In the early morning hours of August eleventh, nineteen seventy nine, a seventy four year old woman was asleep in her den when she awoke to find a black man had broken in through the window by the light of her television. He brutalized and raped her for over an hour after stealing seventy dollars. The assailant pulled the telephone court out
of the wall and fled through the back door. When the victim finally was able to contact the police, she was taken to the hospital, but in her bloodied state, they decided against performing a rape kit. However, other biological evidence was collected from the scene. The victim helped that Georgia Bureau of Investigation develop a composite sketche and immediately one of the investigators said that it looked like a young man named John Jerome White, who was a person
of interest in a string of burglaries. They arrested John and collected physical samples from him, as well as his driver's license. Even though none of the physical evidence was a match for John, the victim I to fight them at first in a photo array and then again at a live lineup, and after all that, how could anyone deny her gut wrench in courtroom identification? So they didn't. This is wrawful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful conviction today.
We have a unique story, but not rare, and it's just as tragic every time something like this happens when a black man is misidentified by a white victim. So there's this double victimization that happens. And it was much easier for these things to happen before the dawn of DNA testing. Not that they don't still happen today, because they do. But here to discuss the matter. As the former executive director of the Georgia Andasis Project, she's now
with the Fulton County Conviction Integrity Unit. So Amy Maxwell without two, thank you for joining us here again on wrongful conviction.
Thank you for having me.
And now the man she represented, mister John Jerome White. You know, I'm sorry for the reason why you're here joining us today, but we are really honored to have you.
Thank you.
You're very welcome. So John, as we like to do here, you know, it's sort of almost a tradition. Now, we'd like to spend some time getting to know you a bit like our audience get to know you a bit, so can you tell us a little bit about what your life was like prior to all this insanity.
Uh.
Well, I'm from the small what we like to call it a railroad town, uh and matt Chester, Georgia. That's in South Georgia. I'm the only boy, six girls. I was raised by my grandmother, just a love to do things for my grandmother, you know, cutwood and working in guardens and things of that nature. You know. Growed up and got a chance to experience you know, what we like to call Crosstown as you know, that city of Manchester,
you know. And I kind of got away from my grandmama, you know, hold on it, you know, making sure I was doing the right thing and thing. And during the time all this occurred, you know, I had started to do little mount of burgers and things of that nature here around Manchauter convenience stores and merchant stores like that. I were going in the wrong direction. They were going totally against the way I was brought up. You know.
I all happened to me, you know, and the way things happen, I feel like it regard's way of putting that putting that roadblock in my path.
Well, that sounds like one way of taking responsibility for the actual wrong that you've admitted to doing in the past. And I suppose thinking of your wrongful conviction like that is a way to make peace with it. But I mean, sometimes on this show we speak with folks that are pulled completely out of obscurity to be tried for a crime that had absolutely nothing to do with But in your case, and this doesn't make it right by any means, but you were known the entity the police because of
those burglaries down in Manchester. But the crime in question wasn't burglary. It was rape. And you had never exhibited any sort of violence and certainly no sexual violence before. So it's really a hell of a label to get saddled with.
Yeah, I couldn't believe it. You know, I always been the type that you know, I respected women. You know, I was raided by my grandmother, you know, all my live that you know, that's all I've been around, you know, women, And it was kind of hard to believe that, you know, I would be in charge with, you know, the whole type crime.
Nevertheless, the burglaries had you on the radar of the local police when this terrible crime occurred, and it was in the early morning hours of August eleventh, nineteen seventy nine, when a man broke into the Manchester, Georgia home of a seventy four year old woman.
Well, what we know is that she was in the den. She was asleep on her couch, and she had her sheets on the couch, and she did have the light on in the kitchen, and she had her television on, so that was the only available to her. She also wore prescription glasses and she didn't have her glasses on and someone broke in through a window in the den. He attacked her, He raped her, He brutalized her for over an hour. Then he ripped out the telephone cords out of the wall and went out the back door.
He also stole seventy dollars in cash from her purse. Now, she eventually called the cops and was taken to the hospital. But do I have this right that no rape kit was collected.
No rape kit was collected, They said because she was so damaged during the rape, The rape was so brutal and there was just so much blood. They made a determination that they couldn't get any viable evidence. And you know, you got to remember back then they were only able to do blood typing, So I think that their thought process may have been, there's so much of her blood, his blood type is going to just get all mixed
up in there. They may also have not wanted to got to remember, this is a small town, right They might have been concerned that she was already so traumatized that they didn't want to do any more of an examination. You know, she was seventy four years old, and I can't even imagine how how she was presenting to the doctors. Obviously they should have done a sexual assault kit. They certainly would today, but they did not.
And since there was no rape kit, there's no seminal evidence. But there was other blood and biological evidence at the scene, which we'll get into in a bit. But in nineteen seventy nine, as Amy mentioned, all we had was serology, which had its own limitations. DNA testing, of course, was not available yet, and I can't imagine collecting a rape kit would have been an easy thing to do with this poor seventy four year old woman in the state that she was in. But the fact is she did
somehow survive. She must have been some tough lady. So what happened next in this investigation.
Well, I should point out that this is such a small town that their local police didn't do the investigation. They brought in the state police, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. And when they were collecting evidence, they collected the bed sheet that was on the couch, and the bed sheet had hairs. Now, I will say that at trial they only thought there was one hair. Turned out there were
several hairs on that bed sheet, and they preserved that. Now, I will say that at trial, the hares were discussed, to use the parlance at the time, they were negroid hares, and that's pretty much all they could say about them. They did a microscopic examination of them, and they said that they looked almost exactly alike, that they were almost
positive that they were from the same person. Of course, what that is is a human eye is looking at two hairs and their pubic hair, so they're very small hairs, right, and saying, oh, yeah, they look alike, you know, And back then that was good evidence, right, Not so much.
Now, yeah, definitely not. We did a whole episode by the way of a wrongful conviction junk science that Josh Duben hosted about hair microscopy, and we're going to link to it in the episode Bio. But to think that someone could compare hairs from a suspect and a crime scene just by looking and match them to the exclusion by the way of all other potential suspects everybody else, all other people on the whole planet, is absolutely bonkers. Now,
remember they used to do that all the damn time. Now, they mentioned that these hairs were from a black man, as the victim had already told them, But what about this piece of skin that I read about.
Yes, so apparently when the man came in through the window, he cut himself on his hand, and there was literally like a triangular piece of his palm that was also recovered from the scene.
And it's unclear whether or not they did seriological testing on that either. But we're going to come back to the piece of skin in a bit. But at this point they moved on to relying on cross racial identification. Now, study after study has shown these are studies which they used a control group that has not seen the crime, that that control group tends to be more accurate than victims or witnesses. So get this. Cross racial identification has
been proven to be less accurate than guessing. So if you actually didn't even witness the crime and were shown a lineup, you'd have a better chance of picking the person just by guessing than someone who did. Mister crime. It's an amazing thing, but it's true. Look it up. I encourage you.
So they do a composite sketch of her attacker that she saw in the dark, the only light from the kitchen and the television while she's being traumatized. Right, So she does do a composite sketch, and there is a GBI agent who was part of the investigation. He says, hey, that looks a lot like John White. And then everything, of course, is often running at that point.
So John, this wasn't a big town. So I'm sure word traveled fast at that point. Had you heard about what had happened?
We heard that, you know, this particular lady had got right. You know, I didn't think much of it. I really didn't, you know. And when all this occurred, they would suspect me of doing those mount of burgers around town and come to find out that they were looking for me. So I decided to just up and leave Manchester. You know, I was at the age nineteen then, and I went to a little small town and the cordial the way. I had some people, you know, some cousins, and I to stay in.
So this crime happened on August eleventh, and they finally caught up with you in Decre, Georgia and drove you back to Meriweather County around September twenty first.
On the ride back, they kept on asking me questions about this here tick little crime involved in the seventy something the year old lady and I had a venera disease they called gongria, and you know, being a little smart addict like I was, you know, I didn't answer the question directly. You know. When they kept on asking me, I said, well, if I did it, she got Gongarria. They took that, and I like to say they ran with it.
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When they got me back to a County, Jay, they took the house and apples being a princes an apple blood from me, and they took my driving license and a social Security car and everything, and you know, they locked me up.
So they took those samples in order to run tests on all the physical evidence that they had tried to match the hair. Like we already mentioned, they probably did some seriological testing with the patchers skin in your blood. We don't know that for sure, but that would seem like it would have been the least thing they could have done, and had any of it matched you, they would have been shouting it from the rooftops. Now they already had this composite sketch that they thought looked like you.
You know, they had to jump with you a few times away and you were being held for the burglaries.
My grandma came to get me out the next day after you know, they had brought me back to Milweather County. That's when she was in on that I was be in charge with, you know, ray Rod reaggravated thaw and murdering.
Curiously, she got that news before they had even taken your driver's license to be viewed by the victim in an alleged photo array.
I don't know if they took my driving license or they took many pictures. They say they took a photo array to her apartment, but I'm assuming they took my driver license.
We don't know much about it because, of course, you know, they didn't record a lot of information. They certainly didn't record the photo of Ray and I don't believe we ever found that photo array did with John. I don't think we've ever seen those photos, so we don't know who else was in the photo and how well they matched either the composite or John.
Now, maybe this composite sketch looked enough like you that your likeness was already imprinted in her mind, So photo array or not, she had been primed to pick you with that composite in mind. And it's also possible that they only brought along your driver's license rather than a number of other photos that favored your features. We don't know, but now you had been chosen from this alleged photo array, and things started going down how fast?
A few you know, weeks after they did all this year, they performed the line up. It was just us on the room and me standing about ten feet from her, along with a few other guys. And I couldn't believe, you know, it was tick with it because they brought another person up there of a place I had robbed, and she didn't pick me out, but they bringed this old
lady nine, and she picked me out. Like I said, I'm quite sure they any take now one of no other guy pictures that was in that line up to her, and I'm the only somebody she had seen recently on a photo.
Again, we're not sure what happened at that alleged photo lineup, as no documentation has ever been found. But I want our audience to note that I witnessed misidentification is a contributing factor in sixty nine percent of all known wrongful convictions, and in this case, we have a cross racial misidentification. So, as I mentioned earlier, in study after study, cross racial
identifications are actually less accurate than guessing. But what about the robbery victim also white, and that would have been the correct identification. It's crazy, but okay, So cross racial or not, she had already been primed to pick you out of the lineup by seeing your driver's license, in addition potentially to a composite sketch that may have favored you or you know, pointed towards you. I mean, nineteen seventies, Georgia, you were already known to police, and then an old
white lady who had been brutally attacked identified you. I hate to say it, but I think your fate was pretty much sealed. Did you have a court appointed or attorney?
At first they gave me a quarter point of attorney. But my mom and them, you know, they raised some money and they hired you know, sound for Bishop.
And he's now a US representative, right.
He was a part of the legislature back you know, when I was going to trial. They took me to trial. You know, they picked a jury which was mainly all white. They presented the evidence. The finger pressed they said they collected at the scene of the crime. They said all of them were sponged to the point that they couldn't get no kind of identification off of them. They say, the blood test came back negative. I don't know what they had tested. I don't know they tested the skin,
I don't know what it was. But the crime left investigator said the house table could be mine. I know they brought up the pigmentation of a black person's hair and they said it was all of it was similar.
Which really this technician was testifying that the hair was a black person's and you were also black, which is just not that probative. And what was it that they tested your blood against.
I don't really remember what it was they tested with the blood. I have to be honest with you. But also, you know we talked about the piece of skin, right that there was the cut, and when they picked John up five weeks later, he had a cut on his palm, and so that was another.
Piece, right. But the item that they tested for blood, which the skin, was more than likely the item it excluded him. But I suppose none of this matters when you have the word of a seventy year old white lady who was a victim of a brutal assault.
They actually to peak me out in court why she was only stand.
The problem with eyewitness identification is it's unreliable, but it's incredibly powerful in court. You have a now seventy five year old woman who is so traumatized the er didn't even want to do an examination of her. Get on the stand and say that's the man that did that to me. You know, the jury at that point is done right. If there's a few little things that they can put together, like oh, that hair might be the same or oh and he had a cut too, that was enough.
I mean, how do you combat that even pointing out that she wore glasses, that it was dark in there. It's debatable whether that helps or hurts your client. When you have an emotionally charged moment like that, how are you going to try to contradict her the victim?
Right?
John, at that point, did you have any hope that the jury might actually still get this right?
You know, me, knowing that I didn't do it, I didn't have no doubt in my mind that I was going home. I was that young and I was so inexperienced that I thought I was going home.
Can you take us back to that awful moment when they read the verdict that.
It broke down and started crying. You know, I will convicted. The rate robbery aggravated thought and two council burgery. And they asked me, did I have anything to say. I just said I didn't do it. When it took me back to the holding, said I know, I broke down and started crying. I was corresponding with a cousin of mind. You know. He just told me, you know, you know, God got his reasons for everything. You know what I'm saying.
And he said it was a reason behind it, you know for me, you know, it was a reason behind and I thought, I just thought that reason behind it. You know, I just accepted it that God will and
I moved forward. I couldn't go through that time, all that time that they gave me feeling some type of way, and I just had to learn how to how to survive inside the penitent I found what they called jail house attorney, and we tried, you know, by filing ahabor corpus against my lawyer that he didn't represent me, right. We they requested, you know, from my transcript and all that everything that will pertaining into my trial. But they, you know, the kind of mayor whether they didn't send
me anything but a transcript. They said, didn't have nothing else to send me and we buy ourselves assistant accounting, and they denied that. So I pretty much lay down on it from that point on.
So at that time, it was much easier to be granted parole, even with a sentence like yours, which was life plus sixty years. And usually, let's face it, they're not going to grant you parole without an admission of guilt and a show of remorse, even if you didn't commit the crime. That that's that's a detail, it gets washed away, but it appears that they may have actually believed in your innocence.
Yeah, after I want to say, eleven years, I came up a parole. They told me, in order to make parole that I would have to do some type of sex offlinal program. And I told the lady that, you know, I didn't do it. Must white. Unless you'd get in some sex offenal program, you ain't gonna get out of jail.
So they sent me to Metro up here in Atlanta, Georgia, where they had the programs at and my mama came up to see, Tay, go on, get in this program if it gonna help you get out, even you had to tell a lie, and they told me to cry till you for getting into safe Defending program which you had to describe what to play during the crime. And so I told him, man, you know I can't do that. I say, I can't imagine what took play doing it said crime. You know I couldn't make that lie up.
So I basically just just gave it up again, you know. And uh So one day I came in from work and the warden called me to his office at me, he ad me why I was at his institution, and I told him that they had sent me there participate in the safe Spherical program and that I couldn't, you know,
participlate in because I couldn't describe the crime. So he sing on back to the dormitor and some strange things occurred there, told me to pack my stuff up, that I was going to hospital lie and Augusta, Georgia for a year. Proud I had opposcopic survey then on my knee. So the inmates that was coming in from work having to notice a piece of paper that had all the transfers on and everything. And he told me that, said John, you wasn't going to Augusta Medical Hospital, Say you going
to constantly on halfway house. And it totally shocked me that they're all finn to get out of prison.
Had the pro board cut you a brake or was it the warden points of strings?
I don't know.
And no one told you.
Nobody told them.
Okay, that's weird. So you got paroled, I guess. And now you were starting out on a tough road to reacclimate into society. There are a lot of obstacles to employment and getting IDs and things like that, and those are some of the many reasons why recidivism rates can be as high as they are in some places. Not to mention that you turned to burglary in the past, and so where and how did you start that journey?
When I first got out, I was up in the Atlanta in the halfwhouse. I parode out down to a room and house. I got tired of the room and house and I moved to moved to Manchester.
Did you move back in with your mom or your grandma?
My mom?
My grandma had passed while I was incarcerated.
Sorry to hear that, but luckily you still had some family, right Were your sisters around now?
Most of them had, they had married. They moved on it was most of just me and my mom and my dad was still living at the time, and my niece.
You know, John got the opportunity to come out on parole, but he came out as a sex offender, right who hires a sex offender? You know, it was a struggle when he.
Was out on parole. So what did you do for work? And I understand you eventually went back to prison.
When I was dining back down here, I was doing odds and then work. And one day I was at McDonald's and seeing this guy and he pulled his wallet out and he had a lot of money in it, and me and another guy follow him and robbing. The guy got caught up some kind of way and he told, you know what, that albumed And I turned myself in again and I revoked my parole and sent me back.
I talked with the DA. He gave me ten years ran into what I already had, and that he wouldn't have no kind of negative recommendation towards if I was to come up with a role again.
Well, I can't say a lot of people are going to have a ton of sympathy for you on that situation. But it's like you said, earlier about how you made peace with your wrongful conviction. You kind of felt deserving of it because of the wrong that you had done. And I want to point out that in nabbing the wrong guy for that ultra violent rape and robber all those years ago, this did a really terrible disservice the entire community, not least of which to the victim, because
the real perpetrator was still free. So now it's nineteen ninety seven year back to serve out this new sentence and your old one. And it's not until about four years later when the amazing Amy Maxwell became the founding executive director of Georgia AND's project. Can you run through how you all came upon John's case?
The Georgia Ennison's Project started in two thousand and one. Obviously, we got cases coming to us fairly quickly. But as we were working on the cases, I started thinking, well, what about all those people who don't know that we could look at the cases? What about those people who've not heard that we exist? So in two thousand and four, first of all, we tried to go through the prison hierarchy and try to get notices posted in prison, and
they wouldn't do that. So what we did is we went through the Department of Corrections website and found everybody who was in prison for rape and sent them a letter. We sent about twelve hundred letters and we got about one hundred and twenty, so we got about ten percent return on our letter. And John was actually one of them.
I didn't I really didn't even know what to write, but I wrote it won a week with soold, I mean, I'm gonna respond.
We looked at his evidence and the hair evidence. They only really talked about one hair that they compared, and so we were under the impression from the crime lab report and from the testimony that there was only the one hair. But most importantly, we were trying to find that piece of flesh. In fact, we called it the piece of flesh case right, because it was such an unusual piece of evidence. You know, this was a straight up If we could find this evidence, we would know
who the perpetrator was. So I had an intern that went down to Meriweather County looking for that piece of flesh. Right, we just could not find it. We couldn't find it at the GBI, we couldn't find it anywhere, and so we just just kept on. It's hard people tell you that the evidence doesn't exist, or.
They just haven't looked at all because either they didn't care or they were instructed to ignore such requests.
Well, there might be that. So finally we went in person to the clerk's office and what they ended up finding was not the piece of flesh, but there were several of their hairs from the crime scene. Now, let me just say that hairs are they're good evidence.
If they're good evidence, right, if the hairs are pulled out from the root, then a DNA profile can be developed, right, if they can.
Give us information. But there's also I mean, there could be other reasons hairs were there. There was another Georgia case that involved hairs, and the theory was that she did her wash at the laundromat and she might have picked up some random hairs there, which, of course, these are pubic hairs, right, Why are you picking up pubic hairs at the laundry. So anyway, but we were concerned, you know, if these hairs didn't match John, that helped us, but it might not walk him out of prison. So
we had to tell John, we've got these hairs. We're going to test on. But so we sent those hairs for DNA testing and we find out that the hairs don't match John, and we all pile in the car to staff members and our intern, Cliff Williams. Cliff had been working on the case almost from the beginning. I can't where were you, John, I can't even remember where you were.
Macon Stay Prison.
So it's like two hours away. We get there and we're getting all we're putting all of our stuff in the trunk because you know, you can't take anything into the prison with you. And I get a call from the GBI and they tell me that there's been a CODIS match and I'm standing in the parking lot going, oh my gosh. We were just going down to tell him we got the DNA but to hold on. And I thought, oh my god, we're going to get to go in and tell him he's coming home. And I said,
who did it match? He goes, oh, it matched a man named James Parhum. And at that point my intern goes, James Parham, I think he was a suspect in this case. So he pulls out the box, you know, because we of course carry John's White's box all the way to the prison with us, you know, his file, and he's going through the file and he pulls out the photo of the live lineup, turns it over and James Parham is actually in the lineup where she picks John White
instead of James Parum. So we don't even know what to do with all this, right, So we get to go in and tell John all of this information. And I'm like John, and don't know how quickly you're coming home, but you're coming home.
Yeah, I'm looking at the photo right now, and we're going to link to it from the bio. I mean, oh my god, Like John is in the number three spot, of course because he was the target. And James Parham sure enough, is right there in number five right.
Oh, actually you know ed al Susan, Now was there? Men? Know, a roommates that a suit that.
What?
Yeah, oh my god. I'm rarely at a loss for words, but that's insane.
It was the strange thing happened throughout that my whole journey concerned that he was in the same room up with me. And I ended up with his Bible. When I got out, it had the name on it. I gave it back to his sister to get him. But yeah, Amy came down and told me about I was getting out. And when they did come to get me out, they came back. They rushed back there because they didn't want no media out at the institution. They rushed me in.
Wanted to know it was anybody to come get me, and they went downtown and bought me some clothes and made sure I was dressed. And when my mom and them came to get me and they they me on the way as quick as they can get me away from there.
So, Amy, what were the machinations that you had to go through to finish the job and get him home?
Well, it was so quick. So you know, we get all the information, but so does the district's attorney. And so of course when the district's attorney, and at that time it was Pete Scandalacus, who is now the head of the Prosecuting Attorney's Council here in Georgia, and he saw what we saw, and of course I'm on the phone with him, and on the way back from the prison, I'm like, Pete, they got a codis match.
What are you gonna do?
And he contacted the prison and honestly, John John's family got the notice to come pick him up, but literally four days later his folks are on the way down to Oglethort, Georgia to pick him up. So John was hum So.
John, what was your first meal? Where did you go? What did you what did you do?
It was like a blur. It was like a blur. I can't remember too much of the only thing I can remember looking back, when we passed the Prills and going out, I think I went to sleep. I think I went to sleep because somebody were happening. We went by some my sister house, and then we went straight to Atlanta, but press conferences and sayings of that nature. And I had me some frid greade tomatoes, had some
some ochre. I've had been worn, it's all. And I remembered that night that I got up and I walked. I walked up to a restaurant, and this guy's a chance just look up at the sky, you know, and look at the stalls and things, and just it's well, I could just see beyond that, you know, I could get a chance to see the sky, you know, and the stall and in the moon. Some of you didn't very often, you didn't get to see too much of why you was inde penal attention.
So James Parham played guilty. Who since the twenty years in prison on this rape right. And then in two thousand and nine, the Georgia legislature authorized the payment of five hundred thousand dollars in compensation to you. Now, no amount of money would ever be enough, and that's not even I mean, that's that number is tiny compared to what it should be.
Yeah, well, you know, Joe or you don't have a conversation law, And I got five hundred thousand dollars a conversation with prescriptions that I gotta maintain some type of employment. I got submit to drug tests and every so often I can't catch another fella there though I'll lose my conversation. I believe they put those stipulations in it because they don't want to get it. They didn't want to give me any money, and that it was done for me
to fail. You know, we asked for a million and something. They got it down to seven undred and fifty thousand. It passed one body of our legislature. Then it went to the other body of our legislation and they they rejected it. They revised it, and they agreed to all these sipulations.
Yeah, you know, it's just crazy to me that anybody could look at someone in your shoes and not have an instinct to immediately want to help, but rather their first instinct is I'm gonna fight this. I'm gonna I'm gonna fight to not write this wrong, to keep this wrong as wrong as it could be. Is there any thing our audience can do for you, you know, right now?
Give them this opportunity to say what I'm about to say, I never you know, go vote. You know what I'm saying, Get these unsimpensated people that that's a part of our legislation wave up there, so we can't get some of the bill pass that would that a and us getting you know, the support we need not only me, but other people that's in then you know, the similar situations. Yeah, you know, I you know, I'm gonna look out for me,
but that's what we need. We need voters. We need those people that's in office that that's that's voting against this is a change to be removed.
I hope our audience really takes those words to heart. And what about you, Amy, any call to action for our audience.
Well, I think folks can obviously follow the Georgia Innocence Project, particularly about the legislation, but there is also an Axigonnery, So if folks wanted to donate to the Georgia Edison's project, they could donate and specify that it's for the exoner refund. That would be great.
Okay, So we'll have those action steps linked in the bio, which brings us to my favorite part of the show. It's called, of course, closing arguments, and this is the part of the show where I thank you both for being here and just sharing this unbelievable, horrible story. And with that, I'm going to kick back in my chair, turn my microphone off, leave my headphones on, and close my eyes and just listen for anything else you want to share it with me and our amazing audience.
I would highly recommend people google the live lineup photo in John's case. When you get a chance to look at the live lineup, you're going to see how different James Parham looked from everybody else in that lineup. And it just goes to show how incredibly difficult it is to deal with eyewitness identification. I mean, the actual perpetrator was there live in front of her, and she still
picked the wrong man. So I think that we all need to be very cautious because, as we said earlier, when the Eyewinness takes the standard trial and says that's the person, it is incredibly powerful. But we need to be very careful. The other thing is how really hard it is to come out of prison. You know, even though he comes out of prison an innocent man, prison does a number on you. Prison physically changes you, you and mentally for sure changes you. And there's really no
support other than the people who rally around him. So you know, we've got to got to do better because people are going to come out of prison and we want them to be able to succeed or they're going to What's going to happen is their struggle and they end up committing a crime because they're struggling.
I'm thankful, I'm thankful aiming she know our love and her determination to start to NSER project. My experience being incost rated is it's like PGSD soldiers. I don't have too much trust for nobody. I'm pretty much a loner. I don't you know. I don't deal with a whole
lot of people. It's hard. It's hard, and I just want the government to step up to the plate and establish our social security benefits, our medical benefits and make these things are possible so we can, you know, at least live, you know, when we do get sick or something like that, that we can go see a doctor. We constantly being denied either easier benefit because we were
wrongly convicted. We weren't given an opportunity to build up, to eat, you know, to have no kind of social security in our benefits built up, it would take them from us. So it should be giving back to us. That's what I want.
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Kleibern, and Kevin Wardis, 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 Wrongful Conviction is the production of Lava for Good podcast and association with Signal Company Number one