Hi, This is Laura and I writer. Because of COVID nineteen, Steve and I recorded this episode from our homes, not together in the studio. We might sound a little difference, but I think the story we tell is as inspirational as always be well and stay healthy. Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I writer.
And I'm Steve Drissen.
Today we'll tell you the story of David McCallum, one of two New York teens wrongfully convicted of murder in nineteen eighty six. 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 DA 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 Stuckey. And Rob told me, he said, Ruben Hurricane Carter would like you to look at this. You know, when Rubin Hurricane Carter asked you to do something, you do it.
At the time, Ruben Carter was the most famous person who'd 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 sixty six he was convicted of a triple murder he didn't commit. After twenty years behind bars, Ruben was exonerated. He dedicated the rest of his life to advocating for others he'd
been wrongly convicted too. In nineteen seventy six, Bob Dylan wrote the song Hurricane as a tribute to Ruben Carter.
You know, I had met Rubin a couple 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 now there was 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 jetplanes circling overhead. It's three point thirty on a Sunday afternoon, October twentieth, nineteen eighty five. 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 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 manage to start the car. And drive off. It's over in the blink of an eye. A carjacking 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 Herbuick 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 foot six and the taller guy who had braided hair was five foot ten. But this car theft and kidnapping soon got even more serious. The next day, October twenty first, police in Brooklyn get a phone call a doa 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 carjacking, Brooklyn police 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 Queen's 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 foot six, the other five foot 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 twenty fifth, two Brooklyn men, Terence Hayward and Herman Mumford are arrested for snatching a chain off a subway rider. One of these guys was five foot six, the other one who had braided hair, was five foot 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 will never definitively know whether these
two were involved in anything. They didn't confess and police stop 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 Willy Stucky.
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 match the descriptions of the carthieves. It's never clear whether this opposed 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 goes straight for Willy Stucky. For some reason, they jump to the conclusion that Willy used that gun to kill Nathan.
At about seven pm on October twenty seventh, police pick up sixteen year old Willy Stucky and bring him to the eighty third Precinct in Brooklyn for questioning, and within a few hours police also pick up Willy's sixteen year old buddy, David McCallum and bring him in for questioningo. Willy and David were longtime friends who played handball together at a local park. Now, Willy 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 of 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 Willy and David 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 Willi and David did. In court, the lead detective testified that both Willia 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 drop 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, am I doing okay? Am 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 was probably true.
Both David and Willie testified that after they agreed to confess, the police rehearsed a story with them. Willy in particular, testified that police fed him details about the perpetrator's conversation with that woman washing her red Bwick Regal. But the police claimed that all the information in Willy 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. The suspects are never going to be found more credible by a judge or a jury. Police officers are professional witnesses. They testify in court on a regular basis, and Willy and David were just kids. They never stood a chance on cross examination.
But David and Willy'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'd only been shot once. Both Willy and David said the shooting happened at night, but the medical examiner said the murder happen during the day, probably right after the carjacking. Willie told the police that he'd hidden the gun under his mattress, but when police went to Willy'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
foot ten. But despite all this, Willy and David were charged with the murder of Nathan Blenner based on their confessions and nothing else. Both were convicted on October twenty seventh, nineteen eighty six. Each was sentenced to twenty five years to life. The story fast forwards now more than eighteen years to two thousand and four. David McCallum was thirty four years old. He'd 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 Stuckey had died in two thousand and 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 four, 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'd 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. Rubin wasn't exonerated until nineteen eighty five, the same year that David and Willie went down for Nathan Blenner's murder. When he got out, ruben 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, Rubin founded his own group, Innocence International.
Rubin 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 incarcerated as a racist, triple murderer, condemned by history, repudiated by the courts, and sentenced to die amid the squalor and despair and 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 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 and four, David McCallum read a magazine interview with Reuben Hurricane Carter, and he sent a letter asking for help to the author, a man named Ken Klonsky. Ruben 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 background, and I had no background in wrongful convictions, so I just thought, well, here's a person sounds honest, and I'll just tell Ruben about him. And Ruben 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'd never been in a prison in my life, and the place itself was enormous. It looked like a medieval castle.
In a visiting room, Reuben and David sat on opposite sides of 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 it case, and Ruben interrupted and 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 sense that this was somebody who was going to make him proud, and Rubin 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 Rubin. Really, who's going to get him out of there?
Rubin and Ken hired a defense lawyer, Oscar Michelin, and in two thousand and six, the three of them sent the confession 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 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 doctor is in the house. Oh see, the doctor makes house calls. The doctor is on the case.
Okay, Doctor 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, but the fact later turns out to be false, and if it is in the suspects 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 Willy and David were the ones who had talked to that woman with the 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 feet 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 join 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 DA'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 DA to exonerate David, not yet. Then two big things happened. First, an election in twenty thirteen, a new Brooklyn DA 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 twenty fourteen, Rubin announced that he had prostate cancer and it was spreading fast.
You know.
When Rubin announced that he had cancer, he and I were kind of at odds with one another. Rubin was upset with me because he thought that we coddled the DA instead of looking for an opportunity to land a knockout blow with new evidence. So Ruben's answer to us was, stop fiddling around with the DA's office, stop 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 going to work. And it created a tension between Rubin 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 Ruben and I knew that his voice was going to be crucial if we were ever going to win this case.
Ruben was very sick and quickly got much sicker, but he was still the ultimate fighter. On his deathbed, With ken Klonsky's help, Ruben wrote an op ed for the New York Post urging the New Brooklyn DA 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, Ruben wrote, He's got me on the ropes, but I won't back down. And then Ruben asked the New Brooklyn DA 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 Ruben write that op ed.
We wrote a look 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 Ruben was dying and that Ruben had made a last wish.
That op ed was the knockout blow that we were looking for.
Ruben's dying plea, combined with the new DNA evidence, made the difference. A few months after Ruben passed away, the Brooklyn DA Ken Thompson announced that he was going to exonerate David McCallum and posthumously exonerate Willie Stuck too. 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 DA's office brought him a lunch of barbecue chicken and whatever he wanted to drink, and one by one, members of the DA's conviction Review Unit congratulated David. David not only met Ken Thompson the DA, 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 court room, 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 free man.
Mister 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 Blenna.
Unbeknownst to David, they had brought Willie Stucky's mother in for the exogeneration 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 Demic in Brooklyn State Supreme I will move in the interest of justice to vacate the convictions of David McCallum and Willie Stuckey.
This was not a reluctant exonerations, 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 that moment you knew his intention to change things, to write everything was going to be realized. It was just a wonderful moment.
You know.
The only thing missed from David McCallum's exoneration was Rubin. Hurricane Carter and the state even found a way to bring Rubin into these proceedings. On the day of David's exoneration, the DA'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 Ruben Carter wasn't the only hero of this story who passed away too soon. On October ninth, twenty sixteen, Ken Thompson, that reform minded Brooklyn DA who exonerated David McCallum and Will Stucky with such grace, also died of cancer.
He'd 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 da who had agreed to free him and gave a powerful eulogy.
He promised that he would investigate lawful convictions in a very fair way, and my legal team and I that's all we ever wanted.
It was two years to the day after David had been exonerated.
Mister Thompson touched me in a way that I don't think anybody ever would again, because mister Thompson didn't only give me my freedom. Mister Thompson, and this may sound point to some who don't believe in compassion, mister Thompson gave me my 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, you still see 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 then I think I'm pretty good at it now, but I just want to be really really good at it because I work very hard work, because it's all worth at the end of the day, and I am braced it.
You know.
I consider myself for hairs on Dad.
She Daddy's little girl.
Absolutely. I have to tell you how many times I've picked us at school that soon I come in the door.
Oh my god.
You know, she just runs from what else he's doing. And that's it's almost undesciable in some way when it's really really good failing 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 nineteen seventy three. 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 Flamm and the team at Signal Company Number one. Executive producer Kevin wardis Senior producer and Pope and additional production and editing by
Connor Hall. Special thanks to Jogi Hammer for additional script editing and for wrangling and writing like a mad woman. Our music was composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura.
Nyriter and you can follow me on Twitter at s Drizzen.
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