I've never been in trouble in my life.
I didn't even have a parking ticket, you know what I mean.
I was brought up like cops are the good guys.
I didn't know what was going to happen, but I do know that everything was stacked against me.
Everything like everything.
This isn't supposed to happen this way. I'm innocent. I know I'm innocent. I know I had nothing to do with this.
How is this possible?
I grew up trusting the systems. I've grew up believing that every human being should do the right thing. And that's why, even though I knew I was dealing with corerough people, I wasn't going to break anyone to get me out of prison because I wouldn't live with the fact that I break my way out of my wife's death. I'm not innocent, too proven guilty. I'm guilty until I prove my innocence. And that's absolutely what happened to me.
Our system.
Since I've been out ten years, it's come a little ways, but it's still broken.
I totally little trust in humanity after what's happened to me.
This is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful conviction. Today, I have a very special show planned for you. One of the people I admire most in the innocence movement, Lara Baslon, is here. Lara, first of all, before I introduce you and read off your accomplishments, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me so.
Lara is a writer and associate professor at the University of San Francisco Law School, and she's the director of the Criminal, Juvenile Justice, and Racial Justice clinics. And her resume is much much longer than that, having spent a long time as a public defender doing fantastic writing on all different aspects of wrongful conviction and places like Slate and New York Times and so many others. So it's
really awesome that you're here. We have a lot to talk about, absolutely, And our other guest is someone who listeners will be familiar with, and it's going to be amazing to catch up with him. Tony Wright is here. And Tony, of course, served twenty five years in prison in Pennsylvania for a crime it was so obvious that he didn't commit that when the jury finally exonerated him declared him not guilty, it took them all of five minutes to figure it out. And that's right. They deliberated
it for five minutes before declaring him totally innocent. So Tony, welcome back to Wrongful Conviction, My.
Man, pleasure always mind. Man, it's been a long time. I bet it's been overdue. Thanks for having me back.
Tony, right back, live and in person on wrongful Conviction. And this time you brought a couple of very special guests with you. Do you want to go ahead and introduce them or you want me to do it. I'm gonna do it, Okay. So you brought two very special guess Shannon Coleman, who is a shining example of everything that restorative justice can and should and will be, and her wonderful daughter Lauren, who actually really started this ball rolling when she read an article and brought it to
your mom's attention. And that must have been an amazing moment and an amazing process. So I want to hear about that from both of your perspectives.
Thank you so much for having us come in tell our story.
So Lara, let's turn to you first. What got you into this work?
So part of what I used to do was direct an innocence project a small one at Loyola Law School in LA and I litigated a case in twenty twelve and twenty thirteen. Our client's name, believe it or not, was Cash Register and he had been wrongfully convicted in nineteen seventy nine of a murder that he didn't commit. So thirty four years later we were trying to get him out, were successful in exonerating him. And then after that that experience led me to think, well, what happens
to people in the aftermath. So there's so many victims. There's cash there's his mother who waited in their tiny apartment for him to come home. He'd been snatched there by the police and basically kidnapped by the prison industrial complex for thirty four years. There was the fact that they had lost his brother, that his father died soon after.
And then there was the victims and the original crime victims and the man's family who died, and what they had to go through realizing that the truth that they'd always been told was not the truth at all.
It wasn't the truth at all, as is the case. And you know every one of these wrongful convict cases, but some are worse than others. Right, I mean, there are somewhere mistakes were made, but you could say, well, you know, there was circumstantial evidence and it piled up, and you know, the above of the cash Register wasn't one of those cases. And by the way, that is his real name. It's cash with a K. And the
fact is with him. It's so dramatic to me because he was in prison for almost twice as long as he had been alive outside of prison.
That's right, And just one edition about the name. His name is cash Register with a K. Interestingly, the other brother was named Norman. So the family naming system was just kind of the whole spectrum.
Somebody had a sense of humor. I don't know, it's really interesting. I mean, I don't know what I would name. My last name was Register. I'm trying to think what I would name my kids. But there's a funny mind in there somewhere. I'll come up with it later. Anyway, So you got cash out there, cash out there goes another fun But anyway, and we know I know obviously firsthand how incredible that feels. It's addictive, isn't it.
Yes, it is.
It's like a drug. There's no feeling in the world like having a judge find your client innocent and having them walk out of prison after having been there for decades.
Yeah, it's remarkable. I mean it's interesting because people who know me and know I have this sort of string double life as a record executive and criminal justice reformer. You know, they'll ask me, you know, what is it about this? Why am I so devoted spending so much time? And the answer is very simple. Years from now or even now, no one will care who signed Katy Perry, Like,
it doesn't really matter. No one remembers who signed the Beatles, for fuck's sakes, right, So but after I'm gone, you know the you know, the lasting impact of the people, or after we're going, I should say, of the people whose lives we've been able to positively affect, who were stuck in the ultimate nightmare really as as hopeless as they could be. That's the good stuff, right, and that's the stuff that really means something. So anyway, it's good to be in this and it's good to be in
it with you. And meanwhile, very exciting is a new development in your life, which is a book. You've got a book, a real hardcover book. I'm holding it in my hands, it feels good, it looks great. It's from Beacon Pressed. It's called Rectify the Power of Restorative Justice after Wrongful Conviction And I'm reading it now and I'm hooked. So tell me the inspiration behind this book.
How did you come to So the inspiration really did grow out of Cash's case, because, as you say, it's so important to be able to really help save someone's life, and then afterwards, what you really want for them is for them to have a good life. And what does
that mean? Because, as you know, when people have been sent away and locked away for so long under unbelievably inhumane conditions, they have psychological trauma, sometimes they have physical trauma, and they have to kind of make sense of the senseless and the monstrous. And what's really interesting is that there's this movement now to help people who've been exonerated. But then also the original crime victims move through the earthquake of exoneration together if they're open to it, by
connecting with each other. And it's fascinating because when you think about it, the exonery comes out starting as a perpetrator and then being revealed as a victim. For the crime victims, especially the victims who testified believing that they had gotten the right person, but it was a case of mistaken identity or even just fervently believing that they were guilty and wanting them to get the death penalty.
They feel culpable, they feel complicit, they feel like perpetrators, and so the whole system has been flipped around and they've each seen each other's perspective.
It is a remarkable thing. I was this phenomenon of that connection, and that the power that's generated from those two sort of opposite forces coming together is unlike anything else I can think of. One of the most important and incredible examples, of course, is Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton. I've interviewed them on the show. Some of the people listening now may have heard that episode. I hope you have. If not, you should go back and check it out.
But talk about that case, because I know you've had a lot of dealings in interaction with them, and I'm assuming I'm going to get to them in your book. I haven't gotten to that chatter yet.
You're absolutely going to read a lot about them. And Jennifer Thompson was a large part of the inspiration because she's really at the forefront of this movement to apply restorative justice practices in wrongful conviction cases. Because, as she says, she and Ronald Cotton were doing restorative justice without even
realizing that that's what they were doing. And then when she saw after their book came out and became a best seller, how many people were in their situation, she realized how many people could also benefit from doing what they had done, which is reconnect with each other. So the backstory is that she was brutally raped at knife point, woken up in the middle of the night by a stranger. She followed the identification procedures that were in place in
time at that time in North Carolina. She picked the person who she believed was her attacker. She went to court, she testified, and that person was Ronald Cotton. And then, as it turned out, thirteen years later, DNA revealed that in fact, her attacker was a man named Bobby Poole.
And when that news was revealed to her, she was completely devastated by it and overcome with shame and guilt and remorse, and she and Ronald Cotton had this very emotional reunion at a church where she just wept and asked him to forgive her, and he said, I forgave you a long time ago. And then they formed this bond.
And what's so remarkable about it is not only that it really is truly a love relationship, but also that their social justice advocates together, and it's really their effort that led to North Carolina revising its eyewitness identification laws and now they use best practices, so what happened is unlikely to happen again.
So your book again is called Rectify, and this story it plays an important part in the book because it's sort of spearheaded this movement, and they now run an organization that is devoted to putting these pieces back together, putting these broken lives together to create something beautiful and even magic. And in their case, I think what's so fascinating and so important to highlight about that particular case
is that she was called the perfect witness. She was sober, she was a college student, she was hyper focused on identifying him. And so she talks about how she spent every second of this horrible ordeal trying to memorize any detail that could help, because, as she says, if I lived, I'm quoting her paraphrasing, but if I lived, I was going to make sure that he went to prison for
the rest of his life. And of course one of the things that motivated her was that she wanted to prevent this from happening to any other women, and so she identified him in a mugshot, in a lineup in court with absolute certainty, and of course she was dead wrong. And then she has to live with.
Just the.
Awful feeling of knowing that he went out and rap dozens of other women because he got away with it, you know. So, and that's one of the tragic things about wrongful conviction, of course, is that when the wrong person like Ronald Cotton is convicted, the right person is left free to go out and perpetrate other horrible crimes
against innocent victims. So let's talk about the book. Rectify Again is the new book, the new release from Lara Baslon, and we're talking about cases that are highlighted in this book and how they have led to this really unlikely phenomenon of restorative justice. What's the first other case that comes to your mind? There's so many of them.
Well, we have Tony here, and he can speak more poignantly than I can. But his story is also a story of restorative justice in that, as you described, he spent twenty five years in prison for a crime he did not commit. And in this case there was just truly egregious police misconduct. And one thing about the case that was so interesting is that the victims elderly woman Louise Tally. She was part of a law enforcement family, and so her great niece, Shannon Coleman, was the daughter
of one of Philadelphia's first African American police officers. And it was Shannon's mother who told her what had happened to her great aunt, and the family was very involved in law enforcement. The mom was a cop. They followed the case really closely. Tony was arrested the next day. Shannon truly believed he was guilty and took some satisfaction from the fact that he was given life without the
possibility of pearl. And then Rolling Stone published this expose of just how corrupt and just how unsound this conviction was. She read it, she was beset by doubt, and she was forced to re examine not only her feelings about him, but her feelings about law enforcement and what it meant to be an honorable police officer, and all of the beliefs she had had about the Philadelphia Police Department, all of a sudden were just kind of blown up.
Yeah, I mean it's you two spent more than two decades, really, I mean as opposite forces, right. I mean, Shanney, you've talked about how you really hated this man for what you thought that he had done to your great aunt.
Correct. I went by what we were told by the police, and I believed that he was a bad guy and that he had done harmed, had killed my own And.
You are not somebody who's unfamiliar with the criminal justice system because you come from a law enforcement family.
Yes, my mother was a policewoman for twenty twenty five years. So again, because of that, probably led me to believe more in what we were being told that he was guilty.
Right, I mean, that would, if anything, that would deepen your belief in this, you know, being exactly as it was presented to you. And obviously, then Harden, You're resolved to see this man spend the rest of his life in prison because had he done what he had done. I mean, no one could blame you for feeling that way. Everybody feels the way they feel. But the crime was a gruesome crime, rape and stabbing, horrible murder of an elderly woman who you know. I mean, it's just it's unimaginable.
So now let's turn to you, though, Lauren, because how did you find out about this case and what made you You must have had a strange moment You're like, oh, I don't know if I can bring this to my mom, right, you know how that must have been difficult.
Yeah, I grew up hearing about it. I guess I would always ask her questions about it. And I think I saw it first in a tweet and I recognized her name. So I went to my mom and I said like, Hey, isn't this your grand aunt that you told me about? And she read it and immediately was alarmed, Like she said, she had no idea, and she just flew into defense mode.
How old were you at the time.
I want to say I was sixteen maybe, So.
You're sixteen, you're starting to really, you know, come into you know, real consciousness of turning from a girl into a woman and becoming you know, more aware of everything in the world. And what a way to be awoken, right, and so you saw a tweet about the Rolling Stone article, right, and what an article that was. I mean, I didn't have any connection to the case. Obviously, I've been involved in this work for twenty five years. But when I read that case, I said, I mean, when I read
that article, I said, oh, man, I didn't. I mean I wanted to run through the streets screaming and waving signs and breaking stuff because I was like, this can't be happening. And again, it's Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, not Philadelphia, Mississippi. So if it can happen there, it could really happen anywhere. And so Tony, like for you, you were on the opposite side of this, right, you were the I mean, there's a lot of victims in this case. I mean all of you were victims in a certain way, right,
in different ways. How did you come to be aware that Shannon had turned this corner and was now becoming a powerful advocate for you, not just forgiving, but actually getting out there and like knocking on people's doors, knocking down doors.
Right, it was insane. I thought my family, I thought my family was trying to pump me or something. I got a visitor, Well, I called home and somebody gave me an indirect message and they said, somebody come up there to tell you something. And I'm sitting there waiting, and my cousin visited me one evening and he told me about Shannon and the petition and all that, and I fell on the floor in the visiting room. I couldn't believe it. I mean, I couldn't believe it. You know,
just was a moment. We was waiting for it for a long time, just to connect with somebody from that family, because before that we had several appears and everybody from my side was there, but nobody ever showed up from uh miss Talley's side, and you know, we couldn't figure out what was going on, did she have any relative left? And when Shannon appeared, man, it was it was such a fresh up breath there.
Yeah, I mean, what a moment to and what a moment to be here with the two of you now. And of course we're here tonight to celebrate the release of Rectify by Lara Basilon, which is a book that really highlights your case and your and your amazing bond that you formed and this beautiful friendship that's blossomed from this most dark, dark, most unimaginably dark place. And so I mean, was it hard for you Tony to forgiven?
No? No, absolutely not. You can't blame Shannon or anybody from that side of family feeling waity for I go. For say, maybe some of my family even thought I mighta been the perpetrator of the scribe until the facts came out. Uh, you know, my family is my family. They supported me. Nobody reached for me. If I call, everybody ans uh answered the call if I needed anything. Uh, they made sure I had what I needed. I mean, so you can't blame her. Uh, you can't even imagine this.
This this is some fairy tough stuff going on between us. I love her to death. She one of my closest friends. Her daughter's my niece, her son is my nephew. Yeah, I mean, you know, uh, Laura here uh on fall or break and and assume she arrived. She let me know she's here. I mean, when she's here, I like to get them together and you know, my little group and we go have dinner and sit down and chat and all that. Man. I I love her to death. Man A family right there to me and Laura.
What kind of impact has it's had on you, Like, what the how old are you now? And what are you doing with your life?
I'm planning on going to law school.
Oh, I was gonna get that so you look like a lawyer.
Yes, So it definitely had an impact on that, and it made me realize the importance of the work that I wanted to get into criminal defense. It was just a shiny example of how to you know that the need to be a good lawyer so things like this don't happen.
You do realize that had you not actually seen that particular tweet and then taken some action which you didn't have to, it would have been easier for you to just be you know, like, Okay, I better keep my mom out of this, you know, like and just but because you did that, I mean, that has something. I mean, it's impossible to know whether it's five percent or fifty percent, but it's a part of the reason why Tony's sitting here right now. So what a thing for a teenager.
I mean, that's good stuff, you know, and I know that's something you'll carry with you for the rest of your life. And it's incredible. And Shannon, what is what what's now for you what's going on? I mean, how does how has this transformed you? And what does it mean for you? And and how's you know, what's what's next?
Well, I'm a big advocate now for the Innocence Project and for you know, I read all the stories that I can find online and see the other examples of situations like Tony's. I'm a big advocate for my daughter because, you know, helping her with this kind of information because I know down the line it's going to help her in her career.
It's just like.
I guess it's like my hobby now. I mean, I would like I went to Harrisburn to help with some legislation for reimbursing wrongfully convicted people. And I would love to do more to help because I just I mean, it's like a passion that I have now.
It is it's it's the most but it's the best addiction that you can have. I mean, helping other people who need the help as much as anybody could ever need help. And and it means so much. And you are really a great advocate and at a beautiful spirit for doing what you do. So Tony, what what else can you share with us? I mean how's you were on the show. I mean that must have been about a year ago, I guess, and you would give such a powerful presentation talking about all There's certain things I'll
never forget. I mean, we're like seventy episodes into the Wrongful Conviction now and so many stories, but I'll never forget certain things that you said during that amazing episode that we tape together. What's what I mean, that's kind of a big development in your life now too, right.
Just just my whole transition. I mean, you know, people seem a maze of everything I got going on in how I'm manure. I mean, you've got a million people hold in my hands like a baby every step I take. Man, I never do nothing along so much help. I mean, and and and you know I want I wanna heart back on you know one thing, uh uh. You know, I think this whole situation really changed sharing in life. You gave her a different perspective on you know, just
a judicial system as a whole. And and and I witnessed the passion she has for other men, and and and and that may be in the situation, and and and learn you know, the apple don't fall far from the tree. You know what I mean. You know she's her mother's daughter one hundred percent. I guarantee you that so smart, so brilliant. Man, I mean, I love him the death.
Man.
It's my family right there.
Man.
I can never yeah, I mean, I uh, that's an understatement. I mean I can never overstate that.
Man.
I want the world and note you know what I mean, Like this is some fairy tale stuff going on here, and it's another member of this family and that's her son, Devin Coleman. So I want to mention him. Devin a shout out to me. I love you, Shan and Lauren.
To me, it was so important to do the right thing because I have a son, Blackmail and two nephews that I raised, and I could only think every time I thought about what Tony went through and was going through, was that could have been one of them? And just I just never forget that no matter, you know, if I'm trying to help somebody or when I'm reading the other stories, I always place them, my kids in that spot.
And that's not good point.
Brian. Two things for me. The first was I wanted Miss Tyley's family to know that Anthony Wright absolutely had nothing to do with the crime that was perpetrated against they loved one, my family. I could have died after that. I didn't even care. I just wanted to clear my name and I wanted to clear those people conscious that I wasn't a person that committed this crime because they loved one except for me. I was good.
Yeah, I mean, it's really amazing read I read about this exact situation in your book, and she describes very eloquently and poigtantly the gamut of emotions that ran through her as this horrible realization took hold. And I can't even begin to imagine what that must be like. But the fact is that she she made not only made peace with it and and turned her whole perspective around
and became a powerful advocate for Tony. Like I mean, she went to great lengths to try to get Tony out after spending almost a quarter of a century hating him, wishing terrible things upon him. And again I'm not judging her for that. And then she, upon being presented with evidence, she didn't like shut it down or try to ignore it. She just went in the complete opposite direction and tried
to fix it. And now, of course she's come full circle to the point that she is now a wonderful spokesperson for this restorative justice movement and and her you know, her story, as I said, is captured in your book Rectify, which is so it's so you know, just I don't know, it's hard to read, but it's wonderful to read that. You know, that that thing that what are having to describe that ordeal that she went through.
She's an amazing woman because, as you say, she did everything she could. She went to her church, she started writing her city council person, she asked friends she knew who had some kind of influence, and then she went directly to the DA's office repeatedly, and she had a meeting with the head of the homicide unit, and she said,
this is an abomination. You can't retry him. Because, of course, the other part of Anthony Write's story is that once the DNA evidence came back and pointed to the real perpetrator, the DA decided that they were going to retry Tony under a different theory of the case. And that was what Shannon was trying to do everything she could to get stopped. When she met with this head of the homicide unit. She begged this woman to drop the prosecution.
And there's this email that Shannon writes afterwards where she says, you told me that you have doubt and that this is for the jury to sort out. But that's not your ethical obligation. Your obligation it's to see that justice is done and this is a travesty. And then she
started a change dot org petition. She attended as much of the trial as she could, and she said that when Tony's lawyer texted to say that, as you say, he's been acquitted in five minutes, she literally screamed with relief, and then immediately started a new change dot org petition to get him money to help out after he was let go.
Right, And that's a different you know, I think when some people think of restorative justice, you know, their mind will turn to the question that I get asked probably more frequently than any other, as I'm out there proselytizing about these you know, innocence cases and the Incence Project and the work that you do and they do, and
so many other good people are involved in. I would say the most common thing that comes up is for people they get all wide eyed and they go, well, they get paid when they get out, right, Like tell me they you know. They also want to know whether you know there's any consequence of the prosecutor's conduct. That's the second most asked question. But the first one is people want to know that these men and women who've
been through this Kafka esque ordeal get compensated. And I think most people think, yeah, you walk out, you get a check. But that's not the way it is.
No, it's not. I think people would be disappointed to both answers to those questions. Police and prosecutors are hardly ever called to account, and even when they are, what happens to them is fairly minor compared to the damage that they've inflicted on other people, including the original crime victims and the exoneries. So with respect to consequence, there isn't often a consequence. And then compensation is all over
the place. It depends on your state. So for example, in Pennsylvania, where Tony was wrongfully convicted, you don't get a dime. There is no statute to compensate you. If you want to be compensated, you have to sue the state, and you have to sue alleging violations of your federal civil rights and hope that your case is powerful enough that you can prevail. So eventually that is how Tony ended up getting a settlement. But it's very hard to do,
it's arduous. And then in other states the compensation is capped, so you'll do twenty years and they'll give you twenty thousand dollars. Now, there's no amount of money that can make up for twenty years, but twenty thousand dollars does not even come close. And I think this all points to this other idea that we have, which is we see these stories of exoneration, and we see the exonery in the news with his lawyer, with his mother thanking God, giving thanks, and we think it's going to be a
happily ever after story. They're going to get compensated, he'll get millions of dollars, and the police officers they'll be put in prison. And so often what wrongful conviction stories really are. They're not happy endings to fairy tales. They're more like earthquakes. And you were talking before about putting the pieces back together, and that's really what rectifies about.
It's about who's left in the rubble and how they sort through it and find a way collaboratively to make their own justice, a kind of justice that was denied to them by the system.
Yeah, it's really nuts. I mean, I call it the second punishment, and it really would be better to put it as the second punishments because there's so many problems and challenges that these these innocent men and women face when they get out, right, which are again not of their doing, but they did. The problems go to employment.
I mean, it's hard when your resume has a twenty something year hole in it, right, And even though as Doug Delosa, who's you know, a friend and a hero of mine, and Zanneri from New Orleans who's in Angola for fourteen years, he says, you know, they go to job interviews and they'd say, I understand, but they don't understand, and they'd prefer to have somebody in generally speaking, who you know, who wasn't incarse, right, even though you have
the newspaper article it says you're innocent or whatever it might be. And of course the challenges with family, the challenges with you know, yesterday I had dinner with Valentino Dixon, who just got out after twenty seven years I was teaching him how to do Instagram right. But it's a process. I mean, there's a lot not that Instagram is the most important thing, but I'm just saying, well, kind of
it is anyway. But I'm just saying, like, it's you know, these are people who have never held the cell phone. They don't have access in many cases to their identification. And the you know, the most to me obvious and probably disturbing aspect of the second punishment is exactly what you talked about. New Hampshire's the state where you can only get twenty thousand. Wisconsin you can only get twenty five thousand. There are some states where you can't get anything.
There's still nineteen states with no compensation statutes, and there's some that have compensation statutes. I think it's Montana, but you can only get education credits and stuff like that. You don't actually get any cash, even in California, which seems counterintuitive because California. We like to think of California as like you know, a you know, an oasis of sanity in a country of insanity. But they're the you know, the hoops you have to jump through to get any
sort of compensation. You basically have to reprove your inn in spite of the fact that a court has already ruled you innocent. It's like, it's not.
That's absolutely right. I just spent some time with Bill Richards, who is wrongfully convicted in California and spent I think twenty six years in prison, and even though he has a finding of innocence, it's not good enough and he has to go through, as you say, this arduous process in front of a compensation board that is staffed by prosecutors, and they have to approve him for compensation. And if that doesn't work, he then has to appeal. And that
happens to so many exoneries in California. It's just incredibly difficult for them under the statute the way it's written and enforced, to get any money.
Right, So they have to jump through these hoops. They need help, They need legal help if they're lucky enough to find lawyers who want to spend our hundreds of hours or more working towards this elusive goal of getting compensation, which may not even really be that much at the end, I mean, it's and then they have to take time out of their lives as well to go basically retry a case that they would probably love to forget as
best they could. It's really busy, are but it's you know, look, it's one of the many, many things I'm working on that particular situation in California. I think we are going to be able to make some progress. Hopefully Gavin Newsom will be the next governor. If he is, you know, he's very forward thinking and very passionate about criminal justice reform, so I believe that he will take that up. I hope,
I hope he's listening. And if you could, I mean, after having spent your entire adult life in the criminal justice system in some of the grungiest places, in some of the you know, in some of the most hopeless situations, and with some amazing victories to your name, and having raised incredible amounts of awareness through your advocacy and your journalism, if you could make, if you could wave a magic wand and make let's just call it three changes, what would they be?
One change I would make is I would mandate compensation for every exonery in every state in this country, so that it's not an accident of geography, whether or not you get a million dollars or zero cents. So that would certainly be one reform, because we have a responsibility as citizens of this country to make these injustices right
and to make people as whole as we can. Another reform that I would make is that I would encourage, and maybe encourage as too delicate a word, I would strongly enforce state bar rules because one way to stop, for example, prosecutoroll misconduct and also bad defense luring, which is another cause of wrongful convictions from happening, is for there to be consequences. And you and I talked about the fact that there rarely are, and that is because
most state bars don't pursue these cases. Even when there are published opinions showing that there was misconduct, showing there was an effective assistance of counsel, there aren't any consequences. And I think it is so important for that to happen, and it's so important to bring a tension to the fact that the prosecutor's job isn't to just tack as many skins up against the wall as possible. It's to do justice, and sometimes that means admitting a mistake and
stepping back and conceding error and dropping a case. We have this mindset in this country that we need to be tough on crime, and that to win elections as prosecutors you have to talk about your conviction rate. I think that's starting to change, and we've had this small wave of progressive reformers. But to really hammer that message home, you not only need to elect reformers, you need to expose people who are not following the rules, who are cheating,
and who are stealing people's lives. So that's certainly another reform that I think we very badly need. And finally, what I would say is that I think that as citizens again and these states, we are responsible to for
caring for the victims of wrongful conviction. And one of the things about the book that was so powerful for me, because, as you say, my role in the system was really to advocate for defendants, for people who were accused, and I never spent a lot of time thinking about the victims. I really couldn't afford to it. It was distracting and sort of painful to live in their anguish, and what happens to them after this is exposed is really that
they're shunted aside we owe them more than that. We owe them services, We owe them therapy, we owe them outreach, we owe them recognition, and so often what they feel is shunted, aside and ignored.
Here's one for you, looking back over your career and your life. As I said in Criminal Justice Advocacy, Reform, Legal Work, et cetera, can you think of the best and the worst moments that you've had, the best one and the worst one.
I'll go with the worst first, because I want to end on a positive note. The worst moment of my career was when I had a client sentenced to life, and court life means life because there is no parole. They abolished it, and we had tried the case once and the jury had hung, and then we tried the case a second time and the jury convicted, and then we had a third trial actually about the punishment, because there was a very complicated question of statutory interpretation involved
in that. And I broke down and sobbed because my client was in his early forties, and even given the conviction and his record, it just seemed colossally unfair that we were going to put him in a cage for the rest of his life. And I felt that I had been part of that process. Even though I had tried as hard as I could to stop that from happening, I had not been able to stop that from happening, and the train had come and run him down. That was the worst moment of my legal career, and I
revisit it. The best moment was when Catherine made her the superior court judge in Cash's case made the decision finding him innocent. And I turned around and Cash's mom was just she had this expression on her face of just absolute amazement, and she said, thank you Jesus, and she wept, and I just felt this overwhelming sense of relief because I had been a part of giving her her son back, and it was just the most amazing feeling in the world to realize that she had lived
for thirty four years without him. She was seventy six years old, and she was alive to see him come home.
Yeah, that's the good stuff, and it is. It is good. It's as good as it gets. What's the plan? So Rectify is out now. People can get it on Amazon, Barnesandoble, dot com, anywhere books are sold. What's next for you?
So I'm going to do a lot of traveling and speaking related to the book, which I'm very excited about. And part of what's so awesome is that I get to go and be with some of the people who are in the book, some friends of yours. I get to go to New Orleans and spend time with Jerro Morgan and Orion's and I get to go to various other places Virginia and see Thomas Hainsworth and Janet Burke.
So for me, just being able to travel around the country and reconnect with the people that I form these relationships with and talk about the book with them present is incredibly powerful and rewarding. So that's what the next couple of months, I think, and maybe longer will look like. My hope is that it will build a following and that people will connect with the message, and that the message of restorative justice will catch hold and not be
such an alien concept. I mean, some people listening to your show, they might not even know what restorative justice is. They might be thinking, what are the two of them talking about, And so my hope is that it becomes as common a ward in our lexicon as criminal justice.
Right, it's actually a sort of a I mean, you know, I'm not a religious person, but it's sort of a Christian concept, right, It's a whole like forgiving, and in this case, you're forgiving for something that never happened in the first place. But it's yeah, it's it's got layers to it, you know, it does.
And it's interesting. It has roots in the Native American community. It's also practiced in South Africa, most famously with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of apartheid. But the concept is essentially, we don't believe in banishing offenders from our community. We believe in renitting our community and bringing them back. So we the criminal justice system in the United States, we ask what crime was committed, who
committed it, and what punishment is deserved. Restorative justice takes those questions and it radically reframes them to ask who is harmed, what are their needs, and who is best situated to meet those needs. And when you put that in the concept of an exoneration, you see all this need from the original crime victims, from the exoneries, from
their respective families, even from the jurors. There are jurors who suffer your trauma when they realized they voted to convict based on evidence that turned out to be false, based on lies that they were told by witnesses or other state actors. And so there's so much harm and there's so much repairing to be done that were stored
of justice. Bringing all these harmed actors together to work through a mutual trauma has turned out to be a way for people to kind of make sense of something very senseless and soul destroying.
And let's talk about jurors because one of the things I harp on on the show is the critical importance of people showing up for jury duty. Good people, the type of people that listen to this show, inform people, people who are awoke. It's an imposition. We all know that, But in your view, how important is it for people to show up for jury duty and what should they be looking out for? Because the people's faces, the people that go to jury duty, by and large, they don't
have experience in the criminal justice system. They don't really know. I mean, I think most people default, as I did growing up, that law enforcement is on our side. There are friends, they're not you know, they're they're there to protect us. And it says right on the side of the car, protect and serve. So what should they be looking out for.
Well, the first thing I would say is absolutely to echo your message. Jury service is crucial. And the second thing they should be looking out for is their own autonomy. What happens so often in these situations is you get in a room and in Cash's case, you have a couple of people who have doubt. In his case, there was no weapon, there was no wallet found, there was
no evidence other than these two eyewitnesses. And the juror who contacted me after Cash's exoneration, who suffered so much anguish, was telling me that he was the youngest person on the jury. He was eighteen. It was the first time he'd served on a jury, and he had these doubts and he expressed them, but basically he felt that because other people on the jury were older and had more powerful personalities, are more and more experienced, he should sort
of defer to them. And then the pressure to convict mounted, and the pressure to get out of the room mounted, and he gave it. And so often you hear about that that jurors have these lingering doubts in these cases because they do smell a rat and they don't act on it. So I would just impress upon people not only go to jury service, but in the jury room, stick to your convictions. If you don't think it's right to convict, it's not. Don't let people push you around,
don't let people bully you. Don't convict so you can go home to your family on a Friday night.
Right, That's the whole reasonable doubt thing, I mean, And I think that's forgotten and ignored in too many cases. And yeah, I mean, that's a powerful picture that you're painting. And I have heard of so many, too many cases in which there's been jurors who've been bamboozled or bullied even in the jury room. And you know, I'm thinking now about the Randall Paget case, right, which Richard Jaffey wrote so eloquently about in his book Quest for Justice
Defending the Damned. And in his case, the jury was ten to two in favor of originally a favor of guilt of conviction. And it was so clear, I mean, when you read the story, it's unbelievably obvious when you're presented now with the facts. But on the other hand, that jury was looking at a guy who had already been convicted and sentenced to death right, so they knew that they knew that this was a brutal murder, stabbing and a rape, and so they were preconceived to think, well,
he's there, it must be. Then there's research that shows my friend Josh Dubin did the research that shows that people have a preconceived notion of someone's in that box, they probably are guilty. But in this case, there was one juror, a woman who came up and spoke to Richard after the verdict, which was innocent. They found him innocent and freedom, and she came up to him on the courthouse steps and told him that she had gotten up because the victim was found in a very strange position.
One leg was up on a nightstand, the other leg was up on the bed, her body was all askew, and she got up and put her legs up in that position imagine an Alabama woman doing that in the jury room, and said, look, you can't rape a woman this way, right, And she showed the other jurors that this was not possible, and sure enough she won the day and he was freed, and he turned out to be absolutely factually innocent. So she saved the man's life.
And when you're in a jury, I'm not suggesting that that's an extreme that you need to go to, but you know, we should remember her and and you know, and honor.
Her absolutely, and what she did was incredibly brave and creative and creative.
Yes, I mean that was such a bizarre case too, because I won't get into all the details. You have to read the book, but it's an amazing, amazing case. And he is such a hero for having, you know, won that case in Alabama, you know, I mean, tough, tough down there.
One final point about jury's and this is to watch out for your unconscious bias because so for example, going back to Cash's jury in nineteen seventy nine, this was a black teenager accused of killing an elderly white man. The jury was all white, twelve people, all white people, and it's hard for me to believe, based on the scanty evidence that they had, that they would have convicted
a white person. And I think, whether it was conscious or unconscious, they valued Cash's life less because he was black. And I think that's another thing that jurors really really have to think about, which is you have to value everyone's life equally, And as you say, you have to drill down on the presumption of innocence, because you're absolutely right, Jason, that people look at the person sitting at the defendant's table and they don't think, Gosh, what's that wrongly accused
innocent person doing there? They think, I wonder what he did? And that's an unconstitutional thought. You actually shouldn't be thinking that you should be presuming innocence. So I think both of those are also very very important for juries to remember.
And while we're on that subject, we know that the justice system is biased throughout right in terms of the number of people arrested, prosecuted, and convicted. The percentages are off the charts if you're a person of color. But at the same time, we also know that people of color don't commit crimes at any higher rate than white
people do. So isn't it odd that we demonize and persecute people who are not only the least able to defend themselves because of socioeconomic reasons, but also people who are by and large less culpable and less likely to commit terrible crimes on a large scale.
And it's also really interesting how those crimes get classified. So, for example, in the eighties and the nineties, we had what we called, or our presidents called a crack epidemic, and of course, predominantly the people who are being arrested and prosecuted and sent away for long periods of time. We're African American. Now we're going going through a huge problem in this country with opioids. But we're not calling
it a criminal epidemic. We're not talking about super predators roaming the streets with crack cocaine because many of the people who are impacted are white. So we're calling it a health crisis. We're calling it a national emergency, and we're talking about treatment. We're talking about options other than
incarceration in a lot of these cases. And yet they're both these massive problems with drug addiction, but we classify it differently depending on who that drug or which community that drug is impacting.
But yeah, drugs are a medical problem. They need to be treated as such. It is unconscionable that even as we're sitting here right now, the people being arrested for marijuana in this country and locked up. But it's happening, and it all needs to stop. But it's part of the same problem, and I think the pendulum is swinging. It's interesting that it's really the only even semi bipart is an issue that exists right now right and it's not truly bipartisan, but at least there are points of agreement.
And a true conservative can't look at it any other way than to say, this is big government at its worst, and we need to deincarce rate, and we need to stop this mass spending on warehousing of people. And I don't think you know, the numbers are so insane in terms of the money that it costs us as taxpayers, but even those numbers don't take into account the loss of tax revenue from the people that are locked up, that aren't out there working jobs and supporting their families.
And it just goes on and on and on. It's so horrible, Lara, we have a tradition here at Wrongful Conviction, which is it's a great tradition because it's my favorite part of the show, and my favorite part of the show is the end. And the reason it's my favorite part is because it's the part where I get to say thank you for being here and for all you're doing and for you know, inspiring me and countless others to keep doing everything we can to to rectify a situation.
And once again, your book is awesome. I recommend everybody read it. It's Rectify the Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction by Lara Basilon. And so, Lara, thank you for being here, and I now get to turn the mic over to you and I get to just tune out and listen to your thoughts.
Well, first of all, I want to start by saying thank you for having me, and thank you for all of the work that you do. I think it's rare to find someone who has such diverse interests and who supports artists and art and makes art and then also looks around and sees that the world is broken in this entirely different place and does everything they can to make it right. And so I want to thank you for the work that you do and for inviting me
onto your show. Parting thoughts, I think we should all think hard about how we can all be practitioners of restorative justice in our own way, in our own lives and our own relationships. When I first found out about it,
my thought was, why isn't everyone doing this? And I looked at the kind of healing that can happen when people face each other who've faced each other down across opposite side of the courtroom and felt nothing but hatred for each other and wishing each other the worst, and they're able to come together and share these experiences that are so profound in circumstances where they might just want to run from each other and run from the pain
and run from the trauma, and instead they're joining hands and they're walking through it together, and then they're coming out the other side. And I think for people who listen to your show, who think, well, I'm not wrongfully convicted myself, and I don't know anyone, and this is sort of outside of any experience that I might have, I think what they can ask themselves is, how can I apply this to my own life and what harms
have I inflicted? Who's harmed me? And how can I use this to make my own life better and make someone else's life better. And I've definitely gone through that process myself, and I've really thought I've been somewhat of a vengeful and unforgiving person in a way that hasn't
benefited anyone, certainly not me. Or the people that I've directed that energy toward, And it just makes so much more sense, I think, to completely revisualize the situation and realize every time you tell yourself you're a victim, quite often you have a piece of culpability and what's happened, and you have some responsibility and some accountability of your own to do. And I think the more people can see that and reconnect and mend broken relationships, the better off all of us will be.
Wow, that's that's pretty much it. I mean, I couldn't have said it any better, and I'm glad I got to hear you say it. So why don't we go start with the youngest and just share anything that you want to share with the audience about your experience.
It was a great experience. It's an experience I don't wish anyone would have to go through. But I appreciate him so much and it's been an honor knowing him, getting to know him, and I will forever cherish this bond.
I think the most important thing for me right now is that perhaps what I did, what I believe the risk I took, that somebody else, some other victim's family will follow suit and try to help somebody else down the route. So I want to be an example for other people to forgive.
Again, you can't imagine this. I mean it's insane. I couldn't. I couldn't even with somebody else's brain. You can't think of this. I mean, this sort of thing doesn't happen. I mean, not just with Shannon and her family, but the jurors, the men and women that read that not guilty verdict. I'm close with everybody.
You know.
Right after the verd they didn't want to leave the courtroom. They wanted to just stay there and see me come out of that. Man like, you can't. You can't. I can't put this in words. You can't imagine this.
Man.
Yeah, man, you know, I'm just so grateful, and it's such a shame that you have to go through such a tragic situation to be breeding some goodness in life. I've been home over two years, just a little over two years. That past twenty five years don't consume my life, not for one second of any day. I'm happy to be alive. I'm happy to have Shannon and Lauren and Devin and that family in my life. I'm happy to have my whole family. I try to find a good
in everything. No matter what situation. You and somebody in the worst situation just keep on fighting, Just keep on fighting. Tough times on last, tough people do. I'm built for this, man.
I'm really almost never at a loss for words, but in the presence of you, I'm really I'm just very very moved and grateful when you're here and sharing your thoughts and your spirit. Once again, You've been listening to a very special episode for me and I hope for you, with Lara Basilon, Shannon Coleman and her wonderful daughter Lauren, and the one and only Tony Wright.
Having play Always Mind Man.
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 in 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