On March twenty fourth, nineteen ninety four, a man named Carl Voltz dropped off his friend Kenneth Hayes at twenty two point fifty Annabelle Street in Detroit, Michigan. As he got out of the car, a gunman came out of the darkness, fatally shooting Hayes as he struggled up the driveway. Neither Carl Volts nor anyone in the house had seen the shooter's face. However, a car in the area belonged to a young man named Jay Clay, which led investigators
to another young man named Larry Smith. The victim's landlord said that Hayes's growl friend identified Larry, and the landlord's son thought the assailant walked like Larry as well. Then Shell Casings allegedly founded the scene with the same size as one allegedly found in Larry's laundry hamper. But this is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful conviction. Today's episode
is an episode well of full circles. And when I say that we have somebody who listeners the show will probably recognize one of my great heroes, Jared Adams, whose full circle involved going from being wrongfully convicted himself, from serving over a decade in a maximum security prison to becoming a lawyer and helping other wrongfully convicted people get justice. Jarrett, so great to have you back on the show.
Thank you.
Jason, always a pleasure man.
The other full circle here is the star of our show, a gentleman named Larry Smith Junior. We're glad you're here.
Thank you very much.
When I say full circle. This is a man who's working at a rec center now in Detroit, Michigan, helping senior citizens as well as youth. And it is Detroit that he was snatched out of when he was just a kid himself. But before we get into all of that, what was your life like growing up? Did you grow up in a Detroit.
Yes, sir, I was the only child my mom.
She had me and then my siblings would come later, like basically through it. I had adoption more or less. But we was family. We grew up in the same house and life was cool. My mom always told me long as I worked, as long as I put forth that effort, as long as I did well in school. At the times was tough, but it was gonna come a time when they wouldn't be so tough. She was gonna have those degrees that she was going and working so hard for, and that our life was just gonna be different.
Great.
So right, I read here that your mom was studying for her masters in sociology. Do you have similar aspirations? I mean, you're just an eight year old kid at the time. What did you have in mind? What did you want to do with your life.
I was working and I was going to school, and my attent was to become a respiratory therapist.
I think my future was promising.
Yeah, and your nickname, I understand, was butter how'd that come to be?
My mama? Some with my mom when I was born?
My complexion And this is the Michigan story. And we've heard a lot of Michigan stories on this show, and this was aticular time and place when people were being framed. It's call it what it is like. It was day in and day out.
You got to think about where Detroit was in the nineties, just like a lot of the inner city neighborhoods dealing with the crack epidemic and drugs and gangs and things like that. So Detroit was dealing with a bunch of homicides, you know, And what they would do is try to find ways to resolve unsolved homicides, and they would do it in a way that would just downright be violating people's constitutional rights.
So Larry fell into the cross hairs somehow, and it didn't make sense because you were a kid who wasn't on the radar, shouldn't have been on the raidar of the police at all, which must have been tricky just to avoid that life in the area and that time and place that you were growing up in. But somehow or other, you were navigating these challenges and then everything went crazy. So Jared set the stage for the whole situation if you.
Would, well, I think the best place to start with. Set in the stage is Ralph Cartwright, who was addicted to drugs along with his mom, Sondra cart Right, lived together in a house that they used to rent out rooms to drug dealers to have a supply of drugs. And in this case, the victim lived in one of those rented rooms because he sold drugs and rob drug dealers.
Which is dangerous behavior to say the least. So the victim, Kenneth Hayes, was shot around five thirty am March twenty four, eighty four, in front of the Cartwright's house at twenty two fifty Annabel Street, Detroit, Michigan.
The victim was called out of his house at the middle of the night to do a drug deal. He has someone drive him to an apartment complex. We assume he makes a purchase or not he comes back. When he's coming back and he's getting out of his vehicle is when someone is lying in wait and runs out of the bushes and fire shots. The victim takes off and runs across the front of the car from whether a person dropped them.
Off and the driver was mister Hayes's friend, a guy named Carl Voltz, and.
Mister Volts saw the shooter and said, I couldn't see anyone's face, but he gave a description, and it did not match Larry at all. He described the man as being heavy set. If you see any picture of Larry from back then Larry is then you would not mistake him for being heavy set at all.
Right, But Carl Voltz's description was disregarded, as was the statement of another witness, the victim's girlfriend, who was in the house at the time of the shooting. What did she tell the police?
She said exactly what she said to the Conviction and Charity unit. Years later, she says she never saw anyone shoot the victim. The victim was her boyfriend, so she would have been honest about that. She said she was still in the bed sleep and didn't see anything but herd the shots.
No. No one knew about that statement until years later. Rather, there was a statement from the landlord, Sandra Cartwright, who, as someone involved in drugs, she and Ralph were vulnerable to police coercion. Well Cartwright attributed the following words to the victim's girlfriend quote, I looked right in his face. It was butter unquote and as we mentioned, that was Larry's childhood nickname.
That same person denied ever saying that she saw Larry. And she also told police the very same day that they were investigating, that someone had came up to her in a social club and told her that they were going to kill her boyfriend, and she gave them the name of that person. And they never went to go talk to this guy investigate this guy.
So instead of just an open and shut case, they chased down a far less compelling lead than a drug dealer who was recently robbed, and who knows what kind of relationship that drug dealer had with law enforcement. So this much less compelling lead was that one of the witnesses had said that they saw a car that belonged to a friend of Larry's name, Jay Clay, who delivered newspapers. But it was five thirty am, the typical newspaper delivery time, and this was on his delivery route.
Larry's friend has identified his vehicle driving past around the time. He has a legitimate reason why. Now, something like that in most cases isn't uncommon to be reported and followed up on, But in Larry's case, they didn't follow up on it to investigate it, to find out if it was any truth of whether his friend was involved, well, whether he was involved. They investigated to make them involved.
They applied pressure to Sondra Cartwright and made her come up with a version of events that has been found to be untrue, and the police knew because they had a police report from the young lady said she never told Sandra cart Write anything about identifying Larry Smith as shooting because she says she was never.
Up And then Ralph Cartwright supported his mother's narrative saying that he didn't see Larry's face, but he recognized him anyway in the area before and after the shooting. No, no, no, no, no, no, Like, what does that even mean?
Larry was never identified ever at all by eyewitness. They got the witness to say that the person that they saw around the crowd six, the way they walked was similar to how that guy named Butter, you know, a couple blocks down walked and also his freeend drives the car. So you can see how if you want to make that narrative fit, you can make it fit.
So we have Sandra cart Writ's secondhand identification even though the alleged eyewitness said she never saw anyone, and then Ralph making an identification of Larry's walk, which sounds like some sort of like that's almost junk science to the nth degree. But this was just a precursor to actual junk science later when a Hancho brand footprint was allegedly found at the scene. Now, Larry, this was in your neighborhood. Your friend Jay had probably overheard the shots. When did you hear about it?
Well, my mom, she called me at work, said she wanted me to go to the police station. I ain't asked no question, like okay, mama, I ain't did nothing, I ain't involved in nothing. So I got my car from work and I drove down there and took me twenty six years, ten months, in seven days actually to come home from that ride.
So as they're investigating the case, they've already gotten out ahead of their skis. They've charged both Larry's friend and Larry with this murder based solely off of this guy who says he saw the vehicle and he's seeing a guy running away who appears to walk like Larry, and the third party statement of a lady who says someone told them they saw, you know, Larry do it. So the case immediately starts to fall apart because Jason it
wasn't true. On the day that Larry was arrested, the police go inside of his house and they come out and say, we found some shellcasings and these shellcasings, mattch some shellcasings that are over at the crime scene right right.
They said forty caliber bullets were used, and then they allegedly found an empty box of forty caliber bullets in Larry's bedroom, as well as a spent shellcasing in his laundry hamper, which was then said to have been fired by the same weapon.
But then the autopsy report comes back and the autopsy says the victim was not with the shallcasings that you got from the crime scene or that you got from Larry's house. He was shot with a smaller caliber weapon and the bullet was left inside of him.
Jesus Christ, it gets worse, It gets, it gets worse. Listens to it to keep from crying sometimes, I know.
But this is gonna really blow your mind.
Now.
So as the weeks are going on and they're turning into months, and they're realizing that they got the wrong guy right, the wrong two guys.
But they still tried to square this circle. So let me guess they accused Jay the paper boy of firing at thirty two.
The cold defendant is able to produce a lady, and this is an older lady, very credible, no dog in this fight. She says that that boy was on my porch handing me the paper when we both heard the shots, and so that definitively places the cold defendant delivering papers. So they dissed the charges against the co defendant, and now said, Larry did this all by himself and had to be shooting with two guns and got away on foot there with.
Two guns, like the wild West, Like boooooo with.
The wild West. It gets worse, Okay. When they investigate further, they find out that the person who dropped off the victim, mister Votes said, I couldn't see anyone's face, but the guy was only firing from one gun. So literally every step that they took to frame Larry, it was unraveling. So what they did was they reached to an old trick and they produced a jail house informant who put together a false story and he had never even met or seen or was even housed with Larry.
So Larry, back to you. So now you're caught up in this vortex. I mean, describe to us what it was like. You go from the police station, they interrogate you, they took you straight to jail. From there, they kept.
Me in jail like three days, and they put me in a county.
How long were you in jail awaiting trial?
Eight months or something?
Did you get to sign a public defender?
Trash?
Trash?
My mother, she took her last money and got an attorney he didn't do very well more or less like did you ever heard the term somebody swap somebody out or they don't do a great job. And I say that because the guy who testified against me, the jail house person, he had testified against other people as well.
He had a history and if.
Somebody would when it did some type of investigation, it was records that was in there, but the police and the prosecutors had them.
They was in eight files, and.
It's possible that they never made those records available to your attorney, just like the statement from the victim's girlfriend. But had you known about this repeat offender snitch, that could have crumbled their whole house of cards. But still, even without that, this snitch, Edward Allen, his story was full of holes. He alleged that you had bragged about how you killed Kenneth Hayes with a glock nine millimeter guns right while j. Clay had a forty five caliber.
So he got the calibers wrong and the number of assailants wrong. Pretty important details. But nonetheless, the state went to trial in November of ninety four, presenting the cart rights, this erroneous snitch testimony, as well as the forty caliber shell casings, which allegedly served as this connection between Larry and the crime scene, even though the victim was killed by a thirty two caliber weapon and the only actual eyewitness, Carl Voltz, said that the shooter fired only one gun.
Yeah, so you know, the police tried to frame Larry. It was a plant of forty caliber shalecasings at and around the scene of the shooting, and that these showcases were recovered from Larry's house, and when the ballistics came back from the autopsy, it clearly was not the same caliber and there was some explaining to do.
Yet they still presented a police technician and a detective that testified about the forty caliber bullets found at the scene in Larry's house, followed by a medical examiner who testified about the thirty two caliber bullets found in the body of the victim.
Yeah, and the bullet is so much bigger on a forty caliber.
They even presented a police firearms expert, David Pouch, who testified to that fact, but he also testified that the forty caliber casings found at Larry's house were fired by the same gun as the casings from the scene, So in other words, just doubling down on the two gun theory.
Even though the only real eyewitness, Carl Votes, has said he never saw anything but one person shooting with one gun. Carl testified that as soon as the victim got out of the car, someone ran out of a gangway and opened fire on him, who he described in detail, and the description did not match Larry at all.
While Carl Voles exonerated Larry, if the jury were to believe him over law enforcement, it would have meant that those shells had to have been planted in Larry's house, which was something it seems like they were not willing to accept. It would have also meant that two more officials who took the stand and claimed that Larry had made incriminating statements to them while in custody, had actually perjured themselves.
They did purgured themselves, I mean, point blank period.
They lot, but somehow they had muddied the waters enough with the casing allegedly found at Larry's house and the scene, in addition to a bootprint that was found at the scene that they matched with the Hancho brand boot taken from Larry's house. When the shoe print analyst took the stand. The prosecutor asked, quote, and these are a mirror image of that pattern end quote to which the expert agreed.
If I found a pair of prints for Air Jordans, what does that mean nothing?
There are other Air Jordans, just like there are other Hancho brand boots. I mean right, It's like, did they only manufacture one pair? It's insane, which is one reason why shoeprint analysis is such bullshit, especially when there's no other corroborating information.
The boot was a boot that his cousin had a bag full of other clothes. They never provided any context to this boot. They never said they saw any mud on the boots, that the boots had looked like it had been worn at all. There was never any pictures matched up to the prints of the boots. The shit was all made up.
And you can hear the shoe print analysis episode of Wrongful Conviction junk signs that we're gonna have linked in the bio. I just listened to it again myself. It's it's mind boggling. So now we get to our witnesses. Let's start with Sandra cart Right, who testified about the victim's girlfriend's alleged identification quote I looked him right in the face, it was butter end quote.
Yeah, I looked him right in the face. And Sandra cart Wright had an open case against her, and she didn't come to court to testify. On a day that she was called, the police issued a warrant for her arrest, and in exchange for her testifying, they dismissed the charges that were pending against her.
So incentivized, to say the least. But this statement was a second hand account. What about the girlfriend herself?
She was never called to court. It was some trickery. And you know, there were some shortcomings of Larry's defense. I'll just say that a fast one was gotten over on them, and this witness was never called. I don't believe that the defense team ever had the police report that was taken the night of from the witness who says that she never saw anyone. I believe if they
had that they would have called her. Because we know that Larry himself didn't learn of it until after his post conviction lawyer had obtained it.
And this was already a decade later.
Wow, So the judge, jury and defense were completely unaware of the girlfriend's actual statement just Sandra cart writes secondhand testimony to the contrary with no opportunity to cross examine the actual eyewitness.
And not only can they not cross examine this person, but now you have a jail house in Foreignert coming in and you know, he's like, yeah, he told me he did it, and things like that, and so you put that together, it's the perfect storm.
And I understand that the inconsistencies between the guns and the snitch testimony and the thirty two caliber bullets pulled from the body of the victim that was never pointed out.
I didn't know nothing about this guy testified That gives me doing what he had a history of doing. Like I just knew I didn't say nothing to him. I knew I didn't say nothing to no police, that I didn't commit no crime.
So the fabricated evidence appears to have overcome the only actual eyewitness, Carl Voltz, as well as your mother who testified about how you were in your basement bedroom all night long.
She knew Larry was in the house because she was in the front room finishing up their dissertation to complete her Masters and it was only one way Larry could get out of his room. He would have to come up the stairs and go out the front door.
When they said guilty, man, do you know that?
My lawyer?
When I asked him, I said, what they say? He pushed away from me like he was scared. He didn't even want to talk to me. He wanted to be separated from me. And it was like, you got my life. Man helped me, you know, helped me. Goodness, man, I'm sorry. I went to Riverside quarantine.
First.
They brought us off a bus, all of us together, and they had a woman strip searchers like they had a man tell us take all our clothes off, and they had a lady inspectors like we was cattle. This introduction into institutions, but it was like experience and the closest thing that I could see slaves having. My second day in general population, I've seen a guy get raped. I walked in the shower on the guy was getting raped. Eight months seeing I've seen a guy get killed.
I stayed there about ten months.
From there, they send me up north to u RF and that stand for you are fucked.
They had on KKK.
Belt buckles, tattoos and that you would have to fight with the guards, period, and if you didn't fight the guard, you had to go to the hole for a year. If you whooped the guard, then you was the man. If you didn't whoop the guard or you was refused to fight. If you lost, it was okay. But if you didn't fight, you had to go to a hole.
For a year like some gladiator shit.
Yeah, for sure, they tell you fight fuck a lock up, and that's what it was. So to go through that experience. In the whole time, all I'm saying is, damn God, why you do this to me? Like I ain't did nothing. So now like I'm going through process of okay, ain't no God, ain't no, this, ain't no that. Like Mama, I'm trying. Every phone causes eight to ten dollars to call home everything. I'm just a purity burden on everybody. I need help. The only help I got his meat.
I just got testified against by somebody who I don't know. And then I'm back in nineteen ninety five. I'm finding out that the guy who testified against me, the jail house person, he had testified against other people as well. He had a history. Well, how do I find these people? And that's put off a whole nother rat race because now I'm going through the process of learning to live
inside of this environment. But I got to ask people who they call killers, that I need to find out what the hell is going on with me in my life.
So you were navigating this horrendously violent situation while not knowing who, if anyone, you can trust, but still desperately in need of information on this snitch Edward Allen, who was a prolific jail house snitch, and he wasn't the only one by far. Rather, Wayne County had a snitch system where they were sort of routinely incentivizing these guys not only with lenient sentences, but they took it several steps further. I'm talking about drugs, women they would provide.
They basically turned part of the police station into a flophouse.
Just going to say that too, Jason, where you can come and have girls come in and go out. And really what they were doing was this. They had a couple men at a time who were housed on a ninth floor lockup. And let me explain what the ninth floor lockup is. If you're suspected of a crime, the police could hold you for up to forty eight hours, but at that point they have to either release or charge you. So anyone on the ninth floor is only supposed to be on the ninth floor for up to
forty eight to seventy two hours. You know, at most they had a couple men at a time who were living on the ninth floor who were Michigan Department of Corrections inmates who were ritted out and housed on the ninth floor and given jobs as tear tenders, and they would grab a broom, sweep past your sale, start a conversation up with you, and he'd go out the next day and say I talked to him what you need me to do?
And that was the scheme. If I understand this correctly. They were giving these guys on the ninth floor like papers to read so that they would know what to say, right because they obviously nobody confessed to these idiots when they were sweeping along the thing like, I mean, just thick for a second, how ridiculous that is. Some guy's sweeping along. It's like, hey, Larry, how you doing. Oh I'm doing great. I just killed this guy at five
o'clock in the morning. How you doing what's your name again? It's so stupid that it's like, I mean, nobody's gonna do that. Yeah, but somehow or other they were able to sell it.
And one of the alleged culprits who was in this informant thing, he had done this upwards of twenty cases. And no alarm bells go off none. This goes without saying, but I have to say it. This was happening to young black men in the city of Detroit. This would have raised alarm beals if this took place in an affluent neighborhood or county. They were only doing this to people who had very little resources to afford a defense.
And you say this all the time, Jason. The justice system is what you can afford, which.
You can't absolutely and it starts with cash bail, because let's face it, if you have money for bail, you don't go through the same experience in the criminal legal system as those who don't. Guilty not guilty, It doesn't matter. Only money matters, and not having it can leave you in a situation or an informant has an opportunity to trade false information on you, as what happened in this case. That can then be spun to appear truthful in court.
And this Edward Allen and countless other snitches have worked the system with their allies in the prosecutor's offices around the country, and who knows, we'll never know how many lives they've ruined.
By the admission of the guy testified against me, not only did he lie, he was weaponized by them. They taught him what to do when he was a minor and then became an adult and then made it all the way to do it to me. Matter of fact, it's a guy named Charles Wilson one seven two six eight eight. The same guy testified against me, testified against him thirteen years before.
Why he's still in prison.
He's still in prisons.
Yes, he's in prison right now, twenty some years.
And that's Charles Wilson. I'm just gonna write that name down right now. I got it our producer Connor, who's of course listening in. It sounds like we're gonna have to cover this case.
We're representing mister Wilson. We definitely need a push. I'll discuss to you. You know what our strategy.
Is, well, you know my number. So this guy, Edward Allen, Larry was definitely not his only, you know, victim, let's call it what it is. In fact, he gave an interview. Edar Allen gave an interview in twenty seventeen in which he spilled his guts on everything, which ended up being very helpful in freeing Larry and several others.
When the informant was interviewed, he said he had never seen Larry before. He didn't even know what he looked like. He says that he was fed the information by prosecutors and by police officers and told what to say, who to point out, and how to get around the questions of the defense attorney. This was not an accident. This was deliberate. Larry and his mom were ill prepared to fight against this because Larry had never been in any
trouble before. His mom at the time that this was going on, she was so adamant that Larry didn't do anything. And do you know whose testimony they found not credible and whose testimony they found credible? I can guess they found mom's testimony not credible. But somehow a lifelong informant who had not even met Larry didn't have any of the details correct. Somehow the court in the jurors found this got to be more credible than the person who gave birth and raised.
Larry credible until, of course, he was no longer useful. And as I understand it, before the twenty seventeen interview and all this information came out, Allen had actually written a letter to Larry in two thousand and three admitting that he'd lied. But the judge denied your motion for a new trial anyway, saying that she didn't find Alan's recantation credible. How convenient. Then your new attorney, Mary Owens,
filed habeas in two thousand and seven. The following year, the Michigan State Crime Lab was shuddered after widespread errors and firearm testing and ballistics evidence were exposed, including in cases involving the expert in your case, David Pouch. So when Mary Owen sought to retest the forty caliber casings allegedly found at the scene and in your basement, the crime scene casings were saved, but the one from your basement had been destroyed. Again quite convenient.
So I had just jumped from two thousand and seven to twenty and thirteen. Right, I'm transferring from prison to prison. So a guy by the name of Jesse agnew He asked me to see a brief of mine. He said, hey, man, I'm gonna introduce you to Claudia Whitman. She came from Colorado and she went to bat for me for like twelve years. She fought for me pro bono, her and Mary Owens, and come be known all the guys who
got released based on this what happened to me. Claudia Whitman, she ended up knowing all of them.
There were four guys whose convictions were reversed that were tied to this ninth floor allegation in a certain set of homicide detectives, and.
They had what they call our Conviction Integrity Unit in Wayne County. That's what opened up and that's what freed me.
So when val Newman and the Conviction Integrity Unit started investigating these cases, they saw that the same allegations were being made. And Jason, you know how that goes, right, Like, if one person, yeah, two persons maybe, but if three, four people, five people are saying the same thing, then it deserves some credit and also some deeper dive investigation.
In Larry's case, they went to interview the witnesses again, and sure enough, the young lady said again she never told anyone she saw Larry shoot anyone because she wasn't even looking out outside. She said she never said it. So at that point was when I believe Val Newman and the Conviction Intergity Unit acknowledged the corruption that was
so blatant in the case. I took my cap to the courage it took from that office to would turn his conviction, because if it was left to Larry filling the motion in court, we would be doing this interview off of a prison call, because no court really designed to take such courageous acts. They are more so designed to preserve finality than they are to deliver justice.
That's true across our entire criminal legal system, unfortunately, and the Supreme Court of the United States actually ruled that way and said that even in death penalty cases, that finality is more important than actual innocence. And people find that shocking, and it is shocking, and it should be shocking to anybody of good conscience or just anybody at all. But that's where we're at. And of course the system is designed thanks to the awful EDPA Act back from
nineteen ninety four and other factors. Yeah, we need to repeal edput exactly. And these things make it virtually impossible for somebody to dig out of that quicksand that you found yourself in. And luckily there was a conviction of you unit, and luckily there was somebody there who was sincere, and that's a big part of why you're here.
Man.
It's heavy, and I think every day like I love al Newman because if it be one for her, I wouldn't be out of prison. She said that one wrongfully convicted was one too many. So you know, I'm just hopeful that they hear this and they hear the pleat for that man, Charles Wilson, so that I can get that stuff for all my conscience, because I know that guy lied on me. And every time I talk to Charles Wilson,
I'm telling him, bro, it's gonna be all right. And it's making me feel like I'm a liar, because it's not all right for somebody to wake up for forty years plus in prison for a crime to commit.
It's not all right.
Yeah. Well, we're in that fight together and that's for sure. And we got Jared, you know, and for me, it's such an honor to get to know you and to see people like yourself who've been through hell and come out carrying buckets of water for the people left behind.
I mean, I don't think there's anything better, you know, you could be doing and taking this horrible, horrible, unimaginable experience and transforming it into positive good, just as Jarrett has done and has so many of the other ex houneries. So okay, so let's get to the good stuff. So ultimately you prevailed. So take us to that series of events, because I you know, we've had a lot of doom and gloom on this show, but I want to hear the good stuff.
Well, they had let Ramon War go, they had a little Sino Hamilton go, they had let Banara Hower go. So watching these people go, my attorney told me that she felt like they was going to do something. So I was in the in there sleeping and guys come and hit the door.
Boom boom boom boom boom. I jump up, like, man, what's up?
Go to the door. They're like, man, you going home tomorrow. You're going home tomorrow. And it's people all I'm talking about, like prisoners, They all in the hall way and I'm coming out. I'm looking like what's up and the security guards people they clapping.
Like, bro, you're going home tomorrow. I'm like what They're like, Yeah, I go to the TV. I see it on the TV. I get up there.
I started passing my stuff for a whund because they say I'm going to court tomorrow where they saying they're going to drop the charges. So the next day came and I didn't go to court. I just walked straight from back in the day room with a prison to the control center to the street where I read a foreigner half paid statement about other people in it semitically frail over sentenced being incarcerated, asking the governor to take a look at what had been taking place. And that's
just what happened, man Like. It wasn't no big long it was, oh, you're going home to Maryland, and I.
Was to it.
I must have seemed like a dream, especially since you were woken up out of a deep sleep and just banging and then all of a sudden everybody's cheering. I mean, you must have had that dream before and now it was real.
I'll just say this for anybody who've been through what we've been through. Right, they gonna understand this. It's times in my life that I still think I'm dreaming. But I'm not gonna do nothing to mess it up. See, I ain't gonna do nothing to mess it up long as I keep putting out good energy, long as I keep giving the love that was bestowed on me.
See, I ain't get a second chance. This was really my first chance.
But for a lot of people our experiences, they considered to be a second chance. They say stuff like, don't do that no more. Right, So you're right, I won't go down to the police station. Like, you're right, I won't do that no more. But as far Red just loving it being a part of giving energy and advocating on behalf of innocent people, medically frail people. Oh but since people like I'm gonna do that every day and a day gonna go by, I ain't gonna do that.
Larry, is there anything you want people to do? Is there a website you think they should go to? Is there another person besides Charles Wilson you want to shout out and bring attention to their case? And what can people do to help?
So out of Wayne County, we got Tamara Washington, She's going through what I'm going through. They say her file is missing. So she talked to Dwayne County prosecuted. She told us that she would do what was needed in order to help her out, but she never did. So I want to shout out to Merraa Washington four A six three six y four Wayne Duve sixteen forty four ninety eight, again innocent, but he been in prison over forty some years. So I want to ask you guys
this question. When a person is innocent, right and they got natural life, when you say that over and over again, what is the next step? Is there any formal relief? Is there any formal relief with a person with a death sentence inside of prison? Is there another option that's made available for that person too? So you serve forty
forty one, forty five years, when is enough enough? So I just want to point that out that in this country where you don't have no self gates and then how you pronounce it the ADPA atput so then you got something as such, it don't allow us to file our appeals. So I'm hopeful that us is on the reads as a collective can march down on DC and that we could talk to these administrations about what's taking
place in this country. Because without getting our friends at the top to help us on our local levels and getting our people on the local levels to work with us people on these levels.
We done, man, We done.
So that's all I just want to say, is innocent medically frail.
Over sentence It.
When you get old and you innocent, you're going to die in prison. That means you're gonna become medically frail because you over sentenced. I just want people to learn that.
With that, we now turned to my favorite part of the show, which of course is called closing arguments or I again thank YouTube guys, Jared Adams, Larry Smith Jr. For being here with us today and sharing your stories. And then I'm going to turn my microphone off and kick back in my chair, close my eyes with my headphones on, and just listen to any other thoughts you want to share with me and our amazing audience. So, Jared,
we always do it the same way. You go first, and then we turn it over to our future guest.
I would love for us to find a way to implement both strategies that prevent wrongful convictions collectively as well as tackle issues of reintegration. And I say collectively again, and I'm speaking to the entire innocent world when I say this, the innocence world, the movement, the network, the organizations. We need to start moving as one body because it is way too difficult to deal with one case alone
and collectively. If we move in the same direction, the same accord, same beat, it allows us to fight this
giant a lot more effectively. I say that along with tackling the issue of government entities such as cities like the City of Detroit, who has decided not to compensate mister Smith but instead find a way to limit their damages and continue to drag mister Smith through this anxiety field roller coaster that has not sopped since he went down to the police station willingly because his mama called him.
I'm just going to say that for every person that's got a family member that's incarcerated, some people saying they innocent, other people, you know, they're just there for a long time, don't give up on your people. If if my people would have gave up on me, I would have died in prison for a crime ie commit And it was that energy that allowed me to carry on to our community in which I stay here and to be able
to put forth these actions. So I just call on every person out there to put forth they good effort, put forth they good heart, because it's something good, and everybody I'm hopeful to anyway. So free William Wiley, Free Tamia Washington, of course, free Charles Wilson. And thank you for having us, thank you for having Jared and myself, and thank you for doing what you do. Oh freeda innocent freedom medically frail Fredo over since we cannot lead it out.
Thank you for listening to Wrong for Conviction. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I want to thank our production team Connor Hall, Andy Chelsea, and Kathleen Fink, as well as my fellow executive producers Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Cliburn. The music in this production was supplied by three time
OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Wrong for Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at it's Jason Flamm. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one