I'm Jason Vlam, host of Rafel Conviction, but this week, instead of hearing me, I've invited a legitimate genius from the legal world to bring their knowledge and expertise to the conversation as guest host Here at Raefel Conviction, we believe that sharing the stories of the incarcerated innocent can create real change in the world, even beyond what these real life legal superheroes do every day.
In September nineteen ninety three, Herman Williams lived with his ex wife Penny in an apartment in Lake County, Illinois. Even though he and Penny were divorced, they still had a great relationship, sharing household duties and the care of their two kids. Herman had joined the Navy as a young man, and he planned to spend his entire career in the armed forces. He was deployed to the Persian
Gulf and earned distinction for his service. By nineteen ninety three, he was making plans to move to San Diego, California, where he would join the crew of a Navy ship and had back out to see Penny and the kids would stay in the apartment in Illinois, but none of these plans would materialize. On Sunday, September twenty sixth, Penny's lifeless body was found floating in a pond. She'd been missing for several days, with Herman frantically trying to find her.
The police decided early in their investigation that Herman had to be responsible for Penny's death, and they only looked for evidence to confirm that theory. In all their recorded interviews with Herman, he denied killing Penny or knowing anything about how she died. But weeks later, the detectives claimed
that Herman had confessed. With this fabricated confession and a woefully underprepared defense team, Herman Williams was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. This is wrongful Conviction. Hey guys, it's Laura and I writer, and I am so honored to be guest hosting this episode of Wrongful Conviction. I'm the co director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University, and you might recognize my voice from another series I co host on
this same podcast, feed False Confessions. Now, if you've listened to False Confessions, you know that usually in these cases we see police using coersive tactics that can pressure vulnerable people into admitting to crimes they didn't commit. But Herman's story is different. Herman was never forced to admit to a crime. Instead, the police completely made up his confession, a total lie. Herman, I am so pleased to have you here today to talk about your story, and we're
also by your two rockstar attorneys. Could you introduce yourselves for our audience.
I'm Herman Williams. I did twenty nine years for a crime I didn't commit, and I owe my life to the Innosons Project.
I'm Lauren Keasberg. I'm co director at the Illinois Innissonce Project.
Hi.
I'm Fanessa Potkin. I'm the director of Special Litigation at the Innocence Project.
So, Herman, I want to start out by asking you to take us back to before all of this happens. You grew up in Arizona and as a young man. When I hear about your life, it seems to me that there were two things, two big things in your life for you as a young man. One was the Navy and one was Penny. Can you tell us about those two things?
You know, I was a typical teenage kid, I didn't know what I wanted to do in life or anything. And I ended up joining the Navy mainly because the first time I was the ocean, it was just awesome. I just found my place. It was me, it was home. I had every intention of basically being in the Navy until they told me I had to take my walker and get out. Penny. She was still in my heart, a terrific woman, and how that day goes by, I
don't miss her. But yeah, you know, our biggest problem was I was all Navy and she just wasn't made to be a Navy wife. So we ended up divorcing, and as far as I believe, it was the best thing that happened to our relationship. We got closer as a divorced couple than we did when we were married. It's hard to explain, but that's the way it was.
And you, if I've got this right, you won some recognition for your work in the Navy, didn't you.
You know, when I was on active duty, I didn't do it for the medals. I didn't do it for the accommodations. You know, I was happy with a thank you at a boy type stuff. But now you know, I would like them to at least acknowledge my place in the Navy, because I feel like they abandoned me when all this took place.
Well, you're too modest to say that you're a decorated VET, but I'm going to say it right now. I'm going to say thank you for your service, and I am going to say you deserve all the recognition in the world for that service that you gave to our country.
Thank you.
So while your young naval office, you, you are married to Penny, you are having adventures in between deployments. You guys are traveling, going to Hawaii, You're going to Mexico. You're living the life of a young married couple, and you have two kids. Tell me about your kids.
Hermon, when all this happened, Charlie was six and Crystal was two. Charlie was awesome. You know, he was a people pleaser, he likes to make people happy. And Crystal, you know, she was a precocious, two handful daddy's little monster, however you want to label her. I mean, I admit I had more focus on the Navy than I did
as me and a father. But while I was out, I made sure that the kids needed for nothing, and when Penny had came back to Illinois, it was kind of cool because I was actually getting an opportunity to know my kids.
Yeah, so at one point you and Penny decide to go separate ways. You move up to Illinois. You're stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Base, which is just north of Chicago, and despite the fact that you and Penny aren't together, she ends up moving up to Illinois as well. Tell me about that.
When Penny came up here, it's like, well, why don't she just stay in the apartment and then she can take the apartment over When I head back to see that, I was fixing to go to San Diego.
And tell me about that arrangement. How'd that work?
The kids had one bedroom that they were sharing and Penny took the other bedroom, and I was sleeping on the sofa bed and it was working out really fine.
So you're there in the Navy station at the Great Lakes Naval Base September ninety three. Penny and the kids are with you, And this is where I want to bring in Lauren and Vanessa, your two rockstar attorneys, and ask you to talk about the crime that happened that is the reason that we're all here today talking about this case. What happened to Penny around this time.
So you know what's so interesting in this case is that after presenting herman for a number of years, we received a report from a forensic pathologist which actually sort of flipped this whole case on its head. And the true answer is, we don't know what happened to Penny. What we do know is that on Sunday, September twenty sixth of nineteen ninety three, she was found in a pond in Waukegan, in a very remote location.
She was deceased.
She had been beaten very severely with a blunt object. She was fully clothed, wearing a floral patterned blouse that was a button up that was neatly tucked into jeans, and she had been clearly attacked. There were defensive wounds on her arms which showed that she fought for her life, and that discovery was made on that Sunday, And we.
Can get into all that in a minute. But this is Penny in her late twenties. She's got two kids, she's got a life and a future ahead of her, and she turns up dead in a pond in rural Lake County, Illinois and an area that's pretty far off the beaten path. Now, I want to talk for a minute about Lake County, Illinois, which is where the naval base was, which is where you were living, Hermon, and
which is where this happened to Penny. Lake County, Illinois is known like Cook County, it's neighbor to the south in Illinois, as unfortunately a hub for false confessions and as we're going to hear in this case, fabricated confessions, confessions it never even happened. But Lauren, can you tell us a little bit more about your experience with Lake County because it is really ground zero. You know, you hear about these places where where it seems like time
runs backward. In Lake County, Illinois, it feels like justice runs backward, right, like you're always pushing against these headwinds that just want to deny that truth, want to deny DNA, want to deny overwhelming evidence of innocence. Lauren, tell us about your work in Lake County.
I remember in two thousand and I think it was fourteen when we first evaluated Herman's case at the Illinois Innocence Project, and seeing it on paper for the very first time. I remember where I was sitting in the room hearing about his case because I saw all the players, I saw what the evidence was against him, and I remember saying, hand me that paper, this is my case. This man is innocent. I can tell you right now from who these people are and what they're claiming this
evidence is. There's going to be something to this case. Mike Marmal himself is a character, this prosecutor who is responsible for many years lost to innocent men in prison, despite having evidence of their innocence. Just this callousness and the lack of professionalism and morals and ethics is just unbelievable. And for years, everyone that practiced in that county knew exactly who he was, knew what his reputation was, and
allowed him to get away with these things. And Herman is an unconscionable example of misconduct that has occurred in that county.
Blake County is a serial offender place. There's absolutely nothing else we can say when it comes to wrongful convictions. But I want to get back to our story here. Penny's found on Sunday, September twenty sixth, nineteen ninety three in that pond in Waukegan, Illinois, and months before trial, the coroner's office gives a time of death estimate that ranges from Wednesday into Friday. So the big question then
becomes who would do this? Now, we all know that in cases like this, right, especially in the nineteen nineties, spouses ex spouses always jumped to the top of the suspect list. And so if we're looking at a timeline of Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, one of the really big questions in this case is herman and his alibi. So, Lauren, can you walk us through what Herman was doing on those days that Penny disappeared.
The night before Penny disappeared, which was Whyesday, September twenty second, Herman and Penny had gone out to go indially to go to the movies, and they had a neighbor who lived downstairs named Wayne and his wife, and they had kids who were of the same age as Herman and Penny, so kids, so the two families would sort of swap childcare and help babysit each other's kids. So that Wednesday night, Herman and Penny had gone out to go to the movies a variety of other things. After the movie had
already started and they missed the show. They come back that Wednesday night together. Their neighbor sees Herman and Penny together as he initially tells the police, and they pick up their kids. They go upstairs.
They all go to bed.
Thursday morning, Herman wakes up early, as per usual being a navy man and reporting to base, you know, in the very early hours of the morning, gets up, sees the Penny as there knows that Penny has the day off of work that day, so she's kind of helping get Charlie ready for school, who's their six year old son. Herman takes their two year old daughter, drops her off at the babysitter as he usually does on the way
to base, and goes to work for the day. Charlie, their six year old son, is taken downstairs to the neighbor who is responsible for getting the kids to school that morning. Right before they leave for school, the neighbor sends Charlie back upstairs to say to find out who's picking up the kids from school at the end of the day, and Charlie comes back down after going back up to his apartment and reports back, my mom's not
home anymore. She left with someone. She left in a car with someone from work, and so it's like no big deal. Everyone moves on with their day. The kids go to school, Herman gets done with work that day. On Thursday, picks up Chrystal from daycare, picks up the other kids, and he's already He and Penny had arranged to watch Wayne's kids on Thursday night, so he gets
Wayne's two children as well. So Herman is in tow with these four kids, I think, all under the age of six or seven, and sort of runs some errands with them, stops at the mall, to the T shirt store, and visits Kitty at the mall. And I think as the day goes on on Thursday, there's some sort of lingering question of you know, where's Penny. Why isn't Penny calling? You know, she had the day off today, she knows
we're watching the kids. You know where's Penny. But no worry yet, right, It's just sort of the days going on. It's just a little strange. Herman is increasingly anxious and nervous about where Penny is. Doesn't know what to do. This is an era before cell phones before being able to reach people. So what do you do in that situation? So Herman, when Wayne, his neighbor, gets home, takes Wayne's kids back downstairs to him and says to Wayne, you know, what do you think I should do? I'm worried.
Penny never came home. It's not like her.
She hasn't called. So Herman uses Wayne's phone on Thursday night to call the Gurney Police Department to inquire what he should do and say, I'm worried, and he's told at that time it hasn't quite been twenty four hours. Usually these situations resolve themselves, you know, give it till the morning and give us a call tomorrow if she still isn't home. This is a case where if this murder didn't happen on Wednesday night, it's impossible for Herman
to have committed it. You know, once we get a little further down the line in this case, the state realizes this is a problem for them and they have to isolate it on that Wednesday night because Herman is accounted for at every moment moving forward.
That's right. It's one of the most thorough alibis I have ever seen. Herman is there. He's at work, right, he's on the base. He's there with four kids in tow. The neighbors see him. Everybody in this community sees you, Herman, right at this time that the coroner has already said, this is happening to Penny. You're accounted for on Wednesday night, you're accounted for on Thursday. You're counted for on Friday, and that's when you get this note, this notification that
Penny's purse has been found. What goes through your head on that Friday morning. She's been missing since you came home from work the pre day, and then you find out that her purse has been found. What goes through your head?
To say I freaked out was putting it mildly because no Penny had stayed out, but she had never stayed out all night without calling. So I was already anxious from that because you know, that was kind of our written, unwritten agreement. So then I go to a Great Lakes Police department and I get her purse. You know, I didn't know what to make of anything, so Gurnie asked me to come in, and at first everything seemed fine and nanty, but then all of a sudden it went from investigation to adversarial.
So this is on Friday. Her purse has been found, but no one knows what's happened to her yet she's still missing. And so you go into the police departments and tell me about it turning adversarial. What happened to you in there?
Well, at first, you know, they were trying to get timelines and find out what was going on, and then all of a sudden it went straight to accusation. What'd you do with her? They start bringing in two or three officers at a time, and during the entire interrogation they're video taping it, and they got a cassette player on the table and they're taking cassette recordings. Even though it turned adversero, I'm still doing my best to be
as helpful as I know how to be. They started asking me questions and then turning those questions into me making these comments, which was, you know, completely off the wall. And then finally I had enough of it and I said, this isn't solving anything. We're not finding Penny, we're not knowing what's going on. I said, I'm going to go, and they told me I couldn't go.
So they've got you and the Gurney police departments, and they're asking you these questions. Right, you're saying, this is turning accusational really really fast. They take your car. You actually have to walk home from the police station that Friday. What's going through your mind at this time? Still Penny's not been found. You've spent all day at the police station. They're acting like you're a suspect. You just want to find your ex wife.
Right, I'm thinking it's time for them to get out there and start trying to, you know, shake the brushes and investigate. But instead they're just busy focusing on me. And I didn't understand why. You know, it's like the stuff on TV. It's a cash twenty two. If you try to help the cops, then you're trying to trick them. And if you don't help the cops, then you're being evasive and you must be guilty of something you can't win for losing.
So this is going on Friday. You're being questioned, they get your car, they take your kids, Charlie and Crystal, they're in your apartment. This is going on Friday, Saturday, and then Sunday. Right that Sunday is when they find Penny in that pond. How'd you react knowing that this is what happened to the mother of your kids.
I found out about it when a newspaper reporter called me to ask me about it. The police didn't even have the courtesy to tell me, and I didn't when they said found Penny. It didn't occur to me that she was killed, you know, and on my way if you found her, how come she hasn't you know, been in contact with me? And said, oh no, they found her. She was dead. And I hung up the phone and I went downstairs to the police that were parked out in the parking lot, and I was like, why didn't
you tell me? They told me it was none of my business, and I snapped. And I'm an alcoholic and at that time I had about two years of sobriety and I fell off the wagon. I turned to the bottle because I didn't know what else to do, and that's when I ended up calling the Great Legs Hospital because I didn't know where else to turn. I tried to call a sponsor that I had, but he wasn't available, and I knew I was on a bad I was
in a bad way. So I called the hospital and they put me in the hospital for a few days, basically to monitoring and keep me away from drinking, which I was thankful for that because it just it became too much.
It's a lot, way too much to ask anyone to deal with. I mean, this is life falling apart over the course of a couple of days, right, and it unfortunately does not stop after those a few days. You are brought back in for another round of questioning. Four days after Penny was found dead.
Every day I was in the hospital, they were coming and questioning me, and I kept telling them, you have you talked to Beauchet who was my attorney at the time, and I had him under a retainer. They were asking me questions and I kept telling them I'm not going to talk without a lawyer. And they did the same thing that they did at Guarannee. They kept bringing in two or three investigators wanting to me to answer questions,
and I answered everything I want my attorney. And the thing is, the whole time I'm handcuffed to I it's bolted to the chair on a chair that's bolted to the ground. And that's why the whole story about Testman coming in and we drinking coffee and we being the best buddies is completely bs.
All right, So let me take a step in here, because you just said a pretty important name. One of the interrogators who questioned you was a detective who at the time was the deputy commander of the Lake County Major Crimes Task Force, a detective named lou Tessaman. And unfortunately, that is a name that is really well known to those of us who've been doing wrongful conviction work in Lake County, Vanessa. Can you step in here and tell us a little bit about Detective Testament's history.
Well, Detective Testament, he has publicly said that he was involved in obtaining confession statements in I believe, around eighty homicide cases throughout his career.
It's a pretty significant number.
And what's even more significant is that we know to a certainty that at least three of those individuals, if.
Not more, were actually innocent.
And so if there are three cases that we know about of the eighty cases that Testament is touting that he obtained confessions in homicide cases, how many other of those seventy seven people also are.
Like Herman Williams and actually innocent.
So you're in that interrogation room with Detective Testament, with other detectives from the Late County Major Crimes Task Force, and at the end of that interrogation they walk out of that room and turns out they start telling people that you had confessed to killing Penny Herman. Did you confess to killing your wife?
No, Man never did, never even said anything in my opinion, that would make them think that.
We're used to on this podcast, on the False Confessions podcast that I host, we're used to stories of people who are coerced into confessing to crimes that they didn't commit, who are pressured during interrogation into saying things that are just not true. But this is different, right, This is different because this is a fabricated confession. They're saying you confessed, but you never did so. At the heart of this case,
from the very beginning, is a lie. And Vanessa, can you tell us a little bit about the statements that the police and prosecutors were making in the press about whether Herman had confessed right after this interrogation.
Just so astounding is that there was no video recording of this interrogation. There was no audio recording In fact, lou Testaman didn't even make any notes of what Herman purportedly said until two weeks later. There's a report that says that Herman purportedly confessed during this custodial interrogation. How do you write up a report two weeks later without having any contemporaneous notes or audio or visual recording of what happened. How do you remember what questions you asked Herman?
How do you remember verbatim his answers. It's just impossible.
But yet this is what Testaman put forward.
I want to move ahead to the trial, right. The trial happens in nineteen ninety four, in February of nineteen ninety four. We've got lead prosecutor Mike Marmel, who you've talked about, and Herman. You're in a fight, fight for your life. If you're convicted, you get sentenced to life
in prison, and that's what you're face. Tell us, please, Lauren and Vanessa, tell us a little bit about the evidence that the state brought forward against Herman, and maybe tell us a little bit about how the investigation and its results were changed by the state to fit its theory of Herman's guilt.
Sure, so, the state prosecuted Herman on this theory that he had a motive to kill Penny because he wanted to bring his children to San Diego with him, despite the fact, as he said, he was boarding a ship and that wasn't even possible. The state had to somehow fit this murder into Wednesday night, because if it didn't happen Wednesday night, Herman could not have committed the crime. So what they did was they used Herman's alleged confession,
which was testimony put on by detective testament. They introduced some blood evidence where they did zerology so blood typing of some miniscule amounts of blood that they found, including on the inside of Herman's pickup truck. And they also introduced testimony from the medical examiner about a very precise time of death with a window of just about five
hours on Wednesday night. That is they presented to the jury is when Penny, with you know reasonable degree of scientific and medical certainty that Penny died within this short window of time on Wednesday night when they were together.
Now, hang on, Lauren, because I remember that in the coroner's inquest months before trial, they gave a range of dates from Wednesday night into Friday morning, and now they're changing that. They're saying that Penny had to have died on Wednesday night. What happened here?
So initially, you know, there's a coroner's inquest that took place in November, and at that time in November, the deputy coroner testified at the inquest that the time of death was sometime between Wednesday night and Thursday.
And you know, that was really.
Significant because for herman's defense attorney, knowing what they knew then, which is that Charlie, their six year old son, had told the police that he saw his mother Thursday morning. He remembered her pouring cereal for him. Knowing that the downstairs neighbor initially told police that Penny came home Wednesday night, the defense theory was locked in on Penny having left Thursday morning and being murdered sometimes Thursday, based on everything
they knew at the time. Right before the medical examiner, doctor Nancy Jones, testified before the jury, Mike murmel Is, prosecutor,
tells the judge. Over the lunch hour, we showed doctor Jones the video of Penny's body being pulled from the water, and her testimony today, and he even kind of sarcastically puts a dig in at the defense lawyer and says, you know, as much as the defense wants this to have happened sometime Thursday, the doctor Jones is going to get up here and tell this jury the based on what she sees in this video and based on everything she saw at autopsy, Penny died between eight pm and
midnight to one am at the latest on Wednesday night.
Now, this is what they're throwing at you, Herman, and you're in a fight for your life, and you decide to testify in your own defense. Tell me what that was like to get up and tell the world right, I'm Herman Williams. I did not do this.
I would have felt better if they had let me speak and say my piece, as opposed to answering yes or no questions. And most of the if you read the transcripts, most of the questions were loaded questions. But I'm being told that all I can do is answer yes or no. It overwhelmed me. But all I could do is get up there and tell the truth. Is I knew it?
Can I jump in and say something, Laura? Of course, So the entire time that Herman is being interrogated by the police to the trial prior to his arrest. He's giving them as much information as he can, trying to be helpful to find Penny at first, and the police are running down certain leads, but they are literally only trying to build a case around Herman. There is no indication anywhere in the reports if the police ever followed
up and tried to confirm his alibi. And even to another layer of injustice, there's Herman's attorney, who he thought this whole time was fighting for him, was doing absolutely nothing and made no attempt to shore up his alibi and get any of these surveillance videos or do anything. So Herman is like a sitting duck up there on that witness stand. He thinks that he's going to get up there and tell the jury what he's been telling
all these other people. And he does that, and he thinks there's going to be evidence to back him up. And because the police is just disregard, if not willful, attempts to not have evidence to confirm what he told them, and his lawyer's absolute abject failure to corroborate anything Hermann says, you end up in a situation where Herman takes the
witness stand, denies all the things that Testaman said. He said, tells the jury all these things and there's zero support for it, and the state's evidence is purposely chosen to contradict basically everything he says. So the jury walks away and you know, thinks he's lying, when if anybody, any of these people, at any time had done their jobs, his testimony would have been corroborated from the first word he said to the last word he said.
Jury walks away and because of all those failures thinks he's lying and comes back with a guilty verdict. Herman, what was that like to hear that verdict pronounced?
I basically spent two days in shock, you know, I mean, I grew up I believed in the law, in the justice system. I was raised to be a law and order guy. I knew police officers and I knew sheriffs my whole life. I've been around them. To think that what my belief was a complete and total failure because of the corrupt and injustice of the system. And I still to this day couldn't believe twelve people could find me guilty of anything least of all killing Penny Herman.
You are convicted and you are sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Can you tell us a little bit about your time in prison?
How did you.
Pass the time, what did you do to keep busy, and how did you maintain hope.
Tried to become a lawyer. If I was going to approve my innocence, I would have to learn the law, and part of it was helping other people with their legal cases, which kind of cemented the fact that the justice system is broken, broken beyond prepare. I'm not going to sit there and say everybody in prison is innocent, but there's a lot of people that are doing time that might have done something to get locked up, but
they definitely didn't do what they're doing time for. And that kind of helped me keep it together and kept working on my cage, and I kept hitting the wall and hitting the wall, and somebody turned me on to the Illinois Innocent Project. I wrote them and filled out the application and everything. They jumped on board and they just did so much for me. Oh my life. You know, it's been a it's been a trial, has been a struggle, and uh, Lauren and Vanessa gave me open a love
for Sorry. I don't mean to be a blubbering idiot.
You're not. You're being one of the most powerful advocates I have ever heard for fixing the system that's so broken.
Well it's broken, you know. Sometimes when it's that broken, you just need to stop and start all over. But they're not going to do that. There's too many Blue Testman and Mike Murmills in the world.
So you take the case, Lauren, you with the Illinois Inoson's project around the case, and Vanessa, you and the Innocence Project come on board a few years later, tell me what you did to dismantle the case against Herman Williams.
So we started. The first step was trying to get DNA testing. You know, we knew that we wanted to test the evidence that was used against him at trial. And incredibly significantly, there was DNA that was able to be tested from skin material under Penny's fingernails, and there was male DNA recovered from under her nails and it's not Herman's DNA. Vanessa, do you want to weigh in on the pathology review that was done?
So part of what was done post conviction was, you know, going back with this pathology and having it reviewed. It was reviewed by an independent medical examiner, James Filkins, and doctor Filkins looked at the evidence and based on established principles of forensic pathology, concluded that Penny William's time of death was much closer in time to when her body
was found, which excluded Herman as the assailant. You know, you really could teach a class on wrongful convictions looking at Herman's case because it has basically every component of
wrongful conviction cases. Tunnel vision where police just zeroed it in on him from the beginning and failed to investigate other leads that came in that you know, pointed to other suspects in the case, and proscatorial misconduct when it comes to the time of death testimony because the medical examiner had given a larger window, but that opinion was not turned over to.
The defense as is required by.
The case of Brady versus Maryland and the US Constitution. And then of course there's the information that came you know that we now know about low testament that wasn't known in the nineties, and so the existence of these other wrongful conviction cases the existence the knowledge that testsment, fabricated evidence, and fabricated confessions in of itself is a grounds for overturning the conviction.
It's so wrong. And just hearing you both recount what you have done in this case and all of the stones you unturned and all of the just flat out lies that you have caught folks in is frankly inspiring to hear. And you know, Herman, as you are watching Lauren and Vanessa work and as you're learning that they're finding all of this out, at some point, I'm guessing you must have felt like you had reached a tipping point, like all of a sudden, maybe there was going to
be a light at the end of this tunnel. When did you have this moment of thinking, you know what, this might work. They might prove me innocent. I might get to go home.
Well, I think the big one was when the DNA testing was done, because that was that put the car in the driver's seat, that put it on the highway. And I also want to give a shout out to Lindbek exactly. I know she worked direly on my case too, but you know, it seemed like with the COVID and everything else. There was a light at the end of
the tunnel, but somebody kept moving the light. But then finally, you know, this spring rolled around and I remember Lauren and Lynn coming to see me and give me a news and even though it took four months from the news, yeah, that was That was the chipping point when they told me that. That's when I actually began to believe that I was gonna be getting out. I didn't know when, but I knew I was going to happen.
And I've seen the pictures Herman. On September sixth, you walked out of prison into a beautiful fall day, blue sky, white clouds, with your lawyers at your side, and you were free. Take us to that moment. What was it like?
Words can't describe it. I was still paranoid that they were gonna come snag me up and say, oh, this is just some big joke, get back in prison. It didn't really start sinking until we got to the park and I've seen all them people come about to support me. We're there for me, having Lauren and Vanessa there, my dream teme. I said, I ain't got no words to describe it. Yes, like I told Lauren and Vanessa, anything and everything they need me to do. I'll do my best. That God I hold them, that.
I do.
Everybody that's similarly situated like me, Wrong is wrong and until right is right, we got to keep up the fight.
Vanessa and Lauren. Where do we start? What needs to be fixed? What's first on the list?
One thing that I thought was so remarkable about Herman's exoneration was the willingness of the current States Attorney to acknowledge the range of misconduct that led to his wrongful conviction. And you know, if we don't acknowledge the range of misconduct that leads to wrongful convictions, and we want to gloss it over to just we have new DNA technology or you know, this shows the systems working.
No, Herman's case shows the systems not working.
And I think that the degree of honesty about what led to his wrongful conviction is what we need if we're ever to really address, you know, the problems in the system.
And speaking of honesty, Lauren, I want to ask you, in particular, right what happened to Detective Testament, the one who said that Hermann confessed but since then has been linked to countless wrongful conviction cases.
So lu Testaman stayed on as the deputy commander of the Lake High Major Crimes Task Force until I believe two thousand and five, and went on to and continues to do some trainings around the state of Illinois related to interrogation techniques. The fact that he would be seen as an expert and a source for law enforcement to learn from I find astonishing. I find it appalling when you have the track record that he has. I just can't imagine that he would be out doing any form
of training. But to this day, he's out declaring that his ways are the right ways, despite the trail of horrors that have followed him in his career. There's no accountability, there's no consequences for people who have those positions of authority and destroy people's lives.
Okay, well, we've reached the end of a really disturbing and important and fundamentally motivating, an energizing story. Hearing from Lauren and Vanessa and how they fought for Herman. And you know, I'm the lucky one to be able to hear this story and bring it to our listeners, the lucky one to be able to sit in Jason Flam's seat to host the Wrongful Conviction podcast and to bring
out Herman's story. And so, just like Jason does at the end of this episode, I'm going to turn off my microphone and I'm going to let you Herman, take over and deliver what Jason likes to call closing arguments. You can say whatever you want, whatever comes to your mind, about your case, about your life, about anything else. But we're going to turn it over now to you and give you the last word.
Herman, Williams, what happened to me, He's happened to a lot of people. It's time to put a stop to it. William Blackstone made a comment that always stuck near and dear to my heart, which he's basically said, it's better to let ten guilty men go for and the lock up one innocent man. But somewhere in life it seemed like it got turned around and justice system would rather see ten innocent people locked up than let one guilty man go free. And that's a pitiful shame. It's time
to put a stop to it. I don't know how, and I'm not sure anybody does other than start making it right.
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. I'm your guest host, Laura and I Writer. I'd like to thank our executive producers Jason Flumm and Kevin Wortis. The senior producer for this episode is Jackie Polly, and our producers are Lila Robinson and Jeff Cleiburn. Our editor is Lexandra Whedy. The music in this production is by three time OSCAR nominated
composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction, as well as at Lava for Good. On all three platforms, you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter at Laura Nyrider. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number One.
Next week, on the guest hosted episodes of Wrongful Conviction, Laura and I Writer will return with another outrageous false confession story. She'll talk to DeVante Sandford, who was just fourteen years old when he was arrested for a quadruple homicide. He had nothing to do do with and there's a shocking twist that you will not want to miss, so listen next Monday in The Wrongful Conviction podcast feed