My interview with Tony Wright originally aired on April third of twenty seventeen, and since his full exoneration and declaration of actual innocence, he started working in the mailroom behing in Philadelphia's largest law firms, Pepper Hamilton in July twenty seventeen. Tony and I have done a number of appearances together. He's always full of life, full of wisdom, and just a great, great guy to be around, sort of a gentle giant of a man. And I'm proud to call
him my friend. And here's the good news. A lot of exgneries never get compensated, and we'll talk about those reasons in the course of the different episodes. But happy to report that in twenty eighteen, Tony Wright received a settlement of almost ten million dollars from the state of Pennsylvania.
I came from a beautiful neighborhood, had a beautiful life.
I went to sleep because September seventh was the first day of my high school year.
I was gonna be a senior.
At twenty two, I was set to start college.
I woke up and my wife was never the same again.
Cops came out with guns drawn and I never saw freedom ever since after that.
It's like roach mode, Tom, once you get in and I can't mount.
This is wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm. Welcome to another episode of Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm. Today, I am particularly honored to have the co founder and co director of the Innocence Project, Peter Neufeld, as well as our most recent I believe our most recent exgnery Tony Wright.
A man jail for twenty four years.
As we tried again today he was found not guilty of his crimes, and.
I walked back inside that prison for the last time. Man. All hell broke loose.
But Tony Wright was victed of the rape and murder of Luis Talley in Philadelphia back in nineteen ninety three, a crime he's always said he didn't commit. Lots of emotion today as the jury read its verdict in the courtroom, audible gas as they declared Anthony Wright not guilty.
Peter, Tony, welcome to the show. Thank you. So let's get right into it. Peter came out well, sort of. We can only say he came out of retirement to if he hadn't actually tried a case in about twenty years prior to this one.
This was the first, my first criminal trial more than two decades, and probably first criminal trial where I was a sort of a principle in more like twenty five years.
And it's sort of counterintuitive because people wouldn't have thought of that, right But the fact is that in almost all the cases where we find DNA that truly proves that the person who's incarcerated convicted falsely but everyone to call it is actually innocent, the charges get dropped. But not here. This was a unique case in that sense, right now.
This was the first case in the twenty five year history of the Innocence Project where after the overwhelming evidence of innocence produced by the DNA testing was certainly enough to get the conviction vacated, Whereas in almost every other case, the prosecutors would then dismiss the chargers. Here the Philadelphia DA said, no way, we're going to back up our detectives, frankly who framed Tony and make you go through another trial.
So Tony, even after the DNA evidence came back exonerating him, had to stay in prison another two and a half years awaiting the retrial.
It's extraordinary and it's horrifying. Tony has sort of become almost like a face of the innocence movement because of the incredible coverage and Rolling Stone Magazine which ran a phenomenal story focusing of course on the misconduct of the Philadelphia police and prosecutors and on this case. In that story, it was very poignant when they said that in this century or whatever they however they phrased it, a black man has a better chance of getting justice in Philadelphia,
Mississippi than he does in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And that's really a terrible indictment of a city, a Northeastern city where people would think that the justice system would function much better than it would in the Deep South. But Tony, I want to get to you. So let's go back to the beginning.
You grew up.
You were in Pennsylvania, born and bred right, yes, And so you grew up in Philadelphia proper, yes? And what was that like?
I was raised by just my mother. My father wasn't there because he didn't want to be there. He wasn't there because at that time my mother wouldn't allow him to be there. I mean, he's a great guy, he's he's president in my life every day now and has been for a very long time. I grew up in the worst part of the city with my mom.
And you had a very difficult childhood with I guess it was your stepfather, right, who was very violent.
Yeah, very beautiful, I mean very It was more so to my mother, but you know, you know I had to endure that as well. You know, as a small child growing up. That's hard.
You know, No, I'm getting the chills thinking about it, because that's almost I would imagine for those of us who have an experience that we can't imagine it. But the fact is, not being able to defend your own mother from a violent predator like that is a terrifying scenario for any child. And I want to fast forward a little bit, Tony, So you ended up getting in
some trouble, but then really turning your life around. We were diverted as a young adolescent, really fifteen years old, right, You were diverted to a program for troubled use as opposed to being sent to prison.
Yeah.
The program was called Vision Quest at that time. I believe Vision Quests saved my life and helped me put things back in perspective because as an alternative to actually lock an use up. I mean, you know, no handcuffs, no nothing. So you know, as a structured environment, very disciplined, right, no picnic either, No no pick, definitely not no picnic. I mean it was hard, but you know, it instilled so much discipline in you, patience, and back then it was a great place place for me to be. I
was there three years. I built some relationships with people that really took care of me. I mean, so you know, a lot of kids was up there for not going to school and shoplifting that, and I was up there for a sat with the police and which was very serious. And you know, the people told me, you know, if I do came there and did what I was supposed to do, they'll take care of me. And they did just that.
Man, And you really did turn your life around. And that's what makes this story particularly tragic because when we get to the point of when you were arrested for a crime you had no knowledge of. It had nothing to do with a brutal crime, the rape and murder of a seventy seven year old woman. You know, you were on the right track, right, You were working a full time job in construction. You had a young son. We were still very young, twenty years old, right, So
let's go back to that. And you know, the facts of the case are well known and have been well documented, so let's go through that. You're twenty years old. You're sitting at home. It's a Sunday afternoon, right Sunday afternoon, very normal, everything cooking, getting ready for the football game.
When I'm ready for the football game. October twentieth, you never forget it, man, it was the worse day of my life. I was staying with my mother at the time, me and my girlfriend and my son was over my mother's house and my mother and my girlfriend was in the kitchen cooking brunch, and they just woke me up. And I was laying on a couch and my son was sitting underneath me, playing with his toys. And it was a knock at the door, and almost simultaneously, the
phone rung. I grabbed the phone and answered the phone, and my mother came in the living room and answered the door. And when I asked the phone, it was my son's grandfather on the phone, who lived down North Philly at the time, and he said, the police just left here looking for you. I said, well, they just walked in in the house. I'll call you back soon as they leave, let me see what they want. And when I got off the phone, you know, they said they wanted to take me down to the station and
asked me some questions. So, you know, growing up, we taught that the police is the people that protect you and serve the community. Again, I didn't do anything wrong, so I didn't have a problem with going with them to ask whatever questions they had for me. And when I got to the station, instead of asking me questions, they told me that they know I committed this murder. They got evidence to back it up, and they also had witnesses.
Right, And this is I mean, we're talking Peter, going back to you know, this is twenty five years ago in Philadelphia.
Right, October nineteen ninety.
One, October ninety one. And back then, the culture in Philadelphia was so I mean, it was as backwards as it could be, is that right.
It was during the time when the police had declared war on drugs, had declared war on black youth, and the combination of the two obviously would come down heaviest on people like Tony and his peers, and they didn't really care about staying within the rules. That was the main thing they wanted to close these cases. There were a number of homicides. They just wanted somebody to be
held accountable. And you had a situation here where the people who were in fact were part of the real group that were responsible for the rape and murder of this woman. Decided that Tony was the person that they would name because it would deflect attention from themselves, and it was somebody who the police would like to get because of that prior run and that Tony had had with the police that sent him to vision quest a
few years earlier. So that was the situation, and once they decided to go with Tony, rules didn't matter anymore. And as you can appreciate, the very first thing is when they bring him in to question him. If you believe the police version, they bring Tony in and within a minute and a half, Tony simply gives a detailed confession to the rape and murder, without any interrogation, any questioning anything. It's not tape recorded, it's not videotape, it's
not even in Tony's words. It's simply written out. As they said of verbatim Q and A by the police. It was idiotic. There's no way any of that happened. It was disproved that it could have happened during our trial. But that's how they did it, and they got away with it in those days.
Yes, it was systematic, and it was really part of a culture that had been created by a Rizzo, right who was the former police chief and a high school dropout who rose through the ranks to become one of the most brutal police chiefs in the history of this country, and he openly endorsed violence.
Domestic battery, aggravated assault with a handgun, child endangerment. Officer Richard Rizzo's arrest record by his own department reads like a launder list of bad police behavior. The seventeen year veteran has been investigated twenty nine times for rules violations, has been suspended seven times, and still has three disciplinary cases pending.
So this was really not really out of the even though out of the ordinary.
Well, in fact, to be very very specific, the precinct with this incident occurred the thirty ninth that in that year or the year before, a number of officers in that precinct were indicted by the federal government for corruption and convicted and sent to prison. Wow, so it's not just an abstraction. It was going on right there.
So back to you, Tony. So there you are in the police station. You're twenty years old, and we know, we have research that shows how common it is for a false confession to be elicited or coerced from a minor. Right, often it's teenagers. But at twenty you're still not fully developed. Right, You're not a child, but you're not really a grown up yet. But in your case, there was a real threat of physical violence, right if you were handcuffed to
a chair. I mean, walk us through that terrifying situation that you were in.
I was waiting for somebody to come and said it was a joke, man, But it just kept going on and on and on and on and wouldn't stop. Man. And at twenty years old, you know, I wanted my mother, man, I wanted to see my mother bad. You know how I've never been in that type of situation. Man. It was crazy.
Uh.
You know, they handcuffed me to a chair in the middle of between both of my legs and the chair that I was sitting in. They made me sign the paper. They actually told me if I signed and I can go home.
What the detectives specifically say to you when he got in your face.
Oh, he said he was gonna poke my eye and skull fuck me.
Right, Well, that's I mean, at that point, you'd sign anything, right in fact, and you didn't know what you were signing, because if, as Peter was saying, if we were to believe the police version of events, you walked in and said basically volunteered to be executed. Right, You're like, yeah, I'm just gonna sign this thing. You guys, go ahead and execute me and I'll see you later. But in fact, you were there. You didn't have a lawyer, right, you
didn't have a guardian or a parent. Right, yet you were all alone against overwhelming odds and the threat of extreme physical violence, which was a real threat. We know from those days that was they weren't kidding.
Oh man, you just said, Man, that whole regime down there, and at the time, twenty five years ago.
Man, and we know that it's I mean, it's improved, but there's still a lot of work to be done to fix the system. I mean, there's still a lot of this stuff going on around the country in Philadelphia, right, and Peter.
Well, you know what's going on, because in fact, you know, these cops did frame Tony. And yet in twenty fifteen, the DA's office said, we're going to back up those cops, okay, because we don't want the public to know that our cops are framing innocent people for crimes. So the DA's office was complicit, right with the cops, except they're doing it in twenty fifteen, not nineteen ninety one.
So victed of a crime you know nothing about, and sent to prison where you're there pretty much in an impossible situation, separated from your son, separated from your family, in a terrible prison.
Right.
Yeah. I just think the one thing you may want to mention is that when he's convicted, he's convicted of capital murder. So he was facing the death penalty and probably would have been executed but for the fact that his mother came in during the sentencing phase and just begged the jury to spare my son, who's a decent human being and wouldn't have done something like this. And so the vote was seven to five to execute Tony. And in Pennsylvania, unlike a place like Alabama, you needed
a unanimous vote to execute somebody. So but for those few votes, Tony would be dead now, despite the fact that he was factually innocent.
So there you are in prison. But you didn't give up, hope, right. I think a lot of people would and no one could imagine what it's like. But you didn't give up. You worked in the law library, you wrote letters right and then and then what happened? How did all this turn around?
My family? My family first, man, my family.
For your family, stuck by you, which is fantasy.
Me always, I didn't feel sorry for myself, man. I just wanted out of there. Yeah, I mean, I just made sure my business and did anything I was supposed to do. Wrote letters, and I wrote sent letters to everybody, and surprisingly almost every letter was responded to. Everybody wrote back, and everybody referred me to the Instance project over New York.
How many letters did you write? Was it one a week or one a month? Day?
Ten at a time. I put ten in the box all the time to day, No, ten, about ten a week, ten a week? Yeah, I mean I just sent them to everybody, everybody that had some type of legal facility, you know, I just wanted some feedback from the people, and a lot of people was interested in my case, and everybody kept it. I guess it was out their jurisdiction. And everybody kept referring me back to the Essence Project
over New York City. And I had written the Nocent Project first, and as you know, when they'd written me back, they sent me a question there and then they said, you know, don't send no additional information, don't call, and we'll contact you as we felt we need some information
from you. And during the time just waiting to hear from the Essence Project, I just kept sending letters and letters and letters, and as an Edison Project was doing this investigation until my case, and finally they accepted it.
And then one day you get a letter from the Niscence Project. It's almost like getting a letter from the lottery commissioned, like, hey, we find your ticket or something.
Right, you have no idea, man. When I got that letter, I read the letter and I thought I was seeing something that I wasn't seeing, or I was reading something that wasn't there. I thought I was dreaming. I got the letter and it was a ut of saying that they accepted my keys. I put the letter down and put it in the cell, shut the door to the long walk down a jail block, and walk back. Yeah. I mean a couple of deep breaths, went back in and read it. Man, it was it was. It was unbelievable.
It was unbelievable, Peter, let's talk about that.
So we get a lot of letters, right, I mean, we have boxes, you know, it's an amazing thing to see. Right, we have the intake department, as we call it. Right, we get letters from all over the country, hundreds a month actually, Right, And so how did it come to be that Tony's case was was accepted? And let's let's explain the process, because I think it's interesting.
So, I mean, one of the problems at the Innocence Project is obviously there's an overwhelming demand for our representation. And so so the way we work, and it's almost like an emergency room in an urban hospital, is you deal with the most critical cases first. So obviously anyone who sentenced to death goes to the top of the list,
and we'll look at those cases first. Otherwise, Tony's case comes in and it goes online and when people get to it, they get to it and that can take a couple of years to evaluate the case, to pull out old transcripts, to look at police reports, lab reports, and see whether or not Tony's case is the kind of case that we could take at the project. And
that's very simple. If it's a case where biological evidence was collected during the initial investigation, if DNA testing could demonstrate that this individual was innocent or likely to be innocent, and that biological evidence still existed, we would take the case irrespective of what other evidence was used to convict somebody, as long as the individual was saying I didn't do it.
And in this case, it was like the trifacta right because all of the it matched up on all of those criteria. And of course, in Pennsylvania particularly, we know that race is a factor in wrongful conviction. So Tony had it all stacked against him, right, he had the.
Except for two things, okay. One is when the case was litigated by our staff attorneys in Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia DIA's office said, this is not a case involving who was there. It's not an id issue because Tony write it, confessed to the cops, all right, He signed a confession and once you sign a confession, you're no longer eligible
for DNA evidence under Pennsylvania law. So the Innocent Project lawyers had to litigate the case for eight years up to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court before they remanded it back to the trial court, saying no, no, no, no, no, Wait a second, just because you say there was a confession doesn't mean it's a reliable confession. And if this biology and the biology could be determinedive, you have that
right to DNA testing. So years were wasted by the stubborn resistance of the Philadelphia DA's office just to do.
In the test.
Forget the consequences of the test, Let's just do the test.
They were opposed to it, which is incredible, right, because a DNA test. The only thing that can happen with a DNA test is that it can find the truth. Right, it's going to find the truth. It might be turned out that the guy's guilty on that, and that happens in some of our cases too.
It certainly happens, right.
And if it is, it is. But I mean, it's so odd that somebody would be opposed to finding out the truth.
Well, it's odd if your purpose as a prosecutor or as a court is the search for the truth and justice if, on the other hand, as was the case with the Philadelphia DA's office, that they thought their primary
responsibility was to defend convictions. In fact, when they initially set up a conviction integrity unit at about the same time that we were fighting to vacate Tony's conviction, the individual assigned to be in charge of that unit said not that his job was to get to the truth and we look at old cases, but his job was to defend the integrity of all old convictions. It was like something out of nineteen eighty four.
So, Tony, So now you're languishing in prison. You know the Innocence Project has got your case. You know they're on your side. You know you have a lot of hope. But it's got to be a tortuous process. And then things get even crazier, right because twenty two years into this, right, it's a lifetime that you've been in prison, and the DNA test comes back and shows, well.
That Tony right committed.
This crown shows that you were telling the truth all along, other than the false confession which was obtained basically under torture. Absolutely, right, so now you're like, I mean, and people at the Inniss Project got to be high fiving, right, and everybody's like, Okay, we're good. We're going to get this guy home and
go back and try to rebuild your life. But as Peter was representing before, that's not what happened, because in this case, they were more interested in standing by the conviction and protecting what they now knew was a false conviction than they were in any type of justice for a guy who they now knew was innocent. And so how the hell does that work? Because anybody would say, well, wait a minute, don't they have to let him go now? So how did they get around now?
So the way it works is, okay, there are two parts to the exoneration process. The first thing you have to do is you have to get them to vacate the original conviction. Once you vacate the original conviction, then it's up to the district attorney whether they want to dismiss the charges or whether they want to retry the case. So in this instance, initially they even fought us on vacating the conviction, and we were about to have a one week hearing in court when the Philadelphia Inquirer came
out with an editorial saying, this is crazy. You have to vacate the conviction based on the new DNA evidence. You can't go forward. And once that story appeared, and that editorial appeared the day before the hearing was to commence, the prosecutor threw in the towel and vacated the conviction, but then announced they were going to retry him, and they were going to retry it as a capital murder.
Right, And now this is particularly I mean, it's as disturbing as it is fascinating. Right, So it was a rape and murder of a seventy seven year old woman, Tally, right, Louise Tally was her name. And so now we've got the DNA that proves with absolute scientific certainty that Tony couldn't have been the guy that did it, So they had to come up with something like what kind of crazy theory could you possibly concot.
So, just to appreciate the setting, So it's the rape and murder of a seventy seven year old widow who lived alone in a modest house in North Philadelphia. She stabbed to death repeatedly after being raped. The DNA testing and it was always the police understanding that there was a single perpetrator crime. So the DNA testing on the seamen a collective from the rape kit, excluded Tony Wright as being the source. Okay, that's number one. Number two.
Once they get a single male profile, it goes off to the CODIS national DNA database of convicted felons that was established by the FBI. It goes off to the database and boom, they get a hit. They get a hit on a guy named Ronnie Bird who at the time, Tony Wright had never known this person, have met this person. Tony Wright was at the time, in nineteen ninety one, was twenty years old. This guy, Ronnie Bird was forty twice Tony's age, but half the age of Missus Tally,
the victim in this case. And we find out that Ronnie Bird was a crack addict at the time who lived as a squatter in an abandoned half house that was adjacent to the backyard of Missus Tally's home.
Okay, so it's amazing, right, right, So.
It's obvious Missus Tally wasn't romantically involved with anybody. Obviously, Ronnie Bird is the person who raped her and murdered her and stole her TV sets, because the TV sets were seen the very next day being sold on the street by one of Ronnie Bird's friends, who was a crack dealer who lived a few houses down. Remember, Tony didn't even live in the neighborhood, so it was obviously Ronnie Bird. So what are they going to do. They have no evidence to connect Tony Wright to Ronnie Bird,
so they invent an insane theory. And the theory is that based on the confession, you should believe that Tony Wright raped and killed this woman, and that when he fled the house, he left the front door Ajar, and after he left, this crackhead who lived as a squadron nearby row the door Ajar, wandered into the house and
vaginally raped and anally sodomized a corpse. Literally, what they were saying is that Ronnie Bird was the unindicted necrophiliac, and that was the theory they put forward to the second jury this summer in Philadelphia to try and get a conviction.
Not just any corpse, a bloody corpse.
Right, And also it wasn't just that we got to remember in terms of where Ronnie birds seamen was found what they had to acknowledge was that Ronnie Bird vaginally raped this woman and then Italy sodomized this corpse. It was ridiculous, it was offensive, it was mean spirited. But because it was an office and a leadership in the Philadelphia DIA's office that cared more about defending corrupt cops
than getting to the truth. Unfortunately, Tony Wright had to endure another trial where if he lost, he would face the rest of his life in prison without parole.
And this is this whole case is so there's so many problems with it. There's evidence we haven't even talked about from earlier, from the first trial, right where they invented theories about him about Tony having had her clothing in his home, which was not true. They brought in the shoes that were the wrong side. They claimed that her TV set was in his house, which it wasn't. There were so many lies, and then they just kept building this house of lies higher and higher, right until
eventually it had to topple. But it took another two and a half years, testing Tony's patience and will even further. And then here comes Peter Neufeld and the Innocence Project team down to Philadelphia, Tony, they bring you back to court, right, but now your roll in not only with conviction, not only with scientific evidence, but also with a team of lawyers that is ready to take on the toughest challenges.
I should add that the team from the Innstance Project was our senior staff returning in Arrison who've been working on Tony's case trying to get DNA testing for eight years, and myself, and then we teamed up with two fabulous lawyers at the Schneider firm in Philadelphia, Sam and Rebecca, and they were just wonderful. And so Tony had four lawyers who were going to the mat Forum and.
We did, rolling in like the fucking Avengers. I like it. So let's go to the you know, the verdict. So there you are in court, twenty five years later, twenty five years in prison, you're back in court. The evidence has been read, the jury goes out. That must be an incredible amount of pressure. And I mean, you've already been through this, You've already been through everything. There's nothing they can throw you haven't seen already. But nonetheless, what happens,
they don't deliberate, they didn't deliver it. For very long, did they.
Well further and form. Well, I've never felt so sure comfortable about anything in my life. Very comfortable with the men and women we selected to serve on this jury. I felt very comfortable with my team. I just wanted my day in court. I was looking forward.
To It was your family there. Everybody was there, so you had a whole you had a whole contingent there.
You had that everybody, my family, friends, people I didn't know, so many people was down there to support.
And then and then the jury went out and they came back unbelievably quickly, really right, I mean there was a long trial.
Well it was a two and a half weree trial, and the jury went out at noon, and the clerk had ordered sandwiches for them, and it's our understanding that they actually reached a verdict within five or ten minutes, but they stayed there because the sandwiches have been delivered, and so they finished the sandwiches and then told the courtroom deputy that they were ready to render their verdict.
And they didn't just render their verdict. This was a particularly powerful thing, didn't didn't some of them cry as.
They crying as was part of the defense team and Tony all at the same moment when the verdict was delivered, which was basically not guilty on all counts, And it was not only an extraordinary moment which Tony should describe, but the only thing I will say, which is really a continuation of the bad faith of the Philadelphia DIA's office. They immediately issued a statement saying just because they voted
not guilty doesn't mean that he's innocent. In fact, it just means they have a reasonable doubt, to which the jurors responded on their own, told the press, that's ridiculous, Okay, They said, the evidence of his innocence was overwhelming, and that's what contributed to the verdict that we delivered. Had nothing to do with reasonable doubt, and it had to do with the fact that we unanimously concluded within minutes that ton Right was completely innocent of these crimes.
And then there's more still to the story, because here's these jurors who had been there for two and a half week, the serious imposition in anybody's life. But they didn't leave, right, They stayed. And why did they stay?
They wanted to see me, Well, they wanted to see me. They was out there with all my legal team, all my family.
They wanted to meet the family. And then, and then, and then, I love this part of the story, Tony, So in just one more little sort of fuck you, right, I mean, in any other situation. And I'm sure people are thinking as they're hearing the story, well, now it's triumphant.
You're free.
They take off the handcuffs, you walk out of the court room into the sunshine, there's balloons, ribbons, whatever the hell there is. But that's not they didn't even do that, right, But there was this over lining.
So they took you.
Back to jail right just because they could, which seemed so ridiculous.
Well it wasn't just that. What happened was when the jury returned the verdict of not guilty, we explicitly on the record, then asked the judge to set him free so we could walk out of the courtroom into the arms of his son and all his aunts and the rest of his family. And the judge refused to do it,
just refused to do it. So the jurors were all waiting downstairs expecting that Tony will be released momentarily from the courthouse and they could hug him which is what they wanted to do, and the judge said no way, and so Tony had to go back to the Philadelphia jail, which was about fifteen miles away from the courthouse, and we had to get a court order. We then had to go out to the county jail to get Tony, but the jurors said they wanted to come back. They
wanted to see him. And so the next day the jury, though they had been discharged, they were no longer part of this case, they took off from work whatever they were doing, and they all went up into town to the Schnada firm and waited just so they could have a moment to embrace Tony Wright, who they knew had endured so much adversity for so many years for something he clearly didn't do.
Right. They wanted to embrace, and they wanted to apologize for what the city of Philadelphia had done to their fellow citizen. Right. But here's the such a happy moment, and I could tell you really lit up when you were talking to me about it before, Tony. So they take you back to the jail, right, But you're on cloud nine, right because you know you're going home and you've been vindicated, and you've been pretty much. I mean, you can't be you can't be more powerfully vindicated than
by this particular jury, and so quickly. It's such an indictment of the of the prosecution who had wrongfully persecuted you. So you go back to the jail and then what happens. You walk in and what happened.
You got a high profile case and you're going back to court. Everything that's happening, you know, I mean going and coming. The jail is always aware of it. I mean, just for the safety of that and made the safety of the institution. You don't know how it's gonna go. You know, I've been on trial for two and a half weeks and everybody's you know, since I got damned, myself was vacated. Everybody had been paying attention to everything
that was going on with me. News reporters outside the court every day, you know, trying to talk to one of my attorneys or all my family, and you know, they reported on the news every night. I was on the front of the paper every.
Day, every day, going back and forth.
Every Monday through Friday, whatever happened to court that day. They had editorial about it in the Philadephia Deli News every single day. I was on the front of the punt of paper for two and a half weeks every day as long as the trial went on. So everybody the institution, you know, the inmates or the papers and you know, pass them around word of mouth, so everybody was really playing a closer tend to what was going
on with me. And and unbeknown to me, uh, when a verdict came in, I guess it was pronounced on the radio that they have a verdict. So you know, they said they locked the jailing down at that point, and the guards was everybody hollowed around the TVs and and and and they computers and and and when the verdict came in, now guilty, they said. The s guards first was screaming, hiling, running around things, saying he they
just acquitted him, you know what I mean? So uh, and not knowing you know I I you just said that I was on cloud nine. I didn't even care that I had to be shadowed one more time and take that last ride back up to the prison because the judge refused and signed off and let me walk out the court room with my family and my attorneys. And when I walked in and when I bought me off that bus and I walked back inside that prison for the last time, Man, all hell broke loose. Man.
Everybody was so guards was jumping up and down. Who came and got me off the bus first? And then when I went to the houses you know where I was housed, that everybody it was so much noise, scream and everybody was hugging me and high five. I mean, it was beautiful. It was beautiful.
Yeah, that's a scene that really, I mean, I wish it was on film, right, we would show it every chance we got.
Well, the one thing we did get to see, which was pretty cool. Two things. One is when the legal team came out with his family to get him. They brought us into the reception area and they closed it off to everybody else, and the superintendents and all the top brass of the jail came out and stood in the line. They all had big smiles on their faces and they all wanted to watch. They all wanted to watch Tony Wright reunited with his family. They all congratulated him.
There were hugs there. It was really quite extraordinary to see all these people. They were all thrilled for Tony, for his family. And then when we took Tony on the walk outside the jail for about i'd say, three hundred yards to get back to the parking lot where the press was, You're walking alongside the jail, tier after tier after tear, and the noise was incredible. Everybody was banging pots and pans against the window, yelling good luck and all that the entire jail and we heard it too,
and it really did send chills through my spine. And it's a sound, it's a wave of sound that I'll never forget.
Yeah, it's something you couldn't even make up right, It's just it's something that happened.
It's real. You're real, you're here.
You're in New York. That's sun is shining. You're one of the most positive people that we know. And he spoke so eloquently last night at an event in New York. And I'm really thrilled that you were able to come and be here on Wrongful Conviction and I want to thank you and Peter Neufeld. This has been a very special episode of Wrongful Conviction, and Tony, I hope you enjoy the rest of the day and the rest of your life, because you deserve every great blessing that could come your way.
Thank you, don't forget to give us a fantastic review. Wherever you get your podcasts.
It really helps. And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project and I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocenceproject dot org to learn how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wartis. The music in the show is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction
and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one.
During the Wine in the Way, Ny