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 are 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 with Jason Flamm. Today, I am actually in the presence of someone who I am. I can only say I'm in awe of this guy. John Huffington is here. John was in prison for thirty two years, ten of them on death row for a double murder that he didn't commit. And the things that he's doing today would embarrass the biggest do gooder among us. So, John, welcome to wrongful conviction.
Thank you. I appreciate that.
So John, let's go back to the beginning, before this insane saga began, because this happened when you were eighteen. But before that, how was your life? What was it like? Where'd you grow up? So?
I grew up in a small town called Churchvills. It's in Harford County, in between two bigger towns that folk would know, bela Air and Aberdeen and Maryland in Maryland, Yes, Maryland. So I grew up probably will be considered middle class, upper class kind of a situation. Nice neighborhood, good schools. I had everything that you know you would want in that sense of support, a strong family. My parents ended up being married over fifty six years. I think it was,
you know, at the end, siblings were doing well. So, you know, it's like anything else young age, you know, we make our choices. We get exposed to different things. And I made a few the wrong choices and took quicker routes to negativity is what it turned out to be, and exposed myself to lifestyles that were not healthy. My choices took me out of an arena where you know, I should have had the white picket fence and half kids or whatever and you.
Know and adult. Were you doing anything violent at the time.
Oh no, no, no, I mean when I say bad choices, it was into getting into drugs and that's what I was doing. I was, I was dealing drugs and I was living that lifestyle.
As you were between tenth grade and I guess twelfth grade when this happened, right, Did you ever have any interaction with law enforcement based on the fact that you were involved with drugs? No.
I never had any regular charge placed on me in that regard. I was a wild child and my parents were trying to bring me more under control. So there was that I was exposed to the juvenile criminal system justice system at that time with what they call sin charle child and need a supervision because my parents were kind of wits end what to do. So I got juvenile probation and had to do like family counseling and
that kind of thing to work through that. But again it was me being rebellious against you know, my parents were. There was a serious generation gap. My parents were born in the twenties and they were in their forties before the kids came along. So as I was pushing the boundaries of curfews and just lifestyle choices, it was very hard to sort of transgress into that through the family unit.
And you know, having your younger brother and sister, my parents didn't want that to be a bad influence on them as well, so you know they were right to try and bring me and bring me in tighter.
So none of the stuff that you're describing would prepare you or anyone for death row or any of the stuff that was to befall you. And it all leads to that faithful day of May twenty fifth, nineteen eighty one, when there was a double murder and you were implicated ultimately by the guy who actually committed the crimes. So how did how did they come to decide to come get you in the first place.
So the night of or prior in that evening, I was with what turned out to be my co defendant and we were at a club and they were closing that club early. It was a Sunday night, and the owner was like, well, we're all going to go over here, why don't we go? And so we ended up over at the club where one of the victims worked as a DJ and the guy had worked for me in the past. Like when I say worked for me, he had purchased quantities of cocaine, you know, and sold for me.
So we had various conversations and my co defendant was actually looking to make a purchase that night. I was waiting for supply to come in anyway. So that's kind of the realm of why we were all in that, you know, gathering, so to speak. So we left there after having some conversation. At the end of the night at two in the morning whatever we had gone back to he lived in a trailer home. We had gone
back and had further conversation. My co defend actually purchased like an eighth of an hour ocid, coke or whatever from him, and we left it at that and we left. So when the murders were discovered the next day and the police investigation led them to my co defendant because his name had been said while they were in the car, because I guess we were following them and somebody's like, who's the car following us, and it was said, you know, that's Dino. So they they tracked him down and he
reached out to me asking for an alibi. And again, look at that age, I was eighteen, I'm I'm a drug dealer, I'm anti police, I'm like all about the loyalty factor and you know, never snitching and all those kind of things, just being young and stupid. So it wasn't a big thing to me. It was like, whatever, no problem. This is The following night, I guess, I got a call from his cousin that said the police had reached out to him looking for me because apparently
they didn't know my last name. They just wanted to talk to me. So I was like, fine, let's go. Let's go see him. So literally, we went to the police station and I walked in, I knocked on the door and I said, you know, I'm John Huffington. I understanding you're looking for me, and they were like, yeah, we are, so.
But you didn't know at that time what they were looking for you for.
No, I honestly, I didn't know the extent of what happened. I just knew something had happened.
Well because your friend at the time, cod defended it turned out to be Dino Canaris. He hadn't told you about what he had done. He just told you that he wanted an all.
We need to we need to have been here all night because we had gone to a convention music convention that they have as a bluegrass convention the next day, and it was like, we need to fill the gap from the night before. You know, I'm not stupid, but I don't. I just didn't know the extent of it.
I mean, who would ever expect that he had committed a double murder? I mean, did you know this guy to be a violent guy.
No, But as the case developed, a quick sidebar on that there was a witness that came forward who I didn't even know. You know, I'd met once in my life. But this guy said that he was with Dino like two weeks prior to this, and they were at the location, the campground, and the Dino pulled out a gun and a knife and wanted to go kill and rob these people. Again, I don't find this out till years later in his trial.
Like that witness never testified at one of my trials. Ever, it wasn't my witness, stayed witness.
And again, you had never personally known him to be prone to this type of talking about violence and extreme violence.
Extreme yeah, no, I hadn't. I mean I always looked at him. Quite honestly, he wasn't a friend of mine. His other cousins were friends of mine. Like I didn't like Dino. He was addicted to the cocaine. This is a guy that chased it.
So you covered for him because you just were more I mean, even though he wasn't really a friend, you were more anti authority at the time, and you were just kind of being questionable too.
Like the Greek.
He was much older than you, right, Yeah, he was in.
Mid twenties something, I think twenty seven. I was eighteen. The Greeks have their thing, and like I said, I was friends with their cousin. I'm thinking, I'm rolling with the gangsters, and this is what we all do, and it's that kind of a lifestyle. But again, it's something I still ascribe to today, Like I don't, you know, have my code of what we could call honor ethics were I don't snitch, you know, so when I get in there and you know, they're confronting me with this,
I don't have a way out. Now. It's different to think abstractly like Okay, something happened, even a crime of violence, something happened. You know, it's abstract, but when you you know, started hearing the elements of it, it was very I'm eighteen, it was a little overwhelming. I didn't even know how to process it. So my reaction to them was, look, I'm not involved in this. You can come search my apartment right now. I'll take a lot of tective tests.
I'll do whatever I can to extricate myself the only way I know how. So they were like, we'll do all that. So literally left the police station now is probably midnight on Sunday, and they drove me back to my apartment and I turned in like all my paraphernalia right then and there, because I told them, I said, if you search my apartment, there might be some things
that you're going to find. And they're like like what, And I'm like, you know, I have scales, I have drug parafhinney, that kind of thing, and they're like, are you willing to turn it in? I'm like absolutely, I just retired as of today, as of this moment, I'm retired. I'm not a drug dealer anymore. Like I knew my life had just completely changed right then and there. So we went back to the apartment, and I turned in all this material and I volunteered to take the LT
of detector tests. So the only thing I had said is I just wanted a lawyer there, and I don't. I don't have a lawyer, I don't know a lawyer. So the next morning, I literally went to the Yellow Pages, and back in those days, they had Yellow Pages, and there was a guy in my class at school who I knew his father was an attorney. So I looked for that last name, called that law firm, and it turns out as father does civil but his uncle does
criminal law. So I set up an appointment and went in there the very next morning at like nine o'clock and met with the attorney and you know, they're like, well, what is it you want us to do. I'm like, I want to take the LOT of detector test. I want this to be you know, I don't want them looking at me like I'm in I want to do this, and they're like, okay, we'll set it up.
So I was.
Leaving the police station, went to get in our cars with my future brother in law. He was my sister's boyfriend at the time, and Dino's father was standing outside because the restaurant's right there. So I said good morning to him and continued on to get in the car. Well, unbeknownst to me that night, Dino had gone to his father and gave his whatever you want to call his confession. But obviously it was all putting the weight on me, saying that I held him hostage while all this stuff happened.
So all that had transpired unbeknownst to me during the evening, So when his father saw me, his father ran into the police station and said, you know, John Hoffingon is out in the parking lot. So we're starting to pull out of our parking spot. I look up, I see the back of the police station door just burst open. A dozen officers are fanning out into the parking lot.
We're the only vehicle moving, so we're immediately surrounded. Guns drown So I told him, my brother in law, I just just stopped, just pull over, and we get out of the car, and it's like.
That was it.
That was the last time that right there, that moment was the last time my feet hit the ground until thirty two years later.
Thirty two years.
Later, and I never did get that light detective.
Test, never got the light detective test. It sounds like some other people should have been given light detectors, and.
They were, and they were and he failed to our knowledge and what my law firm was able to ascertain, were aware that he took two and he failed both of them.
You're talking about Diinoo. So now you know you're in real trouble. You've got this lawyer. Now did he end up representing you? And how and how did things go from there? How long were you held in jail? I'm assuming you were held without bail because this was a I mean you're talking about Joe Hudson was shot and killed outside of farm on his way to a turn out to be a fabricated drug deal. Right. He was the boyfriend of Diana Becker, who was beaten and stabbed.
She had been sleeping her trailer her son found her. I mean, it's the whole thing's horrible in every way, and then it gets worse when an innocent man ends up serving all this time in prison when they actually had the real perpetrator. But he had every reason to implicate you. I mean, he didn't care about you at all, and he was making a deal for himself, probably to spare his own life because of course Maryland had the death penalty still.
Does, I think, right, No, they've abolised it.
So Marylnd's a bossed death en. But they had the death back then. So yeah, he had the strongest possible incentive to implicate somebody. And you were the logical guy because you were the guy who had been around that night, right, So it's like he didn't need to be a brain surgeon to figure that out. But then it's interesting too because he came up with this story which every time I think we've ever heard of it, it's been false, right, which is that you held him hostage.
And it changes, you know, his story changes every time he testifies grand jury. I've had two trials. Will Mitt is his gun. There's really no ducking that because when he was with these undercover cops, there was a point in time where they were driving somewhere and he was in the car with the officer and he said, wait a minute, let me go get my gun. I don't ever go anywhere without my gun. So he went back to his car. He came back with the gun. Now
the officer obviously is not pleased with this. Nervously he's carrying a gun, so asked to see it, like, let me what do you carry? Let me see it. Apparently it's a it was a unique kind of a thirty eight something. There was an animal in the handle or something. The officer noted that. So just he can't duck the fact that this officer is testifying it's an undercover state police officer. The canarious carries a gun. So he tells different versions of he supposedly sells me this gun, like
either two weeks before or a month before. You know, that kind of stuff changes every time he opens his mouth.
And of course you didn't have the gun. I don't have a gun, And they knew you didn't have gun because they'd search your apartment. They searched everything. There was no physical evidence connecting you to the crime.
The only thing that they as far as physical evidence goes, is there's a vodka bottle that apparently was used as a weapon to to bludge in Diana, and my fingerprint, they've claimed, is on the neck of this bottle. Now, this is back in the eighties where everybody, myself included, we always had these big bottles in your apartment or whatever, and where you throw your coins and usually you had these big feathers sticking out of it. I did on mine,
and that's what this bottle was in the trailer. Apparently it was full of coins and such. So, you know, they asked me, well, how could your fingerprint get on there? My answers, I don't know. Like I was in the trailer. Did I touch it at one point? I don't know. I'm not going to sit here and tell you lie and say very specifically that night I moved the bottle. So therefore my fingerprints on there, I don't know. If
you say my fingerprints on there. There was also, I don't know, it was over twenty other fingerprints and handprints on this bottle that still to this day remained unidentified. But that was the other piece of evidence that they've used to put me at the scene. You know, I don't have an answer for that. I'm not going to sit here and make up an answer. I've been in the trailer, I was there that night. Did I touch it? If if my fingerprints on there, obviously I did it
some point point. Did I swing it as a weapon. No, that's just not the facts.
So so you go to trial, did you still have the same lawyer.
No, I you know at this point, I mean, you know, I'm eighteen, and it wasn't that that could have a drug dealer. I couldn't afford lawyers, so it became a public defender. By the time I made it to trial, I was represented by a public defender who, you actually did a fairly good job. I mean he I thought, you know, he did a great job, and apparently the jury didn't.
Your parents didn't want to pay for a lawyer.
No, you know, I was living on my own. I didn't really talk to them about that. I mean, it was kind of understood, like, you know, I'm grown, I'm an adult, and you know, this is my journey, and you know, I wasn't going to pull the family down into it. My mom especially was very supportive, sat there every day of trial and stuff. But no, my entire incarceration, I never financially pulled anybody into it.
That's the way you are in any case. So you had this public defender who did as good of a job as you could have done under the circumstances, which kudos to him. But at what point did you realize that you were doomed.
Here's a funny story.
So the funny story there ain't nothing funny about that. There's not.
But this is this is when I knew I was in serious, serious trouble. So it's a change of venue because it's death penalty case, it's automatic change of venue. So I'm not in Harford County where the crime occurred, which is you know, rural but metropolitan. I'm in Caroline County,
which is extremely rural. So in the middle of the trial, the jury's been sworn, this older woman approached the jury box and passed a note to this elderly gentleman that was on the jury, And of course everybody's watching it, like what the heck, what the hell's going on? You don't do this? And the judge stopped everything. It's like, you know, I don't remember the names, but he's like, Myrtle, come up here for a minute. And she comes up there, and it's like what are you doing? What did you
just pass the bill? Everybody knows everybody in this county, you know, Like she's like, oh, and he had the note, he had the Bailif grab the note, it had one word on it, soybeans. So it's like, what is this all about. She's like, well, the seas just came in and I need Bill at home to plant the crop. Now I knew I'm in trouble because here I am. This is a very cosmopolitan case, and you know, you know, it's drugs and it's the city and this kind of thing.
And I'm in a courtroom where they're talking about soybeans. That's their priority, and they're not going to get any of this information whatsoever. It just was one of those you know, I'm in Mayberry and I'm in trouble. They're going to listen to anything officials tell them, be it state's attorneys, FBI agents on the stand. This is the kind of folk that are just going to believe in authority without questioning it or challenging it.
So and they got to get home to deal with seib.
So they got to get home. So they're going to rush out of here as quickly as they can. And it was Friday the thirteenth that the verdict came in, So of course that was an interesting day. But it was just interesting. You asked when I knew it was like, quite honestly, there was a lot of naiveness on my part, thinking, you know, I had never really been exposed to this system and I'm like, truth, this is what this is about. It's going to come out. They're going to figure this out.
And it just didn't come like that. It's just I had FBI agent after FBI agent come in there and their suits and ties and we're with the FBI lab me and they're saying what they're saying. Well, all three of those FBI agents have now been discounted, like their testimony, their their tests have been thrown out. But at the time, that's an impressive thing to may bury er anywhere else. And you know, I was just up against it. And the more you sit there day after day listening to
the testimony, the more worried you get. This is not going to go.
Well, no, you were. You were doing this backwoods place and people that are that are heredy get home and it's a perfect storm. You're done. And we know now, and the FBI has acknowledged this right because the four year study was conducted by the Innocis Project and the FBI, and the results showed that in a study I think it was two hundred and sixty eight cases, they found that I think in two hundred and fifty seven of them. I'm trying to remember these numbers out of my head.
I think that's right. FBI agents had either lied or been mistaken, and these were all cases involving hair analysis like yours. In fact, yours was one of them. And the fact is that when I say they either lied or were mistaken, what I want people to understand is that in every one of those cases in which they were mistaken, they were mistaken in favor of the prosecution. So it's hard to take a view and say, well, these were honest mistakes because none of them came down
in the other direction. And of the twenty eight FBI agents involved, twenty six of them were complicit in this. So you were a victim like so many other people, based on this hair analysis in which they either lied or exaggerated or or misstated the likelihood that the hairs could have come from somebody else. And we know that they were just making these fingers up out of thin air and saying things with certainty that were in some cases even money or even less right, that the odds
could it could have come from almost anyone. And of course it's extremely powerful, as you said, when an FBI agent gets up there, I mean, who's gonna Who's gonna think twice. Maybe people who listen to the show will think twice. I hope. So so the day comes Friday the thirteenth, you've got very little hope in hell at this point. What were you expecting when the jury went out? How long did they deliberate?
Day and a half.
Wow, that's actually longer than I would have thought. And then they come back in did they look at you?
No?
They always have heard that adage before, like if they're not looking at you, you're in trouble. So they didn't, And so I knew, you know, you just get that, you know, like, I don't know that's true, but I've been to somebody told me that prior. So I was looking to see if they were going to look me in the eye. And they didn't. So you stand for the verdict. The first count. It was the strangest thing.
I still don't understand how they did it. But the first count was first degree premeditated moles forethought murder, you know, murdered the first degree. And they said not guilty.
Wow.
So I was like, like, okay, and you thought you were going home. I thought that's okay, this is good. You know, we made it. We proved our point. Then they said, okay, as to the first count, still the same first count, indictment to felony murder. How do you find And that's when they say guilty And I'm like, wait, I just got it. Guilty and not guilty on the
same count, just two different degrees of murder. It always bothered me, and I've actually challenged that over and over again as a double jeopardy violation, but it never it just never caught wind. You know, we just couldn't prevail on that. But that's my feelings. As I was standing there, is like wow. You know, you go from all the way to the top of the roller coaster all the way at the bottom that quickly, and from that you don't really hear anything more Like I didn't. I was
just in a daze, like what just happened here? And you're trying to process it, and I'm like, I'm eighteen years old, Like as smart as I might have thought I was at that age. You know, now I have thirty some years of hindsight to look back on that eighteen year old kid that was standing there, and I'm not smart and I didn't know how to process it.
It was way above my capacity to really understand and fathom what had happened and what was about to happen, the whole nine I mean, looking back, it's like, I don't even know how I was able to stand there and just absorb it.
Yeah, I mean it's samerically you were able to stay on your feet.
Actually I was rocking. There wasn't any breeze in that courtroom, but I certainly started, you know, like just rocking on my heels a little bit. Like I was taken.
Aback and your mom was there? Do you remember who else was there?
You know? I remember, Yeah, my parents were there. You know, I'm under custody, so I can't even go over and get my mother. Oh, I can't be reassuring. I can't do anything because I don't even know, don't I don't know what's about to befall me. I don't know what death row is going to be like in the penitentiary because it's a buyerfurcated process. So the conviction has happened, but now I've got to come back in about a month and be sentenced. There's a whole other process about
to occur as well. And again I had not been exposed to this. This is long before forensic files and CSI and all these kinds of shows, Like I don't know, I just didn't know, and I don't think I ever processed it. I think I just absorbed it and just like treading water, just kept my head above water and just kept coming.
You know, so so amazing that you said what you just said, and you were so young, and then your situation couldn't have been more diary. You were about to be sent to death, and yet your thought was trying to comfort your mom, not the other way around. It's amazing to me like that. You know, what that says about your character is pretty profound, and I just want to take a moment to recognize that. So now the worst possible thing that could happen has happened. Off you
go to prison. Can you take us through that? I mean death row? I think it's everybody's most primal fear.
Well, interesting enough, in Maryland the time that I went on death row, it was not segregated, and we were in population when I first went in there. What they would do is they put you on ad and in SAG. In other words, they lock you on a cell for a month just to see if you're your head's right, I guess, and then they let you out into regular pop. You know you're in gen pop. There's nothing to distinguish
you as being death row. They had a board somewhere where they had kept our pictures on it and like, these are the guys on death row. But we lived anywhere we wanted inside the prison. We could live in any housing block we wanted. We weren't all in the same tier or whatever at the beginning, the years into it, I don't know, four or five years in, they decided to put us all in the same tiers, so like we were sell one through twelve on the second tier
street side of a block. So we were housed to go at a later point, but in the beginning we weren't. The thing about prison is like everybody knows everything. The grapevine is extremely good, so people know you're on death road whatever, but it doesn't carry any cachet value when the guy next to you is serving five life sentences, so he doesn't give a shit that you got two death ponies. You know, it doesn't matter, doesn't give you any credentials whatsoever. It really comes down to who you are.
Did you say two death penalties.
Yeah, my original sentence was death plus death plus fifteen plus five plus three the first total two death ponies in like twenty one years, all consecutive by the way, right, I don't know how you do that time.
But well so if they execute you when you come back to life, they can execute you again.
And then hold my body for twenty one years, I guess.
Or if you come back to life a second time, right, then they get to hold you in prison for another twenty one years.
It's really just sho, just stepid.
The concept is, yeah, double the double death sentences, Like what the fuck? Anyway? I can't I can't even process this as far as death row is concerned. I mean, there's no good news whatsoever.
There's nothing. There is absolutely zero for that. And you learn the minute you step onto the tier, like nobody gives a shit if you're innocent, you're not, so like there's no point in going in there saying, you know, but wait, I'm innocent. I'm innocent, so I guess I can like it. It's like if you stepped out on a pond, a frozen pond, and you suddenly the ice cracked and you fell through and you drift, so you're
not under that air hole anymore. But you can see through the ice and you know, it's twelve inches of ice there. You see the people, and you could scream all you want, it's just air bubbles, you know, like you just can't be heard. You're trapped. And that's just how it felt. It's a self imposed cage that I put myself on because you want to scream through the world like I'm innocent, I don't belong here. But then you you know, everybody doesn't belong in prison, and everybody's innocent.
You fall into that, so I don't know. I just you bite your tongue. You learn to adjust to the city situation the best you can. And I just hit the law library, you know. I spent the first year just reading everything i'd get my hands on and studying law, and I was writing my emotions and driving my lawyers crazy, you know. But I was fighting for my life, and that's the only way I knew how to do it.
So I tried to be a little bit more proactive or constructive in that way instead of just sitting back with a woe is me attitude. And obviously I couldn't count anybody else to save my life. I have to fight for my life, and that's what I did.
You brought up an interesting point, which is that as a death row inmate, you are entitled to a post conviction council, right, an apella council. So that's about the only positive thing I guess about being sentenced to death, Whereas if you were a normal inmate or sense to life, you would not be entitled to that and you'd be totally on your own. So there you were in the
law library. Was what was the day to day experience, the physical experience, but also what was the mental and spiritual thing that led you to be able to not only maintain your physical health, so I mean as best you could, but also eventually find a way to get out and be sitting right here right now. I mean, what can you tell us?
Well, soon the beginning guy was just angry. You know, I was young and still not that I figured myself out by any means. But I hadn't like really took that time in the introspection and try to figure out who I thought I was. So maybe the first I want to say, these six or seven years, I probably was close to becoming everything they wanted me to be, which is the convict. I was getting in trouble inside.
I had my share of fights. I had a violation of the prison rules for whatever things I was doing. I had an attempt to escape, you know, I just I was not conformed, wasn't going to conform. I had a real problem with authority, with the officers. I literally got an assault charge against one officer one time, who said I saw to them. But I was defending myself against five officers, and you know, I'm the one against the assault charge, which was dropped later. But so that's where
I was becoming. And then I guess I had a little epithemy. You know, I woke up and there was a guy I was working with. I was in the property room, you know, I went did my job every day and I worked in the package room and where the property was packed up. And this guy was always involved in activities like he was a member j c's was you had a chapter inside this is the Junior Chamber of Commerce, And he was always doing paperwork and
doing stuff. And I was like, what are you doing And he's like, you need to come join, you need to be a part of this. So I ended up joining the j CS, and the minute I joined, they asked me to be on their board as Ways and Means director, their fundraiser, and then two years later, one year later, I was the president. And you know, now the jc's are is a leadership training through community service.
They were doing a lot of good things, and I felt a responsibility that I got one hundred and twenty guys. Maybe not all of them voted for me, but they elected me, and so I'm there to lead them. And then, you know, I started looking around and it's like, here are these you know, their kids. Some of them were sixteen seventeen younger than me. They had come into the system and they're the throwaway class, and nobody cared. Nobody
was working with them. The warden had two rules, don't jump on my wall and don't jump on my officers. Other than that, anything went. I mean, guy gets killed, like stabbed to death on the yard. Literally two hours later, they threw sand over the blood and we're back to normal, like nothing ever happened. That's that was the penitentiaries back then.
So I felt a calling to do something different, and so through jc's, you know, we were able to start doing some things that brought a certain degree of i don't know, self respect and measurability to not just the inmates, but to the population inside as well as out. So we did a lot of projects out on the street, and we had a local chapter, the NAACP that was in there as well. And this is like when school
uniforms were first coming back as a topic. There was a young girl that got murdered straight bullet hit her and she was like eight years old, attended Utah Marshburne Elementary School and they were having trouble raising the money for their school uniforms. So we did it inside of prison. We raised that money for the school uniforms, the NAP and the JCS. And then it was you know, I saw a little article in the It was the open
form section of the Aegis. It was a letter that a woman had written about her grandchild needed a bone marrow transplant, shorans won't go pay for it. She was asking for help. So I reached out and contacted her and said, look, you know, we don't have a lot of money, but we have a silk screen shop, so you know, we can design some T shirts and I'll give them to you. You can sell them at your fundraisers,
you know. So we ended up giving her like five hundred T shirts and like a thousand of these little buttons, and they were using those to raise money and the girl got her surgery. It was successful, and you know, every Christmas, the grandmother would send me pictures and a card, you know, tell them to give me an update as she you know, went through life and graduated high school and stuff. So there was a lot of good And
I don't say that because it was me. I'll saying it because it was one hundred and twenty guys following what we were doing that were doing good things and giving back to the community outside as well as inside. And that's where I found, I guess my calling in a sense where rewoken my own social conscience and my passion to do something right and do it well, you know.
To be honest, it was just be An Onnery, like I'm still fighting my case, and my thought process was I'm not going to be carried kicking and screaming into a gas chamber and I'm not going to walk in their head bowed. If that's the ultimate thing's going to happen when I walk in there, they're gonna still question for decades later what they did and why they did it and if they got the right guy, because I'm not going to fit the stereotype of what they think.
So it's just important. And at the end, it really is you know, they talk about the dash. It really comes down to the dash. This man was born, this man dies. It's about what happens in between the dash that's in between those two dates. And if you don't make it count for something, then why were you here? So I figured, if I'm in there, that's where my dash is gonna be, then it's still gonna count. And so it was really really important to me to make
my life mean something, regardless of where I was. So, you know, I was doing the JCS. We brought Alternative to Violence Project from New York down to Baltimore. You know, this was starting green Haven State Prison up here by the Quakers. It's now an international organization conflict mediation. We started that in Maryland and I got my college degree while I was inside. I was in the last graduating classes. Congress took away our access to the Pelgram. They literally
took away my senior year. I graduated as a junior I just was lucky. I was going for a dual degree and I had enough credits to go on out. But I lost my senior year over that poor decision. But so I chose to make the time work for me, not saying it was easy time. I did my time and all the hardest prisons in Maryland. You know, I was in the penitentiary for my first sixteen I was in Cumberland, I was in the cut, I was in supermacs. I didn't get any easy ride. There was no country
club prison for me at any point in time. But we were able to make a difference and change not just our mentalities, but I think somehow society looked at us, and hopefully those seas that we planted back then grow trees now because more people are looking at re entry and trying to get reciptism down and understanding the need to launch programs in the system and work with folk, not to warehouse people, but to actually say, regardless of why you're there, human beings are redeemable and the human
spirit is going to thrive in spite of So why don't we encourage that? Why don't we order that with positivity rather than encourage the negativity. Because you encourage the negativity, you just create an unsafe environment for your own guard force. And seventy five percent of these people are coming home breeding repeat.
So well yeah, I mean nationally, ninety five percent of everyone that's in prison is going to be released at some point. So, just purely on a societal level, it behooves all of us to want to have those people have a shot when they get out at getting on the right track. So you survived this death row ordeal. All the odds were stacked against you. Finally, decades into this nightmare of yours, you discover that the evidence exists
that can actually free you. Right, and the response of the authorities is actually fucking mind blowing.
Right.
Talk about the hair and when that emerged and how it emerged and what the response of the people in power was.
I'll try to do this really quickly because it goes all the way back to the Oklahoma City bombing case. So after the Oklahoma City bombing case, there was a whistleblower that came out of the FBI lab, doctor Frederick Whitehurst, and he brought forth several allegations about the pressure to falsify it evidence and the very fact that the lab was not equipped to deliver a good report. It was dirty, the best practices weren't being utilized. He laid it out
and what ended up happening. It launched I think about a year long investigation from the Spector General's Office at which time, at the conclusion of that, they issued this massive report, three hundred page report, and they found that what doctor Whitehurst had alleged was true in a lot
of cases, so in particular it affects me. They named the FBI agent that it testified in my case, agent Michael Malone, and their commentary about him was that he consistently testified outside of his area of expertise and misrepresented evidence. Now I'm just a layman. It sounds like you just called the man a liar with very fancy words, but they didn't go quite that far to call him that. So here's this report and I'm thinking, great, we can
do something. Well we can't. I'm on collateral attack at this time, meaning post conviction, and apparently that report doesn't mean anything. So I was never able to persevere or follow any kind of motions based on that. So now well let me jump to the next part. So in two thousand and three, I get introduced to the Innostance Project. A friend of mine was working through the Innocence Project in Nina Nina. Morrison was handling his case and he had a hair evidence in this case and a DNA
tested it came back it wasn't his. He was about to go home and he was like, you need to contact these people because he knew my case and he knew me. He'd been around me for decades. You know, we know trust me. This fellow convicts. We know who did a crime and who didn't, and he knew that I didn't do it. So with his encouragement, I'd reached out and got the Innocence Project involved in my law firm, and we had filed to do DNA testing on the hair.
This is two thousand and three. Well, the very first thing the state did in writing was filed in motion asking the court's permission to destroy the evidence. Now we
didn't know why is an odd thing to right? You know, like we want to just know you've held it for whatever, twenty six twenty seven years at that time, and now you want to destroy it when we're about to send it to a lab that we mutually agree you know, is the top it's might have typing lab in Pennsylvania, doctor Terry Melton, who's the foremost DNA scientists in the country. And we all agree this is going to be a fair review,
and you're saying you want to destroy the evidence. So the judge ruled against that, and after an eight hour long court in battle, we've got to approveal to send the hair to the lab.
Well at least time for a second here, right, So I'm just picturing the judge. The judge sitting there and the prosecutors are arguing, saying, you know what, before we discover the truth, we just like to take the preliminary step of destroying any chance of discovering the truth by eliminating the one thing that can actually tell us what happened.
You know, you can't make this stuff up. It's public record is you couldn't write a script like this. It's mind boggling. It becomes more mind boggling when fourteen years later we understand why that. So what happens is we send these slides to the lab, we get a call from the lab that basically says, what do you want us to do with this? And we're like, test the two hairs. And again, I have to pay for this.
I've been incarcerated twenty eive years at this point. Coming up with fifteen thousand dollars is not an easy task, and I'm still it wasn't clear on how I was going to do that, but we were moving forward. So doctor Melton hits my lawyers and says, you know, what do you want me to do? And it's like test the hairs. Well, the problem was there was about ten microscopic slides. Each slide had five to eight hairs on them. They were preserved in some kind of chemical mounting. They
were not identified. They were not even laid out like one strand pulled tight like they were on top of each other.
So you had to test all of them.
Well, to test all of them, it would have cost probably I think it was eighty five thousand, and at the end of the day, like, what does that tell me? Like, I've had two trials, where do these hairs even come from? All along, you've always said we have two hairs, like they were the only two hairs in this entire trailer, and they belonged to Huffington And literally one of the hairs was found on the body and so you put you right at the scene. So I didn't even know
there were that many hairs. We never knew that. So we went back with the help of the Instance Project, and we had an agent look at the file to see if there was any notes in there that might help us. We filed a Freedom Information Act to get the file, which took another year, and at the end of that the FBI told us, well, whoever does their Freedom Information Act? Told us, well, your file exists. Here's the number, here's the town, here's the building, here's the file.
Cabinet is supposed to be in but it's not there. So your request is denied. You can appeal this if you want. Just like that, My file wasn't around, so like, oh okay, So there wasn't anything more we could do. We sent the stuff back to the state. We withdrew the motion from the court, and actually my lawyers withdrew from the case because we were done. There was nothing more that we could do. That was like the last basically a hail Mary that we were trying to prove
the point. So years go by, this is two thousand and three, four in that range. In two thousand and nine, Governor Maalley puts a new law on the book called a rid of actual innocence, and that's based on pre ponderance of evidence or the totality of the evidence. Meaning before you would only look at this cup of water by itself. But if you look at this cup of water with that picture of Warder sitting on this table with two of us talking, now there's a story if
we put it in this proper perspective. So here's this chance to really go back in and say, let's look at all these little pieces together. They tell a story. So my lawyer spent, oh my god, probably a year preparing that motion. They looked at every state that had similar laws and really studied it. We filed a seventy five page motion, and we had a hearing. At the hearing again the provider of this state's attorney. The first thing he tells the judge is where your honor mister
Havin had a chance to test the hairs. He didn't even test them, So why are we still here today? So the judge, who doesn't know why we didn't test them, now turns and says, well, why didn't you tell them? So my lawyers explained to him what happened, and he turned to the State. He said, well, why does mister Huffing didn't have to test them anyway? You test them, which the losses I have to. But he told the State, you go test them. I'm going to hold this hearing.
You go test them. So we left that hearing. The State went to the State Police and asked them to test the hairs, and state Police said, no, we don't test other labs work and we don't have a budget for that, so we're not touching it. So all summer long, the judge thinks that we're testing hairs. What the State was doing is they went back and they tested my boots, and they tested my pants, and they tested the jacket. They tested everything they could possibly test, and then September comes,
they're done. They haven't tried to do the hairs with the FBI. So they tell my lawyers, we're done, let's go back into court. We don't have anything more to test. But they're telling the judge with regular updates like we're working on, we're working on.
And they tested all your stuff just to see if there was any evidence of the victim on your clothes.
Whatever they could figure out. You know, Yeah, they were trying to tie me to the scene through Now, DNA didn't exist back then, so they were trying to pull me in with forensic evidence and none of that worked. So right after they made that announcement, out of the blue, my lawyers got a phone call from a reporter at the Washington Post Spencer's shoe. He's working on this big expose of the FBI Lab and their hair nowsis section. So he wanted to talk to us because I was
the Maryland case that Michael Malone was involved in. So my lawyers are like, well, you know, we're in court, we can't talk about the case. And so the conversation continued, and long story short on that he had my file, the file that we couldn't get. He had it. He got it through Freedom Information Act again years later, but he has it. So there's two things in that file that we never knew about. The first is after the Inspector General's report was done on the FBI Lab, the
FBI Lab, that was a public report. What nobody knew is the FBI Lab conducted their own internal investigation. After that, they went out and hired forensic scientists to come in and review their own agent's work, including agent Malone my case. So there's a report in my file from this outside expert. His report basically just says no way, there's no way that Malone could have testified the way he did in my trial. And he even raised the doubt that Malone
actually even did the test himself. So there's this report, and then the other document that's in there is a letter again from nineteen ninety nine from the FBI to the state's attorney saying, there's a problem in the Huffington case with the hair. You might want to notify either mister Huffington or his attorneys. Nineteen ninety nine. Now, remember what happens in two thousand and three when I go to test the hair. What's the first thing the state does?
Try to destroy it. Now that makes sense because they knew, they knew four years earlier, and that here we are.
Fourteen years later just finding this out.
So the FBI went to the.
State, They sent the letter to the state. Now the state and that's an open court, an open court, and this I'll never forget or forget. He sat in open court and try to tell the judge that he had notified me. Now do you think not to take me out of the equation. You think anybody in prison would have sat there for another fifteen years of that information and not used it. Like where's the logic of this? Like he claims, he claims he sent it to the
Public Defender's office. I've been represented by Roopes and Gray for twenty five years. He knows that. He claims he sent it to the Innocence Project. We talked to them. They'd never heard of him. So where did you send it? How is it You can go in there and literally is an officer to the court. And I'll say it now, you lied. You know to the court. You're an officer of the court. You lied. It's not the first time you've lied. You lied, and that cover up cost me
an extra fourteen years of my life. And when people ask why I'm not bitter, I will tell you that part right there. I'm bitter about because I lost my mom like five years before I came home. We talked about this earlier today, Like don't run from the truth. Let the truth just be itself, Like you have an obligation, you're elected official, you have an oath that you're sworn to. Just let the truth come out, Let your ego get on the side. Stop with the win loss record and
all that. Just let the truth come out. We the DNA tested that back then if it came back, it's mine. You win your case, it's over with. But either way, the truth comes out, and that I can't get that time back with my mother. I can't recover what I lost with the extra fourteen years that that cover up cost me. And to sit there and blatantly tell the judge like, oh, I did all my due diligence, that's bullshit. You didn't, your liar, and your name's Joe Castley and
your liar, And that's how it is. I can say that now because I'm free and clear of that system.
Yeah, it's impossible to understand what motivates people to bathe in that way. I'll hear another one hundred or two hundred of these stories and I still won't understand it. I don't think any of us ever can. But it happens, and it happens not infrequently, and people need to know that.
Just don't stand in the way of an opportunity for truth to come out. Look, we get too caught up in our own personalities and egos and it should be a system of laws rather than a man. And that comes out of the JC cree that's one of the stands of the government should be, you know, laws rather than a men. When we put our own personalities and egos into that, that's where the system gets derailed. Like I said, we had a chance to fix this in
nineteen ninety nine. We should have fixed it, shouldn't. It took till twenty thirteen, actually till twenty eighteen to fix it, because I mean, at the end of the day, I still had to fight even with this coming out. And so what ends up happening is they scramble and instead of letting it go to my lab, the FBI themselves decided to test it. They tell us ahead of time it's going to totally consume the sample. So of course my conspiracy theories. I'm like, they're just going to say
it's mine. I'm not even gonna be able to send it to our lab they can confirm or.
Deny because the hair is fragile, it's old, it's gone, it's a piece of hair. And that's something that's been as you've been talking, I've been sitting here thinking with that like, what an amazing phenomenon that your life is hanging in the balance of two hairs, and those hairs have to be brought from one place to another. If there's a car accident, if somebody loses it, if somebody goes off the I mean a lot of things can go wrong when that thing's being transported, Your life's being
transported with it. And they're fucking hairs. I mean, you know, you're being told that it's going to degrade them to the point that they're useless when we tested, So this really you talked about Hail Mary, this is it, but it ain't a football game.
No, you know. Luckily, they did it as a peer review, so it's like a surgeon operating with other surgeons watching because this is Michael Malone and it's so scandalous. This guy's this guy's infamous for just screwing people's lives. It's just terrible what he's gotten away with. But in this case, they tested it and it wasn't my DNA, So you would think, slam dunk, we're done, we're out of here. Nope. I had to go back and then prove that that would have made a difference. They fought us on that.
Luckily the judge, I was fortunate that he didn't have an ego and he looked at it for what it was. So I want to rid of actual innocence, which meant that they took away my victions and my sentence, But it also meant that he's set it for new trial. Now here's the same prosecutor's been in office for forty years. His career started around the same time as my case. He's kind of his parallel course throughout the whole time. Who won't let go?
So right? Your case probably helped propel him to a long career that he enjoyed.
I you know, yeah, I mean, you know, I think that he has a history of abusing his power and the system. And so I ended up that they set a bail and it's half a million dollars cash bails. Again, here I am sitting there after thirty two years. How's that going to work? But it worked the help of a couple of friends, I was able to post that bail and I came home and the whole time I've been home for four years, just as of December seventh is over. You know, as of January the first, I'm
not on any kind of pro probation supervision. But for the four years that I've been home, I've had one foot on a banana. So you know, I've been really blessed in the fact that, you know, I've been able to launch a career and find some success in some degree of a voice out here. All the while with that's still hanging over my head, I've got an active prosecution or persecution going on trying to put me back in prison for the rest of my life.
So and this prosecutor so driven he actually delayed his own retirement just to get a chance to prosecute you again.
Well, he'd offered me a deal right before that plead guilty and it would all go away time served, and he announced his retirement and then I can't say that it's definitely coincidental, but I will say this, when I said no to the deal, within two days he took his retirement back.
So let's talk a little bit about what's been happening since you got out, because these four years, I mean, do you sleep, because I mean you're on so many boards and different organizations. You know what, that got it right in front of me and read it. So John's a Committee member, the Greater Baltimore Committee's Coalition for a
Second Chance. He's also on the board of the Mayor's Green Network Leadership Team, the Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention, Collateral Consequences Work Group, Baltimore City Police Department, Community Collaborative Division, re Entry Advisory Committee, the DHCDS Keep Maryland Beautiful Steering Committee, and Pivot A Pathway for Women from Prison to Purpose. I mean, I'm tired from reading that. Okay, what in the hell is going on? What are he's trying to improve?
Well, once again, it's about to dash. I mean, so when I came home, obviously I'm on bail and I don't know what the future holds. I'm very cynical a bat the criminal justice system. I don't trust it, and I fully expect they're going to come and hit me with the butterfly net and snatch me back like oops, we made a mistake or something, you know. So it was very surreal getting out here, and then I got very I keep saying lucky. Lucky, he's not the right word.
I was blessed, and I made a few good steps and involved myself with some good people, and I have to say, I got lucky because I came through the very program that I now administer, which is Project Server, our rapid attachment to work model. It's a re entry component. But I was only there for like three months because, like you say, I present myself a little different and people tend to look at me and think, oh, he's okay, and not think, well, you know, he's been gone for
thirty two years, he might need some service himself. So I came into Living Classrooms Foundations the organization, and they gave me business cards in a title, and I was a client advocate event coordinator, and so I didn't do our normal go out in the alleys and clean and do the normal Project Serve work. I literally was working with the members that were in Project Serve and creating their calend of activities and things like that. But there wasn't a funning stream for its, so I needed to
move on. So after three months, I interviewed for another nonprofit, Second Chance in ball or More, and went to work for them. And when I left them, you know, I was a salaried employee and doing well and they were a great organization, were very supportive. But Living Classrooms has sort of called me back. The director of Workforce Development position was open. Honestly didn't think that it was, you know, something I could apply for because you know, I was
a man with no future. You know, I don't bring that future to the table. I'm literally still under trial and or indictment and on bail. And they know that, and they looked past that and felt that I was suited for the job and the right one for the job, and gave me that opportunity, knowing full well that my world could have ended at any time. You know, I could have been sent back to prison, and they entrusted a department millions of dollars of budget and staff and
everything else. So it became even more important to me to honor that, you know, to show that their faith in me was was correct and that you know, I was going to redeem that and make a difference in that role. So I don't know, it just comes down to the dash, you know, it really does, like how much time you have, and the Lord knows any of us could walk out of here and get hit by a bus. But it's about trying to make a difference. And that's just the path that I've always been on.
Like it's important to me, you know, especially to redeem Like I had a law firm Ropes and Gray, I should mention this who believed in me and gave me twenty five years of pro bono legal services. Now think about the cost value of that. And they did it because they believed in me and they believed in my case. So now how do I repay that? They're not sitting there waiting to garnish my check. You know, they're telling
me go live my life and be successful. So again, the only way to repay that debt is to be successful and to redeem their faith in me and why they did what they did. And then I guess the mantle becomes even more big because the more I go out there and become involved in these various committees or have an opportunity to speak, then you become representative of what re entry can look like. So now I can't mess up. Like you know, I'm visible, I'm publicly visible
as others are. I'm not the poster child here, but I think that brings more responsibility that if I were to mess up, then that gives all the naysayers even more ammunitions. This is why we don't do this. This is why we don't give jobs or work with re entry. So you keep moving it forward. You have no choice but to the more, the more you add, the more it becomes important that you utilize your voice everywhere you
can to make a difference. I go back into prisons now to introduce the guys inside with here's an opportunity when you come home, you can come get trained in solar installations and we have jobs for you. Just being able to sort of coalesce those folks and to get that moving in the right direction and to start, you know, having more in depth conversation about why and how we can make a difference with the whole re entry models important.
To me now, and it's great you're here because it's so important for people to hear that message and to take a different view of people like yourselves, innocent or otherwise who were formally incarcerated, and to reach out and give them a chance. I mean, I think that my experience is that that community of formally incarcerated people will work their ass off because they value every day and
every minute. They take nothing for granted. Before we close, if you could just talk for a second about the organization you're working with, it you're trying to raise money for, and how incredible their success rate is at keeping people from recidivating.
Living Classrooms amazing, amazing organizations that I work for right now. It's a nonprofit in Baltimore. We work primarily in East Baltimore through our Target Investment Zone, where we've taken a two and a half mile square area of East Baltimore and we are transforming, trying to disrupt the cycle poverty and UPLI multi generational approach to health and wellness, education
and workforce development. I can't express enough gratitude. You know, these folks gave me an opportunity and a chance and supported me throughout this entire journey.
For people who want to help, they can give money to Living Classrooms absolutely. You know that Living Classrooms dot org.
Is Living Classroesfoundation dot org. You know we're nonprofit. You know we do a lot of work. It's not just re entry. We do you know, after school programming, we do early childhood development. Look at our website and it will show you how you can make a donation. We appreciate that support.
So once again is www dot Living Classrooms Foundation dot org. I'm going to give money. I hope you'll join me and do so too. And now is time for always the highlights of the of the show, which is where I stopped talking, and just turn it over to you for any closing thoughts that you want to share.
Well, first of all, I want to thank you for having me and inviting me to come out here and be a part of the show. I use my time just to say kudos to YouTube. Jason. I mean, I think this is so crucial, so key and important what you're doing and bringing the attention that you bring not just the exign reads, but to the whole criminal justice system, the families against mandatory minimums that I know you're a
big proponent of. So if I can just flip the script and just say to everybody listening, like this guy, like he introduced me as doing all this, trust me, I'm not even in his league for what he does. I don't know when he can possibly sleep. So Jason's going to expose you through this podcast and everything that he's doing. It's just follow him on Instagram. That's what
I'm going to tell you right now. Follow him and see the different things he's doing and understand that you two can have an impact you know, this is one guy, regardless of him being a record mogul or whatever title we want to give him, it's one guy making a difference. And honestly, we all can make a difference. It takes a lot of one guys and one woman out there to make these things happen. And I think the lesson that we can all take away from this is that
we're all empowered to do that. We just got to take action.
Well, John, all I can say is thank you for that. I'm humbled and honored that you're here, and thank you again for coming in and sharing your experience, strength and hope with our audience. You've been listening to a very moving episode for me personally of wrongful conviction.
Thank you for having me, and thanks to the Innocence Project as well. Couldn't a been to do this with Adams, so thank you.
Don't forget to give us a fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps. And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project and I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to 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 Flamm is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one