#196 Jason Flom with Gary Drinkard

Dalton Pace was a large man who ran a junkyard out of his home into Cater, Alabama. He was known to carry large amounts of cash. On August nineteenth, nineteen ninety three, after a brutal fight, someone shot Dalton Pace and stole that cash. Meanwhile, thirty five miles away, Gary Drinkerd's daughter and neighbors were delivering a litter of puppies while Gary was there laid up on the couch with a back injury on heavy pain meds, definitely in no shape to fight anyone, let alone a man the size

Thank you so much.

Jaison.

Great to be here, and with him is someone who he speaks of in the Reverend tones, and he's not the only one. His story will anger you, but his spirit will inspire you. Gary Drinkard, Welcome to Wronful Conviction.

Oh, thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here.

Let's start at the beginning. First of all, Gary, did you grow up in Alabama?

I did I've been all up in the north and out west and everything. I always came back to Alabama.

For the most part. You know, until this insane fate befel you, things were pretty good. Is that fair to say? Oh?

Yeah, everything was going great.

I had just followed fourteen acres of land and enrolled into college. We were fixing to build a dream home. And then bam, everything goes crazy.

Yeah, and everything really did go crazy. And just to set the stage, we're talking about the afternoon of August nineteenth, nineteen ninety three, when the body of Dalton Pace was found in his Decatur, Alabama home. He had been shot twice in the back and once in the head. Now, mister Pace ran a junk yard out of his home and was known for carrying large rolls of cash. He was a guy who didn't trust banks, so he was a logical target for somebody, and all of the cash,

This is really an extraordinary case because Gary was thirty five miles away and when the authorities got there they found a bottle of whiskey in a glass and they didn't even fingerprint these two items. After a couple of weeks, the investigation went nowhere, and suddenly Beverly Robinson, who happened to be Gary's half sister, went to the police and she said, I can help you find who killed Dalton Pace. She said it's my half brother, Gary Drinkard and they said, well,

She was almost sort of editing the tape for the cops. Gary, when did you first find out that you were considered a suspect?

Oh?

I had no clue until the police came one morning and busted my door open. They had a search more for marijuana. It was a quarter ounce, and they were looking for everything except marijuana. They threw my wife and myself on the ground, handcuffed us. They drug my kids out of the bedrooms. One of them stuck a gun to my son's face, leaving the bruise. They made my sixteen year old daughter and her friend come out of

The idea that they were willing to bust up your house and manhandle your family in a way that they did for a quarter ound supot. Of course, we know that that wasn't really what they were after, but that's the idea that it could be used as a pretext to go in and bust up a house and a family like that. That can't go on anymore.

Amazingly enough, it was dry in that area of marijuana at the time.

Beverly's the one that sold it to me.

They knew exactly where to go find it, and I'm really believing that they gave to her to sell to me.

Wow.

Well, I think it's important to realize that Beverly and Rex had also been busted and both of them were facing serious criminal charges. And Rex was on parole from Oklahoma, and he was facing forty years if he screwed up his parole, but as a career criminal, he was looking at a LFE sentence in Alabama. So both of them were hugely motivated to try to give them Gary a likely suspect in their mind, if they could get Geary to confess to something he wouldn't confess to and didn't do.

Now, Dalton Pace was not a small guy. Right, this is a big, strong man who put up a tremendous struggle, and that plays into the story as well. Gary, forget the fact that you had an airtight alibi because you were thirty five miles away and there was a particular reason why your alibi was so tight. Just explain to the audience what was going on that very day when mister was murdered.

I had bought fourteen acres of land, and the neighbor had gave my daughter a Pickanese dog that was pregnant. She wanted to pick of the litter of the puppies, and she told us when she started having the puppies to call her and she would come out there and

And you were also in no physical shape to murder anybody at the time, right.

No, I was on strong muscle lectures and I was laid up on the couch and from a back injury.

Is it fair to say that you couldn't have even driven to thirty five miles, much less got out of the car and gone it. Struggled with a big, strong man.

I could have actually driven there, but I couldn't have struggled with him and overcame anything.

So, Richard, how the hell did they build a care with no evidence? And how were they able to convince a jury that he did it when it should have been obvious to anyone that these snitches were incentivized and in all likelihood were the actual perpetrators.

Well, it's a great question because Geary was appointed for that first trial three local lawyers, but none of them were experienced criminal lawyers, and especially not in the death penalty arena. They didn't call the doctor that treated Geary that would have explained the extent of his condition. The fingernail scrapings that were on the deceased Dalton pace. They didn't even challenge that they weren't tested, nor that fingerprints that were taken from the whiskey wasn't compared to Rex

You no, jury's can be misled fairly easily when people in positions of power view that power. And that's exactly what happened here. Now, the jury didn't deliberate very long.

Yeah, approximately an hour.

The judge had told one of his secretaries, and it got back to my mother that if I put on some type of mitigating evidence that he would give me a life without problem. Well, I wasn't about to get my mother up there begging and crying for my life when I hadn't done anything, and I didn't put on any mitigating evidence, and I was found guilty and sentenced to death. And that was devastating because I figured, well, I'm going down there with the worst of the worst.

I think it's a lot of people's worst nightmare and you were living it. Can you just give us a sense of death row in Alabama? You know, take us inside that cell if you can't.

Well, it was a little five by eight concrete cell. I mean most people's bathrooms are larger than that.

It was nasty.

They would give you clean and supplies, but you couldn't keep it clean. There was cockroaches three inches long, rats running around, insane people hollering. We had a man I was on the second tier. There was a man on the first tier. He would holler twenty four hours a day day. There were people committing suicide trying to beat the executioner. There were people committing suicide because they were in so much pain and the doctors wouldn't help them.

This episode is underwritten by the AIG pro Bono Program. AIG is a leading global insurance company, and for over a decade, the AIG pro Bono program has provided thousands of hours of free legal services and other support to nonprofit organizations and individuals most in need. More recently, the program added criminal and social justice reform as a key

The first attorneys at the trial didn't do a good job, and I was fearful that the appeals attorney wouldn't do a good job. So I wrote mister Stevenson begging for an attorney to handle my appeals. When I did hear back from him, he appointed mister Randy Suskin to handle my appeals.

I was thrilled Gary got.

A new trial because of prosecutorial misconduct improper evidence offered against him in his first trial.

And now that Brian Stevenson and Randy Suskin have done their part.

You got involved.

You weren't even really a decated lawyer, so you had to basically pull some strings and maneuver yourself into this case.

If I was going to get on, I knew that I would have to get appointed. The problem with getting appointed was that the judge doesn't know me. I've not practiced there, but John Mays, my good friend, did and does practice there. So John was ultimately able to talk to Judge into appointing us both with some conditions, and then Steve Wright from the Southern Cider from Human Rights called me at home and he offered the services of

I think for many people listening, they're probably going, well, Okay, now you got this dream team. You have all this evidence. The state has no evidence. This should have been a slam dunk.

The first thing that happened in this case right before trial that basically just blew our world was this We were counting on the perfect alibi that Geary had, which was multiple people besides of course the doctor in his back. And one of those alibi witnesses testified in the first trial,

So they were far from done with their dirty tricks. And in fact, they really pulled the rug out from under you in a pretty serious way here. So you had to pivot. But that wasn't the only card you had to play.

Oh no, no, no. So where I candidly made a tremendous tactical mistake, and I write about it in the book with clarity and candor, because lawyers need to be conscious of every word they speak. And I ask a question that I never should have asked, and it was what were the scratches that she claimed that she sold twelve days later when she said Gary confessed, where were

There's no way.

And once I overcame that hurdle, then showing that she was beyond belief was very easy to do, especially since we had Affi Davids from all the people she stole from in Panama City that she denied.

So the step daughter's claims about an alleged compession were proven to be totally incredible. That lie brought to you, of course by prosecutor conduct. But this wasn't the only person that they'd courced.

An alibi witness that was a friend of Gary's daughter. We flew her up from Oregon on our own dime, and when the investigators and the prosecution found out, they intimidated her at the motel where she was staying and basically spooked her, and she refused to testify. They threatened her with perjury, and that would have been a nice thing to have her because she was another strong alibi witness that they used their power to keep her from testifying.

Now comes another state's witness. Beverly gets back on the stand to repeat the lies she told in the first trial, and really the lies that started the whole thing. And of course she denied having an incentive to lie, and Richard proved that her denials were lies, destroying her credibility. So now Beverly, who bears a great deal of responsibility for Gary's wrongful conviction, was all deflated. And when she

Right as she was getting off the stand, she looks over at me and says, Carrie, I've always loved you. And the judge said, get her out of here, get her out of here. I mean, everybody in there could tell she was lying. Everybody could tell she was hot, she was hopped up.

That's like, it's like a movie. It's like it's like some of my cousin VINNI shit or something. It's crazy. Really, what were the other key things that you think really turned the jury around.

Well, let me start by saying this that in the first trial, the detective detective Gary Walker had said that while listening to the tape recorded conversation between and Beverly, his half sister, that Gary confessed. And I already mentioned that, but the tape got enhanced because we insisted the FBI and Anstein. They brought the agent to testify in the state court, and the FBI agent had to be honest.

I knew we'd put on a good case, and I knew I had a good chance of being found not guilty. But you'll never never allow your hopes to get up, or you'll get crushed and it'll devastate you all over again. But when they sent the jury out to deliberate, Richard and the other attorneys went after some coffee. Well, the

Jesus Christ again, if you put that in a movie, somebody would go, now, I be gonna believe that. Sorry, I gotta take that out.

Gary.

We talked about the worst moment of your life when you were found guilty. So this is the opposite. Paint the picture for us as best you can. You take us inside that moment in the courtroom.

Well, when they told me to stand up and they pronounced a not guilty verdict, everybody in the courtroom, I believe had tears. I think the old judge even she had a couple of tears. That was probably the happiest moment of my life.

We interviewed the drawers afterwards and they all said, basically, look, we know he never could have done it, he never should have been charged, and we reached our verdict in less than five minutes. There's no way to quantify the depth of your feelings when someone is basically snatched away from the grips of death.

Well, I'm walking out the courthouse and my mother's there, my ex wife's there with my children, are good friends there. My kids are just thrilled to death, and they asked me what's the first thing I want to do. I said, get some barbecue right away.

So, Gary, since getting out, you've been doing some great work with Witnessed Innocence, Kirk Bludsworth and the whole crew, raising awareness you're literally on a mission to abolish the death penalty. I would love to hear more about.

That, Okay, be glad to Witness to Innocence is an anti death penalty organization which came to me approximately five years after I was out. The group consists of people that have been exonerated from death row and their family members and support members. We go around the country speaking to anyone that listened to us. We've got this penalty called accuracy and justice. We speak to prosecutors, we speak

How can people get involved?

A website Witness Innocence dot org.

That's Witness to Innocence dot org. A great organization. By the way, we have the link in the bio along with links to the groups that help free Gary. Of course, I'm talking about the Equal Justice Initiative and the Southern Center for Human Rights. So just scroll down and get involved.

Anything we left out.

So we're going to save the best for Lass, of course, and no offense to the great Richard Jaffy. But that means you, Gary, you're bat and clean up here, so to speak. So Richard, the mic is yours.

This case is the perfect example of every reason why the death penalty should be abolished, because everything that's wrong with it is present in this case. One, it was a lottery that Geary ended up with the legal team he ended up with for the second trial, in particular the Southern Center for Human Rights John Mays, Chris Adams. And secondly, Geary got a new trial because of prosecutorial misconduct, and then when his second trial begins, there was more

Kary over to you.

When I got off out of prison, I knew I had to get a different vocation other than construction because it still had a hurt back.

And I went to college.

I told the teachers what had happened, asked them, could I get a job?

They said yes.

I signed up for respiratory therapy. I was doing good in class, I was doing great in clinicals six months before graduation. The hospital will hire you if you're doing good, nurses warned me, because I could feel the patient's pain and they.

Wouldn't hire me.

They laughed when they seen that I'd been convicted of capital murder. They laughed, said, no hospital in the country will hire you. That's still on my record, witness to innocence. I saw what they were doing. I saw the potential in the organization, and I said, definitely, I would love to be a member.

And to me, this is one of.

The best, most powerful anti death penalty organizations around. Before this COVID thing, I was traveling probably once a month without just speaking engagements. But now since this COVID thing's going on, I sit at home and hope somebody will call.

Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction with Jason flamm. Please support your local innocence projects and go to the link in our bio to see how you can help. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Clyburn and Kevin Wardis. The music on the show as always, is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction on