#393 Guest Host Tiffany Reese with Patrick Brown

A warning for our listeners. This episode contains discussion of child sexual assault and of suicide. Please listen with caution and care. In February of nineteen ninety four, a six year old girl living in New Orleans complained of pain in her abdomen and pelvic region. When she was examined at the hospital, the doctor suspected she had been sexually assaulted, and the police were alerted. The child was questioned by

You're welcome, You're welcome.

Thank you so much. To your attorney, Kelly Orion's, who's also joining us today. Kelly, could you introduce yourself and give us a little bit about your background, before we jump into Patrick's story.

Sure, sure, thank you so much for having both of us here today. So I am the director of the Decarceration and Commune to the re Entry Clinic at the University of Virginia School's Law. That is a mouthful in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Patrick, I'd love to go back a bit and talk a bit about you and where you were born, and a little bit about your background and who you were leading up to this horrific experience.

I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, braised in a lay and I I come from a good family. We're a beautiful family. Family was full of love, so it wasn't broken at all. You know, to where my family the open arms of whoever welcome and feed them, help them out. Well. I wasn't no bad person, but I took a turn in my life as I was growing up. That's to become street hung out all night, hung with the fellas, doing this, doing that, to the point to

How did you meet Kathy? What was your reallyationship?

Like? Oh, man, I met Cat. You know, I was just coming at the club and she was walking up and she was squiding me, so I was stopped and I say, you know, saw my concerns. She's a nice looking woman. And when I talked to her, we had hooked up and we know, we dated having fun and you know, moved in with her like two weeks. Then the relationships stuff like that, and from there to where it was a beautiful relationship. She had my daughter, and the whole time she was pregnant, I was just soul

Do you do you think like you did the best you could in the situation you were in at the time. I mean you were only twenty years old.

Right, right in nineteen Yeah, I think.

That it's tough when you want to be able to provide for your family and you feel like you have limited options. I think sometimes on how.

To do that right. Well, you know, I really had no guidance on how to raise a family, how to keep up with the bills and make sure that the family had Medicare, And I ain't know about all that. You know, ain't nobody really hold my hand and showed me how to become a man to provide for family like the man supposed to do. Because when I was really young, my dad had died. I wouldn't had no fault to figure in my life. I just went on my own, try to learn from the streets.

Did you have any previous run ins with the law? You mentioned, you know, the lifestyle, but did you have any like did they know who you were?

When the system? The system, they did know who I was because during the time of my arresting, during the time my trial, they really gave me a figure how many times that I had been arrested and the thirty seven times that I've been arrested, was fighting and activated battery, disturbing the peace, stuff like that. It wasn't have really no major crime. It was like mostly missed the meanor childs.

Yes, and nothing involving violence against children to be.

Clear, no, no, nothing involved.

Thank you, Patrick. We're going to talk about the events that led to your wrongful conviction. Now, I'd like to remind the listeners that we'll be discussing some triggering topics involving a minor child. To protect the privacy of the victim, we are not using her real name. Instead, we'll call her Sarah Kelly. Would you mind walking us through what we know of the case.

All right, So, first, I think it's important to make clear that this is a case where someone was horrifically victimized and survived an awful assault, and then was revictimized for twenty years after while she tried to tell the people around her, including the district Attorney's office, that the wrong person was in prison. I think it's important to acknowledge the two ways that the victim in this case was and the survivor in this case was harmed.

So the case.

Starts in February of nineteen ninety four, when Sarah was six years old.

It was the day after Marti Gras.

When she started complaining about discomfort and her abdomen and her pelvic region. So they attempted some home remedies and over the counter treatment, but that didn't work, and so then she was taken in to see doctor Ronald Wilcox. Doctor Wilcox immediately suspected that she had been reaped and asked doctor Maria Menna, a pediatric specialist in child sex abuse, to evaluate Sarah. And so they start talking to Sarah

Thank you, Kelly. So now Patrick, could you tell us about what your experience was when you arrived at the hospital that day with Sarah's mother.

Me and Kaji arrive at the hospital to get it. And when I got there, I passed the room, the examination room, and I seen family members in the room with Sarah to the part to where when the detectives and then came out of another room and brought me into it. Was questioned me about it and basically questioned me about you know something that happened to the victim. And it was asked me a question by do I

At this At this time, mister Brown is completely cooperative with the police and wants to know who hurt this little girl that he loves and takes care of, and so he is not at all thinking like a suspect. He submits to various testing.

He waived his.

Rights to an attorney and his right to remain silent and spoke to detectives without an attorney, where he denied allegations that he had raped Sarah.

I went out to the police station with him and was in a room where Raeric coroper with him as to answering a lot of questions to the part to where they asked me, did I actually do the crime? And I think I could just tell her this, lamb, I don't know nothing about it. The more I know about it is what y'all telling me right now. And I don't know nothing about it. None of that.

However, based on the statements that Sarah made, or rather was alleged to have made two doctors that day, mister Brown was arrested on the charge of aggravated rape.

It was something unspeakable, you know, it's really speakable to well get you off for something that you didn't do, that did actually putting this charge on me. But some kind of way that everything printed at me for some reason. I don't know why, because maybe I probably do know why, because the way I was through, the type of person I would, and that side of the family didn't really want me to be with their daughter. But like I said, she was my soldier. She was my everything. You know,

After he was arrested, he was given a two hundred and if the thousand dollars bond. His family could not afford the roughly thirty thousand dollars that it would have cost him to pay a bail bondsman, so mister Brown spent more than nine months in jail waiting to go to trial. His family also could not afford an attorney, so Robert Jenkins, an attorney from the Orleans Parish Indigent Defender Panel, was appointed to represent mister Brown.

Can you give us a rundown of the details of the trial? December thirteenth, nineteen ninety four. Who was the judge, the name of the prosecutor?

Absolutely so.

Mister Brown went to trial in Section A of Orleans Parish Criminal District Court in front of Judge Morris Reid.

The prosecutor on the case was David Wolfe.

And the district Attorney at the time was the notorious Harry Connick Senior, who headed up the Orleans Parish DA's office from nineteen seventy three to two thousand and three. Jason's covered some of the many wrongful convictions that occurred under Connick's watch on this podcast. His office was known

The trial started that evening with opening statements and it concluded the next day. We don't actually know the full extent of what happened during the trial, because, as mister Brown learned over the nearly thirty years that he fought his conviction since his direct appeal no trial's transcript has actually been made available. When the case was reopened by the District Attorney's office in twenty twenty three, we still

Kelly who testified in the trial and whose behalf did they testify on.

Zarah was twice brought into the court to testify, and twice her nose started to bleed as soon as she took the stand and questions began, which was something that was really common for her at the time whenever she was in a very stressful situation, and so she was dismissed. No accommodations were made for her to testify in private, and instead the state called doctor Wilcox to testify in her place, and recalled doctor Wilcox was the first physician to examine her.

The child being questioned in front of the whole court instead of the judges chambers, Like, what is your opinion on that.

I mean, it's.

Obviously so traumatic and stressful to the child that they're having this physical reaction after being raped. It just seems that the victim wasn't being thought of.

I completely agree.

I think, you know, cases like this are really tough because we keep courtrooms public for really important reasons, to make sure that crucial decisions in our justice system that carry serious consequences that compromise people's liberty interests do not happen in private, and when witnesses testify juries are empowered to make a decision about that witness's credibility. So, to answer your question, I think there's a tension because we

Would have been able to say the truth.

She would have been able to testify that she did not accuse Patrick of rape, and that was a very crucial fact for the jury to have. Instead, adults testified for.

Her, and instead, what did the jury hear from doctor Wilcox.

Doctor Wilcox testified to what was in what was recorded in his notes that Sarah had told him that Patrick put his penis in me down there, a statement that we now know and knew at the time had the police disclosed it, that was not was what was actually said in the doctor's office. So they were able to introduce the doctor's report with no scrutinity with this statement that never got to be cross examined. So what happened then is she never got a chance to tell her story.

The hardest part being incarcerated is that you lose a family member while you're in now, and I lost several family members. My mom, she went to three open house surgeries who I was incarcerated, and some people that really loved me, like my grandmother, my aunt's cousins, they passed

I'm incredibly sorry that you experienced that. That must have been so hard to be stigmatized like that and for something you.

Did not do. From the time my cuceration, you know, I had to try to make it work for me. I had to due to the times that and let the time do me. So at the time I was

What kept you going, Patrick, What gave you hope?

My family kept coming. It's fishing me talk to my daughter every day on the phone. My daughter was a month and eight days old when I got arrested. From that time, she was just a baby. She don't know nothing about the charge. And she fought for me too. She fought to keep me well, I keep hope going. She wanted her daddy. That kept me going down with my heart. She kept me going, she kept me fighting, ca me find this to be with them, so she could have a fault in our life.

So if you could, Kelly, speak to uh, if you recall when you first heard about mister Brown's case, what stood out to you like as a human and what drew you to essentially work on the case and kind of like how your relationship started those early days.

So I got a call on March twenty fourth of twenty twenty three from the District Attorney's office, Jason William's office. It was specifically from Assistant District Attorney Emily maw who is the head of the civil rights division in the office. And I was asked if I was available to come in immediately, and I was told that a young woman had just come into their office and had essentially said that the wrong person was in prison for raping her.

I didn't need much more information than that.

Yeah, wow, So what did they tell you when you got to their office on that day.

What we knew is that in two thousand and two, when Sarah was fourteen years old, was when she first attempted to get the District Attorney's office to listen to her about the fact that the wrong man was in prison for raping her. She explained that she estimated that she had written at least one hundred letters to the District Attorney's office.

And the DA at that time was still Harry Connick Senior.

In twenty fifteen, she submitted an affidavit to the District Attorney's office at this time led by Leon Canazero, declaring that mister Brown was not the person who raped her and identifying by name the man who did. She remembers going to the DA's office at least four times, but it wasn't until the fourth time, on March twenty fourth, twenty twenty three, that someone in that office actually decided to listen to her.

And that was, of course, after Leon Connazaro had been succeeded as a district attorney by Jason Williams, who was elected in twenty twenty and.

They immediately began reinvestigating her case. And I think what was most important to the investigators and to myself was Sarah's incredible credibility, her ability to recall in detail the efforts that she had made over more than two decades to undo this injustice and for the truth to be accepted by the DA's office. And part of what also bolstered her credibility was how deeply deeply harmed she was by having this truth ignored.

What drew me to this story or this you know, hearing about mister Brown's experiences and Sarah's experience is that it really highlights how important it is to listen to survivors and for their voices to be heard. And you know, on the other side of that, the detriment that can happen to us when we're not heard. Two and a half perpetrators out of one hundred that rape actually end

It's absolutely not okay, and it's just a.

Very heartbreaking, very heartbreaking example of the many cracks within the system. Kelly, What was the post conviction process like that led you from taking this case on to ultimately mister Brown's release.

One thing that I think is very important and I want to throw it in there, is that mister Brown litigated his case himself for two decades. In fact, the petition that was granted on May eighth was actually the one that mister Brown filed himself pro see over a year before this hearing. In it, he argued factual innocence under a very new law in Louisiana that allows you

That sounds like it would have been a pretty major incident for the defense to explore, but somehow the jury never heard about it. Can you tell us more about that exchange and why it was not brought up a trial?

So this fight occurred well before the triald, near the time that mister Brown was indicted on the charge of aggravated rape. The prosecution was aware of this fight. It is not entirely clear how accurately that evidence was provided to the defense. We know definitively that the fact that there were witnesses to this fight and witnesses.

To this admission that was not disclosed to the defense, and.

What was said during the fight that was significant.

He stated, I know that your daughter has got rape and I ain't gonna be the one to do the time for and.

I believe he also said, you know that mister Brown is doing time for somebody else's crime. And it's just it's almost irrefutable, right, Like that's a very relevant fact for a jury to hear and understand. This is the same man that Sarah stated raped her in the affidavit that she gave to the DA's office in twenty fifteen. They submitted this information to the court and on May eighth,

Of the front steps and not have to go back to Angola.

Patrick, I can't imagine what it must have felt like to be in that courtroom with Sarah and to hear her testimony, and for both of you, after almost thirty years, to finally be heard.

Oh yeah, it was unbelievable. It was beautiful. I know that this person came out and being heard, you know what, kind of helped heal me. Heal me a whole lot so well. Once she gave a test, moment she finished gaving a TESTI moment she came up and she hugged me. And once she hugged me in the court room, I felt her pain, she felt mine. She told me that she was sorry that I have to go through it. I told her that I was sorry too, that I wouldn't death for I got supposed to. She said that

Thank you so much, Oh my goodness, thank you so so much for your time and your willingness. It is incredibly brave to be this vulnerable in such a public way, and I just want to hold space and acknowledge that what you did today is an incredibly big thing. And I wish you and your family all of the best in the future. And yeah, thank you so so much. We also want to let our listeners know that there's a GoFundMe page to help you get back on your feet.

This is the first exoneration that I have ever been involved in, and I am horrified by what I have learned through this process. I also think it's really important to remember that what happened to mister Brown.

Is a symptom of a diseased system.

That puts not only people who are factually innocent in prison, but puts people in prison who should not be there in the first place, people who have caused harm, but who also have a larger story, who have a story that is often rarely ever heard, usually until decades later.

Than we have done.

To all of listeners, adele, be mindful what should do because just saying I heard that person they hurt out of people's be truthful to yourself and others to the point to where we need to stop all the nonsense and be straightforward with ourselves. That's not putting an instant person in jail. Let's stop the folence. Let's just stop all that because it ain't worth it. We all just come together, no matter and I we love no color race.

Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all Lava for Good podcasts one week early by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'd like to thank executive producers Jason Flam, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wardis for inviting me to sit in today, and thanks to our production team Connor Hall, Annie Chelsea, Leila Robinson, and Kathleen Fink. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph.