I'm Jason Flamm, host of Wrongful Conviction, but this week, instead of hearing me, I've invited a true genius from the legal world to bring their knowledge and expertise to the conversation as guest host here at Wrongful Conviction. We believe that sharing the stories of the incarcerated innocent can create real change in the world, even beyond what these real life legal superheroes do every day.
On June seventh, nineteen eighty eight, joggers were out on a wooded trail in Pontiai, Michigan when they discovered the body of thirty five year old Robert Mihia. He had been stabbed to death. Mahia was last seen at a bar a couple of nights before, and he left.
With a stranger.
Witnesses described that person to police, who created a composite sketch and published it in the local newspaper.
There were no other leads.
Connie Cook lived in Pontiac back then, and when she saw the suspect sketch and heard about the reward money, she decided to turn in her ex boyfriend, Gilbert Pool. She told police he'd confessed to a murder shortly before they moved together to North Carolina. Police went to North Carolina and arrested Gilbert and took him back to Michigan for trial. Among the other evidence that was presented, the state called forensic identologist doctor Alan Warnick to explain the
supposed bitemark found on the victim's body. Even at the time, there was a suspicion of this type of junk science, but doctor Warnick's testimony was presented to Gilbert's jury as scientific fact. Gilbert looked nothing like the suspect's sketch, and his blood type did not match any of the blood found near the victim's body. But on June sixth, nineteen eighty nine, Gilbert Poole was convicted of murder sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
This is wrongful conviction.
Hi.
I'm Chris Fabricat. I'm the director of Strategic Litigation at the Innocence Project in New York and author of the book Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System.
Hello, my name is Gilbert Poole. I was recently exonerated through the Innocence Project and the Conviction Integrity Unit in the state of Michigan.
Hi, I'm Marla Mitchell Sisian and I'm the former director of the WMU Cooley Innocence Project and currently serving of council with the office.
And mister Poole.
Tell us how you got involved in the criminal legal system and what led to your original conviction.
I was briefly living in Michigan. I moved from Michigan back down in North Carolina in nineteen eighty eight, and I met a girl up here in Michigan and she went with me back down in North Carolina. Subsequently, our relationship ended and we broke up. She came back to Michigan. Unbeknownst to me, she had went to the police down there and told them that I had committed a crime in Michigan.
And this was out of nowhere. Had you been to Pontiac and did you think that your girlfriend might say something like this about you.
I was twenty two years old and I was working as a plumber in North Carolina doing plumbing repair work. I was briefly living in Michigan. I had moved up here from North Carolina, but I found it hard to maintain employment up here because I was not from the state and it's a union state. You had to establish a five year residency in the state before you could join the union. So I decided this wasn't a place for me, and I moved back to North Carolina. My
girlfriend and I, Connie Cook. When we separated. It wasn't a friendly separation, to put it lately, and I didn't think it was beyond her to make up something, but I didn't think it was to this degree or here. After we had separated, I was out working and I came home from work one day and my door was open. Everything in the mobile home was gone, and I thought, well, okay, she came back and stole everything I had. There's no note or anything, but that's okay. If she needed that,
that's fine. Moving on. It wasn't until a couple of weeks later that the police came to my workplace and serve me with this warrant, and then everything made sense. Then, oh, okay, she used me to basically get a ride back to Michigan and claim a reward that was open for a murder case that was unsolved in Michigan. She has me confessing to a murder six months before it actually happened.
It's a problem.
They took her in and they gave her a polygraph test, so she worked with the polygraph examiner until they came up with a test that she could pass.
Well, let's bring in Marla talk a little bit about the crime that mister Pool really had no idea what the details were. Marla, can you tell us a little bit about the crime that mister Poole was ultimately charged with.
Yes, So, mister Poole was convicted of murdering a man in Pontiac, Michigan. And mister Mieha was actually pretty well known in the Pontiac community at that time. He had worked for Pontiac and he had worked for the county in a variety of government jobs, and he was actually pretty popular individual at the time. He was living what would have been considered at that time sort of a double life, meaning he was a gay man in Pontiac, Michigan in nineteen eighty eight, and he frequented a gay bar,
which was the last place he was seen alive. So Miha had left with a stranger that evening. Stranger, through the narrative, became mister Poole. Gil became a suspect when his ex girlfriend Connie Cook said, I have information about a murder which at that point in time when she came forward the murder, the case of gone cold for about seven or eight months, and that's when mister Pool became the suspect.
And so, mister Poole, tell us about when you first learned that you weren't just going to be able to take care of this quick and go back to work. What was the first moment where you recognized that you were beginning a long, slow slide into the criminal justice system.
After I got back to Michigan things, Yeah, we really were setting in back in Oakland County jail. The investigator started taking samples from me, hair samples, blood samples, bite impressions, dental molds.
A dental mold. We'll definitely get to the dental mold. So they were starting to cook up the junk science right away.
Yeah. Yeah, And I hired an attorney in Michigan who contacted me once. While I was introduced to the county jail. They had composite drawings ran in a newspaper that was not me. He showed me the newspaper he said, look, this is the paper that they had. It doesn't even match you. It's not even close. And it was just a matter of a beneful girlfriend and started a process that we're just going to have to take care of. But not to worry he was seeing. He seemed to
be kind of nonchalant about it. So it was kind of calling to me a little bit. But as Tom moved on in the months in the county jail, crep up on me and then it became a lot more serious.
Marlin, let me bring you in to talk a little bit about the investigation that was going on, where this composite sketch came from, and who the people were that saw the victim on the night the victim was murdered.
Yes, so the victim was a regular at this bar and most of the patrons were individuals that were either his friends or knew him. And so obviously one of the first things that the police did to investigate this case is to interview everyone that was in the bar that evening, and they all provided descriptions, and there were two composite drawings that came out in the local newspaper, the Oakland Press, and as mister Poole stated, they didn't
look anything like mister Pool. Unfortunately, when Connie Cook served mister Poole up on a silver platter. What the government did and what the police investigation did is it focused then on mister Pool. This problem was compounded because instead of the composites that were published in the newspaper a week after or the murder, the government produced new drawings.
We to this day do not know where they came from, and they proceeded to suggest to the witnesses and the jury that these were the drawings that were in the newspaper, and those drawings looked exactly like mister Poole Wow. In fact, to this day, I personally believe that they drew those drawings from photographs that they obtained through their investigation.
So they took a new sketch and essentially painted a bullseye around their new target and got their identification that way. No, and we all know that eyewitness misidentification as a leading contributing factor to wrongful conviction. It's played a role in nearly seventy percent of all convictions that and overturned by DNA evidence. But usually those are honest mistakes by well intentioned actors that are using a suggestive lineup. It's usually
not manipulating an image to gain an identification. Mister Pool were you aware that this was going on at the time.
Absolutely. I was poking my lawyer in the side. I said, listen, object to this, and he did a very poor job during trial of getting to the bottom of the composite drawing switcheroo that they that they came to. And I wanted to jump in when you said misidentification. This was not a misidentification. This was absolutely a fabrication. A miss identification suggests that somebody made a mistake. I don't think there were any mistakes made here. I think this was
planned out and intentional. And if you look at it from that perspective, all the puzzles fit like they orchestrated this whole thing to get a conviction. Yeah.
Absolutely, you know. I mean, and I didn't mean to suggest that there was some sort of a mistake, you know. I just hadn't heard something like a new composite spetch to match the suspect before. And I've been around the block, so that's a new one for me, you know. And then we're going to bring in the junk science in
a minute. But I want to just go back, Marli, if you could just talk a little bit about how the victim was discovered and some of the evidence that was alledgs to have been found on the victim's body and ultimately associated with mister Poole.
Sure the victim left the bar at closing time on a Sunday night Monday morning, and the next day he failed to show up for work and towards the end of that day this was very out of character for him. He was considered a missing person and he was discovered on a running path by two runners who were out for an early morning run, and of course they called the police immediately. They identified his body rather quickly and
when they took him. When they arrived at the crime scene, there was a lot of blood because he had been stabbed to death, but there was also less concentrated blood around the body, so they as a result, they collected some blood droplets from some stones and some grass near the body. This is another actually extremely heartbreaking piece of this case in terms of having this information back in
nineteen eighty eight and how it was treated. So they used blood typing at the time, which only allows us to put ourselves in a category of undreds, thousands, sometimes millions of people, and they determined that the victim's blood was oh and that there was also a foreign blood type present B type blood, which, as we now know mister Pool, is a B.
He was excluded from the evidence before the trial. Right, that's what we're telling here, Right, So, mister Pool, you have at this point you've given up all forcibly had blood samples taken from you, hair samples taken from you, a dental mold taken from you. You've been an identification has been manufactured against you. Your girlfriend has falsely accused you of a crime. You're in jail and you're about to start trial. Tell us about when the dentist came for your teeth.
Well, forensic odentologist, self proclaimed expert in BikeE marks came to the county jail and took marks in wax. I say he's self proclaimed. I guess he was certified by a Board of American Board of Odentologists.
By foe junk scientists certified him.
Right. But the certification comes in the form of certifying identification of remains that are unidentifiable otherwise. So if you had a body that was burnt, and you could take the teeth from that body and compare them to dental records and identify that victim but to take that science and stretch it to say, okay, well we're going to take a bruise. It's essentially what they found on the victim was a bruise, and I'd match it to somebody's teeth and say those teeth matched to bruise is a
far stretch. It's not a solid substrate like wax that they're taking my impressions from. Skin is fluid, it's movable, it's elastic. It's going to stretch, and so you're not going to have depth or angulation, registration, all these things that would come into play when you're identifying.
A course bitemark.
Evidence is subject to speculation masquerading as scientific evidence. As mister Poole just said, skin does move and it changes, and that makes it nearly impossible to say for sure which teeth made which marks. More fundamentally, these forensic dentists don't even know a bite mark from any other type of injury. And beyond that, skin changes constantly in a decomposing body, and it changes constantly in a healing victim.
So teeth that might match one day or even one hour might not match the next hour or the next day. The Friends of godentologists in this case was doctor Allan Warnick, the only one practicing in Michigan at that time. Any good defensi lawyer is supposed to question the expert or its credentials in front of the jury in a process
called vordere. So today, if we were listening to this case today, if a jury was hearing this case today, they would learn that this type of evidence that doctor Allan Warnick was about to convict mister Poole with has been responsible for at least thirty five known wrongful convictions and indictments. The jury would also learn that the National Academy of Sciences calls forensic identatology junk science and gross speculation, as has every other scientific entity that has ever examined
this fundamental junk science. I wrote an entire book on the subject of junk science, and I've been on another of our podcast Junk Science, talking about the outrageous practice of bitemark identification and matching. But let's get back to
mister Poole's case. Despite the fact that he and his lawyer both knew that this wasn't a credible witness, doctor Allan Warnick was nevertheless allowed to get up on the witness stand, raise his right hand, and testify as a so called expert practicing in a valid field of forensic science sciences.
So when he gets on the stand and you know, with his little white lab coat on, and says, well, the odds of winning the lottery were better than it not being mister Poole, That's exactly what he told the jury word for word. So the jury hears that, which is a personal opinion, but they're instructed to regard it as a truth. How do I win? How do I come back that?
So let's take us from the moment of the opening statement and describe how you experienced your trial as this nightmare unfolded.
I believe I'll see my attorney twice before the trial. Both times it was less than ten minutes. He was a paid attorney at trial. He gave me a notepad and a piece of paper here, if you want to make notes, just write it down and show it to me. And I was kind of keeping score. Well, well okay, well that didn't sound good for me. So you know that was one against me. Well, well that didn't sound good. There's another mark against me. While the marks kept adding
up and it doesn't look good. Column here on. I'm getting very nervous as lack of preparation, i would say, was coming to light, and it was not looking good for the home.
Team, Okay for the audience with their own score seats at home. The evidence presented against mister Poole was limited to this, the doctored up composite sketch, his ex girlfriend's false testimony that he admitted to the crime, and the junk science the bitemark evidence. A Michigan State Police scientists also conducted blood type testing at the crime scene and did not find any type AB blood that would have
matched to mister Pool. Due to illness, this scientist did not testify, and instead of delaying the trial to get this crucial testimony in front of the jury, mister Poole's lawyers just entered the paper report into evidence, which isn't close to us convincing. So yeah, it was definitely not looking good for the home team. So at this point, mister Poole, you decided to testify on your own behalf. Take us through that experience and how you were feeling at this time.
I'm sunk, I am absolutely beside myself. I'm in a panic state. When the prosecutor ended his his presentation. The judge asked my attorney to put on his witnesses. My attorney says, yeah, no, we're good defense. Rest He put on no witnesses at all, whatsoever. I said, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute, you're not going to put on any witnesses at all. Somebody's got to go up with my defense. I'll testify. He said, well, I went to you're getting on the stand. The prosecutor is really
gonna I don't care. Somebody's got to stand up for me. So I demanded to be put on the stand, and I got up.
So let me interrupt you here for a second. Your attorney had not talked to you about whether or not you're going to testify until that moment. You had no conversation about that. No, he didn't prep you for any of this testimony. No, so you had no idea what you might say or might not say. No, and he just advised you not to do it, and that was it, right.
But I said, no, no, no, no, I'm getting on the stand. Somebody's got to say I didn't do it. Somebody's got to see me, my reaction or whatever I mean, however it plays out, I can't be convicted and just sit here and not say anything. If I'm going to go down, I'm want to go down kicking and screaming. So I did my best. I got on the stand and against the prosecutors manipulations of wording or his learned techniques of
interviewing somebody, I did my best. But I guess it didn't translate to the jury.
It's very you know, I mean that anybody can be made to sound like a liar under those heightened circumstances. And so tell us about was your family at the there for the verdict and your testimony?
You know, due to my attorney's initial response or initial investigation, it was just a matter of routine. This is not you. The evidence says that's not you. Don't worry about it. You'll never be convicted. No, my family's in North Carolina. I wasn't going to have them fly up to Michigan. So I had no family or friends or anybody. I had no support there in the courtroom at all.
Wow.
And so you walked into this believing that you know, a day or two later you'd be acquitted, go back to your life.
Exactly. I could see that this was orchestrated for a conviction of an unsolved murder of a very important person, well loved by the community. We're satisfying a community need for a conviction. And I was just a young twenty two year old kid, so you know I was served up.
Wow, I mean you were just you know, in a life raft on your own, cut from the shore. It sounded like, with no support, no family support, no lawyally support, no scientific support, you get convicted and sentenced to life without parole. Is that right?
Correct?
Tell us the role that Hank Clayton played in this trial.
Hank Clayton was in this storyline as an individual who had spent a considerable amount of time with the victim leading up to the time of his disappearance, and it was basically uncontroverted that on the night of the murder, leading up to the murder, that Miha had left the bar at least once with mister Clayton and returned with him, And in fact, there were witness statements and testimony at the prelim that suggested that he in fact left the
bar with Hank Clayton. The police did question mister Clayton, and they did search his truck they did find a knife, They didn't find anything unusual in the back of his truck, and they pretty much dropped him as a suspect.
And the victim was stabbed right, so there was no testing of this knife.
There was testing, and they did not find any blood. We had an investigator look into his background and he was known to threaten people with knives and behave in a jealous manner, if you want to call it that. We also spent many, many years trying to determine what
mister Clayton's blood type was. We were unsuccessful in trying to determine that, and we had to remind ourselves that we might not be able to solve the crime, and we had to step back and think through how are we going to exonerate mister Poole.
So, mister Pool, after your sentenced, tell us about your life in prison before Marla took on your case. What was your appeals like? What was your prison life like?
I started trying to educate myself as to how I got in there, the law, the statutes, what was required for a conviction, how do I appeal? Just started ordering books and reading case law. I formulated a list of I guess I could say demands. I was going to make sure I was in control of this of this journey here, because leaving it up to my attorney, even though when I had paid, did turn out well. The court appointed lawyer, I got him on the phone maybe
twice throughout the whole Pillot process. I never once seen him. Don't know what it looks like to this day.
Oh my god. And the lawyering you got, mister Poole, it just outrages me. I see a lot of bad lawyering in this job. But you know, here, you know, you have such stark evidence of innocence before you even get indicted, and just go through a trial where they, you know, aren't being straightforward with the blood evidence, and they're using all this junk science and they're inventing sketches, you know. I mean, it's hard to believe that we're talking about the United States.
I was absolutely myself. I said, I'm not going to lose the appeal too. So I had to start out from basics. So in too much time, I got my GD I went to an office occupation class to learn how to type, so I could type my briefs. And then so I got me a typewriter, and I started writing myself, formulating my own supplemental briefs to put in on behalf of myself, and I put everything but the kitchen sink in there. Actually took my case all the way up to the United States Supreme Court, and every
court got it wrong. Yeah. I can only attribute that to just not giving me the time of day because I was a prisoner. I mean, listen, I've been studying law for twenty five years.
Yep.
How could I not know what I'm talking about by this time.
I have no doubt that you're a pell of briefs or stronger than ninety percent of the briefs that are filed in these cases. I want to get to your decision to reach out to Marl's clinic, and how you came when you began to learn about the power of DNA evidence, and how you decided to reach out to the instance prior to that, Marla runs.
The whole time. I reached out to attorneys trying to get assistance because I needed a signature behind my briefs, behind my research. I need somebody to side on and say yes, this is legit. I needed somebody. I needed a voice to stand behind me. Eventually the stars aligned, Marla came to my aid, and Marla has been working diligently on my case ever since.
We actually were looking pretty closely at Gil's case after he wrote us, because we could tell based on just his questionnaire that if half of this was true, he was wrongfully convicted.
Marla and her law students submitted hundreds of freedom of information requests to reinvestigate the case and do their own forensic DNA testing on the evidence that remained. Unfortunately, because mister Poole had, as he said, put everything but the kitchen sink into trying to get himself out on his own, Marla and her students weren't allowed to submit everything they found to the appellate courts because it wasn't technically new evidence.
But the turning point in this case finally comes when Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel launches the first statewide conviction Integrity Unit in twenty nineteen. And Marla, this is the same year you filed an application for mister Poole's case.
When we did his application, we went in full guns. We had the expert's opinion on the DNA, We had the expert's opinion on the identification, and then we had the full history of the role that Alan Warnick played in the case, along with his association with other wrongful convictions in the state of Michigan. We didn't argue that
the bipe mark evidence was new. We just argue that once you find this other stuff to be new, you're going to take a look at the whole case, and you're going to want to take a really close look at this bipe mark.
When they formulated the Conviction Integrity Unit, my case was one of them. They started initially considering they're going to make sure they got it right. And the detectives actually told me, we're either going to be your best friend or your worst enemy, because we're not pulling any punches here. We're going to put it all out on the table. So I knew in my heart I was getting out, and I started bragging, Hey, I'm gonna get out of here. I'm telling people around me, I'm getting out of here,
and regularly I'm getting updates from Marlow. I got notified that I had a Zoom meeting the next day.
I remember very specifically. We were in the midst of COVID ill so we couldn't tell you in person.
She says, it's going before the judge next week, and there's nobody opposing you. Everybody is in agreement that you're innocent.
And I am pretty sure I was crying before I probably got the words out. But it was one of the happiest days for me to say, your case, after working on it for almost twenty years, is finally turning the corner.
I was shaken up. I mean, I think I can remember crying twice in my conviction. Once when the judge sentenced me and I had to make that phone call to my mother, and the other time was when Marla told me that that next day I had to hear And within hours, Marla and her team of attorneys were at the prison walking me out the door. I didn't even have a pair of shoes to put on. They brought me pants and shoes from the church, and I was met there by easily one hundred people. Everybody from
the Attorney General's office was there. There were tears and apologies all around, and I guess that's when I was kind of reborn. I was able to start a new life, which was not easy. I'm not going to complain about it, but I'm going to tell you it was not easy, and it's still difficult at times. I've been out for a year now and I'm just now getting the hang
of some of this technology. They didn't even have cell phones when I went to prison, so and there's been a lot, a big learning curve of how to act in society because this is a whole new world. It's not the end because there's so many cases, so many cases that still have to be reviewed and vetted, and that I wasn't only one. So there's people all left behind, and I feel like obligated to kind of pay it
forward here and help some others here. So there's a lot of people that are caught up in a procedural morass that they can't dig out of, especially some people that are in there that have less than a full education, or don't have the skills to navigate these waters, or don't have the support. I didn't have any support, but I fought a long time tooth and nail to get support. That's just a testament to my tenacity. Some people just
don't have that. There's no reason for somebody to be condemned to prison because they don't have the fight in them.
So I hear your call to action is for people to support the Cooler Innocence Project or righteous Endeavor, no doubt. But Marla, what can listeners do to help people like mister Poole and your work.
Well, certainly we would welcome your financial support, but also I would just say that there's a number of really promising policy issues going on in the state right now. We're working on amendments to our Wrongful Imprisonment Compensation Act. We want to make sure that our clients are adequately compensated. If you care about criminal justice issues, it's a great time to just touch base with your legislator and say that you'd like to support improvements to the criminal justice system.
And you know, I'm always available to answer questions about our office or about the policy work that's going on in Michigan.
Right Let's put the justice in the criminal justice system. I hear that. Thank you both so much for taking the time to share your incredible story with the listeners of Wrongful Conviction Podcast. We're at the point of the show called closing Arguments. Do a round robin as to any final thoughts that you want to share with our audience and We'll begin with you, Marla.
I would just say that when you look back at mister Poole's case, all of the heartbreakings and mistakes could have been avoided and corrected. You know that actually kind of makes me get up every day and do the work. But I guess you know. My final thought to those who are listening is just you know, a wrongful conviction can happen to anyone, and we all love someone, so that means it could happen to someone that we love. Everyone's entitled to an effective attorney at trial and on appeal.
Everyone is entitled to a fair proceeding where things are not made up in their criminal trial. We have to start looking at innocents cases differently. We can't treat them like typical appellate cases for sure, because years this When we look back, right, we see Gill's case and we're like, how did this take thirty two years? But yet Gill knows and Chris knows, and I know that even after thirty two years, it was a mirror.
Called mister Poole, what's your closing argument?
If you ask anybody what's the best criminal justice system in the world. I don't think anybody's going to come up with anything better than what the United States has. But when you have human actors, and when you have human interaction, personalities getting away, bad choices get in the way, and bad actors get in the way. A lot of that comes from no penalties for the bad actors. I think the takeaway is here, take a real deep look
at the things that are presented from different perspectives. If you look at things from a perspective that this was all fabricated, it all makes sense. It was not because I was guilty, It was because they had the ability to do it without any penalty. So I think that needs to be corrected.
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. I'd like to thank our executive producers The Deadly Doctor, Jason Flamm and Kevin Wardis. The senior producer for this episode is Jackie Pauley, and our producers are Leila Robinson and Jeff Claiborne. Our editor is Roxindra Gweedy. The music in this production is 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 Twitter at Chris Underscore Fabricant and on Instagram at Chris Underscore Fabricant. Wrongful Conviction is the production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One.
If you were riveted by the staircase, as I know I was, you're gonna want to tune in next week for the guest hosted episode of Wrongful Conviction Because get this, the two incredible lawyers from the show, David Rudolph and Sonya Pfeiffer, are going to talk to David's former client, Michael Peterson, and you know that name about one of the most famous and infamous wronful conviction stories in the history of America. You know about the case, but now
you're going to hear the real story behind it. Tune in listen next Monday in the Wrongful Conviction podcast feed.