Innocence Project Discusses Recent Wins, COVID-19 Concerns Inside California Prisons

Speaker 1: 00:00 There's no silver lining to the covert 19 pandemic, but there are unexpected twists of fate. Governor Gavin Newsome last week granted clemency to more than two dozen state prisoners. The governor said the cases had been under consideration for some time, but he indicated he took the virus at its potential to sweep through California's prisons into account. Four of the inmates released were among the so-called California 12 a dozen inmates whose cases were championed by the California innocence project. Journey me is Justin Brooks, director of the California innocence project at the California Western school of law in San Diego. And Justin, welcome back to the program. Speaker 2: 00:40 Thank you so much Maureen. It's a pleasure. Speaker 1: 00:43 What exactly does a grant of clemency mean for these inmates? Are they being released from prison immediately? Speaker 2: 00:50 Well, two of them are being released immediately. The other two are going in front of the parole board. Um, they were people who didn't have a chance to getting parole and we're hoping that that process will be expedited and they'll also be coming home soon. Speaker 1: 01:05 Give us an idea of how long the four people who receive this clemency have been in prison for crimes you believe they did not commit. Speaker 2: 01:13 Yeah. All four of them have been in prison for more than 20 years. Um, these are cases we've worked on for a long time. Uh, we had the marched across California eight years ago, actually seven years ago this month. Uh, when we tried to bring attention to these cases and when we first filed the clemency petitions with governor Jerry Brown. And so we had been fighting these cases for years and years and years. And um, you know, this covert 19 things seems to have expedited the process and we've seen that around the country. So there are people very deserving of their freedom. And I think just that the idea of the sickness going through the prisons and when, you know, these innocent people dying motivated the governor to act on them. Speaker 1: 02:01 One of the prisoners was the subject of a recent book called burned that. What's Joanne Park's story? Speaker 2: 02:08 So Joanne parks, uh, was living with her three children and there was a fire in her house. And while she was asleep and the three children died in the fire. Absolutely tragic. And as a result of just absolutely terrible testimony about arson science, uh, the court concluded that she had started this fire and we have seen a lot of these cases over the past several years of bad arson science. A lot of these guys who testify as experts are really just glorified firemen and don't really have training in how fires start. They know how to put fires out. And in her case, and we've seen this in a number of cases, when they see multiple points of ignition, the assumption is it was intentionally started, but we now know that fire within a house after it started. So fire can start in the living room, go up to the ceiling and then drop in the kitchen. Speaker 2: 03:07 And later on when they look at it, it looks like two points of ignition. But there was really just one. We also know that Joanne had a faulty TV set and that model had been linked to dozens of house fires. So we presented that evidence in front of the courts and no one has said at any juncture that she wasn't innocent. It's just we always up against the do we have enough evidence to overcome the presumption that she's guilty and the courts have disagreed with us. But fortunately Gavin Newsome reviewed it and his staff felt it was sufficient that she should be granted clemency. Speaker 1: 03:42 And there's a woman from San Diego who was also among those granted clemency, Suzanne Johnson. Speaker 2: 03:48 Susan Johnson's absolutely tragic as well. Um, every time I visit her, I'm sitting with know an elderly woman who sits there knitting and all she really wants to do is spend time with her grandchildren. And she, uh, got convicted on a bad baby death case. And that's another thing we've seen all across the country. In fact, Suzanne's case was featured in a film called the syndrome that looked at all these bad shaken baby syndrome cases that had been diagnosed. When when babies come to the hospital and they die, uh, when they see certain symptoms, doctors automatically think it's abuse. And we now know those symptoms can be linked to a number of things from vitamin deficiencies to injuries during actual birth and hers was a misdiagnosis of a baby death. Um, in her particular case, the reason that the jury concluded that she, it was abuse and that she hadn't called nine one one in time was because she said the baby was lucid and we now know from a number of cases that babies and adults can actually be dying from head injuries and appear lucid and then suddenly die. We also now know that children can die from short falls and for decades experts were testifying that an infant cannot die from a short fall and it's just a ridiculous conclusion. We know most of the time that doesn't happen and all of us who've had babies have seen them fall and survive. But every once in awhile it can happen. And that's what happened in her case. Speaker 1: 05:26 How is this clemency for your four clients and the other two dozen state prisoners different from the early release that governor Newsome just granted to thousands of inmates. Speaker 2: 05:38 So what they're doing with thousands of inmates is looking at people with very short terms. Um, so people with 60 days left on their sentence, 30 days on their sentence, they've been emptying out the jails of people who are in pretrial detention. They haven't been locking up people who are charged with, so they've been doing kind of blanket policies to decrease the density in the jails and prisons the same way we're trying to decrease density outside correctional facilities. And that's been sort of blanket policies. Ours is very unique and as you said, the governor's only done, you know, 24 of these in that these are cases that are already in the pipeline to be reviewed for release. And we've been able to get those releases expedited. But the governor's certainly not going in and letting people convicted of murder out of prison. Uh, and I've actually had a lot of people contacting me this week saying, Hey, can you help me out with my case? You know, I've got a client in a bad situation. They're innocent and it's very difficult to do that at this stage. You know, we've been advocating for these cases for years. They've been fully vetted by the governor's staff, fully reviewed and we really got the process expedited more than anything else. Speaker 1: 06:55 Because of your work, you are frequently in California prisons. Justin, can you tell us how the covert 19 pandemic is effecting inmates? Speaker 2: 07:05 Well, this is one of the few situations where you'd say now that it's much worse to be housed in a dorm and in general population in the prison, which is usually what you want. You know, when you're incarcerated, being locked down in a cell 24 hours a day, like the people on death row is absolutely horrible. Or being in solitary confinement is horrible. Um, but those are the people now that have some form of safety because they're alone. But the vast majority of people in prison, in California, in the biggest prison system in the United States, um, they are housed in dorms in very close proximity to each other. They move all around the facility, charring the day to, to eat, to go, to work, to be out on the yard. And it's basically impossible to have social distancing in a correctional facility. Add onto the fact that California's prisons have been overcrowded for a very long time. Speaker 2: 08:02 So they weren't even designed to have the number of people they have in them. So that's why this is an absolute crisis. Um, on top of it, the prisons are in the middle of nowhere. Most of them are hundreds of miles from the city. They have very little medical facilities available to them. And you know, we're talking about how many ventilators, so are for the general public will imagine in terms of inmates what kind of priority they'll get when they're severely sick. So it is the worst possible situation to be in during the pandemic to be in a prison because you're more likely to get it than anywhere else and you're less likely to get medical treatment than anywhere else. Speaker 1: 08:44 And a lot of the California innocence projects work has been put on hold because of this fires, hasn't it? Speaker 2: 08:50 Yeah. I actually stopped prison. I had a whole bunch of prison visits set up, um, a month ago and I stopped going into the prisons, stopped all my staff and students from going into the prisons because I was afraid we were going to bring it in. And really the risk is from people from the outside, but you can't cut the prisons off from people from the outside because obviously the guards come and go every day. There's staff and running the prisons. So it stopped our work in the sense, you know, we can't visit clients. It stopped our work in terms of going out and doing crime scene investigation, tracking down witnesses. Um, my lawyers are all working hard at home on their cases and writing briefs and doing petitions and on the phone and doing zoom meetings like everyone else. So we're working really hard, but it's certainly changed our day to day work and slowed down. A lot of our other cases, the courts are, are basically closed and, uh, the criminal justice system is, is pretty much completely closed except for the prisons. Speaker 1: 09:50 Well, congratulations for the grant of clemency to four of the California innocence projects clients and Justin Berks, director of the California innocence project. Thank you so much for speaking with us. Thank you. It's always a pleasure. Speaker 3: 10:08 [inaudible].