In tonight’s episode the guys go live on stage, exploring the war on drugs, criminal justice reform, and corruption with top-notch subject matter experts. They’re joined with guests Gilbert King from Bone Valley, Clayton English and Greg Glod from The War on Drugs, and Jason Flom from Wrongful Conviction, each of whom specializes in exploring the ins and outs of what happens when the justice system gets things wrong… and what the average person can do to fix it.
Recorded Live at iHeart Media in Atlanta, GA on April 26th, 2023
Featuring hosts from the following podcasts;
Stuff They Don't Want You to Know
To see photos and a video of the entire event go to;
https://lavaforgood.com/podcast/s1e11-lava-for-good-live-the-war-on-drugs-did-anyone-win/
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noela.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission Control decad. Most importantly, you are you. You are here and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Oh, it feels like this has been a long time coming. This is a recording of a live panel we did with some brilliant podcasters from Lava for Good and UH do a lot of research for this. One man dove into some incredibly important stuff. Who do we have who do we have in the crowd there today?
That's right, have some incredible podcast creators responsible for shows like Bone Valley, The War on Drugs, and Wrongful Conviction.
Yeah.
So this is like a huge panel of you guys up there talking. I am the only one who is not on the panel of this group guys, And that was literally just so we could lessen the number of human beings that are all talking. You guys just did an awesome job with this. I couldn't be happier with the conversation. It's so in depth. Again, it speaks to the research that you guys did. I don't know, what do you say, we just jump into it.
Before we get to it, incredibly special shout out. I mean, Matt credit words. Do you did as much research like dove into this whole thing? And then you also give this beautiful introduction at the beginning and run the Q and a at the end.
I was there.
Don't doubt that.
I'm just saying, you guys did a great job. But no, for real, let's let's jump into this cause we're gonna there's so many topics that are covered in this that are highly important. And what I say in the beginning here I really do mean. So let's get to it. Hello everyone, thank you so much for joining us tonight for this very very important conversation. It's presented by Lava for Good and iHeart Podcasts. We are here in the brand new iHeart Podcast Studios in Atlanta, Georgia to have this conversation. This is a multi podcast live event. We're gonna be speaking with some very important people and I just can't wait for you to hear. It's a conversation we're gonna have tonight about a decade's long war against a concept, drugs, and it's about how that war, how the attempts to win that war corrupted and completely broke illegal system, and how that broken system affects the lives, the livelihoods, and the futures of everyone who's made to go through that system. So, without further ado, I'm just gonna have our panelists come on out, join us on stage and begin the conversation.
Hey, everyone, where are the guys from earlier? Thanks so much for coming. We're very excited. This is a truly unique collaboration with Lava for Good and iHeartMedia, and as our pal Matt mentioned, Noel Brown and me Ben Bollen, we host the show called Stuff They Don't Want You To Know, and today we're bringing together like an endgame Assembler's Avengers level assembly of some of the greatest minds in the world of criminal justice reform and in the world of the war on drugs, which affects every single one of us, regardless of sir circumstance. So we've got some great minds on stage here. Let's go ahead and start by introducing our guest. First directly, here we have Jason Flum. Jason, you are the creator and host of Wrongful Convictions. Additionally, you are a prominent criminal justice reform advocate. You are a founding board member of the Innocence Project, and wrong Bulk Convictions dives deep into some harrowing accounts of what happens when the justice system goes awry or some would say works by design, right, And we just want to thank you for joining us today.
Well, thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here. I love being at iHeart such a great company, great place, and really excited to share some of these stories with your audience and get people better informed and more I get them anger. Honestly, I want people to get angry and get involved, and that's what we're here for. And so, like I said, and being out on your platform with your audience, it's it's really uh, it's really exciting.
Well.
Also here to help us a little bit with that informed anger that I think we're all going to participate in is Pulitzer Prize winning author Gilbert King.
In addition, if that weren't.
Enough, being a Pulitzer Prize winning author, He is also the creator and the host of the Ambi Award, which is the thing they give out for podcasts now the Ambiy Award winning podcast Bone Valley. In addition to being a prolific author and incredibly tenacious researcher, King's work on his book Devil in the Grove actually led to the exonerations of the wrongly accused men known as the Groveland Four. The podcast Bone Valley brings that same level of investigative rigor to the story of Leon Schofield.
So, Gilbert, thank you so much for my.
Pleasure to be here. I'm really looking forward to joining us very promising and talented group.
Up here and rounding out our experts. Today we have Clayton English and Greg glad Now you guys are the co host and creators of the podcast called The War on Drugs. War on Drugs. No, Clayton, A lot of people in the audience doubtlessly recognize you today. You are a prolific stand up comic, an actor, a writer, and you in your material you deal pretty often with concepts of the War on drugs and I think connect with people in a way that is entertaining but also powerful and educational. And so when you and Greg joined up. But Greg, you're a huge criminal justice reform advocate. You are in the trenches working to refocus the legal system right to repurpose it as to We're going to talk a lot about what that means. But we just want to thank you guys for coming on the show today as well.
Oh thanks, Manav. Yeah, appreciate it. That intro was too good.
Yeah, they pay.
Interesting, no stress, just be perfect.
Like how they didn't sit us next to each other too. I think it's like when the two kids in the.
Class separate, you know. Yeah, no, it's better that way.
Yeah, we just didn't have in the budget. But okay, so let's let's get into it right because we have a lot of stuff in our minds. It seems that no matter where you come from, no matter who you are, no matter what your personal feelings are, like, virtually everyone can agree that the US justice system has some serious issues. Like right now, as of January twenty twenty three, the US incarceration rate is one of the highest in the world. Right We're talking five hundred and five people incarcerated per one hundred thousand, and one of the big questions a lot of people have from the outside looking at without your expertise, is how who did the US find itself in this situation? And Jason is somebody you talked about quite a bit on wrongful conviction. Let's start with you. What's your take here.
Well, we are the most incarcerated nation in the history of the world, and we lock our own citizens up at five times the rate of Western Europe, fourteen times the rate of Japan. We lock our black residents of America, black citizens of America up at a rate that is higher per capita in South Africa during apartheid. So just sit on that for a second. Right, We have not too many statistics, I promise because this is not a college course, but we have twenty five percent of the world's prison population while we only have four point four percent of the overall population of the world. So that's crazy. But we also have thirty three percent of the world's female prisoners are in cells right now while we're sitting here. They're sitting in steel and concrete cages in the United States. So one out of every three women in the world in prison right now is in America. And America is not that big of a country. When you think about it, right, It's like I said, we're only like between four and five percent of the world's population, so it's it has a lot to do with the War on drugs, mandatory sentencing. I mean, we're going to get into it, but it's it's got to change. It doesn't make us safer, it actually makes us less safe. It's a failure across the board. It's a human rights disaster, and for some reason, we feel inured to this idea that we're just going to treat our own people in such a barbaric way. But it's happening right now and it's we got to bring it out into the light. So that's what we're here for.
Do you feel just a follow up here for the group, do you guys feel that this has been normalized in US society? I mean those statistics are pretty shocking when you.
Hear them, just like, yeah, it's definitely like everybody. Most people think that if you in jail, you're supposed to be there. Like we even talking about how people look at court shows now, like uh, the CSI's and the law and orders. They think anybody that's in that box getting questioned is guilty. So I think a lot of things are just people don't care to realize if it's not affecting you, if you don't have anybody close to you, that it's going through these things, and you think, okay, well, and then we vilify people on the news and the media makes things seem like, Okay, this is what's going on, this is why it is this way. People just accept it. But when you really look at it and then we see it now things are starting to hit home for people, and you know, the suburb things that you would just look at, oh, well that only happens in the inner city, that only happens in urban areas.
Now it's reaching you.
And now you're like, oh, okay, well maybe people need rehab, you know what I'm saying. Maybe it's not you know, beat it out of 'em or put 'em in jail or you know.
So yeah, that's just kind.
Of I think you got on something really interesting talking about the cop shows and like the normalization.
You know who loves those cop shows?
The cops because it's sort of this like fantasy world of like how the system operates, like in its best light that could possibly.
Be and I've heard it called compaganda.
Yeah, if there was a piece on it that I think we talked about on the podcast not too long ago. But to that point about perception, you know on Soto that I want you to know, we hear from a lot of listeners who have various opinions on, you know, the brokenness of the legal justice system, but they're all coming from kind of anecdotal places, places of like, you know, observations based on someone they know or a story they've heard, and you don't always get it right when you're just looking at it from one side, and you know, you might have a piece of the puzzle, but you're not going to see the kind of holistic view of it. Greg, can you talk a little bit about, you know, what the average person needs to understand about the large some of the large and that's a very big question, but some of the large races at play here that maybe you're not going to get from just having a kind of anecdotal or experiential you know, opinion on the brokenness of the legal system.
Yeah.
I think one of the things that we need to know is that the criminal justice system is one of the is where the more they fail, the bigger they get to be. And they're actually used their failures to justify expanding So you know, I see like what happened, you know, after COVID, We saw, you know, significant rise of violent crime. We saw you know, overdosees skyrocket into you know, the hundreds of thousands in the United States, and now lawmakers are utilizing those numbers and their failures to actually solve these problems over generations to justify passing even tougher laws.
They were going to exacerbate this.
So overdoses increase, Let's make penalties stronger, Let's do mandatory minimums for that violent crime is going up, Let's increase the penalties. It's like the penalties are already high. Guys like, this is not working. And so you actually see a system that the more it fails, the more they're able to justify those failings with getting bigger. And I think that's something that we need to kind of like step back and look at and go, guys, we've been doing this for how long on this drug war and drugs are getting stronger, they're getting cheaper, they're more prevalent, more people are dying. What metric are you describing that says success right now? But it's up to us. We need to vote, we need to talk, we need to get our voices out there as much as possible. And so, yeah, I think that's kind of an area that we need to start talking about, like what are you succeeding at?
And it really is nothing.
Gilbert, and your investigations are anything that you'd like to add to just sort of the holistic view of what might be wrong and why people can understand that better.
Yeah, I mean, I think we're all sitting up here because of false narratives. False narratives have carried the day, whether it's war on drugs or whether it's these criminal justice cases, wrongful convictions. You know, I'll give you an example. I don't get into statistics, but in Florida, since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, I think one hundred people have been executed in the state of Florida. In that same time period, thirty one people sentenced to death row convicted sentence to death row have been fully exonerated by DNA. That means the wrong person was sentenced to death. Now, these are death penalty cases where you have a lot of eyes on these cases. These aren't just run of the mill felonies. Somewhere. This is one where the appellate process and the lawyering that happens around these cases is pretty extensive, and yet we're still getting it wrong that often. That tells you there's a serious problem.
Let's Gil, let's stay with you here for a second, because as we said earlier, your work has done something powerful. It's led to exonerations, and it's due to the efforts and time you put in as a civilian, you know, not working in law enforcement yourself. What are some of your first hand observations. And this is very timely right now because the subject of Bone Valley is up for parole in just a few days, correct.
Right, big parole hearing. This will be his fourth parole hearing. You know, this is the thing. He's served thirty five years in prison already on a twenty five to life sentence model inmate. But the reason that he's still being denied parole is because he refuses to admit and express remorse for a crime.
That he didn't commit.
So that's being held against him. And he's been standing on a claim of innocence ever since he was arrested, and that's being used against him every step of the way. He was. This is I'm talking about a man named Leo Schofield who, after he was arrested, didn't look like there was much of a case. The prosecutor came and offered him second degree murder, which in Florida at the time, it would have been a twelve to seventeen year sentence. He would have probably served of those of that time three and a half years if he would admit.
It to it.
Instead, he just chose to face the death penalty because he was innocent and he was not going to take this plea because he felt it would dishonor his wife he was accused of killing, and so he did not take that plea and he's been in prison for thirty five years, and so this claim of innocence has been hurting his case. That shouldn't be the case.
No under present Clayton, in your work, you know, you kind of a universality or sort of a shared experience in your audience, and when you explore the war on drugs in particular, what kind of prompted you to explore that topic and explore that universality and the idea of the war on drugs quote unquote sort of affecting more than just the people who are being targeted or the people who are getting convicted. It's really a cultural kind of phenomenon, and it's changed sort of attitudes, you know, in.
This country, because I was getting harassed and I go to jail, and then I did comedy, and the only way to kind of deal with it was to talk about it. And I would just look at the hypocrisy of what happens sometimes, and I would bring up situations and just really realize, it's not about these drugs that are available. It's about It's not a war on drugs as war on people. The people are the ones getting crushed by the families getting messed up. If you go to jail like i'm and now that I'm able to talk to police and hear what they actually say, they they have a saying you you might beat the rat, but you're not gonna beat the ride, which is okay, cool. It might not go on your jail, but this night is over for you, right, probably gonna mess up you trying to go to work tomorrow, probably gonna lead to you getting fired. Now you can't pay b So it's a a effect of you're saying you're trying to get drugs off the street, But if you didn't get 'em in a shipment that was in the tons, what is it doing when you got twenty dollars worth of weed from this person on the street or just things like that. And I've s and like, you know, I mean, I'm I joke about stuff, but it was things I was actually doing. Like I'll be like, I'm not going to jail for weed. I don't keep more than I can eat on me. Yeah, I see the police like I'm eating a whole bloot sometimes and it's not even the police, it's a taxi. So you know what I'm saying, Like now, I don't know when i'm'na be high, but that was like that, that was like situations that actually happened. And then like I just take it to the stage because it it. I know that it's gonna connect with people, because if you smoke with you've been in that situation where you were high and you get pulled over and you're not high anymore.
It's like such a low barrier of entry to getting you into the system, you know, and like then you're in the system, whether you did something egregious or something laughably, you know, Minor, you're in it, and then you have to pay your way out of it, and maybe you can't afford to pay your way out of it, and maybe then it's sort of bankrupting you and causing.
Problems with your family and leading to you additional problems.
But yeah, that's like, that's a question that I think needs to occur more often for a lot of people. It's there is a victimization of people who are already disadvantaged and then demands placed upon them that would typically depend on privilege, right, Like who gets arrested for twenty dollars worth of weed and then instantly has a lawyer?
Right?
Not a lot of people. And this leads to something interesting. This one is for Greg. We'll start with you and we'll go to the group. You mentioned something that I know you guys talk about a lot of more on drugs, which is the perception of the uptick.
And violent crime.
Right, And we hear this cyclically, like throughout the years that there's an uptick and violent crime. Something must be done. We all agree there's a problem, no one agrees how to fix it. And you guys, Clayton, Greg, you guys have talked a lot about what solutions are and Jason, you've done this as well, like ineffective versus effective solutions. What does that mean to someone on the outside. How do you How does that play out in the real world.
Yeah, you know, our response always is that sledgehammer on the back end that we want to increase penalties and we want to you know, really show you know, get that pound of flesh. And that's what gets your electorate happy. That's why people want to move that.
It's like the stance of typical legislators.
Yeah, okay, yeah, and so yeah, so you want to pass all these different laws and exacerbate these and you want to put police in these situations where they have to you know, arrest people and really get the arrest numbers up on drug crimes.
I know, like I grew.
I lived in Baltimore for a while and it was during kind of the o'maley times.
That was a big thing.
Let's increase the arrests. That's going to show that we're really tough on it. Then you start thinking about it, and so you know, you're saying, wow, we don't have enough police.
Okay, so now you're.
Wasting a bunch of time utilizing your police department to you know, essentially harass a bunch of people, like in the inner city, to just get arrests on there. So that's taking a cop off the street. Now, that's putting that person in a worst position. And then they start becoming these habitual offenders because they have a bunch of drug arrests and things like that.
And so that's the issue.
So we always go on this back end or pound of flesh aspects instead of actually looking at what the root causes are. And when you have something like COVID happen, or in two thousand and eight when the housing crisis happened, we saw both those situations where crime went up and also drug use rose significantly. It kind of really shows the rot of the foundation of our criminal justice system. How little we've invested in these other things like the front end community service seeing programs or addiction treatment especially. We have such a lack of knowledge societally and from a government standpoint about what addiction is and how to actually solve it. We addiction is so much about your social situation that things going around you and losing those connections and trying to find that kind of fill something with that whole and so then we throw people into a steel cage and tell them to get better. What do you think is going to happen to these people? And so this is what we continually do. And so this.
Lack of front ends I think treatment.
Removing this from the criminal justice system, putting it as a healthcare issue, those are things that actually solve it. You know, it's kind of it's maddening when you know, we would talk to someone Johann Hari. We talked on the podcast as great authors talk about what they've done in Switzerland and these amazing things and how crime and violent crime went down, because you know, a lot of crime is really drug related, from like the fundraising mechanisms to try to get a two hundred dollars heroin ADTT. We don't have a job. All the things that come from that and all like kind of the turf wars and things like that that happen. And we talk about crime and crime and violent crime and there's ways of solve it, and it's just not politically popular, so we don't care.
And so it's a little little nervy. Yeah, I'll pause there and yeah, sure something like that.
Yeah, and we're going to pause right here for a word from our sponsors before we return with more from this just cavalcade of subject matter experts, and we've returned. We know that nothing occurs in a vacuum. And one of the things that Noel and Matt and I have explored in our years on our show is the systemic issues, the problem of the connective tissue and identifying that. And that's one of the things that we wanted to ask you guys about. What is the connective tissue between war on drugs and wrongful conviction? How does the situation in one exacerbate, feed or create a feedback loop into the other, because it sure seems like a change in one reflects a change in the second.
I'll give it to Grid after this, cause he he knows all the details and stuff. But for me just to see, like our Edwin Ruber's episode, we saw somebody that was in jail for drugs that did not get caught with drugs. And I think most people don't think that, they don't realize that there's people in jail for kilos of cocaine that they never had, never got caught in their possession, never had video footage of, never been seen with it because somebody in whatever organization they in entered into a deal with the with the Feds, and they take this person's word.
For whatever they say.
So it's essentially somebody higher up that knows how the system works using somebody as a pawn. And this guy didn't have a gun, he got a gun charge right because they said that he did, didn't have any drugs in his house. He got charged with trafficking when it was.
There's no checks and balances on stuff like that. How does that happen?
Well, they take go ahead.
Yeah, So, I mean all these laws that we passed that are for the guys of public safety, mandatory minimums, conspiracy charges, truth and sentencing, all these things, they're all to make the system move faster and quicker and more efficient. And it all gets back to terrible incentives that we have because the more convictions that prosecutors.
Get, that's the way that they rise up.
The more arrests that cops are able to get and get those convictions on there, that's how you rise up on this.
Everyone wants to be a good soldier.
Grants from the federal government, a lot of them are based upon the amount of arrests that you're getting, the amount of drugs that you're coming in through there, and so it's all these horrible ascents are under the guys of public safety. So conspiracy charges are absolutely terrible. We call it ghost ope. So Edwin Rubis was literally charged with thirty nine hundred kilos that were never discovered. A guy higher than him and that more money was able to say that guy had it on him, and then he's able to get it because there needs to be a body.
Because you charge this much, you.
Arrested someone doesn't really matter who goes down for this like someone needs to because I need a conviction that we just move forward.
That's what happens all the time.
That's where I see kind of that connection between what you do and you know you talked about it earlier. We're talking about death penany cases where there are multiple procedures, tons of attorneys, all these evidence, all these definitely rules of procedure, and they screwed up how often with these let alone, you're run of the mill drug case or this, and so it's this massive every court system and every you ever sit in the court, it's all trioge.
They're just triosgh and there's.
A public defender that just met you three minutes ago, looking through your case file and wants you just to plee out because he wants to get through this case because he has four hundred a year. There's a prosecutor that's being overworked and has like two hundred and fifty cases a year and he wants us to move through.
There's a judge that wants.
To get back and have cocktails at the you know, the whatever club with his buddies or on going to his golf git. They need to move these through. No one wants you to actually go to trial. And when you do, man, are they going to come at you. Edwin went to trial. Edwin said, I didn't do anything that they're telling me. There's no physical evidence. But when everyone's out of prison and you're going to be in there until at least twenty thirty three, this is how it goes. They punish you for exercising your right so everything actually works as planned. And this is where you get those claudoral consequences of wrongful convictions where people are actually innocent or you just get hammered with it, even if you've done something wrong by the letter of the law and so it works exactly how it's supposed to. And the war on drugs is really exacerbate all this because of the massive amount of people that are just filing through our criminal justice system.
And I think one more point on the police and the war on drugs and how that all plays out. It's important for people to recognize that in the past forty years, Ish police have arrested they've made more pot arrest They've arrested more people for pot than all violent crimes combined. So when we think about it, and this goes back to your question and how these two worlds collide, right, Wrongful convictions happen as frequently as they do, and they happen a lot. If you don't think it can happen to you, it can definitely happen to you. The fact is that because the system has created this churn, right eleven million people going in and out of jail in America every year, and because it's some of the things that Greg just highlighted, you have a system that doesn't have time to worry about whether you actually did the crime or not. They have a saying in police and prosecutors' offices, a body for a body. Right, this is just on murder cases. Right, But there's a body, there's a dead body. They got to get it cleaned up. Especially if it's a smaller town, high profile case. You know, they got to clean it up. There's a lot of pressure. They got somebody, it doesn't matter. And then they get this tunnel vision. They start ignoring obvious signs that it wasn't the person that they're targeting, and they, for reasons conscious and subconscious, they shut all that out and they just laser focus on the person who they've got in their sights, and that person goes down for the crime. They're probably poor, they're probably underrepresented, they're probably, as you said, represented by it. You know, in New Orleans public defenders are representing four hundred people for in cases a year.
Right.
The courts are closed on the weekends. I mean I'm not a mathematician. That sounds like at least one and a half a day, right. So you know a guy comes in and goes, oh, yeah, what are you charged with the game? What was your name? Oh no, that's the other guy. Damn. Oh oh my phone's ringing. You know, it's like and you're going uh, and they go I think you should plead guilty. You don't have been willing to offer you two years, but if you go to trial, he might hit you with We got a case my guy you actually call me, named Siah Johnson in Virginia. He was innocent and he was offered a plea of three years, turned it down, got one hundred and thirty seven years in prison. How can we say you're so dangerous that you have to be in prison for two lifetimes, but also you're not that dangerous because three years is cool, just like they did with Leo. Right, you're so dangerous, we're gonna send you to death. When I said, well, I actually got life right. But the fact is we're gonna threaten you with death. The life which was just a stroke of luck. Ex Yeah, living death right, which sends you to living death, and it doesn't doesn't serve us as a society in any way. Not to mention the expense, you know, David Kim, who's right here, pointed out to me that the New York City controller we got I'm going back to your city because where I'm from, But in New York City it costs five hundred and sixty five thousand dollars a year to keep somebody in Riker's Island. At the same time, you can put them in the Ritz Carlton in a suite. You can send them with room service. Yeah yeah, Harvard to throw that in too, right into my house. That's what I'm saying, dude, what did you do? I've stayed there tonight. And at the same time, you have you have organizations like Avenues for Justice that can take a kid who's experiencing their first serious interaction with the criminal legal system and take that kid and provide a holistic solution, and they are able to sometimes talk with prosecutors and judges and get them to turn the kid back over to them. They spent I've spent two or three years working with that kid, and the kids, ninety one percent of them, never have another interaction with the criminal justice system. They end up going to college instead of prison. So you know, we know what works, but I don't you know why we resist it so mightily. And if we were able to reduce the mass incarceration problem, then there would be time for people to actually have some of their rights and to actually we got to go back to those standards. And I talk about this on the show on ron fulk bigshe all the time We've got to go back to because they're just words now, innocent until proven guilty. Everybody knows that right, everybody knows beyond a reasonable doubt. But it's out the window when you're just something to be processed. You're not a human being after you arrested. You're just somebody who needs to be processed into prison as quickly as possible so they can get to the next one. And it's not I mean, that sounds it sounds pretty dead wrong to me, and it is.
And if I can just and that's where the kind of the drug war gets on it.
It really is a war.
We looked so much into kind of the propaganda, and I know we all grew up in the times of like Dare and all these CBS news reports, and they made it look like they were like, you know, the villain from a war that you are fighting. And then you villainize people and you make them subhuman. You're able to do things to them like deprive them on constitutional right, send them to prison for a long time because they deserve it, because they are an enemy. And so you're able to do all these things because of this propaganda, like you said, to make them just less of a person real much.
And you say it too.
You always say, if it's a war, then you gotta have casualty. Yes, So what do you think the casualty is gonna be? Yeah, and you mentioned it too. It mostly affects like poor people. And I have a thing I say, it's it's expensive being broke, like super expensive. Just like even when I was getting pulled over, it's because a lot of times it was because I had a run down car, tag lights out. Oh you taped up the tag light and it would just be a re and I would see weed be the reason for why they pulled me over. Oh we smelled marijuana? How you smelled marijuana? I was going in the opposite direction you were going with both windows up. And I don't have any weed on me cause I ate it already. How did you like?
So, you know, Jason, you're talking about some you know, positive things that can possibly change this system.
But it sounds to me that these are generational things. These aren't.
These are you know, things that have to be changed through education, like of a whole other generation who will then maybe be in power and actually enact those changes, Like can we look at a positive spin on this, Like we talk about criminal justice reform?
What does that look like to all of you?
And how is it as simple as just like legislation or is it a longer game than that.
Well, we have to change people's hearts and minds first, right, we have to change attitudes and perceptions. And you know, drugs, as we've talked about, are not the problem, right, Drugs you know, at the Drug Policy Aligns on whose board I serve for over twenty years, we have a philosophy called harm reduction, right, which basically says, first you have to accept that drugs have always been and will always be a part of society. Right, cavemen did peyote Little kids spin around in a circle until they get dizzy because they like that feeling of being out of there, you know, like being a little goofy. Right, and you do it too, right. I say, I was a little worried, but I figured it'll be okay. But the you know, but the fact is we need to to accept that and then start to say, okay, what can we do to reduce the amount of harms that drugs do to society? These guys made the great point of the War on Drugs podcasts about how you can say one thing for the war, right, I think it was you, Clayton. We gave it a good try, right, one hundred years, a trillion dollars, and it's worse that it's ever been. I'd say, I mean, I'm not a genius, but I'd say that's a pretty great failure. And the fact is, so I think we do have to elect better, you know people into office, right, who will you know, see these changes through? And the good news is, you know, when I started this, we were talking about earlier, when I started this work thirty years ago, and people are like, you're doing what like decriminalization, that's crazy mandatory sensing. What's that? I don't understand, blah blah blah. But now but somebody put their arm around me, somebody who I thought was old and wise at the time, turns out he was and said, hey, kid, takes thirty years to change anything. And I was like, well, here it is. I was ninety three. It's thirty years later, and we you know, it used to be get cracked in the head by a cop for smoking a joint washing Square Park, and now you can buy it in the park, like from people who have a little booth set up right and they got like a little rainbow flag or whatever. You Yeah, things are good, you know what I mean. And so and I also have to say because Clayton made that point before, and growing up, I mean, I smoked. I kind of thought of myself as like the Jewish Bob Marley. I wanted to smoke as much weed as him, you know.
What I mean.
And I had hair down like down here and all the way around. I couldn't even see unless I look this way to see through the little slit in between my hair right there.
That style.
Yeah, and I always smelled of weed. And I because I started the morning, I mean half the time I was on fire, you know what I mean. And yet I never got arrested because I was white and I lived in a zip code where they didn't arrest kids like me for things like that. So that's one of the things that informs my work is that I don't like on fairness and it's totally unfair. I don't think anybody likes on fairness when they see it, but when it happens behind closed doors in police stations and prison cells and places like that we don't see it, and we need to see it, and we need to see these people as just people. We're not perfect, You're not perfect. But I also didn't need to go to jail. I went to rehab and I ended up starting a business employing dozens of people, paying lots of taxes.
This we're talking right about huge changes, shifts and paradigms. Right see changes, and we hear statistics constantly, and we know. I think the average person again will agree there's a problem, will not agree on the solutions often, and then they'll have the kind of party line they'll say, like, oh, well, what I should do is just I should vote right, I should vote once every four years, I think, is how most people do it in the States. But when we talk about this, you know, Matt said something really beautiful earlier, when he beautiful and horrified when he said, you know this, the war on drugs affects you. And it's something I've heard all of us echo.
Right.
It doesn't matter if you do or don't smoke weed or whatever, it somehow will affect you.
Is the.
Reverse of that true? Does that mean individuals can somehow affect the situation for the better? Can you affect the war on drugs? Can you affect wrongful conviction as a civilian, as just a regular person like all of us?
Right?
I didn't think you could before I did this podcast, really like, I just thought it was you know, it is what it is. You could say stuff and you could post online all you want. But it took somebody like Greg to be like, no, Like, if enough people make enough noise on this issue, then you can get the ball rolling on things. You said, what call your legislator three times?
It does?
People started getting it moving.
It really does.
Like if anyone's ever worked on the lallmaker's office, only that you get a couple of calls on a bill, I mean things, it goes nuts in the in the viility. They think people really care about it.
You'd be surprised to know how few people actually do that.
So when it happens, it's kind of alarming.
It's probably my design to you know what I'm saying.
What's the same with convoluted laws?
I mean, like you're just not being able to drill down and fully understand. They make it that way, you know, to disempower people. But can you talk about the Eric Andre situation?
A little bit that you're involved in.
Like I mean, that's I think a good example of like giving a megaphone to these types of injustices.
Oh yeah, So if you all don't know, I was, I have a lawsuit against Clayton County because I was harassed at the airport. Just try to give it to you. Long story short. I was going, this is past security at the airport. I'm getting on the flight to go to California. I'm getting on the jet bridge. This is the jet bridge kind of curves around. Two officers stop me. They don't stop anybody else. They asked me, can we search We're looking for people who have drugs and blah blah blah blah. And I'm like just trying to get on this flight. And in my head, I'm also thinking who takes drugs to Los Angeles? Like I think you need to be on the other flight when they come, because like it wouldn't make it sense to me. But that later made sense. But they just you know, doing a lot of small talk and searching. And when I got on the plane, I was thinking, Okay, they're gonna come back on here and pull me off this plane. They're just waiting for everybody else to get on the flight, and then they're gonna take me to jail. I don't know what they're taking me to jail for. I didn't have anything, but I just remember thinking that, and I wanted to say something to the steward this. I didn't and I just kind of took it, took it on the gin. That's how most things happened with injustice or getting harassed. You just kind of ride with it. And then the same thing happened to Eric Andre. He talked about it on the Jimmy Kimmel Show. And I knew him, I've worked with him a few times, so I just reached out to him and I was like, hey, the same thing happened to me.
W and he was like, oh, okay.
And then he reached out a few weeks later and said that he was gonna try to pursue, like l a lawsuit and if I wanted to be a part of it. And we've had other people that have joined in. And one of the things that we found was I think sixty seven percent of the people they stopped were people were like black people, and I think eighty percent were people of color. And they called it a drug interdiction program, and they took they stopped. They got three stops for drugs, ten grams a weed, a dude with some gummies, and somebody who had no uh prescription pills with no prescription.
And that was in eight months.
But in that same eight months they confiscated a million dollars from people getting on the plane. Of course, yeah, yeah, uh civil ascid forfeiture, which I yeah and yeah. So basically they were taking money from people who didn't really And it's a shape now because if I would have had money on me, they would have said, where'd you get this money from?
We think it's drugs. We're charging the money.
Do you want to get on this flight, you want to argue with us, maybe go to jail, or you want to get on this flight, then you can fly back here, get an attorney and try to figure out how to get this money back, which you won't, which you won't exactly. So yeah, what's happening now is basically they're they're accusing, they're saying that they're you know, there's no wrongdoing on their part, they're allowed to do it, and they're trying to get the case dismissed. But we've had more people that have joined the case, and no money was taken from eric Andre. But now some of the people in the case are people who actually had their money seeds.
You're talking about a more brazen version of what happens. And you already get put in the system in the first place, where you got to pay for those buy classes or whatever they might be. That's all third party you organizations that aren't governmental. They're just a company that's set up to take your money.
Yeah, and I think the way Atlanta Airport is up is it's patrolled by Atlanta Police Department, but it's in Clayton County's jurisdiction. So what it looked like to me is they were just kind of using the airport as their own little piggyback and Okay, this person looks like they might have something. They were definitely profiling because they're like, okay, who looks like they have something, And okay, let's see if they have cash. And it was a lot of people that'd be like, well, why would someone have that much cash? And first of all, it's US currency. Second of all, this is Atlanta, this is a city, it's everything operates off cash. We got a big strip club industry, big nightlife industry. We've got I mean I get paid in cash. Yeah, so yeah, I just think that somebody shouldn't have cash and that it should just be taken from them.
That's ridiculous to me.
Well, here comes back to like bad incentives within the drug wars that a significant amount of that revenue goes directly back to prociatory law enforcement offices, and that's actually how they raise a lot of their resume for their operating budget. So the videoj did a big you know investigation first Missouri after you know, they had up people there and what they found was like this one incidant happened, and then you know, things happen after that. But it was a lot of other foundational stuff where there's emails from the city council to the police chief saying, we need.
A ten percent increase in revenue. What are you going to do?
And now they're harassing the community members and they're actually putting cops in like these spots where like they're having to harass to and finally when something happened, they're like we've had enough, and like this is the things that start to happen, and so these horrible incentives and drug cases are the ones that bring in the quickest, easiest revenue when you're able to suspec drugs on it.
So that's what happens.
What'd you call it a ghost dope?
Yeah?
Yeah, So that's another part of like what you're saying, Clayton is describing a situation where someone is able to fight back, to seek redress for what's happening. And we see so many people I think again targeted because it's known they it's assumed they will not have the means to survive the length of time it takes to fight the system. Right, So with this in mind, you know, we see again this is something that can affect everyone, Like Jason, like you were saying, he said, and if you don't think it can happen to you, it can happen to you. And with this, like we've we've laid a lot of groundwork here and you guys, shows are such deep dives form firsthand knowledge like Bone Valley, wrongful conviction, War on Drugs. I think no, I think we open it up to the audience. Yeah, let's get some let's because we can't answer the questions. But these guys in the middle probably can't so good.
Yeah, I want to just make one statement before we do that on subtle asset for for sure, because since twenty fourteen, this was first report in the Washington Post, police have stolen more money and property from civilians every year than all the robberies combined. And you can look that up. It's five billion to three and a half billion. And that was twenty fourteen and since then nothing's changed. And it's because of that, because they don't have to prove a crime. They just take your money. They go, we think you might have been involved in charge you with the crime. You don't even arrested. No, there's no conviction requirement.
That you're pretty charging money the state.
Of Georgia versus one hundred, one hundred and seven thousand dollars or in nineteen eighty five Corolla, it's.
There's no recourse.
Well, you can challenge it. A lot of yeah, but a lot yeah. A lot of the forfeitures are such little.
Money and you'd be like a voucher or something six.
Hundred dollars from you.
You're going to hire defense attorney for five grand to get your money. All these good to default judgments, most of the time anyway, don't. People don't challenge it, and it's a very low barrier. It's from honors of the evidence normally, which is.
Like, how are you more likely than not?
How are you getting to court when they take your car?
Right?
Okay, let's pause here for a quick word from our sponsor and then jump right back in with lava for good.
And we're back. Let's get right back into the panel.
So I just wanted to start opening everybody here being able to ask questions. Here with a question to you guys, I've never had to hire an attorney for a criminal thing. I have no idea what that looks like. I have no idea how to do that. I probably don't have the money to hire the right attorney to get me out of something intense like this. Are there any resources out there for someone who you know has been arrested they can look for like a pro bono attorney who would work on their behalf. Or is it we really just have to rely on the attorney that's assigned to us when we go to prison.
Yeah, and I'm sure you have. Yeah. I mean it's few and far between.
There is some and even a public defender if you have financial means if you're not a below a certain threshold. A lot of the times, you know, they kind of really can't provide one to you either, and.
So it's tough.
There's some law firms that do some pro boner work, you know, on that with criminal defense, but a lot of the times it's either the public defender or you kind of trying to figure out our scrape around.
I mean, it's it's tough.
I mean, public defense is one of the most underfunded systems that we have, and so you already had a disadvantage going against the government and then underfund our public defense system pretty egregiously. There's federal lawsuites all across the country on that type of disparity.
So yeah, you're yeah, good luck. That's why a lot of people play. I mean, yeah, that's what happens.
Yeah, I'll just jump. One of the things that you know, I hear a lot is that the post conviction process is so daunting that storytelling is actually one of the most effective ways to change the narrative. I mean, we're all up here because of false narratives. I mean, if you look at you know, Jason's how many how many people have you had on.
The program three. I think we're three hundred and sixty something episodes so far, and we will never stop making the.
Who's been exonerated, So a false narrative has brought them into prison for years until something happens and they're cleared. The War on drugs, you can look at that as still this.
I remember this just like the demonization and the dehumanization of people and just scaring people into thinking that, you know, black people are going to have this crack mania and they're going to have superhuman strength.
We need to protect it. We need to write longer laws. I mean that was part of it too, And so these narratives that get built. I mean, I'll just tell you in the case with Leo Schofield, you know, at one point I've been working with him for several years and you know, we're kind of done with the investigation, and he said, you know, what do you think is going to happen to me? And I said, Leo, I don't know. The post conviction process. I mean, it's so daunting. The only thing I can promise you, I can't promise that you're going to get out of prison because of this information, but I can promise you that we are changing the narrative of your story. And that's why these podcasts are so important, because we can do the deep dive into a topic and actually show the truth. And I think that's why you see so many exonerations because if you have the storytelling aspect, whether it's lawyers or writers or journalists who can come in and sort of expose this, it's really important and it is a positive step because I have to be honest with the state of journalism right now is not that great. And so when you look at a lot of these communities that are having these crimes, a lot of times the local reporters they're biggest sources of the prosecutor and the police. They don't get the other side of the story, so they just kind of repeat the state narrative and that's how it just perpetuates and grows until some people like us can come in and look at it from a different angle and hopefully change it.
You guys are really fun at parties, aren't you? On those Ben's line By the way, anyone.
I hope somebody asked a question about bail reform, by the way, just saying.
Oh yeah, hey, does anyone have a question about bail reform. Okay, okay, but really, would anyone like to ask a question of the panel?
Hi, I just want to say, I'm thankful for what you guys do, but what's a way that US citizens can really make a difference outside of the narrative, because there is a larger crime that's more than the citizens. It's like the government. Like how do you come against that when you can sell weed now but you're not getting the people out that you got on petty crimes? Or like how do you come against a government that is backed by the NRA? You know, Like so it's big companies that pay for the media, that pay for like how things get ran, and they're also behind the government.
I think the first thing is to learn what's really going on. There's a fantastic newsletter called alex Copaganda newsletter. You mentioned copaganda, it's Alec alec Apostrophs Copaganda Newsletter, and that will give you a perspective on I think a lot of the questions that you're so properly raising. And thanks for that question, by the way, And yeah, and since nobody asked about bail reform, I'm just gonna say, you know, back to the question that was posed a minute ago. You know, you better hope with your public defender that you're not in jail awaiting trial, because if you are, that creates a whole another cascade of problems, right if you think about it, If you too poor to post bail, then you can't not only can't assist in your own defense, you can't meet with your attorney. They're not going to come to the jail to meet with you. They're busy, and you can't take care of your family. You can't go to your job, you can't do any of the things that you would be doing otherwise. Jails are generally more violent and dangerous than prisons. People think that's counterintuitive, but it's true. So you're subjected to the most horrible conditions and deprivation, and then on top of that. You don't see this on the TV shows, but if you're in on because you can't post bail and then you're being brought to trial, first of all, prosecutor can offer you, Listen, you're going to stay here for two three years before we get around to you unless you want to plead guilty and go home. So you got that pressure. But if you decide to go to trial. Now they wake you up around two in the morning. They don't feed you, They put you in a bead, they put you a waiting room, then they put you in a van. Then they take you to another jail and the courthouse and you're held there. You're also not fed. Then by the time you get into the courtroom you look half crazy because because you're sleep deprived, you're starving, and also you've been subjected to the most brutal conditions imaginable for weeks, months, or years. Think about Khalifh Browder and that whole horrible story. Right, rest in peace. But so the bail reform, I just wanted to mention this because bail reform is so misunderstood and it's so important for people to understand it. It makes us much safer. And every study that's been done has shown that bail reform decreases the probability of the person who didn't go to jail pre trial committing a new crime dramatically. And it makes sense because I think you were talking about it before. If you do go to jail, your problem's just got a lot worse, even if you're there for three days a week. You're losing all the things that Clayton talked about, and now you may not have a choice but to commit a crime if you want to eat, or if you want to feed your kids, or whatever it might be. So bail reform is one of the most successful policies that I've seen in my thirty years of doing this work. But titians are trying. They'll take one case of somebody who got out on bail and when it hit you know, some old lady over the head at an ATM, and you know, they'll make that into a big thing. And of course the news will report that because it's better for clickbait. Right, nobody wants to report good news stories. No one wants to report the things that we're talking about now. But bail reform makes us safer and saves us huge amounts of money. Remember the five hundred and sixty five thousand dollars ye to keep somebody in Riker's Island who hasn't been convicted of the crime.
So that is so, then to that question, that's one of the things average person could do is maybe engage with their legislators about bail reform.
Absolutely yeah, and give a damn about your local elections. Like we can talk about president and they're all important, but your sheriff's elected, your district attorney's elected, a lot of judges are elected where you're at, Like, those are the people making the decisions. So you talk about bail reform, Yeah, you can be able to pass the law, but if you get a district attorney that says, this is how we're going to handle our jails, or you get a sheriff that says that this is how we're going to handle our jails, or this is where we're going to prioritize red sources, like those are the elections that don't get as much attention, particularly when they're not on a presidential cycle, Like those are the ones you.
Really need to care about.
That's where you see that kind of systemic change happen in these areas. And so I know, and you know in Houston when they went through a lot of their their bail reform, stuff like that probably doesn't happen if there isn't certain actors and you know, within that that realm and things like that, and that's what really really matters to a lot of this stuff. You can have I know, how many bills get passed. A good example is on forfeiture in New Mexico banned criminal civil forfeiture. It was only criminal city if Albuquerque just had some folks there that were like, well, I guess it doesn't it doesn't apply to us.
We're going to continue to do this, like all right, well there you go.
I mean, yeah, they can have the best law in the books, but they'll be able to figure out a way to navigate around that.
You can pass earn.
Credits where you allow people to get ear in credits in prison, but if you're a prison warrior, shaff doesn't want to give those out, ain't gonna happen. So it really is that local, hyper local elections that really matter on the criminal justice level.
So I wanted to talk about prosecutors in this process. You guys talked to little bit earlier about kind of the way things are perceived in the media, with you know, police and everything being kind of pro police. I think a lot of times there's also a perception that prosecutors everything they're doing is noble and good, and I think that's oftentimes the case. But I'm curious your perception about the concept of like prose prosecutorial misconduct, kind of the politics of play, the pressure there under to secure convictions. Just kind of in broad terms of your thoughts on that you've had on this.
Take it to like a micro level. I think one of the things that happens with prosecutors is, you know, their job is defined to their Their job is not to win convictions.
It's to pursue justice.
And so but you know there's ego and career that gets involved in that, and so you know, you want to work your way up to be chief prosecutor or maybe a judge someday. You don't want, you know, a bunch of open cases or lost cases. And so I think what happens is it's like every other business in terms of capitalism. You know, you have prospers, skeeters that are winning at all costs, and they're willing to cut corners. And a lot of that is that what Jason just mentioned, that tunnel vision, that part of your story doesn't fit my narrative. So I'm not going there. I'm doing my narrative, and my narrative is this, and that's how they get caught up in this thing. And I've talked to a lot of prosecutors who have had wrongful convictions, and you know, they attributed to tunnel vision and wanting to win the case, and so they end up making a lot of decisions that you know, cost people their lives basically, and they like to see themselves as very noble and they don't want to see themselves as somebody who's doing something. You know, frankly, there's no accountability for prosecutors. One of the things that you know, sometimes I sometimes ask prosecutors to talk to me about the cases, and they don't want to talk to me because they know I'm not doing the you know, the CSI type stuff.
We're going to make them look.
Like, how did you catch the bad guy?
How'd you do it?
What genius did you bring to the table for that. I'm asking questions about cases that went wrong, and you know, they don't always want to talk to me. One of the things that is really disturbing about that is like they'll say, well, we don't do our cases in the media. We do them in the court of law, where like all the integrity is apparently, you know, if a prosecutor screws up a case so badly and it gets overturned at a higher court and Appellet court. The worst thing that ever happens to a prosecutors. Maybe he gets called out in the opinion of that court saying the prosecutor aired in withholding evidence that would have been exculpatory, and then he goes on and does to his next next case, next conviction. If I was withholding evidence, let's just say, like I had Leo confess to me, Leo Schofield confessed to me, and I said, Gee, that doesn't fit my narrative. I'm going to put that to the side and not tell people about that. And then later on it's discovered that I was withholding evidence, my books would be pulled from the shelves. I probably wouldn't get a chance to do another story because that would be seen as such a horrific violation of integrity. And yet why is it that prosecutors can do that all the time and go on to the next cases, because there's year accountability, And that's the thing I think that really needs to change.
Couldn't you even be prosecuted yourself for withholding that kind of information?
Yeah, as a citizen like forty obstruction or as a defense lawyer, but as a prosecutor, you have absolute immunity. Think about those words absolute immunity. So nothing you do can bounce back on you. And so then and you also have almost total power. And we know what power does to people, right, And I think there are people, I think there are cops that go into the job very idealistic and then they change. The power does something to them, right, And the culture does something to them, and the training, And then with prosecutors, they're human as well, and they some of them I think, go in, you know, very noble aspirations, but then they they become ambitious and when they go back and I have the criminal defense lawyer I know in California as you're stein, he told me that he sometimes in is closing argument, he'll say to the jury when the prosecutor goes back to their office, for you know, tonight this afternoon, after I've finished the case, no one's gonna ask them, did you do justice today? They're gonna say did you win? And that's what they wanna do. They want to win, and it becomes a game. And the problem is they have the ability to to to mess with to mess with people's lives to an absolute extreme. And when they do that in prosecutormis conduct is one of the leading causes. You're hear it again and again on the Wronful Convictions podcast. It's one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions. Believes the prosecutormist contact also lying forensic people, et cetera. But the fact is that they're incentivized to do that, and they're given the power even with Brady violations like Brady is a Brady versus Maryland, very famous Supreme Court case which says that prosecutors must turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense, but they get to decide what they think is exculpatory. So the wolf is literally guarding the henhouse. And when they when they get like I said, they get set, they're just gonna go and they're going to a And the last thing I'll say on the subject is we should all care about this because when prosecutors frame an innocent person for a crime, sometimes they knew, let's face it, they knew they didn't commit it. We don't like to think about that, but it's true, it happens. Listen to the podcast if you haven't already, you'll hear it again and again. They are actually acting in service of the actual perpetrator right that those forces of police and prosecutoral power are focused on protecting the person who committed this heinous crime, because almost by definition, when you lock up the innocent guy, you're letting the guilty person remain frame.
You're becoming an accomplice well or worse.
Guys, I just want to say thank you so much for this conversation. It has been it's been like heavy, right, really heavy. This is serious stuff. But you guys know you know what you're doing or you're exploring this every day on your podcasts. So as you said, Jason, I think the best thing everybody can do here is subscribe to these podcasts to wrongful convictions, to the war on drugs and to Bone Valley and even stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, you can subscribe to us too, That's fine.
We're not above it.
Yeah yeah, yeah, sure it's a good show. Check it out.
But really, thank you, guys.
I think we're gonna end the show now. Second, this this incredible conversation.
Thank you to Kilful Clate today and thank you.
Thank you so much.
And there you have it. One of our first live shows in quite some time. Grateful again to all the fantastic guests we had, and we're up blowing smokers folks. We enjoy these conversations and think there is so important that we ask each person on that panel who wasn't already us to come up here on our show. And I believe we'll have we have a conversation with Jason Flaub that already came out the host and creator wrongful Conviction, We'll have Gilbert, and then we'll allow of our friends from the War on Drugs in later conversations.
Correct.
Yeah, we had a lot to cover in this panel, and these individual episodes really allow us to dig a little deeper into these individual pursuits that these folks.
Have, you know, basically made their life's work.
Out of, and guys personally kind of selfishly, I just want to hang out with each individual person on that panel more so, I can't wait for those other conversations. So look forward to our conversations with the rest of the gang here. Well, hey, we talked at the end there about action you can take if you know you are as incensed as we are about the things we discussed in the episode, So we highly recommend you take those actions. But if not and you want to just reach out to us, you can do that too.
It's right.
You can find us at the handle conspiracy Stuff, where we exist on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, Conspiracy Stuff show on Instagram and TikTok.
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