00:00:02
Speaker 1: At two a m. On July fifteenth, two thousand four, a Houston pool hall emptied into its parking lot along with a young man named Jason Wooey and nineteen year old Adrian Pion was waiting outside to settle a score, but Pion and two friends only brought fists to a gunfight. Jason Wooley began to fire, as did two others who emerged near a gold Cadillac. Pion was wounded, while seventeen year old Emerson Boyorkeez, was fatally shot. Woolley and the other two assailants sped away in the Cadillac while witnesses jotted down the plate number, which led to the name on the registration twenty three year old Pablo Vallese, a trucker whose hobby of fixing up and reselling cars ultimately earned him thirty to life. This is wrongful conviction. The Fox Foundation is proud to support this episode of wrongful conviction and the work of After Innocence, a nonprofit that helps hundreds of people nationwide rebuild their lives after wrongful incarceration. Each year, innocent people are released after spending years behind bars for crimes they didn't commit. Nearly all of them leave prison with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, with no help or compensation from the state, as they face the steep challenges of rebuilding their lives after wrongful imprisonment. After Innocence is changing that After Innocence helps exoneries get and make good use of essential services like health care, dental care, mental health support, legal aid, financial counseling, and more. Since twenty sixteen, they've brought that help to more than eight hundred exoneries across forty six states, working tirelessly to ensure that no one released after wrongful incarceration is left behind. Learn more at a dash innocence dot org and join After Innocence to support exoneries as they rebuild their lives. I'm Lauren Brt Pacheco. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction where we have a story out of Houston, Texas in which our guest's only crime was selling a car to an actual criminal. But before we get into all that, joining us or is pro bono attorneys from Latham and Watkins, herman U and Alexandra van Dine. Thanks for having us, Yeah, thank you for featuring this story and calling in from the Texas Department of Corrections. Pablo Valles, thanks for joining us. So, Pablo grew up in an area of Houston called Houston Heights.

00:02:48
Speaker 2: I mean I grew up.

00:02:49
Speaker 3: Like most kids.

00:02:51
Speaker 2: Mom, dad, two older sisters. We all were pretty close in age, so we all went to the same schools, just doing the normal kid thing, going outside, plane, having a lot of friends. On the weekends, I would go work with my dad. My dad had two bars, so you know, as a kid, if I wanted video games or toys or anything, I have to go to my dad's bar on the weekends and clean up and fill the coolers up with beer and just all that stuff.

00:03:20
Speaker 1: And perhaps this work ethic led to an interest in trucking that was spurred on by one of his neighbors, Jackie.

00:03:27
Speaker 2: My neighbor Jackie, he was an older white man, cool as a fan man. Him and his wife doors. They lived three houses down from us, and across the street there was an empty lot, and as a kid, I would see him. He'd come in his atune with her a flatbed, and he'd always parked across the street and that empty lot, and we'd be over there in that lot, plane jumping onto the flatbed and what now. He didn't mind. As I got older, I was like, drive trucks. One day and he explained to me, get your DL book, study it, read it two or three times.

00:03:58
Speaker 4: If you have to.

00:03:59
Speaker 2: I did that and I ended up getting a CDL and just being able to be free. Man be away, be on that road, peaceful, especially out west in the mountains.

00:04:09
Speaker 4: Driving.

00:04:10
Speaker 2: I loved it, man, It's fun.

00:04:13
Speaker 1: But before his career he fell in love with cars.

00:04:17
Speaker 2: My dad's friends used to come over and they had motorcycles, and my dad had a smoke in the bended trends them.

00:04:24
Speaker 5: Started working at sixteen at the Mini keme Uffler. The owner there, Jimmy King, I'll never forget I went there. I had for an iron. He said, well, Dean, I how to work on brakes? And I said sometimes, and everybody busted out laughing.

00:04:39
Speaker 4: Right, he said sometimes, he said.

00:04:42
Speaker 5: You know what he said, man, just show up tomorrow.

00:04:45
Speaker 4: And he came in the job.

00:04:46
Speaker 2: Man.

00:04:46
Speaker 5: They showed me how to well, they showed me how to fix breaks. They showed me how to work on vehicles, and I took flights from there. Man fell in level cars, sports cars. I would buy a car fixed it up, man have it buy another woman piece it up in Samoa.

00:05:03
Speaker 1: And another neighbor of his, who is believed to be one of the assailants in this case, Ron Strandberg, purchased a car from Pablo.

00:05:12
Speaker 4: It was a ninety eight Cadillac Devil.

00:05:15
Speaker 5: Ron the guy actually sold the cars, and he lived down the street, on the same street as me, maybe about seven houses down from me. And so when I came up on a good deal on this Jaguar, I was like, man, I'm gonna sell this Cadillac. And Ronin had actually seen it, and he was like, I'll buy it.

00:05:31
Speaker 4: And ILL said, look, check this out.

00:05:33
Speaker 5: I'll make it even easier for you. Man, just finished paying it off. You don't got to pay me nothing, just finish paint it off to this little car lot right here.

00:05:40
Speaker 3: And he was like cool.

00:05:42
Speaker 5: And I never had time in the change the title because.

00:05:44
Speaker 1: I was never home every week Sunday through Friday. Pablo was on the road with his truck. So unfortunately the title of the car remained in his name through the incidents of July twelfth through the fifteenth, two thousand and four. Apparently alleged gang affiliates of On Strandberg, including a guy named Richard Shorty Cisnaro's, got into a fight with nineteen year old Adrian Pyon at a local club in Billiards Hall with a distractingly ridiculous name, the Perfect.

00:06:14
Speaker 5: Rack, the perfect rereg Now everybody from the neighborhoods in the heights and surrounding neighborhoods, everybody goes is the perfect wreck. I wasn't a clevin person. I'd rather go change the whole on his you know what I mean, But his true he had been locked up before a gang related from what they said, and got into it with Richard Cis Narrows you know, and Jordie and they beat him on a Monday. He went to get back at them.

00:06:42
Speaker 1: According to Adrian Pion's girlfriend Claudia Beltron and her friend Nancy Elmanza, on Wednesday, July fourteenth, they were hanging out at the club on the lookout for Shorty or his known associates, Ron Strandberg and another guy named Jason Woolley. And while this confrontation was brewing in Houston. This is a Wednesday, so Pablo was on the road.

00:07:04
Speaker 6: Pablo has been training another guy, this guy LG. They have been driving through Oklahoma and Mississippi over a couple of days. Their generator has gone out. In Weatherford, Texas, we.

00:07:16
Speaker 2: Had a generator on the truck that ran the AC system so on our way till death. So we noticed we had a gas leak on the generator, so I called my dispatcher.

00:07:27
Speaker 4: He ended up.

00:07:27
Speaker 2: Calling another truck driver named Ray, and we met.

00:07:31
Speaker 4: Up in Weatherford, Texas.

00:07:33
Speaker 2: We swapped loads. He continued to load back to Odessa, and I took his trailer back to Houston. We left Weatherford around eight thirty pm that night and so back to Houston that it had him not been for that gas leak, I mean, I would never even went back to Houston. I'd have been on the road and killed Friday.

00:07:51
Speaker 6: So Pablo is sort of getting the trainee situated. He's getting home at one point thirty in the morning, getting a shower, getting some cereal, seeing his brothers, and then heads off to his ex girlfriend's house in sort of just the cab of the truck, which I imagine looked very interesting, sort of driving down the street and then in parallel, this other conflict is going on.

00:08:13
Speaker 1: At this point. Claudia and Nancy had spotted Jason Woolly and alerted Adrian pion So. At around the usual two am closing time, clubgoers were spilling out into the parking lot, including Claudia, Nancy, and Jason. Meanwhile, Adrian and his friends Stevan Rodriguez and seventeen year old Emerson Boyorkez pulled into the lot.

00:08:36
Speaker 6: And Emerson Biorkez is in the car. He's told you're seventeen, like, don't get involved in this. Stay in the car. They get out. Waiting for them is Jason Wooley in a red shirt. He pulls a nine millimeter gun from his wasteland, shoots at the ground, and then someone pulls up in this gold Cadillac Deville, the famous gold Cadillac. Other shooters come into this sort of ambush style attack. Adrian runs, Rodriguez runs.

00:09:05
Speaker 1: The police found three different calibers of shell casings at the scene and Wooly was responsible for one of them, and witnesses only described one other shooter who had emerged near the gold Cadillac, standing about five foot four, light hair, firing a long gun, wearing a blue shirt.

00:09:24
Speaker 7: The descriptions of the blue shirted shooter right was a gentleman who is shorter, stockier, heavier. That's not Pablo. Pablo is especially at the time, pretty in shape, tall guy. He's like sick something.

00:09:39
Speaker 1: It just doesn't fit, but it might fit a guy nicknamed Shorty. Either way. Back to the shooting, Adrian Pyon was hit in the abdomen. He and Rodriguez took off running. Wooly chased them along with the blue shirted shooter, but eventually ran back to the gold Cadillac and sped off, at which point Claudia Beltron Tilmanza allegedly chased after them in their.

00:10:03
Speaker 6: Car, and Claudia and her friend Nancy, I believe, grab a bible and write down the license plate an eyeliner or something like that, and so they get the plate. But what everyone realizes during all of this paullabaloo as Adrian is shot but escapes, Rodriguez escapes, por Emerson bi Jorkez has gotten out of the car and he has been wounded fatally and dies And that is all happening in a parking lot in Houston at the perfect rack, and Pablo is elsewhere at his ex girlfriend's house having what sounds like a very serious conversation about their relationship. But it's just two totally different events happening in two totally different places.

00:10:46
Speaker 5: Ron calling me the night of the murder, you know, asking me to the car's going, and you know, I have what happened as I man, I'll play you later, and I'm like, good, I'm just going to have you. Man said, I'm going to go to sleep, and I said, I'm not taking a waight up night for the cups to show up because they're not biking come ride away, just because of carguts. So he was like all right. So the next morning he calls me back and he's like, did you report the carsons?

00:11:10
Speaker 4: And I'm not.

00:11:11
Speaker 5: He don't even worry about it, and I'm like, well, what happened? He's a man, It was nothing, And I was like whatever.

00:11:17
Speaker 7: You know.

00:11:18
Speaker 5: I mean, if you're telling me not to worried about it, if you're not worried about it was gonna obviously, then it's not nothing serious. It's what I've got.

00:11:24
Speaker 1: But the license plate number led investigators to the gold Cadillac, which was still registered to Pablo Valaise. Now Pablo had never been booked before, so police pulled his driver's license photo in which Pablo was three years younger with a buzz cut, and they put it in a photo array for Claudia Beltron.

00:11:45
Speaker 7: The initial identification of Pablo by Claudia Beltran was a photo identification, right, It was just his face, no physical appearance, so she did not have the benefit of his overall body shaped type, and so she had no opportunity to recognize that Pablo looked nothing like the blue shirted shooter that she had seen in terms of the body shaved hype.

00:12:05
Speaker 1: And it turned out that the freezing of Claudia's alleged identification was very important, but that was not shared with the defense before trial, and we'll get into that later, but for now, investigators had obtained arrest warrants for both Jason Wooley and Pablo Vallez.

00:12:23
Speaker 5: I mean, swat was everywhere and there was at eight everywhere, guns drawn on me. And when they got me out the car, I'm like, man, what the hell, He's like, we got a photny warrant for you from murder and I'm like, from murder.

00:12:37
Speaker 4: Like, well, what did I do you know?

00:12:39
Speaker 5: Then of course they asked me all the questions and all that stuff, and I told them how much is my bond? And he's like twenty thousand and I'm like all right, well I'm getting out. I'm down on top of sea and he's like eight charges and I'm like, well, how many charges are?

00:12:53
Speaker 7: Like?

00:12:53
Speaker 5: He said, you know I saw with a daily weapon and murder, and I'm like, okay, sixty thousand, still bonding out. I'm done talking to you. He tried to give me not to bomb out, right, and he was like, well, why do you want to bond out if you didn't have nothing to do with this. You'll see the judge in the morning. He'll see that you had this. He'll let you go.

00:13:13
Speaker 1: As if only guilty people value their freedom.

00:13:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm here on that. I just went to work every day and not knowing what was really going to happen. My attorney he kept telling me, don't worry about it, don't worry about it. If they don't have nothing on you, you weren't there. And so I had the mindset I didn't worry about it. Continued life, living my life, working, having fun, going to the racetrack, taking my cars down there.

00:13:37
Speaker 1: After all, he had an alibi. He'd been with his trucking trainee LG. Holmes until just shortly before the shooting, then at his mother's with his siblings before heading over to his girlfriend Annelle's in the cab portion of his eighteen wheeler. But as time war on pre trial, that relationship fizzled.

00:13:56
Speaker 5: She was mad and had a lot of anger towards Naki because she wanted to shadow down get married and.

00:14:03
Speaker 4: I didn't want to.

00:14:04
Speaker 5: I didn't want to because I had already got with somebody else.

00:14:08
Speaker 4: Right, So we ended up splitting up.

00:14:12
Speaker 2: But before that, when I got arrested and all that she had told me, and she said, man, don't worry about a year with me that night, so fast forward we split up. Of course, I told her like, hey, don't forget when I go to courtor, my attorney needs to talk to you, you know. And that's when she hit me with the oh, I don't I don't remember if it was that night, And I'm like, what the fuck you mean you don't remember? I'm at your house in a big red agent with her. What do you mean you don't remember? You know what I mean, that's the only time I ever went to your.

00:14:40
Speaker 4: House in this acing with her.

00:14:41
Speaker 1: And soon Pablo's new romantic partner became pregnant, so one can imagine that this may have strengthened Annelle's resolve not to participate in his defense, and perhaps Pablo's trial attorney, Ken MacLean would have done more to solidify Pablo's alibi. But he was enduring a may health crisis.

00:15:01
Speaker 7: His defense counsel is being treated for cancer. He's dying of cancer. He's obviously not going to be doing an adequate job representing Pablo. He didn't do the basic investigation of published phone records right, and we weren't able to retrieve all of his phone records given the passage of time when we were involved. But certainly his defense counsel would have been able to retrieve the phone records we did, and more that would have demonstrated his location, the infeasibility of him getting to the perfect rac and published communications with Nielle.

00:15:31
Speaker 5: When I was sitting and they bring in my guilphone and I'm like, what the pup?

00:15:37
Speaker 4: What is she doing here?

00:15:38
Speaker 5: And they're asking her questions and they're like, well, he said he was with you that night and this and whatnot, and she's like, no, he wasn't with.

00:15:44
Speaker 6: Me that night his ex girlfriend announce as we weren't even in contact in July, why would I have been talking to him all night? Put the phone record show that no, they were in fact in touch. They were talking at that time. So that would have, I think, lent credibility to Pablo's testimony as well in front of the jury. And then the phone records show he's not really in touch with any of these people, right, Like he's in touch with Strandberg once or twice related to this car because Strandberg suddenly needs to unload this car.

00:16:11
Speaker 7: Right.

00:16:12
Speaker 6: But when you look at the song records that the police did pull Ron and Jason, they're in touch. They're exchanging all these phone calls.

00:16:19
Speaker 7: Willy, Strandberg and Cin scenario exchanged twenty six calls before the shooting and then thirty eight calls after the shooting.

00:16:27
Speaker 6: Wow, that's right, And so you can tell the jury these guys are all talking to each other. Pablo Valz is really not talking to them other than with respect to this car that we have adduced other evidence about.

00:16:39
Speaker 7: Right.

00:16:40
Speaker 1: So, in addition to the damage and Nell did to Pablo's credibility as well as the lack of any further context that could have been derived from Jason Woolly's phone records. The judge limited the defense's ability to question witnesses about Ron Strandberg and Richard Cisnaro's even though the DA stated in her opening statement that they were likely involved with Woolley, and then they had to contend with Claudia Beltron's alleged identification. But curiously, the prosecutor, Iileen Bogar even said in her opening statement that she was not expecting an in court identification from Claudia.

00:17:18
Speaker 7: When Claudia Beltran sees Pablo Valles at his trial for the very first time, what does she say to the prosecutor? She says, that's not him. Despite that, the prosecutor goes on, she pushes forward. She forces Claudia to testify just about the photo array, not about her now realization that that is not Pablo. Sitting in the defense.

00:17:39
Speaker 2: Table when Claudia when they asked her, she wasn't able to pick nobody up. I was like, okay, I'm good and I'll be going home and this.

00:17:48
Speaker 1: Will be able with right, And then Detective Swainson gets up there and negates her testimony.

00:17:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, he pretty much he seld it to the jury.

00:18:01
Speaker 1: Man called the identification perfect, beautiful, positive.

00:18:08
Speaker 7: He gives those little flourishes, right, because those are the kinds of things that a jury's going to hear and think to themselves, Oh, if he's going to be so descriptive, surely he must have seen it, witness this identification.

00:18:20
Speaker 1: In addition, Adrian Pion also testified, saying that he'd seen Pablo at the Perfect Rack around ten PM, which was not only impeached by Pablo's trucking trainee LG. Holmes, but also that wasn't even part of the state's narrative. Importantly, however, Pion did not identify Pablo as one of the assailants. The defense also presented several witnesses that placed the gold Cadillac in ron Strandberg's possession in the days and weeks before and after the shooting, but it appears that they weren't enough to overcome Officer Swainson's description of the identification that he allegedly witnessed.

00:19:00
Speaker 2: When they came back with the guilty verdict, I remember turning around and my mom, my daughter's mother, and my cousin, some of my friends, my sisters, and everybody they were just in tears.

00:19:14
Speaker 4: My daughter was.

00:19:14
Speaker 5: Three weeks old when they convicted me, and they gave me thirty years.

00:19:35
Speaker 2: I didn't know what to expect, Like, now, okay, I'm not going home.

00:19:41
Speaker 4: I'm not going to be able to raise my daughter.

00:19:44
Speaker 2: Take care of my mom and my little brothers. Now I have to worry about taking care of myself. It's like going to a porough world country man. It's like a whole other world in here, and I had to learn to adjust quick. There's rules and laws in here amongst in mates, and life is the situation in here. It's a negative, evil face in here.

00:20:15
Speaker 5: I'm already at twenty years.

00:20:17
Speaker 4: That's on you.

00:20:18
Speaker 3: Earlier, my daughter was three weeks old and here she had a twenty As a little kid growing up, she would always tell everybody, I just want my daddy for Christmas. She came to me one day and I didn't it.

00:20:29
Speaker 5: And she said, Dad, She said, can I take you home with me? And I'm like, no, I can't.

00:20:34
Speaker 3: Go home, baby.

00:20:35
Speaker 7: You know.

00:20:35
Speaker 4: She was about seven years.

00:20:36
Speaker 5: Old, And I said again, and she said, you know, I'll put two in a box and I'll sink you up.

00:20:44
Speaker 4: And I said, so, I can't.

00:20:46
Speaker 5: I can't. And you know, man, she even said, she said I'll poke hop in and said you can breathe.

00:20:51
Speaker 4: I can't go home baby, you know, and you know, a real.

00:20:56
Speaker 5: Kid, innocent, not knowing.

00:20:58
Speaker 3: You know the seriousness of man.

00:21:00
Speaker 5: And you know kids are.

00:21:05
Speaker 7: I've got a daughter and a son. And if I were in Pablo's shoes and I wasn't able to see my kids, I mean, it would just kill me. I mean it would absolutely destroy me. Yeah.

00:21:16
Speaker 5: Even now, she'll cry, man, when we have to leave visit to cry.

00:21:20
Speaker 2: Man.

00:21:20
Speaker 5: And she would always tell me, She's like, Dad, I've never seen you cry.

00:21:24
Speaker 4: I said, believe me. I said, just because you don't see me.

00:21:28
Speaker 2: Cry doesn't mean I'm not crying.

00:21:30
Speaker 5: But I keep on pushing, man, I keep on pushing and knowing it.

00:21:34
Speaker 4: He man, I'll be home one day.

00:21:37
Speaker 7: You know.

00:21:39
Speaker 1: Pablo began writing to various innocence organizations, which you brought him an investigator named CJ. Connolly, who looked into the case and paid a visit to Pablo's co defendant, Jason Wooley.

00:21:50
Speaker 2: When he went to go visit Wooly. Now, mind you, Wooly didn't know CJ was coming to visit him or why he was even getting a visit and from said he said the moment that he told him, I'm here because of Pablo felt, Woolley immediately told him he had nothing to do with this, these inns he and had nothing to do with this, and CJ's wa Man, that's part to fire, and I mean to continue researching and investigating. CJ ended up reaching out to different attorneys and Lathan and Walking they ended up helping Man a lot of love and respect for them, guys and Laon and Walking.

00:22:22
Speaker 3: Man, what for each.

00:22:24
Speaker 1: Of you was the aha moment where you realized that you were looking at a wrongful conviction.

00:22:32
Speaker 7: For me, as to review the evidence and realized that the only reason Pablo was ever targeted by the Houston Police Department was because of a late change in the title of the gold Catillac that was a getaway vehicle. That's it. That is the only thing that ties any of this to Pablo.

00:22:50
Speaker 6: And the fact that a twenty three year old man didn't get the title to his car transferred right away, that seems eminently reasonable and understandable to me. So the fact that that sort of what this is all writing on is pretty wild The other two things that really stuck out to me were that his own council failed to get his phone records that really substantiated his alibi, obviously the egregious Brady violations.

00:23:13
Speaker 1: Latham and Watkins discovered a previously undisclosed photo array containing both Shorty and Pablo's photos with a signature next to Shorty's photo, which makes sense and lighted the initial description of the shooter in blue. And then they saw Officer King's previously undisclosed investigation notes which detailed what Claudia Beltran actually had said about Pablo when she viewed the photo array.

00:23:39
Speaker 7: So what King wrote in his notebook was Claudia Beltran said he looks like him, but guy in blue shirt had lighter hair. So that was a clear exculpatory description that made it very clear that Pablo was not the person that she had seen at the Perfect wreck. When that interview was inserted into the official HPD report, Claudia Beltran's testimony all of a sudden just becomes he looks like him, which is obviously a very different thing. And of course that makes sense because then when Claudia Bell trans sees Pablo Vallez at his trial she tells the prosecutor that is not the person I saw. And then the prosecutor relies on the testimony of Officer king An, Officer Slainsen, which wasn't just a vanilla identification.

00:24:30
Speaker 1: He says, it was a beautiful, perfect.

00:24:33
Speaker 7: That's absolutely right. I mean, surely he must have been there, he must have witnessed this identification when we went to they.

00:24:39
Speaker 2: Have an intereering. King He he don't even know why Swainson even said that, because he wasn't even in the room when she pointed at the picture. He was in another room talking to Adrian.

00:24:50
Speaker 7: Good lord, he was in the other room.

00:24:53
Speaker 1: So not only was it exposed that Claudia had never identified Pablo, but also that Officer Swainson was not even in the room to witness an identification that he called quote perfect, beautiful, positive end quote. And without that testimony, they had no identification. All they had was a Cadillac registered to Pablo Belez that was placed leaving the scene of the crime, but with someone else in it. And at this time, one of the victims, Adrian Pion, was willing to corroborate that.

00:25:27
Speaker 7: From our perspective, his recanting of his testimony was real. He was in that neighborhood, in that environment where fairly confident he knew the shooters and the shooters knew him. I think he testified in a way that kept him safe, and later on, many years later, I think at that point he felt safer in coming forward.

00:25:47
Speaker 5: He actually told them I know who did it, but not him, and I'm not going to tell y'all who did it.

00:25:52
Speaker 3: But it's not game.

00:25:53
Speaker 5: And my uncle Leo was a chief of police in the Arson Division at that time. He knew some of the other detectives and.

00:26:00
Speaker 3: DA's in there. And when we went back to court in twenty seventeen, they told him Uncle, they.

00:26:06
Speaker 5: Said, oh, man, you'll be home by December. But shiit December came and went, you know, and still here.

00:26:31
Speaker 2: I worked in Metal Fad for nine years, so all of us guys that worked there at the Metal Fat pretty much see each other on a regular basis or know each other. So when I went back to Houston on that evidenier here in seventeen and I came back in eighteenth in March, I ran into one of the guys there Christmas and he was like just shooting the ship, like hey man, I ain't seen in a while and what not. And I told himself, I just got back to the benchmark, then back and he's like, you find your case. And I'm like yeah, I said, man, you don't remember hearing about the murder of the prefect right in two thousand and four, And like he got all excited. He was like, yeah, man, I was there that night.

00:27:11
Speaker 1: Man.

00:27:11
Speaker 2: Listen, Man, I'm listening to him and he's telling me everything that I've read in the transcripts and witnesses reports and whatnot. And I was like, there's no way he knows this stuff unless he was there, right, And he straight up told me he's like, man, Ron and Shorty. He said, Shorty was chasing Adrian. He said, Ron was shooting at that other dude, which was Anderson, and Otob the attorney's the same thing. And they came down here with the DA and some detectives. But that didn't go nowhere either.

00:27:41
Speaker 1: So now, on top of everything else that was exposed at the Evident Cherry hearing in twenty seventeen, they had a witness who was willing to name names. Meanwhile, they also discovered something else about how the investigation appears to have derailed.

00:27:56
Speaker 6: My understanding of it was a confidential informant came forward to the police, he said it was Ron, Shorty and Jason, and they're like, thank you very much for your service. We're going to do nothing with that information.

00:28:07
Speaker 7: And it just doesn't make any sense why they didn't follow up the identification of two gang bangers who also had a connection several days prior at the perfect ract with the same cast of characters. I don't think we, as a team at Latham ever understood why that was simply ignore it as a possible lead.

00:28:27
Speaker 1: Unless this is a familiar pattern we see consistently all over the country where investigators will turn a blind eye to actual criminals if those people are regularly helping them close cases. So perhaps Shorty and Ron are snitches.

00:28:44
Speaker 5: And if that's true, then I can understand why it went the way it went, because if you think about it, I don't work for the police. I drive FORORPS early right, But these guys, their informants, they're more of an asset to them than I am.

00:28:58
Speaker 1: It's absolutely not Where does the case stand now legally?

00:29:03
Speaker 7: So legally, we have exhausted all of Pablo's habeas options and we have no other legal recourse. Just to summarize the record, the first steps we took were to proceed with a habeas petition in Texas State Court, and that was what led to the evidentiary hearing in Harris County District Court. We appealed that all the way up to the Texas Criminal Court. We were denied there. We then filed a habeas petition in federal court. That petition was denied. We then sought to appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Procedurally, you had to actually get permission. We were denied that permission to appeal on the merits to the Fifth Circuits, so we never actually got a chance to do that. And then at this point the only recourse that we had was to file a writ of ctiary with the United States Supreme Court. And so at this point we have no unfortunate other habeas options. If there were, we would still be fighting for him.

00:30:07
Speaker 1: Is there anything that people can do to help now?

00:30:10
Speaker 7: Obviously Pablo still has the opportunity to seek parole. To the extent that there would be opportunities for people to write and to support his parole application, I would certainly encourage folks to do that.

00:30:23
Speaker 2: I'm broke now and I'm not going to break and I'm not gonna let him break and keep on keep on fighting.

00:30:28
Speaker 1: So this season we're really talking about accountability. We know why wrongful convictions happen, but how do you stop them from happening in the future. What does accountability mean to you and what would it look like in your case?

00:30:44
Speaker 2: All of them should be hailed accountable. DA detectives, of course, the guy that did this, Mike's girlfriend, they should all be held accountable. And like, I know that will never happen, but like if the family had a paste.

00:30:58
Speaker 1: Of a quarter of speaking of where are Shorty and Ron now?

00:31:04
Speaker 2: I guess they're still in Houston. I don't know.

00:31:07
Speaker 7: There are a number of aspects to this right when when youre talking about accountability. There's accountability at the time, there's accountability after the fact. And look, police officers do so much to protect us. But Pablo's case highlights the fact that there are also instances where the police are not held accountable for providing testimony that is designed to take an open investigation off the books. There's accountability to the prosecutors who are all too willing to ram through a prosecution and not give the attention that they should give to their obligations as officers of the court to come forward with the truth, to come forward with exculpatory evidence, and to protect the constitutional rights of those who sit in the defense seat. Kim Ogg was the Hairs County District Attorney and she ran and in part on a platform of reform and accountability, taking a look at prior convictions and seeing where injustice had been done. We met with kim Ogg a team of us there or three of us. We had breakfast with kim Ogg. We presented our case story, We gave her a packet. Two of my partners came down from Washington, DC just to meet with her to impress upon her just how wrong the situation was. And we followed up and we pursued this with her office literally for years, and we never, from our perspective, Marion got the time of day. We did not feel that her office took a serious look at Pablo's case. And so you know, when you talk about accountabiity, there's accountability at so many levels.

00:32:45
Speaker 6: So there are some ways to build accountability into the system a little bit better. And you see this with in some other states, not Texas, but a discovery reform right, like really expanding the amount of information that prosecuted are required to hand over to the defense. Now, of course they're always required to handover exculpatory information under Brady versus Maryland. But you do have to wonder had Pablo's defense counsel, who did have his own issues, but had he had much greater access to the information being collected, could he have poke Tols in this case? Could he have said, Hey, isn't it a little odd that the police department didn't do this video lineup or didn't pursue X Y or Z thing and could have hammered that a lot better. So there are some systemic legal changes that you can call your representative about.

00:33:36
Speaker 1: So we will list to information in the episode description if anyone would like to reach out to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Pablo's behalf, and with that, I'll leave the mic open to all of you to share what you'd like our audience to take away from this conversation.

00:33:53
Speaker 7: We have had probably at least a dozen lawyers over the year's work on Pablo's case. This has been in a case that the firm has committed substantial resources to and we've done that because all of us, to the person, truly believe in Pablo's innocence. He is a stand up guy. He is somebody who would have been just a fantastic member of the community, and what has happened to him is just an absolute travesty. We continue as a firm to be frustrated with our inability to get Pablo the results that he deserves and the exoneration that he's entitled to. And look, we hope the listeners will recognizing justice has been done here and this will hopefully motivate them to do what they can in their own ways to help reform the criminal justice system and ensure that these kinds of injustices don't occur in the future.

00:34:51
Speaker 6: I mean, the American legal system, for a lot of good reasons, really does prioritize finality of convictions, finality of dispute resolution, finality, and that systemic preference really makes it hard to come back in and undo these convictions. And you have to think there is some middle ground between the system we have now and some free for all where everybody is challenging their convictions like frivolously right. There has to be some middle ground right where these really compelling facts can make a difference after a conviction, after a verdict has been rendered by a jury, and convicting somebody is not sort of to this broader point about justice, It's not justice if it's the wrong person, because that means a real criminal is out there on the streets terrorizing people. It means the victim has not actually seen the person responsible for their pain punished. It just means someone has gone to prison and someone will not get to see their child grow up. And that's how everybody I.

00:36:02
Speaker 2: Tell people all the time. You know, it's almost like you know, they say that they don't walk right. Well, here we are. We're walking, walking, living and breathing. You know, when someone passes away right throughout the years, people stop visiting that cemetery or that person, and eventually people forget. But in this situation, man, you know, by just cutting the story out there, man, and not just with my story, right, with everyone's story that's gone through something like this, for it not to be forgotten, right, because I mean once you forget, I mean it's over with.

00:36:39
Speaker 4: You know.

00:36:46
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all LoVa for Good podcasts one week early and ad free by subscribing to LoVa for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kathe Think, as well as executive producers Jason Vlahm, Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Clyburn. 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 Lauren brag Pacheco. 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.

00:37:28
Speaker 3: 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