Part Two: Dr. Death: The Texas Death Row Psychiatrist Who Killed So Many People

Transcript

Speaker 1 And we're back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that's about the people who are bad, which is today, this week, Dr.

Speaker 1 James Grigson and the broader industry, cottage industry, he helps ignite of psychiatrists who go to court and be like, yeah, man, absolutely kill that motherfucker.

Speaker 1 Which is only slightly less direct than the actual job was.

Speaker 1 With us again, our guest, Stephen Monticelli. Stephen, how you doing?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm doing.

Speaker 1 You're doing?

Speaker 3 I'm doing. Well, yeah, I'm here.

Speaker 1 What are you doing?

Speaker 3 We're about to talk about

Speaker 3 some really, really uplifting, heartening,

Speaker 3 trust-inducing stuff like makes me really love the system and the medical profession as a whole.

Speaker 1 It's good. It's, I mean, you know, here's the thing, what's frustrating is the medical profession as a whole is trying to do the right thing here.
Like they keep being like, this guy's a crank.

Speaker 1 This guy's a crank. It just doesn't matter for a long time.

Speaker 1 This is kind of an early example of the hell we're in now, where it's like all of the people who know anything about.

Speaker 1 for example, climate or, for example, how infectious diseases work or anything else to do with like vaccines and medicine, all of these like people who know things, space travel, people who know things things about that are being like, nah, this is all, this is really fucked up.

Speaker 1 Like you're, you're shooting us in the foot. All of these different cuts to research are horrible.
Everything that's being done is going to make life worse for everybody.

Speaker 1 But the only people that matter are the ones who are saying, nah-uh. And you kind of get an early version.
This is like a prologue for all of the hell that we're in right now.

Speaker 1 This like anti-science bullshit. Well, I feel like.

Speaker 3 A good psychiatrist should be able to say, oh yeah, this man is definitely going to kill again because I've diagnosed him with something I believe, thanks to tv is a real diagnosis this is our like star wars prequel of the anti-science hell that we're all trapped in now yeah the the sort of non-expert expert the person who is more than willing to set aside all of the good things about whatever field they nominally belong to in order to like push some sort of quackery or ideology yeah it's yeah it's we've seen it in a lot of fields unfortunately and to horrible extents like the Russians with their, was it Lamarckism?

Speaker 1 Oh, God. No, no, no, no.
Lysenkoism. Lysenkoism.

Speaker 3 Lysenkoism. Sorry.
Sorry. Lysenkoism.
I'm certainly not an expert in the history of genetic research, but I digress. Yeah.
Really, really horrible person here that we're talking about today.

Speaker 1 It is interesting to compare it to Lysenkoism, which is like you had obviously actual agricultural scientists in the USSR, and then you had this guy being like, no, plants work the same way we're pretty sure people do, you know?

Speaker 1 And you can like freeze a crop and it'll pass down cold resistance to, it's like, no, that doesn't.

Speaker 1 And there were a lot of people saying, no, that doesn't work. But

Speaker 1 the scientist who happened to be in alignment with the politics of the people. you know, in charge was the scientist who got declared to be right.
And damn the consequences.

Speaker 1 And likewise here, you've got the whole APA being like, at no point should psychiatrists ever do what this guy is doing. Right.

Speaker 1 But you've got people in Texas and prosecutors and the government of texas being like no this is pretty much how we think it it should work so this guy's right and he gets to make a lot of money um it's conveniently a tool of the state and its interests at the time yeah yeah it's great

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Speaker 1 So from this point forward in the story, our boy Dr. Grigson, a.k.a.
Dr.

Speaker 1 Death, is going to continue to expand and extend his practice throughout the 80s, while also dealing with constant and mounting criticism from organized psychiatry as a field.

Speaker 1 Now, the core of the complaints against him have to do with his continued insistence on using the results of competency tests, which he's not supposed to be doing, right?

Speaker 1 But there's some evidence that he keeps doing it after he's told not to by the Supreme Court.

Speaker 1 And then, kind of the bigger issue is, again, that he's making predictions about the future, which he shouldn't be doing.

Speaker 1 Even after being chided by the APA in that Supreme Court case, he continued to rank sociopathy sociopathy on a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 being the worst.

Speaker 1 And as noted in an article by the Death Penalty Information Center, he would regularly rank people higher than 10.

Speaker 1 Like the one through 10 seemed to be like mostly pointless because he would always go above 10, right?

Speaker 1 And up to 12, 13, and even 14,

Speaker 1 which is just what, like, again, like, if you're going to go above 10 on a 1 to 10, yeah, you just say like, oh, he's an 11, like a 14?

Speaker 1 So why even have a 1 to 10 scale if someone can be that high above it? What are you doing? Like, why even introduce that idea from the beginning?

Speaker 1 I promise I'm not going to beat on that the whole time. It's just very frustrating to me.

Speaker 1 Um, now, these numbers are, again, infuriating if you know anything about psychiatry or probability, but they get even more sickening when you dig into the actual stories of the people that Dr.

Speaker 1 Grigson diagnosed as a 100% sociopaths who would 100% kill again. He is often saying a 99% chance they'll kill again.
Sometimes he says 100% chance they'll kill again, right?

Speaker 1 And we know that in a lot of cases he was objectively wrong. And because we have examples like, and this is probably the most prominent case of him being wrong, the tale of Randall Dale Adams.

Speaker 1 In 1977, Adams was convicted of the murder of a Dallas, Texas police officer, Robert Wood.

Speaker 1 Officer Wood was shot to death in late 1976, the same year that Texas finally established its new rules for deciding death penalty cases. Now, we know who the actual shooter was.

Speaker 1 It was a guy named David Harris, who framed Randall Adams to avoid being convicted of the crime.

Speaker 1 Adams's conviction relied heavily on testimony from three witnesses who were illegally hidden from the defense until they showed up in court.

Speaker 1 And said testimony, we also know was at least partially perjured.

Speaker 1 So, not only did the defense hide these witnesses when they shouldn't have, but the witnesses were coaxed and bribed into giving false testimony. And we know this, right?

Speaker 1 So, we're already starting with crimes on the part of the prosecution in this case.

Speaker 1 Now, that begs the question: why are the police and why is the prosecutor so gung-ho to go after a guy with evidence they know, like that they know they're having to cook up, right?

Speaker 1 That they know isn't true. And you would assume, just knowing cops, it's because like, you know, police just for whatever reason decided this was the guy.

Speaker 1 And we're like, well, we can just kind of coax the truth into making sure that we are able to like make a stronger case. And the prosecutor went along with it, right?

Speaker 1 right um that's actually not what happened uh so what's really going on here is that david harris the guy who actually kills this person and this robbery gone wrong um is 16 years old right and they know harris does it from the beginning he's the first guy they take into custody they find that he like the gun that was used in the shooting was his dad's gun that he had access to that night so it's very clear that this is harris but you can't give a 16 16-year-old the death penalty in Texas, right?

Speaker 1 And it's a cop he's murdered. And so the police, even more than making sure the right guy gets executed, the police want to make sure that when a cop gets murdered, someone gets executed.
Right.

Speaker 1 And when it becomes clear Harris can't be executed, Harris is like, well, I'll give you this other guy who like drove me there. Right.

Speaker 1 And Randall Adams, part of why Adams is a good Patsy dependent on is that Daryl Harris is like a kid. He like lives lives with his parents.

Speaker 1 So he's, he's someone who has something of like a normal life. And Randall Adams is a drifter, right? He's like doing day labor.
He doesn't come from the state. He's kind of,

Speaker 1 you know, he's, he's, I think he has a car, but he's essentially a homeless man. Right.
And so it's really easy to kill him. Right.

Speaker 1 And really easy to like kill him because he's not going to have any kind of money for defense and because he's not the kind of person anyone's going to care about. Right.

Speaker 1 So this kind of fits what the cops want, which is we want to make a show of force against somebody for the death of this cop.

Speaker 1 Now, there's a lot of fucked-up details in the case. Everything that happens here, there's a lot of like rule breaking and illegality.

Speaker 1 We don't have enough time to go into, but every detail of this case stinks about as much as it's possible for a case to stink from the get-go.

Speaker 1 In the end, the jury declares Adams guilty after almost no deliberation.

Speaker 1 And as you know, because we've done our little clinic on how the Texas death penalty worked, the next step is they have to decide: should this man die, right?

Speaker 1 And this always comes down to: will he commit another violent crime if we leave him alive? Determining this case came down to Dr.

Speaker 1 Grigson and another colleague testifying about whether or not Adams was, in Dr. Grigson's terms, a maximum sociopath.
Again, not a diagnosis.

Speaker 1 But Grigson testified that Randall would 100% kill again if left alive. Adams, he insisted, was an extreme sociopath.
So we can't even keep his terms straight.

Speaker 1 Adams is sentenced to die in 1979. And the years tick by agonizingly, you know, from this court case, until three days before his execution, the U.S.
Supreme Court stays it.

Speaker 1 They give him a stay of execution because Justice Lewis Powell writes that there is grave concern regarding potential jurors in the case who were excluded for being anti-death penalty, even though they promised to follow Texas law if appointed, right?

Speaker 1 So that's the whole thing that saves his life initially is that there's an appeal based on like jurors who weren't pro-death penalty were excluded illegally from service, right?

Speaker 1 And so that's the only reason he's saved initially. It has nothing to do with his innocence, nothing to do with other aspects of the case.
It's just this issue with the jury.

Speaker 1 Now, by rights, because this has been found by the Supreme Court, Adams should have gotten a new trial, right?

Speaker 1 It's been determined that his trial was like not valid because the rules were broken here, enough that they stayed his execution. You should have a new trial.

Speaker 1 But the Dallas DA at the time, Henry Wade, and does that name sound familiar to you, Henry Wade?

Speaker 3 Yeah, we talked about him. I'm pretty sure Dr.
Phillips and I on one of the episodes on It Could Happen here. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He's the Wade from Roe v. Wade, right? Like that's, that's the, the, and he's on the bad side of the case, right? Yeah.
Um, so.

Speaker 1 Dr. Wade or Henry Wade, not Dr.
Wade, the DA comes in and he's like, we don't need to give this guy a new trial. It would be a waste of money, right?

Speaker 1 And it'll be a waste of money because I'm going to have the governor commute Adams' sentence to life in prison, right? So he's not going to get killed anymore.

Speaker 1 So why do we care about giving him a new trial, right?

Speaker 1 So Adams's people are still like, we want a new trial because he's innocent and he doesn't want to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Speaker 1 But a Texas criminal court of appeals insists that like, well, now that he's not going to be executed, there's no longer any error in the case. So it's fine.
Right.

Speaker 1 Because, you know, those jurors were just being excluded because of their opinion on the death penalty. No death penalty.
Everything's good here. So that's what the Court of Appeals decides.

Speaker 1 God, come on. And so Adams, a man everyone knows has been railroaded into a guilty verdict.

Speaker 1 A lot of this is out now and had been nearly executed due to a crooked case, seemed set to spend the rest of his life behind bars. And this is the case that he stays in until March of 1985.

Speaker 1 And the reason why he gets another shot and ultimately, thank God I'm going to spoil it a little bit, gets freed is because of, we can thank documentarian Errol Morris.

Speaker 1 So Errol Morris is paying attention during that 1983 Supreme Court case against Dr. Grigson.
And he's like, this seems really fucked up. Like this Dr.

Speaker 1 Death guy seems like a real asshole who's killing a shitload of people. I wonder if we can do anything about that.
You know, me being literally Errol Morris.

Speaker 1 So he starts working on a documentary that's initially supposed to be primarily about Dr. Grigson.
And the documentary that comes out is called The Thin Blue Line, right?

Speaker 1 If you've heard of that, like that is the documentary that he makes about this case, ultimately.

Speaker 1 um so morris starts working on this case and that obviously brings a lot of attention to it and you know he's able to put some resources behind it and to talk about what happened next i'm going to quote from an article by the center on wrongful convictions at northwestern university morris's intent had not been to question the guilt of defendants in whose cases grigson had testified but only to question his psychiatric conclusions when morris met adams the focus of the project changed morris learned from randy schafer a volunteer houston lawyer who had been working on the case since 1982 that harris had not led an exemplary life after helping to convict Adams.

Speaker 1 Harris, which is the guy who gives Adams up, had joined the Army and been stationed in Germany, where he had been convicted in a military court of a series of burglaries and sent to prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Speaker 1 A few months after his release, Harris had been convicted in California of kidnapping, armed robbery, and related crimes.

Speaker 1 So Morris is like, well, the guy who said Adams was guilty in the first place and had been the initial suspect really seems like the kind of guy who'd murder a cop, whereas Adams doesn't.

Speaker 1 And there's a bunch of other irregularities in the case. The more he looks into it, the more he finds.

Speaker 1 For one thing, it comes up again that Harris's father had owned the gun that was likely used in the shooting and that Harris had stolen it.

Speaker 1 Now, this is all looking pretty bad, but what comes up next is even worse. And I'm going to continue quoting from that article.

Speaker 1 Morris and Schaefer discovered that Officer Turco, who's one of the, Yacht's the officer that survives, her partner is killed, and she testifies about the murder, that Officer Turco had been hypnotized during the investigation and initially had acknowledged that she had not seen the killer.

Speaker 1 Facts that the prosecution had illegally withheld from the defense.

Speaker 1 Morrison Schaefer also found that robbery charges against the daughter of eyewitness Emily Miller had been dropped after Miller agreed to testify Adams as Woods' killer.

Speaker 1 The new information, coupled with the fact that Miller initially had described the killer as Mexican or African-American, became the basis for a new trial motion, right?

Speaker 1 So they find all this shit is fucked up and like there's not really any evidence whatsoever that ties Adams to the murder.

Speaker 1 And ultimately, you know, there's a new trial motion. The case becomes a major cornerstone for the Death Row Innocence Project, like movement, right? For the people who are trying to,

Speaker 1 you know, especially as forensic science is advancing and we've got DNA now, trying to look at a lot of these people who are definitely innocent and get them off death row, get them out of prison.

Speaker 1 So in 1988, during a three-day hearing in a Dallas district court, Harris finally recants and admits that he killed the cop that Adams was convicted of murdering.

Speaker 1 The judge in that that case recommends a new trial for Adams and that Adams be paroled immediately in the meantime.

Speaker 1 The Board of Pardons and Appeals initially refuses to let Adams out, but agrees to a new trial. And then, after like a couple of weeks,

Speaker 1 he gets released anyway. And then a few days later, all charges against him are dropped.

Speaker 1 And I think this is a case of, as soon as they looked back into it, they're like, oh, there's no case whatsoever.

Speaker 1 Without the shit that the cops and the prosecutors falsified, there's absolutely nothing. We can't even give him a new trial.
Like, there's there's not enough to even try and accuse him of here.

Speaker 1 It's ridiculous. Yeah.
I mean, it's good, right? This is an innocent man gets out of prison

Speaker 1 after having his life. It's ridiculous that

Speaker 1 it got that far, had to get to that point. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So it's a major win, obviously. Randall Adams and everyone who believed in his innocence, you know, scratch up a W.
But this represents a serious problem for Dr.

Speaker 1 Grigson because he had guaranteed in court that this man was an incurable sociopath who would 100% kill again.

Speaker 1 So people started asking him, like, hey, you said this innocent guy was definitely a sociopath. Were you wrong?

Speaker 1 And this is part of why I love that Vanity Fair piece where Rosenbaum spent like weeks traveling with Dr.

Speaker 1 Death because, you know, this is written in 1990, but it's during a period of time in which he keeps getting questioned about Adams because Adams is just like freed in 88.

Speaker 1 So Grigson is still testifying constantly, and defense attorneys are using using this against him. Unfortunately, it's less successful at hurting his testimony than you might imagine.

Speaker 1 Now, this part in that Vanity Fair article comes after Grigson has just testified in one of three death penalty cases. He's doing in like a long weekend with the goal of getting three people.

Speaker 1 killed, right? He's trying to kill the most people that he's ever killed in his career in the shortest period of time. Like, that's what this article is about.

Speaker 1 He's got like three cases in a couple of days. He's got, he's like, can I break my record of, you know, getting people executed by the state?

Speaker 1 So during one of these cases, he's testifying and the defense attorney asks, do you recall the Randall Dale Adams case? The doctor nodded warily and said, I recall it well, yes, sir.

Speaker 1 Are you as sure about this defendant as you were when you declared Randall Dale Adams was guilty and would kill again? Again, the courtroom tensed up.

Speaker 1 Even out on the prairie, the papers had reported on the Adams case. Looking totally unperturbed, the doctor said dramatically, those people that were involved in the case know that he is guilty.

Speaker 1 I examined Mr. Adams.
There is no question in my mind, as well as the mind of the jury who convicted him, that he is guilty.

Speaker 1 And did you say of Randall Adams that he will continue his previous behavior? I most certainly said that, the doctor said defiantly, and he will, right?

Speaker 1 So that's two years later. He's like, no, they were wrong.
He's definitely still guilty. I know it because of my psychiatry brain.
And I guarantee you he's going to kill again. Right?

Speaker 3 It just hasn't happened yet.

Speaker 1 It hasn't happened yet, but it 100% will. Right.

Speaker 1 Now, Rosenbaum talks to the doctor after this case, which the prosecution wins, even though this gets brought up. And he's like, talks to him about Adams.

Speaker 1 He's like, it just seems really weird that you're insisting this guy is still guilty after all the evidence that Morris uncovered and the fact that the legal system backpedaled.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Dr. Grigson is like, no, no, no, the guy's guilty.
Harris only recanted and took credit for the murder because he wanted to jack the system around. Right.

Speaker 1 And in another trial a week later, when asked the same question, Dr. Grigson continued to insist that not only was Adams guilty, but again, he will 100% kill again.

Speaker 1 Like that, I have, I am 100% sure this now free man will commit another murder. Like he testified that.

Speaker 1 So that seems like a pretty good case to judge his credibility on, given that this is happening in 1990 and we have 25 years of additional data into this guy's life, right?

Speaker 1 Seems like something we should look into, which we will after these ads. Wow.
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Speaker 1 We're back.

Speaker 1 So, you could say, I think it'd be fair to say that a lot of Dr. Grigson's credibility rests on the Randall Adams case, right?

Speaker 1 Because number one, this is a guy he said was definitely guilty who then got exonerated. And number two, he is now provided in 1990.
He said 100% he'll kill again now that he's free.

Speaker 1 That's a falsifiable statement. And we have a lot of time since 1990 to kind of look at.

Speaker 1 And about 14 years after he made that statement in 2004, there was a study.

Speaker 1 I found an article about it based on the study by the Texas Defender Service into the records of 155 convicted killers to determine how often they actually engaged in violent behavior post-conviction and what Dr.

Speaker 1 Grigson and other experts had predicted they would do, right?

Speaker 1 So these guys are looking into like what can we actually tell based on the predictions made about these convicted killers and what they actually did, how accurate these predictions were, right?

Speaker 1 So, you know, that's good. I'm going to quote from that now.

Speaker 1 Adams 55 is exhibit A in a study to be released today that found experts' witnesses' predictions of violent behavior were wrong 95% of the time.

Speaker 3 Oh, God.

Speaker 1 So that's way worse than a third, right?

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 3 That's like, you know, a statistically significant confidence interval. Like, you basically can say it's going to happen.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Like, that is.
You would think if you and I were just guessing, if we just got to go into court and like flip a coin and be like, yeah, that guy will kill again.

Speaker 1 Like, you'd expect us to be righter than that.

Speaker 1 Yep. Oh, boy.
That's an incredible degree of wrong, right?

Speaker 1 So, of the 155 convicted killers studied, only eight engaged in later behavior that resulted in serious injury. So, eight out of 155 seriously hurt another person after their conviction.

Speaker 1 A full 20% of these convicts had zero disciplinary violations while in prison of any kind, and 75% had only minor, non-violent infractions, like owning lottery tickets, right?

Speaker 1 So like, yeah, a bunch of them got in trouble after conviction, but it was because like they had an illegal lottery ticket. It wasn't because they were killing or hurting anybody.

Speaker 1 Not one of the 155 convicted killers ever murdered again, right?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 very bad, like rate of accuracy here. Now, it's important to note, this is 2004, which is after Dr.
Grigson dies and well after he stopped practicing.

Speaker 1 But it's important to note that even at the end of the 1980s, the early 1990s, there's good documented evidence that not only had Grigson been wrong on a case, but during his whole career, he'd very likely been wrong on a grand scale.

Speaker 1 I want to quote from a 2003 article for the Washington Times here.

Speaker 1 Andrea Kellen, an attorney with the Texas Defender Service, said she knew of dozens of former death row inmates whose sentences were reduced for various reasons and who have never been involved in any difficulties, though Dr.

Speaker 1 Grigson testified they should be executed because they would likely commit murder again.

Speaker 1 In 1988, a report compiled by an assistant district attorney in Dallas concluded that after the study of 11 specific death penalty verdicts, where the defendants' terms had been reduced, not a single one had been anything other than a model prisoner.

Speaker 1 Mr. Halperin, in a brief for other prisoners, concluded that despite Dr.

Speaker 1 Grigson's near-identical predictions that each inmate would beyond any doubt, absolutely and without any question commit acts of dangerousness in the future, that prosecution-prepared report proved the psychiatrist was seldom accurate.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 a DA report, this is the prosecutor, did a study of 11 death penalty verdicts where Dr. Grigson said they will definitely continue to commit crimes if not executed.
And these people were not executed.

Speaker 1 Their sentences were reduced and none of them did violence again. That's 100% wrong for Dr.
Grigson, right? Based on those 11 cases, you know?

Speaker 3 Jesus.

Speaker 1 So I'm not overly optimistic that he was right a bunch of the time that we don't have data on based on that and based on the Adams Adams case.

Speaker 1 So, you know, going into the 90s here, though, despite the fact that there is evidence building that Dr.

Speaker 1 Grigson is wrong an awful lot, he is continuing to do a shitload of these cases and to be very prominent in the media.

Speaker 1 And the Adams case does nothing initially to slow his career or halt his body count. There was, however, a minor uproar as a result of Morris's documentary and Adams' exoneration.

Speaker 1 In 1993, the Texas State Supreme Court responded to to the epidemic of junk science experts, but only in civil cases.

Speaker 1 So they ruled that expert testimony could only be admitted if it was proven to be both relevant and reliable, a bar that Dr. Grigson's work could not pass as any psychiatrist, not named Dr.

Speaker 1 Grigson, were consulted on the matter. However, this only applied to civil cases, like I said, not capital cases.

Speaker 1 So there's an uproar, but it only stops psychiatrists from testifying in the cases that Dr. Grigson isn't testifying in.

Speaker 1 Now, there is still an uproar even in Texas about this. There are a lot of professionals that are angry about what Grigson is doing.
It's just not able to stop things.

Speaker 1 Like, one of the things I found that was really wild is John Edens, who is a professor of psychiatry at my alma mater, Sam Houston State, said in the wake of this 93 decision of Dr.

Speaker 1 Grigson, it's hard to imagine this kind of testimony would be allowed. It does not meet the criteria of reliability.
There is a known error rate, which is remarkably high.

Speaker 1 So, again, Sam Sam Houston State, not a liberal university. This is the criminal justice school in Texas, right? Like this is not, it's set, it's located right next to death row, right?

Speaker 1 Why is there nothing?

Speaker 1 Why are we just letting this happen then?

Speaker 1 Because any ruling against Dr. Grigson could be seen as attempting to like slow the death penalty.

Speaker 1 And it's really popular, unfortunately. And these are, we're coming into the bush years now, right? Dr.
Grigson is going to be really active during Bush's time as governor.

Speaker 1 And so like, we're kind of ramping up in the 90s to the period where Texas is like considering its ability to continue its death row as like, this is like something that is really important to the state, right?

Speaker 1 It's something we take a degree of pride in, like my family did, you know?

Speaker 1 So it's not like the fact that all of these experts are very much saying this guy is not reliable is not hurting his business yet. So crazy.

Speaker 1 And it's also prosecutors have a lot of power, a lot of political power. Right.
Right. DAs have a lot of political power and they find him useful.

Speaker 3 So. So he was too important of a cog and a broader, bigger machine.
Right.

Speaker 1 He's really politically useful and he's useful to all their careers, right?

Speaker 1 Because a lot of these prosecutors, part of what they're building their careers on, a lot of them want to go into other politics is like, not only do I have this many convictions, but I sent this many dangerous sociopaths to death row, right?

Speaker 1 I made our state safer.

Speaker 3 Yeah, okay. Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yep. And it's one of those things where, yeah, if you put numbers up on the board, it sounds good.

Speaker 3 You can claim that you took dangerous repeat criminals who would have been threats to their communities off the streets. And then if you succeed in actually killing them, you don't face the scrutiny.

Speaker 3 of what you just described of whether or not they actually would live up to that potential future that's been predicted predicted by this expert.

Speaker 1 Yep. Sheesh.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay. So this is cool, right? We're happy.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Works works as expected, right? The

Speaker 3 purpose of a system is what it does.

Speaker 1 Right. And in this case, yeah, the system is doing exactly what the people who set it up want it to do.
Um, Dr.

Speaker 1 James Grigson in 1995 was finally drummed out of the APA for his continued insistence on diagnosing subjects without ever talking to them.

Speaker 1 The next year, the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians expelled him. In 1996, New York University psych professor Michael Weiner wrote this, the problem with Dr.

Speaker 1 Grigson was not that inmates were placed on death row, but that he was fundamentally biased in his assessments and was performing cursory evaluations and drawing broad and damning conclusions from only limited information, a problem of credibility and objectivity.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I would say Part of the problem is that people are being placed on death row based on bad evidence, but I think he's making the point that like Dr.

Speaker 1 Grigson isn't responsible for the way prosecutions work, for how bad, like lying about the evidence is incentivized in these cases and stuff.

Speaker 1 He's responsible for this aspect of it, which is probably fair to say.

Speaker 1 Now, it is impossible for us to know to a point of certainty how often he was wrong, but something like 100 of the people he testified about for money were put to death, and most of those cases were never revisited.

Speaker 1 However, we do have a few more case studies on times when he was proven wrong.

Speaker 1 Back in 1986, a carpenter named David Wayne Stoker was charged with the murder of a convenience store clerk north of Lubbock.

Speaker 1 Five months after the murder, a man described by prosecutors as low-life scum snitched to police that Stoker had done the murder and handed over what he claimed to be the murder weapon.

Speaker 1 Well, this low-life scum had the murder weapon and says this other guy did it. That's all I need to know.

Speaker 3 Case clothes.

Speaker 1 Why would he have a bias, right?

Speaker 1 So. Stoker did have an assault prior and he had a drug issue, right? And was arrested in short order.
Again, it's one of these like, oh yeah, this guy doesn't have any way to fight this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, let's go after him.

Speaker 1 Like many such death penalty cases, his was dogged by poor quality representation and a system in which people like him, who are expected to be guilty, get railroaded through to a conviction.

Speaker 1 Per an article by the Death Penalty Information Center, Felty, the lead lawyer, the defense attorney, and a former prosecutor, later gave up his law license in the face of disciplinary action.

Speaker 1 Felty forged the signatures of two clients on a settlement check, then pocketed the money, records show.

Speaker 1 He also pleaded guilty to felony charges for forging a judge's signature on a court order and falsifying a government document. He was sentenced to five years of community service.

Speaker 1 So that's this guy's defense attorney.

Speaker 1 And again, not shitting on the concept of defense attorneys, but it's a major problem that a lot of these guys in particular, these are like the kind of the lowest of the low and they benefit from the very worst service on average, right?

Speaker 1 They are very likely to get the defense attorneys who are not competent.

Speaker 1 It's, as we'll talk about, weirdly common for like death penalty cases for the defense attorneys to later get disbarred for incompetence or other similar issues.

Speaker 1 The guy who had snitched on Stoker claimed in court to not have been given anything for his testimony, that just like, I wanted the truth to come out, I didn't get any kind of special deal.

Speaker 1 But the day he testified, charges he had for drug possession and for like possession of a firearm illegally in the next county over were dropped, and he received $1,000 from Crime Stoppers as a reward for turning this guy in.

Speaker 1 And further documents made it clear that there had been a written quid pro quo with the DA.

Speaker 1 For one thing, that county didn't have a Crime Stoppers program until it was started for this by the DA, and the check was sent to him by an investigator for the DA's office.

Speaker 3 Lovely stuff. Lovely stuff.

Speaker 1 Not bribery, though. Not bribery.

Speaker 3 No, not picking cases that you think can win, even if it might not be the right guy. And certainly no shenanigans or bribery with regard to acquiring potentially suspect testimony or evidence.

Speaker 3 Not at all.

Speaker 1 Absolutely not. No,

Speaker 1 that would be unethical.

Speaker 3 There's no gambling in this casino. That's crazy.

Speaker 1 In this casino? No. So there's much more that reeks about this case, but things really got nasty once Dr.
Grigson entered the arena. Quote, during sentencing, the prosecutor called Dr.
James P.

Speaker 1 Grigson, the psychiatrist nicknamed Dr. Death.
Though Grigson never examined Stoker, he testified Stoker was a sociopath who would absolutely be violent again.

Speaker 1 With Stoker's life in the ballots, Felty put on only one witness at sentencing, Stoker's mother. She testified briefly about the most superficial aspects of the Stoker family.

Speaker 1 Felty, who works as a supervisor at Home Depot, defended his work. When we went to trial, we were a hell of a lot better prepared than the DA's office, Felty said.
So?

Speaker 1 Not a lot of winners.

Speaker 1 He's not necessarily wrong because the DA is just lying and bribing somebody, but also when your lawyer gets disbarred for felonies and winds up working at a Home Depot, that's not a great sign in terms of the quality of representation you received.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's the look at my lawyer dog.

Speaker 1 Look at my lawyer dog. I'm getting executed.

Speaker 3 Yeah, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 That is just such beautiful shade on that article, too. Just noted that he's working at Home Depot now.

Speaker 1 Almost kind of unnecessary, except for the point they're trying to make here. But

Speaker 3 it's good color.

Speaker 1 It is good color. Now, unfortunately, unlike Adams' story, this story does not end with an 11th-hour stay of execution and eventual exoneration.
Stoker was executed in 1997 during George W.

Speaker 1 Bush's governorship, when he pushed Texas to execute inmates at a rate not before seen in modern times. Even within the ranks of Bush appointees, though, the Stoker case was looked at as egregious.

Speaker 1 Thomas Moss had been appointed by the governor to the Board of Pardons and Paroles, and he voted to give Stoker clemency.

Speaker 1 That he only did this twice in his entire career, and once was with Stoker, because he was like, like, Yeah, this is just too messy a case.

Speaker 1 This is, you know, a lot kept coming out. The local police chief eventually testified that no, the Crime Stoppers group wasn't real.
You know, we founded it expressly for this purpose, basically.

Speaker 1 A DA's investigator made the payment.

Speaker 1 And as this stuff came to light, eventually, like the local sheriff testified that there was no direct tie between Stoker and the crime he'd been executed for committing.

Speaker 1 Now, had Stoker been put under life imprisonment, had his execution basically commuted, right? But given life imprisonment at this point, he likely would have lived long enough to get retried, right?

Speaker 1 That probably would have happened eventually because there was just enough, you know, good evidence on his side of things for this. But Dr.

Speaker 1 Ed Grigson helped to ensure that this could not happen, right? By testifying he would definitely kill again.

Speaker 1 One juror in the Stoker case later said, You couldn't help but listen to what he was saying. He's a doctor, he had a lot of influence on what we decided.

Speaker 1 And several jurors later said, Yeah, if I'd known these other facts about the case, I wouldn't have voted for the death penalty.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, this guy gets executed. And a big part of why is that Grigson said he needed to be.

Speaker 1 And we can say fairly confidently that this was an innocent man who Dr. Grigson helped put to death here.
Yeah. Throughout the Bush years and the bloodiest period for Texas' death row, Dr.

Speaker 1 Grigson was prolific and influential, even in cases where he personally did not testify. That death penalty information center piece discusses another psychiatrist, Dr.
E.

Speaker 1 Clay Griffith, who often often testified along the same lines as Dr. Grigson and had clearly built his profession in the other man's image.

Speaker 1 Like Grigson, he used a 1 to 10 scale for judging defendants and regularly went above 10 in order to make his point, as he did when reviewing the 1984 case of David Wayne Spence.

Speaker 1 Now, Spence, again, was not tied to the triple homicide that he was accused of committing via any evidence, just the testimony of seven informants, all of whom had good reason to lie about what had happened.

Speaker 1 Several of these people later confessed to being fed information by investigators and being shown crime scene and autopsy photos, as well as being bribed behind bars with privileges and leniency.

Speaker 1 Like Stoker, Spence was executed in 1987 or 1997.

Speaker 1 The issues we've discussed in all these cases have been proven via subsequent study to be rampant within Texas's criminal justice system, particularly death row cases.

Speaker 1 An investigation of the 131 executions during George W. Bush's time as governor showed that in at least 29 29 cases, the prosecution had presented testimony from a psychiatrist, often Dr.

Speaker 1 Grigson, that the defendant would commit future violence. In most of these cases, the psychiatrist had not seen or examined the defendant.

Speaker 1 Beyond the issues most relevant to Grigson, in 43 of those cases, the defendant was represented at trial by an attorney who was later disbarred or suspended. Again, I want to really go into that.

Speaker 1 131 executions. Of those, in 43 of the cases, the defendant's defense attorney was later disbarred or suspended.

Speaker 1 That's insane. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So, like, he not only destroyed people's lives and got them killed, but then he also destroyed defense attorneys' careers in the process.

Speaker 1 I think the point, no, this is more a broader point about the fact that most of the people on death row did not benefit from a vigorous defense. Like,

Speaker 1 you were entitled constitutionally to one, and they clearly didn't get it, right?

Speaker 3 I completely misunderstood. Yeah, no, that makes a lot more sense that just you're dealing with a very poor level of representation

Speaker 3 where it is clearly falling underneath the bar time and time again at a very large scale. Okay.

Speaker 1 And part of the problem is that, because in so many of these cases, at least 29, Dr.

Speaker 1 Grigson and others are testifying, you don't have these kind of checked out defense attorneys don't have the wherewithal and often don't have the funding to properly counter the expert that the prosecution has brought up.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 They also found, this is getting into another set of pseudoscience, but I think it's worth bringing up, in 23 or more, at least of these 131 cases, the prosecution's case relied on the visual comparison of hairs, which is not real science and has now largely been banned as being wildly ineffective.

Speaker 1 One study of 62 convictions that were later cleared by DNA evidence found that in at least 18 of those cases, prosecutors had used hair analysis to get the initial conviction. Wow.

Speaker 1 And this brings me to an important point, which is that while Dr.

Speaker 1 Grigson is the most colorful of these experts testifying in favor of the death penalty during this golden age of executing people in Texas, he was not the only or the most obviously fraudulent one.

Speaker 1 In their review of the role fake forensic experts play in these cases, the Death Penalty Information Center also cited the case of Charles Lynch. Now, this is an expert hair analysis guy, right?

Speaker 1 And his expert hair comparison analysis was used in the cases of two people who were executed under Bush. So he helps with two executions as a result of matching hairs.
And this is not a DNA match.

Speaker 1 I really need to emphasize that. He's looking at hairs and saying, oh, yeah, these hairs come from that guy, right? Like, that's what he's literally doing.

Speaker 3 So I just, I just have to bring up this one bit

Speaker 3 that seems somewhat relevant to how much of a shit show Texas court systems and criminal law has been for some time.

Speaker 3 It wasn't until the past like five years or so, I'm trying to remember the exact year, but very recently that

Speaker 3 hypnosis as a tool for testimony and in criminal investigations was banned.

Speaker 1 So many people got convicted

Speaker 1 with that as a factor.

Speaker 3 Yes, yes.

Speaker 3 Someone allowed hypnotists to come in and then do hypnosis as if it were a legitimate, repeatable scientific approach for acquiring legitimate testimony or uncovering forgotten memories or whatever that is being used for.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, I mean, that was recently. That was in this century, not last century.

Speaker 1 No, it took a shocking amount of time for us to be like, no, we shouldn't be doing this.

Speaker 2 I mean, when did the FBI stop doing that fucking gene pattern thing?

Speaker 1 We're like, they this mate. Yeah, yeah, that FBI fucking shit.
As we've talked about it, forensic science is rife with bastardy. But I want to talk about Charles Lynch a little more.

Speaker 1 I want to read another quote from that Death Penalty Information Center piece because it's so funny. Again, this guy's hair analysis is used in the case to execute two people.

Speaker 1 The Dallas Morning News reported that Lynch had been committed in 1994 to a psychiatric ward due to concerns about his depression and drinking.

Speaker 1 Lynch was considered a danger to himself and others, but he was temporarily released to provide incriminating hair analysis testimony against Kenneth McDuff, who was executed in 1998.

Speaker 1 The prosecution did not disclose Lynch's status to the defense, even though Lynch's residence in the psychiatric ward might have been used to challenge his credibility.

Speaker 1 It's incredible. I don't want to, I got people who you know wind up in a psychiatric ward, that doesn't mean they can never do a serious job again.

Speaker 1 But if you probably shouldn't be releasing someone from a ward to testify and then putting them back in because they're a danger to themselves and others, but they can definitely testify this guy needs to fry, right?

Speaker 1 That seems like a stretch.

Speaker 3 Listen, you got to do what you got to do.

Speaker 1 You got to do what you got to do. Yeah, get this guy out.
We can't let this guy have his own like fucking butter knife, but let him tell this jury that a man needs to die. Like, holy shit.
Insane.

Speaker 1 That's nuts. That's like wild.
Just coming across that story, like, wow, it really was the wild ass West for a while, huh? You could get away with anything. Poor Howdy.

Speaker 3 Kind of still can.

Speaker 1 Kind of still can. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, another of Dr. Grigson's colleagues was Dr.

Speaker 1 Ralph Erdman, who testified in numerous capital cases until 1994 when he pled no contest to seven felonies over falsifying evidence and fucking up autopsies.

Speaker 1 He had claimed to have examined organs and decedents that had been removed in surgery before their deaths, for one one thing, right?

Speaker 1 Like in his autopsy reports, he's like writing about the appendixes of people who had no appendix when they died.

Speaker 1 Despite claiming to be a scientist, providing his unbianced opinion, no matter who hired him, a special investigator appointed to examine Erdmann found if the prosecution theory was that death was caused by a Martian death ray, then that was what Dr.

Speaker 1 Erdman reported, right? Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 Which is, you're talking here about the same thing we're seeing with Dr. Grigson, right? This is a guy who's not doing science.

Speaker 1 He's coming in and he's saying, like, yeah, based on my expertise, whatever the prosecution says is true, right? Now, because Erdman is working in autopsies, he gets caught, but there's no kind of,

Speaker 1 there's nothing to catch Dr. Grigson on, really, right? Because psychiatry is largely like, yeah, does this psychiatrist think this person has something?

Speaker 1 You know, there's more rigor built that's supposed to be built into the system.

Speaker 1 But when it comes to the way these court cases are working, it's really just this guy saying, yeah, I'm a doctor and I say, this is what's going on.

Speaker 3 It's kind of like the medical equivalent of a mob lawyer. They're playing this role that is predefined for them and they know what they're supposed to do and they just go along with whatever

Speaker 3 the request is, whatever the need is. They'll say, yeah, sure, go for it.
I mean, in the case of Grigson, it seems like, yeah, he may have...

Speaker 3 claimed there were cases which he was not eager to do so, but I don't know. Maybe he just knew how to pick a winner.

Speaker 1 Maybe he knew how to pick a winner. And also when he says, a third of the cases I didn't take because because I didn't think, you know, the person, we don't know.
There's no evidence of that. Sure.

Speaker 1 We're just trusting this guy, you know? Right. And I don't trust him.

Speaker 1 Now, Dr. Erdman did have to surrender his medical license.
You know, Dr. Grigson never did.

Speaker 1 And we're going to talk about what else happens with Dr. Grigson.
But first, let's have our second ad break. Okay.

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