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540: #540 Jason Flom with Joe Berlinger on the West Memphis 3 · Wrongful Conviction Podcasts

• 00:00:05 Speaker 1: Last time we talked about the West Memphis Three, we interviewed documentarian Joe Burlinger about his experience filming the victim's families and the three suspected killers before and during the trial, and how his realization of their innocence changed the direction of his life's work. To add greater contexts in our episode, we edited in excerpts from our previous interviews with Jason Baldwin and Damian Eccles of the West Memphis Three, who to recap, had been released on an Alfred plea along with Jesse Miskale, were all excluded from some crime scene evidence by later DNA testing, and one hair sample also included one of the victim's stepfathers, but the West Memphis Three are still fighting to clear their names. A twenty twenty one Arkansas law allowed for new DNA testing with more modern methodologies, and when they sought this testing, the state represented in court that all crime scene evidence had been destroyed, But in the same year a box belonging to the West Memphis Police Department was located and it held some missing evidence from their case, including the shoelaces that had been used to bind the three young victims. As well as a hare that might match the long ignored alternative suspect from the po Jangles restaurant twenty twenty two. Denial of further testing was reversed in twenty twenty four, and after additional proceedings, testing is finally going to move forward, hopefully towards the real perpetrator or perpetrators of this horrible crime. Now, without any further ado, here's our interview mashup with Joe Burlinger and the West Memphis Three. 00:01:45 Speaker 2: In May nineteen ninety three, three young Arkansas boys Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore went missing. 00:01:53 Speaker 3: Three little cub scouts, hog tied and left in an Arkansas dis. 00:01:56 Speaker 4: One of the most controversial legal cases in the state's history found the man guilty of murdering the eight year old boys back in nineteen ninety three, in what prosecutors at the time had called some sort of a satanic ritual. 00:02:09 Speaker 3: Celebrities fighting for the teen's release claimed the kids were railroaded because of their mummets, dark clothes, and fascination. 00:02:15 Speaker 4: With the occulty seeking killings that might have been part of a satanic ritual. 00:02:20 Speaker 3: Convicted murderers Jason Baldwin, Jesse mss Kelly, and Damian Eccles are now free men. They spent seventeen years in prison for a crime that stunned dark and so West Memphis three would be allowed to walk out of prison, but prosecutors agreed to sign off on the deal only if the defendants would plead guilty. 00:02:38 Speaker 5: A long time on death row for something that you insist you didn't do. There's always the possibility that the person that you're killing. 00:02:45 Speaker 1: Is asking this is wrongful conviction. You're listening to ronful conviction. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early and ed for by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. 00:03:06 Speaker 6: Hey y'all, it's Maggie. 00:03:07 Speaker 2: I'm here to tell you about a new show I've been working on for the past two years. It's called Graves County and it's an investigative series about the murder of a young mom in Kentucky and just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. 00:03:25 Speaker 6: Here is the trailer for Graves County. 00:03:31 Speaker 1: All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half truth, is a whole lie. 00:03:36 Speaker 2: For almost a decade, the murder of an eighteen year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. 00:03:51 Speaker 7: I'm telling you, we know. 00:03:54 Speaker 2: We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the Citizen Investigator on national TV. 00:04:03 Speaker 4: Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Current. 00:04:10 Speaker 6: My name is Maggie Freeling. 00:04:11 Speaker 2: I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. 00:04:20 Speaker 7: I did not know her, and I did not kill her or raid or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said. 00:04:25 Speaker 6: They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. 00:04:29 Speaker 8: They made me say that I poor guests on her. 00:04:33 Speaker 6: From love of for good, this is Graves County, a. 00:04:37 Speaker 2: Show about just how far our legal system will go in order. 00:04:42 Speaker 6: To find someone to blame MARKA. Y'all gotta work the hell up. 00:04:46 Speaker 7: Bad things happens to good people and small towns. 00:04:53 Speaker 2: Listen, to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed starting September seventeenth on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to LoVa for Good plus on Apple Podcasts. 00:05:14 Speaker 1: Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction Today. I have a special show for you, and I think it's going to be a real treat because with me, I have a guy who has done profound work in film dealing with wrongful convictions. I'm super excited to have him here to share some stories and some wisdom and his outlooks. So Joe Burlinger, Welcome to Wrongful Conviction. 00:05:40 Speaker 9: Jason. 00:05:40 Speaker 1: Thanks. 00:05:41 Speaker 9: I'm a big fan of the podcast and a fan of you, so I'm glad. 00:05:44 Speaker 1: To be here. 00:05:44 Speaker 9: In fact, it amazes me that since I consider myself a music and wrongful conviction guy, and you're amazing music and wrongful conviction guy, I'm amazed we haven't met until recently, which is why this podcast came to me. We shared a nice dinner together. 00:05:59 Speaker 1: Yeah, we had dinner recently with Damian Eccles and Amanda Knox, and so we really connected. And it's interesting because I do sort of music and justice. You do film music injustice, and the thing that you've been known for was your movie about the West, Memphis three, because it was such an important not only such an important documentary, but also such an important moment in the changing of the perception of the American public and the worldwide public as to how these things happen. And I'm interested to know how did you because you know, you and I both were in criminal justice reform before it was sort of a thing, right, I mean, we were early adopters, and I like to say we were before it was cool, but that sounds ridiculous, but anyway, true. Listen, I'm glad it's cool because we need more and more people. 00:06:50 Speaker 9: We didn't have enough storytellers shining a light on injustice and activists trying to change this miserable system we have. 00:06:55 Speaker 1: No we need an army. And so you made this remarkable Paradise Lost trilogy that I'm holding in my hand right now, which told the story of the three kids. And they were kids. They were teenagers, Damien Eccles, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse Miskally who were persecuted, prosecuted, arrested, tried, convicted, for one of the most gruesome and notorious triple murders in the history of the world from the three eight year old boys that went missing in West Memphis, Arkansas, out riding their bikes and turned up in a riverbank, tortured, brutally assaulted, sexually mutilated, and of course dead. And how did it come to be that? And we'll get into how the wrongful conviction happened, But how did you go from being a filmmaker to being this guy? And how were you made aware of this case and how did you get involved? And boy, it's a good thing you did, or Damien would have been executed by now. 00:07:58 Speaker 9: Yeah, you know, it's amazing and thank you for all that. That's very kind of you to say, because you've also done amazing work, which I appreciate. You know, my first film, which I should say, Paradise Lost and Brothers Keeper were made with Bruce Sinofsky, who recently passed away, you know, so if I revert to the eyes, I always mean we. But you know we had made Brothers Keeper, which there was no sense of social justice behind the making of that movie. That was purely an aesthetic exercise to push the documentary form a little further. You know, there was a handful of filmmakers in the late eighties early nineties that were looking to expand what it means to be a documentary. Errol Morris did it with Thin Blue Line, but his contribution, besides the wrongful conviction aspect, was, you know, pushing recreations to a whole new level. Michael Moore was pushing documentary by you know, the filmmaker as on camera curmudgeon, you know, crusading for a social cause. That was new. Morgan Spurlock then picked up that kind of thread in others. What we were trying to do with Brothers Keeper was simply by using a murder trial because it has perfect dramatic structure, is to take the documentary and create a just a film that feels like a narrative film because of how it shot, how it's edited, how it looks, how it's structured, and to push the documentary form. I had no interest in social justice, no interest in wrongful I didn't even know wrongful convictions took place back then. I was very naive about the justice system. And Brother's Keeper was very successful, and so Sheila Evans from HBO came a calling you know, the She was until very recently, the head of documentaries at HBO for you know, three decades, and if I had to pick one person responsible for expanding the form to what it is today, Shila would be that woman. But she also likes salacious material, and so she read this story about three devil worshiping teens who were just been arrested for these horrible crimes, and she wanted a satanic kids killing kids movie because it seemed like that was the case. So one week after the arrests of the three. Of course they weren't called the West Memphis Three back then, they were these rotten teenagers accused of these horrible crimes. We went down to West Memphis, Arkansas in June of ninety three, thinking we were making a film about kids killing kids. All the press was saying they were guilty Jesse miss Kelly's confession without any context. The multiple statements over time were reduced to a digestible paragraph without context, published in the local paper. So we thought there was a confession. You know, the prosecution and the police were saying at press conferences on a scale of one to ten, this is an eleven. I was going down as a filmmaker, coming off of a really great experience on my first film of pushing the form of documentary but no idea of social justice. 00:10:48 Speaker 7: We go down. 00:10:49 Speaker 9: We embed with the families of the victims, mainly the trial is still seven months away. For the first three months of the project, we really spent time with the families of the victims, and of course they hated these guys and thought they were, you know, the devil, and we had no reason to believe otherwise. 00:11:05 Speaker 1: On season seven of Wrongful Conviction, on the fifth episode, I interviewed Damian eccles. Here's an excerpt. You're an outcast, right, And there were these very small minded people around who sort of came to this instinctual called conclusion that it must be the weird kid, right, it must be the kid that wears black and listens to heavy metal. And this was during the Satanic Panic as well. Right back then, for those of you who are old enough to remember, in the early nineties, there was this very strange thing that was going on in America with rumors of Satanic cults and stuff like that. None of them turned out to be true, but that's beside the point. So what happened for. 00:11:42 Speaker 5: Me my entire life. The thing that has been most important to me, that I love the most of my life always sort of revolved around was Western hermeticism, ceremonial magic all the way back from when I was a child. But I lived in a incredibly right wing fundamentalist town. I mean, there are places in this town where you come to a four corner stop and on all four corners of the street will be churches. 00:12:07 Speaker 1: It was like Starbucks. 00:12:08 Speaker 5: Now, yeah, that's exactly what it was like. And if you didn't belong to, you know, one of these mainstream for that area, mainstream fundamentalist religions, you were automatically viewed as suspicious. You were satanic. That's what they thought. And it didn't matter if you were a Buddhist or a Hindu or something like that. You're still satanic. You just don't know you're a Satanist. You're just being you know, tricked by the devil into thinking there's some other religion. You know the fact that I actually did love ceremonial magic, and that's been one of their things that you know, they harp on forever that that is Satanism. So that was a huge part of what made them focus on me as well. You know, that was what they thought made me a freak. They think, automatically, you're a Satanist. It would take a Satanist to commit a crime like this. Stick all those things together, and they didn't even look for anybody or anything else. 00:12:56 Speaker 1: So in this case, they focused on you. And then they had to find a way to get to you, right because there was no evidence connecting you, no, so they found a way, and that way was Jessemiskeally exactly. So they originally sort of tricked him into confessing and he immediately recanted. 00:13:15 Speaker 5: After he confessed of somewhere between seventy and seventy two, and they interrogated him. I can't remember exactly how many hours it was. It was something like between twelve and fourteen hours. And they're tilling this guy who has an IQ that's way way below normal. They're telling him things like, you know, just tell us what we want to know and we'll let you go home. So they finally get this guy to confess, and he can't get anything about the crime scene right because he wasn't actually there, so he didn't know anything. They didn't care. The only thing they cared about was the fact that they got him to say yes. 00:13:47 Speaker 1: And we also know, Damien, that people who are most susceptible to this are adolescents. We now know that the human brain isn't fully formed until you're twenty five. He was sixteen, right, seventeen, and with his low IQ, he was totally outmatched, overwhelmed, and probably after twelve to fourteen hours he would have confessed to you know, anything, killing Abraham Lincoln exactly, I mean, just to go home. So he implicated you and Jason. So Jason was sort of your one and best and pretty much onlyfriend at the time, right, And he was just physical appearances, he didn't have the same stigma that you did, right. He was sort of just an average looking kid, very young looking, must have weighed a hundred pounds or less. Didn't look like a killer, right, But to them you did exactly. 00:14:31 Speaker 5: And he got caught up in all of this too, yep, just because he knew me, right. 00:14:35 Speaker 1: Unbelievable. On season two of Ronfuel Conviction, Episode eight, I interviewed Jason Baldwin. Here's what he had to say. 00:14:43 Speaker 8: And so when the police came, Honestly, it didn't really scare me or alarm me. Because I figured they were going everywhere. I figured it was door to door, you know, that they were talking to everybody they could, you know, and to me, that made sense, you know, that was logical. But what I didn't know that they were targeted us. 00:15:01 Speaker 1: So now everything goes completely haywire and you guys get arrested. 00:15:05 Speaker 8: Correct, they mugshot in me, But when they fingerprinted me, they didn't stop there. They took a fingerprint, they took an entire hand impression. They took my entire foot prints, right, and then they took me to the hospital and they took hair samples, they took saliva samples, they took blood samples. When they were taking these samples from me, it gave me hope because I thought, Okay, whoever committed this crime, they've left something for the police to compare my samples to, right, And so that's where my hope was. And now at this point, I had already been engaged with the police and they had asked me, you know, questions and stuff, and I told them where I was at, and they absolutely refused the truth. They kept telling me, no, we've got another story. Your friend has told us that you have done this, and that what you're telling us is not true. I'm like, well, who is this friend? And they refused to tell me. The boys' bodies were found May the six we were arrested. Jesse Muskelly gave the false confession on June third, But what many people have not really noticed it. On May the fifteenth, just a couple of weeks after the boys' body's found, Jesse went to the police with another friend because there was a tip line and a reward offered out for any information on who may have committed this crime. Now, Jesse did not know who committed his crime, but he wanted the reward money. He was imagining the brand new truck he could buy his father and things like that. So him and another kid out of his trailer park went to the police and said, there's this suspicious guy in the town that you know, you need to check out. And I don't know exactly what all he told them about this guy or whatever, but they ended up telling him, Jesse, you need to come back with a more believable story than that. Right, a few weeks go by, now they're saying they've got that believable story. When they gives the false confession against damian of me. 00:16:58 Speaker 9: Then we finally negotiated access. They were all in county jail awaiting trial, and somehow we taught you know, documentary was a little more naive in those days in terms of people's perceptions, and so we were able. I mean, one of the amazing things about Paradise Loss is just where we stuck our camera. I mean, we got tremendous access, which I don't think we'd ever get today, luckily for all involved. But we finally negotiated access to the West Memphis three and again they weren't called that then, and we did our first series of interviews and I think I'm sitting down with killers, you know, horrible kids, wanting to understand how three teens could be so disaffected from life that they would they would do this horrible thing. There were some killings in the UK on railroad tracks just a few years before, you know, the Jamie Bolger case that actually I had tried to get access to and make a film about. So my head is kids killing kids, it's a trend, Let's make a film about it. Of course, the late eighties was the whole Satanic panic and satanic hysteria. I was a young filmmaker didn't have any reason to think that wasn't necessarily true. So I went into this project in the great irony is that, you know, two decades and three films later, this crusade to get these guys out started off as let's make a film about these rotten punks. So we sit down, we do our first series of interviews. Honestly, Damien was a little hard to read. I look back now, Obviously he was in shock. He didn't believe he would actually be convicted. Not to be judgmental, I mean, Damien's a hero to me, who's gone through the most amazing journey. But that first interview I couldn't quite tell with him. But the person who really just whatever sense of tapping into something that I had at the time, it was talking to Jason Baldwin, where I just said, this doesn't add up four months before the trial, three months into being embedded in West Memphis, Arkansas, because we spent literally seven months camping out there before the trial starts. And it's not like a light bulb went off and I said, oh my god, they're innocent. But something didn't seem right, and so I remember calling Sheila Evans, who again. To her credit, she's an amazing catalyst for what documentary has become. But she also likes, you know, salacious subject matter. And she had sent me down, or sent us down to make a film about teen satanic killers. So I remember picking up the phone calling her to let her know that something. You know, I'm not sure these guys are guilty, and I'm not sure the film is what you think. It's going to be a little trepidacious that she was going to cancel the project, but I felt I had to tell her. You know, we're like four months in and we've gathered enough information that these kids seem like they're the wrong guys had been picked up. I also created this incredible moral ambiguity because we had convinced the parents of the victims that we were here to tell their story, and they were utterly convinced of their guilt. But I called Sheila, and to her credit, you said, oh, that sounds even more interesting. Stick with it, because she couldn't pulled the plug, you know. And it's the number one lesson. I mean, I'm not sure if there are filmmakers in the in your audience or whatever, but my number one lesson that I tell people about filmmaking is never particularly in documentary, never lock into the preconceived idea of what you think your film is about, because you'll miss the story. If we had locked into teen Satan Killers and hadn't opened our eyes to the real story, we might have missed the story. But I never imagined that it would actually ever get to trial because I had faith in the justice system. I never imagined that evidence such as Metallica lyrics or Stephen King novels would be presented in a court of law in the United States of America as the main evidence, and that somebody could be convicted on literally no forensic evidence, no blood at the crime scene. I mean, you know, you know the details of this case, and. 00:20:48 Speaker 1: So yeah, but it's worth refreshing that. 00:20:52 Speaker 5: We're at the police station. The only thing. Every so often one of the cops would come in and say, are you ready to make your confession? 00:20:59 Speaker 1: Yet? 00:21:00 Speaker 5: Just stand there and look at him. They would leave. I stood there all night long until the next day they got me and took me into a courtroom. They tell me, you know, somebody's already confessed to this crime. They've implicated you. They're saying you were the ring leader of this. So now what you need to do is confess to this and say no, you weren't the ring leader they were. Try to put the blame back on them, or you're going to die because of this. I can't even figure out who the hell they're talking about because I've only got one friend in the entire world, and that was Jason Baldwin. I knew it wasn't him because he was with me, and I knew he didn't do it. I knew he wasn't going to confess to something he hadn't done. So I didn't realize who it even was that had confessed until the next day. Whenever they take me into the courtroom, they say who it is, and they ask, you know, how do you plead all this sort of thing. They refuse to even read the confession in the courtroom. They asked me did I want it read? I said yes, and they wouldn't read it even after they asked me and I said yes. Instead, they take me out of the courtroom into a janitor's closet with mops and brooms. They give me a transcript, a type transcript of this confession. When I started reading it, it's immediately obvious why they didn't want this thing or read in court it made no sense whatsoever. You know, you're talking about this story that's like a Frankenstein patchwork thing that they've sewed together out of many statements made by somebody with an IQ of between seventy and seventy two. And what they would do is when he would confess to something and wouldn't get anything right, they would come back into the room and say, well, do you think maybe this could have happened? Or I mean, even more blatantly obvious. The first time they asked him when did the murders happen? And he says something like eight o'clock in the morning. Well, they knew that wasn't true because all three of the kids were in school. So gradually what they did was shape this thing to make it what they wanted it to be. That's why they didn't want it read in court. 00:22:46 Speaker 1: No, and they ignored obvious signs that pointed to at least one, arguably up to three other individuals. Yes, including there was a local restaurant, was it Bojangles or something? Was it Bojangles? The manager called the cops that night and said there was a guy covered in mud and blood that stumbled into the fast food place and went into the bathroom, and to their credit, the manager called up and a police officer came but didn't investigate. And they ultimately collected evidence from that bathroom that he went into, which there was blood all over the place and mud, and they lost it. Yes, and there again were obvious signs. I mean the one I just talked about, the various signs pointing to the stepfather of one of the boys. I mean, this one kind of came with instructions, and I know that it's difficult. I'm not an anarchist. I believe we do need a system of law and order. I think there are a lot of very good police and judges and prosecutors out there. But in this case, it's a small town, high profile, complicated crime. Because the crime scene itself was a muddy riverbed, not the easiest place to collect evidence. It seemed to have been scrubbed to some degree. And then all the pressure you ran into the perfect storm. 00:23:55 Speaker 5: They put me in another sale where I would stay for almost the next year while I waited to go to try. Wow, when we do go to trial, the evidence that they present against us. Is things like Stephen King books, the fact that we owned Metallica T shirts and albums, posters that were hanging on our walls, you know, things that were from like skateboarding magazines, ceremonial magic books. This is the evidence they had. The prosecutors tell the jury that these things are not only evidence that were guilty, but they're evidence that I don't even have a soul, that this is how evil I am. 00:24:29 Speaker 8: I was totally surprised when I went to trial and instead of the narration of the story revolving around evidence, the prosecutor John Fogerman and Brenton Davis were saying things like the crime scene was completely clean, there was absolutely no evidence, no physical evidence left behind, and this in fact is evidence of Satanic cult ritual activity. 00:24:52 Speaker 1: Because the devil fined up the crime scene. Basically, when they put that guy in the stand who was testifying as an expert on satan as a and witchcraft and all that, and the defense attorney quite rightly said to him, where did you get certified at this? And it turned out he had spent like an hour of doing some online something or whatever. It was ridicted was laughable, right. The fact that he was calling himself an expert. Was laughable. And that's one thing that I was like, well, the jury's got to hear that. And the other thing was when they had the doctor understand right, it was like an orthopedic surgeon or something, and they were asking him about the way that the one boy had been mutilated, right, and we had the skin cut off his penis. I mean, he's really pretty disgusting even thinking about it. 00:25:32 Speaker 8: And then we found out later was animals had actually started eating their bodies in the water that they were submerging. And so when the police pulled Jesse into the police station and they laid out the photos of the bodies, they had him make up a story for all the visible wounds. The calls and manner of the wounds were unknown. They didn't know that all these wounds were animal predation. 00:25:52 Speaker 1: If you remember when the jury went out, what did you think was going to happen? 00:25:56 Speaker 8: I sincerely believed that we would go home, they would find us not guilty. They would be able to totally ignore all the flaming prejudicial stuff that the prosecution was bringing up about satanism and everything, and look at the case for what it was and follow the evidence. So told all your life that the purpose of the judicial system is to find the truth, when really it's to get a conviction. 00:26:20 Speaker 5: They came back in. They sentenced me to death three times. They sentenced me to die by lethal injection three times. They sentenced Jason to life in prison without parole. The other guy they sentenced to life plus forty years. They immediately take me from the courtroom to death row, where I would not see Jason again. I saw him maybe twelve fifteen years later, for maybe twenty to thirty seconds. They used to bring other prisoners in to clean the barracks, and he was one of the prisoners they brought in one day to clean death row. So he comes by myself mopping and sweeping. That was the first contact head with them in like fifteen years. 00:27:01 Speaker 1: By that point. It's truly mind boggling the whole thing, even by our standards, being entrenched in this work, you know, and you hear one fucked up story after another, but this one takes the king go. Yeah, you know, I talk a lot about the idea that when we willfully or accidentally you want to call it mistakenly, prosecute the wrong person and convict them. By definition, we stop looking for the right person exactly. And in this case, it sure seems like the prosecutors must have known that these guys didn't do it. At some point they realized that they had the wrong guys. Maybe it was around the time you did, maybe it was sooner, maybe it was later. But then you're left with, wait a minute, So whoever this sick fuck is that did this terrible, or whoever these people are that did this, they're amongst us. Yeah. 00:27:54 Speaker 9: Well, first of all, I do believe that during the trial and through the conviction, the thought felt they had the right guy. And the reason that's scary is because of the utter incompetence and the ability to fall victim to confirmation bias, to all sorts of problems within our system. I actually think that they felt they had the right people. What I find evil, the real evil in this case, because a lot of that initial false conviction I attribute to human error, which is scary in some way scarier than a conspiracy. But it's the post conviction period where it became quite clear, I think to everybody involved that these guys were innocent, and for people to hang on to their jobs, for people to not question things. You know, for the same judge, Judge Burnett, who presided over the original trial, to be the post conviction appellate judge ruling whether he had reversible error in the original is absurd. And that's what the way it was for over a decade on that case. So the real evil in this case is the post can period where people cared more about their jobs, and you see that all the time. It's why there shouldn't be prosecutorial immunity and all sorts of other issues. But just getting back to my origin story, you know, in covering this story, I just still I didn't have the gene that I thought film could be used for social good until the final moments of Paradise Lost, which are the final moments of the trial where oh my god, they really have convicted this guy on no evidence. And you see in Paradise Laws in the movie, Jason has already been convicted halfway through the movie, and then the second half of the movie is focusing on Jason and Damien, and you see Damian being chained up and led off to death row. I mean, we were in the room with him as he was being chained off and led off to death row and Jason was being led off to life without parole sentences and they get escorted out of the room, and Bruce and I look at each other like, oh my god, I cannot believe what we just witnessed. And that's when we vowed to do everything we could. And when the gene or the light bulb went off in my head where I realize that, yes, I'm sitting on all this footage that can help, and that film I think can be used for shining a light. And so I feel like I stumbled on to the criminal justice system as a place to place my focus. But seeing how easy it is for people to make mistakes, seeing how easy it is for somebody to be sent to death, this became my calling when I saw that zero evidence and Stephen King novels and Metallica lyrics can put you on death. 00:30:26 Speaker 1: Row, right, I mean, well, if that's the case, I mean, when you add up all the Stephen King novels and all the Metallica records that would sold out, means there's tens of millions of serial killers out there that we should all be very scared crazy. 00:30:38 Speaker 9: And you know, he did have an affinity for Aleister Crowley, and that was also introduced. But still, this is not forensic evidence. You know, there was no blood at the crime scene, no forensic evidence. I mean, it's just this is the worst case probably I've studied, and you know, in all these years. 00:30:56 Speaker 1: So your film ultimately led to an amazing outpouring of support from people all over the world, regular people as well as people at the very top echelons of society. Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, Natalie Mains, Peter Jackson, amazing, amazing people who became like, not casually involved, but deeply involved. And there's no separating that from the fact that it was a direct result of your movie, which had to feel good. But then how did it feel when finally, eighteen years later, these guys walked out of prison and knowing the role that you played in them, right, Well, a lot of people played roles in it, right, That's the thing. 00:31:38 Speaker 9: I mean this. I hope this doesn't sound falsely humble. I'm very proud of the films, and I think the film's definitely played a role, and I definitely think that we're the ones who said against all the other media, because every night there was a news report or story of these monstrous killers. It was so prejudicing everything, so we were truly the only media saying that they were innocent. I think the film attracted a lot of the attention, but it's the activism of tens of thousands of people and the well known people that got them out of prison. But that feels good. I mean, it's rare in one's career. You know, when you make documentaries, you hope to affect people in some way. When you're a storyteller in general, you want to affect people in some way, and to have that kind of tangible effect on the outcome of a case felt terrific, although I will say it was also very bittersweet because a it took way too long, you know, eighteen and a half years. Actually, with some cases that's on the low end of things, sadly, but still it took so long, and the attempts to deny DNA testing and the fact that the same judge remained on the case during the whole post conviction is just outrageous. And then the end result was the Alfred plea where you know, Damien was not well on death row as we know, and you know, Jason had to really debate whether he wanted to take the deal because he wanted to keep fighting, and some evidence that Peter Jackson paid for was coming out and very helpful, which of course scared the prosecution, which is why they were even willing to do the Alfred plea. Should we explain what the Alfred plea is? 00:33:07 Speaker 1: Yeah, let's talk about it. 00:33:10 Speaker 9: Well, the Alfred plea is basically where you stand up in court. In this case, Damien and Jason and Jesse acknowledged that the prosecution has enough evidence to convict, but you maintain your innocence. You state that I am innocent of these charges, but I believe the state has enough evidence that a conviction could occur, so I plead guilty in exchange for time served. Is basically what happened. So the death sentence was vacated and turned into a first degree murder charge, and he was sentenced to life served, which allowed him to go out of the prison, and the life without parole sentences were vacated and turned into time served. That's you know, you can understand why somebody would accept that, especially if you're on death row, but it's so cowardly on the part of the State of Ark does anyone really believe that if the State of Arkansas had an abiding belief that these were teen child killers who sacrificed eight year olds to the devil in a Satanic ritual, that they would allow them to walk free after eighteen years. Of course not they know they're innocent, but they want to protect themselves from accountability. You know, some people have said, well, they want to also protect themselves from being sued for wrongful conviction, which you know, the average wrongful conviction case is worth a million dollars a year times eighteen years times three defendants, that's fifty four million dollars if I'm doing my math correctly or something like that. But they could have even signed, you know, a way that they won't sue for wrongful conviction. It's all about accountability, and that's how these things happen. That's why post conviction takes for so long. Nobody wants to be accountable. And I think it's so cowardly and disturbing that this is how these guys ended up free. I mean, I took Jason to both the Berlin Film Festival with Paradise Lost three and there's a great documentary festival in Amsterdam called IFA International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam, and both of those border crossings were fraught with delays and problems because in the computer it's Jason bald With convicted child killer. Jason wants to study law and become a lawyer. He can't do it because he's a convicted child killer. So yesfl great that the movie had an impact on people, and those people pushed and pushed until these guys were let out. But sad that it's the alphad plea and they're not fully exonerated. 00:35:41 Speaker 1: The alpha plea is such a it's like a Sophie's choice kind of thing, and we've had oh god, I don't know how many people on Ralph conviction who have resorted to that. You know, they have so much leverage when you're looking at the amount of time it will take to go back for another trial, Yeah, you're going to spend that time in prison awaiting that trial. If you're trying to put yourself in the shoes of someone who's face with that choice, if you know that you've already been framed once or gotten you know, convict, there's something he didn't do. However, it got to that once you would be hard pressed to risk the rest of your life in the system that has already. 00:36:21 Speaker 9: Damien was truly unhealthy and being abused by guards, and that's ultimately why I think they're all heroes to me. But Jason Baldwin acted very heroically because he was ready to stay and fight and clear his name. But everyone felt that Damien's health was in such a state that to wait any longer might be detrimental, so he made that decision. 00:36:42 Speaker 1: In that sentence, Jason, of all the eighty something episodes we recorded, now, his was really like it was difficult to even hear the stories that he told. He's such an amazingly gentle, you know, soul, and you know he was what ninety one hundred pounds back then, le kid. 00:37:07 Speaker 9: We actually did well in school, and you're right, that was the vibe he was giving off. Was this sweet little boy talking to me about phishing and what he likes to do when he's not at school and drawing. He was an avid drawer. And while he's talking to me, I'm looking at his tiny little wrists. Because if you believe the prosecution story, it's Baldwin who wielded the serrated hunting knife that castrated the Buyer's boy, and I'm talking to this sweet little kid and staring at his wrist and trying to imagine that this guy knifed these kids in the way that it was alleged, and I just found it incredible. 00:37:43 Speaker 1: Jason Baldwin on the show. It was an experience I'll never forget when this all came down. You were in tenth grade. 00:37:49 Speaker 8: Tenth grade. 00:37:50 Speaker 1: Tenth grade, let's just reflect on that for a second. You're not even anywhere near being an adulted tenth grade. So then you end up getting sent to maximum security prison. 00:38:00 Speaker 8: Right when you first go to prison and you're not going to death row, you go to what's called a diagnostic unit, and that's where they evaluate you mentally and physically to determine what your parent unit in the department corrections will be. Because they have a myriad of prisons on various different old slave plantations in the South, and each of them are different and in different ways by age and your strength and things like that. And when I went to diagnostics, they saw me like you saw me as a small innocent kid, and diagnostics they were like, we've got to send you to one of two places. Jason or you're not gonna make it PC protective custody or what's called SPU Suicide Prevention Unit and suicide Prevention Unit, you will have your own cell. And you know, I looked at it like this. At the time, we didn't have very many people on our side. In fact, it was just us, and I'm thrust into this incredibly impossible situation. And I was escorted everywhere I went into prison, and so I see the people in SPU going to chow and they'd be doing the thorozine shuffle because they're so heavily medicated. And I had a fear that if I acquiesce and let them put me in SPU, that they would forcefully medicate me and I would lose my mind and my ability to think and reason and to fight. And so I said, no, I can't do that. And as far as the PC protective custody, anybody knows if you are saying you are so weak that you need protection, that people are gonna see that and prey on you even more. And so I knew I had to some way, some fashions, stand on my own two feet in there and earn everybody's respect from the inmates. And guards a light, and they said, well, if you not going to one of these places, we're gonna have to send you to Barner. And at the time, they would just shift all these guys from the Little Tucker Unit to Barner and they were destroying the place. They said, it was just chaos and destruction and just incredibly violent place, and that's where they were going to have to send me. And I just told them that that's what you gotta do. You got to do it. And so they did eventually send me to Barner unit, and it was everything they. 00:40:13 Speaker 1: Said it was. How did you survive there? 00:40:15 Speaker 8: And you know, by the grace of God, you know, as you said, I guess I'll say I was incredibly luckily, but I was incredibly blessed to I went in there. They opened up and mister Patten stepped out and his clerk stepped out, and mister Panton says, in May Bowlin, I'm mister Patten, the classification officer. I'll be assigning you to your housing unit. And this is my clerk, Mojo, And they tell me you got to stand up for yourself in here, or these people will just will run you over and turn you into a sex slave and all these horrible things and make you pay money for protection and stuff like that. And so they assign me to seven barracks, and seven barracks at the Barner unit is in take barracks. I walked down the hall and as I'm walking, and I'm walking next to the barracks and it's got bulletproof glass three stories high, and these guys are beating on it. Right, it's plexiglass, it's got chicken wire in it, and there are sell bars on the inside of it going all the way up three stories. And I look and these guys are literally climbing this thing. They are climbing it above one ano. They're hanging on to the bars, looking at me, beating the glass and pointing at me. Because they've been watching the trial on TV and the hearings and stuff for an entire year. It's like a pep rally. Right, They're finally going to have their hands on me, right. And I get there and Sergeant Ivy's working the door and he tells me, he says, if you go in there and stand up for yourself, I got your back. If not, they got you. And I'm just holding the only thing I have is a bible, a couple of letters from a mom. That's it in a little paper bag. And they opened the door and put me in there, and next thing I know, somebody swings a fist at me. I duck that one. The next one catch me and I'm fighting. Immediately the door opens back up, there's may sprayed. Sergeant Ivy's yanking people off of me. I'm on the ground and he says, are you ready to go to PC? 00:42:12 Speaker 1: Now? 00:42:12 Speaker 8: Do you need to catch out? And the guys are hollering, catch out, bitch, catch out, O all these horrible things, you know, which catch out means to leave the barracks and to go and to protective custody. And like I said, you know, I knew I needed to earn these people's respect because I did not know how long I would be there. I know I'm innocent, but I don't know how long I'm going to be in this prison. And so I tell them no, leave me. And next thing I know, we go from the dayroom tier downstairs of guys like push all the racks up against the wall. They circle around us, and I'm fighting this guy and then I'm fighting this guy and there's people hitting me from behind. So it's kind of orderly and fair, but then again it's kind of not. And so I fight the whole barracks that Friday, everybody. And then they call shout call, and the barracks next door, eight bricks, they called two barracks at a time to go to shower. The shower holds one hundred people, and so when I get there, I gotta fight all these guys from eight barracks. And so I fought all weekend. My whole face would swoll up, my fists were swoll up, my body was beat. And so I do this all weekend. I get into fights in the chowhau, even like because there's even other people from other barracks is wanting to get to me in the chow haw and stuff like that. Come Monday morning, I'm barely even able to walk, you know, and like the guys are like just pushing me and guiding me a bit and which way to go and stuff, because I can't even see even less than I normally do because my eyes and stuff are all swollen up. And I just remember thinking that whole weekend about this job out in the fields. Wholet squad, there's gonna be sunshine. There's gonna be a dawn and I'm gonna get to witness that. I was just looking forward to that first dawn, you know, that morning air. And so there was a part of me just no matter how bad it was, I was just looking forward to that first dawn. I'm like, if I can make it to that, you know, if I can make it to that, that's something good. 00:44:14 Speaker 1: It's interesting. Fifteen twenty years ago, I was going around to different studios in Hollywood and saying, we should do a show that features these type of cases and shine a light on these injustices. And people were like, no, nobody wants that, you know, And now it seems like every other show you turn. 00:44:35 Speaker 9: On, I have several of them. Yeah, you do ye wrong man on Stars and I did a show for Discovery called Killing Richard Glossop, who another horrible case that I wish people would pay more attention to. Richard Glossops And on Oklahoma's Death Row, the status tried to kill him three times. The last time they tried to kill him, the portal was in his arm and they were using the wrong execution drugs and the clock struck three, which is the appointed killing hour. And the family on the outside thought the stay had not come as it had several times before, crying and hugging, thinking that he had been killed, when in fact, what was going on inside the death room was an argument between the state's attorney general and the head of prisons trying to figure out whether they should kill this guy because they had the wrong execution drugs and that fracas, and it's the second time there was the wrong execution drugs were being used. There's you know, there's a moratorium on executions in Oklahoma. That's the only thing that's keeping Richard Glossop alive as opposed to this bizarre story that the prosecution you know, has given as to why he deserves to be killed, which is completely bogus. 00:45:40 Speaker 1: The case of Richard Glossom came to my attention several years ago, and I felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach. I mean, let's talk about him, because they do need to bring more attention to it. Can you give us the capsule summary of this. There's not a long story to tell. 00:45:56 Speaker 9: It's Richard glassp was the manager of a kind of a sleazy motel and he is accused of hiring the motel's janitor who he had given a job to only a few months before, to kill the owner of the hotel so that he could take it over. The whole story on its face, when you pick it apart, is ridiculous. The guy who actually did the killing is the junkie hotel janitor maintenance man named Justin Snead, and he was convicted of the murder, but you know, was not sentenced to death. He cut a deal, pointed a finger at his boss. There's zero evidence, zero corroboration. We did some forensic accounting, or the defense attorney did some forensic accounting to show this idea of swindling and taking money is bogus. But conspiracy to murder hiring somebody to do a murder as a capital offense, and these guys wanted that notch on their belt. I'm convinced. I mean, there's just if you look at the evidence, there is none. 00:46:54 Speaker 1: It's just one of. 00:46:55 Speaker 9: These cases where it's so bizarre. And this guy has been it's been two years since I did the show. 00:47:02 Speaker 1: It's either thirty. 00:47:03 Speaker 9: Five days or thirty eight days prior. 00:47:05 Speaker 1: To your execution. 00:47:06 Speaker 9: Your moved from one terrible cell in death row to your final cell where you're placed on death watch, where the lights are on twenty four seven. You now only have one meal a day. You are sleeping on a thin, half inch excuse for a mattress instead of a real cot, and they're just trying to wear you down. And this poor guy has gone through this process three times. He's had the portal placed in his arm awaiting the lethal injection drugs when they realized, oh, we have the wrong drugs. That's the only thing that has saved this guy. We're two mistakes by the prison. The first attempt to kill him, there was a stay because a new witness came along and the government dismissed it as being relevant. But that was the first day. The other two stays, the last two stays were because of botched execution. And there's just no evidence tying this guy to the murder. The convicted killer who confessed to doing it is serving a life sentence, whereas the guy who allegedly hired him for which there's snow proof, is on death row under the most miserable conditions, you know. And this is where like my big thing is prosecutorial immunity. You know, on the one hand, it's been argued to me, well, prosecutors have to be immune from their actions because you know, in many places prosecutors are underpaid. You know, you wouldn't get good prosecutors to do their job if they were fearful of immunity. I get that on a certain level. And there's lots of great prosecutors, and not everyone's a bad guy, and not every CoP's a bad cop. And it's like like you can't paint people with a broad stroke. But there's got to be a happy medium where willful withholding of evidence. Prosecutors have got to be held accountable, and a lot of this shit would go away in my opinion. I mean, you know, Judge Janine Janine Piro, the Fox commentator in the case of Jeffrey Deskovic, she fought DNA testing for a long time. You know, she went off to go run for office, and then her successor, janetd Fiori, said, of course, we'll test the DNA. The DNA was tested and it immediately pointed to another person. 00:49:13 Speaker 1: Season four of Rompel Conviction, episode eight, Jeffrey Dskovic. 00:49:18 Speaker 7: And then the trial comes in. Just before the trial, the results of the DNA test comes back from the FBI laboratory, which shows that the seamen found and the victim didn't. 00:49:29 Speaker 1: Match me, right, because remember she was raped. 00:49:32 Speaker 7: She was raped. Yes, And by the way, the lieutenant who oversaw everything in the letter that he penned to the FBI asking them to expedite the testing, he wrote in the letter that the DNA testing would either show my guilt or it would exonerate me. But when it came back and it didn't match me, my lawyer did try to get the indictment dismissed against me based on that, but the judge denied that motion. 00:50:00 Speaker 1: That alone seems so just incomprehensible to me. I mean, the judge is impartial, right, we know the prosecutor has an agenda, but the judge is impartial. Yeah, I don't know, I don't understand. I mean, I know that back then DNA wasn't it wasn't as well known. 00:50:16 Speaker 7: But to be clear, I mean, DNA started being used in the court system as early as nineteen eighty seven, and this we're on trial now in nineteen ninety, so it's been around for three years. So while not in currency like now, it is not exactly totally unknown. 00:50:32 Speaker 1: Right, and it's perfect. 00:50:33 Speaker 7: I mean right, it's the gold standard. 00:50:35 Speaker 1: Yeah, so your DNA doesn't match. This is an inconvenient truth for the authorities, and the judge allows this, this circus to go on. Meanwhile, let's spend a moment talking about the actual perpetrator. Yes, because every time and I sound like a broken record when I say this, but every time that somebody like you who gets convicted wrongfully the actual perpetrator, they stopped looking for him. Right, the case is closed, and in this case, the consequences were very real. 00:51:10 Speaker 7: Yes, school teacher Patricia Morrison, who also had a couple of kids. She was from Peak Skill, and she was killed by the stayed perpetrator, Stephen Cunningham. She was killed three and a half years later as a result of Cunningham being left free on the street while I was doing time for his crime. 00:51:28 Speaker 1: Now, you say, the real perpetrator, how do we know that? 00:51:31 Speaker 7: Well, here, great, that's a great question. I'm so glad you asked, because the DNA matched him because he got caught for the second murder Patricia Morrison, which resulted in his being incarcerated and having to give up a DNA sample which was put into the data bank. And so when I eventually got the further testing with the Innocence Projects help, it matched him. Then he subsequently confessed and he played guilty in court. 00:52:01 Speaker 1: When did this happen? 00:52:03 Speaker 7: That happened twelve and a half years after he killed a second victim. 00:52:07 Speaker 1: Well, so Patricia Morrison today would be probably a lot sitting around with her grandchildren, you know, probably be a retired school teacher by now having a nice life. Her children would have grown up as they deserve too, as everyone deserves to with their mother. The rest of her family wouldn't have gone through this horrendous loss. None of it had to happen except for the fact that they went on this crazy witch hunt to convict view Jeffrey Deskovic of a crime that they knew you didn't commit. 00:52:38 Speaker 9: So he was exonerated, got millions of dollars from Westchester County and Putnam County, which the taxpayers should be livid about that. You know, this case was allowed to happen, and same thing in Damien's case. They were you know, the seven or eight years was spent with a guy on death row. Seven or eight years was spent fighting DNA testing because of the finality of judgment concept in our legal system, which is absurd. 00:53:06 Speaker 5: Years later, they do DNA testing, find out that the DNA does not match me or the other two guys they convicted. To this day, they still have not run that DNA through codis to see who it matches. They refuse to do that. 00:53:18 Speaker 1: Yeah, which is so strange because in a case like this, especially in the small community, the people who are doing investigating live in that community. By definition, when you have somebody out there who's capable of this sort of pure evil, you would think, if for no other reason than purely selfish reasons, you would want to get that person off the street. But that's not what happened, and it happens too frequently that these various factors combine to result in a tragic outcome. 00:53:45 Speaker 5: And what people don't realize also, you know, just most people's knowledge of the legal system comes from watching TV, and it fosters this idea that these people, these judges, these prosecutors, these attorney generals, that they have these positions because they're somehow moral, they're good people who are looking out for society. In actual fact, these are politicians, just like senators, just like congressmen. Their number one priority is winning that next election, So they are going to do for that next case exactly whatever the community is pressuring them to do. That's the way they're going to lean because they want to win the next election. 00:54:24 Speaker 9: The legal system should be about finding the truth and if there's reason to believe that somebody has a wrongful conviction claim, especially with the advent of DNA technology, which you know, that's a new that was a new thing. The fact that a prosecutor can fight DNA testing like they did in Damien's case for eight or nine years, like they did in Jeffrey Deskovic's case, which resulted in the death of another innocent human being, it's just outrageous. 00:54:49 Speaker 1: You know. And that's true too in the Central Park five case, where Linda Fairstein prosecuted those five kids even though she knew she had the evidence, she knew they didn't do it, and they had every reason than to suspect Matthias Rays was the actual killer, and then he went out and raped three other women and killed one of them in front of her kids. I mean, it's like, I mean, I'm getting the shills just thinking about it like that is so bad, and we should all want that to end, right. 00:55:15 Speaker 9: I'm telling you, if some tougher laws were passed about prosecutors being held accountable for their actions, I think a lot of the shit would end. It's about winning. 00:55:23 Speaker 1: At all costs. 00:55:24 Speaker 9: It's not about the search for the truth. And again, I'm friends with a prosecutor. I know many good prosecutors. There's good guys out there, so I'm not saying every prosecutor is like that. 00:55:34 Speaker 1: But it's the. 00:55:35 Speaker 9: System is human. It's the reason you cannot have a death penalty because the system is human and it's so easy. We see with Damien how an innocent person can be killed. And so I've spent a lot of times talking to the mothers of victims of violent crime, and they want vengeance. And I understand that desire to have vengeance. And I don't want to look a mother in the eye and say to her, you don't morally have the right to want the death of the killer of your child. But we don't even have to get to that moral place because the death of one innocent person on death row, to me, means you can't have a death penalty because the system is fallible. It's run by human beings, some of whom want to win at all costs. 00:56:19 Speaker 1: No, that's the argument I have with anybody who's pro death penalty. I always say, Okay, what percentage of innocent people are you okay with executing exactly ten percent? I mean, we know that of the people that have been exonerated from death row, there's proof that four percent of people that were on death row are innocent. But we don't know how many others were executed that were innocent as well, because most of those cases just literally die when that death takes place. No one goes and investigates those cases. I want to say too, there was one period of time where Harry Konic Senior was the DA in New Orleans and he put eight people on death row, and six of them were exonerated. I don't know whether the other two are innocent or guilty or what became of them, but that was a pretty scary time right there. And there was that amazing sixty minutes piece where another prosecutor from New Orleans actually came forward and with tears and said that you know, he feels terrible to this day about a guy that he put on death row, that he knew was innocent, and he withheld the evidence, and he talks about his sort of perverse motives, and it's just not a thing, like the death penalty is not a thing, and just a slight divergence. You know, when you said earlier that the typical exunery gets a million dollars a year, the typical exounery actually gets nothing, right. I mean, some of them get paid, but even then it varies wildly from whether they get paid thousands of dollars or tens of thousands, or in the rare case like Jeffrey Dskovik, they actually did manage to get millions of dollars, but those are rare. You have to prove civil rights violations. And I'll never forget. There was a guy who I actually was friendly with. He's gone now, but he was sentenced to death in Louisiana and came within days of being executed before somebody found with a microscope and some brilliant scientific research was able to prove with DNA that he was innocent, and he was exonerated and freed, and he was awarded fourteen and a half million dollars and the state of Louisiana appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court overturned the award five to four. He had proven that they had willfully prosecuted him while knowing that he was innocent, and the Supreme Court made some bizarre ruling that it wasn't the responsibility of the prosecutors to train the younger prosecutors, that they had to turn over culpatory evidence, and that he had to prove a pattern of misconduct. You know, it was just totally nuts. And he wrote an op ed in The New York Times where he said, I don't understand why the prosecutor who tried to kill me, knowing I was innocent, wouldn't be charged with attempted murder. Yeah, I mean, rest in peace. He was a wonderful guy, and what you know, I had breakfast with him actually within days of the time the Supreme Court overturned his award and got nothing. I was happy to be alive. And I'm glad you said what you said, Joe, because I also believe that I still believe in in people. I still believe in in prosecutors and police, and I believe in a system of laws. And I think that the large majority of people in our system are good people. I think most of the judges are good. But the ones that are bad, we should all want to get rid of them because they do such terrible damage that they do damage to the reputation of the profession as a whole as well. And these stories are real, These are real people, right, Richard Glossip. It's unimaginable, And I'm glad you brought that up too, because what the fuck kind of sense does it make that before they execute you, they go through this torture, like literal torture. And you know, there was a guy in Virginia whose case I've been involved with, and thankfully we were able to prevent his execution because he's innocent, guy nam Mean Bond Telugus. And during the process of you know, working through his case, I learned that they have a practice in the Commonwealth of Arigin where I think it's fifteen days or three weeks before your execution, they move you to another sell where you to have none of your books. You have basically nothing. The lights are on, like you said, the whole time, and they come and check on you every fifteen minutes, so they wake you up every fifteen minutes and go, hey, just want to make sure Joe everything okay in there, Like I just want to you know, like what what I mean, Well, who came up with that? 01:00:26 Speaker 7: Well? 01:00:26 Speaker 9: I think they're trying to wear you down? So why so you just accept your death so that you don't make a scene for the witnesses who are experiencing it. 01:00:35 Speaker 1: Is that what it is? I don't know. 01:00:36 Speaker 9: I mean, no one's told me that, but I just feel like they're just trying to wear you down so you don't fight back. And Glossop told me himself, like he was so tired that, you know, he was accepting of his fate even though he knew was wrong, you know, and if it wasn't for the wrong drug, he'd be gone. 01:00:51 Speaker 1: It's so incredibly troubling because like, why just why you got the guy you wanted, You got the actual killer. You guys did your job right, It's done. What do you need the extra body for? And there's so many richer Glossops out there. I Mean. 01:01:05 Speaker 9: The other weird and hard dynamic is that the family of the victim in that case believes the Golossip is guilty, and for years, the families of the West Memphis three. Sorry, the families of the victims, the parents of Michael Moore, Christopher Byers, and Stevie branch It thought we were horrible people, just Hollywood elites, and so funny when them called the Hollywood elite. I live an hour north of Manhattan, and you know that as far away from Hollywood as possible, But you know that somehow Hollywood elites conspire to get these. 01:01:43 Speaker 1: Devil worshippers out of prison. 01:01:44 Speaker 9: For years, they hated us, call us names, and that's painful because you don't want to as makers of these things. You want to shine a light on the truth, but you don't want to cause the famili's pain. And that's the disservice that these police officials and process cocuters who maintain this facade of righteousness, that's the damage they inflict on the family members because a there's no justice because the real killers are running free. And secondly, the healing process. You know, we're both parents and I can't imagine, you know, anything worse than losing a child. And there's no closure for losing a child, but there certainly can be finality to the experience, and your healing process is predicated on knowing justice has been served, and so we came along and upset the apple cart by coming out with a film that's saying, hey, everything, the police and prosecution and all your ten thousand meetings with these people is wrong, and you're putting these families through a double tragedy. And for years they hated our guts, and two of the three families came to accept our point of view by the end of the Second Paradise Loss, but even at by the time of the Third Paradise Loss, which came out in twenty eleven and coincided with their release, one of the families. You know, the movie was nominated for an Academy Award and some other prizes, and I mention that only because these families took the time to write to the Academy and to the Director's Guild and every place that had nominated us for a prize to say that these films are works of fiction, that we manipulated them, we lied to them, that the West Memphis Three are guilty. And I look, I have, even though they hate us, I have endless reservoirs of sympathy for them, because again, going through this experience is every parent's worst nightmare and then to be victimized by the system again because the police and the prosecution have lied to them. That's the other part that people don't really think about is what happens to the victims when the truth is just not the truth. 01:03:44 Speaker 1: Who do you think killed those kids? 01:03:47 Speaker 9: Oh, I don't want to do. I don't want to do to somebody else what I think was done to Damien. What I do know is that the case needs to be reopened. That we all know that no sane prosecutor would knowingly let convicted teen Satanist child killers out into the real world if they had any kind of belief that they were guilty. If they did, because the argument in Arkansas amongst some of these officials is there was so much pressure from Johnny Depp and Eddie Vedder and Peter Jackson. Well, shame on you. You're going to let a convicted child killer who you believe is capable of castrating little boys in a Satanic ritual. You're going to let them out after eighteen years because Johnny Depp said to So if that's true, shame on you. And if you don't believe that, and they're actually innocent, as we all know, then shame on you for sticking with this Alfred plea and not looking into the case. As we all know, there's some evidence that points very directly to one of the stepfathers. I don't want to say he's guilty or not, but a competent authority needs to look into this, and they refuse to because they're hiding behind the Alfred plea. And that's the crime here. There are some simple abuses that I think could easily be remedied. One is prosecutorial accountability. There's way too much misconduct that needs to be arrested, and I think finding the balance between making it so scary that a prosecutor doesn't even want to take the job, which I understand, versus like just wilful withholding of evidence for example, it just needs to be stopped. The other thing is that people get a vested interest in staying on a case forever. Prosecutors stay on a case. Judges in some states like Arkansas are allowed to stay on the case if something is up for review. The original people should be out of the picture immediately. I mean, it just doesn't make sense to me. One of the cases that the Supreme Court finally is going to hear is the Curtis Flowers case, and we profiled Curtis Flowers. I mean, he's a guy. I think it's totally innocent, and we profiled that case on a show I do call wrong man. And the guy has been tried. He's the most tried inmate in the history of American jurisprudence. Jurisprudence is that he said, yes, that's right, I'm better at filmmaking than the vocabulary. He's been tried six times and each time it's the same prosecutor, and they keep affirming his conviction again, circumstantial evidence and so many holes in that case. And thankfully the Supreme Court a few weeks ago said they're going to hear the case again. But even the Supreme Court hearing the case, if it's a good result and the state appeal is overturned by the Supreme Court, then it gets remanded back to you know, to the state to determine if they're going to try him a seventh time, which is absurd. And it's the same prosecutor. 01:06:36 Speaker 1: It's like crazy, right, the taxpayer dollars that are being expended on this if, I mean, it's probably the least important aspect of it, but it's still a remarkable amount of time and energy and resources being devoted to persecuting. There's one guy, Curtis Flowers, who was convicted of murdering four people in a furniture store in Mississippi. 01:06:55 Speaker 9: Mississippi, four white people. He's a he's a black man, and you know that it's the other huge problem as I don't need to tell anyone that the extreme racial inequities in our system, you know, So we. 01:07:08 Speaker 1: Don't have a ton of time left. I do want to ask you what do you think about the role of media in the criminal justice debate? Right now? And then I have one more question for you before we go to final thoughts. 01:07:22 Speaker 9: Sure, you know, I think one size does not fit all. There's a lot of irresponsible reporting. I mean, we saw in the Amanda Knox case that reporters were horrible in festering the image of Foxy Noxy and making her seem guilty and really did her a disservice in her case, And same thing with Eccholes. I mean, you know, the local media down there was just fanning the flames of the monster of the daily headline and the daily news report. So there's a lot of irresponsible reporting. There's a lot of true crime, And I hate that phrase again because it somehow implies, like I'm considered a true crime filmmaker. I'd rather not be known as a true crime filmmaker, you know, I'm a filmmaker who's involved in the criminal justice system. True crime implies that you're wallowing in the misery of others, you know, for entertainment purposes, and that's the last thing I'm doing. But some of that stuff on some of these networks does that. So I think the role of smart, talented storytellers who are shining a light on criminal justice abuse has never been more important. First of all, for the first time because of the last couple of years, with the advent of streaming and the growing popularity of documentary in general. You know, when I started making films twenty five years ago, if you didn't sell your documentary to PBS or HBO, you weren't selling your documentary. And now there's just you know, unscripted series were never heard of. I mean, that was just not even a concept. And with that also has come, you know, the blurring of the line between entertainment and news at networks has become so blurry that certain stories aren't covered. You know, the networks are owned by a handful of corporations after all, and I like all the companies I work with, but there are certain stories that they won't cover for fear of offending advertise. I'm not just talking in the criminal justice round, but there's certain stories that either they won't rate, you know, in other words, the audience won't be big enough, or they'll offend certain advertisers. So today in twenty nineteen, also because of the demise of print journalism because of the Internet, you know, newspapers have been gutted. You know, I think the independent documentarians are doing some of the most robust social justice reporting, and so that kind of filmmaking couldn't be more important and more timely. But it's hard to paint it all with the same brush because there's a lot of horrible reporting and irresponsible reporting. But generally, I think it's a good thing. 01:09:47 Speaker 1: For people that are listening now and who are hearing the amazing story of how you sort of almost accidentally got involved in this or serendipitously got involved in its work and then ended up having an outsize impact. I know, for me more than ever. I'm getting increase from people. How do I help? What do I do? I want to be involved, I want to do something. I listen to your show, or I saw some ATV, or I came to an Innocence Project event, And what would you tell people that are listening now that want to get involved. What's the best way for them to, you know, make a difference. Someone who's not you know, isn't a rich person, but it's someone who has a heart and who hears about Richard glossip or hears about so many of the other people Yvonne Tellegus or Rob will who I recently visited on Death Throw in Texas, who is innocents as could be. What do you tell these people? 01:10:37 Speaker 9: I mean, first of all is awareness. You know, I myself, before I got involved in this accidentally went because I was making a film about something else. I thought I had a basic belief that the system works, and it works sometimes, but it often fails miserably. So just having that basic understanding and awareness is helpful and little actions add up to a lot. Again, not saying anything discourteous about Johnny Depp or Eddie Vedder or Natalie Mains those guys were amazing. Those names wrote checks and did things and did concerts. But what really made the difference, in my opinion, really what made a difference in that case were tens of thousands of regular people who saw paradise lost, who did not have an outsized wallet. But until the local politicians and prosecutors are politicians, and many municipalities they are elected officials. They didn't start taking the case seriously until the local population took the case seriously. And what made the local population take the case seriously is tens of thousands of people who banded together on this website called Free the West Memphis three went down religiously to every action, every appeal, every hearing. There were thousands of regular people from all walks of life who chose to take their vacation in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to hold up a sign and have their voices heard. At the end of the day, a lot of these people who hold positions of power, who have this unique power to take your liberty away, often unjustly, often justly. Again, I don't think every prosecutor is a bad guy, but they are elected officials for the most part, and people should wake up and if you live in Oklahoma, pay attention to the Richard Glossop case. I mean there's sadly there's a case. There's a wrongful conviction case yet probably in every state, and just little actions and awareness I think go a long way. You don't have to write a big check. 01:12:40 Speaker 1: So I guess start by watching learning more. Watch The Wrong. 01:12:44 Speaker 9: Man you can stream on Amazon. 01:12:46 Speaker 1: Watch An Innocent Man, the amazing documentary about the book that John Grisham wrote about these cases in Ada, Oklahoma, and go to Frerobwill dot org. Is there a Richard glossopside. I'm sure there is if you google. 01:12:59 Speaker 9: Richard glas and why I'm drawing a blank what the website is, But just google Richard Gossip and you'll find a lot of supporters. There's a guy named Don Knight in Colorado who's running that case. He's the tireless, thankless defense attorney who is really is doing amazing work. So Don Knight in Colorado is a good guy to be in touch with if you feel you have something significant to offer, or. 01:13:23 Speaker 1: Just be aware and one minute speed round. First of all, I want to thank you for this has been fun coming. Joe Berlinger, amazing filmmaker, and advocate for the wrongfully convicted. And I'm looking forward to doing more work with you. Yeah, me too. And like I said, let's take the last minute or two to any final thoughts that you have, if you have any. 01:13:44 Speaker 9: You know, we have a criminal justice system sorely in need to reform, and I think it's the number one issue, the thing we hold most dear as Americans. The thing that's set us apart is our personal liberty, and a prosecutor has the unique power to take that personal liberty away without accountability. And I think it's time to hold those people who have the power to take our liberty away to be held accountable to a higher standard. And I think a lot of these problems would go away. But there's all sorts of problems in our criminal justice system and people should be aware of it because it really needs addressing. I mean, a whole generation has been locked away over horrible drug laws. 01:14:20 Speaker 1: I mean, we can go on and on and on. 01:14:22 Speaker 9: You know, we have five percent of the world's population and twenty five percent of the world's prison population, more than Russia and China combined. That's disturbing and goes against who we think we are as Americans. 01:14:32 Speaker 1: Yeah, we locked black people up at six times the rate of South Africa, the height of apartheid. It's all a national shame and a disgrace. But absolutely, yeah, please do get involved, keep listening. We appreciate you being here with us. And when you're on a jury, we need everybody to show up serve because it's just your film human being who's up there, and they may be the next Damien Echols. So thanks again for listening. This is Wrongful Conviction. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps. 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 at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm is a production of Lava for Good podcasts and association with signal Company Number one