Dan Slepian reads an excerpt from “The Sing Sing Files”

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Speaker 8 Hi, Dateline listeners. My My name is Dan Slepian, and I've been a producer at Dateline for nearly 30 years.
I'd like to share a story with you that I think you might find interesting.

Speaker 8 I've spent much of my career and my life diving deep into the criminal justice system, and along the way, I've uncovered what I've come to realize is a hidden epidemic, wrongful convictions.

Speaker 8 Now, you may have heard parts of this journey on episodes of Dateline or in the podcasts I've hosted, 13 Alibis, and Letters from Sing Sing, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year.

Speaker 8 But there's so much more to these stories, and I've poured it all into my new book, The Sing Sing Files. My book is so much bigger than the stories I told on those episodes and in those podcasts.

Speaker 8 In the Sing Sing Files, I'll introduce you to six innocent men, all wrongly imprisoned.

Speaker 8 From prison visits to court hearings to interviews with friends, families, lawyers, and witnesses, I investigated the ugly truth of how these men were condemned and then the Herculean struggle to bring the facts of their innocence to light.

Speaker 8 This project is deeply personal to me, and when you hear it, I hope it becomes deeply personal to you too.

Speaker 8 If you like what you hear in the excerpt and want to hear more, click the link in the episode notes to order a copy of the book or audiobook.

Speaker 8 The SingSync Files is also available wherever books and audiobooks are sold. Today, I'll start from the beginning of the Sing Sync files.

Speaker 10 Introduction. JJ.

Speaker 10 It was Thanksgiving Day, 2002.

Speaker 10 I was at the Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison a couple of hours north of Manhattan.

Speaker 10 filming a story for NBC's dateline about two incarcerated men who insisted they'd been wrongfully convicted of murder.

Speaker 10 I'd spent a lot of time around cops and courts, but wrongful convictions and false imprisonments were not things I knew much about when I walked into Greenhaven's dreary lobby that morning and saw a woman holding the hands of two little boys who were staring in my direction.

Speaker 10 You're Dan, right? said the woman, who introduced herself as Maria Velasquez. My son, John Adrian, we call him JJ, is locked up here.
He was convicted of murder, but he's innocent.

Speaker 10 She told me that JJ had heard I was coming that day, and she'd told him she'd do her best to speak with me. I could feel her pain and desperation.

Speaker 10 Can you help us? Maria asked.

Speaker 10 I looked at her and then at the two boys, whom she introduced to me as JJ's sons. Jacob, age five, and John Jr., age eight.

Speaker 10 They were polite, but quiet. It seemed like it had already been a long, hard day for them, and it seemed like they'd already had too many long, hard days.

Speaker 10 John Jr. was on Maria's right side.
Jacob, the littler one, was holding her left hand. He barely came up to her waist.

Speaker 10 He stared up at me with these huge, confused eyes. He didn't say a word, but I swear he was asking me, who are you? Why am I here? What's going on?

Speaker 10 How can I make it stop?

Speaker 10 My first thought was that, regardless of their dad's guilt or innocence, these two little guys should have been at home that Thanksgiving morning, running around with their cousins, not standing in the harsh fluorescent lighting of a prison lobby.

Speaker 10 Their grandmother told me that two years earlier, in 2000, a jury had convicted her son, J.J.

Speaker 10 Velasquez, of of murdering a former New York City police officer, and that he had been sentenced to 25 years to life.

Speaker 10 She insisted her only child was an innocent man.

Speaker 10 Frankly, I doubted it. I was there investigating the claims of two other men who insisted they were innocent, and I still didn't know if they were telling the truth.

Speaker 10 What were the odds that another wrongfully convicted person would be in the same part of the same prison?

Speaker 10 I told Maria that I couldn't make any promises, but I would read about her son's case when I could, making sure to add that it would probably not happen anytime soon. Even so, she seemed relieved.

Speaker 10 She said that for years she'd tried and failed to get anyone to listen to her.

Speaker 10 I wasn't a father myself yet, but as I drove home that day, Something haunted me about those weary kids in that prison lobby.

Speaker 10 I couldn't get Jacob's sad, serious eyes out of my mind. Soon enough, I wouldn't be able to get his dad's voice out of my head either.

Speaker 10 Looking back on meeting those boys and their grandmother that Thanksgiving morning, it would have been impossible to imagine the impact those few minutes would have on my life, both professionally and personally.

Speaker 10 and the way in which my relationship with JJ would come to touch countless other lives as well.

Speaker 10 It marked the beginning of an odyssey that's still ongoing and that continues to reshape my perception of how justice functions in this country or doesn't and cause me to reconsider how I function as a journalist and as a human being.

Speaker 10 This book's title refers to the prison officially known as Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Asening, New York.

Speaker 10 the notorious maximum security prison where JJ would spend most of the 23 years, seven months, and eight days of his wrongful incarceration, and where over two decades I would visit him more than 200 times.

Speaker 10 The title also refers to how I came to investigate and produce dateline reports not only about JJ,

Speaker 10 but also about five other innocent men who crossed paths with him and who were also doing someone else's time.

Speaker 10 Their names are David Lemas, Almedo Hildago, Eric Glisson, Johnny Hinkappi, and Richard Rosario.

Speaker 10 Over the years, as my basement has gradually grown full of boxes with their legal paperwork, I've filmed more than a thousand hours of interviews and footage connected to these men and their cases.

Speaker 10 My camera, a diary of each of my investigations into their claims of innocence and the consequences of their incarceration.

Speaker 10 As a result, I've amassed a vast digital archive of video and audio, a trove that allows me to present conversations and scenes in the pages that follow with precise detail.

Speaker 10 Nothing is reconstructed or embellished.

Speaker 10 In my career as a producer for NBC News, I've witnessed the American criminal justice system from every perspective.

Speaker 10 I've been embedded with detectives, prosecutors, and defense attorneys and followed them and their cases for months, sometimes years.

Speaker 10 I've interviewed countless people who who committed murder, judges, and jurors.

Speaker 10 I've gotten to know many victims of crime and have come to understand the devastating impact it has on them and their families.

Speaker 10 I've spent several hundred days inside prisons across the United States with the wardens who run them, with convicted killers sentenced to death, and with the correction officers who walk those dangerous tiers every day.

Speaker 10 hoping to go home unharmed.

Speaker 10 And I've toured prisons in other countries.

Speaker 10 I even slept in a cell for two nights in Louisiana's Angola Prison, a former slave plantation, with NBC nightly news and dateline anchor Lester Holt for a program about mass incarceration.

Speaker 10 And I conceived and produced the first ever televised town hall from a maximum security prison at Sing Sing, which was broadcast on MSNBC and moderated by Lester.

Speaker 10 Proximity has taught me one overwhelming truth. We have an undeniable crisis on our hands.

Speaker 10 There are roughly 2 million Americans locked up, more than in any other country, and our recidivism rates lead the world.

Speaker 10 I've seen for myself the cruel reality of how people and families have been ravaged by the system meant to protect them.

Speaker 10 I've come to see the inhumanity and irrationality of that system and how its worst aspects are revealed by the way it handles wrongful convictions.

Speaker 10 No one knows how many innocent people are in prison, but given the statistical likelihood of error, the number is staggering.

Speaker 10 Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, told me that he believes the most accurate studies estimate the error of convictions at about 5%.

Speaker 10 Which would mean that as you're listening to this right now, 100,000 people could be locked away in prison cells for crimes they did not commit.

Speaker 10 Other experts I've spoken with told me they believe the number could be as high as 200,000. And yet, only about 3,500 people have been exonerated in the past 30 years.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 10 The system, as I've discovered, isn't built to get people out. It's built to keep them in.
even when, as I will illustrate, that there is clear evidence that they don't belong there.

Speaker 10 In the course of my 20 years of doing this work, I've personally heard from more than a thousand people who claim that they were stolen without cause from their lives and families.

Speaker 10 I've read hundreds of thousands of pages of transcripts, police reports, and court motions, often hunched over my desk or swiping through pages of documents on my iPad late at night.

Speaker 10 And what I've concluded is that I can no longer accept the worn cliché that justice is blind.

Speaker 10 Over time, what I learned is that there are myriad ways in which the system seems designed to easily imprison the innocent.

Speaker 10 What's worse, innocent people remain locked up despite clear evidence proving they're not guilty of the crime for which they were convicted.

Speaker 10 This work has given me a deep understanding of what false imprisonment means not only for the individuals who are wrongly removed from society, but also for their parents, partners, and children.

Speaker 10 As tragic as these injustices are for innocent people in prison, they have a cascading generational impact on those around them and on society that is hard to measure.

Speaker 10 My experience tells me that even when some prosecutors are presented with irrefutable proof of innocence, the default is resistance as opposed to curiosity or concern.

Speaker 10 All too often, an assistant district district attorney will remain deliberately indifferent, willfully ignore facts, and deny reality.

Speaker 10 Year after year, decade after decade, wrongfully convicted people wither away behind bars.

Speaker 10 Racism and corruption are part of it, absolutely. But I've come to understand other insidious ways in which wrongful convictions happen.

Speaker 10 whether through eyewitness misidentification, a false confession, prosecutorial misconduct, incentivized witnesses, or bad lawyering. The problem is an epidemic.

Speaker 10 It's why I can barely manage to sleep five hours a night. The stakes are too high.
The injustice is too great.

Speaker 10 Investigating a claim of innocence is slow and beyond onerous. That's one reason the news media doesn't report on the full scope of this problem.

Speaker 10 These stories are expensive to do, are difficult to report, and can literally take decades.

Speaker 10 For that reason, diving into these cases, trying to find the truth, has become, for the most part, my extracurricular work, while my real job as a dateline producer has been to produce true crime murder mystery sagas, special hours with Lester Holt, and hidden camera investigations.

Speaker 10 Brian Stevenson's powerful groundbreaking book, Just Mercy, is perhaps the most well-known chronicle of wrongful conviction. The heart of that book is about a case in Alabama.

Speaker 10 What I find astonishing, even after all these years, is that each of the cases you'll hear about in this book happened in what is supposedly the bastion of progressivism, New York City.

Speaker 10 I'll tell you about how J.J. Velasquez and five other men were sucked into the vortex of a corrupt criminal justice system.

Speaker 10 I will connect the dots to show that guardians of the system either knew these men were innocent or simply didn't care and in some cases angled to keep them in prison anyway for decades.

Speaker 10 As JJ and the other men fought for their freedom, I saw careers upended, relationships destroyed, and my own faith tested.

Speaker 10 To this day, there has been no full accounting of what happened to these innocent men, and no reckoning with with those who did this to them.

Speaker 10 The system that perpetrated this unnecessary suffering and brutal injustice, and the prosecutors and police who were part of it, have not been made to answer for the harm that was done.

Speaker 10 My hope is that this book will help change that, providing important lessons for reporters, prosecutors, defense attorneys, detectives, judges, and jurors,

Speaker 10 and ultimately, for anyone interested in living in a just society.

Speaker 10 It's Dan Slepian.

Speaker 8 Thank you so much for listening to an excerpt from the Sing Sing Files, written and read by me. Hope you enjoyed it.

Speaker 9 The Sing Sing Files is available wherever books and audiobooks are sold.

Speaker 8 For more information, follow the link in the show notes.

Speaker 1 The Who's Down and Who Newville were making their list, but some didn't know Walmart has the best brands for their gifts.

Speaker 3 What about toys? Do they have brands kids have been wanting all year?

Speaker 5 Yup, Barbie, Tony's, and Lego. Gifts that will make them all cheer.

Speaker 1 Do you mean they have all the brands I adore?

Speaker 4 They have Nintendo, Espresso, Apple, and more. What about?

Speaker 6 So the Who answered questions from friends till they were blue.

Speaker 2 Each one listened and shouted, from Walmart?

Speaker 4 Who knew? Shop kissed from pop brands for everyone on your list in the Walmart app.