Empire on Blood | 8. I Shot Him

Previously on Empire on Blood who stayed a full name for the record, my name is Calvin Lures.

If this is satisfactory for conviction, I might be in for an extremely long haul.

All right, cal you did it.

You did it.

We were two inmates who had sentences that ended with life on the back. Neither one of us knew if we would ever get out of prison.

We're always gonna come.

Out on top.

It was a nineteen nineties hip hop party, loud music, lights, all filled a teenagers email.

McDowell had been at a party, a Sweet sixteen party at a community center in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. It was October nineteen ninety. He was seventeen years old, an honorall student in twelfth grade. Email had gone with a couple of friends, arriving about eleven pm, fashionably late. It was a chilly evening and everyone crowded inside the center.

They ain't really meant to hold that many people put there in there?

Right?

Do you have a DJ there with speakers that are saved probably up to your waist, glaring ll cool J and everybody singing along, screaming a favorite lyric.

Email was at one end of the community Center. At the other end, there was a fight, and then the fight moved outside and there was a shooting. One bullet in the chest. A nineteen year old died.

They asked me to come to the precinct. I walked over there by myself.

I figured, you.

Know, I was at the party, so they would want to speak to me, like almost the other one hundred people that were there, which was fine. I'm always sent up to the homicide squad. They asked me, did I want to be in a lineup? I was like okay. Final three witnesses were brought in. One witness said that he couldn't identify anyone. Another witness he wasn't sure, and they said the third person identified me as having committed the crime. So I was arrested, charged with murdering the second degree.

Email wouldn't go home for two decades. It was like years of confusion for me. How did this happen? This is Steve Fishman and this is Empire on Blood the director's cut a story of murder, betrayal, and a man who fought the law for two decades. In this new episode, we continue Email mcdowe's story because something life changing has happened to Email. Over the years, Email and I had struck up a friendship. I came to trust his judgment. You know, I am so outside the culture, and so

To me, it gives more credibility because it's coming from someone that can't be labeled as like you're just a sympathizer, whereas someone like me who grew up in Brooklyn bephist ivisaid. That's one of the things that I have to deal with because when I tried to advocate certain issues, people see me where if I had lived in the suburbs, it would be different.

All right, Well, that's that's encouraging. In nineteen ninety, the police arrested Email. For the cops, it was an open and shutcase. They solved the murder in under twenty four hours. A trial. Email pleaded not guilty, The jury found him guilty, and the judge sentenced him to twenty two years to life, longer than he'd been alive. Email sometimes thought about his decision to go to the precinct voluntarily.

Go in, thinking you're being cooperative, and you get stuck like glue.

At the age of seventeen, Email was brought to Riker's Island, where his face was slashed while using a prison pay phone in his cell. Email contemplated his life.

I was just trying to make sense of it. How did this happen? I was always under the belief that to get a conviction, they want to make sure they get the right guy, especially in the murder case. And I finally got it. If I was going to prove that I did not shoot this guy, that I did not have anything to do with him getting killed, I needed to take matters into my own hand. I needed to learn the law to start to fight for myself, being my own advocate.

You might remember, Email was what you could call an accomplished prison citizen. His reputation for accomplishment spread through the institution. COAL noticed and.

I was just looking at him from a far and I really could see why he was never supposed to be in prison. He never fell into the mold of prison. He was running Cornell University College inside the prison. He was running a lot of programs inside of prison. He actually ran the whole industry that I made. The license plates in the prison, Email was doing a lot of positive things in prison.

By then, Email had taught himself a lot of law. He was recognized throughout the New York State prison system for his legal prowess. For six years at Auburn Correctional Institution, he taught a legal research class.

Everybody knew that that was my prim everything legal research, litigation, and working on actual innocence type stuff.

Inmates regularly came to him with their legal problems. They wanted help. Email turned most everyone away because most weren't serious.

I was willing to help the other inmates, but I've had my time wasted a lot of times where I could have spent that time on my own case.

Half a dozen years after Call entered prison, he started showing up at Email's door. You can imagine that Email wasn't exactly impressed with a drug dealer accused of murdering a couple of guys near his place of business, and so Email put cal to the test.

The little library is like the place that had the plague.

It.

We didn't have computers, we had typewriters.

We had to use the.

Books, so we had to do it the old fashioned way.

When you walk in it's.

Just rolls and bookshelves with just books, tons of books.

The little library opened for the evening at five thirty. One day, Email told Cal to meet him in the library. At five thirty.

Cal was there and he actually came down with a big fold of papers and he was patient. Actually, it was like he's organizing this stuff because he wants to make a presentation.

But Email lets Col know he's busy. This was the test.

If he wasn't serious, if he really wanted to go to the yard, he would have left on the early go back. But he stated, And I waited until about seven o'clock and I went and sat down next to him. Library had pretty much emptied out, and so I was saying, you know what you got here? And he started telling me his story.

That meeting changed CON's life.

Oh Man, email was very important to me. Man was like, yo, Cal, I know very emotional with your case, but you can't put all this stuff in your case.

Cal rambles.

He was more caught up in his own you know, anger and frustration. Well, he's saying like, I don't know what to do. He said, you know, would would you help me? I'm not asking you to do it for me, but just guide me.

But Email did do some of it for him.

I were a hundred page packet, right, Email turned that packet into fifteen or twenty pages. But it was so concise and so powerful. I was sending this packet out to a lot of the attorneys. I was getting a greater reception.

Right.

So that's when I really learned Yo, Email know his shit.

Email spent almost all of his free time in the law library, and not just to help other inmates. Once Email realized he had to help himself, he was energized. He started focusing granularly on that sweet sixteen party, the one at the community center with the teenagers jammed inside the building, dancing and shouting on a chilly night, and he concentrated on the shooting, the fatal shooting that happened towards midnight. He pieced the story together.

I'm in jail, so I'm calling everybody saying what specifically happened?

What would that?

And different people are telling me different stories.

Remember, Email says that at the party, he didn't see the fight or the shooting that followed, so he needed more information. He learned that there had been a beef between two groups of teenagers. One was led by an older teen a bully. He and his friends had beat up a couple of kids, and then someone put a bullet in the bully's chest. The prosecution supposed eyewitness claimed that someone was Email.

Once I realized where the prosecution witness was saying that he allegedly was, I told my defense attorney, I need him to get photos of the crime scene, because what the prosecution witness was testifying to was that he stood in a doorway and literally seen through a brick wall.

But in court, the prosecutor repeatedly and with an attitude like he was annoyed by the question, denied that he had the crime scene photos, which is bizarre. Cops always take crime scene photos and the prosecutor always receives them. Email was frustrated and depressed. Prison is a very lonely place, and Email's quote unquote investigation had stoled. Then one day out of blue, Email received a letter in the mail. It was handwritten and signed by a friend, a friend

If it's not part of the record, you can't use it. It doesn't even exist.

Email filed every possible appeal, but he could never include the letter. The DA dug in. He opposed each of Email's appeals, and each time the DA prevailed. By two thousand and seven, that's seventeen years after Email entered prison, his state appeals were exhausted. Like cal he had one last shot, a four to forty motion. The four forty offered a legal advantage. It allowed Email to argue that he was actually innocent, and this is key. He didn't have to stick to the record made in court. He

All you wanted to do was convict somebody for homicide. You knew they were I, and that's on the oath. And then you allowed him again to go on the oath to say I looked dead in this guy's.

Eyes, this guy being Email.

I've seen his entire face. I seen him reaching his waist pull a gun out, and I watched him pull a trigger, and I saw that gun flash and it hit the decease in the chest. That's a blatant material lie.

In his four forty papers, Email included the letter from Baron Blount, a letter he'd been waiting seventeen years to use. Yeah, the letter might not be a full confession, but it was close, and it surely qualified as newly discovered evidence. Email was recognized as a master jailhouse lawyer, but still he needed a licensed attorney to defend him in court. He'd recently read in the newspaper about a lawyer named Oscar mitchellin Oscar had won a big case for a

Was it was a relief for me, right talking to somebody who fucking got it. It didn't feel like I was trying to explain a foreigner language.

Oscar grew up in the Bronx. He lives in Long Island now, a bald, middle aged man with electric guitars from his rock and roll days strewn around the house. In the Bronx, he'd attended public school. He'd been to parties like the one that landed Email in jail.

Talking to Oscar. You know, everything that I explained to him is not subjected to this sense of you're lying because it doesn't jive with my life experience.

An Email likes something else about Oscar.

He's aggressive. He doesn't just let them walk him around the courtroom like a fucking puppy like a lot of these lawyers, do you know, Ostill rolls up the sleeves and like, fuck it, this is a rumble, let's get to it.

Email one is for forty motion, and that earned him a hearing on the merits of his case. At that hearing, he could win a reversal of his conviction, and so in two thousand and nine, Email was seated at the defense table with Oscar. There's no recording of this hearing, but I know there was one key spectator, Email's mother. She sat in the back. Email was prepared for a legal war, but then surprisingly, before the hearing started, the

He said, no, no, no, we don't think you shot him. We think you were involved. And that's when my head probably should have exploded.

Twenty years earlier, Email had been indicted as the sole actor, not for anything else, not for being.

Involved, me solo by myself.

He said, I know, you guys probably didn't do this.

That's Oscar talking about the prosecutor.

But I got nothing on Blount.

Of course, at that point, the DA's office didn't think it worth the effort to speak to Baron Blount, the author of the letter. So yeah, they had nothing on Blount.

Know me that he said to.

Me, he being the prosecutor, He.

Said to me, sometimes we can't let the truth get in the way of justice.

I said, what the fuck does that mean?

In effact, the prosecutor is talking to Email.

You're basically telling me I don't care. That's the truth getting lost in a pursuit of justice.

The prosecutor said he was sure that Email was a participant in the murder.

I believe that he was involved somehow, So I'm going to continue to pursue him. He's going to cheat like they did in my first droute.

Yes, I wasn't going to get a fair hamon or fair dropper.

Even though the prosecutor seemed convinced that Email was not the shooter, he had no intention of letting him off. Even if the judge ruled in Email's favor and vacated his conviction. The prosecutor assured Email he would not relent. He promised to oppose bail and to take Email to trial again.

He's despicable. This was a piece of shit movie did here.

But the prosecutor did have an alternative. The prosecutor agreed to overturn the murder conviction, but he insisted that Email plead guilty to being an accomplice the complete fiction. In exchange, the DA would get Email out on time served. He'd never get those nineteen years back. But he could walk out in the next few days.

I'm asking you don't make him take the offer. I said he would admit to kidnapping Charle Limbrough's baby right now to get out.

Are you kidding me?

It's Christmas in a week, it's his birthday in a little while.

She wants to be home, and Email's mother wanted him home. In the back of the courtroom, she was in tears. Her son had been kidnapped by the state and now he faced a terrible choice. If he pleads guilty, he won't be able to sue the government for wrongfully imprisoning him. Col got more than five million dollars in compensation, and he was a drug dealer who helped bring crack to the Bronx. Email was an honor student snatched out of high school, and he'd qualify for nothing. Horrible Email took

And I really, honestly do believe that he thinks it's fucked up the way some of us just got fucking manhattaned.

Email would never say so, but I knew he was angry. I could hear it in his voice, angry at what the criminal justice system had done to him. And so he and Oscar came up with a plan. Oscar sent a letter asking DA Gonzalez to reinvestigate Email's case. On the face of it, Oscars asked, was ridiculous. No one I'd ever spoken to could recall the DA's Conviction Review Unit reopening the case of someone who'd pled guilty and who, on top of that, was out of prison and doing well.

When he read Baron's letter, he said, he read it two or three times. He's like, this fucking guy.

Did this shit.

Suddenly there was energy behind Email's claims, the wheels of justice, a different sort of justice started to turn. The letter traveled to the desk of Assistant District Attorney Rachel Kalman, who'd been at the CRU for four years. Rachel is not someone whose vibe shouts I love a fight, and in all likelihood that's what was in store if the investigation went forward. But she was determined to get to the bottom of this. Where did she start?

So the first step was to authenticate this letter. Anyone could have written a.

Letter, including Email, so.

I had to get the original copy of the letter, which I did. We were satisfied that he had written that letter.

So now Rachel wanted to hear what Baron Blount had to say for himself. These days, Baron seemed to be an upstanding citizen. I looked at his Facebook page. On it Baron's tall and in his photos he's rarely smiling. He lives in New York and Facebook says he works at the Department of Education. Along the way, he'd become a pastor. One post says God. First. Family. Second, there are a bunch of photos of kids in one of

We finally found him at his job.

Baron Blount worked at a school.

I had no idea what we'd be walking into, particularly where I was going to say, did you murder someone that your friend went to jail for doing that? But as soon as I saw him, I got an immediate sense of him then a little stooped, extremely red eyes, as if he hadn't slept in days and days and days.

Where do you talk to him?

We were in a classroom. He's a janitor. I was in elementary school.

So they were sitting in an empty classroom, Rachel Baron and two detectives sitting at those child sized tables. It must have been a bizarre scene. One detective is over six feet tall. His knees must have been in his chest.

I was more looking at him. I wasn't checking out the decorations all too carefully.

But in my imagination, the letters of the alphabet are strung across the top of a blackboard, block letters, and there's probably a fish tank. Certainly everything is in bright colors, and in the middle of that room where everything projects optimism and possibilities, is this woebegone janitor in a janitor's uniform green or tan, with the name stitched into a patch near the pocket. Rachel had the original letter and they'd established that it was from Barn, but they needed more.

We had got very far in the investigation, but it had to go farther.

They needed Baron to come in and give a full confession.

Did you think he was going to come in?

Fifty Barn did come in. Everyone sat in a big conference room with walls that seemed drained of color. The place had the look of a bunker. It wasn't clear what Baron had come to tell the das he brought his lawyer with him, who knew maybe Baron had come to bargain.

I thought that maybe he would be defensive, that he would be denying, But he had come in ready to unburden himself. Baron Blunt was sitting across the table, shuddered, hoveled and started to cry.

Yeah, Baron had carried a burden for a long time and.

Said it had been torturing him for years.

But he admits shooting him, right, he certainly did. How did he say I shot him?

I shot him as easy as that. This all made me think about Email, who'd been forced to take that plea in two thousand and nine.

I'm trying to square the fact that you went back investigated this and found essentially that that was bullshit, and for whatever reason, the district attorney's office didn't do that in two thousand and nine.

Well, we've progressed.

We've progressed. That covered a lot of sins. It's July twenty twenty two, two years after Oscar sent that letter asking the district attorney to reinvestigate Email's case. Email had just heard from Oscar. He learned that the letter had finally finally borne fruit. Oscar told him that Baron had confessed. Email had been waiting for this news for thirty three years. It occurred to me that Email might not just get a reversal of his conviction. He might be awarded a

Full exoneration of data.

Sound, Yeah, that's the only thing he could be So you are so motherfucking lo kating. Come on, have you gone through all the emotions yet? No? No, Email said, Email has been given a date to go to court so that a judge can rule on the motion to exonerate. Nothing is official until a judge bangs the gallo. They said the sixteenth.

So I'm like, all right, boo, Mar sixteen whatever. It's like, yeah, okay, Now I'll wait to with standing side by side and hear you say it out to me, just to make sure there's no other little tweak that's gonna send me left right.

So March sixteenth would make it official. I really wanted to be there, but I had plans. Our baby was due March sixteenth, and I wasn't going to leave my wife in the hospital alone. But she said go, She said I should be there. Email is our friend. So I dashed across town to the CRU's offices. I stood in the same gloomy bunker where Baron Blount had confessed. Email entered the room, seeming a little shy looking around. This was the preliminary to the court appearance. Die Gonzalez

And you know it was more comfortable for me because when I walked in there, my buddy Sea was there.

Email figured they could still pull a fast one. I've heard people say it's amazing that defendants whose convictions are overturned don't hold a grudge despite decades in prison. But Email had been snatched off the street as a teenager. You don't just walk past that.

It's thirty three years since this happened. Not once did anybody say sorry for your experience.

Nothing.

Every other people who are victimized in some form it's a gunshot, rape, child abuse, whatever is like victim services, etc. Right, we are the only group of motherfuckers who get victimized and then get.

Re abused again.

Well, he waited for Da Gunzalez. Email it out just a bit of his anger.

I'm like, Okay, let's see what the fuck y'all want to play with today? You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, because I'm like, Steve got my back. He's gonna record these motherfuckers this time too, and we're gonna put this shit out of somewhere y'all gonna keep playing these stupid fucking games.

Da Gunzalez walks into the bunker. He's stout, serious, halting, not naturally charismatic, but I'd known him for a while and he always struck me as sincere. He followed Email's case. It meant something to him personally.

I was basically entering college as you were going upstate. Your life could have been different. I I I need to on behalf of this office and the criminal legal system, you know, tell you that you've been wronged, and that today is another shot to finally correct there. So congratulations, thank you, and I'm sorry it took us as long as it took us to get to this place.

So Email got an apology finally, and then everyone marched over to the courtroom in an adjacent building on the park woar calendar.

And they have been one to zero eight eighth.

Of nineteen ninety Emil McDowell.

Rachel Kalman for the offer of the District Attorney, Good morning the bell.

It's pursuing to CBL four forty point ten one G and four forty point ten one H.

That is to vacate uh the previous combination on this matter that was entered based uponish Dellat took just a few minutes and then Email had the judge's order in his hands. Actually innocent. Email had been exonerated not only of murder, but the judge wiped away the guilty plea Email had entered for being an accomplice to murder. Nothing was on his record any longer.

I read it like five times.

Email called me and my wife the next day at the hospital.

Oh my god, to us. I was just really like, all right, this really happened, and he had really signed it, and it's really a thing. So it was, you know, it was, it was, it was, it was, I mean, it was great.

Email asked if he could stop by to see the baby. Of course, by then, he'd started just a bit letting himself daydream there'd be a settlement. Email is in line for millions. They'll fight over how many. But he he started to think, yeah, he liked classic cars, maybe he'd get one, and he'd definitely buy a house for his mother.

Well kids.

Part of what my game plan is. At a certain point, I plan on sitting down, you know.

For a little therapy session.

Right.

Email had never been in therapy So what do you think that therapy will help with.

It's just I'm getting it out hoping. It's just something to try, right.

That's what it is.

Yeah, But what he wanted to do.

What I wanted to do.

Is exercise, not like bike exercise like you know, the Exorcist.

I wanted to helped me exhale.

The re release of Empire on Blood is produced and sound designed by Emil Klein. Austin Smith is our associate producer and production coordinator. Fact checking by Ryan Alderman. The original production of the Empire on Blood was also produced by Emil Klein. Miel Lobell was our executive producer. Julia Barton our story editor, fact checking by Stephanie Daniel. Our advisor was Joel Ducett. Original scoring by Joel Saint Julian

A Kingdom Built on Blood leadsday king, lonely, bear the burdens of your citizen, then lonely.

But wear the blurred line between friend and foe. The last words you hear ghost

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