60 Minutes - 03/17/24: The Capital of Free Russia, Healing Justice

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

Vladimir Putin has killed nearly all internal opposition to his unprovoked war in Ukraine. Tonight, Scott Pelley travels to a foreign city that’s become a haven for courageous Russians defying Putin and speaking out. It’s something no one else has tried and perhaps only she could pull off. Jennifer Thompson, a rape victim, is bringing together crime survivors and people who were wrongfully convicted.  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Lithuania's capital is clothed in the colors of Ukraine. And Putin is reminded an international court is waiting with his arrest warrant.

Since the 2022 invasion, Lithuania has become a refuge for Putin's fiercest critics. You would be in a Russian prison just for doing this interview. Oh, for sure. For sure. Good job. It's rare for 60 Minutes to follow a story for 15 years. But tonight you'll be reintroduced to Jennifer Thompson, a rape victim who mistakenly identified an innocent man who was sent to prison.

And then I'm going to tie my string. Jennifer has created something called Healing Justice, a program that brings together crime victims, family members, and innocent men. Dear Chris, you failed in life. Why did you confess? I will never confess. Why can't you just be quiet? You are an angry black man.

You will never know love. You will always be a prisoner. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and

more tonight on 60 Minutes. Today is election day in Russia, but there's no suspense. 71-year-old Vladimir Putin will be named the winner, as he has been over the last 24 years. This time, as often, his challengers died. One after an explosion on a plane and Alexei Navalny, Putin's leading rival, who died last month in an Arctic prison camp. Putin has killed nearly all internal opposition to his unprovoked war in Ukraine. And yet, many courageous Russians continue the struggle outside the country. We met some of them, in a city you might think of as the capital of free Russia. It's 500 miles west of Moscow, the city of Vilnius in Lithuania, where there's no love lost for Russia.

Lithuania is a democracy of about three million people and a NATO ally. Vilnius, the capital, is clothed in the colors of Ukraine. The city changed the Russian embassy's address to Heroes of Ukraine Street, and Putin is reminded the International Court in The Hague is waiting with his arrest warrant. Since Putin's 2022 invasion, Lithuania has welcomed more than 2,500 Russian exiles. It is our policy to provide shelter to all freedom fighters. Montas Adomenis served as Lithuania's deputy foreign minister from 2020 until last August. I haven't seen so many Ukrainian flags since I was in Kyiv. Why do your people feel so strongly about this? Our freedom, our independence, our sort of security is being defended in the battlefields in Ukraine.

Ukrainians are dying so that we can be safe. There are many more Russian dissidents who would like to come to Lithuania. Can you accept any more? Yes, I think we can accept. Of course, we will accommodate as many as needed and provide them with possibility to work for the freedom and democracy in Russia. One of the Russian exiles in Lithuania working for freedom and democracy is a crusading mom. Two years ago, Anastasia Shevchenko fled Putin's regime. This is a terrorist regime. They are threatening other countries with oil, gas, nuclear weapon and grain.

They are threatening us with our children, with our parents, with our lives and so on. More than anything, it was her daughter Alina, severely disabled at birth, that made Shevchenko an activist against Putin. Back then, the family was in southern Russia, and Alina was in a Russian government nursing home. Alina could not speak, could not communicate? No. She was like a one-week child, like a baby. She was 17, but even, you know, to feed her, it was a whole science,

because she needed blended food, you need to hold her in a special position. Shebchenko cared for Alina much of the time because the Russian nursing facility was short on staff and supplies. I was struggling to get medication for my daughter, begging in the pharmacy. She needed it. It was very important for her health. They said, no, we just don't have it because the ministry forgot to order it this month and you need to wait. I decided I'm not going to keep silence and I'm going to stand out and to speak out. She spoke out through a Russian democracy group called Open Russia. It was tolerated 10 years ago

and Shevchenko organized protests in her hometown. But in 2019, the Kremlin cracked down. Shevchenko was arrested, and her lawyer warned her she would be shocked by what the police had already done. He showed me the screenshots of me in my bed. And I realized that they had installed the video camera into the air conditioning unit above my bed, and they have been watching me for six months in my bedroom. A Russian court ordered Shevchenko into house arrest. She couldn't visit or care for Alina. It wasn't long before her daughter developed pneumonia. By the time a judge granted Shevchenko a pass to the hospital,

Alina was unconscious. I spent maybe 10 minutes holding her hand because that's what I do when my children are ill. When you hold their hand, they feel better. But this time, she was cold. She didn't feel me. And she died in an hour. In 2021, Shevchenko was given a four-year suspended sentence.

But when Putin invaded Ukraine the next year, she decided to flee Russia. From her southern city, she took her two surviving children on an 1,100-mile drive. A U.S.-based democracy group arranged Lithuanian visas. What does this tell us about Russia today? It's enough to write something on social media, just one sentence, and you can be imprisoned for years. They are listening to your phone calls. They are watching you in your bedroom. They are controlling you. Breaking that control is why Sergei Davidis also left Russia for Lithuania in 2022. You would be in a Russian prison just for doing this interview? In Moscow, Davidis helped lead one of Russia's largest human rights groups, called Memorial.

It won the Nobel Peace Prize two years ago, but now it's banned. He told us, Almost every day, there are more and more arrests. We hear news about new political arrests. And apart from the legal side of it, more often than before there's violence and torture. Davidis heads Memorial's project to support political prisoners. He told us he has confirmed 680 in prison today, but he believes the actual number is multiples of that. Since 2022, Russians can be sentenced to 15 years

just for criticizing the war on the street or in the media. One of the consequences of the war, he says, was a complete wipeout of independent mass media, a prohibition of any opinion that's not under control of the government. Independent newsrooms in Russia have been forced to close. Government-controlled newscasts report only the absurd lie that the war is self-defense against Nazis. This host says,

VLADIMIR PUTIN, Russian President of the United States, We are on the side of good, against the forces of absolute evil embodied by the Ukrainian Nazi battalions. People are scared, so they feel lonely. They feel terribly lonely. Tatyana Fegenhauer and Alexander Polushev were talk radio hosts on a prominent Moscow station. They were allowed to speak their minds until the day Putin launched his war. It was my morning show. I said, it's half past six, good morning, war began. War began, and within two weeks, their station was forced to close. Now, Polushev and Fegenauer are in Vilnius, streaming daily into Russia on YouTube. Putin silenced Facebook, X, and Instagram.

But YouTube may be too popular for the Kremlin to block so far. This is the only chance to talk about the war honestly, because the propaganda tries to create this feeling that you are completely alone if you are against the war. Why does this mean so much to you? Really, I would hate myself if I am silent or pretending that everything is okay. If Russian radio and TV stations are allowed only Kremlin talking points, we saw a Lithuanian station telling the truth, not on a channel, but on platform number five to a captive Russian

audience. Because part of Russia, Kaliningrad on the left, is separate, like Alaska from the lower 48, the Moscow-Kaliningrad train must travel through Lithuania. The cars are sealed for the transit, but at a stop in Vilnius, Russian passengers were confronted by posters of atrocities. Each read, Putin is killing civilians in Ukraine. Do you agree with this? The gallery testified as the train waited half an hour.

There's no way to know how much truth climbed aboard. And no one is allowed off the train, in part because Lithuania worries about Russian agents. Putin is infamous for attempting to attack his enemies in foreign countries. And I wonder if the Russian dissidents are safe here in Lithuania. Of course it is a major concern for us. We spent considerable effort in making sure that dissidents are safe here and safer than they would be in fact in many other countries. Have there been attempts?

Well, I'm afraid I can't release that information in more detail, but let's put it this way, that Russia is constantly probing and constantly trying. And this past week, Russia may have gotten through. Leonid Volkov was attacked with a hammer outside Vilnius. Volkov, on the right, was a top aide to Putin's late rival, Alexei Navalny. Volkov's arm was broken. The attacker fled. Vladimir Putin's re-election this week will bring him to his fifth term, which will cover the next six years. He enjoys support from nationalists who want to believe that today's Russia is an exceptional nation.

But Putin also has weaknesses. It's estimated he's lost 300,000 troops killed and wounded. And Russia has a population less than half that of the United States and an economy about the size of Italy's. My hope is a country where government takes care about citizens. Anastasia Shevchenko is free in Vilnius, but she's wanted in Russia for breaking her probation. These days, she's streaming her own YouTube show and sends medicine, food, and letters to political prisoners. She's become another voice to the isolated and the lonely and those like her daughter,

who will never escape the new Iron Curtain. She was alone, no one next to her. I really feel very guilty about it. But I wouldn't change anything in my life, I think. Why not? You know, the society in Russia is based on fakes. We have fake democracy by constitution. It is a democracy.

Fake news, Fake elections. And I want to be the opposite. I want to be open. I want Russia to be open. How safe are Russian dissidents in Lithuania? People are asking, come on, are you actually safe there? At 60minutesovertime.com. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade.

Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Fifteen years ago, we reported on a woman named Jennifer Thompson, a rape victim who was devastated to learn, years after her assault, that she and the police had identified an innocent man who was convicted and sent to prison, while the actual rapist had gone on to attack several more women.

Not an uncommon story in this era of DNA exonerations, and Jennifer Thompson has tried for years to do something about it. Thompson knows firsthand that wrongful convictions scar not just the unjustly convicted, but also the original crime victims who are often overlooked. So she's doing something no one else has tried, and perhaps only she could pull off, bringing together crime victims and innocent men from different cases for what she calls healing justice. What I'm going to ask you to do is turn your bowl upside down. What we saw on day one of a multi-day group retreat

Jennifer Thompson is leading sure didn't look like healing. Ten men and women, plus an observer. Nice job, Leslie! Smashing bowls with a hammer. Nice! What I'm going to ask you to do now is I'm going to ask you to repair it. It was quite something to realize that gluing pieces back together at one table were two women who had been raped at the ages of 15 and 12,

sitting across from two men who, in unrelated cases, had been wrongfully convicted of sexually assaulting children and had each spent more than two decades in prison. Anyone need a little blob of glue? At the next table, another woman who survived a sexual assault, sitting beside a man exonerated for rape and murder. And at our table, the partner and daughter of a murder victim. Everyone here, part of a case where the wrong man

was sent to prison for years and years. You have said that wrongful convictions aren't a single bullet. Mm-hmm. You said they're bombs. A wrongful conviction doesn't hurt, like, a person. It's not just Raymond Tower got hurt. Like, his whole family got shrapnel, and the victims got shrapnel, and the community received shrapnel because a child molester was still in the community.

There's just so many people in a wrongful conviction case. I think it's hundreds of people for every single wrongful conviction case that are hurt. Jennifer Thompson was one of them. She was a college student in 1984 when a man broke into her off-campus apartment and raped her at knife point. Jennifer worked with police to create a composite sketch, then identified a man named Ronald Cotton in the photo and physical lineups police showed her. Jennifer testified in court against Ronald Cotton and was relieved when he received a life sentence. But after 11 years in prison, DNA testing proved Cotton's innocence

and identified the actual rapist, whose photo had not been in the lineup. Ronald Cotton was exonerated, and Jennifer was wracked with guilt, as she told us in 2009. Shame? Shame. Terrible shame. Suffocating, debilitating shame. Jennifer turned that shame into action. She apologized to Ronald Cotton in person and then started speaking around the country to police and prosecutors, sometimes together with Cotton, about how to make wrongful convictions less likely. But over the years, as exonerations of the innocent have multiplied, Finally we're free. with nearly 3,500 freed so far,

I'm free! based on new evidence, including DNA, Jennifer began focusing in on what was being overlooked. What do you think most people feel and see when they see an innocent man come out of prison? It's the day that that man or woman who's wrongfully incarcerated and their families are rejoicing. I know you didn't do it. I know. It's the day they've been dreaming about. They've prayed for it.

They're on the court steps, and their arms are raised high, and it's a day of celebration. But for the crime victims, for the murder victim family members, they're sitting back here saying, hey, hold up a second. This is another nightmare on top of a nightmare. The victims have been forgotten. Victims, she says, like Tamisha Carrington-Artis, who was 12 years old when a man broke into her bedroom and raped her. He grabbed me by my throat and put a knife to my throat

and said if I screamed he was going to kill me and my mom. Grabbed me from behind, put me in a chokehold. Penny Bernson, sexually assaulted at age 36, as she went for an afternoon run along the shore of Lake Michigan. And he said, now I'm going to kill you, now you're going to die. And Loretta Zillinger White, who was raped at age 15 on the way to school one morning after she'd missed her bus. It's hard. People expect you to just put it behind you and not think about it again. And they don't realize that it's

going to affect you for the rest of your life. All these women, like Jennifer, had identified a suspect the police showed them, only to learn years later that those men were innocent, and they were gripped by a whole new nightmare. I felt so bad for him because I felt like I sent this man to prison. That's all I could think about. I got scared. I felt like that he was going to try to come out and kill me.

I just... I shut down. Did people blame you? Oh, absolutely. The first time I went out in public, a friend came up to me and said, I can't believe you're showing your face. They were saying that I needed to go to prison. That you needed to go? Yes. That I intentionally sent the wrong man to prison.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, it was bad. Yeah. Memory experts have long understood how crime victims can get it wrong. In our earlier story about Jennifer's case, Professor Gary Wells showed us a simulated crime scene and then a lineup. Now, you know now, after we've talked, probably not to pick anyone. No, no, actually. I actually know who it is, because if I had come upon that, I think it's this guy.

Am I wrong? Am I wrong? Yeah. I'm wrong? Yeah. It's none of them. Studies have shown again and again, when the actual perpetrator is not in the lineup, witnesses often pick the wrong man, who then comes to replace the original offender in their memory of the crime. In Jennifer's case, and to Misha and Penny's,

the real perpetrators, revealed by DNA years later, had not been in the original lineups. 20 years later when they come to me and say, by the way, the person who raped you never went to prison and the person we thought is innocent, see ya, and oh by the way it's all your fault. It's not the system's fault. I mean, here was my narrative. Rape victim falsely accuses an innocent man and sends him to prison. Everything's wrong with that because a false accusation denotes a lie. Deliberate. Why would a crime survivor, why would a victim want the wrong person to go to prison?

That doesn't make any sense at all. You know, when you hear what you're saying, then we get it, but we don't hear it. As you said, there's a blazing headline. Man is freed. Person who fingered him got it wrong. That's it. And the system now doesn't get held accountable for how it failed me, and it failed my family, and it failed the innocent person, and it failed the innocent person's family, and it failed everybody. That failure, Jennifer told us, is also devastating for families of murder victims,

even when they played no role themselves in identifying the wrongfully convicted person. That's what happened to Andrea Harrison and her father, Dwayne Jones. Andrea's mother, Jacqueline, was raped and murdered in 1987 when Andrea was just three years old. It was one of the most horrendous crimes. She was brutally raped, tortured. Someone found her body walking their dog. A local man named Larry Peterson spent more than 17 years in prison for the crime

before DNA testing proved his innocence, and he was released. Did you know that he was going to be released? Did they tell you? No. No. No. For many, many years, someone was tried, convicted, and put away. Yes, ma'am.

And then you find out that the DNA doesn't match. I mean, you go back into flight or flight. Yeah. You got scared. Absolutely. Absolutely, we did. Can you tell us of what? Who the person, who hurt my mother? What happened to Jackie?

Who did it? Whoever that person is, they're still out there. But since Larry Peterson's exoneration, with the case now cold, they feel the original crime and victim have become an afterthought. It's always been, what do you think about Mr. Peterson? That is not my charge. I care about Jackie. I'm worried about Jackie.

What about Jackie? But even while victims and their families are left reeling in the wake of wrongful convictions, Jennifer knows from her friendship with Ronald Cotton and her work with other exonerees that heady, blissful first day of freedom is just the start of a tough, years-long struggle to rebuild. Raymond Towler, exonerated after 29 years in prison, 29 years, plays in a band with other exonerees and says he struggles with the lingering stigma and hurt of being charged with such a heinous crime. Tell us, if it's not too painful, what the crime was. It's painful.

I know, I'm sorry. I'm laughing over it, but it is painful. But it was rape of 11- and 12-year-old kids. When DNA testing finally proved Towler's innocence and won his freedom, he says it was thrilling, but also daunting. The adjustment was difficult. Yeah. I couldn't even really go out the door by myself. You don't feel like you fit in anywhere. At least I didn't. Exoneree's stories are often filled with egregious police and prosecutorial misconduct.

In Chris Ochoa's case, abusive interrogations that led to a false confession to rape and murder. For Howard Dudley, evidence withheld by prosecutors that likely would have cleared him of child sexual abuse, for which he served more than 23 years. I always dreamed of being there with my kids, see the football game, see them on the basketball court. Didn't get a chance to see none of that. So I would like for everybody to introduce themselves. So Jennifer came up with a novel idea.

So I am Jennifer Thompson. I am a victim survivor. My name is Raymond. Raymond Tyler. I'm an exoneree. My name is Loretta. She started an organization called Healing Justice

that brings together exonerees... My name is Chris. I'm an exoneree. ...and crime victims... My name is Penny. ...all from different cases. I am Tamisha. As well as family members.

My brother was an exoneree. My name is Andrea. Healing Justice paid to bring them from around the country to this rented retreat center in Virginia, where they will spend three days sharing stories, playing games, and eating all their meals together. This is the 17th retreat Healing Justice has done. How effective is it when it's not the same crime?

Very effective. There's something powerful in healing when an exoneree can hear what the victim in their case must have felt like. And for crime survivors, it's really healing to also hear about the experiences of exonerees. The biggest thing I lost was trust. Three days of emotional release, rebuilding trust, and healing when we come back. Jennifer Thompson's goal when she created the non-profit organization Healing Justice in 2015 was to help all groups harmed by wrongful convictions. Healing Justice now advises prosecutors' offices around the country on dealing more effectively and empathetically with crime victims in exoneration cases, and they've recently gotten a grant from the Justice Department to

expand those efforts. But it's what they call the healing side of their work that is most meaningful to Jennifer. She did coursework in trauma recovery and worked with psychologists to design a program to safely bring together victims of crime and exonerees. They work in small groups on the wounds left behind when the justice system gets it wrong. Remember the breaking and gluing back together of those bowls? Did anybody notice how fast and easy it was to break it and how hard it is to put it back together again.

That was just the start of this retreat's opening exercise, and perhaps a metaphor for the whole endeavor. So what I'm going to ask you to do now is to paint your broken places with gold. This is actually 24-karat gold paint. She told us it's called kintsugi. Kintsugi. Kintsugi.

Mm-hmm. What is that? It's a Japanese concept that even in our broken places, we're still beautiful, because we're strong at our broken places, and we're not disposable. But before they can paint their real wounds with gold, they have to look hard at the breaks that need repair. I lost part of my heart. So sitting in a circle, using a rock to give whoever holds it the floor, and with a healing justice social worker always present,

they talked about their losses. I lost believing in myself. I had so much confidence. I had so much confidence. I had so much. That first, you know, slam on the doors, everything got real right then. You know, I seen people suicide, death by cop, just getting beat up, killed. You know, the talk comes back. And I have to keep reminding myself, you know, right here, I'm in the present right now. The hardest part for me is hearing what the exonerees went through in prison.

It's so hard to hear, but it's so necessary. So what I want to do today is to... On day two of the retreat, Jennifer led an exercise on how the harsh words used against each of them end up becoming internalized. You might have been called a liar. You might have been called a rapist.

And those words really do take on a life of their own. I'd like for you to write a letter to yourself from the space of the critical mind, that loop that plays in your head over and over again. You had them write letters. What was the purpose? I've done this before.

When they're writing it, they're not happy. And then I had them read it out loud at the circle. They didn't like it. Dear Chris, you failed in life. Why did you confess? I will never have confessed. Why can't you just be quiet? Dear Raymond, you are an angry black man. You will never know love. You will always be a prisoner. And then there was Loretta's.

Dear Loretta, you deserve to be raped and beaten. You really don't deserve to be alive. You aren't brave nor strong. You are a failure as a woman and a mother. Loretta, Jennifer told us, faces one of the most excruciating situations for a victim in an exoneration case, when the DNA clears one man but doesn't identify who the actual assailant was. I'm stuck. She told us she relives the assault daily and can't get the exonerated man's face out of her memory. So even though he was cleared through DNA, his face is still there.

Yes. The DNA said it wasn't him. You didn't believe it? No. I feel guilty because I feel like I did something wrong. So you're having both the feeling that he was the one and that you did something wrong? Yes. Oh my god, you really are stuck. I don't know who did this. For Andrea Harrison, whose mother's killer also remains unknown, it's a familiar struggle. What was told to me was that he was the person who murdered my mother. And so that was a belief of mine for a lot of years. I can't get that out of my head.

On his side of it, I mean, that's sad. It is sad. It is sad. It is sad. The justice system failed him just like it did us. Until now, Andrea and her father had not been willing to attend a retreat with exonerees present. Do you think that the exonerated person and the victim are almost pitted against each other when they shouldn't be? They're both victims of the same perpetrator who knows someone's sitting in jail for what he or she did.

That's right. At the end of the day, when an innocent person's in prison, a guilty person's not. We should all be concerned about that. And maybe they'd go off and do it many more times. In my case, the person who wasn't caught committed six more first-degree rapes before he was ever apprehended.

I just love that we're here working on this. In the circle, after reading the critical letters, Jennifer turned the tables. So I want you to write a second letter now to yourself from the self-compassion voice, the voice that you would use for the person you love the most. So they rewrote it. They did. Oh yeah. And then they read that out loud in their faces. They smiled when they read it. Dear Raymond, you have a kind heart. You are loved. Raymond, your dreams have come true and you are free to dream more and create. You are a great mother, grandmother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, and so on and on. Keep going. You got this.

I've seen you stumble, and I've seen you bounce right back. Dear Loretta, you know that it's never too late to follow your dreams. You should never stop believing in yourself. You didn't deserve to be hurt by anyone or anything. I will always be your biggest fan and supporter. I love you. That was different. So why is it that we speak to ourselves in a way that we would never speak to the people that we love?

Something I need to change, you know, is that it was actually harder to write the happy letter for me. I do believe the good things about myself, but I don't think I really say them to myself enough. And the reality is, if we really want to do good in the world, hating ourselves serves nobody at all. Who's ready? After two emotion-filled days

came a scene we weren't expecting. Catch it! The group gathered together for improv games. Ribbit, ribbit. Acting like animals. Oh, oh. Smiling and laughing. You play a lot of games.

The games are just really a way of inviting that child to come back and play again. If you feel safe, you can pretend like you're a monkey. You can do all kinds of ridiculous things and it's okay because everybody else is doing it too. I know, but don't you feel guilty. We noticed a loosening and connecting later that night over an art project, the kind of impromptu conversation Jennifer says this retreat is all about. How can somebody look at me and think that I would do something so heinous like that? That's part of the trauma for me. When you hear some of our stories, do you ever, like, blame us?

Like me being an exoneree? Yeah. Do you ever see yourself blaming the victims for... You didn't do anything wrong. It's not your fault. The next morning, as they gathered in the circle for the third and final day... I feel blessed. I feel light as a feather in the sky.

The mood had shifted dramatically. I feel open. I feel courageous. I feel nurtured. Even though it's painful to let it out, I think you guys do it because you know it's going to help the next person. And it has. So how did the retreat go? Very enlightening. Very powerful. We took off the mask that everybody sees. What questions did you ask each other,

exonerees to crime victims and back around? I asked what happened to you when everyone was honest. When everybody was honest, I asked right away. I shook Mr. Howard's hand. And I feel for this man. And my other two friends back there that are exonerees, I see it now. Because we only looked from our side of the table. We never seen it from their side.

I had that fear, even when I came here. I didn't know if I would be coming into a hate because I was exoneree. Because, you know, nobody believed me for, you know, 30 years. I think we believe it. I think. Thank you. I think we believe it. We do. I had questions myself for an exoneree, and I was able to build up the courage to even

ask Raymond because I still hold this guilt. And I was finally able to let it go after talking to him. I knew he was speaking from his heart. And it took 30 years for him to let me get that guilt off of me. Wow. I thank you. Do you have any guilt for what happened to Ronald?

No, not anymore. I feel so sad that for 11 years he was in prison for something he didn't do, but I'm also really sad that I got raped at knife point and chased around a neighborhood in the dark while I didn't have any clothes on. I feel deep amount of sadness for these cases and for everybody who's impacted by them. May you keep spreading your love to everyone that needs it. So as the retreat drew to a close, they clasped hands and shared wishes for one another. Penny, may you continue on your journey of healing? What happened in your case that allowed you to heal?

I think I'll always be healing. But I think what has helped me more than anything is the relationships I built along the way with people that have been harmed and hurt, just like me. Because you're helping other people. Jennifer, may you always be in our lives and may you always be courageous. I'm helping other people, but what they don't realize is they're also helping me. I didn't know that. They're healing. They are healing. is they're also helping me. Do I?

I didn't know that move. They're healing. They are healing. And I want to walk with them on that journey. Woo-wee! Now, an update of our story, Agency in Crisis, about the Federal Bureau of Prisons, particularly its women's prisons. This past Monday, FBI agents raided one of them, FCI Dublin in Northern California.

So notorious for sexual abuse and retaliation against those who speak up, it is known as the Rape Club. We asked Bureau of Prisons director Colette Peters if the government owes the inmates more than a safe environment. Is your job to apologize for what happened in Dublin? I don't know that my job is to apologize. Is it heartbreaking and horrendous

to have something like that happen when you are proud of your profession as a corrections professional? Absolutely. The Bureau of Prisons still hasn't publicly apologized for the abuse at Dublin, but it has removed the latest warden and three top administrators. I'm Cecilia Vega. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.