Wrongful Conviction Podcasts

On April 5th, 1990, Bernhardt and Cora Hartig, both 81, were shot to death in their Atwater, OH home with a .25 caliber gun. Miles away, 18-year-old Tyrone Noling was involved in two non-violent robberies – in one, he stole a .25 caliber gun and in the second, it accidentally discharged, hurting no one. This gun, however, was not the Hartig murder weapon, and despite other, more viable suspects, P...

DeRay McKesson joins Jason to talk about his journey from school administrator to activist. His work with Campaign Zero is bringing real reforms to police departments all over the country and helping to reduce police violence. To learn more and get involved, visit: https://campaignzero.org/ https://lavaforgood.com/righteous-convictions Righteous Convictions with Jason Flom is a production of Lava...

The is a re-release of Righteous Convictions with Jason Flom, Season 2, Episode 2. New episodes drop every Tuesday on the Righteous Convictions with Jason Flom feed. Please search and subscribe to be the first to hear them. Ashley Judd joins Jason to share her journey from actor to activist and the importance of empowering women and girls all over the world. To learn more and get involved, go to:...

On December 20, 1987, at about 2 am, two masked men forced their way into a Burger King in Brooklyn, New York, as employees were closing. A third man entered the restaurant at some point, and they blindfolded and raped an 18-year-old female employee and forced a male employee to participate. The three assailants fled with $3,000 in cash. Both employees reported the crime as involving three assaila...

Alexander McLean joins Jason to talk about his work with Justice Defenders. Justice Defenders is a non-profit that works to provide prisoners and prison officers with legal education, training, and even law degrees to help facilitate legal processes. To learn more and get involve, visit: https://www.justice-defenders.org/ https://lavaforgood.com/righteous-convictions Righteous Convictions with Jas...

The is a re-release of Righteous Convictions with Jason Flom, Season 2, Episode 1. New episodes drop every Tuesday on the Righteous Convictions with Jason Flom feed. Please search and subscribe to be the first to hear them. Sir Richard Branson and Celia Ouellette join Jason to talk about their plans for the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice, abolishing the death penalty, and criminal jus...

Brothers, Dennis and Lee Horton, were having a pleasant Memorial Day in 1993 until they decided to visit their father in North Philadelphia and ran into a childhood friend, Robert Leaf. Unbeknownst to the Hortons, Robert Leaf had committed an armed robbery turned homicide earlier that day. Shortly after Robert joined the brothers in their car, police pulled them over. All three were arrested and t...

John Fetterman, Lt. Governor of PA, joins Jason to talk about using compassion, mercy, and second chances to reform our criminal justice system. To learn more and get involved, go to: https://johnfetterman.com/ https://lavaforgood.com/righteous-convictions Righteous Convictions with Jason Flom is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Co No1. See omnystudio.com/listener...

In early May of 1977, Keith Laborde and his 14 year old twin cousins, Karen and Sharon Sanders, allegedly picked up a hitchhiking black man at a gas station in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. About 2 weeks later, when asked about a scratch on his neck, Keith Laborde and the twins told a story about this armed hitchhiker who allegedly forced Laborde into the trunk and raped both girls. Despite not mat...

Darryl “DMC” McDaniels and Static join Jason to talk about their work with Road Recovery, an entertainment industry-driven non-profit organization dedicated to helping young people battle addiction and other adversities by empowering at-risk youth from all backgrounds to face their struggles, while teaching them comprehensive life skills. Learn more and get involved: https://lavaforgood.com/righte...

On the morning of December 29th, 1991, the body of a 36 year old woman was found nude in the men’s restroom of the bar where she worked in Phoenix, Arizona. She had been assaulted and fatally stabbed. No semen was left behind. With DNA testing in its infancy, serology could only show that any blood or saliva at the crime scene matched the victim’s blood type. There were, however, what appeared to...

On January 6th, 1990, a 21 year old woman was working at a convenience store in Covington, Georgia. At around 4am, this woman, who we'll refer to as "BT," was abducted, forced into a truck, and sexually assaulted until she managed to escape 90 minutes later. Despite BT’s insistence that she hadn’t known the perpetrator, police ultimately persuaded her to believe a story that her ex-boyfriend Ronal...

Sir Richard Branson and Celia Ouellette join Jason to talk about their plans for the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice, abolishing the death penalty, and criminal justice reform. Hear the entire episode, as well as all of Season 2 of Righteous Convictions with Jason Flom in its new feed. Search, find, and follow Righteous Convictions with Jason Flom wherever you listen. https://lavaforgo...

On March 16, 1989, Lloyd Witter and Jomo Kenyatta sustained several gunshot wounds at a residence in Jamaica, Queens.  Witter died from his injuries.  Paul Anderson, who also lived at the residence, was found handcuffed near Witter’s body. Under questioning, both Kenyatta and Anderson provided at least a half dozen different versions of the story that finally landed on Carlton Roman as the gunman....

On January 24th, 2007, Keith Washington, a police officer and former Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army, was home with his wife and 6 year old daughter while they awaited a delivery from Marlo Furniture store. Two men, Robert White and Brandon Clark, arrived with the furniture, and while showing them to the master bedroom, Keith realized that White had broken away and was snooping in his daughter...

Season 2 of Righteous Convictions with Jason Flom launches Tuesday, October 26th. Please listen in as music executive, philanthropist, and activist Jason Flom converses with a diverse who's-who of advocates at the forefront of critical issues that will impact our future. Guests include Sir Richard Branson, Ashley Judd, Alexander McLean, Daryl “DMC” McDaniels and many more. His discussions with the...

Atif Rafay was a thriving, brilliant, and happy student who had just finished his freshman year at Cornell University. On a weekend trip in July of 1994, while visiting his family in Bellevue, Washington, Atif Rafay’s mother, father, and sister were all brutally murdered in their home. Investigators targeted Atif and his best friend, Sebastian Burns, because they were ‘acting strangely.’ Despite a...

This is a re-release of an episode that originally aired on October 2, 2019. In 2006, 16 year old Wisconsin special education student Brendan Dassey gave a videotaped confession to the murder of a young woman named Teresa Halbach.  Brendan recanted his confession immediately, but was still convicted and sentenced to life in prison even though there was no evidence connecting him to the crime and t...

On November 6th, 1991, William Catlett was shot and killed on a street corner in West Philadelphia. Nearly all eyewitnesses identified a man named Edward “P-nut” Johnson as the shooter; however, instead of following those leads, investigators coerced a man named Shawn Stevenson to blame Catlett’s friend, Eric Riddick. Eric was told about Stevenson’s 1999 recantation four years late in 2003, when h...

19 year old Anthony Klann was stabbed to death in Cleveland, Ohio in September of 1988. Two men who had a lot to gain worked with detectives to spin a narrative, claiming two other men, Joe D'Ambrosio and Michael Keenan, committed the murder on September 22nd; however, Anthony Klann was still very much alive the following night. Learn more and get involved at:  https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/...

3 Chicago teenagers went to a party at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater where embarrassment turned a consensual encounter into a far-fetched gang rape accusation wrapped up in well-worn racist tropes. Three radically different outcomes for each young man only served to underscore the absurdity of this tragic failure of our justice system. Jarrett Adams’ book Redeeming Justice:  https://www.p...

Anthony Sims is going into the 24th year of a 25 to life sentence based on a narrative constructed by his former friend Julius Graves. The only witness that was neither a friend nor family member of Graves continues to tell the story of Anthony’s innocence (and Graves’s guilt) to this day. Learn more and get involved at:  https://www.freeanthonysims.com/ https://www.wrongfulconvictionpodcast.com/w...

Sometimes when detectives can't get a confession they'll settle for a something else Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin explore the story of Emerson Stevens, a fisherman from Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay. When a young mother was found murdered, it seemed all the evidence pointed to Emerson, until the case fell apart when a key witness was convicted of lying about the case and a forensic test technique wa...

In this live audience recording at ComplexCon Chicago 2019, Patrick Pursley tells us how a purposely false identification, a coerced and immediately recanted false statement, and false expert testimony led to his wrongful conviction. Amazingly, Patrick Pursley changed a law from inside prison in order to obtain the ballistic testing necessary to set himself free. His fight continues on the outside...

On July 28th, 1999, Julius Jones was playing monopoly with his family and soon to be a sophomore on an academic scholarship at the University of Oklahoma. That night, a man named Paul Howell was shot for his GMC Suburban in the nearby suburb of Edmund, Oklahoma. A few days later, Julius was awakened and dragged out of bed, barefoot and shirtless, and taken into police custody as a murder suspect e...