It was Thanksgiving the eve, and after visiting her daughter at Wycoff Hospital in Queen's, Maureen Fernandez went to a few of her usual bars with a man who was unfamiliar to the other bar patrons. The next morning, her body was found in an empty lot next to a stretch of the Long Island Railroad. She had been stabbed thirty five times. Investigators spoke with the bar patrons and a night watchman near the empty lot, who described a white Cadillac type car leaving the lot at four am.
The detectives began looking into people who worked at the hospital, and it turned out that a security guard named Taper Ramos owned a white Oldsmobile. Detectives leaned hard on Ramo's extracted a confession about lending his car to a friend named Richard Pereira. Ramos claimed Pereira had returned the vehicle with a mysterious red liquid on the passengers side, and admitted to the murder before Ramos thoroughly cleaned the car.
When Pereira was cleared in the line, police arranged for Pereira to record a conversation with Ramos, who admits to making up the story, even admitting that his car battery was dead denighted the murder, but instead of switching directions, the cops interrogate Ramos again, extracting the same story with a new suspect, Phelipe Rodriguez, without the Pereira recording being
presented at trial. Phelipe ended up spending over twenty six years in prison after being identified by a man who knew nothing about the murder of a woman who Phelipe had never even met. This is Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam. That's me. I'm your host, and today I am well you can probably hear. I'm excited because we have not one, but
two of my favorite human beings on the show today. First, Nina Morrison is the senior litigation attorney at the Instance Project in New York and just all around certified badass lawyer, human mom, person, friend, and so Nina, I'm really excited to have you back on. Welcome Thanks, Jason. Great to be back. And now, in our tradition of saving the best for last, we have one of the kindest, gentlest, funniest and best dressed humans that you're ever going to
come across so Phelippe Rodriguez. Welcome to wrongful Conviction. Thank you, Jason, I appreciate it. Philippa. Let's start at the beginning. You grew up in Puerto Rico, right, Yes, I was born in Bosta, Puerto Rico, on August fifteen, nineteen And you came to New York and at what time? I actually came to New York with my mother and my stepfather, late seventies. I was like thirteen or fourteen years old. Can you just describe to us what your life was
like for this incident. In nineteen five, I actually get married to my now ex wife, Glaris Rodriguez, and I had a kid with her, Felippe Wiland Rodriguez, Jr. He was born on July two x. By eighty six, I started working for a subcontracting company for the City of New York. I was getting paid good, I had good health care, so I was doing pretty well for myself. And then you were implicated in a murder that you had absolutely nothing to do with. And this particular murder
was really gruesome, Nina. Can you take us back to the crime itself and how they came to sort of I'm gonna say settled because they settled on Philippe. Yeah, Phelippe. I wasn't arrested and charged for this crime until sixteen months after the victim in this case, Marini Fernandez, was murdered. As you mentioned, it was an extraordinarily brutal crime. She was stabbed thirty five times and her body was found in a deserted lot in Queens, New York, near the
Long Island railroad tracks, behind a food warehouse. Her body was actually found on Thanksgiving morning. She had been at a local hospital visiting her two year old daughter, who was in the hospital the night before, went out to a bar with a man that the other bar patrons didn't recognize, but it was a bar that she went to with some frequency, left there around two in the
morning and was never seen again. You know, we get a lot of cases, Jason, where there's some reasonable evidence pointing to our clients as a suspect, and then later through DNA or further investigation or advanced science some other evidence,
we find the picture changes. And when we at the Innocence Project took on Philippe's case, it was just so clear that this investigation was pointing far away from Phelipe for the beginning, and eventually, sixteen months later, when they had no viable suspect, the police just decided to coerce witnesses and argh Philippe. The police had the description of the most likely culprit from the bar patrons, right, you know.
The thing that was so obvious was that the man who was with the victim is Fernandez at the bar, did not remotely resemble Philippe. Phelipe is your desk and see if they google him is a tall, slender, very dark haired, handsome man of Puerto Rican descent. And yet the man at the bar, who was the last person to come to the bar with and leave with the victim, the obvious likely suspect, was described by witnesses as white
or Italian, clean shaven. Phelippe, had a black mustache stocky which Phelippe definitely is not and never was, and had reddish brown hair Recasalies. I mean, the list goes on and on. One of the patrons at the bar, Robert Thompson, who was heavily intoxicated, said that he had tried to sell a watch to Maureene Fernandez and the man she was with and then this Thompson described the potential perpetrator's
hands as large, calloused and wearing rings. Then later on he sort of agreed with the detectives that the man who may have had writing on his left hand. Again, you wouldn't want to hang a murder conviction on this. And then there's this Peter Saloni guy. He was a night watchman at the food wholesaler near the empty lot where the body was found, and he told police that he witnessed a white car with a lone mail driver leaving the warehouse area at four am. He said the
car may have been aes ere at Catillac. There wasn't really any evidence that anybody's white car was necessarily the car used in this crime. The security guard thought he saw a white car with a loan drive or leaving the warehouse area around four am. No one knows what time Ms Fernandez was brought there or when she was killed.
There were different reports about when she left the bar, and originally the investigation focused on a black car, which had a much closer connection to the crime because several witnesses described seeing an unfamiliar shiny black Monte Carlo with nted windows outside the bar, and people started suggesting to police that maybe the perpetrator drove her to and from
the bar in that car. And it was only when six eight months later the case remained unsolved that suddenly a new detective on the case, Jack Bizell, said oh, well, maybe it's maybe it was the white car scene by the security guard, and from that little read of a hypothesis, they reverse engineered a case designed to find anyone they could with a connection to White Coff Hospital who happened
to have a white car of that general description. So the Texas began looking at the staff of the hospital that this poor woman had been visiting her sick child at a pediatric ward. Because people were staying around the neighborhood. It was like a picked up spot, which is bizarre in itself, but okay. So the detective started talking about the staff and there was a security guard named Javier Ramos who had a white oldmobile at the time of
the murdera a Catillac. But he had gotten off work at the hospital at midnight on the night of the murder, and a few months later, in February or March of Ramos had sold the oldsmobile to another staff or a guy named Pedro Sierra, and he had painted the roof of the Oldsmobile read and Saloni. The night watchman guy was taken to the area where the car formerly owned
by Ramos was parked. They drove him around the block, pasted it several times and he didn't pick it out, and then by self finally says to him or detective said to him, Hey, if that car didn't have a red roof, couldn't have been the car. And he said, probably, maybe like an eight out of ten. So that's not exactly an unbiased, spontaneous identification of the car. It's about
a suggestive and equivocal as you get. And then Detective by Zell aggressively interrogated and intimidated, i would say Ramos for hours and hours, and finally the interrogation ended when Ramos told the story that they wanted to hear, and he signed the state not implicating Phelippe, but a friend and co worker named Richard Pereira. Ramass original story implicating Pereira said, Tarrera Barrow the car, brought it back on Thanksgiving morning. There was a reddish stain in the car.
It smelled terrible, and that Pereira allegedly said to him that he had to stab some bitch to show her that he was a man and not some boy. So essentially admitted to a murder, and it was a very damning statement. The problem is it was completely hit up.
The police bringing Richie. We don't know the full extent of the investigation they did, but we know that he was not picked out of a lineup by any of the eyewitnesses from the bar, or by the security guard, and for that or for other reasons, they decided Ray must have given them the wrong guy. So they go back to Ramos and they work him over, and they work him over, but before they do that, they go to Pereira and they say, hey, Ramos implicated you. We
think Ramos might be the killer. Can you wear a wire and go talk to him? Now. None of this was heard by Phelippe jury. This didn't come out till after he was convicted. But Ramos was taped by Pereira, the man he falsely implicated, essentially admitting he made up the whole story, and on this audio tape that none of the juror's ever heard, Ramos said, look, the cops were coming at me. And coming at me. It was going to be me or you, and I had to give them somebody or else I was going to go
to prison for the rest of my life. And then he said my car wasn't even working that day, the battery was dead, and there was no blood on the cushion. That was juice that my girlfriend's kid spilled there. He admitted the whole thing was fabricated, not just naming Pereira, but the whole entire story, and Felippe's jury never heard that. What they did here at Phelippe's trial was that Ramos
gave another version of that statement implicating Phelippe. The only two differences in that statement we're one, and most importantly, he switched the names. So he gave the exact same statement, but he said, oh, was actually Felippe Rodriguez who brought the car back to me that morning and said all these terrible things, not Richie Perga. Okay, So to believe he's telling the truth, you have to believe he implicated one innocent man to protect another man. Felippea Rodriguez not
exactly the most reliable witness in the world. In addition, another thing that always jumped out at us, is that Ramo said in his second statement that he cleaned the car himself. In his first statement, the false one implicating Richie Pereira, he said that his grandfather helped him clean the car, and suddenly, in the second statement, the grandfather disappears. Grandfather never testifies a trial, and to this day we have never seen a single piece of paper indicating whether
the police ever talked to the grandfather. And you know, Jason, I probably don't need to connect the dots for your very crime savvy listeners are even the ones who aren't right. Like, the first thing you would do as a rookie cop if somebody says, oh, I cleaned blood off of a vehicle that was used in a grizzly murder and this person helped me, is you'd go find that person and interview them and see if they corroborate or contradict what
this witness has just told you. And the fact that there is no record of them talking to the grandfather, along with the fact that we now now Ramos made it all up, leads me to the conclusion that the police absolutely talked to him, and that he told them my grandson's full of you know what, I never went near a stinky, bloody car or also what it called
the cops. So they took that detail out of the second statement, but everything else he subbed one name for another, and in the second statement he subbed in an innocent man who did twenty seven years in prison for a crime commit felipe. Had you even heard about it? When they get to me, that was the first I heard it,
and I was shocked this out. So they put Phelipe in a live lineup, and they brought in several of the people from the bar, and none of them identified Phelipe except for the one guy who had admitted that he was drunk as a skunk that night, And you would have to be drunk as a skunk to pix up a guy who's described as Italian five eight with reddish brown hair and chunky too with a guy who's
slender eleven, jet black hair and a mustache. But with Ramos's statement and Thompson's identification that they felt was enough to indicte Phelipe for murder, you know, I was truly truly baffled of y. Phelippe also passed a polygraph denying his involvement and was released on bail pre trial, which again gives me some indication that they didn't think he was that dangerous or they wouldn't have sent it back to the neighborhood. And then there was the issue with
the trial itself. Right, So, originally Philippe was represented by Kenneth Litwack, but then replaced by an attorney named Jennifer Maalo. As we later found out, she was defending Phelipe with one hand time behind her back because there was a lot of evidence of his innocence that she never got. Some of the best lawyers in the world will lose trials when the prosecution doesn't play fair and the police don't play fair and they don't get all the evidence
that they're entitled to get. And that was exactly the situation that was happening here in April. Your trial was held in the Queen's County Supreme Court, and I know that Ramos repeated his false narrative about lending his car to Phelippe, and he said that he had delaid reporting the crime and initially shifted the blame to Pieric because Phelippe was quote like a brother to me. I mean,
the whole thing stinks. As you know, many jurors, when they show up for jury duty, assume that the police have it right, that the person who's charged with the crime wouldn't be sitting there if they weren't guilty, and despite the legal burden of innocent until proven guilty, in reality it's often just the opposite, where jurors assumed the person is guilty, and if there's any evidence to support
that conclusion, they often latch onto that evidence. And so I can see a world where a man who represents himself to be a close friend of Phelippe's, claims to be like a rather to him, comes in and says I didn't want to turn him in, but I had to because it was the right thing to do. Never mind that he implicated another admittedly innocent person in between might give them what they need, or they might have been swayed by just the horrible glory nature of the
crime and not want to let it go unsolved. So the prosecution calls these two witnesses that claimed to have seen the writing on Felippe's hands in the past. This so this also seems just so dicey. You know, it's a sign of how thin the case was that they're relying on things like a witness twenty months later who says she thought she saw something written on Felippe's hands that happens to match something that another drunkenness said ten months after the crime that he thought he saw written
on Phelippe's hand. And that's really emblematic of just how weak a case this was. But um and the other key piece of it was that the police witnesses testified really to back up the whole theory about the white car. You know, the prosecution was allowed to walk detectives by cell and Sullivan through the investigation. Oh and also they had the bartender who would initially not pickedly be out of a lineup, came into court and said, oh, yeah,
that's the guy between the white car. Romis a testimony some of the other incredibly shaky ideas and some dubious testimony about writing and things Philippe elegedly said. And that was enough to send this man away for what could have been the rest of his life. Phelippe was convicted of second degree murder and since the twenty five years to life in prison. When they said that they had found me guilty of murder in the second degree. My niece buckled. Man, I m put both of my hands
on the table, and I just that was a rough date. Man. It was at that time I was married to Loida Castagnero, and all I heard was her screens. It was like a screen when somebody dies. And then the judge said, you remanded, and he told the alto to take meet cross and that's what the whole time may began. This episode is brought to you by Stand Together. Stand Together is a philanthropic community dedicated to helping people improve their lives.
For more than twenty years, Stand Together and its partners have been on the front lines of criminal justice reform. By empowering people to take action, supporting nonprofits, and working with businesses, Stand Together tackles the root causes of problems in our communities and empowers those closest to the problems
to drive solutions. Solutions like reducing unjust prison sentences through the First Step Act, empowering community based programs that help people re enter society, and now working to bridge divides in our communities. To learn how you may get involved, visit stand together dot org. Slash conviction. I was twenty three four. One of the first maximum security persons that I arrived at was Great Metals Correctional Facility better known
as Gladiator School or Calm Stock. There I seen the violence, almo sexuality, the drugs, the gangs, and I said, how can I pull myself out of this dungeon safely and returned to my son. So the first few months were crucial. I prayed a lot, I cried a lot. That was nice when you know, I put myself to sleep crying thinking about my son and you know who was being there for him. I was angry, of course, I was angry.
I was angry at the system. I was angry that I was thrown in prison for twenty five to life for something that I haven't done. And I was completely confused on how I was going to solve this mystery. But quickly I understood that in order for me to think clearly, in order for me to see things for
what they were, I needed to forgive everybody. I needed to take all hatred, I needed to take all resentment, and I needed to get that out of my system so that I won't get more hurt than what I was already, because you know, most people don't understand hatred, resentiment. All that does. It hurts you, It doesn't hurt the person you're angry at, because the person you're angry at is actually in the house, sleeping or having fun with their family while you are doing in all this madness.
So very early in my incarceration, I got rid of all that, and I devoted myself to giving thanks to God for me being healthy and alive and ask him to protect my son. And I started learning and reading every book I get my hands on. And it was a hell of a quest for sure. I can't picture you in this gladiator school, but you turned it into a positivity. But then there was still so much more to come, right, and we're gonna go quickly through the proceedings.
In the early nineties, Philippe got appointed some terrific lawyers from the Legal Aid Society for his initial round of appeals right after his conviction. Right, and this is Martin Lucente, of course, of the Legal Aid Society. We're talking about a very very talented lawyer, and they very quickly through some catching a reference to it in another report, discovered that this tape of the lead witness against Philippe. I have your Ramos existed, was in the state's possession and
had never been turned over. So they got a copy of the tape in which Ramos admits to making up the whole story about the car and the bloodstains and his car having into the battery, and they go to a hearing. And as we've seen so many times times, when you go toal hearing with the claim that the prosecution withheld evidence you're supposed to have, it's a very hard claim to win because the prosecutor will often come in and say, well, I turned it over, I handed
it to the defense layer. I gave it to her. And that's exactly what he said here. And at the end of the day, the judge's decision denying Phelippe a new trial didn't say this wasn't significant evidence. He never says, oh, well, this wouldn't have made a difference anyway, it was so obvious how important it is. He says, I find that there's not enough proof or evidence that it wasn't disclosed.
I'm not going to call the prosecutor a liar. So essentially he's saying that maybe Phelippe's trial or missed it. But you know, she was cross examining Ramo's pretty hard. It's something that would have been almost impossible to miss if she'd had this kind of ammo to cross examine him further about making it up. So he lost that round, but it was still more evidence that, by the time the Innocence Project took the case was on record, further
undermining this already incredible, way tenuous conviction. So none of these initial emotions or appeals led to the result that they should have, which is of course for Philippa to come home. And then it comes to two thousand one, when Philippe you wrote to the Innocence Project, they sent me a letter. They said, look, we have a lot of requests and right now, you know, we only have a certain amount of staff, so we will take a
look at it. We'll let you know. And but then I was transferred to Sullivan, and the Sullivan I met Father Bona, who became my mentor. I really got immerged into the Calcolic religion and and I started serving. They made population. It became chaplain's aide, and the Chaplain Kirk, the eucharistic minister. I was in charge of the entire mass, and I was also in charge of the prayer nice
the Bible studies. You know, we started a formation class that allow people to become secular Franciscans, which I am today. And I forgot about the instance project. I just you know, I left it up to God. And and then I started working with a sir killer. His name is author John show Cross. He was a Stanic worshiper and everybody
hated him in the prison. Actually, one day I came from formation class on a Sunday after Mass, and I was sitting at my table with two of the chairs empty, and Mr shaw Cross, when he rest in peace, was sitting on the floor because nobody wanted them on their tables. And I felt so hypocritical. I felt like, here I am teaching Bible study and holding mass, and and I have a guy that's sitting on the stairs eating its food because people think that they are better than him.
I said, who am I to judge this guy? Or what saying do I have? And saying that this guy is indeed mobile not redeemable, that's not all to me, that's not all to any human being deserved. That's up to God. Whatever we want to call God. So I got up from my table and I went up to short Cross and I said, come on, man, sit on the table. So he came up and side on the table. I said, as long as I'm in this prison, you sit on this table with me, and whoever has a
problem with it, I'll take care of it. He said, why why are you doing that? I said, everybody this searched a little bit of humanity. I'm not here to deprive you of that. I've been deprived of that myself, so I'm not going to deprive you of that. And from that day he started asking me questions about religion and what I believe and why I didn't believe. And one day he came out and he said, um, what would you do if I wanted to go to church? You think they allowed me in church? I said, well,
I'll tell you what. Why don't you come Sunday to Mass with me? If you don't like it, you don't never have to come again, and nobody's gonna judge you or whatever. And he said, are you sure? People, I said, listen, I'm sure God would love to have you in his house. And he said okay. That day was the greatest day from me. I got blessed by God for me. It was the best letter I've ever received. Nina Morrison was
assigned to my case. From there, Nina became my guardian Andrew, I don't think there's ever gonna be a woman more important to me aside from my mother than Nina Morrison. And I'm married and I love Karen, but I'm gonna tell you and I told Karen a hundred times and you can ask, and she could tell you. Eve. Nina called me from China today and told me that she needed me over there. Karen will stay here and I go to China, because that's just the way it's gonna be.
This is where the Innocence Project stands with me. Nina takes a case and the physical evidence had been destroyed. There was almost nothing left to go on. Philippe's case for a few years in our office was literally hanging by some hairs because the hairs were among the few things we haven't found yet. We actually managed, with the help of a pretty diligent newer prosecutor in the years office or rosen Bomb, tracked down some of the hairs,
and then Hurricane Sandy hit and they lost. The enemy had to wait another eighteen months, and after that testing and some testings we found on some biological material left over from the car yielded no DNA that was of any use to the investigation. The hairs were all from the victim herself. The cuttings from the car didn't yield
a thing, no nothing. We were kind of stuck. You know, it would have been at that point not an illogical thing for someone in Nina's position to say, well, you know, like we would love to help you, but we just don't have what we need. But that's not how this
rolled out. I was to joke in the office that we could have a TV show, you know, like the old show Everybody Loves Raymond called Everybody Loves Phelipe, because if I so much as suggested that we might close his case, I was going to have five law students in my office telling me I was insane or worse.
So we just kind of kept it open. So I brought in my old law school classmate, Zach Margatie's anama to do some work with me on the case and lighten the load so I could justify keeping full this file up in And then in the Hall of Seen we started to think we might be able to get Flip out of prison another way, not a prison break, although I think that had this failed, that probably would have been Nina and a helicopter. I have no problems
prison breaks. I'm glad it didn't come to that. So the next and only probably remaining option was couberatorial clemency. So we actually got a call in our office, the Innocence Project, from one of the lawyers in Governor Cuomo's office in New York saying that they were actively soliciting clemency applications from people who had I think what they called exemplary prison work, So people who had done very well inside and had proven that they would be no
threat to anyone on the outside. And of course it helps if you have a lot of evidence that they're innocent, and you know, many of our innocent clients, they're they're in the middle of a healthscape, nightmare, get into some fights, get into drugs, get into all kinds of things just to survive. And you know who among us can judge who has never spent a night in one of those places.
But Philippe and a few of our other clients had managed to have really truly extraordinary records inside of community service, peacefulness, the respect and trust of the staff and the CEOs, and so it was pretty obvious that Philippe would be one of the people who we would want to put forward. But when I went to go talk to Philippe about it,
he said, well, it's not an exoneration. And Philippe, before you get into that, as the man of principle that you are, you had refused to go in front of the parole board because of the fact that they were expecting or even insisting that you were going to admit guilt and remorse a crime you didn't commit. So you had made a conscious decision that you would rather stay in prison than tell a lie and admit to something
you didn't do. When they told me that I was for parole, I told the depth of security at the time, Peter Early. He came to see me and said, you listen, you offer parole. You know I'm gonna. I want to give you a letter of commendation so that you could give parole. I said, I don't want a letter. With all due respect, I appreciate your intentions, but I'm not appearing before parole. I don't want to go out that way.
I'm not negotiating my innocence. I said, I am willing to die in prison if they're not going to recognize that I'm an innocent man. And then came Nina surely thereafter, with this great idea of a partner or a commentation from the governor. I said, no, I said, I'm not interested in that. I that's not an exameration. She said, hold on, I got some nice tickets to the Yankees,
great box seats. When you want to go to a game, we Filippino and you know, man, she saw that ship to me immediately though, Dude, she said, well, we're still fine for your exageration, and we're gonna we're gonna cut your name, but at least we'll get you out of here.
So I said, all right, try it. So it was almost by Christmas the depth of security came Tepp early he would come like with buddies and and I was on the ladder painting, and the death of security came, and he said, a rod get down from the ladder. So the way he said it, I thought I was in trouble. I said, in what did I do? So I getting answer? What's up? That? He said? Get in my truck. I said, what happened? What did I do? He said, you didn't do nothing. Get in the truck.
So I got in the truck. You can't get in the depth struck, dude, no inmate guests you no depth truck. So I knew something was was amiss when a depth of security tell you to get on his struck and then take you outside of the jail to his office. So once I've seen that, I was going outside the gate, I said, you're death. He said, relaxed, everything is good. So we went to his office and there it is the Superintendent, the dep of Administration, dep of Programs, tepperarily
and the Lieutenant. So he says, sit on my chair man. I say, I mean I can tell the bricks. I supposed up that. He said, sit on my chair. Go ahead. So I sat on the depth chair and the Superintendent said, in all the years that I've been in corrections, I never had the privilege to do this. The governor of the state, under your constitu grant you a commutation. Dep said, um, my phone is your phone. You could do whatever you want with my phone. Go ahead and die whatever you
want to die. This is your phone. Is your office for today. The first phone call I made my son. I called my son and I don't flip it, I said, R I said, he's overdue. I said, uh, coming home. I called Nina, and you already knew. She's a bump. She didn't let me know, but she already knew. And Zack knew too. And he's another bomb. He didn't tell me either, So it was like a big bomb dropped on me. You know. I didn't think a commentation will
feel the way that felt. But to get out and be able to hold my son and and see the city after almost three decades, see it and walk free and smell the air, and get in the car and and do the things that we so much take for granted. It was amazing to be restarted back to some extent of humanity, to feel that sense of belonging, to sense that freedom that only comes from you doing what you want when you want to do it. Most people don't know what it feels like because they never lost their freedom.
Freedom is a gift. It is the greatest gift any human being ever has. I am in eternal debt to the entire staff of the INS Project. Governor Cuomo also deserves some gratitude from me, and the next step was even better. But this was a crucial moment in my life after spending twenty six years and nine months in prison, So the best was yet to come. And I'll never forget your sort of homecoming lunch in New York City. I was sort of very blessed to be there for
your first free hug with your son. I had some amazing photographs. I think I was a designated photographer for that moment, and it was just the type of moment that I think we live for all of us who work in this field. And of course then there's still more good news. On a cold day in Queens, New York, we witnessed the formal exoneration three years to the day after he got his clemency. December is Philippe's lucky day, So watch out powerball people, because if he plays the
lottery on that day, things his way exactly. And I didn't plan it that way. It just happened, and it was pretty much the last official act from the outgoing administration of Richard Brown. Mr Brown died in office about six months before Philip they was exonerated, but one of his top aids. Bob Masters agreed. After Philip they was
granted clemency. Bob Masters, who was one of the most senior officials in a very large Day's office, agreed to my pleading to have somebody with authority take a closer look at the case. And I spent about close to the better part of those three years working with him to dig up every last bit of paper that they could find and help them understand on the significance of what they saw by explaining and really opening up our
files for the whole case to them. And on December twenty three I finally got a call from Bob Masters that he agreed that there was a lot of evidence in that Day's file and then the police file that none of us had ever seen the Philippe based trial lawyers certainly never had, and that the jury never had. That convinced him that philip Based right to a fair
trial had been egregiously violated. Okay, so they found a statement from Ramos taken by a Long Island Railroad detective with Ramo's claiming that Philippe was with a black man when he allegedly returned the car. So that's a totally different story. There and then, in front of Robert Masters, Ramos recanted his identification of Phelipe, blaming pressure from police
at the time. I mean, there was also a statement from a bar patron named William Perry that a friendly stated that the couple had arrived in the black Monty car, which undermined the entire theory about the white car seen by Soloni. And if that wasn't enough, one of the biggest red flags of all was that Detective by Zell had gained permission to arrest Phelippe. Get this eight days before Ramos had changed his story from Pereira to Phelipe. I mean, it's unsucking believable, and it left the d
a's office no choice. Finally, Bob Masters agreed, and he had convinced the district Attorney that throwing out fully based conviction and exonerating him was the right thing to do. And I was able to give fully by pretty good Christmas presents. I called him on Christmas Eve and said, can you come to the office. And I couldn't tell him why I wanted him to come in, because he'd want to know what was going on, and so what do I don't you look? I think I said, I
need you to look at some papers. You need to start scions of papers. Come look at some papers. Every typical lawyer excuse. And he was working at a hotel and town and on the way home he stopped off. And when I got there, she's all smiley and you know, being you know, you know how you doing? What's up? And I said, was a documents? Because the documents? She said, relax. You know Santa Claus brought you a gift. And I said what gift? She said, what You finally got what
you wanted. And I looked at Nina say like, nah, I don't drive this again. And she said, well, on decembertery, you will be exagerated. I made my whole world turned upside down, dude, and my then eighteen years of the Innocence Project, this was the first client that I'd ever gotten to tell in person that he was getting exonerated.
I done a lot of joyful phone calls, but the first time, because he was a New Yorker and he was already free and body if not a name, that I got to actually tell someone in my office and be there with him when he got to call all his family members and tell them the good news. So that was pretty special. So now we get to the part of the show that everyone especially looks forward to, and that part of the show is called closing arguments, and this is where, first of all, I thank each
of you. Um Nina Morrison, thank you so much for being on the show again. Thanks Jason, great to be back. And Felipe Rodriguez, thanks again for being here and sharing your story with us. Thank you very much. And now I'm gonna I'm gonna turn my mic off, kick back in my chair, closed my eyes and leave the mic on. Nina, why don't you go first, and then when you're done, just hand the mike off to Felipe, and then Felipe
you do the mic drop. It's hard to know what to say to some up or make meaning out of what Felipe went through. We do know a few things. Why is that he never should have been arrested or charged in the first place, That there was so much evidence even at the time that made very clear that they had the wrong man. Another is that if police and prosecutors had turned over still more evidence that no one on the defense team in Phelippe himself didn't know
was there, he never would have been convicted. Fortunately, New York has since changed its laws on what's called pre trial discovery, meaning the universe of documents that you get not but as a prosecutor says, well, I think this is helpful to you, so I'm going to provide it, and I'm legally obligated to provide it. But all of the documents collected in connection with an investigation, police reports and notes now need to be turned over as a
matter of right. So had these laws been in place at the time Phelipe was charged, I like to think that he never would have been convicted. So we are grateful to the legislature and to the governor for enacting its discovery reform, as we call it, into law, and for keeping the bill strong because it will prevent more Phelifa Rodrigous. It's from going to prison for crimes I didn't commit. So I came out of prison on January.
A week and a half later, Nina Morrison got me to go and walk into the President of Locals six Total Trades Council Union, Mr Peter Ward. He was really taken aback by what I've been through, and he said, look, if nobody wants to hire you, I'll make the call myself. And I became a hotel worker and I just got laid off because of the COVID, But I was making good money healthcare. I got a great family and it. Nina is the one responsible for me marrying Karen Rodriguez.
Nina has done so much for me. Nina is so intertwined in my home, in my life, in my future, in my past. It's amazing. I'm in a great position even though with this COVID. You know, I hear people saying that, oh, we feel like we're in jail. They don't even know what jeal is like. This is no way compared to jail. Trust me, I'm going to tell
you something that people should be thanking COVID. COVID has given the people a chance to know their children, to know their wives, to know their mothers, to talk to share moments with them. So what I say to people is I took prison and I made something good out of it. Let's take COVID and make something good out of it. I mean, sometimes it's stressful, you know, overwhelming with kids, you know, because you're not used to it. But let's see the positive. I mean, prison is a
dark place. I welcomed it. I used the tool that that was placed on my feet and I did something positive. We could do that during COVID. We we just gotta take it one day at a time, you know, and the rest should be history. Man, 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 wrong
for 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 wardas The music on 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 and association with Signal Company Number one