Back in twenty seventeen, I recorded in an episode with Michelle Murphy and Michelle was wrongfully convicted of the murder of her baby, Trevor, of fifteen week old boy. She was egregiously framed and served twenty years to the day in prison of a life sentence. Upon her release, a judge said through tears that in his four decades on the bench, it was the worst miscarriage of justice he'd
ever seen. She's been fully exonerated, and she is an extraordinary person who is full of life, very brilliant, and is working at the Bail Fund in Oklahoma helping two free other women from sentences they don't deserve and getting them back home with their.
Families where they belong.
Sad news is that in twenty eighteen March of twenty eighteen, she lost a lawsuit that she filed against the city of tall for violating her civil rights. There are ongoing developments and hopefully this wrong will be eventually righted. But it's shocking to say that now, almost five years since her release, she has gotten nothing from the state of Oklahoma or anyone else for her twenty years of wrongful incarceration. Her daughter from whom she was taken at the age
of seventeen. When this tragedy happened, she was taken directly to interrogation. She was interrogated for nine hours, without an attorney, without a parent. It was an illegal interrogation, and from that interrogation she was taken to jail and never saw her daughter again. The good news is that in twenty eighteen, in May, she was reunited with her daughter, and I
was there. It was an unbelievably emotional scene. Her daughter, not twenty five, has a daughter of her own, and so there's still a lot of healing to be done. But Michelle is one of the strongest and bravest people I've ever known, and you have to hear her story to believe it. Michelle Murphy Wrongful Conviction Shout out to Michelle.
I fell into the hands of a corrupt detective.
I was naive enough to believe that I would be able to just present all of my proof of actual innocence, that they would investigate adequately, and so that I wouldn't be going to prison because I was a good person. I hadn't done anything wrong.
In the back of your mind, you say, well, when we go to a hearing, we go to court, the truth will come out. The prosecution from day one knew I was innocent and let forced testimony go uncorrected from the lower courts all the way up to the United States Supreme Court.
You have someone with a badge with ultimate and in that moment unchecked authority.
Don't presume that people are guilty when you see him on TV, because it may just be a dirty DA that is trying to rise upward.
Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flomp. I'm actually almost at a loss for words already today because one of my favorite humans is here in the studio with us. Michelle Murphy, the only female ax honery in the history of Oklahoma.
Twenty years in prison for a crime she didn't commit.
On September twelfth, nineteen ninety four, Murphy's fifteen week old son, Travis was found debt his throat slit. One year later, Murphy was found guilty of murder received a life sentence without the possibility of parole. This morning at Tulsa County judge dismissed Mischelle Murphy's conviction. Prosecutors asked for the conviction to be vacated because of new evidence they just became aware of. It involves DNA evidence. They say it wasn't
available twenty years ago. Murphy's attorneys, however, say the Ditrich attorney's office always had the evidence and it was im Haarriss himself who applied to jurors twenty years ago. The blood the crime scene belonged to Murphy.
After two decades in prison, including four years of legal work, Murphy, now thirty seven, gets a second.
Chance at life.
Michelle welcome, Thank you. Yeah, it's good to you. Hear.
And with Michelle is her attorney, Shannon McMurray, and is working on her civil suits. So Shannon, welcome to ronful conviction.
Thank you.
So Michelle, your case is really it's just beyond I mean, your case is so extreme that the judge in your original hearing said that in his more than four decades on the bench, it was the most terrible miscarriage of justice he'd ever seen. But let's go back to the beginning. You were born in Tulsa, Yes, that's great. And what was your upbringing like? You had a difficult childhood.
Did you not?
Yes?
I did. I was brought up in poverty stricken projects, and welfare. I was in and out of foster homes. I went through pretty much every form of abuse you can think of as.
A child, and then you ended up at the age of seventeen with two kids, right, yeah, which may not be as unusual in Oklahoma, but certainly in many parts of America, people be like, wow, that's you know, that's pretty crazy. And you had a difficult relationship with the father of your children.
As well, right, It was a dysfunctional relationship, but I had kicked him out, and I was raising my kids on my own because that's all I wanted was kids in my own to raise.
I've pretty much brought up my sisters and my brother, so I.
Wanted to get out there and have my own.
So I started a little early.
You raise your sisters and your brothers as well, so you were you had experience at this, right, right, Although at seventeen, how much experience can you really have? You'd been through some crazy stuff already, as you said, every kind of abuse and everything else, So I guess you were sort of prepared.
You know, I knew it all, but I was seventeen. What seventeen year old doesn't think that they know everything? And they're ready to take on the world. All I ever wanted was my own kids, and I was ready to make it happen, and I did so.
Now we fast forward to that faithful night we're talking about September twelfth, nineteen ninety four, right when you went to sleep, probably more or less like any other night, you had your two and a half year old daughter right right and your baby son, Travis. Can you just walk us through what happened that night, because it's, you know, it's really the beginning of what is going to be an unbelievable saga.
Well, after I left visiting a friend of mine, I went home. I fed Michelle, my daughter, and I fed Travis and gave him his little bath and everything else, prepared him for sleeping, went to sleep, and I couldn't sleep for some reason, so I stayed up and I was going through baseball cards that I was trying to save for him for his future, because I just wanted him to have something that could possibly be a collectible
one day or something, you know. And I was making a list of them and stuff until I finally was able to go to sleep. And I can't even remember what time it was that I went to sleep, and when I woke up, my my lights were on, my head was hurting, and I noticed my son wasn't where he was when I laid him down to sleep.
You were sleeping with the kids right at the time.
My ac from upstairs had fallen out the window, and so at that time we were all just sleeping downstairs where it would be cooler, and we were sleeping on a couch, all three of us. I had a huge L shaped couch and so we were all in different areas on it asleep.
And so the first thing you would have noticed when you woke up is that your son was missing. I mean, because you're I mean, he would have been right in your immediate vicinity. He would have been in your eyesighted as soon as you woke up.
So he was gone, right, And my first instinct is to look and make sure that they're there and they're asleep and they're okay, because I woke up to try to go use the restaurroom.
Right and there's nowhere he could have gone. It was only fifteen weeks solds now that he walked somewhere, and I just.
I started panicking because I was like, where's where's my baby? You know, my front door was open and my closest friends lived right behind me at that time, so I went to go out the back door and that's when I found Travis.
He was in the kitchen.
Yeah, in a pull of his own blood.
It's the ultimate nightmare of anybody who's ever had a child.
So what did you do?
I freaked out. I went to my friends to get help.
And it's the last time I got to see my daughter, and it was the last time I felt complete half of my kids. You know.
After I went to my friends and they seen what had happened with Travis, they went and they called the police, and then they came out and I was in a police car. I remember sitting there and people just kept coming up to the car asking me what was going on. And eventually they took me to the police station where an officer of the law, if you could call him that,
interrogated me. And it wasn't so much an interrogation, it was more like a browbeating, like he told me I had done this, and this is what I did and how I did it, and why I did this and just and all I could say was I didn't do it.
There's so many things wrong with this story, even just this beginning part of the story, because it's illegal in Oklahoma for a seventeen year old you're a minor to be interrogated without an adult in the room, a guardian or an attorney, right, But that didn't.
Stop them at that time in Oklahoma. It was not proper. It's legal today, they've changed the law. But what they did to Michelle is nothing less than despicable.
But why would they do this? And here you were just an innocent child. I mean, you're still a child. And they interrogated you for seven fucking hours, and that is a long long time, particularly when you are in such a fragile state, right and you're seventeen, you have an eighth grade education, you're totally overmatch. You've apparently been hitting the ad right because you wake up with this horrible headache. And yet they really didn't manage to extract
the confession from you. Seven hours and they finally get you to say they say, you said something that was sort of like, you know, well, maybe I could have accidentally dropped a knife for what.
He had guided me to say. The investigator was guiding me and things that I needed to say this is how I did it, And I was more like asking him a question as to instead of making a statement, I was asking him that's what he wanted to hear, because because I wanted to see my daughter. I wanted to make sure my daughter was okay. I wanted to hold my daughter.
He made false promises. Just say it was an accident. Just say this, and you'll get to go home, and you'll get to see your daughter. We'll get you counseling, we'll get you therapy. You just need to say it this way. When he didn't like what Michelle said, he would start the recording over again. Michael Lee William was very likely the person who decapitated Travis and left him dead in Michelle's kitchen. There was no knife, no weapon
ever found, absolutely no blood evidence on Michelle. They never luminalled. There were five separate sets of fingerprints that they never tested. They didn't test the screen door for fingerprints. They didn't test a chair that was seemed like blocking the front screen door and it had blood on it. There was an open back window that they've later admitted William could
have crawled through. There's so many inconsistencies between his interviews and his testimony at preliminary hearing, and then after preliminary hearing, he was found hung quite suspiciously and dead. So the only person who really knows the truth is dead. After he testified and what the preliminary hearing, judge pulled the prosecutor and the defense attorney in after the preliminary hearing and said, you need to seriously consider him as the suspect.
Well, I was reading about this, Shannon, and I found it absolutely extraordinary that the judge at your preliminary hearing was Judge Messler, And in an interview he called this case and I'm quoting, the biggest miscarriage of justice end quote that he had ever been connected to, and he was holding back tears when.
He said it.
What does that tell you about I mean, for a judge who'd been on the bench for over four decades to say something that holding back tears, this is where it really gets me. And I've never heard this before. At one point during this preliminary hearing, which is when this should have stopped, he actually called the attorneys to his chambers to ask if the quote unquote witness who we now know was almost.
Certainly the perpetrator murderer.
William Michael Lee if he had an attorney, And when the prosecutor asked why, Judge Messler responded, and I'm quoting, because that's the murderer of this baby, and everybody in the courtroom knows it except you apparently.
Wow. You know, like.
You would hope that at that point somebody would have said, Okay, we're done, that's enough.
We could stop.
Now, we can shift our focus. You sit there and go, wait, wait a minute, stop like something, just stop, right, You have that feeling like this has to This can't be right.
It can't be that the judge.
Said something so strong and so profound, and yet everybody felt fine just going ahead with this. Let's not call it a prosecution. Let's call it a persecution, right, because and that's really what was happening. It wasn't an interrogation that Michelle endured. It was like a witch hunt, basically. And it's so nuts because this kid who was another neighbor, right, and who hadn't made unwanted sexual advances towards.
You, right. And it gets worse.
And worse as this unravels because of the fact that there was evidence that was not allowed in court. Because the kid's self asphyxiated and hung himself between the time of your arrest and the time of the trial.
It's all just totally bizarre.
But the testimony was not allowed that was going to be presented that he had decapitated a cat, that he had shown up at school the day of the murder, joyful and talking about how he had, you know, exacted some revenge on you and other details. Yeah, right, So, I mean that would have been the end of the trial right there. Right, it would have been like, oh, I mean, any jury, I don't care, any jury is going to hear that stuff.
And there was more.
There was a psychologist who had said that he was ten years old, he had examined him, and that he had shown when he feels rejected that he had violent tendencies. I mean, this is textbook, right, That's exactly what happened. He had this rejection, and obviously he was pretty twisted considering the way he died, right. Self asphyxiation is a bizarre thing at any age, but the fact that he was doing that when he was fourteen or fifteen when he died is really it takes it to a whole
other level. So there's just so many bad actors in this particular play. So back to this crazy judicial nightmare of yours.
Right, So.
They decide to proceed even though everybody knows that you're innocent, and they just went ahead anyway, which is shocking. So what happens next? Now you're in jail awaiting trial. Right, they didn't let you see your baby. They lied to you in the interrogation room. You're in jail.
I was put in a cell by myself because I was seventeen, with a barrier front of my door until I turned eighteen. Even though I was being charged as an adult, I was still treated as a juvenile. And I didn't get out. I didn't get out but for an hour day after everybody else was locked down and have access.
To the phone, so the shower, what have you. And it was only for an hour at a time.
You're in solitary confinement.
Yeah, that's correct, right.
No, nobody bothered to think that she needed a psychologist, any sort of counseling after what you've been through.
I mean, okay, I can't I can't even process that.
And meanwhile, are you even aware of what's going on with your daughter at this point?
Has anybody told you.
I couldn't get any answers from anybody.
Did you have parents that you could talk to or anybody?
Mother?
But she didn't know either.
Well, they just denied her access as well because of things that had happened to me in her care as a child.
They kept her out of the loop too.
My entire family was anyone visiting you.
I got a few visits from family, but they were in the dark just as much as I was.
And we find out later that your daughter was adopted by close friends of the prosecutor, right, correct, which again just adds a layer to this that is off the fucking wall. I mean, it's just like I mean, it just doesn't make any logical sense. And then you go to trial. You turned eighteen in prison, right, the worst eighteenth parent?
Yeah?
Ever?
Spent some of the best birthdays or supposed to be the best birthdays in jail or prison.
And back then, you know, I've been a lawyer now twenty some years, but I was an intern for the Public Defender's Office and would have to go to the adult detention center, and these women and men were either in cages or in a bunk or so to speak, lying on top of each other, roaches, rats, my it was despicable, and this smell was unfathomable. I mean I would throw up in my mouth every time.
It was just awful.
But you had to go out there as a public defender, intern or lawyer. We would go out there just to check on their well being and we would report the conditions and it never changed. I could not even imagine having to endure that, even if I did do something wrong, but knowing I didn't do anything and being in that just it just.
This is the jail.
It's unspeakable. That's where Michelle was held right prior to the trial. The adult.
Yes, it was horrible, and that's something that is worth understanding. Jails by and large, are worse than prisons for some of the reasons that you're talking about.
There's no recreation.
Many people are held, as Michelle was, in their cell for twenty three hours a day. The lights don't go off, they're never cleaned. They're literally breathing grounds for disease, violence, rape, because there's so much pressure built up because there's nothing to do except for sit there. You've got people in there who are innocent, like Michelle. You've got people in there who are accused of crimes but can't post bail,
but they may or may not be innocent. We have no idea, and then we have them mixed in with violent criminals. It sounds like a more benign word than prison, and it's important for people to understand that it's the farthest thing from it.
Well, and then also especially whenever the media crucifies you and makes you out to be one of the most horrific monsters there is and you're charged with any form of a.
Child crime and they broadcast it.
These people, these women or men in jail, they see that, they watch the news.
You get taunted.
You just get fucked with really bad in there, and it's twenty four hours.
You get fucked with, excuse my language, messed with in there.
And especially for well, the crime that I was charged with and the goryinous, the horror of it, and what they would say on the news and stuff. People will take that and then they twist it and make it even worse, as if you could make it any worse.
But being in there and you're innocent of this as well, and you don't know, like me, I.
Didn't know where my daughter was and just I'm going through this, and then I'm having people yelling through the vents, hollering at me all the time, calling me a baby killer. I got threats all the time. They were going to make sure my food had something in it. They were gonna do the same thing to me that I had supposedly done to my job. I mean, you learn to just kind of try to block it out as much as you can, but you can't block it all out.
And it's twenty four hours a day.
I can't imagine how. It's just bad and worse. And it's a miracle that.
You survived that ordeal, because you're right, it can't be any worse than that. To be in there accused of what you were accused of, having lost your child, being deprived of the scene. I mean, it's like it's literally the ultimate nightmare, and yet you live through it and here you are today, which is that's a miracle. So then there's the trial and you're finally going to trial.
Did you believe that.
Things were going to work out and that finally somebody would tell the truth and you would be able to go home.
I knew that I was innocent, and I believe that once they heard all this bs that they had made up about me, and everything else is somebody was going to see what I knew and they would let me go home. But they were so narrow minded and blinded by what the prosecutor portrayed, and.
I got a life without pearls sins, and so the lawyer was asleep.
As a defense attorney, and I've done it my entire career, I know that we as attorneys are the only thing that can stop the mountain of the United States and the government. We're the stop gap and we have to If you can't get in there and fight like hell, then get the hell out of the courtroom. I see it day in and day out lawyers that aren't prepared.
But they weren't just not prepared. It's almost like they just went with the prosecution and whatever their theory of the case was, they did not control anything in that courtroom or anything leading up into the courtroom, and they didn't do what they're supposed to do. And so that was a part of the problem as well.
Is a problem that we see all too frequently is that people are not adequately represented by their defenders. And you're certainly a textbook case of that as well. I mean, this was a case where even though there was prosecutorial misconduct, gross prosecutor miscrossed, including lies about the blood evidence, which had they told the truth, would have exonerated you instantly because your blood type didn't match the blood that was found with the crime scene. And of course it even
goes further. There was blood presumably from the perpetrator at the crime scene.
And going out the front door, and going out.
The front door. I mean, this one comes with instructions.
I mean it was on the chair as well, that was propped up against the outside of my front door to where I couldn't go out the front door if I had went out the front door, so I'd have to have gone at the back.
On top of everything else, you have no blood on you, right, And so any investigator right out of school would go.
Well, wait a minute, this doesn't make any sense. You can't commit.
Violent, terrible stabbing with blood everywhere, but you don't get any blood on you, right, And so immediately there should have been like, she didn't do it. Let's take care of her, right, She's been through the most traumatic experience that anyone can go through. Let's get her some help. Let's make sure her daughter's okay. That would be the appropriate reaction, and let's go find who did this.
You would think that that would be the proper way.
To do well, that is the proper one.
Well, I think, but that's not what they did, right, I mean, I mean, in a civilized society, there's no question that that's what should have been done. They had their sight set on you, and it's it's hard.
It was an easier target for him.
Yeah, right, except for not really though when you think about it, because they had all evidence that they needed to. I mean, they had blood evidence and everything. I mean, they knew that.
I'm going to get too angry.
So back to where we left off. At trial, you needed a dream team, you needed a superstar attorney, and you got someone who was let's say, borderline incompetent and that maybe being kind. At the same time, not only was the prosecution on this crazy mission to convict you at all costs, but they also broke so many different rules.
Right.
The misconduct in this case is extreme, including I think it was Harris was the prosecutor right, he lied about the evidence. Not only did they withhold the culpatory evidence, which is a Brady violation. They lied about the actual evidence. They at least suggested to the jury that the blood that was found at the crime scene could have been or was probably yours, which they knew was one hundred percent on tropline. They knew it was not yours, but
they led the jury to believe that it was. And that's hard when you're in the jury seat, right You're one of these jurors, and you're sitting there and you been hit with all this publicity around your case and everything else, and you know you're feeling, I'm sure, very stressed out because it was a baby killed.
They even showed the jurors and autopsy of my son. Yeah, that's horrific too, so they I can only imagine what it was like for them to sit there and see that.
I mean, I had to just listen to it. I was forced to.
I didn't want to see it, you know, I already had enough horrors, but I had to sit in there and I could hear the video plan and all the things that they were doing. So I can only imagine that that made a big impact on the jurors too, And they wanted somebody to pay for it, And I get that I want somebody to pay for it too, but not me.
I didn't do it.
So there had been this circus of a trial, and ultimately the jury was out. You were probably, even as a seventeen eighteen year old girl with an eighth grade education, you were probably aware that your own attorney wasn't doing such a great job, right, But did you think that they were going to come back and actually find you guilty?
I never lost hope, and I was just I was praying that they would see the truth and that they would know I couldn't do something like that, but it was wrong.
So that moment, Michelle, Now you've been through everything a human being can endure from the time you were a child, and what was that moment?
Like, I can't forget it. There's a lot of things I wish I could forget. When the jurors come back in and I was in there, I was just holding onto my faith and that they were going to know there is no way that I could do that.
There's too many holes in what they tried to portray, and that they would see through that. And I kept holding on to the fact that I knew I was innocent and that I was hoping that they were. They weren't too blind to see that I was innocent, because it was clear I was wrong, because they found me guilty and.
Gave me a life without pearl sentence.
I remember my grandfather and my uncle in the courtroom, and I had never seen them cry, and they both broke down and cried. I remember my sister break down and she was screaming at the jurys, telling them that how could they do it, that they were wrong. And I remember seeing my mom over there.
And she was breaking down crying as well. Well everybody that was there.
My family was were all broke down and cried because they all believed I was going to come home. And I didn't know what the sentence was that they had given me until I was able to talk to my mom later and I asked her, I said, what was the sense they gave me? All I heard was guilty in life. Everything else was just kind of like blacked out.
I just I couldn't believe it that they had found me guilty, and just hearing them say that, it was like I lost my heart, it was ripped out again what was left of it anyhow, And then seeing my family breakdown like that it was.
It was hard, and then they took me back to the county jail and put me in my room.
Yeah, I can't believe even now that they can.
To you, it's something that all of us as Americans and human beings should be ashamed of.
And I am.
So you're sentenced to life in prison, and you had a lot of life left to live when you're eighteen years old and you end up going to prison. I want to get to how you managed to persevere and find the strength to fight for yourself when you could have so easily given up. I mean, I think most people in your situation would have given up.
There are times that I wanted to give up, but I couldn't.
I just couldn't because.
I have a daughter and now I know I have a granddaughter too, and tell with everybody else, I had to prove to her that I didn't do this, and in order for that, I had to get my innocence proven. And that's what kept me going through the twenty years and even now is what keeps me going is one day, haven't the possibility of let her in heart know the facts, not what she's been led to believe, and being.
A part of her life.
The fact that you still now two years after being three years after being fully exonerated.
And found actual innocent, found.
Actual innocent, and the ruling was with prejudice, so that means they can't retry you. The idea that you still haven't been able to re establish a relationship with hers is something that troubles me a lot.
But I'm hopeful.
I mean, I think that ultimately you will and hopefully there'll be a happy ending to this.
And I believe one day she will come around and she'll let me be a.
Part of her life.
It is going to happen, because it has to. You know, there's another couple of twists and turns in this, right because you ended up serving twenty years. But halfway through that there was light, there was a break in the case.
Yeah.
Before my mom passed away, my mother had written the Innocence Project.
She wrote a lot of people because she.
Wanted to get me in my dream team, my own dream team, so what she called it. They had taken my case on it and.
They had requested all this exculpatory.
Evidence to be turned over to them to be were in and tested, and come to find out, now not all that evidence was provided to them. They supposedly couldn't find some or it didn't exist anymore or whatever.
Right, the games continued.
There were three envelopes at one point that were sent in the mail and two of them were empty, right, which is really like, and let's just reflect on just that alone.
It's so nuts, right, like, really, are you kidding me?
That's ridiculous. But it's not funny. It sounds it sounds ridiculous now, but it's not funny. It's very it's a very real.
They were still trying to cover their masses.
Yeah, so the NS Project took your case, which is the blessing of blessings when you're stuck in that nightmare, right, and the Ennis Project takes your case. But in two thousand, this is two thousand and five.
I believe it was before that. They think it was two thousand and four. I'm not sure on the timeline. But whenever they ran the test on what they were provided with, there was nothing that they could do because it was all just Travis's blood. There was none of the perpetrators. It was just Travis's blood that was provided to them. So they had said that there was nothing that they could do. They did what they could do, so it kind of lost hope for a moment in
a sense. But at the same time, I was like, I'm not giving up. I just didn't know how to go about doing it because I didn't have money.
I was in prison. I had already lost my parents, I.
Lost a lot of people, and finances don't exist really in prison.
You can't make it living in there.
So I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I knew it was going to happen one day.
And you didn't give up. And Nina's Project didn't give up either.
Well, they weren't able to assist with what was provided to him, and they had done what they did. So eventually a friend of mine had found my attorneys that helped prove my innocence, and my sister and her guy at the time, he was a doctor. He paid for my attorneys, and the Innocence Project got involved with them on proof of my innocence because they were able to locate the evidence that was held back from the Innocence Project the first time to be ran and tested again.
And those lawyers the ones that came to your rescue at this time, it's worth giving them a shout out here, right.
I am grateful for them bringing me home and doing the work that they did to brieve my innocence.
And that was Richard and Charisse o' caroll, right correct. So you finally got a team on your side that was up to the task, right, right. And then the Inns Project got reinvolved because the evidence was found, right, which existed all along with this group of very sinister people had successfully hidden for as long as they had.
It was finally found.
And I believe it took Charise and some interns going in theirselves and looking through the evidence theirselves in order to.
Get it and have it tested.
But see, the thing is is that it had already been tested before my trial.
Tim Meritis had already had it tested.
He knew right the Oklahoma State grew up investigations, had tested the evidence and had provided it to the projector, which was Harris. But he just chose to ignore it.
He chose to.
Hide it and ignore it and then lie about it and do basically everything he had to do in order to turn your life into more of a living hell than it already was. Ultimately, you come back to court with appropriate representation, strong representation, actually, let's call it what it is. Yeah, and you finally get justice.
What was that like?
It was like a huge weight of the world just lift it off of me. And it was a major relief. But at the same time, it was like it had a moment of sadness because my parents couldn't be there, especially my mom.
My dad wasn't really a part of my life, but my mom couldn't be there to experience it with.
Me or my daughter who I was there that day, Michelle with you. Besides Richard and Cheris, I had.
Some family in the courtroom that day. I believe my baby sister was there with her husband.
And the doctor was there, Doctor.
Fizzelle, who paid Charis and Ritual Carol to take my case on.
Well that's I mean, that's pretty heroic of him.
So finally some good people have come to your aid rescue. It's bittersweet because obviously your parents weren't there to see their baby beat but it was.
Awesome to be able to finally the court system acknowledges that I am innocent, and to all the people that had prosecuted me and even in prisoned, those that beat me down and talked horribly about me, and made my life hell in there to all those people that.
Had misjudged me. And it was just like I told you I was innocent.
What did judge say?
Really, he looked.
Straight at me and he said, Michelle Lomurphy, you are actually innocent. And he said that three times and said that we were dismissed.
Did anybody apologize?
Oh no, no, Well, not that it would have really changed anything, but it might have been a nice gesture.
And for Christ's sakes, I would just add and not only has nobody apologized to Michelle from law enforcement, that it's their intent to attempt to try and retry her in her civil suit for the murder of Travis in order to convince the jury that Michelle should not receive money damages for the twenty years she's spent in prison innocent. So I think that that's important for everyone to know. The nightmare persists. She can never be convicted or go
to prison or jail. But it is their attempt in the civil trial, which is going to be in April, to put her on trial for killing Travis and to try to get this confession before the jury. And so no, nobody's apologized to her.
Kind of the object.
They still want to try to prosecute me innocence. They don't want to admit that they were wrong, and they don't want to compensate. There's not enough money in the world that could.
Ever replace what was taken from me.
I would rather go penniless and have my kids than have all the money in the world.
And that's something I want to talk about a little bit to Michelle, because it's important for people to understand the struggle that happens after you get out. I think people see on the news, the coverage on the courthouse steps. There's cameras, and there's hugging, and there's crying, and there's cheering, and there's everything. But then you walk out into a
world that doesn't really want you. You've got a resume that's got a twenty year hold in it, and you haven't had a chance to develop skills when everybody else has been out building their career or their family or their and you get nothing. Here we are three years later, and now you have to still wait until April to go and fight for compensation that should be provided to you, in my opinion, immediately, I mean so that you can start rebuilding your life.
I'm grateful to be free and living on this side of the world, but it's so hard to survive sometimes out here because we have to play catch up.
Me for instance, I have no computer skills. I'm learning them now. I had never had a job.
I was seventeen years old. I had never drove a car day in my life. I never had a house alown, you know, I had never experienced so much that most people have experienced in their life or the beginning of their life, you know.
So it's a struggle.
And the panic attacks, the anxiety of trying to catch up, which would.
Probably never catch up to the rest of the world. But I'd like to know somethings, you know.
Yeah, I mean, the PTSD has got to be profound. It's just like I said another sentence.
Almost right form of another prison in a sense.
But you know, you're even with physical problems related to your time you spent in prison and everything else, and you're still here, right, I'm.
Still a fighter and a survivor.
Yeah, And we've got your back, and you're taking classes now with an organization called Goodwill, is that right?
Yeah?
Goodwill? It also works.
The thing is a lot of people out there don't.
Realize what all is available.
They know is the donation sites and the stores that they have, but they don't realize that there's classes.
That are available to them. For me, I didn't have any computer skills.
I didn't know how to do Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel and all this stuff. And I'm learning that extremely quickly and I'm loving it. I know how to do a power point, I know how to do a spreadsheet now. I'm very quick learner. And they've taught me how to do resume, which I don't have much of a resume, but I know how to do one. I know how to carry myself in an interview. I know more about this process that it takes.
To get a job now. But as soon as I complete.
This class, I am going to start a plus certification which does harder and the motherboards and stuff like that and building computers. And I'm going to take forklifting classes as well. And then in January they're supposed to be starting in an OSHA program so it can be certified as well.
Wow, that's a lot. That's really great.
It's great and it's important because people ask me what can I do to help? So programs like this Goodwill program. Do you know that there's not enough of them? People could start one. You could learn more about it, check out the Goodwill program, tutor mentor you know, help provide equipment or clothes. There's a million things you can do and we're gonna help.
It just takes somebody to believe in us. Sometimes, Yeah, exactly. I'm always hungry for knowledge. I want to learn everything.
It's amazing.
There's so many great stories of xuneries coming out and succeeding and triumphing. If there's anything else you can think of that you could recommend for people to do. Who are going to hear this and they're going to say, I want to do something to help, what would you recommend people do.
I would like to.
See more programs that are going to help, especially exoneries. There are some programs that are available to people coming out of prison that are being released from their time re entry programs. Well, one of us, exoneries, we come out. We don't meet their criteria because we're not being released.
We've been exonerated for a crime we did not commit, and we can't get into those programs because their focus is to help those coming out of prison from serving a time and for crime that they did commit.
Yeah, we have in this country. We have various re entry programs and also, you know, parole probation officers, I should say probation officers for people who are released after serving the time of the crime that they were guilty of. But when you're an exonnery, you come out to nothing, right, it's actually paradoxical. You don't get any of those services because you weren't guilty in.
The first place. It's ass backwards, actually, I mean, yeah, I.
Mean help them by all means, but help us as well. Because now I had never even talked on it cell phone or used a cell phone.
I had never even seen it except for on TV, you know.
And as soon as I walk out the county jail, doctor Vizille hands me my first phone, and I'm like, how do I use this? You know? And my sister's calling me on it. I don't even know how to answer it. We don't know how to live in this side of the world.
We've been trained.
To live by prison rules, prison structure, if you can call it that. We just need more programs and more awareness. I want to get stuff out there that's going to help people coming out and provide them with resources.
Not just financial and educational, but emotional mental health counseling, because re entry after certainly twenty years in prison proves to be extremely overwhelming. I've represented clients who have spent most of their life in prison and come out and don't know how to run a microwave or a CD
player or a phone. Without that support family or community, such as Michelle has had, they literally either violate parole or reoffend in some way so they can go back to what they know, which is prison where they feel safe, which is tragic I've had I'm like, why did you do that? Because I don't know how to live in this world and I can't cope.
So, Michelle, we have a tradition on wrongful conviction, as people who listen to the show already know, which is that. I like to just turn the microphone over to you for any closing thoughts at all. What's on your mind.
I'm determined I'm going to change some things. I want to change a fewel all that, especially in Oklahoma, and I want to start a program that's going to go back into facilities and help prove the innocence of those that need to be home, and I want to get programs in the facilities that's going to teach individual skills to survive out here. I want to provide resources for
them on what is available out here for them. I want to go into schools and to speak out and teach to let kids know, Hey, you don't have to commit anything, you don't have to be doing anything.
You can still.
Get caught up and your life can be taken away from you in the blink of an eye, especially the way this is going out here in the world now.
And I just want to help.
Michelle, what can I say?
You are amazing and it's been really a profound experience for me well having you in my life and having you on wrongful conviction today.
So I want to thank our.
Two guests, our star Michelle Murphy and her wonderful attorney Seana McMurray. So thank you both for being here, and I'm looking forward to the next.
Phase of your life.
Thank you for having us.
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 Innocence Project 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 Flahm is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one