On October first, nineteen eighty four, a forty nine year old mother named Catherine Fuller took a shortcut through an alleyway in a busy area of Washington, d C. Known as eighth and h. She was beaten and violated in a particularly brutal fashion, and she succumbed to her injuries. Even though only two men were seen fleeing when police arrived, it was believed that there just had to be more
assailants involved. An alleged anonymous tip confirmed that fear and led to seventeen arrests and eight convictions, none of whom were the two who had fled the scene. This is wrongful conviction. Wrongful conviction has always given voice to innocent people in prison, and now we're expanding that voice to you.
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oh seven four six sixty six. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction, where we've got a historical case from a historical place Washington, DC, where, even though two assailants were witnessed fleeing the scene of a sexually violent robbery and murder, somehow a narrative about a frenzied gang assault took hold and our guest, Chris Turner, was roped into this precursor to the Central Park five, now known as the Exonerated five. Only in this case, it wasn't five.
There was seventeen people.
The first time ever in the history of America that many people were charge for the murder one person without it being a conspiracy or anything.
So seventeen were charged an eight conviction stuck. And we're just super relieved and glad that you survived and are here joining us today.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah, you're very welcome and returning to the show from the mid Atlantic Innocence Project is one of my personal heroes. Sean Armbrus, John, welcome back.
Any chance to talk about this case, I am happy to take.
So this story when it happened was huge news. The graphic gang assault narrative stuck in people's minds, and the setting Chris's hometown also has the distinction of being the nation's Capital.
I literally grew up on Capitol hill Man when Union Station, all those fountains that you see down Pennsylvania Avenue, Constitution Avenue, I swim in all in my I played hide and go see in the bushes at the Supreme Court. We used to ride our bikes and around the Capitol, around the stairs, and I was your average.
Kid growing up.
The neighborhood was like any average middle class neighborhood. The community supported each other. My grandmother was one of the highest ranking members in Peace Corps. She used to take us all over the place my siblings. I had two brothers and a sister, and my parents were separated, but my grandmother was the foundation in the family.
She took us everywhere.
So we would hang out at the Pentagon. From being around that atmosphere, my dream was to go in the Air Force. I graduated when I was seventeen years old. Never been arrested. Used to hang out with a bunch of guys and we'd go to the go gos. We go to different shows, we go to club.
You know.
We were trying to get a band, started a go go band.
Go go music for those who don't remember, it was a subgenre of funk born out of the DC area, And I'm just going to do you a favor and link one of the originating groups in the episode description to give you a feel a flavor for the soundtrack for this group of friends, among whom were the children of the victim in this case, Catherine Fuller.
Yes absolutely new Well neewer son David her Son. Willim was younger than us, but they both looked up to me as a big brother. So we had some instruments and then we thought we could make some go go music. I used to be the so called manager of the band because I was the one who was putting it together, the drama, the guitars, the keyboards. But we only had really two guys in the band that was any good, and that was James Gomellia and Gregory Williams, who would end up charged with the case.
And we're going to get to the laundry list of people from the neighborhood who were dragged into this, including Chris and his alibi witness, Calvin Smith. But first let's go to the afternoon of October first, nineteen eighty four.
October first, eighteen four, kind of a drizzly day in DC. But it's a busy day at eighth and H Streets Northeast. That area is a very populated section of the city. A whole bunch of bus lines come together. It's check day, so you have people out shopping, doing whatever. And I actually like to tell the story the way it actually happened, as opposed to the way the government has it happened.
So on that day, there was a street vendor who was at the corner of eighth and H Streets and his job was kind of watching the area, making sure nobody touched the merchandise, looking for customers. So he's watching the corner, he's watching the alley, and he sees two guys kind of walking up and down H Street Northeast looking like their case in the joint. But that's about it.
At around six or six thirty, he goes into the alley to take a leak, and he goes kind of over to where this garage is at the t point of the alley, and he sees blood and he finds the body of Catherine Fuller, who is a very tiny I think like four foot nine ninety eight pounds mother in the neighborhood, and she's been badly beaten. She's clearly dead. He calls the police. Him and a couple of his friends are kind of like monitoring the alley waiting for
the police. As the police show up, the two guys who had been kind of walking up and down each street the street vender sees them agin as police were arriving, those two guys bolt. One of them has something puffy in his jacket.
They're literally at the garage what a victim is, and they're tucking someone in the jacket and I think the police here. The guys say don't run, and then both of them take off running, So.
The police start processing the scene. Missus Fuller's body is in a very small, cluttered garage. She's been badly beaten anally sodomized, so she's got pretty significant brutal injuries. And if you look at the crime scene, evidence looks like it's happened in this garage. There are a group of witnesses who come forward who say they'd been walking through the alley at around five thirty that evening and the garage doors were closed and they heard some low like
moans or groans coming through the garage. If you look in that garage, there's all sorts of stuff all over the place, and you don't see that stuff as disturbed that there was room for ten, fifteen, twenty people to
be committing this crime. So, if you are someone who's looking at this case like first blush, what you probably think is those two guys who were walking up and down, who were running from the garage, seem important, and this might have been happening at around and so you might ask, how do you go from that to a mob of crazed young people beating Missus Fuller to death in an alley in a total frenzy and sodomizing her with an object, right, Because that's not what that crime looks like.
Well, as we mentioned, many of the kids who eventually were convicted were friends with Missus Fuller's sons, never been in trouble, and would not likely be motivated to do something like this for any reason at all, let alone the jewelry and fifty dollars that were stolen. But according to the investigators McGuinness and Sanchez Torano, they received an anonymous tip and I'm not buying it. It's like a go to fallback, you know, something about that sounds fishy to.
Me, I'm glad you say that because I'd never brought the theory of anonymous call, because they just created a theory and say, way, it was an anonymous tip that it was these even age guys talking about snatches on one in alley.
They don't tend to be huge organized gangs in DC the way there are in like Chicago ORLA. DC has cruise. There was not an eighth and H Crew, though another DC thing is go go clubs, go go's like the DC homegrown music, and the eighth and H Crew was kind of like a go go thing. Someone would say, is the eighth and H Crew in the house, and people from eighth and H would cheer. So there's not
really an eighth and H Crew. But in nineteen eighty four you're kind of at the early talk about wilding and youths and.
Gangs, and this alleged tip led them to a guy named Clifton Yardborough as well as his brother Ernie, and to their alleged involvement in this fabricated gang.
Cliff Yardborough is sixteen at the time, super talented basketball player but very low IQ. So they pick up Cliff, separate him from his older brother and tell Cliff that they know he was at this scene, that if he denies it, he's lying, and if he keeps denying it, he's going to end up getting charged with it.
That right there should tell everyone the story that you pick this guy, the youngest, weakest guy who didn't have the mental capacity, and that's where you win at you just drill them for nineteen hours, the problem of food, water anything.
Cliff gives police a statement telling them that a guy named Alfonso Harris, his nickname was Monk, a guy named Levi Rouse, Roland Franklin, and a couple of other guys robbed Missus Fuller, and on that basis they arrest Monk Harris. At that point though, all they have is cliff statement,
and so they keep investigating. Their next big break, to the extent that we can call it, that comes from a young woman who is sixteen, a heavy PCP user, also has an IQ of sixty three, someone who by the time of trial has changed the specifics of her story so many times that it's hard to keep track.
And that was Carrie Ellerby, whose initial statement was made while she was high on PCP. And for those of you who don't know PCP is a powerful drug, and she identified a guy named Calvin Austin.
The police are talking to her about some kind of unrelated fight at one of the go go clubs, and she kind of spontaneously tells them that she knows who killed Missus Fuller.
First, she says she was riding in a car coming from a go go somewhere in southeast and she over heard a Calvin Austin tell them mal killed the woman in an alley.
So police bring in Calvin Alston, very low IQ teenager interrogated by the same police. Officers who interrogated Cliff tell him that they know he was there. He's denying it. They tell him he faces life in prison if he doesn't talk to them. He can either have a piece of the pie or they can have the whole thing. And Austin eventually says he witnessed.
A group assault thirteen other people. Yeah, when you're hearing the three, you like y'all got this room, man, people would have random Missus Fuller's defense on a street.
This wouldn't have happened that way.
He says, it's on video, and he thought he was going to give the statement and go home.
Calvin Austin immediately recanted it, but it was too late. His statement named thirteen other people, including Chris Turner, his younger brother Charles, and a friend named Timothy Catlett.
Yeah, me and Katnet went to a late night movie and watched Beverly Hills Cop and came home and the next morning they kicking out doors. And the crazy thing about it is is someone that you know that you had to grieve about, You had to greeve what a friend about. That's the difference in the Central Park case, in the Norfolk case, and this is somebody that you actually know.
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The people that were charged on the case have never been together. No one has ever heard of an aph and H gang like. I know all the people that were charged, but some of the people on the case don't know each other. The only person I did not know in the case was Lisa Ruffin. Some of the guys are.
Meeting each other.
They like, Chrissy, who is this? I'm like, oh, that's such and such. That's Bobo or man?
Who is this?
I ain't never seen this dude for in our neighborhood and I'm like, no, he live in the neighborhood, just.
Live up top.
And there was a total of seventeen people charged with the case, so naturally people saw on TV that they are arresting people and they are up to seventeen. So you better come up and tell them something when they come knocking on your door or you will be number eighteen, nineteen, and twenty.
The other witnesses were mostly teenagers who the police interviewed multiple times, and they just keep bringing people in until they finally broke. There was one witness, Linda Jacobs, who was friend of Carrie Ellerby's.
Linda Jacobs gave a statement making her and Carrie ellerbe witnesses instead of just eavesdroppers to Calvin Austin's confession, and the police went back to Carrie ellerb.
Now the story changes and now she's a witness tutor murder at the scene in the alley, her and her best friend. Now, if you dare Calvin Austen, don't have to tell you about it. But that was her initial statement they used her against Calvin Austen and then got her to change all her whole testimony around to Kelvin Smith. Curry Elab was supposed to have had a baby by Kelvin Smith, which was ludicrous because Kelvin Smith he didn't need meet Curry Llerb till after missus Fuller's death.
Now, if you recall, Kelvin Smith was Chris's alibi witness. They were at Kelvin's during the crime. So this new statement from Ellerb somehow gave Llerb credibility making a statement that incriminated her alleged baby's father and discredited Chriss alibi, even though it was all a total departure from the statement Llerb had made about Calvin Austen. But nevertheless, seventeen people from the eighth and H area were now in jail awaiting trial.
Many of the defendants would blame in each other because they didn't know each other. Like, man, whatever y'all guys got me into, y'all need to get me the f off for this case. Man, y'all need to take your fucking weight if you did this. And everybody's agging back and forth, and so we got argaments and fight among ourselves about man. What you know about this man? You better tell the people whatever you know and get me off of this case. And everybody on the case is
just lost and dumbfounded, except for Harry Bennett. Harry Bennett is not from that neighborhood. He put itself on the case to take away a drug charge that he had, but he's not from that neighborhood. He's never mentioned in any of the.
False confessions, and he's referred to Calvin Austin's statement and a striking inconsistency.
Calvin Austin and Bennett said the similar story, but they switched up different people doing different things, and they don't implicate each other. Why because Harry Bennett don't know Calvin alst Kavin don't know Harry Bennett, so they never implicate each other.
Which sounds like a blazing red flag.
What the government says is essentially, well, these inconsistencies don't matter because they all basically say the same thing, so that there was a large grip that attacked Missus Fuller. And first of all, as details do matter when you're looking at those inconsistencies and trying to tell a story and figure out how the witnesses got.
There, and not only are they inconsistent with the each other, but with the objective facts of the crime.
When we asked a pathologist before the twenty twelve hearing to take a look at this and sort of see, like, are these injuries possible for one or two people to have inflicted? He said, yes, It's actually much more likely that this is one or two people than a large grip crime because of the way they're concentrated.
But Calvin Alsen and Harry Bennett said that all these guys was dead. Oh yeah, Chrissy he hit her, Yeah, Charles he kicked her. Snot Rag he hit her. Stephen Webb, yeah he kicked her. It's like it was a similar line, like guys had taken torry, Okay, now you go kick And the autos report didn't support this.
This pathologist looked at some of the witness statements and said, if this had happened the way this witness said, here are the injuries he would have expected. If it had happened the way this witness had said, here are the injuries he would have expected, and they're not there. The other piece of that is that the government has often said in this case that the injuries were so severe that they couldn't have been inflicted by one or two people.
The pathologist said, that's absolutely not the case. If what the witnesses are saying is true, it would have actually been a more brutal crime.
In addition, Calvin Austin fought to suppress his own false confession, a process he began upon leaving the interrogation room.
He immediately retracts the confession and is writing everybody under the sun telling them he falsely confessed. Was planning to go to trial up until very late in the game.
He was in the sale right next to me, across from Lamont Bobby, Calvin Smith, and Daryl Murchison. And once he lost that suppression motion for the video, they actually moved Calvin Alsten. We don't know why they move them. I don't want to say they moved him intentionally, but they put them with people who were sentenced already and he ended up right.
He was sixteen, He got raped in the DC jail and at that point he said, like, I've got to get out here, and so he agreed to testify for the government Jesus.
So they had Austin Bennett Yarborough, Ellerbye Jacobs, and a young man named Maurice Thomas, who claimed to be able to identify Chris Turner from a distance by the shape of his head. Yeah, and that is what passed Muster as the state's evidence that they planned to present at two separate trials, the first of which was for ten of the seventeen co defendants.
They told the public that they were more and they were gonna get more. The other seven were supposed to be indicted on full of two but the one guy, Darryl Merchison, was not indicted because he had a time cause showing that he was at work at the time. Lamart Bobbitt, his girlfriend had a detailed journal hour on the hour and her and.
Lamont was together.
Another one of the guys, we were not in town or was locked up somewhere else at the time, maybe Rowland, Franklin or something. And so they don't want none of that stuff to come out.
The alibi evidence would have impeached the credibility of all of the state's witnesses, so those whose alibis could be undermined went to trial, including Chris and Charles Turner, Kelvin Smith, Timothy Catlett, Levi Rouse, Stephen Webb, Russell Overton, Clifton, Yarborough, Alfonso Harris, and Lisa Ruffin.
One person had public defendant Alfonso Harris, because he was the first person arrested, so the public Defender's office couldn't represent no one else on the case because of conflict they're interests. So we all received quarter pointed attorneys. They never did no investigation work, They never did any research. This would have been came out, but they thought that
we all were gonna plead guilty. How could you not plead guilty to the worst case ever in the history of DC when they offer you plead deals to six years. They offered me a plea deal to two years at least a rough and one year, and offered everybody else a plead.
Deal to six years.
And I told him I'm not pleading juilty to somebody didn't do. And it should have woke the lawyers up if they were actually defense attorneys. Even when trial was going on, they offered us plead They kept on convincing us that we need to plead out to this and move on.
But they refused, and the prosecutor, Jerry Goren, took them to trial in late nineteen eighty five.
The evidence that it is presented at trial is the testimony of Calvin Austen and Harry Bennett that they, along with the defendants of some other individuals, were hanging out at a bus stop at the corner of eighth and H Streets when cliff Yarborough started singing a go go
song about getting some money. That someone saw Missus Fuller from across the street and said let's go get her, and that they accosted her, drag her into the alley, rob her her, beat her in a wild frenzy, and somehow they all come to agree eventually that the person who committed the analsodomy with an object was Leevi Ross, and that they then left. That's the overarching narrative. Bennett and Alston put themselves in the crime. Carrie Ellebie and
her friend Linda Jacobs. They tell very different stories about what they saw, but they put themselves there watching the crime. Another teenage witness, Maurice Thomas. Police were initially looking for a different Maurice who they heard knew something about the crime, but they found Maurice Thomas, and he ultimately told them that he had been walking by the alley, and he was able to sort of identify some of the people, including Chris Turner, by the shape of his head. The
witnesses weren't great. They weren't super credible, so the jury.
Must have picked up on some of the inconsistencies. But then, out of ten attorneys, only the public defender, Michelle Roberts raised the suspects who ran from the scene, and without Clifton Yarborough testifying to what had been coerced out of him, the case against her client, Alfonso Harris was basically non existent.
Calvin Austen didn't know Afonso Hers, Harry Bennett didn't know Afonso Hers really, and then the girls lay what from the neighborhood and didn't know Afonso Hers.
So Harris had a shot. Meanwhile, none of the attorneys even bothered questioning the state's theory of a group assault. Instead, there was a great deal of call it friendly fire.
They were just all fighting with each other. So it was this defendant was there, but my client wasn't, and so they adopted the government's narrative and just quiverled with the specifics. And again the witnesses weren't super credible. But the crime was awful and there wasn't any sort of real competing theory presented.
It was a mess.
I mean, we had the worst attorneys that you could possibly have if anyone had just went to the crime scene. We kept begging for attorneys just go down there and just look. Just take pictures. You'll see. This not possible to happen like this. This can't occur the way they're saying it.
So it appears that the only person who worked in the service of justice was the public defender. And meanwhile the jury was stuck with these inconsistent witnesses and a defense panel that resembled crabs in a barrel.
The initial convictions took a really long time. I think the jury was out for about a week.
One jury told me that they voted over seventy times before they reached the verdict. They found two not guilty right then and there, and then they convicted six.
The two who are acquitted are Alfonso Harris and then Felicia Ruffin, frankly, because I think there's like nothing against her. It's unclear how she ended up there, which.
Left two more for the jury, Russell Overton and Chris Turner.
I was already grieving because they found my brother and other men guilty of a crime. I knew that they had not committed, so I was already grieving. But it was just like you had found me guilty already before.
So over the course of.
The next two days, the juriors kept telling the judge, we can't reach a verdict, that they wanted to go home. They've been sequestered in a hotel, they haven't seen their family, they hadn't been able to take care of their homes. This trial been going on for two months. This impossible for a verdict to be reached, and my attorney moved for a mistrial, and Russell over theon attorney didn't want
a mistrial. The judge continued to send them back there to deliberate anyway, and basically told them what they know what their verdict should be. They had a duty to bring back a verdict and they found us guilty.
So Chris ultimately was convicted of murdering Missus Fuller. He was sentenced to twenty six years to life in prison. He was nineteen at the time, and that was actually the latest sentence received by any of the eight men who were convicted.
It was gut Rich, and it had broke my spirit because I thought that I let so many people down, and so.
It was a tough time for me.
I didn't want people who had invested so much in me to think that I threw that all the way and that I did the crime, and so it put me at the lowest point in my life.
They gave most of the US federal destination.
I was sent to Ashland, Kentucky, and so I would spend the next three years there. I angry, mad as hell solitary confinement most of the time. The gods hated me, the inmates hated me. They applied to kill me a couple of times. They told me that my life was in danger. I just didn't even care at that time. I'm like, you guys think you mad, you should imagine how mad I am.
But I also made the transformation there.
I was locked down twenty three hours a day by myself. So I began to read everything that I could get my own hands on. The more I read, the more I love reading. And so I read a book Call for a Boy, and it changed my life.
I thought my.
Situation was the worst situation in the world, and I thought no one could relate to it. When I read that book about the trocity in South Africa. As bad as I thought my situation was, it was not the worst situation in the world.
That's when the transformation made place.
That was when I made up in my mind that Chris, you get a chance to make this your monastery, or you get the chance to make this your place of how I learned in it. And so from that point on, I began to.
Change my perception.
I changed people's perception of how they was gonna perceive me. I stopped feeling sorry for myself. I stopped feeling bitter, I stopped being angry, and I said, I'm gonna do something about it. I began studying the law. I said, you know what, I'm gonna get myself out of prison.
And part of that journey was reaching out to a journalist named Patrice Gaines, who had covered the trial for the Washington Post.
I was blaming Patrese in Washington Post and everyone for our conviction, because I told him that we were convicted in the newspaper long before we ever went to trial, and we were never given a fair trial. And I reminded her that I was still innocent, and she wrote me back and told me that the case didn't set well with her and she had a problem with it. Then then she was new to the Post and she didn't have no backing.
Patrese was the lone black journey Us there who was covering the case. Even then, she had serious doubts about the case, but she was the only one at the Post who felt that way, And so when she heard from Chris again later, I think it really stirred something inside her. Patrese talks to Calvin Alston and Harry Bennett. I think Calvin Alston had been kind of recanting for a while at this point, and he recanted to her.
Bennett recanted to her. In two thousand and one. She ultimately wrote a story for the Post, but this case, at least back then, still had a lot of power in DC and instead of a series like she was hoping, it became one article in the Style section. But it got the attention of the then newly formed mid Atlantic Innocence Project.
And she had a literal bombshell to share. Patrese discovered that a woman named Amy Davis had told the police about her boyfriend James Blue just weeks after Catherine Fuller's awful.
Murder, Amy Davis comes forward and says she witnessed her boyfriend James Blue commit the murder. Police follow up, they decide they don't think Ammy Davis is credible.
They say they never believe their story. Her family vividly says they went to visit her and witness protection in Annapolis at a hotel that the government is known to have used for witness protection. The family wouldn't have had no reason to make this up. Amy Davis actually had Missus Fuller's wedding ring. They actually sold her ring to a group of people down on a street when they took it to the police office and say we got this ring. We think that might be described as the
ring miss fullet. It was last scene when she left home.
Ammy Davis statement just goes in a pile. It's never just close to the defense. Eventually, Amy Davis is actually murdered by.
That boyfriend, a murder that happened the week before the Fuller trial. Now, James Blue died in prison in nineteen ninety three, and it's possible that Amy Davis was lying to gain protection for herself from an abusive partner and the wedding ring was just a coincidence, but either way, it's Brady material.
And so based on the initial recantations and the Amy Davis evidence, the initial lawyers filed a joint Innocence Protection Act petition and post conviction petition.
And while this filing was processed, Chris had already done twenty six long, miserable years and was finally eligible for parole.
We told him ahead of time that we were not beingmit and guilt, and we presented this Brady material to the parole boy and they had enough sense to believe in my innocence. I'm the first person to ever parole first time up without admitting guilt.
By now, Sean and her team at the mid Atlanticainnis's project had officially taken over the.
Case, so we sought formal discovery, and that's where we got information about all of the times the government interviewed its own witnesses, all of the times those stories were changed, about the people walking through the alley who saw the garage door closed and heard moans at five point thirty. That's where we got some of the most valuable information in the case, including information about James McMillan.
If you recall the street vendor who discovered the body. He and his friend saw two men fleeing the scene. The police arrived, well, they had actually made an id back in nineteen eighty four.
One of the men, identified a guy named James McMillan, is known to police. He lives right on that alley with his aunt, and he's known to police because he's been robbing and beating women in alleys in that area, and the beatings are particularly brutal and nasty.
But it appears that since this didn't fit the gang narrative, McMillan was merely prosecuted for his other violent robberies at that time.
And just months after getting out of prison for those robberies, in nineteen ninety two, James McMillan happened to murder and Analie Sodoma as another young woman in an alley a couple of blocks away. And when you look at the later crime, those injuries actually have a similar pattern and if anything, are even more severe, and we know that crime was only committed by one person.
Unfortunately, the nineteen ninety two murder doesn't qualify as Brady material since it didn't exist at trial. But the nineteen eighty four identification and McMillan's nineteen eighty four violent crimes absolutely did so. In twenty twelve, they filed a motion that contained the Brady material as well as some really helpful supporting evidence.
So at the twenty twelve hearing, all of the recanters, a bunch of witnesses from the neighborhood testify, including two women with CIA level security clearances, who testify about the ways in which the police interrogated them in this case and were making accusations and just kind of assuming that
every teenager in the neighborhood was potentially guilty. But at the end of the day it was all denied by the trial judge, who had been friends with the original trial judge on the case, so I think came in with some pretty strong preconceived notions and brought those to bear.
It appears this judge felt similarly to the trial prosecutor, Jerry Goren, who also took the.
Stand, specifically with the macmillan evidence. He said, it really would have only made a difference if this had been a one or two person crime, and of course, like that's the point, that's exactly the point.
Both Goren and the judge had ignored the new evidence because it had flown in the face of the trial evidence, which was also shown to have been wholly unreliable.
So we appeal that to the DC Court of Appeals. We also lost there, and then as kind of what we saw as hail Mary, we filed a petition for regisource errari with the US Supreme Court. And in the US Supreme Court, we couldn't bring forward the evidence of innocence, so we couldn't bring the recantations because that's only a claim under DC law, but we could raise the Brady issues.
When they said the Supreme Court I accepted it, I thought it was a dune dee. I don't recall a Brady violation that they accepted that they did not overturn.
We figured we.
Had at least four votes, because that's what it takes to get cert in the US Supreme Court, and why would they bother granting cert if four people weren't fairly sure they wanted to reverse the lower court decision. So we had oral argument in the case, and it was pretty clear that we did not have justice sodomor, which was a bad sign, and we ultimately lost. We had
given it our best shot. There was a lot of stuff that was withheld from the defendants at trial, But at the end of the day, the most powerful evidence we have is the similarity between the murder of Missus Fuller and the nineteen ninety two murder that James McMillan committed. But the Supreme Court can't consider that or chooses not to consider that, because it is about what the prosecutor knew at the time and what they should have turned over at the time, and what the trial would have
been like at the time. So anything that happens after that isn't really relevant.
Since this defeat in twenty seventeen, Chris has been focused on living even though his name still hasn't been fully cleared.
The charge is still come up on the certain criterias. I try to apply for a job with Homeland Security TSA, the charge is still come up. This case is over forty years old and we still get back down on verse.
People who are convicted in local DC courts can't go to the mayor. We don't have a governor because we're not a state. What we have is the president. The Central Park five now exonerated five just spoke at the
Democratic National Convention. And if there's any case that this case reminds me of, it is the Central Park five case that kids were like having kind of a wild night in Central Park and ergo, they must have all just gang raped someone that if you browbeat teenagers for long enough, they'll either confess or give you the witness statements you want. And at the end of the day, this type of case is exactly what a pardon is for.
Right a pardon is supposed to be a chance for you to bring evidence that you can't take to court. And so no one with any kind of unbiased view has ever looked at the facts of this case.
Right now we have a pardon and in front of the president by we're confident that we have enough evidence to get him to do the right thing, and all the guys on the case, some of the families can finally get the relief that they deserve, including the fullest family. They hoping that we get the pardon and they can actually get the rest that they deserve and finally move past the case, because until justice is to serve, no one can actually move forward.
Amen to that, and we're going to link some action steps in the episode description and with that, let's now go to closing arguments, my favorite part of the show, where once again I thank you Sean and Chris from the bottom of my heart. And it works like this. Sean, you know you've been here several times before. I'm going to turn my microphone off and leave my headphones on and just listen to anything else you want to share
with me and our wonderful audience. Sean, you go first, and then just hand the mic off to Chris and he'll take us off into the sunset.
Nobody wins when innocent people are convicted. Family of the person James McMillan murdered when he got out of prison like that never should have happened, and the guys who were convicted shouldn't have to live their lives with the stain of allegedly committing one of the most gruesome murders in DC history. Yes, they're out of prison, but I don't like being falsely accused of knowingly parking in someone
else's parking space. Imagine that you are just known in DC and have been since you were a child, for committing a murder like that. Imagine being nineteen years old, being convicted of something you didn't do and going back to the DC jail and having the whole jail erupt in cheers because you were convicted. That's what happened to them. Imagine being target in prison because of the crime you're
convicted of even though you didn't do it. Like that's what they've been living with for most of their adult lives and some of their non adult life. And the President has the power to undo that, and he should or she should.
I extend my honest to you, Jason and the entire staff there and the work you're doing. Whether we get the partner or don't get the partner, we'll still be talking about it. My closing thoughts is just extend honors to the entire wrongful conviction community and the advocates and the tremendous work that's being done on so many fronts behind the scenes to bring.
This to the forefront.
We wish that the Justice Department get behind it, pull your head out of the sand, but I think they're afraid to get behind it.
This is the one case that they.
Don't allow any of their attorneys to have opinion about one way or another. Because you got to ask yourself if you did this in a case that everybody was watching, What the hell is going on? In cases where nobody is watching, and I think that's the thing that they're afraid of, that there'll be a windfall, you know, when you think about what's really going on behind the scenes.
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 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 Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at It's Jason Flamm. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one