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 or 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 really, in that moment, unchecked authority.
Don't presume that people are guilty when you see them on TV, because it may just be a dirty da that is trying to rise upward.
This is wrongful conviction.
Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flomm. Today, I have two people who I admire greatly. Ronald Simpson Bay welcome to the show, Thank you, thanks for having me. And Glenn Martin is here. Glenn is a remarkable activist and has an incredible story to tell as well.
So Ronald let's start with you.
You served almost twenty seven years in prison for a crime and didn't commit. And what you've done with that experience and how it's transformed you is something that I'm honestly in awe of and so I'm looking forward to getting to that. And Glenn, you have a similar story, although you were actually locked up for something you did do and have turned it into an incredible into a movement. Really, Ronald, let's go back to the beginning. You grew up in Michigan.
Yes, I did, Flint, Michigan.
How is your childhood? What was it like?
Let's let's go back like it, you know, back in the day before everything went so horribly wrong.
I think I was born in Flint, Michigan, to a two parent family. My dad was a school teacher, my mom was a homemaker, and I thought we lived a fairly normal lifestyle, kind of middle upper class. Because my dad, he was a school teacher. We got to travel all summer, we had a motor home. We did a lot of things that you know, you don't really see in the inner city community. So I was exposed to a lot at a young age. You know, traveled a lot, and you know, my dad made sure we were educated and
well learned, but I lived in an abusive home. I was the oldest of five children. My dad would beat me, beat my mom and stuff, and became an untenable situation. As a child, you don't realize how dysfunctional it is. You just feel like it's normal. If you grow up so long like that. You know, you get fifteen, sixteen years old of that, like, well, this must be normal, everybody must go through this.
But later on that wasn't the case.
Yeah, I mean, you don't know any different, right as you get older, and then you sort of look back and you have more experiences to compare it to, and then you realize just how wrong that really is. Right, and it's a horrible thing to hear. But even then, nothing prepared you for what was going to happen, right, because it wasn't like you were growing up in a gang lifestyle or in a type of situation where you were running with a tough crowd and getting mixed up in a bunch of problems.
How did it happen? How did you end up in the system in the first place.
Well, I mean, it's kind of like I said, I didn't expect this. No one expects us to happen. And I went to high school, I went to cod With to Eastern Michigan. I ran track for Eastern Michigan University in the seventies, and I was a tooling diemaker General Motors before I went to prison. And in nineteen eighty the first really dramatic traumatic event in my life happened. My mom shot and killed my dad in the Marylton home in front of my two younger brothers and sisters.
I was like twenty or twenty one at the time.
I was married to my first wife and I get a call at work one day. My ex wife called me, say you need to come home right now. And she was pregnant, so I'm thinking that, you know, something's wrong with the baby. So I drive home. Said you need to go to your parents' home. I said, okay, what's going on? So I'd make the two or three miles drive over to mom and Dad's home and I get
there and it's like it's pandemonium. Police cars everywhere, Adbulante the cracker can't even get down the street because it's such a big crowd. And when I finally do get to the house, my mom send in the back of the cruiser, police cruiser. You're like, what's going on here exactly? I'm like, what's going on? And they pulled me to the side. They said, well, your dad is in the home. Your mom and shot your dad, and they took her off and I stayed there until the corner came and
pronounced him dad and removed the body. And that was July twenty fifth, nineteen eighty and six years to the day, July twenty fifth, nineteen eighty six, I walked into prison. My life took almost a perfect spiral.
Wow, that's a that's a very strange and sort of horrible synchronicity, you know. And your case is is troubling for a lot of reasons, but not the least of which is that you were arrested and ultimately convicted for shooting an officer.
Yes, but that officer changed.
His story over time, right where originally he had said that you weren't the guy exactly, So you got blindsided really when you went to trial, for sure? I mean, how could It's so bizarre, Ronald? I mean, you got I mean, you lived it. But I'm just sitting here looking back out it and going wait a minute. I can understand a witness changing their story, but the victim, I mean going that guy didn't shoot me? Oh yes
he did. Yeah, you think you'd remember that. You think how did they get you in their in their crosshairs in the first place.
Well, the case happened on a particular day in October nineteen eighty five. My buddies and I were driving around Flinch, you know, being knuckleheads. We weren't boy scouts. We were driving around doing stupid stuff, and I stopped by a place a friend of mine I had sold some drugs to to pick some money up, but he wasn't home at the time, and it was in an apartment building where a lot of drug activity is and it was under surveillance by undercover cops. So they saw us leave
the place and thought we had robbed it. So they followed us, and about two blocks away from the scene, my buddy was driving my car, say, somebody's following us. That said, what stopped is probably the guy that owes me the money. I'm thinking that's who it was.
We stopped.
I get out of the car. I'm standing there waiting for this car to pull up. But as he pulls up. No one recognizes the guy driving cart one o'clock in the afternoon, Z twenty eight Camaro. The guy jumps out with a blue jean suit on the hat. We all had Jerry.
Curls back then. That's how farther back it was. I still had hair. Yeah, I had had a Jerry curroll. Man, imagine that.
But so the guy gets out. He just in the car door, squads down and pulled the gun. So I'm asking the guy, y'all know who this guy is? No one know who he is, And all of a sudden fires, he's shooting. The guys in my car shooting at him. I'm in the crossfire. I'm trying to run and get out of the way. So I get out of line of fires. The guys in my car take off and the undercovered car takes off behind them.
Wait, you got back in the car. No, the car took off with out me.
Okay, that's nice, friends, you got there, but go ahead.
Yeah.
So anyway, I no honor among thieves.
I guess I started walking because the car. I can hear the cars going through the neighborhood, and I can hear the shooting because the guys panently, they're shooting.
From my car back at the officers car, and I go to the garage I worked on cars back.
Then I go to the garage I worked at was about a mile away from the shooting scene, and I get on the phone. I called the guy's girlfriend of driving my car. I say, if the guys come buy the apartment, tell them come pick me up at the garage, not knowing that, you know, we weren to shoot out with police officers. About a half hour later, I called her back. She said, they've been arrested by the officers.
What officers? They were to shootout with police? I said, oh my god.
So wait, So you still didn't realize at this point that the guys that had been shooting at you were cops.
No, it never announce himself with cops.
Wow.
And what had happened during the car chase scene after I had gotten out two miles down a road, the cars run off the road and there's a second shootout, and that's where that's what actually got he got hit in the arm and the second shootout.
So you weren't anywhere near the place, No, it wasn't. I mean, this would have been more believable easier to understand if it would have happened during the first shootout, because at least you were there exactly, and they might arrested everybody. They might arrested you, and they might, you know, the confusion. They might have thought you were the guy doing the shooting.
Who the hell knows. But in this case, you weren't even there.
No, do you look like the other guys, but they said, we all look a like.
Yeah, I know, I love myself Overen for that one.
That's a objective.
But it wasn't like your twin brother or god knows what, so not by long shot. So they end up arresting you and charging you with a solid stent to commit murder of a police officer. Yes, bad bad. Yeah, you go to jail, yes, awaiting trial.
Yes, I got out on bond.
I was in jail for about two months and posted sixty thousand dollars bond and got out okay. And how long did it take to get to trial? About six seven months. I got out in December, the trials in June.
So you go to trial and who represented you?
Oh, I had an attorney.
My attorney was a matth he's a former judge in the county in which I had the trial.
He used to be a city judge on the circuit court bench. So that sounds like, you know, you were giving yourself a good shot at least you would think, yeah.
But the problem with that was, and I didn't discovered till later, is that the judge we were in front of. My attorney and the judge hated each other when he was on the bench.
And he didn't bother to tell you that, well.
Not initially.
When he tried to get the case moved to another court, because he said, disjudge and I have animosity towards each other, and I don't think he'd give me a fair trial.
Oh my god, that's just what you need to hear exactly. And then he's not going to make the relationship any better by asking that the trial be moved to another right. Okay, so now you've got a pretty good idea that things are looking bad.
Exactly as a confluence of crazy events.
You know, the prosecutor came up with his theory of the case, and the officer himself changed his testimony to fit that theory of the case. There were four of us involved in this crime, myself and three co defenders, and two of the co defenders turned States evidence against me and one other guy. They testified against us, and their testimony fit the theory of the prosecutor's case as well, even though none of the evidence fit. We had a
clear statement from the officer. We had his handwritten police report from the day of the event saying I hadn't done you know, it wasn't me. Eight months later when the trial went down, all of a sudden, I'm the one that jumped out of the car shooting at him.
It was crazy.
So they had everybody at the trial basically telling the story that the prosecutor wanted to be told. The police officer changed his story, right, The other two witnesses changed their story or or came up with a story that was.
In line with the prosecutor wanted.
And so did you believe that when the jury went out, did you believe that you were going to be convicted?
Or there is no way I thought I was going to be convicted. It was a three week trial and not a week and two the trial. They came and offered me a plea bargain. I said, there's no way I'm taking the plea bar. I got the officer of statement saying I didn't shoot at him, so I'm not taking a plea bargain.
That's so crazy, right, And Glenn, let me see, I see Glenn roll in his eyes. So let's just reflect on this particular aspect of it, because this is not a story I've ever heard before.
So they came to you and offered you a plea bargain.
What was the plea bargain of seven to ten? The sins was seven to ten years sins? I forgot with the charge some reduced charge, right, assault with great body harm, intention of great body of harm or something like that.
And you were facing what life if you lost the trial? Yes, so if you were guilty, that sounds like a pretty good deal, right. And now here is we have Glenn Mark, who's the founder and leader of Just Leadership USA.
Glenn himself was.
Incarcerated for six years for robbery and has become I could say, probably the most important voice in the deincarceration movement.
Was that fair, Glenn?
If I wanted to toot my own horn, yeah, that's fair, right.
And he's been instrumental in the Clothes Rikers campaign, has done so much incredible advocacy work that It sometimes makes me feel like I'm standing still, and I know that now you guys work together, right, Yes, Glenn, have you ever heard a story like that where the witness, I mean, I don't know, we just heard it.
But I'm having trouble processing.
I do a ton of public speaking, and I am constantly retelling this story because I am so blown away by it. The fact that the prosecutor even offered that, you know, relatively low number suggested to me that they even thought that they may not win that case, which would be another reason for Ronald to just hold out. You know, if I'm facing life and they offer me seven to ten in the middle of trial, that suggests that they think they may not make it to the
finish line. So I would have done the same thing. But having the key witness who got shot not just change his story in the middle, but also the fact that Ronald even wasn't on the scene when he finally got shot, you know, it blows me away, except I got to be honest. I mean, everything about our criminal justice system is just unfair and there's no equity there, and people of color get outcomes like this over and over,
maybe not as egregious. But Ronald's story has always riveted me as one that stands out for a number of reasons. And we're just touching on the story now. There's a lot more to tell. But the reason I asked Ronald's permission to tell the story over and over is because I think it gets to the core of what's rotten in our criminal justice system.
And I would go even a step further and say that when the prosecutor offered you that deal, what Glenn says is certainly, which is that they must have thought that there was a pretty good chance that they weren't going to win. But also they must have known that you weren't that guy, because if you're a prosecutor, you're not trying to let a guy who shot a cop out after seven to ten years. I mean, when you look at it in comparison, Glenn was convicted of robbery, right,
simple robbery, so he got six years. What we're led to believe now is that they're willing to say, all right, this guy's a bad motherfucker, he shot a cop, but we're gonna give him seven to ten.
Yeah, we're just going to be nice people, right.
Yeah, most people who shoot cops and end up in prison, never get out, to be honest.
Yeah, I mean we can debate that all day long, but that's a terrible crime. Right. We cannot have people shooting at law enforcements. It's not happening, right, And I can agree that people who are violent, and certainly people who attack law enforcement officers in a way like that, need to be in prison because they're dangerous. But this story is really it's stinks. Honestly, it's stinks, and you.
Know it does. So the jury goes out.
It was a jury trial, right, yes, jury trial.
In three weeks in the courtroom, you develop almost like summer rap poor with them, right, You're in close quarters for three weeks every day, all day, right, except weekends. And then they go out and come back in. And did they even look at you? Did you get that sense when they walked in.
When they walked in, I had the sense of, oh shit, I'm in trouble. Because one of the jurors was crying. One of the women, Drews, a young woman was crying. So, oh, that can't be good.
What was the makeup of the jury, Because Flint is a very racially diverse city, right.
The jury wasn't. Out of the twelve jurors, there were two blacks on my jury.
And flint is what sixty uh huh Is that a glint? Do you think that's a coincidence.
No, I think that's a stute prosecutor who's managing the jury pool.
After I was convicted, you know, you get to speak to the court, and I spoke to that exact point that you know that I didn't have a jury in my peers, it wasn't racially made up, and out of the two black people that were on it were older black people from prior to the Civil rights era, and they were used to bond down to when the white
person says something. They were worse than the white people on the jury cause they the people that I thought were holding out with the woman that was crying, and somebody else kind of looked to me like just kind of shook their head, just like this is.
The way it is.
It's the way it is. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, and we know too that after a three week trial and they're stuck in that jury room, people get angry. Everybody wants to go home, they don't want to be there, and it could get abusive in there. You know, and if they're that old, I mean, I'm I'm not excusing what they did. I could understand it.
The last day before I was convicted, when they were deliberating, they had deliberated for over twelve hours, and they told the judge they wanted to go home.
He said, no, we're not leaving until you come back with a verdict.
There you go.
I rest my case so they come back. Can you paint a picture of what that was like? That one probably worst moment of your life.
What did it feel like when the jury come in, the judge said, will the defend the rise? When they get ready to announce the vers I felt like I had five hundred pounds on my shoulder. I could it was so hard to stand up. It was like, you know, I don't know if you ever lifted weight so squatted when you were in prison, we used to squat, and I felt like I.
Had five hundred pounds. I could not get up.
And then as they announced the verdict, you know, and each person was stating, you know, they agreed with the verdict. It was like every time they said guilty, it was like a death blow boom.
It was literally a death blow literally because they're taking your whole life away. Absolutely, And so you go to prison. What prison were you sent to?
Jackson in Michigan? Because I was twenty seven years old when I went to prison. I was an older person apparently speaking, so they sent me to the adult prison, not the younger prison.
So I went to Jackson Penitentiary in Jackson, Michigan.
And is that as bad as I think it is? Oh?
Yeah, it used to be.
It was built the world's largest wall prison because it was such a huge complex.
Over five thousand prisoners were there and it was.
Spread out of all his acres and they had you know, maximum security sales and medium security sales.
There was a pretty wild place.
And when you say that, I mean you want to elaborate. You know, you don't have to, but.
Oh man, Jackson was Jackson was crazy. It was. It was insane.
And to give you some idea, in nineteen eighty seven, there was so much tension between the officers and the prisoners incarcerated people that they were.
Killing each other like literally like bodybacks.
In Marsha that year a female officer was killed in all because of that year, they retaliation, They choked and killed acarcerated person over an asset unit, and in December another officer was killed, stabbed at death.
It was back and forth.
Wow, that sounds it sounds like hell.
It was hell. It was suicide.
You know, people couldn't cope because of the violence and the conditions of confinement. You know, it was an old prison, you know, roaches, ratchet was one of your new modern college campus type printed It had bars, you know, old school, just like you'd see in the movies.
I mean, and then something clicked inside of you, theority man. Unlike a lot of people that we talked to who were literally teenagers, adolescents even when they went to prison, nobody's prepared for this. But you, somehow or other, you found another level of strength.
That is out of this world.
Not just to survive and keep your spirit up and learn the law and actually end up figuring out a way to get yourself out. You could so easily have been another one of those victims. You could have been a suicide, You could have been killed. You could have also just given up, right, I mean, I think I think there's probably a bunch of people that you left behind who probably as innocent as you are, and just gave up, just couldn't. Yeah, And so my question is where did that come from?
For me?
I mean, you do prison in stages.
Anybody does time, especially a long time, you do it in phases. And the first five years of my InCAR sprations, I was angry and I was a twenty seven year old, aggressive, angry young man in black man in prison. When I got to prison to discover that in Michigan, sixty six percent of the prisoners didn't have GEDs. And I had been to college and I was aggressive, So I'm a run this place. So for the first five years I was part of the problem, or not part of the solution.
I was, you know, crea can all kind of havoc on the yard, fight, stabbings, you name it.
We were involved in it. And one day in nineteen.
Ninety or ninety one, a good friend of mine brought me a book called Visions for Black Men by doctor named Akbar, ninety page paperback, small but easy read, Visions for Black Men. Yes, I read that book and it was like an epiphany. Light came on and I could not believe when I looked at myself differently, I looked at my community differently, I looked at my responsibility to myself and my family and my community a lot differently, and it kind of snapped me out of my anger.
I gotta do something different. I'm gonna die in here. I'm gonna kill somebody here and then die.
So that book made me be more reflective and introspective, and I kind of turned my attitude around, and I started looking at things differently, stopped not being about me so much by being about other people because I looked up for a chain first five years I had looked up and saw the degradation around me. I saw how people had been dehumanized by the system, and people that couldn't defend themselves because he either had mental issues or
just didn't have the faculty to do so. And I had the faculty and the mental capacity to do it. So I turned my life around and started going the direction of trying to help other people.
And then another tragedy occurred, as if you hadn't been tested enough, right with the terrible, unimaginable circumstance of your parents and then being wrongfully incarcerated, and then the only other worst thing that can happen to a person happened to you as well.
Man Indeed, indeed, it's two thousand and one. I had been in prison about fifteen sixteen years at the time, and Father's Day I was waiting for a visit. I talked to my son and three daughters. I had a son and three daughters at the time, and I talked to my son that morning. His name is Ronald, and I called him. He say, hey, Dad, I'm bringing the girls up to see you and we will be up there.
And that was like great.
You know on Father's Day, see your children in prison is like nothing is better.
So I'm waiting. I'm waiting. I'm waiting.
One o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock. They don't show up. Now I'm getting worried, so I get on the phone. I start calling and it's strange. I know thousands of people in Flint, Michigan. I could not catch anyone. I called all my family members and taught no one. I end up dilling my ex mother in laws phone them, Hey, mom, this is.
What you doing.
Have you seen the kids they're supposed to come visit. She said, you haven't heard. I said, no, what's going on? Said little Ronnied been shot and killed. My twenty one year old son had been shot and killed by fourteen year juvenile in the streets of Flint, Michigan.
I mean, that's hard enough to probably get the chills and to be in prison, and again, how could anybody deal with that?
By that time, I had been for ten years. I had been you know, I had changed my life around. I had a whole new attitude about life. I had become heads of various organizations, religious organizations, civic organizations. I was I was a name plan off on a class action lawsuit, so I was kind of a you know, I was a high profile person inside. And by that time when my son died, I had been all these years.
I had been giving other people counselor when they went, you know, grief counseling, and when things they got bad news from home that their wife left them, or that somebody died or whatever, I would counsel people. So when it came my turn, I had to apply my own counseling to myself, because for me, the worst thing I
can be is a hypocrite. I never want to be a hypocrite when anything that I do, so I had to do as I said do in my own Here I could hear my voice of all the counsel I had given people over the years, and I just swallowed and took an for myself. And as a result of that, I forgave that child who killed my son. I advocated for him to be treated as a juvenile, to go through the juvenile system, and not be treated as an adult, because I felt that him serving a life sentence in
a Michigan prison would serve no useful purpose. It wasn't gonna bring my son back. It was only going to deteriorate his family. Our community would rode even further. And I felt that that young man was this victim of the same environmental aspects as myself, my son, and many other black men in the community.
That is so extraordinary, And it doesn't stop there. You actually went to bat for a person who murdered your son, your namesake. Yes, And it wasn't like you made a phone call, write or wrote a letter. The fact is that when you started to advocate for this young man who had committed this terrible, terrible crime, pacted you so so devastating to you. The prosecutor didn't want to hear from you. I didn't realize that being an inmate makes you not a father, right. I mean there's nothing in
the constitution or anywhere else that says that, right. I mean that that should outweigh any other factor. Right, you would think, of course, in our system, we treat people so terribly, even when it comes to trying to visit in other people who've lost close family members behind bars, you know, if they get to go to the funeral, they have to find a way to pay for the guards to take.
Them and things like that.
I had to do that.
Oh you didn't, yes, So it's not even anomaly. So you had to go to extreme measures to try to get justice for this person who had wronged you.
Absolutely, I had to contact the judge. I mean I'm ade phone calls. I was in prison, so I wasn't viewed as a traditional victim so to speak. So that's probably why the prosecutor just kind of ignore my calls and letters to them, trying to, you know, advocate half of this child. Ting to write letters to the court. Yeah, I mean a phone call. I had my ex wife, my son's mother, go down and advocate on his behalf, you know, because she could go there in person and
talk to him. It was just we just had to keep at until one day they said we're gonna try him as a juvenile.
It's interesting, right, Imagine if it had flipped, if you had been writing letters to the prosecutor saying, I demand that this kid get life in prison, they would have been like, yeah, Ronald, come on, yeah, come testify.
That's right, we bring a right into the courtroom.
They would have put you understand, you know what I mean? Yeah, for sure, I think that's a pretty safe bet. And so what eventually happened to that young fourteen year old boy.
He served seven years in the juvenile attentions facility most of us in Pennsylvania. He got released and he's living in Cincinnati right now. And there's still some connection, right Yeah, Well, actually, I mean the connection is the guy that killed my son was my son's girlfriend's younger brother. And the story is lead from she told me that.
I just want to repeat that again. So just for my own sake and for the eyes, it was your son's girlfriend's brother.
Right, that killed my son. Okay, And at the time he died, his girlfriend was pregnant with my grandson, with his son because he was born two muths later, So my grandson is the nephew of the guy that killed my son.
Holy fuck, Yeah, there you go.
I mean I knew that because I have read up on you, but hearing you say it.
It's convoluted. But yeah, it's strange in fiction.
Yeah.
So, during your just about twenty seven years locked up in maximum security prison, did you spend time in solitary confinement?
Yes, I spent several stints in solitary in Michigan administrative segregation.
But it's the same thing.
And the longest single stretch I stayed might have been eight months or so, but I had like four months here, three months there, two months, eight months over the years, probably close to three years total.
Eight months. I'm just I mean eight months.
I think if you went to your average person out there and said we need you to stay at the holiday inn for eight months and you know, somewhere in Florida or you know whatever, it's a stupid example, but somebody be like, I can't do that. I mean, I'll go crazy. Eight months. You make a baby in eight months? And what was that like? Because it's a little different everywhere, but it's always the certain things are the same.
Yeah, I mean, solitary segregation is it's a prison within a prison, and it's so terrible because the majority of the people over there have mental health issues. Because when you can't follow the rules in prison, this is where they put the people that can't follow the rules.
And a lot of people that.
Have mental health issues aren't able to follow the rules, so they go over there and they don't get treatment.
So it's just it's havoc.
You can't sleep all night because they're screaming and hollering and banging all night, banging on the doors, banging on the bar, banging steel lockers, and then they sleep all day. So the first had to get acclimated to that. I had to get see healthcare because I have I was having tension headache. I thought I was having a stroke because it was so bad to smoke because they burned toilet rolls to.
Heat water with.
And it's just, man, it's just if you ever saw Mad Max be on Thunderdom years and I'm telling my age now back in the eighties, and that whole that sale scene in that movie kind of reminds me of solitary confinement because it was so chaotic and so noisy.
And you're locked up in that cell twenty three hours.
And twenty three hours a day.
You get out for a one hour yard like three days a week, and the other two or three days you get time to get out the shower.
You don't get showers every day. You get showered like three days a week.
What did you do?
I mean, again, I keep coming back to it, but how did you maintain your sanity and your spirit in that prison?
Within a prison? I kept busy.
I had I had access to my property, and then my property I had. I had my personal library of eight hundred books, so they allowed me to get books out of my property, and I was doing legal work.
So I stayed busy while I was in that.
I didn't let my mind get off into whatever's going on around me inside the segregation unit. I just stayed busy and kept working until they said we're gonna let you go.
And you were able to shut out the noise that way and sort of at least find some sort of sanctuary.
And you have to if you don't it to drive you crazy. I see why people go crazy in now.
I mean people who are crazy, driving other people crazy and getting crazier while they're doing it. I mean, it really does sound like hell I mean, it's hell inside of hell. So it's like, I don't know what the next thing is that's worse than hell, but that sounds like it. I mean, it's cruel and in human punishment by any stretch of the imagination.
And it is an.
Added tragedy that we have these people who need mental health treatment who end up in our prisons and then, as you said, can't obey the rules because they can't, not because they don't even necessarily want to, but they can't, and we end up punishing them even more severely and then rendering them completely incapacitated and unable to ever return to society without recidivating and going back to prison because
we've made them into what they are. And I keep coming back to it, Glenn said it before.
They're human beings, absolutely.
I mean that's what gets me, Like, it's so strange how in America we've gotten to a place.
Where a switch goes off where the.
Minute someone's arrested, they go from being a human being to just being an inmate, and people feel that they can treat them however they want. So let's talk about how you got yourself out and how you ended up working with this guy, Glenn Martin, and what you're doing now.
Oh, thank you, thank man.
Well, I became a para league about obs inside and I've fought my own case for all those years, and twenty four years into my sentence, I got my conviction overturned. The federal Court's granted habeasts relief on my case. But the crazy thing about that, the state appealed the reversal of my conviction and I sat in prison for three more years without a conviction because the court wouldn't grant me bond.
They just they wouldn't even rule on it.
They just left me sitting there for three more years, and my case was reversed on prosecutor misconduct.
That's the issue in which I got released.
On prosecutorial misconduct, and they wait three more years for the same prosecutor's office to figure out what they want to do exactly.
Yeah, I mean, it's the fox guarding the henhouse. It's a reality in our system, and it's just it's so it's one of the reasons why it's so broken.
Yeah, I ended up the court, the federal court, the Federal Peller Court ordered them to either grant me a new trial or release me. So I go back down to the circuit court and the prosecutor they offer me a plea bargain, said well, if you take this plea bargain, you can go home today. I said, if I don't get to go home today, I'm not taking it. So I took the plea bargain. But there was some confusion
behind that because that's I agreed to it. And the judge went on the record because the judge wanted me to walk out the courtroom, but the Department of Corrections the officers were saying, well, we got orders to bring him back and they want to recalculate his time, and the judge was like, what I said, he got time served. So the judge adjourned, got off the bench. He went
back and called the Department of Corrections himself. He called the central office in Lancy, Michigan, and he's like, I want to let this guy go home now, and they were telling him the same crack, Well, we got a procedure, we have to reclculate that time, make sure they are able to be released, and to just say, okay, I got this. The judge came back out beat red. He went back on the record and he changed the whole
plea barging. He said, not only am I sentenced to time served, but I'm going to mend a sentence to fifteen years.
I had already been out over my sentence by twelve me.
He gave me a ten to fifteen year sentence, which made me pass my out date by twelve years to make sure I went home right there.
Good for him. Yeah, it's nice to hear those stories.
We spent so much time talking about prosecutoring misconduct and other misdeeds in the system that it's important to highlight people like that judge who.
Yeah, he had courage and he did what was right.
That courage and those people can make a huge difference, and we need more of them, and more power to you too as well. I mean the idea that you figured out a way to represent yourself and overturn this crazy conviction, which I'm sure they made it as difficult as they could. They always do, but when there's a case of a police officer being shot, they're going to make it extra extra hard if they can. So you figured it out and then you come out and the world looks a lot different.
Huh, oh man, I was compared to our the feeling I had. I felt like Fred Finstone stepping onto the set of the j Justsons.
Of the Justons. Yeah, exactly right. I mean almost twenty seven.
Years that it felt like coming out.
I mean change, yeah, I mean even imagine if somebody going in today comes out twenty seven years from now, God knows what everything's gonna be, it really will.
Be the Jetsons by then.
Exactly how did you end up linking up with Glenn and his organization?
And Glenn, can you.
Talk a little bit about what it is that you're doing a Just Leadership. There's so much that it's hard for me to get it into a sound bite.
Sure.
At Just Leadership, we have the goal of cutting the number of people under correctional supervision in America in half by twenty thirty. So that means probation, parole, correction, prison, jails, you name it. And the reason we have this ambitious goal is because we have a criminal justice system that is just off the charts. That's just a jugging out
of a system that's locking up so many people. And we do that by investing in the leadership of people like Ronald And it's counterintuitive, but the truth is that's how you build movements, that's how you undo systems that dehumanize people, is to invest in the very.
People who have been dehumanized.
And you listen to Ronald's case, and you realize that we have a criminal justice system that just labels people and put them on a conveyor belt and sends them on their way, and you can never shake off the label, except when you listen to Ronald's story, it's not just riveting. You recognize his humanity in the middle of that story.
And so here you have Ronald who's a sophisticated advocate by any stretch of imagination, but also he has this story that is not just compelling, but it works as a way to help other people rehumanize people who are in the system. And I think that for us to start treating people differently, we have to recognize that they're people that their fathers and uncles and brothers and sisters.
And Ronald's story, as difficult as it is to listen to, because the criminal justice system and all of its perverse incentives led to all of those tragedies. In the end, I think what's most compelling is the story of a father who, while suffering in this system, found a way to be compassionate for a child who he didn't want to see end up facing the same sort of human carnage that comes out of our system now.
And in fact, this same sentence that you were facing. That's just another irony of the whole situation. You had to come out and navigate this new world, figure out why everybody's walking around with some sort of a gadget glued to their face, right, and everything else that goes with the technology, everything, everything is completely upside down from when you went in, for sure, because that let's facing
that's almost three decades. I'm sure some people that are listening haven't even been alive that long, right, And so, well, how'd you end up connecting with Glenn and just leadership because you're you're in Michigan. I mean, it's not you know, it's sort of I mean, it's not the easiest thing in the world, is exactly.
I think I met him sitting in the trailer.
Well before that, we met me when you came to my job at the trailer. What happened was in twenty fourteen, I was a Pamiliss at University of Michigan at a conference or convention there and Glenn was the keynot speaker for the student group had some kind of meet and going criminal justice reform conference going, so Glenn was the keynot speaking.
I was a PAMILSS and afterward we met.
He came to I worked at American France Service Committee and our office was in a garage in Anna Aburt, Michigan, and Glenn came to the garage and I met him there and we talked and he told me this vision that he had for starting this organization. He was working on it at that time, and he was telling me that, you know, he wanted me to apply for it when the application went live, and he explained to me that, you know, his theory of those closest to the problem of being
closest to the solution. And I always get a kick out when I think that, because I teased Messa, if I getting any closest to the problem, it's going to kill me after spending twenty seven years in prison, So I was. He offered me this opportunity to join his organization.
So end of twenty fourteen, I did the application and got accepted to the first cohort for twenty fifteen, and I went through the Just Leadership year long Leading with Conviction training and it was an amazing experience and a life changing the experience with Glenn and the guys he had training us. And at the end of that process and the end of twenty fifteen, Glenn was in the process of hiring his staff, his first staff people for Just Leadership, and he offered me a position, which I took.
And what is your job?
Now?
What do you do every day?
I'm the alumni associate for the organization. I'm the point of engagement for our three hundred and sixty six leaders in twenty nine states plus Washington, DC. We just added thirty six more leaders, so we're gonna have four hundred and two leaders in thirty one states.
What is a leader.
Formally encarcerated people that go through our training process. We have a year long Leading with Conviction training that we do here in New York City, and we have a one day snapshot of that training called Emerging leaders Training that we do. We do travel around the country doing at various locations, and the people that go through the programs become part of our network of leaders.
And what do those leaders do on a daily basis? So what's their job. Oh, they have their own job. Lot of them run nonprofit organizations. One of them work for the Department of Justice.
Some do policy in Alaska, some do reentry in Florida, some do re entry in California, the some of the drug counselors. They do a wide range of things dealing with criminal justice reform.
I mean, now I see why you're smiling so much, because you're now able to do something that is causing.
A ripple effect.
Absolutely, because everybody that you help is helping dozens of other people and then training them to go on and you know, and then all of this leads to twenty thirty when me and Glenn are probably could have finally take a vac case.
That's right, that's right, I'm with you, that's probably. That's probably as soon as we can hope for. But you know, it's okay.
It's funny because Glenn like carved out the perfect spot for me, I mean, for my talents, for this job. I mean, I'm like the point of engagement for this for all our cohort, and I leaded. I have such a relationship with him. Lot them call me Uncle Ronald. They come to the core. Hey, Cole Ronald, It's like we have a lot of fun.
The most personable men I've ever met in my life did twenty seven years in prison. Seriously, Ronald's attitude is. I mean, you find people that have vast amounts of other sorts of wealth and don't have the spirit that Ronald has.
No, no, and he's charming, you know what I mean. I can say that I may start. I don't know if I.
Can call you, but this is really what a story, what a full circle, and what an incredible spirit you have. I mean, I'm just uh, and you know it's amazing
because I feel so I don't know. The only word I can think of is blessed to be able to be in a position to be around people like yourself, and to be able to do my part in helping to change the conversation around this issue and to help individuals both in getting themselves out of prison when they don't belong there and returning to life, reintegrating it to society and excelling as you've done. It's an amazing process and it's you know, like I said, it just every time.
It never ceases to amaze me.
And you are as good of an example, and as good of an ambassador or as anybody could ever hope to have. So, Ronald, this has been an experience I'm not going to forget, and I'm looking forward to having more great experiences with you and working together in this fight.
Looking forward to it.
But we have a tradition here on wrongful Conviction. I like to turn the microphone over to our futured guest, well you and Glenn, and give you each an opportunity to just say whatever it is it's on your mind, anything that we haven't covered, or anything you want to say about anything.
I think in a nutshell for me, I mean, you kind of hit on it about the humanity. I think my whole mission in life at this point is to put the humanity back into being human. We've gotten away from that. And can you see how crass our society is, you know, all these shooting, how crazy it is because everyone's mad at each other and.
For what usually superficial reasons.
If we took time to look at each other as humans, to treat each other as humans, just to follow the simple golden rule treat the other people how you want to be treated, you know, learn develop a measure of empathy, not sympathy, but empathy putting yourself in the other person's shoes, And for me, that would go a long way and resolving a lot of issues that we had because in order for us to make some type of sustainable reform, especially for criminal justice reform, we need hardened mind change,
and that comes through putting the humanity back into being human.
You know, Jason, I went from exiting prison owing one hundred thousand dollars in fines, fees, restitution, find myself in midtown Manhattan, trying to figure out what's next, unable to find a job, to meeting one on one with the President of the United States thirteen years later. And the more I emerged as the exception is, the more I realized that it was reinforcing the existing narrative about everyone else.
And so the question was, how can I one help people understand that I'm not the exception, that I was exposed to exceptional opportunities, and to expose other formerly acclustrated leaders Ronald to the sort of opportunities that I've been exposed to. And you know, we tend to think that there's some voiceless people out there. I don't think they are voiceless people. I think there are people who've been
deliberately silenced, and it just leadership USA. We create a space for people who've been silenced to not just have voice, but to end up in much closer proximity with the people I think need to hear these messages. And Ronald is just one of our hundreds of ambassadors at this point, but I appreciate the opportunity to be on here and
create space for Ronald to tell his story. I just think it's hugely important for people who try to find compassion day to day in the world that we live in to recognize that there are people who have been through a tremendous amount of tragedy and still exercise humanity. And I think it challenges the rest of us to step up and be bolder and to lead with our values.
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I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall and Kevin Wartis. The music in the show is by three time OSCAR nominatede composer Jay Ralph.
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Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one