The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2287 - Josh Dubin & J.D. Tomlinson

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day!

00:00:11.000 Josh Stuber, my man.

00:00:14.000 Introduce your friend.

00:00:15.000 This is going to be wild.

00:00:18.000 This is J.D. Tomlinson, the former prosecuting attorney for Lorain County, Ohio.

00:00:26.000 And for the listeners, prosecuting attorney is...

00:00:29.000 Similar to a DA in most jurisdictions, they just call it the prosecuting attorney.

00:00:34.000 He was the head attorney in Lorain County, Ohio, up until January.

00:00:42.000 So the reason why that's significant is the last time we were here, we were talking about that case, the case of the Ohio Four.

00:00:51.000 So why don't you recap that for everybody, for people that didn't listen to the previous podcast where we talked about this.

00:00:58.000 So the Ohio Four are four gentlemen that were wrongfully convicted of a murder they didn't commit.

00:01:06.000 And the last time I came on...

00:01:09.000 We talked extensively about the case.

00:01:11.000 You can read about it at FreeTheOhio4.com.

00:01:15.000 We have on that site my submission that I made to J.D. when he was the prosecuting attorney and all the exhibits supporting it.

00:01:23.000 But what happened is this woman is murdered in the 90s.

00:01:28.000 And these four men become suspects.

00:01:35.000 Actually...

00:01:35.000 Before there's any evidence against them whatsoever.

00:01:39.000 In two and a half decades of doing post-conviction work, I had never seen the police put in an affidavit where they're, excuse me, not an affidavit, a police report when they're investigating this murder that these four men are people we should look at based on nothing other than there was A lot of commotion in the community,

00:02:07.000 understandably so, that there were people from out of town selling drugs.

00:02:10.000 No question, my client and these other three guys were involved in selling drugs.

00:02:16.000 And they wanted drugs off the street in Lorraine.

00:02:19.000 So they immediately start looking at them.

00:02:25.000 This woman is found behind a shopping center, horribly, savagely murdered.

00:02:34.000 She's stabbed multiple times.

00:02:36.000 Her throat is cut.

00:02:37.000 Her name is Marsha Blakely.

00:02:38.000 She had been run over by a car.

00:02:40.000 It was obvious because there were tire marks on her body. 1.00

00:02:44.000 And several hours later that morning, someone that she lived with, a gentleman by the name of Epps, was found murdered in strikingly similar fashion.

00:02:57.000 So the police are investigating this crime and run into a dead end.

00:03:02.000 They have no leads.

00:03:04.000 They don't have any evidence.

00:03:06.000 And they're searching for the perpetrators.

00:03:11.000 So the Lorain County Prosecutor's Office goes public with the offer of an award.

00:03:20.000 They offer $2,500 to anybody that has information about this crime.

00:03:27.000 The next day...

00:03:29.000 Or a couple of days later, in walks a man named William Avery Sr., who was no stranger to the Lorain County Police Department.

00:03:37.000 He had been a paid informant for them for a long time.

00:03:41.000 And he comes in and he speaks to detectives.

00:03:44.000 And they say, in essence, they say, everything you're telling us has been public.

00:03:50.000 You need to give us more information.

00:03:54.000 He then, that week, brings his son in.

00:03:58.000 William Avery Jr. And his son claims to have information about the case.

00:04:05.000 And they tell him, you know, you're not telling us enough.

00:04:10.000 He comes back about a week later and he says, well, I know the guys that did this.

00:04:17.000 And he blames the murder on Al Cleveland, John Edwards, Lenworth Edwards, and Benson Davis.

00:04:25.000 And he claims that...

00:04:27.000 Al Cleveland confessed it to him.

00:04:31.000 So they start investigating this man William Avery Jr.'s account of what happened.

00:04:40.000 And what he is telling them happened does not match the physical state of this apartment where he claims this beating happened.

00:04:53.000 So this is like one of the telltale ways to tell if someone is falsely confessing to you or falsely implicating others.

00:05:01.000 He tells them that there's this horrific beating of this victim that occurs in an apartment.

00:05:08.000 And they go to the apartment.

00:05:10.000 I mean, chairs turned over, tables turned over, a bloody...

00:05:14.000 Knock down, drag out, fight for her life. 1.00

00:05:17.000 And they go to the apartment and take pictures.

00:05:20.000 And it's in the most pristine condition you can imagine.

00:05:23.000 Not a chair turned over, not a table.

00:05:26.000 And they immediately had reason to know that this guy was bullshitting.

00:05:30.000 Because he then comes and says to them, you know, I have other details.

00:05:36.000 And the more details he gives them, the less it's matching up with the evidence that they have.

00:05:44.000 So, they're trying these four men separately.

00:05:48.000 When the first trial happens, William Avery Jr. has an idea.

00:05:54.000 And his idea is, I'm going to extort these people for money.

00:06:00.000 He shows up at the trial, and he tells the prosecutors, I want $10,000.

00:06:06.000 And the prosecutors say to him, what are you talking about?

00:06:10.000 You have to testify.

00:06:12.000 You got the reward money.

00:06:14.000 And he says, I'm not testifying.

00:06:16.000 They put him in jail for contempt.

00:06:19.000 And he says, I made the whole thing up anyways.

00:06:22.000 I did it for the reward money.

00:06:24.000 I made it up.

00:06:26.000 They should have known right then and there, before any of these four men were tried, that this was someone that led them down the wrong path.

00:06:34.000 But instead of doing that, they keep him in jail.

00:06:37.000 I don't remember if it was for 30 days or 60 days.

00:06:41.000 And they let him cool his heels a little bit.

00:06:45.000 The judge in the trial calls a mistrial.

00:06:48.000 And when there's a mistrial, you can try someone again.

00:06:53.000 So about a month goes by, and William Avery Jr.'s story has now evolved.

00:07:00.000 He now no longer claims that Al Cleveland confessed to him.

00:07:05.000 He claims that he was a witness to it.

00:07:10.000 What happens in that intervening month, I think people can draw their own obvious conclusions about what happens, but suffice to say, it's my opinion and my belief that they did a number on this guy.

00:07:21.000 So he goes on to testify at all four of their trials individually, during which time the lead prosecutor gets a correspondence from the U.S. Secret Service.

00:07:38.000 Saying that we know you use this man, William Avery Jr., as an informant.

00:07:44.000 We have been using him as a paid informant in some food stamp sting, and we just caught him in a lie.

00:07:51.000 And he's compromising our investigations because he is accepting reward money and making things up, and we're ceasing to use him as an informant, and we are investigating him for crimes.

00:08:07.000 And giving us false information and accepting reward money for it.

00:08:11.000 So the prosecutor you would think at that point would say, alright, obviously it's over.

00:08:15.000 So these guys all get sentenced and convicted to, I believe it was 25 years to life.

00:08:25.000 That's right.

00:08:26.000 And I became involved in the case about two years ago, a year and a half ago, and dissected the record.

00:08:36.000 Blown away by what I had seen, and I've seen it all.

00:08:40.000 I found out that William Avery Jr. walked into the FBI in 2004, and the FBI documents it.

00:08:51.000 And he says, look, I was a drug addict.

00:08:53.000 My father had threatened me.

00:08:56.000 He was a drug addict.

00:08:57.000 And he made me go in there and tell a lie about these men and falsely implicate them in a murder that they didn't commit.

00:09:05.000 I'm now off drugs and I want to clear my conscience.

00:09:10.000 So the FBI documents it and sends the report to the Lorain County prosecutors.

00:09:17.000 In 2006, Al Cleveland has an investigator searching for this man, William Avery Jr., for years.

00:09:26.000 They couldn't find him.

00:09:27.000 They finally find him and they get an affidavit explaining William Avery Jr. explains how he made the whole thing up.

00:09:36.000 He recounts what he told the FBI. And post-conviction proceedings get scheduled.

00:09:43.000 And post-conviction proceedings is we're going to have a hearing as to whether Al Cleveland is innocent.

00:09:48.000 So the hearing is before a judge named Judge Rothgary in Lorain County.

00:09:54.000 And what happens in essence is that William Avery Jr. shows up to testify.

00:09:59.000 And the judge tells him.

00:10:01.000 Before you testify, you should know your rights in words or substance.

00:10:06.000 And he tells him that if you testify here that these men actually didn't do it, there are potential consequences for making it up.

00:10:15.000 And if you're lying now and saying they didn't do it just to help them out, there's consequences for that.

00:10:22.000 So he's quickly told that he's going to be facing potential perjury charges.

00:10:28.000 So he decides not to testify at that post-conviction hearing.

00:10:31.000 He walks out of the courthouse and reporters for the local paper ask him, look, why didn't you testify what happened?

00:10:40.000 And he says, look, I made the whole thing up.

00:10:41.000 These guys didn't do it, but I'm not going to jail for 25 years.

00:10:47.000 So that is the recap.

00:10:51.000 I was at that hearing.

00:10:52.000 So this is crazy.

00:10:55.000 I found out from Al Cleveland.

00:10:57.000 Al Cleveland spent so much time in prison that he timed out and was paroled.

00:11:03.000 I think he spent close to 30 years in prison.

00:11:06.000 And he approached J.D. and he approached J.D. with his wife and it turned out that J.D. as a young lawyer was sitting at that hearing watching it and knew as a young lawyer that there was something terribly wrong.

00:11:20.000 But back to just to get listeners and viewers up to speed on where we're at.

00:11:25.000 So I came on the show.

00:11:26.000 In November, about a week before Thanksgiving.

00:11:31.000 And I laid the case out in finer detail than I just did.

00:11:37.000 And like I said, if you want more details, you can go to freetheohio4.com and my submission to JD and all the exhibits are there.

00:11:44.000 But that's basically the story as I told it.

00:11:47.000 So I had been trying to get in touch with JD because he was running for re-election.

00:11:53.000 He had listed his cell phone number.

00:11:56.000 On the internet.

00:11:57.000 So I had a cell phone number and I was sending him text messages and emails and calling him and I was getting ghosted.

00:12:09.000 We had communicated for a little bit beforehand.

00:12:11.000 Is that true?

00:12:11.000 No, sir.

00:12:12.000 No.

00:12:12.000 No, sir.

00:12:14.000 So I couldn't get in touch with him.

00:12:19.000 And then as I'm trying to get in touch with him prior to my coming on the show and...

00:12:25.000 Speaking to you about it in November, J.D. gets indicted.

00:12:31.000 Oh, excuse me.

00:12:32.000 Charged by complaint.

00:12:33.000 No, he gets charged by complaint.

00:12:34.000 No grand jury.

00:12:36.000 They charge him with three felonies.

00:12:38.000 And I take a look, and I see that he's running against someone, and that person that he's running against is posting about the fact that he was charged with three felonies.

00:12:50.000 And I'm like, alright, well this seems like a political witch hunt.

00:12:53.000 I don't know much about it, but it seems like a tactic.

00:12:58.000 So I came on the show and I said, look, I know this guy's up against it.

00:13:05.000 Hopefully he now knows what it's like to be accused of something he didn't do.

00:13:09.000 And I said, he's either under so much stress or isn't tech-savvy enough to know that every time I text him and say, please, I just need five minutes of your time.

00:13:22.000 I could see he's reading my text because he had his read receipts on and he didn't know it.

00:13:26.000 Whoopsies.

00:13:27.000 I learned, Joe.

00:13:29.000 I learned.

00:13:29.000 So I leave Austin, fly back to New York.

00:13:35.000 I'm in New York.

00:13:37.000 The episode aired, I think, at 12 p.m.

00:13:39.000 or 1 p.m.

00:13:40.000 Eastern Time.

00:13:42.000 And at about 5.30, I see on my phone J.D. Tomlinson.

00:13:49.000 And I said, I was about to teach my law school class, these kids at the Cardozo Law School that take the Freedom Clinic at the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice.

00:14:01.000 They all know about the case.

00:14:03.000 They know what just happened.

00:14:04.000 I was like, holy shit.

00:14:07.000 This guy is trying to get in touch with me now.

00:14:10.000 And I picked up the phone.

00:14:12.000 I said, hello?

00:14:13.000 And he said, Josh, this is J.D. Tomlinson.

00:14:16.000 He's like, hey, man.

00:14:19.000 He said, I've been under a lot of stress.

00:14:22.000 There's people calling and emailing and flooding our office.

00:14:25.000 You've got to make this stop.

00:14:26.000 And I said, that's the Joe Rogan fact.

00:14:29.000 There's no stopping what can't be stopped.

00:14:31.000 So it had its intended effect.

00:14:35.000 And JD and I got into a discussion right away.

00:14:40.000 And I had to quickly figure out a way to connect with him.

00:14:44.000 And tell him, I feel your pain.

00:14:46.000 I hear what you're going through.

00:14:47.000 And he told me, listen, I'm fighting for my life over here.

00:14:50.000 These people have upended my life.

00:14:53.000 They're threatening my freedom.

00:14:54.000 I've been charged with crimes I didn't commit.

00:14:57.000 And I just quickly pivoted and I said, if you just give me a date, I want to come down.

00:15:03.000 And I want to just show you.

00:15:04.000 You now know what this is like.

00:15:07.000 Imagine going through this for 30 years.

00:15:12.000 I have to say, in all my years of doing this, considering the circumstances that he was in, for him to say, you know, he was wrestling with it on the call.

00:15:25.000 And he said, you know, I'll never forget what he said to me.

00:15:30.000 He said, you know, if I don't at least agree to meet with you, who am I? And I said, thank you.

00:15:37.000 And he said, I just don't know if there's time, but I owe you at least a meeting.

00:15:43.000 And given what he was going through and what he was up against, and he knew the case well.

00:15:48.000 He had had the Ohio Innocence Project had presented to him years earlier, and he knew the case well, so I think he had a sense that there was something really wrong going on.

00:15:57.000 And I had exonerated two people prior to that, so I had some experience in that.

00:16:01.000 Well, you're going to get to that.

00:16:03.000 The way that J.D. made enemies in...

00:16:06.000 Ohio and that town is because he had the audacity.

00:16:10.000 He had the nerve to say, I see two innocent people in another case and I'm going to exonerate them.

00:16:18.000 And that is the beginning of his issues in Ohio.

00:16:25.000 So, I mean, if you want to hear from JD's perspective, because what ensued and what has happened in the months since.

00:16:34.000 Has been one of the most shocking, disturbing, you know, frankly, disgusting displays of what I think is ego and abuse of the system, in my opinion.

00:16:47.000 That two of these four men are still in prison.

00:16:53.000 And two of them are only out because they paroled out.

00:16:56.000 But they're on parole as convicted murderers for a crime they didn't commit.

00:17:01.000 So, I mean...

00:17:03.000 I don't know.

00:17:03.000 It would be interesting to hear JD's perspective on that call.

00:17:06.000 I then met with him right before Thanksgiving.

00:17:10.000 And we had a big rally in Ohio.

00:17:14.000 Derek Hamilton, who's the deputy director of the Perlmutter Center, was there.

00:17:18.000 We organized a bunch of folks in the community, a lot of coverage on local news.

00:17:23.000 And then the next day I met with JD and his team and presented essentially about a two-hour, three-hour closing argument.

00:17:31.000 Where I showed him all the evidence in the case.

00:17:35.000 J.D., what was the whole experience like for you?

00:17:40.000 Like, starting from the first contact with Josh and, you know, how your situation unfolded when you were getting wrongfully accused.

00:17:49.000 Yeah, it all really started because I had developed a relationship with a woman in my office who I had known for many years.

00:17:58.000 And that was a mistake on my part.

00:18:00.000 And it was contentious.

00:18:02.000 It was really beautiful for a long time, like many relationships are.

00:18:04.000 And then it started to entangle, disentangle.

00:18:09.000 Shocker.

00:18:10.000 Yeah, right.

00:18:10.000 And it was all my fault, Joe.

00:18:12.000 I'm really contrite about the situation because I'm very aware of my mistakes.

00:18:17.000 And I've made amends with her.

00:18:19.000 And thankfully, she has accepted my apologies because I put her in a position where she should have never been in as being an employee of mine.

00:18:28.000 But I'd known her for 19 years.

00:18:29.000 I'd never really been the head of such a big office.

00:18:32.000 I mean, it's about 100 people.

00:18:33.000 So for me, it was a really big thing.

00:18:35.000 And there's a romance that goes with kind of winning an election and coming in trying to make a difference.

00:18:40.000 I think it swept us up and we really genuinely cared about each other.

00:18:43.000 But then it started to kind of fail and it was my fault.

00:18:46.000 And I brought a lot of toxicity to the relationship that I... And I don't like the word toxic.

00:18:50.000 I don't know why I don't.

00:18:51.000 Well, it's compromised today.

00:18:53.000 Yeah, it is.

00:18:53.000 It is.

00:18:54.000 But that's exactly probably what it was.

00:18:56.000 And so I'm lucky that...

00:18:58.000 But so anyways, there was arguments that were caught, you know, on camera with her and I. That were released to the public, and it showed us, you know, me arguing with her and raising my voice, and so it was an extremely embarrassing time in my life.

00:19:11.000 But so this was all happening amidst this.

00:19:13.000 And so it all really did start happening when I exonerated those Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen in 2022. My life changed because I knew there would be consequences to actions like that because it creates financial problems.

00:19:28.000 People are suing people in federal courts.

00:19:31.000 So it causes problems even in the sense that I was very close with police.

00:19:34.000 I was a county prosecutor.

00:19:36.000 I'm a very pro-police man.

00:19:39.000 And so it was difficult, the strain that it put on some of the police departments, even though it was an old case, you know, I'm still friends with a lot of these detectives.

00:19:46.000 And to sort of make decisions like that where you have to kind of disagree, it can be difficult.

00:19:50.000 It can strain relationships.

00:19:52.000 But I really didn't realize the extent of how much it would do it.

00:19:56.000 So when I exonerated Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen, which is one of the worst cases I've ever seen, I thought that it was the worst case I'd ever seen.

00:20:04.000 And then I got Josh's case.

00:20:06.000 And after I was going through all that hardship, basically on October 1st of 2024, I was charged with three felonies, tampering with records, intimidation, and bribery.

00:20:18.000 It was shocking to me because I couldn't figure out what the conduct was that they were referring to.

00:20:24.000 So what in essence it was is because of that fallout from the videos that were released and she didn't have a partner releasing the videos and so she had called us in the summertime even though we weren't really talking a bunch and she had kind of expressed her sorrow that those videos had gotten out.

00:20:43.000 And that she didn't intend for them to.

00:20:45.000 And that she kind of wanted some help with the media about how can we kind of help a little bit with the PR. And my partner and my chief of staff, Jim Burge, who's a legend unto himself, he's the best writer I've ever seen.

00:20:58.000 So he wrote a statement.

00:20:59.000 And it was supposed to be prepared for her lawyers if they wanted to review it and see if they agreed with it or change it or anything like that.

00:21:06.000 And to prove that that's what occurred was I have text messages from her on the day that... 0.99

00:21:12.000 Jim wrote this statement that says, you know, I trust Jim and his magic pen because she knew how good of a writer he was.

00:21:19.000 And then the next day, when I'm supposed to be intimidating him, according to the state, when I'm supposed to be intimidating her, according to the state, you know, I received a text message apologizing to this situation that we're in because we both were just really...

00:21:32.000 It was dramatic to have your personal life right in even a small town like that.

00:21:36.000 It was dramatic.

00:21:37.000 So that's really what happened.

00:21:39.000 But what they alleged was they alleged that we had created this false narrative, this false document, and then intimidated her into adopting it.

00:21:46.000 That was the allegation, which is completely, completely false.

00:21:51.000 And we had all the evidence to prove it.

00:21:53.000 So I was fairly confident in my case because I'm a lawyer.

00:21:56.000 I was a defense attorney for 15 years before I took office.

00:21:59.000 So I'm fairly knowledgeable about what Constitutes a good case or not.

00:22:03.000 And I had a great case.

00:22:05.000 But the stress it had put on my family and my mother and my father.

00:22:09.000 Just awful.

00:22:10.000 You know, I have nieces and nephews.

00:22:11.000 I'm a bachelor, but I've got nieces and nephews with my last name, and that really bothered me.

00:22:15.000 And so while I'm battling with this, the interest of me, I'm charged on October 1st.

00:22:18.000 On October 4th, and they had, once we broke up in 23, they had kind of been courting her because they knew that she was my weakness.

00:22:28.000 That the contentious relationship, and I think they were hoping that they would turn her on me. 0.91

00:22:32.000 And so they did as much as to exploit and try to utilize our relationship against me.

00:22:38.000 In fact, the The lead detective that was investigating us was attempting to sleep with her at the same time.

00:22:45.000 Attempting to sleep with her.

00:22:45.000 I have text messages, asking for nude photographs, asking to just go over to her house.

00:22:50.000 This is while he's investigating me, Joe.

00:22:52.000 He's trying to sleep with my girlfriend.

00:22:55.000 Saying stuff like, you should get back at him.

00:22:58.000 You should get back at him.

00:22:59.000 How dumb is this guy to make this in text messages?

00:23:01.000 I couldn't believe it.

00:23:04.000 You want to think the people that are evil, that are manipulating people and falsely trying people, they're like evil geniuses.

00:23:11.000 Joe, it was extraordinary.

00:23:13.000 That's why at first I didn't believe it.

00:23:14.000 I was like, why would he write it?

00:23:15.000 Why would he do that?

00:23:16.000 And then she shared those messages with me.

00:23:19.000 She showed me them.

00:23:20.000 I didn't get to actually physically.

00:23:21.000 And then later I acknowledged it.

00:23:23.000 So what all occurred was in 2020, I won an election.

00:23:26.000 I went against my own.

00:23:28.000 Party and I ran in a primary and I ended up winning and then my my my relationship with the sheriff who actually ended up investigating me for this case that I'm referring to We had pretty good relationship there for the first couple months when I got elected I had asked for a couple of my deputies to be debt or a couple of my investigators be deputized which is a pretty standard procedure he agreed and Then and then he hired the individual that I had defeated in the election and the whole attitude changed everything changed.

00:23:54.000 It was now very contentious He had withdrawn his There's a desire to deputize my investigators.

00:24:01.000 The relationship turned very sour very fast when he hired my predecessor, which is unusual to have a lawyer working in the sheriff's department anyways because statutorily I'm the lawyer for the sheriff's department.

00:24:12.000 So it's an unusual move to even hire a lawyer in a sheriff's department.

00:24:15.000 You could probably get two deputies for that kind of money.

00:24:17.000 So it was unusual in a sense.

00:24:19.000 So the relationship just soured and it was kind of like they were coming after me immediately.

00:24:24.000 And then in late 23, They actually hired then the guy that's running against me, another lawyer, who was a former employee of mine, who's now the Lorain County Prosecutor.

00:24:33.000 They had hired him.

00:24:34.000 So the agency that was investigating me had hired my predecessor, and then the individual who was now running against me.

00:24:42.000 For the office.

00:24:44.000 Two lawyers, first of all, in a smaller town.

00:24:47.000 I mean, we have about 300,000, a tenth maybe out of the 88 counties in Lorain County.

00:24:52.000 It's fairly high, but it's a small town.

00:24:54.000 To hire two lawyers on a sheriff's department is unusual.

00:24:58.000 And they were both my political enemies.

00:25:00.000 And then the detective that's investigating me is attempting to sleep with my girlfriend.

00:25:04.000 So if you can think of a less objective investigation, Joe, I'm all ears.

00:25:09.000 What a fun workplace environment.

00:25:11.000 I'm telling you.

00:25:12.000 What was it like going to that office every day?

00:25:14.000 It was wild.

00:25:16.000 So really what happened was on October 1st, they charged me with the felonies.

00:25:20.000 I was flabbergasted because I was kind of so confident in their inability to ever get anything like that on me that I was kind of boasting in the sense that, hey, all you had to do is go to O'Leary Municipal Court, grab a complaint, you can do it, never thinking that it would actually happen.

00:25:34.000 Yeah, because I was very confident that I did nothing illegal.

00:25:39.000 What occurred was on October 4th, it makes the papers on October 1st.

00:25:47.000 October 4th, the woman that I had a relationship with, she sees it in the paper.

00:25:53.000 She's walking in the store and she sees it in the paper and she sees me and my chief of staff, who she was very close with.

00:25:58.000 And her instinct was to go, well, what did they do?

00:26:02.000 She had no idea that the conduct that they had interviewed her about was actually the conduct they had used to charge me.

00:26:08.000 So she was wondering, what the hell did we do?

00:26:10.000 She had no idea.

00:26:11.000 So that very same day...

00:26:14.000 She sent text messages to the detective in charge.

00:26:18.000 And she said, what are you guys doing?

00:26:20.000 JD never bribed me.

00:26:22.000 These are false charges.

00:26:23.000 All this is on text message.

00:26:24.000 He never bribed me.

00:26:25.000 What are you doing?

00:26:26.000 You turned our personal life into charges against JD. This is crazy.

00:26:29.000 And she was emphatic that she wanted to speak with me.

00:26:32.000 And the problem was, I had an order by the court that I was not to speak to her because her lawyer had represented that she didn't want to speak with us.

00:26:39.000 So she was trying to get to me to tell me what had happened, but I couldn't speak with her.

00:26:46.000 And so she was growing more frustrated and more frustrated.

00:26:48.000 Eventually she spoke to our lawyers.

00:26:49.000 But what happened was I was charged 30 days before the election, and that's devastating.

00:26:55.000 And so what happened was on October 4th, when she sent the text message in, I was entitled to those text messages.

00:27:01.000 Those are exculpatory.

00:27:02.000 I was entitled to those immediately.

00:27:03.000 And they waited a month, and they waited until two days after the election on November 7th, and then they gave me the text.

00:27:12.000 So dirty.

00:27:14.000 Nobody wants to believe that politics and that law enforcement could be that dirty.

00:27:20.000 So this is what's going on while I'm trying to get his attention.

00:27:26.000 And I have no fucking idea about any of that.

00:27:28.000 I'm losing my mind, you know what I mean?

00:27:29.000 What a perfect storm.

00:27:30.000 So I then, when I made contact with J.D., He started explaining this to me, and I'm very—I approach this work like a surgeon, or how I picture a surgeon would approach an operation.

00:27:48.000 I'm single-handedly focused on making the kidney transplant or whatever, however you want to analogize it.

00:27:58.000 So I was hearing him, but I was kind of— Of the mindset that those are your problems.

00:28:04.000 I understand.

00:28:06.000 This sounds wild.

00:28:07.000 But I said, you should now know what it feels like.

00:28:10.000 Because I was pissed that he wasn't paying attention because these guys were so remarkably, in my mind, so demonstrably innocent.

00:28:19.000 J.D., why didn't you contact him?

00:28:22.000 I was going through hell.

00:28:24.000 I had been kind of attacked.

00:28:25.000 They'd been trying to get special prosecutors on me for a year.

00:28:28.000 Because it was happening in the cloud of it all, you had to focus on that one thing.

00:28:31.000 I had to completely self-preserve.

00:28:34.000 I get it.

00:28:34.000 And because, you know, I thought that I was going to be a politician for a long time, Joe.

00:28:38.000 I was really passionate about it.

00:28:40.000 And so it was really important to me.

00:28:42.000 And I had never dreamed that I would ever be charged with felonies.

00:28:46.000 It's insane.

00:28:47.000 So it really, we had been, Jim and I had been fighting, though, for a year.

00:28:51.000 I mean, we were battle-torn.

00:28:53.000 I mean, you know, we always jost around about how we're gunfighters.

00:28:55.000 You face that way, I'll face this way.

00:28:57.000 And we just got to fight our way out.

00:28:58.000 And it had been like that way for a year.

00:29:00.000 So I was kind of just...

00:29:02.000 I was stressed.

00:29:03.000 It was very difficult to think about focusing my mind on anything else other than trying to exonerate myself first.

00:29:10.000 Which is also good for your opponents because it makes you bad at your job.

00:29:13.000 Awful.

00:29:14.000 It gums everything up.

00:29:16.000 Of course.

00:29:16.000 I started to understand on a national level what effects that has.

00:29:19.000 Imagine what Trump went through.

00:29:20.000 It's a similar thing.

00:29:22.000 I've said it before.

00:29:23.000 I'll say it again.

00:29:24.000 And I don't care what your opinion is of that man to have the metal to face what he faced and continue on a path of getting anything accomplished, let alone what he accomplished.

00:29:39.000 If you don't stand up and cheer for that, the human cost of these prosecutions, you're hearing it right now.

00:29:48.000 I still haven't gotten over it.

00:29:50.000 The lawfare is very un-American. 0.62

00:29:52.000 It's a very un-American thing to do to unjustly accuse someone of crimes and use your position of power to try to arrest that person and jail that person.

00:30:04.000 That's very un-American. 0.85

00:30:06.000 That's how we should all look at it.

00:30:08.000 Instead of looking at it in terms of like parties and this is, you know, these are my people, this is against me, this is for me.

00:30:16.000 It's bad for the country.

00:30:18.000 It is.

00:30:19.000 Real bad for the country.

00:30:21.000 We are supposed to represent freedom on the world stage.

00:30:25.000 We're supposed to be the people that have the most freedom of speech, the most freedom of expression, the best path to success if you're a nobody.

00:30:32.000 This is supposed to be a place where everybody gets a shot.

00:30:35.000 And if you allow the system to unjustly accuse and prosecute people for crimes that are demonstrably false, that's very...

00:30:43.000 Very un-American. 0.62

00:30:45.000 And that's how we should look at it.

00:30:46.000 I mean, instead of this fucking fuck my enemies, us versus them, you're kind of committing treason.

00:30:53.000 You're kind of ruining everyone's...

00:30:57.000 If you could pull it off, you ruin our faith in what this thing is supposed to be.

00:31:01.000 Well, look, I think that quite obviously...

00:31:06.000 There are prosecutions that need to happen when someone commits a violent crime, when there's domestic abuse, when there's robbery, all of that.

00:31:14.000 But what should not be lost on people, because you saw it play out on a national stage with the president, you are now hearing about it in a smaller, you know, not a small town, but a smaller jurisdiction.

00:31:33.000 And the irony of this, it struck me as I was speaking to JD the first time, is here's a man that's fighting for his life.

00:31:43.000 And I just, I mean, I'll confess to you, I used it to say, I continually said to JD, imagine you have to go through this for 30 years behind bars.

00:31:55.000 So when I finally got through to him that night, we must have spoke eight times that night.

00:32:03.000 He knew that there was a problem with this case, and he was creating, understandably so, we don't have time for me to actually sit and listen to you and go through the evidence again, because he had been through it before in the Ohio 4 case.

00:32:20.000 So as Dame Fortune would have it, I don't know where I heard that, but the way it worked out is that three or four days after we spoke, The charges against J.D. were dropped.

00:32:35.000 The election happened.

00:32:38.000 He gets defeated in the election.

00:32:40.000 It had its intended effect, I guess, in my opinion.

00:32:44.000 But they dropped the case.

00:32:47.000 So now his problem went away for the time being.

00:32:52.000 So he became a lot more singularly focused.

00:32:58.000 So by the time I got to Ohio, And I had a team of lawyers that were representing the other three men, and I felt like I had a more captive audience at that point.

00:33:11.000 And, you know, what happens from here and what what leads us to today is, in my mind, just as perverse as the irony of him getting wrongfully accused of a crime, because I presented to J.D.

00:33:28.000 and, you know, at one point he welled up.

00:33:34.000 To prove a negative is one of the most difficult things.

00:33:38.000 Our standard is the presumption of innocence.

00:33:42.000 When someone is already convicted and they're wrongfully convicted, in order for you to get someone in JD's position there, he was tough on me, as he should have been.

00:33:52.000 I had to prove a negative because I had to prove that Al Cleveland was not in Ohio when this happened, which frankly became easy to prove because we were able to show that he was in New York visiting his probation officer on a different drug case.

00:34:07.000 He had Damon John, who of Shark Tank fame, was with him the day that this allegedly happened.

00:34:16.000 People saw him all over New York.

00:34:18.000 There were John Edwards, who's my client, Had alibi witnesses all over the place.

00:34:26.000 And if Al Cleveland is in New York, this never happened.

00:34:30.000 Because William Avery Jr.'s story was that Al Cleveland was there leading the charge and they're beating this woman to death.

00:34:37.000 So when I was there and by the time I was done presenting to J.D. and his chief of staff, they asked if they could have some time.

00:34:48.000 Get back to us.

00:34:49.000 And we said, well, if you guys are going to go chat, we're here in Ohio.

00:34:53.000 I'd come in from New York, and the other attorneys had come from other parts of Ohio, and we stayed for several hours.

00:35:02.000 I think he was prepared to stay there the whole night.

00:35:04.000 I had already extended my trip.

00:35:10.000 Interesting, because he didn't make a decision until sometime about a week later, I never asked you what your impression was at that moment after we made the presentation.

00:35:25.000 I had experience not only with the assistant prosecutor that was involved in these cases, but with the Nancy Smith matter.

00:35:31.000 I can't indicate to you how important that was to my thinking.

00:35:35.000 And doing 15 years of being a defense attorney, I know how easy it is for this stuff to happen.

00:35:40.000 It happens.

00:35:41.000 And so I was open to it.

00:35:43.000 I was open to it.

00:35:44.000 But I was free from the stress, at least for that part, and I was going to dedicate the rest of those two months to this issue.

00:35:51.000 And he, I think, realized, he told me this morning when we were talking, he said, I knew you weren't going away.

00:35:59.000 Tenacious.

00:36:01.000 Do you think, is it possible to have a third-party system?

00:36:08.000 Like, you know, you have your prosecutors, you have defense attorneys.

00:36:11.000 Is it possible to also have an overview by an independent group before anything gets started where people can present their evidence so you can find out if something's totally bullshit?

00:36:23.000 Well, Joe, it's supposed to be the grand jury system.

00:36:25.000 And you know what?

00:36:27.000 Most people don't know this.

00:36:29.000 There's a judge in New York that has a very famous quote, which is, you can indict a ham sandwich.

00:36:35.000 You can get a grand jury to believe anything because the standard is much lower than it is to convict.

00:36:44.000 It's that they have to be convinced, what is it?

00:36:48.000 There's to be a probable chance of success at trial.

00:36:50.000 So two issues.

00:36:52.000 Probable cause and a relatively good chance of success at trial.

00:36:56.000 And who consists of the grand jury?

00:36:58.000 Who are the members?

00:36:59.000 Nine citizens.

00:37:00.000 Well, it's nine citizens in Ohio.

00:37:02.000 Nine in Ohio.

00:37:03.000 There are other jurisdictions, both federal and state, where there's more.

00:37:06.000 But what happens is, and something that people don't know, is that the defense is not allowed to present anything.

00:37:14.000 The defense lawyer is not allowed to be there.

00:37:17.000 So it is...

00:37:18.000 Quite literally, this is not hyperbole, it is quite literally a one-sided affair.

00:37:25.000 The number of cases that go before grand juries and don't get indicted is so infinitesimal that it's probably less than.0001%.

00:37:38.000 It's probably not even statistically significant.

00:37:39.000 Jesus Christ, what I was asking about is an independent group of attorneys.

00:37:43.000 That's interesting.

00:37:45.000 Grand jury system.

00:37:47.000 Have a completely independent and then regulate it.

00:37:50.000 Make sure they're independent.

00:37:51.000 No financial ties.

00:37:53.000 No ties to anybody that's a part of any of it.

00:37:57.000 And then make sure that those people, that their position is to review things and make sure there's no bias and there's no bullshit.

00:38:04.000 Yeah.

00:38:04.000 Before you could actually say, yeah, let's try it out in court.

00:38:09.000 Are you kind of saying after the arrest, Joe?

00:38:11.000 Yes.

00:38:12.000 It should be equal sides.

00:38:15.000 The prosecution side should be able to divulge their evidence.

00:38:18.000 The defense side should be able to divulge their evidence.

00:38:21.000 It should be independently reviewed by a group of completely outside attorneys that have no vested interest in the results of this whatsoever.

00:38:31.000 It's an interesting idea.

00:38:32.000 It's not a bad idea because people would be less likely to try to commit fraud because then you would have to have some conspiratorial relationship with the people that are the independent attorneys now.

00:38:44.000 There'd be another paper trail.

00:38:45.000 It'd be a little sketchier.

00:38:46.000 You wouldn't know if you could pull that off.

00:38:48.000 That would be dangerous, especially if they're completely independent and you don't know them.

00:38:51.000 So the way you could do it would be you could You could find independent...

00:39:00.000 First of all, think about the amount of money we spend in this country on shit that everybody agrees is terrible.

00:39:06.000 If we could funnel some...

00:39:08.000 I don't even want to bring up whatever political cause.

00:39:11.000 Just if we could funnel some of that money into preserving innocence, make sure that people are never tried with a crime that they shouldn't be tried with.

00:39:20.000 And it's not that you have a bad defense attorney and they have an awesome prosecutor.

00:39:24.000 It's all...

00:39:26.000 Is this a legitimate case?

00:39:28.000 And if you started doing that, there would be consequences for bringing up illegitimate cases.

00:39:35.000 You would be investigated.

00:39:37.000 You could potentially face charges.

00:39:39.000 You've just stumbled into what is a wormhole because you've brought up so many issues that are so mired.

00:39:48.000 In politics and statutes that, in my mind, make no sense.

00:39:54.000 You would be upending such an institution that it would cause a revolution, and it's in fact not that revolutionary of an idea.

00:40:08.000 It's not.

00:40:09.000 And if it were ever possible, I would venture to say that...

00:40:18.000 These times make me feel like about anything is possible.

00:40:22.000 Yeah, this would be the time that something like that could get pulled off.

00:40:25.000 I think there's a problem.

00:40:27.000 And I think the problem is people are very competitive.

00:40:31.000 And they want to win.

00:40:33.000 Everybody wants to win.

00:40:34.000 And it's important for your career if you win.

00:40:37.000 And when people play games, they cheat.

00:40:40.000 I see people cheat at pool.

00:40:43.000 I've seen professionals cheat at pool.

00:40:47.000 I've seen people cheat at cards.

00:40:50.000 I've seen people cheat at everything.

00:40:51.000 People cheat.

00:40:52.000 They want to win.

00:40:53.000 It's a horrible byproduct of that instinct that we have to win when attached to a legal system that could lead innocent people to be prosecuted.

00:41:04.000 I was listening to a podcast today about the founding of Jerusalem.

00:41:12.000 And one of the cases was a guy who was in trouble.

00:41:17.000 For something that he didn't commit.

00:41:19.000 They knew he didn't commit it.

00:41:20.000 And then they kept him in jail and trumped up charges and charged him with something else.

00:41:23.000 So it's just like, this is 1948 or 47 or whatever it was.

00:41:27.000 So this shit's been going on probably thousands of years.

00:41:30.000 For sure.

00:41:30.000 People have been prosecuting people for things that they didn't do, knowing they didn't do it so they can win.

00:41:36.000 I think cops do it sometimes. 0.99

00:41:38.000 I've seen cops plant drugs.

00:41:40.000 I've seen it on video.

00:41:40.000 There's a ton of them online.

00:41:42.000 You can see cops plant guns.

00:41:44.000 You could see there's a one where a cop shot a guy and then pulls out a gun and throws it on the ground You could see the video of it.

00:41:50.000 He didn't know he was being filmed.

00:41:52.000 It fucking happens It does happen because people want to win they want to win They're playing a game and they're in a system and the system rewards success And if you fucking fail or if you you something falls apart and it looks bad for your career doesn't progress Well, you know where you can start which is an easier fix and If there's accountability, and I say easier fix because I don't want to throw cold water on your idea, it's a fantastic idea.

00:42:19.000 But it just seems like pushing, not a boulder uphill, like a mountain and moving it.

00:42:25.000 Do you think that's bigger than Bobby Kennedy running the HHS? Yeah, I do.

00:42:29.000 I'll tell you why.

00:42:31.000 Because you would be, there are so many constitutional issues with the grand jury system and so forth.

00:42:36.000 But here's something that is not that difficult.

00:42:41.000 Prosecutors have immunity.

00:42:44.000 There are no consequences.

00:42:47.000 So all of these cases where you hear people have been wrongfully convicted, prosecutors don't turn over evidence that would point to their innocence.

00:42:57.000 That's what JD was referring to when he said exculpatory.

00:43:00.000 That just means that would tend to prove innocence rather than guilt.

00:43:04.000 That's constitutionally required that prosecutors turn that over. 0.98

00:43:09.000 But these prosecutors don't have any accountability.

00:43:12.000 And you're going to see in a few minutes when we're going to get to it, what happened after J.D. made his decision.

00:43:20.000 What happened between when we filed it and today is if...

00:43:27.000 You don't have warm blood pumping through your veins if this doesn't get you in some way.

00:43:33.000 But yeah, I think, you know...

00:43:36.000 I think there's an easier way to do it, Joe.

00:43:37.000 Yeah?

00:43:37.000 I think that you get county prosecutors that are extraordinarily powerful in their community.

00:43:42.000 It's like, you know, I try to tell people, vote local because, you know, the President of the United States isn't going to indict you.

00:43:47.000 The guy that's sitting in the county prosecutor's office will.

00:43:50.000 And so, you know, having experience as a defense attorney for that long, it...

00:43:56.000 It changes the way you think about prosecution.

00:43:59.000 So I think that the easier thing is to require that a county prosecutor had some experience as a defense attorney.

00:44:06.000 Because you get to see it from that perspective and you never are the same because you understand how these things happen.

00:44:11.000 You see it.

00:44:12.000 If you practice long enough, you will have a few innocent clients.

00:44:15.000 And I don't want to get down completely on the system because I think most of the time it works.

00:44:19.000 Most of the time.

00:44:20.000 But when it doesn't work, it's awful.

00:44:22.000 It's the worst thing on the face of the planet.

00:44:24.000 I think that prosecutors, especially when they hide evidence which does occur, I think they think, well, he's guilty.

00:44:31.000 I'll cheat a little bit.

00:44:32.000 So what?

00:44:32.000 Which is insane.

00:44:34.000 But it happens.

00:44:35.000 It's like that.

00:44:36.000 Do you know that quote about capitalism?

00:44:39.000 Capitalism is the absolute worst way to run a country except for all the other ways.

00:44:43.000 Right.

00:44:44.000 Right.

00:44:44.000 Yeah.

00:44:45.000 Very similar.

00:44:46.000 It's a great quote, but when will...

00:44:50.000 This is the lesser of all the evils.

00:44:53.000 Finally start catching up with us.

00:44:55.000 And it's so politically driven.

00:44:58.000 If people were more aware of how politically driven some of these prosecutions are, and then you put your finger on the nerve root of what the problem is from the standpoint of human psychology.

00:45:12.000 It's been happening since the beginning of time and will continue to happen until people suffer ego death.

00:45:18.000 And suffering an ego death requires you to look yourself in the mirror in an honest way and to be able to say four magic words.

00:45:28.000 I made a mistake.

00:45:32.000 That's it.

00:45:33.000 And what stands in the way in my mind of prosecutors just so often not moving from their position is because they can't say.

00:45:46.000 I made a mistake, or the office where I work made a mistake.

00:45:50.000 You're going to find that one of the judges that denied relief in this case of the Ohio Four was a prosecutor in this office, is friends with the current prosecutor.

00:46:04.000 One of the other judges that denied relief is the same judge that denied Al Cleveland post-conviction relief.

00:46:14.000 When the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal government says, these guys, Al Cleveland is likely innocent.

00:46:22.000 And they just shove it aside.

00:46:25.000 What gets in the way?

00:46:26.000 What gets in the way is, you touched on it.

00:46:30.000 I want to win.

00:46:31.000 This is, I'm not going to go against the former office.

00:46:34.000 Whatever swirl of emotions.

00:46:40.000 You know, whatever it is that just has people, you know, when you get to that point in an argument, this happens, I always give the same example because she's always right.

00:46:50.000 You know, you get to a point in an argument where you're taking a real strong position and the other person, in this case, it's my wife, is always, you know, taking the opposite position and then you realize in the argument that you're wrong.

00:47:05.000 And it's, oftentimes it's like, I gave you my keys to put in your purse.

00:47:11.000 Where are they?

00:47:12.000 No, you didn't give me your keys.

00:47:13.000 You took them back since then.

00:47:14.000 No, no, no.

00:47:15.000 I remember where I gave them to you.

00:47:17.000 And then you remember, in the middle of the argument, oh yeah, that's right.

00:47:21.000 She did give them back to me.

00:47:23.000 And what happens is, at that moment, you have a choice to make.

00:47:29.000 You could stop, which I've learned to do, and say, you know what?

00:47:32.000 I fucked up.

00:47:33.000 You're right.

00:47:35.000 In my experience, especially in a case like this, it's just like the—and that's not to pat myself on the back.

00:47:41.000 There's plenty of times I dig in, and I know I might be wrong, but, you know, it's just the inability to say something bad might have happened here.

00:47:51.000 Well, and it's protect the state at all times, at all costs.

00:47:56.000 But wouldn't it be valuable for the people to know that the prosecuting attorneys are very ethical?

00:48:01.000 Wouldn't that make you trust them more and want to support them more?

00:48:04.000 Wouldn't that be good for everybody if they just said a mistake was made when a mistake was made?

00:48:09.000 It maintains the integrity of it.

00:48:11.000 I mean, Joe, let me say something that might blow your mind.

00:48:12.000 It blew mine.

00:48:14.000 When I had exonerated Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen, it really was the highlight of my career.

00:48:19.000 Can you tell me what the case was?

00:48:21.000 Yeah, it was a 94 case, which is interesting because it was happening simultaneously with the same assistant prosecutor as the one that Josh is referring to.

00:48:28.000 They were accused she was a bus driver. 0.69

00:48:30.000 She's now become family to me, and they're big fans, Joe, by the way.

00:48:35.000 Shout out.

00:48:35.000 Yeah, shout out.

00:48:39.000 They were 94. She was a bus driver for a place called Head Start for young kids.

00:48:42.000 She was alleged to have driven these kids, after picking them up from their homes, back to another individual's house, a male, and severely abused them sexually. 1.00

00:48:52.000 Now, the Broadway, which is the road where he allegedly lived off of, is a main thoroughfare through Lorraine.

00:49:00.000 The allegations were so wild that, you know, if you can imagine seeing a school bus pull up on the main street, watch little kids go into a house, they were alleged to have been, like, punished by being tied up outside in trees, which is just impossible.

00:49:13.000 So this is the alleged abuse that occurred, because what happened was...

00:49:17.000 Did someone coach the kids?

00:49:18.000 Yes, in fact, that's exactly what occurred.

00:49:20.000 So one of the mothers that eventually got paid, I think it was about $1.5 million in 95 money.

00:49:26.000 It's just a decent amount of money.

00:49:28.000 She had indicated that her daughter had been abused by Nancy, the bus driver.

00:49:34.000 Now, when the investigation occurred, there was a detective on it that did a very thorough investigation and after months found out that, listen, I don't even think a crime occurred.

00:49:45.000 He was very confused by the evidence.

00:49:47.000 It wasn't clear.

00:49:48.000 It was plain as day that he couldn't even prove that these two individuals knew one another.

00:49:52.000 And so he had indicated that basically, listen, I can't go forward on this.

00:49:56.000 I have no evidence that it's true.

00:49:59.000 Well, the public pressure, I'm assuming, was rising because the victim, the woman that had the child, was becoming pretty public.

00:50:08.000 She was organizing the other parents, because as you well know, you can't get these parents together and start talking about the case because it just compromises so much.

00:50:16.000 Now, to the police credit, they would try to tell these individuals, you can't meet and talk about the case, but they did anyways.

00:50:22.000 So then a bunch of erratic stories turned into one pretty substantial story that pretty much stayed all the way through.

00:50:33.000 It turns out, for example, Joseph Smith didn't even have a basement.

00:50:40.000 It was a slab home.

00:50:41.000 I mean, that's one fact out of a million facts that are so disturbing about the case.

00:50:48.000 And so, when I started to look at it, the funny part is, during the first three or four months of me evaluating it, I had a couple investigators that were with me.

00:50:57.000 We were reading only exculpatory information.

00:51:00.000 Nancy didn't do it. 0.97

00:51:01.000 We don't think a crime occurred.

00:51:03.000 And I was wondering, when am I going to start finding the inculpatory information?

00:51:06.000 When am I going to start seeing the guilt?

00:51:08.000 And it just really never happened.

00:51:10.000 And so when I exonerated these two individuals that were clearly innocent, she had done 15 years, Joe.

00:51:16.000 He had done 25. I was in court and...

00:51:21.000 My chief of staff and I had written something to kind of indicate to the court, and I apologized to them for what had occurred to them.

00:51:28.000 After the hearing, Mark Gotze of the Ohio Innocence Project came up to me and said, J.D., I've got to tell you something.

00:51:34.000 You're the only prosecutor I've ever heard actually apologize to a defendant.

00:51:38.000 Joe, imagine how remarkable that statement is.

00:51:41.000 That's crazy.

00:51:42.000 We took 40 years of your life combined, but we're not even going to apologize to you.

00:51:46.000 Now, probably because they're assuming that it's going to protect the state's interests better.

00:51:51.000 I'm a firm believer in that if the state suffers, then maybe it deserves to suffer, and that's justice.

00:51:56.000 You know, it's funny.

00:51:58.000 A lot of cases where I ask, where I represent a client in a civil rights case for wrongful conviction, I sometimes give the law enforcement official During a deposition in a civil case, I said, you know, I did it recently for Clemente Aguirre, who was exonerated from Florida's death row.

00:52:16.000 I gave the, you know, the crime scene technician, the fingerprint analyst, all of who played a part in his wrongful conviction.

00:52:26.000 I said, Mr. Aguirre is here.

00:52:28.000 Would you like to apologize to him?

00:52:30.000 No, sir, I will not.

00:52:32.000 So he exonerates Anthony Smith and Joseph Allen.

00:52:38.000 And all of these folks that prosecuted Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen, law enforcement, the prosecutors, they all turn on him.

00:52:49.000 I had no idea about anything.

00:52:51.000 Because you apologized or because you exonerated?

00:52:53.000 No, it was because I... Yeah, I mean, it was that.

00:52:55.000 I mean, the assistant prosecutor Rosenbaum that you're referring to with these cases, he was the assistant prosecutor.

00:53:01.000 He was heavily tied in with that office because he had been the chief prosecutor for a very long time under an individual by the name of Greg White, who was the Lorain County prosecutor at the time.

00:53:11.000 Now, Greg White doesn't get mentioned.

00:53:13.000 You probably never even heard his name.

00:53:15.000 Now, that's interesting.

00:53:16.000 He was the county prosecutor during that time.

00:53:19.000 He seems to have escaped criticism.

00:53:21.000 I think part of the reason is he's smart enough to be quiet.

00:53:24.000 So when these cases come out in public, he doesn't say very much.

00:53:28.000 But the truth of the matter is the buck stops at the office holder.

00:53:31.000 So just so we're clear, this prosecutor...

00:53:36.000 Rosenbaum prosecuted Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen, and I believe he prosecuted all four of the Ohio Four.

00:53:42.000 Yes, he did.

00:53:43.000 And so when I reviewed two cases, Joe, two cases from this assistant prosecutor, I found that six people were wrongly convicted and did about 162 years in prison.

00:53:53.000 That's two cases, Joe.

00:53:55.000 The question is, how many more are there out there?

00:53:58.000 Jesus.

00:53:59.000 Two cases.

00:54:00.000 It's extraordinary.

00:54:01.000 It's terrifying.

00:54:03.000 Two cases, and those are the only two I review.

00:54:05.000 Now, that doesn't mean most of them are probably good.

00:54:07.000 That's the way the statistics are.

00:54:09.000 But I think it was pretty scary, the thought of me going through all those cases, and I think they knew that I was open to that type of stuff.

00:54:15.000 Oh, God.

00:54:16.000 And so I think that created these enemies that I never thought they would go as far as they do.

00:54:20.000 I just never, you know, maybe it was naivete, but I never assumed that they would go that far.

00:54:25.000 But they did.

00:54:26.000 So after I presented to J.D., he...

00:54:31.000 He had a cart.

00:54:36.000 This is like a popular thing with prosecutors.

00:54:39.000 They wheel in a cart of evidence.

00:54:43.000 You know, it's like a shopping cart, it looks like, without the...

00:54:46.000 Full of files.

00:54:47.000 Yeah, and it's full of files.

00:54:49.000 And he had read a lot of it in years prior, and he said he wanted to re-familiarize himself with more.

00:54:59.000 So...

00:55:01.000 I think we both canceled our Thanksgiving plans and got into a lot of...

00:55:06.000 I was annoyed because when I left Ohio, it was so obvious to me that these men were innocent and that there was a terrible mistake made and a federal court never goes out of their way to say something like this.

00:55:24.000 I have the opinion here.

00:55:26.000 And I showed this to J.D. and his chief of staff.

00:55:30.000 And it says, this is the way it concludes.

00:55:35.000 It goes through the things that the juries in the case heard that were bad about Avery, that he was a liar, he was a liar.

00:55:52.000 But it didn't have...

00:55:54.000 You know, all these prosecutors that are trying to protect convictions and the man that's the county prosecutor now, in his motion to withdraw JD's decision to grant these men a new trial and then dismiss the case.

00:56:09.000 We're going to get to this in a minute.

00:56:11.000 This is what ended up happening.

00:56:13.000 He says, well, these cases have gone through the courts for 30 years.

00:56:17.000 That could be said about every single human that has ever been exonerated in this country.

00:56:22.000 It's the weakest argument.

00:56:24.000 It's the weakest argument.

00:56:25.000 What's the evidence that they did it?

00:56:28.000 And here's one court that says, had the jury also been able to consider Avery's unsolicited 2004 recantation?

00:56:39.000 That's when he went into the FBI. The 2006 recanting affidavit, that's the one that Al Cleveland had in his post-conviction filings.

00:56:49.000 Evidence that Cleveland was in New York a couple of hours before Blakely's murder and could not have flown from New York to Ohio in time to commit the murder, along with the fact that there was no other evidence tying Cleveland to the crime, quote, Now they're quoting a case in this opinion.

00:57:08.000 It surely cannot be said that a juror conscientiously following the judge's instructions requiring proof beyond a reasonable doubt would vote to convict.

00:57:20.000 Thank you.

00:57:21.000 We find that Cleveland has presented a credible claim of actual innocence.

00:57:29.000 It's amazing.

00:57:30.000 That is such a rare thing for a federal court to say those things.

00:57:36.000 That's the federal court telling the lower courts in Lorain County, you have to give Al Cleveland a hearing.

00:57:47.000 It's at that hearing where the judge advises Avery Jr., you know, you're basically going to get charged with perjury.

00:57:53.000 So I make the presentation to JD, and he spends roughly the next five days.

00:58:00.000 You know, at some point, we were joking to each other, and there was a lot of arguing because he wanted to go out to the apartment where the alleged beating took place, and he did, and he was reading lines of transcript from four different trials.

00:58:16.000 And he'd say, well, what about this?

00:58:17.000 What about that?

00:58:18.000 And I just said, you know what?

00:58:20.000 I'm going to cancel my Thanksgiving.

00:58:22.000 He canceled his.

00:58:23.000 And I was just there to answer any question he had.

00:58:26.000 And there weren't really many questions of substance.

00:58:29.000 And I started to realize the second or third day that he's looking for something to say they're guilty.

00:58:40.000 He's looking for some evidence.

00:58:42.000 And around every corner he looked.

00:58:45.000 He would say things to me like, what is going on here?

00:58:49.000 Why in the world would this happen?

00:58:52.000 I'd be curious as to what your thought process was before you finally told us.

00:58:59.000 I couldn't believe they were ultimately convicted.

00:59:00.000 I couldn't believe that there were four trials where people believed Avery.

00:59:04.000 You know, I never told you this story, Josh, but I knew one of the lawyers for one of the defendants, but I won't mention names.

00:59:11.000 And I heard from a good source that would hang around with him in the office on Saturday that almost every Saturday, one of the defendants would call him.

00:59:18.000 And after the phone call, he would cry because he would say, that man does not deserve to be there, and I screwed it up.

00:59:26.000 And so, when I heard that, it made sense to me because, and Josh is right, I was looking for some reason why I was making the wrong decision.

00:59:35.000 You know, it's a big decision to decide to maybe try to free four people from prison.

00:59:39.000 I wanted to be sure.

00:59:39.000 I wanted to get there.

00:59:40.000 You have to look at it from all angles.

00:59:42.000 You have to.

00:59:42.000 And I appreciated Josh's tenacity because that's what good defense attorneys do.

00:59:47.000 But I had to get there myself.

00:59:49.000 And so, I had a...

00:59:52.000 I wanted to take my parents to Mexico City.

00:59:54.000 I called my mom and said, we're not going to Mexico City.

00:59:55.000 It's not happening.

00:59:56.000 So we just stayed and I just...

00:59:58.000 But it was almost therapeutic for me because I had been so much stress on my own case.

01:00:02.000 It was nice to divert attention away from me and try to think about something else.

01:00:06.000 So I really immersed myself in it, and I went to crime scene, which I always believed defense attorneys should go.

01:00:12.000 To every case I had, I went to the crime scene.

01:00:15.000 I learned something that I didn't know.

01:00:17.000 But I eventually got there, and it was extraordinary, though.

01:00:20.000 Not only was this case just on this individual Avery Jr.'s testimony, he might have been the worst witness I've ever seen in my life.

01:00:27.000 I mean, so not only was there no physical evidence that linked these men to it, the only witness that was present was perhaps the worst I'd ever seen.

01:00:35.000 And what the federal court is saying is that, yeah, they could damage his credibility at trial, but they didn't know, obviously, because he does it later, that he made the whole thing up.

01:00:47.000 And they didn't know that he's admitted he made the whole thing up.

01:00:53.000 And importantly, who walks in unsolicited to the FBI and says, here's what I did.

01:01:01.000 And I want to clear my conscience and I want to tell you what I did.

01:01:05.000 That'd be a hell of a double cross.

01:01:07.000 Yeah.

01:01:07.000 And it's a crime to lie.

01:01:08.000 And I knew, I started to feel like, oh, okay.

01:01:13.000 We're about to get hometown, small town, something bad is happening here.

01:01:18.000 Because this should have been a moment.

01:01:23.000 Here we are, myself, my co-counsel, we're about to change the trajectory, not of just these four men's lives, but of their families that have lived under the crushing weight of these wrongful convictions for three decades.

01:01:40.000 My client, John Edwards, and Al Cleveland, and the other two as well, Lenworth and Benson, you know, John is in, Al is out, but Al is suffering.

01:01:51.000 You know, the most horrific psychological damage you can imagine.

01:01:56.000 And John calls me from prison all the time.

01:02:00.000 J.D. tells us that he is going to file a joint motion, joint meaning between defense counsel and the prosecutor, to grant these men a new trial.

01:02:11.000 That's the procedural mechanism.

01:02:13.000 Based on new evidence.

01:02:14.000 Based on new evidence, which is the 2004 recantation.

01:02:18.000 Which they never had the benefit of.

01:02:20.000 Taking the trial.

01:02:21.000 That evidence was never seen.

01:02:22.000 And then the 2006 affidavit, and that once the new trial was granted, he would dismiss the case.

01:02:29.000 So that all gets filed in front of one judge because it really should have been a matter of procedure.

01:02:38.000 In all my years of doing this, 25 years, 24 years, I've never seen a judge do anything other than have the hearing Filed for and asked for, especially when it's joined by the defense.

01:02:54.000 So all of a sudden, the judge that this has filed before is silent.

01:02:59.000 Now, the clock is ticking because now we have the whole month of December, and after January 6th, he's out of office.

01:03:08.000 And right away, within a few days of us filing this joint motion...

01:03:15.000 There's a newspaper article that comes out.

01:03:18.000 What's your local paper again?

01:03:19.000 The Chronicle Telegraph.

01:03:21.000 Telegraph or Telegram?

01:03:23.000 The Chronicle Telegraph.

01:03:25.000 And it has the person that just defeated him in the election.

01:03:28.000 His name is Tony Sillo.

01:03:30.000 It has comments from him and from this prosecutor Rosenberg saying that I don't understand what the rush is.

01:03:38.000 I don't understand, you know, essentially saying wait until...

01:03:43.000 I take office.

01:03:44.000 I, Tony Sillo, take office.

01:03:46.000 And I want to review this.

01:03:49.000 And I thought that that was really interesting because he's someone that worked in that office.

01:03:56.000 He's someone that actually played a role in some of the investigation that I believe should have taken place.

01:04:08.000 When he was a prosecutor in that office, and he did not have the benefit of the thorough investigation that J.D. had done, and he's a private citizen until he takes office.

01:04:20.000 So I found that to be interesting.

01:04:23.000 And all of a sudden, a brief gets filed from the Attorney General of Ohio saying, whoa, it's a brief that gets filed to the court where we filed this joint motion for a new trial.

01:04:37.000 And the Attorney General gets involved.

01:04:40.000 You don't have to look far to see other Attorney Generals getting involved in criminal cases, right?

01:04:46.000 That's happened on a national stage.

01:04:47.000 Happened in New York.

01:04:49.000 And he basically is taking the position that this man, this should all wait until Tony Silla takes office.

01:04:57.000 And I thought, what?

01:04:58.000 This is weird.

01:04:59.000 Then I come to find out that Tony Silla used to work at the Attorney General's office.

01:05:03.000 So I started to have hope.

01:05:06.000 When the judge, one of the judges in the case, because I won't bore you with the details, but the cases get sent out to different judges that were assigned to each man's case.

01:05:20.000 And what the judge says is the AG's motion, this is a quote, this is from an order from the Honorable Chris Cook.

01:05:33.000 The AG, and this is dated December 23rd, the AG's motion is not to advocate for either party to this litigation, which in most situations is the sole purpose of filing an amicus brief, but instead to ask this court to delay ruling on the pending motions until such time as the newly elected Lorain County prosecutor is in office and the victims can be notified.

01:06:00.000 Neither of these purported reasons to opine on this litigation are persuasive or necessary to aid the court.

01:06:08.000 First, the AG argues that the current prosecutor will be leaving office shortly, referring to JD, within the next two weeks, in fact, and any ruling should be delayed in order to allow the incoming prosecutor to evaluate the matter and weigh in on the issues.

01:06:23.000 But this reason is hardly compelling.

01:06:27.000 All elected officials eventually leave office and to suggest that simply because a newly elected prosecutor is taking over, a pending matter should be delayed for the incoming official to review is unwieldy, inconvenient, invites delay, and not how the system operates.

01:06:46.000 Moreover, why should rulings or evaluation of this case be singled out and subject to delay in favor of the new administration but not the other 150 pending criminal cases on this court's docket?

01:06:58.000 At the end of the day, the concept that a court or any government entity, for that matter, should come to a grinding halt because a newly elected official will be taking over is not how government should or does work.

01:07:11.000 Shout out to that guy.

01:07:12.000 Yeah?

01:07:13.000 Put that thought on hold.

01:07:15.000 Because three days later, three days later, now this is curious.

01:07:21.000 What changes in three days?

01:07:24.000 Well, I don't know if it happened during these three days, but this is the prosecutor.

01:07:30.000 I mean, this is the judge that swears in the new prosecuting attorney.

01:07:36.000 Three days later, there is...

01:07:42.000 Another order filed by the same judge.

01:07:46.000 And because we had moved for an emergency hearing, because in our mind, this incoming prosecutor, opines on the case in the paper, had worked at that prosecutor's office and obviously had some feeling about the case.

01:08:05.000 And if he had taken such an interest in talking to the press, We were concerned and filed an emergency motion not to let these men suffer any longer.

01:08:16.000 So the same judge that you just said shout-out, which was exactly my sentiment, issues another order.

01:08:27.000 You could not get a more stark 180-degree turn than this.

01:08:33.000 I'm going to quote from that order.

01:08:35.000 How can it be possibly an emergency that a hearing and potential ruling be accomplished in a matter of weeks for a case in cases that have been pending for almost three decades, not to mention four years on the current prosecutor's not to mention four years on the current prosecutor's watch?

01:08:54.000 Moreover, no rational person would conclude that a change in county prosecutor constitutes an emergency, an inconvenience to the movements, arguably, a delay in rulings, no doubt, but an emergency?

01:09:07.000 I don't think so.

01:09:11.000 In addition to the lack of emergency, two additional but troubling issues are apparent by this motion.

01:09:18.000 This is three days later.

01:09:21.000 First, the movements go to great pains to paint the incoming prosecutor as incapable of fairly and rationally evaluating the defendant's claims of innocence and requests for new trial.

01:09:33.000 To pause there, because this man had sat and listened to and dove through and...

01:09:40.000 It tore through this entire trial record.

01:09:44.000 So, yeah, we had concerns that we would face further delay.

01:09:47.000 It already agreed.

01:09:49.000 We filed.

01:09:49.000 This is oftentimes right away.

01:09:52.000 The court will call a hearing and grant the relief.

01:09:55.000 So the judge goes on to say this effort is unfounded.

01:09:59.000 Contra the movement's reliance on a newspaper article, that's the one I was talking about, the same article quotes Prosecutor-Elect Silla as saying he would review the matter anew, just like Prosecutor Tomlinson did.

01:10:14.000 And it goes on to say, Second, even more troubling is the movement's assertion that Tomlinson's successor has no authority to review agreements made by Tomlinson.

01:10:27.000 I've never seen this in an opinion before.

01:10:31.000 Oh, really?

01:10:33.000 With a question mark.

01:10:35.000 The movement's right that Mr. Tomlinson's successor has an obligation to honor the good faith decisions made by the prior administration, J.D. And it then goes on to use the Head Start case, the Nancy Smith case and Joe Allen, where he granted these people, he exonerated these people.

01:10:57.000 He then goes on to throw it in their face, in my opinion.

01:11:01.000 He says, recall the Head Start case.

01:11:03.000 And he goes through personalizing this and saying that because J.D. Tomlinson exonerated these people, thereby undoing a prior administration's prosecution, that why should the same not apply to you?

01:11:20.000 So in other words, three days before he says, why should justice wait?

01:11:25.000 Three days later, he says, wait a second.

01:11:33.000 This should wait.

01:11:35.000 And it should wait.

01:11:36.000 And by the way, here's one to poke this man in the eye because he exonerated people.

01:11:43.000 You're undermining the decision of a prior administration.

01:11:46.000 So he's using his granting of innocence, in my opinion, to now go back on what he said three days earlier, which is why should this wait?

01:11:53.000 What happened in these three days?

01:11:55.000 I don't know.

01:11:56.000 But I can tell you that you've taken position A and then you've taken position Z. So what happens is on these judges, one of the judges, the one that denied Al Cleveland post-conviction relief that said to Avery Jr., You know, there are potential consequences here.

01:12:19.000 He denies the joint motion for a new trial for Al Cleveland based on nothing.

01:12:25.000 He doesn't call a hearing.

01:12:26.000 This is in December.

01:12:27.000 He says, I'm denying it.

01:12:32.000 He then, this man, Sillow, takes office.

01:12:37.000 All the other judges deny it, by the way, or delay it.

01:12:41.000 The other judges punt until the new prosecutor comes to office.

01:12:45.000 And you don't think this is personal?

01:12:47.000 This man's second day in office.

01:12:51.000 Tony Sillo takes office.

01:12:53.000 His first order of business is to withdraw the joint motion on behalf of the state.

01:13:02.000 So he undoes everything that we did.

01:13:08.000 Because he worked at that office, because he's friends with these guys, I don't know.

01:13:13.000 But I'd like to know.

01:13:14.000 And to make these men suffer is truly, at this point, it's really, really difficult to understand.

01:13:23.000 The craziest part about these is that this Judge Cook, in that first opinion, he said the AG cites as one of the reasons why this should be delayed is that the victims have to be notified.

01:13:35.000 He notified the victims, and the judge calls them on it here.

01:13:40.000 So this is like...

01:13:44.000 It's fascinating.

01:13:45.000 Well, you know, I must have a caveat because I do love and respect Chris Cook.

01:13:50.000 I really do.

01:13:51.000 He's been there for me a lot in my career.

01:13:53.000 Where I disagree with his opinion is the idea that I didn't have any experience with the idea that maybe Tony Sillo couldn't be objective.

01:14:03.000 And I think where I diverge from...

01:14:05.000 Judge Cook is that I had a very real experience on why Tony Sillow couldn't be objective when involving the Nancy Smith case.

01:14:13.000 He was involved in that case in the later stages of it.

01:14:16.000 And in my humble opinion, Joe, anybody that looks at that case and doesn't do the right thing is just, it's scary.

01:14:24.000 It's scary.

01:14:25.000 So I did have an experience, and I know that the relationship that he shares with Attorney Rosenbaum, who was the assistant prosecutor at that, I know that it was a mentor-protege-type relationship.

01:14:35.000 And so the idea that he's going to be objective in undoing such a major case for someone that's arguably his mentor is almost impossible to conceive.

01:14:44.000 And so I knew that I had to be quick about it, because if I wasn't quick about it, I don't think it would ever get done, and I still don't think it'll ever get done.

01:14:51.000 Well, I refuse to think it won't get done.

01:14:55.000 I hope it does.

01:14:55.000 It's interesting to me that I had spoken to Mr. Silla when he took office, and my conversation with him wasn't about all the reasons they're innocent.

01:15:08.000 He said, you know, there's this phone call between Al Cleveland and his dad where they're talking about...

01:15:13.000 Giving Avery money.

01:15:15.000 And I said, what are you talking about?

01:15:18.000 And I went and read the transcript.

01:15:20.000 It's about them giving him money in 2006 for his expenses to put him in a hotel room so he could feel safe with a court reporter and to do the affidavit.

01:15:32.000 And I felt like saying, you know, so let me get this straight.

01:15:38.000 You, your office.

01:15:41.000 Pays this man reward money.

01:15:43.000 He then tries to extort your office for more money in exchange for testimony.

01:15:48.000 He has gone into the FBI before this affidavit was ever a thing.

01:15:52.000 He went into the FBI and admitted he made the whole thing up and you want to talk about a conversation between Al Cleveland and his father when they're talking about whether or not they could reimburse him for expenses if they have to fly him to Florida or get him to a place where he feels safe because he felt like if he told the truth again.

01:16:10.000 That there would be consequences for him because he was going against his father.

01:16:14.000 He'd be labeled a snitch in the community.

01:16:16.000 And, you know, I then emailed him and asked him for a meeting.

01:16:21.000 And I didn't hear back.

01:16:25.000 I heard back finally last week for the first time that we have a meeting with him on March 18th.

01:16:33.000 And I found that curious timing, and I said to JD this morning, did you tell anyone you were coming on the show?

01:16:38.000 You do.

01:16:39.000 And he looked at me, and it's a small town, a word travels fast, so I have my suspicions.

01:16:45.000 But I would make Tony Sillo the following offer.

01:16:50.000 Two things.

01:16:52.000 If you have any evidence that these men actually did this, any whatsoever, with your blessing, Joe, I'd offer him a seat right next to me.

01:17:02.000 To show the world what the evidence is.

01:17:05.000 You tell me what the evidence is.

01:17:07.000 And how about this?

01:17:10.000 Rather than do this behind closed doors on the 18th, how about let's open it to the public?

01:17:16.000 I just argued for a sentence commutation before Governor DeSantis last week.

01:17:23.000 It was a public hearing.

01:17:24.000 I had been told, just as I heard from JD, it just gives me fuel.

01:17:29.000 I don't think it'll happen.

01:17:30.000 I was told that he has never publicly listened to a sentence commutation, ever.

01:17:36.000 And you know what?

01:17:37.000 It happened.

01:17:39.000 And he listened, and he's considering the case.

01:17:42.000 And I feel like if we talk with each other and not at each other, we can get to the right place.

01:17:48.000 And I'm not this—I want to be really clear.

01:17:50.000 I have deep respect for what prosecutors do.

01:17:53.000 I have deep respect for Tony Sillo's commitment to public service.

01:17:56.000 I don't know the man.

01:17:58.000 I don't know him personally.

01:17:59.000 I don't know anything about him.

01:18:02.000 But I do find, I find it really difficult to understand why he took such an interest in this case, such that he blocked justice from happening and withdrew the state's position.

01:18:21.000 How about hear us out and meet with us before you withdraw?

01:18:26.000 The joint motion to dismiss.

01:18:28.000 How about that?

01:18:29.000 How about you hear the evidence before making it the first official act or among the first official acts?

01:18:39.000 I'm not optimistic going in, but I can tell you this.

01:18:42.000 I have found something as recent as yesterday where alternative suspects were brought to the attention of the Lorain County prosecutor.

01:18:53.000 And wouldn't you know, That the person assigned to investigate these alternative suspects and to liaise with the police department was one Tony Sillo?

01:19:05.000 I saw that document for the first time yesterday.

01:19:08.000 So what do you think that could mean?

01:19:09.000 I don't know what it means.

01:19:11.000 I have a lot of questions.

01:19:13.000 What did you do to investigate these men?

01:19:18.000 One of their ex-wives...

01:19:23.000 Says that he was cleaning bloody clothes the night of the Marshall Blakely murder and he knew her.

01:19:29.000 I don't know what it means, but I'd like to know.

01:19:31.000 I have questions.

01:19:32.000 You know, what is it?

01:19:34.000 Truth crushed to earth?

01:19:35.000 Truth crushed to earth shall rise again?

01:19:38.000 It always...

01:19:39.000 The truth comes out at some point.

01:19:43.000 And I am...

01:19:44.000 I am...

01:19:47.000 I'm singularly focused on finding out as much truth as I can about this case, and I just won't let up until I find it.

01:19:56.000 Something's wrong, and I want to figure out what it is.

01:19:59.000 But these men are suffering.

01:20:01.000 They should have been out in December.

01:20:04.000 And to continuously, needlessly delay the process, hard to imagine.

01:20:10.000 You know, Joe, I think we're also getting in this dangerous territory where we're not—I mean, the idea that you could ever prove them guilty with this evidence objectively is impossible.

01:20:19.000 Now we're getting in this dangerous territory where we're having to prove their innocence.

01:20:22.000 And that's significant because that is not the standard.

01:20:27.000 And so when the case is that bad that you have to then just continue to try to find out ways to prove these guys innocent, which is—it's difficult.

01:20:34.000 I was talking with my father.

01:20:35.000 I said, I can't prove you didn't kill Marsha Blakely on August 8, 1991. I can't prove that.

01:20:40.000 So we're in this dangerous territory now where we're trying to actually just argue actual innocence.

01:20:44.000 And the standard is proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

01:20:46.000 It's not even close.

01:20:47.000 It's not even close.

01:20:48.000 You know, and where do I... Scary.

01:20:50.000 Yeah, and all I want to do is...

01:20:52.000 What I want to do is do what I did with JD. Is to say, you know, how many times in your life do you have a chance to say, you know, something was really wrong?

01:21:08.000 And I helped make it right.

01:21:11.000 And Tony Sillo has that chance.

01:21:14.000 I mean, how many moments are there when you have the ability to impact other human beings in a way to set them literally free and to end the most unfathomable of nightmares?

01:21:29.000 And he has that chance.

01:21:31.000 I'm trying to appeal to, you know, I don't want there to be some...

01:21:41.000 One thing I know for sure is that no one has been able to show me any physical evidence, any eyewitness account, and actually, we have been able to prove their innocence.

01:21:57.000 What constellation of fate would come together so that you could show To a factual certainty that Al Cleveland was not in Ohio on the night these killings took place.

01:22:12.000 He meets with his probation officer and he's seen by multiple people.

01:22:18.000 And, you know, what more do you need?

01:22:25.000 That's standing alone.

01:22:27.000 And then you factor in Avery saying, I made it all up.

01:22:31.000 And you factor in the fact that the story he tells is belied by the physical evidence.

01:22:37.000 It is so easy to put people behind those bars.

01:22:41.000 And it takes almost a miracle to fight their way out.

01:22:48.000 So am I hoping for a miracle here?

01:22:51.000 I hope not.

01:22:52.000 I hope that these individuals that are presiding over this...

01:22:57.000 Put whatever it is aside that is causing them to hang on and say, you know what?

01:23:01.000 We just got this one wrong.

01:23:02.000 We can't stand by this.

01:23:04.000 And think about this also.

01:23:05.000 The only person to ever place themselves at the murder scene is Avery Jr. He's the only one.

01:23:11.000 And he's the only one that wasn't charged.

01:23:12.000 It's fascinating.

01:23:13.000 He admitted, basically, to being complicit.

01:23:16.000 Fair enough.

01:23:17.000 I mean, you're at the murder.

01:23:18.000 It's happening.

01:23:19.000 You're there.

01:23:20.000 You're the only one that has been charged.

01:23:22.000 In fact, I think maybe one of the facts you left out, Josh, is in 2004, he implicated his own father.

01:23:27.000 Avery Sr., who went to the police originally.

01:23:30.000 He said, I think he killed her.

01:23:32.000 I think he killed her and told me to tell that story to cover up not only his guilt and killing, but he did know Marsha Blakely.

01:23:38.000 There was some reports that they had a contentious relationship.

01:23:42.000 So, you know, it's very likely that, you know, the two individuals that implicated these individuals may have been involved with the crime.

01:23:50.000 It's fascinating.

01:23:53.000 I've just never seen cases like this before.

01:23:55.000 Like I said, I can't stress it enough.

01:23:57.000 If I took this case to a bunch of fifth graders, they would be objectively able to see that this is a crazy bad case.

01:24:02.000 I mean, it's not even close.

01:24:04.000 And for the retort to be, well, four juries saw it another way and court saw it another way, that's not true.

01:24:10.000 These juries did not see that this man said I made it all up.

01:24:14.000 And, you know, it always leads to this place, like, what do we do?

01:24:18.000 You know, I... If you're a citizen of Lorain County, you want to feel that this couldn't happen to you.

01:24:32.000 Regardless of what your background is, I would think that the citizens of Lorain County would at some point demand action here.

01:24:42.000 These men are not expendable.

01:24:46.000 Whether you disagree with, look, I'll be the first one to say it.

01:24:52.000 On behalf of my client, on behalf of Al Cleveland and the others, they're not proud of the fact that they were dealing drugs back then.

01:25:02.000 They're not proud of the life they were living.

01:25:04.000 That's not a reason to pin a murder on them.

01:25:10.000 Absolutely.

01:25:12.000 And, you know, the reality is if you grew up where they grew up and you lived their life, you're probably selling drugs too.

01:25:18.000 100%.

01:25:19.000 That's reality.

01:25:20.000 Nobody likes that.

01:25:21.000 Everybody's got that pulled them up by their bootstrap shit in their head.

01:25:24.000 That's not real.

01:25:25.000 That's not real.

01:25:26.000 You grow up in crime, you commit crime.

01:25:29.000 100%.

01:25:29.000 It's not 100% that if you grow up in crime, you've got to commit crime.

01:25:33.000 Some people get out.

01:25:34.000 Some people realize the folly of other people's ways, and they have incredible strength and resolve and discipline.

01:25:40.000 We get extraordinary people from those circumstances, whether it's in athletics or art or music.

01:25:46.000 Comedy.

01:25:46.000 There's a lot of people that grew up in horrific circumstances.

01:25:48.000 They became very extraordinary because of that pressure.

01:25:52.000 But that's not normal.

01:25:53.000 The normal thing is everybody gets beaten down by what's around you.

01:25:56.000 You imitate your atmosphere.

01:25:58.000 You're a part of a system that seems inescapable to all your family, to all your friends.

01:26:03.000 People are getting locked up, getting out.

01:26:05.000 They're getting murdered.

01:26:05.000 They're selling drugs.

01:26:07.000 That's your reality.

01:26:09.000 And if you grew up in fucking Connecticut and you go to private school and you're sitting here talking shit about them.

01:26:16.000 You're so fucking lucky.

01:26:18.000 You don't know how lucky you are.

01:26:20.000 If you're a person that's never committed crimes, never gone to jail, never done anything horrible, you're so lucky.

01:26:27.000 That's right.

01:26:28.000 You're so lucky.

01:26:29.000 You're so lucky you didn't have to shoot somebody who was stealing money from you because you were both involved in some crime together and he was going to kill you.

01:26:36.000 And all of a sudden you're in jail and you're like, what the fuck have I done?

01:26:39.000 There's people out there doing that.

01:26:41.000 There's people out there that are committing crimes wishing they didn't have to.

01:26:45.000 Wishing they had some sort of pathway to life or some life skills or some education or counseling or mentorship or something that have given them a path to get out of there and be what everybody wants to be.

01:26:56.000 A normal, healthy person who's enjoying their life.

01:27:01.000 Enjoying their family, enjoying their friends, and hopefully you get to make a living doing something you like doing too.

01:27:06.000 That's what everybody fucking wants.

01:27:08.000 Just everybody doesn't grow up in the right circumstances.

01:27:11.000 Some people just get a shit roll of the dice.

01:27:13.000 Right out of the gate.

01:27:15.000 Pop out of the vagina and right into chaos. 1.00

01:27:17.000 It's like Chris Rockhead that joke.

01:27:19.000 It kind of depends on what vagina you fall out of. 1.00

01:27:22.000 Right?

01:27:22.000 I mean, I got lucky.

01:27:24.000 I mean, my parents, I didn't come from money, Joe, but my parents are still together.

01:27:26.000 They cared about what I was doing.

01:27:28.000 Did you get your homework done?

01:27:29.000 Did you get your homework done?

01:27:30.000 I remember having these clients that really taught me a lot where it's like they never even had a shot.

01:27:36.000 They didn't have a shot.

01:27:37.000 I mean, so many of these people, they're just growing up abused physically, mentally.

01:27:41.000 They're seeing drug addiction in the household.

01:27:44.000 You know, it's not the same for everybody.

01:27:47.000 So yeah, it sucks that they were selling drugs.

01:27:49.000 It sucks that anybody sells drugs.

01:27:51.000 It sucks that people die of overdoses.

01:27:52.000 It sucks that people get addicted.

01:27:54.000 All that sucks.

01:27:55.000 But that's not murder.

01:27:56.000 That's not what these people did.

01:27:57.000 And you can't charge people for shit they didn't do.

01:27:59.000 You know, and I do.

01:28:01.000 I've been called a lot of things.

01:28:04.000 One of them that I take exception to is being called a race baiter.

01:28:07.000 I find that...

01:28:09.000 Really problematic, you know, trolls on the internet.

01:28:13.000 Stop reading comments.

01:28:14.000 I know.

01:28:16.000 But one of the things that people should read, if you want a better understanding of what it's like to grow up a minority in this country, or black in America, again, four black men in a very white community that were from out of town and drug dealers.

01:28:36.000 So, read Cast.

01:28:38.000 By Isabel Wilkerson.

01:28:40.000 And before you go judging what is going on in terms of your perception that people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, you try being born into a caste system.

01:28:57.000 Oh, C-A-S-T-E. C-A-S-T-E. And we are a country.

01:29:02.000 And I'm not on my soapbox.

01:29:04.000 This is a fact.

01:29:05.000 And if you can dispute anything in Isabel Wilkerson's book, this is a caste system that exists in America since its inception.

01:29:13.000 And the experience of a black American in this country is different than that of a white American.

01:29:20.000 So I think that these...

01:29:23.000 Wrongful convictions happen disproportionately to people of color for a reason. 1.00

01:29:28.000 And we have to start changing minds and we have to start getting people to come back to...

01:29:33.000 I don't know what's more innate.

01:29:36.000 Is it innate to find the humanity within ourselves?

01:29:41.000 Or is it more innate to tear each other down?

01:29:44.000 We all have that decision to make.

01:29:46.000 I don't know what it is about human beings where there's some sort of...

01:29:51.000 You know, ostensibly is like some satisfaction in the tearing down of another.

01:29:56.000 I know where that comes from.

01:29:58.000 It comes from a weakness within you.

01:30:00.000 It comes from a hole that you're trying to fill.

01:30:03.000 What we should want is, you know, uplifting these people that have been born into circumstances that are just different.

01:30:14.000 I come from a middle, middle class family.

01:30:17.000 You know, sometimes trending toward the lower end.

01:30:21.000 My dad had the knock-around guy from Brooklyn.

01:30:23.000 My mom was a schoolteacher.

01:30:25.000 And I think that going through some of those struggles set me up for success and to learn how to scrape a little bit.

01:30:33.000 But I didn't have the experience of someone that was born in Watts or Bedford-Stuyvesant or Harlem.

01:30:39.000 I just didn't.

01:30:41.000 And, you know, I'm a little less quick to judge.

01:30:46.000 Me too.

01:30:47.000 That, you know, if more people had your sentiment, Joe, right, that sometimes it's a little bit deeper than you think as to why someone resorts to committing a crime.

01:30:59.000 It's almost always deeper than you think.

01:31:00.000 I mean, I'm not a full believer in determinism because I think will is real.

01:31:06.000 I think free will, there's just an element of will, and that's one of the reasons why we seek inspiration from others, right?

01:31:13.000 Inspiration is fuel for will.

01:31:15.000 You know, whether it's reading or just watching how people live their lives by example, that fuels people to make better decisions.

01:31:23.000 Is that a part of determinism?

01:31:24.000 If it is, maybe I do believe in it.

01:31:25.000 But I think that there's a certain aspect of will.

01:31:28.000 But you can't deny circumstances.

01:31:31.000 You can't deny environmental influences.

01:31:34.000 You can't deny poverty.

01:31:36.000 You can't deny growing up abused.

01:31:38.000 You can't deny those things.

01:31:39.000 We have a real problem in this country is that we only treat.

01:31:45.000 The side effects.

01:31:46.000 We only treat the symptoms of this greater problem.

01:31:49.000 The symptoms of the crime.

01:31:50.000 The side effect.

01:31:51.000 They're a side effect of poverty and of horrible environments that never get fixed.

01:31:58.000 And that probably a lot of them are there because of redline laws and because of Jim Crow laws. 0.51

01:32:03.000 All of it started out in the 1950s and 60s when they started.

01:32:08.000 Making these places where you literally couldn't sell to black people.

01:32:12.000 I mean, there's tracks of Baltimore that were like sectioned off where you could not sell these areas to black people.

01:32:19.000 You would love this book.

01:32:20.000 I mean, the cast by Isabel Wilkerson, I feel like a paid spokesperson for it, but she talks about how, you know, there's very real consequences from the practical implications of what Jim Crow laws did to fragmenting our society.

01:32:38.000 It's not as if this went on a thousand years ago.

01:32:41.000 Right.

01:32:42.000 It would take hundreds of years to mellow out.

01:32:47.000 This is like you're talking about the civil rights movement.

01:32:50.000 You can watch videos on YouTube of them sicking dogs on protesters.

01:32:54.000 You can watch that.

01:32:54.000 It's from the 1960s.

01:32:55.000 You can see all that.

01:32:57.000 That's my childhood.

01:32:59.000 That's when I was a baby.

01:33:00.000 That was going on.

01:33:01.000 Okay?

01:33:02.000 You know, and here I am an adult and there's people alive that experienced that went through it and then their children went through it because they carried that trauma.

01:33:10.000 And you know resources are so important when it comes to defending yourself too.

01:33:13.000 I mean, I remember when I was a kid I watched the OJ trial and what eight million dollars can do is pretty extraordinary.

01:33:20.000 You know, you can have juries that are simultaneously going on, you're testing theories out while the trial is going.

01:33:25.000 And, you know, a lot of these guys get charged with crimes.

01:33:28.000 They kind of get ushered through the system.

01:33:29.000 You know, sometimes they'll get a good appointed attorney, sometimes they won't.

01:33:32.000 That one, to me, seemed like that was gonna go that way anyway because of Rodney King.

01:33:37.000 I don't think that had anything to do with being a good jury system or whether or not the prosecutors weren't as good as the defense attorneys.

01:33:45.000 I think that was just whore shit. 1.00

01:33:48.000 Kind of a foregone conclusion.

01:33:49.000 Yeah, the way he's trying on the glove.

01:33:52.000 Get the fuck out of here.

01:33:53.000 He wasn't gonna just slip it on.

01:33:54.000 It was a circus.

01:33:55.000 But it was also a wake-up call to people that just because someone's guilty doesn't mean they get convicted.

01:34:00.000 True.

01:34:01.000 You could see it that way, too.

01:34:02.000 I remember watching that case, watching how they did it live on television, the verdict.

01:34:08.000 And I remember being in my apartment going, whoa.

01:34:12.000 This girl I was dating at the time, she started crying.

01:34:14.000 She couldn't believe it.

01:34:15.000 I remember where I was when that verdict was read.

01:34:18.000 I was shucking oysters at Barnacle Bills on North Monroe.

01:34:23.000 I remember feeling like something really awful had just happened, but I understood it because of Rodney King, and I understood it not just because of Rodney King, because of what had happened to the community in Los Angeles that for decades had been abused by police.

01:34:46.000 Now, whether or not one wrong...

01:34:50.000 Begets another and whether that's rough justice, you know, I don't even feel like I'm in a position to say I don't think that there's ever been a more guilty person put on trial than O.J. Simpson.

01:35:01.000 Pretty fucking guilty.

01:35:02.000 I mean, you have the victim's blood in your car, in your house.

01:35:07.000 I mean, somebody gave me a copy of that book that he wrote if I did it and my wife threw it out.

01:35:14.000 Did you even get to read it?

01:35:16.000 No.

01:35:16.000 I never was going to read it.

01:35:17.000 It's one of those books I was just going to put on the shelf.

01:35:18.000 I just watched the news.

01:35:19.000 The fuck is that?

01:35:22.000 You know, there's certain books.

01:35:23.000 It's so wild.

01:35:23.000 You have somebody in your office.

01:35:24.000 You go, look, somebody gave me this book.

01:35:26.000 I'm not reading it.

01:35:27.000 It's so difficult because, you know, one thing that always stuck with me about that case is the, and I won't mention them by name, the moral high ground that some of the lawyers involved have taken, you know, on...

01:35:41.000 Various social and criminal justice reform issues.

01:35:44.000 And always in the back of my mind, I'd be like, you fucking defended O.J. Simpson.

01:35:47.000 What are you talking about?

01:35:49.000 That's number one.

01:35:50.000 And the second part of it is the human cost behind that tragedy also.

01:35:55.000 I have these seared images into my brain of that Goldman family, the sister and the father, where they were very outward with their torment. 0.98

01:36:09.000 And I recently watched the—I'm a sucker for it, I guess I'm admitting it—for the true crime genre, but I watched the latest documentary.

01:36:19.000 There's a new one on Netflix.

01:36:21.000 There's always a new one.

01:36:22.000 On O.J.? On O.J. And it's very well done.

01:36:26.000 It is.

01:36:26.000 And it's like 30 years later.

01:36:28.000 And I know that there have been a few.

01:36:30.000 This one is excellent.

01:36:32.000 And, you know, Kim Goldman is still—this ruined her life. 1.00

01:36:38.000 On the flip side, you have these, you know, when there's a wrongful conviction, that was in my mind a tragedy going the other way, but when there's a wrongful conviction, it's not just the people that are in there doing all the suffering.

01:36:55.000 It's their families.

01:36:56.000 It's their kids.

01:36:57.000 You know, there is, it has a ripple effect.

01:37:02.000 Where there is a community of people fighting for them.

01:37:06.000 And I just wish I had some sort of magical power to pull these prosecutors into what that emotional tumult is like.

01:37:15.000 I was grateful that I had, you know, J.D. was able to let his guard down.

01:37:20.000 And I don't know but for his experience being wrongfully accused of something.

01:37:26.000 And, you know, that he would have...

01:37:29.000 Have had the openness to hearing it.

01:37:31.000 And, you know, the way that he was charged with a crime without a grand jury.

01:37:36.000 And I don't think that there's a person among us that if in your worst moments, if someone was recording you and you're saying things you wish you didn't say to a significant other, that's what he did.

01:37:50.000 That's the crime.

01:37:51.000 I mean, hey, I'll tell on myself.

01:37:54.000 There are things that I've done that if someone was recording it.

01:37:57.000 Or things that I've said that I wish I didn't do or say that, you know, but for the grace of God, I fucked it up.

01:38:08.000 But, you know, I mean, anyone in their private moments, you know, and then to just use that to weaponize and undermine, you know, to me, is he a perfect man?

01:38:21.000 No, he's not a perfect man.

01:38:23.000 Perfect man doesn't exist.

01:38:24.000 Yeah, am I saying it because he ended up agreeing with me?

01:38:27.000 No.

01:38:28.000 He's a human that errs, just like all of us.

01:38:32.000 And I think we need more prosecutors, more judges like this man that have been on both sides of it and are willing to set their egos aside, willing to suffer whatever consequences come from it.

01:38:46.000 You know, he told me at one point, when he was nervous about doing this, these people ruined my life because I exonerated.

01:38:54.000 Two people.

01:38:54.000 He said, they've been after me ever since.

01:38:57.000 And the fact that that sort of one-upsmanship and that competitiveness that you referred to earlier, it's just sad to me that we can't get over ourselves enough.

01:39:08.000 What bothers me so much is that I gave them that opening.

01:39:12.000 I gave them that opening.

01:39:14.000 And somebody was hurt that I cared about very much and used and exploited.

01:39:19.000 And it's not like they're calling her today going, hey, how are you doing?

01:39:22.000 Are you doing okay?

01:39:23.000 I mean, it was simply, you know, political.

01:39:26.000 It was just political in its entirety.

01:39:29.000 And I feel like I had a lot more years, Joe, to kind of look at these kind of cases because I was open to it.

01:39:34.000 And, you know, when I mentioned that those are just the only two I reviewed, how many more are there?

01:39:39.000 And I'll never see them.

01:39:40.000 And it was because of a mistake I made.

01:39:42.000 Do you think you're gonna run again?

01:39:45.000 You know...

01:39:47.000 I really loved the experience of politics.

01:39:50.000 I was a door-to-door guy, Joe.

01:39:52.000 I didn't have any money in the beginning because nobody gives you money when you first start.

01:39:56.000 And so I just went door-to-door like eight, nine hours a day.

01:39:58.000 My dad would take me.

01:39:59.000 My dad's 75 now, but he was 70. You're a big fucker.

01:40:02.000 I wouldn't let you in my house.

01:40:04.000 I'd be like, this guy's going to rob me.

01:40:05.000 Brother, you'd be surprised.

01:40:07.000 You'd be surprised.

01:40:07.000 People just let you right in?

01:40:09.000 You know what?

01:40:10.000 You look a little too dangerous.

01:40:11.000 I got really good at reading somebody when they came to the door.

01:40:15.000 How quickly I could be, how much time I had.

01:40:17.000 I could take.

01:40:18.000 My goal was to get you to smile, be happy that I show up, and then leave before you ask me to leave.

01:40:23.000 And I really enjoyed doing this.

01:40:25.000 I thought the rest of my career was going to be politics.

01:40:28.000 And so I'm at this kind of interesting crossroads where I don't really know what I'm going to do next.

01:40:33.000 Well, hopefully this conversation will help you in that regard.

01:40:35.000 Yeah, maybe.

01:40:37.000 I'm sure it will.

01:40:38.000 And I'm hoping that...

01:40:40.000 All this stuff that you revealed will cause people, and let's be as charitable about this as possible, to just review things and maybe take the correct approach.

01:40:51.000 I hope it does.

01:40:52.000 It seems like if you expose something to this extent that you have today, it seems like something has to be done.

01:41:00.000 You can't just allow this to go on.

01:41:02.000 There's too much we know now.

01:41:04.000 Yeah.

01:41:05.000 And too much that's been revealed.

01:41:06.000 I don't want egos to get in the way.

01:41:10.000 If there's more lurking beneath, it's going to get found out at some point.

01:41:15.000 You know, we filed a public records request with the AG's office so that we could see what communications occurred between, if any, between the incoming prosecutor, Sillo, and Yost, who's the AG of Ohio.

01:41:29.000 We're entitled to that.

01:41:32.000 And, you know, at the time this decision came out, the first decision from Judge Cook...

01:41:37.000 We filed a public records request with him, and he sent it to us.

01:41:43.000 And it turned out that, I don't know if it was before or after this decision, but this guy Rosenbaum was the one, I believe, that made the request or that sent an email to Judge Cook saying, you were at the Lorain County Prosecutor's Office in the past.

01:42:01.000 Maybe you shouldn't be sitting in judgment of this.

01:42:04.000 So there are communications that must exist, I would think, between the AG and the prosecutor.

01:42:09.000 But yeah, all this will come to light, and we're not going anywhere.

01:42:13.000 We're going to keep on pushing until—and the easy thing to do is just—all we're asking is look at the objective facts.

01:42:21.000 That's why I want to do it.

01:42:22.000 I think what would help in terms of reform is what's the downside of hearing this out publicly?

01:42:32.000 Let me make my presentation to you and make it a public hearing.

01:42:38.000 What's the downside of the community knowing what evidence exists against these four men or the lack of evidence?

01:42:48.000 And I just hope we end up connecting with them on some sort of human level so that they can put whatever it is aside that is causing them to have this pushback.

01:43:01.000 And, you know, these—I used to be way harder on myself about making a change happen, and you know this because you've watched my evolution in that regard.

01:43:12.000 And I just realized we just got to keep, you know, building the sandcastle one grain at a time.

01:43:17.000 And when you—again, I said it before, I'll say it again—when you walk hand-in-hand with another individual and helping restore their freedom, I don't care.

01:43:30.000 There's nothing like it.

01:43:31.000 Yeah, there's no drug, there's no material, but there's just nothing that can match that feeling of playing a role in that and helping them just live out their days breathing free air.

01:43:42.000 You know what I find most interesting, and Nancy exonerates this, is the lack of bitterness is pretty amazing in some of these exonerees.

01:43:51.000 You're dealing with somebody that did 15 years for a crime, not only that she didn't commit, but that no crime occurred, and she's still not bitter.

01:43:59.000 And they still fight her at every moment.

01:44:01.000 Right now she's battling, you know, there's a statutory remedy for getting paid when you're an innocent individual when you're in jail. 0.64

01:44:06.000 But you have a relatively high standard of proving you're innocent to get the money.

01:44:10.000 There's nobody in a better position to prove they're innocent than Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen, and they still fight them tooth and nail every day.

01:44:16.000 I mean, after the case exonerated them, I tried my hardest to...

01:44:22.000 Forgo the interest of the state and I actually stipulated in the motion that they were innocent which is very unusual because obviously that's Acknowledging that the state screwed up pretty big and because my goal was to get her paid I mean, you know, I got criticized, you know, from some people that basically, you know, that shouldn't be my role.

01:44:41.000 But my role is, you know, if hurting the state represents justice, then that's what happens.

01:44:46.000 And sometimes it's costly.

01:44:47.000 You put someone in prison for 15 years because you were reckless in the way you did it, then they should deserve compensation.

01:44:53.000 And she was at the peak of her earning years.

01:44:56.000 You know, she was a middle-class woman, but she was at the peak of her life. 0.69

01:44:58.000 And, you know, I think what I really want to get out today is Amber is her daughter, and she's got several children.

01:45:04.000 And they've become like family to me.

01:45:05.000 And Amber wanted to make sure that I told you how big of a fan she was, Joe.

01:45:09.000 Shout out to Amber. 0.94

01:45:10.000 Shout out to Amber. 0.94

01:45:11.000 She's going to love that.

01:45:12.000 But the truth of the matter is I got to know them.

01:45:14.000 And I got to know the fact that their story is the untold story.

01:45:17.000 Imagine having your mom leave you.

01:45:19.000 And then for the worst allegations that you could possibly have is child molestation.

01:45:23.000 And so every day they had to fight in school.

01:45:26.000 Every day.

01:45:27.000 And the older brother had to take care of the family.

01:45:30.000 And the fact that she's still fighting to get paid 50-something thousand a year for the time that she was in. 0.86

01:45:36.000 That's what the statutory remedy is.

01:45:38.000 And they're still fighting it every minute.

01:45:40.000 Eventually, I had to get off.

01:45:41.000 It's so crazy.

01:45:43.000 It's such a small amount of money.

01:45:45.000 It happens in every state.

01:45:48.000 I was on the way here.

01:45:49.000 I just took his card out of my wallet.

01:45:52.000 I was on the way up here.

01:45:54.000 And I was sitting next to a guy that I asked to borrow his phone cord to charge my phone.

01:46:00.000 And we started talking.

01:46:03.000 And it turns out he's in the Florida House of Representatives.

01:46:08.000 His name is John Snyder.

01:46:10.000 Marine Corps veteran.

01:46:13.000 Wasn't a lawyer.

01:46:15.000 Which made him in many ways a heck of a lot more down to earth.

01:46:23.000 He told me he got into politics because he was, like, tired of complaining and wanted to actually do something different.

01:46:28.000 And we got to talking.

01:46:29.000 Where are you going?

01:46:30.000 I told him where I was going.

01:46:32.000 He happened to have you—he happened to be listening to you and Elon from the other day.

01:46:38.000 And I said, I'm actually going there.

01:46:41.000 And he said, you know, I'm a Republican.

01:46:45.000 And growing up in this party, it was all tough on crime.

01:46:51.000 And now I sit through the claims bill process.

01:46:54.000 A claims bill in Florida is when you have been wrongfully incarcerated and you're asking the legislator to compensate you.

01:47:01.000 And he said it changed my entire perspective on you can be for a position or against a position, but you don't understand the subtleties and the vagaries until you're in it.

01:47:15.000 And to have somebody...

01:47:18.000 And then he took out his card and gave it to me and he said, if there's any way I can help, there's some bills pending.

01:47:23.000 And that kind of openness and that kind of, you know, he struck me as a guy that was super comfortable with himself and secure with himself to be able to have that approach.

01:47:35.000 And if we could all have that approach, I'm not right about, I've fucked up plenty.

01:47:40.000 I'm not right about every position I take.

01:47:43.000 I'm just trying to find, you know, some common ground.

01:47:47.000 The humanity in all of us should always bend toward the truth, right?

01:47:53.000 And that's what we mean when we say we want justice for these men.

01:47:56.000 That's what we want.

01:48:00.000 It's undeniable.

01:48:01.000 How could anybody argue with that?

01:48:03.000 No.

01:48:03.000 It's pretty well laid out.

01:48:05.000 When we talked about that 2008 hearing...

01:48:07.000 With Al Cleveland.

01:48:08.000 I was a young attorney.

01:48:10.000 I was probably 27. And I'd only been practicing for a year.

01:48:13.000 And I remember being in there waiting for my case to be called.

01:48:16.000 I had another client.

01:48:17.000 And I saw one of the most unbelievable interactions I've ever seen in a courtroom still to this day was Al Cleveland begging William Avery Jr. to tell the truth.

01:48:26.000 Begging him.

01:48:27.000 And I didn't know exactly what the facts were.

01:48:29.000 I later found out.

01:48:30.000 But, you know, I'm sitting in this courtroom watching what seemed to be very genuine emotion.

01:48:34.000 And a man...

01:48:36.000 Begging another man just to tell the truth so he can get out of prison.

01:48:40.000 And it stuck with me.

01:48:43.000 And even now, it's like, Al's a very charismatic guy.

01:48:47.000 You know, what's devastating is what was his potential.

01:48:52.000 Well, Al and his wife, Roberta, are remarkable.

01:48:57.000 Still married.

01:48:58.000 Married the whole time, Joe.

01:48:59.000 Crazy.

01:49:00.000 And, you know, John Edwards is still suffering.

01:49:03.000 He's in prison.

01:49:05.000 Benson Davis and Lenworth Edwards, you know, my message to the four of you is I won't stop fighting.

01:49:13.000 Unfortunately for my mental health, but fortunately for your prospects, I'm going to keep digging until I get you guys free.

01:49:21.000 And thank you again.

01:49:24.000 I always want to make sure I show my gratitude to continuing to give this forum.

01:49:27.000 It makes a huge difference.

01:49:32.000 Saying it makes a huge difference is a terrible understatement.

01:49:35.000 In my wildest dreams, if someone would have said to me, the prosecutor that agreed to set these men free would be sitting next to you on the show, I would have bet the house against it.

01:49:50.000 And I think that this is just a remarkable forum to be able to...

01:49:57.000 Tell these stories and to get into the level of detail where we can touch people.

01:50:02.000 And there's too many people in criminal justice reform that don't extend their hand to prosecutors and people in law enforcement.

01:50:13.000 And it's been an eye-opening and incredibly rewarding experience to get to know these folks that feel just as passionate about issues that are on the other side.

01:50:23.000 And that's what has led me more to the middle.

01:50:27.000 And, you know, I thank you for your humanity, JD. And I hope you do run for something again because we need more people like you in those seats.

01:50:35.000 Well, you know, I appreciate you saying that.

01:50:37.000 I think that, like you said, humility is important.

01:50:39.000 And I've always tried to pride myself on admitting when I'm wrong and knowing when I'm wrong and knowing when I don't know.

01:50:47.000 I think one of the problems I see in society now is like everybody wants to know and they don't know.

01:50:52.000 Right.

01:50:52.000 And it's like sacrilegious to say you don't know.

01:50:56.000 Right.

01:50:57.000 And I find that to be really just lying.

01:50:59.000 You know, if you're just guessing, you're just lying, really.

01:51:02.000 It's foolish.

01:51:03.000 Yeah.

01:51:03.000 And so I try to always put my ego in check.

01:51:05.000 And I'm telling you, I can't stress enough that doing defense work is really what allows that.

01:51:10.000 Vision for me to kind of understand where it can happen because I've had innocent clients and in my experience, you know, it was most likely domestic violence cases because, you know, passions arise, there's cheating going on, there's infidelity, you know, emotions run high, it's easy to make accusations.

01:51:26.000 And so those were the scenarios.

01:51:28.000 Now, obviously, I got to make a caveat.

01:51:29.000 There's very terrible domestic violence cases that are awful.

01:51:32.000 But because of the dynamic between the victim and the perpetrator, that seemed to generate, in my view, any cases that I had that were innocent.

01:51:41.000 Typically were cases like that where, for example, the allegations didn't match up.

01:51:45.000 So, you know, someone said they struck their head on the curb, but there was no injuries, you know, stuff like that.

01:51:50.000 But it's so easy to get probable cause.

01:51:52.000 Probable cause is very easy.

01:51:53.000 And so, you know, I was so lucky when I got charged.

01:51:56.000 I joked around with Jim Burge, my co-defendant and mentor for many years, who taught me a lot, was, thank God I've got the smartest lawyer as a co-defendant ever.

01:52:04.000 You know, thank God, you know, because, I mean, you know, I was, and I also learned that I'm probably not the best client as a lawyer.

01:52:12.000 I used to bitch about clients like me.

01:52:14.000 And I think I'm that way.

01:52:16.000 I'm sitting at the defense table trying to dictate everything to my lawyer.

01:52:19.000 It's like I wasn't the best client.

01:52:21.000 And shout out to Mike Cameron, who was our lawyer, who really had to deal with me.

01:52:25.000 But the truth of the matter is, when it happens to you, the only thing I disagree, Josh, is even if it didn't happen to me, I knew that it could happen.

01:52:32.000 I would have listened no matter what.

01:52:34.000 I think that I was briefed about this case in 2020. 223, I was invited down to Cincinnati for a Ohio Innocence Project.

01:52:45.000 I think I was probably the only prosecutor in there.

01:52:47.000 But I've got to be honest, I never really felt comfortable in...

01:52:51.000 We would go to Ohio Prosecuting Association meetings, my mentor and I, and we never really fit in.

01:52:57.000 I mean, prosecutions, they're fantastic, but they're almost like the hall monitors in class.

01:53:02.000 You know what I mean?

01:53:03.000 And I always just thought defense attorneys were much more fun to hang out with.

01:53:06.000 But we always kind of...

01:53:08.000 Because I have so much respect for defense attorneys, I remember the...

01:53:13.000 The presenters would go up and kind of clown on defense attorneys, and I'd look around, and me and Jim were the only ones pissed off.

01:53:18.000 You know, we were pissed off going, hey, what the hell?

01:53:21.000 You know, defense attorneys are trying to do their thing, man.

01:53:22.000 That's the opposing team.

01:53:24.000 It is.

01:53:25.000 Opposing quarterbacks are pussy. 1.00

01:53:26.000 And that's the problem.

01:53:27.000 And that's the problem right there, Joe, is really we're all looking for the same thing, justice.

01:53:31.000 And you hit it right on the head.

01:53:32.000 It's about winning.

01:53:33.000 And I almost trust police much more than I almost do prosecutors because it seems like there's an inherent desire for them to get it right.

01:53:41.000 And it's more of the prosecutors that want to win.

01:53:44.000 And I just had such a great experience with law enforcement.

01:53:48.000 And they changed my mind because I didn't really like the narrative and I criticized my own party about it.

01:53:53.000 The anti-law enforcement rhetoric is just unwarranted.

01:54:00.000 Agreed.

01:54:00.000 It's a terribly difficult job that gets no reward and your life is in danger every day.

01:54:06.000 And Joe, when I was county prosecutor, I had about 10 police-involved shootings with fatalities in four years.

01:54:12.000 So about two a year, two or three a year.

01:54:14.000 Every one of them was good.

01:54:16.000 Every one of them was good.

01:54:17.000 And, you know, I would get with the officers, and I had a policy, which is a little unusual, where if I made a decision that a shooting was good, I would make a decision, that's it, it never went to the grand jury.

01:54:27.000 It's easy for prosecutors to kind of just dish it off over the grand jury, then that's not their responsibility anymore.

01:54:33.000 But I felt like I wasn't going to put something through the grand jury that I didn't believe in.

01:54:36.000 So I had officers that, you know, the difficult part about being a police officer is when you have to use that lethal force, then you get people armchair quarterbacking it for the next six months.

01:54:46.000 Do you know what I mean?

01:54:47.000 On what you should have done, what you shouldn't have done.

01:54:49.000 And what happens is, what they get in the end of that is, hey, congratulations, you're not getting indicted.

01:54:55.000 When in reality, maybe we should say, hey, thank you for saving your partner's life.

01:54:59.000 And thank you for saving the community from a guy that's obviously dangerous enough to pull a weapon on a police officer.

01:55:05.000 I was just watching an officer involved shooting on one of the social media platforms the other day where there's this...

01:55:13.000 Young very large man who seemed to be Something was wrong.

01:55:17.000 So some some mental issue.

01:55:19.000 Yeah, he was just talking crazy Maybe he was on drugs and the cops are trying to calm him down for like the longest time It's a long prolonged video.

01:55:28.000 He escalates and then he eventually gets physical And I think they tried to tase him, and it didn't work.

01:55:34.000 And then they wind up shooting this guy, and the officer broke down in tears when it was over.

01:55:38.000 He was devastated.

01:55:39.000 He couldn't believe he had to do this.

01:55:41.000 He was horrified.

01:55:42.000 His hands were shaking.

01:55:44.000 The other officer was comforting him, trying to get him to breathe and calm down.

01:55:47.000 But when you see it in real life like that, you see how it actually went down, like how they're trying to make these split-second decisions.

01:55:57.000 Big crazed guy who's out of his fucking mind is running at you.

01:56:01.000 Right.

01:56:01.000 And you don't know what to do.

01:56:02.000 You don't know what's gonna happen.

01:56:03.000 Is this gonna be the end of your life?

01:56:05.000 It didn't happen.

01:56:06.000 That happens all the time.

01:56:07.000 Cops get their guns taken away all the time. 0.75

01:56:09.000 It's a terrifying situation.

01:56:10.000 And so I always am very careful to kind of parse out the fact that, you know, I'm always amazed by how much patience they really do show.

01:56:17.000 Yes.

01:56:18.000 I mean, the millions of interactions that happen every day.

01:56:20.000 Now listen, does it happen and there's bad conduct?

01:56:22.000 Yeah, I indicted police officers.

01:56:23.000 There was some I had to indict.

01:56:25.000 But I believe the vast majority, they just want to go home.

01:56:30.000 100%.

01:56:30.000 They just want to go home.

01:56:31.000 The vast majority of interactions that people have with police are positive.

01:56:34.000 You just only get to see the ones that are negative, that get recorded.

01:56:38.000 That's right.

01:56:38.000 And then you get sampling bias, because all you see is negative, and so you start thinking.

01:56:43.000 I'm sure you saw that Harvard professor who conducted that study.

01:56:46.000 He did a study about violence and police encounters and he found it was like it wasn't biased towards black people and people attacked him.

01:56:58.000 Right.

01:56:58.000 Because we're seeing it every day.

01:57:00.000 You're seeing these videos every day.

01:57:01.000 But they're the only videos you're seeing.

01:57:03.000 That's right.

01:57:04.000 There's the only ones you see.

01:57:05.000 That's right.

01:57:05.000 You don't see the, have a nice day, thank you for your service, I appreciate you too, knuckles, drive safe.

01:57:11.000 You don't see those.

01:57:12.000 That's right.

01:57:12.000 Those are real.

01:57:13.000 Those things happen where cops smooth things over and everybody's okay and they go home and everybody's fine.

01:57:20.000 That happens too.

01:57:21.000 That happens a lot.

01:57:22.000 It happens way more than the other way.

01:57:23.000 But you think cop, murder, black people, bad, everything happened, horrible, bang, bang, windows shot out.

01:57:30.000 You see those videos over and over again and they run like a fucking s***.

01:57:33.000 They do.

01:57:34.000 Yes.

01:57:36.000 But those are statistically insignificant almost.

01:57:40.000 When it comes to the grand scheme of things, I mean, it doesn't happen very often.

01:57:43.000 When it does, we have to punish it harshly.

01:57:45.000 But I grew more respectful of police officers the closer I got to them.

01:57:48.000 I think the big problem that people have these days is you see something and you see it often and you see it replayed.

01:57:58.000 And it's just like you said, it becomes a slideshow in your mind, and it's hard to know how frequent the occurrence is.

01:58:06.000 I had an interesting thing happen to me recently where my son Carter made the travel baseball team, and I'm like, he's like the new kid on the team because we moved from New York.

01:58:18.000 And we went to our first tournament, and I'm the new dad.

01:58:24.000 Hanging out because it's out of town.

01:58:26.000 And I sit down at a table with these other three dads and they're introducing themselves.

01:58:31.000 And we just struck up a conversation.

01:58:33.000 And we were talking about bias.

01:58:36.000 And I said, you know, I would probably be the wrong...

01:58:40.000 We were talking about, you know, juries and jury service.

01:58:44.000 And I said, you know, I'd be like the wrong...

01:58:47.000 Oh, someone asked me, one of the dads asked me, how do I get out of jury service?

01:58:51.000 I said, tell the truth.

01:58:52.000 Because we're all biased.

01:58:54.000 We all have a bias against something.

01:58:55.000 And I was like, like for me, I've done a bunch of cases where corrections officers, like, did something bad to someone.

01:59:04.000 So I'd probably be bad for a case like that.

01:59:08.000 Because the reality is that...

01:59:10.000 Most of them do their job and want to go home and it's dangerous.

01:59:14.000 But I was recognizing my own bias.

01:59:17.000 And I look around the table and they're all looking at each other smiling.

01:59:21.000 And I knew it in that moment that one of them was a corrections officer.

01:59:27.000 It was my buddy Ryan Gillis.

01:59:30.000 And I was like, oh, how do I wipe this shit off my foot?

01:59:34.000 So I've gotten to know Ryan.

01:59:35.000 And he's a corrections officer in Florida.

01:59:38.000 And he's just a great guy.

01:59:40.000 He's quiet and soft-spoken, and my daughter was going to the county fair, and there's rough nights, some nights where kids try to start fights, and I was talking to him about it, and he goes, you know, I do security detail there, and I'm not there that night, but I'm going to tell the guys, you know.

02:00:01.000 If she has an issue, have her call.

02:00:03.000 And he's a great dude, you know?

02:00:06.000 There's great people in all walks of life.

02:00:07.000 And I look at him, and sometimes I'll be thinking, man, I wonder what his day was like.

02:00:12.000 Because he has, you know, a really tough, dangerous job.

02:00:17.000 And I have such deep respect for him.

02:00:19.000 And it was like one of those moments where I was like, shit, that came out wrong.

02:00:22.000 I articulated it wrong.

02:00:24.000 And I think the problem...

02:00:25.000 That a lot of people have.

02:00:26.000 And we're in a society where you're so quick to pick a side and to label something.

02:00:32.000 And I'm just trying to do a lot less, be quicker to listen and slower to speak when it comes to making some big judgment about a group of people.

02:00:43.000 Because, you know, you've got to take each of these situations individually.

02:00:50.000 Well said.

02:00:51.000 Well said.

02:00:52.000 Words to live by.

02:00:53.000 That's right.

02:00:55.000 I think we did it.

02:00:57.000 I think we got it all out.

02:00:58.000 I do, too.

02:00:59.000 I do.

02:01:00.000 Thank you, JD. Thank you for having me.

02:01:02.000 That was really, really great, man.

02:01:02.000 Thank you for having me.

02:01:03.000 I really appreciate you doing this, and I appreciate your honesty and the way you're able to express yourself.

02:01:08.000 Thank you.

02:01:08.000 It was excellent, Josh.

02:01:11.000 I love you.

02:01:13.000 I love you more, bro.

02:01:14.000 Thank you for everything.

02:01:15.000 My pleasure.

02:01:16.000 All right.

The Joe Rogan Experience - March 11, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2287 - Josh Dubin & J.D. Tomlinson

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Summary

Transcript