On April twenty ninth, two thousand and seven, two masked gunmen entered a trailer home occupied by a group of undocumented workers in Slide Down, Louisiana and demanded their cash. When Jose Carlos Martinez Carpio didn't comply, he was fatally shot and a gunman fled in a Chevy Tahoe. The witnesses described a gunman as two black men around five
eight to five ten with no tattoos. Two men were reported disposing of a gun outside of a Chevy Tahoe, and testing confirmed that that gun was the murder weapon. The investigation led to seventeen year old Glenn Carter, who confessed to the crime in exchanged for leniency, saying that his accomplice was a guy named E. Police approached one of Carter's known associates, Ezra Cooper, who offered a trade
information about two more assailants for leniency. But in a crime involving only two assailants, wasn't such lies just be ignored, especially when those lies change repeatedly to adapt a new evidence. When two different sets of facts were needed to convict the actual purpose and these other two guys, A judge would never let that slide, right, you would think, but
this is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful conviction. Today we're headed to the incarceration capital of the most incarcerated nation in the world, and of course I'm talking about Louisiana. And today's case involves four men convicted separately for the same crime. Two were admittedly guilty, while the other two were wrongfully convicted, and each conviction involved a slightly or
entirely different set of quote unquote facts. And we hope for justice to be served for both of the wrongly convicted men. One of them is with us today, Jase Washington, Thank you so much for joining us. All yeah, we appreciate it. And with him his peers advocate Izia Free, who was alerted to this insane injustice while during COVID taking a break from law school writing articles about the
criminal legal system. Now she just passed the bar, but instead of following the corporate law route that she had originally charted and planned for herself, she's diving into her very first criminal case pro bono. So, Izzy, welcome to the show. Thank you so Jase. Before we launch into everything that's wrong with the criminal legal system in Louisiana, especially in Saint Tamminy Parish, and your case in particular, we'd like to get to know you a bit well.
I was born in Probley, Louisiana. My mother and my father separated when I was younger, so I had kind of been going back and forth between them and wait to see permanent my fall the Ondell and we'll playing a lot of sports baseball, basketball, football, or Leydon.
And I got a skateboardings so you were living a very active lifestyle and Slide Dell, Louisiana with your dad. And to make better sense of this story, our audience might want to take a look at Slide Dell on a map. Now, most people are familiar with New Orleans, of course, which is on the south side of Lake Pontre Train. Slide Dell, on the other hand, is just across the lake to the northeast from New Orleans at another fifteen minutes east to Long Eye ten brings you
right into Mississippi. If you go west over the north side of Lake Pontre Train, you go further into Louisiana, where Jace used to go to a skate park. So skateboarding was big for you as was basketball. Right, How tall are you?
I'm about four.
So six three sixty four definitely not around five to nine. Along with a number of other physical characteristics, I should have disqualified you as a suspect in this crime, and also as evidenced by your squeaky clean record prior to this, if I understand correctly, you had never been in trouble with the law in a place where I understand it's a difficult maze to navigate for a young black man just to emerge unscathed.
Right, I've payed out of trouble that wasn't in my faith. Being in Saint Kamney Tarandeine in Louisiana is a very very peculiar situation for young black people, especially young black males. You have higher chances of being disadvantaged by the system coming out and scathed. It's rather hard whether you're a terrible person, a troublemaker, or you're not. I was not.
No, you were not not even a smudge on your record. You are a great student athlete who simply had one unfortunate acquaintance. And we're going to get to that in a minute, but first, in Louisiana from the Post Reconstruction era straight on through to a ballid INITIAI of the past. In twenty eighteen, Jase and so many others, countless others were or could have been convicted by a non unanimous jury, first by a jury of get this nine out of twelve.
Then they changed it too. Eventually they changed it to ten out of twelve. And the reason I don't want to insult anybody's intelligens because you probably already figured it out. So they could disenfranchise black jurors and to make use of the Thirteenth Amendment slavery loophole as punishment for a crime, whether the person was guilty or not. Now, in covering this case, I came upon a person who helped to
organize that twenty eighteen ballot initiative. She's very active in Saint Tammany and remembers Jason's trial.
Well, my name is Belinda Parker Brown. I'm with Louisiana United International, with a civil constitutional human rights organization that focus on the injustice and the criminal justice system. Our organization is responsible for nicknaming this racist, unconstitutional Jim Crow law, this non unanimous jury verdict. Nicknamed it ten to two.
You know, I was so happy to see that happen during the twenty eighteen mid terms. But here we are, just after the twenty twenty two midterms, in which there were ballid issues all over the country where voters were given the opportunity to end the Thirteenth Amendment slavery loophole in their states, and that measure was approved by the way and all of the other states that voted on it except for one, Louisiana. But Louisiana is not alone,
far from it and still benefiting from slave labor. And it needs to stop in every state, especially when you have entire parishes or counties in this country seemingly devoted to pumping out one wrongful conviction after another. And of course, no one is more vulnerable to the machinery of our criminal legal system than the poor.
They wind up taking a plea to things that they did not do. And that's what they were doing here in Saint Tammany, forcing, threatening, badgering young black men to take pleas to things that they did not do, just because they could not afford attorney. And because of that, the lead district attorney, Walter Reed, nicknamed this parish Saint Tammany Saint slammony, and that became something that they'd celebrated here in this paragh, especially when the reelections and all
of that stuff would come around. You know, they was tough on crime. And you know if you come over here with your chie wei's and your dreadlocks, and you know we're gonna get you, We're gonna lock you up and throw the key away.
Right. I read the quote that I believe you're referring to, and at first I couldn't believe it was real because of just the naked racism of it. It was from the Saint Tammany Sheriff Sheriff Jack Strain, and this is the guy who had been in powered there since nineteen
ninety five. He was running for reelection in twenty ten, just after Jason's conviction, and on the campaign trail he said, and this is a direct quote, he said, for some reason, New Orleans chooses to coddle criminals in that area that tend to get away with a great deal. End quote. And first off, No Orleans Parish between Harry Connock Senior and Leon Canazaro was notorious. But back to the quote he said, quote, we will not coddle that trash in
Saint Tammany Parish. If you're going to walk the streets with dreadlocks and chewy hairstyles, then you can expect to get a visit from a sheriff's deputy.
Everybody knew who he was talking about. It was the most profound racial sickness that can come out of a person's mouth that really, you know, inspired me to begin to protest against the sheriff's jail. It's like a god forsaken hellhole.
You know.
People were being beat and raped and committing so called suicide. And he had something that we nicknamed them the squirrel cages.
These squirrel cages were these three by three or four by four foot cells. I mean they were like phone boots, basically, nowhere to move, just you could just stand still pretty much, and of course no plumbing.
In these squirrel cages. They would defecate on themselves. They would put them in their butt naked for weeks. You know, people would just say, okay, I'll do whatever you want me to do. I'll say it, you know, I just want to get this.
Over with, and using torture tactics like these pretty much insures that law enforce will get whatever statement they want to fix a rig a case. So add to that to ninety nineimus jury verdicts, and you've got a system fixed to maintain a ninety eight percent conviction rate. These are the tactics that they used in Jas's case, and
we'll get to that in a bit. So, Belinda, after Jason had already gone to Prisident and Sheriff's strain had made these comments while campaigning, your organization had taken to the streets to protest.
Doing the protest on public property, they came out and told us to get off of their land. And at that particular time, my youngest son, because he was videotaping for us at that protest, they the arrested him and put him inside of one of those squirrel cages. And literally that put the gasoline on my fire to go after these people for the wrongdoing.
So if you take nothing else away from this story, it's that you shouldn't fuck with Belinda. So, the two people most responsible for Jason's wrongful conviction and countless others, the DA Walter Reid, got convicted of a number of financial crimes, and from what I understand, those were the ones that the FBI could make stick. But the sheriff, well, I'm gonna let you tell.
It, Jack Strain. He would spend the rest of his life in prison. This sheriff was just a very sick, sick man.
You know.
As an organizer, you know, people would come to me with these stories and I would like try to vet what they're saying. After we dug up everything that we possibly could on him. And it was over thirty three witnesses that was coming forth saying that the sheriff was raped, been people inside of the jail. He was charged with incests, raping and molesting his own family members.
It's an absolute horror show, and it somehow gets worse. This sheriff was also brought up on bribery charges. They were privatizing the work release program basically slave trading under a different name, and he was getting kickbacks from those contending to take it private. Just it's unreal. Meanwhile, of course he was out there putting these people in squirrel cages, in these literal torture cages to supply fresh bodies for this slave trade.
You know, I don't know if the people are aware that the state and the federal government give so much money to the jails and prison and you got to be at least at ninety seven percent occupancy before you can receive the federal and state funding.
So not only did this sheriff Strain have his own the various incentive to keep convictions up as of course to the DA seeking re election, but there's literally also a financial incentive from the state and federal government to keep up the supply of fresh bodies in a center. Not that same vile and perverse incentive leads many municipalities all over this country to operate this way, torturing or coursing statements from not only the quote unquote suspects, but witnesses as well.
Jack Halstead was one of the corrupt prosecutors and that prosecuted Jase that was known for badgering and threatening witnesses and tell them say if you don't say what it is we want you to say. You know, you're gonna get your kids taken away from you. You're not going to be able to get a job. They literally made people lives miserable. You know, we got people that would testify to that their doors and stuff were kicked in.
Again, you've heard these tactics before on this show, and if police have never threatened you or coursed you this way, maybe you'd be inclined to believe the things they say in court and find yourself among the ten out of
twelve who consistently voted to convict. And so as we begin to talk about this case in which there were two assailants, you'll see how these two now disgraced former elected officials, along with the Jim Crow era practice of non unanimous juries, were all integral to Jace's conviction, as well as the perverse incentives locally for the sheriff, of course,
and from the state of federal government. And how and why these nefarious actors in Saint Tammany Parish would decide to prosecute four young men in a case in which there were only two assailants. The two actual admitted assailants were Glenn Carter and Edrick Cooper. Grant Gathers and our guest, Jace Washington were in addition to what was even called for now. Jace, you didn't even know Glenn, right, but I understand that you did know Grant and Edric.
All of us went to school together, you know, create basketball and school together. Grant were a little a little more than a quaintance's closest.
Than ed and from what I understand, they both had a criminal record. Edric has admitted to making a habit of trading false or real information for freedom and his general occupation of petty theft and grant had been convicted once before, but his experience with the system in Saint Tammany played into his decision once they came after him for this. So that brings us to April twenty nine,
two thousand and seven. This crime happened in Slide El, Louisiana, just on the north side of Lake Poncher Trade from New Orleans, where five or six undocumented workers were living in the trailer as a home base for their day labor jobs in New Orleans. Now being undocumented, these guys carried cash and were not likely to go to law enforcement if they were robbed, which made them easy targets. So, according to the initial statements from the victim's friends, two
gunmen came into the trailer demanding money. The victim, Jose Carlos Martinez Carpio, had trouble understanding with the language barrier and attacked the gunman with a kitchen knife or something and he was fatally shot. The assailants then fled, leaving the rest of the men in the trailer stunned and grieving as well as in It was impossibly precarious predicament, so some time went by before they called the police. The first nine one one call was at nine to seventeen PM.
It was a yap there to God think next door to them ended up calling nine one one. That's what he explained, that another child that minutes had passed time had passed from the time of the shots by and been on when one called, because they were trying to figure out what.
To do, and I want to bring Izzy in here now. Some of the witnesses in the trailer that night were interviewed by the police, right.
Yes, I think all of them were actually interviewed. But there were some of them that said that they heard the gunshot. They closed their doors and did not come outside at all. But there were two people who said that they described seeing two people, the gunmen, enter the mobile home. They had their faces covered, but their arms were bare, and they could tell that they were black men.
The taller of the two men went into the kitchen area and then they heard gunshots coming from the kitchen area, and the shorter gunman who was at the door, he was nervous and so he fired his weapon onto the floor, and then he also fled the area.
So the gunman fled. The two witnesses are Echo, Gooyan and Avola. They said that one gunman was taller than the other, but not by much.
They said that they were similar to their height, which was about five eight and five ten foot tall. Jayce stands about six four feet tall and Carter and Cooper is about five eight five ten feet tall. Now, jas is a black man, but he is extremely light skinned. Carter is a little darker. The witnesses that were inside the home saw the arms of the assailants, said no, they didn't have any tattoos. But if you look at Jays he has clearly visible tattoos on both arms.
So that's three major features right there that don't match the witness's descriptions that should have been right there. These are things that are not subject to the pitfalls of misidentification. You can't really mistake no tattoos for tattoos, dramatic contrasted skin tone and six four for five eight.
The two people that they saw in the mobile home. Did not mash the description of Jace Washington.
Or Grand Gathers for that matter.
No, they mashed the description of Cooper and Carter right.
But at this point, the cops just had two black men five eight and five ten, dark skin, no tattoos, both with guns, faces recovered. I believe they mentioned as Chevy Tahoe according to a report written by one of the detectives in this case, a detective calendar. Other witnesses reported the Chevy Tahoe as well.
Right April thirtieth, there was an eyewitness that reported two black males in a car very close to the crime area. One of the black males exit the car and appear to be hiding a weapon in the bushes. The officers they were able to retrieve the gun and then trace the gun to one of the guns that was used in that robbery, and that's what led officers to arrest Carter in the first place.
So they zeroed in on seventeen year old Glenn Carter a few days later on May third, when he was thrown into a squirrel cage, and I believe he was facing the death penalty. So it's not a hard decision to cooperate. He confessed to the crime, giving a very similar story as to witnesses, and gave up the name
E for the initial E as his accomplice. Now, the police were already familiar with eighteen year old Edrick Cooper as a known associate of Glenn Carter from previous running, so this was basically all the corroboration they needed to go scoop him up.
Who were he was wanted by the detectives already all a week earlier they had been looking for him. That was the way they were able to identify who Glenn Carter was talking about his accompanies.
So on May fifth, Edrick Cooper he also confessed, but he told the officers that there were two other people who were with him, Jason Washington and Grant Gethers.
By Carter implicating him him already being wanted, pulled two names out the air try to relieve some of the trouble that he was in. It could have been anybody, as peoplework from other witnesses that was interviewed by detectives, they say he added four or three other names. You know, if the detectives knew Cooper was not telling the truth, because there were things that they already knew that Cooper did not realize they knew right.
And as I mentioned earlier, this was Cooper's m O to trade false information for freedom. Saint Tammany police knew that from previous interactions, but they were more than happy to work with him anyway.
In the unrelated prime, the same thing happened. I witnesses gave descriptions that sid Carter and Cooper called a told on Cooper again, and when detectives asked Cooper about it, he implicated a third party, and eyewitnesses descriptions that they gave did not hit this third party. All the numbers assailings, that number of sus that were seen in this other unrelated prime.
Yep, DejaVu all over again. And as we spoke about already, Saint Tammany, the sheriff, the DA, they all had their own list of incentives to work with Cooper, and none of them were truth, justice or public safety. So what we're going to see unfold here is the prosecution of Glenn Carter on the basis of the witness statements from the trailer and his own confession. Then Edrick Cooper pled guilty under the same set of facts and then Jace
gets prosecuted under a totally different narrative. The jury was kept completely in the dark, and Cooper was allowed to change the details and manipulate the narrative over time in order to implicate two more young men, Jason Grant, in a crime in which there were only two assailants. So let's talk about the ever changing false narrative of Edrick Cooper.
The initial statement that he gave, he said all four of them rode to the crime scene in Carter's vehicle. He said that he had a black nine millimeter luger, Jace had a thirty eight, and Carter had a forty five. He said, Jace and Carter entered the trailer and Cooper and Grant stood outside as the lookouts. And so when they heard the gunshot, that's when they all started running and they drove out of the crime scene, all four of them in Carter's car. That's the story that he told the officers.
Glenn Carter, and the trailer witnesses said that Carter, the taller of the two gunmen, went into the kitchen, while the shorter gunman stayed in the front by the door. First of all, if Jace was one of the gunmen, then he most certainly would have been the taller one by far. Jace being six four is an irreconcilable truth on its face, as are the tattoos. Then you have the witnesses that reported seeing the gun drop outside the tahoe, and just like Glenn Carter and the witnesses from the trailer,
they also only reported seeing two men. So despite what detectives with any sort of moral compass should have done, they got an a the rest warrant for Jase and the search warrant for Jace's father's house. Now, remember we have Glenn Carter with the murder weapon of forty five, then Jace allegedly with a thirty eight, and Edric Cooper outside with a nine millimeter Luger.
So Jason's father legally owned a nine millimeter Ruger handgun. So when they found that gun, Cooper changed his statement to say.
Ruger, So Ruger not Luger.
And then he also changed his statement to say that it wasn't him, it was Jase that had that gun.
Okay. So, now, with Jas's plausible access to his father's Ruger not Luger Ruger, Cooper has not only to change the brand of gun, but also to switch gun placements between him and jas So in this version of events, Cooper was allegedly outside now with the thirty eight. Now, didn't the trailer witness to say that the gunman by the front door had fired his weapon into the floor.
Yes, the thirty eight gun was actually fired in the trailer, So Cooper changed the statement to include him and Grant Gathers all in the trailer, four people in the trailer instead of just two people that he had initially said.
So the only thing from his initial statement that remained the same, and the only thing that was consistent with Glenn Carter's statement, was that Glenn Carter used the forty five. Other than that, the brand of nine millimeter changed, as did who was holding it in order to match what the police had found at Jace's father's house, And then the number of people in the trailer had to change in order to make room for the fact that the thirty eight had been fired, as well as the change
of who was holding what gun. Jace allegedly with his father's ruger and Cooper firing the thirty eight into the ground, as the witnesses in the trailer had said.
And as you had mentioned earlier, a lot of those people that lived inside the home were immigrants that did not have the proper authorization to remain in the United States. So right after the incident happened, they were all arrested and detained. They were detained until December of that same year, when who I believe is the current DA of Saint Tammany Parish filed a petition with the court and said that these guys were victims and so did not deserve
to be detained and they had to be released. After they were released, one of those people also started change in history.
The current DA is Warren Montgomery, and he worked with the Public Defender's Office at the time. Now one of the undocumented workers, either at Kagoyan or Avola change their story to maybe possibly include a third or fourth assailant to give the state the wiggle room they needed to eventually prosecute Jason Grant. But back to the immediate aftermath, So both you and Grant were about to be arrested.
They end up coming to pick me up from my home the next day. You don't have enough money for an attorney. It took us a long time to figure out what was being said and who's shit.
So no money for an attorney means no money for bail, and you've got no information about why you're even there. I can't even imagine what must have been going through your mind.
They take you in the shack world. Cages are full, some of them have two or three people in them. Some of them still have handcuffs on. You know, I'm nineteen years old and I'm trying to proston what's going on law. They put me right into one of those world keys, and I'm still trying to figure out how did I get here.
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Four was set It in two, Four Black Bodies Set It in two, and at Seeing revealed that work against the detective theories. All they did wasdiated change and this could have been remedied from the beginning if Detective State Calendar, Detective Cannon Garrow had done their job.
And it seems they might have been doing their job. It's just not the job that they pretend it is in public. So you were stuck in jail awaiting trial with one piece of information or report from Detective Calendar about the investigation. Meanwhile they were out there trying to fix the case against you. So they tried to corroborate Edric Cooper's narrative and they had to change it several times by now already just to fit the facts.
And then DNA evidence was also conducted because he had said that they rode in an out in Carter's car, and he said Carter gave them certain items from his car, like a bandana and items to cover their faces. They seized Carter's car, tested it thoroughly for DNA evidence. There is not a single instant where Jason's or Grant gathers DNA was found in any of the items that were found in Carter's car or anything in Carter's.
Car which had they been in there. Finding neither of their DNA. That's not plausible, maybe not even possible.
Yes, So Cooper then changes the story to say that Grant and Jace were in one car, and he and Carter were in Carter's car.
That's convenient, so okay, boom, a new, non existent, nondescript car gets introduced. What's odd, though, is that this narrative is only present in Jas's case. Great Gathers, on the other hand, had a prior and had he gone to trial, he could have got life, so he pled guilty in exchange for leniency. Understandably in his plea though, he copped to being in the Chevy Tahoe, but because he didn't fight it, the fact that DNA testing excluded him from
the Tahoe didn't matter. He just took the seven years or whatever they gave him to get out of his squirrel cage, and Jace would have been out in like twenty seventeen, twenty twenty the latest had he done the same.
They never in a million years expected me to go to trial and fight. They were expecting me to be guilty.
From the moment that he was arrested. All that they wanted him to do was just say you're guilty. Just say you did it, so then we give you a man's a lot of charge and you probably get like ten years. And he kept insisting that he's not going to plead guilty to something that he hadn't done.
They tried to at least three or four times after I asked for an attorney, which is unconstitutional. The Texas State's Canada technique candidero. They would send try to send different people in there to give me to make a succession. At one point, you've been telling me when I asked for my attorney, oh, well, you're going to have a public spending. The public desfendant doesn't care about you, so it is your best interest to just go ahead. And I'm like, man, I, oh my lord. You know, at
this point, I'm kind of im agitated. I want my lawd So after a while of that, they finally keep me in for processing. On my way out to former Sheriff Jack Strain made Tommy said, this is a New Orleans. You know at this time I had the chipy streadlocked Testyle.
Sheriff's Strain was very clear about his views and his reelection campaign in twenty ten. He equated the chieweed dreadlock Hairstyle with criminal behavior, and it's probably why he operated the way he did. So the squirrel cage didn't work on you, reasoning with you about how you're going to get terrible representation hadn't worked.
What happened next I was taken out of the world cage and I was placed in the whole phanati days, couldn't see the news. I had to ask someone friend of mine to send me internet print out of an article to just kind of get an understanding of what exactly they was saying was going on, because we still don't know what's going on.
I don't think they knew what was going on because they hadn't decided on the narrative that they were going to frame me with yet. So you got out of the whole after ninety days, met with your public defender, and finally got to see a report from Detective Stacey Calendar.
What years later we find out that a lot of the stuff she put in that first investigative report was dedignated and fabricated. She fabricated witnesses statements evidence. She changes the descriptions into our witnesses guilds. She changes things that Cooper tells her. She just changes things throughout her investigative report to make their investigations seem tighter. And what she's saying in her report and the investigations done by the detectives, it's not magic goal.
And like you said, you didn't find this out until years later. Unfortunately, you did not have the benefit of effective counsel or the opportunity to review those materials to make that comparison yourself. Certainly, neither your first public defender, James Tally, or your second, Melissa Brink, were able to develop a defense outlining the discrepancies between detective calendars report and the actual investigation.
For maybe a year and a half, the only thing I had was her investigated report. This restricted her words. I had no witness trances or witness statements or anything like that. So I'm trying to build a defense off of what's in this report. And then maybe a two months before trial two thousand and nine, did come back, and now all of a sudden, that's changed.
You know.
I got up an open court and I explained to Judge Richard Schwartz what was Kaye's place, And the answer he gave me was Melissa bringing handle it, and that assessionly turned out to be very, very, very incorrect.
Yeah, she was handling what like three hundred and seventy eight cases. I mean, I gotta pause there again, that's crazy when she should have had I mean, even one hundred and fifty would have been an incredible strain on anyone. The ineffective counsel was virtually guaranteed, as it is with so many indigent defendants all over the country, the constitutional
violation is built right in. So Glenn Carter went to try out first, followed by Edrick Cooper, then you, then Grant, and all four of you were found guilty separately, and I mean very separately. And can you explain what I'm talking about?
Well, First, Glenn Carr was fried August two thousand and eight. He was convicted with evidence of only him and Edrick.
Cooper committing his crime, right, so consistent with the original witness statements and his own admission.
Right, there was no evidence presented by the state of three and four other people. The next day, after Glen Carter was convicted, Edwick Cooper played guilty, but onder the factual basis that it was only him and Carter who committed the crime.
So everything that Glenn Carter and Edrick Cooper copp to at their proceedings exonerated deal you earned even mentioned in those proceedings. What about his statement that was eventually used against you?
The next day, after pleading guilty, the detectives took him for the attorney's office, another slow location. No one's turned and nobody knows where they went to reinterview him, And all of a sudden, miraculously, this second statement comes up, and it seeks to validate the initial investigation that it's not a repeating.
So Cooper's initial statement, which served as the probable cause to arrest you and search your father's house, in which he admitted to his involvement, that was not even brought up at his proceedings, probably because it was so wildly and completely out of step with reality. But now they needed a new statement that wasn't so obviously false that
included you and Grant Gathers. And the only thing about this new statement that even vaguely resembled the initial statement was that you two were there and the Carter used a forty five. They also now had one of the trailer witnesses allegedly giving them that wiggle room of well maybe there was a third or fourth assailant. Who knows if this change was just a translator taking some sort of creative license, I mean, could have been. But how
did the judge even allow this to go on? We're talking about the narrative of a crime that have just appeared twice in front of the court.
Judge Purist, the judge that did Carters trial and the Coopers pleat once he took the plea from Pedrick Cooper said an open court on the record that he was recognizing these as stipulated facts. Basically, he used the legal term he was taking judicial notice, which is he saying he's taking these facts that he's been watching throughout the Carter proceedings and now at this Cooper proceeding, he's saying, Okay, this is what y'all are saying happened in this crime.
These are the facts of the case. So Judge Juris was not going to excel the facts that were presented at my trial. And what happened was I was miraculously taking out a judge Buris court and placed some entirely different set action where a different set of facts were consitting to a different judge saying that Hey, two completely irreconcilable names happened in this case.
Yeah, you just can't have two contradicting narrators of the same crime. So even though they switched you to a different judge, Judge Schwartz, I mean, wouldn't he just see the same thing that Burst did. The state must have recognized that this was weak footing.
Jason's trial was in October twelve, two thousand and nine. October nine, they were presenting him with a plea deal to testify against Grant Gethers, and he said he can't testify against Grant because he wasn't there.
So you're sticking to your innocence to the bitter end. Did your public defender try to encourage you to take.
A play the guilty Yes, every day up until October fourteenth, two thout a nine was the day I was found guilty. And I keep telling her the same thing over and over and over again. I'm not too guilty as something that I didn't do.
And just out of curiosity, what did they offer? Ten years that was.
Ultimately grand Gether's decision in uilty to eight years that was found with guilty of a lesser charge. Grand Gethers would have been going to trial for second to he murdered, which in Louisiana is a mandatory life citizens no parole. So it was a decision between eight years or mandatory life with no parole.
That's pretty easy master to do. And I guess he didn't know about the DNA evidence that excluded him from ever having entered Glenn Carter Chevy Tahoe. That was a part of the narrative of his proceedings. And what about the evidence presented in Carter and Cooper's proceedings. You think your attorney would be a little more confident and you would have fared a lot better at trial. But what happened.
He tried to get cause of confessions that it's not a ray introduced that trial so the jury to hear it. The judge shot it down. He said that it wasn't.
Trustworthy, wasn't trustworthy. They just used it to send two men away, one for life.
It just didn't make any sense. And the dream we never heard of it. The twelve people at my trial still don't know to this state that this succession existed. And if they had, there's reasonable likelihoods that I would.
Have got not guilty burden I mean, what else are we supposed to conclude about this? Judge, he saw the evidence from the other two proceedings which impeached the testimony of the state star witness against you, and he excluded it. So now the jury only hears the narrative of Edrick Cooper, and they have no idea how many times it changed
or how fundamental those changes were. And as we've mentioned, up until this point, the impeachment evidence for Cooper's testimony had not been developed very well by Jason's attorney.
The prosecution, you know, they had the burden, but their burden was very simple, was just really getting Cooper to tell the most recent version of events. The defense's job
was probably harder. That she needed to be extremely organized to list all those statements that Cooper had said that weren't true and then actually also do the extra work to show that even if we're supposed to believe the last statement that he's given and disregard all the prior statements that he's saying, this last statement that he's saying
cannot even be true. And she didn't do that. She didn't have the time to do all the investigation, or probably didn't have the resources to do the investigations that she needed to do, and so she went to trial unprepared and the jury could not follow.
She didn't effectively demonstrate the whole clusterfuck around the narrative changing between Cooper outside the trailer with a nine milimeters luger and Jace inside with a thirty eight to then Jace with a nine milimeter ruger and all four of them inside the trailer. Then you have one witness, likely threatened with deportation or worse, changing their story to include the possibility of more sailance than the original two, then going from one car to two cars because DNA evidence
excluded Jace. How this issue wasn't raised. It just baffles and infuriates me. But then there's this phone record evidence that was introduced to draw connection between Jason Glenn Carter, but it could have easily been used to impeach Cooper's ever changing narrative. Cooper had made statements about how he, Jace, and Grant went to Mississippi earlier in the day, when the phone records show that Jason Grant had never left Louisiana.
She could have connected those dots or called an expert to extrapolate a clear vision of Cooper's lives from the phone record, but again she was just overwhelmed and not prepared to do that, which could have been a game changer.
So Cooper had initially told officers that he and Jace and Grant they had been in Mississippi and then they returned to Sliddale on Sunday, which was the day of the incident, about five or so. What is interesting was that Jayce had a purchase receipt that showed that he was already in Louisiana around three pm. So at trial, Cooper changed the testimony again to say that they arrived in Slydale at ten am.
So this appears to be just more of the police and edred Cooper perfecting his statement to align with reality, and that's what you have to do with live So how did they try to connect Jas with Glenn Carter?
Cooper said that when he got to slide Al, he called Carter on Jas's phone. He said that that's when they all got together with Carter and that's when they planned the robbery together. And then he also said that after the robbery, when they were fleeing the area, he said that Jace called Carter on Carter's phone, and Carter did not answer, so they asked him how many times did he call, and he said he called just once. When all four of them were initially arrested, there were
two numbers that were listed for Carter. One number, the officers found out quickly was not Carter's number, so they proceeded with just the remaining number, and so that number that they proceeded through before Jasu's trial as Carter's number. That number never appeared on Jas's phone, so.
Not at either time that Cooper alleged ten am or nine eighteen pm. So how did they try to make it look like Jason Carter spoke on the phone.
About a week before Jason's trial, the prosecution goes into Jas's phone, there was a phone call from Jase's number at nine eighteen so the prosecution presented this number as Carter's number.
So the prosecution just took whatever number Jase called around the time of the crime and just told the jury that that was Carter's number to match up with Cooper's latest version of events. So let's try to unravel this one.
Cooper said that when Jace called Carter that Carter did not answer, but the number that Jace called around nine eighteen. It shows that the person actually answered and there was a conversation, and it shows that a few minutes or so after, Jace called that number again and the person also answered.
And so I'm sure our audience won't be surprised to find out that the number that they presented as Carter's during trial only appeared in the evening, not at ten am, as Cooper had said, thereby exposing yet another one of this guy's lives.
After trial, Jace, this attorney filed a rid with a Chord for a subpoena to get that phone record to verify if that number was Carter's number, the number that Cooper had testified a trial to be Carter's number, and that number turned out not to be Carter's number. If you read the Court of Appeal's opinion on Jasu's case, it appears that that's something that they consider to be important. That the state was able to establish that connection between
Jas and Carter using that phone record. But the phone record that they presented was in Carter's phone number, and what the prosecution did was they just presented the number and showed it to Cooper a trial and said that, whose number is this? And then Cooper goes, this is Jasu's number. Whose number is this? And then he goes, that's Carter's number. Who's the number calling this number? And it's like Jasu's number calling Carter's number. Then they bring
Carter's girlfriend to the stand. Carter's girlfriend. This is two years later, two years after this incident had happened. Carter's girlfriend comes to the stand and then the prosecution asked her back in April of two thousand and seven, was Glenn Carter your boyfriend? And she says yes, sir. And the prosecution goes and Glenn's Carter's being convicted of murder? Is that correct? She goes, yes, sir, in April of
two thousand, what was Glenn Carter's phone number? Then she lists the number that Jays dialed on the night of the incident. She lists that as Carter's number from memory. Two years two years she remembered the number like that from memory. And this is the part where I just fell so disappointed in Jas's attorney at the time, because she just basically said, I have no questions. She did not cross examine this witness to even understand how she
remembered Carter's number. She did not cross examine Cooper to even find out how he remembered that to be Carter's number. Two years after the incident happened, she did.
Find out that this was not in fact Carter's number, That both of these witnesses perjured themselves, but too little, too late. I've got to imagine that having them memorize a number off of Jason's phone that wasn't their friend
Glenn Carter's had to have been the prosecution's idea. But if I were on the jury, I mean, after hearing Cooper's testimony, not knowing all the inconsistencies with prior statements or how it was contradicted by witness statements, and having that testimony corroborated by the phone records, I can see how the jury was fooled.
And even with that, there was at least one person on the jury that said that they didn't believe what the state was saying. They had that testimony from Cooper. Cooper's credibility wasn't properly impeached by Jesson's attorney, and they ended up buying his story over the story that Jas's attorney. Because I don't even know what story she was trying to tell. She didn't put up that defense. There were so many other people who are willing to testify about
Jason's whereabouts. There were so many other witnesses that she just didn't call. In the beginning, all that she wanted to do was for Jase to plead guilty, So she wasn't prepared for a trial.
Other than the inadequate and disorganized cross examination. I think she put your dad on the stand to say that you didn't have access to his gun and that you were home at the time of the crime. Unfortunately, alibi defense from family rarely does the trek. So other than that, did your attorney present any defense at all?
She called no witnesses, She presented none of the evidence, none of the fall records, no expert for the Fall Reforce, nothing. She did nothing, and she put together no defense to actually test the theory and the chinological timeline of Eddie Pooble and the state. All of the evidence that I have now proving what I'm saying, all of it was avid by the state, stuff that they call open discovery, stuff that she could have pulled, looked at.
And been able to sit the pool, which just points out that the state had to have known what they were doing. This was their information and they simply used it to guide the actual guilty party to frame an innocent man. I mean, did you have any hope after shitting through this sham trial?
Yes, because Cooper admitted to line the day after he took that guilty please. You know, he was asked a question and he was like, Okay, yeah, lie then too, but I'm not lying right now. And I think that was one of the biggest things that made me believe that, I mean, come out of this all right. You know. It wasn't a unanimous very. He was non unanimous. During
the jury pole, he had one white lady. You could see that she was rather perturbed by the fact that the other eleven jurors could not see pass them saying I committed a crime. During the jury pole, she was physically angry that this was happening because she was able to see for the status saying and what Edward Cooper saying doesn't make any sense.
So he was acquitted of the second degree murder and then they found him guilty of the manslaughter.
In that moment, I'm trying to wrap my head around what was going on and how it had taken place. It wasn't very secretive. They're not even sweeping it under the rug anymore. They just dumping it on the ground and leaving it there. In that moment, I kind of realized what I was dealing with. That gilt diberty came. I realized I'm dealing with a monster. I was sentenced to twenty five years. Twenty five Paul Lady digging ditches, digging holes, surrounded by the white guy on a horse
with rifles and digging. You're pulling vegetables. I mean part label and since the day, for since the day. That's not slavery, and I don't know what it is.
It is quite literally slavery according to the thirteenth Amendment, and then according to voters in the twenty twenty two midterms, A voter to keep slavery as a punishment for a crime in Louisiana. I mean, between all of the official and prosecutorial misconduct, the incentives keep the jail in prison population up, and how hopefully overworked and underfunded the public defender's offices, It's almost like this is what the legislature
has planned for poor people. Across Louisiana, let alone all over our country. Having a public defender who could not possibly organize or present an adequate defense is not the exception, it's the rule for indigen defendants. It's a built in constitutional violation of the right to effective assistance of counsel.
So there's a fifty page report that was, i want to say, funded by the US Department of Justice, who's the American University of Washington, DC, and the findings of the report established that the descendants in same family's parish are routinely deprived their constitutional rights and their new process. There was a sixty minute sectment in twenty seventeen with Anderson Cooper and several public defenders from Louisiana were interviewed and they were explaining that it's like an assembly line
in Louisiana. There's an abject underfunding by the state legislator of the Public Defendant's office in Louisiana, and they're basically operating on a budget where they cannot give the constitutionally required representations to get into defendants and expend no remedies, and no one is addressing the people who are being objected. Predominantly lack of meeral.
As it affected you and continues to affects other folks, and you have not been taking this line down between stints out in the fields and studying the lawn, aggressively filing pro sae motions, as well as having some legal help along the way. But unfortunately you're being denied where it seems pretty clear that you should not be, especially on the very basic and effective assistance of council claim.
And you know what that last motion she filed, she talks about things that she should have done prior to trial, and she just kind of laid it all out so that I could come back and fight it on post additional collateral attack. She even made the comment to me that I should get some kind of relief from not being able to use called a statement a trial. She was in the belief that, okay, hey, that was so
big that it's going to get the case overturned. But it just every time it comes back to the same name, not not not.
All the other appeals that he filed for the court have also been denied because the standard of review on appeal, especially if you challenge the insufficientcy of evidence, is that the court just holds the position that if the jury believed these things to be true, then we're also going to believe it to be true. So Cooper's version of events, that's what the Court of Appeals take to be true.
And so when the court finds that a reasonable jury could come to that conclusion based on these facts, then the court will affirm the person's conviction. Cooper's testimony is what is following Jays with every appeal that he files, his appeals get denied. But what Jays has been challenging is that the testimonies, the evidence that the prosecution presented to the jury were not true.
Right, they presented false evidence, and one can surmise easily that they had to know that they were doing so, considering how they helped Cooper's shape and mold his statements over time to drag two innocent people into this situation contrary to the initial witness statements and the factual basis
presented at both Carters and Cooper's proceedings. But shortly after your conviction, between conviction and sentencing, I believe edreck Cooper gave a recantation that is believed to have been made before trial. Is that right?
Is he?
Yes? This is August twentieth, so if I'm reading the date right, this was probably before Jason's trial on August twentieth, two thousand and nine, where Cooper signed an affidavit that he was ready to present to the court to say that he had lied about the whole thing, that every statement that he had provided was a lie, and that he was a scared eighteen year old boy that he knew Jays had never been in any type of criminal trouble, and so because of that he implicated Jace, because he
knew that jas wasn't going to get convicted.
Well, clearly he didn't understand what he was dealing with in Saint Tammany Parish. So he wrote this prior to Jason's trial, but no one was aware of it until between Jase's conviction and his sentencing.
What happened was I go to courtA Citacy and Jack half standard Discratorney's office wrints him with purgury if he goes through with the decantation. Same thing with Grant Dealers. He did recantation, explaining that he was falciplicated in the crime.
Grant said that he wasn't there either, and that whatever it is that he said about Jason's involvement, it's not true.
All of this is taken and once again manipulated in the state's favor, like Cooper was forced to make those he can't taste, or Sam David brand Gillis, and they're making me look like I'm the wolf, you know, like I'm just a big, bad guy that trying to force things into his favor.
And the whole time it's the opposite classic projection. All of these witnesses that they called credible at your trial, whom they had coerced into line, they then threatened them with perjury for trying to say something they knew to be true from their own investigation. So they got Cooper and Grant to keep quiet. What about Glenn Carter.
Carter actually wrote me a letter that I have, and he's playing in a letter that people were also that I ended up getting caught up in all.
So Carter wrote a letter to Jayce in which he said a number of things, but the most important here that he said is that but when all of this is over, you could send somebody at me to sign the papers for you. Since E which is Edric and Grant not gonna do it. I don't feel like you should be in here anyway, you didn't do anything, So, like I said, let me get my shit situated and I might do that for you. I know who was there, and I didn't see you, and I.
Took that and I said, just watched maybe thousand as well to get a new trial. Just watchhot that now as well, without even addressing the significance of that letter in cooperation to everything that I was saying before and during the trial. Letters from all three of them have been shot down saying basically, did they hold no credibility?
It's funny how they will find recantations not credible, but that doesn't drag into question any previous statements made in court by the same person, like did they recently learn how to become a liar? Is that the basic theory. The only metric they're using for credibility seems to be if it maintains a conviction and suits their narrative. And in your case, the state had the evidence that this
credit of the statements made against you a trial. But somehow these recantations are the incredible statements, so incredible in fact, that when Jace received these recantation letters, his cell got tossed do I have that right, Jason?
Yeah, that was in two thousand and ten. I had the letters from Grant and Buy. What happened was they came to all of myself, man, a lot of my early pictures. I've never seen it again after that sease, and in that bag, in that self were the recantation was. Thankfully I had it home and I sit it in someone else's name. I'm glad I did that.
I can't imagine how defeated you would have felt. So at least you have a record of the other two recantations while you await Carter's help. What did you have to wait for to get his help?
So I don't know what he has going on. Legally, they promised him a parole d because he now had parole under the juvenile law.
He was seventeen, right, because he was a juvenile. That falls under two very important Scotis decisions Miller versus Alabama and Montgomery versus Louisiana. Between the two, it makes a mandatory life without parole sentence except in cases of permanent incorrigibility.
It makes that sentence for a juvenile unconstitutional. And that decision was made retroactive, so he was re sentenced and probably wants to wait until those proceedings are through before upsetting his own apple cart by helping you, since it seems they were hell bent on ignoring the signs pointing to your innocence, and that has not changed ever since
your conviction. I think this needs to go to a new trial, if not a new venue, because there is certainly new evidence and I don't see how you could ever be convicted with that new evidence being presented.
So I have cooper statement where he recanted everything and said he liked I have grants where he said he I have Carter's letter.
You also have the subpoena phone records for the number passed off as Carter's phone in court, which established collusion between Jason Glenn Carter. However, that key piece of evidence turned out to be bogus. That subpoena is not in Jason's official filings, so it's new evidence. So given the opportunity, you could subpoena the phone company again to submit that as new evidence. And you also did all the work that his attorney never did, thereby destroying Cooper's morass of lies.
For me, what I'm hoping comes out of this is that somebody goes like, Okay, let's look into this. Not even take my worry for it. Let's look at the paperwork. The statements that were presented to the jury were false, and the prosecutor's office knew or should have known, that those statements were false. Cooper changed and was allowed to
change those testimonies with no consequences of perjury. And so he constantly keeps changing the stories over and over again until it got to a point where the prosecution could sell that story to a jury. And as we had said earlier, even with all of this, there was at least one person in that jury that said that they did not believe what the prosecution was selling.
Them, which in any other state except Oregon at the time, would have meant to hung jury. And this brings us to the very important development of Louisiana no longer accepting non unanimous jury verdicts. They did away with this Jim Crow era practice in twenty eighteen by ballot initiative, but when this new law was taken to the Supreme Court, rather than making it retroactive, they led it up to the state of Louisiana to decide.
To me, that's like telling the fox that's garden a hen house to do something about what you did that you know was wrong. So Louisiana staying they're not gonna let the people go here. Within our organization, we know that it's over eight thousand people. It's over seventeen hundred or more here in Saint Tammany Parish, with jas on the top of the list.
Belinda Parker Brown. She and her organization have now filed a lawsuit against the State of Louisiana, and in this lawsuit they planned to challenge the State of Louisiana once again on the issue of these non unitedmous jury verdicts.
They was caught the highest court in the land, the United States Supreme Court rule what they did here was unconstitutional, and I'm saying it was criminal. So I'm saying that if it was unconstitutional and the United States Supreme Court, along with the people voting sixty four percent, let these people go.
Let them go free.
If we got to organize some type of facilitation on how we want to release the people, that's fine, But it's not right for them to hold THEMN hostage kidnap because they got it wrong.
And we're going to have action steps linked in the bio for Belinda's organization and to help Jace.
So I put together a petition for Jace. We're hoping to create awareness, and we also want the new district attorney who is in Saint Tammany Parish. He has the power to reopen Jason's case. All the support and documents, all the inconsistent statements, Jason's phone records, Carter's phone records, Grant Gatherer's phone records, all of that information is available. It's for him to give jas a second opportunity for his case to be reviewed.
Go to the bio now and we can all work together to write this wrong. And now we're going to turn to my favorite part of the show, closing arguments, where I think both of you again, I mean you just you inspire me to want to work harder and smarter, and we're going to keep fighting for you and for everyone that we can possibly help that's been rawly convicted. So closing arguments works like this, Isy, We're going to
start with you. I'm going to turn my microphone off, kick back in my chair with my headphones on, close my eyes, and just listen to anything else you want to share. With our audience and then hand the microphone off to Jason. He'll take us off into the sunset.
April twenty ninth, two thousand and seven. Another human being, Jose Martinez Carpio, lost his life. He had a family, he had people who loved and cared for him. He was an innocent man. He deserves justice, His family deserves justice. But if you have a situation where there's somebody else who had absolutely nothing to do with what unfortunately happened to Jose Martinez, if you have that person serving time in prison, then you're not delivering any justice to the victim.
You're not serving society any good, and in what may have been the state's good intention, the state ended up victimizing another person and his family. Jason's conviction was a mistake, and it's a mistake that needs to be corrected. It's been fifteen years over you, and that's all that I like to say.
We have social problems going on all over the world, all over the country, social problems affecting predominantly black people. A lot of time or not giving the resources and not giving the pressing a president Joe Biden christology political leaves, but it's wresting a lot of social problems, but it's being left out a lot of times. It's it's criminal justice systems and the way that if you handles black people on a native dating judges in the court, they're
not taking seriously a litigation done by indigent decent. They're not taking seriously a litigation done for who are are almost poor. It has changed. You can't continue to run a system, operate as a state, as a country, as a nation. You can't continue to operate with historically agreeable for people who are being adversity affected by the workings in the working bureaucratic inside of the system.
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Cliburn, 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 flamm Wrongful Conviction is the production of Lava for Good podcast and association with Signal Company Number one