One hot August afternoon in twenty seventeen, Louis Garcia was helping his friend John K build a wheelchair ran for John's girlfriend Rexina at their house.
In San Antonio.
Suddenly, Bear County police showed up with a search warrant. They took Louis and John inside, cuffed them, and quickly found a stash of drugs that were hidden in the house.
Bodycam footage later showed more drugs on the floor near Louie's feet.
John, Rixina, and Louis were all arrested in charge with drug possession and trafficking. Louie insisted he knew nothing about it. Those drugs on the floor didn't belong to him.
This wasn't even his house, but.
His lawyer said it didn't look good. If they went to trial and the jury saw that footage, Louie could be facing twenty five years to life. Reluctantly, he pled guilty and got a lighter sentence.
I mean, after all, the drugs were right there on camera. But this is wrong for.
Conviction, all right, Welcome back to wrongful conviction. We are guest hosting Dave.
My name is Greg Glatt and I'm English.
You might recognize our voices from the War on Drugs podcast that Clayton and I co host, and you know, we're really excited to share the story that we have for you today on wrongful Conviction because I really think it aligns to a lot of things that we're talking about there, you know, perverse incentives within the criminal justice system, within the drug war that lead to devastating consequences, and in the case that we have today, an actual wrongful conviction.
There really isn't a greater example than Louis Garcia, who was the subject and victim of wrongful conviction in the San Antonio of Texas. So we have Louis here and we also have his attorney, Dana Jones. Guys, thank you so much for being on the Wrongful Conviction Podcast.
Thank you, thank you so much for having us.
Yeah, and let's just kind of get into it a little bit. Louis, let's talk about prior to the incident here, back in twenty seventeen. You know, where were you born, where'd you grow up?
I was born in San Antonio. I went to school, I played ball, I lifted a lot of weights, and you know, I was just enjoying myself dating off.
And on any minor run ins with the law, things like that.
I've had run into with the law before, and it's it's just, you know, like when you're in your early twenties and you started drinking alcohol. So I've had some run into with the authorities, and yeah, you know I've yeah, i iuld say I've learned some of my lessons.
Typical stuff for being a young for being a young adult. Like you said, you start drinking, you get you know, you're irresponsible at that age. You get pulled over for tail lights tags, and then something else goes on. But it's not like this was your life or you were in and out of the system before.
No, I was a that's just electrician. I had a real good job. I was running jobs, I was I was doing everything, you know, I was going down a good path.
Right. So when all of this went down August of twenty seventeen, you were like, what forty five years old. Yeah, you were living in San Antonio working, you know, doing your thing, electrician work, and you were friends with a couple of your neighbors, John Kate and Rexina Lenon Wadez who lived across the street.
Yeah, my neighbors are great. Sometimes I have barbecue, sometimes they do, and we'll send plates back and forth. I'm the kind of guy that you invite to the barbecue and bring your tools, right, So I'm like, okay, so I'm always out there, you know, having a good time.
Gotcha. And Mexina, who also went by Mona. You helped her out a lot. You know, she had lost her legs to diabetes. She was in a wheelchair, and in fact, this one day, you'd actually seen her fall off her ramp to get into her house because the ramp was in you know, pretty rough shape, right.
Yeah.
Then I go across the street and start helping her up, and I started looking at this little just you know, whatever you want to call it that was built. It was just a bunch of scrap would put together. And I looked around and I told her, you know, Mona, I'll help you build all this up and clean your fence up.
And you were like, hey, let me get this together so this won't happen again.
And yeah, So I had extra plywood two by fours and a lot of stuff out there that we could have. We were going to build her a better round, and she she was excited about it. But she kept on telling me I can't pay you. I can't pay you. And I told her, you know, well, on the first of the month when you get your food stamp. So you know, I'm a real sucker for some chicken mole. She goes, oh, I can make that. I can say.
We'll be good man.
Listen, home cooked meal sometimes that's more than enough for a hard day's work. So that's what you and Mona's boyfriend, John Cape were up to that day, August tenth, twenty seventeen. You're out in front of their house. You're building a new wheelchair ramp, and Mona had gone off to the dollar store to you know, grab some snacks and some gatorade for you guys.
Right, yeah, And while we were, you know, putting everything together. I don't know who the guy was, but uh this, uh you know, John was communicating with him and he told him that, hey, do you mind if my daughter uses the restroom. She had a pink backpack with her and they go inside. John comes right back out with me and we're taking stuff apart and they leave. And another thing that caught my eyes. She didn't have a backpack this time.
So this guy who you didn't know, and daughter has a backpack, come up and say, hey, just need to use the rest room. You guys are just being good host and let them in. Daughter comes back out, no backpack on her, no backpack on the way back out.
Yeah.
And as soon as.
You hear their car take off of the block, and I looked up and I just see a Bear County Sheriff sticker on the side of a vent and everybody starts jumping out. And I told John, Amen, we're in the RAI dude.
So Dane, let me throw it to you for some background here. Can you kind of run through the facts of the case, Like what's going on at this point? I mean, you know, the listener like, why are the cops even here?
So Bear County Narcotics Division it goes and gets a search warrant for the house where Louis happened to be.
Louie did not live there at all.
They relied on a confidential informant to get into this particular house with really nothing corroborating the confidential informance information at all. This confidential informant had never been relied on before. How they made this person credible in the FI David was that they had conducted a controlled buy for the officer.
The officer says he met with the informant, gave the informant an undisclosed amount of US currency, dropped the informant off down the road, and observe the informant go into a location. Then they later picked up the informant and he had drugs.
Wow.
No, I'm just saying that the informant had never been used as a CI.
Or anything before first time.
And they're just going off somebody's word. Who essentially, you dropped them off somewhere, you saw him go in a place in later on they had drugs, and you will equate that to them being credible.
That's crazy.
I mean, that doesn't even prove that the person knows what drugs are. They just went in there and said, here's money, give me, give me meth. And then they're like, they came back with meth, they must know what it is.
But that's essentially what it was. That's the credibility there.
That information got police lawfully into a house. I mean lawfully in the sense of that's the paperwork the judge signed off on. This got them into a house, took people down, searched their house made a rest base.
On that, and you know, this is the kind of problem that we see with a lot of these warrants, and Clayton, I'm sure you're thinking what I'm thinking. We did an episode of the War on Drugs podcast called The War at Your Door on no knock warrants, and this is not a no knock warrant, but it has a lot of those similarities to it. It kind of has that same feel, right.
Yeah, no, it definitely has that no knock feel. It reminds me of what Radley Balco talked about on our episode that we had.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it feels exactly like that. And really, you know, judges are supposed to be this check a lot of these warrants and they just they kind of rubber stant them quite a bit. And you really look at a lot of the evidence that comes to allow the government just to barrel into your door not announcing themselves,
and how shoddy and minor that is. And then you look at a case like this and you're using an untested, untrained, confidential format has all the incentive of the world to essentially do things to get themselves off, and you're rubber stamping these things and the consequences of that. I think it's just it's a pretty scary, scary circumstances one that
you know, we could all find ourselves there. You know, Louis was just doing a good deed for a neighbor and look at the circumstances that he found himself.
Yeah, justice being served out in the name of a lie is scary anyway, exactly, all right, So Louis, let's wind it back a minute. You and John are building the ram. The guy and his daughter come in use the bathroom and take off, and police show up in a hot second with his warrant.
What happened next?
They started cuffing us up and they secured the location. And uh, I have been cu from the back like everybody else does, and I'll already on the floor. Well I look up and I just an officer comes and he jumps on top of me and he messes up my right shoulder and you know, I can't lift it up over my shoulders right now. And I was like, man, what did you do that for?
Man?
So almost immediately they go back to the bathroom and they come back and they're like, what's this With a huge, large quantity of drugs and that's exactly where this guy and his little girl with the backpack had just gone and they supposedly found it between like there was like a loose board in the wall and like in a hole and that's where they found it.
Wow, So was this We don't know about these people? Are they? Because I'm gonna say what it looks like and what it sounds like is this dude came in with his daughter and planet drugs in there.
So I'm just sitting there and everything, and then they pointed me out and said, hey, get your drugs on the floor. And you guys been looking at me the whole time. My hands have been handcuffed, and so they they jump on me again and they some some narcotics that were found on the floor, and they were saying that it's fine. I was like, I said, no, it's not one. That's that.
What he's talking about is when they handcuffed him, they took they led them in it's on body camp into it inside to sit on a couch and you can kind of see the general area. There's an officer sitting with them the entire time. You don't see anything on the ground. He's handcuffed the entire time, and when they stand him up to leave, there's all of a sudden, like a little bit of drugs sitting on the floor
next to him that was not there before. I don't know how he could be sitting on a couch with his hands behind him and next next to a police officer and somehow get I mean, the implication to me when I was reading the reports was he somehow pulled these out of his pockets or something. But they were accusing him of having this small quantity sitting next to on the floor.
Oh wow, that wasn't there when he sat him down, okay.
And then right about then, that's when Xina came back from the dollar store and saw everything that was going on her.
So she came back to the race.
She came back in the middle of the race.
She came back police there you win, coach.
And she sees like she sat cussing them out. What the hell are y'all doing in my house?
Is that?
You know, she might be in a wheelchair, but she's going to stand the ground sure, and she telling me, you get the hell out of my house. I don't know who y'all are. We're bear County Sheriff and hand there the warrant and she knows she's in cups.
They were Bear County Narcotics Division, where the officers, interesting enough, just a side piece of information is this is not my first case overturning a Bear County narcotics case. Like years ago the same division, they had some lying officers who were in trouble in the same unit, who were just kind of making up information and on search warrants and go.
I was gonna ask that. I was gonna ask, like they have a little bit of history of being.
Dirty, at least with me, they do.
I mean, not every officer is bad. I can put that out there, but I haven't had a good, really positive experience in my career with that particular.
Unit, right, And there's been a history, like you said, within Bear County. I know, back in what March twenty ten, there was you know, I think two hundred and thirty nine warnings of defensive hernees whose cases evolved to narcotics deputies when they're accused of pocketing money that was supposed
to be paid to SEIS. And like you said, there's been other cases there and so this is something I don't know if the term systemic, but there has been a routine within Bear County of this type of stuff going on within their narcotics division.
Correct, Yeah, okay, So each one of them was charged with four to two hundred grams, I believe is what the ultimate charge ended up being with intent to deliver, which in Texas that elevates it up to another offense level range of punishment.
Everything.
So I wait to go see the lawyer, and that's told the racina. She gave me an affidavit stating that it's her house. Everything is found on the property is she's solely responsible for. He looked at that thing and he was like, you don't live there. They searched your stuff, there was nothing found on your person. He goes, I'm taking this all the way to trial, and this is immediately dismissal. Oh man, I just that was a quarter pointed telling me this man, I'm high five of him.
He goes, man, keep your nose clean. Stead He goes, you're gonna beat your case. So I went hopping home, skipping happy them go back to working again and helping out and stuff like that. And there wasn't It wasn't the same when I went to court.
Eventually your bond got revoked and you were back in jail waiting for these charges. And somehow, I don't know, nobody can figure out, but his lawyers like switched and he didn't have the same lawyer anymore, and he got a new quarter appointed a lawyer.
He's already telling me, man, they don't look good.
Wait a minute, man, whoa we go from?
This trial's about to get thrown The case gonna get thrown out, So it doesn't look good.
They were ten years and I was like, what are you serious? Ten years from having all this confidence about me getting this case dismissed to this guy looking at me like, swell, what can you say? You've been in trouble before, and I'm just but this isn't mine. Wow, in the eyes of the court, you're guilty and you're gonna have to sign for something today.
So they immediately wanted you to take a plea yes.
And I just put my head down and just that's when I started like thinking, like, maybe I need to do this. Maybe I knew that maybe. And it wasn't until this case got opened up about me having these drugs that were found come to find out, all these police officers, none of them are credible in court. That's the reason why they didn't want me to take this trial.
Wow, okay, okay, So this goes just going back to what you were saying.
They were trying to get you to admit to those drugs in the house when they put their knee on your chest and everything. They were trying to get a mission then and then when you got the first one saw it for what it was, that it should be thrown out or whatever, then they switched it to somebody that told you to take the plea.
And it just sounds like what we've talked.
About Greg on our podcast, with that whole system of trying to get people to get through the system as fast as possible, get them the plea, Like it's almost shock and all, like we're trying to scare you into.
This, Like you know, I think there's also something to be said there that when somebody is in custody already, like his bond got revoked, he's in custody, the balance of well, okay, if I just take the plea and do a little bit of time, I can get out. It's a lot easier to fight charges when you're actually out of jail, you're working with your lawyer, you can have better meetings with them. There's a lot more discussion
that way. But when sometimes when you're in custody and you have a lawyer who's like, look, not fighting for you, but they're also not meeting with you. Because they're not, you're not able to call their office and talk with them. I think Louie and I have talked about this before, just the okay, well if they want me to do ten and he ended up getting eight years ultimately, But you start running through I could do. I've been in here a little bit of time already, I'm facing life
in prison for this amount of drugs. The reality is you never know what a jury's going to do if you can't get your case dismissed, and you start kind of justifying to yourself, Okay, I can maybe make parole in a couple of years, and those thoughts start going through your mind.
So Louis, now we're over a year and a half out from the actual arrest. You're initially thinking that this is going to get dismissed. Those hopes that kind of just start to dwindle, and then you have to accept a plea deal on something that you know in your heart you had nothing.
I was so twenty five to life if I take this trial, and I'm like, you know, what do you say? It's hard? And uh, You're like, okay, I might beat this one, but this one's over your opinion and what are the chances? And you just put your and just you know, I have to take this. I have to take what they're offering me twenty five to life each case. And I was like, I know I have a history. It's it's you know, I've learned from the mistakes. I
have been making mistakes. And it's just like you totally cos you get a cashp cash, you don't don't do it this way.
Okay. So Louis pled out to serve eight years in prison, and there was time served and all that. What about the other two defendants, Mona and John?
So John ended up taking time in prison. I think he got ten years on his case. And then they call her Mona. Her official name is Rexina. Rexina was very very ill. So John actually took a little bit more time on his sentence so that Rexina could get probation. That's kind of also another reason that these plea. Bargains were all offered so that Rexina could get out because of her health problems, and Louis and John recognized that.
So Rexina got out, she served her probation.
And John and Louis went off to start their sentences.
You get there, you already kind of got your mindset on you know how, You're just going to tread through. You don't want to get involved, you don't want to stay out of the way, Go to the library, read books, do this, and that's what you're mostly focused on. You can't sit there and tell yourself that you know what you do is wrong. You sold yourself out. You know you had nothing to do with this. You know why did you do what you did. I'm just here to do my time. That's all in my mind for it.
There's a lot of disordering, chaos that goes on in there, and you just don't want no part of it. You don't conversate with certain people. You just leave all this stuff alone. And every now and then you're gonna have a clash with these groups or with this or with that, and it's how you deal it. You just got to
keep moving forward. I had a real tough time in there because I had a silly and you know, he was five years older than I was, and we would talk and next thing, I know, the more he's there, we were just talking, talk and talk. Well he had he was making some hooch when I was at the library, and they fought for the bottle or whatever it was, and uh, you know, my my celling. You know he was he died. He beating the death and uh, he still bothers. It still bothers me today.
But hey, do you want me to tell this part? Louis? Okay?
So they I've heard him tell this before and it's really heartbreaking. But they basically brought him like a bucket of water and told him to clean up the blood that was in his cell himself.
So it's his friend's blood and he had to clean.
It all up. I told him, I don't want to go in there. I don't want to go in there. And they said, aren't you coming up for parol? You know, I'm giving you a direct order to get inside your cell. And do you just do that? You know you don't want to get in there. You know, Okay, you lose your pearl next yere, you know, following year. So I put my head down and I cleaned up the blood.
So, Dana, you get involved in this case in twenty nineteen, can you know there's a parallel case to this that is really tied into Louis. Can you kind of talk about what you discovered between Louis case and obviously the other case of Ruby Sandoval, which happened in October that same year in San Antonio, Texas.
Yeah.
So, when I was asked by the Conviction Integrity Union and then appointed by the judge to represent them, I did reach out to Louis and John. I just wanted to know what was going on, what their thoughts on their own case were, and saying I'm looking into this. This is what I've been told so far, but I need to get some information. And both of their letters
back finally were kind of the same thing. We've always said that this guy came into the house and he must have planted the drugs because they weren't ours, and it was a really weird situation and nobody believed us, which it matched up with with Ruby's case as well. So what I find out later is somebody had messaged her or talked to her about storing like a box or a bag, leaving it at her house for a little while. She said, sure, that's fine. She had a
lot of text messages with this person. The person was like, when are you going to be home? When are you going to be home? You know that kind of stuff. And as soon as she gets home, cops raided her house with the search warrant and they have find drugs in this bag that this person asked.
To leave at her house.
So based on that, she starts immediately fighting her case. And it takes her quite a while to prove to the prosecutor and to everyone you know, with her lawyer, get her text messages and everything in line to show this person us have left the drugs here. The state now feels comfortable enough that that's what happened in her case. So that prosecutor in her case went to a conviction
integrity unit that the DA's office has. They immediately pulled every case that this confidential informant had worked on previously, and it was Louis Rexina and John's case. They sent me a memorandum explaining everything that went on and why they think that you know what happened in John and Louise case and Rexina's case might have happened just like it happened in this other woman's case.
Wow, so the same informant, So the same playbook of somebody comes by and leave something there and then the police come the same county.
Wow, No it was It was the same informant, the same situation, same informant. Thankfully, in her case, she had a bunch of text messages from the individual and she was able to establish all of that.
Okay, gotcha? Okay? What was the between Roxine and the confidential informant? Like, was there a connection? Why would is he drawn to this house even plant things? Or was it completely random?
I think that he knew John and Rexina just from the neighborhood, is my understanding. They knew who he was, but that was kind of the extent of it. Louie didn't know who he was at all.
No, no, no, and the person used their daughter.
It just shows the lengths that confidential informants go to to work off their own cases.
Gotcha, So was it readily apparent when you were kind of reading through this and going through What were some of the things that you feel could have nipped us in the bud earlier? What was the kind of the things that stood out to you. The most red.
Flag Number one to me was reading this search warrant, that this is the first time they've ever used this confidential informant. I don't think that they had enough to get a search warrant based on that.
I would have challenged that.
The bodycam footage that what I had said earlier, that they're trying to say that these drugs that are near Louis but they weren't there before.
It doesn't if you see the video, there's turn the camera on and snaked your name and what's your address, and then it turned it back off, then it turned it back on, is that these drugs were found right here.
Officers that turn on and off their cameras or mute their mics always red flag for me. It just all seemed weird, and when something seems weird or off, there's usually some problems there is, in my opinion, So there's definitely was a lot to work with.
Yeah, wow, Okay, So you talked about Dana a lot of the work that the Bear County Conviction Integrity Union has done and the good work that they've done, and they've actually been you know, a really big bright spot within the Prostitorial's office there. Can you talk about, you know, what their involvement throughout this process with Louis once you got into the case and how that looked.
So initially it was the chief of that office. She's not there anymore. She works for a different court, but Matt Howard is now the chief of the Conviction Integrity Unit. I work with Matt quite a bit. I can't I can't ever say that he and I always are going to agree on every case, but I can assure you that he gives everything a thorough review, and if it's a wrongful conviction, he will stand up and say it's a wrongful conviction.
He's not afraid to do it.
So I really do commend the work our das Jo Gonzalez. He didn't start the Conviction Integrity Unit, but he's kept it going and really built on it, and they do a great job of overturning wrongful convictions when the proof is there. So in my work, when I file the claims, I got every claim together that I could possibly file for Louis and John and Rexina, and then I file them in the writ, application and memorandum of.
Law from there.
I worked with the conviction Integrity unit on what facts and details we're going to agree to, and we put those agreed orders together and we get those in front of the judge. And we also had a great judge, Judge Mesa here in town. She agreed on a lot of this. She actually went even further than what the Court of Criminal Appeals was willing to do. Judge Mesa recommended that all three of them are actually innocent of the charges. That's kind of the process when, especially when
we have agreed facts and agreed relief. The DA's office here is willing to get on board and we file a lot of agreed stuff together, which is unique. As a defense attorney, it does feel weird to give so much credit, but every DA's office, because of situations like this, need conviction integrity units and true ones that are willing to say our das messed up, our sheriffs messed up. So they are they're willing to make those hard calls.
And the convection Integrity Unit here and I appreciate the work that they do, especially on this case.
Oh Man, a conviction integrity unit, I think that that needs to be implemented everywhere.
Man likes that's something that.
It's a resource I think that can hopefully get a lot more cases overturned.
You know, Yeah, Clayton, I totally agree, and you know we're seeing them pop up a lot more and more, and yeah, to your point, we definitely need more oversight on these things.
All right.
So, Dana, as you said, Judge Mesa recommended that Louis and John's convictions be overturned and they should be found innocent. But then it went up to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Can you explain what happened next?
Yeah, the Court of Criminal Appeals for John and Louie said no, that they should their case is overturned, but they're not actually innocent, which it's it's a really high difficult burden to prove with actual innocence. So I can
go into why they didn't. There were because in John's house there was some little minor amounts of drugs that were found, like personal use, small amounts like that, and because they said that that's a lesser included of the greater amount, they're not going to give them an actual innocence finding. That's why they went that route. But Louie didn't live there, and there was nothing directly linked to Louis.
I really felt like, at least in Louie's case, he should have had the actual innocence finding in this case. So since they don't get an actual innocence, it gets sent back down to the trial court level, and the DA's office immediately filed dismissals and all the cases just to make it official that it's overturned and now dismissed officially. So they don't have a conviction on their record for these cases.
And because they are not found actually innocent, Texas law does not allow them to be entitled a compensation because of that.
Correct.
Correct, Have anyone, any officers or anyone else been disciplined that were connected to this case?
Not that I'm aware of.
Was the informant ever charged with anything about lying.
In this case?
No, not that I'm aware of.
Okay, And so we're now looking into what August twenty twenty, Judge Maza finally finds for wrongful conviction and then Louis you're released at the same time as John on bond in September twenty twenty.
Yes, you had like kind of a turn, because you sound like you kind of gave up and just like said, I'm gonna put my head down and do my time in too, be walking free. Man.
What was that like?
It was the meeting my little grand baby, playing with her is just I just started smiling, like be there for my parents. You know, I'm the only son, I'm big little brother, and so it's kind of, you know, gonna go do what I'm'm supposed to be doing.
One other little kind of piece of sad part of this whole case is the whole time that I represented Rexina, she was on hospice care because of her illness, and the day that the judge signed these orders for them, like for her case to be overturned, it didn't need to go up to the Quarter of Criminal Appeals, but the day she signed it. I called the next day after I got the order, and she had passed away the night before, so I never got a chance to tell Rexina her case was overturned.
Yeah.
The first thing that John and Louis did was they were pall bearers at Rexina's funeral.
Yeah, her sister had told us that she knew, you know that young guys are going to get out. She was happy we got out. I think about a year into my sentence, she wrote me a letter. I know with her it is that probably took a lot out of her. Even when I was incarcerated, we still kept in touch what little she could say, because it was like, Hi, thinking about you, how have you been? And pretty much is it? You know, I still keep in touch with John.
I still keep in touch with Delma Rexina's sister. Yeah, we're still, like I guess, easing our way through this and just slowly turning pages and moving forward.
Wow.
Just an unbelievable story. I think this, this case really does exemplify so much that's wrong with our criminal justice system and the war on drugs and how these negative incentives can really, you know, impact people's lives in such a dramatic fashion that you know, you see where these negative sentences can lie with the confidential informant and where his incentives are are drawn from the detectives to garner or two more convictions kind of fairly easily without kind
of you know, really respecting someone's constitutional rights. It's such an exemplification of all the negative that we see within the criminal justice and the fact that we have, you know, somewhat of a happy ending with Louis, and how many other thousands of people have probably gone through similar things and never got this opportunity to actually be you know, have their cases dismissed because there wasn't this commision integrity
or there's wasn't this piece of evidence. And so yeah, I just want to thank you Louis for coming on today and discuss this case.
Well that's one thing with our podcast, we don't have a lot of happy ending. Yeah, so to have somebody who's actually been through everything and come out the other side and it's great.
So thank you, Thank you both, Louis.
Is there any call to action? Is there a go fundme page? Is there a number for people can reach out about you know, you and your your your skills as an electrician, anything else with that that we can we can plug for you.
If anybody needs to help, we need some work or stuff like that, you can go through Dana.
It's all right with her.
I'll be your secretary, Louis.
But I mean, you.
Need you need plumbing in the electrical you need to fix your fence, and I ain't gonna wash your dogs, but you know all that other stuff like anything to keep uself busy, keep myself moving. Keep some guess it in the truck and a little change in my bucket.
I'm fine.
I'm looking at some curtains right now that are crooked because I couldn't do that. You look at the whole fucking house by yourself. God damn worthless.
Man. Come on, you gotta get your skills up. No, I take that back. We got to get our skills, that's what we think. We gotta get our skills up.
Yeah. Man, Look, we've come to this segment of our show called closing Arguments. Louis and Dana, thank you so much for being here with us today. This is the last segment of the show, so we turn it over to YouTube for any final thoughts that you may have for your closing arguments. So, Dana, why don't you start us off.
I always say that I would love to not do this job anymore, only because I would love that there's never another.
Wrongful conviction ever.
But there's always going to be this job because humans are involved in this process, in this system, the use of confidential informants really needs to be questioned in every single case. If they're going to do it, I don't personally think they should be doing it. But that's I'm not a law enforcement officer. Judges who review search Warren Affi Davids and arrest Warren Affi Davids. I mean the
whole process. Everybody needs to have better training so that we can catch these things on the front end and prevent them from ever even happening. I just think, I hope and I love podcasts like this where we're getting the word out that wrongful convictions do happen. They absolutely do happen, and we can't just incarcerate somebody and turn a blind eye anymore.
That we need to start working.
So if there's any local organizations innocence projects in your state or local community, get involved, if you can donate. If you ever get called on jury duty, really take it serious because you could be deciding somebody's fate.
Keep your head up and keep going. You get enough wrong two you're out there doing right. So yeah, I've had enough wrong done to me. So now it's just you know, I go out there and help out all I can, and I don't hold any negativity, any grudge or nothing like that. You know, I still have a lot of respect for the law, and I still respect you know, these people that are doing a hell of a job out there. And it wasn't until I was released and I saw all the effort that Dya and
the Judge mess It put into getting me out. It's like these people already they didn't know me for any date, they didn't owe me anything, but they fought hard to get me out. They fought hard to where I'm at. And so that's you know, I guess check marks on my side. You know, you do have people looking out at me. Not everybody's there to hang in.
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. We are your guest hosts Clayton.
English and I'm Greg Glott, and.
We'd like to give a shout out to executive producers Jason Flamm and Kevin Wadis.
Plus everybody on the Wrongful Conviction production team Connor Hall, Anny, Chelsea, Lyla Robinson and Jeff Cliber.
The music in the production comes from three time OSCAR nominated composer shave Rout.
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 Lava for Good on all three platforms so.
You can find US online too. I'm Clayton English on Instagram.
And I'm on Twitter at greg Glott.
And For more about the state of drug criminalization in your society, listen to the War on Drugs podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one