Letters from Sing Sing - Last Stop on the Road to Freedom

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Speaker 10 Hi there, Letters from Sing Sing listeners. This is Dan Slepian.

Speaker 10 It's hard to believe that more than a year has passed since this podcast first launched, and so much has happened since then.

Speaker 10 First, we are enormously humbled that the podcast, along with the incredible team behind it at NBC News Studios, has been honored with several prestigious journalism awards, including being named a Pulitzer Prize Finalist.

Speaker 10 And just a few weeks ago, my book, The Sing Sing Files, One Journalist, Six Innocent Men, and a 20-year fight for justice was published, which details not only JJ's case, but also the stories of several other men JJ introduced me to at Sing Sing.

Speaker 10 All people who, like JJ, were wrongfully convicted and ultimately exonerated after years of tireless efforts.

Speaker 10 And on November 23rd and 24th, the Sing Sing Chronicles, a documentary series produced by NBC News Studios about some of those men, including JJ, will air on MSNBC.

Speaker 10 Stay tuned to this feed for more on that to come.

Speaker 10 This podcast and the recognition it received, publishing a book, the upcoming documentary series, all of it has been deeply meaningful, but none of it compares to what happened earlier this week.

Speaker 10 On Monday, September 30th, after nearly 27 years, JJ Velasquez was finally exonerated.

Speaker 10 As many of you know, JJ was wrongfully convicted in 1999 of killing retired police officer Albert Ward.

Speaker 10 For more than two decades, JJ fought from inside Sing Singh, never wavering in his claims of innocence.

Speaker 10 I've had the privilege and honor of walking alongside him for more than 20 years, documenting his journey every step of the way.

Speaker 10 As you might remember from the last episode, I was there with him in 2021 when he was released after the governor granted him clemency. But despite his release, one thing eluded JJ, full exoneration.

Speaker 10 His conviction was never overturned, even with the overwhelming evidence proving his innocence.

Speaker 10 That all changed this week after a new Manhattan DA's office did its own investigation and tested DNA evidence proving JJ wasn't there.

Speaker 10 After all the years of fighting, after the relentless pursuit of justice, JJ's name was finally cleared in a New York City courtroom.

Speaker 11 The people do not believe they are in a position to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. I am granting that application.
So this matter is dismissed.

Speaker 10 That is the sound of a judge giving JJ his full freedom. Monday was was one of the most emotional, important, and validating days of my life, marking the end of JJ's long journey to clear his name.

Speaker 10 Before the exoneration, JJ and I had the opportunity to sit down with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press for a Meet the Moment conversation to reflect on JJ's story, his struggle, and what this moment means.

Speaker 10 Here's that conversation. I hope you enjoy it.

Speaker 12 And now a closer look at our criminal justice system.

Speaker 12 Veteran dateline producer Dan Slepian first met John Adrian Velasquez, or JJ, in 2002 when he was already serving time for a 1998 murder he did not commit.

Speaker 12 From his cell in Sing Sing, JJ aided Slepian in his own investigation until he was granted clemency and released in 2021 after more than two decades in prison.

Speaker 12 The Sing Sing files, one journalist, six innocent men, and a 20-year fight for justice tells the deeply personal story of their relationship, their fight to overturn wrongful convictions, and to reform the legal system.

Speaker 12 I sat down with Slepian and Velasquez for a meet-the-moment conversation.

Speaker 12 Thank you both so much for being here. Welcome to Meet the Press, Dan Slepian, J.J.
Velasquez. A real honor to talk to both of you.

Speaker 13 Thank you for having us.

Speaker 12 Dan, let me start with you. You're a dateline producer.
You were initially focused on telling crime stories, and then you became focused on telling the stories of those who were wrongfully convicted.

Speaker 12 And meeting JJ, who is sitting here today, was a turning point for you. What was that first meeting like?

Speaker 10 With JJ?

Speaker 10 Well,

Speaker 10 meeting JJ was the turning point of my life. There is no question about that.

Speaker 10 But as a dateline producer, I was covering crime just the way I thought justice worked.

Speaker 10 And it was through the prism of police officers, it was through the prism of the NYPD when I was embedded with the NYPD,

Speaker 10 where a detective and a prosecutor in the city of New York were telling me that they knew two innocent guys who were in prison because they knew who did it, and they couldn't get anybody to listen to them.

Speaker 10 And I was like, huh? Aren't all these guys on the same team? And what I came to find out and what that turned into is that that man who was innocent in that case shared a wall with JJ in prison.

Speaker 10 And so it was only through him I learned about JJ and what ended up happening was this sort of game of the surreal game of human dominoes where one innocent person led me to the next.

Speaker 10 And what it did was it made me look deep into the abyss. of what the criminal justice system really is.
And JJ and I talk about this often. We don't even call it the criminal justice system.

Speaker 10 We call it the criminal legal system now. It's an adversarial system.
So, meeting JJ, to answer your question, was the turning point for me.

Speaker 10 I didn't know if he was innocent. I didn't know if he was guilty.

Speaker 10 And I said to him, what I say to everybody who says that they're innocent to me: I said to him, Look, I don't know if you're guilty or you're innocent. I am not your friend.
I am not your advocate.

Speaker 10 All I care about is the truth.

Speaker 10 And if I find evidence of your guilt, it's coming out.

Speaker 12 JJ, what was it like from your perspective when you first met Dan and you heard those words? That he wasn't ready to accept off the bat that you were innocent. And he was very clear.

Speaker 12 He was going to approach learning about your case, investigating it as a reporter, as a journalist.

Speaker 13 Well, much like Dan just shared, meeting him was also a turning point for me as well.

Speaker 13 Initially, you know, it's always painful when you're telling the truth to someone and they're not trying to hear you, right?

Speaker 13 But it's also expected because of the circumstances that I was under.

Speaker 13 I'm being accused for taking a police officer's or a former police officer's life, which is one of the most heinous crimes someone can be charged with.

Speaker 13 And so as a young journalist, which Dan was when we first met 22 years ago, you know, I can't expect him to just not know me from anywhere or not have any credible sources and just expect what I'm saying is the truth, right?

Speaker 13 So the reality was in that moment, as he was saying that, the only thing that I could come up with in my mind was like, how do I get this guy to really believe that I'm not playing with this, that I'm serious, I'm innocent, and I need help.

Speaker 13 And so I challenged him to prove me guilty. And that's what caught him.

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Speaker 12 Let's talk a little bit about the details of the case. Sure.

Speaker 12 The fact that your mugshot was even included in the other potential mugshots when there was this murder that was being investigated that you were wrongfully accused of. Take us back to the beginning.

Speaker 12 of how this happened because you had a strong alibi and no one believed you. Yes.
And you didn't even look like the person who witnesses said had committed the crime.

Speaker 13 Thank you, Kristen. I mean, that's really where it all starts.
Like,

Speaker 13 you know, I grew up believing in the system. My father was a police officer.

Speaker 13 You know, I knew police officers. They sat at my dinner table.
I grew up around them. And so I had no reason to not believe in the system.

Speaker 13 The problem was that my father died 10 months before I was accused. And so I had nobody to protect me anymore.

Speaker 13 And so I had to face this as a man of color on his own, facing a system that really wasn't what I thought it was, right? And so the reality is, is that like,

Speaker 13 how do you take an individual who's considered because of our human barriers, we consider people, you know, other than human. We consider people either black, white, Latino, et cetera.

Speaker 13 Like my whole life, everybody's always known that I was Puerto Rican or at least Latino, right?

Speaker 13 This was the first time I've ever been confused as a black person. And then a black person with dreads.
I understand I'm a person of color.

Speaker 12 That's who witnesses said

Speaker 12 the shooter looked like had dreads. Right.

Speaker 13 And so I understand as a person of color, maybe someone who is not a person of color might not be able to distinguish the differences.

Speaker 13 But the real situation here was that we're talking about eight witnesses that were all African-American males or females that are in their 50s and 60s, which means that they went through a life period where racism was prevalent in their life.

Speaker 13 And so they knew what they saw that day. They saw two black people.
That's what they said. One was dark-skinned, one was light-skinned.
Neither one of them were me. And there's science to this.

Speaker 10 As JJ mentioned, all of the eyewitnesses were black. And that's an important fact.
When we talk about eyewitness identification, it's called cross-racial identification.

Speaker 13 Cross-racial bias.

Speaker 10 Cross-racial bias. People who are of the same race and color are more inclined to identify someone of their same race as opposed to someone as an opposite race.

Speaker 10 So all of the eyewitnesses said the shooter was a light-skinned black man.

Speaker 10 The way JJ became a suspect, check this out. There was a...

Speaker 10 drug dealer in the numbers parlor run by the victim who was a former cop running an illegal numbers game in harlem within the confines confines of the precinct that he used to work in.

Speaker 10 There was a drug deal going down between a 20-year-old and a 45-year-old. The 20-year-old's name was Augustus Brown selling heroin.
He ran away after the crime, after the shooting.

Speaker 10 Two days later, cops pick him up. He has 10 bags of heroin in his underwear.

Speaker 10 They bring him to the precinct. They put it on the table in front of him.
They question him for hours. They threaten him with arrest.

Speaker 10 saying, we're going to arrest you for the murder unless you pick somebody out.

Speaker 10 He looks at 18. he describes the shooter as a light-skinned black man.
Like everyone else. He looks at 1,800 mugshots of people who had been arrested in that area.

Speaker 10 JJ had been arrested because he was picked up for shoplifting that he did not commit.

Speaker 10 He had receipts, but the cop used it as a pretense to search his car and found a little amount of drugs. It was deemed an illegal search and seizure.
The case was thrown out.

Speaker 10 His picture should have been expunged. It shouldn't have even been in the database.

Speaker 10 In fact, when Augustus Brown pointed his picture, I later find out at random,

Speaker 10 they unseal his picture to show it to other witnesses. And get this:

Speaker 10 once he's identified, the lead detective on his photo, on that mug shot, says light-skinned Hispanic.

Speaker 10 Once he's arrested, the detective changes his race and says he's black Hispanic.

Speaker 12 What does the fact that that could happen

Speaker 12 say about the justice system?

Speaker 12 That he was even in the lineup, Dan.

Speaker 10 So this was

Speaker 10 the beginning for me.

Speaker 10 This was my baptism

Speaker 10 into how this is the way the system works.

Speaker 10 The question is, is not how can it happen?

Speaker 10 The question is, is why does it happen all the time?

Speaker 10 And once we know it happens, why can't we fix it?

Speaker 10 We can't fix it. This is a huge epidemic in this country.

Speaker 12 One of the

Speaker 12 points in your book that is frankly so stunning and is a follow-up to what you're saying, it's not just that you're a singular case.

Speaker 12 You started covering the wrongful conviction of, again, someone who you were in jail with, David Lemis,

Speaker 12 who was also wrongfully convicted. And you were in disbelief that there could be two people in such close proximity.

Speaker 10 That is a one in a million case.

Speaker 12 And he was accused, wrongfully convicted in the palladium murder of the 1990s in New York, a murder at a nightclub.

Speaker 10 On Thanksgiving night.

Speaker 12 How is it, how was it explained that length? So what happened?

Speaker 10 You referenced it for a while. So what happened was, is David was convicted of the murder of, as you say, the Palladium Nightclub Club on Thanksgiving night, 1990.

Speaker 10 Two detectives and a prosecutor believed he was innocent. We know who.
The real killer confessed to me at Rockefeller Center, right? So we know who committed this crime.

Speaker 10 But when I came to my own moral certainty that David Lemis was probably innocent, I visited him.

Speaker 10 at the prison he was at on Thanksgiving Day on the anniversary for the murder for which he was wrongfully convicted. I knew nothing about wrongful convictions other than this case.

Speaker 10 I thought this was a one in a million case. Like, what?

Speaker 10 Like, the cops say he's innocent. Why is he still there? Like, huh?

Speaker 10 My God, little did I know about this system. But I walk into the lobby that day and I see a woman holding the hands of two little boys.
And she stops me and says, Are you Dan?

Speaker 10 I hate to tell this part of the story, bro. I can.

Speaker 12 Because you could see those two little boys. Yeah.

Speaker 13 I wasn't there and I could see them.

Speaker 10 JJ's older son was on Maria's right side,

Speaker 10 John Jr. and Jacob, the littler one, was on her left side.

Speaker 10 He like came up to her waist, you know?

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 10 I didn't know who these people were.

Speaker 10 And Maria says, my son, JJ, he's innocent. Can you help us?

Speaker 10 And I

Speaker 10 didn't believe her.

Speaker 10 But it was the little boy, Jacob, who looked up at me with these eyes, these huge, beautiful saucer eyes. And

Speaker 10 my daughter, my wife wasn't even pregnant yet. I was about to be a father.
I mean, I've known JJ longer than I've known my daughter, who's in college.

Speaker 10 And I looked at that boy's eyes,

Speaker 10 and I thought that my immediate thought

Speaker 10 was,

Speaker 10 I don't care if his father is innocent or guilty. This little kid should not be in a prison on Thanksgiving morning.

Speaker 10 And it was for that reason that I said to Maria, send me whatever you want and I'll read it. And I even said to her,

Speaker 10 It's not going to happen anytime soon. It's going to take a long time.
And you know what?

Speaker 10 She was relieved.

Speaker 12 She was relieved. Because you you listened to her.

Speaker 10 Because no one was listening to her.

Speaker 10 A television producer who she's standing waiting in a lobby of a prison to try and get somebody's attention.

Speaker 10 That was the beginning for me. And what happened from there were letters from JJ and a relationship that ensued that today

Speaker 10 22 years later, I would put myself in front of a train for him. I would take a bullet for him.

Speaker 12 I know it's emotional.

Speaker 10 He's among the closest people in my life.

Speaker 12 JJ,

Speaker 12 and I want to talk about your relationship, but I want to talk about those little boys.

Speaker 12 Because from that moment on,

Speaker 12 you were behind bars for

Speaker 12 another 20 years.

Speaker 12 What was taken from them in that time, and how hard was it for you to be away from them? What kept you going at that time?

Speaker 13 Great questions. Thank you for them.

Speaker 13 I would say it starts with the fact that what they took from both of us, they took the right to be a father from me

Speaker 13 and they took the right to have a father present from them.

Speaker 13 Our lives were lived in pictures.

Speaker 10 Not in real time.

Speaker 13 The only real time we had was on visits, where you can barely do anything.

Speaker 13 And for the first 10 years of my children's life,

Speaker 13 as a father, I'm scarred because

Speaker 13 they spent five days in school and one day in prison and only had one day to build their social lives.

Speaker 13 And that's just not the life for a child.

Speaker 13 They deserve better.

Speaker 12 Through all of that pain, JJ, you never gave up.

Speaker 12 You continued to give every piece of evidence you could to Dan for his investigations. You continued to ask for retrial after retrial.
You were never granted freedom at that moment.

Speaker 12 How did you keep going?

Speaker 13 Hope, purpose.

Speaker 13 Hope for a better day, hope for the opportunity to be reunited with my family.

Speaker 13 Hope that the truth would one day come out and vindicate me and restore me.

Speaker 13 Unfortunately, I've learned there's not going to be any restoration in my life. I just have to deal with

Speaker 13 the hand I've been dealt. And then purpose.
You know,

Speaker 13 during the early part of my incarceration, I read this book by Victor Franklin and it's called Man's Search for Meaning. It's a very thin book, but it's so powerful.

Speaker 13 It was about Victor Frankl himself, who was at the concentration camps,

Speaker 13 and he was studying the people around him. And what he found was that the people who survived the Holocaust survived because they were tied to a sense of purpose.

Speaker 13 And so that led me to believe that I had to find the sense of purpose while I was in prison. And it took a while for me to figure it out.

Speaker 13 But

Speaker 13 when my mother approached me on a visit one day and she was just like, I can see you slipping. I see that you're changing.
Don't let this place change you. You need to grow where you're planted.

Speaker 13 They can lock up your body, but they can't lock up your mind. And that led me to another book that I was reading because reading was my escape from the madness, right?

Speaker 13 And I read another book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Colvey. And what he taught me is that between a stimulus and a response, you have the freedom to choose, right?

Speaker 13 And so at that point, I realized it's not what happens to us that matters, it's how we respond to that. And that's where we're able to exercise our freedom, even in the worst conditions.

Speaker 12 Dan writes about how horrifying life is in a prison cell.

Speaker 12 But you lived it.

Speaker 13 Absolutely.

Speaker 12 What do you remember about what it was like to be alone in a cold, dark

Speaker 12 cell by yourself?

Speaker 13 Well, I'll tell you the first thing.

Speaker 13 There's like lifelong trauma that I'm still battling right now, right?

Speaker 13 Shortly after I blew trial

Speaker 13 on this case,

Speaker 13 and that happened in 1999. So somewhere in the early part of 2000,

Speaker 13 I lost the ability to remember my dreams.

Speaker 10 And I know why it happened.

Speaker 13 It was a defense mechanism because all I was having was nightmares about my trial and what that meant for for my future.

Speaker 13 And I fought so hard not to remember that that I can literally actively try to remember what I'm, what I'm dreaming about as soon as I wake up and I can't.

Speaker 13 You know, and I understand that that's a part of a defense mechanism inside of me that has buried it so deep so that it can't hurt me.

Speaker 13 So there's a lot about my life. that I've shared with Dan, but I kind of like try to share it and then let it go.

Speaker 10 Right.

Speaker 13 And in sharing it, as long as it leads to a sense of purpose and can help someone else, then it can become cathartic for me, where I can feel like there is a sense of purpose behind sharing that pain, because it's not always easy to share that pain.

Speaker 12 Dan, you talk about the fact that you were not going to give up.

Speaker 12 But as you referenced, you didn't even have your daughter when you met JJ.

Speaker 12 You poured through thousands of pages of testimony, of legal documents.

Speaker 12 You didn't give up either. What kept you going to fight for someone who was not family?

Speaker 10 Well, first of all, in my early cocky young days when he challenged me,

Speaker 10 I'm like, okay.

Speaker 10 I'm going to prove you guilty.

Speaker 10 And the more that I set out,

Speaker 10 every single thing that I was finding was only pointing to his innocence. Now, in the case that I had done right before his,

Speaker 10 I had two active duty NYPD police officers and a Manhattan prosecutor saying the guys in prison were innocent and they couldn't move the needle. In JJ's case, he had nobody in authority.

Speaker 10 And police and prosecutors were telling me that five eyewitnesses and his co-defendant pled guilty, saying they did the crime with with him that's a huge i had no idea how he or i would ever overcome that

Speaker 10 but there's only one way to eat an elephant so i started at the beginning and and i and i went through every witness i i wore hidden cameras in my butt these are witnesses that were all either

Speaker 10 involved with drugs or had their own convictions, all very shaky witnesses.

Speaker 12 Were you scared, Dan? Because you take us along this journey and I felt scared scared reading, frankly, when you're knocking on the door.

Speaker 10 I mean, I brought armed guards with me

Speaker 10 to speak to suspects.

Speaker 10 But I got to a point where I felt that I was learning enough about the system

Speaker 10 and how broken it is because he became so obviously innocent to me. Anybody with any intellectual honesty that looks at the details of his case can only come to one conclusion.
So as a

Speaker 10 it is my responsibility I saw a quote the other day which really resonated with me which is that we all have our own responsibility to be more ethical than the society we grew up in.

Speaker 10 And so when I came to my own moral certainty that he was innocent, it was my job. I have a platform.
We have a platform.

Speaker 10 So this is not something I was looking for. This is something that found me.

Speaker 10 And so when I came to the conclusion, and I'm looking, I'm sitting in a chair. I'm not sitting on an elephant.
This is a fact. The earth is round.
It is not flat. These are facts.

Speaker 10 All I cared about was truth and facts.

Speaker 10 And when the facts became apparent and clear that he was innocent, I had no choice but to not turn away.

Speaker 10 But what became increasingly difficult for me, and we did a story about JG on Dateline in 2012, and it aired and he and I thought,

Speaker 10 that's it, he's getting out. He spent another decade in prison after that

Speaker 10 and led me to three other people that I did stories about that helped get them out. That may have been part of his purpose.
But the second decade was what was really hard for me.

Speaker 10 Because as journalists, you and I and other journalists, we have responsibility to NBC or our careers.

Speaker 10 I have worked very hard my entire career to maintain a rigorous detachment from

Speaker 10 subjects so I can be fair, objective, unbiased. But it came to a point with JJ's case where there were no two sides.
There weren't any two sides anymore. There was only one reality.
JJ was innocent.

Speaker 10 And the people in prison, I'm sorry, the guardians of the system

Speaker 10 who are responsible for making sure justice is done, not convictions, justice,

Speaker 10 people who have control over whether you or I go to prison, when those people start ignoring facts like they don't exist,

Speaker 10 I have a responsibility to be more of a human. I don't want to say journalists journalists aren't human, but my humanity

Speaker 10 comes before anything else. And JJ had become someone I love.

Speaker 10 His family became my family.

Speaker 10 So

Speaker 10 I made it clear to everybody that I could no longer report effectively and objectively on him because I believe he was innocent. And our relationship changed after that.

Speaker 10 And over the past decade, I mean, I visited JJ at Sing Sing over the past two decades about 250 times.

Speaker 12 JJ,

Speaker 12 in reading your story, it's hard to believe that you found the inner strength and the purpose to keep going for that length of time.

Speaker 12 But in 2021, you did learn that Governor Cuomo granted you clemency. This is not a full pardon.
So, in the eyes of New York, you are still a convicted criminal. But

Speaker 12 what was that moment like

Speaker 12 when the gates opened and you walked outside a free man?

Speaker 10 I don't know.

Speaker 13 I've had a lot of milestones since I've been released. I used to think that that was like the best moment of my life.

Speaker 13 I do believe that it was definitely one of the best moments because it was the birth of a new beginning

Speaker 13 and the end of an era, the end of the biggest era of my life that I had to,

Speaker 13 you know, deal with,

Speaker 13 and of course, still dealing with. But

Speaker 13 when that gate opened,

Speaker 13 my purpose was right in front of me because my family was waiting for me right there. My children, my mother, that was my hope.
That was my purpose.

Speaker 13 Dan became a part of the family and he became the hope and the purpose. But Dan met me in my cell and walked me out.
So it was a little bit different. But when that gate opened um

Speaker 12 my soul definitely felt a sense of relief because i knew that when i went out that gate the only way i was going to come back is as a volunteer and um which you have done yes which is just such an incredible act of selflessness what motivates you to go back to this place where you have experienced so much pain, JJ.

Speaker 12 How do you go back?

Speaker 13 Much like what Dan says, and he knows I'll argue against it, but I'm going to actually agree with him on this. Like, because

Speaker 13 my whole programming and educational factors that I share with people revolves around choices.

Speaker 13 But I didn't make a choice to go to prison for a crime I didn't commit.

Speaker 13 I didn't make a choice to suffer all that time.

Speaker 13 But I did make a choice to utilize that as an educational platform.

Speaker 13 And I realized that since I was spending a life bid in prison, which is actually what I've done, right? They gave me 25 to life. I spent almost 24 years in there.

Speaker 13 So they didn't do me any favors with that.

Speaker 13 But in spending that time, and I credit this a lot to Dan, Dan used to always tell me how important it was to actually

Speaker 13 be an observer,

Speaker 13 like in the third person, like watching the people that are watching the people, right? And being able to share that with the world.

Speaker 13 He basically put it on me maybe about 15, 20 years ago and said that this was going to be my responsibility to educate the world through my experience. And I've accepted that.

Speaker 13 And I believe that that was a part of purpose. And it kept me strong enough to be here.

Speaker 13 And my belief in him and the work that he was doing, as much as my disbelief in the system had overpowered that because there were plenty of times where he thought it was it and I told him it's not gonna happen these people play games too much

Speaker 10 You know, there were a lot of letdowns, but

Speaker 13 I think that as hard as it is for me To swallow what I'm about to say

Speaker 13 I've realized that as much as I've been through there was a need for me to go through that

Speaker 13 to be in the position that I am right now to have this conversation with you and to be able to touch the world because I am not an anomaly.

Speaker 13 There are hundreds of thousands of wrongfully convicted people on this earth and they are suffering just like I suffered and they're not being heard.

Speaker 12 We do have to say that you helped Dan identify three other

Speaker 12 people who were wrongfully convicted. If both of you could speak to policymakers, to people who would have an impact on the criminal justice system.
JJ, what would you say to them?

Speaker 13 I would say it's time to start having these town hall meetings, having these discussions, getting the wrongfully convicted people in the room with the policymakers and spending time and becoming proximate so that they can realize the damage that's being done.

Speaker 13 Let the families come in. Let the people that are the lawmakers stare the families that they've broken in their face

Speaker 10 and hope that they have an ounce of pure

Speaker 13 humanity inside of them to help them change how they see what's going on.

Speaker 13 Because I realize that a lot of people that have gone into law enforcement and government went into it with the right ideas, with the right interests, with, you know, like

Speaker 13 they went in with one idea the same way Dan went into journalism with one idea. and came out another.

Speaker 13 And sometimes culture is the problem. There is a culture inside of these offices where it's more important to get the win than to seek the truth.

Speaker 13 And that's where the problem starts because everybody wants to be successful. And so in a sense, the culture is saying for you to be successful, you may have to bend the rules here and there.

Speaker 13 But it's okay because it's in the interest of justice. And it's the biggest lie that's ever been told to anybody with a law degree.

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Speaker 12 Dan, what's your message?

Speaker 10 I have two, without getting into any specific policy proposal, because there's all sorts of things that we know will reduce the chances of eyewitness misidentification or false confessions.

Speaker 10 Most police departments haven't done that yet. So those are policies without getting into details.
But two just general thoughts. One is

Speaker 10 unlike

Speaker 10 the EPA

Speaker 10 where they decide how much arsenic should be in our drinking water. We don't vote on that.

Speaker 10 We vote on criminal justice policy because politicians believe they're being tough on crime. We need to remove emotion from these decisions.

Speaker 10 It is emotion that makes people believe things that aren't true.

Speaker 10 It creates an us versus them mentality.

Speaker 10 That you are less than, you are bad, right?

Speaker 10 Proximity, as JJ said, changed that for me. That's number one, because we know, I've been to prisons in Germany and Norway, I know what works.

Speaker 10 I wouldn't put my dogs in a cage that he had for a weekend, that he had to live in for 24 years in this warehouse of human beings, right?

Speaker 10 So when it comes to mass incarceration as a whole, when it comes to policy, take emotion and put it on the side because emotion doesn't dictate what's best best for society.

Speaker 10 The second thing that I would say, and I've learned this because of JJ,

Speaker 10 part of my DNA,

Speaker 10 that we look at people with a scarlet letter who have been through what he has been through. And what I now know, I don't believe, I know

Speaker 10 that the people that society has once considered the problem are the solution.

Speaker 10 JJ rose like a phoenix from the ashes. He's a special guy.
His emotional intelligence, I've been telling him for two decades, is higher than anybody I've ever met.

Speaker 10 I have walked through things saying I cannot count how many people who have said to me, if it wasn't for JJ, if it wasn't for JJ, getting him into school.

Speaker 10 He was in there year after year like a prize fighter in training to do what he's doing right now. He's a special case.

Speaker 10 But

Speaker 10 I have met scores of people in prison.

Speaker 10 Their incapacitation incapacitation is their punishment.

Speaker 10 We don't have to treat people like animals.

Speaker 10 And when people have to live through that suffering, there's a lot of solutions that are formed in those environments. And we don't spend enough time focusing on that.

Speaker 10 Instead, what we do is when people get out of prison, we don't allow them to get jobs. We don't allow them to get loans.
We don't allow them to get housing. They have to go to parole.

Speaker 10 They don't have an ID. We make it impossible.
It is literally irrational and pathological by definition, what we're doing. So we know it works.
It's just having the emotional strength to do it.

Speaker 12 Talking about emotional strength, I want to ask you about one of, quite frankly, the most horrifying revelations of this entire book, which is the conversation that you have with the juror,

Speaker 12 who shares with you that she regretted her

Speaker 12 vote for a guilty verdict verdict all of those years, JJ, that you were

Speaker 12 in prison. She shares that there was a lot of skepticism among the jury pool, but there was also they were sequestered

Speaker 12 a desire to get home. It was Halloween.
People wanted to get home to see their kids. And she told you, Dan, that she regretted the guilty verdict ever since she cast it.

Speaker 12 What was that conversation like for you?

Speaker 10 Unsettling. She walked into the room and she started crying.

Speaker 10 She said that she always believed JJ was innocent from the beginning. She said she was weak and young.
The jury was exhausted, sequestered for three days. They were going into Halloween.

Speaker 10 The family, everybody wanted to go to see their kids. And she caved along with another juror.
And they both went back to the judge that day

Speaker 10 and said, we think we made a mistake. And the judge said, nope, you did the right thing.

Speaker 10 Not only that, by the way, one of the eyewitnesses during his trial pointed, was asked to point to the defendant sitting at the table. We've all seen law and order.
We know who the defendant is.

Speaker 10 She pointed to juror number six.

Speaker 10 Even that guy voted guilty when he believed that he made a mistake and he tried to take back his verdict.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 10 it was a revelation that when you think about the system as a whole, it's not just police, it's not just prosecutors, it's not just defense attorneys, it's not just investigators, it is you and me.

Speaker 10 It is all of us. Our responsibility as Americans is to pay taxes, vote, and serve on a jury, really, right?

Speaker 10 If we're being asked to do that,

Speaker 10 why are we being put in those positions when people's lives and fate are on the line?

Speaker 10 And by the way, I'm glad you brought up that as the most,

Speaker 10 the conversation, because there was another conversation in there that I was hoping you didn't bring up,

Speaker 10 which was the one where I had this mantra. that I kept saying to JJ, but we won't talk about that.
I'm sorry. I didn't mean to talk about that.

Speaker 12 Well, no, but I think I know what you're referencing. The mantra that you said to JJ, kind of the official line in journalism.
And you said it to him. I'll tell you this.

Speaker 12 And that was a turning point because you realized, that was the moment you realized

Speaker 12 that you no longer questioned his guilt or innocence, that you could no longer proceed just as a journalist.

Speaker 10 So this is an important moment for me. And when you asked me before what it was like to meet JJ, it was a turning point.
Yes, meeting him was a turning point, but I didn't know it then.

Speaker 10 The real turning point in our relationship came about a decade ago when I had this mantra that I said to JJ all the time, like I do everybody. I'm a journalist.
I'm not your friend.

Speaker 10 If I find anything that proves your guilt, it's coming out. I even said to him, even the color of your underwear, right? We have this pact to this day.
We do not lie to each other.

Speaker 10 And so

Speaker 10 I did a show in 2012. It came out.
I humbly say, and not because of pride, that it was nominated for three Emmys.

Speaker 10 And I only only say that because the world of journalism saw it as an act of journalism. It proved his innocence.
And what the DA's office did after that was horrendous.

Speaker 10 And people could read the book to learn what happened.

Speaker 10 But it got to the point where JJ was as innocent as he was alive.

Speaker 10 And he was a good man, an exceptionally,

Speaker 10 an exceptional human being.

Speaker 10 And we were friends at at that point. And it was about 2014, and we thought that a decision was going to come in his favor from a judge, and I was in the courtroom.
And it didn't. He got denied.

Speaker 10 At that point, I had known him for 12 years.

Speaker 10 And I was coming down the elevator, and he had called me from Sing Singh, and I delivered the bad news, and I heard the disappointment in his voice.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 10 there was a prosecutor standing a few feet away from me.

Speaker 10 Now, I know all my phone calls are recorded from Singh Singh. I was always very careful because I said to him, I'm going to say this to you on the phone.

Speaker 10 I don't want them, because they were coming after me, too.

Speaker 13 Right.

Speaker 10 So I saw this prosecutor, and to put my objectivity on display,

Speaker 10 I said, Jay,

Speaker 10 just so you know, if anything comes out, proving your guilt, I'm going to report it.

Speaker 10 And there was this long silence,

Speaker 10 and he said three words to me.

Speaker 10 Really, Dan?

Speaker 10 Now?

Speaker 10 It is so painful for me to think about that

Speaker 10 because

Speaker 10 for a few reasons. What it did to him, he wouldn't even, he was in prison, he wouldn't even talk to me.

Speaker 10 He wouldn't even call, he would not talk to me.

Speaker 10 So, what it did to him,

Speaker 10 how I made him feel, devastated me.

Speaker 10 But it also made me think about something on a much deeper level.

Speaker 10 JJ was innocent. There weren't two sides to this.
And what I was doing is I was playing the game.

Speaker 10 I was putting my objectivity on display in a way that I was taught I should.

Speaker 10 And that's why people are wrongfully convicted in the first place.

Speaker 12 JJ, what was that moment like for you when he repeated that journalistic mantra that in that moment felt like a betrayal to you, it sounds like?

Speaker 13 You said the words exactly. And then in that moment, it did feel like a betrayal.

Speaker 13 And, you know, like when Dan and I, when I was able to get past my emotions, because I know that emotions cloud good judgment,

Speaker 13 he came on a visit. And we had a real talk.
And it was just like, if you ever say that to me again, I'm never going to talk to you again.

Speaker 13 And it was the hardest thing to do because at that point, I already loved him like a brother.

Speaker 10 And it was just, I'm sorry I did that. I'm sorry.
It was real hard because

Speaker 13 at that point, he took me, and the way I had

Speaker 13 digested it was like,

Speaker 13 you just diminished my humanity to a story. You're telling me I'm a story.

Speaker 10 This is real. Like, I really don't belong here.

Speaker 13 How can you say that to me for them?

Speaker 10 For anyone.

Speaker 13 At that point, it was too real for me for you to even.

Speaker 13 You know more about my case than me.

Speaker 10 You know I'm innocent.

Speaker 13 For you to say that is disrespectful. But I did understand that it came from a sense of training.
It came from the position that he was in. It took me a while to see that.

Speaker 10 But he taught me that I have a responsibility to be more of a human. My humanity was not on display that day.

Speaker 10 And that came second to my own desire, my own need to feel like I was doing the right thing for other people,

Speaker 10 not what was right. And you know what? I've never said that to him again, ever.
And I never will, obviously.

Speaker 13 That's kind of why he asked for permission to say it.

Speaker 12 No, that makes sense, but it's a powerful story. And I think it's important for people to hear it to understand

Speaker 12 this incredible relationship and bond you both have now. And I know you're both still fighting.

Speaker 12 You are fighting because you do want to be pardoned, because you did not commit the crime that you were convicted of. Do you have hope, JJ, that you will be pardoned?

Speaker 10 Well, right now,

Speaker 13 we're three years in into a reinvestigation in the Manhattan DA's office. There's a new prosecutor.
I've been through three prosecutors from Robert Morgenthau to Cyrus Vance to now Alvin Bragg.

Speaker 13 But the investigation has been a pretty open investigation.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 13 we have all the reason to believe that they're going to do the right thing and that they'll be doing it soon.

Speaker 10 I'm the reporter here.

Speaker 10 What can you tell me?

Speaker 10 What I'll say is that I have a lot of sources

Speaker 10 in the city and in the DA's office. And their investigation is over.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 10 the inclination, I believe, is that his conviction will be vacated. They cannot do that.
A judge needs to do that.

Speaker 10 There is no specific date on the calendar now, but I would be surprised if it didn't happen sometime within the next four to six weeks.

Speaker 12 Sitting with the two of you,

Speaker 12 I read about it in your book, Dan, but I can feel the bond between the two of you that you write that you're family, but sitting with you, that's so clear. Dan, what does JJ mean to you?

Speaker 10 JJ has taught, this is what makes me uncomfortable: is that people say, look what you did for JJ.

Speaker 10 I hate, I mean, I understand it comes from a good place. I don't want to diminish people saying that.

Speaker 10 But the reason I feel uncomfortable is because JJ has done so much more for me than I have ever done for him.

Speaker 10 He has taught me so much about so many different things that I didn't know about myself, about the world, about a society that I didn't even know existed. That

Speaker 10 he taught me what loyalty means. He taught me what it means to be human, what it means to be a good friend, what it means to be a better journalist.
He also helped other people.

Speaker 10 He led me to three other people. These conversations that we're having now about that moment, that turning point, was before I did all these other cases.
It got worse and worse and worse. And

Speaker 10 what I think when people read this book, and I hope that they read it or listen to it or whatever,

Speaker 10 when I was recording the book, I spent 20 years living this. I spent thousands of hours writing that.
I'm recording the book. I'm reading it.
He said he was in Florida and he had 13 alibis.

Speaker 10 I look up at the, I'm like, do you believe this? Like, like, it's the first time I have my outrage.

Speaker 10 only increases with time.

Speaker 10 No one is ever held accountable. There is no accountability, zero.

Speaker 10 All of the stories in this book where these men were railroaded in the face of obvious innocence, those detectives are still getting their pensions.

Speaker 10 No one is ever, all across America, until there's accountability, until people start seeing this for what it is, and by the way, it affects everyone. not just the people who are in prison.

Speaker 10 If you think it doesn't affect you because you're never going to end up like that, guess what? You're wrong.

Speaker 10 I've done stories about people who have been plucked from the street, kidnapped from their lives, never been convicted before. And if it doesn't affect them, it affects their kids.

Speaker 10 And by the way, if you don't know one of those people, you know who it does affect? Your wallet.

Speaker 12 JJ, you referred to Dan as your brother.

Speaker 12 You hear him using this powerful word, innocent. What does that word mean to you? What does innocent mean to you?

Speaker 13 Unfortunately, innocent is a word that I don't believe society respects.

Speaker 13 You know, like

Speaker 13 there are a lot of people

Speaker 13 during time right now in prison that don't deserve to be there.

Speaker 13 And, you know, there's this, I think he said it best earlier. Dan said it about the emotional piece.
This idea that society has about retribution. Like, we're filled with hatred.

Speaker 13 Politics is fueling hatred in our country, division, right? Because it's so much easier to control us when we're like that.

Speaker 10 I mean,

Speaker 13 I can't really speak to the word innocent because words in our,

Speaker 13 and like the way we use words today,

Speaker 10 they don't even have, they're not backed by meaning.

Speaker 13 It's like money that's not backed by gold.

Speaker 13 We just say what sounds right or what we think people want to hear. But we're not really getting anywhere because people aren't paying attention to what's really happening.

Speaker 12 JJ, what do you want people to know about your relationship with Dan? What he means to you?

Speaker 13 Besides my mother, Dan's my hero, he's my brother.

Speaker 10 I mean,

Speaker 13 I feel like I'm three years old in the new world, right? I've just been reborn. I don't know much, but what I do know is that this is real.

Speaker 10 Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 10 It's, you I got my wife, my daughter, and JJ. Yeah.
And E. We got E and David.

Speaker 10 Eric Listen is the guy in the book. Me, JJ, and Eric hang out.
And we call each other three the hard way.

Speaker 10 That's our little name for each other.

Speaker 13 Yeah, but the relationship between Dan has been a redefining moment for me because I've never been so close to somebody. who is not my actual blood.

Speaker 12 Well, it is just an honor and deeply humbling to talk to both of you. Thank you so much for sharing

Speaker 12 your story with us.

Speaker 10 Thank you for doing this because people who listen to this, particularly people who are in prison,

Speaker 10 are going to be heard.

Speaker 12 Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you both so much.

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