Latest / Wrongful Conviction Podcasts / 522: #522 Jason Flom and Maggie Freleng with Andre Brown live from the UJC Summit
Transcript
- 00:00:04 Speaker 1: Since our original coverage of Andre Brown's case, there have been some terrifying developments. Our listeners might recall that Andre's team revealed a very compelling alternate suspect in this case, someone who looked like Andrea, lived in the neighborhood, had a motive, and who at the time of the crime, was not recovering from a debilitating injury, unlike Andrea, who could barely walk, let alone chase the victims in this case, so, Andrea's conviction was overturned. But despite this information, the Bronx District Attorney's office appealed the decision that overturned Andrea's conviction, and they won. So this Friday, yes, this upcoming Friday, April twenty fifth, twenty twenty five, they aimed to take Andre from his wife and children and the freedom that he richly deserves to serve out the remaining seventeen years of someone else's forty year sentence. So I am pleading with you to help save an innocent man from further injustice. There's a petition for clemency linked in the episode description. Scroll to it, sign it, share it, and perhaps by this weekend there will be one less terrible thing happening. 00:01:20 Speaker 2: In this world. 00:01:24 Speaker 1: On the evening of January fifteenth, nineteen ninety nine, a masked man approached two teenage boys in front of a bodega in the Bronx, on a corner known for drug activity. The assailant drew a gun and shot one of the young men several times while the other ran off. The gunman chased the other young man down the block and around the corner before paralyzing him with one shot to the back. While both victims survived, only one was conscious, but he couldn't or wouldn't provide a lead. An eyewitness said that she recognized the shooter as a guy from the neighbor named Drey. The police remembered Andre Brown, a neighborhood kid who was shot in the leg one year prior in a drug dispute. The specter of his injured leg and alternate suspects were ignored when both the witness and the victim agreed that Andre was the assailant. 00:02:18 Speaker 2: But this is wrongful conviction. 00:02:28 Speaker 3: 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. 00:02:47 Speaker 2: Welcome Back to Wrongful Conviction. 00:02:49 Speaker 1: Recently, Jason Flamm and I were asked to record an interview in front of a live audience at the annual United Justice Coalition Summit. 00:02:57 Speaker 2: The UJC aims to raise awareness around. 00:02:59 Speaker 1: Social justice issues and the need for criminal legal system reform. So for our live interview, we thought of a mutual friend, someone whose case I covered on my podcast Unjustin Unsolved. Well, he was still wrongfully incarcerated, Andre Brown. Andrea agreed to join us at the summit along with his attorney Oscar Michelin. 00:03:22 Speaker 4: Thanks everybody for being here. 00:03:24 Speaker 3: I'm gonna ask, first of all, how many people in this room were wrongfully convicted and sentenced? Oh my god, see that? And how many people here know somebody who was wrongfully convicted? Oh my god, that's a lot of hands. 00:03:35 Speaker 4: Yeah. This shit is everywhere. 00:03:37 Speaker 3: It's horrible, and I'm really really thrilled to be here with these amazing, amazing people, Maggie Feeling, Oscar and of course Andre Brown. And I'm so glad that Andrea is here. I mean, I'm so glad you're here, because I'm so glad you're here with your amazing, beautiful family and everything. 00:03:52 Speaker 4: But his case start with this, okay. 00:03:56 Speaker 3: It features a witness who didn't testify, but her testimony was allowed in any way, which meant that no one. 00:04:03 Speaker 4: Was allowed to cross examine her. 00:04:05 Speaker 3: Second of all, the shooter shot one guy execution style, then chased his friend caught up to him on the street. Now that this was an eighteen year old kid running for his life and somehow this guy was fast enough to catch up with him and shoot him and paralyze him too. Andre had a bullet wound in his leg and had a syndrome that meant that he could barely walk, much less run. And it also features a lawyer who, while he was representing Andrea a trial, had a side hustle which was committing so many crimes for the Banano crime family that he ended up being the only attorney in American history to enter the witness Protection program. 00:04:45 Speaker 4: So it's a shit show. 00:04:47 Speaker 3: So get ready to hear what we're about to hear, because this is just different and Andre is just a different kind of guy. 00:04:53 Speaker 4: I mean to no one is to love him. So with that, Maggie, all right. 00:04:57 Speaker 1: So hello everyone, thanks for coming. I'm just gonna start from the top with Andre, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself. 00:05:04 Speaker 5: I was raised in a two parent household. It was the Uptime area, the Northeast Bronx. The crack epidemic was going on, a lot of gun shots being fired continuously. The trains were littered homeless people, and it was just a real, just tragic time in the Bronx. My life was a fair life. My mother was a stewardess for the airlines, and she raised us and groomed us to be good individuals. And then my mother and my father separated. At that time, I was in high school and now I was taken on the onus of raising my brothers. So I said, how can I now change the course of their lives and allow myself to continue in an upward manner. First, I took on a job at creating barrel, trying to think that it would be able to fit the bill, and it didn't. It couldn't feed my little sister or my other two brothers. So at that time I said, you know what, I have to do something else. And my friend introduced me to selling drugs. And when I started to sell drugs, literally I thought I was a genius Sabbath, And this is how your mind gets cultivated poorly in the streets. You start to really engage and think that you know better than law enforcement, you know better than society, and you also know better than that old adage cartoon the Turtle and the rabbit, thinking that, oh, I know what I'm doing. I'm running past this little working man, this turtle. So in selling drugs, in thinking I was a genius, I got shot a simple leg shot, mind you. It hit my major artery and I almost bled to death. And that was the turning point in my life. 00:06:56 Speaker 1: So you almost died, So you got on a better path in life. 00:07:00 Speaker 5: Yes, First of all, you have to be an enforcer on a block in order to hold it down. I was injured, critically injured. I was at the point where I couldn't walk, I could no longer hold down a block. So I said, what am I going to do now with my life? And I started going back to college. At that point, I enrolled in BMCC. And that's when you know, tragedy. 00:07:22 Speaker 1: Occurred, right, And I want to bring that to Oscar. January fifteenth, nineteen ninety nine. What happened that day? 00:07:29 Speaker 6: So on that day there was a shooting on a street corner in the Bronx Allerton Avenue, White Plains Road. That area. The corner there was Little Bodeiga, a little corner store had been a spot where young Jamaican gang had started selling marijuana out of for the past about year or so, and the cops were aware of that, and so there became a little bit of a rival turf war for that location from the earlier crews that had been working there selling marijuana. And so the first incident that happened was on January eleventh, there was a shootout on that corner, two exchanges of gunfire. Nobody got shot, some cars were shot up, so the police responded. On January thirteenth, two days later, one of the guys that hustles on that corner, guy named O'Neil virgo, got arrested, and sure enough the gun he had on him was connected to the shooting on the eleventh, so he gets the rest of for a gun charge. And then on the fifteenth O'Neil Virgo and another man Sewn Nicholson or out on that corner selling drugs. Somebody comes up right down White Planes Road sees them on the corner, they see the gun. He's got a mask on. The shooter literally stands over O'Neil Virgo and shoots him several times and then runs down the street to try to get the other guy, Sewn Nicholson, They were in a full city block. He makes a left turn onto the next block, which is Olinville, and the shooter shoots him there one time, hits him in the spine and paralyzes him. Somehow they both survived. So his attempted murder, there was lots of descriptions as to what the shooter was wearing. Was it a face mask, was it a handkerchief of bandana, et cetera. So they asked the victim at that time, Sean Nicholson. Mister Virgo could not speak. He was the one who shot five or six times. And that initial police report, Sewn Nicholson, he says, I can't identify the shooter, and so the police start scouring the area looking for witnesses. 00:09:21 Speaker 3: So how did it end up with them settling on a guy who, it should have been painfully obvious from the very beginning not only didn't do it, but couldn't have done it. 00:09:33 Speaker 6: They started listening to rumors in the in the street, and one of the women who later recanted said, you know, the shooter looked a little bit like this guy I know from the neighborhood, Dre. So the next thing they do with that is go to the hospital and get Sean Nicholson, who had repeatedly said I didn't see the guy he had a mask to pick Andre allegedly out of a photo array. So what Nicholson actually said, or what the police got him to say, was, as he was falling to the ground, he looked over his shoulder and saw the shooter pulled the mask off his face, and he could recognize Andre from the neighborhood. 00:10:07 Speaker 4: Sounds totally legit exactly happens all the time. 00:10:10 Speaker 6: Two days later, a witness comes forward who claims she was in her car when the shooting occurred. And this is about five point thirty six o'clock at night on a winter night, so it was just starting to get dark in January. And then she says she saw the shooter run past her and pull up his mask just as he passed her car window. She also said that the shots were fired by her car, but the shots that shot mister Nicholson, as a described, were around the corner, so she would not have been able to see what she said she saw, and she said that she was so upset that night she reported to the police because she almost had a heart attack and she was treated for angina that night. So she didn't come forward until two days later after there was already the rumors in the neighborhood and they were already looking for Andre. 00:10:55 Speaker 1: So, Andre, when you found out they were looking for you, you turned yourself in with a lawyer. 00:11:00 Speaker 5: Yes, they came to my girlfriend's house early in the morning. They missed me. I had just went out to get breakfast really quick and came back. She was trembling, and she said, listen, the police were here. They left the card that they searched the home. I immediately reached out to my mom and she said, Andre, they were just here. Also, I was just about to call you. And I went to the Bar Association to meet Martin Fisher. Martin Fisher was a family attorney, and I said, Marty, they're looking for me. I don't know what they're looking for me for. They were contacted by Martin and they said we want to ask him a few questions. He said, no, he's represented by me. You cannot ask him any questions. I said, okay, well, if we need him, we'll contact you. Two days later, on the Wednesday morning, they contacted him, which was the twentieth of January, and I went down there with my mom and my girlfriend at the time, walked right into the prison. I didn't have a worry in the world because I knew that I didn't have anything to do with this case. So at that time I was not a prisoner yet. I was actually seated outside of the push door. And it's ironic because one of the detectives there, he said, Andre, don't you remember me? And I'm like, no, I don't. Who are you? He said, when you were shot? I came to the hospital, so they knew that I was shot already before even any questions were occurring. And then my attorney went inside spoke to them, and he came back out, and at that point they arrested me, and I became enraged. You know, I was yelling at my attorney. I was yelling at them. I said, listen, I could have never committed this crime. I showed them my injury. They noted it. It was on the police reports and then I went to a lineup, and when I went to the lineup, I was picked out of the lineup as the suspect. 00:12:54 Speaker 3: Freedom Agenda is a proud sponsor of this episode of Wrawful Conviction. Freedom Agenda is led by people to directly impacted by incarceration, and they're organizing to get Mayor Eric Adams to follow the law and shut down Rikers Island. Right now, thousands of people are awaiting trial there in life threatening conditions. Freedom Agenda is committed to creating a safer and more just city by winning investments in long neglected communities, protecting the rights of people involved in the criminal legal system, and ending the cycle of violence that Rikers perpetuates. To learn more about the campaign to Close Rikers and to sign up for Freedom Agenda's mailing list, go to Campaign to Close Rikers dot org, slash, get involved, or follow at Freedom Agenda and Why on social media. It's a perfect time to highlight the fact that eyewitness identification has been proven in experiments to be less accurate than guessing when you're in a hyper tense situation like your own life is on the line, when there's gunshots being fired, when it's a running gun situation. Literally in the case, your adrenalinees going, and most people think their minds work like a camera, but in fact we're so easily influenced that in this case, it seems like the police may have influenced these witnesses, and I'm being very kind. 00:14:11 Speaker 4: They may have. 00:14:12 Speaker 6: And we believe that she did witness it, that she was there, that we do believe, but we believe that she was guided into picking the wrong person. 00:14:20 Speaker 1: In addition to any guidance the victim and the witness may have received from law enforcement, Andre's case features a very unfortunate coincidence. It became clear many years later when the true assailant was discovered that he and Andrea could easily be mistaken for one another, especially given the alleged quick glances that the witness and victim were relying on to make their identifications. 00:14:44 Speaker 5: What were the charges to attempted martis? Two assaults, reckless endangerment, and the list just goes on and on and everything under a gun possession gun possession. The family hired a well known criminal defense attorney named Ira Brown, and the first appearance, Iira says to the judge, but the family retained me, but they don't have enough money to pay for an expert. 00:15:05 Speaker 6: Can the court pay for an expert? You see, Judge, my client just recently started being able to walk without a cane. He's still undergoing physical therapy, and at the time of this shooting, he couldn't possibly have ran the two city blocks that the shooter did. So I want to get the medical records, and I want to hire an expert orthopedist. And the judge said, well, that sounds like a pretty strong defense. So let me start with five hundred dollars, get the medical records, and then when you hire the expert, let me know you know what else you need, because yes, we'll pay for that. What happened was Ira was on trial two or three times in a row when Andrea's case was on and the family decided we have to get somebody else. At that time, there were a lot of mafia trials going on, you know, the gotty cases, and mafia lawyers were kind of considered the cream of the crop, and they hired a guy named Thomas Lee to take over the case. And that's where everything fell apart. So even though the judge had proved this money, Thomas never pursued the medical evidence after that. And there were two witnesses that he told the court he was trying to locate who would name another shooter, a witness named Graham and a witness named Cleveland. And he gave subpoenas to the judge and he didn't have the addresses on the subpoenas, so judge said, I can't sign a blank subpoena. Get me the addresses and I'll sign them. And he never did anything else after that. The last straw, and what Jason was referring to, was that the one eyewitness was going to testify. The woman in the car ran into Andre's mother and a family friend at a laundromat and they pleaded with her, you know, he made a mistake, my son didn't do this. She reports that to the DA, who reports it to the judge, and the judge said, well, that's perfectly normal. They didn't threaten her. They just told her they think her son is innocent. But what the DA was saying was that she didn't want to come forward and testify. We believe she didn't want to come forward and testify because she knew that she probably did not identify the right person. But what happened after that is the day before she's supposed to testify, a bullet in an envelope ends up under her windshield wiper and it says, this is what happens to rats, you fat bitch. 00:17:08 Speaker 5: And it was written in reading and ready with two bullets in a left on her windshield right. 00:17:14 Speaker 6: So of incarcerated. So he didn't do it right the point about Lee being involved, what the judge said was it had to have been someone connected to the defendant. What she didn't consider it was the lawyer was a fully made member of the Bonano crime family and one of the crimes he got arrested for and turned informant was that he would go to the jail and speak to the dawn who was arrested because he could go see him without anybody listening. He's a lawyer, and he would go back and give instructions including who to give a garbage contract to in Staten Island, who to give a garbage contract to in the Bronx, and who to kill and who to promote within the family, who's more likely to intimidate it Like that's their game, that's what they do. This sounds like a mob guy. And it would also explain why he wouldn't do the rest of the work because he says, there's one witness. If she doesn't show up, the case is over, and I can't you know, many times they would tell clients, you know, they would say, don't worry, she's not going to show up. And I would say that, you know, the third floor in Attica is called that she showed up wing. Okay, you know, don't count on someone not showing up. She's going to show up. She hates you, okay. But so Heap was probably counting on that he was going to be able to intimidate her and I don't need to worry about it. 00:18:29 Speaker 1: Even though it's believed that this witness refused to testify due to her doubts over her identification, the appearance of witness intimidation probably did not reflect well on Andre. Meanwhile, his attorney's trial strategy hinged on both her absence and being able to cross examine the victim, who had initially said that he could not identify the shooter. Well, both of those things came to pass. The witness's absence at trial had an unforeseen and unfortunate result. 00:18:56 Speaker 6: They let the DA read her testimony from the jury. It was a total of six questions, Where were you on that night in my car? What happened? Somebody ran by me? What happened after that? I saw a second person would have gone ran after him. What happened after that? I heard shots? What happened after that? He pulled his mask off. Were he able to see his face? Yes? Did you recognize him? Yes? Who Andre Brown? Now she didn't know the name Andre Brown, She only knew was Dre But by the time the grand jury she had learned the name, and he said, how do you know him from around the neighborhood? That's it? Okay, those eight questions, whatever I just went through. That was her testimony. That's what convicted Andre essentially was those eight questions. But she wasn't cross examined about being in the car at night being scared. The jury never heard she almost had a heart attack. The jury never saw how similar Andrea looked to the real shooter. Obviously, Now Nicholson testified, you know also that he saw him as he fell, and he was pretty well cross examined by Lee. I will say that that's what he was good at to say how incredible it could be that you could be falling down looking over your shoulder and catch a glimpse of the guy, you know. So that was the whole evidence. 00:20:03 Speaker 1: Right there, right So to just summarize the entire evidence against you, Andre, was not cross testimony from this witness. 00:20:12 Speaker 4: That's it. 00:20:12 Speaker 5: That's it. 00:20:13 Speaker 6: No motive, no physical evidence. 00:20:15 Speaker 2: Those eight questions convicted Andre. 00:20:16 Speaker 3: I said, so, Andre, that moment when the jury came back in, can you take us inside your heart, your soul, your experience of being in that courtroom jury comes back and says guilty. 00:20:30 Speaker 5: At that very moment, I was shaking the pinnacle of either I'm going home or I received this forty years. And I sat there and the judge came in and we all rose, and there was one guy I'll never forget in the jury and he kept looking at me and he was shaking his head like, Yo, Yo, it's not good, man, it's not good. And I looked at him. I said what happened? He said, Yo, they found you guilty. And I told Lee, I hit him. I said, Yo, they're gonna find me guilty. He said, what are you talking about. I put on a great defense here, and he put on no defense didn't bring my medical records anything like that to the jury's attention. And I was trembling knowing that I was about to be convicted. I just felt like an entire cold go over my body. It's almost as if your soul leaves you, because you know this is the transformation of life itself. After I was convicted, I was taken back upstairs. I was crying continuously taking back to records island. So the judge waited. I think it was like three months before sentencing, and I thought that the judge would have saw the lies and would have changed her mind and sent me home. I can remember it clearly. I said, she's going to see it. She'll see the lies, she'll see that Thomas Lee didn't put on the defense, She'll be able to see medical records something. But when I come back, I'm going to be freed. And when I was sentence, I snapped again and I said, do you see what you're doing to an innocent man? Do you see what you're taking me away from? Do you see that you're taking me from my college, from my family, from my potential girlfriend, everything that I've worked so hard for. Do you see what you're taking away? From me, and she said, mister Brown, I understand what you have an appeal, and she sentenced me. She said, for the first count, I'm going to sentence you to twenty years, and then she said for the second count, I'm going to sentence you to twenty years, and both of these sentences will run consecutive to one another. And I didn't understand what that meant at the time. And then when I got back and they gave me my sentence and commitment papers, it said forty years. I want our audience to really understand going through a book pin therapy the three stages of prison because it changes the cognition of your mind. 00:23:06 Speaker 2: Well, so you were a. 00:23:06 Speaker 1: Child, so your brain is still developing when you went into prison. 00:23:10 Speaker 5: Absolutely, so you know I'm arrested, kicking, screaming, being dragged into prison saying you did something that you didn't do. I go through the central Booking is the first stage of prison. Straight madness and chaos. People sleeping on the floor, you're trying to get to the phone system, You're trying to lay on a bench where individuals is fighting and pulling and tugging and saying if you're not built like that, you're not sleeping on the bench. You're going to sleep under the bench. You're going to sleep on the floor. You may sleep near the toilet, whereas all urine filled. So this is the first stage of being thrown inside the madness. And then the second stage is going through reik As Island. And now you're fighting to get on the phones again, you're fighting in the yard. You're making sure now you're exercising so that you can stay, you know, buil for anything that's going to come at you. So it's a war zone from Central Book and two ryk As Island, and now you're getting thrown inside the Department of Corrections where they're supposed to rehabilitate you. But now it's more gangs, it's more violence, it's more police assault, it's more just the pitfalls of the criminal justice system. So immediately my mind started to trigger Andre. Now you're going to be like them. You have to now engage into the brutality to make it to take phone, to carry raisers, to carry sharp objects, to protect yourself. You have to battle in order to have your core beliefs and your freedom's met. In the minds of these men who understand that we're criminals. 00:24:53 Speaker 1: When you put an innocent child in prison with people that are actually dangerous through d fist people in prison, you have to survive, absolutely, and that could also be a huge hindrance to him getting out if he got in a fight or someone attacked him and something happened. I mean, we don't even think about that when we put someone like you in prison that's innocent, you could come out an actual criminal. 00:25:18 Speaker 6: At that point, it came up but as strong because he got into a fight and the DIA brought it to the attention that he got into a violent altercation at prison because they made a bail application. So even though you didn't know that, that's exactly what happened. 00:25:30 Speaker 1: I didn't know that, but yeah, that could have hurt your chances of getting out absolutely. 00:25:34 Speaker 2: So Oscar, how did you get this man out of prison? 00:25:37 Speaker 5: Yeah? That's good to the good stuff here. Well. 00:25:40 Speaker 6: So one of the reasons I got involved in Andrea's case is this is my neighborhood. We went to the same high school, Christopher Columbus. 00:25:45 Speaker 4: In the Bronx for Columbus, he wrongly identified a whole country. 00:25:48 Speaker 6: Exactly, wasn't even on the same continent. But in any event, the case right, I said, it spoke to me, but also showed how weak it was. We just found out during freedom of information laws, which is everybody's good friend. We first found a report at DD five that was not given to either mister Ira Brown or to Lee that showed that the police had actually tested the bullets and found that the bullets on the fifteenth matched the gun that was used on the eleventh, So we already knew that Virgo had one of the guns, so this had to be the gun that was shooting at Virgo on the eleventh. So frankly, I felt that was almost enough because now we had a motive for the jury that the same person who shot at these two young men also shot them on the fifteenth, and O'Neil Virgo had told the police he got a look at the person who shot him on the eleventh and he didn't think it was Andre. So if Andre didn't shoot him on the eleventh, and how could Andre have had the gun on the fifteenth, And the judge at his hearing had a lot of questions about that. That was the first thing. We then found another DD five of a witness, Courtney Weezy, who said that the shooter was wearing a TAM. Tam is what Jamaica men were to hold. It's a big woolf cat. Courtney Weezy said the shooter had a TAM and he was showing a photo array with Andrea's picture in it and said he couldn't recognize anybody in the photo ray. We only got the first page and I noticed there was a check mark on the front page as witness can I d yes? And then no one ever got the second page, said makes. 00:27:20 Speaker 2: Id no, so that's a Brady violation. 00:27:22 Speaker 6: That would be a Brady violation. But they argued that the shooter had a mask on, so you know, it wasn't a big deal and he couldn't see it. But the point is he had a right to know that. And so I said, well, there'd be no reason for Andre to be wearing a TAM. So this shooter was likely Jamaican. And I knew that back then there was a lot of battle between Jamaicans and American blacks over turf as the Jamaicans are moving into the Bronx, So didnt makes sense to me that both of the victims were Jamaican. Why would a Jamaican shoot these victims. But we found out when we located the witnesses was that the real shooter was a Jamaican guy who happened to have gotten into the neighborhood a little bit earlier and was working with America Blacks to sell weed at that location. And even though they were Jamaican, he didn't like that they were working his corner, and that's what the shooting was all about. The guy who we discovered was the real shooter, we did some research and tried to get his yearbook picture, and we got his middle school yearbook picture. By sheer coincidence. The principal of the middle school that he went to ended up being my English teacher from back in seventh grade. So there's a lot of connections for me in the case. If you put these pictures side by side, Andre and the real shooter look extremely similar. And that's a key factor is that the person who might have seen the real shooter when his mass was off could have easily picked him as Andre. They were the exact same height and the exact same weight, okay, and a very similar face. When we found the motion, we showed, hey, look what tam means. The real shooter we found out was Jamaican. He would wear that the victims were selling weed. Andre never sold weed. This guy only sold weed. Seven months after this shooting, guess what happened. Real shooter gets gunned down. 00:28:59 Speaker 5: Just finding the funeral picture where he actually had dreads, right, we were able to actually put together the two pieces of the tim and now the dreads with the funeral pictures. Right. 00:29:08 Speaker 6: We found his funeral program, which is great because it said his real name, but in the middle it said Bonkers. Okay, his nickname was Bonkers, and the witness said, this guy was crazy. This guy would shoot you up for no reason. So it's like, let's put this together here, okay. And then we actually found a surgeon who did the surgery on Andre's leg. He had a very serious condition called compartment syndrome. And what happens there is you get shot and your leg swells up so much that they have to expose all four quadrants of your calf. They cut it open, and they leave you lying in bed with open wounds until the pressure goes down. He had skin grasps. We're talking about a scar from his thigh down to his angle, proven atrophy, and the doctor actually remembered the case, which is unbelievable. He's the head of trauma at Jacobi in the Bronx, which is a trauma one center, so this is not some quack. And now he was head of medicine and surgery at my Moderny's in Brooklyn. 00:30:09 Speaker 5: And listen, I just want to say that when you're wrongfully convicted, you better know God. All right, We're not going to allow that not to be set on this forum right now. It really must be stated because a lot of this is sheer luck and God's umbrella had to be on me because my surgeon was alive. 00:30:31 Speaker 6: And he said, there's no way someone with this injury could have ran. He said, maybe he could pull his leg along, he said, but he would have a noticeable limp at best. And the judge at Andrea's hearings said, could he jog? He said, no, he could not jog. He could not jog. He could not run this quickly. The problem was because the case was so old, there were no physical therapy records to show how far along to me when in. 00:30:59 Speaker 1: God those medical record to because his amazing wife, and not to mention my. 00:31:03 Speaker 5: Brother Devon who's not here. Also where we were on the phone, like illegally at that point, making three week calls to Jacobe Hospital to locate these records. 00:31:14 Speaker 6: This surgeon he actually called over there to try to get him himself. I mean, he really knew that something wrong was going on. I got to give him Ronald Simon. He said, there's got to be pt records there. Maybe I five call, you know, we'll find them. And no one could find those therapy recordscause they don't preserve them. It's talk about the year in nineteen ninety, we're looking for them in twenty twenty, you know. But we did have Ira Brown telling the judge at his first court appearance, my client is still undergoing physical therapy and only recently was able to walk without a cane, and so that formed the basis. 00:31:45 Speaker 3: You know, there are a series of sort of miracles, right that led to you being here. But it points out, you know, my estimate is that there's probably around two hundred thousand innocent people in prison while we're sitting here right now in this country, and that's probably conservative. And those people, many of them don't have a way out. They don't have an Oscar Michelin, right, they don't have a Maggie feeling to do a podcast about the case. 00:32:09 Speaker 4: In fact, this goes back to. 00:32:10 Speaker 3: Very early when we first started the Wrongful Conviction podcast and our producer back then was a woman named Sabine Jansen. 00:32:16 Speaker 4: She alerted me to your case. 00:32:18 Speaker 3: I brought it to our fantastic PR person named Don Cameron. To generate some interest, we brought Jeffrey Deskovic. I was about to go there and let me brag on Jeffrey for a second. So Jeffrey Deskovic right there sitting in the front row, standing in the front row, wrongfully convicted, served sixteen years in New York State and is now a member of the bar. 00:32:42 Speaker 4: And he turned out to be Listen. 00:32:45 Speaker 5: As a joke, and as a joke, you know, we say that Jeffrey is the media whore. 00:32:53 Speaker 2: Okay, they love your case because you brought the case. 00:32:57 Speaker 5: Listen, they love jeff the media so immediately. And it's not a joke, guys. 00:33:04 Speaker 6: He pays a lot of attention to this. 00:33:05 Speaker 5: Yes, that's for sure, because Jeff is my brother. Jeff is the guy who went hard, extremely hard in the media for my case. Him and then Sabine will never forget Sabine because she contacted Jason, and Jason said, who's Andre Brown? And Sabin explained it and he said, listen, we got to put Dawn on this because the only thing that Governor Cuomo does in the morning is he reads and not bad. So at that point he put Dawn right in the fray of everything, and the campaign began. 00:33:42 Speaker 6: First, we went to the Conviction Review Unit. They rejected the case and so we filed a four to forty. 00:33:48 Speaker 5: At that time, it was COVID and they were not trying to bring me down on a hearing. 00:33:52 Speaker 6: We had asked for a virtual hearing because the courts were closed to in person hearings, and the DA opposed that, and then Jeff four organized a rally in front of her office to try to get her to agree to a virtual hearing, and we had a hearing and the judge agreed that at the very least Lee was ineffective for not presenting the medical evidence, and just to put the icing on it. I've known Jeff for a long time. We kind of mentored him through with his law school experience, and he became an admitted attorney right before we had got a hearing granted. So I asked him to second seat me and Andre was 's first client. So and Jeff, he's bat in one hundred. 00:34:34 Speaker 1: So actually, Oscar, I do want to point out not exactly one hundred Andre. 00:34:38 Speaker 6: Oh, I shouldn't say that's right. 00:34:40 Speaker 1: Andrea is not exonerated yet, which is why we were here telling his story because the bronx DA is actually still fighting his conviction, wanting to put Andre back in prison. So not only do we need to exonerate him, we need to make sure that he doesn't go back to prison. 00:34:56 Speaker 6: Yeah, they're filed an appeal of the khure of the conviction, and I got to tell you, you know, the odds of its success are not high, they're low. But this room speaks to what happens when you caught up in the criminal justice system. Right, if you're counting on the criminal justicism to work out for you, you know you're going to get very sorely disappointed. So it really, you know, is a case that should not be appealed. Never mind the fact that he served well over twenty years for a crime that we established, you know, he didn't commit, but to just drag it on, have this over his head. They fought bail. Now after the judge vacated his conviction. They asked for five hundred thousand dollars bail. Okay, the judge released him, but to supervise release, just like it wouldn't give us the measure that he was actually innocent. Took the safe path and said he was ineffective. You know, as I said to Jason before we came out here, I've been involved in a lot of cases. I've never had a case with this much evidence of innocence. And the judge just couldn't get there. And then he couldn't just do he had to send him to supervised release. So it's just constant. The justice system loves finality. They want to, you know, keep that hold on you. To the point where when he first started going to the supervised release place, which is now run by the Fortune Society, they called us and said, why are we supervising this person? He went to another program to be interviewed and ended up hiring him instead of supervising. He works there. Now, Yes, I mean it's really daunting and it's very discomforting to believe that. You know, we now have to wait. It'll take about two years to decide this appeal, and I want. 00:36:35 Speaker 3: To get to what people here can do, if they can write letters, or if there's anything else they can do to make their voices heard. 00:36:40 Speaker 1: For Andre, well, I do know there's a GoFundMe for Andre. It's GoFundMe such support Andre Brown, So that exists, so please donate to. 00:36:49 Speaker 4: That if you can, and we'll link to it in the episode. Yeah description as well. 00:36:53 Speaker 1: And you guys have the power to vote for the DA. I mean, we can vote in progressive district attorneys. So just so you guys know that you have the power to make sure that there are conviction review units, that there are progressive das that don't fight these convictions that are so obvious, so obvious. 00:37:10 Speaker 4: And before we go to we have a tradition on the show. We call it closing arguments. 00:37:15 Speaker 3: But before we do that, there's one other very special person in this room I want to acknowledge, and this is a young man named Aj. 00:37:21 Speaker 4: Right, your son's daf Aj, And I. 00:37:24 Speaker 3: Heard somewhere that he scored thirty points in a basketball game this week. 00:37:28 Speaker 5: So if there's any. 00:37:28 Speaker 3: Agents in the room, might want to get in now because he's only twelve. 00:37:32 Speaker 1: Actually, I did want to talk about Ajamika Tamika and Andre you knew each other from high school, yes, and now you're married. 00:37:40 Speaker 2: You did over twenty years in prison. 00:37:41 Speaker 1: And actually we talked about how you're lucky that you're alive, because if you're a leg you're lucky now that you're out, a lot of people get out and don't have family, and you have a wonderful wife and a son, yes, that you're coming home to right. 00:37:54 Speaker 5: There, right there, right Look for only do people not have family, They don't have hope, they don't have faith. They lose their souls inside of prison because they don't have friends. I've seen individuals walk in the yard until they turn mad because they're innocent, and now everybody has shunned them. So what does that really mean when society itself make you the treads and then inside of the prison you're a nobody. 00:38:29 Speaker 6: Well, it's just a dangerous place. Where we were waiting for Andrea's hearing because of COVID. One of the reasons we filed for the virtual hearing was Andrew is actually on the phone with Tamika on Thanksgiving Day and some other guy in the prison thought he was on the phone too long and nearly took Andre's that stabbed him in the face with a pen. Yeah, while he was on the phone with Tamika, right, Yes, And you know I wrote to the judge and said, look, we got to get this guy hearing like he's in the Honors prison. By way, this is the place in the Eastern that those are here. They call it happy Nap because it's like the place where you're supposed to be the safest. And he got attacked just on the phone. So, you know, sending someone to prison is you know, it could potentially be a death sentence. 00:39:11 Speaker 3: It is for too many people. And we know that're right here in Manhattan and right here in New York Rikers Island. Since may Or Adams took office, twenty nine people at last count, have been murdered and Rikers Island, and most of them, over one in b jar of them had even been convicted of anything. 00:39:23 Speaker 6: Yet most of them were presumed innocent. 00:39:25 Speaker 5: Yeah, just waiting for trials detainees. 00:39:27 Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. 00:39:28 Speaker 3: That could have been you, or could have been so many other people in this room. So anyone who's listened to the Wrongful Conviction podcast knows this is my favorite part of the show. We call it closing arguments. It's where we thank each of you, Maggie and I for being here with us today, everybody in the audience, everybody listening at home, and then turn it over to Oscar first to say anything else is left to be said, and then you take us off into the sunset anything you want to say. 00:39:53 Speaker 6: First of all, thank you for being involved in the issue and spread the word. Tell people that there were folks in there who do belong there. There are many people who serve their time and are route that will never get the justice that they deserve, and that time has been lost. WI let people know that this is an issue that should be addressed at every time that there's a DA running for office. 00:40:12 Speaker 5: And for me, I got to mention some of my great colleagues, Michael Cobb, who we all know is shat Do, Raphael Martinez, Pedro Rodriguez, Nochia Rose, Ronaldo Morgan. These men are still fighting for their freedom today and I mentioned them because I want everybody here in the live audience at home to take a second look. I give you the analogy that I give to some of the students when I did my last speech with Jeff and it is like when you guys are driving home and you just see something as simple as a pedestrian pulled over on the side of the road, and you're just like, oh, it must be a lawful stop, so you just keep moving. Take a second look, take a second look when you see somebody in trouble, because you never will know when it's your time to give that help in hand. 00:41:17 Speaker 3: Thank you, Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I want to thank our production team Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink, as well as my fellow executive producers Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Cliburn. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at it's Jason Vlamm. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts association with Signal Company Number one