On this episode of the podcast, we discuss the recent case of a man who was convicted of a murder that never should have happened, but still got away with it. We also talk about the case of an alleged serial killer who is serving a life sentence for a murder he didn't commit. We also discuss a case where a man was released from prison after serving 25 years for a crime he didn t commit and is now serving a 25 year sentence. And we talk about an unfortunate incident that happened a month after that case and the reaction to the news of it and how it affected the comedian who was the one who was with him the night of the murder and how he dealt with the aftermath of the case. Thank you to everyone who has been kind enough to reach out to us and support us. We really appreciate it and we will continue to do our best to help those who need it most. Thank you for being a part of this movement and supporting it. We are here for you! and we are here to help you. Love ya. -Jon Sorrentino Jon John Rocha Steve Kamb Mike McLendon Chris Williams Paul Kasinski Michael Pape Kevin Crutchfield Ben Price Adam Driver Joe Scarborough Jacklyn Thompson Carl Castellani Daniella Pizzi Matt Maddie Turner Tom Delonge James Herndorfer Alex Vellian Jake Froehlich Will Smith Matthew Herrell David Kuchta Brian McElroy , Ben Kotnik Jeff Perla & - Andrew Wyndor Jason Stell BOB SCHULTZ Chad Miller Evan Lewis Andruv Brandon Herndorf Thank You Erickson JOSH MILLER Sam Pizzio Tim Pippin Thanks to: Daniel Gray Gynn Cheyennek Jimmie Nick ( ) Sarah Jordan Zachary Cody Justin Jared . Shane Brad Jimmy Kaczyn Ryan Kyle Taylor Music
00:01:59.000I mean, I was in St. Louis, of all places, which is only memorable because that's where I was when someone called me and said, have you looked at the news?
00:02:12.000And I said, I was in court, and I was on a break, and...
00:02:18.000You know, I called him a miracle on this show.
00:05:43.000When you talk to him, he's very intelligent, very nice guy.
00:05:48.000He just thought he could get away with getting payback on somebody.
00:05:51.000Yeah, look, that's super gracious of you.
00:05:53.000Whether I did something wrong or not, I typically go to blame, and that's a kink I have to work out in my personality.
00:06:01.000But let me just articulate it because I think what I... The platform is so important to me and getting these stories out is so important to me.
00:06:11.000And I think that where I've landed is that he didn't let me down.
00:08:52.000About what incarceration does to somebody from the standpoint of the practical day-to-day from the deep psychosis inducing confinement and everything else.
00:09:04.000And two days before the book was released and it was reviewed by the New York Times, the guy snapped and killed someone in the East Village.
00:09:17.000And no one will know what it is like to be in there.
00:09:21.000And again, I don't want to offer this as an excuse, but what it has caused me to do is reevaluate and say, look, maybe I need to take a much closer look at what sort of mental health counseling these folks are getting.
00:09:35.000Like Sheldon, I arranged for him to be speaking to a trauma therapist.
00:09:42.000Should I have been on him more to be going to those appointments?
00:10:26.000And I frankly don't want to know at this point because someone lost their life.
00:10:33.000And that, you know, I think unfortunately for my mental health, I just wear that stuff.
00:10:39.000You know, if I felt even remotely responsible for that, which I do, and, you know, I have to – I can – I can be at peace with it, but I didn't cause that death.
00:10:50.000And I don't, you know, I can take some responsibility for it in the sense that what could I do going forward?
00:10:59.000Whether it's people that are being exonerated for crimes they didn't commit, or if it's people that are getting resentenced, you cannot undo decades of confinement.
00:11:29.000It's no different than if you have a problem with your liver, you know, and you have to take medication.
00:11:35.000I mean, I've always been upfront about the fact that I'm on medication.
00:11:40.000It's nothing to be ashamed of, and it's especially warranted when you're in those circumstances.
00:11:45.000Again, none of this is to make an excuse, but I just think that there's a lot more emphasis that I can focus on Assimilation more.
00:11:54.000And I think that making sure that they have job training and that they feel safe when they get out.
00:11:59.000I mean, there hasn't been one person who I've been involved in their case where Even when they're innocent, they get out and it's a fucking shock.
00:12:09.000And I need to be a lot more sensitive to that, I think, and pay a lot more attention to what they're doing, how they're doing.
00:12:22.000Again, I had the foresight to put Sheldon in touch with and ensure that we were getting him mental health counseling with a trauma therapist, but I didn't want to meddle too much in that because it's on him to go.
00:12:46.000Well, if the guy really did slash his face, if you've been in literal mortal combat with a person and this person is allegedly threatening your son or whatever, there's only so much you can do to stop a person from seeking revenge.
00:13:02.000Especially if they don't have any hope outside of the system and they've been completely institutionalized, which, given the length of his sentence, is reasonable to assume.
00:13:16.000Yeah, you're a lot more forgiving and understanding than a lot of people were and have been about this.
00:13:25.000You know, there's been two schools of thought in the reaction.
00:13:28.000I mean, I got pretty nasty hate mail, and I got a lot of words of encouragement.
00:13:37.000I think the hate mail outweighed the words of encouragement.
00:14:02.000By telling the truth about the state of race and the criminal justice system in this country.
00:14:08.000You see, the thing is, the one force field I have around myself is when that's incoming, I'm able to say, okay, thanks for the fuel, thanks for the fuel.
00:14:20.000You know, unless you're doing mental health counseling in a prison, unless you're a corrections officer, a police officer, know what it's like to be incarcerated, you have no fucking business giving me your shitty opinion about what you think I am or others that do this work.
00:14:40.000Get in the fucking arena and do it yourself.
00:14:43.000And I, you know, so I take that with a big grain of salt.
00:14:49.000I had, you know, I have enough common sense and practical sense to sort of let, to disregard that.
00:15:00.000But I have to be a big enough person to look at myself and say, well, what can I learn from this?
00:15:06.000Because, you know, I was talking to Derek Hamilton, who's been on the show and the deputy director of the Freedom Clinic at the Perlmutter Center.
00:15:48.000We're trying to formulate a plan to normalize mental health counseling in prison.
00:15:55.000So Derek and I are doing a town hall at Shawongunk, which is a pretty rough prison in New York on December 6th, to try to get some of the inmates to understand that it's okay to ask for this help.
00:16:06.000I think when they see Derek and hear his story, it's helpful for them.
00:16:15.000It's going to sound pretty controversial, but I think one of the conversations that I've had repeatedly, I've had it with JD Vance, I've had it with quite a few people, is psychedelic therapy for veterans.
00:16:30.000People with severe PTSD because of war I think are the most deserving of psychedelic therapy and the benefits of it and the fact that that stuff is Schedule 1 and is illegal in the United States I think is absurd.
00:16:44.000It's a massive disservice to those people that put their lives on the line and went over and experienced horrific things that the average person like myself can only imagine and you're not going to do a good job of imagining it.
00:16:59.000I think prisoners could benefit from psychedelic therapy as well.
00:17:02.000I think there's a lot of people that could be rehabilitated by changing the way they view things, literally changing their mind, changing their perspective.
00:17:10.000And I think there's a lot of psychedelic therapies that could aid in that, particularly for people who, you know, they're not violent people.
00:17:21.000They're just a victim of circumstance or they made bad decisions in their life or what have you.
00:17:30.000And they're stuck both mentally and physically.
00:17:33.000And if we want to use prisons as just a deterrent to crime, I think we should probably put some effort towards rehabilitation.
00:17:45.000Sincere, significant efforts towards rehabilitation.
00:17:48.000And one of the best ways to do that is to try to change the way people view themselves and view the world and view themselves as a part of the world.
00:17:59.000The fact that you would even think that that would be controversial, I think, is just a byproduct of the fact that anything that somebody articulates that's outside of what's considered mainstream is rejected.
00:18:16.000Unquestionably, the research is overwhelming that psychedelics are one of the best, most effective therapies for PTSD. My therapist has,
00:18:33.000you know, counseled people with PTSD coming back from war and, you know, has I mean,
00:19:09.000We talked about the stats, and I'm not going to You know, re-litigate that here, but look, we incarcerate people at a higher rate than any other civilization on Earth.
00:19:23.000So we have to decide as a society, are we just going to throw people away and put them in cages and make them worse, even if they committed the crime?
00:19:32.000Or, as you said, are we really going to try to rehabilitate people?
00:19:37.000Because some people are getting out no matter what.
00:19:40.000Whether they have people like me involved and other great people that do this work.
00:20:39.000We talk about like looking up at the mountain and saying, can I scale it?
00:20:45.000I think what you have to do, and I'm talking about this, all it takes is one state, one municipality, one person who says, that's interesting.
00:20:59.000At the Perlmutter Center named Sarah Chu, and she's in the trenches having these arguments, having these fights, trying to get forensic labs, you know, ensuring that they have the proper training accreditation so that they're not introducing,
00:21:14.000you know, various forms of junk science.
00:21:17.000All it takes is just the effort going forward to try to start pushing that boulder uphill or else, you know, again, this goes to The incoming hatred in a situation like we had here is like,
00:21:34.000what the fuck are you doing to help try to make the situation better?
00:21:39.000Because just calling names and pointing fingers and saying, you fucked up, or this person that we threw away is not worth saving, listen.
00:21:50.000Everybody has made some mistake that they wish other people didn't know about.
00:21:57.000You know, and it's not always homicide, obviously, but a lot of people have done something that, but for the grace of God go I, right?
00:22:11.000Where if somebody was looking, if law enforcement was looking, it could be you that was there.
00:22:54.000And I think, you know, so I know that the literature is there.
00:22:58.000It's just we have to get past this whole, it's so weird that you mentioned that.
00:23:06.000I was talking to a guy on the plane on the way down who asked me if marijuana legalization passed in Florida because we were talking about where you're from, this and that.
00:23:27.000And he told me that, you know, in Colorado, when marijuana was legalized, that there was this whole movement of people that were saying that it would be a gateway drug, and that it was going to lead people down the slippery slope to doing other hardcore drugs.
00:23:46.000And he said, you know, the gulf between smoking weed and turning into a meth addict doesn't exist.
00:23:54.000He said that the bridge between the two doesn't exist.
00:23:58.000And if you start walking marijuana use and trying to link it to...
00:24:05.000Drugs that the U.S. government considers a problem, the link just isn't there.
00:24:10.000So, I mean, he was sort of trying to explain to me how he didn't understand how marijuana is any different than alcohol.
00:24:19.000And I said, well, go tell that to the state legislator in Florida.
00:24:52.000But in any event, I don't understand the resistance to psychedelics as a therapeutic, both in mainstream society, let alone in the prison system.
00:25:05.000Well, it all goes back to 1970. It all goes back to the Nixon administration, the sweeping psychedelics act of 1970 that turned everything, Schedule I, that was designed to cripple the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.
00:25:24.000It was about having new tools to imprison people that were anti-war, that were protesting the war.
00:25:32.000The Black Panthers, civil rights organizations, all these people that were doing drugs, that were using psychedelics to try to achieve a different state of consciousness and that brought them to these ideas that we're all one and that war is evil and that the United States government is being controlled by the military-industrial complex and that this is a giant problem in our culture.
00:25:58.000People were so weirded out by the Timothy Leary's and, you know, the whole tune in, you know, turn out, whatever the fuck his motto was, drop out.
00:26:11.000This whole thing of leaving polite society and being a loser and just like traveling around.
00:26:20.000This was like the perspective that people had that was going to take their kids and turn them into ne'er-do-wells and turn them into losers.
00:26:28.000And that we were going to have a society filled with people that didn't understand the ethics of hard work and what made America great and all this bullshit.
00:27:08.000You're legalizing that intelligence gathering that allows you to start violating people's civil liberties so that you can gain intelligence on them because the way they think is unlike you.
00:27:29.000So, you know, it's, again, sort of, to me, all ties back to this very...
00:27:38.000I guess tribal mentality that you're either like us or you're like them.
00:27:42.000And everything that you mentioned, the Psychedelics Act, the resistance to the civil rights movement, it was all based on the fact that, look, we have a potential uprising here of people that are going to challenge the way we think and the way we do things.
00:27:59.000So for people that call me a race baiter, Right?
00:28:03.000I, you know, I feel like I'm more of a truth teller and just taking the thread through history.
00:28:09.000And, you know, I have at least I'll read and try to educate myself and get perspective.
00:28:19.000If it wasn't a fact that brown and black men and women get incarcerated at a higher rate, Mm-hmm.
00:28:45.000Any pharmacologic form of therapy that has probably way worse side effects can be addictive and can lead to a whole host of other issues that you then have to take something else to address, versus just having the openness to take a look at a different way to potentially help someone.
00:29:06.000So I don't understand it, and the only thing that I can do is just to keep on being open-minded And, you know, try to figure out if there's other ways that we can convince the people that are in these penitentiaries and that run them to allow programs that at least give you a crack in the door to get in.
00:29:31.000Well, I think the doorway to that is to first show the effectiveness with veterans and with other people that aren't incarcerated.
00:29:42.000And that once that gets established and once that becomes something, I think it's much, much more established now than it was when I first started talking about this stuff 20 years ago.
00:29:52.000You know, like probably when I've had my first experiences was a little more than 20 years ago.
00:29:59.000I think people have this very ignorant idea that was born out of propaganda.
00:30:04.000Because you have to think 20 years ago, it was only 30 years removed from the Sweeping Psychedelics Act.
00:30:10.000So you're dealing with a whole society that's been...
00:30:15.000Just programmed by propaganda and lies.
00:30:18.000And those propaganda and lies were established in order to villainize this one group of the population that was completely changing the culture.
00:30:28.000The difference in the United States culture from 1965 1955 to 1965 was so dramatic.
00:30:38.000You know, then you have the Vietnam War, the protests, all these things that were happening in the 60s, the music, everything was changing so radically and so drastically that the people in power had a very, like,
00:30:55.000an accurate sense that they were losing control.
00:31:13.000Yeah, a great job of changing culture, which was changing in a potentially beneficial way for everyone.
00:31:22.000To get us to recognize that we truly are all one and that the way to make things better for everyone is to make things better for the most disadvantaged.
00:31:34.000And this was the civil rights movement, right?
00:31:38.000This was recognizing that people are being taken advantage by the military-industrial complex and just sent overseas so that they could profit.
00:31:51.000The first guy that I met that really changed my perspective on the world, especially in terms of what I could potentially do as a lawyer, was Jerry Lefcourt.
00:32:07.000Jerry Lefcourt was Abbie Hoffman's lawyer.
00:32:11.000He was the lead attorney in the Panther 21 trial.
00:32:34.000And he would regale me with tales of the Panther 21 trial.
00:32:40.000And here's a guy that was kind of winging it in his late 20s and can feel the change that you're talking about happening.
00:32:50.000And he could feel the weight against him, the pushback coming.
00:32:56.000From the other side where he would get death threats.
00:33:00.000He would get bomb threats at his office where he could not even see his client in jail approaching trial and had to get on a cherry picker.
00:33:13.000And outside the jail to be able to get even with the window so that they can communicate.
00:33:55.000It flew in the face of, you know, father knows best.
00:33:59.000It flew in the face of what white America was trying to instill as a value system that should be followed by all people without question for all time.
00:34:13.000And people started to say, what the fuck is this about?
00:34:17.000I want to explore the messiness and the gray areas of what it means to exist as a human being.
00:34:25.000And that expression, whether it was Richard Nixon or the people around him that got their backs up, You know, so if you are a student of history and you start to understand sort of why we're here rather than just looking here and forward,
00:34:47.000I think these things for me are a little bit easier to understand when somebody comes at me and calls me a race baiter for the work that I do because I talk about the problem of race.
00:35:01.000I understand that that's born out of ignorance.
00:35:03.000And I don't mean ignorance like you're a dummy.
00:35:44.000It stops me in my tracks when I think about it, when I talk about it, because it's like the only way that we can get to a more common understanding is to, you know, I think to read books like that and to talk to people.
00:35:56.000And if you're so closed off and closed minded, and again, I keep on sort of adding this disclaimer, and maybe this is my...
00:36:03.000My aversion to, like, getting attacked.
00:36:06.000I am not excusing if Sheldon did this.
00:36:09.000I just think that it's not so simple as, oh, you helped some guy get out and get resentenced and look what he did and fuck all these people and fuck your movement.
00:36:20.000Okay, you're entitled to that opinion.
00:38:30.000Look, I don't want this to come across as like constantly being like Situation where I'm,
00:38:47.000every time I get on here, I thank you.
00:38:48.000But I think the importance of this forum was made clear by having the president on, by having the vice president on, because it's the only open forum where you don't have to worry about being judged, about Someone chopping up what you say and twisting it or leaving some remarks on the cutting room floor.
00:39:12.000And it's also important because you don't give a fuck about what...
00:39:20.000Other people say or think and you just do what you feel is the right thing to do because I've I mean I've told you privately I'll say it now again It would have been the easy thing for you to do would have been to say well fuck this guy I'm turning my back.
00:39:33.000I don't need to have him on again It was never gonna happen.
00:39:36.000Yeah, well listen what you've done is amazing and the people that you have brought on this show I've changed a lot of people's perspectives about our justice system.
00:39:48.000You brought on some incredible people, and you've told some incredible stories, and as you said, people have been exonerated for crimes that they didn't commit.
00:39:56.000If you are a person who's listening to this, and you could be fucked by the system.
00:40:07.000Thank God it hasn't happened to you, but if it did happen to you, you would pray that there's a Josh Dubin in the world that pays attention to your case.
00:40:24.000And I think highlighting that and highlighting the need for that and understanding of how the system can railroad you and the system can really fuck you over.
00:40:34.000I think one of the things that we saw during the Trump campaign was the legal system being used against one of the most powerful people in the world.
00:40:44.000And how they can get away with turning 34 misdemeanors, so essentially one misdemeanor, but 34 versions of it, 34 writing in a ledger incorrectly that's a misdemeanor and is past the statute of limitations,
00:40:59.000can be converted into a felony and turned against a guy who's running for president as lawfare.
00:41:07.000It's just completely using the legal system to try to attack a guy And try to take him out of the race and also try to label him a convicted felon.
00:41:17.000So once you have this label, a convicted felon, you heard it on all the talk shows, convicted felon, convicted felon.
00:41:24.000But enough people had a chance to look at The circumstances of the case and understand what he was actually being tried for.
00:41:32.000Paying someone off to not talk about how he fucked them?
00:41:56.000It's so interesting to me because the conversations that people in the legal community in New York were having at the time, I cannot tell you how many times.
00:42:05.000It didn't matter what side of the spectrum you were on politically.
00:42:11.000But in New York, there's a lot of fucking Democrats.
00:42:13.000And I can't tell you how often I got this call.
00:43:35.000The judge in that case agreed to a joint motion by the prosecution and the defense to put everything on hold because they're deciding whether or not they're going to dismiss that case.
00:43:47.000And if you remember, the drum that was constantly beat before this election was he'll never get out of these state cases, the federal ones we understand because he can pardon himself.
00:43:59.000But the state cases, oh, those are going to be a problem.
00:44:04.000Because now, if it was that much of a crime and that people were so up in arms about it, why are they now considering dismissing it?
00:44:13.000And I think that it puts the lie to the notion that this was really something that we wanted to make an example out of and you can't engage in this type of conduct.
00:47:30.000And they sit with him for over an hour.
00:47:34.000And they say to him, everything you're telling us has been in the papers.
00:47:40.000So you're not giving us anything new here.
00:47:42.000He shows up the next day with his son, William Avery Jr. And he says he witnessed the murder.
00:47:52.000So William Avery Jr. talks to the police.
00:47:56.000At the end of that interview, he goes, what about the reward money?
00:48:01.000And the officer says, let's turn the tape recorder off and let's talk about that.
00:48:10.000They tell him, we're not giving you the reward money because now you're telling us that information that's been in the papers and all you're telling us is that you saw Marsha Blakely assaulted in an apartment.
00:48:23.000You're not telling us anything about the murder.
00:48:27.000The very next day, he shows up and says that Al Cleveland told him that he murdered Marshall Blakely.
00:48:37.000So let's put a bookmark in it because I decided I wanted to do something a little bit different today.
00:48:47.000At the end of the episode, I'm going to give you a Twitter account.
00:48:52.000I've submitted today a 40-page submission.
00:48:58.000All of the exhibits that are mentioned in that submission to the Lorain County prosecutor.
00:49:08.000So now I'm going to invite the public.
00:49:12.000Before you go writing a letter to him or calling him, you read the submission and look at the exhibits yourself.
00:49:18.000Because what often happens is that in these reinvestigations, Prosecutors' offices have something called a Conviction Integrity Unit, where they say they'll reinvestigate the case.
00:49:30.000And the very first thing they make you do is sign a no-media agreement, that you won't go to the media, because the last thing they want you to do is what I just did, is to talk about the case publicly.
00:49:43.000So we're not in a conviction integrity unit.
00:49:45.000We're trying to appeal to a prosecutor, J.D. Tomlinson, who from what I understand has told Al Cleveland's wife, because I've spoken to her, her name is Roberta, great woman, came up to her in the summer at a barbecue and said,
00:50:01.000when I was a law student, I sat in on your husband's trial.
00:51:04.000You know, I think that the justice system has been weaponized against J.D. Tomlinson because he was coming up for a re-election.
00:51:14.000There's all sorts of, like, personal animosity between him and the guy that just got elected.
00:51:20.000There's allegations, at least, that the guy that just got elected helped, you know, was somehow involved in...
00:51:29.000Getting him indicted by a special prosecutor.
00:51:31.000I don't know if it's true or not, but it doesn't just happen on the big national stage.
00:51:37.000It happens all over the place, and you just don't always hear about it.
00:51:40.000Well, I think the fact that it happened on the big national stage the way it did, and not just the case of the hush money, but also the case of Mar-a-Lago being overvalued, which is preposterous.
00:51:55.000That was one of the most ridiculous ones.
00:51:56.000They listed it at, what, 17, 18 million dollars?
00:52:00.000I would buy five of those if they were available for 18 million dollars.
00:52:04.000You know how much money you would make for that kind of property?
00:52:55.000So the club had revenues of $25.1 million for the calendar year of 2017, 22 in 2018, and 21 in 2019. 2022, Forbes estimated the value of the estate around $350 million.
00:53:09.000I think Trump jacked it way higher than that.
00:54:17.000Across the street, they have the beach club that sits right on the beach.
00:54:20.000But the point is, is that they're meddling into, look, the bank could have said, well, we're going to send an appraiser out there, and we're going to determine whether or not we agree with you that it's worth that.
00:54:31.000That happens for anyone that's ever sold a home.
00:54:34.000Again, the point is there's no victim.
00:54:36.000The point is it's not like he got this loan and then defrauded the bank and then defaulted on his loan and then pocketed the money.
00:54:56.000So that's another one that was in the news that everybody got a chance to see.
00:54:59.000Well, hopefully it opens people's eyes.
00:55:01.000Look, there's a lot of white-collar crimes that I've been a defense lawyer on where you see the human cost of a prosecution, what it does to the person accused, but also their family.
00:55:19.000And to somehow crawl out from under the weight of the federal government, these take years and a fortune to defend.
00:55:30.000And oftentimes you're thinking, why did they bring this case?
00:55:39.000And they come up with some loss calculation that's very theoretical.
00:55:42.000I'm talking about cases where you can't point to a victim that lost money.
00:55:49.000You know, you wonder why some prosecutions are brought and others aren't.
00:55:55.000And you see again what it does to not only devastate families and the accused, but is it really deterring anyone?
00:56:05.000I would never, ever enter an industry that I think?
00:56:28.000You know, regardless of what side of the political spectrum you're on, what happened to Trump should be eye-opening to people because you don't have to agree with him or his politics or his policies to see what's happening today as we sit here when everything's being reconsidered and you think about the massive expense that it takes to prosecute these cases.
00:57:19.000I mean, the guy's 78 years old, and I talked to him for three hours, and he didn't pee before, he didn't pee afterwards, just sat here, talked, didn't lose any energy, and then flew off to do a campaign rally.
00:57:32.000Yeah, listen, I wish him all the success in the world.
00:58:04.000You spoke on the podcast about her history as a prosecutor and what she had done.
00:58:09.000And I know they contacted you afterward.
00:58:12.000Yeah, I mean, what was happening—well, this was way back when—I think it was days before she was selected to be the vice presidential running mate for Biden.
00:58:25.000But I think it was Carpenter who was—is that his name?
00:59:20.000With prosecutors that just want to be right and win, and I would just say, please, just open your mind a little bit.
00:59:28.000I just sat in a room with a conviction integrity unit, and there were prosecutors in the room where, and I can't sign one of those agreements, so I can't name the case or the city or the borough,
00:59:44.000but where the prosecutor went to federal prison.
00:59:49.000for bribing witnesses and is accused of the same conduct in this case where he was giving money to someone who has recanted their testimony And the prosecutors sitting in the room were like, it wasn't that they weren't open-minded.
01:00:06.000They had their mind made up before we got in there.
01:00:09.000And you feel like saying, can't you just listen?
01:00:44.000But when I came to this country, I saw my mom fight for citizenship, and I saw what she had to go through the right way for me to get citizenship.
01:00:55.000And she said, so I just can't vote for anybody but him.
01:00:59.000So everybody has their own reasons for doing it.
01:01:02.000It doesn't mean it has to be all about a cult of personality and you're endorsing everything about the person.
01:01:10.000And I think that having that understanding that, look, a lot of people that...
01:01:16.000I spoke to a friend of mine the other day that grandparents were in the Holocaust.
01:01:21.000His grandfather survived the Holocaust and he voted for Trump because he's like, I didn't feel protected by the other side.
01:01:27.000You know, as those grandson of people that went through that.
01:01:33.000So, yeah, I just think that watching a system get weaponized against someone in that way, it's upsetting and hopefully, like you said, it opens people's eyes to the fact that if they could do it to the president,
01:02:52.000But I feel different about some of the cases.
01:02:54.000I feel like the election case has the most substance to it.
01:03:02.000Standing up and saying, the election's rigged, the election's rigged.
01:03:05.000I have a problem with that, but obviously more than half the country didn't have as much of a problem with it.
01:03:13.000Well, that was one of the ones that I said was the weirdest where he didn't have an answer ready.
01:03:19.000That you should have an answer ready right away.
01:03:21.000If I had been accused of something like that and I strongly believed that the elections were rigged, I'd be able to give you facts right away.
01:03:46.000I would hope that if you have something that's so controversial, like you ran for president, you believe you should have won and they rigged it, you should have data that you could spit out at any cocktail party.
01:03:59.000But he's doing the same thing that you're talking about CNN and MSNBC do, which is just repeating the same thing.
01:04:06.000When people were standing in line voting a couple of weeks ago, he was saying this election was rigged.
01:04:11.000And poof, it must have straightened it out because he won.
01:04:16.000What he was saying was they were trying to rig the election.
01:04:20.000What facts did he have to back that up?
01:04:22.000Well, there's the one thing of bringing in people to the country illegally and then pushing for amnesty, which they were doing.
01:04:30.000Yeah, I just don't know the numbers on it.
01:04:51.000And the evidence against it was like, well, they're not all moving to swing states.
01:04:53.000Well, okay, you can't tell people where they can and can't move once they come to the United States if they have family that's in Texas or if they have family that's in Arkansas or whatever.
01:05:00.000They're going to go wherever the fuck they want to go, but a significant number of them Yeah.
01:05:23.000And then giving them an incentive to vote for the party that did that to them when the other party wants to—they want to round people up in mass deportations.
01:05:32.000Yeah, but putting party aside, what evidence did you see?
01:05:36.000Documentary evidence that people were registering to vote and how many of them?
01:05:42.000Well, it's not that they were registering to vote.
01:05:44.000The issue is that there's no voter ID, which is fucking insane.
01:06:15.000Vice President also won New Hampshire, which requires voter ID, but allows individuals without one to either have their identity confirmed by a designated official or fill out an affidavit.
01:06:25.000Harris also won both Delaware and Virginia.
01:06:29.000So there's a couple states that she won that have voter ID. But these are like these deep blue states.
01:08:12.000They have to hope that this person decides that they're a person worthy of being in this country, and you had to be a person of extraordinary skill and talent where that talent and skill wasn't available in the United States.
01:08:25.000Listen, I recently moved out of New York to Florida, and I got my driver's license and registered to vote pretty quick after I moved there.
01:09:32.000And if that keeps going, the state's going to go red.
01:09:34.000And I think if the state keeps falling apart, people are going to come to their senses and recognize that the policies that they have in place right now are fucking gross.
01:10:36.000And we had to grind it out and there were financial problems and everything else.
01:10:40.000So the American dream is to make it on your own, to be self-made.
01:10:43.000And then you get to that point and you get demonized for it.
01:10:48.000Now you need to give back in a way that how dare you not give more than half your effective salary, more than half your income if you live in California or New York.
01:11:09.000If they were doing a great job and they were legitimately making people's lives better, I'd be fine with that.
01:11:15.000If there was a system where I had to pay 50% because I make a lot of money and I had to pay 50%, but that 50% was changing people's lives, they could show you all these success stories.
01:12:29.000There's a lot of stupidity involved in why we choose things, you know?
01:12:33.000I read this article once about how there was a poll done of female voters when Bill Clinton ran the first time and they asked the reasons why and it was multiple choice and one of them was that he was good looking and had a full head of hair.
01:13:27.000It was very interesting to me that this is playing out in real time with the incoming president, and I have this parallel situation going on in Ohio.
01:14:49.000And he says that he watches this woman, Marshall Blakely, get beat for 15 to 20 minutes inside of her apartment and that, you know, the reason this woman gets beat is because Al Cleveland wanted him to work off a debt and beat her up.
01:17:35.000At the trials of Al Monday, that was his pseudonym, Al Cleveland's pseudonym.
01:17:42.000At the trials of Al Monday and those charged with him, I testified under oath that I was an eyewitness to Alfred Cleveland, who I knew as Monday, along with other people I knew as J.R. Will and Shaquem, who was John Edwards, beat Marsha Blakely at Floyd Epps' apartment and then murder her behind Charlie's Bar and Lorraine.
01:18:54.000So William Avery Jr. is, after they get convicted, is working as an informant for the FBI and the Secret Service.
01:19:04.000Now, prior to this case, maybe this is how obtuse I am.
01:19:09.000I thought that the Secret Service's purview was the president, but apparently they have other investigative functions because he was working on some food stamp scheme as an informant.
01:19:19.000The Secret Service tells the FBI, and the testimony is in that exhibit file.
01:19:25.000The Secret Service tells the FBI, this guy, William Avery Jr., he's not to be trusted.
01:19:30.000He's lying to us, and he's lying to us for money.
01:19:37.000The FBI calls the prosecutor in Lorain County and says, this guy, William Avery Jr., used him as an informant in that case against these four men.
01:19:50.000So they end up getting Al Cleveland's lawyers, John Edwards' lawyers, Lenworth Edwards, Benson Davis, they end up getting an evidentiary hearing.
01:20:00.000And William Avery Jr. comes to testify.
01:20:05.000And he's coming to testify that I made the whole thing up.
01:20:48.000If you read the interrogation and his testimony that he's being led, they show him pictures of the apartment where this woman was allegedly beat.
01:21:02.000He was telling conflicting versions of the story.
01:21:04.000So at these post-conviction hearings where these men should have all been exonerated, He gets on the stand and before he testifies, the judge says to him, have you been advised?
01:23:22.000This is the kind of thing that these four men, two of them are out, two of them are serving life sentences.
01:23:29.000Al Cleveland's wife, Roberta Cleveland, saw this DA and he said he was going to do the right thing.
01:23:35.000He knew that the case was problematic.
01:23:37.000And now, because he's worried about his own indictment, you know, he's not responding.
01:23:43.000So what we're asking for is your listeners to go through and read this very detailed submission.
01:23:52.000That I've made along with the Ohio Innocence Project, the Ohio Public Defenders, and a great attorney by the name of Kim Corral, who you actually had a good laugh over one time, oddly enough,
01:24:09.000because she was at the White House when Kanye West was there.
01:24:13.000She was apparently standing over him, smiling, and you were like, look at this fucking girl.
01:24:18.000She just thinks that, like, how the fuck did I get here?
01:25:20.000His alibi witness was Damon John from Shark Tank.
01:25:27.000He testified at his fucking trial at post-conviction hearings.
01:25:33.000Damon John, back then, was a hardscrabble New Yorker.
01:25:38.000He was doing whatever he could to grind it out.
01:25:40.000This was before FUBU. And he was friends with Al Cleveland, and Al needed to have a TV moved, and Damon had like a gypsy cab service, a car service in New York.
01:27:54.000Because they pinned it on these other guys.
01:27:56.000Because they pinned it on these guys and this guy, William Avery Jr., only came in with information about one of the murders.
01:28:03.000The cases were so clearly connected that the medical examiner pointed it out.
01:28:09.000These people were killed in the same way.
01:28:12.000Why there isn't an outrage, a fucking outrage about this case is beyond me.
01:28:19.000When I got this case, I said, there is no way what you're telling me is true.
01:28:24.000That this guy has come and wants the clearest conscience and tells you exactly what happened and the FBI told the prosecutors that he's a liar.
01:28:33.000And these guys are still, two of them are still serving life sentences.
01:28:38.000And when you have to live stamped as a murderer, even in the free world, you know, Al Cleveland is out and he's suffering.
01:28:49.000I mean, I had to listen to his wife heaving.
01:28:57.000She couldn't get a hold of herself because she went down to J.D. Tomlinson's office and said, you told me you were going to help.
01:30:13.000There is no way that you could look at this evidence, and this is why I think it's a good idea for...
01:30:20.000Rather than give a snapshot of a case and have to rely on some process with these conviction integrity units behind closed doors where they run the reinvestigation.
01:30:34.000I like the public being able to get invested and look at the evidence themselves.
01:31:31.000The best use I feel like I can make of publicly advocating for change is to help bring in the public and give them a vested interest in trying to help.
01:31:42.000Well, this case, this is just an amazing example, right?
01:31:48.000I mean, you said this is the craziest case you think you've ever had.
01:31:57.000Where the sole alleged eyewitness recants and then is threatened with jail time is actually put in jail after trying to extort the prosecutors.
01:32:11.000Where there's no forensic evidence and it was the most incomplete investigation I have ever seen.
01:32:18.000What would be the most logical thing to do if this guy says, you know what?
01:34:01.000If you tell the truth, it's just as bad as putting these guys, you know, you either told a lie to put them in jail or you're now telling a lie to free them.
01:34:16.000I don't understand why, you know, in almost half of the cases where there has been an exoneration based on a sole eyewitness's testimony, over half the people recant.
01:34:31.000And the courts are very critical of these recantations.
01:34:36.000So in other words, if someone makes up a story and then they come back and say, look, I made that up because my dad was threatening me, because the police threatened me, that's somehow viewed very, very critically.
01:34:50.000Whereas the initial allegation, it's really easy to put someone in jail.
01:34:59.000So, do you think that's because the system is set up to not reverse convictions because it's bad for the prosecutor's record, it's bad for the confidence of the judicial system?
01:36:58.000And I said, well, there is something that you can do as part of this bill.
01:37:03.000We would like to make it not only a felony, but give defense attorneys that have a good faith basis to believe that it's an alternative suspect's DNA. The same right to collect that DNA as law enforcement.
01:37:19.000And if they make a showing to the court that they have a basis to believe that this is an alternative suspect.
01:37:25.000So I had a former police officer who was a member of the Judiciary Committee say, look, I was a cop and we used to do it all the time.
01:37:34.000And his exact quote was, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
01:37:38.000And I think if you can make a good faith showing, I want to support that.
01:37:43.000When it came time for the bill to go to the Senate, the guy that was sponsoring the bill wasn't responding to me.
01:38:03.000Criminal defense attorneys with an adequate showing to collect the DNA of alternative suspects.
01:38:10.000And I said, so we'd like to add that amendment.
01:41:13.000People do desperate things in desperate times, depending upon your environment, depending upon how you grew up, what your influences were, what trauma you experienced, whether you were incarcerated at a young age.
01:41:26.000No one has any understanding of that other than the people that get trapped into the system.
01:41:35.000Yes, I think you should be tough on crime.
01:41:37.000I think you should arrest criminals and evil people that do terrible things and make society awful.
01:41:41.000Yes, so do I. But also, you should definitely not arrest innocent people.
01:41:46.000You should definitely not imprison them and then punish someone who's trying to say, hey, the reason why these people are in jail is because I told a lie.
01:41:55.000Yeah, I mean, I don't get the threat of punishing them.
01:41:58.000And, you know, I hope you have the type of influence and following that.
01:42:05.000Just listen to that perspective, folks, right?
01:42:08.000You know, I have, in the last few years, developed a way deeper understanding of how relative trauma can be from individual to individual.
01:42:21.000I did not realize trauma that I had suffered until I started to travel those roads.
01:42:46.000But I'm trying to make more educated judgments rather than Judging someone based on, you know, not having a complete picture of what they might have been through and also not being able to put myself as best I can behind their eyeballs or in their brain.
01:43:07.000It's hard unless you really make an investment and I think the easy thing to do is to make a quick judgment and keep it moving.
01:44:20.000I promise you I'll do better in making sure that I'm a little bit more plugged into the help people are getting when they get out, whether they have done it or not.
01:45:09.000But, you know, I have to do a good job of making sure that people are getting the attention and care they need.
01:45:15.000It takes resources and, you know, we're thankful to everybody that continues to reach out and support any of these causes.
01:45:23.000The Perlmutter Center, you know, the Midwest Innocence Project is a great one.
01:45:29.000The Ohio Innocence Project, those are all satellite projects, but The Freedom Clinic at the Perlmutter Center, we've had some terrific folks, including the Perlmutters, that have given us the resources we need to make a difference.
01:46:20.000Maybe it's good to hear other people's perspectives, kind of like you put your ego in check.
01:46:25.000But if you're a person that's introspective, and I know you are, if you're a person that is hard on yourself when you make mistakes, no one's harder on me than me.
01:46:44.000You know, if you look inward and you don't like what you're doing or what you've said or who you are, don't do that again.
01:46:51.000One of the best things I did in the wake of this whole Sheldon Johnson incident is I turned my comments off on Instagram and turned my account private.
01:47:03.000I think I'll make it public again after today because I want to generate support for the Ohio Four.
01:47:11.000But turning comments off is a nice thing because you can't believe the good stuff or the bad stuff.
01:47:30.000And this is a manipulative tactic that's used online both for and against people.
01:47:37.000Hey man, look, when I was on my way over here today, I was walking into the Uber and a guy at the hotel goes, I hope you're going to talk that talk over on the JRE. And I said, yeah,
01:48:10.000He goes, man, this motherfucker was popping and locking all the time.
01:48:14.000He's telling me about him breakdancing and he's like, no, for real, you know, shining a light on this stuff gives a lot of people out here hope.
01:48:21.000And I told him that, you know, I wrote a letter to the legislator here in Texas that's reconsidering that case.
01:48:30.000So it's just real cool, man, to get people behind it that really care about this stuff and The public can really help out.
01:49:21.000The guys that have been on here are all thriving.
01:49:24.000Bruce Bryan works at the Queen's Defender's Office.
01:49:28.000He has not been without challenges, trust me.
01:49:31.000But he's actually going, I'll leave you with this, Bruce is going to hope-hope that parole lets him, because we're still working on his full exoneration, even though he was granted clemency on the innocence claim.
01:49:47.000Bruce is going to Nairobi and Uganda to speak to prisoners there.
01:49:53.000And he's a climb advocate for the Queens defenders.
01:49:57.000Derek continues to be a whirlwind of positive activity.
01:51:07.000Because it makes them not think about the suck of their own life.
01:51:10.000That's why they like it when a celebrity falls, like a P. Diddy gets arrested, because they see these people living these lives they could never imagine, like yachts and Rolls Royces and all that shit.
01:51:22.000And then they see them get taken down like, yeah!
01:54:16.000I've been playing with this idea and something that I'm writing right now, and it couldn't be more impression than right now, is this notion of what the truth is.
01:54:34.000Are some of the swing states requiring ID or all of them?
01:54:39.000It's hard to keep a grasp on reality and the truth these days because there's information that is intravenously injected into your veins, it seems like.
01:54:51.000So I have a hard time knowing what's true anymore.
01:54:57.000It's not like a conversation like we have where Jamie checks it in real time and I saw a thing that said the states that required no voter ID are the ones that she won.
01:55:24.000These people are putting narratives out there that are just flat-out lies, and they're doing it all the time.
01:55:31.000I mean, Obama did it during the campaign where he repeated that lie about Donald Trump talking about white supremacists saying they're very fine people on both sides.
01:56:37.000Said that there were very fine people on both sides of a white supremacist rally.
01:56:44.000And you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were Very fine people on both sides.
01:56:53.000You had people in that group, excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures as you did.
01:56:58.000You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
01:58:09.000Because the news has said that lie over and over and over and over and over again.
01:58:16.000The news, the mainstream corporate-controlled news that wanted this narrative that Donald Trump was a Nazi said that over and over and over again.
01:58:57.000And you're changing the perspective of millions of people, especially low-information voters that look at Obama like a thing from the past when time was sane, when the world was normal.
01:59:10.000A brilliant guy who was the president.
01:59:12.000If this brilliant guy is willing to lie in front of everybody...
01:59:39.000But in the context of a campaign where you're completely distorting the perspective of the person you're running against, not just who they are, but what they've done and what they've said and what they stand for.
02:00:54.000I didn't follow it closely enough to say- I think they all lie too, but there's not a thing like that that I can point to where he was saying something about Biden that was factually incorrect.
02:01:04.000Here's the thing that turned me off completely about the election this time and why I said, fuck it, I'm voting for Jill Stein, a physician that probably is the least qualified of anyone.
02:01:13.000Only as my form of saying, I'll protest it.
02:01:17.000Kamala Harris, during the debate, said that there's not a single American soldier deployed in a war zone.
02:01:27.000And then I saw videos of American soldiers in a war zone watching it in parallel reality.
02:03:01.000Maybe it is that Trump repeats things that he heard that are moronic and nonsensical sometimes, and that takes away from the great he can do.
02:03:11.000Like talking about people eating dogs and cats and the election being rigged, all sort of baseless shit takes away from the fact that, you know, the things that stick out to...
02:03:21.000And it's like, get out of your own way, bro.
02:04:59.000I have, and this is why I mentioned, you know, it's hard to know what the truth is.
02:05:05.000The reason why I posted all the exhibits, the reason why I put the letter up, and the reason why I put the contact information up is that when you have a transcript and you have, you know, actual documentary evidence,
02:05:41.000But I think that there is—it's very difficult to understand.
02:05:48.000You know, I feel like I'm sitting here and I feel manipulated by the fact that I never—and it's really on me that I didn't go and watch the entirety of— That comment.
02:06:01.000Because I literally don't think I've ever listened to the part where he says, obviously the neo-Nazis and, you know, the people that were there for the wrong reasons need to be condemned.
02:06:10.000You know, when I was watching recently, I was talking to the great Dubini about this.
02:06:16.000He pointed out to me that comment about Liz Cheney.
02:06:23.000And then he's like, go watch the full clip.
02:06:34.000So then you start to wonder, well, how much is my opinion of him...
02:06:38.000Been formed by my concern about other people lashing out at me.
02:06:45.000I mean, you should hear the shit I got when I spoke ill of Kamala Harris by, you know, I guess call them the left.
02:06:56.000You know, and it was like infuriating to me.
02:06:59.000You know, so I don't, politics to me is too, it's too much of, you know, you have to serve so many different interests that you sort of forget who you are and what you stand for.
02:07:33.000I think what you said is very important for people to understand that a lot of what people say, they say it because they don't want people to attack them.
02:07:42.000They say it because they think that if they say it, it will clear them.
02:07:47.000If you say you support X, you might not even support X, but if you say you support X, you're not going to get attacked and the right people will leave you alone or agree with you and appreciate you or praise you.
02:08:23.000They think the country's going in the wrong direction.
02:08:25.000They think that this control of social media by the government, which we would have had pretty much fully if it wasn't for Elon buying Twitter, that this is a dangerous precedent to set, whether it's a right-wing government or a left-wing government.
02:08:38.000And that what you see that's happening in the UK where people are being imprisoned for tweets and Facebook posts is fucking crazy.
02:08:44.000Yeah, in the UK is the part that's mind-bending about it.
02:08:55.000Trump has vowed to have free speech become a very important part of what he's standing for, and that this censoring of information needs to stop, and that we need to stop all government influence in what people have to say.
02:09:20.000I mean, it's essentially the First Amendment.
02:09:21.000You know, and I think it's so transferable to what I do in this context because a lot of The reluctance of prosecutors not to do the right thing or what their conscience tells them is the fear of the backlash.
02:09:57.000You have to be a blindly ambitious sociopath who can weave your way through these sort of social and political relationships and to get to the top.
02:10:09.000I mean, imagine if one of those person does wind up becoming president that has no real thought or no real care about the country, no real ambition other than the blind serving of their own success.
02:10:23.000Well, I think that that's what, for people that are so like, it's hard to explain if you didn't live in New York.
02:10:34.000For people that are just like, oh my God, what's the next four years going to be like?
02:12:42.000I talk to my wife about it often, you know, especially going to Florida, where the laws on abortion ain't the same as they are in New York.
02:12:52.000And I understand it from a woman's perspective completely.
02:12:56.000And I actually disagree with, you know, overturning Roe versus Wade, but you cannot be that myopic.
02:13:04.000You just can't because if you're that myopic, you're going to then find yourself in a corner on one issue.
02:13:11.000And life is a little bit more robust than that, isn't it?
02:14:23.000I'm really, really, really appreciative of this.
02:14:32.000If that can't shake the foundation of this forum, I think we're going to just keep on making great change happen and hopefully we free the Ohio four and keep on moving.
02:14:44.000Yeah, and I hope we do do a podcast one day with them.