#049 Jason Flom with Leroy Harris

Published Mar 19, 2018, 5:00 AM

From the moment he was charged with rape and robbery in 1989, Leroy Harris has insisted on his innocence. In May 1983, a New Haven, CT nightclub owner was robbed at gunpoint by three young men late one night. The men stole his car, and later that evening robbed and sexually assaulted two women. Leroy became one of the numerous suspects because he was misidentified. He was tried in April 1989, six years after the crimes were committed. Despite the fact that not a single eyewitness identified Leroy as being involved in the crimes prior to the trial, all four witnesses—the two assault victims, nightclub owner, and nightclub owner’s girlfriend—positively identified Leroy for the first time in court. He was convicted of three counts of robbery and one count of sexual assault in the first degree and sentenced to 80 years in prison. Even after his conviction, he fought the verdict through five appeals. Leroy finally got the Innocence Project of New York working on his case in 2012. The Innocence Project had the Connecticut forensic lab test new DNA evidence which excluded Leroy from the male DNA on the inside of one victim’s blouse. The sexual assault charge against Leroy was dismissed, but in order to be released, Leroy Harris agreed to enter “Alford” pleas to the remaining charges in exchange for his freedom. He spent almost 30 years in prison in Connecticut.

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America has two point two million people in prison. If just one percent is wrong, that's twenty two people. That's a lot of people's lives destroyed. If the system wants to take you out of society, they will do it no matter what laws they have to break, saying that they are enforcing the lords, but they're breaking the lord. Having to hear those people say that I was guilty of a crime that I did not commit, and then here my family break down behind me and not be able to do anything about it. I can't describe the crushing weight that was. I'm not anti police, I'm just anti corruption. A lot of times we look and we see something happened to somebody, and that's the first thing we said, that could never happen to me, But they can. This is wrongful Conviction. M Welcome back to Wrong for Conviction. Today's guest is an extraordinary person who has been through something that nobody should ever go through. Leroy Harris, Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. There's so many crazy aspects of your case, but I think we should probably start at the beginning. First of all, where did you grow up? I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and how was that. Did you have a nice family situation? I mean, was it a tough childhood? Well? No, we had a close knit family. I mean we was very supportive of each other and brothers, sisters, yea brothers. My mother she was a single parent. She raised fourteen children. Huh yeah, my mother had having sons and seven daughters. Wow, that's amazing. And you know my father he well at the time he worked as a truck driver, but so he was in and out. But you know, he was supportive of the family too, but he just a lot of times he just couldn't really provide as much as he wanted to because the family was so big. How big was your apartment that you lived at When we lived in the house, you know, we went from East New York to flap Bush and at that time in flat Bush, you know, it was a lot of different families, different nationalities coming in and so it was pretty integrated. It was a good community that I lived in. And you know, so that the family just growing up, it was it was it was a good wholesome family. Were you the oldest, youngest but was one of the middles before this criminal justice nightmare hit you like a ton of bricks. Did you have when you were twenty two years older? Yes, I was before that. Did you have any interaction with the justices? No? I I didn't really have no encounters with the police. Uh. You know, I wasn't a bad kid. And if you consider, you know a little bit of every now and then, you know, growing up a little beer well something, you know, as a kid, you know, growing up younger two, I took a drink here and Neil, you know, Okay, so you were a regular kid. Yeah, that's it. That's it. I was a regular kid. I mean not nothing other than that, A little bit here and there. That was it. You know. So this part of the story starts in Yeah, just a long time ago. I mean, that's like I'm trying to think back of I mean, like when I watched the movie of my life backwards. If I think about the last thirty five years and thinking about you spending it incarcerated, it really is Um, that's just it's an enormous amount of time and none of it ever made any sense. You originally picked up on a warrant four and I knew nothing about it. And this was in Connecticut, in Connecticut and New Haven so they pick you up on a warrant. Now most people are probably saying, okay, so what was the warrant for? And you didn't know. Well, like I said, I'm from Brooklyn. My mother she lived in New Haven at this time, so I'm out of town. They picked me up and locked me up, and that's all I know. At that point, I'm waiting to see a judge, you know, get the court um locked up. Four months, I finally come to court September eighteen eighty four, and I'm asking them, where's the lawyer? Can you call my lawyer down? So you have not at this point I ever even met your lawyer yet, nobody, So you don't have a lawyer. I don't have any, but I know I'm coming to court, so they have to have the Public Defender's office have somebody come down to see me before I go up to see the judge. So I'm asking where's the lawyer because I know you you have to get a lawyer. I don't have no money. But the logical thing mind is gonna say, but wait a minute, you must have seen a lawyer while you were in jail. For everyone's entitled to a lawyer. It says that in the constitution, how were they keeping you in jail for four months and you didn't even know what was going on and you didn't see a lawyer. But they you know, sometimes people do what they want to do. I mean, just because a person is a prosecutor or a person is a police offense, it doesn't mean that they are following the letter of the law. So we need to make that clear because if they were following the letter of the law, I would have seen a lawyer day one when they arrested me, and then most likely none of this ever would have happened, because you would have been able to prove that whatever it was that they were charging you with, they had the wrong guy. Right now, you can't see him, but Leroy is a very DApp or dresser. He's all decked out today. And that's actually an important point because it plays a role in the next part of the story. Right, So you show up in court dressed to kill, yes, no pun intended. And what happens next, Well, they called me the court that day. I get to the courthouse, I'm down in the lock up. I'm asking the sheriff, where's the lawyer? Can I see a lawyer. Who's my lawyer? He goes upstairs to the Public Defender's office. We got Leroy Harris downstairs. He's asking who is his lawyer? This dad? And he comes back down maybe twenty five minutes later and says, I don't know. Then the doorbell to the lock up gets the buzz that someone comes in. He says, Mr Harris. He says, they're here for you. Now, I said, they're here for me. Now, what do you mean? He says, Uh, there's a cop offer, Sir Lemon, he wants to speak to you. The officers said, asking me, are you Leroy Harris. I says yes I am. He says, as your data birth sixty. I says, yes it is. And he says, well turned around. Yonder arrest. I said for what he said, for robbery and sexual assault. He says, this happened May one. Now this is another warrant. So they take me from the locker to one Union Avenue, which is the police headquarters, process me and put me in the vand bring me back to another court for arrangement for this new warrant. So when I get to the court, I'm sitting there waiting to be arranged and pandemonium erupted in the courthouse, and when the sheriffs ran over and said, hey, come on, get out of here. And I didn't ask any questions. I got up and I walked out. So wait, when you say pandemonia erupted, what do you mean. It was a lot of excitement in the courthouse. People were yelling over here, and so he was just trying to clear everything out. And he told me, you get up. And because the way I looked, he didn't think that I was a prisoner. Did he think you were a lawyer? I guess he did, because that was inside the transcripts. He said, well, he did. The clothes he was wearing, the suit, the way he looked, look at the pictures, no one knew. You know, that was lever, right. I mean, you do look more like a lawyer or a college professor than somebody who's been in prison. Even now. I mean, and this is something that's just totally surreal. Like here you are with two warrants. Why don't you still don't know what it is? The other one? You don't know what the hell they're talking about, right, you know what it is, but it doesn't make any sense to you. You walk out of the courtroom into the fresh air. Yes, because they told you to. They told me, go ahead, get out of here, which sounds like it's all sounds so crazy, right, So you walk out and then what happens. Well, I walked out and I got on the train and I went home to Brooklyn and I was then Brooklyn for maybe a year and a half before I was picked up and brought back to New Haven and they charged me with escape from custody. Now I got an escape from custody, and I've got three cases. I don't really didn't really have nothing from the beginning. I didn't know what we're going on. And they take me to trial in November. They take me to trial for escape. And by the way, this is the most elegant escape I've ever heard of. Right, They actually told you to walk out, So this is the most peaceful escape in the history of escapes. Just like off you go, like take a walk. So you later get on the train, go home, Thank you very much. Okay, So now they're charging you with escape. The previous warrant. They still didn't tell you what it is. I later found out it was lostity in the second degree. Okay, Larson in the second magree. Okay, so another thing. So they brought you to try out and they charged you with all three crimes, just escape. That's later. We talked about six right now. So they charged me with escape. So now they convict me. Now you had a lawyer, right, yeah, I had a lawyer, but it wasn't Sometimes you say bootleg, and I think that's what this was. This was the bootleg of fleet markets, you know, the fleet market lawyer. He wasn't in my best interests at all. What was going on? I guess, like I said, if the system wanted to take you out of society for whatever reason, they will do it no matter what laws they have to break. Saying that they are enforcing the laws, but they're breaking the laws. Because it would seem like a relatively simple argument for a lawyer to make to say, well, the sheriff told my client to leave and he left doesn't seem to meet the definition of escape, but that he didn't even bother them out that argument. They charged me with escape from custody. End. So the assist the part where I did escape, because escape, yeah, this is the escape. This is now, this is the escape. Wins they did that once they did that from walking out and they told me to walk out that day, November twentieth, the prosecutors said to me, now you're convicted, what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna have you charged as a serious persistent felony offender. I had no cases, I had no charges, I had no felon needs except the escape that you just convicted me on. He says, I'm going to charge you as a serious persistent felony offender. And you're going downstairs in the lock up. And this was before one o'clock that day I was convicted, and at two o'clock you're coming back upstairs and we're gonna pick another jury, and all that jury has to do just say that you're guilty as a persistent fellow the offender. And the sheriff right here that within the courtroom during the trial, he's a witness, and the snographal that's sitting right there, she's a witness that you just was convicted and you've got another felony. They're going to testify to that. And if the jury sees that, they can double up and give you instead of ten years for walking out for the escape. That's when I escaped, and then how did you escape this time? Because it's really amazing because I'm sitting here thinking, well, if they're gonna charge me with an escape, and I'm gonna show them what escape blows. Last what I did. And that day when I went downstairs, I left catching, I went through, I went, I just went through the control room. I opened up the door, I walked out the fence. I walked up the driveway. I walked onto the New Haven Green and I sat there for a minute, took off my suit and I had my short tilling of that because I was one trial for I had I would staff. I had a dress suit on and I had gym shorts underneath that. So I just took that off, took my suit over, left it, throw it in the garbage, and I just walked down the Elm Street and I've seen somebody with a car and they gave me a ride to the train station and I got on the train and I went back to Brooklyn. And when I got back in Brooklyn, I was again charged with escape from custody until I was picked up on March fifteenth, nine teen eight. Now that's just where this comes in. That so March now wow, and here we are two thousand eighteen. It's not hard to do the math on that one. And then you never saw daylight again from that point until two thousand seventeen, until November twenty one, two thousand and seventeen. That was when I've seen freedom as I known it to be. So it's so recent too, it's really uh just started processing this right now. Um. You eventually ended up getting picked up this now third time, charged with an escape that was an actual escape. And it's interesting listening to you talk about it because you make it sound like it was so easy, but it couldn't have been that easy. I mean, they make it serious. I was just furious, become furious. I mean what they did, what they did, I was just so furious. I just left. Yeah, you left, but I mean again, like it doesn't people can't just leave. I mean you had to put some I don't know how you did it. It's still that it's still sort of mister me. I'm trying to picture of the different doors and walls and things. But you got out. So now here it is you're back in custody, and this time they're gonna try you for this sexual assault at robbery that you know nothing about, and now you have another public defender, And was this guy any better than the other guy? No, this wasn't him. This was her, Patricia buck Wolf. She was an advocate for batted women, for women of sexual ships, but sheltered women and women in crisis and everything else. So I didn't have no defense at all. I just sat there during the whole trial, and the state put on their case. It was my five hundred and twenty pages in the transcript and nothing with me. So she was from the picture that you're painting. It sounds like he didn't have a lot of interest because she was looking at it like if they're charging you, you must be guilty, and she wants to take the side of the woman, and it was. It was a terrible case. Nobody, nobody, would you know, whatever want this to happen to anybody. But that doesn't mean that you don't deserve a fair trial, and it doesn't mean that we should convict the wrong guy, which is exactly what happened. Is what happens too frequently in this country, and people, I think would expect that there would be a system of justice that wouldn't totally break down in the way that it did in your case over and over again. It's not like there was one time, and I mean like you had multiple opportunities for the justice system to work in your favor, as just a regular law abiding citizen deserves and would expect, and every single time it almost got worse. I mean here, they basically sounds like and I don't know whether they did it on purpose, but they probably stuck you with a lawyer that was the least likely one to want to really mount an aggressive defense for you in this case. How long did the trial? Who the trial went from the fourth to the detail at the eleven. The next day they sent into me nine o'clock in the morning. But I didn't find out about Patricia buck Wolf until two thousand and eight. It was a prejudice did because of the case and what she represented, and I didn't know that. I found out out years later. I found that out. And you know what's ironic about that, Leroy, is that you can't escape the fact that in doing what she did, which was not defending you and not getting to the truth, what she actually did is allowed the actual perpetrator to remain free to abuse more women. She broke the law she was, she broke the law. But also if her goal which we can agree with, which is to help battered women and to be an advocate for women who are in suffering and abused, if that was her goal, she actually accomplished the opposite thing, because not only did she do a grave injustice see you, but also any other woman that the actual perpetrator went and and abused. Those women would never have been victimized if the system would have worked, and if she and the other people would have done their job and they would have actually figured out that you were innocent and gone and found the guy who's a bad guy and should be off the streets and should be in prison. So she actually did a terrible disservice to women by using this twisted logic that she had in just disregarding your guilt or innocence and throwing you to the well, throwing you to the wolves. Right, you end up getting sentenced to eight years eighty years in prison. I mean, how did you even managed to deal with that? You've already been wrongfully arrested multiple times, charged wrongly multiple times in and out of prison escapes. You've already had like a nightmarish journey and now comes the ultimate, which is an eighty year sentence. I mean, you had at this point, you had a wife and a child and a life that you were supposed to be living, and you're being pulled away from all of that and basically sentenced to die in prison. You weren't gonna live another eighty years. No, I wasn't, but I knew that I had to fight this. April eleven nine, they gave me eighty year sentence, and I said from that day I gotta fight him. And let's go back for secondly, Roy and talk about this case, because this was a terrible crime, right. There were three guys who stole a car and some money from somebody, and then there were two young ladies in the car who ended up they and the terrible twist of faith, they ended up making a wrong turn and getting stuck on the dead end and then running basically into a more or less a roadblock that these guys who had just stolen this other car were able to sort of box them in, and so they were sexually assaulted and robbed. They knew they had three perpetrators, right, and they had two of them. They had caught two of them, is that right. No, they had a whole lot of suspects, James Pooky, Round Trees, Smith, Shepherd, lingle With, They had a whole lot of people that they thought that was a potential suspect that never came out because they wanted, I guess, to punish me, and so I was punished for that. And today, as I said before you, I have proven that November one, even prior to that, that it wasn't me and everything that they knew all of them years, it was because of a prosecutor named James Clark. He was being vindictive. He was mad because I left the first time, and then after they tried to get double up and give me twenty years for walking out the door. He was mad about that. That's when I escaped and they gave me the ten years and absencia. When they brought me back in custody, I was sentenced to ten years. So he did that while I was on the run, and so he it was just being vengeful. He just wanted to hurt me, just to hurt me, you know, because I left, and showing me that he got the power. I got the power. So I'm gonna take it life. I don't care me take it, and that's what he did, even though he knew and held the evidence at the time from day one showed that I had nothing to do with it, that I wasn't there, you know, I wasn't even supposed to have been a suspect. He knew that from day one, He knew that from a D three and all the documentation shows that clearly, all the evidence. But he took me to trial in eighty nine and had me suffer for twenty nine years, taking that I would die in prison because this conversation around the water fountain was he'll be catching up the mats and when he get out, he'll be doing this. He'll be doing that for nothing. So this was a vicious person. Yeah, it's um, it's really hard to figure out how people can go so far wrong that they can just sentence somebody like you to spend the rest of their life in prison and then go home and have a nice dinner coach leeve, you know, just go on with their lives like nothing happened. But as unfortunately, there's a lot of people out there like that. There are there are good people in the justice system, and I always say that, and we need a justice system, and we need when you're in trouble, you need to be able to call somebody, need to be able to call a cop. Absolutely that we need judges, but they're just too damn many of these people like this guy who have no conscience and have no and and really have no interest in justice at all because again, and I make this point over and over again, when they lock up the wrong guy, they don't lock up the right guy, and that guy is free to go out and terrorize the community. And in your case, it was proven with d n A that you were innocent, but they also had other evidence. They knew that the witnesses had said that they didn't know you. I mean there was nobody that places. You had to see the crowd that nobody even knew who you were. Even the victims told them that. And September three, when they arrested me the eighteen four the documentation that I have that says that when they asked the victims, is this the guy? They said no, he had nothing to do with it. But in eighty nine, everybody comes parading in there because the clock. Do you see the man? Do you know Lee Ray Harris? No? From the witness do you see the man in the courtroom. Let the record reflect that the victim just made an identification of defended. Okay, you may step down, Come on next with do you know Leroy Hard? No, you ever seen them before? No? Uh, tell us what happened? Do you see the person in court? Let the record reflect that the victim just made the identification of the defend Okay, step down, called the next person. And we know now that the Supreme Court of Connecticut has outlawed those type of practices. Right, so under today's rules, they would not have been able to do that because obviously that's a suggestive identification technique and it's been in use for a long time. But luckily now no one else will be able to be um wrongly identified as you were in that corp room that day using those same tactics. And why do you think that those witnesses changed their story six years later? Well, I think that Clark told them that because they said it in the Habeast trial that um, we came to court because you come to court to identify a person, and Clark told them it was me, He's the prosecutor this or documented. He put them in the room on the side and said that looking there, that's him right there. There's all documented. And by the way, we also know that so many different studies have shown how memory works. Right, First of all, you look different six years later. Everybody looks different six years later. The memory of some of an event that happened six years earlier is going to be foggy at best. Right, people can't even make a correct identification, you know, a day later in most cases, in many cases, right in your case here it is all these years later, and the suggestive techniques, a borderline course of techniques that were used could cause a person to either who knows whether they knew at the time that they were actually identifying an innocent person, and maybe they were threatened if they didn't do that. Well, I don't know if we'll ever know the answer to that one or whether they just were mistaken. But the fact is, going back to this should have never proceeded past that point because they knew, and later on DNA proved it, and the witnesses have also come clean and said that they knew that you weren't the guy. So it's really, uh, it's it's a fucking tragedy, is what it is. I like to talk about how you know. When people are listening, most people's reactions is going to be, well, that could never happen to me, But what what would you say to that. I wouldn't say that it couldn't happen because it couldn't happen to anybody. It happened to me. I mean a lot of times we look and we see something happened to somebody and that's the first thing we said, that could never happen to me. But right, And that's one reason that it's it's important that we talked about your background because the fact that you came from a good family, that you were a law abiding citizen who had never been in trouble. I think a lot of people jumped to conclusions they think, well, if this guy was convicted, he must have done something right. There's a lot I hear that from people sometimes, even people that you know, you think are good, you know, good hearted people, but they have a negative preconception that's been caused by years of pressed or different things. But it's important that people be educated to the fact that that's not the way it is. And it happens to so many people. A big percentage of our clients at the Innocence Project are people like you who had no prior record. They just got caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time, or mistakenly arrested as you were in the first place. And then once the justice system gets you in its grasp, they just grind you up and spit you out in too many cases. When you were in prison, can you talk about what was the best and what was the worst thing that happened in those twenty nine years. Well, I think the saddest part for me was just being in a cell, because you know, you you learn a lot in the cell. You learn about yourself, and you learned that that cell can mint out a hell of a punishment if you're not strong, and what I mean by that if you don't have a purpose. And my purpose was getting my life back. So what I did while I was confined was started to improve myself, learning the law, helping people that couldn't read or write l b A Literacy Volunteers of America. I was one of the tutorers for that, just getting involved with all types of educational and vocational skills to just keep my mind focus and try to have some type of normalcy. And then and not just going with the flow with the prison antics or just the common flow in prison, gambling, running around, smoking, you know, to some people Pruneo getting high. No, I wasn't doing those things. My focus was getting my life back. So I stayed in the life, very red, thousands of cases, wrote a couple of books, put organizations together. I made sure kept briefs and stuff in the courts face, letting them know, hey, you know what you did, and I'm not going away and I'm not going away. And this is where caring and them come in, Vanessa and them coming in. But I've been fighting them for years and you know, arguing, fighting, and they came in and seeing that what the hell is this? And so the Innisence Project took your case in two thousand fourteen. And how did you receive the news that the Inniscence Project was taking your case? Because that's got to be a big day. Yeah, that was a big day. I received that through um Mindy ger Amount. She came up to see me and we talked and she told me this is what's going on, and me I was pro se. So they wouldn't give it to me, but I didn't want it to go nowhere. So when she came up, she went and made sure everything was we're supposed to be and sealed it up. And that brings us the way we are right now today. We know that at the Innocence Project, it does take even after we take a case. It's not like there's no magic, you know, like it's still a lot of work, still hundreds of thousands of hours of legal work. And in your case, it took three years. Let's talk about how this thing ended up because the justice system still had one more, one more the way that they really wanted to fuck you, right, and forgive my language, but I can't think of another word that fits the situation. So um, yeah, here it is three years go by, the Innocence Project is working on your case. You have now from going from having some of the worst legal representation anybody's ever had, now you have some of the best legal representation anybody's ever had. So now you've got hope and the day comes when finally the DNA has found it's proven that you're innocent. But the justice system's got one more trick up its sleeve. Talk about that, because you ultimately were forced to take an Alfred please right, and which is not a common thing. I mean, people hear about it on the show, but only six of cases end up with Alfred please, so it still too big of a number. But it's not like it's an everyday thing. It's reserved for for very special circumstances. And the offer plea in a nutshell, allows the prosecutors to maintain their conviction, if you want to call it that right to sort of not admit that they were wrong, while you can be freed. Right, that's the best part of it, and you can go out there and say I'm in a sent But in terms of the eyes of the law, it forces you to plead guilty to a lesser crime in order to be free. Is that that's fair? Yes, yes, yes, But what I believe is that in this situation here they dismissed the case. They gave me the opportunity to plead under the alpha doctrine. But to me, it was like, rather than stay and can in, you to go through the nonsense, because that's what it was all of them years. When they knew they had to turn me loose, they wanted to still keep a conviction that they know doesn't even really exist. So they dismissed the rapes, they dismissed the robberies, and they gave me a kidnap. They said, pretty guilty to a kid now, and we're gonna let you go home. What type of fiction is that you've been in twenty nine years for this? We're dismissing that right now. That's twenty feet all of that. But take kid now and we're gonna let you go home or else or else you stay in another fifteen years until we decide to think about doing something. But the conviction had already been They just dismissed it on the twenty one in November. So they dismissed it only after you agree to take the offer. Right, They dismissed everything, and then they told me this is what it's going to be. It was all dismissed. Wait wait, wait, I don't think we're making it clear here. So on November one, what happened on November twenty one? I went in the courtroom and it was a hearing. They said, well, in this hearing, you know, they just talked about the case and we're gonna dismiss it today. But you're gonna plead under the alpha doctrine. The kidnap, but the robberies and the sexual assaults are dismissed. Dismissed. Now we're going to put you to plea because otherwise they're going to keep Otherwise you're going to stay in until we decide ten twenty more years under the kidnapping charge. Yeah, but it was never no kidnapp so the yeah, it's real. What I'm saying is that day put me to plea on a fiction on something that never happened. First they dismissed all the charges, and then a half an hour later they tell me, please to kidnap and you can go home. But if I'm listening to this at home, I'm saying to myself, what if they dismissed all the charges, there's nothing And by now the Innistence project had proven with science everybody was there that you weren't the guy. So it's so it's so crazy like that they could just pull this kidnap out of thin air. I don't even understand that. I'm neither I do this for me neither, wow, but I'm here. But that's that's what it is right now. Kidnap, You got a kidnap. You got a kidnapp from I don't know where. But we gave it to you, like we gave you the robbery, we gave you to sect yourself. We gave you a warrant, we gave you this. Now we're gonna give you a kidnap, right, And this is a kidnap when you say it's a kidnap that not only you weren't involved with, but it's a kidnap that never even happened. The warrant never happened. This we prove never happened. The escape, the first one never happened. You told me to leave, the second one I did. But now here's because something else that we've given you was this an actual, real kidnapping of a human. It's just to just pull them out of We're just gonna charge you with you give me a kidnap. You go home today, But we're gonna give you a kidnap. So you got you. You still got a felony now, but it's kidnapped. So did you kidnap the Lynnburg baby or Patty Hurst? I don't know who. They don't even tell you. I don't know who that was. Just that's the fiction. That's the fiction. And I'm here today because I truly believe fIF of something. It's better than nothing. And I did not want to sit in jail another ten fifteen years fighting when they already knew from day one. It's already proven now in two dollars than seventeen prior to that has been proven with the Innocent Project, everything's clear, not just do d NA, but do everything. Documents that evidence that everything that the victims of everything, It's already been clear. But this is what we're gonna do. We gave you everything else, we're gonna give you this to walk with that. So and the practical effect to that is that you now have to live with the conviction on your record. You're convicted selling that never happened, and you have to live with the stigma of having participated in a fictional kidnapping of a fictional person that was made up by somebody with a crazy, vindictive imagination. And the reason why they want to do that is because it means that you can't see what alked. What they say, Yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons. And and that's just another thing that's really so difficult to to accept. The idea that society owes you a huge debt and they want to pull the rug out from under you instead one more time and say we're not going to allow you to sue a good you know, goodbye and good luck, or they don't even say that, but you know what I mean. Now, on the other hand, you've got a lot of life left to live, right, you do have a beautiful family. You are able to just carry on and you're here now. Actually was your beautiful wife. And that's an amazing story. Just switching subjects for a second. So your story is actually a love story, and it's remarkable and that um, I don't know if I've ever heard of anything quite like it before. Because you were married when when this nightmare started, and you're still married to the same person, and you have grandchildren now, and your wife Gwendolyn, who's here in the studio when who looks a little like a rock star. She waited for you the whole time you're in prison. M let's just take a moment and and and think about that. I mean, that is that is an extraordinary person that would do that, And how much does that mean to you? That meant the world to me because I wasn't looking for that because I was in prison and I figured that, you know, I wouldn't want to see nobody suffered the way I would have to suffer. And I think that that, to me was a form of imprisonment. And I didn't want her to feel that she had to stay with me because I was confined. I wanted her to go on with her life because I can understand. But she chose to be there and to hold on with me, and you know, I'm I'm grateful for that. And it was only by the grace of God that it happened. And I I, you know, I respect that and I love her with all my That's beautiful. And tell me about your You have a daughter, yes, India. Yeah, and then she has two children. Yeah, my grandson Trap he's fifteen twenty two of this month, February. And my granddaughter Jules, she just turned eight to seventeen for last month. Dead mother. She's uh, an amazing woman. That's my daughter. I'm very proud of her. I see that, and that's really a blessing. You know the fact that you had this support system while you're inside, and I see when you talk about it, obviously that was a part of your survival. Real Yes, it was Obviously you have the support system with the Innocence Project, and you have your family, which is great because many many people come out in your circumstance, come out to nobody and nothing. But still there's a lot that you're gonna need to really get to where you deserve to be. People listening, I want to do something for this guy. What what could people do? How could they help? Well, my organization is called to Help the Needy Foundation, and that's something that I established from prison. You know, it's to put people back on track. Our mission on our model is to be peaceful, be respectful, enjoy yourself. So it's just helping those in need, homeless, helping the youth get back on track with vocational and educational training to try to help them build their self esteem. You know, it's just it helped me. I'm I'm an example of that. This is what got me and this is why I'm who I am today And you can email me at Leroy Harris sixty at yahoo dot com. That's my email address. So we right before we sign off, we have a tradition here and wrong for Conviction, which is at the end of the show, I'd like to turn the microphone and let you share anything else that's on your mind that you want to talk about anything at all. Well, just you know, being here today it's an honor. And just being out and back into the hustle and bustle. Have an enormously once again seeing life as I known it to be, family, friends unleashed. You know, it's amazing. It's ain't no better feeling after twenty nine years in the cage. There's no better feeling than this. It gets no better than this. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review. Wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps. And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project and I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future wrong for convictions. Go to Innocence Project dot org to learn how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wardis. The music in the show is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam is a production of Lava for Good podcasts and association with signal Company Number one

Wrongful Conviction

Hosted by celebrated criminal justice reform advocate and founding board member of the Innocence Pro 
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