On May nineteenth, nineteen seventy five, two men approached fifty nine year old Harold Franks outside of a Cleveland, Ohio grocery store, demanding his briefcase. Franks resisted, and the men clubbed him with a pipe and splashed acid in his face before shooting him twice in the chest. The shooter fired into the grocery store as well, hitting co owner Ann Robinson, who survived. Mister Franks, however, did not. An eyewitness wrote down the plate number as the assailants sped
off in a green convertible. Despite the plate number and other compelling leads, police instead focused on the word of twelve year old Eddie Vernon, who had been bragging about witnessing the crime from a bus, repeating an alleged rumer naming Ricky Jackson as well as Wiley and Ronnie Bridgman as the assailants. Vernon's classmates and the bus driver denied even having the vantage point to see the crime during
interviews and then the lineup. When Eddie Vernon tried to back away from the lie, investigators threatened to lock up his parents if he didn't stick to the story. By ignoring more compelling suspects and instead coercing a child. The states at Ricky Jackson as well as Wiley and Ronnie
Bridgman to death rout. When the nineteen seventy four reinstatement of the death penalty in Ohio was struck dout as unconstitutional in nineteen seventy eight, those condemned between those years had their senses commuted to life, including Ronnie, Wiley and Ricky, assuring the possibility of their innocence one day being recognized. This is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful conviction. Today's
story is important in so many ways. The man who lived through this well four decades of imprisonment on the basis of an eyewitness who wasn't there, who was twelve years old at the time, who was coerced, pressured, croutbeaten by authorities, the same authorities who overlooked or ignored evidence pointing to the actual two assailants and what was a brutal, brutal crime. And I'm very, very honored to have the man himself, Ricky Jackson. Ricky, thank you for being here today.
Thank you for having me Jason, I appreciate it. Thank you.
So let's set the stage here. When I tell you the name of the place where this occurred, people are probably going to be given some knowing nods in their car or their home wherever they're listening, because it feels like every other episode we do is a wrong for conviction based in Cuyahoga County.
Well, when you look at the number of Alexanderies through Kyahoga County, it justifies the statement you just made. At least in those times, the police pretty much owned the prosecutor's office, the coroner's office, whatever they sent up the pipeline. Nobody went against the police.
No, that's right. Your story, as you were telling me earlier, is important because if it could happen to you, it can happen to anyone. And when I say that you lived a relatively normal, peaceful life growing up, you were only eighteen when this happened. You were still really a child, let's face it, but you know, turning into a man.
I mean back in the mid seventies, you know, life was not as hectic as it is today, and I was doing the typical eighteen year old stuff. One of my friends, or Wilie Bridgeman, he had joined the National Guard.
He came home one day on lead we saw that uniform and we were so all and impressed and amazed by that.
That we immediately set our sights so on joining the military, you know, and.
You joined the Marines, right, and then we're honorably discharged for medical reasons.
Yes, I was doing a detail and the driver pulled off before.
I had a good burm hold.
On the back of a dump truck and I fell off, and my back hasn't been the same. I thought I was going to be able to get out, we had my back and re enlist. But in the process of doing that, Eddie burning happened.
Yes, Eddie Vernon happened. That's a help of a way of putting it very direct. It all comes down to this kid, and I'm talking about he was a kid, he was twelve years old. I feel that he's a victim in this as well. I don't know if you share that belief.
I do. I do. I strongly share that. I mean, he was a twelve year old kid.
Yeah, and at twelve years old, we know how easily influenced you can be and how easily scared you can be at that age. And then a lie just grows into.
Something you can't control.
Yeah, it grows horns and it gets worse and worse. So Eddie Vernon, was he just a kid from the neighborhood. Did you guys know him?
He used to be our paperboy at one time.
I remember when I used to come home from school to have lunch in the winter time.
He will be sitting at our kitchen table.
My mother would like give him soup and a grilled cheese sandwich or something like that because it was so cold outside before he continued on with his route. I mean because of our age difference. I never, you know, hung out with him and anything, but I knew his family.
The crime itself, this is a crime that happened on May nineteenth to nineteen seventy five when fifty nine year old Harold Franks, who was a money order salesman, where he was leaving a grocery store on Fairhill Road in Cleveland, Ohio, when two men approached him. The men confronted mister Franks and demanded his briefcase. And this is where it gets really crazy. When Franks resisted, they clubbed him in the head with a pipe and splashed acid in his face.
What kind of sick people are these And one of the men then shot him twice in the chest and fired a shot through the store's glass front door, hitting fifty eight year old Ann Robinson, who was the co owner of the store. She was shot at the neck, but somehow miraculously survived. Mister Franks tragically did not. The two robbers fled with the briefcase. Remember I said, two robbers containing four hundred and twenty five dollars and some blank money orders, and they escaped in a green car
that was parked down the street. Did you have a green car, by.
The way, No, never, I didn't even own a car.
Okay, man So and by the way, the three guys convicted for a crime the two guys committed. That's just one little fraction of the problems with this case. Right find out as we go along.
May nineteenth, the crime had just happened not two hundred feet from where we lived, the three of us, and so, you know, we saw people gradually going towards the Fair Hill area, and so we asked, like, what's going on, you know, and they like, somebody just.
Got killed up at the store.
We didn't have nothing to do at the particular time, so we decided to go up there and be lucky lose as well. We got up there and by the time we reached the location, the police were up there. There were TV cameras out there. The police had the area Hordendolph and there was a body with the sheet laying askew. And I saw Eddie Vernon at the scene at a crime and he was looking around like everybody else was. And so we stayed up there for approsequently fifteen to twenty five minutes and we left.
The investigation involved detectives Eugene Terpe and James Farmer, as well as numerous others. They had the license plate number of the green escape car. This case came with instructions that escape car belonged to a guy named Ishmael Hickson. And they were also pointed this is I mean when I read this, my head about exploded. Okay, so get
this everyone. They were also pointed in the direction of Paul Gardenshire, whose own mother contacted the store owner and the police to report that her son had a gun and that she believed that he was involved in the shooting. Oh my god.
The same caliber gun, mind you, of the gun that was used to kill mister Franks.
The guy's freaking mother came forward, and then another informant also implicated Gardenshire, who said that he stole his grandfather's thirty eight caliber gun, which was the murder weapon, and was driving around in a convertible that was yes, you guessed it green in color, and that was the escape car. These details were not public knowledge at the time, right, so this is inside information, and Officer Terpe found the green convertible exactly where the informant said it would be.
I'm getting the chills now.
There were a lot of viable suspects.
The FBI even got in contact with the Cleveland Police Department and told them that you need to be looking at.
These guys right here.
They have anmo of throwing liquids in people's faces when they robbed them, you know, And you know, the police for a time went down this road. But when you got a twelve year old boy saying that he was an actual eyewitness, you know, and they're not going to spend on that time chasing these leads of what might have been when we got an actual witness.
And of course you're referring to Eddie Vernon, who had he actually seen anything and had you and the Bridgeman's actually been the culprits, he could have pointed you out to the police when you were all at the scene right after the crime had occurred. But the fact is he hadn't seen anything, As he admitted so many long years later, he was actually on the bus with a bunch of his classmates at the time of the crime. They all heard the gunshots, but none of them had
a vantage point to see anything. It was not possible for them to see the crime, not even the bus driver who would have had the best view. So from what I understand, there was a rumor that you and the Bridgemans may have been involved. We don't know how this river got started. Maybe there wasn't even a rumor at all. Maybe your name came from the cops. Either way,
it's hard to know. But how the hell is Eddie end up as a target of police coercion and get forced into making a statement implicating you as well as Wiley and Ronnie Bridgeman.
Edward Burning was running around the neighborhood telling people that he had saw the whole crime and he knew who did it, and so you know, eventually this got back to the gentleman that owned the store where the crime took place, and so he tracked Edward Burning down, took him back to the store and started grilling him, like, if you saw who did this, you need to tell us. And so the store owner got the police involved, and then the police started putting the screws in Eddie burning.
But upon talking to this twelve year old boy, even for a rookie police officer, it would have been easy to tell that this kid was fabricating a lot of shit.
You know, yeah, I mean, this is probably an insecure kid who wanted to be the center of attention. So he went out and told people he had seen the crime. Well, and that's what started this whole snowball effect. And then the police get this tunnel vision and they decided that they don't really care about investigating the crime. In fact, when they did investigate the crime. When investigation they did, they collected physical evidence from the scene, but inconveniently, none
of it matched you, Ronnie or Wiley. So the evidence that they did have, which again should have been the giant red flag ding ding ding ding ding that should have been it, right, all of that evidence pointed to other people, including the license plate number of the green escape car which they.
Had, I mean, and all these people had arm robbery on their rap seats.
So no other investigation was conducted into these or any other leads. Once Eddie Vernon came forward, all the other investigations stopped and they focused on you three guys with absolute total tunnel vision.
They pretty much kidnapped this kid, you know, and they told his parents if they ever tried to get involved or ever tried to stop them from coming to get Edward, that they would prosecute them. Had complete and total control of this twelve year old kid, and so this began the process of molding Eddie Vernon from a liar and
to aligning witness. They pretty much had to build this case and give Edward burning information as they went along, which is why his testimony and his statement changed from day to day, you know, because they were feeding him information. He didn't see what happened, and so he had to create something and they kept the pressure on it. Fast forward a few days later, the three of us were
coming home from a party. Was about one o'clock at night, and my dad had this policy when he locks his doors at night, all in ain't getting in, you know, so it wasn't not common for me to, you know, go sleep at the Bridgeman's house, who stayed just a
couple of houses down for me. Anyway, just as I was knotted off, I saw lights going by my window, you know, flashlights, And before I could get my whereabouts together, the door was exploded in the room was filled with police officers who with guns lights, and they were shouting my name and was shouting at Bridgeman's names. They got me first because I was right there on the couch in the front room where the door was kicked in, So they grabbed me, threw.
Me to the floor, knees in the black.
Handcuffed me, asking me what were the Bridgeman's at And I was so confused. I didn't know what to say because I was horrified. I mean, it was just like a total shock. But by the time they drugged me outside and had me on top of a police car, I could look down the street and see my entire family. I could see my entire family stressed out in the street, and every one of them had a shotgun pointed at their heads.
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It became obvious to me that they had hit my house first en route to the Brisma's house, and they finally got to Bri out of the house, and I mean, we were still just totally in shock. We didn't know what the hell did we do. We had just came from a party. There was no incident at the party, so we are totally confused as to what's going on, not knowing that this is all related to that man having got killed. A couple of days earlier up at fair Hill. We didn't know this at the time, We
had no clue. We get downtown the next morning, we go into a lineup, they do their thing, they let us out. Unbeknownst to us at the time, Eddie Burning was standing behind that two way glass.
And he refused, he couldn't pick anybody.
He didn't pick anybody, and so the police never told us we were free to go. Instead, they took Edward Burning in the back room, a twelve year old boy, unescorted by a parent or a lawyer.
Took him back in the back room and they threatened him.
They told him that they couldn't do nothing to him because he was a kid, but if he didn't pick us out in that line up Ricky Jackson and Wally Bridgeman and Ronnie Bridgeman.
That they would make sure that he never saw his mom and dad again.
They would sending his mom and dad to prison for a long time because he started this process and now he had to finish it. And so while we were outside in the common area making a phone call to call our folks and say, well, you know, they haven't told us anything, so I guess you can come and get us he points us out while we're out in the common room with hundreds of other people, prisoners or whatever, making phone calls.
And a couple hours later, they called us and told.
Us that we had been indicted for murder and they were seeking the death penalty. And that's when we found out that Edward Vernon was a kid that was saying that he had saw us do this. It was just mind boggling because my mind instantly went back to that day when I saw him standing there at the scene at the crime like everybody else in the neighborhood, you know, and like, why wouldn't you say to the police because there was plenty of police there.
That's him right there.
Because Eddie Vernon never saw a freaking thing nothing. He just told a lie like many little kids do, and then he got roped into repeating that lie in an arena where the stakes were well life and death and so On May twenty fifth, nineteen seventy five, You, Wiley, and Ronnie were all charged with aggravated murder, aggravated attempted murder, as well as aggravated robbery, and the trial started that August.
You guys went to trial. The prosecution's case rested. Well, there was nothing else other than the testimony of this little kid who is now thirteen. His testimony was all
over the place. He initially told the cops that he was on the bus coming home from school when he saw two men attack mister Franks as he got out of his car walked the store, But a trial Eddie that he had already gotten off the bus when he saw the attack, and that the attack occurred as Frank's emerged from the store, So very very different than what he originally said. That should have been a huge flag
there as well. An Robinson meanwhile testified the woman who was shot in the neck that she had been shot by a bullet that came through the store's front door, but she was unable to identify the robbers, understandably so, and a sixteen year old neighborhood girl testified for the defense, saying that she walked into the store just before the attack and saw two, not three men outside the store, and that neither of the two men or any of
you three guys, very brave young girl. Several of Eddie Vernon's classmates testified that he was on the bus with them when they heard the gun shots, but that none of them were able to see the robbers.
During the course of our three separate trials, we had nearly every kid on that bus testified in our behalf about what they saw where the bus was at that time. And that was like ten or twelve kids saying the same thing. You know, he couldn't have possibly be seen, and we were all on the bus together. He didn't get out before we got all we got off at the same stop, and the bus driver he's got the best seat in the house, you know, but he didn't
see anything. But it was so easy to inflame an all white jewelry when you got a black person accused of killing a white person. You know, anything you have to say on your behalf, never really not listening to that. You know, Let's let's get to the park where we execute this dude.
You know.
And that's pretty much what my trial balled down to, you know. I mean a judge even said during a recess that he didn't believe the state witness for one minute. But I'm not gonna take the power out of jury's hands. That's your job as a judge. If you have a witness, a key witness, you talk about executing three people, and you say, outside of the court record of I don't believe this kid for a man that he's lying. I saw him and being coached out in the hallway, but
I'm not going to do anything about it. And when you're up against stuff like that, there's no way you can win.
And let us not forget that. In so doing, and not just the judge, but the prosecutors, the cops, and everybody else who was involved in this fiasco, they're also allowing the two guys that committed this disgusting crime to remain free.
Thank you for bringing that up, because it's a point I try to make so often about the uncounted victims that off Boss imprisonment possibly created.
We'll never know the numbers you guys.
Meanwhile, did have alibi witnesses who testified.
I hate to keep saying this man, but whatever we had to say, Yes, we had a lot of witnesses, you know, my mother, I mean, timelines, everything. But all they wanted to know was like, when is we gonna hang this league? And I'm sorry to say that, but that's what I felt like. You know, it didn't matter what we had to say. It didn't matter that the evidence was shitty. A white man is dead and somebody
needs to pay for it. If they didn't do this, they probably did something else, you know, And that was the Bavaili attitude.
How can you be prepared.
To kill three young men based on almost absolutely nothing, but they were willing to and didn't blink an eye about it. I spent two and a half years on death road. I came within two months of being executed. This has got to stop. For a long time, I thought that this was just a racio and an economical issue.
But this happens to everybody.
I know a lot of gunneries from around the country, including Hawaii. You know what I'm saying, that had professions, they had children, they were happily married, and they got caught up in this same madness. They got caught up in the same madness. And when it's you against the state, guess what, You're gonna lose every time. You are gonna lose every time because they don't have to follow the rules. And if they get caught, guess what, there's no repercussions.
Right. Imagine if the suspect went to a twelve year old kid and threatened him, I'm gonna take your parents away from you. You'll never see him again unless you do exactly what I said. You lie like I tell you too. I mean, we all know that no allowed to bribe a witness, but the government can offer them plea deals. I can threaten them and not supposed to threaten them, but they do. But they could definitely offer them plea deals, and that's the best bribe of all.
So it's like, yeah, you have no shot in hell. You're absolutely right, and you had no shot in hell. So in August of nineteen seventy five, you were convicted along with Wiley, and Ronnie was convicted in September, and all of you were sentenced to death later commuted to life in prison, which is like a living death sentence. What was your experience of death.
Throw The moment you got back, there was always this feeling I'm impending doom, Like it was right around the corner. You know, you had you had two options, go crazy or you accept this and make it work for you. You know, I was on the mission anyway, you know, I was innocent, you know, and I wasn't gonna lay back here waiting for my death. Dating So between my workouts,
I would write. I wrote so many letters, you know, and they cut the lights off at a certain time in prison, so you got to get up on the bars and like get the little light coming out from the security light outside. And I'm up, like two thirty in the morning just writing anybody that would listen, you know, like I'm on death row, my execution data so and so so and so I'm innocent. My two friends are innocent looking to my case, you know. And that's what
I did, worked out, made friends back there. You know, you survived, man, the best you could, you know, like I said, But it was always an impending doom while I was back there. You know, the Ohio state legislation was in flux about what they wanted to do with the death penalty and soul. They placed the moratorium on executions, and that's what eventually got everybody off of death row.
Doing my stint back there, but.
Life in general back there was like, you don't have a life. Your life is on the calendar, you know, you can see the end of your life.
It's on the calendar. So you lived.
From day to day and hope something comes down from the United States Supreme Court or the Hio Supreme court. That's going to spare your life. You know, things could have went the other way. This interview might not ever be happening today. My daughter might not be here today, my wife, my other children. Things could have easily went the other way. You know, it's not uncommon for innocent people to get executed.
It happens all the time.
So I know you had been writing letters. A very powerful image you gave before from death row leaning up against the bars to get a little bit of light you could get. So you had written probably to everybody and their mother by this point. But how did you manage to get the Ohio Innocence Project particulication? When did they get about I.
Think it was around two thousand and five when I first wrote them, they were just themselves starting up. I contacted them and I gave them the particulars of my case. It was a long process, I mean, because they vetted everything that you send them and say to them, because they only deal with totally innocent people. I say, ope appeared of like three and a half years. I got a letter from them saying that they had decided, after
reviewing my case, to take our case. It took another additional three or four years, you know, to get to the point of the recantation for Maddy Vernon.
So okay. Twenty eleven, Cleveland Scene magazine published a very detailed examination of the case and highlighted the many, many inconsistencies in Vernon's testimony, as well as the absence of any other evidence linking you, Ronnie or Wiley to the crime. And the article pointed out that Vernon had been paid fifty dollars by Ann Robinson's husband to testify at the trial. Okay, now, fifty dollars in nineteen seventy Whatever it was to a twelve year old kid, probably was a lot of money.
But besides that, there's all the other stuff. But that was the fact, most importantly that Vernon had failed to mention in his testimony that he had literally been paid for it. Okay. So, Kyle Swenson, the recorder who wrote this article, attempted to interview Eddie Vernon, but he refused to talk about the case. So Swinson reached out to Vernon's pastor, Arthur Singleton. This Swinson, guy, man, I'd like
to buy him a beer. When Singleton mentioned to Vernon that the reporter wanted to talk to him, Vernon brushed him off, telling him to ignore the reporter. But months later Swinson sent his article to Singleton, who asked Vernon about it, and still Vernon refused to talk about it. In twenty thirteen, Singleton paid a visit to Vernon in a hospital where Eddie Vernon was being treated for high
blood pressure. Singleton later said in a sworn AFFI David that he asked Vernon again about the article, and this is a direct quote. Eddie Vernon told me that he lied to the police when he said he had witnessed the murder in nineteen seventy five and he had put three innocent men in prison for the murder end quote. Then another quote. He told me that he tried to back out of the lie at the time of the lineup, but he was only a child that the police told
him it was too late to change his story. Quote. Singleton said that Vernon then broke down and wept, and he said, quote I could see the weight being lifted from his shoulders end quote.
By then, I and myself, Brian Howell, Mark Gatzi, and the rest of the team were quite familiar with each other.
I get a call one day and Brian.
Said I could immediately tell that it was something, something I've been waiting for for a long time.
I didn't know what it was, but I knew just by.
His attitude and the way he was trying to keep his composure, I knew it was something big. And when he told me that Eddie Vernon had recanted his testimony being a lawyer, that he is the great lawyer that he is, he was like, Yep, this is great.
But it's not the end of the journey.
You know.
Now we have to get a judge to accept this.
And I got to tell you, Ricky, recantations are the hardest piece of evidence to get before judge.
You know.
Once a witness makes a statement, that's it. But we're going to see what we can do.
So now, after this recantation, Brian Howe and Mark Gotzi at the Ohio Innocence Project filed the petition for a new trial on behalf of you Ricky Jackson, and similar petitions were later filed on behalf of the Bridgeman brothers, and the Ohio Innocence Project's reinvestigation of the case uncovered evidence that when Vernon attempted to recant his identification of
the three defendant's police intimidated him to testify falsely. The police had never disclosed to the defense attorneys to any of you guys that Vernon attempted to recant his accusations prior to the trials. Of course, if they had, it would have blown the case up. So of course they didn't, right,
because they were just deep in their own lives now. So, police reports obtained by Ohiouse Innocence Project also showed the police considered the two other men, Paul Guard and shion Ismael Hickson, as suspects, but their investigation was terminated as soon as this young kid falsely identified you three guys.
And of course, lastly, the license plate on the green car scene speeding away from the crime was matched to a car belonging to mister Hickson, whose record, his long rap sheet, included a robbery and a shooting a year earlier. Back in nineteen seventy six, a year after the Franks murder, Hickson pled guilty to over a dozen counts of aggravated robbery. So now we get to twenty fourteen, Judge Richard mcmonagall held a hearing on your motion for a new trial.
Eddie Vernon testified that police had bet in the details of the crime. A direct quote from him, I don't have any knowledge about what happened at the scene of the crime. Everything was a lie. They were all lies. End quote.
Edward Vernon was a catalyst to all of this. He got all of this started, He got us locked up. But in the end, his testimony is what got us free. Anybody that was in that courtroom, in that gallery that day, hearing him from the witness stand left no doubt in anyone's mind that this was a guy that had made a terrible mistake. And now he's sitting here, everybody against him, everybody hating him. But he's sitting up here and doing what he know he has to do. And he did it. Man,
he really did it. And so I know a lot of people can't understand this. People like I don't care, I still would hate him or whatever. Well, that's y'all's.
Problem to deal with. I don't have no time for it.
You know, I'm just giving credit what credit is due because his testimony and his candor on that witness stand was tent about to us being free.
Here today, so Vernon told the judge that he was on the bus when he heard two pops that sounded like firecrackers. The bus was, you know, in the neighborhood, in the area of the store, but not near enough to the crime scene that he could have seen anything that took place, just like all the other kids on the bus had said. But based on a rumor he heard on the street, he went to the scene and
told police that you three guys committed the crime. He was thinking at the time he was doing the right thing, he said to the officer, and that he knew who did it. But he testified that he had tried to recamp. The detectives took him to a room, just like you said, into a room and told them that they would arrest his parents for perjury and he would never see them again, etc.
So he agreed to testify at the trials. He was a traumatized kid at that point, and I can't even imagine being in his shoes, much less yours.
The court had decided to take a brief recess, and the prosecutor went to the ad bench and they talked to the judge and they took me back into my holding sale and I was in there about a minute, and my lawyers came in and said, Rick, they got a proposition for you. They said, if you plead guilty right now to all the charges, they'll consider sitting served and you can go home today. And we got to have a decision right now. I mean, nothing in the
courtroom was guaranteed. This was guaranteed. You know, plead guilty and you can go home today. But you're gonna live your life as a convicted murderer. It only took a few seconds when I told my lawyers, like, you know what, man, I'm innocent, and it came too far at this point, I ain't got nothing to lose. I'm gonna stay with
the hand I was deal. We went out there, We went back out in the courtroom and proceeded with the proceedings, and after most of the testimony, the pertinent testimony, the prosecution once again went to the bench and I heard the judge say are you sure in a whispery tone, and the lady nodded, and they went back to their pspect the benches, and the judge.
Asked me to rise.
He said that the state was not going to you know, they weren't going to pursue me anymore. In other words, they weren't going to try to prosecute me anymore. They really believed that was innocent, you know, And it was just as simple man. After all that.
It was just as simple man.
So Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGuinty said, and this is very powerful, he said, quote the state concedes the obvious. Wow. McGonagall dured the hearing, granted motions for the new trial filed by you and Wiley, and vacated your convictions. Ronnie's conviction would later be vacated as well. The prosecution then dismissed the charts and you were released after thirty nine years, three months, and nine days, and would you say four hours on top of that, And at that time you
were the longest serving defendant exonerated in US history. We know that there are others who served longer that we never heard their names because they were never freed. But this, this is the flip side, now, right, This is the good part. This is a good stuff. This is what I live for, right, So tell us about that moment when you were finally vindicated and released and walked out into the first free ara you had breathed in almost forty years.
I guess that's one of the quirky things about all of that. You know, it's just saying those simple words guilty, innocent, Just those simple words, man. But it took so much and so much time to get to that point. Honestly, I was kind of subdued because I was tired. I was tired. But at the same time, I was grateful because I made it through the ordeal, and I feel like I was stronger than they were. But it was more tremendous relief than actual glee and happiness.
You know. It's just like, man, it's nice to be able to breathe again.
You know.
It was a great moment. Man. Everything after that was like I was on cloud nine. You know. It was just a great relief man, to be free. You know.
So, ultimately all three of you guys were compensated. I wish I could say that for most of the people that are on our show.
Yes, and it's a real tragedy. Man.
It should be automatic. It should be you walk out of prison with an apology and a big check and a chance to start your life anew. But even the people who do get compensated normally have to wait years, typically have to wait years.
I can attest to that.
Trust me, and now, luckily, thankfully, you have been compensated. There's no amount of money that would be enough, but it does give you the freedom to be able to live out your days in relative comfort.
I'm sixty five now, you know, and I've been fortunate enough to be surrounded by people who have given me so much, you know, helped me navigate the world that I've been absent from for thirty nine years.
And you know, trust me.
Man, if I didn't have to help, man, I'm still lost today. I've been out here for almost six years now, and I'm still kind of lost compared to what a lot of guys got it.
Man.
I had it. I had it easy. Man, I cannot lie. This is a social problem. This is our society, This is our America.
You know.
When I became an exignery, always before that, I always thought it was black people because that's all I ever saw black people.
On TV getting exonerated.
But my first Exigonnery conference after I got out of prison, I saw people from all manner of life. They have an innocence project in Hawaii, and that boggles my mind. I've been to Hawaii. It's paradise. Why would you need an innocent project over there?
But it just.
Brings back home that we need it everywhere, you know, because justice isn't perfect anywhere. And it just opened my perspective upon like, man, this just isn't an inner city black problem. This is an America world problem, you know. But there's a lot of stuff you can overcome, man,
you know. And I'm living a great life right now, and I try to live my life and an example of what it can be like I mean and out of perfect life now, but I'm living a life that I love and the life that I usually dream about in my prison cell every night, every night, you know, now.
Ricky, without further ado, the best part of the show is the same every week. It's called closing Arguments, and it's the part of the show where I first of all, thank you again. I'm going to turn my microphone off, kick back of my chair with my eyes closed and my headphones on, and just listen to anything else you want to share my journey.
You know.
I know a lot of people say I don't know how you so calm, cool and collected, but you need it to be there to understand why I am the type of person I am today forgiving understanding. Yes, I get mad sometimes when I think about I just had a baby two years ago, my butt, my daughter's about to turn to my first child. I think about all the time that I'm not going to have with her, and I kick myself in the butt for that, because I need to be thinking about the time I do
have with her. But sometimes those thoughts creep in, Like my mother died while I was in prison, you know, And.
It's just stuff like that.
You know, it's okay to reminisce about the time you lost, but you can't get caught up in it. You know, you can't get caught up in it. You have to appreciate what you have right now. And that's what I'm doing. I have a beautiful wife. I have three knucklehead step children and lovely the daughter me and my wife had together. We got three dogs, we have a beautiful home, and I'm blessed.
Man.
You know, the easiest thing to do is to be angry and bitter. You know, I'd rather be happy and get out there and try to change the system. Channel that anger and bitterness and resentment into doing something. Man, Get out there and help somebody because somebody helped me, you know, And I'd be a complete asshole if I will just sit here and then't try to help anybody else.
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Cliburn, and Kevin Wartis, with research by Lyla 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
TikTok and Instagram at It's Jason flam Ravil. Conviction is the production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one