July 31, 2023 • 36 mins
How can one man save the life of a perfect stranger?
The case of Daniel Villegas shows how ordinary people can make an extraordinary difference in the fight against wrongful convictions. Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin tell the story of an unexpected hero who fought for years to turn tragedy into triumph, ending in one of the most dramatic courtroom exonerations ever seen.
This updated episode shares the great work that Daniel is doing today to pay it forward.
To learn more and get involved, visit:
http://proclaimjustice.org/donate/
https://www.centeronwrongfulconvictions.org/
Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey guys, it's Laura and I writer. In Season one
of False Confessions, we brought you the story of Daniel Viegas,
a teenager from El Paso, Texas, who was coerced into
giving a false confession to a double murder in nineteen
ninety three. One of the people who ultimately helped free
Daniel started out as a complete stranger to him. It's
a story of real heroism that proves anyone can have
(00:27):
an impact when they put in the effort. Now, we're
pleased to tell you that since his acquittal in twenty eighteen,
Daniel is living in that spirit. He's paying it forward,
so to speak. Today he works with Proclaim Justice, an
organization founded by Jason Baldwin, a member of the West
Memphis III. Proclaimed Justice helps to free other innocent people
(00:48):
across the country. Daniel also bravely shares his story on
stage and on social media. He helps to raise awareness
of this all too common miscarriage of justice. We need
advocates like Daniel Vehegas and organizations like Proclaimed Justice to
speak out against wrongful convictions, to tell the world that
this really can happen to anyone. It's through their work
(01:11):
that we can create a future where no innocent person
ever spends another day in prison. Daniel, We thank you
for your invaluable work. We're replaying this episode in your honor.
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Writer, and I'm Steve Drusy.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Today we're going to tell you about a case that
shows just how much ordinary people can help the wrongly
convicted find real justice, even when they start out as strangers.
In today's case, an unexpected hero fought for years to
turn tragedy into triumph, ending into one of the most
dramatic courtroom exonerations I've ever seen. Like so many of
(02:07):
our cases at the Center on Wrongful Convictions, Steve first
learned about Daniel Viegas through one of his infamous online searches.
By this time, I actually had my own newsfeed, and
so did our colleague Josh Tepfer. But Steve had his
own reasons for being particularly excited about this case.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
So after all three of us read about a possible
false confession case in Alpasso, it seemed like destiny for
us to get involved in this case. You see, in
two thousand and six, Alpasso was host to one of
the most important conferences in the history of false confessions
that brought together many of the leading experts on the
(02:45):
subject to the University of Texas.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
For people like us, this is basically the Olympics meets Coachella.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Who was there? Well, Donald Connery, the author of Peter
Riley's book, was there.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Steve's talking about a book called Guilty Until Proven Innocent.
We'll tell you that story in a later episode about
a false confession from nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
And Geezley good Johnson, the famed Icelandic detective turned psychology
professor at King's College of London.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
You might remember Geasley from our last episode. His scientific
expertise helped exonerate Tana Pora in New Zealand.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Richard Offshe and Richard Leo and Saul Cassen, some of
the leading experts in the United States on false confessions,
were there.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
We're going to hear from Saul Cassen in another episode two.
All of these guys are og experts in the world
of false confessions. They're Steve's heroes and mine too. So
if I've turned into a geek here, you know who
to blame.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
This conference was a watershed moment in the history of
false confessions and the idea of going back to al
Paso to work on an actual false confession case, it
just seemed like destiny to me.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
This story starts in El Paso, a border city in
West Texas. Now. In the early nineteen nine El Casso
was a different place than it is today. The crime
rate was sky high. There was lots of gang activity.
Street violence was a daily problem, and in some neighborhoods,
shootings were regular occurrences. We start our story in the
early morning hours of April tenth, nineteen ninety three. Good Friday.
(04:18):
It's just after midnight, and four teenagers are walking home
from a party and they find themselves in a rough neighborhood.
Three of them, Manda Lazo, Juan Carlo's Medina, and Jesse Hernandez,
were seventeen years old. The fourth, Bobby England, was eighteen.
All of them were good kids, none of them were
caught up in gangs or the street life. But they
(04:38):
ran into trouble anyway. At the intersection of Electric Street
and trans Mountain Road. That's where a maroon car with
tinted windows rolls up behind them and starts following them. Slowly. Now,
just as the four of them start to get scared,
the car takes off. It speeds away, but a few
minutes later it comes back, and this time the driver
(04:59):
turns off the headline light. Words are shouted from the
car in Spanish, possibly an insult keeputos, and then a
series of shots ring out, one right after another. Wan
and Jesse take off running as a matter of sheer instinct,
and they think that their two friends are running away
alongside them. But when Onan and Jesse feel that they've
(05:19):
run far enough that it's safe to slow down, they
look around them and they don't see Mondo or Bobby
with them at all. They take a deep breath, go
back to the scene of the shooting and they see
police lights flashing. Bobby had been shot in the head
and died in the street. Mondo had been shot in
the stomach and the thigh. He made it one hundred
(05:41):
yards to a house up the street, where he collapsed
in the front yard and died as the residents frantically
dialed nine one one. Now, the police found six shells
from a twenty two caliber handgun littered on the street
right where the car had pulled over, but That's about it.
In terms of evidence. There were no fingerprints, no DNA,
nothing forensic to help them solve this crime. It was
(06:01):
going to have to come down to confessions.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
The Alpasso Police assigned one of the toughest cops on
the force to the Good Friday shooting, an officer whose
name we can't share, but an officer who is known
as a closer.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
This guy is so tough he's even been featured on
the TV show Cops.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Now, what's a closer? A closer is someone who is
very skilled at police interrogation. A good closer will gather
evidence and then slowly reveal that evidence to a suspect,
like peeling off layers of an onion, so that the
suspect feels like he is nabbed, his goose is cooked,
and that leads the suspect to confess. But there are
(06:41):
other kinds of closers. Closers who use brutality and threats,
and they don't only use these tactics with suspects. Their
modus operandi is to use these tactics with suspects, with
witnesses and sometimes with victims, and they get statements, but
those statements are coerced and false statements. This detective, he
(07:05):
was in that second camp exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
So the closer is brought in right this detective from
the al Paso Police Force. He begins investigating the case
and pretty soon he comes across a seventeen year old
boy named David Rongel. David is brought into the police
station in theory about a completely different case. The police
had told his mom that they needed to talk to
Davide about some telephone harassment complaints, but when questioning actually began,
(07:33):
it had nothing to do with telephone harassment. Police began
accusing Davide of committing the Good Friday shootings. Now later on,
Davide said that the police falsely told him during this
interrogation that his friends had implicated him, and David himself
was threatened. He says he was told that he was
a pretty white boy with green eyes who would be
(07:54):
raped in prison if he didn't confess. This scares David
and eventually he starts offering some information. He tells police
that his sixteen year old cousin, Daniel Viegos, had been
bragging about committing the Good Friday shootings, although he added
that everyone was sure Daniel had been joking. You see,
Daniel had a reputation as a jokester. He was the
(08:16):
type of kid who always boasted about things he hadn't
actually done. Daniel had bragged about owning a waterbed when
he didn't. He'd bragged about owning a fancy stereo when
he didn't. He'd even bragged about being descended from Italian
Royalty when he definitely wasn't.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
I want to be descended from Italian.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Royalty, me too, but that kind of lucks just ain't
for us. Steve Anyway, when it came to the Good
Friday shootings, Davide never believed Daniel to be serious, not
even for a minute. It just wasn't him. Daniel had
nothing serious like this in his background.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Just like criminals have a modus operandi, many times closures
or interrogators have a modus operandi, And in David's case
we saw evidence that we later were able to demonstrate
was a modus operandi. Almost all this interrogator would tell
the suspect that his best friend or close associate had
implicated him in the.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
Crime, even if that's untrue, right.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Always untrue, right. He would threaten the suspect with the
death penalty, and he also told the suspects or the
witnesses or the victims in this case, that they were
going to go to prison and they were going to
be raped. I mean, if you're a seventeen year old kid,
and most of these witnesses were teenagers, and you're told
that you're looking at going to an adult jail where
(09:30):
you're going to be a rape victim, you're going to
say just about anything you need to get out of
that interrogation.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
It's terrifying stuff. And for David, the information he gave
was that his cousin Daniel, had been joking about committing
the Good Friday shooting. He never believed Daniel to be serious,
but this information was enough for the police. They asked
Devid to write out a statement describing what Daniel had said.
David wrote that Daniel had bragged about using a shotgun
(09:56):
to commit the shootings, but the detective had David take
that part out and write the statement a second time
without mentioning the type of weapon, because remember, the shells
at the scene had come from a twenty two, not
a shotgun. Even with the detective's edits, da Vide's statements
still contained errors. He remembered his cousin bragging about being
in a black car, not a maroon car, and Davide
(10:19):
said that Daniel described firing a few shots, then getting
out of the car, chasing Mondo Lazo to the house
and shooting him again. There, that's just not how this
crime happened. The shots were all clustered together, not spaced out,
and there were no casings found near Mondo's body. But
none of us mattered. Now, this was a statement that
(10:41):
David regretted giving. It haunted him for the rest of
his life that he'd implicated his own cousin in the
Good Friday shootings, when even he didn't believe that Daniel
was guilty. But it was a statement that he felt
he had no choice but to give in light of
the threats that he was encountering in the interrogation room.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
So there errors, errors in Da VID's statement, errors in
the statements of other witnesses, errors that the true perpetrator
would never have made. That's a red flag.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
It's a huge red flag. But it doesn't stop these police.
Within hours, three more people are brought in for questioning.
Late at night on April twenty first, two friends of
Daniel's Marcos Gonzalez and Rodney Williams and Daniel himself. They're
all questioned, and when Daniel is interrogated, he denies involvement.
He tells the police he was babysitting that night with
(11:30):
a group of friends and they were all watching White
Men Can't Jump on TV.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
But here comes that modus operandi exactly.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Daniel reports being told that if he didn't confess, he
would be taken to the desert to get beaten, and
then to jail where he would be raped by old
men then sentenced to death by the electric chair. This
is how they scared Daniel. This is how they began
reducing him down to this feeling of hopelessness. But if
he confessed, on the other hand, he was told that
he would get leniency because he was just a minor.
(12:00):
And after about five hours of interrogation, Daniel ends up
signing a confession typed out by detectives. It's about three
o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
He repeats the same errors that David Rangell had made,
but he makes other mistakes too. First of all, what
about the people in the car? Daniel says the driver
was someone nicknamed Popeye, and that the front passenger was
someone nicknamed Droopy, but the only known Popeye was incarcerated
at the time, and the only known Droopy he was
also on house arrested at the time. They could not
(12:31):
possibly have been in the car the color of the car.
Davide had said the car was black. Survivor Jesse Hernandez
he had said the car was maroon. Daniel said they
were in a white four door sedan at the time
of the shooting. And finally, Daniel said that he had
shot Bobby and Mondo in the back, but it was
(12:52):
clear from the medical examiner's report that they had been
shot from the front.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
The more and more you study Daniel's confession, the more
you start to a pattern. The only facts about this
murder that he was able to get right are facts
that had been publicized about the Good Friday shootings in
the local paper, the El Paso Times. Now, this is
a pretty big red flag when you can only get
facts right when you've read about them in the newspaper.
And there's another red flag in this case too. As
(13:19):
soon as the interrogator left the room, Daniel immediately recants
to a juvenile probation officer. I didn't do it, he said,
and he explained that he only confessed because the cops
kept harassing him. He said, I was tired, so I
told them what they wanted to hear.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
And the police and prosecutors rang with that confession, even
though it was filled with many false facts and errors.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Despite the red flags in his confession, despite the recantation,
despite the lack of any physical evidence connecting him to
the crime, Daniel Viegas is arrested and charged with capital murder.
He's sixteen years old. Now. Daniel didn't come from a
(14:09):
family with a lot of money, but his parents managed
somehow to scrape together ten thousand dollars for an attorney.
Daniel Viegas's first trial took place in December nineteen ninety four.
At that trial, David Wrangle testified, but he maintained that
Daniel had been obviously kidding when he'd bragged about the shooting.
Rodney and Marcos, Daniel's friends, well, they'd given police statements
(14:32):
implicating Daniel when they'd been questioned, but on the witness
stand they said their statements were false and had been
obtained through threats of prison, rape and other similar threats,
and Daniel's attorney called eighteen defense witnesses, including several alibi
witnesses who testified that Daniel was with them babysitting and
watching TV at the time of the shooting. Right, white
(14:53):
men can't jump, And Daniel's attorney argued strenuously about all
these inconsistencies in Daniel's confession, how it just didn't match
the facts of this crime, how it showed every indication
of being false.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
He even called other witnesses who called into question the
credibility of this detective, former prosecutors who had sought indictments
for perjury.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
The defense mounted a huge fight. They made every argument
they could. The trial lasted a week and at the
end there was a hung jury eleven to one, but.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
It was eleven to one in favor of a conviction,
which gave the district attorney some thought that this would
be an easier case to convict the next time around.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Sure enough, about nine months later, again, Daniel veegis Is
tried for the murders of Mondo and Bobby. But the
second trial was different. You see, Daniel's parents had spent
every penny they had on the first trial, and they
couldn't afford a lawyer for the second trial. This time around,
Daniel was represented by a court appointed lawyer, someone who
had been assigned the case only two months before the
(15:58):
trial began, and so when the second trial rolled around,
that lawyer called only one defense witness, no alibi witnesses
at all. He hardly pointed to any problems with Daniel's confession,
even though he had a blueprint for success in the
form of the first trial, and.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
He didn't make a full frontal attack on the integrity
and credibility of the police officer who got these unreliable statements.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
And so on August twenty fourth, nineteen ninety five, Daniel
Viegas was convicted of capital murder. Because he'd been a
juvenile at the time of the offense, he wasn't sentenced
to death. Instead, he was given two life terms in prison,
one for Bobby and one for Mondo. Daniel was a
teenager when he went to prison, and he might still
(16:45):
be there today if it weren't for a man named
John Mimbella. What a man now. John is the head
of a successful El Paso construction firm, a firm that
hired a lot of formerly incarcerated people. Because John is
a guy who believes in second chances. One day in
two thousand and five, John Mabella walks into an El
Paso bank and he ends up asking his teller, a
(17:07):
woman named Lucy, out on a date.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
Six months later, we're buried. Lucy had three daughters with
Daniel's brother, so Daniel was actually Lucy's ex brother in law.
I adopted Lucy's daughters two years later, and that's when
I learned more about Daniel's case.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Now, Lucy often brought the girls to see their grandparents,
who were Daniel's parents, and eventually John started coming along too.
That's where he started to hear stories about their son, Daniel,
who was serving life in prison for two murders he
didn't commit.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
At first, I thought, you know, any parents gonna not
want to accept that their son might be a killer.
I had a lot of faith also in our system.
You know, I always believe that if a jury found
you guilty, it must have been because they had plenty
of evidence against you. So I figured, hey, you know,
(18:01):
they must have all kinds of evidence on this kid
if they sentenced him to life.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
John was skeptical, but he saw how heartbroken the grandparents
were and he agreed to read through the court papers.
Before long he was dumb struck. There was no reliable
evidence tying Daniel to these shootings at all. And then
John Manbela became a man possessed.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
I've got a couple of friends and I asked him
if they could set up a meeting with our DA
because I saw some serious problems in Daniel's conviction. Our
DA happened to be high Miss Parsa, and he personally
tried Daniel. So I figured, you know what, if there's
some mistake, if there's some doubt, you know, he's going
to reopen this case. So we had the meeting and
(18:48):
I told him, I go, you know what, I think
Daniel's innocent. Something's wrong here, you know, we need to
look into it. This DA fought us a lot just
to get evidentry heering. After he told me the hire
Good of Bills lawyer and opened up the case again,
he fought as to the new.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Now this really fired John up. It didn't make any sense.
He starts paying for billboards around El Paso that say
free Daniel Viegas. He starts organizing rallies and protests outside
the courthouse, and he hired a private investigator.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
He read the transcripts and he was dumbfounded too. He goes, John,
I was a homicide detective for twenty years. This case
would never have gone to trial. I would never have
presented this to my DA if this is all I had. Well,
he was very upset, and he goes, yes, John, I'll
take your case.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
John nan Bella's invested in Daniel's innocence and the work
he would go on to do ended up costing him
personally hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
He's the patron saint of the Daniel Viegis case. You know.
I went down to l Passo shortly after John had
hired lawyers and investigators to reopen Daniel's case, and when
I went into the courthouse, there were like fifteen or
twenty people walking around with signs saying free Daniel Viegas.
(20:03):
You know, false confessions happened. Justice for Daniel Viegas. John
had organized a rally right in front of the courthouse,
and on the street in front of the courthouse was
a truck that had billboards on both sides of it
that was driving around the courthouse. So when you walked
into the courtroom in Alpaso. You were just blitched by
(20:24):
this notion that an injustice had occurred and that it
needed to be fixed.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Exactly, and John brought his entire community into this case too.
There was a manager who worked at his construction company
who was a songwriter, and he ends up writing a corrido,
a traditional Mexican ballad, about the wrongful conviction of Daniel Viegas.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
John was so proud of that song that one of
the first things he did when I was down in
El Paso was to play that for me. It's on
YouTube now if you want to hear it.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
John and the private investigator, right, they want to really
find out what happened, and one of the first people
they go to speak to is Jesse Hernandez, one of
the survivors of the shooting. Of course, Jesse was now
a grown man, and John shows Jesse for the first
time a copy of Daniel's confession.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Jesse's like, John, this is not what happened. This does
not look like a confession from somebody who was there
who took this confession down. And I told him. At
that point, Jesse turns pale and he's like John, that
same detective almost had me confessing to that crime. He
(21:46):
shows up that night and he tells me, we know
you shot your friends. Your buddy Kwan Madina, I just
told us that you did it. And Jesse says that
he was just hysterical. He's like, wait a minute, these
are my friends. I love my friends. I would never
do it like that to my friends. He goes, well,
maybe you blacked out, you know, and you shot them.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
You didn't even realize it.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
And at that moment, Jesse goes, well, man, you know,
why would my friend say I shot them if I
didn't shook them. Maybe I did do it And he
put his head down on the table and just crying uncontrollably.
Had it not been for his mom that stepped in,
he says, he was almost ready to confess. So Jesse's like,
the last thing I want is somebody innocence spending the
(22:28):
rest of their life in prison. That could have been me.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
This was an absolute bolt from the blue when John
heard this story from Jesse Hernandez, and it only motivated
him to continue pounding the pavement. Eventually, John hires a
highly skilled El Paso trial lawyer, a man named Joe Spencer.
Now Joe files a state petition for a writ of
habeas corpus, arguing, among other things, that Daniel's lawyer at
(23:01):
his second trial had been ineffective for failing to call
Daniel's alibi witnesses. There's a hearing plan it's going to
happen in twenty eleven, and in the run up to
that hearing, that's when Steve and I first heard about
this case.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
Yeah, we heard about it through our news feeds. And
this time what made this special is it wasn't just
me who came in to the office the next day.
It was me and Laura, and so did our third attorney,
Josh Tepfra That all three of us got this news
feed at the same time, a case of a juvenile
who had confessed to a crime he didn't commit and
(23:36):
who was trying to reopen his case through a new hearing.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
At the hearing, Jesse Hernandez takes the stand for the
first time. Jesse testifies that Daniel's confession didn't match what
actually happened to him and his friends. Daniel's alibi witnesses
also testified, saying that they were with Daniel on the
night of the crime, and remember doctor Richard Leo, one
of the experts from that falsecon profession conference in El
(24:01):
Paso back in two thousand and six. He took the
stand to and testified that Daniel's statement showed every sign
of being false. There was even evidence introduced that two
other known gang members had threatened Mando Lazo's life right
before the shooting, and they'd bragged about killing him afterwards.
When one of those two gang members was called to testify,
(24:22):
he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination and
refused to answer anything.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
And Joe Spencer also mounted again a direct attack on
the integrity of the detective who had taken the false
witness statements, who had almost gotten a false confession from
the crime victim, and who had gotten the confession from Daniel.
And one of the things he discovered, which is pretty incredible,
was that one of the tactics that this detective had
(24:51):
used in another case was that he would enter an
interrogation room dressed in a smock. Now, why would anybody
wear a smock? Well, he tried to mislead the suspect
into thinking that they were speaking to a medical person,
a doctor, unbelievable, instead of a police officer, and When
(25:12):
the judge heard that evidence, his eyes rolled back into his.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Head, and eventually we had an opportunity to file an
amicus brief about the unreliability of Daniel's confession and add
that to everything that Joe Spencer was already doing in
the courtroom, and we emphasized how vulnerable a teenager like
Daniel would have been to making a false confession. The
hearing concluded, and then we waited. The judge took nine
months to reach a decision, but on August seventeenth, twenty twelve,
(25:41):
Judge Sam Madrano recommended that Daniel Viegues receive a new trial.
Judge Modrano concluded that Daniel's trial lawyer had provided ineffective
assistance by failing to investigate or introduce evidence of the
unreliability of Daniel's confession. Now, Judge Modrano's decision was a
fabulous victory, but it was only a recommendation. It had
(26:03):
to be adopted by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
It was at that point that we joined the team
to craft a presentation to that court that we hoped
it would accept. As that appeal process is ongoing, Daniel's lawyer,
Joe Spencer, asked Judge Madrano to free Daniel on bond
let him go home as the appeal process dragged on,
(26:25):
and on January fourteenth, twenty fourteen, after nearly two decades
in prison, Daniel was released on bond, straight into the
arms of John Mambella, who drove him home in a
brand new, shiny red convertible.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
It was almost like a chick or tape parade. Daniel
was free.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
He got started living right away. As soon as he
was released. He got married to a woman named Amanda,
whom he'd met when he was behind bars, and in
short order they had two beautiful children. But even though
Daniel was walking out of the prison into the arms
of a crowd of supporters, that could have all been
taken away from him.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
And the Court of Criminal Appeals in Texas is a
court that has a reputation of being hostile to defendant's claims,
especially claims regarding their actual innocence, So it was anything
but a sure thing that Judge Medrano's decision would be affirmed.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Long story short, the High Court affirms Judge Madrano's ruling. Yes,
Daniel Viegs deserves another trial and a chance to prove
his innocence, but the DA didn't get around to the
new trial until twenty eighteen, So for four years Daniel's
living with a sword hanging over his head. If he
goes to trial and loses, he'll be back in prison
(27:43):
for life. This is enormously stressful. The months and years
are ticking by. Daniel's starting a family. He's working at
John Manbella's construction company, tasting freedom and cherishing it. What
does the DA do? He asks Daniel to enter an
Alfred plea stay free as long as you plead guilty.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
It's such a tempting offer, especially to somebody who was
locked up for a crime they didn't commit as a
teenager and had to spend two decades or more in
prison suffering under the weight of that wrongful conviction. But
now Daniel's got other people. He has to think about,
his wife and their children.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Daniel considered the Alfred plea option seriously because it meant
that he wouldn't have to go back to trial. You
would be a convicted murderer, but at least he would
have his freedom. Of course, he was tempted to put
the whole thing behind him, But Daniel lived in El
Paso Texas and El Paso had become home to a
small community of wrongly convicted individuals. Among that community was
(28:47):
a man named Jason Baldwin. Now that's a name that
true crime junkies might recognize because Jason Baldwin was a
member of the West Memphis III, a group of three
teenagers from Arkansas who had been a hughes of the
nineteen ninety three killings of three eight year old boys.
One of them, Jesse miss Kelly, had falsely confessed and
the three of them were convicted, two sentenced to life
(29:09):
in prison, and the third, Damien Eccles, sent a death
row in Arkansas. They fought their case for seventeen years.
Steve and I were fortunate enough to join Damien Eckles'
legal team at the very end, and they were freed
only when the State of Arkansas made them an offer.
All three of you enter Alfred, please say you're guilty
(29:31):
of these crimes, and then we'll let you out. Now
this is an easier decision when it came to Damien,
he was on death row, but Jason, who had been
sentenced to life in prison, wrestled with it. He didn't
want to admit to a crime he didn't commit even
to secure his own freedom. Ultimately, he chose to accept
the Alfred plea to help save Damien's life.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
One of the consequences of entering an Alford plea is
that you can't get compensated through state compensation statutes. The
Alfred plea is considered a plea of guilty, and that
disqualifies you from recovering any compensation.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Prosecutors dangle freedom so long as they can secure guilty
please in return and prevent themselves from being sued down
the road. It's a tool of injustice that happens way
too often. It was used in the Robert Davis case,
it was used in the West Memphis three case, and
it almost worked on Daniel Viegas. You see, Jason Baldwin
had moved from Arkansas to Texas, where he became involved
(30:29):
in a wrongful conviction advocacy organization called Proclaim Justice and
joined John Manbela's fight to free Daniel Viegas. Jason Baldwin
became one of his closest friends and confidants. As Daniel
wade whether to accept that Alfred play.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Daniel told me, Johnny goes, if I take this deal,
all this work that you did is for nothing. So
we called Jason Bodwin for his advice, and he said,
let's talk about it before you decide anything. And he
tells Daniel, Noah, I can't tell you what to do.
You have a family. But in my case, you know
(31:05):
there's no way that I would do it again. It
bothers me every day of my life. So just think
hard about this because it could bother you the rest
of your life too.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
And with Jason Baldwyn's counseling and support, Daniel Viegas found
his courage and turned down that unjust Alfred Plea offer.
He decided to go to trial.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
The stakes were so high at this trial. Daniel had
tasted freedom, he was starting to live the kind of
life he had always dreamed of. But here he was
back in that court, a place where the last time
had ended in a conviction.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Now this trial was very different because this time Daniel's
team of lawyers we succeeded in getting his confession thrown
out as involunteer and coerced. And without that confession there
is precious little evidence to go on. The state presented
a case to the jury, The jury deliberated and in
(32:09):
October of twenty eighteen, a verdict came out.
Speaker 4 (32:14):
The State of Texas versus Daniel Viegus.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Now, this is one of the highest profile cases in
the history of El Paso at this point, and the
courtroom is packed with supporters of Daniel Viegas. Jason Baldwin
of the West Memphis three is there, the local wrongful
conviction advocacy organization Proclaimed Justice is there, and John and
Lucy Membella sitting in the front row right behind Daniel
(32:37):
and his lawyers.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
They are there, and when the judge asks Daniel to
stand up for the verdict, his knees buckle. He almost collapses.
He has to hear whether this beautiful life that he
has started reconstructing is going to continue, where is it
going to end?
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Daniel's lawyers actually have to help him stand up, and
he was able to stand just long enough to hear
the verott.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
We the jury finally defended Daniel viegis not guilty of
friend not guilty, and the courtland rupts in a sound
of both cheers and incredible relief. And then he collapsed
under the.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Weight of a lifetime's worth of fighting. He had finally
been exonerated. It was over.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
It was a feeling that I don't think I'm ever
going to feel again in my life.
Speaker 4 (33:38):
Hey, Daniel, is that you? Yeah? Tell me about your kids?
How many kids you got? Now there's four all together.
The man of my wife to me short pregnant. I remember,
I told him, man, I'm told to be a dead
and right at that time, my daughter got pregnant too,
and I was like, oh man, you know I'm pretty
young to be a grandfather.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
What do you tell your kids about what happened to you?
Speaker 4 (33:59):
The two little one of the are too small to know
about it. They don't understand yet. Like I love when
they tell me life ain't fair. I tell him, tell
me about the nineteen years in print and tell me
how life ran fair. Preenia Room, I know that the
Wrongful Conviction podcast played an important role in your case too. Yes, Amanda,
she's really into the Wrongful Conviction community, right, She's like
(34:22):
the voted fans to Jason Plant. So when they came
in with that offer flee, you know, they were just
telling me by signing the sea the paper, that case
is closed. So I was going to sign it almost
and that's when Amanda jumped in and says like, no, no,
I know all about this. Alpha Please. You know Jason
Plant told me about this. She educated me on that,
and then that's when we decided not to take that
pre deal.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
Daniel, You're an incredible human being. To see you as
a free man at Innocence Network conferences, at events for
proclaimed you justice, it makes my heart seek.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
You're a symbol of endurance. It's been our honor to
know you and to tell your story today. Wrongful Conviction,
False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
in association with Signal Company Number One. Special thanks to
(35:23):
our executive producer Jason Flamm and the team at Signal
Company Number one. Executive producer Kevin wardis Senior producer and
Pope and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Special
thanks to Jogi Hammer for additional script editing and for
wrangling and writing like a mad woman. Our music was
composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram
(35:45):
or Twitter at Laura Nywriter, and.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
You can follow me on Twitter at s Drisen.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
For more information on the show, visit Wrongfulconviction podcast dot
com and be sure to follow the show on Instagram
at Wrongful Conviction on Facebook, Get Wrongful Conviction podcast, and
on Twitter at wrong Conviction
Hey guys, it's Laura and I writer. In Season one
of False Confessions, we brought you the story of Daniel Viegas,
a teenager from El Paso, Texas, who was coerced into
giving a false confession to a double murder in nineteen
ninety three. One of the people who ultimately helped free
Daniel started out as a complete stranger to him. It's
a story of real heroism that proves anyone can have
(00:27):
an impact when they put in the effort. Now, we're
pleased to tell you that since his acquittal in twenty eighteen,
Daniel is living in that spirit. He's paying it forward,
so to speak. Today he works with Proclaim Justice, an
organization founded by Jason Baldwin, a member of the West
Memphis III. Proclaimed Justice helps to free other innocent people
(00:48):
across the country. Daniel also bravely shares his story on
stage and on social media. He helps to raise awareness
of this all too common miscarriage of justice. We need
advocates like Daniel Vehegas and organizations like Proclaimed Justice to
speak out against wrongful convictions, to tell the world that
this really can happen to anyone. It's through their work
(01:11):
that we can create a future where no innocent person
ever spends another day in prison. Daniel, We thank you
for your invaluable work. We're replaying this episode in your honor.
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Writer, and I'm Steve Drusy.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Today we're going to tell you about a case that
shows just how much ordinary people can help the wrongly
convicted find real justice, even when they start out as strangers.
In today's case, an unexpected hero fought for years to
turn tragedy into triumph, ending into one of the most
dramatic courtroom exonerations I've ever seen. Like so many of
(02:07):
our cases at the Center on Wrongful Convictions, Steve first
learned about Daniel Viegas through one of his infamous online searches.
By this time, I actually had my own newsfeed, and
so did our colleague Josh Tepfer. But Steve had his
own reasons for being particularly excited about this case.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
So after all three of us read about a possible
false confession case in Alpasso, it seemed like destiny for
us to get involved in this case. You see, in
two thousand and six, Alpasso was host to one of
the most important conferences in the history of false confessions
that brought together many of the leading experts on the
(02:45):
subject to the University of Texas.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
For people like us, this is basically the Olympics meets Coachella.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Who was there? Well, Donald Connery, the author of Peter
Riley's book, was there.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Steve's talking about a book called Guilty Until Proven Innocent.
We'll tell you that story in a later episode about
a false confession from nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
And Geezley good Johnson, the famed Icelandic detective turned psychology
professor at King's College of London.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
You might remember Geasley from our last episode. His scientific
expertise helped exonerate Tana Pora in New Zealand.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Richard Offshe and Richard Leo and Saul Cassen, some of
the leading experts in the United States on false confessions,
were there.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
We're going to hear from Saul Cassen in another episode two.
All of these guys are og experts in the world
of false confessions. They're Steve's heroes and mine too. So
if I've turned into a geek here, you know who
to blame.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
This conference was a watershed moment in the history of
false confessions and the idea of going back to al
Paso to work on an actual false confession case, it
just seemed like destiny to me.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
This story starts in El Paso, a border city in
West Texas. Now. In the early nineteen nine El Casso
was a different place than it is today. The crime
rate was sky high. There was lots of gang activity.
Street violence was a daily problem, and in some neighborhoods,
shootings were regular occurrences. We start our story in the
early morning hours of April tenth, nineteen ninety three. Good Friday.
(04:18):
It's just after midnight, and four teenagers are walking home
from a party and they find themselves in a rough neighborhood.
Three of them, Manda Lazo, Juan Carlo's Medina, and Jesse Hernandez,
were seventeen years old. The fourth, Bobby England, was eighteen.
All of them were good kids, none of them were
caught up in gangs or the street life. But they
(04:38):
ran into trouble anyway. At the intersection of Electric Street
and trans Mountain Road. That's where a maroon car with
tinted windows rolls up behind them and starts following them. Slowly. Now,
just as the four of them start to get scared,
the car takes off. It speeds away, but a few
minutes later it comes back, and this time the driver
(04:59):
turns off the headline light. Words are shouted from the
car in Spanish, possibly an insult keeputos, and then a
series of shots ring out, one right after another. Wan
and Jesse take off running as a matter of sheer instinct,
and they think that their two friends are running away
alongside them. But when Onan and Jesse feel that they've
(05:19):
run far enough that it's safe to slow down, they
look around them and they don't see Mondo or Bobby
with them at all. They take a deep breath, go
back to the scene of the shooting and they see
police lights flashing. Bobby had been shot in the head
and died in the street. Mondo had been shot in
the stomach and the thigh. He made it one hundred
(05:41):
yards to a house up the street, where he collapsed
in the front yard and died as the residents frantically
dialed nine one one. Now, the police found six shells
from a twenty two caliber handgun littered on the street
right where the car had pulled over, but That's about it.
In terms of evidence. There were no fingerprints, no DNA,
nothing forensic to help them solve this crime. It was
(06:01):
going to have to come down to confessions.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
The Alpasso Police assigned one of the toughest cops on
the force to the Good Friday shooting, an officer whose
name we can't share, but an officer who is known
as a closer.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
This guy is so tough he's even been featured on
the TV show Cops.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Now, what's a closer? A closer is someone who is
very skilled at police interrogation. A good closer will gather
evidence and then slowly reveal that evidence to a suspect,
like peeling off layers of an onion, so that the
suspect feels like he is nabbed, his goose is cooked,
and that leads the suspect to confess. But there are
(06:41):
other kinds of closers. Closers who use brutality and threats,
and they don't only use these tactics with suspects. Their
modus operandi is to use these tactics with suspects, with
witnesses and sometimes with victims, and they get statements, but
those statements are coerced and false statements. This detective, he
(07:05):
was in that second camp exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
So the closer is brought in right this detective from
the al Paso Police Force. He begins investigating the case
and pretty soon he comes across a seventeen year old
boy named David Rongel. David is brought into the police
station in theory about a completely different case. The police
had told his mom that they needed to talk to
Davide about some telephone harassment complaints, but when questioning actually began,
(07:33):
it had nothing to do with telephone harassment. Police began
accusing Davide of committing the Good Friday shootings. Now later on,
Davide said that the police falsely told him during this
interrogation that his friends had implicated him, and David himself
was threatened. He says he was told that he was
a pretty white boy with green eyes who would be
(07:54):
raped in prison if he didn't confess. This scares David
and eventually he starts offering some information. He tells police
that his sixteen year old cousin, Daniel Viegos, had been
bragging about committing the Good Friday shootings, although he added
that everyone was sure Daniel had been joking. You see,
Daniel had a reputation as a jokester. He was the
(08:16):
type of kid who always boasted about things he hadn't
actually done. Daniel had bragged about owning a waterbed when
he didn't. He'd bragged about owning a fancy stereo when
he didn't. He'd even bragged about being descended from Italian
Royalty when he definitely wasn't.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
I want to be descended from Italian.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Royalty, me too, but that kind of lucks just ain't
for us. Steve Anyway, when it came to the Good
Friday shootings, Davide never believed Daniel to be serious, not
even for a minute. It just wasn't him. Daniel had
nothing serious like this in his background.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Just like criminals have a modus operandi, many times closures
or interrogators have a modus operandi, And in David's case
we saw evidence that we later were able to demonstrate
was a modus operandi. Almost all this interrogator would tell
the suspect that his best friend or close associate had
implicated him in the.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
Crime, even if that's untrue, right.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Always untrue, right. He would threaten the suspect with the
death penalty, and he also told the suspects or the
witnesses or the victims in this case, that they were
going to go to prison and they were going to
be raped. I mean, if you're a seventeen year old kid,
and most of these witnesses were teenagers, and you're told
that you're looking at going to an adult jail where
(09:30):
you're going to be a rape victim, you're going to
say just about anything you need to get out of
that interrogation.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
It's terrifying stuff. And for David, the information he gave
was that his cousin Daniel, had been joking about committing
the Good Friday shooting. He never believed Daniel to be serious,
but this information was enough for the police. They asked
Devid to write out a statement describing what Daniel had said.
David wrote that Daniel had bragged about using a shotgun
(09:56):
to commit the shootings, but the detective had David take
that part out and write the statement a second time
without mentioning the type of weapon, because remember, the shells
at the scene had come from a twenty two, not
a shotgun. Even with the detective's edits, da Vide's statements
still contained errors. He remembered his cousin bragging about being
in a black car, not a maroon car, and Davide
(10:19):
said that Daniel described firing a few shots, then getting
out of the car, chasing Mondo Lazo to the house
and shooting him again. There, that's just not how this
crime happened. The shots were all clustered together, not spaced out,
and there were no casings found near Mondo's body. But
none of us mattered. Now, this was a statement that
(10:41):
David regretted giving. It haunted him for the rest of
his life that he'd implicated his own cousin in the
Good Friday shootings, when even he didn't believe that Daniel
was guilty. But it was a statement that he felt
he had no choice but to give in light of
the threats that he was encountering in the interrogation room.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
So there errors, errors in Da VID's statement, errors in
the statements of other witnesses, errors that the true perpetrator
would never have made. That's a red flag.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
It's a huge red flag. But it doesn't stop these police.
Within hours, three more people are brought in for questioning.
Late at night on April twenty first, two friends of
Daniel's Marcos Gonzalez and Rodney Williams and Daniel himself. They're
all questioned, and when Daniel is interrogated, he denies involvement.
He tells the police he was babysitting that night with
(11:30):
a group of friends and they were all watching White
Men Can't Jump on TV.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
But here comes that modus operandi exactly.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Daniel reports being told that if he didn't confess, he
would be taken to the desert to get beaten, and
then to jail where he would be raped by old
men then sentenced to death by the electric chair. This
is how they scared Daniel. This is how they began
reducing him down to this feeling of hopelessness. But if
he confessed, on the other hand, he was told that
he would get leniency because he was just a minor.
(12:00):
And after about five hours of interrogation, Daniel ends up
signing a confession typed out by detectives. It's about three
o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
He repeats the same errors that David Rangell had made,
but he makes other mistakes too. First of all, what
about the people in the car? Daniel says the driver
was someone nicknamed Popeye, and that the front passenger was
someone nicknamed Droopy, but the only known Popeye was incarcerated
at the time, and the only known Droopy he was
also on house arrested at the time. They could not
(12:31):
possibly have been in the car the color of the car.
Davide had said the car was black. Survivor Jesse Hernandez
he had said the car was maroon. Daniel said they
were in a white four door sedan at the time
of the shooting. And finally, Daniel said that he had
shot Bobby and Mondo in the back, but it was
(12:52):
clear from the medical examiner's report that they had been
shot from the front.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
The more and more you study Daniel's confession, the more
you start to a pattern. The only facts about this
murder that he was able to get right are facts
that had been publicized about the Good Friday shootings in
the local paper, the El Paso Times. Now, this is
a pretty big red flag when you can only get
facts right when you've read about them in the newspaper.
And there's another red flag in this case too. As
(13:19):
soon as the interrogator left the room, Daniel immediately recants
to a juvenile probation officer. I didn't do it, he said,
and he explained that he only confessed because the cops
kept harassing him. He said, I was tired, so I
told them what they wanted to hear.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
And the police and prosecutors rang with that confession, even
though it was filled with many false facts and errors.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Despite the red flags in his confession, despite the recantation,
despite the lack of any physical evidence connecting him to
the crime, Daniel Viegas is arrested and charged with capital murder.
He's sixteen years old. Now. Daniel didn't come from a
(14:09):
family with a lot of money, but his parents managed
somehow to scrape together ten thousand dollars for an attorney.
Daniel Viegas's first trial took place in December nineteen ninety four.
At that trial, David Wrangle testified, but he maintained that
Daniel had been obviously kidding when he'd bragged about the shooting.
Rodney and Marcos, Daniel's friends, well, they'd given police statements
(14:32):
implicating Daniel when they'd been questioned, but on the witness
stand they said their statements were false and had been
obtained through threats of prison, rape and other similar threats,
and Daniel's attorney called eighteen defense witnesses, including several alibi
witnesses who testified that Daniel was with them babysitting and
watching TV at the time of the shooting. Right, white
(14:53):
men can't jump, And Daniel's attorney argued strenuously about all
these inconsistencies in Daniel's confession, how it just didn't match
the facts of this crime, how it showed every indication
of being false.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
He even called other witnesses who called into question the
credibility of this detective, former prosecutors who had sought indictments
for perjury.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
The defense mounted a huge fight. They made every argument
they could. The trial lasted a week and at the
end there was a hung jury eleven to one, but.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
It was eleven to one in favor of a conviction,
which gave the district attorney some thought that this would
be an easier case to convict the next time around.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Sure enough, about nine months later, again, Daniel veegis Is
tried for the murders of Mondo and Bobby. But the
second trial was different. You see, Daniel's parents had spent
every penny they had on the first trial, and they
couldn't afford a lawyer for the second trial. This time around,
Daniel was represented by a court appointed lawyer, someone who
had been assigned the case only two months before the
(15:58):
trial began, and so when the second trial rolled around,
that lawyer called only one defense witness, no alibi witnesses
at all. He hardly pointed to any problems with Daniel's confession,
even though he had a blueprint for success in the
form of the first trial, and.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
He didn't make a full frontal attack on the integrity
and credibility of the police officer who got these unreliable statements.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
And so on August twenty fourth, nineteen ninety five, Daniel
Viegas was convicted of capital murder. Because he'd been a
juvenile at the time of the offense, he wasn't sentenced
to death. Instead, he was given two life terms in prison,
one for Bobby and one for Mondo. Daniel was a
teenager when he went to prison, and he might still
(16:45):
be there today if it weren't for a man named
John Mimbella. What a man now. John is the head
of a successful El Paso construction firm, a firm that
hired a lot of formerly incarcerated people. Because John is
a guy who believes in second chances. One day in
two thousand and five, John Mabella walks into an El
Paso bank and he ends up asking his teller, a
(17:07):
woman named Lucy, out on a date.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
Six months later, we're buried. Lucy had three daughters with
Daniel's brother, so Daniel was actually Lucy's ex brother in law.
I adopted Lucy's daughters two years later, and that's when
I learned more about Daniel's case.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Now, Lucy often brought the girls to see their grandparents,
who were Daniel's parents, and eventually John started coming along too.
That's where he started to hear stories about their son, Daniel,
who was serving life in prison for two murders he
didn't commit.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
At first, I thought, you know, any parents gonna not
want to accept that their son might be a killer.
I had a lot of faith also in our system.
You know, I always believe that if a jury found
you guilty, it must have been because they had plenty
of evidence against you. So I figured, hey, you know,
(18:01):
they must have all kinds of evidence on this kid
if they sentenced him to life.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
John was skeptical, but he saw how heartbroken the grandparents
were and he agreed to read through the court papers.
Before long he was dumb struck. There was no reliable
evidence tying Daniel to these shootings at all. And then
John Manbela became a man possessed.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
I've got a couple of friends and I asked him
if they could set up a meeting with our DA
because I saw some serious problems in Daniel's conviction. Our
DA happened to be high Miss Parsa, and he personally
tried Daniel. So I figured, you know what, if there's
some mistake, if there's some doubt, you know, he's going
to reopen this case. So we had the meeting and
(18:48):
I told him, I go, you know what, I think
Daniel's innocent. Something's wrong here, you know, we need to
look into it. This DA fought us a lot just
to get evidentry heering. After he told me the hire
Good of Bills lawyer and opened up the case again,
he fought as to the new.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Now this really fired John up. It didn't make any sense.
He starts paying for billboards around El Paso that say
free Daniel Viegas. He starts organizing rallies and protests outside
the courthouse, and he hired a private investigator.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
He read the transcripts and he was dumbfounded too. He goes, John,
I was a homicide detective for twenty years. This case
would never have gone to trial. I would never have
presented this to my DA if this is all I had. Well,
he was very upset, and he goes, yes, John, I'll
take your case.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
John nan Bella's invested in Daniel's innocence and the work
he would go on to do ended up costing him
personally hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
He's the patron saint of the Daniel Viegis case. You know.
I went down to l Passo shortly after John had
hired lawyers and investigators to reopen Daniel's case, and when
I went into the courthouse, there were like fifteen or
twenty people walking around with signs saying free Daniel Viegas.
(20:03):
You know, false confessions happened. Justice for Daniel Viegas. John
had organized a rally right in front of the courthouse,
and on the street in front of the courthouse was
a truck that had billboards on both sides of it
that was driving around the courthouse. So when you walked
into the courtroom in Alpaso. You were just blitched by
(20:24):
this notion that an injustice had occurred and that it
needed to be fixed.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Exactly, and John brought his entire community into this case too.
There was a manager who worked at his construction company
who was a songwriter, and he ends up writing a corrido,
a traditional Mexican ballad, about the wrongful conviction of Daniel Viegas.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
John was so proud of that song that one of
the first things he did when I was down in
El Paso was to play that for me. It's on
YouTube now if you want to hear it.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
John and the private investigator, right, they want to really
find out what happened, and one of the first people
they go to speak to is Jesse Hernandez, one of
the survivors of the shooting. Of course, Jesse was now
a grown man, and John shows Jesse for the first
time a copy of Daniel's confession.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Jesse's like, John, this is not what happened. This does
not look like a confession from somebody who was there
who took this confession down. And I told him. At
that point, Jesse turns pale and he's like John, that
same detective almost had me confessing to that crime. He
(21:46):
shows up that night and he tells me, we know
you shot your friends. Your buddy Kwan Madina, I just
told us that you did it. And Jesse says that
he was just hysterical. He's like, wait a minute, these
are my friends. I love my friends. I would never
do it like that to my friends. He goes, well,
maybe you blacked out, you know, and you shot them.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
You didn't even realize it.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
And at that moment, Jesse goes, well, man, you know,
why would my friend say I shot them if I
didn't shook them. Maybe I did do it And he
put his head down on the table and just crying uncontrollably.
Had it not been for his mom that stepped in,
he says, he was almost ready to confess. So Jesse's like,
the last thing I want is somebody innocence spending the
(22:28):
rest of their life in prison. That could have been me.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
This was an absolute bolt from the blue when John
heard this story from Jesse Hernandez, and it only motivated
him to continue pounding the pavement. Eventually, John hires a
highly skilled El Paso trial lawyer, a man named Joe Spencer.
Now Joe files a state petition for a writ of
habeas corpus, arguing, among other things, that Daniel's lawyer at
(23:01):
his second trial had been ineffective for failing to call
Daniel's alibi witnesses. There's a hearing plan it's going to
happen in twenty eleven, and in the run up to
that hearing, that's when Steve and I first heard about
this case.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
Yeah, we heard about it through our news feeds. And
this time what made this special is it wasn't just
me who came in to the office the next day.
It was me and Laura, and so did our third attorney,
Josh Tepfra That all three of us got this news
feed at the same time, a case of a juvenile
who had confessed to a crime he didn't commit and
(23:36):
who was trying to reopen his case through a new hearing.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
At the hearing, Jesse Hernandez takes the stand for the
first time. Jesse testifies that Daniel's confession didn't match what
actually happened to him and his friends. Daniel's alibi witnesses
also testified, saying that they were with Daniel on the
night of the crime, and remember doctor Richard Leo, one
of the experts from that falsecon profession conference in El
(24:01):
Paso back in two thousand and six. He took the
stand to and testified that Daniel's statement showed every sign
of being false. There was even evidence introduced that two
other known gang members had threatened Mando Lazo's life right
before the shooting, and they'd bragged about killing him afterwards.
When one of those two gang members was called to testify,
(24:22):
he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination and
refused to answer anything.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
And Joe Spencer also mounted again a direct attack on
the integrity of the detective who had taken the false
witness statements, who had almost gotten a false confession from
the crime victim, and who had gotten the confession from Daniel.
And one of the things he discovered, which is pretty incredible,
was that one of the tactics that this detective had
(24:51):
used in another case was that he would enter an
interrogation room dressed in a smock. Now, why would anybody
wear a smock? Well, he tried to mislead the suspect
into thinking that they were speaking to a medical person,
a doctor, unbelievable, instead of a police officer, and When
(25:12):
the judge heard that evidence, his eyes rolled back into his.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Head, and eventually we had an opportunity to file an
amicus brief about the unreliability of Daniel's confession and add
that to everything that Joe Spencer was already doing in
the courtroom, and we emphasized how vulnerable a teenager like
Daniel would have been to making a false confession. The
hearing concluded, and then we waited. The judge took nine
months to reach a decision, but on August seventeenth, twenty twelve,
(25:41):
Judge Sam Madrano recommended that Daniel Viegues receive a new trial.
Judge Modrano concluded that Daniel's trial lawyer had provided ineffective
assistance by failing to investigate or introduce evidence of the
unreliability of Daniel's confession. Now, Judge Modrano's decision was a
fabulous victory, but it was only a recommendation. It had
(26:03):
to be adopted by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
It was at that point that we joined the team
to craft a presentation to that court that we hoped
it would accept. As that appeal process is ongoing, Daniel's lawyer,
Joe Spencer, asked Judge Madrano to free Daniel on bond
let him go home as the appeal process dragged on,
(26:25):
and on January fourteenth, twenty fourteen, after nearly two decades
in prison, Daniel was released on bond, straight into the
arms of John Mambella, who drove him home in a
brand new, shiny red convertible.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
It was almost like a chick or tape parade. Daniel
was free.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
He got started living right away. As soon as he
was released. He got married to a woman named Amanda,
whom he'd met when he was behind bars, and in
short order they had two beautiful children. But even though
Daniel was walking out of the prison into the arms
of a crowd of supporters, that could have all been
taken away from him.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
And the Court of Criminal Appeals in Texas is a
court that has a reputation of being hostile to defendant's claims,
especially claims regarding their actual innocence, So it was anything
but a sure thing that Judge Medrano's decision would be affirmed.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Long story short, the High Court affirms Judge Madrano's ruling. Yes,
Daniel Viegs deserves another trial and a chance to prove
his innocence, but the DA didn't get around to the
new trial until twenty eighteen, So for four years Daniel's
living with a sword hanging over his head. If he
goes to trial and loses, he'll be back in prison
(27:43):
for life. This is enormously stressful. The months and years
are ticking by. Daniel's starting a family. He's working at
John Manbella's construction company, tasting freedom and cherishing it. What
does the DA do? He asks Daniel to enter an
Alfred plea stay free as long as you plead guilty.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
It's such a tempting offer, especially to somebody who was
locked up for a crime they didn't commit as a
teenager and had to spend two decades or more in
prison suffering under the weight of that wrongful conviction. But
now Daniel's got other people. He has to think about,
his wife and their children.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Daniel considered the Alfred plea option seriously because it meant
that he wouldn't have to go back to trial. You
would be a convicted murderer, but at least he would
have his freedom. Of course, he was tempted to put
the whole thing behind him, But Daniel lived in El
Paso Texas and El Paso had become home to a
small community of wrongly convicted individuals. Among that community was
(28:47):
a man named Jason Baldwin. Now that's a name that
true crime junkies might recognize because Jason Baldwin was a
member of the West Memphis III, a group of three
teenagers from Arkansas who had been a hughes of the
nineteen ninety three killings of three eight year old boys.
One of them, Jesse miss Kelly, had falsely confessed and
the three of them were convicted, two sentenced to life
(29:09):
in prison, and the third, Damien Eccles, sent a death
row in Arkansas. They fought their case for seventeen years.
Steve and I were fortunate enough to join Damien Eckles'
legal team at the very end, and they were freed
only when the State of Arkansas made them an offer.
All three of you enter Alfred, please say you're guilty
(29:31):
of these crimes, and then we'll let you out. Now
this is an easier decision when it came to Damien,
he was on death row, but Jason, who had been
sentenced to life in prison, wrestled with it. He didn't
want to admit to a crime he didn't commit even
to secure his own freedom. Ultimately, he chose to accept
the Alfred plea to help save Damien's life.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
One of the consequences of entering an Alford plea is
that you can't get compensated through state compensation statutes. The
Alfred plea is considered a plea of guilty, and that
disqualifies you from recovering any compensation.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Prosecutors dangle freedom so long as they can secure guilty
please in return and prevent themselves from being sued down
the road. It's a tool of injustice that happens way
too often. It was used in the Robert Davis case,
it was used in the West Memphis three case, and
it almost worked on Daniel Viegas. You see, Jason Baldwin
had moved from Arkansas to Texas, where he became involved
(30:29):
in a wrongful conviction advocacy organization called Proclaim Justice and
joined John Manbela's fight to free Daniel Viegas. Jason Baldwin
became one of his closest friends and confidants. As Daniel
wade whether to accept that Alfred play.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Daniel told me, Johnny goes, if I take this deal,
all this work that you did is for nothing. So
we called Jason Bodwin for his advice, and he said,
let's talk about it before you decide anything. And he
tells Daniel, Noah, I can't tell you what to do.
You have a family. But in my case, you know
(31:05):
there's no way that I would do it again. It
bothers me every day of my life. So just think
hard about this because it could bother you the rest
of your life too.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
And with Jason Baldwyn's counseling and support, Daniel Viegas found
his courage and turned down that unjust Alfred Plea offer.
He decided to go to trial.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
The stakes were so high at this trial. Daniel had
tasted freedom, he was starting to live the kind of
life he had always dreamed of. But here he was
back in that court, a place where the last time
had ended in a conviction.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Now this trial was very different because this time Daniel's
team of lawyers we succeeded in getting his confession thrown
out as involunteer and coerced. And without that confession there
is precious little evidence to go on. The state presented
a case to the jury, The jury deliberated and in
(32:09):
October of twenty eighteen, a verdict came out.
Speaker 4 (32:14):
The State of Texas versus Daniel Viegus.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Now, this is one of the highest profile cases in
the history of El Paso at this point, and the
courtroom is packed with supporters of Daniel Viegas. Jason Baldwin
of the West Memphis three is there, the local wrongful
conviction advocacy organization Proclaimed Justice is there, and John and
Lucy Membella sitting in the front row right behind Daniel
(32:37):
and his lawyers.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
They are there, and when the judge asks Daniel to
stand up for the verdict, his knees buckle. He almost collapses.
He has to hear whether this beautiful life that he
has started reconstructing is going to continue, where is it
going to end?
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Daniel's lawyers actually have to help him stand up, and
he was able to stand just long enough to hear
the verott.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
We the jury finally defended Daniel viegis not guilty of
friend not guilty, and the courtland rupts in a sound
of both cheers and incredible relief. And then he collapsed
under the.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Weight of a lifetime's worth of fighting. He had finally
been exonerated. It was over.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
It was a feeling that I don't think I'm ever
going to feel again in my life.
Speaker 4 (33:38):
Hey, Daniel, is that you? Yeah? Tell me about your kids?
How many kids you got? Now there's four all together.
The man of my wife to me short pregnant. I remember,
I told him, man, I'm told to be a dead
and right at that time, my daughter got pregnant too,
and I was like, oh man, you know I'm pretty
young to be a grandfather.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
What do you tell your kids about what happened to you?
Speaker 4 (33:59):
The two little one of the are too small to know
about it. They don't understand yet. Like I love when
they tell me life ain't fair. I tell him, tell
me about the nineteen years in print and tell me
how life ran fair. Preenia Room, I know that the
Wrongful Conviction podcast played an important role in your case too. Yes, Amanda,
she's really into the Wrongful Conviction community, right, She's like
(34:22):
the voted fans to Jason Plant. So when they came
in with that offer flee, you know, they were just
telling me by signing the sea the paper, that case
is closed. So I was going to sign it almost
and that's when Amanda jumped in and says like, no, no,
I know all about this. Alpha Please. You know Jason
Plant told me about this. She educated me on that,
and then that's when we decided not to take that
pre deal.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
Daniel, You're an incredible human being. To see you as
a free man at Innocence Network conferences, at events for
proclaimed you justice, it makes my heart seek.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
You're a symbol of endurance. It's been our honor to
know you and to tell your story today. Wrongful Conviction,
False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
in association with Signal Company Number One. Special thanks to
(35:23):
our executive producer Jason Flamm and the team at Signal
Company Number one. Executive producer Kevin wardis Senior producer and
Pope and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Special
thanks to Jogi Hammer for additional script editing and for
wrangling and writing like a mad woman. Our music was
composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram
(35:45):
or Twitter at Laura Nywriter, and.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
You can follow me on Twitter at s Drisen.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
For more information on the show, visit Wrongfulconviction podcast dot
com and be sure to follow the show on Instagram
at Wrongful Conviction on Facebook, Get Wrongful Conviction podcast, and
on Twitter at wrong Conviction
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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