It was late on the night of April eleven, when a single teenage mother of two Sabrina Butler, went for a jog while her two young boys slept at home. When she returned and checked on her nine month old Walter, he wasn't breathing. With no phone in a new apartment building, Sabrina picked him up and banged frantically under neighbor's doors, begging for help. Finally, a woman let her in and showed Sabrina how to perform adult CPR on her infant son.
At the hospital, they couldn't figure out what was wrong with Walter, and they blamed his internal injuries on child abuse. Sabrina was aggressively interrogated well into the morning hours, and a statement was drafted for her to sign, accounting for the damage to his internal organs, a common result of performing adult CPR on an infant. Tired alone and scared, Sabrina signed underneath the dotted line as an act protest.
A parade of medical professionals, and her coerced statement made Sabrina's not guilt deeply look like a callous lie, sending her to Mississippi's death Row. Her novice trial lawyer contacted civil rights attorney and death penalty activist Clive Stafford Smith, whose investigation discovered and confirmed why Walter had stopped reading in the first place. He suffered from chronic nephrotic syndrome
brought on by policystic kidney disease. Sabrina Butler is the first female Death Row ex honoree in the United States. This is Wrongful Conviction with Jason Farmer, Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction. Today we have Sabrina Butler Smith, who is the first woman ever to have been exonerated from death row in the United States. And the story is much deeper than that, but Sabrina, welcome. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you for having me. And we have another Smith
by Skype. We have a British attorney who specializes in civil rights cases as well as overturning death penalty cases in the US. Clive Smith, thanks for being here and joining us over the phone. My pleasure. Sabrina. Let's start with you. I want to go back in time to your life, you know, as a teenager, having a child, having a baby, single mom, right back in Mississippi, Columbus, Mississippi right correct, and what was that, like, how did you deal with it? That's that's a lot of responsibility
for a young kid like yourself back then. Well, actually being that young, I was kind of me and my mom didn't have a really good relationship, and so I think that let me down the path that I traveled on. Um. And actually my son that passed, he was my second child. I actually had two at that time. I've it on my own since I was fourteen, So basically trying to figure out life from fourteen year to grow up fast?
Yes I did. Sabrina was convicted, wrongfully convicted, and sentenced to death for the murder which we know was not a murder at all of her baby boy, Walter Dean Butler. So let's go back to April eleven. You went out for a job, yes, and you returned to find a horrible situation. My son wouldn't breathing, and I panicked, and I didn't know what to do because where I stayed at i'd only been over there a little while. I didn't have a phone. UM, I had just got the
apartment through hood housing. I was a four teenager that didn't have a job or money, and the people over there did not know me in that apartment complex, so it was kind of hard, and I didn't have a car or anything like that, and so I just grabbed him and started beating on doors trying to, you know, get someone to help me. And that was very difficult at that time of night because it was late. What time was it, almost twelve o'clock, so I did have
a hard time trying to get help. Um. The first lady that opened her door, she said that her kids were sick and she didn't have time to take me to the hospital. So that lady closed the door in my face. And when I ran downstairs, a lady from an end apartment and asked me what was wrong, and grabbed my son and we took him in an apartment. She put him on the floor and started CPR. So I went next door to try to get someone else, and finally I got this couple that was willing to
take me. And so when I went back in, she told me to hold his nose, blowing his mouth and pressing his stomach, but she didn't tell me the right way, so I applied adult CPR to my son all the way to the hospital, not knowing that whatever was wrong, I probably was making it worse. I didn't know that though. I was just scared and I was trying to get him to breathe, but he um, he didn't, and we know that by the time he got to the hospital was really too late. Um. They attempted to resuscitate Walter
at the hospital unsuccessfully. And then I have to say, there are, unfortunately, tragically a lot of cases like this where people, well meaning people like yourself, apply CPR that they've been taught to do, but they have never been taught the difference between doing it for a child or an adult. And we know that if you do it the normal CPR techniques to a child, it's virtually impossible to do that without breaking their ribs or causing some
other kind of injuries because they're so little and so fragile. Um, Clive, let's turned to you. How did this thing go so wrong so fast? And why was Sabrina convicted when all she was trying to do was help? Well, I mean, there there are several factors on. I mean, one is Sabrina, as she says, was eighteen and panic stricken. Another is that and this was something I didn't know until I got involved in Sabrina's case. Actually that in Mississippi, which
is true of all fifty states. If you go to a hospital with a child who has been injured, if the doctors and medical staff report this as child abuse, then they're absolutely immune from being sued or being prosecuted for anything. If they don't reported as child abuse, then
they can be held liable themselves. So what happens when a child is brought in by a terribly panic stricken mother like Sabrina, is there's this osmotic pressure that forces the hospital to look at this and start talking about it as child abuse from the very beginning, whether that's true or false, and their insurance policy makes them do that. And obviously what that does to an eighteen year old Sabrina is make a panic even more. And then you
get this other absolutely bizarre thing. I mean, I've done now a lot of shaken baby cases and that a child syndrome cases. There are only two medical diagnoses. They have nothing to do with helping the child get cured, but everything to do with prosecuting the caregiver. And that's
those two diagnoses. So if you think about it, the diagnosis of that a child syndrome is it looks like the child has been abused, and then there are other elements of this diagnosis that the caregiver changes her story. And this's got nothing to do with treating the child for whatever it is, a broken rib or whatever. It's all to do with prosecuting the parents. So when someone likes Sabrina says, you know, I don't know what happened. The child stopped breathing. I think he's sick, and then
the doctors say, well, I don't think that's true. I think this is abuse. Then someone like Sabrina inevitably starts panicking, saying, well, you know, yesterday he had a little fall, or the other day something else happened. That's then a diagnostic criterion for saying that she abused that child. And then of course the police come in and start getting heavy handed
at the young girl like Sabrina. When I took my son in, I was panic and I was scared, but I thought about, oh, you're in trouble because you left him at the house by myself. That was my thing. So people were asking me, you know, why were there so many statements. Well, the statements was trying to cover up the fact that I had left my son alone for those ten minutes, and so I was trying to explain that away. I knew that I should not have left him at home by myself, but I didn't kill him.
I just was trying to cover that up. And so when we got an intem derogation, you know, they asked me a bunch of questions, and I could just remember trying to, you know, say something to that fact. Did you have a lawyer or anyone to help you as you were there in your most panic state that anyone could ever be in having just lost your child? The only thing I had With the two detectives that were in the room, and they were dead set on saying, you stump your baby, You beat them. That's what they
kept saying. But how did they finally succeed in their quest to get you to say a bunch of things that that not only weren't true, but that you knew weren't true, and that they probably knew weren't true. Well, the lead investigator kept screaming at me, and when I finally started telling him what exactly what happened, um, he bought up everything that I had to say, and he
threw that into trash. And after so many hours of him yelling and screaming and looking like he wanted to get up and jump on me, fight me, you know, I was scared. He actually wrote out the statement and he shoved it in my face. Um. He wrote on the statement that I had punched my son, and I just agreed to everything that they said because I wanted it to end. He kept saying, you know, this is what you did, and we need you to write sign this.
You know, they kept screaming at me, and that was like four hours of interrogation with him, and I was just I was tired. I just didn't know how. I just wanted it all to end. So I didn't sign where he told me to. I signed under the line, hoping that that was my way of saying, look, I didn't do this and that someone would see that. Well, and at this point, you had been up right, because
this started at midnight. This ordeal started at midnight. So now we're talking about a teenage traumatized grieving mother who hasn't slept, who is literally fighting for your life at this point, who knows how you would react. I mean, we've been talking about false confessions. We of course have our whole new season of the show False Confessions, which is very purposefully highlighting the fact that these false confessions
play a role in approximately of wrongful convictions. In your case, the circumstances were even more grave because we know that ultimately you were sentenced to death. Clive, how is it that they did such a ridiculously poor job investigating the medical side of this case, so much so that later on, when Sabrina was finally exonerated, that they basically acknowledged, Oh, yeah, we didn't really do any work on it. And the doctors were like, yeah, I guess I was wrong about that.
Like I think most people like to think that that couldn't happen in America. Well, I tell you, when you think about what the causes are of illnesses and injuries and children, we're still pretty medieval in that, and you know, we're getting better. But the other factor is that you have a g P. I have great sympathy with GPS. I don't know how on earth how some GP who's meant to know everything about everything is possibly going to be able to figure out what it is that's afflicting
the person. And so you have these folks who actually they're just not experts, and they're called in and they're asked to say what happened to this child? And again all of this had been set in motion by what happened in the hospital, where the doctors had this sort
of pressure to say that it was child abuse. And once they say it's child abuse, people professionals don't like to admit they made mistakes, and they really really really don't like to admit they made mistakes in cases where they contribute to an eighteen year old young woman being
sentenced to death for something she didn't do. So when a doctor takes a position that this looks like abuse, there's this sort of human pressure to stick with it and to then start justifying it using granderlinquent Latin terms that no one else understands. And you know, in that first trial, there was no challenge, no meaningful challenge to these doctors coming in saying this was abuse, and they stated it like it was on a tablet and Moses in Mount Sinai. In this trial, from what I've read
and seen about it, it's basically a joke. Not a funny joke, but a joke. I mean, this trial, no witnesses recalled in your defense, because the disc attorney subpoenaed every last one of them, and one of my Ernie, was drunk during the whole trial. He was piping can in his mouth and he kept telling me, you know, we got this thing nipped in the bullet, don't you worry about it. And so that's the way it went through the whole trial. I was just told to look
at the jury. That was it. If you're a corporate lawyer in New York and you're representing someone for money, you get a thousand dollars an hour, and yet in Mississippi, for representing someone for their life, you get a thousand dollars for the whole case, and you get what you paid for. And there were two lawyers in Sabrina's first case, and one, as she says, I'm afraid, he's absolutely true that he was just a drunk, and the other was this young guy who I have great respect for. But
he had no idea what he was doing. He tried um and you know the thing I'll give him most credit for was after that had failed, Sabrina, the first thing he did was give a call to my office to get some help on the appeal. But you kind of wish that that had happened before poor Sabrina had got sentenced to death. The trial took, how well, it took a week? You had now been held in jail awaiting trial for how long? Did a little bit over a year before I went to try in the first trial.
So you've been in jail for a year. Obviously that's a traumatic experience, piling on top of the other, you know, awful experiences that you've had already. You've got one drunk lawyer and one lawyer who doesn't really know his way around the courtroom. But you know, you didn't do it right. So when the jury went out, how long did they
deliberate for? I think about an hour or two. I just knew that they were going to come back and and say I was guilty because my attorneys they didn't really, you know, stand up and do anything in my behalf. And it was like everything was solely on the district attorney. The jury was not looking at my attorneys at all. They were looking on the floor, they were looking at the ceiling, they was looking everywhere else but when my
attorney spoke. But when the district attorney spoke, they were on the edge of these seats, and so me looking at it at that age, I said to myself, I'm done for I mean, I knew that, I just had
that feel. I ask you a question on that though, because you know, if it's my son, well, and he's died through some tragedy, and I'm incredibly broken hearted about it to have some prosecutors stand up there and say that I'm guilty of murdering my own child, and then going one step further and being all pious and saying I'm so sub human that I deserve to die. Um, when you know that the worst you did was maybe
give up for a jog when you shouldn't have. Glad they hurt me with every fibrob might being because I kept asking my attorneys to let me take the stand in my own defense, and they wouldn't do what. They kept saying, we got this thing, we got a nipped in the bug, we don't need you to testify. We beg them through the whole thing, and they would not let me testify. And I try, and then they impugned
your right to not testify. Your for the moment, right, And then the prosecutor got up in her face and said looked like a masters right, That's what he did. The Pacers Foundation is a proud supporter of this episode and of the Last Mile Organization, which provides business and tech training to help incarcerated individuals successfully and permanently re
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work in the criminal justice area. When I walked into Mississippi's death throw that was nineteen I had to walk down this long haul and when I first got there, they put book spray in your hair. They strip you of everything that you have. I sit in it like glass tank for like two hours, and I'm looking at all the people going around. And they came and they fingerprinted me and they just took all of what I thought was me away. They gave me his name tag. It had murderer on it, it had my MDOC number
on it, and it had death. So I had to walk with my hands shackled around my waist and I had to walk with leg guards. And I had a security guard who was walking next to me, a correction officer, and he said, you see those inmates out there and then feel He said, um, we tell them when to get up, and he said, we tell them when to go to sleep, We tell him what to eat, and
he's what, you will die here. And by the time he said that, by the time I got to MAXI security, because we had to walk, I was just I was crying. I couldn't think. I was trying to figure out, you know, what was happening to me. So when I got there, they put me in a six by nine c oh no bigger than your bathroom and shut the door and left. And during that time that was one of the hardest things to ever have to deal with. None that I didn't kill my son, knowing that these people are saying
we're gonna kill you. I had a death date at the time was July the second of and I didn't know that the state had exhaust all state remedies before they could actually carry out his death sentence. So when that day came, that was one of the hardest days. Man. I I paced the floor, I listened for every sound I listened to all the Noah's his keys made because I was thinking that they were coming to take me for my depth. So that is very it was very
traumatic for me. That is completely insane. I mean, talk about psychological torture beside all the physical deprivation, and for you not to even know that you weren't going to be executed, no one bothered to tell you that you have I mean, that's that's nuts. I've never heard that before, and I've been doing this stuff for almost three decades.
It's insane. And the fact that you're sitting here upright again and smiling is I you know, now I'm starting to understand why people say all the great things they say about you. So how did you find the strength to persevere? She was the only woman on death row in Mississippi at that time. Know I was not. It was another girl on on death row named Susan Bafford
who helped me a lot. But I say to anyone who asked that question, my most basic strength is Claude because when claide game, Cloud was the only one who came to the prison. Cloud brought me artwork. He kept talking to me. He kept saying, you know, give me a chance to look at this case. We're going to fix this. That's why I feel so close to him,
because he saved my life. Without Clive or Rob McDuff, the other attorney, right, correct, I don't think I would be sitting here because I mean, he was a godsend. Cloud was a godsend. And I thank him a hundredfold for bringing out the evidence in my case. I really do. And Clive, so you got a letter one day and the mail from one of her trial attorneys. Is that
how they started? I think he called me up actually, and I remember coming to see Sabrina, And you know, I was representing Susie belf for at the time too, And it's sad to say, not the only time that I've heard of someone on the throw. But the lawyers didn't even tell them that they weren't going to get executed. And you know, I remember meeting Sabrina for the first time, and you know, she's a kid, right, Sorry out that Sabrina that you were a kid, You're right, and you
know she's stuck there all by herself. And you know, I looked at her case and I thought this is going to get reversed. I mean versus the comment on silence, but there's all sorts of other stuff that the Mississippi Supreme Court actually didn't even reach. So I was pretty confident we're going to get a new trial. But then you know, we're going to have to go back and start again. And you were convinced you were going to get executed. I was convinced you weren't. That there was
still a long road ahead of us. The case against her as such nonsense. But nevertheless, you know, once someone's been convicted and since to death, there is a huge presumption of guilt and it's going to be really hard to get him out from under it. Sabrina on death roll in Mississippi. Um, I know you talked about the one other person who was there with you, Susan. Yes,
Susan Badfort. Did she give you hope to persevere? I mean you talked about Clive and the other attorney who came to your rescue, quite literally, like the Avengers writing it out of nowhere, I guess. But um, were there anything like that? I'd like to be an Avenger? I appreciate well, Sabrina and I are going to go to a costume store and get your cake when we're done here,
so you'll be all right and I don't worry about it. Um. But yeah, was there any Was there any particular moment that you think back on and you go, that was a moment when I found hope. Well, I can remember going through my deaf date. Before that, we used to get down on the floor and the toilets were connected between walls and we would have that as our phone,
and I started talking to her. She was older than me. Um. I think Susan was like twenty six when she got sentence in the same county that I was from Columbus, Mississippi. Clyve worked on her case as well, and so we got to know each other like that, you know, And she started talking to me and was trying to explain to me about the death sentence and how it works and stuff like that after the fact. So that's how
I had someone to talk to. So she communicated through the event or through the vent, through the vent and the toilet. They kept us where we couldn't um talk to anyone. They put us down this hall and they put a piece of tape on the floor because they didn't know, you know, where to put female death row inmates. So we were just down the hall and I think
it had no one beyond this point. And as far as me and Susan, we had to sign paper saying that we wouldn't kill each other before we could even go on Yark Altogether, everywhere we went we had to be shackled. We had no contact, No other inmates could come and touch us, to say anything to us. We were locked down twenty three hours a day, and then when they did give us a yard call, it was just just standing this bullpen like you do dogs, with
no shade, no nothing. It's just standing out there. That's the way they had us. I mean, it was crazy, but now we know you're here, and I want to highlight that beyonds changed a lot in court with proper legal representation that everybody should have. And Clive, when did you feel that the tide really turned in the retrial. Well, you have to remember that actually no one ends up in prisoner on death row for something they didn't do without there being a semblance of evidence. First, there was
the question of the injuries to little Walter. You had the injuries to his chest, which we could explain through CPR, and that also tied into the statement against Sabrina, because the police said coaster into saying she punched the child, which wasn't that far from the truth. The truth is she had done CPR to the child in a way that was almost the equivalent. But this was after the child was succumbing to other things, and so we were able to show to the jury the way that the
police coerster. Most importantly, I think was the medical evidence. I spent many many long hours in the medical library in your Lands looking for what I thought the real explanation would be for what we saw in this child, and that was when I came across the chronic nephrotic syndrome,
the syndrome that Sabrina's daughter has. To you know, this seemed clearly to explain everything we were seeing, and that was one part of hope, because we were able to get our own medical examiner who could give an explanation for what really happened, but also get their medical examiner to admit what he didn't know, and their GP also to admit that they simply didn't know that there was this chronic nethrotic syndrome that could explain all of the
things they saw and they just didn't know about it because that was beyond their expertise. And then, you know, I think the turning point in the trial was when we had their cup on the stand and I had this really ugly doll, and I wanted him to show the jury how he would do CPR on a little infant. And you know, it didn't really matter what he did because he was a police officer who was trained in CPR.
So if he did it properly with two little fingers on the infant's chest, then that would demonstrate what no one else in the courtroom probably knew, which was how to do it properly. But if he got it wrong, then that was the end of that case. Because if the police officer trained like that would do CPR in the way that we said that Sabrina had done it, in a way that would crush the infants ribs, then you know, that was an incredibly powerful argument for for
what had actually happened. And sure enough, he would have killed that little child the way he did CPR. He put his two hands on it, and he would have crushed the child. And then of course he went out in the hall, and I knew he was going to tell his body in the hall that we just got him. So I made an argument to the judge in front of the jury that I was afraid that he was going to tell the next police officer how to do
it properly. And sure enough, that's what he did, And so we exposed that when the next guy came in, and that just showed that they were all getting together in the whole way and trying to concoct a case against Sabrina. So all of that went really well. But having said that, there are a couple of other things. Some of the other witnesses the neighbors and so forth who corroborated what Sabrina said, which was that she had run around desperately trying to find people to take her
to hospital and help her. You know, this just showed the truth that here was eighteen year old who was in a massive panic, as opposed to what the prosecutor wanted to say that she was some sort of sociopath with beaten up a little baby. Then you come to the verdict, and I've got to say, you know, capital trials, for me, as a lawyer of the greatest laxative known to humanity, if you're not nervous when you're doing those cases,
then you just shouldn't be doing them. And I'm not going to admit to my knees knocking, although in cruptly well,
I was trying to hold Subrener out. Oh man, claud Now, I mean when we had to stand before the judge, my legs felt like spaghetti news and Clidnn was holding me on either side, and I when the when the judge came back with that not guilty verdict, I just felt because I I was like, finally this is over, and I'm you know, thinking that it's you know, it's okay, I'm free, but you know that wasn't the whole thing.
I wasn't. I'm still not free. I'm still working through that because after I got out and I got a chance to see my oldest son, I had to fight four more years to get him back. And then my daughter, who was seventeen years old, has the same exact disease my son died from so and it was policyistic kidney disease. And both of her kidneys are bad and they're saying that she will lose both and there's no cure. So it's the same thing. I'm fighting, the same, the same
thing every day. It's hard because I've already lost one. The reason I consider my profession such a privilege is there is no greater privilege, I think, than being able to help just give someone like Sabrina her life back. It's it's a fantastic thing to be blessed and be able to do. It would be great if we didn't have to do these things, but those of us who work in this field movement, I couldn't have said it
better myself. I mean, the happiest moments of my life putting my kids in a separate category, because that is a separate category. It's true. But let me say this, Well, I've got you. I mean, I'm really grateful for you doing what you're doing. And let's just get a commitment on the air while we're here that you're going to carry on doing it for the next fifty years. What age? I'm not sure? Well if will I will, I can't stop, won't stop, not gonna stop. And just getting to now
all the amazing things that Sabrina is doing. Um, not to spoil the surprise, but Sabrina has been a tremendous advocate for change for moments a quarter century now. If you go to Witness to Innocence dot org, we are death row survivors. And if you go to that website then you can get me and several others any other speaker that you might like to come and speak for you. Right.
That's Witness to Innocence dot org. Witness to Innocence dot org, and you can find Sabrina there as well as so many other extraordinary people who I'm very fortunate to call my friends and who I'm proud to work together in this fight to abolish the death penalty. And before we get the closing arguments. One thing I did want to ask you, Clive, is I would like you to talk about what people should look for if they're on a jury, and how to make our listeners be the best jurors
that they can be. There are several things you should bear in mind. The first is what does it really mean to be sure beyond a reasonable doubt? And I'm pretty horrified when I ask judges about that because when I've asked judges to put a number on it, the average judge, both in America and in Britain, and I've done this many times, that has averaged out it sure.
That means they're aiming to be wrong one time in six and with six million Americans are in the judicial system, the judges are aiming to put a million innocent people into prison when they take that as their standard. And there's Robin Hurdle teach you if you aim low, you miss. And the other thing to think about is a juror is there are twelve of you, but there's only one of you, and the one of you is the person
who has responsibility for what you do. So very often there's this sort of herd mentality where everyone wants to agree, but you're not responsible for what those other people do, and as an individual juror, you have the right from beginning to end to say, you know, respectfully, I just disagree. And one of the things we never tell jurors is how they can disagree, so they're never told that. At any moment, you as a juror, can send a note out to the judge saying, well, you know, I don't
really matter what these other eleving people are doing. I'm telling you we're not no agree because I think that this person is not guilty and you always have that right, and people try to bully you into not doing that. Well said, and I'm glad you brought that up. That's actually a new, a new point I think for a lot of our listeners, and it's super important for everyone to know that if you're on a jury, you have
that right. You can just basically say, hey, this this is going to end in hung jury or an acquittal because I'm not voting guilty. And if that's how you feel, don't be bullied. I've heard too many stories, as you have, people who finally just got tired and they wanted to go home and they threw somebody life away literally because of peer pressure and because no one told them, and that is your right. No one told them that you can say enough is enough now, and I think that's
just very unfair. I'm juriorus that we didn't say them. You know. I think a lot of jurors also aren't told that. Actually, therefore is the only one that really matters,
because we have to have unanimous jury verdicts in this country. Okay, So now comes the featured part of our show, where I thank both of you profusely for coming in, and Sabrina for you sharing your story and your remarkable journey, and and Clive, of course, thank you for for calling in and for all the amazing work that you've been doing. And so now in order, because we saved the best for last, with all due respect to you, sir Clive, we're going to save Sabrina for last. All right, very good?
I will. I've been doing death penalty works since I was about twenty, which is a long long time ago, and I do it because of what my mother said to me, which is, there's no point you're having a law degree if you don't look at the people that we as a society most hate and you get between
them and the people doing the hating. And you know, when you think about the death penalty, it's extraordinary in theory, but in practice, when that jury and that judge came back to say to Sabrina, who I count as a dear friend and I count as a very valuable human being, when they came back and said to her that we are going to take your life away. We're going to sacrifice you on the altar to some mythological god of deterrence, because we're going to do that to pretend that we're
doing something meaningful about crime. That's just terrific to me. I've watched six of my clients die in the electric, the gas chamber, and the lethal injection ganny, and it's always in the middle of the night for whatever reason, and it's because I think we're deeply ashamed of what we're doing. And each time I have come out of the death chamber and I've looked up at the stars above and I've thought to myself, my God, did that really make the world a better place? And you know,
the bottom line is sure didn't. And I'm so glad that in Sabrina's case, not only did she not end up on the lethal injection ganny. But she ended up getting her life back and making so much of it. And that's just a wonderful, wonderful thing. Sabrina Well, I basically want to say that the journey was not easy. UM. I had to do a lot of growing up going through this trial and tragedy of losing my son. Um. Today I still fight the state of Mississippi where my
son is buried. It took me two years to find him. When I did find him, he was buried on a dark gravel road in the woods, on a hill under a tree. Uh, no marker except the little bit marker that they have. UM. I am trying to fight them because I found out that the death certificate still says today that he was murdered. Okay, So when I found that out, there was another blow to me as a person, because I'm trying to say, you still have this out here.
I was found not guilty. The system of Mississippi paid me for wrong for conviction what they thought it was worth. But you still are convicting me in some sort of way. How could I ever be a nurse or doctor anything with death certificate that stated that. So the attorney is now working in the process of trying to get the State Examiner's office to change the death certificate in itself. They refused to do that, so now we have to go to That is another battle that I am currently
in the process of trying to do. Um I said that in the sense to say that we are all a human beings, we do not have the right as each individual to take a person's redemptive period. That's my belief. I feel that as long as God has me here, I Am going to fight till I can't fight anymore, because that's what I'm here for. I feel like I can go all over the world and talk about this case and tell I'm blue in the face. If it changed one mind, one heart, then I feel like I'm
doing my job. And I just thank God and for all the people that were involved in my case that he gave me a second chance to try to help someone else, and that's what I'm here for. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps. And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project, and I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to 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 in the show is 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 Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one