Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BWt2USIWR4
[Music] hello joseph good to see you man never called you joseph that's okay i never called you joshua i think i did like five minutes ago um that's all right my mom and my wife call me joshua oh well i'm sorry that's all right depends on the context um first of all uh we should uh we should talk about the people that got off because the last podcast we did because that's an amazing thing so let's talk about that because because of you and your work there's two men out there that would still be in jail because of you talking about it and you putting the heat on whoever was responsible yeah now these two guys are free yeah and i you know it's hard to determine with any certainty the various factors that go into an exoneration or you know prosecutors dropping charges but there are two immovable truths here two young black men are have a new lease on life and have had horrific nightmares end and i know that this platform and this show not only helped that but were a driving force behind it and i know it not just based on what i think i know it based on empirical evidence because there was a time when i was asked to come to lawrence kansas and sit at the lawrence police department on the case against ron taurus washington so that the lawrence police department could tell me here's the evidence we have against your client and before the meeting started the district attorney walked in the room and instead of saying hello to me she said welcome to the armpit now that was a direct reference to something i said on this podcast and that i quickly right after saying it caught myself and corrected myself because the context in which i was saying it
and i and i said that that was a horrible way to put it or whatever i said but the context in which i was saying it was in my mind that if you are a black man or woman and caught in the criminal justice system in lawrence kansas that is the armpit so i knew then and there that she was paying attention and not just paying attention paying attention to this podcast and she knew full well that i had the cavalry behind me now what how much that factored into the story i'll tell later about how those charges against ron taurus washington were dropped and what happened to albert wilson who was the same prosecutor's office um we'll never know isn't there also an argument for you expressing the facts of the case outside of a courtroom setting where they're trying to win right there isn't there a problem with prosecutors and defendants and this the system that's set up that's set up like it's a game and i don't mean it's a game like it's trivial i mean it's a game like people are trying to win yeah yeah there's a part of that but i i think that in in recognizing and you and i have spoken about this and recognizing that sort of fault that exists amongst us as mammals as human beings that is especially so when you're talking about prosecutors in my opinion that have this tunnel vision that we'll talk about i think you just have to recognize that pressure breaks pipes in these cases if you think about um what's going on with purvis pain right now what's going on with julius jones with rodney reed i mean purvis payne is going to get out in five years julius jones rodney reed is facing a new trial those results were brought to bear by pressure public pressure so one immovable
truth i referred to two before but one sort of overarching known is that this works and it's because i want to tell you the spirit in which i'm here today and you know i am here not on behalf of the innocence project i don't speak for them even though i'm the ambassador advisor i um there are other organizations that i'm involved with that pay attention to news cycles of media i'm here as josh dubin the human being that is doing my part and it's not for me to judge whether it's small or large doing my part to help in whatever way i can whether it's a drop in the bucket a grain of sand or something more and that's for someone else to judge to help free people that are wrongfully incarcerated period full stop this show has been a critical part of telling these stories and getting that out there i'm not here to have a debate about people's perception of things other people say or past judgment or anything like that that's not my role and that's not what i'm here for and i'm i think that we need to have a discussion about race in our in the criminal injustice system and i know you're i know enough about you to know your heart and that we're going to have that today and that is the spirit in which i'm here and i know the direct results because two young black men um were exonerated as a result at least in parts of the show how many cases are you dealing with like concurrently how many cases do you have on file like right now where you have to go over the details of someone who may be innocent the answer to it is thousands i get mail every day from jails all across the country well we were talking about this earlier about how much your business has exploded
because these kind of conversations what would you how do you manage that okay so the innocence project which i am again i can't speak on behalf of them but what the innocence work with them yes i'm the ambassador advisor to the innocence project which makes me sort of you know somebody that it's a unique role because i have done so much pro bono work and awareness raising that there was a decision to give me that title they have a remarkable male you know mail room center that processes mail from prisoners from across the country then there is a network called the innocence network which are franchisees if you will there's the midwest innocence project who was my co-counsel in the ron torres washington case and there are you know there's one in new orleans they're all over the country that operate on their own and they are constantly getting mail and then there are just people like myself jason flum that are constantly getting mail and it's so much to keep up with that you need to be able to have a network of resources so i have decided to take on a role at cardozo law school which is where the innocence project started as a field what they call a field clinic of law students over 25 years ago founded by barry scheck and peter neufeld i was offered the role of becoming um the executive director of a new program called the redemption project and look again this is why not only the show but being able to find common ground with people we disagree with is so critical in this process the founder or excuse me the chairman of marvel ike perlmutter and his wife it's going to be called the pearl mudder center chairman of marvel comics yes marvel entertainment and he's a right a
right leaning republican that was friends with president trump and we otherwise wouldn't have much to agree on but we found common ground in this and and that is um a role that i'm going to be taking on where we're going to be focusing and it's going to start in the fall now i'm going to have more resources to help more people because um ike perlmutter and his wife lori have agreed to fund it for 10 years how did they get involved like what what is his interest in criminal justice it's the craziest thing it's like a an episode of i can't talk too much about it because the case is still pending um but what is out there publicly i can talk about it's like an episode of of like seinfeld or curb your enthusiasm gone way off the rails his dna his wife's dna was stolen it was a condo dispute about the tennis pro that descended into chaos it started as this crazy civil case where he was accused of you know spreading missing there was one faction of people that want the tennis pro removed the tennis pro was very good friends with him right and the and he cared about this woman she was a single mother he's a very philanthropic guy when no one's looking he just not he he went to iron man in a disguise because he doesn't want people to know who he is he's just a very private guy so there was this faction in this condo community that wanted the tennis pro removed because she was selling real estate out of the tennis pro office and this faction wanted her to partner up with another couple that sold real estate it was crazy it was a condo dispute right out of boca del vista in a seinfeld episode so he took the opposing side and said you're not removing her and
in any event about a year later this hate mail against the people that wanted her remove this one individual starts to arrive in the community and it's accusing him of all sorts of awful [ __ ] accusing this other man of being a child molester and a murderer and all kinds of craziness and there's jewish stars on it in like hebrew slang all misspelled so this guy gets in his mind that ike perlmutter is behind it and they have ike and his wife subpoenaed as third party in connection with the tennis center lawsuit subpoenaed to sit at a deposition and they framed him and his wife and they stole her dna from a they gave her water to drink and they falsely claimed and it was published in the new york times that her dna matched the hate mail so he set her up from and given her a glass of water and him they gave him this paper to touch that apparently to get his epithelial skin cells phony exhibits holy [ __ ] so the famed criminal defense lawyer roy black brought me into the case just to really help with trial strategy which is allegedly my forte and then it descended into dna and i have some expertise in that from my work at the innocence project because all the cases that we do with the innocence project are using biological evidence to get people off so when roy had sort of hit his limit on what he knew about dna he said now i need more from you and will you join the case so i figured out how they had set her up i figured out that it wasn't her dna and the case ultimately got dismissed the only thing that exists now is his case against the insurance company for setting him up because the the allegations in the lawsuit now he's suing chubb because it was a chubb lawyer that engineered this so they know that they have the actual correspondence like the actual evidence where someone said we're gonna get his dna yes and it's all a matter of public record jesus and one of the guys was a chub attorney
and that that should land you in jail for a long [ __ ] time one of the things we were able to do is i i testified before the florida house judiciary committee and used this case as an example and the testimony is out there publicly to change the law in florida citing this case from a misdemeanor to a felony and we were able to get that done so it is possible that someone could do something like that where they could set you up for a crime and steal your dna and that would be a misdemeanor in some cases not anymore not in florida not in florida but they didn't prosecute this man for it no they did not prosecute him for it palm beach did not decided not to prosecute him but to answer your question so the way the way ike perlmutter a strange bedfellow if you will with me in criminal justice reform and his wife got interested is he is a very hands-on guy and why aren't you paying attention to my case paying it was this was five years ago and i said there's no trial date and by the way i have a man sitting on death row in florida and i became lead trial counsel for him and you know i'm gonna be busy with that and it was the clementia geary case so ike started to pay attention to the case in the media because it was in the orlando sentinel every day and i guess the palm beach post has some affiliate he started to read the media attention so i ended up the story about clementi gear has been told so many times but i ended up getting my phones off i ended up getting him um exonerated with a with a village of people i don't want to make it like it was just me and the day that i walked him out ike had called me so many times that i thought there was an emergency and he said can you please come to palm beach before you leave florida
and i said sure so i drove down to palm beach a couple of days later and he sat me down and you know he's a very stoic older israeli man and he had a tear in his eye and he said i realized that if i his case was still very much alive we hadn't figured out the dna he said by watching what just happened with this man in orlando i realized that if i didn't have the resources and you know the the means by which to have you and roy black that i might have ended up like him and i'm like well you wouldn't have ended up on death row but it was like right his moment of clarity and his epiphany and then he has been just he's been by my side and my partner in this and that's why i always stress the importance of you know we're never going to see eye to eye with everyone and we're certainly not going to see eye to eye with anyone in a two-party system that's a problem and it's a huge problem i think that's the major problem honestly because when you have a two-party system you have people that feel like they have to subscribe to all the opinions on one side if they agree to the critical ones like what's critical to them whether it's a woman's right to choose or whether it's freedom of speech or whether it's uh gun control like whatever it is on the one side that you feel like you need to be aligned with and then you'll accept all the other nonsense that goes with it instead of what most people are most people are in the center i think the vast majority but that's not an option there's no center option so a guy like ike ike perlmutter he's probably he seems like a very compassionate guy but he's also a businessman and when you're a businessman and you want your taxes taken care of correctly and you want loopholes in place and you want you know you want to do what these guys have been doing forever with their money yeah that's a right wing thing yeah listen
with for full disclosure ike is very conservative and abides by every law when it comes to yeah no i don't mean it no i know i don't know no i know and you know that's what i found now i was just joking i mean look that is what i've found he's become like a family to me he knows my children you know i i love the man and i love his wife that's great that there there's common ground man there's more common ground than there's not people they get ideological and they get tribal and they they find themselves segmented off in these groups that can't communicate with other groups and that's one of the things you see like even in the podcast world as weird as it is there's certain people that like you can't go on that guy's show because he's right-wing or a you know a right-wing person will say like why do you talk to that person they're a libtard like they have these like ridiculous ideas of what you should and shouldn't be doing and like i feel like the more opportunities we have to to just find common ground the better off we're all going to be yeah and and that's why i'm that's why i will continue to be here and talk to you because i've always like this is the biggest problem with our society and i don't even want to go near i hate even saying the word cancel culture that's just like an easy thing to do yeah it's an easy word it's easy an easy phrase and the more difficult thing to do is take a step back and hover above the moment and think about it this way like what's what's on my mind right now and if people can't get this they just can't get it as far as i'm concerned this situation with this young man amir locke who is just executed in minneapolis by officer in my opinion i guess you always have to say that these days who i don't know this case okay so this is this this is the best um example current example
of why this is not a democrat or a republican issue it is a human rights issue amir lok is a young black man in his early 20s who would lives in minneapolis carjackings in cities or on or in the news cycle quite a bit lately you hear about them in la you hear about them all over the place right and in minneapolis he goes out no criminal record and legally buys a gun why because he's a door dash driver so it's obviously a concern to him he's sleeping at a friend's house this happened just last week he's sleeping at a friend's house and either four or five police officers execute what's referred to as a no knock warrant okay within three or four seconds apparently he is sleeping five seconds later by second number nine he's dead now when the doors blow open and five cops come in you don't know who they are at first and you go to reach for a gun that you legally have and you get blown away that is a problem and here's the problem i want to go back to this no knock warrant but this is not this is an epidemic happening mostly to people of color to black men and women and they're not all no knock situations but it but brianna taylor was a no knock warren situation um you know antoine wasn't it a no knock situation about marijuana as well yes yes um bottom bottom jean was not a no-knock situation but it was the same type of thing right here in texas where this female white female officer said he's eating ice cream in his own place and she comes in and thinks she's in the wrong apartment and blows him away um tamira rice eric garner fontability philando castile dante wright the list goes on and on it sickens me and i'll tell you something
you know these are all men and women of color getting blown away and executed now look some of these people their families are dear friends of mine bottom jean's sister is a dear friend of mine so i see that her name is elisa finley and she's become an amazing voice and has somehow summoned the strength to be an activist um antoine rose's mom michelle kennedy as well and these are people that to me mean something i cried with them i try to console them i try to help their causes but let's take like a step back and look what these no knock raids are about and by the way the difference between an a knock raid and a no knock rate is the difference between a few seconds so let's forget about democrats and republicans no knock raids were born out of the 1980s um just say no nancy reagan war on drugs campaign and the rationale behind it not that she was responsible for the legislation or or the phenomenon but the rationale behind it from law enforcement standpoint was we want to surprise drug dealers and people involved involved in narcotics trafficking and we wanted to prevent them from being able to grab a gun or from destroying evidence and so they have warrants no knock warrants yeah so you would go in front of a judge and you would say this it's probable cause this person's selling drugs and they have guns and we want a no-knock warrant it's a specific type of one correct correct so that's exactly right and so it was born out of the 1980s quote-unquote war on drugs so in the wake of the devastation that it's caused specifically to people of color because there is some whether you call it institutional racism whether you call it whatever it is we're just not living in reality if we are not if we are not recognizing the fact that
there are many white white folks that see someone of color and think danger and typically african americans they think danger they think there's a problem they have all of these conscious and unconscious biases there this is not a coincidence that all of these people that are being killed in these situations whether it's a no knock warrant knock warrant a black person running from police so if you get back to these no knock warrants you know the failure is not on the part of republicans or democrats it's on the part of all of them as human beings and politicians the george floyd policing act for which joe biden and kamala harris championed and i think tim scott who is the only african-american republican really got behind you know it ultimately failed um and that failure is not a democratic failure or a republican failure it's a failure of all of us what was in it it would there were many police reforms in it but critical to this conversation was what the was the george floyd policing act sought to do away with no knock warrants by telling municipalities we are going to cut off your access to state and federal funds unless and until you stop this practice so when an act like this is proposed how does it get reviewed and what what makes it get denied so it passed the house because the vote was largely on party lines and then it didn't pass the senate because they could not get enough votes for it so what ends up happening is that when you involve this is my theory anytime you involve human beings in any endeavor it gets messy right yeah egos power plays um insecurities all this messy stew of
emotions comes into it am i pleasing my constituents am i going to anger police unions is it going too far in this area so it encompassed many things did it come close it would no it was 12 or 4 or 14 votes shy so the problem is is that you know it passes the house it fails in the senate and the votes were largely along party lines and you know democrats are quick to say oh but the republicans didn't do it and republicans are quick to say well democrats put all this other stuff into it did they and do they add things to the act yeah of course it covered other things but it takes people on both sides to say well where can we find common ground because when i think of washington and i think of politicians and i think of capitol hill and legislate any of those words i get a [ __ ] headache right here without even knowing what the conversation is going to be about just because it's such a quagmire yeah it just conjures up yeah it conjures up a visceral response in me of people that just cannot figure out a way to sit across the table or at the table or next to each other and figure [ __ ] out and i don't know you know it's like i guess a fair question would be like all right dude if it's that easy one you go run for office and solve it i'm not you know i don't have the answers i just know what i see and i know that that you need we all need to step away from our what we think our allegiance is in this two-party system because i'm i'm ready to just like register non-declared or independent you know and i'll i'll you know everybody is so like you don't ask people about their age you don't ask them who they voted for you know i voted for joe jorgensen as did i because i just feel like that was my way of saying no yeah i'm saying no this is a nonsense situation but
do you think that in our lifetimes we're ever going to see like a legitimate third party candidate because it seems like there's no peop at least the general consensus in this country is that anyone who's independent is not serious that's not a serious person for president there's no one who's been independent where it stands out since ron paul excuse me ross ross yeah that's what i meant actually sorry um but when he was running he was in a very unique situation where he had massive amounts of resources and so he could actually buy this is pre-internet he bought entire half-hour blocks on network television to explain why you're getting [ __ ] do you remember that yeah of course wild [ __ ] i remember it and i remember i remember being a kid a teenager whatever i was and rooting for him because he was this little guy and a great way of talking yeah he was a character he had those droopy earlobes you know and and i was like this little [ __ ] speak see this is like why i am hopeful because you just brought me back to like you know when you hear a song or smell something yeah like i don't know why i just like went back to my my living room couch as a kid hopeful days hopeful days yeah oh [ __ ] well you know i think we have hope i i think there's still hope but we have a problem we have a major problem in this country when it comes to the way we feel about leaders in politics and the the shenanigans that go on behind the scenes like what's what's really uh operating the machine versus what we would like we would like is it to be a representative of the people and everyone working together to make this world a better place to make the environment better to make the economy better the infrastructure better make this the inner cities and the communities better it's not what they're working for they're working for the people that got them into office and those people are just trying to make the most amount of money possible and that's what muddies you know that's that when you know i was with you
vis-a-vis hope until you got to the last part of the sentence and that's where i start to lose hope right yeah it's a problem but i think people realizing that this problem will exist forever unless we change the way we view things and one of the problems that we're having is we think along ideological lines and when you do you will you will not judge people that are on your team that are [ __ ] it over for everybody else you'll give them a pass you'll give them a pass for doing all the same things the republicans did or doing all the same things the democrats did for doing all the same things for their special interest groups and you know whatever the lobbyists are setting up for them and you'll you'll forgive them for patting these acts with these ridiculous measures and where nobody wants a vote for them like when you look at the build back better there was a i forget who the politician was but they had that build back better bill and he brought it up in front of these uh these uh press people he showed this how thick it is and he goes do you really think they've read this he goes who do you think has read this there's thousands and thousands of pages anybody combed over this and they know all the details of this this bill goes nobody none of them are doing it they're just passing it because their party wants to pass it especially when our mindset these days is to grab the lowest hanging fruit in terms of headlines and use that as the basis upon which we form not only opinions but make decisions and decide how will i act and who will judge me for acting that way based on whatever decision i come to and i i question whether when people tell me they have an opinion about something the same way i question myself it's it's a bit of a mind [ __ ] you know do i really feel this way or do i feel this way because i'm afraid of whatever backlash i'm gonna get yeah that's the thing everybody's worried about backlash now and it's designed that way it's engineered that way this system is engineered that when you step outside
the lines they will attack you and that will force a lot of people who are watching that to stay quiet yeah and i think that that like i said the easy thing to do is to stay quiet or to go with the crowd and out of fear of whether it's being you know canceled retribution losing relationships if we can't have these discussions and be able to look at ourselves in the mirror and be introspective enough to say you know what i'm not going to be a democrat or a republican i'm going to be a free thinking human being and the way that i try to apply that and look i'm not trying to be a you know one of the things that i have like a real this is my psychiatric issue among many you know i worry about coming off self-righteous or that i'm trying to save the planet or you know it's like i worry about other people feeling that way about me that's good that's humility that's smart i hope it is no it is i know you yeah that's exactly what it is you don't want anybody think you're pompous you're not and i'm i i'm you know sometimes i it's in my heart in a way that it hurts me to even think about that but i understand that people will will come to whatever conclusions they do so i'm not trying to be a martyr or anything like that i just feel like like i don't not here today speaking on behalf of the innocence project but it's in that's in my dna i will take that with me that's a that that was a bit ironic to say it was in my dna since we do dna but i will take that experience with me to this new role which i'll talk about later but i just feel like it uh it it requires us to take a step back and you know if you just look at no knock warrants as just the example we're using and you look at the emir lock case there's example after example in the south of this happening not just in the south you know there was a a kid
up during one of these no knock warrants where they threw a flashbang through the window and it landed in a baby's crib yeah yeah and a cop got you know all caught up in it her name i think her name was nikki autry um you know there was the case of marvin guy who is still in jail um marvin guy this case was another no knock warrant and you know look it's here in texas yeah think about like talk about mine [ __ ] 5 a.m your house gets stormed you don't know who it is he's got a legal gun he starts getting fired at he fires back and there's uh an explosion of gunfire and i i encourage people to look these cases up you know the the one that i mentioned earlier with the baby in the crib nikki autry just how it sounds was the police officer that was charged in that case i think she got acquitted and the baby's name was boo boo and you know you could read online about the that the settlement got no but horrific injuries uh marvin guy um has been sitting in in prison here in texas and you know the guy there's a hail of gunfire and a a white officer is killed and he wasn't the one that hit the officer it was one of the other officers bullets oh jesus but he gets blamed for it because he shoots back and it's like we this is this is a human rights issue and this is a state of emergency as it relates to people of color in this country and these you know there is a uh i hate when people toss around statistics with me because i'm always like yeah where'd you get that staff from especially in an age
where you know you got to check your sources right but there is a reason why the african-american population is roughly 13 in the u.s and roughly half of the wrongful incarcerations exonerations are are black men and women that should blow people's [ __ ] minds right because that's just the exonerations how many people don't get exonerated that's right yeah right what i mean what is the percentage of people that are wrongly accused convicted prosecuted put in jail and they lose their lives we'll never know because we don't you know the the people that have studied this have estimated that range to be anywhere between one and three percent and and one percent should blow your mind one percent's nuts that means that of every 100 people that get prosecuted one person didn't do anything wrong right so and you know so i know that's a solid statistic yeah one i just gave you it was a study done by the university of michigan um and that's just known so if you think about that in the context of the other thing that is known is that we incarcerate african americans in this country at six times six times the rate that south africa did during apartheid you know we just need to be real about so this is not about martyrdom it's not this is just this is a human rights issue in this country and you see it when you know we go back to the the two cases that we um i'll say it i'll go as far that you helped save two men this show helped save two men and uh in whatever way did well that's amazing that's that's an amazing thing and you know i feel like you're here so we could keep doing this so we could do more but i could tell you in those cases that you know ron taurus washington
was accused of a horrific murder that he did not commit and he was good for it because he was quote unquote the black guy because someone testified that there was a black guy in the parking lot downstairs and the whole case was built on there was stunning evidence that the the husband of this woman that was butchered did it and there was hard blood on his clothing there was i've talked about it his hair in her dead hand the police knew that she had been beaten by him and was afraid of him and had told people if anything happens to me he did it ron taurus washington was threatened by this man that committed these murders with a knife days before this happened or week before got a problem and the entire case was built on what i now know was a a problematic timeline of and the police suspected the victim's husband of doing it and they had this timeline that they constructed through cell phone records and and the the husband got into an argument with the victim a heated argument in which there was pushing and shoving and witnesses and she ends up murdered an hour later and they based not charging him but charging ron taurus washington on this the husband's cell phone traveling down a highway the guy takes a picture of himself in a rest stop bathroom takes a selfie of himself because that's just a natural thing anybody does i'm taking a piss let me just take a selfie it was clearly done to try to conjure up an alibi and they based ruining a young man's life he sat in pre-trial detention for six years which is another issue in and of
itself before he saw a trial he ended up getting tried there was a hung jury and they're going to retry him again right based on this cell phone they're still going to they're going to return so i went and listened to this presentation the details of which are i'm not allowed to talk about and i got one of the best cell phone experts in the world that taught the state's expert this theory and he said he's got it wrong he's got it wrong there was evidence that they should have caught that that husband stopped on that freeway and headed back in the other direction and you could see it from the way the cell phone towers are pinging and i figured it out with him with his help that he had plenty of time to go back and commit the crime and so i had the midwest innocence project as my co-counsel i had been discussing the case and getting and there was a lot of activism um that that this show and other people that got behind it as a result of this show it started to generate that pressure so and then the albert wilson case which you know about which is this young black man that was at a ku and gets accused of um you know a sexual assault of a white girl who i believe strongly in his innocence i had already won him um a new trial based on ineffective assistance of counsel so i had staring down my 2022 was going to be retrying both of their cases because albert was offered a deal which would have been no jail and he wouldn't take it because he said i'm not confessing to something i didn't do and ron taurus was facing a retrial as well
so i had been in discourse with the da's office and you know i think that they finally realized the problems um with these cases and they will never come out and say these two men are innocent and we [ __ ] up here she was a new da and i give her enough credit to do what she finally did it it didn't feel good along the way because i was not treated very well but this wasn't about me she would alternatingly be kind to me and understanding and then she would also walk into a room and say welcome to the armpit there was a lot of passive aggressive stuff but i know it was an indication to me like aha this works and the ripple effect of it is is such that so here's one for you i try very hard to keep up and i'm not great at it with instagram messenger with the messages i'm getting on instagram that come as a result of being on the podcast there's one guy and i'm i can go months without looking at it but there's one guy that reached out to both me and jason flom his name is jordan grossinger and he works at a big firm called greenberg trag and he had never done this kind of work before but was like very relentless and pursuing i really want to help i really want to help and you know he literally he just took on a case in california um i don't remember the case the pierre rushing case and has thrown the full resources of his firm behind the case and you know he called me he was hiking with jason flom in la and he's like this is amazing the way this works look at the ripple effect of what you're doing so there are more people to save and i just think that it takes there's a lot of of what can i do to help whatever you're doing keep doing it
whether it's writing letters serving on juries and we'll talk about that but not trying to get out of it um because there is there is a movement taking place here and you made a promise to me that i i wasn't expecting and that is is bearing fruit in a way that is the sweetest fruit you can imagine because you know i want you to hear um and speak to these men and you met you meant robert last time i was here but when you know when when i called her on taurus washington and told them that they dropped the case against them i cried like a child he fainted and to hear the over the relief and the the joy and you know out of the two of them i got very close to the albert wilson and his family his sister-in-law nikki you know he pulled over to the side of the road when i told him and we cried together and uh you know i i've said it before i'll say it again there's no drug material but there's just no way to match that feeling and the fact that we're doing it and making a difference just you know is um very gratifying it is very gratifying and i should also tell people you don't believe everything because i brought a case to you i've talked to you about several different scenarios and situations but there was one case where a guy came up to me and he had a family member that he said was innocent and i said well get me your information tell me who that person was and uh i'll send it over to josh we'll see what's up and uh we have a phone call like a couple days later i think this person is guilty as [ __ ] yeah and i don't you know and i i'm look i thought that about clementi for a second until i scratched the surface and i said not only is he innocent he's innocent as
[ __ ] um because it's until you hear the whole story right um and that is the problem right when you're researching something you're only going to get what's been printed yeah or what somebody is telling you in that moment yeah i can tell you that i'm ocd enough and i guess i i have enough existential angst that i literally just printed three articles about that case two nights ago really knowing i was coming here just thinking you know i i deserve to give that a closer look okay so i will and i'm not the the only arbiter of you know what is or what isn't i know like in clementi's case i can't talk too much about it because i'm handling the federal civil rights case but some of the [ __ ] that i have found out that the police knew at the scene is so infuriating and some of the lies that i believe they've told that i've never known and i've lived that case as much as you could live a case you know it's like you you you think you've heard so much about um so many different scenarios and prosecutorial misconduct cover-ups lies that your mind can never be blown again and you know when your mind keeps getting blown it's fuel for me and i just don't know you know like it's hard to know how to feel about different reform issues sometimes because like you know there's an argument that i heard i'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that police aren't needed for traffic stops that's a weird argument because sometimes they are right i've seen people get pulled over for traffic stops and then they pull out a gun and start shooting at the cop so right what happens there no i was i don't know and i was talking to someone actually this morning that asked me what i how i felt about it and he said you know there's some western countries where
police handle traffic stops but they're unarmed and i said well that's not good either that doesn't seem effective i don't know what if you're pulling over a a mass murderer like what if you catch someone what if you someone's got a unlicensed vehicle or whatever and it turns out the person inside i mean this is uh i have a friend who's a cop and we had this conversation recently because there's they're trying to pass some new rules for cops in los angeles and one of the things that he's saying is they don't want to pull people over for like bad tail lights they don't want to put people over pull people over for failure to signal for all these uh different transgressions and he was saying that the problem with that is this is often how we ca catch a lot of people that are that have warrants out for them and oftentimes very dangerous criminals right and i've seen you know videos of people you know shooting their cops shooting at cops on a routine traffic stop i just saw one the other day i saw one uh yesterday in fact this guy pulls the guy over the guy hits the hazard lights pulls over to side road totally complies and then cracks opens the door turns behind him and just starts firing at the cop and then they're in a [ __ ] gunfight like out of nowhere so if you're a cop and you pull somebody over there's the very real possibility that you you might be in a situation where this person is going to he's going to fight for his life because he's guilty of something or he's got a warrant out for him he's done something and he's armed and it was a wild video it's wild because they the guy got out of the car and he's shooting the cop and the cop got out of the car and he's hiding behind the cop car it's [ __ ] crazy yeah and it's like you just see that convinces me yeah that it's like kind of you know so is the solution that there needs to be better training um before we go handing a police officer a gun i think that's a hundred percent
true i think there needs to be better training i think there needs to be better qualifications and i think there's a long road to get to this point but i think we got to get to a place where people respect police because the police are better than they are now and i don't mean all of them i mean there's for sure bad cops just like there's for sure bad bankers and and every other profession the problem with a bad cop is someone who cuts corners and lies and [ __ ] with things and [ __ ] with the rules as a cop you make other people's lives hell because you put other people in jail that aren't supposed to be in jail you lie about evidence you withhold information that would exonerate somebody all that stuff should be a horrific crime and it's far too commonplace in the world of prosecutors and police officers and the all of this this this world that we live in where the people that are supposed to be withholding the law and upholding the law are actually breaking it like that's a giant problem and i think the only way to fix that is careful examination massive training i think you have to treat cops and my friend jocko said this very well jacqueline who's a navy seal and just embodies leadership in basically every cell in his body and he said you these guys have to go through real training and they should be spending a large percentage of the time they're on the force training whatever that is 20 whatever it is but they should be training the same way tactical troops train the same way someone would train if they're in special forces operation you you have to be prepared for everything and you also have to understand this extreme position in society that you have is it extreme honor but it's also an extreme the the job and the obligation and what it means to serve as a police officer and that's what it is you're serving that is a an incredible position of power and influence and it's got to be treated with far more respect than it's treated today you know i i drove down the street in l.a last time i was in town there's a billboard hiring
well like they're looking for cops and it was like talk about how much you get an hour you know how much you get a year and i was looking at that i was like that should be the last thing you think of if you want to be a cop not saying that you shouldn't get paid well you definitely should get paid well but you shouldn't be saying oh i need [ __ ] 80 grand a year that's not what you should be to go and be a cop that is the last [ __ ] thing you should be thinking of you should be called to service and duty it should be something where you're thinking you know i want to do better for my community and i think i'd be a good police officer because i'm a fair person and i'm a kind person and i really care and i think i can protect people from bad guys yeah and it's it's interesting because i've seen similar ads and i've thought you got to try to induce people somehow to want to do this especially now when it's tough to be a cop yeah and i hate one of my biggest pet peeves is broad generalizations of people yeah there's bad cops there's great cops there's bad judges you know there was just video of this judge this white woman using you know the most horrific racist language looking at a video in in a clearly racist way and it's like you're you're sitting there shuddering she's on the bench you know but then there's amazing judges like judge galuzzo who was in clementi aguirre's case and it's like i'm not not on my watch are you gonna like you know abuse this man's constitutional rights but there's great cops and it's a hard job but everything you said made total sense to me i guess the part of it that becomes much more complicated is you come to that job with certain life experiences value beliefs you know philosophical leanings that inform that training and how you're going to act
so this whole you know driving wall black phenomenon is a real thing so i worry that i guess my my what gets left sort of out of the mix or lost in the shuffle is you know i don't know what the solution to this is is how do you teach racial sensitivity and i've i've often struggled and i have lately with trying to figure out whether it is um nature or nurture for police officers no for human beings to look at someone as dissimilar to them and decide whether or not they when i see something or someone dissimilar i equate that with not good i think it's almost always nurture and not nature because if you look at little kids when little kids have uh a friend that's white or a friend that's black they don't give a [ __ ] that's just my little friend like there's a famous video of these two little four-year-olds that haven't seen each other in a while you've seen it somebody said someone sent it to me and i make you cry they just this little boy and his friend and one of them's black one was white and they run toward each other and they give you sort of a giant hug and you're like this is supposed to be the world this is this is not supposed to be separation by looks or by economics or by neighborhood or by state it's nonsense and there's a problem with people that there's so many variables in life to take into consideration when you're dealing with other human beings it's easier to generalize it's easier to put people in groups and i think when you're a cop there's a real problem when you're seeing the same crimes and the same situation over and over and over again and you get calloused and i think the root problem with that is that the source of what's causing a lot of the economic despair a lot of the rampant crime and drug dealing and gang members that's never addressed no one ever goes into these neighborhoods
and says there's like you think about the amount of money that halliburton got with no bid contracts to rebuild iraq [ __ ] insane amounts of money to go build up [ __ ] that we blew up right why wouldn't they do that with baltimore why why wouldn't they do that with the south side of chicago why wouldn't brownsville exactly hire giant corporations to go in and clean them up make them safer present a plan and put a shitload of money into it so it becomes a profitable venture and then everybody profits from it everybody benefits from it because i've said this before i'll say it again you want to make america great have less losers what's the best way to have less losers have people start from an even position have people start from a place where they have a community where they have some sort of role models or guidance or a safe place to be where their community is more safe because whatever whether it's they have better police presence or more compassionate police presence figure out a way to stop people before they commit these horrible crimes do something to make these places better places economically give people more opportunity it's totally a possible thing to do it's not like you're asking people to breathe air underwater you're asking people to do things that have been done in other cities right cities have sucked and they've gotten better and cities have been great and they've gotten bad we kind of can figure out what causes both of those situations and throw a bunch of [ __ ] money at it no i don't want to step on your words no it's it's um this is why i like i love these conversations because i'm sitting here listening to you and thinking that that is that is a potential real solution it's a real solution it's a real solution and what what frustrates me also is that you know then you you get what does that look like was that feel you know what here's what it looks like last summer when all these corporations were feeling guilty that they hadn't done enough for social justice causes i can tell you it was probably one of the biggest fundraising
um pushes for social justice reform organizations across this country to the point where they raised more money than they probably ever did right and it was like the summer of like white guilt right or the summer of corporate guilt and i bet you that amount of money eclipses the billions um because i can draw on examples and organizations that i may be involved in tangentially or otherwise that benefited from that that's only that's that's to make a company or a corporation feel good in the moment and check the box that i'm doing that but what you just said you know if you look at like what bill gates um and you know the billionaires pledge have done whether it's for clean water um for or for other public health endeavors this is a public health human rights crisis at every level the way that race um the the the disparities and the treatment of people of color in this country um is it solvable ever who knows but what you're suggesting seems to me like if you're going to make an investment in anything how about make an investment of that and it makes total sense because when you it was funny because when you said how you make america great you can't make less losers yeah it's true it's like i'm tired of hearing these stories of after the fact people realize that it was my upbringing and the the nightmarish situation i was born into that had i had the perspective i have now if i was able to have overcome that um i may otherwise have been on the path i'm on now and it's like it makes you sort of feel helpless and hopeless inside that well well yeah you're right and how do you solve that problem of someone being born into circumstance i mean i've
managed a bunch of professional fighters that are from brownsville and you know sort of started with no chance but thank god they found fighting because fighting gave them at least some kind of an opportunity to do better a lot of people never find anything and this idea that just because someone does it this is what drives me crazy when someone says oh look at this guy he made it into the nba he lived in a [ __ ] neighborhood look at this guy he became a rapper he made he made it out of the streets like so what how many people don't do you know that's the craziest path ever the path of being a world championship fighter to get out of the ghetto as a person who uses his knuckles to punch another guy in the face that is one of the craziest ways to become successful ever and there's so many variables that are outside of your control like genetics speed fast twitch muscle fibers whether or not you can take a punch there's so many different things whether or not you have good coaching whether or not you have a trainer that gives a [ __ ] about you that doesn't send you to the wolves right away the idea that a guy should be able to do it because this guy did it or that or mike tyson did it you're out of your [ __ ] mind it's so hard but it's easy for people to say if they've not come from those circumstances all the people that i know that are all those pull yourself up by your bootstraps never had to [ __ ] do that they never had to do that when we've talked about this is the mo the most frustrating thing to me is like oh this guy did it that's shut the [ __ ] up i mean listen i have i have direct experience with this i manage zab judah for a period now zab was and you know like i light up when i talk about him because there's something about him that i just love there's something magnetic and different and and in a way righteous and has he made his share of mistakes yes i mean if you see what the the circumstances that this guy was born into and what he had to overcome and he was so gifted as a fighter but he didn't have a chin right
um but he also took punches that people didn't see but putting all the boxing part aside you know did it work out for zab the way it should have so partially you know he's making him a world champion world champion he's famous but well respected well respected and i love the guy and we don't talk as much as we used to but you know and then he had this brain bleed because he stuck around too long and it was like oh i didn't know about that oh my god he was in a real bad situation but for every zab judah and shannon briggs and mike tyson and i mentioned those examples because they're all from that neighborhood and they all happen to be dear friends of mine right um you know shannon briggs is gonna fight rampage jackson yeah and he won't listen to me or anyone else he'll just do it what do you mean he just shouldn't do it well aren't they gonna fight like one round boxing one round mma i don't know is that what they're doing i don't know i don't talk to him enough about that because all we do i might have made that up now that i'm thinking about that i think that's demetrius mighty mouse johnson and he's fighting rod tang and that's how they're doing it one round muay thai one round mma shannon just like you know it just ends up being like a laugh fast find out that's true though jamie he might be i might be right about that they might have that might be what quentin agreed to i know that they were beefing back and forth yeah rampage is a dangerous man if if i don't have it that's not a joke fight like if if he gets into an mma fight with rampage rampage is a [ __ ] serious wrestler he's so strong there's a there's a video of rampage jackson it's one of the most horrific slam ko's in the history of the sport he's fighting ricardo arona ricardo arono is his badass jiu jitsu guy and ricardo arono catches rampage jackson in a triangle you know what a triangle is yeah okay so he's got his legs wrapped around rampage's arm one arm and his neck rampage picks him up off the ground like a pillow i've seen it and slams in there all the way down and then head butts him uh you know from the impact like as he's driving him down
he's his head slams into ricardo around his head and then he punches him a couple times and he's out cold ricardo ronan was never the same shannon is he able to left the shaman breaks yeah he's enormous big strong dude so is ricardo arona oh okay we're currently not as big but ricardo arono was jacked but it's interesting you raised that example because the next person i was going to talk about was actually recently in a video when shannon briggs and rampage jackson were going back and forth his name is curtis stevens and he was another kid from brownsville who was like a little brother to me and he was one half of what they called the chin checkers back in the day my brother who you know was a ring announcer and used to do all the local shows and actually was on hbo as a ring announcer too and uh he did paul paulie malinaji's first world title fight my brother's debut on hbo wow so the great dubini shout out to the best magician he's a great [ __ ] musician his magician skills are top-notch i was very impressed i mean we were all hanging out at dinner and he was doing [ __ ] i was like what did you just do and you're and you're a guy that is like got a good eye for magic and catching it he's he's very good he's very good and that happened naturally so yeah check him out it was fun dub and magic the great dubini is that this is their website he's got an instagram yeah is it with dube and magic i'll look it up and we'll get it we'll get it in but um he um [Music] so look at him now because people aren't gonna remember yeah let me do it now so what so what happens is in the video shannon briggs and and uh rampage jackson are going back and forth you know i don't know if it was playfully doing it was a little playful but also a little serious so one of the guys in the video is this kid curtis stevens so curtis and the reason my brother came up is that
he's one half of the chin checkers from brownsville brooklyn curtis showtime stevens and my brother would would announce him at these small club shows at the hammerstein ballroom and he was the most devastating one punch knockout power for a welterweight and a you know 54-pounder and he created a buzz in boxing that was so unbelievable hey there you go that was that was the great dubini blowing joe that's hilarious it's tony's mine yeah that's tony's got a card he's holding the card that your your brother did something too so we're like oh my god so it's it is doom and magic yeah it's doom and magic on instagram he will he will blow your mind and there's my wife giving him the black hearts at the bottom that was right after we did madison square garden yeah it was awesome so yeah that was a great night it was a fun night because greg just happened to have matt he had magic about him and we were all out getting hammered having dinner celebrating your epic conquest of the garden and he was like they were like show us some [ __ ] magic yeah that was dope so so this kid curtis stevens was like gonna be the second coming it was like a little mike tyson and you know whether it was personal issues career issues you know he didn't make it and he's got a comeback fight coming up he must be 35 36 whatever he is but there are way more curtis stevens yes that still are like [ __ ] what am i gonna do now that boxing didn't work out yeah um did he make some money he fought you'll recognize who he is he fought golovkin okay and he got hit by golovkin and he was the the guy when he was on the ground he was like had this look a shock like what the [ __ ] did i just get hit with so golovkin does that to people he does that to people i don't know if he still does it to people but he looks a little
saucy lately it looks uh i don't know what he looks a little like he's been going down to tijuana for special medication he looks good looking jacked for a guy oh he's he's like 37 now and he looks as good no he looks better than he's ever looked his last fight he looked fantastic yeah he's and the energy level has you a little suspicious but well you know boxing is not you know the ufc has its problems with with supplements i mean then i use that term loosely but the vast majority have to be cleaned because usada is knocking on your door at six o'clock in the morning boxing doesn't have that that's not true well you do if you sign up for water but it's nada vada sorry v8 yeah but the thing is ufc has it built in so all the fighters get tested and you get tested randomly it doesn't you don't get to opt out right so like there's certain fights where people decide to opt out of vodates really yes um you know all boxing is not vada tested i was just being facetious listen we shakur stevenson i manage him with james prince um shout out to to the big homie james prince and you know i i personally think that shakur is the best fighter on the planet he's fantastic and he's absolutely fantastic he is got everything everything and i and when i say everything i mean dare i say floyd mayweather-esque he's he's something special so shakur is fighting oscar valdez for to unify the 130 pound titles on april 30th at the garden we'd love to have you there if you're in town and look oscar valdez failed the drug test before his last fight and it was for an amphetamine called fenermine and it's a weight cut i i had the opportunity to get very well versed in and because andre ward thought kovalev was on something or suspected it so i i educated myself as much as i could and i joined the wreck where you could run
you know any supplement through it margaret goodman i got to know very well who runs vada but look he has been in a random drug testing program that's been sanctioned by the wbc for a while and then shakur um you know if you have good management which i'll i'll give myself at least that much credit james prince and i made sure that there's never a lapse in the testing from the from september all the way through the fight it should be um it should be that there is a central governing body that dictates that but when you're in different states and different sanctioning organizations and that's what frustrates me when like i'm not like some dana white groupie or fan but people don't get the benefit of having the ufc being the central governing body you can make rules like that that can protect fighters so in any event that's no i agree with that as well and i think that the you know the argument against that is that the ufc is a monopoly right but that's not real the reason why that's not real is because there's all these stories about guys going over to bellator and making more money in bellator or guys going over the pfl there's a lot of organizations now there's one fc if you're a championship level or a high level professional fighter you can go to these other organizations and you can get paid especially if you have a name they're willing to give you a bigger chunk of the pie because they're trying to build up their organization yeah i don't yeah um but the point is the ufc check they check the [ __ ] out of the fighters but even through that they're do you know have you ever seen the youtube page more plates more dates no it's a funny name but the guy who runs it his name is derek and he's a brilliant guy like really brilliant and knows so much about the human chemistry and about ways that people use performance-enhancing drugs and and
cheat and he talks about it openly because he's done a lot of steroids he's done a lot of performance-enhancing drugs he understands what they what he also runs a hormone clinic which is like hormone replacement therapy so he knows what you can and can get away with cannon cannot get away with so he analyzes some of the blood work by some of the people that have passed usada and he calls [ __ ] and he breaks it down very scientifically and he talks about it like why is this person's testosterone level so low and they have like some trace amount of this steroid that's in their system that seems to indicate to me that they were doing something oh that's fine and their testosterone dropped and why would a super athlete of the highest order have such a low testosterone blood level testosterone right here that's deep yeah well he's on top of it it's also the testosterone to epi testosterone there's a there's a testosterone ratio right like where they're looking for testosterone to compared to estrogen testosterone compared to all these other hormones and there's a balance it has to be there's like a natural level of balance but he's pointing out like a lot of these balances are way off like there's nothing that would make them off other than cheating so what you need is like a far more comprehensive examination of that individual to find out what's causing that because vada i know speaking for them and they do a fantastic job for what they do is just telling you if there's the presence of of a substance so yeah i went deep down a rabbit hole on it before with the catlin institute in california and i spoke to oliver catlin because i just wanted to make sure that if i was in charge of policing not policing it but understanding the testing procedures for a guy like andre ward and now shakur that i had as much knowledge as possible have you ever talked to that balco guy what is what's his name ducante we had him on the podcast for a very interesting guy because here's a guy that used to do that right he used to give people undetectable steroids yeah i mean he gave it to barry bonds he manufactured this stuff he actually came up with a formula to give people
something that would evade testing because it's a molecule removed or it's like something that's different from this is one of the reasons why the olympics and uh even the ufc they hold on to these samples of drug of blood and urine rather and then they test them when new technology becomes available and when new knowledge of new supplements become available because there are things that can avoid detection initially and then they find they come up with new methods to check and because of that there was a bunch of medalists and i i believe gold medalists from russia in in wrestling had their medals removed because they went back and looked into old samples and they go well look at this this guy's pissed hot like we just didn't have the ability to detect it back then yeah no it's it's tricky did you ever see icarus no [ __ ] amazing documentary you need to see it you need to see it the second icarus is brian fogle and brian fogle this is the most fortuitous combination of events while one was filming a documentary so this is what happens brian fogle is filming this documentary about himself brian is a an athlete and he's a cyclist so he decides to enter into this cycling competition and he's going to do it two times he's going to do it one year completely clean and then he's going to hire someone to dope him up so he can see and document the effects and put in this documentary he's like let's see what it does and did anybody know that he was doing it yes yes i mean not the people in the the race right that's what i meant no i think he did it he wanted to do it like a cheater would do it right but he was documenting it so uh i don't think he had a chance to win honestly i think he's a very good cyclist but he's not elite so it's not like he like was in lance armstrong or something like that so he does it once this way and then he hires this guy gregory ruchenkov and gregory is the guy who runs the air quotes anti-doping program for russia but really he's just doping everybody so
what gregory does is he gives him this protocol he tells him what to do how to do it what to happen and while this is all going on it turns out that the sochi olympics had been rigged and they find these microscopic abrasions in the urine jars and it turns out that these urine jars that were supposedly untemperable you couldn't get in them this the russians had figured out a way to get into them and they devised this wild scheme where they made literally a [ __ ] hole in the wall and one person would hand out the good urine and the other person would give them the tainted urine during the olympics during the olympics so they would swap urine so they had this place where they stored the urine they swapped the urine and according to gregory chenkov the russians doped everybody except the figure skaters it turns out for the figure skaters these fine movements there's actually like a negative consequence of giving them testosterone and all these they're the only person people who are clean but they did this through trial and error so what they did was they they doped everyone and is this part of the documentary he goes into this so while this is going on this guy gets caught and he has to flee russia so he flees russia while this documentary is being filled he's in protective custody right now in russia the russians want to kill him because he gave up all the goods and they get removed from the olympics so in brazil when the russian athletes went to compete in the rio olympics they were not representing russia they couldn't represent russia because russia was banned from being able to have teams sent so like so many of their athletes were not able to compete anymore and this through this documentary he really captures the moment where all this stuff is exposed that's that's fascinating it's a [ __ ] wild documentary because i i was just somebody told me that they um that they cycle recreationally with lance armstrong now up in aspen i thought he meant cycle drugs he was like damn lance is still hitting the needle and i was like i was like wow that must be interesting and i was like it's like [ __ ]
what is that like i don't even know what to say to that i mean this this was just like a couple of months ago in atlanta it was a one of shakur's fights you should meet lance he's a complicated person he's a very interesting guy very smart guy he was in a dirty sport bill bill burr had a [ __ ] great bid about it he's like they were all doing drugs he goes he was just the best at all those [ __ ] psychos he was the best and he's dead on he belongs in the in i could see burst man he belongs he's a first ballot hall of fame [ __ ] doper well they were all doping here's the thing when they take away lance armstrong's jersey and they say that he didn't win you have to go back past 18th place to find someone who didn't test positive no [ __ ] yes it was that it's a dirty sport it's a 100 i don't i don't want to say now i don't know anything about it now but when lance was competing it was a [ __ ] dirty sport that that's why you know he's a good example like he's before this whole phrase cancel culture came about right but here's a good example of a guy that without contacts without frame of reference we write we write people off so easily and you know like i do believe i don't know if brian stevenson coined it from the equal justice initiative but i really do believe this and it's hard to live it all the time is that we are all better than the worst thing or things we've done if you took anybody's life and put it through a mild microscope you'd find way worse [ __ ] in your mind or the next person's than what lance armstrong did and that is the problem like i feel so conflicted about media and social media and just how everybody's life is in our veins other people's lives your life that's why it's difficult to understand and and um process the world these days yes well it says it's there's a guy named alan lavinovitz is a brilliant guy i've had on my podcast before and he has a phrase for it and uh he said he calls it processed information the same way you have processed food and it's bad for you yeah there's processed information and
when you're getting a tweet you know you're reading a tweet rather than like being around a person talking to that person or experiencing their whole life you can like someone could say something abrasive in a tweet they're just trying to be funny or they're just in a bad mood and you can just decide well [ __ ] that guy forever but what he is trying to say is i've seen it happen i've seen it happen too but it's it's not good for the person that does that either for the person that writes people off like that for you to have the least charitable impression of someone possible and just decide right away that you're done with them that's it's it's unhealthy it's unhealthy for everybody because you you either are not thinking or you're thinking and you're dismissing complexity you're dismissing emotions you're dismissing circumstance you're dismissing all the different aspects that make a person so variable people vary so much depending upon the stress that they're under depending upon what's going on in their personal life or private life there's so much going on with human beings you you can't just look at a tweet you can't just look at a moment in time and we're doing that now and we're doing that to the detriment of discourse into the detriment of friendship and compassion and community we're just deciding that this person is a bad person or this person's irredeemable and irredeemable is a very dangerous thing oh it's a way of othering people it's the most dangerous thing because look a big part of what i am this new endeavor that i'm taking on is clemency and you know at the pearl mudder center if it's going to be called the pearl mudder center for forensic science education and criminal justice reform we haven't arrived in a name but clemency is a very important process that has at its heart and soul not only i will grant you clemency because i think you may not have done this or didn't do this but because i think you are worthy of redemption and forgiveness and instead of throwing out your life
or a large portion of it i'm going to see past it and redeem help redeem you and it is it's up to us as the public at large to start putting pressure on politicians regardless of because you know how easy it is it's it's so like you just you just sort of crystallized it the easiest thing to do is to say [ __ ] it i'm done with that person and then put them out of your mind and consciousness it's easy when you hear someone was accused of committing this crime to say [ __ ] them they deserve it yeah and i see that happening and governors who have this unbelievable magic wand and power maybe even on a higher plane than police officers and other members of law enforcement to say you know what i'm going to treat this clemency process as a real thing and i'm not i i am not saying this as a democrat because i don't know that i am any longer one i don't know what i am i think i'm an independent human being but if you take ron desantis for example in florida the clemency regime in florida needs to be overhauled and there needs to be human pressure not from democrats and from human beings one of my clients is one of the oldest men sitting on death row in this country james daly i've talked about him before and he's one of three people in their 70s and 80s that are sitting on death row and the clemency regime in florida is one that exists but is not in practice in any real practical way don't you think that if a governor does have the ability to pardon people and they they do they also have almost i mean next to the president the president has the most obligations right because they have to deal with international issues but the amount of issues that a governor has to deal with the amount of things they have on their plate
the idea that we're asking them to go over thousands and thousands of cases just in their state where people might be innocent there should be some sort of a program that examines all of these cases don't you think there should be like each state with if you're gonna have like you know defendants and you're gonna have prosecutors and you're gonna have incarceration in the death penalty and all the various things that go along with that shouldn't you have a wrongful incarceration department like an actual organization that can go over all the pertinent facts the dna witness testimony everything find holes in it someone who's completely dedicated to truth not dedicated to winning or losing winning on each side right yes that's what they need the answer is yeah that should be a part of the criminal justice and here's and here's the thing joe it exists in some municipalities there are these things called conviction integrity units that re-review old cases and they are an arm of the district attorney's office now in new york we just put one in place and i believe it's being headed up by terry rosenblatt who is if i'm not mistaken as being headed up by her as an old friend of mine where they re-review old cases but they're an arm of the district attorney's office there's one in jacksonville florida that has been responsible for helping get people exonerated but those are exonerations and those are re-reviewing cases but getting to your point about the governor you're a absolutely right and b it exists he doesn't act alone ron desantis or any other governor they have a clemency board and then there are all the statewide top statewide elected officials are have a staff they have a lot of resources to re-review these cases so here's how this works nikki freed who is the secretary of the commissioner of agriculture i went up to tallahassee to try to lobby on james daley's behalf not to set him loose
just give me a [ __ ] hearing just the hearing i can live with the result if you just let me lay bare for you the facts of this case this case is was on there was a whole 2020 devoted to it i'm on it you can read about it i've talked to you about the james daily case on this podcast before there's stunning evidence of his innocence i've presented it at an evidentiary hearing in florida and it keeps on getting denied on procedural grounds no one wants to look at the facts if there was ever it gets it's time barred you're bringing it up too late the the real killer confessed to me in a jail cell he has nothing to no reason to do that and then he doesn't want to testify in open court because his mother is in the courtroom but check out the 2020 special on james daly and so when you're failing in the courts clemency becomes okay let me present it to you when i was up there trying to talk to people on the clemency board nikki freed was the only one that would give me a meeting at a time where she wasn't running for governor now i'm supporting her because she gives a [ __ ] i spoke to ron desantis it was a favor for him to meet with me he was two and a half hours late and his decision was like reading a tweet what about the wet pants i said well he goes and i have 30 seconds 30 seconds i said what about the wet pants and you have 30 seconds i said mr governor sir and he said and take off your mask this is like at the height of the pandemic and i was like what did my mask have to take it off and i'm i'm like okay it was so bananas and i was like i'm not in a mask debate with you and if in 30 seconds you want me to tell you what about the pants if you give me the benefit of a hearing all i'm asking you to do is listen he's like you don't really think that i would let him go what are you asking me to do commute his sentence i said i'm asking
you to listen by this point he had turned his back and began to walk away from me down the hall and i said so that was our meeting and he didn't answer and his aide goes to me that went great right he engaged with you i said if that's your definition of great we're really [ __ ] here really yes and i'm not there if if anything i am tempering the story it was so bizarre to me that just listen and then if at that point you want to do something let me get the facts out there there's another guy that's sitting on death row in florida named nelson serrano all right nelson must be in his 80s by now this this case is nuts nelson has a flat out alibi these murders were committed in miami i think it was a former business partner of his he look at the nelson serrano case he is in atlanta he has the strongest alibi possible and the the state of florida argued that he had time to get on a flight make it to miami get back on a flight make it back to atlanta and commit this crime without anyone having seen it they don't take into account the fact that the flight was delayed don't they have flight records like they have flight records and they they cobble together a timeline in which he could have gone under an assumed name it is bizarre it is bizarre what year is this um this must have been in the 90s oh okay so like the the murder but then he's living in i think ecuador somewhere in either south or central america he's retired this was his former business partner that got killed um and they just figured he must be good for it and they tried him and he's sitting there on death row and if you were ever going to listen i mean this is the state in the country that has the most death row exonerations by far so there were 39 people have been exonerated from death row in florida
let's give these guys a clemency hearing and your listeners what can we do i'm going to i'm going to get to a case in a minute that's happening in texas a woman that is on on the verge of being executed but what can you do you put pressure on governors ron desantis you know it's not just ron desantis gavin newsom you know you put pressure on democratic governors republican governors take yourself out of this party affiliation and think about the human beings what's going on with the woman in texas can i i'm going to faint if i don't go to the bathroom yeah i can see in your face we'll be right back and we're back how was that good relief sweet relief right it was like uh it was like a supernatural relief [Laughter] because i was so into i was so into the conversation and i didn't want it to end i know but that's like a lot of resources thinking about holding back the p i got a weak bladder man oh he's weak it's normal well i'm on this medication to help relax it so medication to relax or relax my bladder apparently i have something called bladder neck syndrome which causes the you have of all the muscles that i should be proud of being shredded shredded it's not my [ __ ] bladder neck so your bladder neck tenses up too much thank you mom and dad for blessing me with that genetic is that a genetic thing yeah is there a side effect to that no it's just like you have a strong bladder neck and you need to relax it oh so the medication makes you pee more it relaxes your bladder neck yeah so that you can it doesn't make you pee more but it allows you to fully eliminate oh okay the more you know something [Music] let's look at those nbc things the rainbow you know i'm i'm i'm old enough to remember yeah
um so this woman in texas oh so i mean look if there were ever anything i don't know i keep giving texas references but that's where we are that's where we are maybe that's why melissa lucio is set to be executed in less than 90 days um and there is hopefully forming and will continue to form enough of a groundswell of support for her [Music] she's been on death row more than a decade i think close to 15 years and she's accused of killing her child and i wanna i wanna preface the story of melissa lucio by saying if you're inspired by anything i say and you wanna do anything if you just google melissa lucio and it's l-u-c-i-o and innocence project right on the landing page of the innocence project you will get to information about how you can support right now but you know here is someone and this goes back to rebuilding communities and why this is so important right this is someone that was born into awful circumstances a history of of sexual abuse that started when she was six years old and um finds herself being interrogated by the police and why why i reference why it's so important to building communities not that that's going to cure all instances of sexual abuse but oftentimes sexual abuse happens in lower socioeconomic depressed areas where there isn't the social emotional intelligence that people it's proliferated through generations it's not always but she was born into awful circumstances and not very well off and she's at the hands of this terrible abuse why i tell that story is with stronger communities i think we get less instances of that but and many other things but the reason why i raise that is because someone that has had past
trauma like that is way more susceptible to being broken down during an interrogation because they have a certain vulnerability to them so she is the mother of 12 and is pregnant with twins and is accused of killing her child um there's no physical evidence of any abuse whatsoever and she's interrogated over and over again and you can watch clips of the interrogation online and the culmination of this five-hour interrogation was i guess i did it and you really have to invest in just understanding why people confess the crimes they didn't commit this is not an uncommon phenomenon a lot of wrongful incarceration cases start with a false confession and the false confession is hard for people to understand because the reaction that it invokes in folks is that i would never confess to a crime i didn't commit i don't care what you do to me i don't care what pressure you put on me that's just a not true and b you have no idea what it's like unless you have been through it and the best example is a starting place that i can give and we'll get back to melissa in a minute and i i'd like everybody to think about and really sit through this emotion you're driving in your car and you hear the sirens and see the lights go on think about what that feels like for most people it's a rush of adrenaline it's a raise in your blood pressure
and it's the release of hormones that you probably know the names of and i don't even if you weren't speeding didn't run the stops on whatever it is for a minor traffic violation so start there when you're having an interaction with law enforcement it is a stress inducing event even if it's because you're being pulled over for speeding there is no one among us that will deny that now try to put yourself in a windowless room where on the day of losing your child or in the weeks or months following losing your child you are being accused of doing that and try to wrap your head around the grief and the the depth of the pain the spectrum of emotions that comes along with trying to cope with that and add that to your already existing vulnerabilities and the psychology that goes into that is very complex and very well documented and well studied there's a professor at john jay college in new york named saul cassin who has done some of the most famous experiments about this you can read about why people falsely confess there's tons of great stuff to read about it but she was one of the most vulnerable candidates for it and she finally said i guess i did it and the way you determine whether or not somebody is falsely confessing to something is you start to match the physical characteristics of the crime to what they say they did and if you're not seeing that they match up it's a strong indication of a false confession popular example that most people can latch on to is brendan dassey who my dear friend laura nyriter you know who was in making a murderer and runs this really amazing um social justice organization wrongful
for the wrongfully incarcerated up in uh at northwestern um and is handling his case you know brendan dassey you know he was stephen avery's nephew in the making the murder you know the things that they were getting him to say didn't mat he was saying okay i did x but really why happened they'd say no say why happen so you start to match the disparity between what they're confessing to and what happens to melissa lucio is something similar they're trying to supply her with details they're trying to force her to say things she doesn't know the answers she's dealing with the enormity of the death of her child she's pregnant and she finally says i guess i did it what are they accusing her of killing her child but if of how um i think it was i think it was manual strangulation you can read about the case on the innocence project do they know what the kid actually died from they know now and her experts show that it was not you have i don't want to speak about the case in details without giving people a chance to read the details and decide from themselves because getting behind something is not something you should do because somebody says it on a podcast i encourage people to do their own research and frankly i don't know enough about the details of the nooks and crannies of the case but i know enough to know that the people that i'm close with that are working on her case have done the amount of due diligence that i would do in way more and what what i do know is that they had cp child protective services records to go through that didn't document a single instance of physical violence toward kids and as a as a starting point the statistic on this is staggering 70 of women that were exonerated are exonerated for crimes that never happened so let me say that again
of the women that have been exonerated in the united states for crimes they did not commit are exonerated of crimes that never actually occurred they either turn out to be accidents suicides um where no crime happened at all so that's the starting point um you know i i just think that if you go and read about um her case and if you were ever like i want to do something right now you know that is something that the governor's name here is governor abbott i believe yes you know and a lot of people lose hope and but you know when it came to rodney reed and others you know things happen and when there's a ground swallow support things can happen and before we go taking the life of a mother of 14 kids she had to deliver her twins from in jail from death row um you know we better be really sure and she's been in jail for how long uh 15 14 years on death row and you know before we go if we have any pause any pause at all we stop you know it's interesting this this so go to the the innocent if you google innocence project and melissa lucio l-u-c-i-o there's a very specific way that you can sign on to a petition in a very specific way you can contribute and learn about her case and you know i deal with this often and this is more of a question for you because i don't know the answer and it's a riddle i've been trying to solve for more than 20 years we like to think of ourselves as as impartial right so when i whenever i'm i'm an alleged expert in jury selection that was like my initial claim to fame i wrote a book with a federal judge called the law of juries and that was like the sexiest part of what i did right i was the jury expert and
when you're picking a jury you're not really picking a jury you're deselecting people because you don't have the ability to say i want joe and jamie and mary and cindy you only have the ability to say i don't want joe and i don't want mary and i don't want jamie so it's really deselecting and the psychology behind that is let me get rid of the people that i think are not in a criminal case for instance are not going to presume my client innocent in the great fallacy of our system of justice perhaps the biggest fallacy is this notion that we presume people innocent until proven guilty it's something we like to say and it's something that we like to trot out there is what makes us different from the rest of the world and we say we're the only system of justice it's just not true if we're honest with ourselves the first thing you think about when someone has been accused of a crime is that they must have done it and now i don't accept my own opinion on it my firm there are tons of independent studies on it i had my firm conduct a study on it with thousands of participants and close to 90 percent of people pulled when they respond anonymously say if i hear someone is accused of a crime i assume they are guilty all right so there is no presumption of innocence so my question is there have been decades and decades of lawyers far more gifted than i'll ever be that have tried to crack this code and i can encourage you to you know serve on juries and not look for ways out i can encourage you that when you stare at the person sitting in that seat at the table you look at an innocent person and say that is an innocent man or woman and there are all sorts of tricks and you know devices of persuasion the great criminal defense lawyers from clarence darrow to ted wells to
you know roy black and barry scheck and you know every every great jerry sharkell jerry leftcourt you know lisa wayne the best criminal defense lawyers i know have tried you are shrouded in a blanket of innocence and that that sh that that shroud does not fall from your shoulder not a bit unless in or until the government can tear it away from you and when you go back into that room to deliberate you should walk through that door saying we are dealing with an innocent man or woman and let and and lessen until the government can meet its burden of proof beyond reasonable doubt but these are just words and the problem that we have is that if you look at the rate of conviction in most federal jurisdictions across the country it's over 98 percent and that can't be it just can't be so my question to you is and i don't know that you know the answer or i invite people to sort of what is how do you impress this notion of the presumption of innocence because if we don't breathe life into it through our deeds through verdicts and through saying if i have a matter of pause in my own life in a moment of importance that is reasonable doubt and i must acquit which is what the jury instruction usually is how do we make that happen with more regularity so that it's better to have 10 innocent 10 guilty people walk free than one innocent person go to jail for a crime they didn't commit and i don't i've run out of fresh ideas today but it's something always on my mind i think we have a problem with with human beings just in general that we don't really know if someone's being truthful there's it's very very hard to tell and it's one of the reasons why when people are consistently truthful like when you know for a fact they're truthful when you know for a fact you can count on them for truth we
value them so much because we don't know there's always this chance you know you meet someone they're charming and they turn out to be a serial killer you don't know i think we're going to come to a point in time with civilization where there's going to be a technological innovation that allows us to bypass what we're looking at as a bottleneck now which is like what is your intent what's going on actually in your head versus what you're saying really yeah i think that's going to happen i don't think it's going to happen it's probably going to be a neural transplant it's probably going to be something like neurolink it's going to be something where i say transplant i mean i meant uh implant um it's going to be something that interfaces with the mind that allows you to share ideas without the use of words i think there's a problem with words i think the problem with words is that you can use them to manipulate perspective you can use them to manipulate the way someone feels you that's what charm is and personality and all that charisma [ __ ] it gets it becomes a problem and the lack of charisma becomes a problem as well the uh you know when people are nervous and they're not good at communicating that becomes a problem there's like we don't know if someone's telling the truth a problem in that we equate it with them being dishonest yes yeah well some people just lock up like some people if like you're talking about the cop behind you some people have a cop behind them if they've never done anything wrong they [ __ ] feel guilty and they're terrified for no reason just they have this fear of authority and if a cop is behind the lights go on they're a babbling mess and if you pull them over and if you're quick to judge or if you're you think you're smarter than you are you think you're more perceptive than you are you might decide this is a guilty person and you might detain them i think we need some because like most of what you're dealing with here is a lack of truth if you arrest someone and convict
someone for a crime they didn't do that's not truth if you say that you did something because you were coerced into confessing that's not true either and we need to figure out a way obviously these are like long solutions we're not talking about like very recent in in the future or very soon in the future there's going to be something where we're allowed to see into the contents of someone's mind without the use of verbal language and the way elon's put it with this neural link thing that he's working on because essentially what that is is going to be some sort of an interface that allows you to have much more access to information and also to share this whatever this frequency is or this thing's transmitting with other people that have the same device and what he said to me is you're you're not going to have to use language to talk anymore that to me is the gateway to ultimate truth i don't think it's good like let me let me be real clear on this i'm not like happy about this i like humans i like the messiness of people i don't like it when it comes to being incarcerated wrongly or when it comes to someone getting away with a terrible crime because they're a good liar but i do like it because the messiness of humans that's where romance comes from that's where intrigue comes from mystery that's where charisma like when i love talking to a charismatic person an interesting person i love like listening to someone's words how they craft their thoughts together and express them to you i think it's one of the more fascinating aspects about human communication it's just i love it and trying to find out and trying to solve the mystery of that person it seems like neural link and he'd be a fascinating guy to talk to talk to about this it's sort of it it robs you of the romance that surrounds the mystery of solving the riddle of another human being i think we are destined to become cyborgs and i don't think there's any way around it i think what our reliance upon technology is so extreme and so overwhelming and i think
one of the answers to the solution that we were talking about earlier about this the social media aspect of communication like the the social media aspect of the way we talk about people and share information and write people off this the only way we're going to pass this is better technology we've embraced that shitty technology so much it's so overwhelmingly a part of people's lives whether it's text messages or social medias that i can't imagine there's going to come a world where people wake up and go back to flip phones and say this is too nut this is too nuts this is not the way people are supposed to be interacting with each other but i'm am i crazy to think that i i'm i wonder if you have this feeling and maybe it's like a misery loves company thing where you're with someone and we've all had this experience and they're i feel like a hypocrite because i'm sure i do it too but where you're with someone and their faces buried in their phone and you're trying to talk to them oh it's brutal and it pisses you the [ __ ] off well you know when that's really clear when i do podcasts because i do so many podcasts where i don't ever have that happen we just sit and talk and occasionally i'll have a guest that picks up their phone starts going through their text messages while the podcast is going on and i'm like what are you doing and you maybe just hasn't happened in a while but when when it does happen you're like hey hey junkie put your phone down for a little while we're here for a couple hours and millions of people are going to listen to it and it feels great just to have this conversation we're sitting across a table from each other and it's like why can't my phone's off and you know it's like i don't i'm not jonesing for it right now but i'm not gonna lie are there times where like i i went to this like went to this talk at my kid's school years ago from this she was a i wonder where she's at with it now this psychologist at harvard that was doing a study on what
this what this technology and specifically phones due to kids minds but more so what you being on it in front of them does to their minds and it was really scary and she had these like tips that were real practical and interesting about when you get home there should be a period of time between five and seven or six and nine that you leave your phone in a drawer because what emergency can't wait if you're with your family right and i started to try to do that it's not always easy well you're busy that's part of the problem so your life doesn't end when you come home you're still getting text messages and emails you have to respond to and there's a important case that you have to follow up on yeah with most people it's just [ __ ] you know most people it's like someone's sending them a meme lol and you gotta respond i don't wanna be rude i gotta respond you know but i but i'm curious as to what what you said because that you're right it is a longer term solution this idea of being able to read into people's minds but you know i i um i don't know what it is about us as human beings that assumes guilt because if you look i'm not a big like founding father's headed right guy um but i'll tell you one thing the presumption of innocence is is a fascinating concept because what it reflects if you really think about it is a belief in the best about another human being it is it presumes not that they're innocent not that they're benevolent it presumes the best about humankind it presumes that you wouldn't do this awful thing that someone is saying you did and it presumes that before we go ruining a life and i can tell you that whether it's someone being accused of a white-collar
crime a robbery or a murder until you have lived the emotional toll of of human destruction that any prosecution leaves in its wake for the family and friends of the person accused you just have no frame of reference and and i you know me i'm like emotionally overwrought about a lot of things and that's one of them is that sometimes you know i'll go through the the process of well even if they did what they're being accused of isn't it enough at this point i mean this person has suffered enough and i'm not talking about violent crimes i'm talking about like white-collar crimes and you know what motivates u.s attorneys to do these things and you know it's it's a hard it's a hard issue to solve because if you've ever been through and then thinking about the psychology of it you know i don't know if you guys jamie if you guys have been involved in jury selection ever have you ever been called as a juror you know it is on so many levels um a fascinating exercise in human behavior because i'll tell you two things that this might scare people so much and alarm them so much that the next time they think [ __ ] i got a summons to serve on a jury how do i get out of it might cause them to re-evaluate i'm going to start with the federal system if you were accused of a federal crime in this country 99 of federal jurisdictions do not allow the attorney to ask a single question of a prospective juror what it is i think when i say it out loud i feel like i'm getting pulled over in my i get the rush of a driver so you have a bunch of people that are going to be on
the jury how do you select or deselect so what happens is in most cases in federal court the very very vast majority the judge will ask the questions okay you can submit questions that you want the judge to ask they will ask maybe one percent of those questions and then they seek to rehabilitate people and talk them out of whatever bias they are willing to share which is rare and i'll tell you why in a minute and you have to base it on their occupation you have to base it on their how you think they might think based on just very general demographic information where they work do they have experience in finance or accounting if it's an accounting fraud case because a lot of federal cases are you know white-collar cases and in the rare case like the el chapo case the the glenn maxwell case there'll be a jury questionnaire which you'll get information but when it comes to following up with the jurors look the glenn maxwell case is a great example the last two pages of the questionnaire in that case asked if you have ever had any experience or been the victim of sexual abuse and there's one juror in that case that checked off no and then did an interview with a british news outlet and said that when they were deliberating that the way that he was able to get the other jurors to understand that these alleged victims weren't lying was to recount his own experience with being sexually abused so he lied about the most fundamental question that the defense was interested in and whether you think she's guilty or innocent you followed the trial or you didn't that she in any universe should get a new trial
so what so the answer to your question is most of the follow-up is done by the judge ninety-nine percent of the time if not a hundred percent of the time so you think about this you're in a situation where somebody's liberty is at stake and you can't stand up trying to defend that person and protect their presumption of innocence by saying look and this is my shtick in state court when you can ask questions and it comes from a place of understanding that when you are in a room full of strangers you want to view yourself as being fair and impartial and you want others to view you that way that's who we are as mammals it's psych 101 so i always start by saying look bias can be a dirty four-letter word when you apply it to your someone's ethnicity sexual orientation and so forth but it's not always because we all have biases all of us based on our life experiences things that you know happened to us during childhood um our value beliefs so i give an example like for instance if i was in a case where i was asked would you believe the police and give them equal weight if they were on the stand i might say no because my experience has been in situations that skew my perspective because i've been involved in cases where police have covered things up so i get people's guards down that's my first to to tell them that it is okay it we just want to know so and it's totally fine ladies and gentlemen if you feel this way and we just encourage your honesty and if you want to talk to me off to the side with the judge you can but just please take a look at my client and please stand up and just search yourselves for a minute and how many of you feel that he must have done or she must have done something to be here must have done something wrong
you know they don't just prosecute people for no reason and if you feel that way that's fine and i always get a hand and then i say i say thank you so much for your honesty that is so important that you did that and all of a sudden people start to see that that's okay and they feel comfortable and then you see more hands and now that is what this process should look and feel like you cannot ask that question in federal court period why because it's just become accepted not to and you know when the galene maxwell case was federal court of course it was federal court but so there was a questionnaire that asked us this person had been sexually abused yeah so in cases where there has been a ton of media attention totally up to the judge totally up to the judge they can grant what's called a supplemental juror questionnaire so they granted one and then you have to worry about people lying and then you know if you say to the judge i'd like to follow up on questions x y and z oftentimes the judge is like no we got enough that's why you did the questionnaire and the question becomes in most federal cases jury is picked by lunch and misspeak there's like a race to get the at the most critical these kid the wheels of justice grind slowly right it can take years for these prosecutions to to develop and at the time when you should be slowing down and taking your time is you know at a time where you know you should be so careful so careful you know the michael avenatti case is another example he just got convicted in new york again
and watch what happens in this case and i've been on a panel with this judge before years ago and his his attitude seemed like to me any old any old 12 will do it was like kind of like an arrogance and in that case the jury comes back and says that they're deadlocked okay and then he gives what's called an allen charge which is a pretty standard instruction to a jury go back begin deliberating again don't let emotion factor in and then they get a note from the jury they get a note the judge gets a note from the jury saying that there's one juror that you know doesn't want to look at any evidence and is just going on their emotions and can't even show evidence to prove her side of it or his side of it and then the judge goes back and says you need to put a motion aside and you need whatever instruction he gave it was obviously a juror that wanted to acquit the defense has no burden to put on evidence it's the prosecution's burden so the judge should be taking their time there and being very careful and this judge essentially didn't put a finger on the scale smashed the scale down with his foot and that's not saying i believe or don't believe in michael avenatti's innocence i just think that it's it's these are high-profile examples so in federal court if you say attorneys have to start making a record and saying your honor i really need you to ask how many people assume my client must be guilty and i need to be able to be the one to ask it and you know as for your listeners if you're summoned to go sit on a jury you know remember these stories of the wrongfully convicted and god forbid it could be you or someone in your family and really think about the human life and take a long hard look at the person and you know i think we know by now the [ __ ] government gets it wrong
they get it wrong they get it wrong when they're dealing with pandemics they get it wrong when they're dealing with budgeting they get it wrong when they're dealing with the criminal justice system and they get it wrong more often than you think they usually assume guilt and work backwards from that assumption and focus as you have correctly identified on the win so that is the process in federal court and it's it should be it is one of the biggest threats to the presumption of innocence that is not talked about enough and the way i connected with the co-author of my book is that she was a federal judge and it's a very prestigious position they're appointed by the president she's a federal judge in boston her name is nancy gartner and she was the only judge in that federal district that would allow attorneys to conduct jury selection and she heard about my work and i heard about hers and we came together in that way and you know we co-authored this book and it just should be you know something that happens more often but is for your jurors and this i mean i get a lot of interest from aspiring lawyers um as a result of being on your show whether you're going to be a prosecutor or a defense lawyer this is these are things you need to keep in mind because we're dealing with real people and real human beings and it's easy to talk about them like their numbers but it's like you didn't know that this was the process in federal court right yeah scary isn't it it is scary the idea that you can't ask any questions doesn't seem any that doesn't seem to serve any purpose yeah and you know and if you juxtapose that with state court i mean i had this this um dentist that was accused of of poisoning his his lover's husband to death with midazolam and the dazzlem is some
you know relaxation amnesia agent that is administered by dentists um and you know when they're pulling teeth to get them to get people to you know it was a um it was an anesthetic and i was i conducted the jury selection in the case and it was one of you know the one of the great criminal defense lawyers of our time jerry shargill was one of the last cases that he tried and he asked me to conduct the questions and it was in state court the jury selection lasted days because you know how many panels we went through of people where i was able to get their guard down and say look look at him mr nunez stand up you know he must have done something right and the hands would fly up and i would say your honor and excused let's go on to the next panel and that's what should happen and we need that kind of reform to happen in the federal system and we would see a lot less convictions if that happened because people lie because they don't want to be viewed as unfair how does this election work in the federal system then like say if you were gonna if you were a defense attorney how do you help pick a jury or deselect so it's an interesting question so what the judge will typically do is say have you heard anything about the case or read anything about the case and you know that's not enough tell you why because the description they were given of the case the names may not ring a bell right but if you like if i know that the media coverage of the case was such that two men were from ex-bank were accused of trying to fix the market by spoop by this process called spoofing and make it look like there were trades happening that weren't to drive up the
market price if the judge says have you heard of john q smith or mike q public before and charges against this bank and no one says yes okay how about well have you ever heard about a case where people were accused of doing what i just described that sometimes raises hands and then they realize oh i have heard about this case so what happens is that you'll get a chance to submit questions and oftentimes i'll submit the question please ask how many of you assume the person's guilty and the judge will just using their own judgment say i'm not asking questions 1 through 17 but i'll ask question 19 and 20. and then the judge will go through two rounds one is called for cause and you have an unlimited amount of what they call cause challenges so if somebody knew one of the parties if somebody was a former fbi agent if they were had a family member that was those are usually grounds that you have cause to get rid of someone or if someone has read about the case right and all they've read is that the person's guilty so watch this a high percentage of judges used to be prosecutors a very high percentage oftentimes there were prosecutors in the same office that they are now presiding in cases over i mean i have three trials coming up where that's the case and what they will do is they will say i understand and i am not i am not shading this a bit this is exactly what happens i understand that you've read about the case and you may have formed an opinion i'm going to instruct you that you are only to listen to the evidence in this case and you were only to consider that evidence and put aside whatever it is you have read or heard do you think you can do that so let's just stop for a second
think of the psychology here you have someone that is physically standing above you on a bench okay in a black robe appointed by the president of the united states these federal courtrooms are very regal you have this authority figure and the psychology there is of course i want you to view me as being fair and i want to view myself as being fair so 99.9 repeating nine percent of the time the person will say yes i can do that that is not getting to the truth about that person's bias that is rehabilitating someone that needs to be struck because someone's freedom is on the line so if i'm ever given the opportunity to inquire further i can usually get them there i understand this is are you nervous yes so are you a little intimidated would you mind if we we should all step back a little bit give you some space but i really want you to search yourself because you can't unhear what you've heard and unthink what you've thought and you know i want you to look at my client and i really want you to give this some thought because is it fair to say that might be difficult for you to just forget it or put it aside and i would say 80 percent of the time i will get the person to a place of honesty and say yeah i think it might be a problem and the person should be excused right then and there the very vast majority of judges won't even allow that in federal court will not even allow that follow-up and to the extent they do they will and i could send you example after example it happens all it's like though it's like the the kind of joke inc in circles of criminal defense lawyers that is you you have to laugh or else you'll cry and that is what happens so you you then just end up being relegated to
if you can't excu make an argument and get the judge to agree that person needs to go for cause which you should have an unlimited number of challenges you then have the peremptory phase which are what or better best way to describe it as free strikes and for certain felonies you get six you know others you get three you just get a number of strikes that you get to get rid of people and if you have eight problems but only six strikes you're gonna be left with two shitty jurors and shitty meaning that they're not there with the presumption of innocence they're there with the you know with the assumption of guilt so i had i had a situation once where i got so fed up with the judge because i was a former prosecutor in the southern district of new york he's now sitting as a judge in the southern district of new york and the juror prospective juror said i've read about the case i think your client's probably guilty and he said okay well i'm going to instruct you and he went through that whole [ __ ] routine and then said you know so i'm gonna ask you can you put that aside so i i said to him i asked the prospective jury to leave and i said your honor with all respect it is a a fundamental um impossibility and departure from the most basic tenets of human psychology to ask someone to put something aside and erase it from their mind we don't think that way as human beings when we're not cyborgs yet we can't compartmentalize things in the matter in what you're asking these jurors to do so i would respectfully ask that you don't ask it that way anymore and he said i'm going to ask it the way i want to ask it and i have this all on the record so the next time he did it i just i said to myself you know what next time he does this i'm gonna ask the next logical follow-up so he did it and then he said
can you put it aside and she said yes and he said anything further mr dubin i said yes where are you gonna put it and she said i don't know and he got so red in the face and screamed at me in front of her don't you do that i want and called the marshals back into his chambers and i i didn't know whether i should take my shoelaces off because i was going to get arrested but if i said you joe i know that you've been a ufc commentator and that's been a huge part of your life but i'm going to ask you to sit in judgment on something that requires you to put that aside and not consider that where the [ __ ] are you putting that right especially if it's relative right where are you putting it i mean where are you putting it you read about the case and assume my client's guilty right but can you put it aside where are you putting that that's crazy yeah well that's a power thing right when you're a judge and you have that i mean a judge is such an ultimate position of power and you see some of them they wield it with such arrogance and some of them wield it with with dignity and some of them wield it with humility humility and honor but there are people just like again there's bad everything bad flight attendants there's bad judges and it's just a part of being a human being so you you should have at least some sort of fail-safe mechanisms in place to stop the intentions of a bad human being from ruining somebody else's life yeah and i don't know if the answer you know i don't know one of the solutions is for people that are listening to say you know what my job will survive without me for two weeks i'm gonna really a be honest even if i'm not asked the question i just want you to know i think if the federal government would go to the point of
convening a grand jury and indicting someone they must have the goods on them i think they're probably guilty just say it because think about it wouldn't you want to know that if it was you sitting in that chair yeah joe wouldn't you want to know it of course so it's like you know there's so many issues to tackle and things to you know get excited about in terms of good excitement and bad where you you we all can make a difference because the one rare thing that we can agree on that is different about our system of justice related to really the rest of the world and most of the western world is we do bring our disputes to each other to resolve yeah it's pretty [ __ ] rare and scary yeah it's scary it's it's definitely scary when you let other people decide if you're telling the truth and you have a woman like this woman in texas that is vulnerable and has been coerced into confession you know i've had amanda knox on the podcast yeah a friend of mine and she's brilliant and you know i would not want anybody to go through what amanda knox has gone through but because of what she's gone through she's this insanely intelligent aware compassionate human being like very uniquely intelligent because she's she's faced a level of uncertainty and of conflict and of just chaos in her life at 20 years old being accused of a horrific murder that she had no connection to and they knew who did it i mean you know the whole story i'm sure you've seen the netflix documentary amanda is a dear friend of mine yeah it's horrific but for people that are just listening oh yeah yeah it's a horrific miscarriage of justice that she was tried not once but twice for this crime and and if you haven't seen the netflix documentary you should because it will give you insight into how how absolute power can so corrupt absolutely and a prosecutor who just decided that she must have been good for it
because he didn't like her reaction at the scene yes and you know amanda and i had dinner with her fiance who's now her husband who's a really fascinating dude that you would love right and amanda and i talked about like how people process um tragedy and shock and how she the last thing from her mind on in that moment when she's standing out in front of that apartment is if she's being judged for how she's interacting right or what her reaction was or wasn't yeah and you know wow she's a force of nature and just such a brilliant person and and a really important voice in the movement you know that the thing that's uplifting about this if we were gonna like leave it on a note of positivity and and like sort of triumph is that you know you never know how strong you are until you go through some [ __ ] and i look i personally could be going through something at the time and i draw strength from thinking it's never remotely close to what some of these men and women have endured right and they you know i i remember speaking to a woman named deborah milke who was exonerated in arizona and um of killing her son and um or having him set up to be murdered and i i remember asking her one time how how the [ __ ] she survived and she said you know you it sounds cliche but you don't realize your strength and how strong you are until you're put in a situation where you're either gonna succumb to it or figure out a way through it and i draw so much strength in my personal life from and that's why i think people are attracted to this movement of the wrongfully incarcerated because they end up on the other side very damaged
um and you've met amanda and you've met robert and you've met others that have been wrongfully incarcerated but you know there's something special about them that you feel well that's the same thing we're talking about people that grow up in bad neighborhoods or people that grow up in challenging circumstances they develop character that you don't get if your parents are billionaires there's something about going through adversity and coming out on the other end of it they're more compassionate they're more understanding they're more there's there's something there that exists because they've had to endure just like i mean it's it's maybe not the best analogy but the only way you get good at running is to run the only way you're getting good in shape is to push yourself these people have been pushed emotionally they've been pushed psychologically and they've developed this resiliency that the average person doesn't have and that's what it is and that's one of the one of the reasons why they're so compelling that's why they're so fast she's so fascinating to talk to she's so brilliant but i would never want anybody to go through that i would never want my worst enemy to go through what she went through to be unjustly accused of a horrific crime and because of that uncertainty and that chaos and also she's beco she became this famous person famous for being accused of a crime and most people don't look past the headlines right so most people look at her and probably thought oh she killed that girl that's instantaneous right the instant so she has to live with that so everywhere she goes she has to overcome this initial bias that people has that she she's a murderer so they don't want to trust her or you know there was so many things about that case that were connected to like devious uh sexual practices and satanism and all kinds of wacky [ __ ] that prosecutor devised to try to justify his bias towards her you know there there's a um there's an important book that people
should read and he would be a fascinating guy for you to speak to at some point his name is david rudolph he's a very prominent criminal defense and now civil rights attorney and he just wrote a book called american injustice and i brought it to you yeah rudolph american justice yeah and he he has this terrific podcast with his wife who's also a criminal defense lawyer her name is sonya pfeiffer but his book american injustice you remember the peterson case where you know the netflix documentary the staircase yes i didn't watch it though so you got to watch it so david was the star of that he represented that guy peterson and peterson you know was accused of shoving his wife down those stairs the staircase and david allowed netflix this wild access to the whole process and embargoed the whole thing until after his appeals were exhausted so he wasn't violating privilege so you get a real interesting look behind the scenes um and i he's my co-counsel in clementi aguirre's federal civil rights case and he's someone that i've known since i was like a baby lawyer for 20 plus years and he wrote this book american injustice and he has made a lifetime about telling the stories of these cases um and the book is so fascinating because it takes you into the belly of that beast of cases that maybe didn't get the headlines like the peterson case and the in the netflix doc the staircase but his perspective on it is really one that um explores the power dynamic why law enforcement gets it wrong so
he's you know i i used to think early on that the way to get across to juries and federal civil rights cases where i was trying to get compensation for someone that had been wrongfully incarcerated was to demonize the police and it's not it's first of all it's not factual because i don't think that most cops and in fact i think the very vast majority of law enforcement in wrongful incarceration cases don't set out to frame someone or to put something on someone i think that they succumb to their biases subconscious or not and their gut or their hunch that someone did it and then they make it try to fit and when that light switch went off for me i became far more effective advocate because you don't need to demonize people and take on that burden a because it's probably not true and b because you have to understand the phenomenon of tunnel vision and david really explores that in the book is that you you become incapable of seeing evidence outside of your tunnel of vision which is you did it or they did it so i will not consider this fact over here i can't even see it right i will not consider this evidence over here or this witness statement because i can't see it so it's an important read and he's an important guy to um and consider that perspective because i think you know like often like my mom sometimes how could they have done that to him those [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] the best and stay on and i'll say mom i don't think that they set out to do it i think that yeah they did those [ __ ] but no mom i'm telling you it's not that and that that's the the reaction without the the brooklyn accent you know that's the reaction that a lot of people have and it's it's that's not always the same they need to understand psychology and human nature and then the
pressures and then this thing that we were talking about about winning and losing yeah i i have that problem with uh all things that involve power like police and judges and any and even teachers like there's this thing where people want to win or lose you know they want to be able to decide that what how how things go down and then they want to walk away with it with a victory right and this is when you have something set up as simple as um pulling people over were you speeding you know uh i caught you going 65 miles an hour in a 55 and you're like no no i wasn't going that fast [ __ ] you like i'm going to win i have the thing i'm going to write well see in court like oh great and then this guy gets i mean maybe you were speeding and you weren't paying attention or maybe you really weren't i mean i know people that have been pulled over that were not speeding i know people that pulled over that swear they stopped at a stop sign and the cops said you rolled right through the stop sign they're like the [ __ ] i did because the cop has a quota and that's a real thing that's a real thing there is pressure put on some cops and some some places not saying everywhere but i know i've talked to cops who tell me that you can get [ __ ] on if you don't arrest or you don't write a certain amount of tickets or you don't have a certain amount of interaction that's a fact which is crazy because my perspective was what if we all decided no one's going to commit a crime for the month for one month no one's going to go over the speed limit everyone's going to stop at every red light everyone's going to stop at every stop sign no one's going to do anything for a month what the [ __ ] happens then you know what happens what the municipality says where are we going to generate money from yeah that's the problem because a lot of them are glorified revenue collectors and that's the argument for when people pull people over that you shouldn't have cops do it but then who are you going to have yeah leader maids well it's it's funny too because you said that they are the ones that wield the power i don't know if they had this when you were in
elementary school but you remember safety patrols yes so i don't know what the [ __ ] they were thinking because i ended up being a bit of a problem child but i remember when i got that that orange it was like a belt with something you became a chess i became a cop i remember thinking i remember going like this it's on i was in third grade it's all [ __ ] [Laughter] dude i had a similar thing happen when i became a security guard i was a security guard this place called great woods and i talked about it in that video that i made about the whole neil young controversy when i was a kid i was 19 years old i worked as a security guard and i saw right away from my first day on the job that there's this very clear separation between us and them because when someone the first day on the job someone who stole one of the golf carts we drove around these golf carts and some kids stole it and there's a guy named alicat alicat was running the the security thing and he was a hardened older dude who'd been around the block for a long [ __ ] time they tackled this guy off the golf cart and they beat the [ __ ] out of them and they beat him with a walkie-talkie and i watched it happen and i was like oh [ __ ] like this is like this is a serious job and the the what i'd said about it is that one of the reasons why i quit the main reason i quit was actually a neil young concert which was hilarious like neil young's concert what was going on was kind of cold outside and so a bunch of people there was a like a it was an amphitheater so there's a covered area and there's an outside area that's not covered it's a lawn area and on the lawn area these neil young fans started bonfires and we were told to go put out the bonfires and tell them to stop and we went out there and then chaos broke loose brawls and cheddar exactly and i put a hoodie on i zipped it up over my security outfit and like [ __ ] this job and i quit i quit on a neil young concert and i walked home i walked out to my car drove home singing keep on rocking to the free
world or in the free world that's that's the that's the that's a crazy irony that's really what i did i mean i was literally drunk keep on rocking in the free world because i was a neil young fan and then here he is playing and i get to see him while i'm working there and then a brawl breaks out and i have to help so why don't the fires out why did you because you were just like [ __ ] this it was 15 bucks an hour or if i was lucky i mean i'm not exactly sure how much i got paid this was 1986 i believe when i was 19. so i was like i am not going to get my ass kicked for 15 bucks an hour you know i'm not a big guy like me being a security guard is not like a wise move anyway so were you what are you doing oh yeah oh yeah well they're all black belts all the people that work with me were all black belts from my taekwondo school that's how we got hired but i'm not fighting people for 15 bucks an hour like random psychos at a neil young concert that are lighting bonfires get the [ __ ] out of it so you were just like i'm out yeah i quit the job i'm like i have a feeling of self-preservation like this is not wise this is not smart like this the whole thing was wrong did you watch the rest of the concert i did not i don't think they i don't think the concert continued i think they shut it down because the fires got out of control it was pretty crazy but i remember chaos was going on i remember my friend larry who's like one of the most peaceful guys i know punched this dude and i was like well i'm out of here because if larry's punching people then i'm next and i'm not getting my [ __ ] brains kicked in you know for this [ __ ] stupid job and i was also like realizing that there was this separation between us and them that you would have like when you tell a car hey man you can't park there they'd like [ __ ] you you're like no [ __ ] you and you like bring other guys over and then it was like and then it would happen yeah i was like this is so and at that age that probably felt good well it did but i was also like if i would if i ever lost my temper always i would always be like i was always disappointed with myself always and then always be like why was that like what
happened there and then i would think about it and i was like what this is like a thing that's happening where i'm separating the people work as security from the people that are the the people in the crowd the audience members i'm like this is weird like this and then i was like this is probably what happens with cops on a much grander scale but isn't isn't there something something about how power makes even the most innocent and pure-hearted amongst us intoxicated in some way that's the stanford prison studies right yeah which i think are flawed i think there's some sort of a flaw in there like people wanted to get out and they were i don't know there's something to that but it's not shocking when you hear about people having power to tell people what to do and not to do and abusing it you see it at tsa you know you see it at uh you could see it almost everywhere like p there's certain people that are abusive when it comes to power and you know this is a strange time when it comes to power when it comes to police and because the respect for police has waned considerably since the george floyd murder like everybody is like like if you think about the way people view the police from 2019 from that moment i guess it was 20 right 2020 when he was killed from 2020 to now it's a very different world in terms of the way people see the police once those they started lighting cop cars on fire in la and you start seeing some of these crazy riots and then you start seeing these smash and grabs all throughout new york city where that [ __ ] goofy mayor told everybody to not do anything and to let stand down and let this all take place let them burn it out of their system you're like oh my god this is wild like we literally have like a different world now it's a different world in the terms of perceptions like how people think about law enforcement well and it has a corrosive effect on the good cops that are out there that you know are afraid to get accused of something when they're actually enforcing royal crime so yes it's complicated and it is complicated and this the i think defund
the police is an easy thing to say and i understand the motivation behind it and i agree with the motivation and the sentiment behind it but i think that a better better way of looking at it is let's find out what the [ __ ] root cause of all these problems are let's fund that fun fund whatever it is that's causing all these problems and then when it comes to police let's find out why they behave so poorly when they do and fund better training and also come to grips with the concept of ptsd because how many cops have seen the videos that i was talking about earlier like where the guy pulls over and pulls the gun out starts shooting at the cops oh they've all seen those because that's their job every cop has seen a video online of a cop getting shot because he makes a mistake or they have a buddy where it happened to them every time they pull someone over and they have tinted windows they have no idea they have no idea what to do it must be frightening as [ __ ] it's got to be and they've probably seen so much violence i mean i have friends that have worked as emts and they'll tell you that there's there comes a time where you've seen too many people dead you've seen too many people that have been shot too many people that have been hit by cars and it gets you you have like a like a numbness a horrible numbness that can come upon you now imagine if you're a cop and you're 10 years on the job 15 years on the job how many murders have you seen how many people have you seen [ __ ] up i mean how many times have you seen this how many guys do you know that have been shot how many times have this has this happened where your whole life is like centered around some mitigating the threat to yourself and trying to get home every day it's we don't think about because we just think of these cops doing these terrible things and there are cops that do terrible things that's real too but there's also the the psychological burden of being a police officer first of all managing that ultimate power that you have over civilians and or citizens rather and then also worrying about your own life yeah no it's and that's why i'm
i get really frustrated with people that i know that you know make these blanket assertions about whether it's cops or whatever other profession anything right anything yeah because there are shades of gray in between it one thing i do know is that not being a person of color you know i i guess i'm more i'm the kind of person that always wants to solve the problem and i get frustrated if i can't in my personal life um even in you know professionally and and i know that the problem as it relates to police is more complex for a person of color and their feelings about it are something that i can't speak to with any sense of empathy because i'm not them so i am i guess where i'm at like you hear defund the police which i get and understand and identify with aspects of and then i also know some great cops yeah and i know one that was you know has been in some horrific circumstances who and i know his heart and he's such a good man so i'm i think i'm finding myself in situations like that quicker to listen and slower to speak and learning as much as i can because i don't know that there's one easy solution that's a good attitude and i think that's a good maxim for everything i want to continue to live my life as somebody talks too much which is what i do yeah that's good i i listen more i wish i listened more i try to listen as much as i can i've listened more now than i used to like i've gotten better at it but it's a process you know it's a process of uh i think one of the things that i've gotten out of this podcast is this process of understanding people that i understand people way better than i ever did before just from having these long-form conversations with them and just different people you're different than
the guy who's here yesterday who's different than the guy was here before it's like there's this constant interaction with different minds with different life experiences in different circumstances and and you know and i'm different every day too so it's like these these things are just layers upon layers upon layers of education that's what's come out of this podcast for me that was very unexpected you know when i first started doing this it was really just talking [ __ ] with my friends we just get high and say stupid [ __ ] and just laugh and joke just talk just have fun just to hang and it then became something very strange like what it is now where it's this it's too big it's like it's it's just two people right it's just you and me and you know jamie's in the room but it's you and me talking just two but it's not two it's two with an audience of millions and millions and millions and millions and it's hard to see that's a hard thing to see it's a hard thing to even conceptualize because if you saw what 11 million people looks like if you saw them in a room you'd be like holy [ __ ] if we had to have this conversation on a stage with 11 million people in the audience you'd be like what the [ __ ] is this there's no room big enough to hold that many people that's how staggering it is and look i could tell you as somebody that is a student of and going through therapy right now which i think is good mental it's like going to the gym for your mind um as a friend i'll say to you that you are a good listener and i've i've even seen a difference in the amount of listening you do from the first time i met you to now and i'm i'm learning to be easier on myself and that's the process because it is a process right i think that we both share that trait that we're hard on ourselves maybe i'm i won't get into a competition i feel like i'm a little harder on myself than most but you hang in there friend no mark i'm okay it's strange though it's very strange to be me but it's always been strange to be me it's like
this is not anything that much stranger it's my life is very odd you know but uh somehow or another it seems to make sense and whatever challenges you do face i really firmly believe that you come out of them on the other end more educated and more resilient and better for it i hope so i think so i think that's the case with most people with most things i think and i don't think it's a golden rule or steadfast rule but i think it's possible and it depends entirely upon how you look at these circumstances while they're taking place but that's again so much easier than what we're talking about with these cases with the innocence project with these cases that you've helped get these people free cases where these people on their own do not have no not the resources not the there's no possibility of them getting reached a new trial no possibility of them getting exonerated you know i was just to leave you with this i just notified someone that i was going to take their case on pro bono and [Music] it's not important who it is and he started a weep and uh today's tuesday yeah yeah he surrendered yesterday um to begin serving time and he was crying and i was and i and he said i just needed some hope and you know i think that when you give people hope when that's all they have there is a cavalry um and it's not just me it is this amazing um i hate to say village because i feel like hillary clinton stole that word from the world it takes it takes it does take a um it takes a network of beautiful people that are kind-hearted human beings that are in this for the right reason and i'm one
grain of sand and i have like there are these two women at the innocence project that are like dear friends of mine one is vanessa potkin and one is nina morris and nina morrison was just nominated to be a federal judge and there needs to be more federal judges like her because she's someone that comes from not a prosecutor's office but the innocence project so she's awaiting senate confirmation and those are my heroes because i do this you know as now probably with sixty percent of my entire forty percent of my time they do it with a hundred and ninety percent of their time and um one thing that the the podcast has done is help provide a lot of people hope so i encourage people to keep reaching out and now the um the bandwidth to help more people is here as a result of you giving me this platform that will continue hopefully yeah let's keep doing it and then we plan on doing it like once a quarter yeah so in between now and then i'll have other cases so we went over you know melissa lucio's case today um you know the the emir lock situation we gave the update about ron taurus and albert which were amazing outcomes and um certainly the situation with nelson serrano and james daly in florida there's also a girl who could really use it i'll close with this that is in las vegas i don't want to get her name wrong christina curling or christina curless it's one or the other christina carlos i believe who is accused of shaking baby syndrome death and i know the case is very important to jason flom and it is uh one that he really really is convinced of her innocence and i've read you know some some of the materials and she could use the help and support now so um i thank you again brother thank you thanks for being you man thanks for what you do you give me hope you really do you make me think that there's good people out there that care only about doing the right thing and helping people who are innocent and that
is that makes the world a better place thank you man that that hits me in all the right places good um uh tell people website innocence project yeah for melissa lucio um you can go to innocenceproject.org or just type in there it is right here innocenceproject.org so if you there it is you can learn all about her case on that website and it will it tells you you know who she is um all about her case and then if you scroll down thank you so much for pulling this up jamie if you scroll down this is why i said let people go and make their own decisions and educate themselves and [Music] find out more about her case and then you can add your name as you just you just passed it to the petition and we know that um we can stop this execution and there's detailed information on this page and then i'm at on instagram and anything you guys can do to help get the word out because i i now have the resources to help sift through some of the contacts that i'm getting um and address some of these cases because some of the cases are coming to me through instagram jordan grotzinger who's handling this pierce rushing case and has to put a lot of resources behind it came to us through through instagram so reach out and um i'm excited to come back with more good news and i thank you again for everything and particularly for your part in the exoneration of ron taurus washington and albert wilson i can be happier so let's um let's plan on june do it again june beautiful man beautiful thank you brother thank you all right bye everybody [Music] you