America has two point two million people in prison. If just one percent is wrong, that's twenty two thousand people. That's a lot of people's lives destroyed.
If the system want to take you out of society, they will do it no matter what laws they have to break, saying that they are enforcing the laws, but they're breaking the lord.
Having to hear those people say that I was guilty of a crime that I did not commit, and then hear my family break down behind me and not be able to do anything about it. I can't describe the crushing weight that was.
I'm not anti police, I'm just anti corruption.
A lot of times we look and we see something happen to somebody and that's the first thing.
We said, that could never happen to me, but they can.
This is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction. Today's guest is an extraordinary person who has been through something that nobody should ever go through. Leroy Harris, Welcome to the show.
Thank you very much.
There's so many crazy aspects of your case, but I think we should probably start at the beginning. First of all, where did you grow up?
I grew up in Brooklyn, New York.
And how was that. Did you have a nice family situation? I mean, was it a tough childhood?
Well?
No, we had a close knit family. I mean we was very supportive of each other and brothers, sisters, Yeah, brothers. My mother she was a single parent. She raised fourteen children. Huh yeah, my mother had seven sons and seven daughters.
Wow, that's amazing.
And you know my father he well at the time he worked as a truck driver, so he was in and out. But you know, he was supportive of the family too, but he just a lot of times he just couldn't really provide as much as he wanted to because the family was so big.
How big was your apartment that you lived in?
We lived in the house.
You know, we went from eastern New York to Flatbush and at that time in Flatbush, you know, was a lot of different families, different nationalities coming in and so it was pretty integrated. It was a good community that I lived in. And you know, so the family just growing up, it was it was it was a good wholesome family.
Were you the oldest, youngest, Well, I.
Was one of the middles.
Before this criminal justice nightmare hit you like a ton of bricks. Did you have when you were twenty two years older? Yes, I was before that. Did you have any interaction with the justices?
No, I didn't really have no encounters with the police. You know, I wasn't a bad kid if you consider you know, a little bit of every now and then, you know, growing up, a little beer or something, you know, as a kid, you know, growing up younger twenty one, twenty two, I took a drink here.
Nil or you know.
Okay, so you were a regular kid.
Yeah, that's it. That's it. I was a regular kid. I mean, nothing other than that little beer here and there. That was it. You know.
So this part of the story starts in nineteen eighty three, Yeah, just a long time ago. I mean, that's like I'm trying to think back of I mean, like when I watched the movie of My life backwards. If I think about the last thirty five years and thinking about you spending it incarcerated, it really is. That's just it's an enormous amount of time, and none of it ever made any sense. You originally picked up on a.
Warrant nineteen eighty four, and I knew nothing about it.
And this was in Connecticut in Connecticut in new Haven, so they pick you up on a warrant. Now most people are probably saying, okay, so what was the warrant for? And you didn't know.
Well, like I said, I'm from Brooklyn.
My mother she lived in New Haven at this time, so I'm out of town. They picked me up and locked me up, and that's all I know. At that point, I'm waiting to see a judge, you know, get the court. I'm locked up four months. I finally come to court September eighteenth, eighty four, and I'm asking him, where's the lawyer? Can you call my lawyer down?
So you have not at this point ever even met your lawyer yet.
Nobody, So you don't have a lawyer.
I don't have any but I know I'm coming to court, so they have to have the Public Defender's office have somebody come down to see me before I go up to see the judge. So I'm asking where's the lawyer because I know you have to get a lawyer.
I don't have no money.
But the logical thing mind is going to say, but wait a minute, you must have seen a lawyer while you were in jail. Everyone's entitled to a lawyer. It says that in the constitution, how were they You were in jail for four months and you didn't even know what was going on and you didn't see a lawyer.
Well, they you know, sometimes people do what they want to do. I mean, just because a person is a prosecutor or a person is a police officer, it doesn't mean that they are following the letter of the law. So we need to make that clear because if they were following the letter of the law, I would have seen a lawyer day one when they arrested me.
And then most likely none of this ever would have happened, because you would have been able to prove that whatever it was that they were charging you with, they had the wrong guy. Right now, you can't see him, but Leroy is a very dapper dresser. He's all decked out today. And that's actually an important point because it plays a role in the next part of the story. Right, so you show up in court dressed to kill, yes, no pun intended. And what happens next.
Well, they called me the court that day. I get to the courthouse, I'm down in the lock up. I'm asking the sheriff, where's the lawyer? Can I see a lawyer. Who's my lawyer? He goes upstairs to the Public Defender's office. We got Leroy Harris downstairs. He's asking who is his lawyer? This dad and he comes back down maybe twenty five minutes later and says, I don't know. Then the doorbell to the lock up gets the buzz that someone comes in.
He says, mister Harris. He says, they're here for you. Now, I said they're here for me. Now, what do you mean? He says, there's a cop officer Lemon. He wants to speak to you. The officer said, asking.
Me, are you Leroy Harris. I says yes, I am.
He says it is your date of birth ten twenty five sixty. I says yes it is, and he says, well turned around Yon Durest. I said for what he said, for robbery and sexual assault. He says this happened May twenty first, nineteen eighty three. Now this is another warrant. So they take me from de Locaup to one Union Avenue, which is the police headquarters, process me and put me in the van, bring me back to another court for arrangement for this new warrant. So when I get to
the court. I'm sitting there waiting to be arranged, and pandemonium erupted in the courthouse, and one of the sheriffs ran over and said, hey, come on, get out of here. And I didn't ask any questions. I got up and I walked out.
So wait, when you say pandemonia erupted, what do you mean?
It was a lot of excitement in the courthouse.
People were yelling over here, so he was just trying to clear everything out. And he told me, hey, get up. And because the way I looked, he didn't think that I was a prisoner.
Did he think you were a lawyer?
I guess he did, because that was inside the transcripts. He said, well, he did.
The clothes he was wearing, the suit, the way he looked, look at the pictures, no one knew you know, that was Leroy.
I mean, you do look more like a lawyer or a college professor than somebody who's been in prison. Even now. I mean, and this is something that's just totally surreal. Like here you are with two warrants, one of you still don't know what it is, the other one you don't know what the hell they're talking about, right, you know, what it is, but it doesn't make any sense to you. You walk out of the courtroom into the fresh air. Yes, because they told you to.
They told me, go ahead, get out of here.
Which sounds like it all sounds so crazy, right, So you walk out and then what happens.
Well, I walked out, and I got on the train and I went home to Brooklyn and I was then Brooklyn for maybe a year and a half before I was picked up and brought back to New Haven and they charged me with escape from custody. Now I got an escape from custody and I got three cases. I don't really didn't really have nothing from the beginning. I didn't know what was going on. And they take me to trial in eighty six, November twenty, nineteen eighty six, they take me to trial for escape.
And by the way, this is the most elegant escape I've ever heard of. Right, they actually told you to walk out, So this is the most peaceful escape in the history of escapes. Just like, off you go, like, take a walk, see you later, get on the trade, go home, Thank you very much. Okay, So now they're charging you with escape. The previous warrant. They still didn't tell you what it is.
I later found out there was lossity in the second.
Degree, okay, larcening in the second degree, okay, so another thing. So they brought you to trial out and they charge you with all three crimes.
Just escape. That's later.
We talked about eighty six right now. So they charged me with escape. So now they convict me. Now you had a lawyer, right well, yeah, I had a lawyer, but it wasn't Sometimes you say bootleg, and I think that's what this was. This was the bootleg of fleet Market, you know, the fleet Market lawyer. He wasn't in my
best interest at all. What was going on. I guess, like I said, if the system want to take you out of society for whatever reason, they will do it no matter what laws they have to break, saying that they are enforcing the laws, but they're breaking the laws.
Because it would seem like a relatively simple argument for a lawyer to make to say, well, the sheriff told my client to leave and he left, doesn't seem to meet the definition of escape, but that he didn't even bother him out that argument.
They charged me with escape from custody. And this is the part where I did escape.
Right, because there's a real escape.
Yeah, this is the escape. This is now, this is the escape. Once they did that. Once they did that from walking out and they told me to walk out that day November twentieth, nineteen eighty six, the prosecutor said to me, now you're convicted.
What I'm gonna do. I'm gonna have.
You charged as a serious persistent felon the offender. I had no cases, I had no charges, I had no felon needs except the escape that you just.
Convicted me on.
He says, I'm gonna charge you as a serious persistent felon the offender. And you're going downstairs in the lock up. And this was before one o'clock that day I was convicted, and at two o'clock you're coming back upstairs and we're gonna pick another jury. And all that jury has to do just say that you're guilty as a persistent fella in the offender.
And the sheriff right here that within the.
Courtroom during the trial, he's a witness, and the sinographer that's sitting right there, she's a witness that you just was convicted and you got another felony.
They're gonna testify to that and.
If the jury sees that, they can double up and give you instead of ten years for walking out for the escape, twenty that's when I escaped.
And then how did you escape this time? Because it's really amazing because I'm sitting here thinking, well, if they're going to charge me with an escape, and I'm going to show him what escape looks and ask.
What I did.
And that day, when I went downstairs, I left how I went through. I went.
I just went through the control room.
I opened up the door, I walked out the fence, I walked up the driveway. I walked onto the New Haven Green and I sat there for a minute. Took off my suit and I had my shorts onto that because I was on trial, so I had I was stap. I had a dress suit on and I had gym shorts underneath that. So I just took that off, took my shoe over, left it through it in the garbage, and I just walked down to Elm Street and I seen somebody with a car and they gave me a ride to the train station and I got on the
train and I went back to Brooklyn. And when I got back in Brooklyn, I was again charged with escape from custody until I was picked up on March fifteenth, nine teen eighty eight.
Now, and that's just where this comes in at.
So March fifteenth, nineteen eighty eight. Now, wow, and here we are in twenty eighteen. It's not hard to do the math on that one. And then you never saw daylight again from that point until twenty seventeen.
Until right until November twenty first, two thy seventeen. That was when I seen freedom as I known it to be.
So it's so recent too. It's really just started processing this right now. You eventually ended up getting picked up this now third time, charged with an escape that was an actual escape. And it's interesting listening to you talk about it because you make it sound like it was so easy, but it couldn't have been that easy. I mean, they make it serious.
I was just furious, become furious. I mean what they did, what they did, I was just so furious. I just left.
Yeah, you left, but I mean again, like it doesn't people can't just leave me. No, you had to put some I don't know how you did it. It's still sort of missing me. I'm trying to picture the different doors and walls and things. But you got out, so now here it is nineteen eighty eight, you're back in custody, and this time they're going to try you for this sexual assault and robbery that you know nothing about. And
now you have another public defender. And was this guy any better than the other guy?
No, this wasn't him. This was her, Patricia buck Wolf.
She was an advocate for battered women, for women of sexual assass for sheltered women, and women in crisis and everything else. So I didn't have no defense at all. I just sat there during the whole trial, and the state put on their case. It was my five hundred and twenty pages in the transcript and nothing with me.
So she was from the picture that you're painting. It sounded like she didn't have a lot of interest in that because she was looking at it like if they're charging you, you must be guilty, and she's wants to take the side of the woman. And it was a terrible case. Yeah, nobody would you know whatever, want this
to happen to anybody. But that doesn't mean that you don't deserve a fair trial, and it doesn't mean that we should convict the wrong guy, which is exactly what happened is what happens too frequently in this country, and people, I think would expect that there would be a system of justice that wouldn't totally break down in the way that it did in your case over and over again.
It's not like there was one time, and I mean like, you had multiple opportunities for the justice system to work in your favor, as just a regular law abiding citizen deserves and would expect, and every single time it almost got worse. I mean here, they basically sounds like and I don't know whether they did it on purpose, but they probably stuck you with a lawyer that was the least likely one to want to really mount an aggressive defense for you in this case. How long did the child take?
When the trial went from the fourth to the tenth, the eleventh. The next day they sit in to me nine o'clock in the morning. But I didn't find out about Patricia buck Wolf until two thousand and eight. It was a prejudice did because of the case and what she represented, and I didn't know that. I found that out years later, most twenty years later. Yeah, I found that out.
And you know what's ironic about that, Leroy, is that you can't escape the fact that in doing what she did, which was not defending you and not getting to the truth, what she actually did is allowed the actual perpetrator to remain free to abuse more women. She broke the law, well,
she broke the law. But also if her goal which we can agree with, which is to help battered women and to be an advocate for women who are in suffering and abused, if that was her goal, she actually accomplished the opposite thing, because not only did she do a grave injustice to you, but also any other woman
that the actual perpetrator went and abused. Those women would never have been victimized if the system would have worked, and if she and the other people would have done their job, and they would have actually figured out that you were innocent and gone and found the guy who's a bad guy and should be off the streets and
should be in prison. So she actually did a terrible disservice to women by using this twisted logic that she had in just disregarding your guilt or innocence and throwing you to the well, throwing you to the wolves, right, her name was wolves. She threw you to the wolves. You end up getting sentenced to eighty years eighty years in prison. I mean, how did you even manage to
deal with that? You've already been wrongfully arrested multiple times, charged wrongly multiple times, in and out of prison escapes, You've already had like a nightmarish journey, and now comes the ultimate, which is an eighty year sentence. I mean, you had at this point, you had a wife and a child and a life that you were supposed to be living absolutely and you're being pulled away from all of that and basically sentenced to die in prison. You weren't going to live another eighty years.
No, I wasn't, but I knew that I had to fight this. April eleventh, nineteen eighty nine, they gave me eighty a sentence, and I said, from that day.
I gotta fight him.
And let's go back for a second, le Roy and talk about this case, because this was a terrible crime. Right.
There were three guys who stole the car and some money from somebody, and then there were two young ladies in the car who ended up and a terrible twist of faith, they ended up making a wrong turn, getting stuck on a dead end and then running basically into a more or less a roadblock that these guys who had just stolen this other car were able to sort of box them in, and so they were sexually assaulted and robbed. They knew they had three perpetrators, right, and
they had two of them. They had caught two of them, Is that right?
No, they had a whole lot of suspects.
James Pooky, Round Trees, Smith, Shepherd, Blingold. They had a whole lot of people that they thought that was a potential suspect that never came out because they wanted, I guess, to punish me, and so I was punished for that. And today, as I said before you, I have proven that November twenty first, even prior to that, that it wasn't me and everything that they knew, all of them years, it was because of a prosecutor named James Clark.
He was being vindictive.
He was mad because I left the first time, and then after they try to get double up and give me twenty years for walking out the door.
He was mad about that.
That's when I escaped and they gave me to ten years in absentia. When they brought me back in custy, I was sentenced to ten years so he did that while I was on the run, and so it.
Was just being vengeful.
He just wanted to hurt me, just to hurt me, you know, because I left, and showing me that he got the power.
I got the power, so I'm gonna take it life, I don't care. I'm to take it.
And that's what he did, even though he knew and all the evidence at the time from day one showed that I had nothing to do with it, that I wasn't there, you know, I wasn't even supposed to have been a suspect. He knew that from day one. He knew that from eighty three, and all the documentation shows that clearly,
all the evidence. But he took me to trial in eighty nine and had me suffer for twenty nine years, taking that our die in prison because this conversation around the water fountain was he'll be catching up the mats and when he get out, he'll be doing this.
He'll be doing that for nothing. So this was a vicious person.
Yeah, it's it's really hard to figure out how people can go so far wrong that they can just sendence somebody like you to spend the rest of their life in prison. Then go home and have a nice dinner, coach lead, you know, just go on with their lives like nothing happened. But as unfortunately, there's a lot of
people out there like that. There are good people in the justice system, and I always say that, and we need a justice system, and we need when you're in trouble, you need to be able to call somebody, need to be able to call a cop. Absolutely no, we need prosecutes that, we need judges, but they are just too damn many of these people like this guy, who have no conscience and have no and really have no interest
in justice at all. Because again, and I make this point over and over again, when they lock up the wrong guy, they don't lock up the right guy, and that guy's free to go out and terrorize the community. And your case was proven with DNA that you were innocent, but they also had other evidence. They knew that the witnesses had said that they didn't know you. That the body, I mean, there was nobody that placed you had to see the crowd, there was nobody even knew who you were.
Even the victims told him that.
In September twenty seven, nineteen eighty three, when they arrested me the eighteenth, nineteen eighty four. The documentation that I have that says that when they ask the victims, is this.
The guy, they said, no, case, he had nothing to do with it.
But in eighty nine everybody comes parading in there because the clock.
Do you see the man?
Do you know Lee Ray Harris?
Nope? From the witness, do you see the man in the courtroom?
Let the record reflect that their victim just made an identification of the defendant. Okay, you may step down, Come on next with do you know Leroy Harritt?
No?
You ever seen them before? No, tell us what happened? Do you see the person in court?
Let the record reflect that the victim just made the identification of the defendant.
Okay, step down, call the next person.
And we know now that the Supreme Court of Connecticut has outlawed those type of practices. Right, so under today's rules, they would not have been able to do that, because obviously that's a suggestive identification technique and it's been in use for a long time. But luckily now no one else will be able to be wrongfully identified as you were in that courtroom that day using those same tactics. And why do you think that those witnesses changed their story six years later.
Well, I think that Clark told them that because they said it in a habeas trial that we came to court, because you come to court to identify a person, and Clark told them it was me.
He's the prosecutor. This or documented.
He put them in the room on the side and said that looking there, that's him right there.
It is all documented.
And by the way, we also know that so many different studies have shown how memory works. Right, First of all, you look different six years later. Everybody looks different six years later. The memory of an event that happened six
years earlier is going to be foggy at best. Right, people can't even make a correct identification, you know, a day later in most cases, in many cases, right in your case here it is all these years later, and these suggestive techniques, a borderline course of techniques that were used could cause a person to either who knows whether they knew at the time that they were actually identifying an innocent person and maybe they were threatened if they
didn't do that. Well, I don't know if we'll ever know the answer to that one, or whether they just were mistaken. But the fact is, going back to nineteen eighty three, they should have never proceeded past that point because they knew, and later on DNA proved it, and the witnesses have also come clean and said that they knew that you weren't the guy. So it's really it's
a fucking tragedy, is what it is. I like to talk about how you know, when people are listening, most people's reactions are going to be, well, that could never happen to me. What would you say to that.
I wouldn't say that it couldn't happen because it couldn't happen to anybody. It happened to me. I mean a lot of times we look and we see something happen to somebody and that's the first thing we said, that could never happen to me.
But it can, right, And that's one reason that it's important that we talked about your background, because the fact that you came from a good family, that you were a law abiding citizen who had never been in trouble. I think a lot of people jumped the conclusions they think, well, if this guy was convicted, he must have done something right.
A lot I hear that from people, sometimes even people that you know, you think are good, you know, good hearted people, but they have a negative preconception that's been caused by years of press or different things. But it's important that people be educated to the fact that that's not the way it is, and it happens to so many people. A big percentage of our clients at the Innocence Project are people like you who had no prior record.
They just got caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time, or mistakenly arrested as you were in the first place. And then once the justice system gets you in, it's grasped. It just grinds you up and spits you out. In too many cases when you were in prison, can you talk about what was the best and what was the worst thing that happened in those twenty nine years.
Well, I think the saddest part for me was just being in the cell, because you know, you learn a lot in the cell. You learn about yourself, and you learn that that cell can mint out a hell of a punishment if you're not strong, and what I mean by that if you don't have a purpose. And my purpose was getting my life back. So what I did while I was confined was started to improve myself, learning the law, helping people that couldn't read or write. LBA
Literacy Volunteers of America. I was one of the tutorers for that, getting involved with all type of educational and vocational skills to just keep my mind focused and try to have some type of normacy in there and not just going with the flow with the prison antics or just the common flow in prison, gambling, running around, smoking, you know to some people prune o, getting high. No, I wasn't doing those things. My focus was getting my
life back. So I stayed in the library, read thousands of cases, wrote a couple of books, put organizations together. I made sure kept briefs and stuff in the court's face, letting them know, hey, you know what you did, and I'm not going away and I'm not going away. And this is where Karen and them come in. Vanessa and them come in in twenty fourteen. But I've been fighting them for years and you know, arguing, fighting, and they came in and seeing that, well, what the hell is this?
And so the Innis Project took your case in twenty fourteen. And how did you receive the news that the NISS Project was taking your case, because that's got to be a big day.
Yeah, that was a big day. I received that through Mendy Jeremount. She came up to see me and we talked and she told me this is what's going on, and me, I was pro se, so they wouldn't give it to me, but I didn't want it to go nowhere. So when she came up, she went and made sure everything was we're supposed to be and sealed it up.
And that brings us to where we at right now today.
We know that at the Innocence Project, it does take even after we take a case. It's not like there's no magic, you know, like it's still a lot of work. It's still hundreds thousands of hours of legal work. And in your case, it took three years. Let's talk about how this thing ended up because the justice system still had one more one more way that they really wanted to fuck you. Right and forgive my language, but I
can't think of another word that fits the situation. So yeah, here it is three years go by, the innsis Project is working on your case. You have now from going from having some of the worst legal representation anybody's ever had, now you have some of the best legal representation anybody's ever had. So now you've got hope and the day comes when finally the DNA is found, it's proven that you're innocent. But the justice system's got one more trick
up at sleeve. Talk about that because you ultimately were forced to take an alphad plea right, yes, and which is not a common thing. I mean, people hear about it on the show, but only six percent of cases end up with alfhad please, so still too big of a number. But it's not like it's an everyday thing.
It's reserved for very special circumstances. And the offer plea, in a nutshell, allows the prosecutors to maintain their conviction, if you want to call it that right to sort of not admit that they were wrong, while you can be freed. Right, that's the best part of it, and you can go out there and say I'm innocent, But in terms of the eyes of the law, it forces you to plead guilty to a lesser crime in order to be freed. Is that that's fair?
Yeah, yes, yes, But what I believe is that in this situation here, they dismissed the case, they gave me the opportunity to plead under the Alpha doction.
But to me, it was like.
Rather than stay and can you to go through the nonsense, because that's what it was all of them years. When they knew they had to turn me loose, they wanted to still keep a conviction that they know.
Doesn't even really exist.
So they dismissed the rapes, they dismissed the robberies, and they gave me a kidnap. They said, plead guilty to a kidnap and we're gonna let you go home. What type of fiction is that you've been in twenty nine years for this? Were dismissing that right now, the twenty first, all of that, but take kidnap and we're gonna let you go home or else or else. You stay in another fifteen years until we decide to think about doing something.
But the conviction had already been They.
Just dismissed it on the twenty first of November.
So they dismissed it only after you agreed to take the offer.
Right, They dismissed everything, and then they told me this is what it's going to be.
It was all dismissed.
Wait wait, wait, I don't think we're making it clear here. So on November twenty First, what happened.
On November twenty First, I went in the courtroom and it was a hearing. They said, well, in this hearing, you know, they just talked about the case and we're going to dismiss it today, but you're going to plead under the alpha doctrine the kidnap, but the robberies and the sexual assaults are dismissed.
Dismissed. Now we're going to put you to.
Plea because otherwise they're going to keep you.
Otherwise you're going to stay in until we decide ten twenty more.
Years under the kidnapping charge.
Yeah, but it wasn't never no kidnap.
So the yeah, it's real.
What I'm saying is that.
They put me to plea on a fiction, on something that never happened.
First they dismissed all the.
Charges, and then a half an hour later they tell me plead to kidnap and you can go home.
But if I'm listening to this at home, I'm saying to myself, well, if they dismissed all the charges, there's nothing. And by now the Interests Project had proven with science, everybody was there that you weren't the guy. So it's so it's so crazy like that they could just pull this kidnap out of thin air. I don't even understand that.
I mean, either I do this for me neither. Wow, But I'm here. But that's that's what it is, right now. Kidnap. You got to kidnap.
You got a kidnap from I don't know where, but we gave it to you, like we gave you the robbery, we gave you to sex yourself, we gave you a warrant, we gave you this.
Now we're going to give you a kidnap.
Right And this is a kidnapp when you say it's a kidnapp that not only you weren't involved with, but it's a kidnapp that never even happened.
The warrant never happened. This we prove never happened. The escape, the first one never happened. You told me to leave, the second one I did. But now here's got something else that we're giving you.
Oh, was this an actual real kidnapping of a human pers it's just to just pull them out of here. We're just gonna charge you with can.
You give me a kidnap? You go home today? But We're gonna give you a kidnap, so you got your state. You still got a felony now, but it's kidnapped.
So did you kidnap the Lindburg baby or Patty Hurst?
I don't know who.
They don't even tell you.
I don't know who that was. Just that's the fiction. That's the fiction.
And I'm here today because I truly believe fifty of something. It's better than one hundred percent than nothing. And I did not want to sit in jail another ten fifteen years fight and when they already knew from day one it's already proven now in two thousand, more than seventeen prior to that has been proven within this in project. Everything's clear, not just through DNA, but through everything, documents, the evidence that everything, the victims of everything, it's already
been clear. But this is what we're gonna do. We gave you everything else, We're going to give you this to walk with that.
So and the practical effect to that is that you now have to live with a conviction on your record. You're convicted felling that never happened, and you have to live with the stigma of having participated in the fictional kidnapping of a fictional person that was made up by somebody with a crazy, vindictive imagination. And the reason why they want to do that is because it means.
That you can't see would That's what they say.
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons. And that's just another thing that's really so difficult to accept, the idea that society owes you a huge debt and they want to pull the rug out from under you instead one more time and say we're not going to allow you to sue. But good luck, you know, goodbye and good luck or they don't even say that, but you know what I mean. Now, on the other hand, you got a lot of life left to live, right, you do have a beautiful family. You are able to just
carry on and you're here now. Actually it was your beautiful wife. And that's an amazing story. Just switching subjects for a second. So your story is actually a love story, and it's remarkable in that I don't know if I've ever heard of anything quite like it before, because you were married when when this nightmare started, and you're still married to the same person, yes, and you have grandchildren now grandchildren, and your wife Gwendolyn who's here in the studio,
who looks a little like a rock star. She waited for you the whole time you're in prison. Let's just take a moment and think about that. I mean that is that is an extraordinary person that would do that, and what how much did that mean to you?
That meant the world to me because I wasn't looking for that because I was in prison and I figured that, you know, I wouldn't want to see nobody suffered the way I would have to suffer. And I think that that, to me was a form of imprisonment. And I didn't want her to feel that she had to stay with me because I was confined. I wanted her to go on with her life because I can understand. But she chose to be there and to hold on with me, and you know, I'm grateful for that. And it was
only by the grace of God that it happened. And I, you know, I respect that and our love her.
With all my heart.
That's beautiful. And tell me about your You have a daughter, yes, Cadija, Yeah, and then she has two children.
Yeah, my grandson Trap he's fifteen to twenty second of this month. February and my granddaughter Jule, she just turned eight to seventeen for last month, their mother. She's an amazing woman, that's my daughter.
I'm very proud of her.
I see that, and that's really a blessing. You know the fact that you had this support system while you were inside, and I see when you talk about it, obviously that was a part of your survival.
Really, yes, it was.
Obviously you have the support system with the NSIS Project, and you have your family, which is great because many many people who come out in your circumstance come out to nobody and nothing. But still there's a lot that you're going to need to really get to where you deserve to be. People listening say I want to do something for this guy. What could people do? How could they help?
Well, my organization is called to Help the Needy Foundation, and that's something that I established from prison. You know, it's to put people back on track. Our mission on our model is to be peaceful, be respectful, enjoy yourself. So it's just helping those in need, homeless, helping the youth get back on track with vocational and educational training to try to help them build their self esteem. You know, it's just it helped me. I'm an example of that. This is what got me and this is why I'm
who I am today. And you can email me at Leroy Harris sixty at yahoo dot com.
That's my email address.
So Lee, right before we sign off, we have a tradition here Wrong for Conviction, which is at the end of the show, I like to turn the microphone and let you share anything else that's on your mind that you want to talk about, anything at all.
Well, just you know, being here today is an honor and just being out and back into the hustle and bustle have an enormacy once again seeing life as I am, knowing it to be family, friends unleashed. You know, it's amazing. Ain't no better feeling after twenty nine years in a cage. There's no better feeling than this. It gets no better than this.
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 Wardis. 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