#134 Jason Flom with Damon Thibodeaux

Damon joined what eventually became the entire neighborhood on a frenzied search for crystal that lasted through the night and into the next day. When he returned home for some much needed sleep, the sheriff came knocking at the door. Inexplicably, Damon had become a suspect and what would turn into a rape and homicide investigation when they found Crystel's partially nude body strangled to death with a red extension cord.

Damon maintained his innocence, agreeing to a polygraph, which interrogators would tell him he had failed. Now, if you've listened to our series about false confessions with Laura and I writer and Steve Drisen. A lot of the elements of

Damon's story will sound familiar. The polygraph ploy, the false fed facts followed by a false confession, in this case, to the rape and murder of an underage family member, even with no physical evidence connecting him to the crime, the wild disparity between his confession to her rape and the fact that she hadn't been raped at all, among a host of other inconsistencies, Damon Thibodeaux was nevertheless convicted

and sentenced to death. With the help of the Innocence Project, DNA testing, and a surprisingly cooperative district attorney, Damon was exonerated on September two, thousand twelve. This is Wrongful Conviction

with Jason Flom. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction. Today's episode is an very interesting when we're recording in front of a live audience, But today is particularly special because I have Vanessa Potkin, who was the first staff attorney at the Instance Project and as a senior staff attorney now and has been on the show before. So Vanessa, welcome back. It's great to be back. And with Vanessa is Damon Thibodeaux, who was sentenced to death for a brutal crime that

we now know he didn't commit. So damon, as I always say, I'm glad you're here, but I'm sorry you're here. Thanks for inviting me, Jason. Um, let's go back to the time that all this stuff happened. Um, you were twenty two years old, and what was your life like? You were from Louisiana, right, I'm from Louisiana. Um, spent most of my time in Texas. I moved back to Louisiana and I got a job as a decand working

off shore. Got my job, you know. It was three weeks into the job, took some short leave to pay some bills and things like that, and your step cousin disappeared. Right, Yes, was sitting at the dining room table. Her father was sitting across from me. He left to go do something. I was working on his watch. He couldn't put the band on, so I said, I'll put it on for you, and she asked me to take her to the store.

I told her I couldn't do it without your parents permission, and she said, no, I need you to take me down. I said, no, I can't do it, and she left and that was the last time I saw her. Wow, what time was that? More or less just afternoon I believe and she was fourteen, right, yes, and so that was noon. When did you start to become concerned? And how did the whole thing unfold? And how did you find out that she was missing? And when did the search start? Of me, we want to know everything. Well,

her mother was the one who started to panic. What time, uh maybe two three o'clock? She started making calls to try to find out where she is because she had never done anything like this before, She never disappeared like that, you know. She started calling people to help her look for and offered to help her out, you know, driving around the neighborhoods and help them look for So how many people went out, I mean I'm envisioning like a large group like you see on TV A hold the

whole neighborhood. They had the Coast Guard helicopter there as well by nightfall, flying around the neighborhood with their light trying to help the search teams in the wooded areas. And they had fire trucks out there with all their lights, and the police were out there and there was a wooded area behind the apartment complex where they lived, and everybody in the neighborhood just went walking through it and

it was like almost side by side. We had all driven around the neighborhood, some of the places that she'd hang out in, some of the friends that she would hang out with, none of them had seen her. After searching all night long and having been up for the previous thirty five hours as well, Damon finally went home, planning to rejoin the search after getting some much needed rest, But just as he was about to lay down, there's

a knock at the door. It's the police. Damon wants to help in any way you can't, and so he agrees to go with them. But while at the police station, everything would change. I was in the interrogation room when they found the body, so they had already identified you as a suspect. Yes, why you? I still don't know to this day. Do you have any theories on the evidence. The state's theory was that his cousin goes missing, she

walks out to the store. She's going to the Win Dixie and when her mother starts to worry about her. About an hour later and there's a search party that Damon actually leaves the house and encounters her, and it's at that point that he decides to have sex with her and kill her, and then comes back, you know, to be seen and to be part of a search party. So it never really added up, but they did, you know,

take him into custody and start interrogating him. And initially they were interrogating him about a missing person, right, and then during that questioning her body is found, and so it turns into an interrogation about what happened to this girl who's missing too. Now you're a suspect and a homicide. And when she was found, the initial thought was that she had been sexually assaulted. That's correct, because she was partially nude, and she had been strangled with a chord, right,

an electrical chord. And so they interrogated you for almost half a day on no sleep. And they can, and they did, play all sorts of dirty tricks in the interrogation room. UM. In America, unlike England and many other countries, they can lie to you and the interrogation room as much as they want. They are allowed to watch you, and they did. Um. They gave you a fake polygraph test,

among other things. UM, there's a thing actually was developed in Chicago about fifty years ago, right, the read technique, which is a psychological protocol that's designed to elicit confessions, be they false or true. So what what happened in the interrogation, Banessa, Because you've studied this obviously you worked on the case, and you've got him out, I mean fifteen years and death row. But he's here, he's not dead, which is great, right, Um. In essence, project worked on

the case. You know, it was a huge monumental effort to get to the point where Damon was released. When we looked at the confession evidence. Um, you know, Damon was brought in and he is, you know, interrogated under, as you pointed out, less than ideal circumstances. You know, the night before she went missing, he had been out hanging out with friends and so he didn't get a lot of sleep. And then of course she goes missing and there's a search party, and so he's not getting

sleep that night either. And then the following day he's after about thirty five hours of being up, he's brought in and interrogated, and for the first five hours, Damon is adamant about his innocence. Right, You brought up the read technique, and you know, in the US we went from a time where it was permissible to be confessions out of people, and then we became more enlightened and said, no,

you can't physically coerce the confession. But that coercion turned to mental coercion, and so the read technique really is about using different coercive techniques to elicit a confession, and many times it is an accurate confession, and a lot of times at also work so well that it will get people who are completely innocent to confess. So for the first five hours, Damon is saying, I'm innocent. I had nothing to do with this. But part of the

re technique is to not accept the denial. So when you know the suspect denies that they were involved, they keep saying, we know you're lying, and they will not accept innocence as an answer. So they did that to Damon and the ultimately they told him the only way you can prove your innocence is for you to take

a polygraph. So he agrees, right, But the polygraph, as you pointed out, Jason, was a sham and it was really employed just to advance the interrogation, and so he takes what he believes to be a polygraph um and they come back and they say, you failed, and we

now know you're lying because you failed. So hearing that you know you failed, and if you have any belief in a polygraph test and you're twenty two, you know, they keep questioning him, how could this happen, and ultimately, you know, get him to say, well, I had a dream and a dream, you know, I saw my cousin who was killed, or I saw a girl who was killed.

And then ultimately, you know, they keep questioning him. And you know, what we've seen in so many false confession cases is that through questioning, with leading questions, details of

the crime are conveyed. That then, under pressure, when you know, somebody like Damon, nine ten hours into the interrogation just has had enough and feels their only way out is to give the police what they want, they incorporate those details that now have been you know, either consciously or unconsciously conveyed to them by the detectives who are asking

the questions. And so ultimately he gives a statement. But as we you know, would would come to learn looking at the statement, many of the details that he gave about the crime matched what the police believed to be true at the time they were doing the interrogation, but later turned out to be details that were inconsistent with the known facts of the crime. Right, they're feeding him information is not even the right information. All he's doing

is repeating what they're saying to him. And if we know that a false confession is the worst possible thing in the eyes of a jury, they don't know it's false obviously. And what I've seen is that false confessions typically happen after long, long interrogations like yours, because someone who's guilty would prefer not to sit in there in that airless room that we've all seen on TV for hours and hours on end, in a very hostile environment with no food and no drink and no nothing, so

they might as well just spit it out. I mean, if it's just incredible, innocence is actually a risk factor for making a false confession, because an innocent person under that pressure feels like, let me just give them what they want to hear. And once I get out of here, the system is gonna work and it's going to sort itself out, and people are going to realize that, you know, as they further investigate, as they do their police work that they should do, they're going to see that they

got the wrong person. And here in addition to you know, telling Damon that he failed a polygraph, they also threatened him and said, look, if you don't admit this, you know, there's gonna be a media circus and you're gonna be ranted, you know, a pedophile, and you're going to die by lethal injection. Of course, by confessing, you know, he didn't save himself from the death penaltakes, that's exactly what he got.

And we know also that they interrogated youth Damon for nine hours, but they only recorded fifty four minutes of it, right, so we know how that works too, right, They left all the various stuff out. Well, the polygraph came up missing as well. They can't find it. They don't, no one knows where it's at. But this was the premise

for them to keep going with their investigations. The police used the polygraph as a ploy to coerce Damon's false confession to having raped, beaten, and strangled Crystal with a white or gray speaker wire from his car however, the victim was strangled with a red extension cord. He also said that he ejaculated both in and on the victim, but the medical examiner found no semen whatsoever, and that she hadn't even been raped. Given these inconsistencies, prosecutors got

very creative to salvage their case. So basically in the confession statement, they had Damon saying that he, you know, had sex with the victim and ejaculated on her stomach and inside of her. But as Jason said, there was no seaman evidence recovered. And so, uh, you know, as wrongful convictions go, you know, a detective takes the stand and has asked, how can you explain? How can you account for this? And he says, well, there were maggots on the body, and so the maggots ate the sperm,

and the jury bought it. The Corners report says she hadn't even been raped, right, So it's just how they found her, and they just went off to that conclusion while she was raped. In the case, there is no case I was. I was getting copies of whatever my lawyer at the time was getting from the crime labs. You know, I had copies of the same thing. I'm like, Okay, there's no way they're going to convict me, you know,

but it just didn't turn out that way. So you went to trial, and can you explain to us what that was. I mean, you sit there and you watch as your life falls apart, and there's nothing you can do about it. You're a spectator on the sideline. You're now in someone else's life. I mean, who who, whoever did this was supposed to be sitting in that seat, not me. Now I'm sitting in that seat. So now I'm in this individual's life. I have no idea who

it is. And it's just you're speechless. And when the jury went out, did you think for a minute that they would convict you. No, I didn't. I'm like, okay, they see the evidence put in front of them, you know, they're gonna look at this and say, okay, there's no way he did this. But it's like they didn't even pay attention to what was being presented. And most juries don't. They don't pay attention to the evidence that's in front of them. Like, like you said, they hear a false

confession and they think, oh, that's it. Okay, I'm not gonna con fest is something I didn't do, so obviously he did it. And that's just not true, right. I mean, we know that in the first what was the first hundred and fifty DNA generations, almost a quarter of them involved false confessions. Right, that's how common it is, right, And the numbers just growing. So now we have three hundred and sixty five DNA generations and we're up to have involved false confessions. It is one of the leading

causes of wrongful convictions. And yet it's very hard for the public and judges and lawyers even to understand how you would confess to a rape or murder that you didn't commit. With a false confession, you're almost certain to be convicted. And more often people then will take a guilty plea because the chance of a conviction despite innocence is almost certain. So the jury comes back and they declare you guilty on all accounts. I mean, I can't imagine. Well,

I mean, there's not a whole lot you can do. Now. Your life is not yours anymore. You now belong to the state. You are the property of the state. That's why they give you a number. You know, they took me to Angola took all of my identification and destroyed it everything, gave me a little prison I d with a prison number on it and that's it. Put me in the cell, and then gold just to paint a picture.

Is formerly the slave Plantation. The reason it's called Angola because the slaves were brought over from Angola and it was once the bloodiest prison in the country. And there you were. How did you deal with it? And how did you even find the strength to survive and ultimately reach out and get ahold of the Innocence Project and and you know, how how are you even here? It's amazing. Well, for the first three years, I contemplated whether or not I wanted to be part of the monkey show? What's

the monkey show? The execute? I actually thought about um dropping my appeals and having them carry out the execution and just be done with it. They make a spectacle when they execute someone, as everyone knows, you know, it's all it's all on the media. You know, it's the taking of a life, and they've turned it into some kind of sport. You know, everybody's like, oh, I can't wait to kill this guy. And I did not want

to be part of that. Things are a little different now because now they're looking at things while they're trying to look at it more humanely. But it doesn't matter. How you kill someone is still an inhumane act. And with all the exonerations in the country today, I have to ask the question, how many more is it gonna take before we abolish it? Before we bolish it? How many more you already know you've killed innocent people? How

many more? Twenty three hours a day no contact with anyone, twenty three hours a day in the cell, but no human contact. How do you deal with it? How did you deal with it? Like? How did you not lose your mind? You find things to do, like what whatever? You can play cards, exercise, clean the cell. I actually scrubbed myself with a toothbrush just to stay busy, just to stay busy. So ultimately you ended up somehow or

other finding out about the Innis's Project reaching out. Well, Denise le buff had comes to see me one day. This was, you know, long before I had written the Innocence Project. We'll get to that in a minute. And this is the first time I had met Denise. Everyone calls her Danny. I call her Denise. It's a respect thing. I don't know, but she's sitting down in front of me and she's like, Okay, look, you didn't do this. I know your first lawyer wasn't all that good, but

give me a chance. And that point on, I made it a point to at least attempt in existence, I suppose, instead of just giving up on it. And um, you know, I had heard about the Innocence Project and I actually wrote them a letter. I gave them my lawyer's information, my information and the case number, and I sent it to him and I got a response back saying, Okay, this is the only correspondence we're going to have because

until they actually pick up a case. That's how it works, because you know, obviously there are guilty guys out there who are writing the Innocence Project trying to find a loophole. And that's the type of letter that I got. Next thing, I know, you know, there's this law firm in Minnesota who's down there taking my case. There's the Innocence Project. Barry and Vanessa show up one day and I'm like, okay, what does that like. It's like the Avengers write again

or something. Right now now you look at it, Yeah, here comes thor with the hammer, you know, but still here, I am, what six seven years into this death sentence, and it takes another three or four years before they're ready to go talk to the district attorney. You know, Steve calls me Steve Kaplan, he's one of the lawyers from Frederickson and bron who handled my case, and he's like, Okay, how do you want to do this? You want to just go to court and you you want to talk

to the district attorney. I said, talk to the district attorney first, and everyone was was against the idea. It's not gonna work. You know who he is. He's he's a product of Paul Connick and they just want to kill people. And I said, well, what do I have to lose? You know, it's either another ten twenty year fight or maybe just by luck, he'll talk to you. So they set up a meeting and he agreed to reinvestigate my case and you're you're in that meeting. Yeah,

So this wasn't you know. Now, there's a lot of talk about conviction review units, you know, being established throughout the country, but this was several years go, and so you know, we arranged a meeting to go talk to the d A. Paul Konic and who was the cousin of Harry Connick. So he's the good cousin, and um, he is the d A. M. Jefferson Parish. And you know, big team there. They had an investigator, Vince Lammy on

the room and uh Steve Wimberley the first assistant. So they assembled a big team and we basically went through a presentation of the confession of the timeline which just virtually made it impossible for Damon to have been involved. So when we walked through and we did a presentation, they did acknowledge that there were enough problems in the case that they should undertake an investigation. And it was

quite a massive undertaking. Um, every piece of evidence that existed was sent out for DNA testing, and because he had been arrested that night, they had taken a male rape kit from him. I mean there was not one piece of physical evidence to suggest that he had anything to do with the crime. And in fact, the victim had been strangled with a piece of wire and um it had been burned off of a wire that was

hanging in a tree. So the perpetrator burned it off and then took it to strangle the victim, and we were able to get some bloods and DNA on that wire at the scene that that excluded Damon. So you know, there was years of a joint reinvestigation with the district attorney's office to get to the point where they acknowledged that Damon was innocent and they had convicted and sent

an innocent man to death row. How often is it that a district attorney that's prosecuted a case is the same district attorney that comes back and releases that individual. It's rare. So kind of did something in Louisiana that was pretty much unheard of and it could have hurt him. You know, he took that chance to step out there and say, okay, wait, we got a problem. I'm glad. I'm glad he got out of his comfort zone and

decided to take a step in a new direction. So now it comes to the good part of the story, right, the moment right when you found out that you were actually going to go home. How did you find out? What was it like? It was a phone call on a Wednesday. I think it was. Everything was agreed to. They had set something up to have the judge and the district attorney signed everything. But the thing they were trying to get everything done before Friday because that's when

the prison office is closed. So this was all done on a Friday, and they had everything faxed over to the prison and the sergeant comes down to the to the cell. He says, pack your stuff. You're going home, but first we have to take you over to the hospital to have you checked out. So I mean, I'm I'm in a full jumpsuit and change and I go to the hospital and the ranking officers there is like

by s and a jumpsuit and chains. Where's his property? Well, he's it's everything's back to the the cell where he's going home. He's he's not supposed to be going at So they had to take me back to death Row, take me out of the jumpsuit, and I gotta put my clothes on and grab my stuff. So you know, it's kind of it's not real until you walk out the gate. And after you worked on this case for all those years, what was it like for you? Well, um, it was amazing.

I personally wasn't there because I was basically nine months pregnant and I couldn't get on a plane, so I missed that moment of seeing Damon Um. But it was you know, Barry Scheck was there, Steve Kaplan from the law firm, Danny Labuff from the Capitol Resource Center in Louisiana, and it just you know, I don't even know what the estimate is of Steve's hours. Steve, I mean, he he was so instrumental in helping me out while while I was there, and post release, he helped me out

in ways that you know, you just can't repay. You know, this man, he flew down here and drove me back to Minnesota because I had decided to move to Minnesota after I was released to start things over, and I lived with him until November of that year, got my own place, and he actually the Innersence Project helped me get a car, helped me with my rent, and Steve helped me out with that as well. And you know,

I can't repay him for what he's done. So Damon, I have to ask you, and it's beautiful to hear you say that. UM, have you been compensated? No, so you've got nothing. I've got nothing. There is current litigation, um, right, but if you know you're having to make ends to me on your own. Yeah. I mean, if I don't do nothing, I'm gonna lose my mind. You know, there are things I want to do, places I want to go.

You know. I like that juicy steak, you know, Uh, but you gotta pay for it, right, So you're out there, So you know, I'm out there doing my job, and you know, if it comes through, then hey, I'm all for it. But if not, then you know I've got a job to do. So look, I think, Damon, it's a it's a terrible story. It's a remarkable story. You're a remarkable guy. You're out there now driving a truck and living life and seeing the country and experiencing freedom.

And that's awesome and we're really proud of you. And now we get to my favorite part of the show, which is that I actually get to stop talking and just listen. And so before I do that, I want to thank you both again for coming and being on the show. Vanessa Popkin, Senior staff attorney at The Innocence Project, badass lawyer and human being and uh and Damon Thibodeaux Death row Ax honoree and inspirational character. So um, i' gonna think We're gonna save the best for last, and

that's you, Damon. So with all due respect that we're gonna turn it over to you, Vanessa for your closing thoughts. Well, we've talked about, you know, the number of people in prison and the US leading in terms of our prison population leading the world. Um, and you know when it comes to and what the error rates are and how many people that means are innocent in prison today, and when you take a look just at death row in itself,

we have about people on death row. There have been conservative estimates that four four or four point one percent of people on death row are actually innocent, and so that would mean there are hundred and nine people incarcerated today on death row facing execution um for crimes that they didn't commit. David, Well, Um, you know, being where I am now as opposed to where it was six years ago. You know, a lot of guys in my position they don't have anything when they walk out, and

it's sometimes years before they get compensation. I had a lot of help getting where I am. You know, the reason why I'm driving in truck is because I'm at a guy at the Minneapolis Auto Show, guy named Bill Collins Fronds of truck driving school. Uh he was, you know, at the auto show. He drives, you know, stock cards as well as a hobby. And he asked me one day, he said, what do you think about driving truck? And

I said it's okay. He said, well, I want to pay for you to go through my school and get your CDL. I'm sitting here thinking, okay, I have the Innocence Project doing this, I have Steve doing this, and now here's this guy here. He's he's offering to pay for me to go to schools to get this license. You know. Here here I am today. I'm pretty much paid to see the country, you know. But it takes a lot to give someone their life back. And I don't mean life as breathing. I mean we walk out.

We have no job, we have no soil of security, we have no retirement we have we don't have a license, we don't have an idea. I had to fight to get my birth certificate with my name on it. And if not for the Innocence Project and other lawyers involved, then I don't know where I'd be right now. More programs need to be put in place for exonorees because someone who actually gets out on parole has more resources at their disposal than someone like myself, and you know

that should not be the case. You know. Being where I am now is is it's a blessing, you know, And coming from where I've been, will but reduced said it best. My worst day out here is better than my best day in prison. So I think, I think everybody for helping me out every day. I try. I try every day to do it right, So 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 Innocents Project that I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocence Project dot org to learn how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wardis. The music on the show is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at

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