April 17, 2025 • 41 mins
On March 25, 1988, Harold Wesley shot and killed Jimmy Calibera in a drug deal gone wrong. The crime occurred in front of the Breukelen Houses estates in Brooklyn, NY where John “Divine G” Whitfield lived with his mother and sister. Divine G was scheduled to turn himself in on drug charges in May of that year, but due to the testimony of an unreliable and incentivized informant, and despite evidence disproving this account, Divine was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 25 to life.
To learn more and get involved, visit:
https://innocenceproject.org/petitions/new-york-discovery/
https://a24films.com/films/sing-sing
https://pen.org/the-whitfeld-files/
https://divinegentertainment.com/shop/
https://www.instagram.com/divine_g47
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
On March twenty fifth, nineteen eighty eight, outside of the
Brookline Housing Project, a drug deal went bad, resulting in
the shooting death of a guy named Jimmy CALIBERA Soon,
a notorious thief and cyrial informant named Richard Doyle ran
into one of the assailants, a guy named Howard Wesley,
and after their encounter, Doyle claimed that a guy who
(00:25):
lived at the Brookline Houses named John Whitfield, also known
as Divine G, was one of his shooters, and while
Harold Wesley admitted his own involvement, he vehemently denied Divines,
but Wesley died in jail before getting to say so
at Divines trial. This is wrongful Conviction. You're listening to
(00:53):
Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all the
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by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
All right, welcome to a very special edition of Wrongful Conviction.
(01:15):
And I say that in all sincerity. We have not
one but two of my personal heroes here today. Jeffrey Deskovic,
who's been on the show before as an exonery. Now
he's back as the attorney for a man who's yet
to be exonerated, but is as innocent as could be
and will be exonerated with your expert help. Is that
fair to say, Jeff, you're to say, Jeff Deskovic, welcome
(01:37):
back to wrongful conviction.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Thank you very much. And I do want to share
that I do represent the Vine also in collaboration with
Oscar Michelin.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
And that's ironic that as other lawyers named Oscar because
the Vine was just nominated for an Oscar for his
film Sing Sing, So he's got Oscar covered in every direction.
Were you actually nominated for an Oscar or the film
was nominated?
Speaker 3 (01:57):
No, I was nominated for Adaptive screen Well that's why
I went to the Oscars. You can't go to the
Oscars unless you're nominated, right, specifically, Yeah, sat next to
Ray find during the class photos.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
It's incredible.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
I mean, this man is just different. Twenty five years
in prison, Oscar nominated, accomplished author, playwright. I mean he's
a healer, right, I mean, this is a guy who
brought peace to a place that desperately needed it through creativity.
Divine is out shopping a number of new screenplays that
he's written. All of us are looking forward to seeing
(02:31):
where you go next, because this guy is truly the limit.
Sorry if I'm embarrassing you right now, but Divine, I'm
just really honored that you're here on our show.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
I'm honored to be here, man, thank you for inviting me.
And this is a New York story. You were born
in New York, right like me?
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Absolutely, East New York is where I actually was born
and had lived in Kanas and Brownsville.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
I'm a Brooklyn Night one hundred percent.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
And you grew up in a time when New York,
especially in those areas, was experiencing a lot of turmoil.
But you, somehow or other, even back then, were working
on developing your artistic side. Right, Can you can tell
us a little bit about growing up in your teenage
years and what that was all like before everything went
off the rails.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
I was kind of like a good kid. I was
one of them adventurous kids. I was all into really
positive and productive things. And I was around about eleven
twelve years old. I was so fascinated with Bruce Lee.
I used to make eight millimeters karate movies. Me and
my friend Frank Johnson, we used to make these karate
movies in charge our friends like a quarter a dollar.
That was an early state of my artistic energy. And
(03:38):
then I eventually started dancing. I became a really efficient dancer.
I actually I was recruited by a dance group called Realism,
and it was a semi professional group. I appeared on
television with Stephanie Mills. Y'all probably may remember the show
called Soap Factory Disco.
Speaker 4 (03:54):
In nineteen seventy nine. It was an old show.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
I appeared on two episodes with Stephanie Mills when she
was singing her song put Your Body in It.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
I did shows with Neil.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Ward, Instant Funk, and a variety of other popular groups,
and I was pretty good at dancing.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
Then.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
At that time I also became a DJ and eventually
became probably one of Brookline's most famous DJs. It was
a group I had called mix Machine. Actually in the
movie sing scene they mentioned it. Coleman Domingo says, yeah,
they used to call me mix Machine, and they mentioned
that name several times. And because of the dancing, eventually
I went to High School Performing Arts, and for those
(04:33):
who know high School Performing Arts, that's the fame school,
the famous Fame.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
School from the movie Fan Yeah, from the movie Fame.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
They filmed it in that particular school where I was at.
I really wanted to go there for acting, so I
got in with dance and I wanted to switch over
to acting. But eventually I left high school performing arts.
I just couldn't deal with all of the teasing, the bullying,
and I wasn't the type of person who really respond
well to abuse. I mean, I knew martial arts, I
got into a lot of so eventually I moved on
(05:02):
and went to Kanarsi High School, where I ultimately graduated.
Speaker 4 (05:06):
While all that was going on, I.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Always kept a after school job, worked on the weekends
because as a DJ, I needed money to buy the records,
to buy the equipment, to keep things updated. That was
basically my life before my life, like you said, went
off the rails. And then I got into this accident.
It was severe, woke up in the hospital. It was
really damaged pretty bad. I couldn't work, and eventually I
(05:30):
even tried to go back to work. I started delivering pizzas.
I was Abdomino's pizza delivery boy, and eventually I had
to quit that job because of the injuries. It was
so much on me and the doctors telling them, you
can't work. My lawyer's telling me, you can't work. You
gotta let these injuries heal. Time go by, I couldn't
get unemployment, I couldn't get certain monies, and then I
made probably the biggest mistake of my life.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
All my friends was in the game.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Hustling out in the street, and I was always able
to avoid it. But after that accident, I said, you know,
when I'm a sneak, out sell some drugs, and it
backfired on me. I didn't last two weeks on the
streets because I had no idea what I was doing.
I had copped out to the drug possession. I went
up state for one to three and out of the
clear blue Scott They brought me back down the Riker's
Allen and recharged me for a homicide, a homicide I
(06:17):
had absolutely nothing to do with.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
It was about two months before Divine began his one
to three year bid for possession that this homicide had
occurred on March twenty fifth, nineteen eighty eight, somewhere along
the stretch of one hundred and eighth Street that ran
through the Brookline Projects and much of what we know
comes from a recorded statement with one of the assailants,
a guy named Harold Wesley.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
From what I understand, it was a drug deal gone bad.
It was between Shatik, Harold Wesley, an individual named Patrick,
and this guy named Jim. Harold Wesley calls him Jim Carabella,
but his actual name, according to the police reports, was
Rudolph MIGLARISI. What happened is the old Shatique drugs or something,
(06:58):
and Shatik wanted to drug ugs or the money, and
they started arguing over it, and Shatig says that he
pulls the gun, shoots him in the head, and then
he made Patrick stand there and pull the trigger. Then
they run and Harold Wessey says that he sees a
woman who was dressed in some sort of green coat
or something. That was Marjorie Shack, whom he says she
lived in that building on the third floor.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Divine only found out about this recording and Marjorie Shack
long after he had been convicted.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
Come to find out.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
We eventually tracked her down and Marjorie Shack also confirms
that she told the.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
Police it wasn't me.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
The police kept showing up pictures of me trying to
convince her that it was me, and she said, no,
it's not him, it's not him. The night that had happened,
I was across town at my stepfather's house over there
on Buffalo Avenue, and that night I remember coming in
and because the crime happened in the back of my building,
I've seen all the police ropes and police cars in
the back of my building, so obviously I knew something happened.
(07:55):
Next day, I'm hearing rumors in the neighborhood. Yo, some
guys from out of the neighborhood shots guy in the
back of the building.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
So the neighborhood was buzzing. But it doesn't appear that
anyone cooperated until Harold Wesley had a run in with
police that June.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Harold Wesley had got arrested for possession of drugs, a
shotgun and the weed, and when the police pulled him over,
he was about to have a shootout with the police.
Somehow the shootout was avoided. Howld Wessey goes in custody.
Now he wants to cut a deal with the Feds.
So now atf steps in and this is how the
(08:31):
audio tape came about. He's on this audio tape trying
to cut this deal with the Feds, and now this
guy starts talking about every crime and everything he knew
in the neighborhood. And he's jumping all over the place too.
He's not focusing on one thing. He's talking about this thing.
Then he jumps to this, then he jumps from here.
He's jumping from there, and it's kind of discombobulated when
(08:52):
you read the tape. And onside one of the tape
he mentions me he's mentioned me about a conflict with drugs,
had been with some guy named R and Jr. That
he was trying to get me to pay him to
deal with JR and R. So somehow the police thought
that he was saying that the JR and R was
(09:13):
Jim Carabella.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
So they got that whole thing all screwed up.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
So by the time you get to side to of
the tape, you can see that they're confused. See, the
police already knew that it was Shatique and Patrick that
did it, so they confirmed that. But then he said,
well then what about Divine, Well did Divine order it?
And then Harold West They cleared it up conclusively. By
the end of the tape, he said, no, Divine didn't
order it. Even he was getting frustrated with ATF agent.
(09:41):
His name is Bob Hamilton. He was getting really frustrated
with him, like, well, why you keep bringing up this
divine character when I'm talking about something else.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
And while this recording happened and Wesley was in custody,
a guy named Richard Doyle and his friend Scott Bell
were arrested for burglarizing the home of someone named mar
Sigliano as for a possession of crack. And Doyle knew
Divine from the projects, but they never got along, so
that's a bit of bad luck. When Doyle ran into
Harold Wesley.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
Richard Doyle saw Harold Wesley's shatik in the ballpins, and
because they knew each other, they started talking. Now, I
guess what Shatik must have told him. Yo, They must
have thinked, this is the vine, because you can see
on the tape that they actually kept pressing Harold, that
kept mentioning my name, and Harold kept telling him no,
not the vine, not the vine. Then Richard Doyle came
(10:33):
to Scott Belly and said, yo, listen, I got a
way for us to get out, we can say we
saw Devine did this crime.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Richard Doyle got the idea that he was going to
get both of them out of jail by falsely implicating
Divine for a homicide.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Because Richard Doyle is a professional informant, He's been doing
this for a while. He testified in Pencil and Jeffrey's case,
he testified and Gary Reedy's case, but he testified in
multiple cases.
Speaker 4 (10:56):
So he has a history of this and he knows
that if you.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
Come up with this type of information that prosecutors love
you for this and you can get out of jail.
So Scott Bello says, no, I'm not doing that, No,
I'm not doing that. So Richard Doyle goes on about
his business and Scott Belli sees him talking to a
man in a suit and the next thing you know,
they walking out of prison. Then, after Richard Doyle gets
out a week later, miraculously, he goes to the police
(11:21):
station claiming to be an eye witness to this.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
So, on the strength of this serial informants word, Divine
was transferred from Upstate to Rikers to face this homicide charge,
even though Harold Wesley had already cleared his name.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
The minute I went on Rikers Island, like about three
days later, he committed suicide in Brooklyn House of Detention. Well,
they say he committed suicide. I did a four year
request and got all of the documents. They said that
they found him with the rope that allegedly hung him
under his mattress. So in essence, he hung himself, took
the rope off his neck and put it under his mattress.
Speaker 4 (11:57):
So you figure that out.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
But like I said, I didn't even know about Harold
was the or this confession tape until after his conviction,
let alone what he was about to face a trial.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
I didn't know who actually was accusing me of it.
And to the day of trial.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
It was a tactic that they used called trial by ambush.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
They would hide.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
All of the evidence from you and then on a
day of trial they come in there with a two
foot stack of documents and say here. And that's when
I discovered that it was this notorious crackhead. I mean,
he was the crackhead extraordinary in Brookline projects and he
accused me of this homicide.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
And here's where discovery laws being inadequate before, which is
why we're fighting to try to maintain them now comes
into play. Okay, because this tape that Divine has mentioned,
the tape went missing many years later they claimed it
was missing. But if it had been automatic discovery right away,
very early in the process, then Divine's lawyer could have
had that tape, It could have used that at the
(12:55):
trial and almost certainly would have gotten an acquittal.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Discovery laws in New York changed from trial by ambush
to automatic discovery in twenty twenty, and right now various
nefarious forces are working to repeal this vital reform. They
want to take us back to an era when a
request for discovery was both over and underwhelming. As Divine described,
(13:21):
a defendant would literally receive a volume of documents that
would be near impossible or impossible even to digest on
the eve of or during trial. But also the prosecutor
would get to decide what was going to be given
to the defense. Right. I mean, it's the wolf guarding
the henhouse, and I don't have to tell our audience
what a Brady violation is. And in Divine's case, that
(13:44):
meant Carol Wesley's confession, any mention of Marjorie Shack or
the deal made with Richard Doyle, who claimed that he'd
witness Wesley and Divine shoot MILLIASI under a street lamp
from thirty five feet away, and then he'd run to
a nearby stay order to retrieve receipts for some unknown reason,
and returned to the scene with a store clerk named
(14:05):
Wayne Harris.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
And Wayne Harris says, no, I never saw him that night,
But in terms of his credibility here in this case,
there's three provable lies. There's another twelve very likely lies.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Doyle testified that his burglary charges had been dismissed before
he'd come forward because the burglary victim's nephew, sal Mar Sigliano,
had directed he and Scott Bell to do it. He
also testified that he'd received no benefit for his testimony,
even though it was later discovered that the burglary charge
was pending through his grand jury testimony, as well as
(14:38):
an armed robbery charge in Nassau County that also just
poof went away. He also said that after he'd gotten
out of jail in June of eighty eight, that he
was approached by armed men who he didn't know, implying
possible witness tampering, but according to police reports written by
the lead detective, Robert Lincoln, he knew who that armed
person was and was unrelated to this case. Doyle also
(15:00):
claimed to have been sober for months, but on the
night he been arrested, one of the charges was for
possession of crack. In addition to Doyle, the jury heard
from the medical examiner about the cause of death, Harold
Wesley's arresting officer about the gun he found in Wesley's trunk,
and then a ballistic expert linked that gun to bullets
recovered from the scene.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
The whole case against the Vines is based on this
one and formant the trial judge, you know, Judge Edgido
at the sentencing even says that this whole case just
comes down to Richard Doyle's credibility.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
He said, without Richard Doyle, there was no case.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
And you end up getting sentenced to concurrent terms right
of twenty five years to life, five to fifteen years,
and two to a third to seven years.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
I mean, listen, man, it's a nightmare beyond description. You
know when they read it out, you know, the whole
courtroom exploded. I exploded, you know I didn't do it,
screaming it was just a nightmare.
Speaker 4 (15:58):
I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Family was crying, I was crying. It was just the
shark of all sharks. At the time in Clinton, Attica,
(16:23):
green Haven, that was a very racist jail. They got
active clanmen in Greenhn and at the time in Auburn.
Speaker 4 (16:30):
I did my rounds.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
But when I got to Sing Sing Sing Sing was
terrible too because they had a lot of drug wars,
a lot of gang violence, a lot of just a lot.
Speaker 4 (16:39):
Of prisons are just violent, period.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
But when I got to Sing Sing, it was a
blessing in disguise because Sing Sing is close to the city,
so they were more acclimated to have programs and people
were more able from the city to come up to
the jails. So I seen it as an opportunity. I
was on an all out mission. Being sentenced to twenty
five years to life can bring something to you that
(17:02):
you don't even know that you got waking up every
morning into a nightmare. When you go to sleep, you
out of the nightmare, you dreaming you free, and then
you wake up.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
It was like every morning, Uh, here go this nightmare again.
Here we go again.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
So that gave me that fire. I got into the NAACPA.
I eventually went to college, eventually got a master's degree, started.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
RTA and rehabilitation through RTA is rehabilitation through the arts.
You know.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
It was just a lot going on, and I became
a jail house lawyer man that was very efficient.
Speaker 4 (17:35):
I learned how to do motions.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
I learned how to do this because at that point
I knew that my entire life depended on me finding
a way to do it. And I'm not rich. I'm
a poor person. My family's poor. We don't have lawyers,
we don't have money for that. So I went in
that lawyer liberry and I learned, and ultimately I do
legal writing. I ended up becoming a very efficient novelist
(17:57):
writer because I said, once the court thought rubber stamping it,
I said, I gotta come up with some kind of
way to fight this.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
Well writing, what can I do? I can write, and
ultimately my.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
Memoir The Whitfield Files, won a National Writing Award.
Speaker 4 (18:10):
It's a Pen award, right, Yeah, there's a Pen Award.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
In addition to his Oscar nomination, Divine won the prestigious
Pan Award four count of four times. So we're gonna
link all of that in the episode description. He was
and still is stunningly prolific.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
It shocked me at times when I sat back and
realized one time, I wrote three novels in one year,
did a four to forty article seventy eight, and was
running RTA, and was the president of the NAACP sponsoring
culture war in his classes Black History Month classes GED classes.
People used to ask how do you do it? And
one of the ways I used to do it. I
(18:47):
had a meticulous checklist system. Every year I would write
out what I'm gonna do for this year, and then
every month I would break them down into months, a
checklist in months, and then a checkliss in weeks, and
a checklist in days, and every day I would check
off those. So every day of my life that was living, breathing.
(19:08):
It was about doing something. If there was a moment
I wasn't doing something, was it was misery. It was
like I lived by just staying proactive and moving.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
And he brought that drive and organizational prowess to his
appellate fight as a pro say litigant, meaning he was
on his own without an attorney, and after his initial
appeals were denied, his first post conviction motion, known as
a four to forty in New York, was based on
Doyle's perjured testimony that his burglary charges had been dismissed
before he even spoke to police about this, and that
(19:39):
he'd received no benefit. But Divine found out that Doyle's
charges hadn't been dismissed until after his grand jury testimony.
This was a Brady violation as well as false testimony,
and in addition, Scott Bell gave an affidavit about Doyle's
plan to falsely accused Divine who he didn't like, to
get their charges dismissed, and there was also an affidavit
from the burglary victim, Salmar Sigliano about how he tried
(20:02):
to press charges but nothing ever materialized. Yet somehow, the
motion was denied in nineteen ninety six, so Divine moved
on to federal habeas and filed a Foyer request with
the King County DA, which turned up a disclosure for
him that mentioned a tape.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
When I finally realized that there was a tape, they
adamantly insist that there was no tape that exists. I
did an article seventy eight to try to compel them Finally,
a judge in King's County said, you either have to
produce that tape or you're going to have to do
a very detailed APPI dated explaining why this tape doesn't exist.
(20:41):
These documents says that this tape exists. I eventually had
to do a motion to have him held in contempt
the court. I was doing all of this pro say,
and the judge granted it.
Speaker 4 (20:51):
Then and only then did all.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
Of a sudden, out of the clear blue sky the
mailman that does the mail, the mail officer comes to
my gate with a tape and lays it here and
have me signed for it.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
I'm like, wow, so they did have the tape.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
They lied to The judge kept telling the no tape exists,
No tape exists. Yah, this is nothing, and I'm looking
and then we finally, when I listened to the tape,
I said, I see why they did this.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Day Harold Wesley, when he was being questioned by the HF,
he mentioned that he did the crime with Patrick from
Queen's Divines from Brooklyn. His name's not Patrick.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
I couldn't sleep for three days after listening to this tape,
shocked by the fact that these people had this tape
in their possession, with this man telling them I wasn't
a shooter and I didn't order it. So that's what
turns this case until a grecious misconduct. You're listening to
this tape. This man is exonerating me, and you're hiding it,
(21:48):
and this is malicious.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
So they had that tape, and they had every reason
to believe that they should go look for this guy Patrick.
Of course, from the very beginning, did they know Patrick's
identity or just Patrick from Queen's.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
Nobody was able to track them down. I mean, that's
the full extent of what we know Patrick from Queens.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
At this point, Divine pursued a success of four forty
with Brady material that would have definitely changed the verdict.
It should have been a slam dunk, but it was
inexplicably denied, as was his amended federal habeas and a
slough of successive four forties. But Divine was able to
put the demoralizing legal system in the background, not only
for himself but for others as well, when he co
(22:29):
founded what turned out to be the subject of his
OSCAR nominated screenplay, And of course I'm referring to RTA
or rehabilitation through the arts.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
One of the things that I vowed that if I
got to stay here in this place, I'm gonna find
every way in my powers to make sure that any
and everybody that I can touch make sure that they
get out and don't come back.
Speaker 4 (22:52):
I'm gonna find a way.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
To strip the system of the thing that they needed most.
That was kind of like my fire, like, if I
can help them, these guys stay out because Gods was
coming back and it was hurting me. It was like, Wow,
I'm trying so hard to get out of this place,
and so you guys are coming right back. So that
was the creation of RTA, finding a way to make
(23:13):
sure that when these guys got out, they stayed out.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
And our audience will recall hearing about RTA from Jermaine Archer,
Eric Clisson, Johnny and Capier JJ Velasquez JJ, who actually
plays himself in the Oscar nominated film Sing Sing. It's
a theater group in the most unlikely place, a maximum
security prison where guys have to do more than just
wear a tough face to survive.
Speaker 4 (23:36):
I saw the power of art.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
You got to remember, like I explained to you earlier,
I've been in entertainer, My Whole Life, movies, dancing on
TV DJ.
Speaker 4 (23:45):
And the whole work.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
So arts are what I describe as an explosive expression
of humanity. It has this amazing way of allowing people
to relax and to be comfortable with each other, to
sometimes take the mass off.
Speaker 4 (24:01):
It wasn't easy. Now they don't think it was a
walk in the park. But we had a strong steering committee,
the founders of this program. We had some good guys
and we will shout them out, which man.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
Dino Belaud, David Wayne Peto, Shorty King, Herm.
Speaker 4 (24:17):
You know, this is just quite a few, It's a
few more.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
It was we had a strong network of good, solid
people that were well respected in the system. So when
you've seen a guy like Diano or Blaud or Shorty
King and me update, they're like, wow, these guys was
walking the yards of Attica and Clinton and these guys
as stand up dudes, And it would give other people
(24:39):
permission to say, damn, if they can do it, we
want to do it because subconsciously a lot of people
really want to do like things that's open, and we
give them permission to explore.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
Then in our program, since it's about.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
Healing, it's about brotherhood, it's about camaraderie.
Speaker 4 (24:57):
When you came in, we kind of.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Prepped you that, bruh, you're gonna be dealing with some
unfamiliar behavior around here because you're gonna have to open up.
We're gonna have to learn how to work with each other.
And once we've built it into the program, it just
started to blossom and work. And one of the criterias
that we always had that was built into the program
is that if anybody leaves Sing Sing, go start it
(25:21):
up wherever you go. We want to share it with
as many people as we can. And we got like
eight different facilities with RTA, and now it's expanded all
the way to Ohio and in California based.
Speaker 4 (25:33):
On the movie, so it's expanded.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
We really would love to have this thing available all
across the country if it was up to me.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
And what have been the results of this program in
terms of violence and recidivism.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
Listen, RTA has a recidivism level of three percent in
comparison to sixty percent of the national average of prisoners
who leave and don't get this type of program or
this type of involvement. Sixty percent of them come back
with than three years. So I think RTA gave certain
segments of society something to live for, because when they
(26:07):
wanted to get into RTA, we used to kind of
tell them, Okay, you got to stay out of trouble
for this amount of time, and we would give them
an incentive they want to stay out of trouble.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Three recentivism made I want to just let that linger
for a second.
Speaker 4 (26:21):
Yeah, why you think I wrote so much?
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Because every time when I started writing a novel, I
was enmeshed in those stories, creating these characters in these
worlds and these images. I was escaping, and every time
I touched the stage it was therapeutic.
Speaker 4 (26:34):
It was cathartic.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
It was like that moment when I'm becoming the character
on stage, in that world of the character, I was free.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
I had to have that freedom.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
Because when we had to go back to ourselves, it
was like, well, the nightmare begins again.
Speaker 4 (26:50):
And RTA was that escapism.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
And the beautiful thing about RTA we were able to
find love amongst so much hate, plain and simpers. Ultimately,
as the movie sing scene depicts, I eventually got a
(27:16):
clemency heart from Governor Elliot, Spitzer, who was considering me
for a full parton. If you could get a governor
to look at this and consider you for a full parton,
it has to be something there.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
And according to Divine, the clemency board was confused as
to what they were missing about this evidence. Why hadn't
an appellate court granted belief, which, by the way, are
great fucking questions. But they let their disbelief and uncertainty
lead them to deny clemency for Divine. And so again
Divine went back to the drawing board, hiring an investigator
(27:48):
who found out about Richard Doyle's arm robbery charge in
Nasau County that was also dismissed around the time of
his testimony. So a success of four point forty was filed,
and you guessed it, that was denied too, at which
point Divine wrote to the newly formed Deskovic Foundation.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Divine had wrote, my organization. I mean, people remember me
from other episode, but in brief, I did sixteen years
in prison myself for a murdering rate before DNA exonerated me,
and eventually I went to law school and became an attorney,
started the Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for justice.
Speaker 4 (28:20):
So with your own money, with.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
My own money, Yes, that's true. So Divine wrote us,
and we evaluated his case and we determined he was innocent,
and we saw a potential route to exoneration. But while
we were doing investigative work, he had a parole board
appearance coming. And it's always our policy to try to
get our clients out however it is we can, so
that they could be free while the long, often uncertain
(28:42):
road to exoneration takes place. So we wrote a letter
to the parole board which outlined all the primary and
secondary reasons why we believed in Divine's innocence. And as
people probably know listening to your podcast, if you maintain
your innocence rather than expressing remorse and take responsibility, you'd
almost always denied parole. So it already unjust prison stay
(29:03):
gets extended.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
But he was paroled, and that was twenty twelve. So
while an attorney with Jeff's Foundation, Rita Deve hired an
investigator and worked on his case, Divine continued some of
the work he'd been doing inside as a youth counselor.
When his past connection to the arts scene in New
York afforded him an incredible, almost unreal opportunity.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
When I got out of prison right in twenty twelve,
Lil Wayne's road manager approached me.
Speaker 4 (29:33):
It's this guy named Ei.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
Actually, when I was a DJ, I used to look
out for him and his little sister let him come
behind the ropes and stuff, and e I knew I
was innocent too, and everybody knew I caught a bad deal.
So when I got out, he came and picked me
up a Bentley, gave me some money and said, yo,
you want to go on my tour with Lil Wayne.
I said, damn right, I want to go. He said, listen,
I'll let you be a stage manager. If you can
(29:55):
get on, this tour is yours. At first, they wasn't
gonna let me go. The pro office admits, you crazy.
You just got out of prison for murder.
Speaker 4 (30:02):
You think you going on a tour with a famous rapper?
Are you crazy? I said, man, all right, cool.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
I've did an article seventy eight folled a major lawsuit.
Then I got some media people involved, and I did
emergency court for seeding, which is called an injunction. So
they did it like within a week. I was in
front of the judge and I went on that tour.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
Man.
Speaker 4 (30:22):
It was like the best seven months of my life. Man.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
And all that came about just because when I was
a DJ, when I was young, I had this history
of just looking out for people.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
And thankfully Jeff and Rider were looking out for Divine
as well. Obviously, Harold Wesley was deceased, but they got
in touch with his brother Ralph, who gave an affid
David that his brother told him the same story that
he killed familiar Racey with Patrick from Queen's. They'd also
tracked down the woman in the green coat and Divine's
ali by witness by Endevory.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
So in terms of Divine's innocence, there's a tape we
just mentioned Wesley confessed to his brother. Okay, there's also
Divine's alibi. He was with Bryant Devery Marjorie Shack, who
knew Divine from the neighborhood. She said she heard the
gunshots and people running, that they passed by her, that
it was not Divine. Her story is corroborated by another
(31:13):
witness who also didn't see anybody, but corroborated the direction
that the perpetrators were running from. So we got all
this evidence of his innocence juxtaposed with one informant Okay crackhead,
three lies, many other lies contradicted by witnesses. I mean,
it doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
But instead of filing another four to forty, they applied
to the King's County Conviction Integrity Unit in twenty eighteen,
who allegedly reinvestigated Divine's case. But by twenty twenty three
there was still no relief. And at this point Oscar
michelin enjoined the team.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Five years had passed by without the Conviction Review Unit
doing anything. So from there we had a meeting with
the then head of the Conviction Review Unit, Charles Lenahan,
and the line attorney, and Elenahan said, look, I haven't
read the case, but I took the meeting as a courtesy,
but I have the line attorney here, and she was
intimating like they just hit brick walls, and like she
(32:10):
wanted to say. She was on the verge of saying
we're going to close the case. But I'm fast on
my feet sometimes, and I saw what she was about
to do, and if she had gotten that sentence out,
politically it would have been hard for the unit chief
to overrule her. So I jumped in and I said, well,
what about this witness? What about that witness? Did you
talk to this one? Did you talk to that one?
Speaker 1 (32:31):
No?
Speaker 2 (32:32):
So I ignore her and say that the unit chief, Well,
how can you guys be about ready to close his
case when there's all these witnesses that you haven't spoken to. Look,
can we submit a twelfth page report to you outlining
all the evidence of Divine's innocence. We'll have complete references
to the record, and we'll contrast that with this one informant.
(32:52):
So he gave us the okay, and so sixty hours later,
you know, a twelve page memo was sent to the
conviction review unit. A year goes by and again nothing happens.
And the next thing we know, we're getting word that
he's leaving the unit, going to go into a private practice,
And we naturally reached out to him again, kind of
(33:13):
in desperation because we really don't know who the new
unit chief is going to be. And so we just
read the report and at the end of the day,
he did nothing. The most he did was had the
case assigned to a different lawyer. The lawyer that had
did nothing left the unit. I guess she was never
enthusiastic about doing conviction review to begin with, but he
(33:33):
assigned it to somebody else and Oscar emailed him. I
piggybacked off of it. I did like a short reiteration
of all the evidence of his innocence. I reattached the
report and we heard nothing. And so it's been two years.
They appear to not be working at all on Divine's case.
So our strategy at this point is we're doing as
(33:54):
much media as we can. We have a petition for
Divine which calls for the Brooklyn District Attorney to order
his conviction of unit, just to make a decision. It's
been seven years. Just make a decision. It's been seven
years already now, So people listening like to sign the petition,
spread it around. We certainly need that. The website is
fredivine g dot org. We're hoping that if we get
(34:17):
enough petition signatures that die Gonzalez will order the unit
to make a decision. We could pull his case from
the unit right now if we wanted to, and file
a post conviction motion and litigate. That's going to take
about two years, okay, and maybe we win. We're supposed
to win by everything, that's right, but he might not.
But we don't want Divine to walk around with this
(34:40):
conviction for another two years that it's going to take.
Hence trying to gather petition signatures.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
It's freedivineg dot org. We'll have it linked in the
episode description as well. So sign the petition in the
hopes that Kings County will finally do right by Divine
and if not, they'll move on to another four to
forty to resolve a case for which Divine should have
never gone to trial in the first place. Additionally, a
case in which the current discovery laws might have given
(35:07):
Divine a fighting chance.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
We helped myself in many organizations and advocates when we
helped improve the discovery laws. All the information had to
be turned over automatically within the first two weeks, and
if the prosecutor didn't have everything together in the first
two weeks, they had another two weeks. Anything passed a
month they would have to get a court order to extend. Okay.
(35:30):
So that's how we improved it.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Laws that are right now under attack.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Well, the District Attorney's Association and a lot of law
enforcement they did a campaign of fear mongering all of
a sudden, Now we're not can build of solve crimes.
People aren't going to want to come forward. Now we're
going to have witness intimidation, witnesses being killed. Which was
all just a bunch of rhetoric. Because New Jersey, a
border state to New York Okay, has had automatic open
(35:54):
file discovery for many years, and as I often joke
in order to make the policy point, we don't have
bodies floating up and down the Hudson River, Okay. So
there's all a bunch of fear mongering.
Speaker 4 (36:06):
Now.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Aside from the fear mongering, the other complaint is they're
trying to say that because of the discovery laws, that
many cases are being dismissed by judges because the prosecutors
are not turning over the information and timely manner. So,
first of all, that's not true statistically, and second of all,
to the extent that any case gets dismissed, why not
(36:28):
get on the prosecutor meet your deadlines, right. And so
the latest and greatest on that Governor Hokele now wants
to repeal the discovery law. They want to try to
modify it. First of all, they want to say that
a defense attorney would only have thirty five days now
to complain that you haven't gotten all the evidence turned over. Right,
(36:49):
that makes no sense because to me, whether it's on
day one or day two hundred, whenever it is that
you realize that you haven't been given all the discovery material,
you should be able to make a complaint, put that
on the record, object, etc. So that's one aspect of it.
Second thing is they want to go back to where
instead of turning over everything, they want the prosecutors to
(37:13):
look through the file and determine what can be helpful
to the defense and turn that over, which is part
of the problem.
Speaker 4 (37:21):
Before the wolf was guarding the henhouse.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Exactly right, and that was all under Brady.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
Now.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
The second aspect of it is called Rosario material, and
in a common sense way of talking about it, the
prosecutor would only have to turn over information pertaining to
witnesses that they were planning to call at a hearing
or at a trial. They would often do that on
the eve of a hearing, on the eve of a trial,
So not only is there not enough time to read
(37:47):
through the material, investigate, interview witnesses, incorporate that into your strategy.
But also if they didn't want you to know about
a witness, just don't call them at the hearing or
the trial, and they wouldn't have to turn anything over.
So that's the way that.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
It was as opposed to a civil case where you
have to turn over everything.
Speaker 4 (38:07):
Correct, if you and I have a business dispute.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Literally you have to turn over everything, and all that
systake is money, And here you're dealing with somebody's freedom,
their life right.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
When I brought a federal civil rights lawsuit in connection
with my being wrongfully imprisoned, I had more discovery rights
as a plaintiff bringing the lawsuit than what I did
when I was a criminal defendant defending myself against the
false charges.
Speaker 4 (38:33):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
So we're going to put links in the episode description
for people to sign petitions, call the governor.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
They can also email their elected official, the assemblymen, their
senators that represent them and say, look, we don't want
discovery rollbacks, okay, we want the system to be fair.
We want people who are charged to know exactly what
the evidence is against them so that they can prepare
a defense, so that we can reduce the likelihood of
wrongful convictions.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
Exactly, because I could happen to Jeff, if it could
happen to Divine, it could happen to you. I mean,
that's really the truth or somebody you love. Correct, So
if you do it for no other reason than that,
do it. But we should all care about making the
system fairer and better for everyone. And now return to
closing arguments. I'm going to just kick back and.
Speaker 4 (39:18):
Not say another word.
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Just listen to anything else you feel is left unsaid,
and tradition holds that, Jeff, since you're the attorney this time,
you go first, and then Divine will take us off
into the sunset.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Seven years to wait for a conviction review unit to
make a decision. Are you going to agree to overturn
or not? It's simply not justice. That's unreasonable. Diaganzalis order
your conviction review unit to make a decision on Divine
with Field's case.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
I would like to echo that seven years is a
bit extreme. It doesn't take that much time to just
simply make a decision.
Speaker 4 (39:58):
Seven years.
Speaker 3 (39:59):
I'm quite sure if you had any intentions of investigating this,
you've had sufficient amount of time to do it. I
also want to just put great emphasis on the fact
that Arts is life saving. Also, I want to remind
everyone the site is fredivindg dot org.
Speaker 4 (40:17):
Please read the evidence of the.
Speaker 3 (40:18):
Innocence, sign the petition and encourage others to sign that petition.
Speaker 4 (40:23):
It's not a hard task to do. That would be
highly appreciated. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Thank you for listening to Ron for Conviction. You can
listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts
one week early and ad free by subscribing to Lava
for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I want to thank
our production team Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink, as well
as my fellow executive producers Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wartis, and
Jeff Kleiber. The music in this production was supplied by
three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to
(40:57):
follow us across all social media platforms Alava for Good
and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on
Instagram at It's Jason Flamm. Wrongful Conviction is a production
of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company
Number One.
Speaker 4 (41:10):
We have worked hard to ensure that all facts reported
in this show are accurate. The views and opinions expressed
by the individuals featured in this show are their own
and do not necessarily reflect those of Lava for Good.
On March twenty fifth, nineteen eighty eight, outside of the
Brookline Housing Project, a drug deal went bad, resulting in
the shooting death of a guy named Jimmy CALIBERA Soon,
a notorious thief and cyrial informant named Richard Doyle ran
into one of the assailants, a guy named Howard Wesley,
and after their encounter, Doyle claimed that a guy who
(00:25):
lived at the Brookline Houses named John Whitfield, also known
as Divine G, was one of his shooters, and while
Harold Wesley admitted his own involvement, he vehemently denied Divines,
but Wesley died in jail before getting to say so
at Divines trial. This is wrongful Conviction. You're listening to
(00:53):
Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all the
LoVa for Good podcasts one week early and ad free
by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
All right, welcome to a very special edition of Wrongful Conviction.
(01:15):
And I say that in all sincerity. We have not
one but two of my personal heroes here today. Jeffrey Deskovic,
who's been on the show before as an exonery. Now
he's back as the attorney for a man who's yet
to be exonerated, but is as innocent as could be
and will be exonerated with your expert help. Is that
fair to say, Jeff, you're to say, Jeff Deskovic, welcome
(01:37):
back to wrongful conviction.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Thank you very much. And I do want to share
that I do represent the Vine also in collaboration with
Oscar Michelin.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
And that's ironic that as other lawyers named Oscar because
the Vine was just nominated for an Oscar for his
film Sing Sing, So he's got Oscar covered in every direction.
Were you actually nominated for an Oscar or the film
was nominated?
Speaker 3 (01:57):
No, I was nominated for Adaptive screen Well that's why
I went to the Oscars. You can't go to the
Oscars unless you're nominated, right, specifically, Yeah, sat next to
Ray find during the class photos.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
It's incredible.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
I mean, this man is just different. Twenty five years
in prison, Oscar nominated, accomplished author, playwright. I mean he's
a healer, right, I mean, this is a guy who
brought peace to a place that desperately needed it through creativity.
Divine is out shopping a number of new screenplays that
he's written. All of us are looking forward to seeing
(02:31):
where you go next, because this guy is truly the limit.
Sorry if I'm embarrassing you right now, but Divine, I'm
just really honored that you're here on our show.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
I'm honored to be here, man, thank you for inviting me.
And this is a New York story. You were born
in New York, right like me?
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Absolutely, East New York is where I actually was born
and had lived in Kanas and Brownsville.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
I'm a Brooklyn Night one hundred percent.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
And you grew up in a time when New York,
especially in those areas, was experiencing a lot of turmoil.
But you, somehow or other, even back then, were working
on developing your artistic side. Right, Can you can tell
us a little bit about growing up in your teenage
years and what that was all like before everything went
off the rails.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
I was kind of like a good kid. I was
one of them adventurous kids. I was all into really
positive and productive things. And I was around about eleven
twelve years old. I was so fascinated with Bruce Lee.
I used to make eight millimeters karate movies. Me and
my friend Frank Johnson, we used to make these karate
movies in charge our friends like a quarter a dollar.
That was an early state of my artistic energy. And
(03:38):
then I eventually started dancing. I became a really efficient dancer.
I actually I was recruited by a dance group called Realism,
and it was a semi professional group. I appeared on
television with Stephanie Mills. Y'all probably may remember the show
called Soap Factory Disco.
Speaker 4 (03:54):
In nineteen seventy nine. It was an old show.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
I appeared on two episodes with Stephanie Mills when she
was singing her song put Your Body in It.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
I did shows with Neil.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Ward, Instant Funk, and a variety of other popular groups,
and I was pretty good at dancing.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
Then.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
At that time I also became a DJ and eventually
became probably one of Brookline's most famous DJs. It was
a group I had called mix Machine. Actually in the
movie sing scene they mentioned it. Coleman Domingo says, yeah,
they used to call me mix Machine, and they mentioned
that name several times. And because of the dancing, eventually
I went to High School Performing Arts, and for those
(04:33):
who know high School Performing Arts, that's the fame school,
the famous Fame.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
School from the movie Fan Yeah, from the movie Fame.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
They filmed it in that particular school where I was at.
I really wanted to go there for acting, so I
got in with dance and I wanted to switch over
to acting. But eventually I left high school performing arts.
I just couldn't deal with all of the teasing, the bullying,
and I wasn't the type of person who really respond
well to abuse. I mean, I knew martial arts, I
got into a lot of so eventually I moved on
(05:02):
and went to Kanarsi High School, where I ultimately graduated.
Speaker 4 (05:06):
While all that was going on, I.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Always kept a after school job, worked on the weekends
because as a DJ, I needed money to buy the records,
to buy the equipment, to keep things updated. That was
basically my life before my life, like you said, went
off the rails. And then I got into this accident.
It was severe, woke up in the hospital. It was
really damaged pretty bad. I couldn't work, and eventually I
(05:30):
even tried to go back to work. I started delivering pizzas.
I was Abdomino's pizza delivery boy, and eventually I had
to quit that job because of the injuries. It was
so much on me and the doctors telling them, you
can't work. My lawyer's telling me, you can't work. You
gotta let these injuries heal. Time go by, I couldn't
get unemployment, I couldn't get certain monies, and then I
made probably the biggest mistake of my life.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
All my friends was in the game.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Hustling out in the street, and I was always able
to avoid it. But after that accident, I said, you know,
when I'm a sneak, out sell some drugs, and it
backfired on me. I didn't last two weeks on the
streets because I had no idea what I was doing.
I had copped out to the drug possession. I went
up state for one to three and out of the
clear blue Scott They brought me back down the Riker's
Allen and recharged me for a homicide, a homicide I
(06:17):
had absolutely nothing to do with.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
It was about two months before Divine began his one
to three year bid for possession that this homicide had
occurred on March twenty fifth, nineteen eighty eight, somewhere along
the stretch of one hundred and eighth Street that ran
through the Brookline Projects and much of what we know
comes from a recorded statement with one of the assailants,
a guy named Harold Wesley.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
From what I understand, it was a drug deal gone bad.
It was between Shatik, Harold Wesley, an individual named Patrick,
and this guy named Jim. Harold Wesley calls him Jim Carabella,
but his actual name, according to the police reports, was
Rudolph MIGLARISI. What happened is the old Shatique drugs or something,
(06:58):
and Shatik wanted to drug ugs or the money, and
they started arguing over it, and Shatig says that he
pulls the gun, shoots him in the head, and then
he made Patrick stand there and pull the trigger. Then
they run and Harold Wessey says that he sees a
woman who was dressed in some sort of green coat
or something. That was Marjorie Shack, whom he says she
lived in that building on the third floor.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Divine only found out about this recording and Marjorie Shack
long after he had been convicted.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
Come to find out.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
We eventually tracked her down and Marjorie Shack also confirms
that she told the.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
Police it wasn't me.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
The police kept showing up pictures of me trying to
convince her that it was me, and she said, no,
it's not him, it's not him. The night that had happened,
I was across town at my stepfather's house over there
on Buffalo Avenue, and that night I remember coming in
and because the crime happened in the back of my building,
I've seen all the police ropes and police cars in
the back of my building, so obviously I knew something happened.
(07:55):
Next day, I'm hearing rumors in the neighborhood. Yo, some
guys from out of the neighborhood shots guy in the
back of the building.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
So the neighborhood was buzzing. But it doesn't appear that
anyone cooperated until Harold Wesley had a run in with
police that June.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Harold Wesley had got arrested for possession of drugs, a
shotgun and the weed, and when the police pulled him over,
he was about to have a shootout with the police.
Somehow the shootout was avoided. Howld Wessey goes in custody.
Now he wants to cut a deal with the Feds.
So now atf steps in and this is how the
(08:31):
audio tape came about. He's on this audio tape trying
to cut this deal with the Feds, and now this
guy starts talking about every crime and everything he knew
in the neighborhood. And he's jumping all over the place too.
He's not focusing on one thing. He's talking about this thing.
Then he jumps to this, then he jumps from here.
He's jumping from there, and it's kind of discombobulated when
(08:52):
you read the tape. And onside one of the tape
he mentions me he's mentioned me about a conflict with drugs,
had been with some guy named R and Jr. That
he was trying to get me to pay him to
deal with JR and R. So somehow the police thought
that he was saying that the JR and R was
(09:13):
Jim Carabella.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
So they got that whole thing all screwed up.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
So by the time you get to side to of
the tape, you can see that they're confused. See, the
police already knew that it was Shatique and Patrick that
did it, so they confirmed that. But then he said,
well then what about Divine, Well did Divine order it?
And then Harold West They cleared it up conclusively. By
the end of the tape, he said, no, Divine didn't
order it. Even he was getting frustrated with ATF agent.
(09:41):
His name is Bob Hamilton. He was getting really frustrated
with him, like, well, why you keep bringing up this
divine character when I'm talking about something else.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
And while this recording happened and Wesley was in custody,
a guy named Richard Doyle and his friend Scott Bell
were arrested for burglarizing the home of someone named mar
Sigliano as for a possession of crack. And Doyle knew
Divine from the projects, but they never got along, so
that's a bit of bad luck. When Doyle ran into
Harold Wesley.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
Richard Doyle saw Harold Wesley's shatik in the ballpins, and
because they knew each other, they started talking. Now, I
guess what Shatik must have told him. Yo, They must
have thinked, this is the vine, because you can see
on the tape that they actually kept pressing Harold, that
kept mentioning my name, and Harold kept telling him no,
not the vine, not the vine. Then Richard Doyle came
(10:33):
to Scott Belly and said, yo, listen, I got a
way for us to get out, we can say we
saw Devine did this crime.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Richard Doyle got the idea that he was going to
get both of them out of jail by falsely implicating
Divine for a homicide.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Because Richard Doyle is a professional informant, He's been doing
this for a while. He testified in Pencil and Jeffrey's case,
he testified and Gary Reedy's case, but he testified in
multiple cases.
Speaker 4 (10:56):
So he has a history of this and he knows
that if you.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
Come up with this type of information that prosecutors love
you for this and you can get out of jail.
So Scott Bello says, no, I'm not doing that, No,
I'm not doing that. So Richard Doyle goes on about
his business and Scott Belli sees him talking to a
man in a suit and the next thing you know,
they walking out of prison. Then, after Richard Doyle gets
out a week later, miraculously, he goes to the police
(11:21):
station claiming to be an eye witness to this.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
So, on the strength of this serial informants word, Divine
was transferred from Upstate to Rikers to face this homicide charge,
even though Harold Wesley had already cleared his name.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
The minute I went on Rikers Island, like about three
days later, he committed suicide in Brooklyn House of Detention. Well,
they say he committed suicide. I did a four year
request and got all of the documents. They said that
they found him with the rope that allegedly hung him
under his mattress. So in essence, he hung himself, took
the rope off his neck and put it under his mattress.
Speaker 4 (11:57):
So you figure that out.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
But like I said, I didn't even know about Harold
was the or this confession tape until after his conviction,
let alone what he was about to face a trial.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
I didn't know who actually was accusing me of it.
And to the day of trial.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
It was a tactic that they used called trial by ambush.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
They would hide.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
All of the evidence from you and then on a
day of trial they come in there with a two
foot stack of documents and say here. And that's when
I discovered that it was this notorious crackhead. I mean,
he was the crackhead extraordinary in Brookline projects and he
accused me of this homicide.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
And here's where discovery laws being inadequate before, which is
why we're fighting to try to maintain them now comes
into play. Okay, because this tape that Divine has mentioned,
the tape went missing many years later they claimed it
was missing. But if it had been automatic discovery right away,
very early in the process, then Divine's lawyer could have
had that tape, It could have used that at the
(12:55):
trial and almost certainly would have gotten an acquittal.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Discovery laws in New York changed from trial by ambush
to automatic discovery in twenty twenty, and right now various
nefarious forces are working to repeal this vital reform. They
want to take us back to an era when a
request for discovery was both over and underwhelming. As Divine described,
(13:21):
a defendant would literally receive a volume of documents that
would be near impossible or impossible even to digest on
the eve of or during trial. But also the prosecutor
would get to decide what was going to be given
to the defense. Right. I mean, it's the wolf guarding
the henhouse, and I don't have to tell our audience
what a Brady violation is. And in Divine's case, that
(13:44):
meant Carol Wesley's confession, any mention of Marjorie Shack or
the deal made with Richard Doyle, who claimed that he'd
witness Wesley and Divine shoot MILLIASI under a street lamp
from thirty five feet away, and then he'd run to
a nearby stay order to retrieve receipts for some unknown reason,
and returned to the scene with a store clerk named
(14:05):
Wayne Harris.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
And Wayne Harris says, no, I never saw him that night,
But in terms of his credibility here in this case,
there's three provable lies. There's another twelve very likely lies.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Doyle testified that his burglary charges had been dismissed before
he'd come forward because the burglary victim's nephew, sal Mar Sigliano,
had directed he and Scott Bell to do it. He
also testified that he'd received no benefit for his testimony,
even though it was later discovered that the burglary charge
was pending through his grand jury testimony, as well as
(14:38):
an armed robbery charge in Nassau County that also just
poof went away. He also said that after he'd gotten
out of jail in June of eighty eight, that he
was approached by armed men who he didn't know, implying
possible witness tampering, but according to police reports written by
the lead detective, Robert Lincoln, he knew who that armed
person was and was unrelated to this case. Doyle also
(15:00):
claimed to have been sober for months, but on the
night he been arrested, one of the charges was for
possession of crack. In addition to Doyle, the jury heard
from the medical examiner about the cause of death, Harold
Wesley's arresting officer about the gun he found in Wesley's trunk,
and then a ballistic expert linked that gun to bullets
recovered from the scene.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
The whole case against the Vines is based on this
one and formant the trial judge, you know, Judge Edgido
at the sentencing even says that this whole case just
comes down to Richard Doyle's credibility.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
He said, without Richard Doyle, there was no case.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
And you end up getting sentenced to concurrent terms right
of twenty five years to life, five to fifteen years,
and two to a third to seven years.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
I mean, listen, man, it's a nightmare beyond description. You
know when they read it out, you know, the whole
courtroom exploded. I exploded, you know I didn't do it,
screaming it was just a nightmare.
Speaker 4 (15:58):
I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Family was crying, I was crying. It was just the
shark of all sharks. At the time in Clinton, Attica,
(16:23):
green Haven, that was a very racist jail. They got
active clanmen in Greenhn and at the time in Auburn.
Speaker 4 (16:30):
I did my rounds.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
But when I got to Sing Sing Sing Sing was
terrible too because they had a lot of drug wars,
a lot of gang violence, a lot of just a lot.
Speaker 4 (16:39):
Of prisons are just violent, period.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
But when I got to Sing Sing, it was a
blessing in disguise because Sing Sing is close to the city,
so they were more acclimated to have programs and people
were more able from the city to come up to
the jails. So I seen it as an opportunity. I
was on an all out mission. Being sentenced to twenty
five years to life can bring something to you that
(17:02):
you don't even know that you got waking up every
morning into a nightmare. When you go to sleep, you
out of the nightmare, you dreaming you free, and then
you wake up.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
It was like every morning, Uh, here go this nightmare again.
Here we go again.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
So that gave me that fire. I got into the NAACPA.
I eventually went to college, eventually got a master's degree, started.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
RTA and rehabilitation through RTA is rehabilitation through the arts.
You know.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
It was just a lot going on, and I became
a jail house lawyer man that was very efficient.
Speaker 4 (17:35):
I learned how to do motions.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
I learned how to do this because at that point
I knew that my entire life depended on me finding
a way to do it. And I'm not rich. I'm
a poor person. My family's poor. We don't have lawyers,
we don't have money for that. So I went in
that lawyer liberry and I learned, and ultimately I do
legal writing. I ended up becoming a very efficient novelist
(17:57):
writer because I said, once the court thought rubber stamping it,
I said, I gotta come up with some kind of
way to fight this.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
Well writing, what can I do? I can write, and
ultimately my.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
Memoir The Whitfield Files, won a National Writing Award.
Speaker 4 (18:10):
It's a Pen award, right, Yeah, there's a Pen Award.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
In addition to his Oscar nomination, Divine won the prestigious
Pan Award four count of four times. So we're gonna
link all of that in the episode description. He was
and still is stunningly prolific.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
It shocked me at times when I sat back and
realized one time, I wrote three novels in one year,
did a four to forty article seventy eight, and was
running RTA, and was the president of the NAACP sponsoring
culture war in his classes Black History Month classes GED classes.
People used to ask how do you do it? And
one of the ways I used to do it. I
(18:47):
had a meticulous checklist system. Every year I would write
out what I'm gonna do for this year, and then
every month I would break them down into months, a
checklist in months, and then a checkliss in weeks, and
a checklist in days, and every day I would check
off those. So every day of my life that was living, breathing.
(19:08):
It was about doing something. If there was a moment
I wasn't doing something, was it was misery. It was
like I lived by just staying proactive and moving.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
And he brought that drive and organizational prowess to his
appellate fight as a pro say litigant, meaning he was
on his own without an attorney, and after his initial
appeals were denied, his first post conviction motion, known as
a four to forty in New York, was based on
Doyle's perjured testimony that his burglary charges had been dismissed
before he even spoke to police about this, and that
(19:39):
he'd received no benefit. But Divine found out that Doyle's
charges hadn't been dismissed until after his grand jury testimony.
This was a Brady violation as well as false testimony,
and in addition, Scott Bell gave an affidavit about Doyle's
plan to falsely accused Divine who he didn't like, to
get their charges dismissed, and there was also an affidavit
from the burglary victim, Salmar Sigliano about how he tried
(20:02):
to press charges but nothing ever materialized. Yet somehow, the
motion was denied in nineteen ninety six, so Divine moved
on to federal habeas and filed a Foyer request with
the King County DA, which turned up a disclosure for
him that mentioned a tape.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
When I finally realized that there was a tape, they
adamantly insist that there was no tape that exists. I
did an article seventy eight to try to compel them Finally,
a judge in King's County said, you either have to
produce that tape or you're going to have to do
a very detailed APPI dated explaining why this tape doesn't exist.
(20:41):
These documents says that this tape exists. I eventually had
to do a motion to have him held in contempt
the court. I was doing all of this pro say,
and the judge granted it.
Speaker 4 (20:51):
Then and only then did all.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
Of a sudden, out of the clear blue sky the
mailman that does the mail, the mail officer comes to
my gate with a tape and lays it here and
have me signed for it.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
I'm like, wow, so they did have the tape.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
They lied to The judge kept telling the no tape exists,
No tape exists. Yah, this is nothing, and I'm looking
and then we finally, when I listened to the tape,
I said, I see why they did this.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Day Harold Wesley, when he was being questioned by the HF,
he mentioned that he did the crime with Patrick from
Queen's Divines from Brooklyn. His name's not Patrick.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
I couldn't sleep for three days after listening to this tape,
shocked by the fact that these people had this tape
in their possession, with this man telling them I wasn't
a shooter and I didn't order it. So that's what
turns this case until a grecious misconduct. You're listening to
this tape. This man is exonerating me, and you're hiding it,
(21:48):
and this is malicious.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
So they had that tape, and they had every reason
to believe that they should go look for this guy Patrick.
Of course, from the very beginning, did they know Patrick's
identity or just Patrick from Queen's.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
Nobody was able to track them down. I mean, that's
the full extent of what we know Patrick from Queens.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
At this point, Divine pursued a success of four forty
with Brady material that would have definitely changed the verdict.
It should have been a slam dunk, but it was
inexplicably denied, as was his amended federal habeas and a
slough of successive four forties. But Divine was able to
put the demoralizing legal system in the background, not only
for himself but for others as well, when he co
(22:29):
founded what turned out to be the subject of his
OSCAR nominated screenplay, And of course I'm referring to RTA
or rehabilitation through the arts.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
One of the things that I vowed that if I
got to stay here in this place, I'm gonna find
every way in my powers to make sure that any
and everybody that I can touch make sure that they
get out and don't come back.
Speaker 4 (22:52):
I'm gonna find a way.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
To strip the system of the thing that they needed most.
That was kind of like my fire, like, if I
can help them, these guys stay out because Gods was
coming back and it was hurting me. It was like, Wow,
I'm trying so hard to get out of this place,
and so you guys are coming right back. So that
was the creation of RTA, finding a way to make
(23:13):
sure that when these guys got out, they stayed out.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
And our audience will recall hearing about RTA from Jermaine Archer,
Eric Clisson, Johnny and Capier JJ Velasquez JJ, who actually
plays himself in the Oscar nominated film Sing Sing. It's
a theater group in the most unlikely place, a maximum
security prison where guys have to do more than just
wear a tough face to survive.
Speaker 4 (23:36):
I saw the power of art.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
You got to remember, like I explained to you earlier,
I've been in entertainer, My Whole Life, movies, dancing on
TV DJ.
Speaker 4 (23:45):
And the whole work.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
So arts are what I describe as an explosive expression
of humanity. It has this amazing way of allowing people
to relax and to be comfortable with each other, to
sometimes take the mass off.
Speaker 4 (24:01):
It wasn't easy. Now they don't think it was a
walk in the park. But we had a strong steering committee,
the founders of this program. We had some good guys
and we will shout them out, which man.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
Dino Belaud, David Wayne Peto, Shorty King, Herm.
Speaker 4 (24:17):
You know, this is just quite a few, It's a
few more.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
It was we had a strong network of good, solid
people that were well respected in the system. So when
you've seen a guy like Diano or Blaud or Shorty
King and me update, they're like, wow, these guys was
walking the yards of Attica and Clinton and these guys
as stand up dudes, And it would give other people
(24:39):
permission to say, damn, if they can do it, we
want to do it because subconsciously a lot of people
really want to do like things that's open, and we
give them permission to explore.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
Then in our program, since it's about.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
Healing, it's about brotherhood, it's about camaraderie.
Speaker 4 (24:57):
When you came in, we kind of.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Prepped you that, bruh, you're gonna be dealing with some
unfamiliar behavior around here because you're gonna have to open up.
We're gonna have to learn how to work with each other.
And once we've built it into the program, it just
started to blossom and work. And one of the criterias
that we always had that was built into the program
is that if anybody leaves Sing Sing, go start it
(25:21):
up wherever you go. We want to share it with
as many people as we can. And we got like
eight different facilities with RTA, and now it's expanded all
the way to Ohio and in California based.
Speaker 4 (25:33):
On the movie, so it's expanded.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
We really would love to have this thing available all
across the country if it was up to me.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
And what have been the results of this program in
terms of violence and recidivism.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
Listen, RTA has a recidivism level of three percent in
comparison to sixty percent of the national average of prisoners
who leave and don't get this type of program or
this type of involvement. Sixty percent of them come back
with than three years. So I think RTA gave certain
segments of society something to live for, because when they
(26:07):
wanted to get into RTA, we used to kind of
tell them, Okay, you got to stay out of trouble
for this amount of time, and we would give them
an incentive they want to stay out of trouble.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Three recentivism made I want to just let that linger
for a second.
Speaker 4 (26:21):
Yeah, why you think I wrote so much?
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Because every time when I started writing a novel, I
was enmeshed in those stories, creating these characters in these
worlds and these images. I was escaping, and every time
I touched the stage it was therapeutic.
Speaker 4 (26:34):
It was cathartic.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
It was like that moment when I'm becoming the character
on stage, in that world of the character, I was free.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
I had to have that freedom.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
Because when we had to go back to ourselves, it
was like, well, the nightmare begins again.
Speaker 4 (26:50):
And RTA was that escapism.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
And the beautiful thing about RTA we were able to
find love amongst so much hate, plain and simpers. Ultimately,
as the movie sing scene depicts, I eventually got a
(27:16):
clemency heart from Governor Elliot, Spitzer, who was considering me
for a full parton. If you could get a governor
to look at this and consider you for a full parton,
it has to be something there.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
And according to Divine, the clemency board was confused as
to what they were missing about this evidence. Why hadn't
an appellate court granted belief, which, by the way, are
great fucking questions. But they let their disbelief and uncertainty
lead them to deny clemency for Divine. And so again
Divine went back to the drawing board, hiring an investigator
(27:48):
who found out about Richard Doyle's arm robbery charge in
Nasau County that was also dismissed around the time of
his testimony. So a success of four point forty was filed,
and you guessed it, that was denied too, at which
point Divine wrote to the newly formed Deskovic Foundation.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Divine had wrote, my organization. I mean, people remember me
from other episode, but in brief, I did sixteen years
in prison myself for a murdering rate before DNA exonerated me,
and eventually I went to law school and became an attorney,
started the Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for justice.
Speaker 4 (28:20):
So with your own money, with.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
My own money, Yes, that's true. So Divine wrote us,
and we evaluated his case and we determined he was innocent,
and we saw a potential route to exoneration. But while
we were doing investigative work, he had a parole board
appearance coming. And it's always our policy to try to
get our clients out however it is we can, so
that they could be free while the long, often uncertain
(28:42):
road to exoneration takes place. So we wrote a letter
to the parole board which outlined all the primary and
secondary reasons why we believed in Divine's innocence. And as
people probably know listening to your podcast, if you maintain
your innocence rather than expressing remorse and take responsibility, you'd
almost always denied parole. So it already unjust prison stay
(29:03):
gets extended.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
But he was paroled, and that was twenty twelve. So
while an attorney with Jeff's Foundation, Rita Deve hired an
investigator and worked on his case, Divine continued some of
the work he'd been doing inside as a youth counselor.
When his past connection to the arts scene in New
York afforded him an incredible, almost unreal opportunity.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
When I got out of prison right in twenty twelve,
Lil Wayne's road manager approached me.
Speaker 4 (29:33):
It's this guy named Ei.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
Actually, when I was a DJ, I used to look
out for him and his little sister let him come
behind the ropes and stuff, and e I knew I
was innocent too, and everybody knew I caught a bad deal.
So when I got out, he came and picked me
up a Bentley, gave me some money and said, yo,
you want to go on my tour with Lil Wayne.
I said, damn right, I want to go. He said, listen,
I'll let you be a stage manager. If you can
(29:55):
get on, this tour is yours. At first, they wasn't
gonna let me go. The pro office admits, you crazy.
You just got out of prison for murder.
Speaker 4 (30:02):
You think you going on a tour with a famous rapper?
Are you crazy? I said, man, all right, cool.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
I've did an article seventy eight folled a major lawsuit.
Then I got some media people involved, and I did
emergency court for seeding, which is called an injunction. So
they did it like within a week. I was in
front of the judge and I went on that tour.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
Man.
Speaker 4 (30:22):
It was like the best seven months of my life. Man.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
And all that came about just because when I was
a DJ, when I was young, I had this history
of just looking out for people.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
And thankfully Jeff and Rider were looking out for Divine
as well. Obviously, Harold Wesley was deceased, but they got
in touch with his brother Ralph, who gave an affid
David that his brother told him the same story that
he killed familiar Racey with Patrick from Queen's. They'd also
tracked down the woman in the green coat and Divine's
ali by witness by Endevory.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
So in terms of Divine's innocence, there's a tape we
just mentioned Wesley confessed to his brother. Okay, there's also
Divine's alibi. He was with Bryant Devery Marjorie Shack, who
knew Divine from the neighborhood. She said she heard the
gunshots and people running, that they passed by her, that
it was not Divine. Her story is corroborated by another
(31:13):
witness who also didn't see anybody, but corroborated the direction
that the perpetrators were running from. So we got all
this evidence of his innocence juxtaposed with one informant Okay crackhead,
three lies, many other lies contradicted by witnesses. I mean,
it doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
But instead of filing another four to forty, they applied
to the King's County Conviction Integrity Unit in twenty eighteen,
who allegedly reinvestigated Divine's case. But by twenty twenty three
there was still no relief. And at this point Oscar
michelin enjoined the team.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Five years had passed by without the Conviction Review Unit
doing anything. So from there we had a meeting with
the then head of the Conviction Review Unit, Charles Lenahan,
and the line attorney, and Elenahan said, look, I haven't
read the case, but I took the meeting as a courtesy,
but I have the line attorney here, and she was
intimating like they just hit brick walls, and like she
(32:10):
wanted to say. She was on the verge of saying
we're going to close the case. But I'm fast on
my feet sometimes, and I saw what she was about
to do, and if she had gotten that sentence out,
politically it would have been hard for the unit chief
to overrule her. So I jumped in and I said, well,
what about this witness? What about that witness? Did you
talk to this one? Did you talk to that one?
Speaker 1 (32:31):
No?
Speaker 2 (32:32):
So I ignore her and say that the unit chief, Well,
how can you guys be about ready to close his
case when there's all these witnesses that you haven't spoken to. Look,
can we submit a twelfth page report to you outlining
all the evidence of Divine's innocence. We'll have complete references
to the record, and we'll contrast that with this one informant.
(32:52):
So he gave us the okay, and so sixty hours later,
you know, a twelve page memo was sent to the
conviction review unit. A year goes by and again nothing happens.
And the next thing we know, we're getting word that
he's leaving the unit, going to go into a private practice,
And we naturally reached out to him again, kind of
(33:13):
in desperation because we really don't know who the new
unit chief is going to be. And so we just
read the report and at the end of the day,
he did nothing. The most he did was had the
case assigned to a different lawyer. The lawyer that had
did nothing left the unit. I guess she was never
enthusiastic about doing conviction review to begin with, but he
(33:33):
assigned it to somebody else and Oscar emailed him. I
piggybacked off of it. I did like a short reiteration
of all the evidence of his innocence. I reattached the
report and we heard nothing. And so it's been two years.
They appear to not be working at all on Divine's case.
So our strategy at this point is we're doing as
(33:54):
much media as we can. We have a petition for
Divine which calls for the Brooklyn District Attorney to order
his conviction of unit, just to make a decision. It's
been seven years. Just make a decision. It's been seven
years already now, So people listening like to sign the petition,
spread it around. We certainly need that. The website is
fredivine g dot org. We're hoping that if we get
(34:17):
enough petition signatures that die Gonzalez will order the unit
to make a decision. We could pull his case from
the unit right now if we wanted to, and file
a post conviction motion and litigate. That's going to take
about two years, okay, and maybe we win. We're supposed
to win by everything, that's right, but he might not.
But we don't want Divine to walk around with this
(34:40):
conviction for another two years that it's going to take.
Hence trying to gather petition signatures.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
It's freedivineg dot org. We'll have it linked in the
episode description as well. So sign the petition in the
hopes that Kings County will finally do right by Divine
and if not, they'll move on to another four to
forty to resolve a case for which Divine should have
never gone to trial in the first place. Additionally, a
case in which the current discovery laws might have given
(35:07):
Divine a fighting chance.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
We helped myself in many organizations and advocates when we
helped improve the discovery laws. All the information had to
be turned over automatically within the first two weeks, and
if the prosecutor didn't have everything together in the first
two weeks, they had another two weeks. Anything passed a
month they would have to get a court order to extend. Okay.
(35:30):
So that's how we improved it.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Laws that are right now under attack.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Well, the District Attorney's Association and a lot of law
enforcement they did a campaign of fear mongering all of
a sudden, Now we're not can build of solve crimes.
People aren't going to want to come forward. Now we're
going to have witness intimidation, witnesses being killed. Which was
all just a bunch of rhetoric. Because New Jersey, a
border state to New York Okay, has had automatic open
(35:54):
file discovery for many years, and as I often joke
in order to make the policy point, we don't have
bodies floating up and down the Hudson River, Okay. So
there's all a bunch of fear mongering.
Speaker 4 (36:06):
Now.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Aside from the fear mongering, the other complaint is they're
trying to say that because of the discovery laws, that
many cases are being dismissed by judges because the prosecutors
are not turning over the information and timely manner. So,
first of all, that's not true statistically, and second of all,
to the extent that any case gets dismissed, why not
(36:28):
get on the prosecutor meet your deadlines, right. And so
the latest and greatest on that Governor Hokele now wants
to repeal the discovery law. They want to try to
modify it. First of all, they want to say that
a defense attorney would only have thirty five days now
to complain that you haven't gotten all the evidence turned over. Right,
(36:49):
that makes no sense because to me, whether it's on
day one or day two hundred, whenever it is that
you realize that you haven't been given all the discovery material,
you should be able to make a complaint, put that
on the record, object, etc. So that's one aspect of it.
Second thing is they want to go back to where
instead of turning over everything, they want the prosecutors to
(37:13):
look through the file and determine what can be helpful
to the defense and turn that over, which is part
of the problem.
Speaker 4 (37:21):
Before the wolf was guarding the henhouse.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Exactly right, and that was all under Brady.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
Now.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
The second aspect of it is called Rosario material, and
in a common sense way of talking about it, the
prosecutor would only have to turn over information pertaining to
witnesses that they were planning to call at a hearing
or at a trial. They would often do that on
the eve of a hearing, on the eve of a trial,
So not only is there not enough time to read
(37:47):
through the material, investigate, interview witnesses, incorporate that into your strategy.
But also if they didn't want you to know about
a witness, just don't call them at the hearing or
the trial, and they wouldn't have to turn anything over.
So that's the way that.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
It was as opposed to a civil case where you
have to turn over everything.
Speaker 4 (38:07):
Correct, if you and I have a business dispute.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Literally you have to turn over everything, and all that
systake is money, And here you're dealing with somebody's freedom,
their life right.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
When I brought a federal civil rights lawsuit in connection
with my being wrongfully imprisoned, I had more discovery rights
as a plaintiff bringing the lawsuit than what I did
when I was a criminal defendant defending myself against the
false charges.
Speaker 4 (38:33):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
So we're going to put links in the episode description
for people to sign petitions, call the governor.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
They can also email their elected official, the assemblymen, their
senators that represent them and say, look, we don't want
discovery rollbacks, okay, we want the system to be fair.
We want people who are charged to know exactly what
the evidence is against them so that they can prepare
a defense, so that we can reduce the likelihood of
wrongful convictions.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
Exactly, because I could happen to Jeff, if it could
happen to Divine, it could happen to you. I mean,
that's really the truth or somebody you love. Correct, So
if you do it for no other reason than that,
do it. But we should all care about making the
system fairer and better for everyone. And now return to
closing arguments. I'm going to just kick back and.
Speaker 4 (39:18):
Not say another word.
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Just listen to anything else you feel is left unsaid,
and tradition holds that, Jeff, since you're the attorney this time,
you go first, and then Divine will take us off
into the sunset.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Seven years to wait for a conviction review unit to
make a decision. Are you going to agree to overturn
or not? It's simply not justice. That's unreasonable. Diaganzalis order
your conviction review unit to make a decision on Divine
with Field's case.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
I would like to echo that seven years is a
bit extreme. It doesn't take that much time to just
simply make a decision.
Speaker 4 (39:58):
Seven years.
Speaker 3 (39:59):
I'm quite sure if you had any intentions of investigating this,
you've had sufficient amount of time to do it. I
also want to just put great emphasis on the fact
that Arts is life saving. Also, I want to remind
everyone the site is fredivindg dot org.
Speaker 4 (40:17):
Please read the evidence of the.
Speaker 3 (40:18):
Innocence, sign the petition and encourage others to sign that petition.
Speaker 4 (40:23):
It's not a hard task to do. That would be
highly appreciated. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Thank you for listening to Ron for Conviction. You can
listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts
one week early and ad free by subscribing to Lava
for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I want to thank
our production team Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink, as well
as my fellow executive producers Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wartis, and
Jeff Kleiber. The music in this production was supplied by
three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to
(40:57):
follow us across all social media platforms Alava for Good
and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on
Instagram at It's Jason Flamm. Wrongful Conviction is a production
of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company
Number One.
Speaker 4 (41:10):
We have worked hard to ensure that all facts reported
in this show are accurate. The views and opinions expressed
by the individuals featured in this show are their own
and do not necessarily reflect those of Lava for Good.
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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