00:00:02
Speaker 1: On July twenty first, nineteen ninety seven, a young man was fatally shot while being driven past a building in Brooklyn, New York. The driver, Carlos Bethune, told police that he hadn't seen the shooter, but later named a resident of that building, Jermaine Archer, who ran for his life from Bethune, the victim's family, and the police. In retaliation, Jermaine's brother was shot but survived. Soon tensions cooled when the family figured out who the actual shooter was, but the police stayed stuck on Jermaine and Carlos Bethune went along for the ride. This is Wrongful Conviction. You're listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early and ad free by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to Wrong for Conviction. Today's episode, well, let's just say it features a man named Jermaine Archer, who I consider a friend and a personal hero. And I'm so glad to welcome you to the show, Jermaine, because this is the story people need to hear. So first of all, I'm glad you're here.

00:01:24
Speaker 2: Thanks for coming, thanks for inviting me to the show.

00:01:26
Speaker 3: And I want to shout out my attorney, Peter Cross, who's here with me, who's been with me through the fire. When a bunch of other people walked away, attorneys included Peter, didn't go nowhere.

00:01:35
Speaker 2: Peter stood here, worked with me pro bono.

00:01:37
Speaker 3: He believed in me, he believed in my innocence, and eventually he helped me.

00:01:41
Speaker 1: Prove it well. I was about to introduce Peter, but you did a much better job than I could have possibly done. So thank you for that, and Peter, thanks for coming on the show. My pleasure. Let's go back in time, Jermaine. You grew up in Brooklyn.

00:01:56
Speaker 3: Brooklyn, New York, Massy Projects and then eventually Flatbush back it. My childhood was great. I mean, we weren't rich by any means. I'm the seventh of eleven or twelve, whoever you want to believe. My father says eleven, my mother says twelve. She said my father went and had another child. We don't know about what. We were kind of separated through the years. I grew up with five boys and one girl living in my apartment, and I just always felt protected, like I'm the seventh, the baby, and the family on that side, and my mother went to work at five in the morning. She didn't come home till sometime nine o'clock at night. But we had everything we needed. I might have didn't have the latest, most expensive sneakers that I might have wanted, but it was nothing but love.

00:02:36
Speaker 2: Growing up in.

00:02:37
Speaker 1: Brooklyn and you were growing up in the nineties, which was a crazy time, rife with street crime and police violence and corruption and those go together sometimes unfortunately, and of course the news media, any crime that happened, they would amplify it as alt saying if it bleeds, it leads, and then that would of course drive the pressure on the police to make arrests and for ultimately people to get convicted.

00:03:03
Speaker 3: I would say because of the Giuliani Pataki tough on crime era, I know personally fifteen people that were wrongly convicted. It was five district attorneys across New York City that were just prosecuting people. It didn't matter if they got the right person for the crime. They were holding witnesses hostage, they were holding witnesses in hotels, they were paying witnesses and lying about it. They were using drug addicts to testify.

00:03:30
Speaker 1: And when you lock up the wrong person, the right person remains free. And everybody's endangerous.

00:03:34
Speaker 3: And it wasn't about making the streets safer. It was about incarcerating as many black and brown bodies as they could from poor communities.

00:03:42
Speaker 2: Who was going to really complain?

00:03:43
Speaker 1: And when this crime took place, it was the time. For people who can remember this far back, it was the same summer as Abner Louima.

00:03:53
Speaker 3: First off, Abner Louima was violated by the same precinct that investigating eventually charged me, in this case seven to zero Precinct.

00:04:01
Speaker 1: So for those who don't recall, Admir Luimo was scooped up from the scene of a fight and was brought back to the seventieth precinct where he was not only brutally beaten by the police, but was also and brace yourself, I'm sorry I have to even say this, but he was sexually assaulted with a broomstick. Thankfully, those officers were charged and convicted. But this was the precinct where just a few weeks before, in late July, there was some friction between two groups Jermaine's family and friends at twenty Westminster Road, and the victim Patrick Niles. His people, specifically his older brother Ronaldo, and a guy named Carlos Bethune.

00:04:42
Speaker 3: Carlos Betun was Ronaldo's right hand man, that was his friend. I only knew him as the short, chubby guy that's always with Ronaldo. I didn't even know his name until this case actually happened. I didn't know Ronaldo's name. We called him Crocodile because he got a long face. Crocodile is crocodile a Spanish, but cocodrillo, and that's his nickname. We didn't give him that name. He was known for violence. He was a street guy. I can't really say that I've witnessed him do certain things that other people said he did, but I know he was one not to be played with.

00:05:09
Speaker 2: I know that.

00:05:10
Speaker 3: Looking back, I understand that they was just troubled young people like me, and that was involved in some things we probably had no business being involved in.

00:05:18
Speaker 1: And that sets the stage for July twentieth, nineteen ninety seven.

00:05:22
Speaker 3: July twentieth, nineteen ninety seven, I was walking down the street with a friend of mine. We wanted to go to the store, and there was a girl sitting on a bike and she was talking to a couple of people from the neighborhood that we knew.

00:05:33
Speaker 2: I asked her if I could borrow her bike. She looked hesitant.

00:05:36
Speaker 3: I was like, I'm gonna give you back your bike, and my friend offered her some money to hold. It was like a lot of money. So the guy she was talking to, Ronaldo he felt, showed up and he snatched the bike and said, YO, don't ever disrespect me again. And I was like, we cool, Like where's this coming from. He had just given me a ride the other day to my sister's house, so we grew up together.

00:05:55
Speaker 2: I didn't know.

00:05:56
Speaker 3: I found out later that his father died that night. That's where the attitude was coming from. But I didn't know. I was like, no problem, they ain't even worth it. I went back in front of my building. I told my brother Michael what happened, because they were the same age, and he said, just stay in front of the building.

00:06:10
Speaker 2: I'll talk to him in the morning. I don't know, maybe he going through something.

00:06:12
Speaker 3: A little while later, as I'm walking to the store, he pulled up in the car and pulled out a gun. The people that I was with ran except one. He said, Yo, I know you went and got a gun. Don't make me leave you. One brother's less, all this craziness, and then he leaves again. I go back and tell my brother again, and my brother tells me stay upstairs for the night. The next day, I'm in the house the entire day with my children's mother. I don't want to go outside. I want my brother to be able to talk to him. I don't know what he's going to do. I don't know if he's going to send anybody. He's notorious. People knows who he is.

00:06:44
Speaker 1: So the kids who hung out in front of Jermaine's building twenty Westminster Road, they were aware of the danger from Ronaldo and his crew while doing what they normally did. And the police, well, they were doing what they normally did.

00:06:55
Speaker 2: Normally.

00:06:56
Speaker 3: We were on the corner shooting dice, smoking weed, drinking beer, talking to girls. It was literally like that was the hangout. But that night I stood in front of the building. This is those days of tough on crime. The police came. They did this almost every night. They would search us literally two or three times a night.

00:07:12
Speaker 2: So they came.

00:07:13
Speaker 3: They put us on a wall, even in front of my building. They patted everybody down that was there, and they drove off. When they drove off, I got up. I went to the alley to piss. While I was in the alley, I was talking to three girls in the window and I'm joking with them like this is kind of heavy because y'all hold this for me, wash your hands. I'm having fun with these girls the things we do in the neighborhood. And while we're all talking, one of them stuck ahead back in the window. The other two stood While we were talking. We heard three shots, so they literally had eyes on me when the shots were fired. After that, I'm trying to get my stuff together because i don't know what's going on. I'm thinking it's Ronaldo. He's back, he's shooting at us.

00:07:50
Speaker 1: But it wasn't Ronaldo. Out in front of the building, Carlos Bethune had driven by and someone shot into the car, killing Ronaldo's brother Patrick Niles.

00:08:00
Speaker 2: I go up to my roof.

00:08:01
Speaker 3: My best friend comes up to the roof and I'm like why, and he's like, what are you asking me for? I don't know, and so I'm thinking it's going to be a problem. Because they notorious. They got guns. They gangsters. Why would this guy do this in front of Like, I'm upset at the time, I don't know what's going on now.

00:08:17
Speaker 1: The police came to investigate, and luckily a neighbor kid named Kester Jones saw the whole thing and was interviewed. However, that doesn't seem to have been memorialized.

00:08:27
Speaker 4: Kester thinks he was interviewed. I don't know if it was in fact by the police. He had been playing basketball at the park down the street. His apartment was all the way at the end of the block, and so as he was walking home, he happened to be there when this happened. He saw the guys outside Germaine's apartment building, and he didn't want to walk by there because you know, he didn't want to get haressed. So he was trying to get over to the other side of the street, and that's how he was right there behind it when he saw exactly what happened.

00:08:55
Speaker 3: He said he saw a car stop near the first building, which was ten, then he saw another cost by twenty, which was my building, and then he saw someone run into the street and shoot at the car from behind it As he was driving down the block. It went through the back passenger window. It struck a victim behind his right ear and went from right to left. According to the medical examiner, So Carlos Bethune went to the precinct that night and he said, I don't know what happened. I was driving down the block. I heard three shots. I took off. My friend got shot in the head. That must have been true. Three days later he went back to the precinct and said, I lied to y'all.

00:09:32
Speaker 2: Jermaine did it? Bang did it? They called me Bang, Bang did it? Now?

00:09:36
Speaker 3: The story he gave couldn't have been true because one, he's the driver of the car, So the only way you could see somebody shoot your friend in the back of the head is if you're driving looking backwards. But he said Bang came and jumped in front of the car, The car stopped, ran to the side, and shot the passenger in the head. The medical examine a proof that couldn't have happened that way because there was no stippling, There was no gunpowder residue on the person's head. The crime scene invests to get it said it couldn't happen that way because the bullet didn't come through the passenger window. It came through the back window, so none of the stuff he said lined up, But he said I did it. We found out later Ronaldo convinced Carlos to implicate me so that they could track me down.

00:10:14
Speaker 1: So Ronaldo believed Jermaine had done it, even though the folks at twenty Westminster knew otherwise. And now, as the result, Jermaine was in real danger.

00:10:23
Speaker 3: So I'm not trying to get shot for something I didn't do, and I'm not trying to get arrested for something I didn't do. So I ended up leaving. I went through New Jersey, I came back up state, and I went to Pennsylvania, and eventually I just dropped off my children's mother and my children, and then I just was like living on the road. I was just I had a car. I was just driving back and forth from state to state. I wasn't staying in any place too long because I figured, over time the police realized I didn't do it, and I'll be able to figure out what comes next.

00:10:50
Speaker 1: So while Jermaine was out of town, Rinaldo tried something else to try to smoke him out.

00:10:55
Speaker 3: About three weeks after that, I'm not sure the exact date, but it was August nineteen ninety seven. My brother was at his house in Queen's and Ronaldo pulled up. We're still unsure how he found that way he lived or Ronaldo pulled up on him. He was with his daughter and they just shot him up.

00:11:11
Speaker 1: And Carlos Bethune was allegedly the driver. Now, miraculously Jermaine's brother lived, and now this attempted murder with a surviving witness was looming over them. Meanwhile, about seven months rolled by before the police caught up with Jermaine and Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he was arrested and sent back to New York.

00:11:29
Speaker 3: When they arrested me, they say, you're gonna tell us who did it, or we're gonna lock you up. And I was like, I didn't see the crime. I'm being honest, like I said, I was in the alley, so that was part of the problem.

00:11:39
Speaker 2: I didn't see the crime. Well who did it?

00:11:41
Speaker 3: And I said, you can't put this on me. I remember telling office to that and he said, I'm gonna tell you what's gonna happen.

00:11:47
Speaker 2: I'm gonna lock you up.

00:11:48
Speaker 3: You're gonna go in the lineup and you're gonna get picked out and then you'll take your chances at trial, or you could just tell me who did it right now. And I remember saying something slick like, did jacket don't fit? Everyone knew me I was a petty drug dealer at the time, the jacket don't fit, And as if we had both seen the same movie, he spit right back, I know a good tale. So when Carlos implicated me and the police arrested me, he came to the lineup and said, I'm not really sure, and then he made a phone call, and somebody on the phone call, according to the detective, was trying to convince him not to identify me. My belief was that they wanted to get me back in New York and then let me walk out of the precint where they knew I would be unarmed. Thedn't gonna be down That's what I'm thinking, Like, you're coming out the precinct, you definitely can't defend yourself, and they're gonna be down there.

00:12:49
Speaker 2: But they didn't realize I had a probation violation.

00:12:51
Speaker 1: Which sent him to Rikers Island while the police arrested his child's mother's brother.

00:12:56
Speaker 3: They got him for some drugs and they said, we don't even want you. You just got to save what we need you to save for bang And he said that he didn't see who shot, but that I went to his house and he had a bunch of guns in his house, and I put a bunch of guns in a book bag and came downstairs and started handing him out, which was a cold bloody line.

00:13:13
Speaker 1: And so he was indicted, but Carlos Bethune had still not identified him.

00:13:18
Speaker 3: When they didn't identify me in a lineup, I was thinking, either they're gonna try to work this out or they're going to try the exact street revenge. Rinaldo ended up tracking down my brother said I thought he shot my brother my bag, so I knew by then they knew I didn't do it. So I wasn't really concerned we're going to trial because I didn't think they was going to testify against me. And I found out later that the district attorney and the police Prussian Carlos. It would reach a certain point where he was also hiding from Ronaldo. That's in those transcripts too. He was hiding from Ronaldo because he said According to him, he thought Ronaldo wanted to kill him.

00:13:52
Speaker 1: It appears Carlos was willing to cooperate, which conflicted with Ronaldo's plan to avoid his own charges see King Michael's forgiven for the attempted murder by not helping the prosecutors close his brother's murder case with Jermaine, who it appears they knew was the wrong person, and Jermaine's attorney, Jesse Young, was trying to expose whether or not Carlos had accepted a deal.

00:14:13
Speaker 3: There was back and forth whether they let Carlos off the hook in my brother's shooting. He brought his paperwork to the court and the judge went through his file and they said they couldn't find anything. We knew there was a deal made. We just wasn't sure where the deal was made. We thought it was in Queen's but it wasn't. It was actually in King's County.

00:14:31
Speaker 1: Jermaine's attorney tried to admit Michael Archer as a witness as to why Carlos might have had a reason to testify.

00:14:38
Speaker 3: They wouldn't let my brother testify because he was not a witness to the crime that I was being charged with. What happened on July twenty first, nineteen ninety seven, in front of twenty Westminster Road. If you have nothing to say about that, we're not going to let you come in and testify. So they took me to trial. Carlos said what he said.

00:14:55
Speaker 1: Carlos testified about the confrontations and the lead up to the shooting, and then his alleged EXPERI parents that night, stopping his car near twenty Westminster Road to let a disabled person across the street. Well, such an upstanding guy, right, and then Jermaine allegedly emerged from the minivan, firing into the vehicle. Carlos was cross examined with how that differed from his original statement and how he'd said that he hadn't seen the shooter.

00:15:20
Speaker 3: I had no concerns whatsoever, Like, there's no way they're going to convict me on it because I didn't do it, and also because he don't flip the story a couple of times, and because there's people that saw it that's willing to come and testify. For my children's mother, her sister, and my best friend all came and said it wasn't Bang. Bang was in an alley when it shots fired my children's mother was on the street, so she's seen it. They all testified that it wasn't me.

00:15:43
Speaker 1: And they even named the person who they'd all seen shoot, Patrick Niles. However, being Jermaine's friends and family appears to have hurt their credibility. But what about the other guy, Kester Jones.

00:15:55
Speaker 3: Kester wanted to testify, He was in court To this day, I have no idea why he didn't testify. Kester even recently he brought it up. He said he went to court ready to testify, and someone came and told him, we don't need you.

00:16:07
Speaker 1: But they needed everything they had because Carlos Pethune and the prosecutor strategy appear to have been enough for the jury.

00:16:13
Speaker 3: It's off the record, but one of the jurors reached out to my brother after the trial, not sure how she found them, and said it couldn't get over the nickname Bang.

00:16:22
Speaker 4: Yeah, not helpful.

00:16:23
Speaker 2: Wasn't helpful.

00:16:24
Speaker 3: But my mother named me after Bang Bang Morales. It was a boxer in the seventies, so she nicknamed me after him. But the prosecutor, if you go through the transcripts, she doesn't call me archer, she doesn't call me Jermaine and Bang did this, and Bang did that, and she was emphasizing it. Most people cursed the lawyer out when they get convicted, and I remember just telling him, thank you man, you tried. And I remember my mother telling me that she was hysterical and crying and everything. But to judge Michael Duval actually saw her in the hallway and said, your son should have took a bench trial. Basically, if I had took a bench trial, I would have beat the case of trial.

00:17:00
Speaker 1: Following the verdict, Jermaine's attorney filed the motion to vacate and set aside the verdict, questioning whether the preclusion of Michael Archer had denied jermaine affair trial. Additionally, Jermaine's brothers had secretly recorded alleged confessions from the actual shooter. They had a hearing, but the recordings were difficult to hear. Meanwhile, Ronaldo was trying to avoid his own trial.

00:17:21
Speaker 3: After I got convicted. He sent word through a family friend. He said, let's do what we can to make it right. If you don't press charges against me, I'll make this guy recant the story against your brother. And then Rinaldo convinced Carlos to recant his testimony, which was the second time he changed the story. He turned around and said, I'm not sure it was him. They saying it was this guy I heard they look alike. I don't want to send an acent man in prison. So then he changed the story and then they overturned the conviction.

00:17:50
Speaker 1: At this point, Jermaine was released pending a new trial.

00:17:53
Speaker 3: And then I don't know if specifics of that deal, I'm not going to give here say. I just know that deal fell apart at three four months after that, they changed the story again. It was like, you know what, on second thought, it wasn't. I heard the judge tell Peggy, and this is Assistant District Attorney Peggy Hoffman, you're over trying this case. He's clearly not an angel, but it doesn't look like he did this. The judge told her that it was in an off the record, you know, sidebar, but I heard her and she said, I'm just following instructions from up top your eye. So basically Charles Hines or whoever he delegated, they were saying, we're gonna fight this case all the way through, and they put me back in prison behind.

00:18:31
Speaker 5: Them after I got convicted.

00:18:48
Speaker 2: You know, my children's mother, she had to move on.

00:18:51
Speaker 3: I don't have the best relationship with my three biological children because they didn't bring them up to visit me.

00:18:56
Speaker 2: She had to move on.

00:18:57
Speaker 3: She got into another relationship, had another child, and.

00:18:59
Speaker 2: She had to focus on that. So I suffered from that. I watched my mother grow old in prison.

00:19:04
Speaker 3: My health suffered, my mother's health suffer because she knew I didn't do it.

00:19:08
Speaker 2: Not to say it would have been okay if she knew I did it, but it hurt on more.

00:19:11
Speaker 3: That her baby was in prison for something he didn't do, and she couldn't do anything to help me out, to get me out.

00:19:16
Speaker 2: So this case just destroyed so many people's lives, not just mine.

00:19:22
Speaker 3: I realized my time was the same, whether I was in prison or not, be doesn't matter when I hit that grave, that tombstone, that dash, all of this time count. These twenty two years are gonna go by, and I'm gonna have a twenty two year gap in my resume. I'm gonna be twenty two years older, so I can't do the construction work and all the stuff that I may have been inclined to do. I'm gonna be competing with people that never been in prison in the job market and don't have felonies, and a lot younger and probably better looking at me. So I knew I had to do the best I could. While I was in there. I got my parer legal certification, and I earned a master's degree. I was asleep bachelor's and associates. I joined Carnegie Hall and learned how to play the piano. I taught classes on ag V and AIDS, aggression replacement training, on alternatives to violence, on parenting, on healthy relationships. I would have taken classes on marbles if they offered it. It didn't matter. Whatever was there that was therapeutic, educational, academic. I was a part of it, which made my parole packet over four hundred pages. But I felt like, I'm going to get all of these tools in my tool belt and when I go home, I'll figure out what I can apply.

00:20:25
Speaker 2: But I didn't turn down anything.

00:20:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean not to mention reading, writing, and speaking Spanish, French and German, and creating a Chinese Mandarin language course, the only one ever to be taught inside of New York State Prison. And I think the one thing we must.

00:20:39
Speaker 2: Talk about is voices from within.

00:20:41
Speaker 1: Voices from within, That's what we got to talk about.

00:20:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, I was going there next. So it was me and ten other guys and some of us wrongly convicted, some of us not. It doesn't matter. Some of us were out there doing some things. We weren't living the best life. How can we pay our debt to society? How can we make a better community, How can we come together and just be assets even from the inside. It started out as advocacy lobbying. We were bringing senators and legislators and judges and community activists into the prison, hosting town halls, and eventually we specialized in preventing youth gun violence because we realized who better to deter them from that behavior than people that was either a victim of it that were perpetrators of it. So we created workshops, We created a curriculum choices, choose a healthier options and confront in every situation. And we were doing exercises play back theater where a young person to come in and explain how they had got in trouble and then they get to pick people to re enact that and they would see it play out in front of their eyes and then they could see where they could have made a different decision instead of us just saying that was wrong, Maybe you should have did this.

00:21:48
Speaker 2: And there were other exercises that we did.

00:21:49
Speaker 3: We were able to get people that's incarcerated to have more time with their non incarcerated youth in their life. I believe that was one of the most impactful programs that I was a part of. I'm glad to have created it, and I feel like we also created a fraternity through that program all of us are still close to this day. I think Voices from Within has the power to really change young people's trajectory because it's not those typical listen I did thirty years.

00:22:16
Speaker 2: Let me tell you what it is. It's caring. They don't care how much you know.

00:22:19
Speaker 3: They want to know how much you care, and we actually showed them that we care about you.

00:22:23
Speaker 1: Jermaine kept himself very busy in prison, including with a program that was very important to other former guests on Wrongful Conviction podcast. It was actually recently featured Get This in the OSCAR nominated film Sing Sing, And of course I'm talking about a theater program called Rehabilitation through the Arts or RTA.

00:22:43
Speaker 3: I have to say one, I'm the executive director now, but two, rehabilitation due to OZ gave me a childhood that I never had really as a teenager, I felt like I was grown when I got to rehabilitation, to to Oars, I was able to do goofy things.

00:22:56
Speaker 2: Again. I was too cool to do that in high school. I was like, I'm not doing that, I'm not doing foolishness.

00:23:00
Speaker 3: But we rolled around the floor, we danced, We created safe spaces in there and the arts heals. So many people went through rehabilitation and either ended up going to college or they ended up creating their own programs, and I have to put that front and center. We created voices from within. I was already a member of rehabilitation through the arts. We took some of the exercises to incorporate it, tweaked it to fit out purposes, But a lot of that came from rehabilitation to the arts. Because people on RTA knew my name. I wasn't a cell number, I wasn't a department identification number.

00:23:31
Speaker 2: I was Jermane Like. It actually restored humanity as so many of us.

00:23:34
Speaker 1: In addition is staying busy with programs. Jermaine also continued to fight his case. He was denied on his direct appeal, and then in two thousand and three he found out about a recording that Ronaldo had made of conversations with Carlos Bethune, which may have been missed by his attorney during his motion to vacate the verdict.

00:23:53
Speaker 3: Somehow, my mother ran into a private investigator, Kevin Hinkson. He turned over all the files in the case. I didn't read realized that there was a recorded transcript between Ronaldo and Carlos Bethune. When I took my time and started going to the little library and reading it, I realized Carlos admitted that they gave him three thousand dollars to move. That's what he said on the tape. So now I'm trying to figure out how can I prove this. I don't know a lot about law, but I know that they denied giving him anything. There has to be something illegal or unconstitutional about that. So I filed the freedom of information request. They didn't answer it. They didn't answer it. Eventually I peeled it and then they answered it with a certification that says they never gave him anything. There's no records to prove it. They don't have anything in the King's County District Attorney office that says they ever had an agreement with him. So, okay, I know what happened, I can't prove it.

00:24:43
Speaker 1: And without the proof, he moved forward with post conviction motions, citing ineffective assistance of trial council, saying that his attorney should have called Kester, Jones and other alibi witnesses, and again they were denied. Meanwhile, Ken Thompson was elected Brooklyn District Attorney and before and died too young in twenty sixteen, he formed a conviction review unit and at this point Peter took on Jermaine's case.

00:25:07
Speaker 4: So, fortunately for us, before Ken Thompson passed away, we had gone pretty far down the road with the reinvestigation of the case by the conviction review Unit. The assistant district attorney was a really nice person, very ethical, right. We signed a cooperation agreement where we agreed that we would turn over to them whatever evidence we had, and they agreed they would turn over all the evidence that they had, and in that agreement they also said they would give us witness statements at some point. But I signed the agreement. My client signed the agreement. We never got a sign copy of the agreement back from them, but they were operating under the agreement.

00:25:45
Speaker 3: And Peter asked her, is there anything that shows whatever you may have given benefits to any of the witnesses. We left it broad on purpose. She turned over three sheets of paper that shows, according to that summer, he was thirteen hundred dollars or something like that.

00:25:58
Speaker 2: That was the start. I said, Peter, get that, and I got it, and I got it.

00:26:00
Speaker 3: I said, get anything else she got, so she went back to look for more. They transferred off the case as soon as they found out she gave us that documentation. She was no longer working the case.

00:26:12
Speaker 2: She was gone.

00:26:13
Speaker 4: The good thing is we discovered that the only alleged eyewitness had a cooperation agreement. He got housing and other compensation from them his testimony, and they never disclosed that.

00:26:24
Speaker 1: In addition to this Brady violation, both the ADA and Carlos Bethune denied the deal existed a trial, and at this point the Conviction Review Unit went unresponsive. Meanwhile, Jermaine paroled out in twenty twenty from prison.

00:26:38
Speaker 3: I married a beautiful woman and helped raise her children, and their father was murdered, so I got to raise two children from prison. I walked out of prison on November thirty of twenty twenty. My wife, my children, my mother, my brothers, like everyone was waiting on me.

00:26:54
Speaker 2: There was a film crew waiting on me. I couldn't believe I was out.

00:26:58
Speaker 3: I wanted to jump in the car goal I wanted to pinch myself make sure I wasn't sleeping. They asked me what I wanted to do first. I said McDonald's and they told me order whatever I want. And I went up to the register and no one paid me any mind. Of course, I'm not going to make a scene. I was in prison twenty minutes ago. So I'll wait patiently, and eventually one of the clerks. So one of the cashiers told me, you got to order on the kiosks. So I go to this little black looking thing. I've been in prison twenty two years. I don't know how to turn it on. I don't know about touchscreen or any of that stuff. At the time, my family got a good kick out of that. That was my introduction to technology and how far I had been behind. I didn't even know how to order food at McDonald's on the Kiosk, and then they took me home, had a nice little reception and family and friends and supporters, and I got a job at the Legal Aid Society of Westchester five weeks later, and Peter and I were discussing, like, when do we file the motion, because we wanted to wait till I came home. I wanted to be in the courtroom. I didn't want them to deal with a paper motion like all the other ones that had got denied. I wanted them to have to deal with a human being. We waited until September of twenty twenty one to file the motion.

00:28:03
Speaker 1: During these proceedings, they tried to compel the DA to share whatever evidence they had that had dried up when the Conviction Review Unit went unresponsive. After all, they had this twenty fourteen cooperation agreement.

00:28:14
Speaker 4: When we tried to get them to turn over the witness statements, they said, oh, this is an unsigned agreement. The court to my chagrin, and said, yeah, there's no evidence there was in fact disagreement, and obviously there was because we were cooperating under the agreement both sides.

00:28:28
Speaker 3: Because they never provided us with a signed copy of the agreement. Like the gamesmanship, I lost my cool a couple of times, and they Peter calmed me down because it was at a point where y'are.

00:28:38
Speaker 2: Playing games with my life.

00:28:40
Speaker 3: And the judge ordered them to turn over whatever else there was in relation to this cooperation agreement. They turned over eight more pages, so now we have eleven sheets of paper that put the whole thing together. We ended up getting granted a hearing, but official hearings started twenty twenty three, blasted about six different court dates, and they had given us mission to pursue actual innocence. Under actual innocence, you can bring up things outside of the record.

00:29:05
Speaker 2: When I got on.

00:29:06
Speaker 3: A stand, the district attorney brought up things that I was accused of fifth grade.

00:29:10
Speaker 2: Like it was just chaos.

00:29:12
Speaker 3: We weren't talking about the murder I was in prison for. We were talking about things that I was never accused of, never convicted, I've never charged with, and it was wearing me out. I ended up in the hospital that night. I ended up back on my medication, and after a good long, lengthy discussion of our attorney, I went back in the courtroom told the judge were withdrawing that we're just going to deal with the Brady violation, which is the fact that you paid someone and you lied about it. They didn't want to talk about Brady violation. They had four hundred pages and when the judge said you have to talk about the Brady violation, she said no further questions, John, because they couldn't talk about that. They were just going to try to smear me in front of the court. We know when it started. It started the day before trial. And when my lawyer, Jesse Young, intimated that she may have made a deal with him, she said, I just want to point out for the record, no one from my own if this has promised him anything. You had just promised him at the date before, and we got the paperwork to prove it. And as the hearing went on it became obvious there was a deal made, you're lying about it. You're still lying about it. And the judged overturned the conviction based on the Brady violation.

00:30:16
Speaker 1: And importantly a material violation that this would have caused a different verdict at trial. So the conviction was overturned. And we wish you all the luck in the world in civil litigation as well as at your new job working for rehabilitation through the arts, this time though from outside the walls. And for anyone who wants to get involved or donate, we're going to link to the places you can go in the episode description and with that we're going to go to closing arguments. First of all, I thank each of you from the bottom of my heart, and now I'm just going to kick back in my chair, close my eyes, and leave my headphones on and listen to anything else you guys feel has been left unset. So Peter you go first, and then and the microphone off to Jermaine and he'll take us off into the sunset.

00:31:05
Speaker 4: I think we said it all.

00:31:06
Speaker 2: I have a final thought.

00:31:07
Speaker 3: Anybody that's a resident of Kings County, anybody with connection to the King's County District Attorney office, reach out prove me wrong.

00:31:14
Speaker 2: I'm telling everybody I didn't do this crime.

00:31:17
Speaker 3: Contact the District attorney and ask them where's the evidence that I did this crime? Contact them and ask them why are they still wasting tax payer money or something that is obvious how to can do?

00:31:27
Speaker 2: Reach out and.

00:31:27
Speaker 3: Find out if you can find any evidence other than the liar that I did this crime. Then hey, now we're talking. But otherwise this is just political theater.

00:31:36
Speaker 2: This is just a.

00:31:37
Speaker 3: Lot of waste of taxpayer money, people getting paid to uphold something that can't be held up. It's ridiculous. Yes, he's supposed to be a progressive prosecutor. Find out why he has me in the scope and why he won't do the right thing.

00:31:56
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early and ad free by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I want to thank our production team Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink, as well as my fellow executive producers Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Kleiber. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at It's Jason Flamm. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One. We have worked hard to ensure that all facts reported in this show are accurate. The views and opinions expressed by the individuals featured in this show are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Lava for Good