#131 Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions - David McCallum

of two New York teens wrongfully convicted of murder. In Luckily for David, he had incredible allies in his corner, the famous boxer Reuben Hurricane Carter and a district attorney, Ken Thompson, who was dedicated to real justice. Here comes the story of the d A and the Hurricane and one of the men they saved. So it was two thousand and six and I had just become the legal director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, and my colleague Rob Warden came into my office and handed me a

VHS tape. On the tape there were confessions from David McCallum and Willie Stucky. And Rob told me he said, Ruben Hurricane Carter would like you to look at this. You know, when Ruben Hurricane Carter asked you to do something, you do it. At the time, Ruben Carter was the most famous person who had ever been wrongly convicted. In the nineteen sixties, he was a prize winning professional boxer,

nicknamed Hurricane for his record of early round knockouts. But in nineteen sixties six he was convicted of a triple murder he didn't commit. After twenty years behind bars, Reuben was exonerated. He dedicated the rest of his life to advocating for others he'd been wrongly convicted. To invent sex. Bob Dylan wrote the song Hurricane as a tribute to Ruben Carter. You know, I had met Reuben a couple

of years before Rob handed me that tape. Ruben was at Northwestern he was at a conference to honor dozens of people who had been exonerated off of death row, and for me, it was you know, there's a little bit of hero worship on my part. I was eager to meet him because I was so impressed with the way he remade himself. You know, from a brawler to a deep thinker. To be honest, you need both of those skills to work on cases of wrongful conviction, and

you need plenty of perseverance. I got hooked on a ten year struggle to represent David after watching that tape. Today's story begins in Queens, New York, in South Ozone Park, a working class neighborhood next to JFK Airport. It's phil with single family homes, storefronts, and the sound of jet planes circling overhead. It's three thirty on a Sunday afternoon October. Twenty year old Nathan Blenner is behind the wheel of

his nineteen seventy nine black Buick Regal. It's parked on a neighborhood street and he's trying to get the car to start. A couple of kids playing in a nearby yard were the only witnesses to what happened next. According to the kids, Nathan is fiddling with the ignition when two men approach him from behind. They're about to pass the car when they turn around, go to the driver's side and tell Nathan to move over. The men push him into the backseat, get in, managed to start the

car and drive off. It's over in the blink of an eye. A car jacking and a kidnapping. Police from the local precinct and Queen's canvass the neighborhood looking for leads. About a block away, they find a woman who says she'd been outside washing her Buick Regal a red one, when two men walked by, clearly checking out her vehicle. One of them said nice car, She answered, if it goes missing, I'll know where to look. The two men didn't say anything else. Instead, they kept on walking in

the direction of Nathan Blenner. The woman gave a description to the police. Both men were black and in their twenties. They were also of noticeably different heights. One was around five ft six and the taller guy who had braided hair was five ft ten. But this car theft and kidnapping soon got even more serious. The next day, October one, police in Brooklyn get a phone call a d O a dead on arrival in a wooded area near a cemetery.

Nathan Blenner's body had been found. He was lying face down with a single gunshot wound to the back of his head. And two days after the car jacking, Brooklyn lease were called to Fulton Street, about a mile from where they discovered Nathan's body. A car had been set on fire. It was Nathan's Buick. Regal police douse the flames, search the car and find fingerprints, along with some cigarette butts in the ashtray. Brooklyn cops get in touch with

NYPD Central Robbery. They learned there's been a string of eight car thefts in Queens over the two days leading up to Nathan's kidnapping. In every case, the offenders were described as two black men around age twenty one, five ft six, the other five ft ten and armed with a gun. This was a two man car theft crime spree that culminated in Nathan Blenner's murder, and police were

feeling intense pressure to stop it in its tracks. A few days later, on October to Brooklyn men Terence Hayward and Herman Mumford are arrested for snatching a chain off a subway rider. One of these guys was five ft six, the other one who had braided hair, was five ft ten. Both were black. In other words, they matched the car thief descriptions pretty well. Police question Hayward and Mumford about

the string of car thefts and about Nathan's death. Now we'll never definitively know whether these two were involved in anything. They didn't confess, and police stopped investigating them pretty soon. That's because Hayward deflects attention away by telling the cops he knows about a gun that had been used in a murder. Now stick with me here, because like a lot of police investigations, this gets messy. Hayward told the police that his friend James Johnson knew more about the gun.

It turns out that James was a suspect in a grocery store robbery in which a gun had been used. When police interviewed James, he said that he'd given the grocery store gun to his aunt Lottie, who then gave the gun to a man named Jamie, and then, shortly before Nathan's murder, Jamie supposedly gave the gun to a sixteen year old Brooklyn teenager named Willie Stuckey. What kind of story is that you got James's and Jamie's and

Lotties and who are all these people? No kidding? This is a ridiculous story, and it's even worse because it's coming from two guys who matched the descriptions of the car thieves it's never clear whether the supposed grocery store gun had anything to do with the car thefts or Nathan Blenner, and there's no record of police ever speaking to Aunt Lottie or Jamie. Instead, police go straight for Willie Stucky. For some reason, they jumped to the conclusion

that Willie used that gun to kill Nathan. At about seven pm on October, police pick up sixteen year old Willie Stuckey and bring him to the eighty third Precinct in Brooklyn for questioning, And within a few hours police also pick up Willie's sixteen year old buddy, David McCallum and bring him in for questioning who Willie and David were longtime friends who played handball together at a local park. Now, Willie had never been in trouble with the law before,

but for David it was a different story. David's family had moved from South Carolina to Brooklyn when he was just seven years old, and the culture shock had been pretty severe. You know. He went from a very rural environment where he would play in the fields and go fishing and not have that many worries in his life.

But once he hit the streets at Brooklyn, he took on this sort of aura of a big, tough guy because he needed that to survive, and he began to act out on the street in ways to fit his profile. But it was really more bravado than anything else. Police feel like they're hot on the trail and they begin

interrogating Willie and David in separate rooms at the police station. Now, neither one of their interrogations was recorded, so we'll never have a perfect record of what happened inside the box, but suffice to say that the detectives described the interrogations very differently than William David did. In court, the lead detective testified that both Willie and David voluntarily confessed to

killing Nathan Blenner after just a few questions. But Willie testified that police handcuffed him and then hit him three or four times. David also testified that police hit him in the mouth hard enough to draw blood and they threatened to use a chair next time. You know. The confession, when I first looked at it had a very rehearsed quality to it. It was very short. But there's one

moment it gave me pause. It's when David McCallum looks with a moment of sheer terror at the police officer who's not on the screen but is clearly sitting in the room, and it was a look like and like doing okay, um, I telling the story the way the story needs to be told. And I remember Freeze framing that one frame of terror, and that suggested to me that what David was saying in terms of getting hit,

it was probably true. Both David and Willie testified that after they agreed to confess, the police rehearsed a story with them. Willie in particular, testified that police fed him details about the perpetrator's conversation with that woman washing her red Buick Regal. But the police claimed that all the information in Willie and David's confessions came straight from them. This is exactly why you need to record the entire

interrogation process. If you don't do that, it's the police versus the suspects, and the suspects are never going to be found more credible by a judge or a jury. Police officers are professional witnesses, they testifying court on a regular basis, and really and David were just kids. They never stood a chance on cross examination. But David and Willie's confessions were both really problematic. The stories they told

didn't match the actual evidence. Willie said Nathan had been shot three times, when in fact he had only been shot once. Both Willie and David said the shooting happened at night, but the medical examiner said the murder happened during the day, probably right after the carjacking. Willie told the police that he had hidden the gun under his mattress, but when police went to Willie's home and looked, they

couldn't find any gun. There were other problems too, Like a lot of New York City kids, David and Willie didn't know how to drive, making them unlikely suspects for a car theft ring, and most importantly, they didn't match the descriptions of the car thieves. David and Willie were sixteen years old, not twenty something, neither one of them had braids, and both were short, nowhere near five ft ten.

But despite all this, Willie and David were charged with the murder of Nathan Blenner based on their confessions and nothing else. Both were convicted on October six. Each was sentenced to twenty five years to life. The story fast forwards now more than eighteen years to two thousand four, David McCallum was thirty four years old. He had transformed from an insecure teenager into a man known by other

prisoners for his unshakable integrity. David had always maintained his innocence, but he'd lost all his appeals and was running out of options. Tragically, Willie Stucky had died in two thousand one, at the age of thirty one, from what the prison said was a heart attack. So this was David's fight now, and for too long, he'd been fighting alone. By two thousand and for, David had written over six hundred letters.

He wrote to lawyers, he wrote to TV stations, radio stations, he wrote to anybody, and he always insisted that he was innocent, But all he got back were rejections until one of those letters made its way to Ruben Hurricane Carter. Remember Ruben Carter was the famous boxer who had spent twenty years in prison for a triple murder he didn't commit, whose long fight to clear himself was immortalized by Bob

Dylan in the song Hurricane Now. Ruben wasn't exonerated until the same year that David and Willie went down for Nathan Blenner's murder. When he got out, Reuben was malnourished from decades of prison food, and he'd lost sight in one eye from a botched prison surgery. He couldn't fight for the middleweight crown any longer, so instead he started fighting for the wrongfully convicted. After working for one of North America's leading innocence organizations, Ruben founded his own group,

Innocence International. Ruben recognized that he was probably the most well known figure who had been wrongfully convicted, and that if he didn't use his voice in some way to be a champion for the wrongfully convicted, that it would be a terrible waste. For twenty years, I was incuscerated as a racist, triple murderer, condemned by history, repudiated by the court, and sentenced to die amid the squalor and despair, and you creation of a maximum security prison. And tonight

I am standing here at the United Nations making this address. Now, if that's not miraculous, then I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is. David was at his wits end. His best friend had died, and every day was a struggle for him because he didn't see a way out. In February two thousand four, David McCallum read a magazine interview with Ruben Hurricane Carter, and he sent a letter asking for help to the author, a man

named Ken Klonsky. Reuben and Ken had started working together on wrongful conviction cases, and today Ken is the director of Innocence International. David sent me a letter and he explained his case and the situation he was in. Now, I have no legal back and I had no background in wrongful convictions, so I just thought, well, here's a person sounds honest, and I'll just tell Reuben about him. And Reuben at first he took it in and he said at some point, well, let's go visit the brother

and see what he's like. Both Ken Klonsky and Ruben Carter read up on David's case and came to visit him in prison. This was a prison in New York called Eastern Correctional. When we visited, first of all, I've never been in a prison in my life, and the place itself was enormous. It looked like a medieval castle. In a visiting room, Ruben and David sat on opposite sides at the table, silently studying each other. Later, David would remember feeling like Ruben was reading him, and David

refused to break the silence. The eye contact was like love at first sight, and they had a conversation which David started going on about case and Reuben interrupted says, you know what, I'm not interested right now in your case. I want to know who you are. Ruben was a tough interviewer. He grilled David about you know, if I get involved in your case, I don't want you to come out of prison and act like a fool and

I'm wasting my time. And he got from David the said that this was somebody who was going to make him proud. And Ruben left that meeting knowing that he was going to do everything in his power to get David McCallum out of prison. I think we were there about two hours, and I remember us getting up and leaving, and I look back at that enormous prison and I said, Reuben, really,

who's who's going to get him out of there. Reuben and Ken hired a defense lawyer, Oscar Michelin, and in two thousand and six, the three of them sent the con session tapes to the Center on Wrongful Convictions for Steve to review. Now, David had read about your work, Steve, and I'm going to out you here. He considers you the Lebron James of false confessions. Look, Laura, we're in Chicago, and out of respect for the greatest basketball player of all time, I think we should go with the Michael

Jordan's of false confessions. Slow down, Steve. First of all, you're from Philly, that's right. So actually, the more I think about it, I prefer to be known as the Doctor j of false confessions. As in the Doctors in the house, the doctor makes house calls, the doctor is on the case. Okay, Dr j you analyze these confessions and you found a pretty revealing error what we call

a false fed fact. I did. A false fed fact is a fact that comports with the police theory at the time of the interrogation, and it's adopted by the suspect in his or her confession. Um, but the fact later turns out to be false. If it is in the suspect's confession, then you know that the police fed that fact to the suspects. And that's exactly what happened here.

At the time of the interrogations, the police believed that Willie and David were the ones who had talked to that woman with a red Buick Regal just before going around the block and attacking Nathan Blenner. And sure enough, right there in Willie Stucky's confession is a story about talking to that woman and saying nice car. But David and Willie didn't match their description. Remember, the woman had described two guys five ft six and five ten, one

with braids. Now David and Willie were both five six and neither of them had braids. They couldn't have been the guys who talked to that woman. And by the time of trial even the state agreed that David and Willie were not the ones she'd seen. So how did story get into Willie's confession? It must have been fed by the police. That was enough to make Steve joined the team right then and there, and I decided to recruit Laura Cohen, a law professor and an attorney at

Rutgridge University, to join our defense team. Laura Cohen and Steve approached the Brooklyn d A's office and got them to agree to do forensic testing on the cigarette butts and fingerprints found in Nathan Blenner's car, and the results the cigarette butts had DNA on them that excluded both David and Willie. Instead, the DNA matched a different Brooklyn teenager they had no connection to. The fingerprints also excluded

David and Willie. They matched yet another Brooklyn teenager who had been killed years before in an altercation with the police. This was more powerful evidence of both Willie and David's innocence, and the whole team, including Rubin, was very excited. But this evidence still wasn't enough to persuade the Brooklyn d A to exonerate David, not yet. Then two big things happened. First, an election in a new Brooklyn d A was elected a reformer named Ken Thompson who had campaigned on a

platform of rooting out wrongful convictions. David's legal team immediately contacted Thompson and told him about the case. We used every bit of our connections to try to get David's case on Ken Thompson's radar screen, and it worked. The second big thing that happened was a terrible blow to the whole team. In Ruben announced that he had prostate cancer, and it was spreading fast. You know. When Ruben announced that he had cancer, he and I were kind of

at odds with one another. Ruben was upset with me because he thought that we um coddled the d A instead of looking for an opportunity to land a knockout blow with new evidence. So Ruben's answer to us was, stopped fiddling around with the d a's office, stopped dealing with state court. You need to go to federal court in order to get David out of prison. And we told Ruben that's just not gonna work. And it created a tension between Reuben and me at this point in time.

But the announcement that he had prostate cancer was devastating because even though we were at odds, I had tremendous respect for Reuben and I knew that his voice was going to be crucial if we were ever going to win this case. Reuben was very sick and quickly got much sicker, but he was still the ultimate fighter. On his deathbed, with ken Klonsky's help, Reuben wrote an o ed for the New York Post urging the New Brooklyn d A to exonerate David McCallum. It was one of

the last things he did with his life. Here's some of what Reuben Hurricane Carter wrote. My single regret in life is that David McCallum is still in prison. My aim in helping this fine man is to pay it forward, to give the help that I received as a wrongfully convicted man to another who needs such help. Now now I'm looking death straight in the eye, Reuben wrote, He's got me on the ropes, but I won't back down.

And then Reuben asked the new Brooklyn d A to look straight into the eye of truth, a tougher customer than death, and not to back down either. To this day, Ken Klonsky remembers helping Reuben write that abed. We wrote a utter together and it didn't have a proper ending, and finally I hit on something to live in a world where truth matters, and just as however late still happens, that world would be heaven enough for us all. So it was out there that Reuben was dying and that

Reuben had made a last wish. That op Ed was the knockout blow that we were looking for. Reuben's dying please, combined with the new DNA evidence made the difference. A few months after Reuben passed away, the Brooklyn d A. Ken Thompson announced that he was going to exonerate David McCallum and posthumously exonerate Willie Stuck two. And while this news was incredibly welcome, the way Ken Thompson's office handled the exonerations was extraordinary. I had never seen so much

grace in an exoneration. And let me explain what I mean by that. When we exonerate people, most of the time, it's after a hard fought legal battle that brings the state down to its knees and the state reluctantly gives up, and on the day of exoneration it's oftentimes a kind

of anticlimactic moment. But David's case was so different. When David was picked up by the detectives from prison, he was taken to the courthouse and then the d a's office brought him a lunch of barbecue chicken and whatever he wanted to drink, and one by one, members of the d a's conviction Review unit congratulated David. David not only met Ken Thompson the d A, but he also met Ken Thompson's wife, and there was such a recognition

of the humanity of David throughout this process. I'm Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson, and I'm here today with some members of my conviction review team. And it continued because from day one I made a pledge to the people of Brooklyn, and my pledge was to put the guilty away, but also to make sure that our criminal justice system was based on fundamental fairness. That's what we're doing here today. Normally, when prisoners are brought into the courtroom, they had come

in through the back door. They're handcuffed and they are shackled. When it came time for David's case to be called, he walked in through the front door with his head held high, knowing that he would soon be a freeman. Mr McCallum asked me to look at his case. I agreed to do so because my duty is not just

to convict, but to do justice. We have conducted a thorough and fair investigation of this matter, and as a result of that investigation, we've determined that there's not a single piece of evidence that linked David McCallum or William Stuckey to the abduction of Nathan Blunt. Of unbeknownst to David, they had brought really Stucky's mother in for the exoneration and it was a reunion that was just heartbreaking and incredibly tender. She was there also to feel that her

son was being vindicated at the same time. And so today at two pm before Judge Demmick in Brooklyn State Supreme I will move in the inches of justice is to vacate the convictions of David McCallum and Willie Stucky. This was not a reluctant exhoneration, but a public reckoning, and that kind of exoneration really is such an important step in the healing process for people who get out of prison. David McCallum walked into prison as a boy. Today he will walk out of the courthouse as a man.

The District Attorney had a press conference and in the press conference he said, I've inherited a legacy of disgrace with respect to wrongful convictions. And at that moment you knew his intention to change things, to write everything was gonna be realized. It was just a wonderful moment. You know. The only thing missed from David McCallum's exoneration was Ruben Hurricane Carter, and the state even found a way to

bring Reuben into these proceedings. On the day of David's exoneration, the d a's office dispatched two detectives to take him from prison to court, and on the way back from prison, one of the detectives pulled out his iPhone and he pressed play, and of course it was the Story of the Hurricane by Bob Dylan. It comes the story of the Hurricane, the man the authorities came to blame. Reuben Carter wasn't the only hero of this story who passed

away too soon. On October nine, Ken Thompson, that reform minded Brooklyn da who exonerated David McCallum and will He's stucky with such grace, also died of cancer. He had exonerated by that point in time about thirteen or fourteen people, and so when he died it was a really terrible

blow for justice. But one of the things that happened after Ken's death was his wife actually reached out to David McCallum and invited David to speak at the going home service for Ken Thompson, and so David McCallum stood up at the packed memorial service for the d A who had agreed to free him and gave a powerful eulogy. He promised that he would investigate vawful convictions in a very fair way and my legal team and uh, that's all we ever wanted. It was two years to the

day after David had been exonerated. Mr Thompson touched me in a way that I don't think anybody ever would again. Because Mr Thompson didn't only give me my freedom. Mr Thompson, and this may sound quaint to some who don't believe making passion. Mr Thompson gave me my father an old daughter, Quinn. Because had he not did what he promised he would do, I'm not sure where I would be right now. David, Yes, how still seek It's been a while, so you've been

out now for five and a half years almost. You know, what are your hopes and dreams? And what are your hopes and dreams for Quinn? What about hopes and dreams is to become even the more effective than I think. I'm pretty good at it now, but I just want to be really really good at it because the hard working, very hard work if it's all worth it at the end of the day. And I embraced it, you know, set myself at hands on dad. She had daddy's little girl. Absolutely.

I could tell you how many times I'm picked us to school and so as I'm coming to door, oh my god. You know, he doesn't runs from what else she's doing. And that's uh, it's almost underscinal one someday, but it's really really good sailing up. And that's the story of David McCallum. Join us next week for the last episode in our first season, we'll tell you about one of the first modern day cases of false confession from Peter Riley was just sixteen when he was wrongfully

convicted of murdering his own mother. Peter's innocence was championed by everyone from neighborhood moms to New York celebrities. His people powered campaign for exoneration has been the inspiration for the work Steve and I do till then. Thanks for listening to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association

with Signal Company. Number one special thanks to our executive producer Jason Flom and the team at Signal Company Number one executive producer Kevin Wardace Senior Producer and Pope, and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Special thanks to jog Hammer for additional script editing and for wrangling and writing like a madwoman. Our music was composed by j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura ni Writer and you can follow me on Twitter at

s Drizzing. For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com and be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction d