Dateline Originals - 13 Alibis - Ep. 8: Wrongful Convictions

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

Josh Mankiewicz and Dan Slepian discuss the issues of wrongful convictions in front of a live audience at the CrimeCon conference in New Orleans. This episode was originally published on September 2, 2019.

Hi, Dan Slepian here. Thanks for listening to 13 Alibis. About a month after we released this podcast, I had a discussion with my Dateline colleague, Josh Mankiewicz, about the series and about wrongful convictions in general at a convention called CrimeCon in New Orleans. So we made a bonus episode out of that conversation. Here's Josh. Hi, everybody. Thanks for coming. I'm Josh Mankiewicz. This is Dan Slepian. I know you've all seen Dateline. Dateline almost always about the best in law enforcement, about officers and detectives who don't give up,

who take the case file home with them, who sometimes keep working a case even after they've retired or after they've been transferred to another division. And those stories are a pleasure to tell, and they're ones that our audience has responded to and ones that I think deserve a great deal of the credit for how well Dayline has done over the years and how long we've been on and how devoted all of you are to it. Somewhat less often, we tell stories like the one Dan tells in the podcast, 13 Alibis, which is the story of Richard Rosario. Tell me how you

first came across his story. It was 2013 I first heard about Richard Rosario. And I heard about him like I have so many others of these kinds of stories that I've done. You know, sometimes I describe my professional life as like the surreal game of dominoes where one innocent person has led me to the next over the years. I've done several stories for Dateline over the years, one with Josh, that have helped people get out of prison. And so I was visiting an inmate that I had done another story about. And he said, I got another one for you. And I'm thinking, how many are there? And he said, there's this guy named Richard Rosario. And what struck me about his story was that it was so easy to understand his claim of innocence. Very often with these kinds of stories, when someone says they're innocent, it's like, okay, let me just tell you the story. You need a few days to understand it.

My friend was there and the guy was there. This was very easy. This was, I was in Florida. I wasn't in New York. And to me, when I heard that, it was, I thought, simple to a certain extent. Either he was in the state or not. And I set out to find that out. So that's how I heard about it.

How, I mean, the simple question is, if you were in another state at the time of the murder, how'd you get convicted? Yeah, you know, I was just saying before, like, one of the things, I've been doing this, this is my 24th year at Dateline. I've met all sorts of people, like all of our producers and what we do. And what surprises me is that I continue to be surprised. The story, I've lived with it for several years. I'm still surprised by it because I don't have a good answer to it. I think,

you know, just very, very quickly, for those of you who haven't heard the podcast, what happened was, is that Richard Rosario was convicted of a murder in the Bronx in 1998. He became a suspect because an eyewitness looked at books of mugshots in the precinct. And he had a mugshot in there because he was arrested for a juvenile robbery. And one of the witnesses said, that's the guy. About a week later, Richard calls home and his mom said, police are looking for you. And he says, I'm in Florida. And he had been in Florida for some time at that point.

Several weeks. And he comes back with a bus ticket. He buys a bus ticket and takes a Greyhound back and goes to the precinct. And he says, you got the wrong guy. On June 19th, I was in Florida. And he gives them the names, phone numbers, addresses, and contact information of 13 people who he says could say he was in Florida. And the reason he knew is because he was there for the birth of his friend's baby.

Call John and Janine. John Torres, the first name. All right. So he, I'm going to do this like a Dateline interview. So, because that's the only way I know how. He gives police 13 alibis. He does. The names of 13 people and contact information.

And their phone numbers. Right? Didn't just say, it was a guy named Bill in a blue jacket. He goes, no, it was my friend, Bill. Here's his phone number. Here's where he lives. And here's why I was there. How many of those people were contacted by police?

Zero. And to answer your question, how can that happen? That's really what I set out to find out. First of all, I set out to find out if it's true. And by the way, the bar for these stories is enormously high. And I don't take it lightly. When a jury renders a verdict, that's a big deal. And there should be a sense of finality in the system for victims' families, for everyone. I mean, if we keep retrying these cases, courts would be clogged forever. Generally, I mean, the way the system is supposed to work, if police don't do their due diligence

and discover and look at the evidence that you've presented them, you have an attorney or one will be appointed for you. And they're supposed to do that and say, either at trial or in some hearing, trying to get the charges dismissed, here are the affidavits of 13 people who say that my client was with them in Deltona, Florida on that day and on the day before and on the day after and for a week after. So what kind of legal representation did this man have? That's an excellent question. So the police and the prosecutors, especially at that time when New York was overridden with murders,

it was a crazy time, their position is, look, we got eyewitnesses picking out the guy. If he's innocent, that's what court is for. That's what his attorneys are for. Let him prove it. Right. So Richard, who had a court-appointed attorney, said to his attorney, like he had said to the police, here's my 13 alibi witnesses. And the defense attorney knew that that was important, obviously, as any one of us would, right?

So what the attorney did is the attorney applied to the court for money for an investigator to go to Florida. And that petition was granted. And what happened is that first attorney left the case for personal reasons. A second attorney was appointed. And there was some miscommunication between the first attorney and the second attorney where they said the second attorney believed that the petition had not been granted. So even his own defense team didn't thoroughly investigate the allegations. I say this all the time to audiences,

which is that, and I don't think this becomes a big shock to you and probably not to many of you. If you have the money to afford a private attorney, you're going to have a completely different shake from the criminal justice system than if you rely on the court-appointed attorney. There's no question about that. Money spent on competent criminal defense is rarely wasted, and we see that on Dateline

all the time at all levels, both people who are innocent but convicted and people who are guilty and on trial. Right. And frequently, frequently court-appointed attorneys are, in a lot of cities, they're just another cog to sort of make that big system operate a little more smoothly. And their response to nearly every defendant, I mean, check me on this, but this is my sense of it, is you should see if we can get a deal. We might be able to get you a year or less. We might be able to knock this felony down to a misdemeanor.

You should not testify. If you do testify, make this trial go on longer, make everybody angry. There's a very good chance you'll get locked up for the maximum. So don't talk. Right. But by the way, I think deals come with private attorneys most often as well. I mean, I think court-appointed attorneys in this country get a raw deal. They are really, I mean, ones that I know are incredible lawyers, good people.

And the problem is that they're simply overworked. And the debt is hugely stacked against them. Right. So there's too many. I mean, how many cases do you think actually, does anybody have any idea how many cases actually go to trial in this country? Less than 10 percent go to trial. Most cases end up in pleas. I mean, if that's one thing is that if everybody in this country who was arrested demanded a trial, the court system would never work. It would be it would be clogged forever. So most cases actually end in

police. The vast majority of cases end in police. Because frankly, by the time you get into that position, most people are probably guilty. The question is, is it fair to say that Richard Rosario was convicted because of a fluke, because of this miscommunication between one attorney and another who believed that this information, which was obtainable, actually wasn't obtainable? Or, I mean, clearly something did go wrong. Or is this sort of emblematic of a bigger problem? Yeah, I think in his case specifically, it was the perfect storm. Now, more generally, I think that this issue of wrongful convictions is pervasive.

I mean, I think it's a huge, important issue. And it's one that I have become. You've become a man with a mission. I feel like I'm on a mission and I hope you are all on this mission with me. And what I mean by that is that there are many stories that we do where you're passive audience members. We all are. Oh, here's a good story. To me, this is fundamentally different, where instead of passive audience members, I want you to be ambassadors to an issue that is really important that I personally care about because I've witnessed it. We don't put anything on the air, right?

We need facts. We're journalists. So I don't put anything on the air, right? We need facts. We're journalists. We don't, so I don't just say stuff, but I've seen on the front lines, like this case and others, where the system just won't listen. The system is built to put people in prison. It's not built to get people out of prison. So you basically need a strike of lightning to hit another lock on your jail cell to get another day to be heard.

And, you know, I mean, if you think this doesn't affect you because you don't know anybody who's been wrongly convicted or even anybody who's facing trial, you know, your tax dollars are paying for all of this, paying to keep these people locked up who shouldn't be locked up. In addition to the tax dollars, you're probably happy to pay to keep people locked up who should be locked up, in addition to the tax dollars you're probably happy to pay to keep people locked up who should be locked up. One of the things that Dan and I were talking about yesterday as we prepared for this today, a couple of years ago on Dateline, Dan and I did a story about a guy named Eric Glisson

who was locked up for 18 years for a murder that he very clearly had nothing to do with. He was identified. He and five other people. And five others. But he's the guy we interviewed. He was interviewed. He was identified by police based on a woman, a local woman from the neighborhood who said she was at her bathroom window.

She saw him commit the crime, heard him talking about it afterwards could identify all the people and hated him because they'd had a relationship and it hadn't worked out and not only none of that apparently make it to the ears of the investigating detectives but the most basic police work which would be to go to the place uh where she said she was standing uh to see what what she could see and whether it in fact matched her testimony. They never did it. Josh was the first person to do that.

We did it. And from her bathroom window, you can't see the crime scene. Because we know exactly where it was. It was that simple. That should have gotten all of these guys off the hook right then, or at least made detectives think, this woman is not credible. We're going to need further investigation, and we're going to charge any of these people.

But they didn't. And they hauled all these people in. This one eyewitness. Based on this one eyewitness, and off they went to prison. Here's the amazing part about that story, too, is that one of the murders that he was really ended up being convicted of was the murder of a taxi driver. The taxi driver's cell phone was stolen in the murder by the killers.

This was back when having a cell phone was something that not everybody had a cell phone. One minute after the murder, there was a phone call made from that cell phone. And lo and behold, that number comes back to the real killer, who wasn't that guy. And Eric Glisson, who was convicted of it, found that out from his jail cell. He was the one that put it together. All information that would have been available to law enforcement at the time. Now, what law enforcement are we talking about here? In this case, for both Richard Rosario and Eric Glisson, we're talking about the NYPD.

We're talking about the NYPD in the Bronx. We're actually talking about the NYPD in the same precinct in the Bronx, in Soundview. This was what year? Which one? Well, both of them were 95 and 98. Both mid-90s, right? This is what makes this issue so nuanced, particularly in New York. You know, in 1990, there were 2,245 murders in New York. That was the highest point ever in the history of New York to this day. And the citizenry of New York was understandably and correctly outraged, upset, and offended, and wanted the largest police department in the country with 30-something thousand officers to take action. And if you talk to people on the street,

maybe they wouldn't say this under oath, but if you ask them, do you want police to start cracking heads? Do you want people to start cutting corners? Do you want something done to stem this tremendous tide of murders? People universally said yes. When you ask them specifically, are you okay with what happened to Eric Glisson

and Richard Rosario, the answer is almost certainly no. I mean, they threw out the net, and they captured a lot of fish in those years, and a few dolphins got caught in there, too, along the way. What you were saying about the numbers, most people that go through the system are guilty. By far. By far. By way far. But let's just use the most conservative estimates.

There's 2.3 million people in this country that are in prison. A couple hundred thousand are in federal prisons. The rest are in state local jails and state prisons. By far, by the way, the highest incarceration rate anywhere in the world. We represent 5% of the world's population. We incarcerate 25% of the world's prisoners. Way higher than anywhere in the world, by far, the United States. But let's just say we have, and we have a good system. Let's just say we have a great system. Let's just say it's 98%, which I don't think it is, but let's say it is. That means right now, with those numbers, there's more than 40,000 innocent people today, as we sit here right now, locked in a cell for a crime they didn't commit, taken from their children, taken from their families, screaming into the wind, not getting any. They only can get in touch with a television producer. That is when there's a problem when people are reaching out to us. And you're paying for this.

And you're paying for it. comparison, if that is 2% and if it is 40,000 people today, in the past 30 years, roughly 28, 2,900 people, less than 3,000 people have been exonerated in this country in 30 years. So right now, if it's 2%, that's 40,000 today. Today. So when I hear about these stories, they're hard for me to ignore. They're hard for me when people are so desperate, when families have been torn apart, when there's evidence that can be followed up on that no one has followed up on. You know, I feel it is a moral responsibility. It's kind of one of the reasons I became a journalist and got into this business. But it's also, as you say, it's become a passion. And by the way, one of the things, this is kind of a non sequitur, but thinking about a mission, I don't like to be

called an advocate. People say, oh, you're an advocate for these people. I don't believe that's true. And I think it's an advocate for the truth. The same way that the guilty guy goes to prison and the victim's family gets justice, if somebody is in a prison for a crime they didn't commit, their family should get justice. And by the way, that means the real killer is walking free and is out there to kill other people. And in many cases has. And many cases has and many cases has yeah yeah uh one of the problems with stories like this one is that this one maybe not particularly but i remember on the glisten one uh one of the problems was there was a number of defendants there was there were a lot of

different characters and a lot of moving parts to the story. And the result was it became a difficult story to tell on television. This is not, you know, we say this all the time, you know, TV is not like a newspaper article. If you don't get it the first time, now with a DVR you can go back and see it again, but you're probably not going to. People tend to see television stories generally once, which means they've got to be clear. It's got to be obvious what's going on.

You read a very dense newspaper interpretation of a story, and you sort of realize halfway through, wait a minute, I don't know who that is, that name here. Who is that? I go, oh yeah, okay, that's the judge. So that makes this kind of story difficult to tell on television it makes it somewhat easier to tell in a longer form format like a podcast yeah and i've got to say we've done many of them on television and thank god dateline has allowed us to do it i i often say and i'm not saying it because you guys are here oh i am but my bosses are here like david corvo and liz cole and i often

not in their presence say i'm like the pro bono unit of the law firm corvo and Liz Cole, and I often, not in their presence, say I'm like the pro bono unit of the law firm Corvo and Cole, you know, that they have been very, very generous. And look, generally, when we do our story selection, we write up our stories, they have an editorial meeting, these guys decide what they want to do do or not. Generally, when they decide they are going to spend money and move forward and do a story for, I mean, it's very, very important real estate, you know, on primetime television. And there's hundreds, thousands of pitches and they have to pick a certain amount. Usually it's, here's the beginning, middle, end of the story. We know the story. My story is generally, we don't know where they're going and it's not really it's because

when we begin them we don't know what's going to happen right person is going to be you know whether they can make maybe they'll get a new trial and then they'll be convicted at the second trial i mean that happens right and so these are not stories that are easy to do they're not inexpensive to do i'm very grateful to have been given the freedom and the opportunity and by the way so are those people in those families who have been vindicated as a result of our show. Um, and I'm not the only producer who has done this,

by the way, we have other producers who, who, you know, Shane Bishop and others, Keith has done stories as well about wrongful convictions. I mean, we're not the wrongful conviction show.

Um, and the minority of our stories, obviously. No, I think pretty clearly, those of you who watch Dateline know, generally we tell stories in which, you know, as far as we can tell and as far as the system can tell, the right person gets locked up. Jimmy Breslin, the late New York City newspaper columnist,

I used to work in local news in New York. Jimmy once said to me that you weren't a real journalist unless you'd gotten somebody out of prison or put somebody in, neither of which I'd done. Yes, you have. Jimmy, I think, has done both of. I don't know that that is, in fact, the mark of a real journalist, but there is no question that you, Dan, has had remarkable impact. I mean, there is, when people, and a perfect example of that

is the way the system handled Dan's interest in the Richard Rosario case, because they did nothing for a very long time, and then suddenly when they realized that this was all coming together and that Dateline was going to tell this story, all of a sudden people were getting on an airplane. Well, there's the key. Years and years and years later. It's not the power of me. It's the power of Dateline. And it's the power of what we bring.

I mean, we are an American institution. Everybody in the country knows Dateline. And certainly those people in power and law enforcement know Dateline. So it's not what I'm calling. It's what I'm calling on behalf of NBC News knows Dateline. And certainly those people in power and law enforcement know Dateline. So it's not what I'm calling. It's what I'm calling on behalf of NBC News and Dateline. And that's why, you know, we have to, I'm very, very, very careful. You don't throw that around. So when we get to the point where it's undeniable, this is either a bottle of water or it's a zebra, right? And the system will look at this and say, you know what? A jury said zebra. I think we're going to go with zebra. And you'll be like, you know, but it's a bottle of water.

You know, that's the thing that gets to me. That's what bothers me. I don't know where it comes from, but it's a frustration. It's a sense of injustice. In Richard Rosario's case, his case went to the United States Supreme Court. It went all the way to the United States Supreme Court and was denied by the United States Supreme Court. It wasn't heard. His last appeal was denied three or four months prior to us releasing this. His last appeal was denied. So you really were his last hope?

I don't want to say it was me because it's not me. He said it was you. He did. I know. We didn't put that out there though you're being too he like you but you're but the truth is it takes a village it's it's it's not just me it's us taking a spotlight and shining onto a light onto a set of facts and a bunch of people you know this story couldn't have happened had the alibi witnesses not spoken with me when

richard rosario was released when the judge said i am releasing you from custody yes he then said mr rosario do you have anything to say and mr rosario said what i didn't put that in the podcast i know he thanked dateline and me yeah but it's it's it's it's really yeah i don yeah, it's not really about that for me. No, I understand that. But it is, it's satisfying that families can be reunited, but it's so much bigger than just Richard Rosario to me. You know, this is to me not just, it's a narrative. It's a very interesting story, I think.

And they're bite-sized chunks and you can listen it quickly, and I think you'll be entertained. But beyond that, I think it's an incredibly important issue as we want to make a more perfect justice system for the victims and for the people who are sitting in those seats. The system becomes so much stronger when you recognize your mistakes. And that's something that is not done like ever. That's right. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.