#455 Jason Flom with Darrell Siggers at the 2024 Innocence Conference

The following interview was recorded in person at the twenty twenty four Innocent Network conference in New Orleans. On February sixteenth, nineteen eighty four, a fight broke out at a party in Detroit, Michigan, and three young men were told to leave. About a block and a half away, a gunman opened fire on them, fatally shooting twenty five year old James Montgomery. The police focused on those who attended the party, including twenty year old Daryl Singers, even though the shots came

To the show.

So here to tell the story is the man himself, Darryl Siggers, who lived through this thirty four year nightmare of wrongful conviction. Darryl, glad you're here. Yes, thank you, thanks for being here with him to present this incredible story. Is his attorney, Wolfgang Mueller. Go by Wolf right Wolf, and I love Wolf because Wolf was just flying upside down.

Yeah.

Yeah, So Darryl, before we get into this crime, what was your life like growing up?

Did you grow up in Detroit? Yes, East Satura, Detroit.

It's real rough, but my mother and father it tried to do the best that it could to keep a handle on us. At the age of sixteen, as some things changed, I'm began to smoke weed, I start having sex and going to dance parties, and I had a real direction. I'm just finding myself at this point.

Sounds about like my life too, you know what I mean, except when we grew up in very different zip codes, And I'm very aware that the color of my skin and the place and neighborhood I grew up in had a lot to do with me not ending up where you ended up.

In my neighborhood. They had all these type of different police units. They had STRESS.

The Detroit police in the late sixties and early seventies had a unit. STRESS was the acronym Stop the Robberies and enjoys Safe Streets. It was a bunch of big white who would abuse black men.

It was doing horrible stuff to guys in the hood. Every time anybody in my neighborhood spoke with the police, it was not a good.

Outcome, including planting evidence on them that one cop was charge of planting a knife on a person he shot. So there was such abuse of black people, black men, particularly in that timeframe. They ended up disbanding the STRESS unit because of that abuse. And so when Darryl talks about in his neighborhood, if the police are coming, it is not going to be a good outcome. It's because they had that historical perspective.

And Detroit was is no different from so many jurisdictions across the country where we see co werced and incentivized witnesses, junk science, cops or experts test the lying, all of which appeared to have been a factor in this case, which started in nineteen eighty four when Daryl was twenty

There were a lot of people at the party, Daryl being one of them and being eighteen nineteen, twenty years old, a lot of testosterone mixed with alcohol, I think, and somebody dating Daryl's baby mama and he's in the house. Things got to be a little heated. There was a fight that broke out and a guy who was at the party named Toby Red real light skinned guy, black guy who passed for white, reddish hair. How he got

There was another neighbor who not only saw, but spoke with this light skin man and gave a lot more detail, But it appears Detective Alex may have chosen to keep that information to himself instead. Daryl's name came up, and we're not sure who was the initial source or why he was mentioned, but the shooting survivors, Lawson and Jackson, a few days after the shooting, eventually claimed to have recognized Daryl as the shooter from one hundred feet away in the dark.

The evidence against Darryl came down to a kid who was drunk and hi who said it was Darryl Siggers. They call him little Man. He was the guy who shot us. As soon as they got somebody, the expediency of it makes them not look at anybody else and ignore all of the other evidence that might suggest it's not who they think it is, and they just focused on him.

I didn't know at that time. Somebody got killed. Well, a couple days after the party, my son and daughter's mother, Christine, calls me. She said, the police came back. They want to talk to you. A guy got killed. She said, well, I gave them your father's number, so they called. So my father convinced me. He said, listen, if you ain't got nothing to hih, woay talk to these people. So I agree to talk to him. I come back home. As soon as I walked in the door, he said

He go back out me and cop comes back in. We know you did this. You're gonna tell us you did this.

And they go on and on back and forth with this, and they keep you there for hours to their way down, trying to get me to confess. I don't, so he gets frustrated with me after this long ordeal. I keep telling this guy, you got the wrong guy. I don't know who did this. I don't know nothing about this case. And he says, listen, I'm gonna go get a pen and a piece of paper and you're gonna tell me that you did this or I'm gonna knock the.

Shit out of you.

Now I'm scared to death, I'm twenty years old, never been in trouble, and here's a big white cop screaming and hollering.

So I look over.

I see a window. I don't know, I'm just high up. I run jump out the window five stories halfway down. I thought to myself, this was not a good idea, but it was nothing I could do. I couldn't go back up, so I falled three stories down on the landing boom roll over. And at this point I'm an autopilot, So at this point I would have liked to went back up, but I wasn't going to sign a statement confessing to something that I didn't do, so I felt

One minute you're talking to your father, everything's normal. Next minute you're like living in this alternate reality. These cops are threatening to beat you up or worse, and you jump out the fucking window and you literally didn't know what floyd you were on.

They were terrorize me, and Who's I gonna call the police? They were the ones who was cheerizing. There's nothing I can do.

That's a miracle you lived through that.

You know, there was only one other guy had done that, and he did die. He broke his neck.

He broke out that same window.

Yeah, he broke his neck.

You're listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early and ad free by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. So now you're taken to jail and held there for how long we're waiting trial?

Six months?

Wayne County Jail, which is horrible, just horrible. When I first got there, I got cast on my leg, cast on my arm.

I'm in his.

Bullpin and it's alcoholics, it's drug addicts. Is people laying all over the floor. The stench is horrible. This room is built for maybe like twenty five people. They got fifty in it. There's nowhere if you can sit. And the full of was just full of grime and dirt. It was just the nastiest, funkiest And in my mind, I'm saying to myself, I'm not finna sit on this nasty, dirty floor. There's people laying all on the benches. So I stood for maybe like two hours, but my leg

And that said like eight thirty never on time.

When these kind of jails are cold, and so all I got on this little jail uniform and it's and I'm freezing every day.

This is how it is every day.

How are you supposed to think straight when you're coming out of an environment like that, sleep deprived, hungry, freezing, you know, and then you supposed to present like somebody who looks like an upstanding citizen, right that the jury's going to look at it and go, yeah, I know, he like you look now, you know. I think it's a really under reported aspect of the way our system works, the dehumanization that's designed to drive people crazy before they

You are one hundred percent correct. You come in and disheveled wreck. My clients have told me the Wayne County jail is designed to get you to plead guilty.

And then here comes to trial.

I was represented by an attorney called Timothy Murphy. He did the best that he could, but the deck was stacked even before we got there.

So the two other guys who were shot at Lawson and Jackson, they identified you as the gunman. It's pretty ridiculous to think that someone is going to make a positive identification in the dark from one hundred feet away in a situation that's chaotic and violent and dangerous. You know, if you're one hundred feet away from a shoot, you're going to be running or turned the other way, or you know you can't help it, You're going to be

One of the things we didn't know was these guys was in jail also with me. They let these guys collaborate, talk to each other so that they could get their stories together.

However, the crazy circumstances of the ideas made these witnesses impeachable on cross examination. So police Sergeant Claude Houseworth, an alleged ballistics expert, came in to testify about a bullet that was allegedly found in an apartment that was neighboring Daryl's apartment.

This expert gets up there and he's with all these nice professional words, and he tells the jury he's been in the Detroit crime lab for six years. Later on I filed the Freedom of a Masonach request for his personnel. We found out this guy an expert. The report showed he had been in a Detroit crime lab for less than three hundred and six four days, not the two years that was required to even give testimony, and not the six years that he claimed he had been in the Detroit crime Lab.

All lies so under oath.

Under oath, this so called expert claimed that a bullet allegedly found at my home matched a bullet that was found in the deceased body and according to him, in it identical lands and grooves. Now, I don't know nothing about ballistic identification at this time. I'm twenty years old. I'm a city kid. I don't know nothing about hunting guns and none of that type of stuff. But I'm telling my lawyer it's not true.

Ballistics evidence has covered on the tool mark Identification episode of Wrong for Conviction Junk Science, and we'll have it linked in the episode description. A ballistics evidence is only capable and only really meant to rule a gun out. It's not able to identify a weapon to the exclusion of all others. But that's what Sergeant Houseworth did at Dalls trial.

If you have a weak witness, if you throw on forensics, and that supports the testimony cases over because I don't have to believe these guys. Maybe they were a little bit drunk and high and maybe they didn't see what they saw, but there was a bullet came out an apartment next to Darryl Siggers, and it matches the body, then he did it. Now it strengthens the identification, and

When I heard the jury say guilty, it was like somebody hit me in the head with a brick because I was dizzy.

So you're convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Yes, without the possibility pull. It was a sensing on death rope. I didn't have a date to go to the gas chamber. That's how I looked at it. That's just the truth facts.

Of their living death sentence.

Yes, what they do is they put chains around your waist, chains on your wrists, chains on your legs, and then they march you out and you got a duck or they chain me to twenty other guys, and I feel like a slave.

First.

When I got there, I'm seeing all types of crazy stuff, you know what I'm saying, Stabby rapes, you know, I've seen guys hang themselves, all types of stuff, drugs, gangs, gambling. So I'm walking the yard and an older gentleman sees me. His name is Madrick Bonnard. He said, listen, young fellas, you walking around there acting tough. You need to be in a law library so you can learn the law and get your bod out of here. He takes me to the law library and he begins to teach me

The more I.

Learned, the more I wanted to learn. The more I read, the more I wanted to read. And so now I'm understanding how they got me here, At least from a legal standpoint, I was laser focused on being in a law library learning the law so I could get out. Had children and family, mother and father out there, but I wanted to get back to and they were my motivating force and inspiration to keep going until I could prove that I was innocent. And that was the key

I couldn't do it.

With his growing knowledge of the law, Daryl was very active in post conviction, but nonetheless he was denied throughout his state and federal proceedings. He really needed a team on the outside to reinvestigate the case.

Every day I wrote somebody, I got piles of letters denying my requests for saying we couldn't help you. I remained undeterred, and I just kept writing. In two thousand and two, University of Michigan appointed me four law students, two professors. They came worked the case up, researched it, and they were the ones who ultimately discovered the identification gaps. Where these guys couldn't see what they said he saw from where they said he seen it from. It was impossible,

In addition, Ernard Jackson's cousin came forward saying that Jackson admitted to testifying Paulsey against Darrel under threats from the police. Then evidence of the hidden alternate suspect came to light. If you remember, the neighbor Gary Kelly, had seen a light skinned man or potentially his white neighbor, with a long gun near the scene that night. But it appears Kelly wasn't the only person who mentioned this alternate suspect to Detective Alex.

There was a friend of christineau Daryll's baby mama. His name was Fuka. He lived about Kitty corner behind the house of the party. He said there was this guy Toby Read who he knew, came to his house with a long gun looking for one of the guys at the party. Fuca wouldn't let him in his house, and Toby Red left. So we have two identifications. One who says Toby Red has a long gun right after the party comes to Fuchal's house a block and a half away.

They ignored two very credible witnesses, and not only Daryll not fit the description, not even by a stretch, right, I mean, nobody's going to mistake him for a light skin guy with reddish hair. That's ridiculous. If you remember, Toby Red had left the party after the fight, saying

Joseph Alex was the officer in charge of the case. He testified that he had found a bullet in my home, but he himself signed the return wants for my home saying nothing taking dry hole results negatives. He didn't get anything from my home. None of that stuff came out at trial.

They claimed they found the bullet in the wall, right, yes, right, like you were shooting guns in your own house.

Yes, next door was what guys who used as a shooting gud and so guys in the hood would come in fire weapons in the next door apartment, and so this is where they found this bullet.

But it gets deeper.

The bullet that.

They found in the wall that they claimed matched. The bullet that was from the deceased body had four lands and grooves. The bullet that they got from the deceased body had twelve lands and groups, so it was impossible for them to match, and even the first year of cadets should have known this.

Fortunately, Darryl obtained an examination by a guy named Dave Baalas who was retired in Michigan State Police firearms expert. He is the one who busted the DPD crime lab. The crime lab was shut down in two thousand and eight at the order basically of Kim Worthy who was the prosecutor at the time, Wayne Kunty prosecutor, because a defense lawyer had Ballish look at some identification issue and

So in the aftermath of the demise of the Detroit PD crime lab, Daryl got this report, shredding his ballistics evidence and tried to use the new evidence both in the newly formed Wayne County Conviction Integrity Unit as well as in court. First came an evidentary hearing in twenty seventeen.

At this hearing, it's in front of a notorious judge. As soon as you see that the judge's name, you're not going to get relief. They came to this hearing and the expert was out of town, and as he's supposed to get up on the TV, there was a glitch.

The zoom says, it don't work.

And because of that glitch, they postponed the hearing and they adjourned it, and in that gap of time, the newly formed Conviction Integrity Unit says, we'll take a look at the case.

Wow, even an atheists like me can see that's a miracle.

You would never be out. I wouldn't even know you. But this happened a glitch, And the CiU said, we're not interested in just finality. We're interested in truth and making sure that if you are innocent and you can prove it, then we will help.

And it'shed by a wonderful person, Valerie Newman. She's the director of the k Wayne Kiny Conviction Integrity Union and kim Worthy who was Wayne Kinky prosecutor, and so they got to look at any case and that's how this whole thing began to unravel, and I ultimately got out of prison.

Because in another jurisdiction, without a Kim Worthy, without a Valerie Newman, without a conviction and Integrity unit, and most places don't have them, you'd probably still be in prison and he would have died there, right, Yes, So these people deserve their flower.

They're the ones who took the information that Daryl was lucky enough to get of this police firearms expert. In combination with everything else, Daryl get exonerated. And then we were able to discover in the civil lawsuit of the Brady violations that the lead detective had that kind of broke the case opening from a civil standpoint.

So now finally the tide has turned. Tell us about that I.

Had an attorney from the State of Public Finis office named Michael Waldo. And so now I've been denied so many times, and the course I'm expecting and denial, so office comes down in my room. So Daryl, you have a phone call. The lawyer wants to talk to you. I get on the phone. The first words out of his mouth was, Daryl, they granted they vacated your conviction. Imagine walking around every day with a life sentence for

So he kept talking.

I didn't hear anything else, and it was like I was just floating on air. Officer comes back down to the room, sitting cigars. You're no longer under the Mission Department of Correction jurisdiction. You got to be gone by twelve o'clock.

What time was it that he said that? About eleven? And I told we can go now, you know, we can go now.

And I had all this stuff he wanted me to pack up, you know, because I had foot lockers and at this time cassette players and you know something that young people don't even know what it is now when you put these little tapes in. And I had to pack up all my books, all my paper, all the stuff that I had accumulated for thirty four years. So I pushed all that stuff out into the middle of the hallway and say, hey, anybody wants some free stuff. Them guys came and grabbed it. He said, mister Cigares,

Something went to the court.

It was August tenth, twenty eighteen, and the judge said, mister Siggers, the convictions bac headd case dismissed.

Free to go.

My son was there, my daughter was there, Wolf was there, Another lawyer was there, my sister was there. Just the most beautiful experience of my life, just to be able to breathe some fresh air and not be locked in a cage being told what to do.

You know, we had a funny story a couple of days after he got out, and this puts in perspective of us who live on the outside and are wrapped up in our own worlds and our own things that we consider important. A couple of days after he got out, we went to a mall. I wanted to get him some clothes. Mid afternoon, we go to a little restaurant and he has a salad and then Darryl tells, me, oh my god, this tomato is so good. I haven't

Oh well, put the tomato is a powerful symbol in this case, you know, And we've had different people talk about that. For Jason Strong, it was an orange, you know.

I mean, even now, most of my dreams is still about prison because you go through that for so many years. And I've been in prison where I dreamed many times that I was free, only to wake up I'm still in prison, And so again, even now sometimes I had to say to myself, is this real?

Are you really out?

And my dreaming it's just the most wonderful feeling in the world to be free after all of that stuff.

Amidst this incredibly joyous moment. As if the Cigarets family hadn't experience enough already, tragedy struck once again.

My daughter passed and nothing in life could have prepared me for that, because I had fought so many years to get out just to be with her and my grandchildren, and then for her to pass. I didn't get a chance to really spend no time with her. So I've lost all my family while I was in prison. I lost my mother, my father, my oldest brother, youngest sister, visually all my family. And so to lose her after getting out was a punch in the gut.

But you go on, what else can you do?

Well?

Rest in peace.

But you have a bunch of grandchildren now, right, yes, eight, So you get to be a great grandfather, not a great grandfather, but a great grandfather. Yeah, and that's beautiful.

And so now I'm living life on all terms and I'm having a book.

Now we get to come to my favorite part of the show, and this part of the show is called closing arguments. This is a part of the show where first of all, I thank both of you guys, and then what I'm going to do is turn my microphone off and just kick back in my chair and listen to anything else that you think we may have left out, that needs to be said, or that you want to say, and that literally could be anything. That floor is yours. So we always save our most honored guests for last.

I think the biggest lesson that can be learned in this case is that, fortunately, since the advent of the smartphone and videos on phones, we don't put the police on such a highest pedestal anymore. We need to look at them with the human frailties that everybody else has, and they are in such a position of power. With power comes at great responsibility, and when you abuse use that power, you have to be held accountable, just like

But that's what they they have.

The system is not designed to look once you've been convicted at whether you were guilty or innocence. And that's why it's so important that these innocence projects exist, that these conviction integrity units exist to get it right, because it's just too important. Freedom is on the line, the Constitution is on the line, and that's why it starts with the integrity of the police. And if we don't do a better job of policing the police, it doesn't get better.

One of the things that I've learned, and it's a real sad commentary, is the law really isn't blind. Them skills are justice. It really isn't blind. There's so much discrimination, racism, classism, and our judicial system.

And I've lived with.

Guys who I know are innocent, but they didn't have the mental acuity to learn the law. And the law is a very complex language or science in and of it self, just like you go to a doctor and if you look at all these long terms that they use and the medications or whatever. It's the same with law, and some guys just give up. It's just too hard. And so for me it was just a matter of staying with it, learning it, seeing successes.

And I didn't try to learn all the law. I only wanted to learn what was pertaining to me.

But the saddest commentary is you could look at the judge, see who appointed them, and know whether your case is going to be granted or do not. If you get a Trump appointee, you know your chances are very, very slim. If you get somebody who's appointed by Obama, you got a better shot because they're going to be more fair.

And that's very sad because when you.

Submit a brief or emotion, it's supposed to be decided based on the facts in that motion, not on all these procedures or not how whether you're a conservative or liberal, or whether you're a Republican or it shouldn't be like that. Well, great lawyer, I've learned so much from him. We filed our lawsuit, solid issues, go to the United States Court of Appeals. We get two Trump appointees and a Bush appointee, and they butcher to appeal, they reduce it to not.

Want of the claims.

They bent over backwards to violate their own law just to deny me. That's one of the things that surprises me more than anything else. That's why I have no faith in the law. I don't believe it. I think it's all bs because the real law are the judges. They just use the law as a tool to settle your lawsuit. But whatever it is, anyway they choose.

Thank you for listening to Ron 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 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