On August twenty fourth, nineteen ninety four, sixteen year old New Orleans native Eric Brown spent the night at his friend Carmelo's apartment along with some mutual friends. Early the next morning, Eric drove home in Carmelo's car, which wouldn't have seemed out of the ordinary until one of their mutual friends reported that Carmelo had fatally shot and that his safe had been stolen. In addition, she told police that Eric was still there when she left for work,
implying that he and he alone had the opportunity. Then the missing safe was discovered near the home of two other mutual friends, who also implicated Eric, sending him away for the rest of his life. But this is wrongful conviction.
Wrongful conviction has always given voice to innocent people in prison, and now we're expanding that voice to you. Call us at eight three three two oh seven four six sixty six and tell us how these stories make you feel and what you've done to help the cause, even if it's something as simple as telling a friend or sharing on social media, and you might just hear yourself in a future episode. Call Us eight three three two oh seven four.
Six sixty six. Welcome back to wrongful conviction for yet another case out of Louisiana, this time involving a child tried as an adult, convicted by a none unanimous jury verdict in a state that wasn't and isn't to this day, trying to hide the direct connection and the transition from plantation to penitentiary. And the man who's so somehow survived this harrowing ordeal is joining us today, Eric Brown, Thank you for being here and sharing your story with me today.
Thank you them.
Would you say all that's accurate?
Absolutely? Prison is a big business, especially in Louisiana. As one of the sheriffs said, they called prisons their honey holes. When Louisiana told these full profit prison facilities that if they build their prison in Louisiana, they would give them tax breaks, etc. And they will guarantee that they would keep their bids eighty five to ninety percent field to capacity. How do you make a guarantee like that if you're not infringed upon people's rights.
Those non unanimous jury verdicts have wrecked havoc in Louisiana since the era of reconstruction all the way until twenty eighteen or even later.
I believe that now unanimous Jewry vertical law was only enacted in the eighteen hundreds explicitly assided to perpetuate Slater. Louisiana and Oregan was the only two states out there union that allowed this.
And we're glad to finally have that law off the books. I mean, all a prosecutor would need to do was eliminate enough black jurors to make a conviction and near certainty, you know, with what the fact it's still an all white jury, and that hadn't changed much even as late as nineteen ninety four, when Eric was just a sixteen year old kid.
Well, I'm a native of New Orleans. We stayed in various different parts of New Orleans, across the river, Kenner, Jefferson Parish, et cetera, et cetera. My upbringing was pretty moderate. I had a father in my life taught me the essence and the definition of a man. Taught me about having principles and morals and honor, dignity, integrity, keeping your word. I had a great mother, she's still with us today.
They did their best to raise me right. However, as kids become mischievous, sometimes I had an incident when I was thirteen years old. Three years prior to this crime, there was a guy that was shooting dice and I want his jet come to find out. He went home and told his daddy, who was a police officer, that I robbed him for his jacket, and they arrested me for armed robbery. So they made a big scene, came
arrested me in front the whole school and everything. And my dad had just bought me one of those staughter jacks, so I had enough brand new and so it was no need for me to rob. They searched my home, didn't find any gun, didn't find any weapons. I got adjudicated for armed robbery. They gave me six years probation. So when I come home, you know our officers are they they have this pride about themselves. Whether he believed the son or whether he knew the truth, I was
public in him. A number one my brothers, they had run INDs with officers as well, went to prison. So I guess it was like he's going to follow in their footstep. He's going to be the same way, et cetera, et cetera. One of those officers that arrested me in that case was one of the lead investigators in this case.
In addition, at the time of the crime, Eric had begun selling weed for a guy named Carmelo Salmonin, who it turned out was the grandson of a well connected organized crime boss named Carlos Marcello, and Carmelo, the grandson, became the victim in this case.
He was a good few years older than me, pretty much meant to a mutual friend. He was looking for a way to supply we the things of the nature into the neighborhood, and so a lot of people knew me and respected me in the neighborhood, so he recruited me. That's why I said, kids could be mischievous sometimes, but that don't lead to the capital punishment, you know what I mean.
So Carmelo and Eric sold weed together along with a young lady named Valencia Peabody and two brothers, Charles Pitts who was also sixteen years old and William Griffin who was a little over eighteen, and their group were all at Carmelo's house on the faithful night of August twenty fourth, nineteen ninety four.
It's something that we've done many times with smoke weed, get high and pass out. And then in that morning I get up and lead. It was a normal thing. And when I do lead, I take the vehicle, I go drop off things of that nature. And so it was real early when I left. Hours later, wake up, my sister's coming and talking about hey man, the police looking for you to talk about Carmelo's dead, this, and then like what.
At this point, on August twenty fifth, police had already spoken to a neighbor named Ruth McKennis, who told them that she hadn't seen or heard anything, as well as Valencia Peabody, who had alleged that Eric and the car were still at Carmelo's when she left for work, but when she returned on her lunch break, she allegedly discovered Carmelo's body, saw that Carmelo's car and the safe were gone, and called the police.
She just started saying my name automatically. Every did everything like what Me and Camello. We never had augument, We didn't have a disagreement, We didn't have a falling out of anything, she said. She came home from work, she said she noticed the top lock of the bottom lock was unlocked up like that. Then she said she noticed something about the sliding glass door was opened or whatever. So she said, she's calling his name, she don't hear anything.
She goes up the stairs, gets in the bed with him, and then that's when she notices blood coming out of his head, his ears and stuff like that. Right, However, when you look at the photographs that the police took of the crime scene, you're gonna see blood splat on the headboard, you gonna see blood all over the pillow. How does she get in the bed when photographs of the crime scene gruesomely shoes what's going on? We're standing at that door.
Valencia, Peabody's supervisor at work, also said that he hadn't seen her that morning, but the police were unaware of that detail or any of the other holes in Valencia's story when they went and arrested Eric and began looking for the murder weapon and Carmelo's missing safe.
Because of this guy's connections, who is grandfather or whatever the bloodline was with them, law enforcement shook down that whole area. While I'm in jail, people telling me, man, they're all in the sewers, drained dumpsters and stuff like that looking for the safe and things that you mentioned right now. There's two other guys. They're two brothers. One was a juvenile Charles Pitts and the other one was an adult William Griffin. So they found his safe in
a dumbster in front one of those guys house. There are two brothers. Guy said he got the safe from me.
At some point, for some unknown reason, the police reinterviewed the neighbor, Ruth McKennis.
Ruth McKinney's has the IQ of sixty, equivalent to a six year old child, so on the scene, she said she didn't see anything, didn't hear anything. Two weeks later, after talking with Valencia Peabody, all of a sudden, she mysteriously remembers me coming out of the apartment. As later they don't know me from Adam and Eve. I don't know her. All of a sudden, now she knows me. But the whole collusion was those two guys in Valencia Peabody.
And we're not sure if the police recognized Valencia's potential involvement or how convenient it was that Ruth McKennis had a sudden realization. But something certainly seems off with how they so readily accepted pitt and Griffin's explanation for the safe.
The William Griffin guy. He said in the statement, bro, I'm just saying what y'all want me to say to get out of here. So then they said, well, look we need you to take the sting, Like what you mean already said what you wanted me to say? You saying, did Eric did? He say?
I don't know, never mind how the sausage was made. They had four people implicating Eric, who awaited trial for nearly two long years in jail, and.
I couldn't afford the attorney. I had to go with the state attorney, which is just a prosecutor and defense attorney clothing. He kept trying to get me to take thirty years forty years, and I'm like, I'm not taking her thirty years or now forty year for something I didn't do.
Meanwhile, as Eric said, his older brother was already in prison. He had been convicted of armed robbery, a crime he actually did commit, and he reached out with some advice.
It was a blessing and occurse to actually have a brother that was inside the institution. He already knew what the fight was going to be for me, so he was the right le in the jail, say error, go to the law library, read this case, Go read this case, go read that. Go shepherdize this sort to teach me about what shepherdized me with different legal turnsment. I've been studying law even before my conviction, because the first motion
that I filed my motion for a bond reduction. When they first arrested me, they had me on the first degree murder, so you don't have a bond, but we don't have no murder weapon like witnesses. We don't have to nate, no powder, burn, no fingerprints. So there was like, well, we got to reduce the charge to second degree murder. Then now they had to give me a bond. So the DA said, okay, a million for the murder and
five hundred thouars for the own rap. So he tried to set a bond at one point five million dollars. So what the judge did was he said, well, I'm not even going to hit his motion and I'm not even going to set the bond because mister Brown has an attorney and his attorney was supposed to file this. So I'm like, obviously, why havn't my attorney filed this yet?
For me. It appears he was just too busy communicating plea deals for thirty to forty years rather than building a defense like investigating Valencia Peabody.
I had my attorney so peanup her record, and they said that her supervisor never even seen it at work all that day. So requested to have the supervisor come take the stand. They had the manager come, like what you're sitting in The manager is the supervisor that's in this report, and the manager wasn't able to provide us with any information.
Peabody's alibi appears just as shady as Ruth mckinnis's memory of who she said she saw that morning.
Now, at the Motion for Discovery, they tell her do not come in this courtroom until we call you. So I'm sitting in an orange jumpsuit with all the other prisoners. She came into that courtroom three times when they looked in the box. So finally when they called for it to stand, my atturny asked her, do you see the person that you claim that you've seen coming out of the house. So she's looking around and still couldn't identify. She's, oh, yeah,
that's him right there. I see him. My Atturny asks, well, is this the first time you seen him since that? She said yeah, She said, now you sure that's what you want? To continue with that statement, didn't we tell you not to come in here? And didn't you come in three times prior to you get on his stand?
It seems like she was trying to figure out who to identify, since she didn't appear to be too familiar with what Eric actually looked like. Nevertheless, Eric Brown was taking a trial for second degree murder in April of nineteen ninety six.
Once they syduced to Charles the second degree murdered, it was easier for the prosecutor to convict me because now he don't have to present those of it. He could just present a theory and whoever does the best magic trick in court is going to win. And you see who I got as attorney repositional, he's a bad magician. He's not going to perform well.
But when the autopsy evidence was presented that Carmelo had in fact been shot in the back of the head at very close range, from two to five inches away, Eric's attorney did point out that Carmelo was laying on his side facing the wall, near the opposite side of a king sized mattress from where the shooter must have
been standing. While Eric, who stood five foot one one at the time, okay, he did not have the reach to get within too the five inches of Carmelo's head without leaning onto the mattress, potentially alerting Carmelo.
So he was kind of making a valid point on that. But when he was saying that, the DA literally jumped on top of the desk in front of me. Put your finger in my head, mister Brown, put your finger to my head, like trying to get me to show that, oh, I could reach this fall. But yet he wasn't in the actual range and the bed is a king sized bed.
It wasn't making sense. And that was another thing. There was no powder burns on me on my clothing, the same clothing that Blinsa said she seen me in that day, with the same clothes that they arrested me in.
Which brings us to our star witness, Valencia Peabody and another performance from the DA.
He showed her photograph of father way then nearer and then closer, and every time he did this, he said, you identify this picture here, and she was like, yeah, that's him. I almost I don't see them more so that was just cute. Then he showed another one, and then he showed another. She literally jumped up out the chair, not the chair, over in front the whole entire court room and ran out the courtroom hollering a scream and how to get out of here? My trial was who put on the best performance?
And it didn't stop with to Lindsaya Peabody. They brought in an assault rifle that had been pulled from a lake that didn't appear to have any relevance or connection to this case at all.
This particular assault rifle, it was so rusty they couldn't check the serial numbers and anything to see that. It was just even actually camellous because he owned all kind of guns. So when they found this particular weapon in the water to used a story saad, a mother and a child was walking to the child almost stepped on the gun. But they already concluded that it's not the word of weapons. So it's like, what is this weapon even being presented for? But just to inflame the jury.
Yet not all the theatrics played out so well. Since William griff had appeared to have given his statement under duress. The only one they could put on the stand was the juvenile Charles Pitts.
Charles Pittsy, I told the people that he got the safe from me in nineteen ninety five. So that was impossible because I had been in court for Rader since nineteen ninety four. And so then the DA realized, like, hold up, man, that's not looking good for his case. So the DA he got up and scared him and it was not at Ford did you say nine at fod Oh, I got it in ninety four. So he prompt him into saying he's seen the safe over in my police over the midy Times.
But the safe was stolen on the exact same day that Eric was arrested.
The same day, just a few hours later. Not only that, he said that I gave it to him so he could collect baseball cars. But my attorney didn't properly a fully cross examiner.
Now, perhaps since Pitts and the DA had embarrassed themselves so effectively and thoroughly with this exchange, he felt like he didn't even have to, even though he probably should have pointed out the glaring inconsistency to the jury, let alone that Pitts's explanation didn't effectively deflect playing away from him and his brother, and then Eric's attorney once again failed to point out how Ruth mckinnis had changed her story from her original statement to say that she had
seen you leaving the house. But what sticks out even more than the inconsistency's improvable falsehoods was that fabricated as it was, no one went so far as to definitively say that you were the assailant.
Nobody that took the stand really gave any type of factual evidence to put me there at the time of the murder or to say that they seen me do the murder. And the DA told the jury, we don't
have no other physical evidence against mister Brown. But y'all got to use common sense, Like I wish I could add some more stuff and highten it up and make it seem more But the reality of it is to show you how the lack of evidence they have, man, they could still pull you away for the rest of your life or something that they knew you didn't do. If I would have been in any other state in America,
I never would have been convicted. It was two jurors that found me not guilty and no word of weapon, no eyewitnesses, no DNA, no fingerprints, and two juris found me not guilty to get out still sentence to life for our parole plus thirty years at sixteen years old.
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Just getting on that bus, shackled up on that bus, it had to have those hot jumpsuits on in the middle of summer like that. It was so hot, man, it was packed in like sardines on their bus because everybody that shallowed up is money for them. They had us working in the field in over one hundred plus degree heat, whether the horses was falling out or the horses are shaking. Gun gard because you had gun guards where they had to sit on the horse back with
guns and they called it the gun line. If you go outside their gun line, they'll shoot you. And now the only you think of a complete year prior to me going to Angola, they shot and killed my brother in front of Angola, shot him in the bat. We'll never really know the full truth of what happened. They say he tried to escape. So there was a saying throughout the institution, if you're black, you don't come back. So if a white guy escapes, they bring him back.
If a black guy escapes, they kill him. Immediately when I got there, people started like hearing my name. It was like, hold up, man, that was your brothers that they killed. Man, And so a lot of people was messed up about that. That was inside, even some of the guards. You gotta remember a golda with me. When I got there. It was considered by National headline news
the blood is prison in America at that time. So you couldn't just go there and just be happy, go lucky, he or you couldn't just go there and just be a key. I had to grow up fat. So I had to conduct myself in a certain manner to earn
my respect in that place. And so by doing that, some people they observed me, and they've seen that, and they gravitated toward like, man, if I can help you, look man, he bro no, this is information or this is how you get to the law libarial And so from day one, I just started reading just reading law. Just reading it might sound corny in it, but studying law and educate myself is what kept me sane throughout them whole nine and twenty five days.
After relying on state appoint to the Pellet Council, his initial appeals were denied, and now he began to apply what he'd been learning in the law library, leading to the discovery of a great deal of the state's witnesses provably inconsistent statements.
I found out that the prosecutor allowed witnesses to take the stand and say something other than what they said in their original statements. And if I would have had that information, I would have been able to properly cross examine them and show the jury that they lied. What they're saying shouldn't be taken at. Some of it I tried to present on my own because I had no help, no attorneys, so I had to present it on my own, and they refused me a right to a hearing.
Eric was relentless in his pursuit of freedom, but he was thwarted by procedural issues and time bars, which kept the full weight of his innocence claim from ever being heard.
Were talking twenty five years of filing and everything wasn't discovered at one time because I didn't have money for investigators all the time. So I used to do some time. I used to do free work for attorneys and they'll lend me some help with an investigator, things that needure to give me able to look. I'll get my investigator or help you out for a few hours or something like that, right for free, and I'll prepare a brief or do some research for one of the attorneys and
things that I nature. So one hand washed the other. So they'll help me out like that, And that's what really started getting me attention. That's what really started getting a lot of support when people saw how dedicated I was to my case. They saw how motivated and driven
I was to help other prisoners. Once I learned something about the law, even if this information can't help me per se, I wanted to at least try to help somebody else that I feel is wrongfully convicted, because you meet a lot of people, man, and I'm working in the law library at this time, and I'm seeing a lot of cases that you could clearly see that, man, this guy didn't do this.
Eric's involvement in the Law Library also helped him build community.
There was a few guys in there that was juveniles as well, so we decided to come together and start a club called the Youth Development Program to start helping the juveniles who were wrongfully incarcerated or if there was properly incarcerated still to try to help us educate ourselves and just become better people. From there, I got involved with the Life's Association. From there, I got involved with
the Angola Special Civics Project. From there, I got involved with toast Masters public Speaking that became the president of toast Masters, became the Secretary of Life this organization. I got involved with the CPR team teaching life saving skills to the prison population. So with doing that, they had other organizations. We used to have what you call functions.
A bank was where we were allowed to invite people from society to come in to these functions and share with information that we were trying to share with them.
It was Eric's community with other juveniles, his knowledge of the law and their cases, as well as this connection to like minded folks on the outside that eventually brought him into contact with none other than Brian Stevenson and if you're not aware. Brian and other attorneys across the country sought out cases in which children have been tried
and sentenced as adults. We brought that all the way to the US Supreme Court with the aim of proving that the sentences constituted a violation of our Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. The first of what ended up being landmarks Godis decisions was Roper versus Simmons in two thousand and five, in which the death penalty for juveniles was found to be unconstitutional. But the quest
to attack juvenile over sentencing didn't stop there. They just had to find the right cases first.
So Brian Stevens said, I want to talk to you guys about the strategy that I have with this and what we need to do. So I figured out how to get him inside the institution. I figured out to get everybody that was under the age of eighteen, and there was hundreds of us inside the institution. I got all them into the visitor shared area, which we call the A building and the GOOLDA. I got hundreds of those guys in there. I got all their names. When they able to casser rate how ol they were what
they charges were. I got all of them in there so Brian Stevens could come and speak with us and disseminate his strategy to us. And he told us he have to separate it. If we try to present it as a whole, you're going to lose. So he figured out the way. He said he's going to push for peagibility for juveniles who didn't commit a homicide. For non homicide juveniles. It was the Gram case.
So he prevailed on Graham versus Florida in twenty ten, juveniles could not receive life without parole in non homicide cases. Then in twenty twelve, Supreme Court the United States ruled in Miller versus Alabama the same for homa site cases as well. Brian Stevenson and was able to chip away at a great deal of conviction, setting so many like Eric on a path to re sentencing from a living death sentence imposed on them when they were just children.
And it was all predicated on an argument that you've heard me repeatedly make on this show.
I think it was the Roper case. We were saying about the pre frontel cortex or the front A little bit of brain is not fully developed until the age of twenty five, and therefore a child is more prone to act out instead of thinking before they act. So with that said, when they said that they couldn't kill someone who's mentally disable because of that reason, then the same reason must apply that you can't give them a virtual death sentence by giving them life. For the oparole,
children will grow and develop and change. It won't be the same aschieve as child will meet you or not, not the same achieving child that we were coming up and growing up, because we've we've grown now. And so mister Brian Stevenson prevailed, and so I was just blessed and thankful to have that opportunity to get him inside the institution. And he told me this, he said, I've been to many institutions throughout this country. He said, you have this facility here, the best organized out of all
of them that I've been going. And I really appreciate your help. I said, man, it's an honor to be able to do that for somebody like that. And then he went on to win these cases for us, and that helped open the door to get me home today. So much love and respect for mister Brian Stevens, you finally got this opportunity man to have some type of relief from this life, since that's when they had this thing about parole as ability and things of that nature
day and people saw dollar signs. And now we're trying to say that the Miller verse Alabama's not retroactive. So we're about to get into another argument in a fight about something that we already wanted. So that go back up there and prove to them that Miller was ritually active and show you how shist didy are because Toka
was up there first. Toka was actually innocent. The state didn't want the US Supreme Court to be ruling on the case that put the rail road and took the life of a fifteen sixteen year old child and rail roaded into prison. That would looked bad on them.
Eric is referring to George Toka, whose case we've covered here and we're gonna link to it in the episode description check it out. But the US Supreme Court had actually chosen Eric's friends, George George Toka his case for Sergeierrari, but to keep this extremely sympathetic case out of the Supreme Court, the da Leon Conezzaro offered George a plea deal which amounted to being released that day, and George reluctantly accepted freedom over the justice he richly deserved.
So they took the Montgomery case, a guy who was convicted of killing a cop. So they wanted the worst case scenario to go up there and for the us of priso. So they were just doing that's so dirty, man.
Even with taking the Montgomery case to the Supreme Court, Skotis still ruled that. And I'm paraphrasing here, Yes, U assholes, it is retroactive. I guess you're just gonna have to re sentence and release a sizable chunk of your free labor. For so Louisiana was forced to make a path to freedom for Eric and so many others to be re sentenced and come home.
In another case, State versus Sugaski, it stated that the law in effick of the time of the crime and Louisiana always prevailed. That's been a president for one hundred years in Louisiana. However, when I was arrested, there was no such thing as preregibility on life sentences, So you
can't give me parole. Eligibility on a life since what you're supposed to do is amend your charge and it resentence you under the next lesson responsibility, which is in my case would have been manslaughter, which they knew that I was completed the maximum sentence on it, so I would have been released with no parole anything. That's not what they wanted. They wanted to have some type of rope around my neck. It was a strategy all alone.
Plus they get paid off parole fees, etc. Etc. So they compelled everybody to go up under this new law with the pegibility. So they make the laws and did he break their own laws at the same time.
Fuckery aside. Now, Eric finally faced the parole board as an innocent man who should have never been asked about guilt or innocence. Instead, they were supposed to focus on all of his many accomplishments on the inside, which was respected by all but one parole board member.
So he said, well, I want to know why he did it. So my lawyer objected, she got involved. So this is what he said. You're right, this is the law. He don't have to answer that on this board, he said. But if he don't, he might not like my route. So he threatened me a little bit, and me being who I am, It's like, man, I already knew I'm not about to admit to somebody didn't do so I just politely scooted my chair and I looked him in his eyes and I said, Sir, I didn't commit this crime.
And I told him just like that, I didn't do this crime. If you look at the evidence, it's going to show you that I didn't commit this crime. I said. However, that does not mean that I don't sympathize with the victim family, because members of my family too have been victimized by since the violence. My hog goes out to them, but no, I didn't care.
They loved one. Eric was finally released on August twenty six, twenty nineteen, exactly twenty five years from his arrest nine thousand, one hundred and twenty five days.
Once they granted me the parole, my family had been out here in Texas since Hurricane Katrina, and so they were like, hey, man, come stay out here, and I get to hug my eighty four year o mother without being in no change between those balls, and I get to take her out to dinner and we get our favorite meals, our New Orleans style seafood, gumboll pool boys and shrimp stuff like that, man, And to see the smile on that lady face, to see her baby boy had made it home, alive and free. That's the best
thing I could ask for. My father was there for me until he passed away, but he never would come visit me because he said he never want to see this child locked up like a animal. But he excepted my phone calls and put money on my books, you know, helped me out any way that I can. But I was a child when I went in that place, and so for him not to see the man that I've become the day because of his teachings and his principles and morals, that's kind of like a hurt and feeling.
But I do appreciate the fact that I do have a mother that's still alive and she sees what I'm doing today, you know, because I have so many friends their mothers passed away that they they're not able to do what I'm able to do today. And so man, I just cherish every moment of it, and they live vicariously through me by seeing me do that.
A lot of the guys that Eric is talking about are men who we profiled here. Vincent Simmons, Sullivan, Walter, George Toka, and many of these guys we saw at the twenty twenty three Innostance Network conference in Arizona, where we met Eric in person for the very first time.
Last time I seeing those guys. We all were incarcerated, trying to figure out how we was going to prove our innocence and get out of that place, right and then here it is, man. The Innocence Conference was held in Phoenix, and Jason we were like, hey, Man, come on out, I said, man, And that was my first time reuniting with those guys in the outside world. Man. That was a self speechless.
But release on parole is not going to be the end of Eric story.
As of right now, I have an attorney. You're still pushing about the ten to two issue with the fifteen hundred of us that was wrongfully concerated with the nine aims Uri verdicts. We're still fighting for the retroactivity of debt. So now we're trying to use that evidence that I discovered that was Brady material about the prosecutor allowed witnesses to say something other than what they said in their original statements. And it's compounded with the fact that two
Jewis found me not guilty. And so that's what we're pushing for right now, hoping that soon down the line that we'll get some justice, which you'll afford me an opportunity to go back to try and fully get exonerated.
Amen to that. And in the meantime, I understand you've got a bunch of creative projects in the works.
Well, right now, I'm trying to get this documentary off the ground, man, twenty five days. I've been looking for more support on that for some editors. I wrote a book called Crimes for Dummies, The Embarrassing Side of Crime and Punishment. That book is completed. I also have a curriculum called Crimes for Dummies, The Embarrassing Side of Crime and Punishment for young Dummies all the way up to old Foods to learn from this book. And then I have my memoirs and my autobiography that I'm about to
get done. So if anybody wants to help me with that, man, I'm open to that too.
Man.
I appreciate any support I can get with that.
Yeah, And we're going to link to Eric's Instagram in the episode of description as well, so people can reach out to him or just follow for updates on the many, many different irons he's got in the fire. And with that we go to closing arguments, where I'm just going to turn my microphone off and kick back in my chair with my headphones on and listen there's anything else you want to share it with me and our wonderful audience.
The last thing I really want to say is that I understand the need and the purpose for prisons and things of the nature that for law and order. I have an aid for you, mother. I wouldnt want nobody to buy lead up, so I understand that completely. But wrong for convictions is a is a disease. It's only because of people like you, Jason, the Innoc's project that is starting to get more and more exposure that it really deserves to let people know that this could happen
to you as well. Don't think that or it never happened to you. No, it can't happen to you, white or black. And in conclusion, I just want to say this, the experience of imprisonment would undo a lifetime of learning. Human values can be suspended human concepts will be challenged in the most ugliest of basic pathological side of human nature can surface. So I just want to say to the guys, my comrades who've been exonerated, man, don't allow what happened to us in our past to bring to
the worst out of us. User to bring the best out of us and show society that he Man. We was in that place, but we wasn't of that place. We could come out here and we could function that we could be assets in our liability to society.
Thank you for 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. 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 Cleiburn. 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 Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at It's Jason Flamm. Wrongful Conviction is the production of Lava for Good podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one