good is to be criticizing it, right?
01:06:44.000If I be angry and upset and grab a gun and become some animal, that doesn't help the society.
01:06:49.000It doesn't help the criminal justice system.
01:06:51.000So, again, I had to really, really think about it.
01:06:54.000Let me tell you, I'm the first person to tell you that I had fantasies of killing the cop.
01:07:01.000I had fantasies of killing the prosecutor.
01:07:03.000I went and spoke to mental health people and said, listen, I can't sleep at night.
01:07:07.000All I think about is killing these guys when I get out of here.
01:07:10.000You know what the social worker told me?
01:10:19.000Yeah, well, I think one big step is I always thank you, and I don't think that there should be a limit to my gratitude.
01:10:28.000Being on this podcast is the best example because I don't think we would have got the two exonerations in Kansas without the attention, and I think we need to keep the drumbeat going.
01:10:40.000So I'm forever and continually grateful to you for giving me a platform.
01:10:45.000But I think that in addition to that, more people need to understand that they can help make the change happen.
01:10:52.000So, again, we can't announce the name.
01:10:57.000But Derek and I are on the precipice of starting a very major legal justice center at a major law school together, where I'll be the executive director and he'll be the deputy director.
01:11:10.000And it was funded by someone who had this experience where they were wrongfully accused of a crime and had the resources to fight it and has now funded it.
01:11:20.000And we need, you know, donations always help because the more resources you have, the more attorneys you can hire.
01:11:28.000But it needs the public awareness and then it needs to keep the drumbeat of pressure going because we know that works.
01:11:38.000Derek mentioned The Daily News article that got the parole board's attention.
01:12:17.000And, you know, Joe Schilling is like...
01:12:21.000An example, this happened in Mississippi.
01:12:23.000This is what happens to black men in the South.
01:12:26.000And Joe Schilling is an example of a case where if enough people write to the clemency board, write to the governor, somebody will pay attention at some point.
01:12:38.000And here's a guy where they look at, you know, things that he has done in the past, and they say, well, it wasn't just this marijuana conviction.
01:12:47.000He was also involved in an armed robbery, right?
01:12:51.000Well, he wasn't involved in an armed robbery.
01:12:53.000When you say involved, you picture, stick him up!
01:13:16.000If you really want to do something to change the rate of deaths in this country, the rate of violence in this country, and you really are not a hypocrite, you'll ban alcohol.
01:13:33.000Because alcohol causes a lot more accidental deaths because of drunk driving.
01:13:39.000There's not a lot of people that are sitting there smoking weed, getting in their car, and blowing up another car in a family.
01:13:47.000The biggest victims of marijuana smoking are fucking potato chips and chocolate.
01:13:55.000I mean, it's like, what the fuck are we talking about here?
01:14:03.000And saying, oh, well, this is because of what you did before.
01:14:07.000Joe Schilling's case should be advertised.
01:14:11.000There should be letters flowing in by the hundreds of thousands.
01:14:14.000So the bottleneck is, I think, and maybe I sound a little bit arrogant in saying this, but you'll correct me and be my reality check, both of you.
01:14:28.000The bottleneck is not having the fucking balls to To stand up and say, I am going to speak truth to power.
01:14:35.000And I'm going to tell you, this is not okay.
01:14:41.000I have had my families threatened, because I will speak truth to power.
01:14:46.000And I look, I wear it like a badge of honor.
01:14:49.000And you know, Derek told these students, because they said, well, what if we get emotional?
01:14:54.000He said, this business is not for the faint of heart.
01:14:58.000You can get emotional, and you can be sympathetic, but it just takes more caring and more doing.
01:15:04.000So the more people that can write to clemency boards, the more people that can say, I'm not going to vote in a tribal way, the more people that say, you know what, I can do better as a leader by running for office.
01:17:48.000Other than that, this is how I was raised.
01:17:51.000And I watched her evolve to the point where when I finally got married to my wife, the fact that she was Christian and that a judge married us in a non-denominational ceremony that was more human than it was religious, it wasn't even an issue.
01:18:05.000So if we're willing to break from what's expected of us and the norm...
01:18:11.000You know, and I had a dad, my dad recently passed, you know, that he was a complicated dude, but, you know, like, we...
01:18:25.000I remember in college, I was home for Thanksgiving, and my mom sent my dad off to Home Depot to get light bulbs because the light bulbs in the living room burned out.
01:18:38.000And he comes back from Home Depot with these two young black guys that were selling these keyboards with a flip-up screen that could connect to the internet at the time.
01:18:53.000It was like, he felt bad for them because he's like, these guys were out here in the fucking Florida heat in November.
01:19:01.000And he's like, they had nowhere to go for Thanksgiving.
01:19:04.000And it was like, my mom was like, what the fuck are you doing?
01:19:28.000I mean, what he does after is he goes and drives him home and comes back two hours later blazing high and he's like, I smoke something called the cryptos with them.
01:21:23.000And laws sometimes limit the power of judges.
01:21:27.000This is why it's so important to have legislators, right, to enact laws that says innocence is the most fundamental to our criminal justice system.
01:21:34.000Every state right now should pass laws that says no innocent person should stay in jail no matter what.
01:21:41.000The Supreme Court and Reed Troy Davis in 2008, 2009 made that decision.
01:21:48.000That's how I was able to go to the Bell Division and get that decision in 2014. That said in New York, innocent people, case have to be heard.
01:21:55.000Every state should have laws like this.
01:22:54.000But he also appointed a bunch of fucking nutjob Supreme Court justices who recently published an opinion that said innocence doesn't matter.
01:23:05.000They literally wrote the words, innocence doesn't matter.
01:23:23.000How can someone say innocence doesn't matter if the whole idea behind the legal system is to find out who is guilty of a crime and convict them?
01:23:33.000And I don't care, by the way, about that public circus about Kavanaugh's past.
01:24:20.000And if you don't If you are in possession or should have been in possession of this newly discovered evidence and you don't file it in a timely manner and raise it, it's deemed waived.
01:24:33.000So what the opinion was basically saying was that we cannot let innocence or the fact that someone may be innocent trump these procedural hurdles.
01:24:44.000So in other words, rules exist for a reason.
01:24:48.000And if we don't follow those rules, just because somebody might be innocent and just because there's compelling evidence of their innocence does not mean that we are going to let that get in the way of these procedural rules.
01:25:16.000And, you know, you got to look at 28 U.S.C. 2254 is the habeas corpus statue in the feds if you're a state prisoner coming to the feds asking for relief.
01:25:27.000And they've been watering that down for years, basically saying that states should be the one to decide these things, that you shouldn't be able to come to the federal court to get relief.
01:25:36.000And let's just explain for the listeners what habeas corpus relief is.
01:25:41.000Habeas corpus means, I think the Latin translation is possession of the body.
01:26:03.000So when you raise a habeas or a habe, it's often referred to, petition, you're basically throwing everything against the wall and saying, please look at the merits of the case.
01:27:32.000That the lawyer should have got it and presented it.
01:27:34.000The courts reversed it and said, no, we don't care about his innocence, and you should stop holding hearings on ineffective assistance of counsel claims, whether it relates to innocence or not.
01:28:34.000It was a 6-3 opinion by Thomas, and Judges Sotomayor and Kagan filed the dissenting opinion that they would reverse the case and release this guy.
01:28:45.000And the judges that was involved was Clarence Thomas, Roberts, Alito was a part, and Kavanaugh was a part of the majority.
01:28:55.000And it's just, you know, these cases, look, it's not just innocence.
01:28:59.000Clemency is going to be a big part of our clinic.
01:29:04.000I don't know if you ever heard of the Pamela Smart case out of New Hampshire.
01:29:09.000Pamela Smart has been in prison over 30 years.
01:29:13.000A remarkable young woman, white woman, that taught a lot of people in Beffitt Hills Correctional Facility in New York how to get out and run organizations.
01:29:20.000She has all kinds of degrees, PhD, kind of like Bruce Bryant, but a female version of it.
01:30:22.000Like, it's things like this that keep me up at night because, look, when you have redeemed yourself, whether you're guilty or not, when you can serve society best by being out and running programs and helping people, I think you should be here.
01:30:36.000Well, we're supposed to be not just punishing people in prison.
01:30:40.000We're supposed to be rehabilitating people.
01:30:42.000This is the whole idea behind prison, right?
01:30:56.000But the environments that you're describing and the environments that everybody that I've ever talked to that's been incarcerated describe are nothing like that.
01:31:04.000And if you can't, Larry Hoover, 50 years in prison, right?
01:31:08.000If you can't become a better person after 50 years, there's something terribly wrong with the system, right?
01:32:06.000Why not hold prosecutors and judges accountable?
01:32:09.000Yeah, they have something called qualified immunity.
01:32:12.000And qualified immunity means that in most situations, they're not going to be held accountable.
01:32:19.000And you've asked this question before, and it is probably the most important question to ask.
01:32:24.000Because the way that we deter people from engaging in this type of behavior, I mean, the reason why people don't, you know, think twice about whether it's cheating on their taxes, selling cocaine, whatever is...
01:32:42.000The fear of going to jail is a real fear.
01:33:05.000If prosecutors know that they're not going to be prosecuted or subject to prosecution themselves, you know, it makes it a lot more difficult for accountability to follow.
01:33:18.000And, you know, how do we change qualified immunity?
01:33:22.000We get new people in the fucking legislature.
01:33:24.000I'm not on some crusade against Ron DeSantis.
01:34:01.000It would have provided $2 million to low-income women to gain IUDs, more access to contraception.
01:34:12.000So you would think that the president of the Senate, who's a Republican, and championed this bill, I thought that would solve a lot of abortion issues,
01:34:32.000probably eliminate thousands of abortions.
01:34:35.000And then he goes on and he blames himself for not convincing DeSantis.
01:34:40.000What was DeSantis' reasoning behind it?
01:34:42.000His reasoning behind it is that he received a letter from, I think, the Catholic bishops.
01:34:50.000And the Catholic bishops told him that if you—these IUDs prevent— They prevent a fetus from grabbing onto the uterine wall and that that was a form of abortion in and of itself.
01:35:17.000So now he's become a doctor and he's against contraception.
01:35:26.000Personal decisions of a woman of how she wants to go about contraception, whether you are stymieing semen from entering a woman by putting a fucking raincoat on your dick, or you are putting a device in a woman to prevent sperm from getting into the uterine wall.
01:36:38.000So, you know, it's like we have to have the...
01:36:47.000I guess the the ability to step outside of this tribal primal box and say, you know what, I don't care if you're a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian and say, I'm not going for that shit, just like I'm not going for somebody that fought To keep DNA testing from seeing the light of day.
01:38:05.000A lot of politicians, they're afraid of the political cost of admitting a mistake.
01:38:11.000I'm so turned off by it, I almost want to run for office.
01:38:16.000I was asked, would you ever run for governor of New York?
01:38:19.000I said, I don't want my family ravaged and people looking into my past and making a mockery of me.
01:38:26.000I understand why people don't want to run for office.
01:38:29.000But at the same time, it kind of makes you feel like if the people that are in power are wielding power in a way that is so dangerous and so harmful to people, sometimes I think about it.
01:38:42.000I also don't want to give up my privacy and I also don't want people judging me on every time I make, you know, a decision that they disagree with.
01:38:50.000And, you know, I'm conflicted about it.
01:38:52.000I almost, I'm like encouraging people to get involved in a way that I even wouldn't get involved.
01:39:12.000And I just don't know, you know, this is like, it's a pretty simple equation to me when it comes to how problematic racism is in our criminal justice system.
01:39:26.000I don't get why people don't understand this equation, the following equation.
01:39:30.000You take an entire race of people, steal them from their homeland, Enslave them, savage them, brutalize them.
01:39:48.000Build a system in which, in our lifetime, your parents, my parents, could not urinate in the same bathroom as people of color.
01:39:59.000And then an entire system is built upon, you know, making, you know, why don't you pick your, we've talked about this before, pick yourself up by your bootstraps, I'm tired of the excuses, all that.
01:40:29.000And it just feels like the criminal justice system is going to be problematic because people are wielding power, you know, and abusing it in the first place.
01:40:38.000And then you throw, you know, the racial injustice into it, and it complicates it even more because we're just not willing as a society to say...
01:40:48.000You know, like I hear from friends of mine, look at the Jews.
01:43:15.000Like, you know, make sure that you are explaining that you were there in your individual capacity because they don't want...
01:43:27.000People are so afraid of cancel culture.
01:43:31.000They're afraid that you will be painted in a certain way because of who you associate with or who you speak to or who you try to sit across a table from.
01:45:23.000I appreciate what you are and who you are and what you're capable of doing and the love that you have for these people and the way that you put yourself out there.
01:45:39.000I know what you're doing, you know, and Some people they just they think again, it goes along tribal lines and it's also the fear of Repercussions a feel fear of criticism they read too much.
01:45:52.000They're paying attention to too many idiots on social media They're paying attention to too much nonsense the greater good of what you're doing outweighs everything by a gigantic margin and And the fact that they can't see that, it just shows that even on the right side of important issues,
01:46:08.000you're gonna have people that are cowards.
01:46:16.000They don't like when someone displays character and a point of focus that's beyond what they're capable of.
01:46:24.000It intimidates them, it bothers them, and they try to find weakness in it and they try to critique it and criticize it and shut it down.
01:46:32.000And it's just a lack of understanding of just the true character of human beings and how important it is to have someone like yourself that dedicates a massive amount of their life to trying to help innocent people get out of jail,
01:46:48.000which should be the focus of our entire culture.
01:46:50.000Our entire culture should be, let's, first of all, make sure that no one is ever convicted of something that they're unjustly accused of.
01:47:11.000If we have a culture that not only allows people to be imprisoned but creates law and signs decisions that keep people in prison that they know are innocent,
01:47:30.000That should be number one, because these are innocent people.
01:47:33.000We're supposed to be protecting innocent people.
01:47:35.000Those people, that should be our primary concern, and that's your primary concern, and that's an incredibly noble and brave and honorable and loving perspective.
01:47:45.000And for people to not see that and try to connect it with nonsense, And try to just get you upset or just criticize you or try to tear you down.
01:47:56.000It's because they don't have what you do.
01:48:07.000I mean, maybe I don't give myself enough flowers, and I'm not looking for flowers.
01:48:11.000I just feel like, you know, I'm not looking for anything but the feeling of, you know, I just know, I've said it before, that the feeling of restoring another human being, and when you walk someone out, there's just like...
01:48:28.000You know, I've done plenty of drugs in my life, and I've tried it all, and there's just nothing that can match it.
01:48:35.000And it's like almost the feeling that you were describing of when you, like, surround yourself with good people and see them succeeding and you get a thrill off of it.
01:48:45.000I remember one time where Emanuel Stewart, who trained Lennox Lewis and Tommy Hearns and so many other champions from the Cronk Gym, I mean,
01:49:01.000I was like a baby at the time, now that I think about it.
01:49:08.000I don't even think I've ever told you this story, have I? I don't think so.
01:49:12.000All right, so Walter Swift served, I think, close to 40 years.
01:49:17.000And I was with Barry Sheck at dinner, one of the founders of the Innocence Project, and he was telling me about this case in Detroit.
01:49:26.000And it was a rape case, and this black guy was accused of it, and they had stunning evidence of his innocence, and he's like, if I could just get the DA to pay attention.
01:56:36.000You know, and to get them out of the prison industrial complex, to me, is therapeutic.
01:56:40.000I gotta also imagine that that hard work that you did when you were in prison fortified your character and changed you as a person because you knew that you could do that now.
01:56:49.000You knew you could become this incredibly knowledgeable lawyer now.
01:57:07.000And it fortifies you further, strengthens you further.
01:57:10.000It's very admirable and it's very inspirational.
01:57:14.000And for a lot of people listening to this that maybe have pity on themselves for nonsense, they're listening to your case right now and they're going, holy shit, what am I talking about?
01:57:26.000Yeah, and you know, if you Google Derek Hamilton, it's like, I remember the dean of the law school where the center is being launched, and it's killing both of us if we can't.
01:57:44.000I told her, I said, you know, there's this guy that got out and she said, you're going to have an exoneree be the deputy director of this big legal center?
01:59:18.000And the clemency arm of our legal justice center, you know, you mentioned it earlier.
01:59:26.000You've got to make a decision as a human being.
01:59:30.000What do you believe in terms of the ability to forgive and give a second chance?
01:59:39.000Are we all better than the worst thing we've done?
01:59:42.000If you take a real look at yourself in the mirror, And I'll take a look at myself in the mirror and say, I hope I'm better than the worst things I've done.
01:59:52.000And if the worst things I've done define me...
01:59:55.000Then I should be, you know, condemned.
02:00:44.000And to stop that business dead in its tracks, you're going to have a lot of people out of work, and they have a vested interest in continuing that industry.
02:00:52.000It's not different than the pharmaceutical industry.
02:01:11.000Explain to Joe and the listeners the private prisons and the inherent dangers that that presents our country.
02:01:21.000Well, I mean, you talk about private or state rent, but private more so allows, you know, I mean, look, you get a private prison, it's not going to be regulated on the same way that state prisons are supposed to be regulated.
02:01:35.000So the minimum standards go out the door, right?
02:01:38.000Because it's strictly for profit, right?
02:01:40.000There's no rehabilitative characters in it whatsoever.
02:01:43.000But I think they both kind of marry each other because whether it's state-ran or private-ran, the deprivations are the same.
02:03:06.000If I write this guy up and say he punched me in the face, who's going to disbelieve him?
02:03:10.000Cuomo, when he ran for governor of New York, one of the first things he said in his stated address is that New York got to stop using prisons as an industry.
02:03:18.000That we got to find another way to make some money.
02:03:20.000He admitted it outright that New York was doing it.
02:03:24.000So I think that the private, whether it's private or whether it's state-run, the goals are the same.
02:04:18.000What goes back to the history when slavery was first absolved, abolished rather, one of the first things they did was go out and arrest people and force them to work for slave labor in prison.
02:04:40.000They didn't give them, there wasn't some sort of comprehensive plan to rehabilitate them and introduce them, and no reparations and no nothing, no punishment for the people that did it to them, and no assistance to those people.
02:06:14.000That's the only thing that makes sense to me.
02:06:15.000If you look at all the communities that were damaged by redline laws, all the communities that were apart, that's the number one problem in this country.
02:06:23.000Is that these people that grow up in this, the idea, this is where I have the biggest problem with this whole bullshit about pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
02:06:31.000You have people that are growing up in a neighborhood that you couldn't comprehend, filled with violence and crime and gangs, and to tell that person that they just have to be accountable when they have no examples around them.
02:06:57.000And if we don't concentrate on that, we spend $40 billion to Ukraine.
02:07:02.000We spend billions of dollars for all sorts of military programs that many of us don't agree with, interventionist foreign policy that many people don't agree with, and there's a countless coffer that pays for that shit.
02:07:15.000Where's the money to revitalize communities?
02:07:17.000Well, I mean, you know, and that takes the...
02:07:38.000I don't know Where the fuck did he go?
02:07:40.000And before that, reform gave him money.
02:07:48.000And this is like, you know, Joe raised this with me before and it makes so much sense because you think about a guy like Jeff Bezos Or Elon Musk or any of these guys that are...
02:07:58.000Elon Musk seems to me to be one of the most forward-thinking, progressive, dynamic, creative human beings I've ever laid eyes on or listened to.
02:08:08.000And if anyone could reimagine a society...
02:09:17.000It's so eye-opening for me to work with the Sean Carter Foundation and Jay-Z's mom and with these students because I was watching these students that I know were born into circumstances that I was not born into.
02:09:32.000And they just didn't have the same opportunities that I had.
02:09:36.000And to watch them flourish and they doubted themselves quite a bit.
02:09:42.000And this man, Derek, would tell them, you can do this.
02:09:45.000I don't want to hear any bullshit that you can't.
02:09:47.000I don't care that you're not a law student, you're not a lawyer.
02:10:10.000It is not only uplifting, it fills you with the type of hope that propels you forward and says, well, I have to do more, right?
02:10:19.000You know, Jay-Z sits in the background, and so does his mom, and he has this pretty remarkable impact on society and culture that he does not really seek attention for.
02:10:58.000Because they know them since they're in high school.
02:11:00.000And it was a moment of awakening for me this summer to see children that otherwise didn't have the confidence or didn't even know the potential in themselves realize that potential.
02:11:13.000And they're not going to all go on to be lawyers.
02:11:15.000You know, one of them is a dancer, one of them is a drama major, and one of them wants to help the incarcerated through dance and healing in that regard, right?
02:14:01.000You know, and then you get out there and do it instead of figuring out reasons why you can't.
02:14:06.000You can make this kind of change happen.
02:14:08.000And that starts with like, if someone makes a stupid joke that's a racist joke that you don't think is going to propel the conversation forward, here's why that's harmful and won't advance the ball.
02:14:59.000You got to dedicate yourself to the cause.
02:15:01.000Just yesterday in Jersey, family and friends of the room were convicted, protesting against Jersey because of so many innocent people and they're incarcerated.
02:15:22.000And there's more people that, you know, I was told something in Louisiana.
02:15:26.000They got an organization called Vote There, all incarcerated, forming incarcerated people.
02:15:30.000And what they do, and we should actually link with them, they do is they get involved in elections.
02:15:36.000And that's how they got to New Orleans, Governor, and different people up there.
02:15:39.000And one of the things the guy said to me up there, I'll never forget.
02:15:42.000He says, our motto is that if it's 10 of us, and each of us bring one person, that's 20. And then each one person, bring one person that's 30 and 40 and 50. This is what we believe in.
02:16:05.000And they know that, to me, this is a real, real situation because we're all Americans.
02:16:11.000At the end of the day, no matter how you want to say it, no matter how you want to believe it, we all are Americans.
02:16:15.000We all believe in this system where we dislike what it does or not.
02:16:19.000We're all a fabric of our environment.
02:16:21.000So we all should hold our government accountable.
02:16:25.000One of the things that kept me going was the Magna Carta.
02:16:28.000I learned that in 1215 it was bold English barons that held King John at gunpoint and made him sign the Magna Carta.
02:16:35.000You didn't give it to them, they made them give it to them.
02:16:37.000And when people talk about, you know, I speak to people, they talk about What happened at the Capitol, right?
02:16:44.000And what I teach people, the Second Amendment, if you read it, right, it says when the government becomes tyrant, the people can get a militia to revolt.
02:16:52.000Well, will you agree with them, people, or not?
02:16:54.000If they believe that the election was stolen, right, they had a right to revolt.
02:17:08.000And this is why you have three branches of government.
02:17:10.000When there was a debate, when the Constitution was being put into effect, there was a great debate on what type of government we're going to have, right?
02:17:17.000They knew that the government was corrupt, so they put all these checks and balances in place, right, so that we wouldn't be abused by the government.
02:17:36.000So I believe that the call to action is that every American, every person that's on this shore should stand up and change something in your lifetime.
02:17:45.000Change something to make it a better place.
02:17:47.000And I just believe that from the core of my being.
02:17:49.000And when you talk about the government being involved, I mean, what about the people that were involved in January 6th that were agent provocateurs that were encouraging people to go into the Capitol?
02:18:00.000There's people that are on record that they 100% got that they know most likely were federal agents that did this that have faced no criminal consequences whatsoever.
02:18:12.000They were actively encouraging people They know who these people are.
02:18:36.000Is your point, Joe, that you should be going after, if you're going to go after the people that actually were revved up to do it, you should actually go after the people that revved them up?
02:20:03.000And I think that speaks to what we were talking about earlier, that part of the problem is that this is a game.
02:20:08.000These guys are trying to convict people.
02:20:10.000And if you can arrest someone who was a religious extremist that wanted to blow up a bomb, and they wanted to become a martyr, and they wanted to do this because they felt like this was a righteous thing to do, because they were convinced by people, What the fuck kind of a government is this?
02:20:28.000Well, I mean, you know, I never really looked at it that way.
02:20:33.000Yeah, I never really looked at it that way because a lot of the people that were involved in January 6th end up becoming fall guys, fall men and women.
02:20:42.000But, you know, look, what kind of government is this?
02:21:27.000We should remove the law that allows the governor to do that in every state.
02:21:30.000And what's going to happen with this guy, Andrew Warren, who was the state attorney that was removed, what's going to happen is he's going to appeal this.
02:22:03.000So, you know, if you are a Democrat, Republican, libertarian, if you just believe in America, you should not get behind somebody that is willing to go move an elected official from office.
02:24:12.000And I don't know how you reinvent human beings, you know, other than what I know about what might change human beings.
02:24:21.000And the only thing that I think that changes them is having the ability to let your guard down and say, maybe everything that I thought I knew is not true.
02:24:33.000And maybe everything that I was taught by the people I held up as heroes, as idols, You know, we all have that moment where we stop viewing our parents as superheroes and as human beings.
02:28:07.000Well, I would say in Brooklyn, what we did with a voter block, we was able to remove the bad prosecutor and put one in that had the values and ideas of the people of Brooklyn.
02:30:11.000And were you able to identify common characteristics in those shell casings such that you were able to determine whether or not they came from the same gun?
02:30:21.000And he said, to a degree of scientific certainty, the markings on those shell casings lead me to believe that they came from the same gun.
02:30:30.000And he came up with all the reasons why the striage...
02:31:33.000And he's saying that upon ejection, that marks are left on the shell casings, that...
02:31:39.000If the shell casings have the same common identifying characteristics, you can say to a degree of scientific certainty that they were ejected from the same gun.
02:32:43.000The prosecutor then, within the same two pages of transcripts, says, if I take a gun and shoot it into that file cabinet in front of this jury and you find two shell casings and two bullet fragments...
02:32:59.000How many guns will you say were used in my shooting the file cabinet?
02:33:05.000And without missing a beat, the ballistics expert says, two.
02:33:32.000So in other words, what he's saying is, in other words, what he's saying to introduce the possibility that two guns were used in a crime.
02:33:42.000He is saying that if you find two shell casings and two bullet fragments, you cannot assume That those bullet fragments came from those shell casings.
02:33:52.000He's introducing the possibility that two guns were used.
02:33:56.000Right, but possibility versus deciding that there was two guns.
02:34:58.000And there was a guy by the name of West that would testify case after case after case that you could look at the indentation in the skin and you could match it up to teeth marks.
02:35:09.000And it was proven to be such junk science that they set him up and they gave him the teeth impressions of a detective.
02:35:20.000And they asked him if the detective's teeth, they told him that it was from the suspect, and he said it's a perfect match because he was told it was a suspect.
02:35:30.000So odontology has basically worked its way out of the criminal justice system.
02:35:34.000It was born out of the Salem witch trials.
02:35:36.000How was it born out of the Salem witch trials?
02:35:38.000So there was a case of a guy who They claimed was biting young children and killing them and sacrificing them and that he was a witch.
02:35:54.000And it was in the 1600s of Salem Witch Trials.
02:36:19.000If you want to listen to Wrongful Conviction Junk Science Season 1, I'd do the first episode on this.
02:36:29.000They ended up finding out that this man was not only innocent, he was in jail in another town when these crimes were committed.
02:36:35.000It's the first case of a wrongful conviction and compensation because the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ended up compensating his family for executing him for a crime he didn't commit.
02:36:49.000And that was the first known case of teeth marks, bite marks being used.
02:36:55.000Since then, it's been outed as a junk science, but it's one of the few junk sciences that has been outed.
02:37:01.000In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences did a study on forensic sciences, and the only one that they could find was even remotely credible was DNA. So everything that we knew about forensic science should have been turned on its head.
02:37:20.000Fingerprints are completely subjective.
02:37:22.000We're taught that they're the gold standard.
02:38:18.000The similarities of the witch trials and what happens today is that we're looking for We're looking to take evil people off the street, right?
02:38:30.000That's what they were looking for back then.
02:38:31.000They thought that they were gonna get rid of witches.
02:38:35.000They thought they were gonna get rid of evil.
02:38:48.000These people were eating bread that had gone through, the wheat had gone through a late frost, and it develops a fungus called ergot, and ergot is psychedelic.
02:39:01.000So these people were all tripping balls, eating bad wheat and all the other products that they made with the wheat bread and all these different things, and they were getting ergot poisoning, so they were all tripping.
02:39:12.000And they were all conjuring up this notion that there were witches out there?
02:39:18.000For a while, and then when the late frost was gone and all that wheat was consumed, they went back to normal.
02:39:24.000And that's why there was a waning of...
02:39:28.000There's some dispute about this, but there's no dispute about whether or not there was a late frost.
02:39:33.000There's some dispute about the way they cooked the bread and whether or not ergot would still be available.
02:39:42.000But there's no dispute that there was a late frost when they do core samples of the earth and they find out during that time period that this matches up to what is established science on you know on this and they have found residue of ergot and they know that in similar situations when people have consumed ergot they have these horrific unexpected psychedelic consequences.
02:40:07.000Yeah, I mean, in doing the research for this wrongful conviction junk science, I went back to the—and this was a couple of years ago when we first met, many years ago, I guess three, four years ago.
02:40:20.000I was doing the research into the origin stories of all these junk sciences, and I was just blown away that nobody said, wait a second— Why are we accepting this?
02:40:31.000And the way things become legal precedent in our system is, you know, it's scary.
02:40:38.000Because if one judge accepts it, then other people start citing it.
02:40:42.000And if other people start saying, well, there is precedent here, then it just becomes ingrained in the system.
02:40:47.000And it's happened with everything from fingerprints to blood spatter to bite mark impressions to tread marks.
02:40:57.000And, you know, if you look at the origin story of each of these so-called forensic sciences, you would think that you were listening to some tale of like a religion that was cooked up.
02:41:12.000I mean, you know, blood spatter evidence was born in the basement of some fucking crackpot in upstate New York that was taking college-age girls and having to dip their hair into the blood of cadaver dogs Yeah.
02:41:51.000All of these, like, shit, horse shit forensic scientists infect a lot of the cases we work on.
02:42:01.000Clemente Aguirre's case, we've talked about it on this.
02:42:03.000I can't talk too much about it, because if you could believe it, the state of Florida is doubling down.
02:43:13.000Might you question them if you found out, as I found out during Clemente's case, during discovery, something I didn't even know when I exonerated him, that the detective in the case was going down to the lab and saying,
02:43:40.000And, you know, I didn't even know it at the time.
02:43:45.000And you end up finding out that there's no training manual, there are no training standards, there are no standard operating procedures, there's no one doing administrative review on their work.
02:43:54.000You would think if we're going to be so quick to accuse someone of a crime and take their freedom away, We want to make damn sure we're getting it right.
02:44:03.000I think it speaks to what we were talking about earlier that people, when you set up this thing, whether it's with cops or with prosecutors, where a conviction is good for their career and good for their record, that's a point.
02:44:26.000And they think they're going to be able to connive their way and weasel their way through it.
02:44:30.000Even if they look at what you've said just on this podcast, where you reviewed it and brought me to tears, there's astounding evidence that he's innocent.
02:44:40.000Well, it's not just astounding evidence that he's innocent.
02:45:22.000He has to relive this whole experience again.
02:45:24.000I'm happy to do it because it's a labor of love for me.
02:45:27.000The guy that's trying the case with me is a guy named David Rudolph who has a bit of a cult following because he was the lawyer and then Netflix hit The Staircase where the guy Peterson was accused of pushing his wife down the stairs.
02:45:43.000And he's just a tremendous civil rights lawyer who's seen it all.
02:47:03.000He told me about the owl theory years before it ever got pressed.
02:47:06.000He said, Josh, I actually think a fucking owl did this.
02:47:10.000If you look at a woman's head and a full head of hair, Tell me that shit doesn't look like an animal.
02:47:15.000And not only does it not look like an animal, but there are claw mark impressions and a beak impression in the same exact spot that an owl would do it.
02:48:12.000He said if he pushed her down the stairs, and that's where the murder took place, the so-called murder, how the fuck was she bleeding when they were out by the pool, walking in toward the pool?
02:49:06.000Yeah, and then using her as a witness.
02:49:08.000You know, this use of jailhouse informants, maybe we close on this.
02:49:14.000Pamela Koloff is an investigative reporter that wrote an award-winning story about the most notorious jailhouse snitch in history named Paul Skelnick.
02:49:28.000He was the informant that was used in, where do you think, Florida.
02:49:37.000And if you read the article in, I believe it's in Texas Monthly, that she wrote, she won a very prestigious award for investigative journalist of the year for this story about Paul Skalnik.
02:49:56.000And then you tell me how you don't give James Daly a clemency hearing.
02:50:01.000This guy claims that James Daly walked by his cell, a known informant, and said, hey, by the way, hey, you informant that are in isolation, hey, by the way, I killed this girl.
02:50:18.000A call to action for your listeners would be go read the story that Pamela Koloff, C-O-L-O-F-F, wrote about Paul Skownick.
02:50:28.000And watch the 2020. And if you're not enraged that this guy put somebody on death row on his word alone with no physical evidence, I don't know what else will inspire you to get involved.
02:50:42.000There's a feeling of helplessness that I get, and I'm sure a lot of people also get listening to this, that there's so many cases.
02:50:49.000There's so many cases and for every Clemente, for every case like Derek, for every case that you get out, there's countless more that are still being locked up.
02:51:00.000It's a terrible feeling to know that there's people out there that didn't do anything wrong, or at least didn't do the crime that they've been accused of, and they're gonna be locked in jail for the rest of their life.
02:51:11.000And that this is the system that we rely on.
02:51:13.000And this is when you call the police, when you, you know, you see someone getting tried and convicted, and you sleep well knowing that, oh good, they got the good guy, they got the bad guy, they got the right person, that it's not right.
02:51:24.000Well, listen, Another call to action would be, if you get called to jury duty, this notion that there is a presumption of innocence only exists if you breathe life into it.
02:51:48.000The question that I get the most traction from is I ask people during jury selection, You know, I just picked a jury in a case that is not so sensational but for the media.
02:52:03.000It was one of the so-called Varsity Blues cases, alright?
02:52:08.000You've heard of these cases where the parents were accused of...
02:52:14.000Yeah, bribing the universities to get their students in.
02:52:22.000Well, this guy was accused in Boston of putting $180,000 in a brown paper bag and giving it to the tennis coach so that his daughter could get in, fake a shoulder injury, and not be on the tennis team.
02:52:35.000Now, you have the tide of a tidal wave of media.
02:55:04.000We're finishing today, though, this race to finish.
02:55:07.000So my first question was, please tell me what you read.
02:55:11.000All right, well, I read that, like, the woman from Full House brought, I said, okay.
02:55:17.000Given that my client was charged with essentially the same thing, isn't it fair to say that he's probably starting off a little bit behind?
02:56:48.000I just helped get a jury that was the fairest possible.
02:56:52.000But give that some thought as a closing thought.
02:56:56.000You are charged with a crime in federal court in this country 999 times out of 1000. That jury will be picked in one day and the lawyers won't get to ask a single question.
02:57:20.000And a lot of lawyers don't want to stand up to the judge and say, you're violating my client's right to a Sixth Amendment right to a fair and impartial jury.
02:57:32.000Part of a fair trial subsumed within that right.
02:57:36.000How do you get a fair trial if we don't know whether the jurors are fair?
02:57:40.000If you don't know what their occupation is, if you don't know what their spouse's occupation, all these things that inform decision-making.
02:57:47.000So I think it's also incumbent on lawyers to be able to not worry about pissing off judges so much and be more interested in protecting your client's rights and standing up for their rights.
02:57:58.000The conviction rate should not be 99% in federal court, if we really have the presumption of innocence.
02:58:46.000What you've done is incredible, and the impact, just the millions of people that are going to listen to us talk here, it's going to have a profound impact on people.
02:58:57.000And people like you really do make a difference.
02:59:28.000No, I'm not here on behalf of the Innocence Project.
02:59:30.000I think that what really needs, because I'm branching out on my own, I think that if you contact me on Instagram, dubin.josh, we can give you the details on our criminal justice reform organization,
02:59:49.000but a great place to start would be the Midwest Innocence Project.
02:59:54.000The Midwest Innocence Project, the executive director is someone by the name of Tricia Bushnell.