into this classroom turned heads. Um, you are Your story is the story of the Central Park. Five is the story of the exonerated five. Can you share with us who you were in April 1989 and what happened to you. But one of the one of the beautiful things about my story, my personal story, my personal journey is that I've often equated it with a love story between God and his
So Richard is the only person this particular prosecutor allowed-- joined us in, that wasn't a DNA case. was to get people exonerated , the end.
me get that started because his heartbreak was after Trayvon Martin's uh killer was uh exonerated by the jury he said why is it that if you see a black kid wearing a hoodie you think
These problems happen here in California as well. He was completely exonerated .
People fight too hard to get credit that they think they deserve, but that other people don't necessarily think they deserve. And when we feel blamed, we tend to work too hard to get exonerated of that blame. And like many other things in life and work, the underlying issue, the underlying contribution that you did or didn't make, or mistake you did or didn't make, is often much less important than what you do about it afterwards.
So Richard is the only person this particular prosecutor allowed-- joined us in, that wasn't a DNA case. And with Richard's story or the exonerated five, it's very, very easy to feel for them, but for people
So Richard is the only person this particular prosecutor allowed-- joined us in, that wasn't a DNA case. Yes, so I was exonerated in 2012, and I started Miles of Freedom.
He tell me how great this Mr. Bryan Stevenson is. How many men and women need to be exonerated before we as a country decide that enough is enough?
with legislators, with decision makers, with judges, with prosecutors, with defense lawyers, with everyone what this work is all about are our clients, the exonerated . And so we are really privileged today to have here Kevin Richardson, one of the defendants in the Central Park Five case.
So she went to prison for three years. The whole time her husband worked to have her exonerated . He finally had some microbiological studies done of the infant's brain.
We see some circumstance or some person. Now, he was eventually exonerated .
awakened from your stupor where you realize that you are the modern day character in the Matrix. You are Neil, beautiful on the bottom. It says exonerated five. And this is actually a piece of a piece of art that I created
So if the first sample comes back positive, they run the test on the second sample. And if that then comes back negative, then that athlete is exonerated because running a second test, even if it's no more accurate than the first, can dramatically reduce the rate of false positives.
And surprisingly, Jim came to believe him, got his entire record, read it, was sure that he was innocent, and wound up committing to him using his own money, got him exonerated within three years. And once Jim graduated from seminary a year later, he decided this was going to be his life's work.
And so I don't think it hasn't really changed me, per se. It pains me when I think about these stories or when I listen to them or I meet people who have been exonerated , it's painful, quite honestly.
Fortunately the bad math went away. The good math took over and she was released, she was exonerated , and found innocent later on. But the idea that we find reasons why things happen is not necessarily a bad one.
you, you might end up--. They might say, "OK, OK. It was you who did that, but now I don't wanna work with you anymore. Now you're unpleasant as a colleague and collaborator." And similarly, you might push so hard to be exonerated of a minor mistake or oversight--. First of all, doing that might mean that you have to then blame someone else. So one of the lessons of this book is not to rush to judgment, not to act impulsively, but instead
Sina's guilty. Having to prove yourself innocent, Um, full of hope and thus the name of the character Amal means hope, and that's what we wanted to build it around. So I met Yussef in the spring of 1999 at Hunter College, and at that time he had not yet been exonerated . Andi walked into our classroom and the professor immediately knew who he was. It took us some time because the Central Park Five jogger case had happened 10 years prior and
It became a lot more sophisticated. When you look at wrongful incarcerations, especially Dallas, I mean, we had like 60 something people that's been exonerated , and I believe 53 of those 60 something individuals are all African-Americans.
We have 30 cases sitting in a drawer waiting for us. We're working on 25 cases, but the work is overwhelming, and it takes years and years and years to get somebody exonerated . Richard's case was unusual in that one of the things we do just routinely is, we file for Freedom of Information Act
And so we also brought it to the prosecutor, who at that time was being very open to DNA cases. His name was Craig Watkins, and he was freeing a lot of people through DNA testing, allowing DNA testing to go forward and get people exonerated . And we brought him this case, and thank goodness, he hated the prosecutor who worked on Richard's case,
So Richard is the only person this particular prosecutor allowed-- joined us in, that wasn't a DNA case. Now, if you look them up, all of the names that I just named have been released, and they've been exonerated .
But there was a major investigation across Whitehall investigation in the '60s that was done as a direct result of the defection of Philby. Now, Philby, of course, had been suspected in the '50s, and indeed left SIS, but he'd been exonerated . He bluffed it out, essentially.
These problems happen here in California as well. And we do have one individual, Obie Anthony, who also works for Death Penalty Focus as a justice advocate, who was serving life without possibility of parole and he was exonerated .
Which she actually just put together a panel here. Of people on, you know, two people that were on Death Row, that actually through a long and I'm sure arduous process, that they'll tell you about, were exonerated . And also a former warden at San Quentin that can show you that perspective.