 I used to read People magazine, I don't anymore because my celebrities are exonerees. These are people that I look up to, they inspire me every day. I'm sure Linda will join me when I say I'm blown away by the, I like to call it emotional tenacity of these people to believe in yourself when no one else did or that's how it felt at least, and to keep yourself going. And what we try to tackle in the book, as Lori said, is thankfully I think our culture and our media is showing a little bit more that wrongful convictions happen. They happen everywhere in every state. Of course they do, it's a human system. This is not a factory. We don't put in materials and stamp out widgets at the end. This is human actions, which is judged by other humans, which is judged by other humans, which is, it's a human system, it will happen. What we, the majority of people agree that at a minimum 5% of people in United States prisons are innocent. That would come out to about 220,000. There have been about 2,000 roughly people who've been exonerated. And what we wanted to show in the book was what does that feel like? What is it like to be in the soul, in the skin of someone who is innocent, who has been wrongfully accused of something, and literally taken away from society and family and friends, and then get out. I mean, it's an incredible, surreal journey that I still don't understand, but I feel privileged to keep learning about. So, we've had a couple of miracles with this book. Rob Borden, who's a friend of Linda and I, who is one of the founders of Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern, he had a, I met him for lunch one day and I said, well, we've got these great writers, and we're trying to show a snapshot chapter of each stage of a wrongful conviction. So, the knock on the door. Everyone who's innocent says, sure, I'll come answer questions. Sure. Then there's the sitting in trial and hearing this stuff that is not true about you. The majority of people, I haven't asked Maurice, but I'm going to believe they will hear not guilty, because even though they're caught up in a system that they realize is of course flawed, they believe in it and hope to hear that, those two words. We wanted to know what's it like when you first walk into prison, when you're dealing with the insanity of it. When you're looking for someone to help you get out, maybe it's yourself, maybe it's an innocence organization like the Northern California Innocence Project, and maybe it's other people who have to help you out. And then what's it like when you get out? So that's what we asked these writers to do. Could we pair you with an exoneree and ask you to tell just one of those chapters? So, it really was in a remarkable project and we got remarkable participation and enthusiasm and really just amazing devotion from so many writers. Rob Borden gave me a real gift because we have the only unpublished Arthur Miller piece since his death. So technically, Les and I, I think we moved to comma, we edited Arthur Miller. That's what we're gonna be, that's what we're gonna take from this, but it turns out Arthur Miller had helped an exoneree in Connecticut, a young man who'd been accused of killing his mother. And he gave a lot of time and effort and he really never asked for any compensation or any recognition about it and had written a piece and I happened to tell this head of an innocence organization and he said, come back to my office. I have a letter from Arthur Miller with a piece about how sometimes the community has to help you get out. Sometimes it's not lawyer, sometimes it's not the Northern California Innocence Project, sometimes it's your community. So, we had the pleasure of having all these writers team up with these exonerees and we really think it's an amazing piece. But I wondered if I could start with a question to Maurice. We were flipping through our phones and kind of talking about, isn't that amazing? You, correct me if I'm wrong, 20 years? 21 years, 20 years, six months, eight days. Everybody has the years, months and days. I'd be forgetting mine sometimes. How was it when you got out and dealing with all, I think the majority of us are still trying to go, should I be on LinkedIn? What is LinkedIn? I'll try to rationalize my words into clips, just like when Lori got up there, she said, crime doesn't pay. Okay, when mine came, it was like, just take yourself out of this world and you're going to start wars and you just start looking around how just things is just so different and so ironic in my life. But my encounter that I had when I first came home, it wasn't the technology, it was a real scary encounter. I went to a bar, I got a job and this was my first time getting on a bar. My sister dropped me off at the bar station and she already told me not directly how to go about doing it, pushed them buttons. But I just figured it was just like getting on the bus, so I went to the bar and I was trying to read it. You know, like what would I do? I got the money in my hand and I couldn't understand it. That was just the thing about it. I couldn't understand it. You know, it was like not familiar to me. It was something that I felt that I had to sit there and study, but as I was sitting there and study with the time I would be missing my train. So I asked a person next to me, I say, excuse me, can you help me buy a ticket? I got the money in front of me to San Francisco and that person looked at me very strange. You know, like this is a nice gentleman. What is he distracting me for? You know, he should know the way and I wanted to explain him like, hey, I haven't been in society for almost 20 years. You know, so people could just try to fully understand that I don't wanna come in an uncomfortable way. I don't wanna put the next person in a strange way by asking questions that everybody in society know. So it was very strange to me, you know. But as time got better, I just, a lot of the stuff I'm not familiar with, I don't shy away from, you know. I don't even follow through, you know, like if I have, if somebody tell me like to catch a bus and I got a train, you know, let's use the planes. Ever since I've been home almost six years now and I never used, I never got on a plane in my life. That's something I always feared. I had a phobia about planes and boats, you know, so when I first came home to eight days after I was home, they had a conference in Cincinnati and it was a wrongful conviction, innocent conference where all of wrongful convictions guys be, they gather together in one state. So my lawyer and Linda and them was saying, you got to catch a plane. I was like, can we just get on the train? They was like, no, don't no train come there. So I was, my thing was, who gonna get on the plane with me? I needed escort. I need somebody to be there with me. And I'm an older guy. You know, I just felt like I didn't have the security. You know, by me being in prison and me being took away from society, it took away from my sense of security and my ability, you know, to perform. So it was like how people always use the saying, a new kid, you got to walk before you, you got to crawl before you walk. That's how it is with me. But my whole crawling, my guidance has been the trust of Santa Clara, the innocent project and my lawyer, you know what I'm saying? I got a good lawyer named Paige, that's my friend. You know, she helps me when I don't know things, you know, the littlest things I don't know. I don't ask people in my family, people that's out there that may judge and may talk about it later. I pick up the phone and call my lawyer or I call the innocent project and I ask them anything. You know, so they're my comfort into my survival, the way I get through life every day. You know, even my lawyer like, buddy, you got to learn how to do it on your own. I know, I know, I know. But I still cause, but it's very strange, but it's adaptable, you know, it's hard. And Linda, can you just give us a little background about how you've been in the innocence world from the beginning, it seems. Can you tell us how you got into it and has it changed? I got into it, I was a prosecutor in New York. I clerked for a judge. I did criminal defense work from a post-conviction standpoint and my wife was running a criminal defense clinic at Santa Clara and we said, there is no innocence project in California. We know that the mistakes that contribute to wrongful convictions happen in California as much as they happen anywhere else. People don't see better here. There's not better forensic science here. Eyewitnesses are just as mistaken here. So, and there are, at that time, there were something like 175,000 prisoners in the state of California. So we felt like we could do this. We started the innocence project. We weren't exactly sure that it would take off. We started with a yellow pad and a pen and said, okay, we're an innocence project. And then the letter started coming and we really haven't stopped since. I would say it's changed a lot. And I'm sure you all know, as well as anybody, the number of wrongful convictions that you hear about in the popular press, it seems like every week there's one now. It didn't used to be that way. It used to be we would go into a town and people would say, innocence, who? Who are you, the innocence project? Get in line. Now when the innocence project shows up in a town, people take it seriously and hopefully recognize that we're coming to them with a righteous case. There has been a lot learned from wrongful convictions. When somebody is wrongfully convicted, we can do a post-mortem on that case and figure out what went wrong. Rarely is it one thing. It's almost always a confluence of things. It could be a bad eyewitness identification procedure that is then turns into a false confession where somebody is convinced to admit to something, information that isn't shared with the defense by the police or the prosecution, bad representation for the defendant by his counsel, an appellate system that's very complacent and that sees every error as harmless. Every single thing that goes wrong in a case is viewed as harmless. They don't see it as something that might have contributed to a wrongful conviction and reverse the case. So we have learned by taking apart these cases where to look for errors and where we might find them and what they might look like. And not only have we learned, but I think some prosecutors have learned and have developed conviction review units where they actually, the good ones, are engaged in looking at cases to see if they may have been involved in a wrongful conviction if their office has been. And judges too are learning that these things do happen and that they do have an obligation to reverse those convictions and let those people free. Linda, could you tell us a little about the intake process? How you select the cases that you're gonna handle? Sure, we get letters from clients. We get letters, mostly we get letters from clients. We also get inquiries from lawyers who say I worked on a case 20 years ago and it has bothered me ever since. I don't know what to do. Can you do something to help me? We've had referrals come from district attorneys. Several of them have said people came to us. They have said that this was a wrongful conviction. Can you help us figure out whether this is a wrongful conviction and whether we should do something? We've had judges refer cases to us. So we get them from all over the place and we look at all of them agnostically. We don't believe it, we don't disbelieve it. We just look at it and start gathering the information that we need in order to make that assessment. And that's a ton of work. That triage process of finding people, finding documents. We're in the Silicon Valley, Santa Clara and nothing is digitized in any court anywhere on any of the cases that we work on. We have to go find dusty old boxes in grandma's garage. We find things in the lost and found, in fact, here in San Francisco. In the lost and found box of the evidence room we found some evidence. So that's a big part of what we do is find people, find documents, find information and then talk to those people and see what we can learn from them. Read those documents, analyze that evidence, see if there's forensic testing that we need to do. Once we've done all that, we then determine whether or not we think there's a legitimate claim that we can raise to attack that conviction. And then once we do, we litigate it. And we never, we don't consider a loss a loss. That's just the first step. We then go to the next place or the next step or the next step. We take it to any court we can. We have litigated it every state court, every level of the state court and federal court and we even had one of our cases that was sort of granted and held at the United States Supreme Court many years ago. So we have been all over. We're also part of the Innocence Network and that network also refers cases to us. If somebody writes in Maryland from a California prison, remember, California prisoners that are wrongfully convicted, they write anywhere. They look for help anywhere they can find it. And so oftentimes we'll get referrals from other organizations as well. How much of this is student work? Our class, ours is a student project as well. So we're a law school clinical program where students sign up and take us like they would any other class. And that's the, it was not like any other class they've taken there with us for a whole year. We meet and have classes where they learn about the causes of wrongful conviction and they learn practical skills, like how to write a habeas petition, how to do investigation, how to consider drafting a declaration, how to talk to witnesses. They go with us and licensed investigators to talk with witnesses, to meet with police officers, to do the forensic science work that we need to do. And they actually participate in the hearings and the drafting of the pleadings as well. It is an extraordinary experience for a student. I mean, students leave there and if they've participated in one of our cases, we tell them, this is the high point of your career. It's downhill from here because this is really, there is no feeling like being part of an exoneration where you help obtain somebody's freedom. It is one of the most unbelievable experiences and one of the most humbling and rewarding experiences that you could imagine as an attorney. And so our students, they come to know that whether they participate in an exoneration or not because they see the extraordinary amount of work that goes into investigating the cases and moving them forward. Lori, I wanted to ask you, can you tell us about the exonery you were paired with and about the process and how that went for you? Yeah, as Lori said, the book is divided up into several sections of the experience from the knock on the door and arrest to life after parole, after exoneration. And Laura and Les matched 15 of us writers, professional writers, up with exoneries to tell that section of their story. I was asked to do chapter three, which is the trial. And the case involved a young man who was arrested for a horrendous sexual assault on a child in a park near Chicago. So I asked if I could have the trial transcript because I don't know if Laura and Les chose me for this particular one, but my background, as I mentioned, is theology. That is I am accustomed to working with text. You give me a primary text and I tell you what it says and what it means to me and what it means to the world. So I needed the text to work with. And they eventually uncovered it 30 years on. So it was a little faded, probably had been Xerox copied about 15 times because some of it sort of needed Sherlock Holmes' magnifying glass to figure it out. But I was fascinated with it as a text, how much it gave away without really realizing it. All of the subtle interplay between these people, the judge and the prosecuting attorney and the defense attorney and the jury sitting there as a sort of Greek chorus in the background and the witnesses who were carefully led in and carefully shown what to say. And I was fascinated with, I mean, I have no background in criminal law, none at all. I haven't even sat through a most of a trial. I was the foreman on a drunk driving trial one time. So, you know, that was my court experience. But this transcript came to life. This badly typed and flimsily printed object came to life and revealed this subtle shift in a young man who walks into a courtroom knowing that he's innocent and knowing that they can't possibly find him guilty because he's innocent and he trusts the system. And to follow this from him sitting down and looking at his attorney and thinking, I don't know who this guy is. And then the final verdict. Then you feel the incredible shift going on in that courtroom that I tried to capture in that chapter. You really, it's the most beautiful and haunting of chapters because Ray Taylor is just this lovely man. He's very jovial and he plays in the Exonerie band. He's the bass player. And what you captured was his younger nature. He struck me and talking to him too. He struck me as a simple man. I mean, it's really not a complicated guy. He was in the National Guard for a while and he came home and he couldn't really get a job. And so he lived with his mother and he loved his two nieces and he just was a nice guy who really didn't have a lot of drive or ambition or really an awful lot going for him. But he just was simple, just a nice guy. And to watch him come out and talking with him on the phone, I mean, after all that, he's still a nice guy. I mean, how? Interestingly, only two of the writers that we asked to participate in the book have a journalism background. But what we wanted and what we got to our great pleasure was amazing stories because, I mean, I think writers like Laurie, mystery writers, they get inside, even if they're making it up, they're making up believable people. They understand what goes on in the human brain and how people react. And they were able to take these complex stories and find the moment and compress it and tell it in a way that's powerful. This book, I just did an event the other night talking about the book and a woman was telling me how she said on the beach sobbing, reading the book. This is just, it's heartbreaking because of the power of the writers and not just the stories. The stories, of course, just the bare facts alone would tear you up, but to see them presented as dramatic tales is really amazing. So thank you. But the fascinating thing that I found is that they're not just heartbreaking. I mean, because you know what's coming and you know, I mean, as I said, I don't know how these people can have come out the far end without just hating the entire universe. And yet most of them, just all they're interested in is it's getting on with life. I mean, just, okay, I gave you my 28 years. Let me just get on with it. And I think that that's the kind of cumulative effect, too, so that although, yes, you may be sobbing, there's also tears of joy knowing that these people had a light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Maurice, yeah, do you want to respond? Yeah, I would like to add in, you know, to give y'all, you know, what Lori talking about, you know, like when I was going to trial, me, my family, we all knew, you know, I was raised, you know, with the truth that always set you free. That's everything anybody here, no matter if it's fit for you or fit for your friend, the truth will set you free. So when I was going through my trial process, went through the trial, the ending of the trial, I stood, the judge said, just say, can you stand up? You know, I stood up and I'm just like, I'm going home. You know, I'm just tone. And he was like, guilty. I'm still like, hey, I'm gone. You know, and then I started hearing in the back, you know, like mourns for my family. You know, like the courtroom just like, you know, my friend like, oh, no, and to me, I'm still, you know, like looking and then I'll just look back and see my family crying. And I'm wondering why should they be crying if I'm coming home? And then it just dawned, man, looked at my lawyer and he's shaking his head. You know, everybody's sad, you know, like, I'm thinking why should it be a sad day? You know, I'm coming home and then to hit me, you know, like they said guilty, you know, and just, I just wanted to go crazy. You know, I didn't know what to do. You know, but I had to maintain so I could fully understand that this really happened to me. You know, and it did. And then just like Lori say, when we do, at the end of the time, we serve in prison for a wrongful conviction and everything we go through inside that prison that should make us a very angry person, you know, a revengeful person. But we feel that every day, and I'm speaking for me, you know what I'm saying? And I can just imagine what every auxiliary feel. I was mad and hurt every day. I didn't know how my family was growing without me and I was just torn up, you know, every day in there. I didn't want to end my life, you know what I'm saying? I wanted, you know, that motivation helped me continue to fight to get out. But when, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. When you were in prison for so long and then you come home, it's already a stigma that they looked at you as the bad person. You was already the bad person that they convicted you, me, they convicted me the bad, all the angriest person 21 years ago. So I couldn't come home and shared that angry. Cause that'd be the ones they point, look at, this is an angry man. And they, everybody say we validated, we have a reason to be angry, okay? But the best thing for exonerees to do is do like the NCIP, do like Lori and Lori and everybody doing, share, bring awareness. Cause I feel by me being here, I could, I could, like Lori say, she needed to try, to really put stuff together. But with me, I could tell a person what the feeling was. You know, the feeling was unbearable. But then when you come home, it's something we had to deal with. You know, just like people say, I don't know how you deal with prison, being in prison for a crime, you didn't do. You know, I don't know how you could come home and not be angry. Okay, but we can't be looked at as that angry person. You know, we got to have rationalized in a better way. And that's what I do every day. I'm angry every day. I'm, you know, like people, you see exonerees get on TV, say, no, I'm not angry. I'm angry, I'm hurt, man, I stay hurt. It traumatized me. It changed my life. It's effective to me each and every day. But I don't want it to create bad stigma towards me or other exonerees. We shouldn't have never been there. We deserve to be here. We was a good person. Like Lori say, the man was a good, nice guy. And he still is. You know, it don't change us. It just restore us. And it makes us, you know, better people to be able to share our story. You know, like they say, it's chapters and books now where people could tell you just the way, like some of the things you really think about. Like I wonder how they was feeling. How do they eat? How do they do this? There's things in there to bring awareness now. And that's the best thing we could have in life, man. You know, not thank everybody for even being a part of it, you know? That's right. Well, Lori was saying that there are some uplifting stories in the book. And of course, the book is a little self-selecting. I mean, we're talking about people who were, in fact, exonerated. Certainly, there are tens of thousands of people in prison who are innocent, who are not going to be exonerated. They're not going to be exonerated because there aren't enough innocence projects. The innocence projects that there are can't take every case. And there are people who are denied parole, routinely denied parole, because the parole board wants to hear, I'm sorry for what I did. They don't want to hear, I didn't do it. So you're not eligible for parole. So the people in the book and the other exonerees are incredible, remarkable people. My question for you, Maurice, is really how did you do it? How did you get yourself through? I read these stories, and I seriously wonder whether I would have the strength to do that, to get through 20 years. It was hard. But when I first came home, I tell my lawyers and them, and I made a YouTube video, I say, it's like a cat. When you got a cat in a corner, that cat will do anything and everything he can to get out that corner. I don't care if you got to scratch up the wall, scratch towards the wall. He go get up on it. So that's how I felt. I knew I was in prison for a crime I didn't do. My whole trial, and everybody knew I didn't do this crime. So I wasn't going to sit here in this prison and just accept a pillow, accept the programs in prison, and just live every day in prison. I was going to be up in there just like people say. I'm going to make noise. If you get an angry criminal in the backseat of a police car, he going to make noise. And he making noise because he's guilty. I'm making noise because I'm innocent. So I expected all the continuous fighting I was, me writing letters. I used to write letters. I wrote 2020, hard copy, Mori Povic, Dateline, Montell Williams. I wrote every talk show that I can tell. I wrote, I write one letter, and I'll be like, I'm innocent to this crime. And here's the facts of this crime. And I was just one person just pick it up. And it was hard because I'll go through a phone book. I'll write so many lawyers and just send them letters. Send them letters. And I would get wish you luck. I'm saying wish you luck. Then the Innocent Project came into my life. And that's when they started responding. And it was like, man, is this the same as other? And then they really started responding. Started listening, hearing. And like they say, when you're in prison and you're in prison for a crime, you didn't do, it's a lot of us go cry wolf. But then it's a lot of them that's saying they innocent. And I think I don't know if I told Linda. I say, I characterize the type of innocence that a lot of people in prison say. You know, because they use that term blunt, bluntly. You know what I'm saying? You know, but now with the Innocent Project, they pointed clearly, if you're 100% innocent and did have no involvement whatsoever in the crime, them are the cases we take. We're not taking the crime that your crime got away and they giving you the time for your crime and you felt that was wrong. See, a lot of that fall in the cats in prison saying they're innocent. You know, hey man, he the one did, he did the murder, but you was there. You know what I'm saying? So you're not innocent. You making it bad for actual innocent people. So when Linda and them say the letters they get, they get thousands of letters. I've been to the vault. They got a vault, a big old vault. You know, like a bank vault at the NCIP. And I see the boxes of letters, man. And I still go visit the prisons right now and I do speakers. And I tell the guys in prison, man, that it's people out here care. You know what I'm saying? There's people out here. When you write a letter, I don't care. You can write a letter, say I didn't do the crime. I didn't do it, whatnot. They will get that letter. And like Linda say, they will look at the letter. They will screen it and see what they could do to have an avenue to get further involved in it. And they do it and they help. And like he said, when you in prison, you will never, like me, I had a 27 a life prison term. I was never coming home because in order for me to ever come home, I would have to go sit in front of a four pound old board just like this on opposite side of the table and say, I feel sorry for the victims that I created a hardship on and I feel bad for the victim who life I took. You know what I'm saying? I knew I was wrong about that. I was younger. That's what they wanna hear. I went to two board members. And when I come in, they already knew cause they hear the last tapes from the last one to see if you go collaborate what you say. So when I walk in, they just, here come Maurice again. You know, this is a real one for them to come in here and waste our time with this innocent stuff. You know, this stuff we don't know about. But see, y'all are blessed cause y'all are being aware of it. But I don't wanna hold up too much. Go ahead. I'll get to talk. Well, one thing I think that the book does a great job of is the stories. And we never are successful in a case unless we are able to capture our client's story. And for Maurice telling his story has been his mission since he got out is to let people understand what it was he experienced, how it happened to him and what has happened to him since. Many of the exonerees, almost all of the exonerees that get out and I'll echo what Les said, they are remarkable in their ability to transcend what it was they experienced. They might be angry and they have every reason to be angry. But I have asked several of them, how do you manage to put that anger aside enough that you can continue on with your life? And one of them explained to me that if I continue to be angry and I let that be what motivates me in life, they still win. I'm still incarcerated. And so I have had to, I don't wanna be incarcerated. If I keep thinking about what happened to me and how mad I am, I'm still in prison. And I don't, I'm out now. I am out and that is not where I wanna be. And I thought that was an interesting way of characterizing it. He said, I didn't choose to do that. My human spirit forced me to take that so that I could continue to live. And that was an interesting way for me to try to understand what he had experienced. Another one of our clients told me, told us he was explaining what Maurice was describing. I expected the system to work. He was only 16 when he was arrested and charged and convicted of murder and sent away for life. And he said, I kept waiting for the grown-ups to come. I kept waiting for the grown-ups to come and fix it. My lawyer was a grown-up. Where's my father? Where's my mother? Where's the judge? They're all grown-ups. How come they can't fix this? He said, and I finally just became a grown-up in prison and had to figure out how to do it myself. So. Laura, would you talk a little about the post-release problems and the ones that you work with? Yeah, you know, we tried to, we featured a couple of stories of people after innocence. One of my clients, Antoine Day, we featured his release, which was unfortunately not atypical. His case was up on appeal, so he had gone back to county jail. And the prosecution was realizing that they didn't have anything. And so they quickly agreed to release him on, I was gonna ask Linda how often this happens, but they quickly said, okay, well we got a Friday afternoon status date and they sent some young lawyer down there and the state says we're gonna nallypros, we're gonna dismiss. So Antoine has to go back to county jail to be processed, which can take anywhere from, in Chicago, it can take anywhere from two hours to two days. So there's really no standing outside with banners kind of a thing. And Antoine was walked into a room where people who'd been arrested had taken off their clothes. So people had been drug sick and in those clothes for days and days and days, said okay, pick out what you want. Pick out this like sweatsuit. You're nodding, I'm horrified that this, and he was walked out to the corner of, I don't know if anyone's from Chicago or has been there, but 26th Street is our criminal court system. It's the world's busiest criminal court system. And it is not in a great part of town. And he was walked out to the corner, no bus pass, no ID, no phone, no nothing. Imagine if they just took your phone away from you right now, the stress. Imagine if someone just walks you out onto the corner right now and you're all, you've gotten yourselves here, you can probably figure it out, but imagine how disoriented you would be. Now add 20 years to that. So you guys are nodding. Can you tell me why? Yes, the same, the story she's telling is, that's have always been a conflict in my life, you know, the way they did me, you know? But I just wanted to separate, I appreciated the clothes. You know, they give you homeless clothes, salvation or every clothes, but I appreciate them because it was 21 years in prison clothes. So I would have just, I would have left in my drawers. You know what I'm saying? I would have left in boxes, you know? But the way they leave, they let you go, they let you go like they just arrested you and had you in a drunk tank for 24 hours and they just let you go. You know, when they let me go, they didn't give me no, they didn't give me no instructions on what type of bus to catch. You know what I'm saying? No bus pass, no, no go phone. They got, they got phones, you know, that they got go phones that they should, they should be allowed to give you until you could contact family. You know what I'm saying? And like I say, the only saver we got in our, in our life is the NCIP and people like this. They were the ones there when the state and the system should have been there. If you were parolee, see, that's the irony. If you were parolee, you get out and there's all kinds of systems. When you get, when you get paroled, if you do a crime and you release from that crime, they don't let you go home until they tell you what to do. Well, huh, here go your money for your bus, here go your money for the weekly living, here go your bus token, and you could go here for a stay, you could go here for, you know, they didn't do, they don't do nothing. They don't have a program in store for a wrongful conviction person. You know, they got the programs in store for if you're guilty and you did the crime, now you rehabilitate it. But for somebody that they just took your life and took 20 some years or many years or 20 days from your life, they don't have nothing in pack to restore. That's what the Innocent Project and people like this, and like y'all, you know they won't change, stand for it, man. They aren't, they don't equip to know what to do. It's not that they are purposefully trying to harm the exonerees, they are like their hands are up in the air, we don't know what to do. I had one client who was convicted of a horrible child molestation that never happened. He was one of the Bakersfield witch hunt defendants that when they went through and just arrested dozens of people in Bakersfield and accused them of all kinds of satanic witchcraft, child abuse, which was later turned out to be false. He was a very large man, a very dignified man and they didn't have any clothes for him. So they released him in a paper suit. So here's a six foot six man being released into society in a paper garment because he didn't have anybody to contact and he didn't have anything to wear and they didn't have anything to give him. The other thing is that they say they have five days by statute or regulation to do all the processing that they need in order to figure out if this person should be released. Now they have a court order that is reversing the conviction and ordering the release of the client. So a court has told them that they need to release it but they always explain it, we need to do warrant checks. Like a guy's been in for 20 years, haven't had a chance to do a warrant check yet? He hasn't incurred any other since he's been in, he's been in. So if I could stop for a speeding ticket, they run a warrant in about three minutes. They come back and tell me whether or not I need to go in. So I don't understand why it takes them five days but that's one of the things they claim that they need to do. So we are just in the practice of hovering wherever they're gonna be, where the client is, we'll just be there and it can be three days and we're taking turns and in shifts to be there so that when they get out, there's somebody there to help them find a car, get to wherever they're gonna go. When exonery comes out and they have a 20-year blank on their resume, they have no job training, they have no social security benefits for those 20 years. Some states have compensation. Lord, you wanna talk about the overview of compensation and then maybe Linda, you can tell us about the wonderful California system. Yeah, so 30 states in the nation have some law on the books that provides compensation for the wrongfully convicted. It is so different, would you agree, Linda, from state to state, it varies widely. Texas, for example, has long been held up as the poster child for wrongful convictions. However, they had such a reverb effect that they have passed some very effective legislation that gives $80,000 a year for every year you were in, as well as an 80,000 annuity, education credits, mental health benefits, and job training. On the other hand, Illinois is also one of the repeat offenders and we have a, now, and by the way, for any of these things, you have to prove your innocence. You don't have to prove you're not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. You actually have to prove your innocence. It's quite the high bar. In Illinois, we only give 215,000 and I've been trying since 2009 to add all these benefits to the compensation package and getting nowhere. So finally, I've just started going in and at Life After Innocence, we've added to the veterans benefits. It says veterans get education credits. So I said, how about exonerase? So we put that in it. I was, we were never allowed to just add to the package, which we only give 215,000 max. So the first person we worked with, Jerry Miller, 26 years, 215,000 max. How's it working here? So in California, we have a generous allotment of $140 a day for all the time that you were incarcerated but you do have to prove your innocence. And it was so draconian what you had to do in order to prove your innocence that you could have a judge that had a hearing, listened to witnesses, declared you innocent. You still had to go before the compensation board, have a full blown hearing, call all the same witnesses and the hearing officer who's like a guy named Kyle, listens to these witnesses and said, I don't believe them. I'm not gonna find you innocent and refuse to pay. So we have done a whole lot of work to try to tinker around the edges of the statute to try to make it more fair so that if a judge says you're innocent, the hearing officer is, and the board are compelled to accept those findings. I have a little more faith in a judge that's heard, witnesses evaluated their demeanor, that's their job and declare so, it's not innocent. It's not easy to get a judge to declare somebody innocent. It's not like they roll over by any means and the standards that we have to meet in order to get that are extraordinary. So if we get that from a court, that should be binding on the hearing officer. One of the words that always comes up in these discussions is Kafka-esque. Kafka-esque, yeah. It is and it is difficult. But one of the most effective things we've had in order going to the California legislature is taking somebody like Maurice to meet legislators and explain to them what he experienced going in, what he lost, what it's been like for him coming out, and they are appalled that our state doesn't do more to try to help exonerees. So we have had some success in trying to change the rules and regulations regarding compensation. It is still very difficult because the ultimate deciders are political appointees who if it's not gonna serve their interests, they're not gonna do it. Of course, we should underline there are 20 states that have nothing. None, that's right. And you'll read in the paper every once in a while about, oh, this person got 10 million, this person got $24 million. First of all, those are extremely rare, extremely rare. I mean, I don't know how many individuals have gotten civil judgments, but a handful. And the bar is extremely high. You have to show a pattern of wrongful conduct by the prosecution or the police in order to do this. Just a mistake doesn't mean you get 10 million dollars. We're gonna take questions in a minute, but Lori, I kind of wanted to touch on your new book. You're often steeped in Sherlockian things, but your new standalone novel is about a school shooting. Have you seen any crossover sort of amongst what you were writing about and what you encountered with this project? Well, I think that, I mean, this particular book, Lockdown, is kind of difficult to talk about because it always sounds like, oh, it's a, what's the phrase ripped from the headlines. And it's actually what interested me in the story, and I kind of was hoping people would take away from it, is that it's about the school community. And yes, there is a gun that it does come to campus, but the response of the community and the way that kids deal with it is what interested me. I mean, I wanted, and I think, again, we are talking about stories and how you build a sensibility out of stories. That if you have a story about a school shooter, we tend to think immediately about, oh, yes, it's this. If you have a story about a black guy who's convicted of raping a white child in a park, oh, you think it's this. But when you begin to pick that story apart, something very different can come out. And that's, I think, what fascinates me and has ever since, I mean, as I said, I did my masters in Old Testament theology because it's all the stories. I mean, you're talking about issues that are of basic importance to human beings and they are told in stories. So before we take questions, I just like to slip in the 30-second sermon of sort of what I want you to take away from this program, two things. One is I want you to question authority. Think about whether there could be mistakes that are below the surface, maybe not the headlines. Many of the cases that are involved in the book here are cases where the emotions ran very high in the community, it was a horrible crime. And so it wasn't evil people, it was people who really wanted to find a guilty person and they didn't want to spend a lot of time thinking about whether the person they found was in fact the guilty person, but they found somebody. Because the police arrested him so therefore he had to be. So it's about question authority. And the second thing is by the book. This is a non-profit project. We're here trying to do two things. One is to raise money for life after innocence, but more importantly, we wanna spread the message. So buy four or five copies and give them to your friends. I have two more things. Say yes to jury service and donate to innocence organizations like Northern California Innocence Project. Because literally like every, I can tell you from spending the last eight years just in awe of these attorneys and their passions, every dollar is used to help people get out. I mean, and it's not currently going to be well-funded given our sort of climate. That's as far as that's gonna go. Do we have questions? We've got a mic, so we're gonna let our mic person pick who's going first.