I'm Jason Vlam, host of Roefel 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 Rofel 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 the middle of one November night in nineteen ninety five, there was an explosion in Brooklyn, New York. Nineteen different people called nine to one one to report what they heard and what they saw. They reported seeing two men running up to a subway token booth on Kingston Avenue. They poured gasoline into the coinslot and threatened the attendant with a match. Almost immediately, the toll booth burst into flames. The attendant was a man named Harry Kaufman, and as
the tollbooth caught on fire, he did too. Harry was able to run up the street, where passers by helped extinguish the flames on his body. More than eighty percent of his body was badly burned. He died a few weeks later, the crime made headlines in New York and around the country. Prominent politicians like Senator Bob Dole and Mayor Rudy Giuliani mentioned the case in their tough on crime rhetoric. Pressure was mounting for the police to find
the attackers. With little physical evidence and no clear suspects, Detective Lewis Scarcella turned to one of his favorite tactics, coercing witnesses. One of the nine to one to one callers, James Irons, was forced to give a false confession and to name two more accomplices. Thomas Malik and Vincent Ellerby, were both detained and interrogated, and both eventually gave false
confessions under pressure. After an investigation and a trial riddled with lies and misconduct, Thomas Malie and Vincent Ellerbee were convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to twenty five years to life. This is Wrongful Conviction. Hi, everybody, it's Laura and I writer. I am so glad to be
here guest hosting another episode of Wrongful Conviction. I'm the co director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University, and you might also recognize my voice from another series I co hosted on this podcast feed False Confessions. Today, I'm here with a real fighter, a real survivor of false confessions, Vincent Ellerby Vince, you've endured more than any human should be asked to endure. I am so honored
to get a chance to talk to you today. Do you want to introduce yourself?
Hi, my name Vincent, I'll be I did twenty four years, eleven months in twenty five days. I had nothing to do it. I was forced to take the way for crime. I had nothing to do it.
And I'm Ron Coopy. I was the lawyer for Vince's co defendant way back in the nineties, and they were tried together, although in front of separate juries.
Ron, We're so glad to have you here, and Vince, I am so glad you said every one of those days, because every one of those days, hours and minutes counts. But Ron, I'm going to start out by asking you what was New York City like in the nineteen nineties in terms of crime and how people were talking about crime back then.
By nineteen ninety five, we were pretty much in our tenth year of the crack epidemic, which saw a dramatic increase in crime and a wildly dramatic increase in punitive law enforcement. It was a time in which the super predator theory was gained and had gained tremendous currency in legal circles and sociological circles. It was coined by a sociologist who later attracted it, but the damage had been done.
The theory was there was a whole generation of black youth growing off without fathers, living on the streets, who were committing crimes. There was never any consequence to their crimes. They would always get away with crime after crime after crime, and as a result, they would become super predators. These are people who were so feral and so consciousless they would go out and do anything to anybody without any empathy, compassion,
or mercy. And we were in the process of creating a whole generation of these people, and the only thing that we could do about it as a society was to incarcerate them forever.
It's one of the most toxic theories out there, right, I mean, we know this is the theory that led to the wrongful conviction of the Central Park five, for example, now called the Exonerated five. Few years before this happened to Vince. And there are so many other cases around the country that were driven by the super predator myth. Right here in Chicago, the Dixmore five, the Anglewood four, the Marquette Park four, the Uptown seven. These numbers just
keep mounting and mounting and mounting. And Vince's case in particular is a horrific example of these racist tropes being used to incarcerate black kids, Black male children in particular. So tell us how this toxic brew of racist myths showed up in this case.
So on November twenty sixth, nineteen ninety five, outside of a token booth in Brooklyn, two people two people, not three, and this will become important later on in the story. Two people went to that token booth. One of them was armed with a thirty caliber carbine a rifle. The other had a bottle with gasoline in it. They were
trying to rob the token boos. The token booth clerk, Harry Kaufmann, refused to give up the money and he was behind bulletproof glass, and the perpetrators poured gasoline into the slot. According to the prosecution, they then set it on fire. The token booth exploded. It blew up the booth, it blew up the money, and it burned up Harry Kaufman, and he had third degree burns over most of his body. And he lingered in the burn unit, agonizing day after
agonizing day until I think December tenth he died. It was one of those horrific crimes that still made the headlines in New York even though crime overall actually had dropped as the crack epidemic wayne. But it was still one of those incredibly high profile crimes that people used to illustrate why you can no longer live in New York City. Our mayor at the time, a guy better known to this audience in his latter incarnation as a
Trump apologist. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, for reasons still unclear, noted that the movie Money Train had just come out, and he claimed, utterly without evidence, that this particular robbery murder had been inspired by the movie Money Train. So it was a horrific crime, and everybody agreed it was a horrific crime, of course, made more so by the fableism of our mayor.
What evidence did investigators begin to look into? What leads do they have to go on.
The problem was they had no suspects. There were no fingerprints at the scene, the firearm couldn't be traced. This was before the days when there were cameras everywhere and everybody had a cell phone. There were no cell phone towers. There was absolutely no evidence that the cops had to give them a lead to anybody. So when nobody's a suspect, everybody becomes a suspect. Now that night, that night, nineteen people called nine to one one to report an explosion
in the subway station. One of those people was a guy named James Irons, and he was in his mom's apartment. He called up as well. Later his mom got on the phone. And this is noteworthy because James Irons sounded normal on the phone. That is, obviously he was paniced something horrible. It just happened, but it just seemed like another nine to one one caller.
So I want to take a minute and just ask you to tell us a little bit about the cops who ended up getting assigned to this investigation. They were out of the seventy ninth Precinct.
Right.
Stephen Camille of the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad was lead on this case. And he was assisted by Lewis Scarcella, which is a name that listeners of this podcast will remember. Can you give us a little bit of background here.
Now, Disgrace. Detective Lewis Scarcella and his partner Stephen Camill were known as Batman and Robin, and Scarcella was very much Batman. Whatever the lead was, whoever the lead detective was named, whether it was Camille or Murphy or O'Reilly or Derita or O'Toole, it was Scarcella who was actually in charge. He led a homicide task for us throughout Brooklyn that had a roving commission to stick their nose
in any homicide they wished. And the amazing thing about Detective Scarcella, and the reason he received such adulation within the police department and the DA's office was he got witnesses and he got confess sessions, even in cases where there appeared to be no witnesses, and even in cases where there appeared to be no suspects. He was known as the closer as well, because he will close this case. At this point, there's close to I think two dozen
wrongful conviction cases attributed to Scarcella. I think at this count eighteen have been exonerated. There are still some cases in the pipeline that may or may not result in exonerations. Out of ninety trials, ninety homicide trials that he.
Works, it's unbelievable. It sounds like he's been responsible for so many lost centuries. It's mind blowing.
He's been responsible for lost millennia of black life. If you add all those years together, it's not going to be in the hundreds at this point, pretty sure it's going to be in the thousands. And he didn't have any suspects either. So when you have case like this with no suspects, kind of everybody's a suspect. So what you do is you go out and you take every snitch, every informant, every person on the street that you know of, and you basically beat the crap out of them. So
they go back to the nine one one calls. I don't know the television theory the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime, and maybe one of the nine to one one callers actually committed the crime, right, So so footnote here. You know you're told if you see something, say something. The lesson of this case, if you see something and you say something, depending on who you are, you may end up getting convicted for what you saw and said.
Because one of those good Samaritans who called nine one one, who tried to help out was this kid, eighteen year old James Irons. But here's the thing, right, if he did the crime and then called nine one one from his home, he would have had to run really really fast in order to get home and call nine to one one when their call lugs say he did. He would have been out of breath on that nine one one call, and he wasn't. That just doesn't make sense.
So right there, right there, if you were paying attention, which nobody was, you would have had your doubts. Anyway, Scarcel and Camille bring him in and he gives a confession. He gives a full confession. The confession itself is riddled with things that are completely untrue, and he starts to name people that he was with, he places himself as the look at.
So the way this.
Works in interrogations, right, is that when you've got a group of people that you want to turn into suspects, you bring one of them in and you accuse that person of being there, but you say, hey, I'm going to cut you a deal. You were probably the lookouts, You probably weren't an active participant, and things will go easier for you if you just tell us a story where you were the lookout and you say, some other guys do it.
Right.
You see this over and over and over again in all these cases around the country involving multiple defendants, all of whom eventually falsely confessed to the same crime.
Right, and they get people to say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I knew there was going to be a robbery, but I know nothing about a murder. And the guy thinks he's getting Okay, I'll do time for the robbery. Lo and behold, he just confessed to fell any murder. Or yeah, you were just a lookout. They just asked you to look out while they went in and did something. Yeah yeah, I was just like making sure nobody came down. I didn't have a weapon. Boom, You've just confessed again to
acting in concert in a murder. Very very common, and it's one of the flashing yellow lights when you see it today.
Exactly, it's a hallmark of a false confession. So here you've got the idea that irons would just be a lookout the details of his story aren't matching up with the facts right, the number of people, the guns, getting things wildly off. But he does put some names forward.
He does. He among other names he puts in are Vincent Lerby and Thomas Mulwake.
So, Vince Ron and I just spoke at length about your hometown, Brooklyn, New York, and the horrible crime that happened there in November nineteen ninety five. Vince, I want to ask you, what was it like to realize all of a sudden that you were caught up in this case and you were facing these charges.
When I went to Rackens Island, and I didn't really have enough time to really sit back and dewelo on the case, because you know, you're walking into Rackings Island, you know, you got to worry about the phone, making sure that nobody's taking nothing from me. So in my mind, I just blanked it. I just blocked it all out. I just put all my faith for my lawyer, because I said to myself, it's no way possible that they're gonna find me guilty.
It's impossible. No matter what, it's impossible, no.
Matter their confessions, They're gonna see everything it's a lie. It's mathematically impossible for you not to see it. A blind man can see it.
You were in like short term survival mode, right, like this is gonna be over because they're gonna see I'm innocent.
Yeah, so it's just out here they say this is a normal environment, but when you get it locked up, that's an abnormal environment.
So you got to adjust to that.
I just put my faith for my lawyer, and I put my faith for my cole defending because he already knew the law.
So for me, it was just I was just in survival mode.
Survival mode in a Rikers in the nineties. It's no joke.
No, you gotta make adjustments real fast.
And there's somebody else in Rikers at the time, right, somebody who ended up giving police what he said was information about your case.
Yeah, rakuon Shabazz, Yeah, they called him ice Pick Marlin. I met him, I knew him for all the three days, and I'm not.
Gonna live to me when we went to trial.
We were sitting there and we're on trial, so I never knew him as Rayquoron Shabas. I only evenew him as Marlin show as we sitting there. When the DA, I mean, the DA calls.
Their next witness.
They say, Rake Won Shabazz and I took and looked at my coat offending, and he put his head down, so I tapped him.
I'm like, what's up? And he shook his head like.
So I'm saying to myself like, okay, who And the door opened up and he come out. He got this jean suit on, looking fly and in my mind I'm saying, what is he doing here? And he get on the stand and he get to proceed in telling him how time he choled him what we did, and how I chold him what we did, and that I was in one upper with him for like three months. And I'm saying to myself, like, they got records that will show
you how long I was up there. So when the when when Ron and George's questioning the guy and you just you just you just see you see it.
Then they brought up his past.
That's when I found thought about we wasn't the first individuals he did this too.
In my mind, I know I'm coming home now.
So you're there, you're being tried with Tommy, right, you're being tried together separate juries but you're being tried together, and Shabaz comes up and says that you confessed again to him, and you must be sitting there going I'm going home because this guy's crazy.
When you look at everything, from every witness that they had to, all the confessions to everything, if you just look at it, it's not a jury in the world. It's not a jury in the universe that's going to convict the money's crime.
Ron, Can you give us a rundown of this trial? How was this case with all these holes, these confessions that are obviously wrong, How does it result in these convictions?
This was really before the time there was much science available on the issue of false confessions. Some people had started work on it, Saul cass and I think had been doing it for a few years. But the idea of calling a false confession expert, that just was not an idea that existed in New York criminal trial practice at the time. And Ray Kwan Shabab's I actually did
one of these sort of bush league lawyer things. I took his criminal record, which at that time was written on paper, and I taped all of the sheets together, and as I approached him, I let the sheets unspooled as they did, and I handed him the document, which at this point stretched all the way back to the defense table, and I asked him if he recognized it, and he said, yes, it's his criminal record. I knew that he had done this twice before, and I considered
him to be a so called professional informant. He worked for the DA's office, not regularly, but whenever he needed to. Whenever he got in a jam, he would cook up some sort of plot, some confession, some conspiracy, and go to the DA's office and trade it for lighter treatment. The DA's office admitted that, yes, he had testified once in Brooklyn, and yes he had testified once in Queen's.
Judge France's xavier A Gito, a name which should also be familiar to your listeners because he presided over many of these wrongful convictions, said two times isn't enough to make him a professional witness, and they let him testify. What we did not know, but the Brooklyn DA's office certainly knew, was that in the Brooklyn case which preced this, he had testified that he was a professional liar. He was asked, you lie for a living, don't you, mister Shabaz, and he said, yes, it's insane.
I mean when you think about the way that this playing field was stacked, right, it stacked from the moment that a teenager walks into the interrogation room alone, without a parent, without a lawyer, without any clue about what's facing him, and a trial that all just continues with lies and concealments. Vince, I want to ask you if you'll take us back to that moment. I mean, this is when the wheels really come off. Right. You've been sitting at this trial. You've been telling yourself, I just
have to make it to the acquittal. I just have to make it to the moment when the jury realizes that this entire situation is constructed bullshit.
Well, when they at the crows and arguments, they came back with di verdict, little fat thing it was, and I don't think we probably wasn't even downstairs an hour something like that.
They called us back upstairs.
I remember sitting down and I'm saying to myself.
All right, I'm about to slide up out of here. It's over.
And they said, we find the defender's guilty on all chargers, so quick fast. I did a calculation in my head how old I be when I go to the board. I said I'd be forty two years old, said I'd be an old man. My daughter wasn't even born yet, her mother was six months pregnant. But it really didn't hit me until I went back to get sentenced, because even then I still thought they might have made a mistake, might be a chance. But I think the one good
day about that sentence. That day I wore regular clothes, jeans, sweating sneakers, and my col defendant, that's the only thing that made me smile that day. He walked into the court room, and to this day, I don't know where he got it from, but he had on a lime green suit, a lime green suit, and I'm looking at him and I'm saying to myself, this guy can't be serious. They're about to give us twenty five years and you
walk in here with a lime green SUITO. And I remember when I was taking me out the courtroom, I started singing Tupac, And somehow when I went to the board, somehow it changed for me singing Tupac to me cursing the judge out the parole board. When I went to the board, asked. They asked me, did I curse the judge out? I said, no, I didn't curse the judge. Job, I said, I read a statement that my mother wrote for me, I said, And when I walked out, I
was singing Tupac. I said, I don't know how y'all got that, but it really didn't hit me til I got downstate that I wasn't going home for a long time.
How did you survive all those years in prison?
Fear y'all understand something.
It is island.
It's different from the penitentiary, and you hear all the Harvard stories about the penitentiary. When I get downstairs, the old timer that I ran into, he asked me, did I want to.
Do a smooth bed? And I said yeah. He said, okay, this is what you do.
He said, for the first five years in your bed, you put in major work. I don't care if somebody owe you a stamp, if they don't have your money, when they say they gonna have it, you give them the business.
So what happens.
What happened to me, and it still affects me to this day. My heart became real cold because that's what the penitentiary turned me. Into I drink now a lot, the shield all the pain go through every day. Nobody know what it's like when you go to prison for a crime you commit, and you wake up every morning and you go to brush your teeth, wash your face. You can't accept that.
But when you're there, they the day after hour, year after year, for something you didn't do.
A lot of hate, build up, a lot of thoughts about suicide setting. I couldn't put a rope around my neck, couldn't take a lot of pills. I couldn't do that, So I will cause a lot of problems hoping that the police would kill me because I became tired. Nobody know what it's like for me, even to this day, just to fight to get up. I gotta give myself a reason to keep getting up every day. Yeah, people see me. I still look young, still got my swag,
but they don't know what it's like for me. I gave these people twenty plus years of my life for no reason, and.
They start detective.
He's living somewhere suburbs, somewhere, he get his pension.
You all right? He all right?
No matter how many times people do stories about that coward not feeling never habit too. But I thought they say, well, you committed crime, you go to jail for it. I ain't equit, make no crime. I went to jail. They exonerated us. So that means everything he did, he lied, he committed crimes. He forms to five evidence.
They say it's a misdemeanor what he did. Okay, cool.
I know a whole lot of people that got mister Meanings that went to jail. I would within a few of them, So I understand what y'all doing. I appreciate. Let me make this clear to y'all, and I'm just being honest. It's only one person that's gonna make him pay for what he did to all of us. Everyone that was not just me and my co defenished. We're the only ones that coward violates it. We ain't told he once, but the law gonna make him pay for it. Though he gonna be a rack. He gonna be a rack.
They broke me a little bit, but I'm gonna keep fighting. That day, thought my cold defend.
They need me to hold him down. Now it's my turn. He helped me, Damn.
He helped me. Damn Well, I was in prison, ripping and running. He was in the little library fighting for both of us. These tears just say for me, he's tears for him too. My cold defriend it is hurt the same way they broke me. They broke my cold defend in too. But he kept fighting for us. That's why I'm sitting there. He got us to this point. No matter how many interviews I gotta do, I got us. I'm gonna let the people know about that coward. I got nephews that I ain't.
Even grow up with my moms, my sister. What about their pain? What about them knowing that they huh like like no.
I was inning, I got a door. We'll never have a relationship. But she can't never understand why her dad wasn't there. And I don't know how to fix that. That coward took that from me. That cowward took that from me. You know, yesterday I watched my daughter come out of the building from coming from my mom's house, and she was in the cabin. She just turned and looked at me, and we looked at each other like we were full blooded enemies. You know how that feel.
Don't nobody know how that shit? But it's all right, though, It's all right it's part of life. That's the only way it could make sense for me. That's the only way I.
Can survive is if I said it's all right.
That's anyway. I ain't got no choice no more. Without that, my moms and my sister be burying me. That's how it makes sense something it's all right. That's how I keep going every day. It's all right when I wake up every day. It's all right for me. I'm real for it because at the moment I stopped saying that it's all right, it's the.
Moment I don't want to be here no more. So it's all right. No woman is all right.
You know what.
Let's take a break. Okay, Let's just take a break for a second from having to talk about this for just a moment. Okay, So I think I.
Just need a few minutes.
I just need a few minutes.
To our listeners. I just want to acknowledge that Vince is clearly in a lot of pain here. All of us who work on this podcast take the health and safety of our guests very seriously. Immediately after this interview, we connected Vince with a specialized trauma therapist and we talked to his family to make sure he was being
taken care of and supported. In the days and weeks following this conversation, we also spend a lot of time talking and thinking about which parts of this interview to air, whether or not his pain was too raw, too fresh, whether or not Vince really wanted all of this out in the world, We asked him, and the answer is he does. He wants the world to know what happened
to him, how it still affects him today. You know, wrongful conviction stories are often packaged as these stories of triumphs, but behind so many of them there's deep emotional suffering. So to Vince, I just want to say that I'm amazed and humbled by your bravery. You're sharing the truth of what happened to you, and our shared life work is to stop this from happening to anyone else ever again. So with that, let's get back to what happened next in Vincent's story. So, Ron, let's go back to you.
You've been involved at the time of trial. Years pass and you do get back involved with this case. Can you tell us how you got involved again and how the case eventually started to turn its direction back towards justice.
The turning point in the case came in early twenty thirteen when Tommy Malik, who never gave up, sent the most extraordinary document to me that I've ever seen. And what Tommy found was a ten page order from a state Supreme Court justice regarding Raekwan Schabaz and his most recent false testimony where he created a conspiracy to murder a sitting judge. The FBI got involved and they quickly realized what the DA's office could never face, which this
is a hoax. This is something that Shabaz is doing simply to create a reason for him to be an informer, to get out of prison. And judge the judge issues a ten page injunction saying that Rakwan Schabaz aka Marlon Avilla is a clear and present danger to the administration of justice. He is permanently enjoined from ever intacting anyone
in law enforcement. Again, if he feels the need to contact someone in law enforcement, he will contact a Special Master who I am appointing, And he is the only person that Shabbaz is ever to contact because his history and his habit of lying, creating cases, falsifying testimony, falsifying conspiracies is such that to let him talk to law enforcement is in fact, to disrupt the criminal justice system. I had never seen a document like this before. I
have never seen a document like that since. And I called the head of the conviction Review Unit, who I had known from other cases, and he said, just wait a little bit. There's going to be things coming out about Detective Scarcella that you're going to want to know. Early on, they took this case. This case was handed to them in twenty thirteen, and by the time of this exoneration in twenty twenty two, it was the oldest case,
the longest any case had lingered. But in the end they found everything they needed to convince everybody beyond any doubt whatsoever that all three of these young men, then young men, were wrongfully convicted. I started with Tommy, and then in twenty seventeen I realized that they were all going to stand or fall together just like they did at trial.
And so you ended up representing Vince too in his effort to be exonerated. But at this point, Vince, you had already been paroled, right, you were parolled in twenty twenty How did you and Ron get in touch again?
I got a letter from him, and he said he wanted to come see me. Right, I already knew who he was, so I really I you know, by this time, it's twenty seventeen. I got three years left before I go to the board. It's all right, I said, my cold infinity must have came up with something. He pulled the rabbit out of hot force or something. He ain't come up here, just just for no reason. And when he came to see me then he said, look, it's
a seventy five percent chance we're gonna get it over Trump. Right, seventy five percent. I'm saying to myself, that's pretty hard. On a seventy five percent note. Normally a lawyer tell you at the most he might put it at. If he's trying to be a little cocky, he might put it at fifty. So right before I went to the board, I let him know I was going to the board,
and I asked him to write me a letter. Now, normally when you go in front of the parole board, you know, after you say your name, they tell you who they are, they name and everything, and they asks you your name. They jumped right into the cakes and everything. But they didn't do that with me. First thing they asked me about was the letter from my lawyer, and I said, yeah, I guess after getting the letter from Ron, and Ron told him he let him know straight up
and down. Y'all should do the right thing because this case gonna get over trunk. Y'all don't want to be the reason why he had to stay in prison any longer, so y'all should let him go.
And he was right.
I made my boy when I came home and then I was sleeping, called me early in the morning, and like he always do, when he called me his greeting, Hey Vince, I said, what's up, bro, How you doing? He said, I'm all right. He said, listen, you got to be at the court room on Friday. Cats your case getting over turned. I said yeah, he said yeah. I was tired. I was tired that morning. I was
tired that morning. But after he told me that I couldn't go back to sleep, I started figuring, trying to put together what I'm away of the court, nice white white shorts, my fitted hat broke down to the side.
I still got a little bit of swag.
I told you that y'all came in there, you know, and I'm not gonna lie them. When I got there, were higher our other lawyer. She met me out in the hallway. She says, I was nervous, so I asked her where my co defending was at, So what tell me yet? She said they bringing them out, So I said, all right, And they brought them out in the handcuffs. That kind of that That that that pissed me off seeing him come out of handcuffs. When we walked out, we walked out together.
At the end.
They asked us what we're gonna do now, and I told him We're going to Disney World. So when this is all over with, when everything is all over with me and my boy going to Disney World. Depending on how this's turning out, depending on how after I see the last the.
Ending cut, I might invite y'all. I don't know yet.
And all I want to see is him and lime green, you and white at Disney World. That is how I want to see you.
No he no, no, no, he can no. He can never put on lime green again. No, no, that is against the rules for him.
Ron, we're getting to the end of a story. I just want to say, you've been working on this case for a long time. This has been a twenty seven year labor for you.
Yeah, I mean, look, one of the advantages about living to be my age is that sometimes you do get to see stuff come around again. I'm happy that I'm old enough now that I am living to see some of these things happen. So I wouldn't call it a twenty seven year labor. I'd call it a twenty seven year look at watching what goes around finally finally does come around. And while I don't think the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, in fact, I don't
think the moral arc of the universe freaking exists. I do know that sometimes for some people there is a reckoning at least, and that's what's happened here, and.
That reckoning, I think is going to come one day for the officers who did this. We all know that the law creates exceptions for police officers. We know that qualified immunity protects police officers even when they do things like this. But what I will say is that the world will know their names. They will know their names as bad police, and that's going to have to be where we leave this for now. At the end of every episode, of wrongful conviction. We do what we call
closing arguments. This is where you get to close out the show. You can talk about anything you want to talk about. And before you do, I just want to say thank you to Ron and thank you to Vince for sharing your story with us today. It has been an honor. Vince.
I'll give you the floor first and foremost, let me say thank you the wrong Thank you to my cold defriend of Thomas Malie, because without them, I wouldn't be sitting here right now now. Yeah, the penitentiary broken. I ain't afraid to say it. If you look deep enough in my eyes, you'll see it. But I'm just good at shilling it. That's what the penitentiary is designed to make. Break it break you down. But for me, like I said, I just keep telling myself it's gonna be all right.
They said, Lord, don't place a burden on a person that they can't bear, And I guess it was designed for me to carry a heavy burden. Some days it's light like today, real heavy, and for the next couple of days it's won't be real heavy, and I may isolate myself, my girlfriend may not understand it, my moms may not understand it.
My sister will.
Lord, that's my baby girl, my sister's tears.
As you see, Man, he's ain't a for us. All this is years hurting pain those that will see this. No one understands something. Man.
Penitentiary ain't designed for nobody. Man, white, black, blue green, especially for those that didn't do it. If you did a crime, you know and understand what it is. I could have did a million years long for something I did. But it's all right, though, life goes on. Me and my colder friendly are gonna survive because the same thing I tell myself, he telling itself. Because that's all we got. Our family there, but that's all we got to tell ourselves.
We all right, We're gonna make it. And I leave y'all with that.
Thank you, 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 Flamm and Kevin Ortis. 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 and I Writer. 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 and Lauren Bright Pacheco will sit down with Mark Shann, the victim of the Springfield, Massachusetts Police Department and their blatant disregard for the truth. Mark served nearly thirty years behind bars while his family and community fought for his freedom, surviving not only prison but also a dire medical emergency. Lauren Brye Pacheco is a brilliant investigator and she's no
stranger to wrongful conviction cases. You may know her from her groundbreaking incredible podcasts Murder and Oregon and Murder in Illinois. Listen next Monday in the Wrongful Conviction podcast feed