November 28, 2016 • 46 mins
In September 1986, 34-year-old Douglas Dilosa was found bound with rope in his Jefferson Parish, LA home. His wife was found strangled upstairs. Dilosa, who is white, told police that he was awakened by a noise, and when he went downstairs to investigate, he was beaten and bound by two black men. Police suspected that Dilosa, who was in financial trouble, had murdered his wife for the insurance money. A jury convicted Dilosa of second-degree murder and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I came from a beautiful neighborhood, had a beautiful life.
I went to sleep because September seven was the first
day of my high school year. I was gonna be
a senior. At twenty two, I was set to start college.
I woke up and my life was never the same again.
Cops came out with guns drawn, and I never saw
(00:22):
freedom ever ever since after that. It's like roach moke tow.
Once you get in, you I can't now this is wrong.
Forul Conviction with Jason flower Um particularly thrilled today to
(00:55):
have as our guest my good friend Doug Delosa. Doug,
welcome to this show. Thank you Jason. Having worked with
the INNSS project now for about twenty years in my
role as a founding board member, I thought I had
heard everything until I heard Doug story. So you were
living in Louisiana, right, I grew up there. I was
(01:16):
born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. At the time,
I wasn't living in New Orleans proper, but I was
living just outside of New Orleans in the city of Canada.
I was married. My wife and I had been together
a little over ten years. We had two beautiful children,
A son who was seven at the time, and a
(01:38):
daughter who was five. Right, so you had a little
yard and uh and basically some neighbors and sort of
like they we pay think of in New York. We
think everything they called the Sack. Right, we had this
strange regional America as a series that called the Sack.
But basically, uh, am I painting the right picture? Yes,
until it all went wrong, absolutely, until that American dream
(01:58):
turned into the American nightmare. Right, And it's a nightmare
of proportions that are impossible to overstate. You were at
home with your wife and and and kids, right, and
tell us what happened. It was a typical Friday evening
in our lives. Fast forward to about to thirty in
(02:20):
the morning on Saturday morning, September and I woke up,
sat up in bed. I heard a noise. The noise
that I was positive I heard was our pet parrot,
squawking and fluttering around in its cage. I get up
(02:42):
from bed, Tell my wife, I'm going to check on Andy.
That was the name of the bird. And what was
your wife's name. My wife's name was Glinda. I get up,
I go downstairs. As soon as I got to the
foot of the stairs. One person came from the side
of me, out of our bathroom area, and this person
(03:06):
immediately struck me with an object that I think was
a piece of my handle or a broomstick. Another person
came from the kitchen area and immediately knocked me to
the ground. And the two individuals I don't know how
long it lasted, probably less than thirty seconds, kick me,
(03:29):
beat me until I lost consciousness. Uh. Sometime later I
was regaining consciousness. I'm not sure how long I laid
on the floor, but I realized the thing that sort
of frightened me. At first, I couldn't move my fans
and feet were tied behind my back. I was hog tied,
(03:50):
and I was struggling to gain consciousness and put my
thought process together to figure out what had happened. And
after whether it was one minute or ten minutes, I
started calling for my wife. Didn't get any response at all. Uh.
So you're at the foot of the stairs, at the
(04:11):
foot of the stairs, inside of what would have been
our den, and she's upstairs, upstairs in the bedroom. Uh.
Getting no response at all from my wife. I called
from my seven year old son, Dennis, and on the
third of the fourth call from my son, I heard
(04:35):
him stirring upstairs. He answered me. Initially, he went into
the master bedroom and he I could hear him say, Daddy,
where are you? I see Momy, but she's sleeping, and
I said, Daddy's downstairs. Please come downstairs. He came downstairs,
(04:58):
and I told him, Dennis, two bad men had broken
into the house and they hurt Daddy. But I'm gonna
be all right. I need you to untie my hands.
He couldn't untie my hands because it rope was tied
so tightly. Then I asked him to go in the kitchen,
please get a knife and try to cut the rope.
(05:20):
He came back with a knife, but he was panicking
because he said, Daddy, I'm scared because I can see
four legs under the blind or the curtain in the
kitchen leading out to the patio. I can see people
standing on the patio, and I'm afraid it's the bad
men that hurt you. And I sort of panicked myself then,
(05:44):
and I said, Dennis, pick up the phone. The phone
was right there on the landing of the stairs. I
said dial nine one one, and he immediately picked up
the phone. Dial nine one one. He says, what do
I say? And I said, just tell him you need help,
(06:04):
that your daddy's hurt. And two um and you had
seen um two men standing on the patio. I don't
think he told them that exact anyway, he got their attention,
and within minutes police arrived on the scene. And then
and then the police arrived on the scene. And then
this is where things start to really get crazy, right
(06:26):
because it seems like a pretty simple situation. You're hog
tied right the police center. The first thing one of
them does is kneel down next to me, asked me
if I'm all right? I guess I basically tell him, yeah,
I'm fine. He doesn't untime, he doesn't do anything, and
I hear another officer goes upstairs, and at that point
(06:52):
in time, the next thing I hear him is kicking
the door off the hinges. And it turned out that
to my son had gone in the bedroom when I
called him, and he found his mother what he described
as being asleep. He must have pulled the door shut
behind him and it just automatically locked. Uh so, so
(07:18):
he in the door. He kicks in the door. When
he kicks in the door, he really startles my daughter,
who's in the bedroom next door, and she starts crying hysterically.
And at that point then my son starts crying hysterically.
And I'm I'm getting pretty hysterical myself, laying on the floor.
I'm still hogtied, and I'm telling like, what's going on,
(07:40):
what's going on? And policeman is trying to restrain me
and keep me on the ground, which is not that hard.
You're hot typic go ahead, and and I'm like, and
he says, don't worry, everything will be fine. And I mean,
within moments, it seems like ambulance attendance arrived on the scene.
(08:01):
I couldn't hear exactly what they were being told, but
they were being told something about my wife was in
the bedroom upstairs and that somebody needed to get my
daughter and bring a downstairs, which they did. And again
I don't know how much time was elapsing, but at
some point in time, more police officers arrived on the scene.
(08:24):
Eventually someone cut me free. Uh. Moments after they cut
me free, they told me that I would uh have
to be taken to the emergency room and that the
other paramedic team was working on my wife and I'd
(08:44):
see her there. And also at some point in time
they asked me if there was anybody that they could
call to take care of my children. I'm being treated
in the emergency room. I don't know how much later again,
was it ten of fifteen minutes? Was it an hour later?
(09:08):
My brother and a priest come into the emergency room,
and they informed me that my wife had been killed.
And at this point, you're I mean, You've just been
through and possibly traumatic experience, and now you're getting hit
with this news, and the whole world must be collapsing
around you. At this point in time, it was pretty
(09:32):
hard to believe what I was being told. I think
I almost went into shock when they told me my
wife had been killed. And I mean, I just can't
process what I'm being told and come up with any
logical reason why it had happened. And and then and
then you get back with your kids, um and try
(09:56):
to piece things back together. You had given the police
the information that they wanted, right about that, basically the
story that you just told us. I had, um recalled
everything I could remember to the police, except for when
you were unconscious, of course, which is that that's the
only missing part. But and then, and then they were
having trouble solving the case. Right. There had been considerable
(10:20):
criticism of the police department for not solving and having
any viable leads in this case, demanding to know from
the police chief what were they doing? How were they
protecting the neighborhood. I had gotten a little bit vocal,
and I probably sat on more than one occasion all
(10:41):
of these stupid son of a bitches need to be
fired because they don't appear to know what they're doing. Uh.
Their actions were in my mind, reminiscent of the old
Keystone cops in uh slapstick comedies, because they just didn't
appear to be very bright, right, Okay, and so obviously
the police, uh, you know, they're feeling a lot of
(11:05):
pressure and they're feeling a little they're getting their back
up about this. Right. So then comes the craziest part,
in some ways the craziest part of the story, right,
which is that now we're three months from the day
to the crime. Basically, right, we're now the morning of
December twenty nine. I was it's hot, it's hot, and
(11:26):
it's very warm in Louisiana. Uh, I'm deciding I'm gonna
put out the Christmas tree. Uh, it's starting. It was
a live tree. It's starting to drop needles all over.
So I tell my children I'll be right back. I'm
just going to put the Christmas tree out for the trash.
I've got a pair of cut off jeans on, nothing else.
(11:46):
And as I'm putting the tree in the back of
my house by the curve for the trash, I hear
Doug Dolosa turn around, and I sort of turn around
and I'm like on most in shock. I I have
no idea how many police officers are there, A minimum
(12:07):
of six, maybe ten or more. I have no many,
no idea how many news cameras are there. Probably as
many news personnel were there as there were police officers
pointing cameras at me there, uh, and the police pointing
guns at me, and they say, you know why we're here.
We're here to arrest you for the murderer your wife.
(12:29):
And I'm just like thinking to myself, this can't be true.
You know, this nightmare just keeps getting worse and worse.
I knew that I had been labeled to suspect, but
I never, in my wildest imagination thought that it would
evolve into an arrest. I'm not dressed with except for
(12:50):
with a pair of cutoffs on. My children are in
their pajamas. And I asked the one detective, could I
please go dress my children and call somebody to take them. Well.
As I was changing their clothes, I turned to this
man who couldn't have been more than two to three
ft away from me, standing right in my face, and
(13:13):
I asked him. I said, detective Dote, why are you
doing this to me? Why are you doing this to
my children? You know that I didn't kill my wife.
And this police officer when I asked him that question,
he had the look of a wild man on his face,
and he almost, I don't know how to describe it.
(13:36):
His voice, uh, was almost venomous, and he says, man,
fuck you, fuck your children, and fuck that dead wife
of yours. I didn't ask that stupid bitch to die
in my city. And and he he goes on to say,
he says, why should I give a funk about you
or your children? Do you care about me and my children?
(13:58):
My job's online, And he said, you have asked that
i'd be terminated in competence. Well, you know what, I
don't know who did it. Maybe I know you didn't
do it, but I can build the case against you,
So you're it. So you're you know, you go to trial,
(14:18):
and they well they were they withheld several critical pieces
of evidence from the defense, that which is called the
Brady violation, which which would have uh excluded you and
would have led to you being found innocent. Do you
want to do you want to talk about that the
trial from start to finish, nine days had passed, and
(14:40):
from the very beginning, the two district attorneys prosecuting me,
I told the jury that they were never going to
hear any direct evidence that tied me to this crime.
That basically what they were trying to convict me on
was a theory of how I did it and why
(15:01):
I did it, And what was going to be important
to the jury to find me guilty was that I
had no evidence to support my story that two black
men broke into my house that night, beat me unconscious,
hog tied me, and at some point in time killed
(15:23):
my wife. Right now, But the reason we know that
you couldn't provide any proof is because they were withholding
the proof that they had. They had the investigators, you
didn't have investigators. They had all the guys sweeping the
house and doing the whole thing exactly. They were fingerprints
found in several places throughout the house that didn't belong
to me, any of my family members, any of our friends, anyone,
(15:48):
any member of the investigative team that had all been
ruled out. And these fingerprints found throughout the house belonged
to someone. But we have no idea who they belonged to.
But they didn't tell you that no. There fingerprint expert
committed perjury on the stand when he said absolutely no
(16:09):
other fingerprints um were found in the house. Can we
talk about the cab driver for a second, because that's
one to me, that's one that's always stuck in my mind.
That's really you know, some sometime after I was arrested, actually,
let's back up two. Right after my wife's funeral, three
days after the murder, a taxi driver came forward to
(16:33):
the can Of Police department and he said, I think
I may have some uh testimony that would help you
catch the people who killed this lady, meaning my wife.
And as the story goes in his written deposition to
the police, he was dropping off a fair in that neighborhood,
(16:56):
which at that time was exclusively white. There would have
been no reason whatsoever to have seen blacks in that
particular neighborhood at least about three in the morning, at
least of all at three to four o'clock in the morning.
And he goes on to give in his written deposition
that as he was driving down this one street, he
(17:20):
saw two black men leaving the vicinity of the front
of my house carrying what would have fit the description
of some of the items I told police were taken
from him my house. And he says that as his
light shone on the two men, it appeared that they panicked.
(17:41):
They ran to a um silver van that was waiting,
and they sped off in a reckless manner. And he
found that very unusual and thought it was important to
bring that uh testimony to the police, which he did
as it was. But they, of course withheld that from
the defense illegally. They withheld that and said that there
(18:01):
was nobody had ever seen anything regarding UH any black
men in that neighborhood, much less in the vicinity of
my home. Now fast forward another six to seven months.
I'm at trial. This, you know, good citizen is reading
in the newspaper and hearing on the TV that I'm
(18:24):
undergoing a trial for the murder of my wife. Well,
he just doesn't understand that. At this point, he doesn't
trust the police because he's already gone to the police twice.
So he shows up at the court house somehow manages
to talk to one of the two or maybe perhaps both,
of the district attorneys who were trying the case, and
(18:44):
he tells his story to them, and they very nonchalantly
brushed him off and said, oh, don't worry. Uh. We
presented your written statement to Mr Delos's attorney. He reviewed it,
but in light of the overwhelming evidence against him, he
(19:05):
knows that your testimony wouldn't do any good, so he
decided not to call you as a witness, which was
a total lie. They hadn't given any of that information
to my attorney. And one of the biggest parts of
their case was over and over again they repeated to
the jury, no one repeat, no one saw anything suspicious
(19:28):
in that neighborhood that night, much less two black men.
And that's why you must find Mr delos So guilty
because he was lying. The jury comes back, they find
(19:52):
you guilty and sends you to life in president. Now,
the only thing that can make it worse is they're
going to send you to what is arguably the worst
prison in America, in Louisiana, which is the state which
has the highest prison population by far. Louisiana does have
three times higher rate of incarceration than the rest of
the country per capita, and of course America has a
(20:13):
five times higher rate than the rest of the world.
So it's off the chain. But now you're being sent
to Angola Prison farm, and and let's and let's talk
about that. Well, arriving at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which
they call Angola, it was beyond culture shock. I didn't
know what to expect. I'd heard numerous rumors. Uh that
(20:37):
scared the hell out of me. Uh. But I arrived
at Angola, and one of the first things that I
guess was really strange was they put you in an
initial classification, decide where you're going to be housed. And
I'm going before these classification offices and they decide that
(20:58):
they're gonna put me in a work in cell block
for my protection rather than general population. And then they
make a statement that's pretty odd. They said that they
don't have a white cell available to put me in,
so I'd have to be sent to a security um
(21:18):
cell while they prepare a white cell. And I'm like,
what the hell is a white cell. At that time,
they still believed in segregating the white and black prisoners
at Angola. They didn't mix white and blacks in the
same cell. But my very first night in Angola, I'm
(21:42):
in a disciplinary um tier and I'm in a cell
and there's someone down the tier in another cell acting up,
and at some point in time he throws human waste
on a security guard, and I'm just like, scared of
ship list. I don't know what's going on. Their guards
(22:03):
and would appear to be swat uniforms and riot shields
and everything coming down the tier. They're dragging this person
out by force, that beating him, and I guess I'm curious.
I'm sort of looking, you know. I guess maybe I
should have known better than to try to look. When
(22:24):
one of the guards saw me looking, he's like, what
the funk are you looking at? He turns around and
sprayed me with a pepper spray of mace For about seconds,
and the only thing I knew was my lungs were burning,
my face was burning, and it was sort of like
a welcome to Angal And that was my first night
(22:46):
in the penitentiary. So and then things get even crazier.
So you end up working on the chain gang. Is
that right? I mean, I don't know that chain gang
is a little bit misleading because we're not actually linked
by chains, right. It's a term that applies to it's uh,
(23:08):
a group of inmates working under the supervision of gun
guards on horses in the swamps. It could be swamps,
it could be anywhere on the farm. Here's a clip
where Burl came the warden talks about the infamous history
of Louisiana State Penitentiary. The work and the farm is
(23:28):
critical angel That's what it is. It's a plantation prison.
It was that way throughout its entire history. So very
important that we have agriculture here on the farm that
provide work for the inmates, which you know, it's good
for them because they have something to do to use
after energy and so forth. It turned out that I
was working in what they called Camp a Line one
(23:50):
under one of the most vicious inhuman h farm bosses
that Angola had at the time, and I found it
difficult at my age and my physical condition to keep
up with the average man who was only in their
early twenties. And I'm thirty seven thirty eight years old
(24:14):
at this time, in horrible shape. But one of the
things that this particular field form and used to enjoy
doing to torment the people under his supervision. He would
put us, say on the levee cutting um high grass
with what they called the ditch bank blade, which is
(24:36):
it's impossible to describe on air, but it's this huge,
heavy um cutting blade. And what he would do is
they might have been close to a hundred men in line.
He would put us up on the levee and there
would be two inmates with a water bucket, and he'd
tell the people with the water bucket, I want y'all
(24:58):
to move about a mile down um road with the
gun guard supervising you. And he said, y'all keep moving
that water bucket. Don't let anybody have water, because it
says until ten people pass out from the heat, I'm
not letting anybody drink water. And that was a typical
(25:20):
day working for this man mac Shaw, where he would
see people pass out, fallout as we'd say, from heat stroke,
heat exhaustion, from lack of water, and once whatever number
he arbitrarily determined he wanted to pass out and be
carried off in the back of a truck for disciplinary purposes.
(25:43):
Then he'd let everybody else have a drink of water.
And then then things got really crazy, because at one
point the you were singled out, it was more than
one point. I mean, it seemed it was something that
happened day after day every time I'd go in the field.
(26:05):
I never had the distinction of being one of the people.
I guess I was fortunate enough that I could go
without um drinking water longer than other people that I
might not be one of the first five to ten
people to pass out from heat stroke and lack of water.
But I certainly wasn't keeping up with the work quota
according to this field form, and and he would just
(26:28):
almost every day that I went to work, he would
write me up on a disciplinary report, lock me up
in administrative segregation to be disciplined by the disciplinary court.
They would hear my case and say it would say
something like I flatly refused to work. Well, I never
ever flatly refused to work. I simply worked until I
(26:52):
couldn't work anymore, or I worked at the fastest pace
I was capable of. But the field forman never wrote
the truth on disciplinary report and the disciplinary board that
help them court they didn't they knew what the truth was,
but they would just continue to stack punishment on you,
(27:12):
and I'd be sent back out to work. It's it's
just I don't I can't even I can't find any words.
The good news is you're a smart guy. You're a
guy of an educated guy, uh, somebody who can can
really think for himself. So you get to the point
where you realize if you're gonna get out, you're gonna
(27:33):
have to be the one to do it. Is that
Is that a fair statement? That absolutely? And I would
say that I worked as a clerk in an air
conditioned office in the print shop h silk screen shop
and a goal for a little bit over a year,
but I knew I my ultimate goal was I want
to get the hell out of prison, and everybody that
(27:56):
I associated with said, you know, you'd probably be better
all going to be what they call an inmate council
substitute or um prison lawyer, working in the law library
and I finally decided I'd apply for that job. I
did end up with the job over there, and over
(28:16):
the next several years, I learned the law. I think
I became pretty proficient with it. And after I had
exhausted all of my appeals in state court, after I
had gone through hundreds of thousands of dollars on about
seven different lawyers who all promised to do something, but
(28:39):
no one followed through and did what I hired him
to do, I finally sat back, spent six months researching
and another two to three months writing my own federal
writ a hundred percent on my own or with having
other inmate council's reviewing give me their critique. I filed
(29:04):
my writ of habeas corpus into the federal court system
on my own. Uh. I didn't know what my chances
were gonna be. I didn't I figured slim to none
at best. But I felt like, at this point in time,
if I'm denied, I'm gonna be denied on my own terms,
and I'll have given it my best shot. Finally, one
(29:40):
day they called me for legal mail. UH So I
get up at like five o'clock in the morning go
eat breakfast. I went to the window where they pass
out the legal mail. They had me a little brown
envelope and I was scared shitless to open it. I'm like,
because if if, if, it's if, it's the wrong answer,
(30:03):
You're done. This is your last appeal, right, it's the
wrong answer. I had a plan to escape from Angola,
and my escape from Angola was I had enough drugs
in my possession hidden that probably within twenty four hours,
I was going to o D and that's how I
was going to get out of prison. And that had
been something I had planned for months, anticipating a negative
(30:26):
response from the court. So I'm getting the chails right now.
So you've got this envelope. Uh and and it's gonna
it's gonna basically tell you whether you're gonna never die.
At this point, you've been in prison for fourteen years.
Fourteen years. It's been a long time, exactly. I put
up with as much as I felt like I could
live with. And I felt like my children were getting
(30:47):
up in age, and as much as I love them,
as much as I felt that they loved me, they
continued to visit me almost every opportunity that they got,
I felt I was doing them a disservice I having
them come to visit me in prison, by having them
trying to explain to their uh friends in college, why
(31:11):
can't you hang out with us this weekend? Oh, because
I'm going to the penitentiary to see my dad. And
I think I probably, you know, was looking at it
the wrong way, and I know I would have heard
him tremendously, But I felt like the best thing for
myself and for my children in the long run was
to take my life. Unfortunately it didn't come to that.
(31:34):
Because you're sitting here now and and so you've got
this envelope, what do you do to open it? I
went to the law library where I worked, and I
locked it in the bottom cabinet. I'm like, I'm the
only person here this early in the morning. I just
need somebody else around me when I opened this up.
So about half hour forty five minutes later, a couple
(31:59):
of my close friends at work in the law library
lived around me. They came in and I told when
my one friend, Mike Singletary, who was my closest friend
in the law library at that time. I said, Mike,
I got my decision from the federal court, and he says, well,
what's it say? I said, I don't know, Mike. I
don't have the nerve to open it. And he says,
(32:23):
oh my god. He said, come on, give me that envelope.
I'll open it for you. So I said, I said yeah,
but I said he took it out of my hands.
After I got it out the cabinet, he opened it.
I said, now let me read it, Mike, don't so
I took a couple of big, deep bress uh and
I don't know how. My heart was probably beating two
hundred beats a minute, and I was shaking, and mine
(32:45):
is right now, and I know the answer and it.
I opened the uh, ripped to the last page, and
all of a sudden, I just stopped shaking, and I
guess sort of a smile aim over my face, and
for the first time since my wife's funeral, I cried.
(33:07):
I started crying almost uncontrollably, when I read that the
magistrate judge recommended that my conviction be set aside and
that i'd be, um, you know, freed. I just, against
all odds, I went up against the most conservative federal
magistrate in the Eastern District for the state of Louisiana, who,
(33:31):
according to what I had been told, had never before
granted a writ filed by an inmate on their own behalf.
That's a happy ending to it, incredibly terrible saga. Um,
and you're back and I've gotten to know you well.
Doug is um now working closely with the Rising Foundation
(33:55):
in New Orleans, helping other exonorees to rebuild their lives
on the outside, uh, using the skills that he has
to help them with everything from you know, you name
a job applications to tax problems to building their houses
to you know, fixing things, getting employment. Um. He's he's um.
(34:18):
He's become a tremendous advocate for not only the Innocence
Project and innocence projects, although in your case you represented yourself, um,
but really somebody who has devoted himself to helping others,
which is uh quite an extraordinary thing and makes me,
uh really so proud to know you and to be
(34:40):
a part of your life. Um. It's important to note
in all of this that the compensation that you were
given ultimately by the state was paltry to say the least, right,
because people ask me all the time, well, these guys
must get they must get millions of dollars when they
get out. I mean, after what you went through fourteen
years and then go to prison and all this stuff,
(35:01):
almost being beaten to death, all the other indignities that
you suffered, and and the fact that you were so
egregiously framed. The compensation in the state of Louisiana allows
for twenty five thousand dollars a year for a maximum
of ten years of incarceration. Uh. It's doled out at
(35:22):
twenty five thousand dollars a year over ten years, which
gives a person barely enough to exist on if you
have a very modest lifestyle for ten years. But the
other thing, I mean, in my case, it fell short
(35:43):
a hundred and thirty seven thousand dollars short of my
actual expenses, So I didn't even recoup what I spent
because you had actually spent the money on attorneys on
my legal defense. UH. Basically paid ten thousand dollars a
year to be locked up for fourteen years, is what
it comes down to. That's about what it comes down to.
(36:06):
It's important to note that there are twenty states that
have no compensation statutes, and the ones that do have
compensation statutes. Some of them are even worse than Louisiana,
like Wisconsin. You know, people think that, oh, you were
proven that you were wrongfully convicted, you must have gotten millions. Well, no,
I'm still struggled to this day. I was never able
(36:27):
to repay my children for selling their interest in their
family home so I could hire that last attorney. Uh.
And it's just not right, not just for me, but
for all of the men in Louisiana and elsewhere it too,
and elsewhere. According to the National Registry of His Honorations,
there have been forty six generations in Louisiana s and
(36:49):
the courter of them occurred in Jefferson County, the same
office that prosecuted you. The sad truth is that there's
probably hundreds, uh, if not thousands of other dug bill
in Louisiana alone. It's certainly around the country. And I
can tell you that we won't stop until we exonerate
as many of them as we possibly can. People say
(37:16):
to me, you know my work at the Innescent, They say,
what the But prosecutors they don't lie that. People don't understand,
like it's it's it's unfortunately it's commons which is why
we asked Nina Morrison to join us in the studio today.
Welcome to RONFO Conviction with Jason flam Is. Good to
have you here. Thank you good to be here. So.
Nina is the senior staff attorney at The Innocence Project UM.
(37:36):
She litigates claims for access to post conviction DNA evidence
under both federal civil rights laws and state DNA testing statutes.
To date, Ms Morrison has served as lead or co
counsel for more than twenty innocent prisoners who are freed
from prison or even death row based on DNA or
other newly discovered evidence. So, can you explain to us
(37:58):
what exactly is a Brady violation? We talked about it
a lot on the show. Yeah, So a Brady violation is, uh,
where a prosecutor doesn't give the defense evidence that either
the prosecutor or the police or some other agent of
the state like a crime lab has that is favorable
to the defendant's case. Sometimes it's proof of their innocence. Uh,
(38:22):
you know, another suspect who was seen in the area,
somebody else who admitted to the crime. Sometimes it's evidence
that shows that a witness you know, who claimed to
be an eyewitness was you know, high out of their
minds that night, according to five other people, or couldn't
have seen what they said. They said. There's a whole
array of stuff. It's basically anything that helps the defense.
(38:42):
And it's a strange system when you think about it,
because you know, prosecutors and defense lays go into court,
they're fighting hard in these big murder cases or rape
cases or other hard fought criminal trials, and the way
the law is set up is the prosecutor has to
give the other side something voluntarily that might make them lose,
and we trust them in most places to turn it over.
(39:04):
So they say, I'm fulfilling my Brady obligations, and there's
no check on it until after the case is over,
and sometimes not even then until it's literally too late.
And and this leaves a very wide lane open for
the bad actors in the system, the bad prosecutors to
do what they feel like on a given day, and
to really railroad um people who are just regular people
(39:28):
like you and I who get find themselves stuck in
this nightmare, people like Doug Glosa. Yeah so, and and
there's even worse news in terms of how it gets
dealt with after the trial, because if you discover that
a prosecutor in your case withheld Brady material something favorable
to you, your conviction doesn't automatically get reversed. You then,
according to US Supreme Court case law, have to show
(39:52):
an appeals court that the violation is what the courts
call material, which means it actually made a difference. So
you basically have to come in after the fact when
a jury never heard this information, a witness was never
cross examined on it, and say, you know, Judge, if
I'd had this, I would have argued this. I would
have said that the jury wouldn't have believed this person.
And here's why you have to kind of have a
(40:14):
mental do over, a hypothetical duover of the trial. And
if they say, uh, you know, it made a difference, maybe,
but we don't know, it might not necessarily have made
a difference in the outcome. So it's what's called harmless error. So, Nina,
I wanted to ask you how common are these Brady violations.
You know, we don't know because by definition many of
(40:34):
them are hidden. We know that we have seen them
in a very significant proportion of our cases. Um, you know,
there's at least fifteen featured cases on the Innocence Project
website just from the last few years that involve serious
Brady violations which we uncover in the course of investigating
a client's other claim of innocence. Um And and there
(40:55):
is no scientific way to study them because by definition,
there are things that haven't been turned over. It's sort
of like everyone we find is in some ways by chance. Um.
You don't have a right to get a lot of
files after somebody has been convicted. Things get destroyed. I
wake up at night sometimes worrying about you know, these days,
when almost everything is electronic, we don't have the piece
of paper in the file anymore the way we used
(41:16):
to in the cases from the eighties and early nineties.
Now it's all in a memo on somebody's computer and
they hit delete, or that person leaves the office and
it's gone. Uh. It's in an email, it's in a voicemail,
it's in a text from a witness. It's you know,
you know, it's really a level of evil. Um that
in this particular case, I don't know what else to
(41:36):
call it. The prosecutor is and you know, we have
I know, Barry check in one of your other episodes, UM,
when you had Barry gibbs On was talking about this
concept of noble cause corruption, which I think is a
very real phenomenon. You know, I don't think even the
prosecutors that we've caught red handed withholding evidence, um, I
think most if not all of them, honestly believed that
(42:00):
were doing it for a higher purpose, which is they
had a killer sitting in the courtroom who was going
to get away with murder if they didn't win their case,
and so they convinced themselves that whatever they were holding
back was not really proof of innocence. It was something
the defense would use to create a smoke screen. Right.
But the laws the law. You have a job as
(42:21):
an officer of the court to follow the law and
turn it over. And now we know that many of
those people were actually innocent, so we see what the
real harm is from that skirting the ethical line. So
that brings us to the sort of the practical question
of what can be done. We at the Innocence Project
(42:42):
are working on a couple of things to police things
before trial happened. So one of the things we are
trying to do is get judges to take a more
active role in ensuring that Brady's guarantee is a real one.
Um by putting prosecutors on the record issuing court orders
to say, I want you to check these five locations
(43:05):
to see if there's anything favorable to the defense, and
I'm going to have a conference a month before the
trial to see how it's going. What have you turned over?
What are you looking for? And at that point the
defense lawyer will have an opportunity to speak up and say,
I haven't gotten anything on the witness statements. I don't
know who what these witness statements are. And our theory is,
you know, for example, two black men came in and
(43:26):
did this crime. Are there any reports of suspicious African
Americans in the area, whether you think they did it
or not? You know, is there anything we should investigate?
And the reason why you want to have the judges
be policing it is it if you lie to a judge,
you can get charged with contempt of court and lose
your law license and even go to jail. And on
the back end, we need to take accountability seriously. You know,
(43:49):
we need to make sure that the state bars uh
have a culture where they can go after just as
they would a lawyer who doesn't give a client all
their money back or didn't do the job they were
hired to do in a trust and the states case
or a civil case, that they will go after the
prosecutors who break the law, even if it's not politically
(44:11):
easy to do. And then lastly, you know, it is
very hard, as you know, and you've talked about on
your show, for prosecutors to ever be sued civilly and
even for states or counties to be held liable for
the misconduct of prosecutors. Um. Prosecutors are what's called immune
from suit in all but a few very rare cases.
(44:34):
And so if a prosecutor knows of some favorable evidence
and doesn't turn it over, the court Supreme Court has said, well,
you can go after them on our discipline, or you
can maybe criminally prosecute them. Talk about Fox and Penthouse, right, Um,
But you can't see them unless there's a pattern and
practice of violations, and those are very hard to prove.
(44:54):
And criminal prosecutions of prosecutors are extremely difficult, not least
of which because prosect suters generally don't like prosecuting prosecutors,
correct and they will Air. I mean, you know, they
will give every benefit of the doubt. O. They missed it.
They were busy, they thought they turned it over and
they put it in the wrong notebook. You know, yes
they did. The defense layer says they didn't have it,
but we think they did. I mean, yeah, and look,
(45:17):
our clients should have been so lucky to get the
benefit of every doubt when they were being accused of
a crime. Thank you so much for being on Wrongful
Conviction with Jason flam And. Uh, it was great. Uh,
it's great to have you here. Thanks so much. It's
great to be here. Don't forget to give us a
fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps.
(45:41):
And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project and
I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very
important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go
to Innocence Project dot org to learn how to donate
and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team,
Connor Hall and Kevin Awards. The music in the show
is by three time OSCAR nomine composer Jay Ralph. Be
(46:03):
sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and
on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction. Podcast Wrongful Conviction with Jason
Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in
association with Signal Company Number one
I came from a beautiful neighborhood, had a beautiful life.
I went to sleep because September seven was the first
day of my high school year. I was gonna be
a senior. At twenty two, I was set to start college.
I woke up and my life was never the same again.
Cops came out with guns drawn, and I never saw
(00:22):
freedom ever ever since after that. It's like roach moke tow.
Once you get in, you I can't now this is wrong.
Forul Conviction with Jason flower Um particularly thrilled today to
(00:55):
have as our guest my good friend Doug Delosa. Doug,
welcome to this show. Thank you Jason. Having worked with
the INNSS project now for about twenty years in my
role as a founding board member, I thought I had
heard everything until I heard Doug story. So you were
living in Louisiana, right, I grew up there. I was
(01:16):
born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. At the time,
I wasn't living in New Orleans proper, but I was
living just outside of New Orleans in the city of Canada.
I was married. My wife and I had been together
a little over ten years. We had two beautiful children,
A son who was seven at the time, and a
(01:38):
daughter who was five. Right, so you had a little
yard and uh and basically some neighbors and sort of
like they we pay think of in New York. We
think everything they called the Sack. Right, we had this
strange regional America as a series that called the Sack.
But basically, uh, am I painting the right picture? Yes,
until it all went wrong, absolutely, until that American dream
(01:58):
turned into the American nightmare. Right, And it's a nightmare
of proportions that are impossible to overstate. You were at
home with your wife and and and kids, right, and
tell us what happened. It was a typical Friday evening
in our lives. Fast forward to about to thirty in
(02:20):
the morning on Saturday morning, September and I woke up,
sat up in bed. I heard a noise. The noise
that I was positive I heard was our pet parrot,
squawking and fluttering around in its cage. I get up
(02:42):
from bed, Tell my wife, I'm going to check on Andy.
That was the name of the bird. And what was
your wife's name. My wife's name was Glinda. I get up,
I go downstairs. As soon as I got to the
foot of the stairs. One person came from the side
of me, out of our bathroom area, and this person
(03:06):
immediately struck me with an object that I think was
a piece of my handle or a broomstick. Another person
came from the kitchen area and immediately knocked me to
the ground. And the two individuals I don't know how
long it lasted, probably less than thirty seconds, kick me,
(03:29):
beat me until I lost consciousness. Uh. Sometime later I
was regaining consciousness. I'm not sure how long I laid
on the floor, but I realized the thing that sort
of frightened me. At first, I couldn't move my fans
and feet were tied behind my back. I was hog tied,
(03:50):
and I was struggling to gain consciousness and put my
thought process together to figure out what had happened. And
after whether it was one minute or ten minutes, I
started calling for my wife. Didn't get any response at all. Uh.
So you're at the foot of the stairs, at the
(04:11):
foot of the stairs, inside of what would have been
our den, and she's upstairs, upstairs in the bedroom. Uh.
Getting no response at all from my wife. I called
from my seven year old son, Dennis, and on the
third of the fourth call from my son, I heard
(04:35):
him stirring upstairs. He answered me. Initially, he went into
the master bedroom and he I could hear him say, Daddy,
where are you? I see Momy, but she's sleeping, and
I said, Daddy's downstairs. Please come downstairs. He came downstairs,
(04:58):
and I told him, Dennis, two bad men had broken
into the house and they hurt Daddy. But I'm gonna
be all right. I need you to untie my hands.
He couldn't untie my hands because it rope was tied
so tightly. Then I asked him to go in the kitchen,
please get a knife and try to cut the rope.
(05:20):
He came back with a knife, but he was panicking
because he said, Daddy, I'm scared because I can see
four legs under the blind or the curtain in the
kitchen leading out to the patio. I can see people
standing on the patio, and I'm afraid it's the bad
men that hurt you. And I sort of panicked myself then,
(05:44):
and I said, Dennis, pick up the phone. The phone
was right there on the landing of the stairs. I
said dial nine one one, and he immediately picked up
the phone. Dial nine one one. He says, what do
I say? And I said, just tell him you need help,
(06:04):
that your daddy's hurt. And two um and you had
seen um two men standing on the patio. I don't
think he told them that exact anyway, he got their attention,
and within minutes police arrived on the scene. And then
and then the police arrived on the scene. And then
this is where things start to really get crazy, right
(06:26):
because it seems like a pretty simple situation. You're hog
tied right the police center. The first thing one of
them does is kneel down next to me, asked me
if I'm all right? I guess I basically tell him, yeah,
I'm fine. He doesn't untime, he doesn't do anything, and
I hear another officer goes upstairs, and at that point
(06:52):
in time, the next thing I hear him is kicking
the door off the hinges. And it turned out that
to my son had gone in the bedroom when I
called him, and he found his mother what he described
as being asleep. He must have pulled the door shut
behind him and it just automatically locked. Uh so, so
(07:18):
he in the door. He kicks in the door. When
he kicks in the door, he really startles my daughter,
who's in the bedroom next door, and she starts crying hysterically.
And at that point then my son starts crying hysterically.
And I'm I'm getting pretty hysterical myself, laying on the floor.
I'm still hogtied, and I'm telling like, what's going on,
(07:40):
what's going on? And policeman is trying to restrain me
and keep me on the ground, which is not that hard.
You're hot typic go ahead, and and I'm like, and
he says, don't worry, everything will be fine. And I mean,
within moments, it seems like ambulance attendance arrived on the scene.
(08:01):
I couldn't hear exactly what they were being told, but
they were being told something about my wife was in
the bedroom upstairs and that somebody needed to get my
daughter and bring a downstairs, which they did. And again
I don't know how much time was elapsing, but at
some point in time, more police officers arrived on the scene.
(08:24):
Eventually someone cut me free. Uh. Moments after they cut
me free, they told me that I would uh have
to be taken to the emergency room and that the
other paramedic team was working on my wife and I'd
(08:44):
see her there. And also at some point in time
they asked me if there was anybody that they could
call to take care of my children. I'm being treated
in the emergency room. I don't know how much later again,
was it ten of fifteen minutes? Was it an hour later?
(09:08):
My brother and a priest come into the emergency room,
and they informed me that my wife had been killed.
And at this point, you're I mean, You've just been
through and possibly traumatic experience, and now you're getting hit
with this news, and the whole world must be collapsing
around you. At this point in time, it was pretty
(09:32):
hard to believe what I was being told. I think
I almost went into shock when they told me my
wife had been killed. And I mean, I just can't
process what I'm being told and come up with any
logical reason why it had happened. And and then and
then you get back with your kids, um and try
(09:56):
to piece things back together. You had given the police
the information that they wanted, right about that, basically the
story that you just told us. I had, um recalled
everything I could remember to the police, except for when
you were unconscious, of course, which is that that's the
only missing part. But and then, and then they were
having trouble solving the case. Right. There had been considerable
(10:20):
criticism of the police department for not solving and having
any viable leads in this case, demanding to know from
the police chief what were they doing? How were they
protecting the neighborhood. I had gotten a little bit vocal,
and I probably sat on more than one occasion all
(10:41):
of these stupid son of a bitches need to be
fired because they don't appear to know what they're doing. Uh.
Their actions were in my mind, reminiscent of the old
Keystone cops in uh slapstick comedies, because they just didn't
appear to be very bright, right, Okay, and so obviously
the police, uh, you know, they're feeling a lot of
(11:05):
pressure and they're feeling a little they're getting their back
up about this. Right. So then comes the craziest part,
in some ways the craziest part of the story, right,
which is that now we're three months from the day
to the crime. Basically, right, we're now the morning of
December twenty nine. I was it's hot, it's hot, and
(11:26):
it's very warm in Louisiana. Uh, I'm deciding I'm gonna
put out the Christmas tree. Uh, it's starting. It was
a live tree. It's starting to drop needles all over.
So I tell my children I'll be right back. I'm
just going to put the Christmas tree out for the trash.
I've got a pair of cut off jeans on, nothing else.
(11:46):
And as I'm putting the tree in the back of
my house by the curve for the trash, I hear
Doug Dolosa turn around, and I sort of turn around
and I'm like on most in shock. I I have
no idea how many police officers are there, A minimum
(12:07):
of six, maybe ten or more. I have no many,
no idea how many news cameras are there. Probably as
many news personnel were there as there were police officers
pointing cameras at me there, uh, and the police pointing
guns at me, and they say, you know why we're here.
We're here to arrest you for the murderer your wife.
(12:29):
And I'm just like thinking to myself, this can't be true.
You know, this nightmare just keeps getting worse and worse.
I knew that I had been labeled to suspect, but
I never, in my wildest imagination thought that it would
evolve into an arrest. I'm not dressed with except for
(12:50):
with a pair of cutoffs on. My children are in
their pajamas. And I asked the one detective, could I
please go dress my children and call somebody to take them. Well.
As I was changing their clothes, I turned to this
man who couldn't have been more than two to three
ft away from me, standing right in my face, and
(13:13):
I asked him. I said, detective Dote, why are you
doing this to me? Why are you doing this to
my children? You know that I didn't kill my wife.
And this police officer when I asked him that question,
he had the look of a wild man on his face,
and he almost, I don't know how to describe it.
(13:36):
His voice, uh, was almost venomous, and he says, man,
fuck you, fuck your children, and fuck that dead wife
of yours. I didn't ask that stupid bitch to die
in my city. And and he he goes on to say,
he says, why should I give a funk about you
or your children? Do you care about me and my children?
(13:58):
My job's online, And he said, you have asked that
i'd be terminated in competence. Well, you know what, I
don't know who did it. Maybe I know you didn't
do it, but I can build the case against you,
So you're it. So you're you know, you go to trial,
(14:18):
and they well they were they withheld several critical pieces
of evidence from the defense, that which is called the
Brady violation, which which would have uh excluded you and
would have led to you being found innocent. Do you
want to do you want to talk about that the
trial from start to finish, nine days had passed, and
(14:40):
from the very beginning, the two district attorneys prosecuting me,
I told the jury that they were never going to
hear any direct evidence that tied me to this crime.
That basically what they were trying to convict me on
was a theory of how I did it and why
(15:01):
I did it, And what was going to be important
to the jury to find me guilty was that I
had no evidence to support my story that two black
men broke into my house that night, beat me unconscious,
hog tied me, and at some point in time killed
(15:23):
my wife. Right now, But the reason we know that
you couldn't provide any proof is because they were withholding
the proof that they had. They had the investigators, you
didn't have investigators. They had all the guys sweeping the
house and doing the whole thing exactly. They were fingerprints
found in several places throughout the house that didn't belong
to me, any of my family members, any of our friends, anyone,
(15:48):
any member of the investigative team that had all been
ruled out. And these fingerprints found throughout the house belonged
to someone. But we have no idea who they belonged to.
But they didn't tell you that no. There fingerprint expert
committed perjury on the stand when he said absolutely no
(16:09):
other fingerprints um were found in the house. Can we
talk about the cab driver for a second, because that's
one to me, that's one that's always stuck in my mind.
That's really you know, some sometime after I was arrested, actually,
let's back up two. Right after my wife's funeral, three
days after the murder, a taxi driver came forward to
(16:33):
the can Of Police department and he said, I think
I may have some uh testimony that would help you
catch the people who killed this lady, meaning my wife.
And as the story goes in his written deposition to
the police, he was dropping off a fair in that neighborhood,
(16:56):
which at that time was exclusively white. There would have
been no reason whatsoever to have seen blacks in that
particular neighborhood at least about three in the morning, at
least of all at three to four o'clock in the morning.
And he goes on to give in his written deposition
that as he was driving down this one street, he
(17:20):
saw two black men leaving the vicinity of the front
of my house carrying what would have fit the description
of some of the items I told police were taken
from him my house. And he says that as his
light shone on the two men, it appeared that they panicked.
(17:41):
They ran to a um silver van that was waiting,
and they sped off in a reckless manner. And he
found that very unusual and thought it was important to
bring that uh testimony to the police, which he did
as it was. But they, of course withheld that from
the defense illegally. They withheld that and said that there
(18:01):
was nobody had ever seen anything regarding UH any black
men in that neighborhood, much less in the vicinity of
my home. Now fast forward another six to seven months.
I'm at trial. This, you know, good citizen is reading
in the newspaper and hearing on the TV that I'm
(18:24):
undergoing a trial for the murder of my wife. Well,
he just doesn't understand that. At this point, he doesn't
trust the police because he's already gone to the police twice.
So he shows up at the court house somehow manages
to talk to one of the two or maybe perhaps both,
of the district attorneys who were trying the case, and
(18:44):
he tells his story to them, and they very nonchalantly
brushed him off and said, oh, don't worry. Uh. We
presented your written statement to Mr Delos's attorney. He reviewed it,
but in light of the overwhelming evidence against him, he
(19:05):
knows that your testimony wouldn't do any good, so he
decided not to call you as a witness, which was
a total lie. They hadn't given any of that information
to my attorney. And one of the biggest parts of
their case was over and over again they repeated to
the jury, no one repeat, no one saw anything suspicious
(19:28):
in that neighborhood that night, much less two black men.
And that's why you must find Mr delos So guilty
because he was lying. The jury comes back, they find
(19:52):
you guilty and sends you to life in president. Now,
the only thing that can make it worse is they're
going to send you to what is arguably the worst
prison in America, in Louisiana, which is the state which
has the highest prison population by far. Louisiana does have
three times higher rate of incarceration than the rest of
the country per capita, and of course America has a
(20:13):
five times higher rate than the rest of the world.
So it's off the chain. But now you're being sent
to Angola Prison farm, and and let's and let's talk
about that. Well, arriving at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which
they call Angola, it was beyond culture shock. I didn't
know what to expect. I'd heard numerous rumors. Uh that
(20:37):
scared the hell out of me. Uh. But I arrived
at Angola, and one of the first things that I
guess was really strange was they put you in an
initial classification, decide where you're going to be housed. And
I'm going before these classification offices and they decide that
(20:58):
they're gonna put me in a work in cell block
for my protection rather than general population. And then they
make a statement that's pretty odd. They said that they
don't have a white cell available to put me in,
so I'd have to be sent to a security um
(21:18):
cell while they prepare a white cell. And I'm like,
what the hell is a white cell. At that time,
they still believed in segregating the white and black prisoners
at Angola. They didn't mix white and blacks in the
same cell. But my very first night in Angola, I'm
(21:42):
in a disciplinary um tier and I'm in a cell
and there's someone down the tier in another cell acting up,
and at some point in time he throws human waste
on a security guard, and I'm just like, scared of
ship list. I don't know what's going on. Their guards
(22:03):
and would appear to be swat uniforms and riot shields
and everything coming down the tier. They're dragging this person
out by force, that beating him, and I guess I'm curious.
I'm sort of looking, you know. I guess maybe I
should have known better than to try to look. When
(22:24):
one of the guards saw me looking, he's like, what
the funk are you looking at? He turns around and
sprayed me with a pepper spray of mace For about seconds,
and the only thing I knew was my lungs were burning,
my face was burning, and it was sort of like
a welcome to Angal And that was my first night
(22:46):
in the penitentiary. So and then things get even crazier.
So you end up working on the chain gang. Is
that right? I mean, I don't know that chain gang
is a little bit misleading because we're not actually linked
by chains, right. It's a term that applies to it's uh,
(23:08):
a group of inmates working under the supervision of gun
guards on horses in the swamps. It could be swamps,
it could be anywhere on the farm. Here's a clip
where Burl came the warden talks about the infamous history
of Louisiana State Penitentiary. The work and the farm is
(23:28):
critical angel That's what it is. It's a plantation prison.
It was that way throughout its entire history. So very
important that we have agriculture here on the farm that
provide work for the inmates, which you know, it's good
for them because they have something to do to use
after energy and so forth. It turned out that I
was working in what they called Camp a Line one
(23:50):
under one of the most vicious inhuman h farm bosses
that Angola had at the time, and I found it
difficult at my age and my physical condition to keep
up with the average man who was only in their
early twenties. And I'm thirty seven thirty eight years old
(24:14):
at this time, in horrible shape. But one of the
things that this particular field form and used to enjoy
doing to torment the people under his supervision. He would
put us, say on the levee cutting um high grass
with what they called the ditch bank blade, which is
(24:36):
it's impossible to describe on air, but it's this huge,
heavy um cutting blade. And what he would do is
they might have been close to a hundred men in line.
He would put us up on the levee and there
would be two inmates with a water bucket, and he'd
tell the people with the water bucket, I want y'all
(24:58):
to move about a mile down um road with the
gun guard supervising you. And he said, y'all keep moving
that water bucket. Don't let anybody have water, because it
says until ten people pass out from the heat, I'm
not letting anybody drink water. And that was a typical
(25:20):
day working for this man mac Shaw, where he would
see people pass out, fallout as we'd say, from heat stroke,
heat exhaustion, from lack of water, and once whatever number
he arbitrarily determined he wanted to pass out and be
carried off in the back of a truck for disciplinary purposes.
(25:43):
Then he'd let everybody else have a drink of water.
And then then things got really crazy, because at one
point the you were singled out, it was more than
one point. I mean, it seemed it was something that
happened day after day every time I'd go in the field.
(26:05):
I never had the distinction of being one of the people.
I guess I was fortunate enough that I could go
without um drinking water longer than other people that I
might not be one of the first five to ten
people to pass out from heat stroke and lack of water.
But I certainly wasn't keeping up with the work quota
according to this field form, and and he would just
(26:28):
almost every day that I went to work, he would
write me up on a disciplinary report, lock me up
in administrative segregation to be disciplined by the disciplinary court.
They would hear my case and say it would say
something like I flatly refused to work. Well, I never
ever flatly refused to work. I simply worked until I
(26:52):
couldn't work anymore, or I worked at the fastest pace
I was capable of. But the field forman never wrote
the truth on disciplinary report and the disciplinary board that
help them court they didn't they knew what the truth was,
but they would just continue to stack punishment on you,
(27:12):
and I'd be sent back out to work. It's it's
just I don't I can't even I can't find any words.
The good news is you're a smart guy. You're a
guy of an educated guy, uh, somebody who can can
really think for himself. So you get to the point
where you realize if you're gonna get out, you're gonna
(27:33):
have to be the one to do it. Is that
Is that a fair statement? That absolutely? And I would
say that I worked as a clerk in an air
conditioned office in the print shop h silk screen shop
and a goal for a little bit over a year,
but I knew I my ultimate goal was I want
to get the hell out of prison, and everybody that
(27:56):
I associated with said, you know, you'd probably be better
all going to be what they call an inmate council
substitute or um prison lawyer, working in the law library
and I finally decided I'd apply for that job. I
did end up with the job over there, and over
(28:16):
the next several years, I learned the law. I think
I became pretty proficient with it. And after I had
exhausted all of my appeals in state court, after I
had gone through hundreds of thousands of dollars on about
seven different lawyers who all promised to do something, but
(28:39):
no one followed through and did what I hired him
to do, I finally sat back, spent six months researching
and another two to three months writing my own federal
writ a hundred percent on my own or with having
other inmate council's reviewing give me their critique. I filed
(29:04):
my writ of habeas corpus into the federal court system
on my own. Uh. I didn't know what my chances
were gonna be. I didn't I figured slim to none
at best. But I felt like, at this point in time,
if I'm denied, I'm gonna be denied on my own terms,
and I'll have given it my best shot. Finally, one
(29:40):
day they called me for legal mail. UH So I
get up at like five o'clock in the morning go
eat breakfast. I went to the window where they pass
out the legal mail. They had me a little brown
envelope and I was scared shitless to open it. I'm like,
because if if, if, it's if, it's the wrong answer,
(30:03):
You're done. This is your last appeal, right, it's the
wrong answer. I had a plan to escape from Angola,
and my escape from Angola was I had enough drugs
in my possession hidden that probably within twenty four hours,
I was going to o D and that's how I
was going to get out of prison. And that had
been something I had planned for months, anticipating a negative
(30:26):
response from the court. So I'm getting the chails right now.
So you've got this envelope. Uh and and it's gonna
it's gonna basically tell you whether you're gonna never die.
At this point, you've been in prison for fourteen years.
Fourteen years. It's been a long time, exactly. I put
up with as much as I felt like I could
live with. And I felt like my children were getting
(30:47):
up in age, and as much as I love them,
as much as I felt that they loved me, they
continued to visit me almost every opportunity that they got,
I felt I was doing them a disservice I having
them come to visit me in prison, by having them
trying to explain to their uh friends in college, why
(31:11):
can't you hang out with us this weekend? Oh, because
I'm going to the penitentiary to see my dad. And
I think I probably, you know, was looking at it
the wrong way, and I know I would have heard
him tremendously, But I felt like the best thing for
myself and for my children in the long run was
to take my life. Unfortunately it didn't come to that.
(31:34):
Because you're sitting here now and and so you've got
this envelope, what do you do to open it? I
went to the law library where I worked, and I
locked it in the bottom cabinet. I'm like, I'm the
only person here this early in the morning. I just
need somebody else around me when I opened this up.
So about half hour forty five minutes later, a couple
(31:59):
of my close friends at work in the law library
lived around me. They came in and I told when
my one friend, Mike Singletary, who was my closest friend
in the law library at that time. I said, Mike,
I got my decision from the federal court, and he says, well,
what's it say? I said, I don't know, Mike. I
don't have the nerve to open it. And he says,
(32:23):
oh my god. He said, come on, give me that envelope.
I'll open it for you. So I said, I said yeah,
but I said he took it out of my hands.
After I got it out the cabinet, he opened it.
I said, now let me read it, Mike, don't so
I took a couple of big, deep bress uh and
I don't know how. My heart was probably beating two
hundred beats a minute, and I was shaking, and mine
(32:45):
is right now, and I know the answer and it.
I opened the uh, ripped to the last page, and
all of a sudden, I just stopped shaking, and I
guess sort of a smile aim over my face, and
for the first time since my wife's funeral, I cried.
(33:07):
I started crying almost uncontrollably, when I read that the
magistrate judge recommended that my conviction be set aside and
that i'd be, um, you know, freed. I just, against
all odds, I went up against the most conservative federal
magistrate in the Eastern District for the state of Louisiana, who,
(33:31):
according to what I had been told, had never before
granted a writ filed by an inmate on their own behalf.
That's a happy ending to it, incredibly terrible saga. Um,
and you're back and I've gotten to know you well.
Doug is um now working closely with the Rising Foundation
(33:55):
in New Orleans, helping other exonorees to rebuild their lives
on the outside, uh, using the skills that he has
to help them with everything from you know, you name
a job applications to tax problems to building their houses
to you know, fixing things, getting employment. Um. He's he's um.
(34:18):
He's become a tremendous advocate for not only the Innocence
Project and innocence projects, although in your case you represented yourself, um,
but really somebody who has devoted himself to helping others,
which is uh quite an extraordinary thing and makes me,
uh really so proud to know you and to be
(34:40):
a part of your life. Um. It's important to note
in all of this that the compensation that you were
given ultimately by the state was paltry to say the least, right,
because people ask me all the time, well, these guys
must get they must get millions of dollars when they
get out. I mean, after what you went through fourteen
years and then go to prison and all this stuff,
(35:01):
almost being beaten to death, all the other indignities that
you suffered, and and the fact that you were so
egregiously framed. The compensation in the state of Louisiana allows
for twenty five thousand dollars a year for a maximum
of ten years of incarceration. Uh. It's doled out at
(35:22):
twenty five thousand dollars a year over ten years, which
gives a person barely enough to exist on if you
have a very modest lifestyle for ten years. But the
other thing, I mean, in my case, it fell short
(35:43):
a hundred and thirty seven thousand dollars short of my
actual expenses, So I didn't even recoup what I spent
because you had actually spent the money on attorneys on
my legal defense. UH. Basically paid ten thousand dollars a
year to be locked up for fourteen years, is what
it comes down to. That's about what it comes down to.
(36:06):
It's important to note that there are twenty states that
have no compensation statutes, and the ones that do have
compensation statutes. Some of them are even worse than Louisiana,
like Wisconsin. You know, people think that, oh, you were
proven that you were wrongfully convicted, you must have gotten millions. Well, no,
I'm still struggled to this day. I was never able
(36:27):
to repay my children for selling their interest in their
family home so I could hire that last attorney. Uh.
And it's just not right, not just for me, but
for all of the men in Louisiana and elsewhere it too,
and elsewhere. According to the National Registry of His Honorations,
there have been forty six generations in Louisiana s and
(36:49):
the courter of them occurred in Jefferson County, the same
office that prosecuted you. The sad truth is that there's
probably hundreds, uh, if not thousands of other dug bill
in Louisiana alone. It's certainly around the country. And I
can tell you that we won't stop until we exonerate
as many of them as we possibly can. People say
(37:16):
to me, you know my work at the Innescent, They say,
what the But prosecutors they don't lie that. People don't understand,
like it's it's it's unfortunately it's commons which is why
we asked Nina Morrison to join us in the studio today.
Welcome to RONFO Conviction with Jason flam Is. Good to
have you here. Thank you good to be here. So.
Nina is the senior staff attorney at The Innocence Project UM.
(37:36):
She litigates claims for access to post conviction DNA evidence
under both federal civil rights laws and state DNA testing statutes.
To date, Ms Morrison has served as lead or co
counsel for more than twenty innocent prisoners who are freed
from prison or even death row based on DNA or
other newly discovered evidence. So, can you explain to us
(37:58):
what exactly is a Brady violation? We talked about it
a lot on the show. Yeah, So a Brady violation is, uh,
where a prosecutor doesn't give the defense evidence that either
the prosecutor or the police or some other agent of
the state like a crime lab has that is favorable
to the defendant's case. Sometimes it's proof of their innocence. Uh,
(38:22):
you know, another suspect who was seen in the area,
somebody else who admitted to the crime. Sometimes it's evidence
that shows that a witness you know, who claimed to
be an eyewitness was you know, high out of their
minds that night, according to five other people, or couldn't
have seen what they said. They said. There's a whole
array of stuff. It's basically anything that helps the defense.
(38:42):
And it's a strange system when you think about it,
because you know, prosecutors and defense lays go into court,
they're fighting hard in these big murder cases or rape
cases or other hard fought criminal trials, and the way
the law is set up is the prosecutor has to
give the other side something voluntarily that might make them lose,
and we trust them in most places to turn it over.
(39:04):
So they say, I'm fulfilling my Brady obligations, and there's
no check on it until after the case is over,
and sometimes not even then until it's literally too late.
And and this leaves a very wide lane open for
the bad actors in the system, the bad prosecutors to
do what they feel like on a given day, and
to really railroad um people who are just regular people
(39:28):
like you and I who get find themselves stuck in
this nightmare, people like Doug Glosa. Yeah so, and and
there's even worse news in terms of how it gets
dealt with after the trial, because if you discover that
a prosecutor in your case withheld Brady material something favorable
to you, your conviction doesn't automatically get reversed. You then,
according to US Supreme Court case law, have to show
(39:52):
an appeals court that the violation is what the courts
call material, which means it actually made a difference. So
you basically have to come in after the fact when
a jury never heard this information, a witness was never
cross examined on it, and say, you know, Judge, if
I'd had this, I would have argued this. I would
have said that the jury wouldn't have believed this person.
And here's why you have to kind of have a
(40:14):
mental do over, a hypothetical duover of the trial. And
if they say, uh, you know, it made a difference, maybe,
but we don't know, it might not necessarily have made
a difference in the outcome. So it's what's called harmless error. So, Nina,
I wanted to ask you how common are these Brady violations.
You know, we don't know because by definition many of
(40:34):
them are hidden. We know that we have seen them
in a very significant proportion of our cases. Um, you know,
there's at least fifteen featured cases on the Innocence Project
website just from the last few years that involve serious
Brady violations which we uncover in the course of investigating
a client's other claim of innocence. Um And and there
(40:55):
is no scientific way to study them because by definition,
there are things that haven't been turned over. It's sort
of like everyone we find is in some ways by chance. Um.
You don't have a right to get a lot of
files after somebody has been convicted. Things get destroyed. I
wake up at night sometimes worrying about you know, these days,
when almost everything is electronic, we don't have the piece
of paper in the file anymore the way we used
(41:16):
to in the cases from the eighties and early nineties.
Now it's all in a memo on somebody's computer and
they hit delete, or that person leaves the office and
it's gone. Uh. It's in an email, it's in a voicemail,
it's in a text from a witness. It's you know,
you know, it's really a level of evil. Um that
in this particular case, I don't know what else to
(41:36):
call it. The prosecutor is and you know, we have
I know, Barry check in one of your other episodes, UM,
when you had Barry gibbs On was talking about this
concept of noble cause corruption, which I think is a
very real phenomenon. You know, I don't think even the
prosecutors that we've caught red handed withholding evidence, um, I
think most if not all of them, honestly believed that
(42:00):
were doing it for a higher purpose, which is they
had a killer sitting in the courtroom who was going
to get away with murder if they didn't win their case,
and so they convinced themselves that whatever they were holding
back was not really proof of innocence. It was something
the defense would use to create a smoke screen. Right.
But the laws the law. You have a job as
(42:21):
an officer of the court to follow the law and
turn it over. And now we know that many of
those people were actually innocent, so we see what the
real harm is from that skirting the ethical line. So
that brings us to the sort of the practical question
of what can be done. We at the Innocence Project
(42:42):
are working on a couple of things to police things
before trial happened. So one of the things we are
trying to do is get judges to take a more
active role in ensuring that Brady's guarantee is a real one.
Um by putting prosecutors on the record issuing court orders
to say, I want you to check these five locations
(43:05):
to see if there's anything favorable to the defense, and
I'm going to have a conference a month before the
trial to see how it's going. What have you turned over?
What are you looking for? And at that point the
defense lawyer will have an opportunity to speak up and say,
I haven't gotten anything on the witness statements. I don't
know who what these witness statements are. And our theory is,
you know, for example, two black men came in and
(43:26):
did this crime. Are there any reports of suspicious African
Americans in the area, whether you think they did it
or not? You know, is there anything we should investigate?
And the reason why you want to have the judges
be policing it is it if you lie to a judge,
you can get charged with contempt of court and lose
your law license and even go to jail. And on
the back end, we need to take accountability seriously. You know,
(43:49):
we need to make sure that the state bars uh
have a culture where they can go after just as
they would a lawyer who doesn't give a client all
their money back or didn't do the job they were
hired to do in a trust and the states case
or a civil case, that they will go after the
prosecutors who break the law, even if it's not politically
(44:11):
easy to do. And then lastly, you know, it is
very hard, as you know, and you've talked about on
your show, for prosecutors to ever be sued civilly and
even for states or counties to be held liable for
the misconduct of prosecutors. Um. Prosecutors are what's called immune
from suit in all but a few very rare cases.
(44:34):
And so if a prosecutor knows of some favorable evidence
and doesn't turn it over, the court Supreme Court has said, well,
you can go after them on our discipline, or you
can maybe criminally prosecute them. Talk about Fox and Penthouse, right, Um,
But you can't see them unless there's a pattern and
practice of violations, and those are very hard to prove.
(44:54):
And criminal prosecutions of prosecutors are extremely difficult, not least
of which because prosect suters generally don't like prosecuting prosecutors,
correct and they will Air. I mean, you know, they
will give every benefit of the doubt. O. They missed it.
They were busy, they thought they turned it over and
they put it in the wrong notebook. You know, yes
they did. The defense layer says they didn't have it,
but we think they did. I mean, yeah, and look,
(45:17):
our clients should have been so lucky to get the
benefit of every doubt when they were being accused of
a crime. Thank you so much for being on Wrongful
Conviction with Jason flam And. Uh, it was great. Uh,
it's great to have you here. Thanks so much. It's
great to be here. Don't forget to give us a
fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps.
(45:41):
And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project and
I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very
important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go
to Innocence Project dot org to learn how to donate
and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team,
Connor Hall and Kevin Awards. The music in the show
is by three time OSCAR nomine composer Jay Ralph. Be
(46:03):
sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and
on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction. Podcast Wrongful Conviction with Jason
Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in
association with Signal Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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