Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrJP0W7hxe8
the jurogan experience 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 um [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 want to i want to preface the story of melissa lucio by saying if you're inspired by anything i say and you want to 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 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 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 and 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 in 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 are 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 onto is brendan dassey who my dear friend laura nyriter you know who was in making a murderer and runs this really amazing 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 seventy percent 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 a 14 kid 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 and 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 as 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 and lessen 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 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