We originally released our interview with Lamont McIntyre on September twenty fifth, twenty seventeen, but with all that has changed in this case and the world around us, we thought it a good time to release an updated version of this episode. On the afternoon of April fifteenth, nineteen ninety four, Donielle Quinn and Donald Ewing sat in a powder blue Cadillac when a man dressed in black pumped four shotgun
rounds into the car, killing the two men. Within six hours of the crime, Kansas City, Kansas Police detective Roger Glubski began the process of framing Lamont McIntyre, who was seventeen at the time, for two counts of first degree murder. Why did he do this because Lamont's mother had refused Glubski's repeated sexual advances. But without any physical evidence whatsoever to link Lamont to the crime, Kolubski in the state, would rely on mistaken eyewitness identification to seal them's fate.
And to make matters even worse, Lamont was represented at trial by a public defender who would later be disbarred for failing to diligently handle three other cases. All of this resulted in his wrongful conviction at being sentenced to two consecutive life prison terms. On this episode, I'll speak with Kansas City attorney Cheryl Pilot, who worked to exonerate Lamont McIntyre and was successful shortly after this story was released.
She's joined by former FBI agent Al Jenerich, who spent much of his career investigating police corruption all over the country. And finally we spoke with Lamont while he was still behind bars, a victim of the systemic racism and police corruption that plagues our criminal legal system. This is Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flaub. Welcome back to Ronful Conviction with Jason Flumm. Today's episode will make your blood boil and
it will blow your mind. So settle in because this is going to be a crazy ride.
Guilty one word ceiling Lamont McIntyre's fate.
Lamont McIntyre, aged seventeen in nineteen ninety four, has so far been imprisoned for twenty two years. Twenty two years ago, two young men, twenty one year old Donielle Quinn and his thirty four year old cousin Donald Ewing, were gunned down in a horrible double homicide.
Six hours after the murder's police arrested McIntyre but never searched his house for evidence.
Moreover, it was a trial which prosecutors offered no physical evidence tying McIntyre to the crime, no motive, no connection between him and the victims, no weapon, no fingerprints, nor did Kansas City, Kansas believe even request search warrants to find any of that material.
A retired officer who reviewed the case caused the investigation grossly deficient.
Most notable is that the family of the victims for twenty two years have steadfastly insisted that he is innocent. Other witnesses, also relatives of the victim, insisted as soon as they saw McIntyre sitting at the defense table, they knew he was not the shooter. They told the prosecutor, but were ignored. One family member has signed an affi David claiming that under pressure from police and the prosecutor, she lied at McIntyre's trial.
For the first time, a jury is speaking publicly about the case, Greg Lauber says that he now believes that yan Dot County jury was wrong.
They didn't care about anything.
They just had their.
Man and it was enough for the twelve person jury in deliberations, Lauber says he and another juror were holdouts, but it was late in the day and there was mounting pressure from others who wanted a verdict.
Maybe I had an opportunity to, you know, do something good on that jury, but I sure didn't do it.
I took a coward's way out.
It is the speedy investigation and prosecution of that crime in this place that a team of exonerators now insist was also the focus of a terrible injustice. Lamont McIntyre, aged seventeen in nineteen ninety four, has so far been imprisoned for twenty two years, convicted, and given two consecutive life sentences for a crime they say he never committed.
Well, I'm just going to say I'm really happy that today joining us to discuss the insane case of Lamont McIntyre, we have with us Lamont's attorney, Cheryl Pilot, as well as retired FBI special agent Al Jenerich. Cheryl and Al, thank you for being here.
Thank you so much. We're glad to be here, happy to be.
Here, and we will be hearing later on in the episode from Lamont, who will be calling in from president Kansas, where he has been incarcerated for approximately twenty four years now since he was a teenager for a crime that he did not commit. Now, let's go back to the beginning. On April fifteenth, nineteen ninety four, there were two men sitting in a Cadillac in Kansas City, Kansas, when they
were approached by a man with a shotgun. These facts are not in dispute right correct, And what we know is that four shots were fired into the car, killing the passenger, Donielle Quinn instantly and the driver, Donald Ewing,
who died later in the hospital. And amazingly, within six hours, they managed to find a guy who had nothing to do with the crime, Lamont McIntyre, who was seventeen at the time, and he was arrested and charged with two counts of first degree murder in spite of a total lack of any physical evidence connecting him to the crime. How did this happen? Cheryl and al jump in whenever you want.
Lamont was arrested and prosecuted after police obtained three interviews from eyewitnesses, one of them never testified, but the taped interviews of these eyewitnesses in a very serious crime obviously, where someone can go to prison for the rest of their life. Amounted to a total of twenty taped minutes, and one of the eyewitnesses was only interviewed for four minutes. Is that an investigation?
What is that?
So? Al? You've done a lot of research and you were in the FBI for quite a while, Is that right?
I was in the FBI for twenty five years. I was a special agent. I specialized in investigating police corruption. I worked in Chicago very successfully, and then in Kansas City, Kansas.
Agent Generich was not involved with this murder case at all when it happened. I knew mister Generich through other cases, and after he retired a number of years after he retired, actually and I was working on trying to achieve Lamont's exoneration, I approached him to talk to him about the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department and things that I had a covered
in my investigation. And it was at that point that Alan and I started talking about some of the things he had learned while working for the FBI, and they matched up with some of the things I had uncovered in my investigation. And it was because of that that he became a witness in this case that I hope to use at our hearing.
So prior to Lamont's arrest, can we talk about what was happening with this particular cop, whose name was Roger Glubski.
Sometime around nineteen eighty eight or so, I was able to open an investigation into police corruption in Kansas City, Kansas. And as the investigation went on over time, over many years, we developed maybe somewhere between twelve and fifteen police officers who were titled subjects of the investigation. Some of it involved civil rights like beating people up, stealing their shoes when they were walking down the street because the officer liked the shoes, or in the case of Kaulupski, you know,
sexual extortion. But most of it involved corruption involving drugs, mostly cocaine.
And in the.
Course of this investigation, just by talking to people, which is what I'm pretty good at, over time, you know, a number of people told us about Gaulupski extorting sex from black women, and he liked black women. We never developed enough evidence on Gallupski to prosecute him. That's the extent of my knowledge about Gaulupski.
I always believe that that police were good and the police were on our side and they're there to protect us all and so I always find these stories, even as long as I've been working on this issue, and I've got twenty five years now of experience, but I always find these stories so just depressing and shocking, and it flips everything upside down.
Well, like you, I was very nice eve until I went to Chicago, and then I sought police corruption on the massive scale. But then when I got back to Kansas City in eighty six and probably got involved in Kansas City, Kansas in eighty eight, I saw the same activity. There wasn't on the grand scale.
You know.
It's that it's conducted in Chicago. It's basically police officers, most of whom are white, picking on minorities, most of whom are black, some of them are Hispanic. Because when you're a drug dealer, you know, you can't go to the police or the FBI and say, hey, these cops are stealing my drugs, these cops are stealing my drug money. You basically have to you have to suck it up. So that's what they do in Chicago, That's what they do everywhere.
So Lamont his troubles really began when his mom was at a car with I guess was her boyfriend at the time, showl right. Glubski approached the car and told her to get out and threatened her with the rest or the rest of her boyfriend unless she agreed to
come down to the police station. And then the problems really began when she refused to become one of his girls, so to speak, right, I mean, obviously, she was in a terrible situation where she's very vulnerable, not able to defend herself from a cop who's willing to go to
almost any length to fulfill his desires. She had a tremendous problem, and she decided that she wanted to maintain her dignity, really right, And so what seems like happened is that as a consequence, Golubski decided that he would target and frame her son in something that is so evil that makes me want to quit the human race.
There was an encounter that Lamon's mother had with the detective some years earlier. I mean it was years actually before the double homicide happened. And at the time of the double homicide, my client was inexplicably dragged into the case. One of the eyewitnesses told the police she thought the shooter looked like a Lamont dating her niece. Police never bothered to find out what Lamont that was. They don't
go ask the niece what Lamont that was. They simply put another Lamont and it's undisputed, an entirely different Lamont my client into the case, and somehow obtain this identification. What's interesting about the lineup, and I've never seen anything like this before, is three of the five photos were of young male members of the McIntyre family.
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to say, well, that doesn't make a lot of sense. It's one perpetrator. It's not like somebody said there were three brothers that were involved. It's one perpetrator, you know. And then the justice system, we know, has a tendency to chew people up and spit them out when they are poor, particularly if they're minorities and underrepresented. It's really it's not a fair fight, is it.
Well, I mean, this whole thing was an impossible battle for Lamont to begin with. I mean, first of all, the investigation itself, I don't think really qualified is a true investigation because so little was done, no evidence of motive was ever uncovered. There was no physical evidence that tied Lamont to the crime. There was not even any evidence that he knew the two victims. There are backgrounds of the two victims and who might have a motive
to harm them that was never investigated. There was an eyewitness directly across the street who was never interviewed, whose mother said, you know, she knows who the suspect is. I mean, the failures and lapses and regularities in this case just go on and on. I mean, other than the twenty minutes of taped interviews from the eyewitnesses, there was very little else and the only evidence at trial against Lamont were two eyewitnesses. One of them has admitted
that she lied, that she was coursed. The other eyewitness seems frankly, very perplexed by her testimony, and it's very clear that it's an eyewitness a misidentification based on manipulation.
And we know also that had this trial taken place twenty years later or so, with everything that's known now about the unreliability of eyewitness identification, there's a very good chance that would have been discredited. Because there was no other evidence connecting him to the crime.
You take a person who's traumatized, who has just witnessed a really horrific event, and they can be pretty easy to pressure or manipulate. And in factness provided in a tape statement my client's last name, a man she did not know and had never heard of, which raises the very interesting question of who gave her the name. It was undisputed at trial that she did not know my client, yet the fact that there was an original tape statement where she provided his name never came out. That was
never admitted at trial. She also stated wrongly that my client was the Lamont who had dated her niece. At trial undisputed that that was not true. It was an entirely different Lamont who was in fact identified by his name to the jury, an entirely different person. So, I mean, the whole thing is troubling beginning to end, really a perfect storm of chaos and horror and misconduct, things being done improperly.
So you have this cop and this department that is so corrupt isn't even the word, but that's engaged in so many illegal activities, And isn't it ironic and tragic that Lamont is in prison, living in hell after twenty four years, and this cop who was, from what I've read, raping people, robbing people, dealing drugs, protecting drug dealers, he's out. How is that? I mean that must not sit well with you with your whole background either.
What I'm really hoping for, what our entire team is hoping for, and what we have sought for a long time, is a very full investigation into the activities of this detective. There needs to be an investigation by people who have the power to follow all the leads, develop information, compel the testimony of witnesses, and obtain other evidence.
Ah, let me turn it to you for a second, because we have not had somebody with your background and
experience on the show before. And I would adventure to say that you had a very very difficult and dangerous job, right, I mean, investigating cops, particularly when you're investigating cops who've got a lot to hide, makes you a very unpopular person, I would think so, looking back on it, how did this manage to go on for so long without somebody coming along and saying, you know, besides you, hey, hey, we're not going to tolerate this.
They don't give a shit. At the time we were doing these investigations, the police chief of Kansas City, Kansas, a guy named Tom Daly. He had previously been indicted by the Federal Strike Force for extorting money at a whorehouses along the Kaw River in Kansas. He was doing that allegedly when it was a captain. He was acquitted because it was a real weak case, but after a quit it for extortion, the city wound up eventually making him the chief. Is that the actions, you know, over
responsible a city administration or a police department. So he had the chief over here, Tom Dale, who had previously been indicted by the Feds. He despised the federal government, he hated the US Attorney's Office and the FBI. And he's the chief. He was part of it.
So you have this guy Golubski who in that scenario is operating basically with impunity, right because he knows his chief doesn't give a shit, And with the chief having literally, well for what it sounds like, gotten away with that particular pattern of activity as well as I'm sure other things that he was doing, the people underneath him are probably thinking, hey, this is great. No one's going to touch us, and they're right, and nobody did. So how frustrating was that for you?
There?
You are really fighting an unwinnable war, right, They're trying to protect the public from the police force with they chief of police who not only doesn't give a fuck, but doesn't want that he wants you. He probably wants you the fuck out of his hair, so he could just you know, run the streets how he wants to.
Right when I started working over there, you had a person, you know, some guy I knewed know a lot of people in the county jail, and they would say, he so and so confronted me and stole my money, stole my drugs. You go, what's the cops name? I don't know his name, you know what's he looked like, Well, you know he's some white guy. Well you go to
the police. The police did not have photographs of their police officers, So if if a victim came in there alleging that so and so officer robbed from me, extorted me, they didn't even have photographs to show people so they could identify who the police officer was. So good luck, you know, through the US Attorney's office, through Julie Robinson, who was a prosecutor at the time. We subpoenaed photographs of every sworn officer in the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department,
and there was hell to pay for that. I was almost removed from the investigation because of that.
I think one of the problems is that other law enforcement officers don't want to investigate law enforcement, and as a general rule, I think they find it distasteful, something they would rather avoid, and there is a tendency to minimize misconduct. I found that really pretty shocking, not.
In light of everything else we're talking about, but I could see how you would, and it really gets easier and easier to see how these wrongful convictions are so common. I mean, here, we have an interesting situation, right, We're talking to Al who's in there with his badge, working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and basically being told go fuck himself. So what chance does a seventeen year
old black kid from the poorer side of town. What chance do does he have against this blue wall, this blue monster that was out to get him. He had no chance. So now fast forward to twenty four years later, the monsets in a prison studying reading by all accounts, a model prisoner, somebody who maintains a positive outlook in spite of this what can only be described as the worst fate that can befall an individual, to be incarcerated with something he didn't do for the rest of your life.
But now we have hope, right, I mean, he has hope thanks to you and the years of work that you've done in this case and al and other brave people who have devoted their time and in some cases probably even risk their own personal safety to try to get justice in this case. What does it look like now? What happens next? Tell us what's going on.
We have a evidentiary hearing coming up in October, and we tend to present somewhere between forty and fifty witnesses who provide very powerful testimony on various aspects of the case. There was almost nothing really to support the conviction to begin with, nothing other than the testimony of the two eye witnesses, and I believe that has been thoroughly shredded at this point through recantations and admissions and the result of other investigation. And we are also focusing on the
very troubling misconduct in the case. It is intimately connected to how the investigation was conducted, and we're going to bring all that out and show how we believe this went wrong, and we very much hope to be successful.
What's the data of the hearing October twelfth, October twelfth, and is this in a federal court?
We are in Windock County District Court is a state court. My client is litigating what's called a successive petition under sixty fifteen oh seven, and you have essentially a procedural barrier to get over before you can get back into court. But we do have this evidentiary hearing schedule that we
are very very excited about. One of the most compelling things about the case we haven't mentioned this yet, is that the families of both victims have always known my client is innocent and are very much squarely supporting the quest to free him. They know that they did not get justice, Their families did not get justice.
And that's Cheryl. In your experience, it's not a common thing, right. I mean, most of the cases I've seen, even in the face of what could be overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the victim's family sometimes stick with you. What they've been told all along, because they just can't They can't even process the idea that they may have been lied to and that the wrong person may have been serving time for the murder of their loved one. So in this case, this is a very very unusual scenario, isn't.
It It is? And one of the eyewitnesses is related to both of the victims, and she her family and the family of the second victim to whom she's a bit more distantly related, have always told me that they have known from the beginning that the authorities got the wrong man. They have always known this. They've made periodic efforts to correct this, to address this, to try and get some justice, all without success.
And if there wasn't already enough to chew on, this is the part that really just sets me off, his court pointed. Attorney Gary Long was on supervised probation at the time of the trial for failing to diligently handle three prior cases. He was suspended from the bar a couple years later for failure to adequately hand or a separate criminal case. And he was this bar in nineteen
ninety eight. How is it even possible that, in all life or death situation that you take somebody and you say, you know what, we're going to give you a lawyer who's already messed up three times.
Well, when I said nobody gives a shit, do you understand what I mean? Do you know that that you know that Tara Morehead Do you know she's now a federal prosecutor.
Yeah, so Tara Moorehead was the prosecutor in this case. Obviously didn't see anything wrong with her prosecuting a case in which a young man's life was at stake in front of a judge with whom she had carried on an affair a few years earlier. I think most reasonable people would agree that one or the other should have been recused from this particular scenario because even if they
were saints, and obviously they weren't. Because she's also the same woman from what I've read, who threatened a witness who tried to come forward with the truth with losing custody of her own children. But yes, so now she's moved up the ladder. Seems like all the bad guys have won here. Al what the fuck?
Well, I think Sarah Morhait's currently married to a police officer. I think there's some other prosecutors over in the federal US Attorney's Office that are married to other police officers. So you're not going to expect them to investigate police corruption, are you.
Well, I guess that would make it tricky, wouldn't it.
They're not going to do it, and they don't.
I mean, there is so much that it could be investigated that ought to be investigated. And you know, I should also point out that sexual misconduct among police officers is not unusual in some departments. When you have poor and vulnerable people encounter folks with ultimate authority over them, ultimate authority in that particular moment, you know, those things can happen all too easily, and they do happened frequently.
You know, when I was an agent, I'm about six foot four. I had a gun, a badge, and a radio and everything. At nighttime, when I was on my way home or on the weekends, I would not drive through Kansas City, Kansas unless I was accompanied by another FBI agent.
So because you thought they might have run you off the road or something else.
They could do anything. They could pull me over and not saying they don't know who I was, and they could say I pulled a gun and they could shoot me. So I have all that power and authority. What does some little black kid on the street have.
I hope that in exposing the story of Lamont and some of the things that you've shared out that people, you know, get their backs up and get get angry and get involved. These are just people, They're just regular people, and they're being so terribly abused and victimized by people who are supposed to protect them. I don't it makes me sick.
I just say that the fear and the terror that some of the citizens experience cannot be overstated. I mean, you have someone with a badge with ultimate and really, as I said in that moment, unchecked authority, there's enormous fear of the police and enormous, sometimes unmovable resistance to getting involved in anything that has to do with the
criminal justice system. I've spent some years, honestly, just earning the trust of some people in the community so that they will sit down and speak with me so that we can investigate the case. Nobody wants anything to do with a case you say, courthouse people walk the other way. They don't want anything to do with that. And ultimately we have been successful in securing some very good witnesses because they did want to help someone they viewed as innocent.
And you know, I should point out here that all of the street talk have ever heard in the community is that Lamont is innocent, the guy who got wrongfully convicted. It's like everyone knows, the whole community knows, the victims' families know, everyone knows Lamont did not do this. Everyone knows.
You have a prepaid call from the Boks an innate at Kansas Department of Corrections Lancing Correctional Facility. To accept this call, press or say five to refuse. This call will be recorded and subject to monitoring. At any time. You may begin speaking.
Now, Lamont, Welcome to the show.
Thank you.
So, Lamont. I want to go back to the beginning, when you grew up and how this all started. I've seen photos of you with your family. It looked like you had not an easy but a happy childhood. Is that fair?
Yeah? I did.
Can you just describe what it was like. I've heard you talk about Christmas and stuff. Uh.
Yeah, we was tight knit.
You know.
It's like my mother was just an only parent in the house and we was close. Me and my siblings, and we did everything together. We stayed in one house. You know, we took care of each other. So glowing up with me was my family was a big game. We didn't really fight about a lot of stuff.
You know.
It was me and my three brothers and my sister, my modest sister. My mother worked a lot, so my sister kind of watched after us a little bit. Some other family members. I used to go to my family member's house, my uncles, and be around them. Our mother was at work. I kind of still stayed around family outside my home. So real family.
Oriented and where you grew up, you had no idea at this time that the police force was really as corrupt as any one could possibly imagine until this terrible incident occurred. And I want to go back to that. What happened. You were a seventeen year old kid going along with your life, trying to make it in a difficult place, and then one day out of the blue, you get arrested and don't even know what's going on or what happened.
Uh, That's exactly what happened. And it was a typical day. It was like a Friday, typical day. I was in road in a downy commage program where it's all time to school where they would help you get your high school the phone wall, and then they gets you in college. So it was like a little degree program I was a part of. And it was just a Friday. I get a car phone call saying the police is over
my grandmother's house looking for me. Call my mother. We go to the police station and they start talking about two murders and I had no answers for him because I didn't know what they were saying talking about. So from that moment, I was arrested, charge and ovously convicted of two murders that I had nothing to do with about.
And we know now that they were deliberately targeting you because of this particular police officer who was up to all kinds of criminal activity himself. And that's the irony of this is that he belongs in jail. And I'm hoping that by the end of this that's exactly what's going to happen. But the idea that this system, this so called justice system, had made a decision that you were going to be their guy. There was this double murder right two guys sitting in a car. They were
involved in drug activity. They were dealers. We now know also that one of them had been beaten by the guys he was working for in the drug business. Right. He was working as a doorman in a crack then, and he had feared for his life. And in fact he had good reason too, because I guess he had from what I've learned, he had been stealing from them. So that every reason to know that this was a drug hit. And you weren't involved in that game or that business. Did you know these guys.
I didn't know the witnesses, I didn't know the victims, and I wouldn't connected to it at all. That's why so it so halted me to understand how something like that could happen, because and I was bored about everything. I didn't try to hide nothing, because I knew what they were talking about at that time. I had nothing to do with it, and I wasn't involved. I don't know what the police officer's motive was to plan it on me or I still don't know if this day what happened.
Well, it does seem like now with everything we've learned that the officer involved, the first one who arrived on the scene was an officer named Golubski. It's a white guy who had a proclivity for women of color, and when he didn't get his way, he would exact revenge. And so what it seems like is that in this particular case, he targeted you because your mom wasn't having any part of that. And that's what makes this particularly
sinister and sick. You end up going to trial, and I find it interesting, among all the other things in your case, that they offered you a plea bargain right and you didn't take it.
I woman in the rest in the pleaborgan, I can't understand how was I sit in that situation, and I didn't know nothing about the crime itself, So plea borger was far from my mom would think about a plea bog.
And why I find that and why I brought that up, Lamont. And I've seen the mugshot picture of you, and it really hurt my heart because I could see in your face just how confused you were and scared of a situation that you couldn't possibly imagine what's happening at that time. I also would think that if you were guilty and they're offering you a deal and you know your chances of winning in the court are going to be low because they have all these cops and everybody else that
is going to testify this. You would have taken the plea bargain. Anybody with the right mind would take a plea bargain. You're not crazy, are you? I'm not right. It don't sound it don't sound crazy at all. So in the situations like this, I mean, we have in this country over ninety percent of cases end up in plea bargains. So had you been guilty, that would have
been a very logical thing to do. But as an innocent person and probably somebody who still trusted in the system, you went forward with your right to a trial, and you were represented by a guy who they knew your court appointed lawyer. They knew this guy was incompetent because he had already been disciplined for three previous cases that he had completely botched. It almost sounds like they did
it on purpose. They assigned a guy who didn't go and interview witnesses, who really didn't do anything he was supposed to do. And what was that like? Were you aware at that time that this guy I wasn't I mean, I don't even know if it was really on your side, But I mean, as you're watching these procedings, what were you thinking.
He presented himself like a lawyer. He presented itself like a person in there on my behalf to take care of this business. And he's seeing real professional at first. So I didn't know what to expect because I've never been in that situation before anyway, So his first impression was for me, it was a good impression because I didn't know what a lawyer was supposed to do, or I was so ignorant to the law and how things worked. I just believed in the justice system at that time,
I really did. I thought there was no possible way, being an innocent person or person that has nothing to do with that crime, that I would be found guilty. So I didn't really pay too much attention to the credibility of this lawyer. It didn't dont on me that I would be found guilty of the crime that I had nothing to do with, so I didn't really think about it in those times. I was just thinking, you can give me any lawyer, anybody from anywhere, and it'd
be okay. Because once they realized they had the wrong person ironed out in trial. That's what I was thinking. But I didn't plan all. I think that people would get on the stand and line it was on fabricate and I didn't think that was gonna happen. I had no idea that they had already made up in their mind that I was going to be escaped goal for this particular crime, so being needed at all, and how they worked in the justice system. I believed in the justice system at that time. I really did.
I think all of us do when we're kids, especially brought up in a good home like you were. You brought up to believe that people are good and that the system is going to work for you. And then you had a lawyer who, had he been competent, I still think would have won your case in spite of all this, because of the simple fact that it was an easy case. The witnesses were not credible at all.
We now know that they also withheld exculpatory evidence, So you really didn't have a fair chance, especially not with a lawyer who was incompetent. And ultimately, let's not forget that this particular lawyer was disbarred not too long after your trial. And again for the listeners out there, think
about that. This is a guy who had been disciplined in numerous cases prior to Lamont's and then ultimately gets disbarred when the extent of his gross incompetence is brought to the Supreme Court of Kansas the attention of the Supreme Court, and then he voluntarily gave up his license to practice law. And that wasn't the end of the nightmare. We now know too that your appellate lawyer was disbarred. I mean, you can't even make this stuff up. So
what happened? Like now you're in the courtroom, the jury goes out, the arguments have been made. You saw these witnesses get up and lie. You saw these police officers get up and lie. Your defense made whatever arguments they made. Did you believe that they would come back and declare you innocent?
I did. I did fire with my ben I did. I just didn't know that this is how the system worked. They found me guilty based on false evidence or the kind of evidence that was presented by a certain district attorney. They heard stuff about me that wasn't even about Lama mcnatize, and she just kind of made it stuff up, they
told his story and the jury believed it. But at the time before they came back it was guilty verdict, I still didn't think I'll be found guilty because the whole time I'm sitting there and the whole time I'm going through the process of getting too trial, I still had no knowledge of the actual crime. So I'm thinking, with my young mind being naive, that there's no way a jury can find me guilty when I'm really not guilty, when I had nothing to do with it. I'm not
tied to it at all. The witnesses, the victims, I'm not tied to it. I wasn't in the area when it happened. When they came in, I noticed that no jury's no one looked me in my face, no one looked looked up. Everyone came in looking down at the floor. So I kind of had an eerie feeling, but I still had hope that it would work out in the
right way. So when they read the verdict and they said guilty, it's like I seen my whole life last before me and I and for that moment, I froze, and I was sitting there and I stood up, and I just remember saying something. I was screaming something, you know, to the effects of I'm not guilty, and you got the wrong person whatever, And I felt someone hold me or grab me from behind, and I was in shot, so I didn't really I was like a lost moment.
But I turned around. I see my mother hold me, screaming, crying like don't take my baby away from me, don't take my baby. And I'm looking at her and I realized that this is a serious situation. Now I'm but it still didn't feel real. It was my life in my situation, but it didn't feel like my life or my situation. I felt like I was outside of myself looking at this event happened and I couldn't stop it. So I was in shot and that shot lasted for a few years after that. I was in shot.
So, no, you're convicted of a double murder and sentence to life in prison. Where did they take you to?
The process is like from the time you get convicted, stay in the county for about two months, then you go to a citizen. Now the sentaceen in Wanna County. It gave me two life sentences toront consecutive. Then after that they send me to a process and center which we call ARDU, where they see you to determine what classification you would be, what custody you would be in. I was considered max custody. So from there they send me to prison. I was in hunts That's a that's
a prison in Kansas. They came Glady in the school, one of those tough prisons. You know with people. You know, it's a prison. It's like the work not there. You have a prison? Is that more? It's it's this dark negative, It's pension fields, hopelessness. It's a world that is all.
As a seventeen year old. Did you have plans, did you have a career in mind? What was the outlook for the future. We were still just trying to figure it out.
Yeah, it was seeing I wanted to do. It was just I was I was being guided the line, and I was just in a place where everybody around me was either dying or going to jail or I was just in the kind of environment. It didn't produce a lot of hope or didn't have I didn't have a lot of people to look up to or emulate, nothing like that. But I did enjoy taking care of my family so my life was just basically about trying to take care of my family the best way I knew that,
or to look out for my loved ones. You know, I had skills and things I could do, Like I was a barber, I was cut here since I was twelve, or you know, I was comedian. You know, I had these in the back of my mind. I wanted to be a comedian. I had things I wanted to do. I just didn't know how to get to where I wanted to be. But I still didn't think that my life was just of being in prison or going to jail, being in this kind of situation.
What is a typical day like for you on the inside, How do you get through it? What's the schedule?
Typical day? Typical day is, I'll readjusted. It's like from one day to the nextus finding a way to get by for one day, learn something from my days, and then I just try to it just sucks. I gotta repeat it. Like if I have a bad day or I'm frustrated for one day, I go to sleep, wake up to repeat this day again. So I try to find the best I can or get the best I can out of a day. Because waking up and repeat
it is the anxiety. That's why all that The worst stuff is knowing that for the last twenty three years, two hundred some months, eleven hundred weeks and eight thousand days, it's the same thing. It never changes. So I devote my time to reading and studying and write. I write music, I write poetry. I try to keep my mind free as possible. I try to stay out of prison mentally. I try not to. I'm not into prison politics. I'm
not in prison mentally, but I'm here. I have to be my body here, but I try to keep my mind. It's far from as place as I can. So it's just a bunch of moments of readjusted every day. And I have a lot of love people that love me and care about me, so I focused on that. But it's bad. It used to be a lot worse than it is now. I'm starting to see I'm coming alive now because I can see a light and then it just dark. Toddle, I've been there for so long. Something
better now, But yeah, it wasn't so good before. It's better now. But it was always sad to wake up. I had to repeat this same cycle over and over again. That stuff is another driving person crazy. There's a lot of moments while I'm feeling like it's the point, you know, to keep going to wake up every day to have to deal with the exact same nightmare you trying to stay something the night before. But I had my mother like she never gave up on me from day one.
When the worst moments of my life, you know, I felt like I just couldn't do it no more, feel like I couldn't take another step, she would show up. And when she would grab me and hold me and look me my faith and tell me this is not my life I'm passing through, this is not my destination. And so I had a lot of support my family, and I gave my life to God and I pray
a lot of meditated lot. So initially I was kind of in this dark place where I was just so hurt and sad and depressed, and so I kept people kept coming to my life. There was like becons of light and hope for me. And I thank God for all those people came into my life and supported me. They sure that, uh I always had something to look forward to. Because this is a dark place. It's a dark situation where if you don't have enough support for me,
it was just support I had. Family is important. Then years later chryl and ministries in anything projects, they kept start coming into my life and they they breed a life into me. It's like a second win. And I'm grateful for those people, everybody who support me and everybody who put forth effort go out every day and do something to help me get my life back. I'm very grateful for those people.
If you even allow yourself, if you allow your mind to go there, what are you dreaming about when you get out? Because I'm convinced you are going to come home and I'm going to be there fighting right alongside with everybody else. What's the first thing you want to do? And then how do you see the future?
First day I'm gonna do with eat something. That's what I fantasize about. Mostly, I want to eat something that there from there, I want to have some type of impact or effect on young people making poor decisions that was eventually land them in a situation like this. You know, So I want to just raise any kind of wareness I can out decision making, because you know, had I
been taught how to make better decisions for myself. I think even though I was eign to the law and this is something that had nothing to do with me and all that, I still could have been making better decisions for myself before this stuff even came about. So I didn't want to be able to be there for
young people as much as I can. So I can, I can help them understand that even though you don't do something wrong, even though you don't commit a crime, you can be you still got to be accountable, and you still got to be mindful of the fact that you out there floating around and you can easily be put in a situation like that and if you're not being productive and doing something that's productive out there in life. So I don't want to be able to reach the
young people as much as I can. And now that this said to be young, just anybody that doesn't want to be able to share my experience and hopefully it will help out in any kind of way.
I'm sure that you will do that. And then you're going to have a very positive impact on a lot of people because you have a very rare combination of intelligence and a manner that is so positive and strong but still gentle that I believe that you'll be able to affect a lot of a lot of young people, and I'm looking forward to watching you do that. There's
one other thing I wanted to raise. I'm always amazed when I speak to someone in your situation, and especially so with you, that you don't seem to be bitter after everything that's happened. And I know you talked about your faith and family and the strength that you get from them, But how is it possible that someone can go through this most unimaginable nightmare still be in it, and yet be as positive and strong as you are now?
Well, I have my moment with anger, but you've always liked taken poison helping someone else die from it. I would only want to think about me being angry. No one else seemed to notice a pay attention to meet being angry, So how is just for ourn experience? Being angry doesn't help me? So I just wanted to help myself because I knew. I always knew I was gonna be here forever. I knew that eventually the truth was surface and I would have a life outside of the wall.
So I devoted a lot of time and energy towards helping myself and not hurt myself. So being angry was something that was a hindrance to me, not a benefit. So I try to say positive because this place is you got to keep up with yourself and take care of yourself, and anger and stress and all those things is just shorten your life span. And I got life to live, so I just choose. I choose to be positive. I choose to not be angry and allow anger to kill me. I don't want to die in this place,
and I don't want to have a short life. So I stick fine to what I believe in, and I believe in my favor and I believe in meditation, I believe in exercise. I believe in taking care of my mom body and soul, and that's what I devote my time to.
Wow, all I can do is tell you that you have you have all my respect and support, and I have a saying, lamont you know. I've seen too many miracles to stop believing in miracles. So I'm excited to watch you be the next one or one of the next ones, and we'll never stop fighting for you and for other people in your situation. I'm looking forward to a positive outcome and to getting to know you on
the outside. The min I'm just going to turn it over to you and say, is your microphone, what do you want to share with the audience.
Well, these kind of cases having well more than they should, you know. So it's like a I always stay on TV or DAYLN twenty twenty we see innocent man so many years in prison and you get exonerated and you see this happened Tom and Tom again. But what you never ever see or hear or hear about is how much that stuff and impact the affected the families. For
those people like I had a close knit family. We was close and it was a thing just like me being affected by it and invent that happened in my life. It hurts me to see how much how much it affected not only me but my family. And it's difficult because if a man has to go through a certain thing by himself, that's his life, that's his path and life he gotta go through that. I have to do
what I have to do, no matter what. But when you see somebody you care about being affected by what you have to do or what you have to endure, it a different kind of feeling. And it's like people don't really pay attention to that or know about that. Like when district attorneys of being dishonest when they're trying to get convictions and all that, often they take that consideration how many people they are affected by just not going by the law, just not being truthful about certain things.
It's not just me, whatever issue personal issues they may add about with me. My family is affected by that. My brothers, my brother's kids when all this happened, and they feel like they've lost a mother because my mother devoted so much time for trying to get me back out of the system that they felt like they was neglected. So they was affected by that. My older sister was affected, my brother was affected. I mean, everybody was.
Affected one minute.
And when you try to hold onto something good, even when you try to get something good this kind of situation, it's still nothing good comes from me. It's just always bad. It's always negative because always a challenge, it's always hurdles, it's always something. But for the person that's in the middle of it, that's just my experience. But on the outside of it, that's something people don't ever get a
chance to see. That's just a harsh or harsh reality for the person that lives based on someone else being in competence when all this stuff basically could have been avoided by someone that's doing their job. But the job people was uh employed them to do, you know. So I think people should understand that and know that it's a lot of people to be affected by something like that. I think a lot of tasers should be brought to this moment and this kind of situation, so a lot
of people will get up. If you ever find another person that situation, it can be more modeful of it. It's not to help in a different kind of way they could. It's not just about me, it's about everybody who here about me too.
On October thirteenth, twenty seventeen, Wyandot County District Attorney Mark dupri moved to vacate the conviction and dismissed all charges against Lamont Magatyre. Hours later, Lamont walked free for the first time in over twenty three long, miserable years. He called me from the courthouse steps. It was one of
the best calls I've ever gotten. And in that call, he said he thanked me, and he said that the exposure that his case had gotten from being on this podcast had helped, and even if it was a tiny bit, it had helped to lead to his exoneration. It was a really extraordinary feeling, and I'm excited to share that one has since won a one and a half million dollar judgment for his wrawful conviction, and he and his mother are currently suing Roger Klubski for all the damage
he did to their lives and their family. After a thirty year reign of terror in the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department, disgraced officer Roderikklupski went to work in Edwardsville, Kansas in twenty ten. He has yet to face justice, and he retired in twenty sixteen. 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 Ennocence 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 by three time Oscar nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on
Facebook at Wrongful Conviction podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one