#249 Jason Flom with Raphael Rowe

responsible to justice. It is believed that the first car theF was traced to a hostel where eighteen year old Raphael Rowe lived with five other men. On December nineteen, he and his hostel mates, along with several others, were arrested. Despite the prior identification of the perpetrators as two white men and one black man and solid alibi witnesses, police focused their investigation on Raphael and two other black men,

Michael Davis and Randolph Johnson. It became clear at trial that the prosecution was relying on information from an incentivized informant who was involved in the crimes. Discrepancies between the victims and witnesses initial reports and their testimonies. A trial race suspicion Despite all of that, plus Raphael and Michael's alibi witnesses and the description of two white and one black assailant, the jury convicted all three black men, and

Rafael was sentenced to life plus fifty years. During his incarceration, Rathfael was able to develop evidence with the help of journalists, to shed light on the details of his wrongful conviction, including official misconduct and the fabrication of a false narrative. Rafael joins us today to share his harrowing story and his continued bite to clear his name. This is wrongful Conviction. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction. Today, we're taking you overseas

to Southeast England for a wrongful conviction case. That is, it's a powerful story, not least of which because the man who lived it has a way of telling it. That is, it rocks my world. So I think this is gonna be a wild episode and I'm really honored to have with us today the man himself, Rafael Row Rafael, Welcome to Wrongful Conviction. Thank you for inviting me on podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've never had the privilege of interviewing a wrongfully convicted

person who is themselves a podcaster journalists. But let's go back all the way to even before this happened, right, These are crimes that took place in December, a series of robberies, violent robberies in Southeast England. It's like something out of Clockwork, Orange or worse. And they're much more than robberies. It was a murderer. There were other types of home invasions and me, when I say robberies, it sounds too benign to describe what was really going on here.

But what was your life like for all the sexacty happened? So? I grew up in Southeast London in a very deprived neighborhood. We had canceled houses, which are sort of social housing. I come from a mixed race background. My father came to the United Kingdom on the wind Rush as a Jamaica and my mother is a born and bred Londoner from West London. And when they got together they had my three sisters and then along came me and my

dad was a laborer. My mom was a housewife bringing up four kids, and so financially we struggled as a young family, but we had quite a stable upbringing. Of course, there were problems in our household. You know, my dad liked to drink. My mom and dad would argue, but on the street everybody was struggling and trying to make ends. Me. Everybody came from a working class background and we all grew up in small flats, in blocks of flats. You know.

I come from a neighborhood where riots had kicked off in the United Kingdom because of the oppression of people like myself, in particular black people in and around London, especially migrants. To be honest, there was no one in my life in my early teens that inspired me to become anything. You know, everybody around me, we're just looking to earn money, and for me, as a young teenager,

that was about being involved in petty crime. And so by the age of eighteen, I got in trouble with the law and I was put on what we call probation. And at that point I went to live in a hostel with one of my best friends. And in this hostel in southeast London, there were lots of other sort of wayward kids, if you like, people who have also been sent there by the authorities for getting in trouble

with the law. And I was living with my best friend, Michael Party in doing the things that you do as a teenager without a care in the world. And so that brings us to this insane series of events. Four separate violent, hyper violent robberies that took place between December

thirteenth and December sixteenth. The first crime took place in Sadly Here on December thirteenth, where two men stole a car, a Triumph spitfire in the middle of the night and took it back to Lori Park Road, which was the hostel that you were living in that you just described now. The next crime took place a few days later on December sixteenth and Fickleshaw, where three masked men interrupted Peter Herberg at a younger man named Alan Really as they were having sex at a car. The masked men had

a knife and a gun. Really was pulled from the car and robbed of ten pounds, and it was clear that the three masked men intended to steal the car. When Herberg objected, he was attacked, Really passed out, and when he awoke he found that Herberg was dead after having been savagely beaten. He had fractured ribs of bruce heart and he had actually died from a heart attack,

obviously as a result of the beating. This car, by the way, an Austin Princess was gone, but the stolen car from the thirteenth, the Triumph Spitfire, was discovered abandon close to the scene. The Austin Princess was then driven to Oxted, which is about ten miles away, where the three men invaded and robbed a home. There was a violent struggle and one of the homes occupants was cut badly with his artery severed. The house was ransacked and the robbers left with the man's Toyota now here too.

The car from the previous robbery that night and Austin Princess was found abandoned near the home. And in the finalnce and an hour later, about twenty miles from Oxted, in a place called Fetch Them, a couple woke up in their bed to find three masked men in their room. The robbers asked them for money, jewelry and car keys, and the couple was tied and gagged while the robbers ransacked the house. The men eventually left, driving off in

a Renault and a Vauxhall Cavalier. As before, the stolen Toyota from the previous robbery was found nearby, and the Renault and Voxhall were later found abandoned and burned out in the field. So this is four separate incidents in which eight people were robbed, one was severely injured, and another one killed in a truly gro tesque manner. These robberies hit the front pages of all the national news papers.

The headlines were things like two white men, one black man commit horrors M twenty five gang, which is what these three men were dubbed. Catch these monsters, bring back hanging family. Wards for the arrest of these monsters, ETCETERA. Tho pounds back then was a huge amount of money, right we're talking about I don't know what that would be in current dollars are with the exchange rate, but I would say it's well over a hundred thousand dollars

in today's money. What I would say is that in case after case, we see that these type of rewards, which sound like a good idea on paper, lead to people who want the money saying things that they might otherwise know not to be true or guessing. So how did they come to target you and the others? Well, the facts don't materialize as to why we were initially targeted until many years after I'd spent time in prison. The reason the police targeted our address was because they

were given a tip off. I believe that there was different evidence that led them to our address, i e. The cars that had been discovered from the final robbery that will burn out. Witnesses saw people standing over those cars at the time and described those individuals to the police, and I think the police then made some inroads on who those people were. Two of those people were living in the same address as me, two white guys. All of the victims described the perpetrators as two white men

and one black man. One of the most significant factors in this case, all of the victims of these crimes, as terrified as they were, were able to give a consistent account of what the perpetrators looked like, despite the fact that these robbers were wearing balaklavas. And in case anyone our eardience is unfamiliar with the term balaklava, it's

a scheme. Ask anyway, continue when the victims described the perpetrators, having described one of the white men with blue eyes and fair hair, another white man whose skin they saw through the eyehole and the mouth of one of the balaklavas was white and the black man, they said, had brown skin with quite a hubby face. So that was the level of detail. When I was arrested and my co defendants were arrested, the three men that ended up

being charged were all black. I had dreadlocks at the time, my code defendant had dreadlocks at the time, and the other code defendant was of dark black African appearance. So all three black men who were eventually charged didn't fit the descriptions that were not only described by the victims, but it was also repeated in these headlines that the police were looking for two white men and one black man, and that two white men were seen burning the cars

and etcetera, etcetera. The details were quite obvious. How could the police go on to charge three black men, right? These were no identifications that were given for a cross the street or down the road, where you might say, well, maybe they were mistaken about the race and it was dark the street. They didn't work something like that. No, these were up close and personal crimes, and there's no way that everybody got the race of the perpetrators wrong.

You're absolutely right, Jason. These weren't fleeting glances across the road in the dead of night. There was a level of detail that you could not excuse. And this was certainly a case as well where you would hope that the authorities would be on their a game because everybody needed these guys off the streets. I mean, whoever did this are literally the people for whom prisons are built.

I totally agree with you, Jason. I think the problem is is when the sensational headlines put politicians and lawmakers the police under the extreme pressure that they then start to target people that are innocent. They then home in on people who are the most vulnerable, i e. Those types of individuals like myself, who the public wouldn't care about. This episode is underwritten by A i G, a leading

global insurance company. A i G is committed to corporate social responsibility and is making a positive difference in the lives of its employees and in the communities where we work and live. In light of the compelling need for pro bono legal assistance, and in recognition of A i g s commitment to criminal and social justice reform, the A i G Pro Bono Program provides free legal services

and other support to underrepresented communities and individuals. Twelve people were arrested on the nineteenth of December under suspicion of

being involved in these crimes. I was one of them, my co defendant Michael Davis, who was also my best friend and lived with me in the hostel, as was a number of other individuals who lived in at astle Free In particular, three young white guys were also arrested, as was a young Asian guy, but it was only me, my co defendant, and the three white guys who remained in the police station being interviewed and interrogated by the police between the nine December and the twenty second of December,

when I was charged and then sent to a remand prison to await trial. My friend Michael was reminded in custody. The two white guys and the Asian guy were not charged with the murder and the series of robberies, and it was about three weeks later that Randolph Egbert Johnson, who was involved in a high speed car chase with the police, was arrested and he became the third suspect in the so called m case. Randolph I didn't know him.

I had no association with him. I think i'd met him once before, but we had no connection at all. So tell me about the police interrogation. There were two particular police officers who were responsible for my arres and these two cops were typical of of your good cop, bad cop type guys. One of them hated me from

the moment he set eyes on me. The other one was slightly more reserved, always thought for and reflective of my answers, and he always gave me some confidence that he was believing me because I was not one of those suspects who sat in the police cell saying no comment, no comment, No. I took every opportunity to tell them that I was not involved, that they were pointing the

finger at the wrong guy. I was providing them with as much detail as I possibly could about where I was, who I was with, what I was doing, and it fell on deaf ears. And the reason for that is because the other suspects that the police were interrogating him, we're telling lies, were making stories up and I'd go as far as to say they were con buying with other police officers at the time to fabricate evidence that

would then be used against me. You know, even the victims themselves, who I have all the sympathy for in the world as to what they experience, even they started to change their statements. So every time I told the police where I was and what I was doing and who I was with, they quickly got people to change their statements or their time so that it would undermine the evidence that proved unequivocally that I was innocent. And

you know why that is, Jason. During the interrogation, the police have it in their head that they've got the right people, the evidence that's coming into the interview room, all these fabricated bits of evidence which were convincing the police that they were onto the right guys, regardless of

the victims descriptions. The problem was is that by the time they were starting to discover the real evidence I, the evidence that proved I had an alibi, the evidence that proved I could not have been involved in these crimes, it was too late. So that's why they then went back to witnesses and victims and started to get them to change their statement. And that's easy for the police to do when you believe in the police, and these victims are law abiding citizens who lower by whatever the

police tell them they need to go by. You know, I have to point out that in America, there's only one state, which is Minnesota, where they record I was interrogations, and I feel that's a reform that needs to be instituted nationwide and worldwide, because most people understand the reason why you need to record interrogations of suspects to make sure they're not being beaten, coerced, fed information, etcetera, etcetera.

But in some cases, including this one, that would have been extremely valuable to have access to the videotapes of these incredibly suggestive witness identificatory procedures. I mean, they were not even being suggested. They're being told you're wrong, don't believe your eyes, believe us. And I should say now, there was slutely no forensic evidence or any other kind of scientific evidence in this case that pointed to me or my code defendants. In fact, the opposite was true.

There was some forensic evidence i e. Fingerprints found on the car at the scene of the murder that linked the case to a white guy with blue eyes and fair hair. I fitted the description as described by some of the victims, and when the police discovered that and I'm already locked up in prison charged with these crimes. They went to this witness and they got this witness to say that they stole the car that was used in the robbery for me and my code defendants rather

than interrogate that individual about their involvement. It a tangled freaking webman. This is this is a lot, and Raphael, let's get to your alibi because you had multiple people testifying to where you were during the crimes, right, please take us through this. Initially, in the witness that survived statement, the murder was time to take in place at eleven thirty pm on the night of December. At that time, me and my code defendant were with four girls who

we were knocking about with. I was sleeping with one of those girls. And about ten thirty on the night of the murder and these series of robberies, one of the girls invited me and my friend and her mates back to her parents house. So about ten thirty, the girls and my code defendant went back to this other girl's house. I met her mom for the first time, I met her sister, and I met her sister's boyfriend, who was a solicitor and we were there into about

half past midnight. All these witnesses very fy this, so that's an hour after the murder had been committed, and about half past twelve, the solicitor wanted to get rid of this rowdy couple of guys who were smoking weed and bouncing around with their dreadlocks. The solicitor offered to give me and my friend a lift back to our flat, and we agreed, and the solicitor drove me, my cody friend and the girl I was sleeping with back to my flat and we arrived back at about just twenty

two one in the morning. I went back to my room with this girl. We smoked a joint and then we made love. So I was in bed with her until about one thirty in the morning, So this is two hours after the murder had been committed. This was just as the second robbery was taken place, and I'm forty miles away from where these incidents were already taking place,

and this was my alibi. And all of these witnesses I just mentioned came into the court at the time of my trial and told the jury that I was with them at this time, and this is why the police got that first victim to change their statement. They said that the crime didn't happen at eleven thirty, It happened at twelve thirty. But even then I still had an alibi that put me miles away from where this

crime was committed. But crucially, the girlfriend that I was in bed with was then undermined by the police because she gave the police items of jury that had come from one of the robberies, saying that she got that jury from me. That was an outright lie. And I

can tell you why. When I was in prison a few months later, this girl wrote me a letter, unbeknown that it would be crucial evidence, admitting that she'd lied and that she had been put up by the police to tell in the police that I had given her items a jury in order to save herself from being accused of perverting the course of justice or something like that. So a I had a cast iron alibi, be the police's attempt to undermine my alibi witnesses edibility by fabricating

evidence which she admitted was untrue. That's what we were up against at the time of my trial. Yeah, they're changing the times, they're changing the races of the perpetrators. They're coercing or well threatening eye witnesses and alibi witnesses. It's a whirlwind. So the trial itself, Raphael, it must have been a circus atmosphere. If I'm going to guess,

please tell us about that experience. Here you are now all of a sudden, I'm going to say, one of the most hated men in the country, along with your Code offense. The court setting was that the Old Bailey, which is the number one call in the United Kingdom.

And yes, it was a circus. Me and my two co defendants, all three of us stood in the dock accused of the murder and the three robberies and the attempted murder, and witness after witness, including the victims, who stood up in the dock and gave evidence against us. Some told the truth, many told lies. One of the most awkward moments Jason, in the trial was when the victims stood in the dock and they were asked to describe the perpetrators, and that's when the ms and are

started to come in. You know. The victims were Yeah, I did say that it was white skinned, and yes I did say they had blue eyes, but maybe I was wrong. Why was you wrong? But the police seemed to believe that those men in the dock were guilty. That was one of the saddest things for me that the victims could look at the three guys that were in the dock, know that we didn't commit the crime and couldn't do anything about it, and yet somehow that jury they went out and they came back and they

found us guilty. So yeah, in spite of the fact that the victims are acknowledging their own original identifications of these white, blonde, blue eyed individuals, and in spite of the fact of your many alibi witnesses, in spite of all of that, the jury goes out and finds you guilty. So can you take us back to that moment when the jury came in and they read the guilt t verdict against me for murder, for attempted murder, and for

three serious robberies. The judge had no alternative but to send me to prison for the rest of my life plus fifty odd years, which is the accumulation of all the sentences added up for the robberies. It's really difficult to say at that point that I was crushed like a peanut under my foot because I had already been crushed when I was first charged with these offenses and

condemned to prison. I was crushed, And it was during those eighteen months that I built a resilience within myself, a determination not to allow them to get away with what they were doing, not just to me and my family, but also the victims and anybody else that was being

caught up wrongly. So by the time the jury came in and found me guilty, as crushing as that was, as desperate as I was a twenty one year old destined to spend the rest of my life in prison for a crime I didn't commit, I knew I was not going to give up. I knew that they got it wrong. They knew that they got it wrong, so I was never ever going to allow this to sit

on that day forever. More. I think it was the fact that I became so militant as a young twenty one year old that I did everything I possibly could to keep my body as fit as I possibly could in order to withstand the four walls that I was being confined in. So rather than sit in that cell, I exercised in that cell, used it as my gym, used it as my office, used it as the space that I was gonna work my way out, whether that

was psychologically or physically. So I was studying the law, teaching myself as much as I possibly could about the law in order to understand how and why what had happened to me happened to me. And I should stress that in those years I was so militant. I did not conform. I refused to work in prison every day. As a convicted person, you are expected to follow the regime of the maximum security prison. I you go to work, you do the things the authorities expect you to do

as a guilty man. When I wasn't a guilty man, so I was going to do everything in the opposite. So when they opened my cell door and shouted my name to go to work, I refused to leave the cell. The consequence would mean that they would come into the cell and physically dragged me out of the cell, take me to the isolation block, where I would spend days or weeks or months being punished for not being prepared to put up with what guilty people had to endure.

And that went on for years. It was me against the system, him as well as my wrongful conviction. And I mean I I was brutalized so badly by the authorities for not conforming. There were plenty of times where they physically beat me or locked me in isolation cells completely naked, for no other reason than they could. So Now, from inside the confines of these barbaric prisons that you were in, how did you manage to ultimately for yourself?

One of the big turning points for me, Jason was the media, the publications of broadcast has paid a significant role in my wrongful conviction by calling me and monster, by asking for hanging to be brought back into the United Kingdom to kill people like me who were guilty of such horrible crimes. If the media could play such a powerful role in my wrongful conviction, maybe they could

play a role in getting my conviction overturned. So I embarked on a journalism correspondence course whilst I was in prison, and that just meant paper push him in the same way that I read every document, every line, every sentence of every document that was involved in my case over and over again for years, and I'd become very tuned into how cases worked and didn't work. And I learned so much teaching myself how journalists work. Meant I could

manipulate stories that I could send out there. So I'd write letters to some of our national newspapers, the Guardian and the Independent, son the Mirror, and they'd start slowly but surely publish my letters or published little things that I said. And then that triggered what happened next, which was simply that the media who called me a monster, where all of a sudden starting to question the safety of my conviction, and they were showing interest in coming

to visit me. So I'd sit on a visiting table and talk to these journalists about why was innocent and asking them questions about what they remembered at the time, and that just led to a lot of publicity question in the safety of my conviction, and that rocked the British criminal justice syst into its core. They really started to wobble at the idea that they'd locked up three

innocent black men. And once the media started questioning the safety of my conviction, once the media started to remind the new generation of children that free black men were imprisoned for crimes committed by two white men, we got neared a lot of support, and that made a big difference because it was then ten years into my wrongful life imprisonment that barristers and reputable lawyer started to take an interest when I wrote to them asking for their help,

and so they did start to help. And then there was one moment where an eminent human rights lawyer discovered that the non disclosure of the reward money meant that I've been deprived the right of a fair trial, and that particular lawyer took my case to the European Court of Human Rights and it was an opportunity to set out the fact that free black member in prison for crimes committed by two white men one black man, I had a cast iron aller by witness had given fabricated evidence,

reward money had been paid and it had not been disclosed. So all this was laid out in front of twenty nine judges at the European Court of Human Rights and they unanimously in ruled that I had been denied the right to a fair trial, and that that wrote the British government and in two thousand the government told the Court of Appeal they had to re hear my case and it was just a few months after that my convictions were overturned. You turned the train around on the tracks.

It's amazing that you were able to do it from this dungeon that you were in, and even managed to keep your wits about you. Your codefendants did they benefit from your work as well? Were they reread when you were? They were? Yes, my co defendants convictions were also overturned at the Court of Appeal at the same time that my convictions were overturned. And that happened on the seventeenth of July two thousand and What was that moment like walking out from the age of twenty and to the

age of thirty two. I was confined in a single cell by myself. I suffered in those twelve years. And it wasn't until they quashed my convictions. I walked down the steps of the Court of Appeal. They opened up the door, the door that was going to set me free, that I for the first time cried. I fell into the arms of my sister, one of my three sisters, and it was the first time I cried in all the years that I was in prison, and it felt

so good. And then I walked with my family to the front of the Court of Appeal and shouted my mouth off about how I'd lost so many years of my life in prison to the world's media. The judges cheekily and typically turned round and said, this is not a declaration of innocence. But they quashed my conviction as unsafe and they set me free. And that was the big turning point. That's where my life began. That wasn't the end of an ordeal. That was the beginning of

my life. That's beautiful, and you're inviolude so many things now, Raphael, and it's it's awesome to see how you've taken the world by the polls since you came home. So please share with us what's your life like now. For me, it was one of those kind of classical right place, right time, right opportunity. From the age of twenty to thirty two, I studied the law. In prison, I studied journalism.

So there was only two things I could do when I got out of prison, and that was go down that route of campaigning on behalf of other miscarriage of justice victims. But I just spent twelve years of my own fucking life fighting hard, and as much as I do that in my own way. Now, the other option was journalism, so that's what I did. I went. I met a man who at the time was a senior

figure at the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation. He offered me an opportunity, and before I knew it, I was working on the most prestigious radio program here in the United Kingdom called the Radio for Today program, and I remember sitting at the desk as a sort of call center calling up politicians. Asked him to come on the program. And after two or three days, I went into the editor and I said, listen, you know what I've just spent twelve you sitting on a cell bed or a

cell chair. I can't do this. This is not for me. I need to be free. And he offered me the opportunity to try my hand at being a reporter on this prestigious program, and I accepted and I didn't look back. I went on to become a reporter on this program. There. You've got to remember, Jason and your audience. When I came out of prison, I was handed a mobile home for the first time. The Internet didn't exist when I went to prison, so there were lots of technological developments.

So I was learning things on the job at the BBC, and this was within twelve months of getting out, and I worked my way through the BBC, working for the Radio Pro then I worked for the prestigious BBC News program, and then I worked for the longest running current affairs investigative program Panorama as one of their correspondents. I spent a lot of my early career as a BBC journalist as an undercover operative because I knew how to duck and dive. Having survived in prison, I had a gift

for the gap in that well. And so I spent the next sixteen years, having been released from prison, carving out this successful career as a BBC journalist as a public speaker, as somebody who inspired other people from backgrounds like mine, or bringing together people from my background and the academic or the affluent background to show that we could work together to bring about change in social justice.

And I left the BBC after sixteen seventeen years and was given the opportunity by Netflix to do this series called Inside the World's Toughest Prisons. And I thought they were crazy to be asking me, having spent so long trying to get the funk out of prisons to go back in willingly. I thought long and hard and thought, you know what, I can change people's perceptions about the people that are in these places. I can change people's perceptions about what prison is really like. You know, Let's

get rid of all this sensational violence stuff. Let's get rid of all this kind of stigma around who these individuals are, and let's try and understand more. And it's been a phenomenal success. I go in prisons all around the world, spent seven days with the prisoners to try and find the balance between rehabilitation and punishment. In addition

to that, I have my own podcast, Second Chance. I talked to people about why they give people a second chance, what their second chances, what that means to people, not just people that have come out of prison and gone on to become entrepreneurs, or people that have been wrongly convicted who have gone on to lead successful careers like I have, but loads of different questions around what second

chance actually means. During the lockdown first pandemic, I wrote my first book because so many people have asked me about my life story, and although in bits and pieces I've shared it, I've never put it all in one place. So I wrote my autobiography, Notorious, which was published at

the end of last year. The most important thing for me, the legacy of everything, is the Raphael Row Foundation, and having experienced prisons around the globe, I realized so much needs to be done, not just for the prisoners, but the prisons to improve the humanity and the ability to

rehabilitate or give people a second chance. And that's why I recently set up the Rafael Row Foundation in the hope that my legacy will be to guard near people change their perception about what prisons really are, what they mean, and how they can help people rather than destroy people or their families. It's great work and it uh it speaks volumes about your character that you're giving back in

the ways that you best can, right. I mean, you have a natural gift for this stuff, and you found your I'm gonna call it your calling, and it's wonderful to see you sort of thriving and you know, succeeding I think, beyond any reasonable expectations that anybody could have

had and just making a difference. You know, what can I say except you have all of my respect and I'm just glad that you're here today, and of course for anyone listening who wants to learn more about Rock Fail's journey and follow it as I do, and as I will his podcast, his book, The Rock Fail Row Foundation. We're gonna have links to all of them in our bio. And I'm sure people can follow you on Instagram, right and what about other social media? Yeah, I'm on Instagram,

I'm on Twitter, I have a website. If you put my name Raphael Row R O W E or a reporter on Twitter or Instagram, you'll be able to find me. And now we come to the closing of our show. It's called closing arguments, and closing arguments works just like this. I'm gonna kick back in my chair, turn my microphone off and leave my headphones on, and of course leave your mic open for you to share any final thoughts

you may have with our audience. I think for me, one of the most important things is who am I? Who am I? So I shared with you my upbringing, I shared with you my ordeal of being wrongly convicted and imprisoned. I've shared with you a bit about the work that I do now having got out of prison. You know when you think you hit the summit, you never quite hit the summit because there's always more to climb. And that's what I've done in my successful career as

a journalist. But I'm constantly asking myself the question who am I? And that's what I want people to do, ask themselves, who are you? Who am I? Am I the person that wants to make lots of money? Am I the person who wants to care for my elderly parents? Am I the person who wants to become a high performance athlete? I always ask myself the question who am I? And I've reached what I think is a fair description of myself. I am who I've always been. I'm the same person that I was when I was a kid.

I'm the same person that I was when I was in prison, and I'm definitely the same person now that I'm free. And that person is an honest, direct with morals and values where I believe not just in myself, but in other people. And by other people, I mean the good, the bad, and the elderly. Why shouldn't I Why shouldn't you give up a few minutes of your time or your space to see the other side of of someone because I've shown over the years there are

different in sides to everybody. The person I am today, as I say, is the same person I was when I was a kid, when I was innocent, when I just enjoyed the things that we all do before we're corrupted by the things that we witness and here as we get older, or our desires and our wants. So that's my final word. Ask yourself, who are you? Because I know who I am. Thank you for listening to

Ronful Conviction. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Justin Golden, Jeff Claver, and Kevin Wardis with research by Lada Robinson. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction, as well as at Lava for Good. On all three platforms. You can also follow me on both talk and Instagram

at its. Jason flam Raval Conviction is the production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one h