13 Alibis - Ep. 8: Wrongful Convictions

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Hi, Dan Slepian here.

Thanks for listening to 13 Alibis.

About a month after we released this podcast,

I had a discussion with my Dateline colleague,

Josh Mankiewicz, about the series

and about wrongful convictions in general

at a convention called CrimeCon in New Orleans.

So we made a bonus episode out of that conversation. Here's Josh.
Hi, everybody. Thanks for coming.
I'm Josh Mankiewicz. This is Dan Slepian.
I know you've all seen Dateline. Dateline almost always about the best in law enforcement, about officers and detectives who don't give up, who take the case file home with them, who sometimes keep working a case even after they've retired or after they've been transferred to another division.
And those stories are a pleasure to tell, and they're ones that our audience has responded to and ones that I think deserve a great deal of the credit for how well Dateline has done all over the years and how long we've been on and how devoted all of you are to it. Somewhat less often, we tell stories like the Dan tells in the podcast 13 Alibis, which is the story of Richard Rosario.
Tell me how you first came across his story. It was 2013 I first heard about Richard Rosario.
And I heard about him like I have so many others of these kinds of stories that I've done. Sometimes I describe my professional life as like the surreal game of dominoes where one innocent person has led me to the next over the years.
I've done several stories for Dateline over the years, one with Josh, that have helped people get out of prison. And so I was visiting an inmate that I had done another story about.
And he said, I got another one for you. And I'm thinking, how many are there? And he said, there's this guy named Richard Rosario.
And what struck me about his story was that it was so easy to understand.

It only took a couple of sentences to understand his claim of innocence. Very often with these kinds of stories, when someone says they're innocent, it's like, okay, let me just tell you the story.
You need a few days to understand it. My friend was there and the guy was there.
This was very easy. This was, I was in Florida.
I wasn't in New York. And to me, when I heard that, it was, I thought, simple to a certain extent.
Either he was in the state or not. And I set out to find that out.
So that's how I heard about it. How, I mean, the simple question is, if you were in another state at the time of the murder, how'd you get convicted? Yeah, you know, I was just saying before, like've been doing this this is my 24th year at dateline i've met all sorts of people like all of our producers and what we do and what surprises me is that i continue to be surprised the story i've lived with it for several years i'm still surprised by it because i don't have a good answer to it i think you know just very very quickly for, very quickly, for those of you who haven't heard the podcast, what happened was, is that Richard Rosario was convicted of a murder in the Bronx in 1998.
He became a suspect because an eyewitness looked at books of mugshots in the precinct. And he had a mugshot in there because he was arrested for a juvenile robbery.
And one of the witnesses said, that's the guy. About a week later, Richard calls home and his mom said, police are looking for you.
And he says, I'm in Florida. And he'd been in Florida for some time at that point.
Several weeks. And he comes back with a bus ticket.
He buys a bus ticket and takes a Greyhound back and goes to the precinct. And he says, you got the wrong guy on june 19th i was in florida and he

gives them the names phone numbers addresses and contact information of 13 people who he says could say he was in florida and the reason he knew is because he was there for the birth of his friend's baby call john and janine john torres the first name all right so so he um i'm gonna do this like a Dateline interview.

Because that's the only way I know how.

He gives police

13 hours. So he, I'm going to do this like a Dateline interview, because that's the only way I know how.

He gives police 13 alibis.

He does.

The names of 13 people and contact information.

And their phone numbers.

Right?

Didn't just say, it was a guy named Bill in a blue jacket.

He goes, no, it was my friend, Bill.

Here's his phone number.

Here's where he lives.

And here's why I was there.

How many of those people were contacted by police?

Zero.

Thank you. And Bill, here's his phone number, here's where he lives.
And here's why I was there. How many of those people were contacted by police? Zero.
And to answer your question, how can that happen, that's really what I set out to find out. First of all, I set out to find out if it's true.
And by the way, the bar for these stories is enormously high, and I don't take it lightly. When a jury renders a verdict, that that's a big deal and there should be a sense of finality in the system for victims families um for everyone i mean if we keep retrying these cases courts would be clogged forever but generally i mean in i mean the way the system is supposed to work if police don't do their due diligence and discover and look at the evidence that you've presented them, you have an attorney or one will be appointed for you, and they're supposed to do that and say either at trial or in some hearing, trying to get the charges dismissed, here are the affidavits of 13 people who say that my client was with them in deltona florida on that day and on the day before and on the day after and for a week after so what kind of legal representation did that's an excellent question so the the police and the prosecutors especially at that time when new york was overridden with murders it was a time.
Their position is, look, we got eyewitnesses picking out the guy. If he's innocent, that's what court is for.
That's what his attorneys are for. Let him prove it.
Right. So Richard, who had a court-appointed attorney, said to his attorney, like he had said to the police, here's my 13 alibi witnesses.
And the defense attorney knew that that was important, obviously, as any one of us would, right? So what the attorney did is the attorney applied to the court for money for an investigator to go to Florida. And that petition was granted.
And what happened is, is that first attorney left the case for personal reasons. A second attorney was appointed and there was some miscommunication between the first attorney and the second attorney where they said they the second attorney believed that the petition had not been granted so even his own defense team didn't thoroughly investigate i say this all the time to audiences which is that and i don't think this is going to come as a big shock to you and probably not to many of you.
If you have the money to afford a private attorney, you're going to have a completely different shake from the criminal justice system than if you rely on the court-appointed attorney. There's no question about that.
Money spent on competent criminal defense is rarely wasted, and we see that on Dateline all the time at all levels, both people who are innocent but convicted and people who are guilty and on trial. Right.
And frequently, court-appointed attorneys are, in a lot of cities, they're just another cog to sort of make that big system operate a little more smoothly. And their response to nearly every defendant, i mean check me on this but this is my sense of it is you should see if we can get a deal uh we might be able to get you a year or less we might be able to knock this this felony down to a misdemeanor you should not testify if you do testify there's a very good make this trial go on longer make everybody angry there's a very good chance you'll get locked up for the maximum so don't talk right i think but by the way i think deals come with private attorneys most often as well i mean i think defensive court appointed attorneys in this country get a raw deal um they are really i mean ones that i know are incredible lawyers good people and the problem is is that they're simply overworked and the deck is hugely stacked against them.
Right. So there's too many.
I mean, does lawyers, good people. And the problem is, is that they're simply overworked.
And the deck is hugely stacked against them.

Right.

So there's too many.

I mean, does any, how many, how many cases do you think actually, does anybody have any

idea how many cases actually go to trial in this country?

Less than 10% go to trial.

Most cases end up in pleas.

I mean, if that's the one thing is that if everybody in this country who was arrested demanded a trial, the court system would never work. It would be clogged forever.
So most cases actually end in pleas. The vast majority of cases end in pleas.
Because frankly, by the time you get into that position, most people are probably guilty. The question is, is it fair to say that Richard Rosario was convicted because of a fluke, because of this miscommunication between one attorney and another who believed that this information, which was obtainable, actually wasn't obtainable? Or, I mean, clearly something did go wrong, or is this sort of emblematic of a bigger problem? Yeah, I think in his case specifically, it was the perfect storm.

Now, more generally, I think that this issue of wrongful convictions is pervasive. I mean, I think it's a huge, important issue, and it's one that I have become.
You've become a man with a mission. I feel like I'm on a mission, and I hope you are all on this mission with me.
And what I mean by that is that there are many stories that we do where you're passive audience members. We all are.
Oh, here's a good story. To me, this is fundamentally different where instead of passive audience members, I want you to be ambassadors to an issue that is really important that I personally care about because I've witnessed it.
We don't put anything on the air, right? We need facts. We're journalists.
So I don't just say stuff. But I've seen on the front lines, like this case and others, where the system just won't listen.
The system is built to put people in prison. It's not built to get people out of prison so you basically need a strike of lightning to hit another lock on your jail cell to get another day to be heard and you know uh i mean if you think this doesn't affect you because you don't know anybody who's been wrongly convicted or even anybody who's facing trial you know your tax dollars are paying for all of, paying to keep these people locked up who shouldn't be locked up, in addition to the tax dollars you're probably happy to pay to keep people locked up who should be locked up.
One of the things that Dan and I were talking about yesterday as we prepared for this today, a couple of years ago on Dateline, Dan and I did a story about a guy named Eric Glisson who was locked up for 18 years for a murder that he very clearly had nothing to do with. He was identified.
He and five other people. And five others, but he's the guy we interviewed.
He was interviewed. He was identified by police based on a woman, a local woman from the neighborhood who said she was at her bathroom window.
She saw him commit the crime, heard him talking about it afterwards, could identify all the people, and hated him because they'd had a relationship and it hadn't worked out. And not only did none of that apparently make it to the ears of the investigating detectives, But the most basic police work, which would be to go to the place where she said she was standing to see what she could see and whether it in fact matched her testimony, they never did it.
Josh was the first person to do that. We did it.
And from her bathroom window, you can't see the crime scene. Because we know exactly where it was.
It was that simple. That should have gotten all of these guys off the hook right then, or at least made detectives think, this woman is not credible.
We're going to need further investigation, and we're going to charge any of these people. But they didn't.
And they haul all these people in and and and they've one eyewitness and based on this one eyewitness and off they went to prison here's the amazing part about that story too is that one of the murders that he was the murder that he was really ended up being convicted of was the murder of a taxi driver the taxi driver's cell phone was stolen in the murder by the killers back when having a cell phone was was something that not not everybody had a cell phone one minute after the murder there was a phone call made from that cell phone and lo and behold that number comes back to the real killer who wasn't that guy and eric glisten who convicted of it, found that out from his jail cell. He was the one that put it together.
All information that would have been available to law enforcement at the time. Now, what law enforcement are we talking about here? In this case, for both Richard Rosario and Eric Glisson, we're talking about the NYPD.
We're talking about the NYPD in the Bronx. We're actually talking about the NYPD in the same precinct in the Bronx, in Soundview.
This was what year? Which one? Well, both of them were in 95 and 98. They were both mid-90s, right? This is what makes this issue so nuanced, particularly in New York.
In 1990, there were 2,245 murders in New York. That was the highest point ever in the history of New York to this day.
And the citizenry of New York was understandably and correctly outraged, upset, and offended, and wanted the largest police department in the country with 30-something thousand officers to take action. And if you talk to people on the street, maybe they wouldn't say this under oath, but if you ask them, do you want police to start cracking heads? Do you want people to start cutting corners? Do you want something done to stem this tremendous tide of murders? People universally said yes.
When you asked them specifically, are you okay with what happened to Eric Gliss and Richard Rosario? The answer is almost certainly no. I mean, they threw out the net and they captured a lot of fish in those years and a few dolphins got caught in there too, you know, along the way.
You know, what you were saying about the numbers, most people that go through the system are guilty. By far.
By far. By way far.
But let's just use

the most conservative estimates. These 2.3 million people in this country are in prison.

A couple hundred thousand are in federal prisons. The rest are in state local jails and state

prisons. By far, by the way, the highest incarceration rate anywhere in the world.

We represent 5% of the world's population. We incarcerate 25% of the world's prisoners.
Way higher than anywhere in the world by far the United States. But let's just say we have, and we have a good system, let's just say we have a great system.
Let's just say it's 98%, which I don't think it is, but let's say it is. That means right now, with those numbers, there numbers there's more than 40 000 innocent people today as we sit here right now locked in a cell for a crime they didn't commit taken from their children taken from their families screaming into the wind not getting any they only can get in touch with a television producer that is is when you know there's a problem when people are reaching out to us right and you're paying for this and you're paying for it so just by way of comparison if that is two percent and if it is 40,000 people today in the past 30 years roughly 28 2900 people less than 3,000 people have been exonerated in this country in 30 years.
So right now, if it's 2%, that's 40,000 today. So when I hear about these stories, they're hard for me to ignore.
They're hard for me when people are so desperate, when families have been torn apart, when there's evidence that can be followed up on that no one has followed up on. You know, I feel it is a moral responsibility.
It's kind of one of the reasons I became a journalist and got into this business. But it's also, as you said, it's become a passion.
And by the way, one of the things, this is kind of a non sequitur, but thinking about a mission, I don't like to be called an advocate. say oh you're an advocate for these people i don't believe that's true and i i think it's an advocate for the truth the same way that you know the guilty guy goes to prison and the victim's family gets justice if somebody is in a prison for a crime they didn't commit their family should guess us and by the way that means the real killer is walking free and is out there to kill other people and in many cases has and many cases has yeah yeah one of the problems with stories like this one is that this one maybe not particularly but i remember on the glisten one uh one of the problems was there was a number of defendants there was there were a lot of different characters and a lot of moving parts to the story.
And the result was it became a difficult story to tell on television. This is not, you know, we say this all the time, you know, TV is not like a newspaper article.
If you don't get it the first time, now with a DVR, you can go back and see it again, but you're probably not going to. People tend to see television stories generally once, which means they've got to be clear.
It's got to be obvious what's going on. You read a very dense newspaper interpretation of a story, and you sort of realize halfway through, wait a minute, I don't know who that is, that name here.
Who is that? I go, oh yeah, okay, that's the judge. So that makes this kind of story difficult to tell on television.
It makes it somewhat easier to tell in a longer format like a podcast. Yeah, and I've got to say, we've done many of them on television, and thank God Dateline has allowed us to do it.
I often say, and I'm not saying it you guys are here oh i am but my bosses are here like david corvo and liz cole and i often not in their presence say i'm like the pro bono unit of the law firm corvo and cole you know that they they have been very very generous and look generally when we do our story selection there's we write up our. They have an editorial meeting.
These guys decide what they want to do or what not. Generally, when they decide they are going to spend money and move forward and do a story, I mean, it's very, very important real estate on primetime television.
And there's thousands of pitches, and they have to pick a certain amount. Usually, it's here's the beginning of the story we know the story my stories generally we don't know where they're going and it's not really it's because when we begin them we don't know what's going to happen right person is going to be you know whether they're going maybe they'll get a new trial and then they'll be convicted at the second trial i mean that happens right and so these are not stories that are easy to do.
They're not inexpensive to do. I'm very grateful to have been given the freedom and the opportunity.
And by the way, so are those people and those families who have been vindicated as a result of our show. And I'm not the only producer who has done this, by the way.
We have other producers who, you know, Shane Bishop and others. Keith has done stories as well about wrongful convictions it's i mean we're not the wrongful conviction show um and the minority of our stories obviously no i think pretty clearly those of you who watch dateline know that generally we tell stories in which you know as far as we can tell and as far as the system can tell the right person gets locked up uh jimmy breslin uh the late new york newspaper columnist, I used to work in local news in New York.
Jimmy once said to me that you weren't a real journalist unless you'd gotten somebody out of prison or put somebody in, neither of which I'd done. Yes, you have.
Jimmy, I think, has done both of. I don't know that that is, in fact, the mark of a real journalist, but there is no question that you, Dan, has had remarkable impact.
I mean, there is – when people – and a perfect example of that is the way the system handled Dan's interest in the Richard Rosario case, because they did nothing for a very long time. And then suddenly when they realized that this was all coming together and that Dateline was going to tell this story, all of a sudden people were getting on an airplane.
Years and years and years later. It's not the power of me, it's the power of Dateline.
And it's the power of what we bring. I mean, we are an American institution.
Everybody in the country knows Dateline. And certainly those people in power and law enforcement know Dateline.
So it's not what I'm calling. It's what I'm calling on behalf of NBC News and Dateline.
And that's why we have to – I'm very, very, very careful. You don't throw that around.
So when we get to the point where it's undeniable,

this is either a bottle of water or it's a zebra, right?

And the system will look at this and say, you know what?

The jury said zebra.

I think we're going to go with zebra.

And you'll be like, you know, but it's a bottle of water.

You know, that's the thing that gets to me.

That's what bothers me.

I don't know where it comes from, but it's a frustration.

It's a sense of injustice. In Richard Rosario's case his case went to the united states supreme court it went all the way to the united states supreme court and was denied from by the united states supreme court wasn't heard his last appeal was denied three or four months prior to us releasing this his last appeal so you really were his last help i don't want to say it was me because it's not me he said it was you but he did i know we didn't put that out there though you're being too he like you but you're but the truth is it takes a village it's it's not just me it's us taking a spotlight and shining onto a light onto a set of facts and a bunch of people you know this story couldn't have happened had the alibi witnesses not spoken with me when richard rosario was released when the judge said i am releasing you from custody yes he then said mr rosario do you have anything to say and mr rosario said what i didn't put that in the podcast i know he thanked dateline and me yeah

but it's but it's it's it's really yeah i don't yeah it's not really about that for me no i understand that but it is uh it's satisfying that families can be reunited but it's so much bigger than just Richard Rosario to me.

You know, this is to me not just,

it's a narrative, It's a very interesting story, I think. And they're bite-sized chunks and you can listen to it quickly and I think you'll be entertained.
But beyond that, I think it's an incredibly important issue as we want to make a more perfect justice system for the victims and for the people who are sitting in those seats

you know when the system becomes so much stronger when you recognize your mistakes and that's something that is not done like ever that's right thank you for coming thank you hey this is will arnett host Smartless. Smartless is a podcast with myself and Sean Hayes and Jason Bateman, where each week one of us reveals a mystery guest of the other two.
We dive deep with guests that you love, like Bill Hader, Selena Gomez, Jennifer Aniston, David Beckham, Kristen Stewart, and tons more.

So join us for a genuinely improvised and authentic conversation

filled with laughter and newfound knowledge to feed the smartless mind.

Listen to Smartless now on the SiriusXM app.

Download it today.