On September sixth, nineteen ninety eight, three teenagers from Chicago, Jared Adams, Dmitri Henley, and Rovon Hill, took a trip to the University of Wisconsin Whitewater for a party. While trying to meet up with their friends, a student named Sean Demain invited the guys into his dorm room to use his phone, where they ended up hanging out with the man's friends and meeting two girls who will refer
to as the accuser and her roommate. After some flirting, the two young white women invited the three young black men back to their own dorm room, and the group slowly trickled up to the room. When the roommate finally arrived, the accuser was performing oral sex on one of the young men on the roommate's bed. Enraged, the roommate called the accuser a slut and ran out of the room. The accuser ran after her roommate, who went into a
friend's room and locked the door. When her apology was rebuffed, the accuser returned to the room and continued the sexual encounter. Later on, the group all went outside to the smoking area, where they reconnected with John Demaine joked around and went home. It all seemed like a consensual coming of age experience
until it wasn't. Three months later, the criminal legal system and the racism that has always plagued our country came to claim three more victims, and in typical fashion, money and arbitrary procedural bars made for three radically different outcomes for these three young men, two of whom spent nearly a decade each behind bars. This is Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flaum. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm.
That's me.
I'm your host, and I am particularly excited today, even honored because we have such an incredible group of guests. First of all, Keith Finley is on the show, and Keith is all. I'm just going to say it like it is. He's a legend in the innocence community, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, former president of the Innocence Network, which is an affiliation of early seventy innocence organizations throughout the world, co founder of the
Wisconsin Innocence Project. You may know him from Making a Murderer as well. Keith, all I could say is I'm really honored that you're here.
Thanks so much.
I'm really glad to be with you here.
And so with us today are two guys I'm proud to call my friends, both of whom are roughly convicted of a crime that never happened. So, first of all, Jared Adams, your journey post exoneration has been nothing short of remarkable. Jared has been an attorney with the Innocence Project, He's now in private practice, he's an author, He's been on TV a bunch of times. Jared, I'm so sorry for what you went through, but I'm glad you're here.
Thank you. Jason. I appreciate you having beyond.
And with him is Dmitri Henley. Dmitri was convicted of the same crime that Jarrett was convicted of, again as a crime that didn't happen, and Dmitri still has not gotten justice, and we're going to get into that. So I appreciate you being here, Dmitri.
All right, thanks for having me.
So before we get into the store, Jarrett and Dmitri, where did you grow up and how was your life in a nutshell before this this insane saga began.
So we grew up South side of Chicago and attended the same high school a little bit outside of Chicago in the suburbs, and you know, we met through passing, but we knew with each other and he and working at the same summer job and started to hang out together.
So Jared, take us back to the day in question. Its September sixth, nineteen ninety eight. You and Dmitria a third friend, Rovon Hill. You guys headed up to the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater to go to a party, you know, just doing like normal stuff that kids all over the country are doing basically every day, right, Yeah, So.
I mean, that's just it. The neighborhoods in which we and Dmitria grew up in are extremely rough, and you know, we weren't in gangs doing drive by shooting each other. That's just not what we were into. Each one of us came from backgrounds and families where our families were active in our lives. You know, where you're going, what
you're doing. So how we got there was this. We each told our parents we were spending the night over each other's house, and we all three went to go to this party and puol what is known as.
Like an all nighter.
We would go up to the party, party all night, and then afterwards we would hit a waffle house and be back home at about seven eight, you know in the morning. Right, we had done it before, no issues, no problems at all. And so we go to this party and we're looking, you know for the main central party room. But when we got to this campus, it
was parties in every dorm room. You could go to this dorm room, beer pong, this dorm room, people smoking weed and and so we just were kids escaping the violence in Chicago going to a party on a college campus like so many other kids do each and every day in America.
Yes, I mean I think a lot of people are listening now and going, hey, that reminds me. One time I went out, I told my parents da da dah, and then I stuck in. And you know, so who is Sean Demain Because you ended up going to his room to use the phone? Right, how does that play into any of this?
So Shandamain actually saved our life. It's who he is because he was the person who you know, unbiased and supported you know, our version.
Of events, the truth.
And so when we go to this college campus again, there's parties everywhere, but we're looking for a specific party. So we talked to Shan Domain who was outside in like a smoking area. And just so the listeners are understanding, this is nineteen ninety eight, so this is before everyone had cell phones. People usually had pages, so we went to use his phone. But when we were doing it, it was like his room was like party central checking. So it was everal people who would come in, Hey,
got what you guys doing. Hey, we're getting ready to go here. Hey you got a beer? You know, Hey, we'll be back downstairs a little bit later. We were all playing video games in there, so when we're playing a video games, it's when these two young ladies come into the dorm room and we're flirting, we're talking, we're laughing, everybody's drinking, and eventually we all make our way upstairs to our accusers dorm room, and we did it like staggered. First, Dmitri and Rovan went up and I came up a
few minutes later, and we were there. We were in a room and we had a consensual encounter and this young lady's roommate walked in on it, and that's when the wheels of a false accusation started to turn.
So the roommate walks in on you in the midst of this sexual encounter and calls the accuser a slut and then runs down the hall to a friend's storm room. Now, at this point, your accuser gets up, goes after the roommate, but doesn't say anything at all about being raped or assault or anything like that, but simply not on the door,
and says, are you mad at me? The roommate wouldn't open the door, and according to a sworn statement I have right here, the roommate said, and this is a direct quote, I told her to go back to doing whatever she was doing, but not on my bed. So it's probably fair to say that that might have been what made her mad. So the accuser went back to
the room they shared and continued the sexual encounter. So I mean, I don't think I'm alone here in being confused, because if an actual assault was taking place, as was alleged, why does her roommate call her a slut instead of trying to do something to save her or summon help. And after chasing her roommate down the hall, why did she go back to her room instead of trying to escape or again trying to cry out to get someone to help her. It doesn't add up.
Number One, The roommate walks into her room and sees the accuser on her bed engaging in what her looks like consensual sexual activity. That's why she calls her a slot and runs down the hall. Second point, if it's a rape, are these guys going to let the victim get up and leave at on her own free will? Yet that's exactly what she did. Then, if it's a rape, is the victim going to say, are you mad at me? Or is she going to say, hell me, I'm being raped? But no, she says, are you mad at me? Now?
The question you asked is what's the explanation as to why she walked back.
To the room.
The closest they came to an explanation was that she was going to leave, and she was walking towards the stairs, which took her past the bedroom, but there was a stairwell at the other end of the hall.
She didn't go that way.
She walked back towards her room, and in the process she walked past the room of the ra who lived on the hall, and didn't knock on that door ask for help. During the course of the encounter, she got a phone call from somebody and she chatted on the phone and giggled, never said anything about I'm being raped. I mean, it's just a head scratcher. How anyone could have thought this was a sexual assault.
And not only that, I actually accompanied her walking down to the room that the roommate went into, and I was there with her while she was standing there trying to talk to her through the door, and when she could not even gain any access and went back to the room, I stayed there because I tried to talk her roommate out of the room, because we talked a little bit when we was in Sean de Maine's room, so I can actually hear them in the room, the
roommate and the residents of that room having a conversation. But they decided not to come out, so I went back to the room. We engaged in the sexual acts, and then we actually went downstairs to the smoking area.
And I thank god that we all did, because when we went downstairs in the smoking area, Sean Demaine was outside and he was the one who created the timeline of corroborating our innocence. It was so so crazy, because this thing was out of embarrassment. You know, this girl didn't go to the police or anything. She went to a friend and said, my roommates making these accusations about me being a slut, saying that I was sleeping with these black guys. That didn't happen. So before you hear it,
I was actually rape. It was that friend who went to another friend, and that's how the rumor started to circulate and the investigation started. This young lady, through the help of the police, said that she walked up to her dorm room and was opening the door, and before she knew it, two to three black guys that she didn't know was behind her, and we just walked our way into her room, cut the lights out, and played the music. The accusation wasn't that she knew us or
that she met us. We knew we had been invited up. We knew that after the roommate had walked into the room, we had all went down in the smoking area where we were with Sean Demain again. And so if you're asking the questions about how on earth could an incomplete and crazy story like this make its way to a
conviction and result in twenty eight and twenty years. It's because we were try as black men raping a white girl, and it did not matter if it made sense because of the historical depiction of black men and white accuses.
And we know how that can go.
Three young black men from Chicago visiting UW Whitewater. It's a fairly rural community that's very white, and a lot of these sexual assault cases are difficult because he said, she said, But this one, in so many respects, wasn't
even he said, she said. The accuser's own version of events was actually, in many respects, in many important respects, the same as Dimitri and Jared's version, in that she candidly admitted on the stand that no one used force against her, no one raised their voice, no one threatened her. And so when I read the transcripts of this, I was scratching my head and said, well, where's the sexual assault?
All we see here is that she says they engaged in sex, And what made it a sexual assault in the prosecution's eyes and in this community's eyes, was that she claim that, despite the absence of any physical force, despite the absence of any threats, she went along with the sexual acts because she was frightened of these men. Well, think about it. Why in the world would she be frightened of them if they were all at a college party together and they'd been flirting, and she invited them
up to her room. You know, nobody was doing anything by onderarth writing. The only thing that I can conjure up in my mind that explains this potential fright is that they were black men.
You know.
I was struck also as I was reviewing aspects of this horrible story that there was a number of months went by before you were arrested. And of course I'm talking about December one, nineteen ninety eight. But why was that the lapsed time in there? This must have been all in just distant memory at this point, right.
Yeah, Yeah, I really can't answer what took so long, other than to suggest that, I mean, clearly, if it had been an open and shutcase from the beginning, it wouldn't have taken so long. Clearly, the police and prosecutors recognized that there were problems with this story, and they took some time to build the best case they could.
So, unbeknownst to us, Sean Demain wrote a three page handwritten statement saying everything that we're saying right now on this podcast. So the police had already had that statement and they couldn't explain it. And then they went and did a check on the phone records, and during the time that we were up there in this young lady's room, the phone was ringing. She was on the phone talking
to friends. So the authorities, instead of allowing the evidence to tell them the truth, they decided that they were going to make a case and base it off of race.
And nothing was going to keep them from doing that.
So leading up to the arrest, you know, I'm working as an assistant manager at this grocery store and my dad comes by the job and says, hey, you know, the police came by the house. They want you to come down to police station to grew you out as a suspect and an armed robbery.
I said, Dad, this is absolutely nuts.
That said, I'm not going down there, man, because I don't know what they're doing to me.
I heard stories.
I didn't think it was gonna be a good idea, but my dad was like, no, I think you should go. So make a long story short, after work, I went down there. My dad went along with me. He was sitting down in the lobby. So I'm talking to one of the texts at the time. You know, we just want to rule you out, you know, we don't want you to get in trouble. When we get done asking a few questions, maybe we'll take you downstairs to take some pictures.
So I said, okay, fine, no problem. So that's what.
Happened, same thing they did to me.
I come home one day and there's a card in my door and it's from the police and it says robbery homicide. I'm like, nah, I know they got the wrong God like, let me let me call in before my crazy father see this in this door and just go nuts, right.
So I called.
And the guy was like, hey, you know this is a textive so and so, and you know, we just want you to come down and take a picture so we can, you know, rule you out of this accusation because you know, we know you've never been in trouble and we don't have you know, a booking photo or anything like that. You know, just come rule yourself out.
I'm like, man, I'm on my way. So when I go down there and they have an investigator from Wisconsin there and the investigator is asking me all these questions about you know, us going to the party, and did you go to the party, did you have sex at this party? And I'm answering the question straight forward, like like I'm doing now. Yeah, you know, we had a crazy incident with this girl and her roommate were arguing.
So they come and arrest me for a first degree sexual assault and I'm like sexual assault, Like when did this happen?
I wasn't disbelieve. I couldn't believe it.
And being a kid at that time, I'm thinking that they're going to arrest me. I'm finna go right out here to prove my innoc's nabby, right back to my life. Of course, she didn't happen that way.
I was gonna be charged, along with Dimitri and Rovan with five counts of first to resexual assault. I think I was turning eighteen, like a couple months later, and Dimitri had already turned eighteen and Rovan was eighteen, so we were all kids, Like I remember being so quiet, you know, on that intake getting off the bus going through intake.
We wasn't in Kansas anymore, you know.
So all three of you guys were arrested on December first of nineteen ninety eight. I'm talking about Ravan of course, as the third person arrested, but we haven't really talked about him. Keith, if you could explain how these.
Paths diverged at this point, right, because the three guys were all accused of the same exact thing, in the same exact circumstance, but all three ended up with completely different outcomes.
Yeah, it was exact same conduct, the exact same incident, the exact same time, place, circumstance, exact same evidence. Everything was identical. But you're exactly right, three very different outcomes, which is part of what we've been trying to get the legal system to pay attention to. And how did that happen, Well, the three of them were charged together. They were tried together initially, but the first trial ended
in a mistrial. The prosecution was apparently expecting a strong statement from the accuser coming in about how she was forced and all that, and yet when she got up on the stand, she acknowledged that there was no force used, that no one threatened her.
Et cetera.
And so the prosecutor recognized that there was a fatal flaw in the case as originally charged, and so the prosecutor moved to amend the charges to fit the evidence
as it had come in from the accuser. And at that point Gerald Boyle, defense attorney for Ravan Hill, just went nuts objected, and the court agreed that it was unfair to amend the charges mid trial like that, after the case had been partly presented, after strategies had been locked in and whatnot, and so the prosecutor declared a mistrial. A mistrial simply means that this trial ends and we're going.
To do it again.
But there are some circles instances in which a mistrial ends the case for good. And Ravon Hill's lawyer thought that this mistrial was caused by the prosecution's own mistakes and therefore a retrial should be barred. And so as the prosecution set to retry all three of them, Ravon Hill and his attorney sought leave to appeal and to
stop the retrial from occurring. The prosecution, not wanting to wait for that appeal to be concluded, then just pulled Dmitri in Garrett's cases away from Ravan's and initiated the retrial for them without Ravan Why Jarrett and Dmitri's lawyers didn't join in that appeal. I have no idea, but they didn't didn't stop the appeal, so Dmitri and Jarrett were tried together without ravon at a second trial.
What's particularly sickening to me is the fact that your attorneys called no witnesses at the trial. No freaking witnesses here. It is your life is at stake. They didn't even make an effort on your behalf.
Tell them about the no defense theory, Kief.
Yeah, so that's actually the basis upon which we ultimately succeeded in getting Jared's conviction overturned, was claiming that defense
council was constitutionally deficient under the sixth Amendment. Both Dimitri and Jareded's lawyers got together and talked about it and decided they would present what they called a no defense defense, which means they were just going to rest on the prosecution's case and say, well, they didn't prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, so we're not going to put on anything.
And what we argued in what the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit agreed was that made absolutely no sense at all because they had a defense this was entirely consensual, and the consensual nature of it was in a very compelling way, corroborated established by the testimony not only of the accuser's roommate, but also by the testimony of Shan Domain And these lawyers never even talked to Shan Demaine.
So let's just go to the moment that had to be the worst moment of a lot worst moments, which is, of course, when the jury came back.
I remember sitting out in the lobby talking to my dad, and my dad the type of guy he was.
He was a very confident guy, you know.
For seeing my dad when he was reacting, and seeing Jared Diad how he was reacting when we were talking about really strong men, I mean, just out there, very nervous. I couldn't help at that moment before we even heard the verdict, just become very emotional.
Yeah, I remember both our dads, you know, had to be escorted out of the courtroom.
You know, they just couldn't believe it.
And when we're found guilty, I just, man, I had to say something. So I'm like, this is a lie, you know, I'm apologizing to my parents. I'm like, but I'm not about to apologize for a rape I didn't commit. So they ended up giving me eight more years in prison based on that, saying that I wasn't remorse for and I had an outburst. So me and Dmitri were split up based on that, I went to a maximum slash super maximum. Dmitri because he had twenty years, he was like on a track to go to meet prison
right away. Based on the time in Wisconsin, if you get anything over twenty five years, you're basically going to go do time with everybody who has twenty five to life. And so after we were found guilty, Ravine hadn't went to trial yet. I started to write letters to Raban's attorney.
That's when boiling them for the first time interview Sean Demain, and when they interviewed Shondmain, they called them as a witness and Demain was like, look, I wrote a three page statement when the officer came and talked to me the night after, so I don't know what else you guys want. That's how we found out that the officer never turned over that three paige statement. It was never a part of the record when we were going to trial.
So they proceeded with a retrial against Ravne, and Ravne having a better lawyer than had been assigned to Jared
and Dimitri. Ravane's lawyer saw the value of Sean Demain as a neutral, independent witness who could both corroborate that the girls had been flirting with the boys before and had invited them up to their rooms, and even more importantly, could establish that after the alleged sexual assault, he saw Jarrett and Dimitri, along with the accuser and her roommate, socializing and laughing together in the smoking area outside the dorm rooms, which was entirely inconsistent with the accuser's version
of events and entirely inconsistent with what would have happened had they just completed a sexual assault. And so, having presented shond Mayne's testimony at his own trial, the jury deadlocked, was unable to reach a verdict, and so another mistrial was declared and all of the charges that were ultimately dismissed against Ravane.
I want to say one of the roughest days where I really just started to fall into a shale was when I found out that they dismissed all the charges against Rovin. When they found that statement that was with Hale by the police, and then A decided not to
give me a Dmitri new Trials. That's when I really was like, if it doesn't work, that evidence that supports all of your innocence that wasn't presented and didn't make his way in your trial, if it doesn't work by way of truth, then how does the system ever work? I mean, that's really how I felt.
I'm like, I thought, Okay, maybe.
Now that they have this statement, they know and they all apologize and will come home. Never happened like that, And I remember, you know, my salemate. I was locked up old white guy. You know, he was the one who encouraged me to pick up the pen and start to write. And essentially it was if you gonna go down,
go down swinging. And I started to write everyone that I could think of, and both me and Dmitri were writing the Innocence Project and everybody we could trying to figure out how could we get help.
I was at the time co directing the Wisconsin Innocence Project, is a clinical program in which law students handle real cases under faculty supervision. And we received these letters from both Dimitri and Jarrett asking for help and describing what had happened, and just by happenstance, we got to Dimitri's letter first, and so I gave it to my students to do an analysis of the case. And they came back and they said, this case is outrageous, this guy
is innocent. We've got to do something about it. And so we looked at it and we realized that he had appealed through the state court system and had lost, which meant that federal Habeas corpus review was the next place to look. The problem is, we realized that under President Bill Clinton, Congress passed and Clinton signed into laws something known as the Anti Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. The acronym is called EDPAT, which made it much more
difficult to obtain federal Habeas corpus relief. And one of the ways it made it much more difficult was that it imposed a one year statute of limitations, and by the time we were able to review Dmitri's case, his one year had elapsed. He was procedurally barred from going into federal habeas. But the student said, but you know,
his co defendant also wrote. Jared Adams also wrote, and by pure happenstance, Jarrett and Dmitri's state court appeals had been handled separately, and Jarrett's appeal had been decided a short time later than Dmitri's, which means his one year statue limitations was a little bit later. And by the time we were able to review Jared's case, he still had about a week left before his statue limitations expired. And so my student said, look, we got to do something.
We've got to file this federal habeas. They drafted the habeas. We filed it just before the expiration of the one year deadline and just got it in under the window, and we're able to then proceed with litigating that claim. We were denied relief in the district court in Milwaukee. We appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and the three judge panel unanimously agreed
that Jared's conviction was invalid. Vag the conviction in June two thousand and six, and he was finally released from custody in January of two thousand and seven. This is how we wind up with three completely different outcomes. Ravine Hill never convicted Jared's convicted and serves the better part of a decade in prison, but then his conviction is vacated, so he's exonerated. In Dmitri exact same case, exact same facts, remains convicted of that crime to this day.
Yeah, I mean, it has to live his life with that sort of scarlet letter or you know, that stigma for no reason whatsoever.
Yeah.
I got to tell you is it is one of the great sadnesses of my career that we have not been able to correct this injustice for Dmitri.
I want to say, my dad actually passed six months before I got out, and it was one of the things I wanted him to disturb that moment.
And man, I told you someday I was going to make it here.
I wanted him to at least be a part of that moment, and he wasn't.
So after Jared was exonerated, we were still struggling with what had happened to Dimitri and said this can't be justice, and so we thought, well, what in the world can we do? We said, you know, there is a longstanding doctrine in Wisconsin law that says that circuit courts have the inherent authority to grant a new trial in the
interest of justice. It's just a broad discretionary granted authority and decided, well, if the interest of justice ever called for a new trial, this is the case where it calls for. So we filed a motion on behalf of Dimitri. Then went back to the same judge who presided over the conviction and said, look, this can't be justice in America.
To have these wildly disparate outcomes on the same facts and a federal appellate ruling saying that these guys have been denied their right to the effective assistance of counsel. This can't be right. And the trial judge agreed and said, in the interest of justice, I can't let this conviction stand, and she reversed Dimitri's conviction, to my great dismay, for reasons that I still can't fathom. The state chose to appeal that decision, and I'm thinking to myself at the time,
on what basis this is a discretionary judgment. Discretionary judgments are almost bulletproof on appeal because the very nature of discretion is the judge can do it or cannot do it. It's up to the judge. And what they actually just chose to appeal on was to challenge whether the judge even had the legal authority to grant a neutral and
the interest of justice at all. It went up to the Supreme Court, and we have now an extremely conservative, very pro prosecution Supreme Court, and they seized that opportunity, and in Dmitri's case, they changed the law and ruled that circuit courts do not have the authority to grant a neutrial and the interest of justice. They took that authority away and thereby reinstated Dmitri's conviction in what I see as one of the really sad moments in Wisconsin history.
So we tried another tack, and we went back to the same trial court judge again and said, all right, you can't vacate the conviction, but you can modify the sentence, and so please modify Dmitri's sentence to time served so that at least he can get out of prison. And to the judge's great credit, she did that, which is
why Dmitri was ultimately set free. But he remains convicted of a sexual assault and must register as a sex offender and bear all the burdens that go with being a convicted felon and a convicted sex offender.
And ultimately he was freed after.
How much time, almost two years.
I must say also that in these two cases of Jared and Dimitri, there are a lot of heroes at the end of the right. I mean, let's not forget the law student who managed to catch this before it fell through the cracks. And of course you and your whole team at the Wisconsin Innocence Project. We're gonna link in the bio to Wisconsin Innocence Project.
Jarrett.
Of course there's you and Dimitri, who are you know, just sort of pillars of strength and just courageous people who I think so many of us are inspired by. And anyone who's new to this cause wants to know two things. One is, if a prosecutor framed somebody, do they face any consequences? And we both know that the answer is almost one hundred percent of the time, no, none, whatsoever. And then they want to know people will tell me, please tell me the person who went through this got compensation.
And in your case, neither one of you guys got compensation, which is I mean, you know, it's nuts.
I mean, and Jason, listen, you know, so get compensation. Dmitry still has it on his record. Right, I'm gonna give you a quote Thurgood Marshall said that sometimes you got to just do what is right and let the
law catch up. And that's exactly the reason why I came home to get this degree to become an attorney, because I felt like this couldn't just be Jared Adams, DIMITRIENLEI wrongfully convicted, conviction reverse the end I needed to carry on to be able to get to this point where not only do I have the experience of going through it, but now I'm gaining the experience and I'm blessing the clients that I come across by helping them get through it.
No, and amen to that. It really is inspiring to see you out there fighting a good fight and channeling this awful, this nightmare that you went through into something so positive. So now Jared, you're an attorney. You have offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. I think you have a book coming out on top of everything else, which I'm I'm really excited to read. It's called Redeeming Justice. Jared, if you could just tell us a little bit about the book.
Right, So, it talks about my journey because what I didn't want people to think is that I got here alone, because I didn't get here alone.
I had to help with the community.
I had to help, and the support even of Dmitri while going through through years of law school. Me and Dmitri supported each other as well and Keith Finley. The Wisconsin inisis Project Life After Justice. If you want to go and support the work support Life After Justice, Support Center for Forensic Science, which I am a part of the board SIFTS along with Keith Finley. SIFTS is an organization that make sure we hold people accountable in terms of forensic evidence and how it's being used in the
ways in which it should and shouldn't be used. That's important to people's innocence as well. There are so many ways to get involved, including holding lawmakers and legislators responsible for laws such as that book which Keith spoke about, which is currently keeping Dmitri with this record. There are ways for us together to help and to right the wrongs that have been created by bad legislation. Use your voice, it is key.
So we're going to have a link to the book and they have a bio as well as a link for people who want to find out more. And get involved with the Center for Integrity and Forensic Sciences support click the link in the bio We need you. Now we turn to the closing of the show, which of course is called Closing Arguments. First of all, I thank each of you again from the bottom of my heart for being here, taking your time and sharing your stories. Jarrett is just an amazing guy man, and it's great
to have you here. Of course, Dmitri Henley, thanks again for sharing. I know it's not easy to share your story, but it's important. And Keith Finley, you know when I grow up, I want to be you. So what can I say? And now the closing Arguments works like this, I'm going to turn my microphone off and leave each of yours on for you to share any final thoughts that you want. You can say nothing or everything or anything in between. So let's finish the way we started. Professor,
why don't you go first? And then Jarrett and Dmitri?
Yeah? Thanks.
Well, first, let me start by saying thanks to Dmitri and Jarrett for being who they are and for having strength that they have shown to endure all this and to keep up the fight. It's not over. I don't know if I could have done what you've done, Jason, I got to say thank you to you for giving them a voice, for giving us a voice, for getting the word out there, for all you've done to support the movement. It's just vitally important what you're doing here
as well. And I guess the only other thing I'd say right now is this case is just a reminder of so many of the things that are wrong with our criminal justice system, beginning with the baked in racism that I think is just undeniable in a case like this, to the problems with the way counsel is assigned to people who can afford to hire their own lawyers. Too, as we've seen so strongly here, all of the barriers that legislatures, Congress, and the courts are erected to achieving
justice on behalf of the wrongly convicted. We got a lot of systemic reform we've got to engage in. That's why programs like this and the work of people like Jared Dimitri is so important.
Man.
Thank you, Keith, thank you Jason.
You know, when we were reached out to do this, I wanted to make sure that all three of us was on because we are all three connected.
You know, including Rovinne.
I mean, what many people don't know about Rovine is this, after Romane's charges were dismissed, Rovinn went to the army, and the army has its own experiences, both negative and positive as well. So it's like he had never talked about going to the army. He wanted to escape and never ever be in a situation like this again, and
that's forever changed his personality as well. And so to have gone through all of this, three different people, three different outcomes, you know, I decided to write this book about the journey and about the work that I'm doing now and about being able to work alongside of Keith now and to work and try to figure out how do we finally get finality in justice for Dimitri's case. And the book focuses on what it was like for me and Dmitri going through it and to have the
opportunity now to speak about it, you know. Compensated. I didn't get it done. I got out, and I bust my butt to get to where I am. But I believe in sending the elevator back down, which is why, no matter you know, how or where my career, you.
Know leads me.
I most certainly won't forget those who help me on my journey, Keith Finley, the Wisconsin Innocence Project, and also those who are part of my journey, Dmitri and Jason. I can't thank you enough. I mean, this is a huge platform and what it does, I hope you know this is this for many people, me and Dmitri included. This platform gives people for the very first time, to be the author of their own story because for so long, the police reports and the false narratives within them have
become the facts of the case. And now because of this platform, the record could be set straight. You know, Jason, you guys are the only podcast that would have me, Keith and Dmitri telling the story together, and I thank you guys for that opportunity. I want people to go out by the book and support Life After Justice, a nonprofit and also sifts the Center for for Ends the Integrity.
Thank you guys again.
I really appreciate you.
Keith Man, you know, you guys gotten me who I am right now and I'm.
Very appreciative of that. Thank you again.
Think Wisconsin ANDSCE Project, you know, as well as Jerry, you know, Jared's my brother forever man, and I'm definitely grateful for him, you know, reaching back, and I agree definitely what he said.
Jason.
You know, we appreciate the opportunity for you giving us the platform to actually getting our side of the story out there.
What I can say, you know, talking about this is just like.
Opening old wounds. You know, this is a story that I live. It's difficult, it has been difficult. But my whole point of view from the day I got out, even when I went in, you know, was to have some hope and I'm going to make the best of the situation regardless of what I was going through. I do look forward to today that my name is finally clear, but you know, until then, I'm going to continue to live the best life I can and continue to fight
with whatever I have to work with. So again, I thank everyone for the opportunity.
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm. Please support your local innocence organizations and go to the links in our bio now to see how you can help. I'd like to thank our amazing production team, Connor Hall, Justin Golden, Jeff Clyburn, and Kevin wardis The music on this show, as always, 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 Flamm is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Sigma Company Number one