This call is from a correction facility, and it's subject to monitoring and recording.
Fact ere and it hasn't been easy.
One hundred years that sad man. I'm a kid.
I didn't do anything, you know, and uh, you know that was ah, that was real painful, man, you know, because my life was discarded as if you know, like I was a piece of trash or something, you know, one hundred years and I had dreams and I wanted to do things I wouldn't commit in crimes.
You know.
I was a very good young man.
That is what happens in so many cases. The cops have a hunch because they're so smart at the scene, they have a hunch, and once they act on that hunch, they sort of developed tunnel vision and they take off marching in the wrong direction. And that happens in so many of these wrongful convictions.
They open it to cell door and I'll walk down stif and I actually walked downstairs to be outside.
It felt very strange to.
Be, like I said, to be walking without no shackles on my feet.
I thought it was a dream. But then again it wasn't a dream.
This is wrongful conviction. Welcome back, to wrongful conviction. Today I have Gloria Chillian, who served seventeen years for a murder that well, double murder that of course she had no part in. And when you hear how this all came down, you're going to be scratching your head like I am now, and with her is one of my favorite humans. The senior staff attorney at the Innocence Project, Nina Morrison. So, Gloria, Nina, welcome, Thank you, Hi Jason.
And like I always say, I'm glad you're here, but I'm sorry you're here.
So you know, here than somewhere else.
Yeah. I read about your case in that amazing book, Anatomy of Innocence by Laura Caldwell, and I was dumbfounded, actually, I mean forgetting the fact that you look. I mean, you can't judge a book by its cover, but you look so unlike anyone that would be a double murderer that's actually sort of hard to process. I don't know if you ever looked like a double murderer back in nineteen eighty one, did you?
No?
Hardly, No, not so much. And if you don't believe me, just take a look at my Instagram and you'll see what I mean, because I posted pictures of Gloria on there, and then I defy you to identify her as anything other than just what she is, just this sweet, lovely woman that.
Was not a master criminal.
No.
In fact, you were a law student. But we'll get to that in a minute. And this is a bizarre case because on December ninth, nineteen eighty one, just to set the stage, two men disguised as telephone repairman this is what we know, entered the home of an elderly couple in Rosemont, California. Sounds sort of ominous. Already, Ed Davies was fatally shot, his wife, Grace was shot in the head but survived, and six suitcases full of silver were stolen. I mean, it's like the beginning of a
novel or something. It's weird. Okay. This was obviously a terrible crime and raised I'm sure a lot of anxiety in the community, which leads to pressure. But you were an unlikely suspect for a lot of reasons. I mean, you weren't anywhere near there. So this whole situation makes absolutely no sense to me and for you, I can't even imagine. So can you take us back to nineteen eighty one. Can you explain how this all happened?
Yes, back then I was going to law school. I also worked as a process server and did small investigative work in order to make enough money. I had just gone through a divorce and it was not particularly pleasant, so we were fighting about everything. So I actually took a semester's leave from law school so that I could make enough money because it looked like the settlement for my divorce wasn't going to go through. I worked for a man named Virgil Fletcher who owned a coin store.
It was called Allied Coins, and mister Davies was one of the customers there. We found out later Virgil Fletcher did not like mister Davies for some reason which I didn't know at the time, which made it even more confusing. Virgil Fletcher and his partner were splitting up, and that also was a very acrimonious split, and he and his partner were trying to pull everything on each other that they could, you know. So what I was doing for him was a lot of the accounts that had been
assigned to him. I had to go out and find them and do things like that. But this whole case is centered around coins and coin shop dealers and the people that were were fully involved in that scene. At that time, there were several robbery murders from people that were in that particular world.
And it's interesting too reading back to the story of how you were first arrested. I mean, it's sort of very cinematic too. Right, you were visiting your boyfriend. I guess he was right and preparing to have a little afternoon delight type situation. And I'm not saying anything that the book.
Why that always comes up, I don't.
Know, but it's sort of a It sort of does paint the picture, and then here comes a knock on the door.
Yes, And the knock on the door, unfortunately, was the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department. And one of the things that you mentioned was, you know, creating a problem in the community. Sacramento County sheriffs had not solved one single homicide in nineteen eighty one. Wow, so they were really pushing on this one as well. The Sheriff's department had set up a tip line and someone called in. It was a woman and it was later to learned that it was
Virgil Fletcher's girlfriend. He got her to make this call, but it's said you should check out a law student named Gloria, And that is how the police got to me. They had interviewed Fletcher the night before and the next day when the knock came on the door at the most inauspicious time, what they told me was that they wanted to ask me some questions about Fletcher, which, okay, I didn't really get it, but I went downtown with them and the minute they got me in a room
everything changed. That was very cinematic as well. You know, you have the poor suspects locked up in the room with these guys and they're accusing me of planning this crime. They're starting from the position that they know I did it and they can prove it. And you know, I talked to him for a little while and finally I just said, you know, this is ridiculous. I want a lawyer.
When people get picked up as you did, who had nothing to do with and had no knowledge of a situation a crime, they generally go in as you did, waving their right to an attorney, expecting that everything's going to go smoothly. And you, being a law student, you had reason to believe that the system would work. You're studying the law, and you're a smart woman, so if you just say what you got to say, you can get home in time for the six o'clock news. But that was not anything like what happened.
I actually ended up on the six o'clock news right because once they stood up and arrested me and they took me outside, I realized this had to have been a setup. The media was everywhere. Obviously, they had been notified and it had been called, and this had been their intention from the very beginning. One of the cops I was wearing a long sweater coat, and he took it and put it over my head, which was the perfect image right there.
Right this way they could begin the process of sort of shaping public opinion in the way that they wanted to, which is to turn you into this master criminal, which was again ironic, since you had no prior record of any kind. Do you think that they actually thought that you did it at that time?
I don't know. I do know that years later, when my investigator went to Sacramento, he interviewed Lieutenant Beyondy, who was the head of homicide at that time, and he asked him specifically if Beyondy thought I was guilty, and Beyondy said, quote, I don't know, I know Ray thought she was.
Sounds like sometimes in these cases there's a little thread where they have one fact that they can't quite figure out, or a lead, and then they run with it in a direction that has no basis in fact, but fits what they think they know. Was there a temporarly on or some information that a woman had shown up to case the house with the two actual killers at.
Some point, yes, And that made the case even more confusing because that particular I guess pattern style of operating had been used in Sacramento County, and one of the
victims was a woman named Elizabeth Lee. Elizabeth Lee happened to be in the courthouse when she saw Gary Massey's wife and she went running to the nearest dep He's saying, that's the woman, Those are the people that robbed me, And she ran around the courthouse in a state of panic, and eventually she ended up talking to Christopher Cleland, who was the district attorney who was prosecuting me, and he told her if she didn't shut up and get out of the courthouse, he would have her arrested. He was
not interested in anything that she had to say. If she identified Joanne Massey as a woman who came to her door with that same particular fact pattern, it would just make my guilt even more dubious as far as a jury was concerned.
Right, it would have made his job more difficult. Yeah, that was not part of the plan.
No.
They held you in jail for almost five months awaiting trial.
They tried to get an extension. I was being prosecuted by John o'mera at the time, but the judge who was hearing the case ruled that there was insufficient evidence and he ordered me released right then.
Yeah, there was insufficient evidence. There was noah evidence, and you go back home, try to, I guess, rebuild, right.
I was really in a state of shock and I just kind of wandered around, both dazed and numb. But I had a horrible feeling in the back of my head somewhere that this wasn't over. And I don't know why I had that feeling, but I was right, it wasn't over.
And then there's another knock on the door.
Yeah. Literally about a year later they came and they rearrested me. And this, of course was after Gary Massey had gone to trial and had made the deal that he had made, which I knew nothing of at the time.
So Massy was the killer, yes, and he had been sentenced to life in prison.
Life without the possibility of parole.
And as soon as he got that sentence, he decided he was going to try to take a little more active role than his own sort of destiny, right. He wanted to make a deal with the cops, and he immediately contacted the Sheriff's department offering the same day.
Same day, he went back to the jail and picked up the phone and called them and said, I can help you.
And at that point it's fair to say me and I guess he would have said anything they wanted him to say.
Yeah, it's hard to believe he just suddenly had a crisis of conscience. On the same day he got sentenced to life without parole. And this is again pretty common.
You know.
Sometimes we see people who've committed crimes, who are arrogant, assume they're going to get away with it. Suddenly the trial or the investigation doesn't go so well. They're facing serious time, and then they become desperate and say, what can I do to help myself. My lawyers aren't going to get me out of this. I got to help myself and offer up somebody who had nothing to do with the crime as a way to try to reduce
their own sentence. That's perfectly legal. They can do that, they can offer cooperation, but the law says that the prosecutor has to turn that information, all discussions, all agreements, all suggestions or promises of benefits to these witnesses over to the accused so that the jury can hear about it. Because a jury is going to feel very differently about someone who they think is getting a better fit to themselves from turning in another person, versus someone who claims
there's nothing in it for me. I just am doing the right thing. And in Massi's case, because he'd already been sentenced, it allowed the prosecutor to say he's got nothing to gain, he's already going to prison for the rest of his life. In some ways it makes it much more believable because he's doing his time, he's going to pay the price, and he's just come and clean on what really happened, and that wasn't.
The truth, right, And if they would have asked him to identify you as the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby. That probably would have been what he would have done, absolutely right, I mean, because at that point he really did have nothing to lose. We know that guy's not a stand up guy, and he's looking to make a deal and they've got a great offer. So he identifies you for allegedly planning this crime, and we say incentivized witness, we could say extremely incentivized witness. In this case.
Incentivized almost doesn't apply to the treatment that they gave him. They took him out to dinner in nice restaurants, They let him have sex with his wife in some of their offices. They he actually took his twelve year old son with them when they went up in the hills with Massey to reclaim the property that he had buried up there. The district Attorney Kit Cleveland gave this twelve year old boy a coin that had come from the robbery.
It had belonged to mister Davies, and allowed him to keep it, apparently as some sort of souvenir, which still appalled me to this day. I think that's absolutely sick. It's macabre, yes, very.
But I'm still trying to get a grip on this. So all these perks that he was offered, this was after he was convicted.
Yes, people have been convicted of serious crimes can get a lot of benefits after they testify. I mean, we've got on the Innocent Project website examples of benefits that convicted people get while they're in jail, video games, and you know, extra visits and hotel rooms when they go travel to testify that the rest of us could never afford. You know, Thankfully, it doesn't happen in every case, or
even most cases, but it does happen. And again, the rule is prosecutor's office can give people benefits within the law, depending on whatever the law is of that jurisdiction, but they've got to let the defense know. And that's really where the outrage comes in because when jurors hear about this, if they hear about this criminal getting treated like a king, they're obviously going to feel very differently about their testimony.
And prosecutors know that, so they either don't give the benefits in the first place, or if they do, they have to disclose them.
And the inverse is true too, Like in Sonny Jacob's case, when the real murderer wanted to confess, they kept giving him perks in prison in order to get him not to confess.
Right.
So that's actually the flip side of the same sort of very strange problem. And it is such a strange thing because everybody knows that you can't bribe a witness, right, All kinds of penalties come with that. Nothing good happens out of that, but they can anyway, So he identifies you, they come and arrest you, and you go to trial.
Actually, when they came and arrested me, they'd charged me with the death penalty again, even though Cleland, who was now the prosecutor, knew for a fact where he'd gotten his new witness from and his new information. But fortunately for me, the California Supreme Court made a decision in People versus Carlos that took my actual charges out from underneath the death penalty. So they released me on bail.
The judge let me out on twenty five thousand dollars bail, and I was out for almost three and a half years.
Crazier and crazier. I mean, I've never been a judge, but I would say that if I was a judge, and I thought that you were responsible for shooting two elderly people, killing one of them during a robbery in cold Blood. I'm not sure twenty five thousand would be the number I would choose, you know what I mean, I think it would be a high multiple of that. So you're out for three and a half years with this gigantic anvil hanging over your head. How did you function during that time?
Very poorly?
What did you do?
Mostly have a nervous breakdown? I mean, I was really as you said, it's like having an anvil hanging over your head. It's a true sort of damocles. But I worked. It's difficult to explain, and part of it was my own state of mind. But it was almost as if I didn't have this case. I never went to court except to get an extension. Nobody seemed to be interested in me. Nobody paid any attention to me until everything else was done. The other problem was that I could
no longer afford private counsel. I had hired a lawyer from my first arrest. This time I had a lawyer who was appointed from the Appellate defenders because the public defenders were already involved in Massey's case, and I guess he was just good enough to get me convicted.
Well, it's good enough to process you, but not represent you. Right, it's pretty nuts that you were sentenced to thirty two years to life.
Right.
Oh. Yes, the prosecutor on the day that I was sentenced, and the standard sentence for this type of case would have been twenty five years to life, but mister Cleland stood up in court and he went on to this short rant about how I'd always been a model citizen, I'd never been in trouble, I was going to law school,
and therefore I should get more time than anybody. And the judge granted his request and they sentenced me to thirty two years to life, despite the fact that the actual killer was already going to be sentenced to twenty five years to life.
Right, So you got an extra seven years for allegedly planning this crime. Yes, and when you're experiencing that, this doesn't seem like and I don't want to come off sounding the wrong way, but this doesn't seem like the type of crime that a young woman who's on her way up in the world as a law student would participate in. Like if you were really desperate for money, would you go and rob and shoot an elderly couple to steal some silver.
I mean, a lot of our clients get prosecuted on theories that make absolutely no sense, you know. And oftentimes what we find in these wrongful conviction cases is the police come up with a suspect or a theory and then come up with a motive to make it fit. So they think that somebody must have killed his spouse or girlfriend, and even though there's no history of animosity,
they come up with a crazy hypothesis. Like our client Michael Morton in Texas, they said he killed his wife because she wouldn't have sex with him on his birthday because she was tired, because they had been out to dinner with their toddler son and he was disappointed they didn't have sex, which is true because he left a note along those lines, but he didn't kill her over it.
And in Glorious case, there's some indications that they thought that there was a woman involved helping them case the joint and then it seems like somebody came up with this concept like, oh, maybe it's that law student who's hanging around with that coin dealer she's a smart broad,
maybe she's the mastermind, and they ran with it. The problem is there was no evidence to supported except these incentivized witnesses facing criminal charges themselves, and in some cases like Glorias, they build an entire prosecution around these highly dubious witnesses and an unsupported theory.
I mean, there was no evidence whatsoever except for the word of the killer. Yes, I mean it almost seems like that should be not okay, not okay.
Well, state courts are free to set the parameters of what constitutes sufficient evidence to convict someone. So just because a jury says you're guilty doesn't mean the conviction stands. That's not even because of new evidence, but even just evaluating what happens at trials. A lot of times courts will undertake what's called a sufficiency review and say that's
just not enough. In Texas, for example, of all places, the highest criminal court has ruled that you cannot be convicted of murder based on the uncorroborated testimony of an accomplice. So if someone were to be charged in a situation like Gloria's, where the only evidence against them was the word of one or two people who admitted their own involvement in the crime. You couldn't be convicted without corroboration. The problem is that in a lot of places that
even have those rules, almost anything counts as corroboration. So one eyewitness saying oh, I saw someone who looked like a woman with short brown hair fleeing the scene could be corroboration. Or a witness who's not an accomplice saying, oh, she said something about you know, they did something bad last week. I mean, people can interpret it pretty loosely. It really depends on the judges you're in front of. But at least there's a corroboration requirement. And I don't know.
I don't practice in California now, so I don't know what the law currently is. It's hard to imagine many courts today, knowing what we know about Jeilhouse informants, would allow that testimony to be the basis for a conviction, even if the jury believed it.
Right, at least all of the conviction in which I mean thirty two years to life's basically a life sentence. Yeah, in thirty two years eligibility right, So, and that doesn't mean you're walking out the door at thirty two years either.
No, I mean, and as you know, Jason, and you know most parole boards, the innocent get penalized. So you get a sentence of thirty two to life. But as soon as you come up for parole, if you're not ready to quote unquote express remorse for the crime, which really means admitting guilt. You can't say I'm sorry those people died, but I had nothing to do with it. You have to say, I'm sorry they died and I
did it, and I regret what I did. And if you don't show that appropriate remorse in their view, you're not going to get parole in most cases. And so in glorious case, you know, she was exonerated before I think, right before you had to go before the board.
No, I still had several years left to see even though I had been in there for seventeen and a half years. But when I went for my first parole board review, which they later did away with, but the woman from the board talked to me and I told
her I was innocent. I had nothing to do with this, and she actually said to me, you know, you're not going to come up for parole for a long time, but you need to realize that if you don't accept responsibility, and if you don't express your remorse and make a miss for what you did, then you are not going to get out on parole.
Right. So isn't it bizarre that we have a system in which you plead innocent, you go to prison, and you plead guilty and you go home. Yes, that's truly Alice in Wonderland, right, except not the cute kids version. So we can go back to the trial, that moment in the courtroom when the jury went out, and now you're dealing with your appellate defender who's not Clarence Daryl, right,
and the jury goes out. I mean, you've been now through sort of Kafka escortdeal for the last four plus years already, starting with the time that you were first you know, taken in well, yeah, before you've even arrested it, starting for the time to knock on the door. Did you think that there was still a chance that the jury would see the light and do the right thing.
It's difficult for me to put that into words. At times my law school education really betrayed me, and at other times it served me well. On this particular issue, I simply decided that, you know, I hadn't done this. They couldn't possibly convict me. I mean, there wasn't anything there except for this guy on the witness stand, and I don't know the jury was out for two and a half days, if I recall it correctly. But I rocketed from one side to the other half the time.
I believed that I was going to go home. When my boyfriend dropped me off at court that last time, he said, I'll pick you up for dinner. You know, we'll go out someplace nice, assuming that I would be found innocent, and so I went with that fantasy for a while. It's difficult to explain how the mind deals with some of these things that are simply impossible to deal with. I mean, you think I'm going to lose
my mind. This is insane, and it is insane. And then again, somehow or other, you managed to switch over to another state of thought or of being. Most people that have been through this experience have experienced that same thing to where they're you're not even thinking logically anymore. I'm having a hard time articulating it because it is that difficult to understand. Yeah, and I still don't get it.
It was something you were ill prepared for, to say the least, right, based on your previous life. You know, I mean you were going to have you were on your way to having a very pleasant existence. Right. What kind of lawyer were you planning on being?
By the way, actually I was interested in estates and trusts, but I also would occasionally give some thought to criminal law. But like everybody else, the only thing I knew about criminal law was what I learned in the first year of law school. You know. I didn't want to have anything to do with criminals, not those people. Well, I rapidly became one of those people and found out that those people are not at all who we think they are.
You know, when I started recording these podcasts Wrongful Conviction, my main goal wasn't is that we would by telling these stories and sharing the real life situations that happen to people just like you, we would educate the audience so that when they go to serve on a jury, they are woke right and they are for lack of a better where that's a technical term, and they are you know, armed with the knowledge that these things happen,
and also that you know, it's really terrifying. You know a friend of mine who is herself from a Harvard Law school graduate lawyer, she was on a jury or not that long ago, and she told me by the third day, people were like, I really don't care anymore whether they're guilty or not. I want to go home. I got stuff to do. Like so if you need me to vote guilty, so be it. Like that was
literally conversations that were happening in the jury room. And we don't know what was happening in your jury room. But the fact is all I can do is say to people that are listening, you know, listen to the words of Gloria. Even though it's all that long, you can still hear the pain and you know, recognize that, you know, the extra day of your life or whatever it is. And of course then there's that saying, which I'm gonna start using a tag line of my emails.
I think you know that it's better that one hundred guilty men go free than the one incent should suffer William Blakston.
And people seem to literally believe that it's better and they are safer if all the innocent people go to prison just so they get the one guilty.
Person, right, And then the irony of that is that, of course, we know in most cases, when the innocent person goes to prison, the guilty person remains free. In your case, if there was another perpetrator, that person was free. We know the actual killer in your case did go
to prison. But in most cases, and you know we know this from the Innocence Project, there's so many cases where we have used DNA to identify an innocent person or to prove the innocence of the person who is convicted, and then whila, a hit comes up in the National Database CODIS and we are able to identify the actual perpetrator or the authorities identify the actual perpetrate.
Yeah. I mean, one of the things that all the innocents cases, the DNA cases, and the non DNA cases have shown is that this false choice we were sold in the nineties by the tough on crime crowd, that you have to choose between safety and due process or safety and justice, is a myth, because sending innocent people to prison doesn't keep us any safe, or it makes us less safe. We've you know, as you mentioned, in a number of our cases, in fact, close to half
of them. One hundred and sixty out of the first three hundred and sixty four DNA exonerations. The investigation that was done to clear the innocent person also led to the apprehension of someone who had actually gone on to commit other violent crimes while the innocent person was sitting in prison. And that includes murders, that includes rapes, that includes robberies, you name it. Sometimes multiple crimes by the same person. And we created additional crime victims and additional
suffering while this innocent person was sitting in prison. So you know, juror should know that by sending someone to prison in who they have some doubts about their guilt, they're not making the streets safe or they're not doing the safe thing or the right thing. They're doing a pretty reckless thing.
No, they're actually making themselves left safe. Yeah, even on just a purely selfish basis. Right, And you look at probably one of the most glaring examples that would be Ronald Cotton, right, because we know when he was wrongfully convicted of rape, the actual perpetrator remained free and raped over thirty other women before he was apprehended. So, I mean, what a terrifying thought that is it's just my heart goes out to everyone involved in that situation. It's just unimaginable.
So how did you manage to survive this ordeal in seventeen and a half years? And it seems like your mind is intact? Right? I mean I only know you for days. No, from what I know of you, you've accomplished amazing things since you've been out, So you can't have lost your mind completely while you were in. Can you explain that?
What?
How does that? No one can really understand, including me, and I've been doing this for twenty five years.
Actually, it goes back to what I said earlier about having to separate states of mind. But I was also saved by a peculiar situation at that particular time. When you first go to prison, you have to appear before what's known as a classification committee, and they look over your past, your conviction, et cetera, et cetera, and they decide where you should best work. When I told them that I'd been to law school, this particular group of
people laughed at me. They said I was lying, They said it was impossible, and then they assigned me the law library and I remained working there for sixteen years, and it was a strange time and place. It has never happened before with California Department of Corrections, and it will never happen again, that's for certain. But I worked for people that had absolutely no information about a law library or how to staff it, how to run it,
or how to do anything else. And they quickly realized that I could help them learn this, and then I thought, oh, what the heck, We'll just let her do it. So I eventually ended up buying all the books organizing the institution, and I spent all of my days helping women, not just with their various convictions, but also with a lot
of institutional stuff. And about that time, there was a senator from San Diego and she wanted to hold a hearing on battered women because it was just at that time period that people were becoming interested in battered women, and in California at that time, they were not allowed to present any evidence of abuse or violence against them in their defense, which made those convictions a definite slam dug. So anyhow, this had all they had been institution had
been contacted. Chief Deputy Warden came down and he asked me to put together panel and to do some other stuff for these various interviews that were coming up, which I did, and after that they just pretty much let me do whatever I wanted to do. I ordered all the books. I instituted services across the fence, which means that there were areas of the prison where the confinement
is far more restrictive. One area of the prison was simply for people who were suffering from mental illness, and so I was able to establish legal services for them.
So it's fair to say that you maintained your own well being by helping other people, right.
I had my little underground law practice going on there, and some very strange clients by the way, But yeah, I knew I could not figure out what had happened to me. The only thing that I seized on and I don't know why, and as it turns out, it was presciented. But I always believed in the back of my head that if the Ninth Circuit ever saw my case, they would not let it stand. And as it happened, it was the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that reversed my conviction.
So I'm just going to read paragraph that I think is going to really shake people up because it shakes me up, which is that Ten years later, after a federal petition for rid of habeas corpus had been filed, defense investigators discovered evidence of Massey's agreement with the prosecution, including a letter. This is where it gets deep, right, that's me editorializing, including a letter Massy sent to the
prosecutor soon after you were arrested. In the letter, brace yourself, Massey said, quote, I lied my ass off for you people. The letter, as well as two others Massey wrote that detailed the resentencing agreement, were never disclosed to the defense by the prosecution. M Nina, you want to shine a little light on this one, because that's illegal.
I'm going to use my actual law.
Degree to tell you that's illegal.
No, it's in all seriousness. That is a textbook example of the kind of correspondence from a witness that has to immediately be turned over to the defense. Whether or not the prosecutor thinks that Massey is telling the truth, that is, did he lie his ass off?
Then?
Is he lying his ass off now when he says he did? Is the truth somewhere in between? The defense has to have access to that statement so that they can cross examine him on it, and obviously a witness who's telling the prosecutor I lied my ass off for you people is not going to have much credibility in the eyes of the jury. So the prosecution has to know that turning that over will be fatal to Gloria's prosecution.
They still have to turn it over. At my Hebe's hearing, the district attorney when he was questioned about these letters and what he had done with them, he was asked, why didn't you turn them over to the defense at once, and he said, I didn't know where to send them. Obviously, once your conviction is final, you no longer have the same trial attorney that you had, But that doesn't mean that the guy fell off the end of the earth either. He should have turned them over immediately to him. He
could have sent them to me. He could have done anything, and he knew precisely what he should have done, but he was determined enough to stand there and come up with a bald face.
Lie Lauria was pretty easy to find. He could have found her. She was in the California Department of Corrections with a number attached to her name, and he knew exactly where to find her, and he could have sent the letter to her, and he certainly knew who her prior lawyers were.
Yes, And the idea that he would even have a gall to say something like that, it just bothered me, and it still does. There are a few things that have been said and done in my case that just still blow my mind.
And I think it says a lot about the culture of lack of accountability for the minority of prosecutors, and it is fortunately still a minority. But who commit these egregious acts of misconduct that he thought he could get away with such a ridiculous answer. You know, anybody, anybody else caught red handed hiding a letter like that, I mean, could have come up with a better excuse, a lie,
a something. And the fact that he just gave this completely ridiculous explanation that doesn't hold water just shows how he thought nobody was going to care and nobody would believe him. And Gloria, you know, was the rare convicted defendant who was able to get a federal court to throw out her conviction based on undisclosed evidence. It's very
hard to do these kinds of violations. By definition, stay hidden right, They're designed to stay in the shadows, and many of those letters get shredded, never to be seen again. And it's you know, as in so many of these cases, Jason, of people you talk to, they are both the unluckiest and the luckiest people in the world. The unluckiest for what happened to them, and the luckiest that the proof of their innocence and of the state's misconduct was available and that their lawyers found it.
Someday and Massy, in some sort of strange attack of conscience, later admitted that much the evidancy gave was false, including all the testimony that what he said that he didn't make a deal with the prosecution in exchange for a sestimony that is nessimarily that you were the mastermind behind the robbery. You admitted all of that was false. Yes, And ultimately, as we said in two thousand and two of the Ninth Circuit Court reversed your conviction and ultimately
the charges were dropped. From all the years of me working with Nina and the good people at the Innocence Project and serving on their board, the two questions I get asked most frequently are in cases like this, did somebody go after the prosecutor. And the second question I get asked the most is did this person who served seventeen this killian lady, did she get compensation? I mean, please tell me she got taken care of.
He was brought up on charges by the California State Bar Association from what he had done to me. And they had fooled around with my case for apparently quite a few years. They were considering raising charges, then they did, then they didn't whatever. But eventually he had a trial at the State Bar Association. He was found guilty and he was censured. The judge said that the real problem with the case was that it was so old that he had a wonderful career except for these minor laughs.
And if the case had been recent then her decision would have been very different because he had already retired, and so she censured him and that was it. It did make a difference to me because it was at least an acknowledgment by the state of California that somebody had done something wrong to me. Personally, I would have liked to have seen him locked up, even though that
wasn't on the table at that particular time. But at least they acknowledged that there was an issue there other than that the whole thing was a big joke.
I mean, it's extremely rare for any prosecutor caught committing misconduct ever face any accountability from the state bar in
any state. And we actually have data in California. There was this study done about ten years ago by our friends at the Northern California Anison's Project and the Veritas Initiative where they tracked court findings of misconduct by prosecutors over a twelve year period, and they found more than six hundred cases where they could identify the prosecutors by name who were found by a court who have committed misconduct, and only six of them had faced any professional discipline whatsoever,
So less than one percent of the ones they could find, and of those, many were what glorious prosecutor got, which was a slap on the wrist. I mean, he got a finding that he had violated the ethics rules, which is what the state bar has jurisdiction over. But all he got was a what's called an admonishment, so just
don't do that again. Yeah, And she lost seventeen years of her life plus all the time she spent before she went to prison, with the hanging of her head, and then the lifelong consequences and repercustoms that she'll have to deal with for having had her life stolen and her career stolen.
Yeah, you know, and society lost out too, because you could have been out here contributing and you know, doing good stuff and paying taxes and instead of us paying for you to be locked up, right for Californians to be And that's a whole other consequence of all these things. It's probably the least dire consequence, but it's still a consequence. And when you multiply it by the number of people who end up in a situation like yours, it becomes
a real number. Since you got out. I mean, one of the things that I find interesting because of my you know, sort of obsession with this advocacy work on behalf of people who are formally incarcerated, is this organization that you founded, which is called the Action Committee for Women in Prison. And all I know is what I read, which is that it's an organization that works to improve
conditions for female prisoners. Of course, it's worth noting that in America, many people know that we have four point four percent of the world's population twenty five percent of the world's prison population. But what people don't seem to talk about as much is the fact that we have
thirty three percent of the world's female prison population. So, you know, organizations like yours are so needed, and can you talk about the organization and what led you to found it and what is due and where's it at now.
I wanted to help the women that I left behind, and at the time when I was in prison, there was a lot going on in there, not just with battered women, although that was where I developed my interest in expertise and battered women because I didn't believe they should have been in prison in the first place. I mean, you know, when someone is strangling you or attempting to shoot you, I think you have the right to defend
yourself or to defend your child. Other than that, there were a lot of women that I knew that deserved to get out regardless, and the parole board was a real problem at that time. There was also a tremendous problem with the medical department. They were killing us on a regular basis, and that also includes in the men's prisons, and beyond that, I wanted to do what I could to ensure that they did not feel that they were forgotten. When I first went to prison, things were a lot different.
We wore our own clothes, we got various privileges, we got Christmas gifts. There was a lot that was done to try to make people feel women feel that they were not forgotten by society and that they were still decent people. That changed radically, particularly in the nineties. The composition the pro board changed totally. It was all former law enforcement basically, and I certainly didn't think that they could understand what it was like to be small, female
and in fear of your life. I started a Christmas project so that people would not feel that they had been forgotten, and it still goes on to this day. Last year, my organization helped provide approximately five thousand gift bags for incarcerated women in southern California. That includes the prison and the fire camps and the jail as well. The main thing that I thought that I could do was to tell people what I had learned, which was that women in prison were not who I thought they were.
They're just basically people like you and me who've made wrong choices. Or who've been in intolerable circumstances. That of course applies to people who acquired their convictions in defense of their life or in defense of their children. I thought that people in prison must be vicious, bizarre, every stereotype you could possibly think of. And I learned very quickly that that is not who those women were at all.
And a lot of those women helped to save my life, because there was a lot of times when I didn't think I could make it another three and a half seconds. And there are times when it just closes in on you and you can't do this anymore. With women, it usually happens between five and seven years. It happened to me at about six years, and I had a very good friend. Her name is Janet Dixon. We're still trying to get her out. She's been in almost forty three years.
But she would pick me up every night after dinner with a friend of hers, another lifer, and they would make me come out and they would just walk me around the yard for two three hours at a time. I guess the purpose was just to keep my feet moving and to keep my head from the darker places, and somehow or other, I mean, with their love and their care. I got through it. There were definitely times when I looked at the fence and thought, why isn't
that stupid thing electrified? And why can't I get to it. I was devastated when they told me they didn't shoot to kill. There are times when that is exactly where you go. Suicide is an alternative to an intolerable reality. And there were plenty of times when I spent that time thinking about that, thinking about some way to end this all, when I didn't think I could stand in
the pain anymore. But then I would, something would happen, and I would get interested in something else, like getting somebody out of prison, or you know, beating their one fifteens, which are disciplinary reports. And somehow I got through it. You just put one foot in front of the other day after day. I do not know how people that are sentenced to life without the possibility of parole get through a day. I don't believe that I could have done it if that had been my sentence. I'm not
a stupid woman. I would not have been there. If I was facing something like that, I would have taken myself out.
Can I ask you about something that you know we hear and read a lot about women in prison that there are a lot of women there who end up because they have a relationship with someone, typically but not always, a man who is kind of high up in a crime or a criminal enterprise, and the woman might have some tangential involvement, agreeing to carry something or transport something or make a phone call once, but they don't have access to information they can trade with law enforcement when
they get caught. Was that something that you found to be common among the women that you met inside.
Absolutely. In fact, there were cases where the women weren't even involved in the crime at all, but they were convinced by the man, usually a man that they were with, that if they would plead guilty and take the case, that you know, they'd only get like sixteen months in prison and he would love them forever and take care of them and send them boxes and whatever. And some of these women actually walked into court and did that, they took the case, and of course everything turned out
totally different. They ended up getting longer sentences, like maybe ten years, and the guy was gone in the wind. Another thing is that people who were involved with crime or have been arrested or have dealt with the criminal justice system in some way know how to work the system. There are cases that I know of where women have confessed to doing something that is physically impossible for them to have done. And I'm thinking of the woman who
was about my size. I'm five feet tall and if I lie about it, I weigh one hundred and thirteen pounds. This woman was convicted of strangling her six foot one husband to death manual strangulation, and it was her son who committed the crime, and the prosecution just went along with it. I mean, what do you tell him, just lie there and I'll try to make this quick. It's insane. And yet they go ahead and they accept those cases. They accept those please, and the women end up doing
the time. Oftentimes the man will say something like, you know, you'll get less time, the women get more time. Or if the man says that she is the mastermind, she's the one who planned all of this, she will get a longer sentence than he will. He'll get twenty five to life, she'll get life without he'll get fifteen to life. She'll get twenty five to life. And they are held to longer terms by the parole board. It's a type
of discrimination that. I mean, you think it can happen until you see it and it's right there in front of you on the paperwork. It amazes me to this day that someone would even accept a plea bargain like that.
So I wanted to ask you this. I'll ask both of you this, and then we'll go to closing comments. If people are listening now and they want to get involved, and they want to help with your organization, or they want to help with women in prison in general, because I have a number of amazing women who have approached me and wanted to volunteer and wanted to do stuff, so we started to put together our own sort of impromptu group. We came up with an interim name called
Women for Women who Shouldn't be in Prison. But then I found out that you've already been doing this work, and so I wanted to hear more about that and how can other people, women or otherwise get involved.
I do have a website. I haven't been doing much with it lately. I've been focusing more on the exoneration issue and my work with the Exonerated Nation. But my website is acwip dot net. It's always a struggle to come up with enough gifts. We can definitely use donations and anybody who wants to get involved. I think the saddest thing about prison that is so different in the United States from other countries is that we isolate our prisoners.
We demonize our prisoners. They're all murderers and maniacs, and nobody should have anything to do with them or to get involved. And that just isn't true in other countries where they have a different philosophy, they help people rehabilitate themselves and reintegrate themselves into society. We don't do that here. But visiting programs, gift programs, letter writing programs, all of those things are really important, and.
People can access that information on your website.
Yes they can.
Maybe there'll be some web designers out there who want to take that duty over from you so you can focus on the other piece.
That's a wonderful idea.
You know, everyone in prison needs outside support, but for women it can be particularly lonely and isolating. Because of the way our society is structure and the way we're raised. Women are often the caretakers when a man goes to prison. They're the glue that keeps the family together, keeps the
relationship together. And sadly, when women go to prison. You know, there are exceptions to every rule, but by and large, a lot of men, a lot of family members, they're overwhelmed with their own lives and they move on and the women get left behind. And that's why the support from people who are generous of heart is so critical.
Women get dumped at the gate.
Okay, So once again it's acwip dot net and you can go there and learn about how to get involved and write letters and volunteer or send donations. Glory, can you tell us about your book.
Yes, my book is called full Circle because it begins with my arrest and it ends with my district attorney being brought up on charges, and in that sense, the circle will is closed, despite the fact that so much has continued to go on. It's available on Amazon, It's available on Barnes and Noble or any place else where you can normally buy a book. I talk about my case, but I also have about a third of the book explaining what happens in prison and what goes on behind
the walls. And it actually is like a real little universe, but it's not one you'd ever want to get caught up in again. The book is full circle, like Gloria Chillian and Sandy Coburn, full.
Circle like Gloria Chillian. I'm going to read it, and I hope you will too. So we have a tradition. Nina knows this, I'll tell you, Gloria at rofuel conviction, don't be scared.
I don't like surprises.
So the tradition is that at the end of each episode, I first of all thank you both for being here, Lauria Achillian and Nina Morrison. And then I get to stop talking, which I think you know is not something I'm great at, but I'm going to do it anyway and just listen and just leave the mic open for any final thoughts that you have. And so let's start with you, Nina, and then you will be the closer. You're the headline act.
One thing you asked about earlier that I don't think we got to because our conversation was going in so many other interesting directions is whether Gloria ever got financial compensation for any of the time that she lost or
what happened to her. And the answer is no, And her case highlights a glaring whole of injustice in the compensation system, which is that if your civil rights are violated, which Gloria's clearly were, in the course of a criminal case, you often can sue the law enforcement officials responsible under the federal civil rights laws or under state law. The catch is that if the prosecutor is the one responsible for those civil rights violations, they have what's called immunity.
It's like those of you who read Harry Potter may remember the invisibility cloak where you can put it on and be seen. Prosecutors get the lawsuit equivalent of an invisibility cloak. By and large, were anything they do during the course of a criminal trial, no matter how egregious, they can't be sued for by order of the US
Supreme Court from many years ago. And so if the letters from Massi the real killer, had been in the police file but the prosecutor had never seen them, Gloria might have had a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the state and one. However, because they were in the prosecutor's file, everyone involved gets immunity, and that's incredibly unfair.
It needs to change, thank you, Nina. It's often said that you can judge a society by looking at its prisons, and if that is true, then our society is in really terrible shape. As I said earlier, we demonize our prisoners, We separate them, We do everything that we can to act as if they're not even humans, they're not part of us. I think maybe it makes people feel safer. I don't know, but I probably felt the same way decades and decades ago before I had any real experience.
But we need to stop sending innocent people to prison. And I know that sounds like a no brainer, but it happens all the time. My guess is that at any given time, there are at least probably one hundred thousand people you know in prison who do not deserve to be there, who are wrongfully convicted. Most of them have short sentences. You can't even get organized to help them because it is so expensive and so time consuming
to exonerate a person. I am, as we said earlier, one of the luckiest people alive, because the evidence that saved my life and that got me out of that hell hole was there for me to be able to use. But I need to help the people that I left behind. I have to believe this happened to me for a reason other than just plain ill luck. We need to take a look at what goes on in our criminal justice society. And the last thing that I can say to you is the most important thing. This could happen
to you. Don't ever believe it couldn't.
Thank you for listening. This has been a very special episode for me and hopefully for you too.
Yeah, Gloria, thanks for coming.
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 Innocenceproject 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
nominade composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flahm is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one