Latest / Wrongful Conviction Podcasts / 547: #547 Jason Flom with John Restivo

Transcript

547: #547 Jason Flom with John Restivo · Wrongful Conviction Podcasts

• 00:00:04 Speaker 1: I'm here today with a major announcement with my longtime producer Connor Hall in eight decades old murder case that we covered back in twenty twenty. 00:00:15 Speaker 2: Yes, so this was the wrongful conviction of three men, John Restivo who we got to talk to, as well as Dennis Halstead and John Kogit, who were all convicted of a nineteen eighty four rape and murder. And then they were later cleared by DNA testing and then freed in two thousand and three, while the actual perpetrator remained free until it appears yesterday, October fifteen, twenty twenty five. This is a now sixty three year old man named Richard Bilediteou Richard Bilideau. 00:00:42 Speaker 1: And what's extraordinary about this case. First of all, it feels close to home because it is close to home. This happened in Long Island. This was a sixteen year old girl named Teresa Fusco who had left her job working the snack bar at a roller ring in lynn Brook, Long Island. 00:00:58 Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, I remember going birthday parties at that skating rink. It was called Hot Skates. 00:01:03 Speaker 3: Wow. 00:01:04 Speaker 2: Yeah, kid's birthday parties. And then this is going on. 00:01:06 Speaker 1: Police said Teresa Fusco had been strangled, sexually assaulted, and beaten, and then her body was found under leaves and some shipping palace. 00:01:16 Speaker 2: Now, back in eighty four, DNA testing hadn't even been used as a forensic evidence yet, so the three men had to languish in prison waiting for the science to progress before you know, being able to use the physical evidence in this case to prove their innocence. And then when they finally did, it took another eight years before they even got free, followed by over a decade of fighting for compensation. But then you know, somewhere along the line that Prosecutor's office in Nassau County, there's some kind of change of heart. Now it may have happened because of the election of the current DA and Donnelly or whoever it was, somebody finally cared enough about finding the actual perpetrator. 00:01:56 Speaker 1: And by the way, kudos to the team that was involved and actually finally bringing this. I mean, if he's the guy, which is sure seems that way the DNA shows that he is. 00:02:07 Speaker 4: This is good. 00:02:08 Speaker 2: It's while what he says when he gets picked up, because they picked up this straw out of the garbage that he had just used out of like a smoothie or something like that. They pick it up, they swab that and it's a match. They go to talk to him and he says, well, I don't know anything about that man. A lot of people are getting away with murder back then. 00:02:26 Speaker 1: Wow, he's sixty three years old. Now he's lived free. God knows what he's doing. I'm gonna bet you, I bet dollars to donuts that they're going to find more horrible crimes attributed to this guy. 00:02:40 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:02:40 Speaker 2: Absolutely so as a cautionary tale, we are going to listen to John Restivo. John, I hope you're doing well out there. And congratulations to Nina Morrison on your federal judge. 00:02:53 Speaker 1: Nina Morrison, who was like the heart and soul of the litigation team and strategy team at the end for many years. She's now a federal judge in this case. I know this case really really shook her. 00:03:06 Speaker 2: This was her first case at the Innosons Project. 00:03:09 Speaker 1: Right, that's incredible, you're absolutely right. 00:03:11 Speaker 2: Well, without any further ado, here we go. 00:03:15 Speaker 1: On December fifth, nineteen eighty four, the naked body of a sixteen year old girl was found in a wooded area of Lynbrook, Long Island. 00:03:22 Speaker 3: The victim had. 00:03:23 Speaker 1: Been last seen leaving her job at a local roller rink about a month earlier. The medical examiner determined that the cause of death was ligature strangulation and seamen found on her Baginal swabs suggested that she had been raped. By March nineteen eighty five, authorities believed that this rape and murder were connected to similar disappearance as an investigator started focusing on Dennis Halstead, who was believed to have been associated with another young woman who had disappeared. John Restivo had been interviewed as part of this investigation and mentioned that he was acquainted with John Cogit, an occasional employee of his and his brother's moving business. After Covid was given three pole, police asserted that he lied when denying involvement with the disappearance of the sixteen year old victim. He endured twelve hours of aggressive interrogation and eventually he cracked and signed a confession that was handwritten by one of the detectives. The sixth version of events given by cogd containing information all of which was previously known to investigators. According to Kogo's false confession, the victim voluntarily got into Restivo's van, where Cogd and Halsted stripped her and Halsted raped her. Further into this coerce statement, he said that when they arrived at a cemetery, Restivo also raped her and Cooged strangled her when she regained consciousness and became frantic with the false confession at a number of hairs found in Restivo's band said to have matched the victims. The three men were tried over the course of nineteen eighty six. John Coged was tried separately and convicted of rape and murder in March, then Is Halsted and John Restivo in November. Through the concerted efforts of Centurion Ministries, Paced Law School, Post conviction Clinic, private counsel, and the Innocence Project, the defense used police department property records to finally locate and test intact baginal swabs for DNA in two thousand and three, ultimately excluding the three men as the perpetrators. John Restivo spoke with us at the Atlanta Innocence Network conference to tell their horrifying story. Together, they spent over half a century in prison for a crime they did not commit. This is Wrongful Conviction with Jason Plum. You're listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early and ad free by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction. I'm especially excited today because I've got a guest who I've wanted to have on my podcast from long before I even had a podcast. So ever since I read your story in The New Yorker, John Restivo, I've been sort of in awe of your story, your your case, your everything. 00:06:12 Speaker 3: So I'm really I'm really happy you're here. 00:06:15 Speaker 4: Yeah, what a long, strange trip it's been. 00:06:17 Speaker 3: Yeah, how about it? 00:06:18 Speaker 1: And like I always say, I'm sorry you're here, but I'm happy you're here. 00:06:21 Speaker 3: So and with you. 00:06:24 Speaker 1: Nina Morrison is a return guest on the show today. Nina is the senior staff attorney at the Innocence Project in New York. 00:06:31 Speaker 3: Welcome back, Thank. 00:06:32 Speaker 5: You, Jason. It's always so nice to. 00:06:34 Speaker 1: Be here, and this is going to be an amazing experience for me, I think for everyone who's listening as well, mainly because of you. 00:06:42 Speaker 3: John. So let's get right into it. 00:06:43 Speaker 1: So, and yours is a New York case, right, which is which makes it personal to me as a New Yorker, a lifelong New Yorker. And just by way of background, John was convicted. 00:06:54 Speaker 3: Of a rape murder. 00:06:56 Speaker 1: Along with two other innocent men and sentenced to thirty three and a half years life could well have been executed if not for Governor Mario Cuomo blocking repeatedly the death penalty in New York State. I think that's an important thing to touch on. But let's go back to it. All these crimes we talk about are horrible. This one is particularly terrible, right. This is the rape and murder of a young girl, sixteen year old girl, And obviously everybody wants to see those crimes solved, but they don't want to see it solved this way. I mean, when we get the wrong people locked up, whoever it is that did this was free to commit other heinous crimes. But take us back to the crime itself. And how did you first hear about it? I mean, you were at the time, you were in the moving business. 00:07:38 Speaker 3: What were you doing? 00:07:39 Speaker 6: Yeah, I was in a moving business with my brother, right, And when young lady disappeared, we had seen articles in the newspaper. There was missing persons fly is on different store windows. 00:07:52 Speaker 4: Or telephone polls, so. 00:07:53 Speaker 6: People in the community knew that the young lady who's missing, which town was this just was in Limbrook, New York, in Nasville County all around. Yeah, And there was a couple of articles in a newspaper. So approximately three weeks later, a body is found and it's identified as being her body, and now instead of it being a missing person's case, it's a homicide. 00:08:19 Speaker 1: And this case, it's got so many layers because you have three guys, which makes it really especially tragic because the other two guys that were convicted of the same time that you were convicted of were just as innocent as you were. But one of them confessed, and we know how that goes as well. But every one of those even inside of that false confession, there's a lot of nuance to those situations. Do you want to talk about that? Because I was a guy named Kogut, right, Well. 00:08:47 Speaker 6: Part of the problem with the interrogation process that he was put through is that the police lied to him. And I understand, okay, the police are allowed to lie to you, but he took a lot to technifize, and the police told him. 00:09:02 Speaker 4: He failed the light detected tests. 00:09:05 Speaker 6: And we had experts that actually viewed the you know, the poly charts, and our experts said that, you know, he didn't lie, right, that he was telling the truth, but the detectives used that as a tool against him. You know, while this guy is being you know, he's in a small room with a couple of these let's call him thugs because that's what they are. Don't get me wrong. I'm not calling all police thugs. We need the police, and I'm not saying at all and that's yeah, so. 00:09:38 Speaker 4: I'm not calling all police bad. 00:09:41 Speaker 6: But so they held that over his head, saying that, okay, you lied during the polygraph test, which was an actual lie. I mean they were lying to him, right, And their polygraph expert said, well, I don't really go by the charts. I go by the person's demeanor. I'm giving them, well, I'm giving them the tests. 00:10:05 Speaker 5: It's just a tool they're using to interrogate someone. It's not and poagraphs are not you know, people can debate whether they have any utility for determining if someone is or is not telling the truth, but police have used them for decades as part of what they the experts now call a guilt presumptive interrogation, where they bring somebody in they've already decided based on these subjective factors, like I get a feeling he's not telling me the truth, or they think they have other evidence the person did it, and once they decide that the person is guilty, the interrogation is not a search for the truth. It's a search for a confession. 00:10:41 Speaker 6: In the false confession, right, everything that the police had known, right, every fact that they knew right, was incorporated into this confession. 00:10:53 Speaker 4: Right. 00:10:54 Speaker 6: The young lady disappears in early November of nineteen eighty four. They're interrogating COVID in early March of nineteen eighty five, and according to the police, in this false confession, this fact's coming out of color of pocketbook, color of sneakies. I mean things that no normal person could ever remember. 00:11:21 Speaker 4: You know, last week, what did you have a breakfast last Monday? 00:11:24 Speaker 6: I mean, like every fact that was known, even like the piece of jewelry that they recovered that she had been wearing. Right, he supposedly remembers the type of jewelry, and since it was all fictitious to begin with. Right, every fact that they knew was incorporated into the false confession except one thing. The police didn't know the colored blouse or shirt that she was wearing on the night she disappeared. And that's the only thing that wasn't incorporated into this false confession. So, according to all of the experts, they considered as a classic false confession because no normal person would be able to actually remember all of these facts. There were just too many facts incorporated into this confession for it to be reliable. 00:12:15 Speaker 1: Okay, now we know that COVID confessed, but how did that lead to your case being brought to where it went and ultimately you being convicted and almost executed? 00:12:27 Speaker 6: The police they incorporate my name and Dennis's name into the false confession because in a way, the police had us labeled as suspects. I don't believe that we were labeled as targets. I personally believed that they were going to frame us one way to the other. Right when I done this, I wouldn't have a clue. I wouldn't have a clue after COVID confessed, falsely confessed. Now my family retained a private investigator we're trying to figure out where I was on the night this younger lady disappeared. We figured out where I was through receipts because I had just purchased the house, and that weekend I was standing in the floors. I was an ouse all night. That evening, I was on the phone with my girlfriend, who was pregnant. We were putting polyurethane on the floor. So she was pregnant. She couldn't be in an house. She was out of mother. So we had phone right kids, we had receipts, so we knew exactly where we were where I was right and Dennis was with his kids in another town, and Kovid was at a birthday party in another town. We didn't even lay eyes on each other that whole weekend, and beyond that, the three of us were never together in that van as a threesome ever, and we all had independent alibis. 00:13:43 Speaker 4: And by the time we got the. 00:13:45 Speaker 6: Trial, they took my independent alibi witness because the guy that was helping me, he was a friend at the time. He was helping me stand the floors right. He was at the house all night. The cops picked him up up the street. They bring him in for ten or twelve hours, and they tell him that, well, if you don't tell us what we want to hear, right, you're gonna end up in jail with them. So they've actually flipped my independent alibi witness from my witness to their witness. And he actually gave damage and testimony against me at trial and at the civil trial, during his testimony, the judge actually stopped the proceedings, had the jury removed and told him that you're on the borderline of being charged with perjury here because he had changed his testimony so many times, right, and when he testified at the criminal trial, he lied right, but they wouldn't give us his original grand jury testimony. So it was always my opinion that his testimony was different from what he testified at the grand jury to what he testified two years later at the criminal trial, because during that time span, the cops put so much pressure on it, dude and flip them. 00:15:01 Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, he was in an impossible situation. It doesn't excuse what he did. 00:15:05 Speaker 6: No, you're right, In a way, I felt bad for him because he was stuck in the middle of this, right, and he's under this tremendous amount of pressure by the police and he's being told, well, if you don't tell us what we want to hear, you're gonna end up in jail with him. And he sees innocent people in jail, right, and he sees how easy it was for the police to do that. 00:15:27 Speaker 3: Exactly. 00:15:28 Speaker 1: He knows what they're capable of, because he already knows you're innocent, and he knows what they're doing, So there's no reason to not believe that they would do the same. 00:15:34 Speaker 4: Thing, right. 00:15:35 Speaker 6: And then we had the other problem with the police planting evidence in the band and the judge, because that was a bench trial, so the judge concluded that the heads that they intimated that were found in my van were never in the. 00:15:50 Speaker 1: Band, right, And you know, let's talk about that because that is even by the standards of some of the crazy shit that we see in this line of work. That's going even beyond some of the misconducts. 00:16:05 Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, this is so far. 00:16:06 Speaker 1: They were literally pulling hairs from the corpse and then taking those hairs and putting them in the van, Like who does a thing like that? 00:16:15 Speaker 5: Well, who does it? Are police who are desperate to solve a crime that has the community absolutely terrified and up in arms. So what John talked about earlier about the flyers around town, I mean this was the mid eighties, you know, bedroom community, suburban Long Island. The young woman who was killed in the case that John was falsely convicted in her name is Teresa Fusco, was actually one of three young women that went missing around that time, and the other two to this day, those crimes have never been solved, and for all we know, it may have been the same killer or killers in those cases. But by the time Teresa disappeared, she was missing for what was it, John, three weeks? Three weeks, about three weeks before her body was found. So the terror and the paranoia that they're feeling in this town is only heightening. And the parents, the elected officials, the teachers are saying, solve this crime, solve this crime. And after she was found naked, brutalized in the woods, just a horrible way to go, you know. The police spent months basically bringing in every working class guy between the ages of eighteen and twenty nine in town in and working them over trying to see if they could find a weak spot until they get poor John Kogd who had had a really rough life grown up in foster care, nobody to fight for him, and even he held out for hours and hours un till he finally confessed, you know, and gave a false confession that, as John said, was a classic false confession, and that it had no information that the police didn't already know, so he couldn't point them to clothing or jewelry or fruits of the crime or anything about her that wasn't part of the police's knowledge. But everything they did know almost too perfectly. But when it came to the hairs. Part of what was wrong with this case, when they decided they were going to pin it on John and his two friends, is that they had no physical evidence. There was no evidence again them, no DNA, no blood typing, nothing of hers that was ever found with them, no eyewitnesses as far as anybody knew at the time, who had seen what vehicles she'd gotten into, and she was leaving her job at a roller skating rink. And we don't say lightly that police frame people. I mean a lot of times police will make bad mistakes, they will cut corners, they will interview witnesses in a way that's not ethical or permissible. But in this case, there is actual scientific evidence that John and his co defendants got framed. Namely, Detective Alpi, the lead homicide detective, claimed that he found several hairs when he finally got a search warrant for John's van when he used for his moving jobs. He claimed that he found several hairs that were long hairs, looked just like Teresa's, and microscopically appeared to be the same as Teresa's hairs. We later did DNA and confirmed that they were in fact her hairs. So that would be pretty bad evidence, and normally you'd think, well, that makes John guilty. The problem was those hairs would have had to be deposited in the van during this period when John and his friends were alleged to have abducted her for just a few minutes. According to the confession, they had given her a ride and then raped her, and she was in the van for not longer, certainly no more than an hour, and then she was missing for several weeks. But the hares came from a corpse. They had this decomposition at the roots of the hairs called post mortem root banding, which basically happens when hairs are attached to a corpse that's decomposing, and so detective Vulpi takes these hairs and whether he planted them in the van or just put them in an envelope marked hairs from van that was back at the lab, we don't know and doesn't really matter. But he lied under oath and said that these hairs came from the van, and it's physically impossible because she had been decomposing for several weeks when these when these hairs were collected, they were from her autopsy, not from the van. 00:19:46 Speaker 1: I do believe that most people that are doing those jobs are doing the best they can, and we need police to keep us safe. But when you get somebody like this Vulpy character who does the type of damage that he did, they have to be held to a. 00:19:59 Speaker 6: Ca I mean, these detectives actually created a fictitious scenario after they actually watched what we think was the actual crime scene. And unbeknownst to us, the night she disappeared, a car within approximately a mile of where she was last seen was stolen, and when this car was recovered approximately a week later, they found a pair of blue striped jeans with one of the legs inside out in the back but stuff underneath the sea and on a missing persons report when she was last seen, that's what she was wearing, blue stripe jeans. So the homicide cops grabbed this car right, which was already cleaned by the owner, and the blue stripe jeans were. 00:20:51 Speaker 4: Thrown out by the Limberth Police department. 00:20:53 Speaker 6: So there was police reports regarding the stolen car and the blue striped jean right. And then there was a piece of rope missing from the car. And according to them, right, there was a piece of rope similar used as what would you say the murder weapon, ye, right, and this was missing from the car. When they brought the owner back to the area where the car was recovered, they found the piece of rope. 00:21:21 Speaker 4: But they took a picture of the piece of rope. 00:21:24 Speaker 6: And one would think that given the significance of that this piece of rope would be taken into evidence and vouched, and the police say it never was. So this is information that should have been turned over to the defense and it never was. And we never found out about this information till we were in the civil litigation stage twenty something years later. 00:21:47 Speaker 4: Correct. 00:21:48 Speaker 5: I was John's Innocence Project lawyer, We didn't know about this information. 00:21:52 Speaker 1: You know. 00:21:52 Speaker 5: A lot of times, as you know and a lot of your guests have talked about there's evidence pointing to someone's innocence, and you know, certainly in this case, this is evidence about where the crime occurred and what type of vehicle was used, which is a huge objective lead. That's different than the entire case that was against John and his co defendants, but that is evidence. Often we learn about that when we're in post conviction, meaning the person's been convicted and we're litigating their appeals and we're trying to exonerate them. In John's case, as he'll tell you, we cleared him with DNA and other evidence that we gathered as part of the Innocence Project and Centurion Ministry's investigation of the case. But we didn't even know about this other evidence the police had of his innocence until after he was exonerated. It only came out when he had lawyers representing him in his lawsuit against the police department in the county that this all came to light. So it's a really stunning fact that you can have evidence of innocence that's hidden, possibly even from the DA's because it was in the police file and only come out after someone's exonerated, and so his case is a DNA exoneration case. But as with so many, there's a the evidence that could have cleared him even before he went to trial. 00:23:15 Speaker 1: As the son of a police officer, this must have been totally surreal to you, because as much as we all grew up and when I was a son, I had, you know, ideas that I would become a policeman, right, I mean, you know, we all look up to firemen and cops. I think most boys do, especially growing up right in the year that. 00:23:32 Speaker 3: We grew up in. 00:23:33 Speaker 1: But for you, it was a very personal thing, right. You must have been very proud to have a dad who was a cop. I would think, right, right, I mean I would be. But then at the same time I would expect that you must have thought that, because of the fact that your dad was in blue, that this wouldn't happen to you, right, And was your dad around? Was he alive at this time? 00:23:54 Speaker 6: My fault passed away in January of eighty four, so he wasn't around. But my father said something to me at one time while he was on the job, and he told me, if you ever have a problem with the top, call oyer. And when the police brought me in and interrogated me for twenty plus hours. Once I was released, I immediately called a lawyer. 00:24:21 Speaker 3: Why didn't you call lawyer? At first, they. 00:24:23 Speaker 6: Wouldn't let me leave, They took my car keys. I mean, they wouldn't let me call a lawyer. You know, I was there. I mean, they weren't letting me go anywhere. And finally they let me go, and after twenty hours, I was so out of it. They wouldn't even let me drive home. They drove me home and drove my call. 00:24:40 Speaker 3: There's so many things wrong with this that I'm just like, no, this is. 00:24:44 Speaker 6: A complicated case, there's no doubt about it, and I'm just glad it's over it. But what the cops did to me, right, it's unfortunate that they can do to whoever they please. 00:25:05 Speaker 4: I mean, they could. 00:25:05 Speaker 6: They could pick somebody out of a group, right and make them a target, and then they fabricate a case around them, and that's exactly what they did to us. But from day one, I requested DNA testing, and back in the eighties mid eighties, there was no DNA testing, and back in ninety three, ninety four, ninety five, we had three different DNA tests done. One was inconclusive, the two other ones excluded us. And back in ninety five, I thought we were going to get cut loose. I thought that was going to be the end of the gospel. 00:25:36 Speaker 4: That wasn't the case. 00:25:36 Speaker 5: The judge should have been one of the first DNA glunomies in the country because he was going in pro se and he had a lawyer who was helping him out for some of that time, you know, early on, and he's incredibly smart, and he was researching and filing his own emotions. He had a DNA test from sperm from a sixteen year old girl who was a virgin that didn't come back to him or Dennis or coked, and the DAS said, eh, doesn't matter. Could have been a fourth guy, right, fourth guy. There's a third guy. There's a second guy. There's one guy. It was his firm, and it wasn't any of these guys. And he goes to court and the judges back then weren't as educated as they are now about DNA and what it shows, and you know, he had different lawyers and they said, sorry, not giving you a new trial. And so there he was, you know, in the mid nineties, starting at square one. 00:26:28 Speaker 4: Again. 00:26:29 Speaker 1: Let's just reflect on that for a second too. So you proved with DNA that you were innocent, and they're like, yeah, that's right, doesn't matter. I think probably everyone at home is experiencing the same or in your car or wherever you're listening, the same thing that I'm experiencing, which is that wait a minute, that sounds like a misprint or a misstatement. 00:26:46 Speaker 3: That can't really be true. 00:26:48 Speaker 6: The prosecutor is actually lying in the papers about the reliability of the tests. They insinuated that the test results were not reliable, which is ludicrous because the two independent tests done by two independent labs, and they identify the same exact DNA profile. So if one lab made a mistake, how could the other lab, independent lab make the same mistake and identify the exact same DNA profile. So when they argued in their papers that the tests weren't reliable, I mean, that was totally ludicrous, and the judge adopted all of this insanity. 00:27:31 Speaker 5: And then, if I remember correctly, after they realized they weren't getting anywhere for a while, the judge was getting skeptical of the reliability argument. Then they said, well, the only thing that was tested for this last round was off of a vaginal slide, which is a glass slide that the medical examiner or autopsy makes from the cotton swab that was actually had most of the sperm and the semen on it, and it was just the one part of the slide. So maybe these three guys who we convicted, maybe their DNA was on the rest of the slide or on the swabs, and we just don't have enough material. So you had to believe two things. One that the test was missing all of their DNA, but also that they had some crime partner. This mystery John Doe, who was the fourth guy whose name didn't come up in the confession, didn't come up from any of the informants, didn't come up from any of the witnesses, you know who. Everybody had been covering up for this last ten years, which was absurd, but the courts bought it. And so then they basically gave John a challenge, which was prove us wrong, prove to us that your DNA is not really there, And then. 00:28:35 Speaker 6: We did that right in two thousand and one, there was a small portion of sample left, and they retested it using new methodology where it would be able to run that result through the federal and state databases, you know, through quotas, right, And again when they tested that, it comes back matching the same DNA profile that came back in the nineties. 00:29:02 Speaker 3: Amazing man. 00:29:03 Speaker 6: Yeah, And they ran it through code is, hoping that they would get a hit, right, And since they didn't get a hit, they're still maintaining that it's not reliable. Then in two thousand and two I met Nina Morrison and IP took on more involvement in the case, right, and got us all independent lawyers. Right, They got lawyers for Dennis, they got lawyers for John And in early two thousand and three, Nina and a couple of the lawyers went to inventory evidence that the police had and lo and behold. 00:29:43 Speaker 5: For photos and maps. We were looking for some old photos related to another part of our investigation, and they wouldn't just send us the photos, so we said, fine, can we come look through the boxes? So we were out there with an ASSISTANTDA who was new to the office, relatively new, and she said, yeah, let's just go look through the boxes, so go ahead. 00:29:58 Speaker 6: So Nina and the other lawyers they opened up the boxes and they're going through the boxes and all behold, they found a plastic envelope with a glass tube in it and a swab in it, and it has the case number and Teresa Fusco's name on it, and it's vouched by Volpi. And after they insinuated all of them is that there's no samples left to be tested. It was right there in the box, you know, in the DA's officer and the police had deports wherever they were, and Nina scene is and the DA scene is, and then now they had to collaborate. Okay, now where are we going to send this to have it tested? And they sent it out to have it tested. And this is a sample that was never touched, so it's in pristine condition. 00:30:42 Speaker 5: And if anybody had you know, raped her, that that DNA is going to be on there. So they had said for years, well, the other guys, you know, John and his co defendant, their DNA was there. 00:30:53 Speaker 4: We just burned all. 00:30:54 Speaker 5: The samples so we can't protest it now. And then suddenly we had this big intact swab that everybody said was going on for fifteen years, that was finally available and not surprising to any of us, we tested it and guess what, it's the same guy whose profile has been coming up again and again, but this time because it was such a big example, the DA's office finally, you know that, plus a whole lot of other evidence we gathered, we went out and made a presentation to them, a whole coalition of people that really did take a village. It was my very first innocence project case. I was a young lawyer and very motivated, shall we say, and still am, but you know I was. I was very invested in this one, and a whole bunch of US century ministries, the Unison's project, to Delmernard and then my old law schoolassmate Terry Maroney, who was a lawyer at a big firm. We all did this big presentation with Barryscheck together and got them to finally agree. They actually caved in and agreed we didn't have to go to court. They agreed to throw out their convictions. 00:31:57 Speaker 1: You had a kind of a bright future at the time, Right, you had a pregnant girlfriend. 00:32:03 Speaker 3: Right, you had a good job. 00:32:04 Speaker 1: Right, you had a career that was growing, and all of a sudden, you're. 00:32:10 Speaker 3: Accused and ultimately convicted of. 00:32:13 Speaker 1: The worst crime that anyone could be convicted of, right, I think, which is the rape and murder of an underage person, child or a teenager or whatever. 00:32:20 Speaker 3: How did you deal with this? 00:32:22 Speaker 1: And then you had to go through this eighteen years in the maximum security prisons? 00:32:26 Speaker 3: I mean, can you kick us through that? 00:32:29 Speaker 6: In the beginning, turn my life upside down, turned my family's life upside down. But that being said, my family always supported me. Right, my original trial lawyer always supported me, and everybody always believed. 00:32:45 Speaker 4: In my innocence. 00:32:46 Speaker 6: And I had the one thing going for me that I knew that not only was I innocent, that I was framed because I watched the evidence come out during the course of the trial. So I knew that I was framed. Now it was up to me to prove all it is. So I ended up in the penitentiary, and I started going to the law library, and I started teaching myself how to use the books. I taught myself how to become a legal writer. I don't want to say illegal scholar, but I became a legal writer. And I started writing and writing, and I started writing letticed all kinds of organizations or individuals seeking help. 00:33:34 Speaker 4: And I wrote. 00:33:36 Speaker 6: Century Ministries in nineteen eighty seven and started corresponding with them, and then I started corresponding with the Innocents Project, and you know, there was a lot of setbacks, you know, like because originally, when we extract the DNA testing, the this Returnings Office refused to do it. 00:33:55 Speaker 4: This is no way we're not going to do that. 00:33:58 Speaker 6: And this was in the late eighties because DNA was first used in a criminal case. I think it was nineteen eighty eight or nineteen eighty nine, something like that, and I think it was an al leading county case. And so I wrote my lawyer, I mean, if they're going to use this to convict somebody, why can't we use this to exonerate us? 00:34:18 Speaker 4: Right? 00:34:18 Speaker 6: And I got letters signed by John by Dennis agreeing to have this DNA test done in my layal correct, right, because I'm not doing this just for me. I mean, this is a frame job, it's not like so we all agree, and my lawyer filed the motion, the judge denied it, and then my lawyer went on his own writing campaign to the DA and finally, on the eve of when New York State legislature was getting ready to sign the post conviction Statute for forty to allow DNA testing to. 00:34:55 Speaker 4: Prosecutors or the DA's office. 00:34:58 Speaker 6: Finally agreed to due to DNA testing, and that's why the DNA testing occurred in ninety three, ninety four hundred. 00:35:05 Speaker 4: And five or otherwise. 00:35:05 Speaker 6: If that legislation wasn't going to be on the books, that would have probably continue to refuse it, even though you know, people at that point were being exonerated because of the results. 00:35:14 Speaker 4: Of the DNA tests. These people fought tooth. 00:35:18 Speaker 6: And nail against this DNA test, and then when we finally got the DNA test going, they just finds it unreliable, like you mentioned before. 00:35:26 Speaker 4: But you know, I. 00:35:27 Speaker 6: Always had this hope, right and then you know, things started falling together with more people getting involved, and the more people that I got involved, the more confident I felt that I was gonna one day be vindicated. 00:35:41 Speaker 1: But let me ask you, I mean, I guess what I'm trying to figure out is it seems like it would have been really easy for you to either give up or get consumed by anger, because this was not a situation where it was a mistake. This was a situation where you were deliberately prosecuted and persecuted by people who did you incredible harm and also denied justice to the family who must have been fucking devastated. I mean, like, as a father, I can't imagine, you know what they went through, and then there's no justice for them either. So was there a secret that you could share that allowed you to sort of find this extra gear and instead of banging your head against the wall or doing whatever, you channeled this It seems like this. 00:36:27 Speaker 6: Is gonna this is gonna sound strange, but I still use this line today. 00:36:32 Speaker 4: It could be worse, right. 00:36:35 Speaker 6: And I was facing a level of adversity that the average person could never understand. 00:36:42 Speaker 4: Well, I was inside. 00:36:44 Speaker 6: I read a lot, but I didn't read you know, novels. I read a lot of nonfiction. I read a lot about World War Two. I read a lot about pous So I'm putting in my brain like, okay, me doing his life sentence for something I didn't do. How does that compare to an eighteen year old kid that is pushed onto the beach in Normandy and you know, lives for five minutes and he's gone, right, or a pow in the Philippines that is being tortured every day. So I'm putting my adversity and kind of perspective of, you know, adversity that other people in worse situations that I was in. Right at least I was getting, you know, three meals a day. I wasn't being physically tortured, nobody was pulling my fingernails out. I put it all in perspective of, you know, a peow in the Philippines or a peow in Vietnam, and I got it in my brain. Well, at the end of the day, I don't belong here, but it could be worse. 00:37:47 Speaker 5: John's too modest to talk about this, but I'm going to say he also spent on a lot of time when he was in prison trying to make it a less horrible place for other people and also helping people on the outside. So among the men, any things he did, like when I first talked to his prison counselor, she just blew out my phone with oh my god, John, He's just incredible. I want him to go home, but what are we going to do without him? He was an HIV AIDS counselor for other inmates, either on how to avoid contracting the disease or helping them deal with their diagnoses, even though he was a straight man who was HIV negative at a time in the eighties and nineties when people were scared to talk about AIDS, much less work directly with people who were affected. He'd worked with mentally ill and meates, the guys that everybody thought was crazy and were prized at the prison, and he was just trying to help them get the medication they needed and the support they needed. And then people on the outside, I know people who John was like their phone buddy. You know, family friends and young nieces and nephews who he would just call once a week and talk them through their problems in school, their issues with their families. You know, all the while he's facing the most unimaginable thing any of us think we could go through, and that's just a testament to who he is and how. 00:38:54 Speaker 4: Strong he is. 00:38:56 Speaker 1: I'm glad you said that, because that is an awesome thing to hear from me, and I'm sure many other people who are going through whatever they're going through to hear your perspective on that. And here then, Nina, you know, adding in what you were too modest or humble to talk about. It's incredible. And I got to tell you John, and you know it's true too, that I think I can speak for Nina and almost any of the other six hundred of us who are here at the Innocent Network conference who are part of the network, right, the activist, the lawyers, the social workers, the people who are just obsessed with this stuff like me. 00:39:30 Speaker 3: And the simple reason why is because of people like you. 00:39:33 Speaker 1: When someone's made aware of the quality of person that you are, and that I would say the overwhelming majority of the people, the men and women who've been exonerated, what they're made out of, it's like it only inspires us to want to do more. And that's why for anyone who's ever asked me, you know why you keep doing this, it's because of people like you. 00:39:54 Speaker 3: So you know what, can I say you have all my respect? 00:39:58 Speaker 6: Well, I look at it the other perspective because and I appreciate where you're coming from. But to me, people in nina shoes, dear my hero. People in your shoes, what you do for the movement, you're my hero. And everybody who supports. 00:40:18 Speaker 4: This movement dear my hero. 00:40:20 Speaker 6: Right because if it wasn't for people like Nina and people like you, right, I probably still be in at sixty. 00:40:27 Speaker 3: Eight, John. 00:40:28 Speaker 1: I just want to ask you one more question, though, and then I am going to get to the closing. So I interviewed Gloria Kelly on on the podcast and she said she's an amazing, amazing woman, very powerful presence, and wrongfully convicted sort of seventeen and a half years. I encourage people to listen to her episode of the podcast. 00:40:50 Speaker 3: But she said. 00:40:51 Speaker 1: Something that I think is important to hear, and I want to get your perspective on this. She said, to anyone listening, if you don't think this can happen to you, it can happen to you. 00:41:01 Speaker 4: Would you agree with that most definitely? 00:41:04 Speaker 6: And you could be walking down the street one day, just mining your business and get surrounded by cops and before you know it, you're thrown into the system and you don't have a clue as to what's going on until all of a sudden you're brought in front of a judge and you're being charged with whatever, and you're totally clueless as to what happened. And in a lot of these wrongful conviction cases, that's exactly what occurred. I mean, because if so many things that this can't happen to them, that's totally wrong, because being willfully convicted can happen to anybody, anybody, and it doesn't have anything to do with race, gender, anything. And I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy to have to go through something like this, because no matter what you do after you're exonerated, you carry it for the rest of your life. 00:41:58 Speaker 4: I mean, it doesn't go well. 00:42:00 Speaker 1: Yeah, you can't get back those years and all the things that you missed, the birthdays, the family stuff, just everything. 00:42:07 Speaker 3: I mean, nobody can give you those back. If we could, we would. 00:42:10 Speaker 1: But that being said, it's amazing to see you making the most out of it. And you're in Florida. You're joining some sun and some palm trees or whatever it is down there, and I'm really glad that things are going your way. 00:42:26 Speaker 3: And now comes my. 00:42:28 Speaker 1: Favorite part of the show, which is that part of the show where I first of all, thank both of you, Nina Morrison and John Restivo for joining me sharing your thoughts on Wondful Conviction. 00:42:42 Speaker 3: So thank you both for being here. 00:42:44 Speaker 1: And now I get to sit back and listen and just leave the microphones on for final thoughts. And I'm gonna let Nina go first because it would be appropriate for you to close the show, so you're. 00:43:00 Speaker 3: Bad and clean up, so to speak. 00:43:02 Speaker 5: So anyway, so Nina, well, all I want to say is, you know, your listeners have gotten a flavor for who John is and what he's gone through. But one of the things that's really special about John is what he's done after he's been out and how much he's done. He's done a lot to help get people registered to vote in Florida, to feed the homeless, to make his community better. And his personal journey is told in this beautiful, Beautiful future story in the New Yorker magazine by a writer named Ariel Levy, And if people google John's name and the title, I think is the Price of a Life. And it's all about the deep pain and suffering that he went through. If your listeners are interested in the human toll that wrongful convictions take. Ariel told his story in a very revealing and intimate way, and I hope folks will check it out. 00:43:50 Speaker 4: John. I just take it one day at a time. 00:43:53 Speaker 6: I wake up in the morning and I just say to myself, no day in paradise, I'm just glad to be free, and if I can do something to help my community, or if I feel or if I see something that needs to be done, I try to help. And I was involved in two thousand and eight in this huge voter registration thing that we had going in Florida, and we just got passed. We got an amendment passed where felons are going to be allowed to vote. So now we're going to have to start getting felons registered to vote for our upcoming election. And when I'm asked, I have a group of friends, and when I'm asked to help, I'm more than happy to help. And I want to thank you for having us here. 00:44:50 Speaker 1: All I can say is thank you both again, and thank you all for listening, and I'll see you next week on Rafel Conviction. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts. 00:45:08 Speaker 4: It really helps. 00:45:10 Speaker 1: And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project, and I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocenceproject dot org to learn how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wartis. The music in the show is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook. 00:45:36 Speaker 3: At Wrongful Conviction Podcast. 00:45:38 Speaker 1: Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flahm is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one