For those not already familiar with the story of Marty Tancliffe, his case began on the night of September sixth, nineteen eighty eight, when Marty was just about to start his senior year of high school in an affluent area of Long Island, New York. Marty's father was an entrepreneur and investor who was playing poker with some friends and business associates in the house. That night, Marty awoke to two absolutely gruesome scenes in which both of his loving parents
had been brutally beaten and stabbed. His mother was dead, his father was dying. When authorities arrived, they kept him separate from any of the adults in his life as they focused their investigations solely on Marty instead of Marty's father's business partner, Jerry Steerman, who all signs pointed to
being the obvious suspect in this awful crime. In our original twenty seventeen release of Marty's story, we touched on many of these details, but at that time, with ongoing civil litigation, we were not at liberty to delve more deeply into the details of the reinvestigation of Marty's case
that ultimately led to his exoneration. In this episode, you'll hear excerpts of that original interview, which included both Marty and false confession expert Saul Cassen, to set the stage for not only the evidence and witnesses that made Marty's freedom possible, as well as all the amazing things Marty has been able to accomplish since winning his freedom, but also what Marty intends to do to bring closure to this harrowing tragedy. This is Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm.
Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm. I'm especially excited today because I have two people who I consider to be well, let's just call it what it is. They're heroes of mine, but for very different sets of reasons.
Marty Tankleff is here today. Marty is an exonery who was wrongfully convicted of murdering his parents, which I get the chills just hearing myself say that, and he's going to share his remarkable story of going through what could be considered one of the most traumatic experiences that any human being could ever endure, and his subsequent triumph post exoneration. You will be amazed at what he's been able to
accomplish and overcome, we also have today. Saul cassen Saw pioneered in the eighties the scientific study of false confessions by introducing a taxonomy that distinguished between three types of false confessions, voluntary, compliant, and internalized that is universally accepted today. He has recently studied forensic confirmation biases and the impact that confessions have on judges, juries, lay witnesses, forensic science examiners,
and the plea bargaining process. He is widely considered the foremost expert on false confession. So welcome both of you. Thanks for coming in and joining us today.
Thank you for having us.
Marty, let's start with you, So let's go back to you grew up in Long Island.
I grew up in an affluent area called Beltan, New York, which is a little hamlet in Port Jreffson, New York, north Shore, Suffolk County. I went to Port Joffson High School, where the norm was we drove nice cars, we went on boats. And what happened to me was not something myself or anyone in my neighborhood could have ever imagined.
No, no one could imagine it. You had a happy childhood nuclear family, right, you and your sister.
Your parents idyllic, A little bit more idyllic because I was adopted, so my parents were older. So a lot of what we did growing up, my father live vicariously through me because he didn't have a very good childhood. So you know, we had the boats, the ATVs, we traveled a lot. People used to joke that I was a spoiled kid. I was, but my father instilled amazing work values in me. I was working since I was probably eleven or twelve years.
Old, and he was the bagel king, right.
My father was an entrepreneur who invested with Jerry Steuerman, who was then known as the bagel King of Long Island. My father had invested over a half a million dollars with Jerry in his bagel stores and horses, and in the summer of nineteen eighty eight their relationship significantly deteriorated. What I later learned was is that we believe my father learned that the bagel businesses may have been a money wandering operation for Jerry's son, Todd's drug dealing business.
And we're talking hard, hard drugs.
Todd was arrested went to prison for possession of cocaine, marijuana, and other drugs, and he served time in New York State prisons. But my father was a tough older man. Nothing would stop him. And one of the things that he was involved with was is there was a weekly poker game. September sixth was his night to hold the weekly poker game, and one of the members at that game was Jerry Struerman. My father was a type of man. It didn't matter, you know, how much threatening Jerry Struman did.
And there were threats. We later learned about two weeks before September sixth, Jerry Struman threatened to cut my father's tongue out, and it got so bad that my father was even looking into buying a shotgun because he was fearful.
Now we've set the stage. There's the poker game, right. There's obviously a tense environment right with the two of them in the room. But you went to sleep.
I went to sleep because September seventh was the first day of my high school year. I was going to be a senior. And I woke up and my life was never the same again. The lights were on in my house, the house wasn't locked up.
Walked through the house, and they were upstairs.
It's a ranch house. There's a very long ranch house. Where the bedrooms were in one end of the house, where the card game was was in the complete opposite end.
Of the house, right, So you wouldn't have heard any.
Would have heard anything. And I discovered my father who was still sitting in his office chair, and he was alive, and he was bleeding.
And what'd you do?
I called nine to one one and I followed their instructions, right.
They told you to wrap them as best you could, gave you some medical tips whatever, try to stop the bleeding, that kind of stuff, right.
And within a short period of time, law enforcement showed.
Up at the house. Where's your mom?
My mother was actually in her bedroom. Cops come and immediately they removed me.
From the house.
And what I kind of can say now is that the process of questioning me, trying to find out what happened started almost immediately. Even when I had family members show up that morning, there was this immediate separation. When my brother in law showed up, he was ripped away. When my godfather, who was also the family attorney, showed up, I saw him. He never saw me. But McCready, who is the lead detective. His name is Kay James McCready
was the lead detective on the case. Ran to him and basically told him I was already on the way to the hospital. I wasn't at the house. Even though I was at the house, I was told consistently I was being taken to the hospital. Unfortunately I was never taken to the hospital. I ended up being taken to police headquarters.
At this point, were you aware that your mom had been killed? Yes, so you're in a state of total shock, panic.
Words can't describe it.
Your parents were beaten to death. Is that right?
There was a bludgeon instrument and a knife, and to this day neither one has been discovered. And there was some forensic evidence which I can talk about. There was glove prints, so whoever did do this were wearing gloves that they still haven't found the gloves. So, I mean there's all these little things that actually the jury was aware of, but they chose just to ignore.
So they took you to police headquarters because and obviously this whole sort of pattern is emerging right where they wanted to. They had an agenda.
Yeah, I mean, you know, at that day, I didn't know that when I was seventeen years old. My father was the police commissioner of our little community. I was raised to trust law enforcement, believe in them. Law enforcement wouldn't lie to you, they wouldn't deceive you. Unfortunately, that's everything that they did that morning.
Right, And you're in an extremely fragile state, and you need help, right, you need someone to help you. You're seventeen years old, right. We know that they have misled as it probably a nice way to put it, his family guardian at this point, right, your godfather, who was also the only lawyer that was available to you at this time.
They kind of mislet everybody though. I mean I had other cousins and aunts and uncles who were at the hospitals, and they were lied to too. They were told, Marty's on the way to the hospital. Marty's on the way to the hospital.
Right. So they're basically doing everything they can to prevent you from having any responsible guardian or legal representative that might be able to stand in the way of them getting the conviction that they wanted, regardless of truth.
Yes, there was no truth seeking here. I mean, you have a man who was business partners with my father, half a million dollars involved was there the night before. My father also had in the weeks prior, had demanded he had two notes fifty thousand dollars. Back in the days after the murders, Jerry Struman cleaned out a joint bank account. He faked his death. He fled to California. He had a hairwave back then, and he went to a club that he wasn't a member of. He had
five or six different aliases at that moment. But law enforcement never consider him suspect. And every time I tell people, you know, the average person would say, well, how is he not a suspect?
I mean, you could have stopped that. He faked his own death. So let's get to the interrogation and the false confession in prison and the whole saga. So let's I mean, you're obviously very familiar with Mary's case. You've known Marty since nineteen ninety three, is all right.
He started writing letters to me from prison in ninety three.
So here's Marty in a state of panic and shock and grief. And as we discussed, he's still a child. And his confession is different than any of the other ones I've studied, right, because it may or may not have ever even actually happened. Right. Usually they actually get somebody to say something on video, or they'll get a written statement or something. But in Marty's case, it's much more highly nuanced, isn't it.
Yes? Yes, And in Marty's case, You've got to ask yourself the first question, why did Marty, a seventeen year old without a criminal record, without a history of violence, with good parents and good relationships and an affluent community, Why would Marty kill his parents in a brutal way, in a brutal in the most brutal of ways. And you have to ask yourself the question, how in God's name did he become their suspect?
You know, most people said, well, you know, he did it for the money, because they thought my parents were affluent. The way the wills were structured, I would have gotten everything. And we later learned that law enforcement never really understood the way the wills and never looked into the way
the wills were structured. I wasn't going to benefit financially until I was twenty five and I was seventeen, and so, you know, as one of my aunts said, what was he supposed to do from seventeen to twenty five, live on the streets.
So Saul there he is in the interrogation room, alone.
Alone, seventeen, not street wise, never been in trouble before, never had to worry about how do you behave when you get picked up by police. He had done nothing wrong. And the funny thing about innocent people is even if they had read him as miranda rights, he would have waived those rights right. Most people do, so Miranda becomes not a safeguard that's particularly effective at this point. Keep
in mind, they've got him in police headquarters. The whole family is with his father, who is dying but still alive in the hospital. That's where Marty wants to be. So he's already in a state where he's motivated to cooperate. And they start asking him questions about what he saw, how he saw it, what had happened, and he gives them answers, and the answers are consistent. They don't believe him,
They tell him they don't believe them. They asked for the story to be told again, and they're searching for inconsistencies, and they're calling him a liar, and they're not believing the story that he keeps telling over and over again. But then they shift gears, and they shift gears toward a procedure now where they start to lie about the evidence. Now, the average American doesn't realize that in the United States, police are allowed to bring in a suspect and lie
about the evidence. They're allowed to say to the suspect, we have your fingerprints on the murder weapon, even if that's not true. What happened in Marty's case is they bring them in they say, well, you know, it appears that your mother was in a struggle and there's hair in her grasp and it turns out it's your hair. We did the analysis. It's your hair, and that confused Marty wasn't true, but he got confused as to how
that was possible. And then because it was such a bloody scene, it was two bloody scenes, it just wasn't enough blood on Marty to account for that. They suggested to him that he had showered before calling nine to one one. He said, no, I didn't use the shower. They came back and said, well, we did a humidity test in your bathroom and we found that the shower had been used that morning. A humidity test. I don't
believe even on CSI, they've given us humidity test. Now they've delivered two lies, and then the detective delivers the ultimate lie. He leaves the room. There are two detectives in there. The lead detective McCready leaves the room, stages a phone call, and comes back to deliver the news to Marty. Marty, I've got good news and I got bad news. I just spoke to the folks at the hospital. The good news is your father has come out of his coma. He's regained consciousness. The bad news is he
said you did it. Now, think about this for a nuck and sick, insane. You've got a seventeen year old and you're now delivering one lie after another, culminating in a lie that to Marty, the person he trusts most in his life has just said he committed this crime. And not only did Marty of course, had no choice but to believe that that evidence, because he doesn't believe police would lie to him. Certainly, not like that. Even
McCready's partner believed that presentation. So what choice Marty have now but to wonder, how is it possible that they have this kind of objective evidence? My father doesn't lie, he said. Marty has almost no cognitive choice but to accept that information.
Well, because he's got two things right. His father doesn't lie and the cops don't lie. Right, These are the two things that he believes exactly. So those things lead to one conclusion.
One conclusion, I must have done it. And the conversation turns to memory consciousness, the possibility of sleepwalking and doing it without awareness, and generate theories from Marty to explain how come you don't remember doing this. So we know that that was the nature of the conversation. We know that for some degree of transient time, Marty became confused
about even his own innocence. His confession was a handwritten statement, handwritten by the detective, that is inaccurate as a description of the crime. It doesn't complete itself, it's actually ends in midsense, and it is uns signed. This confession, the so called confession, was written by the detective and not signed by Marty. And yet that allegation of that confession is the one and only piece of evidence that was used to convict him.
You're at trial. You still believe that justice is going.
To be done at trial? Still believe it? I mean, this is what the lawyers are telling me. The system works. I was innocent. I testified on my own behalf. The prosecutor had charged me with intentional murder and depraved indifference murder. So when we got called back in, the first verdict that I was read was not guilty, and then all of a sudden, the second one was guilty. The one thing I vividly remember is the walk after they read
the guilty verdicts over to the county jails. They had these tunnel systems, and I remember just I felt like I was being led like a dog because I was just listening. And I remember getting to the property room, and I remember the property room after saying what are you doing here, Marty? And I go why else would I be here? And then everything else went blank for about the next six or seven days.
But now you're thrown into this environment. You're in maximum security prison, Is that right? Yeah?
I was. Basically every day it's a fight for your life because you never know in maximum security facilities what could happen, whether it be the gangs going to war with each other, the ulcers taking you know, they're aggression out on you, or just the random attacks that occur just for no reason whatsoever.
Right, I mean, we know that people are being killed every day in prisons in America, sometimes by guards.
Even absolutely for me, my case was very high profile, so prisoners knew about the case. Guards knew about the case. And I had a guy come up to me and he said, Lilizen, he goes, if you want to survive, he says, don't do drugs, don't get involved in drugs, don't get involved homosexuality, don't get involved in gambling gangs, he said, and work your way into the college program with the lay library.
He said.
One of the hardest things is once you're innocent, is getting out, he said, But you'll figure out a way to do it. My lawyer said, okay, what's never been done here before? And we said a full investigation. And that's when I started looking for private investigators and ended up hiring j Salpeter. And one of the things that Jay said to me was, if you're innocent, hire me. If you're guilty, don't. I said, I'm innocent, I'll hire you. I just find the truth, Jai. And it took years.
You ended up serving six three hundred and thirty eight days, which is about seventeen and a.
Half years.
Now that we're up to speed from our twenty seventeen release, and with Barty's civil litigation out of the way, he was finally able to tell us about the mountain of exculpatory evidence that they built, how his freedom came to pass, all of the amazing things he's been able to accomplish, and of course his plans to finally bring the people
who conspired to murder his parents to justice. Witness is an evidence slowly emerged over the years pointing towards a conspiracy involving at least Peter Kent, Joseph Creeden, Glenn Harris, and of course the Steuermans and Moore continues to come to light to this day. But the process started back in the early nineties when a woman named Carlene Kovacs went to a party.
In the early nineteen nineties, Joseph Creeden, who was an enforcer for Todd Steuermann, was at a party where he admitted his involvement in the murders to Carlene Kovaks. So the idea that Todd Struman and Jerry Schuman were responsible for this not only from day one, but every year subsequent to my conviction investigation, more and more evidence would come forward, continuously pointing back towards the Steuermans, And it was around nineteen ninety two, nineteen ninety three when we
presented the DA's office with that information. And as the years would go on throughout the nineteen nineties and the two thousand's, the court system failed me.
It feels to me like the tides started to turn around two thousand and three when you hired Jay Salpeter.
Jay started from the very beginning, it was kind of like who benefited financially and let's just start branching out from there. The criminal ties around the Steuermans was pretty well known when Jay took on this case of investigating it, and he just started looking at Todd Steuerman and Jerry Steuerman and started branching out, and eventually they found Glenn Harris. Glenn Harris said something to the effect that I've been waiting for this day for twelve or thirteen years.
Glenn Harris davi a Swarren statement saying that he had been high fired by Steuerman to drive the two hitmen, Joe Creeden and Peter Kent two and from the Tankliffe House where you lived on the night of the cline.
And that just kind of started the snowball effect. We assembled a body of evidence of witnesses and in two thousand and five we presented everything to the Suffolk County DA with the hopes that with their subpoena power and wiretop power, that they would actually take a real serious look at this case. And we said, you know, if you don't do anything after forty five days, we will
file a post conviction motion in New York. And we learned that it wasn't until the forty fourth day that they actually went out and went to interview the first witness, and we thereafter filed a post conviction motion. Judge Braslow granted a hearing, and throughout the hearing of very technical issues came up and more witnesses came forward.
Throughout the hearing, Carlene Kovacs claimed that Joe Creeden told her about how he and another man hid in the bushes outside the tank of house, evaded capture and got rid of the bloody clothes. And then there was more. There were family members of the killers right, there were murder weapons that were actually had been hidden that were found. Am I wrong about that?
Marty? So the culminating witness at the hearing was Joseph Creeden's son, who said that his father confessed to him of his involvement. There was a pipe that was discovered on a piece of property that Glen Harris said a pipe was thrown. Nobody knows if the pipe was actually used, but what are the chances that somebody could know or say, look, go search on this piece of property. We threw something there eighteen years ago, seventeen years ago and it was found.
The actual murder weapons then have never been found.
By now we're talking about two thousand and five, two thousand and six, the defense your team had assembled twenty witnesses, twenty who all painted collectively a picture of how Storman had orchestrated these murders. Two of the witnesses had seen McCready with Storman just before the murders. Hello. There was also the matter of the murder weapon not having been found.
There was a bloody stain of what appeared to be a knife imprinted on one of our lead tank lif sheets, but no match was found, suggesting that someone had taken it. But justice was right around the corner right. So March seventeenth, two thousand and six, the petition for the newtrial was denied. But then December two thousand and seven, tell us about.
That, Well, in New York State, after you follow post conviction motion, you have to seek permission to appeal the case. Thankfully, the Appel Division that had denied me relief in nineteen ninety three had granted me permission to hear my case, and my lawyers argued before four amazing judges in September of two thousand and seven, and I remember it was December that I was calling home, calling the lawyers every single day, trying to find out how the decision come down.
And I had four different appeals in the Appella Division, including one for a new trial, one for DNA testing. So I was finally able to get through to one of my lawyer's offices and the receptionist said to me, she's like, don't tell Bruce, I told you, but we
won the big one. And my legs started to shake a little bit, and I kind of almost didn't believe it because it was kind of that moment when you are just waiting for that day, for day after day, year after year, and when I finally spoke to Bruce Barquett, I'll never forget his words. He said, back your shit, You're coming home, and you'll never see the inside of
a jail cell again. And at that very moment, don't ask me why I said this, but I was kind of sarcastic, and I said, Bruce, and I said, I've been studying the little long enough. I said, it's an oral agreement that I'm going to hold you to it. And he kept his word. I was brought down to the Suvin County Jail December twenty sixth, the day after Christmas, and on December twenty seventh, I was freed and I have never returned to a jail cell since. So Bruce Barkak kept his work.
In the book A Criminal Injustice, which is I recommend so highly that it reads like a Grisham novel, but it's true and you lived it. And in that book, one of the things that sticks out so much and about your story is that Suffolk County was like a criminal enterprise, and I'm talking about the justice system. Can you describe it well?
I think it was best described. I think it was William Hellerstein described it as the wild wild West of law enforcement and the court system. And essentially he said is that in Suffolk County they do whatever the hell they want to do, whenever they want to do it,
because they are almighty. And I think that almighty attitude can be traced back to the homicide division where in the eighties they used to wear these shirts that said ninety nine percent and that referred to their confession and conviction rates for homicide cases, and they were proud of it. And Suvia County has a long history of tourmoil and corruption.
When the Attorney General reinvestigated the case during some of the post conviction proceedings, they uncovered forensics that were in the possession of Suba County the entire time, and they proved to be exculpatory in nature. It just goes to the depths of how sinister and evil the criminal injustice system was in Suffolk County back then, even up to recently where the district attorney that was in office during my post conviction litigation, Tom Spoda, was recently criminally charged
while he was a district attorney. When Tom Spoda was in private practice, he and his firm had represented Todd Steuerman and Jerry Stuerman and the chief of police, William Burke, was also criminally charged and he went to prison.
It's unbelievable. And this gets deeper and deeper because mccreedy, the detective, was under investigation for perjury. And let's not forget mccreedy went into business with your sister, who became the heir to the family fortune.
Shortly after my conviction, my half sister threw a celebratory party at a country club for family and friends, and right around the same time went into business with the money she received from my parents' estate with the lead detective who put me in prison, and they opened up a bar restaurant, diggero Dell's, in a Riverhead, New York.
Yeah.
I didn't want to go down in history as being known as the person who was convicted of murdering my parents because I didn't do it, and nobody stands crimly charged or convicted of those murders as of today. I knew that I wanted to continue fighting till the truth came out, and we continue to explore every lead, and even to this day, we've had new witnesses who have come forward. And the only reason why they've come forward
was because Peter Kin and Joseph Krein have died. They've come forward with exculpatory evidence that no one has ever heard before that I'm hoping by the end of the year it will get out there.
Are you still hoping for the authorities to do what they should have done decades ago and prosecute the people responsible for this tragedy.
There is a new district attorney who ran on a line of exposing injustice. He set up a conviction integrity unit. He has clearly stated time and time again that he owes no allegiance to the prior administration, and I'm currently working on putting a package together. I'm confident that any fair minded prosecutor, if they look at the body of evidence that we have now, someone should be criminally charged. And I'm going to be asking the Suvin County District Attorney's office to reopen the case.
July twenty second, two thousand and eight, the charges were dismissed and your life began again or anew I mean, you hit the ground running, and there's so much to talk about still, because there's the federal civil suit against New York State and the Suffolk County Police Department. And this was not a frivolous suit. In fact that July twenty fourteen, New York State settled for three point three seven five million, and in twenty eighteen Suffolk County settled
for another ten They didn't do that willingly. They did that because they had no way out. I mean, you had them literally dead to rights, and then you go and graduate from law school. Now, I mean, seriously, Marty, like, are you trying to make the rest of us look? It's unbelievable.
I was just going to say, is that you know you when you say get up and start running. It was three weeks after I was out of prison if I started finishing on my bachel's grey at Hatstraw, and I knew that, you know what I went through, no one should go through, and if there was somebody that could help make a difference, it would be me. I am out now, I'm a lawyer, also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and a Toroural law school.
There's a very hard to miss message of what the rest of us have as an excuse not to live out our dreams. I mean, that's an unbelievable transformation, and I am so so proud of you. So you're now the head of the prisoner and civil rights litigation group at Metcalf and Metcalf you're living your best life. And they say living well is the best revenge. I mean, I think you can attest to that, but we can't
leave alone. The other thing that you're doing now, which I'm going to guess is probably the most rewarding thing other than your family of everything, which is of course the making an exodary program. You're, of course, as we talked about, an adjunct professor at Georgetown, let's just say that again, you're a professor at Georgetown, like, what the hell anyway, and you're working with your childhood friend and my dear friend Mark Howard co teaching a class called
making an Axannery. And one of the students from that class was on this show in our episode of the Awful Case of Terrell Barrows, and she said, and I think any of the students would say that her life has been forever changed by this experience. So please, anyone go back and listen to the Terrell Barrows episode. Terrell really needs and deserves our help. Listen and you'll get some ideas of how you may be able to make
a difference in his life. He's just as innocent as Marty was and is so tell us about some of the people that you've helped wherever you want to go.
With this, just to get people a little background and making fund a lot more on our website, making agxgnery dot com. Mark and I have been for instance, we were three years old going to lovew preschool and after I got out, Mark would invite me to come down to his class and speak to him about my experience
about the criminal justice system. And as the years went on, we start talking about the idea about teaching a class together, and the idea of making exona re kind of came together one day, just us talking taking undergraduate students and having them reinvestigate real cases of men and women in prison, try to track down new witnesses and try to develop a body of evidence that could help get them exonerated.
And their final project was to create short documentaries. And we started the class in twenty eighteen and one of our cases was Valentina Dixon, and our students were able to uncover enough evidence that was shared with Valentino's lawyer
and he was exonerated in September of that year. And each year our students have done this amazing work, and there's not a single student who's taken our class that hasn't walked away and said that the opportunity to try to to impact someone's life is life altering for them. Our students become friends with the individuals whore incarcerated. Tragically, John Moss, who was from our first semester, our students
uncovered evidence that convinced the Innocence Project to represent him. Tragically, he passed away and Martin Luther King Junior Day this year, but the students became so close to him and his family they went to his funeral. I mean, it's kind of unheard of that students can develop a bond like that.
Every one of the student groups, even after they've graduated, continue to work on any of the cases that they were connected with, and if they're in a position where they can't work, they want to know what's going on. Because in Valentinero Dixon's case, when he walked free in September of twenty eighteen, Ellie and Julie, who were two of the young women that worked on his case, flew back from France and England to be there when he walked out of prison. And I think it's something that
they will never forget their entire life. And Valentino has said time and time again that they have lifelong friends and if they ever need anything, he would be there for them. The relationship you develop with these men and women is just different. You know. We walk in and we tell our students that there's no guarantees here other than you putting one thousand percent in, and they do more than that. Our students can sometimes work thirty hours
a week outside of class. They travel around the country, they track down witnesses, they confront former prosecutors. In one case, they confronted a krly sitting judge who was a former prosecutor. There really is no fear that our students have. And it's just to me an amazing experience having the opportunity to work with them, and it really even feel like work. From times, it feels like such an honor and pleasure to work with students that want to come to class,
want to work, want to sacrifice their time. And I remember this year when the idea of spring break are going to see somebody in a maximum security prison during spring break. Our students said, who cares about spring break? Let's go to prison.
Who cares about spring break? Let's go to a prison. Wow, that's really going to say it all. And the fact is that those of us who work in this area know that the first time you get to be a part, I don't care how small the part is of helping somebody out of this Kafka esque nightmare. It is unlike anything else that I've ever experienced. And it makes me
feel useful. You know, you now get to live that to the tenth power or to the nth degree, you what ever you want to call it, because you're doing it again and again, and you're doing it from a place that the rest of us can't possibly understand, and doing it for all the right reasons. So it's wonderful
to see. And people can go to making an axanareed dot com and see these eight minute videos which are so powerful, and I know that every one of those students is going to be forever changed by this experience and they're going to become freedom fighters in their own right. And so there goes the Marty Tankliff force multiplier effect. Marty you've been on the show before, you know how it works. At this point, we turned to my favorite
part of the show. It's the part of the show we call closing arguments where first of all, I thank you for being here, sharing your story and just being this sort of beacon of hope and light that you are, and then I turn off my microphone leave yours on for what we call closing arguments.
I remember when I talked about becoming a lawyer, I said, you know, I say, I don't think I can ever reach the pinnacle of exonerations of Barry Scheck or Steve Drisen or anybody like that. But I know if I'm instrumental in helping one innocent person walk free, you know, I kind of joke. I've done my job, and I was there the day Valentino walked out, but I'm far from over. You know, it is so rewarding, And I know, Jason, you've had the opportunity to be there when people have
walked free and been involved in exonerations. It impacts your life in a way that I think nothing else does. And I know one of my lawyers said, you know, those who do this work are doing God's work. And he explained it was simply that, you know, when you fight to get somebody who's innocent out of prison, you
were almost giving them an opportunity at new life. So it's almost like a rebirth for them because some of them have been locked up longer than they were free, and now all of a sudden you help them gain their freedom back. It really is probably some of the
most rewarding work. And you know, Mark is somebody who is just amazing because you know, Mark was a tenured professor of government and it was because of his involvement and his choice to go to law school to join my defense team to fight to get me out of prison, that his career essentially changed. Where he teaches prisons and justice.
He goes into prisons and teaches college credit courses. He's established the Frederick Douglas Project, and Mark and I have made a decision that we will teach this class every year going forward, just because so many innocent people don't have the ability to have their voices told. You know, after Just Mercy came out, I told our students that you have to watch the scene where Jamie is talking
to his lawyer after the evidentiary hearing. And he says something to the fact that even if I don't get out of prison, I'm good because the truth came out. And that's what we empower our students to do. Get the truth out there, because those who are incarcerated, that's what they want. We can't control the criminal justice system, but we can control investigating these cases and telling the stories and having those who are incarcerated have their stories
told through our voices. I think anybody who walks away and watches the videos will just find that our system is so flawed on so many levels, and everyone across America can do something because that's a question. I'm sy. You get asked all the time what can we do?
And we tell people, you know, find something you're good at, and just offered help, you know, whether it be writing a letter to somebody who's in prison, social media development sharing, passing along petitions, if there are fundraising efforts, do fundraising because so often people sit back and say, I'm not
a lawyer, I know nothing about the system. And when I tell people that the system is about humanity at its core, because our system succeeds and fails based on humans on so many levels that if we go deep into our hearts we can find something that we can do to make a difference.
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 Nisnce Project and I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to innescenceproject dot org to learn how to donate and get it. 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