Dateline Originals - Dan Slepian reads an excerpt from “The Sing Sing Files”

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

Hear an exclusive audio excerpt from NBC News and Dateline producer Dan Slepian’s new book “The Sing Sing Files” which chronicles his two-decade journey navigating the criminal justice system to help free six innocent men.  Available now wherever books and audiobooks are sold.  For more details and to purchase, follow this link:https://bit.ly/TheSingSingFilesDateline

Hi, Dateline listeners. My name is Dan Slepian, and I've been a producer at Dateline for nearly 30 years. I'd like to share a story with you that I think you might find interesting. I've spent much of my career and my life diving deep into the criminal justice system, and along the way I've uncovered what I've come to realize is a hidden epidemic, wrongful convictions. Now, you may have heard parts of this journey on episodes of Dateline or in the podcasts I've hosted, 13 Alibis and Letters from Sing Sing, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year. But there's so much more to these stories, and I've poured it all into my new book, The Sing

Sing Files. My book is so much bigger than the stories I told on those episodes and in those podcasts. In The Sing Sing Files, I'll introduce you to six innocent men, all wrongly imprisoned. From prison visits, to court hearings, to interviews with friends, families, lawyers, and witnesses. I investigated the ugly truth of how these men were condemned, and then the Herculean struggle to bring the facts of their innocence to light. This project is deeply personal to me, and when you hear it, I hope it becomes deeply personal to you too. If you like what you hear in the excerpt and want to hear more, click the link in the episode notes to order a copy of the book or audiobook. The Sing Sing Files is also available wherever books and audiobooks are sold. Today, I'll start from the beginning

of The Sing Sing Files. Introduction. JJ. It was Thanksgiving Day, 2002. I was at the Greenhaven Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison a couple of hours north of Manhattan, filming a story for NBC's Dateline about two incarcerated men who insisted they'd been wrongfully convicted of murder. I'd spent a lot of time around cops and courts, but wrongful convictions and false imprisonments were not things I knew much about when I walked

into Greenhaven's dreary lobby that morning and saw a woman holding the hands of two little boys who were staring in my direction. You're Dan, right? said the woman, who introduced herself as Maria Velasquez. My son, John Adrian, we call him JJ, is locked up here. He was convicted of murder, but he's innocent. She told me that JJ had heard I was coming that day, and she told him she'd do her best to speak with me. I could feel her pain and desperation. Can you help us? Maria asked. I looked at her and then at the two boys, whom she introduced to me as J.J.'s sons, Jacob, age five, and John, Jr., age eight. They were polite, but quiet.

It seemed like it had already been a long, hard day for them, and it seemed like they'd already had too many long, hard days. John Jr. was on Maria's right side. Jacob, the littler one, was holding her left hand. He barely came up to her waist. He stared up at me with these huge, confused eyes. He didn't say a word, but I swear he was asking me, Who are you? Why am I here? What's going on? How can I make it stop? My first thought was that regardless of their dad's guilt or innocence, these two little guys should have been at home that Thanksgiving morning,

running around with their cousins, not standing in the harsh fluorescent lighting of a prison lobby. Their grandmother told me that two years earlier, in 2000, a jury had convicted her son, J.J. Velasquez, of murdering a former New York City police officer and that he had been sentenced to 25 years to life. She insisted her only child was an innocent man. Frankly, I doubted it. I was there investigating the claims of two other men who insisted they were innocent, and I still didn't know if they were telling the truth.

What were the odds that another wrongfully convicted person would be in the same part of the same prison? I told Maria that I couldn't make any promises, but I would read about her son's case when I could, making sure to add that it would probably not happen anytime soon. Even so, she seemed relieved. She said that for years she'd tried and failed to get anyone to listen to her. I wasn't a father myself yet, but as I drove home that day, something haunted me about those weary kids in that prison lobby. I couldn't get Jacob's sad, serious eyes out of my mind. Soon enough, I wouldn't be able to get his dad's voice out of

my head either. Looking back on meeting those boys and their grandmother that Thanksgiving morning, it would have been impossible to imagine the impact those few minutes would have on my life, both professionally and personally, and the way in which my relationship with J.J. would come to touch countless other lives as well. It marked the beginning of an odyssey that's still ongoing and that continues to reshape my perception of how justice functions in this country, or doesn't, and cause me to reconsider how I function as a journalist and as a human being. This book's title refers to the prison officially known as Sing Sing Correctional Facility in

New York, the notorious maximum security prison where J.J. would spend most of the 23 years, seven months, and eight days of his wrongful incarceration, and where over two decades I would visit him more than 200 times. The title also refers to how I came to investigate and produce Dateline reports not only about J.J., but also about five other innocent men who crossed paths with him and who were also doing someone else's time. Their names are David Lemus, Almeda Hildago, Eric Glisson, Johnny Hincapie, and Richard Rosario. Over the years, as my basement has gradually grown full of boxes with their legal paperwork, I've filmed more than a thousand hours of interviews and footage connected to these men and their cases. My camera,

a diary of each of my investigations into their claims of innocence and the consequences of their incarceration. As a result, I've amassed a vast digital archive of video and audio, a trove that allows me to present conversations and scenes in the pages that follow with precise detail. Nothing is reconstructed or embellished. In my career as a producer for NBC News, I've witnessed the American criminal justice system from every perspective. I've been embedded with detectives, prosecutors, and defense attorneys and followed them and their cases for months, sometimes years. I've interviewed countless people who committed murder, judges, and jurors. I've gotten to know many victims of crime and have come to understand the devastating impact it has on them and their families. I've spent several hundred days inside prisons across the United States with the wardens who run them,

with convicted killers sentenced to death, and with the correction officers who walk those dangerous tiers every day, hoping to go home unharmed. And I've toured prisons in other countries. I even slept in a cell for two nights in Louisiana's Angola Prison, a former slave plantation, with NBC nightly news and Dateline anchor Lester Holt for a program about mass incarceration. And I conceived and produced the first ever televised town hall from a maximum security prison at Sing Sing, which was broadcast on MSNBC and moderated by Lester. Proximity has taught me one overwhelming truth. We have an undeniable crisis on our hands. There are roughly two million Americans locked up, more than in any other

country, and our recidivism rates lead the world. I've seen for myself the cruel reality of how people and families have been ravaged by the system meant to protect them. I've come to see the inhumanity and irrationality of that system, and how its worst aspects are revealed by the way it handles wrongful convictions. No one knows how many innocent people are in prison, but given the statistical likelihood of error, the number is staggering. Barry Sheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, told me that he believes the most accurate studies estimate the error of convictions at about 5%, which would mean that as you're listening to this right now, 100,000 people could be locked away in prison cells for crimes they did not commit.

Other experts I've spoken with told me they believe the number could be as high as 200,000. And yet, only about 3,500 people have been exonerated in the past 30 years. Why? The system, as I've discovered, isn't built to get people out. It's built to keep them in, even when, as I will illustrate, that there is clear evidence that they don't belong there. In the course of my 20 years of doing this work, I've personally heard from more than a thousand people who claim that they were stolen without cause from their lives and families. I've read hundreds of thousands of pages of transcripts, police reports, and court motions, often hunched over my desk or swiping through pages of documents on my iPad late at night. And what I've concluded is that I can no longer accept the worn cliché that justice is blind. Over time, what I learned is that there are myriad ways in which the system seems designed to easily imprison the innocent.

What's worse, innocent people remain locked up, despite clear evidence proving they're not guilty of the crime for which they were convicted. This work has given me a deep understanding of what false imprisonment means not only for the individuals who are wrongly removed from society, but also for their parents, partners, and children. As tragic as these injustices are for innocent people in prison, they have a cascading generational impact on those around them and on society that is hard to measure. My experience tells me that even when some prosecutors are presented with irrefutable proof of innocence, the default is resistance as opposed to curiosity or concern. All too often, an assistant district attorney will remain deliberately indifferent, willfully ignore facts, and deny reality. Year after year, decade after decade,

wrongfully convicted people wither away behind bars. Racism and corruption are part of it, absolutely. But I've come to understand other insidious ways in which wrongful convictions happen, whether through eyewitness misidentification, a false confession, prosecutorial misconduct, incentivized witnesses, or bad lawyering. The problem is an epidemic. It's why I can barely manage to sleep five hours a night. The stakes are too high. The injustice is too great. Investigating a claim of innocence is slow and beyond onerous. That's one reason the news media doesn't report on the full scope of this problem.

These stories are expensive to do, are difficult to report, and can literally take decades. For that reason, diving into these cases, trying to find the truth, has become, for the most part, my extracurricular work, while my real job as a Dateline producer has been to produce True Crime Murder Mystery Saga's special hours with Lester Holt and Hidden Camera Investigations. Brian Stevenson's powerful, groundbreaking book, Just Mercy, is perhaps the most well-known chronicle of wrongful conviction. The heart of that book is about a case in Alabama. What I find astonishing, even after all these years, is that each of the cases you'll hear about in this book happened in what is supposedly the bastion of progressivism, New York City. I'll tell you about how J.J. Velasquez and five other men were sucked into the vortex of a corrupt criminal justice system.

I will connect the dots to show that guardians of the system either knew these men were innocent or simply didn't care, and in some cases, angled to keep them in prison anyway for decades. As J.J. and the other men fought for their freedom, I saw careers upended, relationships destroyed, and my own faith tested. To this day, there has been no full accounting of what happened to these innocent men and no reckoning with those who did this to them. The system that perpetrated this unnecessary suffering and brutal injustice, and the prosecutors and police who were part of it, have not been made to answer for the harm that was done. My hope is that this book will help change that, providing important lessons for reporters, prosecutors, defense attorneys, detectives, judges, and jurors, and ultimately, for anyone interested in living in a just society. It's Dan Slepian.

Thank you so much for listening to an excerpt from The Sing Sing Files, written and read by me. Hope you enjoyed it. The Sing Sing Files is available wherever books and audiobooks are sold. For more information, follow the link in the show notes.