Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Why We Deserve a Fair Criminal Justice System with Jason Flom

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

In this episode, Sharon hears from Jason Flom, a successful record label executive who followed his passion into working for criminal justice reform. After reading about a young man’s conviction where the crime did not fit the punishment, Flom rolled up his sleeves and began working to help overturn wrongful convictions and change criminal justice policies and practices through the Innocence Project. He is a founding board member and deeply committed to the mission of the project. Jason addresses what we can do to address the issue of how the general public can help keep innocent people out of jail, and his answers may surprise you. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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

Hey friends, thank you for joining me today. I'm chatting with Jason Flum, who is a longtime, highly successful music industry executive. He's signed artists from Katy Perry to Lorde to Stone Temple Pilots, but his real passion is on the criminal justice system. In fact, he hosts a highly successful podcast called Wrongful Conviction. On his podcast, he's had guests like Brendan Dassey and John Grisham and Kim Kardashian. And he is also a founding member of the Innocence Project, which seeks to overturn the convictions of people who have been wrongfully accused. So let's dive into this fascinating conversation with Jason Flum. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. So let's dive into this fascinating conversation with Jason Flum.

I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Jason, I am absolutely delighted to have you here today. There is so much to talk about, and I am really grateful for your time. Well, thank you, Sharon. I'm thrilled to be here and looking forward to a lively discussion. Tell everybody, first of all, what an interesting career you have had and currently have. Tell everybody a little bit more about your background, what you do and what you're involved with now. Sure. I do have a very strange double life, I guess you could say, which is that my career

since I was 18 years old has been in the music business. I started off putting up posters in record stores at Atlantic Records for $4 an hour, which I thought was the greatest job in the world and ended up becoming the chairman and CEO of the company. Signed a lot of wonderful artists over the years, many of which you and your audience probably have enjoyed, I hope. And about 30 years ago, 29 years ago now, I found what I call my calling, which is reforming the criminal justice system, ending mass incarceration, eliminating mandatory sentencing laws, decriminalizing marijuana and other drugs. And I guess the center, the sort of glowing orb from which most of my work emanates is the Innocence Project. glowing orb from which most of my work emanates is the Innocence Project. I am the founding board member of the Innocence Project, which is an organization that utilizes DNA, true science, to get people out of prison who were innocent of the crimes that put them in there in the first

place. Tell me more about why you became interested in this as a topic to begin with. more about why you became interested in this as a topic to begin with. How did this calling descend upon you or how did you uncover this calling when you had spent, obviously invested a significant amount of your time in the music industry? You were so successful at it. Where did this calling come from? It was very serendipitous, actually, Sharon. I wasn't expecting it. I didn't know anything about it. But what happened was I was getting in a taxi in 1993 and happened to pick up the New York Post because the Times was sold out.

That's the paper I normally read. And again, serendipity being what it is. And there was an article in the newspaper that caught my attention about a kid named Steven Lennon, who was serving 15 years to life for a nonviolent first offense cocaine possession charge in a maximum security prison in New York state. Now I know some of your listeners are probably saying, no, what he said didn't make any sense. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Let me just repeat it. 15 to life for a nonviolent first defense cocaine possession charge in a matchless security prison in New York State. So this story blew my mind. And I'll jump

ahead because we could spend too long talking about this particular case. But I decided I had to do something about this. And I called the only criminal defense lawyer I knew at the time, a guy named Bob Kalina. Bob was the guy who represented two of the artists I had signed, Stone Temple Pilots and Skid Row. And they were getting busted like weekly, it seemed like. So I had him on speed dial. So I called Bob and I said, Bob, you got to do something. What can we do about this? And he said, there's nothing you can do.

You know, it's just the Rockefeller drug laws. Laws are crazy, but thousands of people are in the same situation. But by now I had already called the woman, the mother of the guy, Stephen Lennon, her name was Shirley. And I'd offered my help. And, you know, she said it was hopeless. He said it was hopeless. I got Bob to talk to her. Bob Kalita was the lawyer, but he took the case pro bono as a favor to me. And six months later, we ended up in a courtroom in Malone, New York. And on some technical legal loophole that he had found, I ended up sitting there holding Mrs. Lennon's hand. I still had a mullet back then. That's how long ago this was. As the judge, the old white haired guy looked like Ted Forsythe, if any of your listeners

remember the actor. Then the judge banged the gavel down and sent him home. And it was a moment I'll never forget. And I just said, oh my God, maybe I have a superpower, you know? And if I do, then I'm going to use it to the best of my ability because I love this feeling of, you know, sort of lightning bolt of just like, wow, I did something really good here. And so it still resonates to this day. And that's what got me started. And what an interesting, interesting thing to think about that, even though you had not set out to embark on a career of criminal justice or criminal justice reform, or working in the law, that it was your career that allowed you to have the connections to actually have a

person to pick up the phone and be like, listen, it's Jason. I have a problem. I'm wondering if you can help me with it. Had you not spent time in the music industry, that person wouldn't have owed you a favor, so to speak. You're the first person that's ever pointed that out. And I've told this story countless times. In fact, Rolling Stone recently did a story about my work called The Record Exec's Crusade for Justice. I never thought of it that way, but it has it does have interesting connectivity that has that has gone throughout as I've pursued these two different passions of mine. One thing I am, Sharon, is the people who know me would probably tell you this. I'm stubborn. Right. So hopefully you can relate. I'm sure you probably can. I don't like to admit

I'm wrong and I don't like to give up. And it's true with many of the musical artists that I've been responsible for signing and promoting and marketing, you know, the ones that have been the most difficult and the ones that most people had disdain for were the ones I most enjoyed taking to the top of the charts. And the other thing too, that just strikes me is that because you had enjoyed so much success in the music industry, people were willing to take you more seriously when you said, hey, I have something that I really need you to take a look at. People looked at a man of your success and they were like, well, he's not just out here trying to convince me of stuff that isn't even worth looking at. He has better things to do with

his time. And so consequently, he must really mean it. This must really be worth it because otherwise he could be out there just looking for more artists to sign or booking more artists on talk shows or whatever it is. I think a great example of that was when I became involved in a case several years ago, about five years ago in Virginia of a guy named Lenny Singleton. Lenny was a U.S. Navy veteran who had come out of the military and gotten addicted to crack cocaine. It was PTSD, whatever their causes were. And he ended up committing a series of dash and grab robberies, they call them, over the course of a week, which means he went into a 7-Eleven or something. And when the guy opened the cash register, he took what little cash he could get and

walked out the door. He didn't even run. He didn't carry a weapon. One time he carried a butter knife. That's it. He didn't threaten anybody with it. And the other times he was totally unarmed. And he stole a total of $511. By the time I heard about his story, he had served 23 years of two consecutive life sentences plus 100 years that he was sentenced to. So here was a guy who needed help, right? And I believe we should treat our military veterans with the respect that they deserve. And if they come out addicted to drugs, we should get them help, not treat them as if they are career criminals or serial killers or whatever, unless they are, which Lenny certainly was not, right? the sense, the double life plus 100 and something years. I read about his story in the New York Times. And I guess there's sort of a through line there. And I decided I had to get to the,

I had to get a meeting with the governor of Virginia. If I showed this to the governor of Virginia, he would see. I knew he was a good man, Terry McAuliffe. And I was able to get through a mutual friend, a meeting. And originally I was supposed to go to his office, I guess at the Capitol. And then they called back and said, Oh, you know, he googled you. And he's decided he wants to invite you to the mansion for dinner. And by the way, if you want to stay over, you're invited. I was like, Oh, good thing for having signed Katy Perry or whatever, you know, like, I mean, so exactly what you were saying. So I was able to go and have a very social, beautiful dinner. A number of people there.

Terry and I ended up staying up, you know, smoking cigars, drinking some wine. We were the last people. I was the last person to leave. And by then I had compiled some other cases that I thought were grave injustices. So the results of that meeting, Lenny came home. I was there the day he walked out of prison. It was a spectacular moment that I'll never forget. We've become great friends. He's a fantastic human being. And Travion is out and

doing very well, as well as another man that I was able to help get relief from Governor McAuliffe. You have a position of influence that other people may not have had. And so because of that position of influence, you're able to do more in this space. This is not to say that other people should not take up the same cause. That's not what I'm saying. I'm sure you have thought about this, and I'm sure other people have thought about this too. It's very interesting how your life path leads you at places you didn't even realize you were going to go. I look at all of these things as there, but for the, I'm not a religious person, but there, but for the grace of God, go I, right? Because I had drug problems when I was a kid. I

ended up going to rehab when I was 26 years old, sober for decades. And, you know, I ended up creating a lot of jobs, paying a lot of taxes, doing a lot of positive stuff. I didn't need to go to jail and neither did Steven Lennon and neither do a lot of other, paying a lot of taxes, doing a lot of positive stuff. I didn't need to go to jail, and neither did Stephen Lennon, and neither do a lot of other people. I mean, countless other people. So for me, it's my way of sort of, you know, recognizing that had chips fallen in a different way, I could be in a different situation. And I would want somebody like me to come and help. And I would want somebody like you to, you know, shout it from the rooftops and try to change the system. So this doesn't happen to other people. We all know somebody who has struggled with addiction. We all do. All of us know somebody who has struggled with addiction. And if we are going to begin incarcerating literally every

addict for the crime of being addicted, that'd be a different America. Yeah. And you know, we kind of are that America though. I mean, it's sad because we've spent trillions of dollars. That's with a T on the drug war and drug use is, I believe, at an all-time high right now. It doesn't work. It never worked. It never even was designed to work. One of Nixon's chief aides, I think it was either Haldeman or Ehrlichman, just a couple years ago, said that Nixon didn't care about drugs. No one cared about drugs back then. The police weren't interested in making those type of arrests. They were interested in pursuing violent criminals. But Nixon wanted a war on Blacks and hippies. And he couldn't say that out loud. So he came up with this very clever ploy, evil, but clever, that he would

declare a war on drugs and use that as a pretense to go and make the lives of these people miserable and put them in jail and disrupt their families and their communities. I want to go back to that moment where you were sitting in that courtroom with the gentleman that you had just helped free and you felt those feelings of like, this is like nothing else I have ever experienced. What did you do next? What was your next step after realizing like, I need to do more of this? You mean besides getting a haircut and finally getting rid of my mullet? I was wearing purple Doc Martens that day. I still can't believe it. But anyway, I became super motivated to learn more and get more involved. And soon after that, I saw an

article in Rolling Stone magazine about this sting operation that the DEA was carrying out at Grateful Dead shows. What they were doing was they were posing as deadheads, sending agents in, and then sort of tricking these deadhead kids into selling them a little bit of LSD, which, you know, it's sort of, I guess, that culture is sort of like sharing and you sell a little, you buy, people do whatever they do. I don't know. And then they would arrest them and send them to prison for 10 years or more, right, for trafficking LSD, because it took a very small amount of LSD to trigger a 10-year minimum sentence. And so in this article, they referenced this new organization that had just started called Families Against Mandatory Minimums. I called them up and I said,

I want to get involved. I want to help. And I joined their board. But soon after that, I saw something on TV. I came across a story about a guy who had been sentenced to death and was scheduled to be executed in this new organization called the Innocence Project had come along. Peter Neufeld and Barry Sheck, the founders, had come along. They had found the evidence that proved that this guy was actually innocent of this crime. And the execution was canceled and he was set free in relatively short order. And I just said, oh, my God, that is the crazy, it never occurred to me that we execute innocent people

in this country. And I was like, I gotta help. So I went down to their office. In those days, you could more or less walk in as it was Barry and Peter in a little room with a briefcase, a microscope, a phone, and a dream. And I said, I will volunteer whatever you guys need and more. I'm your guy. And so I became the first board member, also known as the founding board member. And I've been deeply committed to the mission

of the Innocence Project, which is not only to free the innocent, but also to change policies and practices so that these things don't continue to happen with such alarming regularity going forward. I'm Jenna Fisher and I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends and together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus,

on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Let's talk about why these things happen to begin with. So, of course, any institution run by humans is going to be imperfect because humans themselves are imperfect. There is no way to have a perfect system. If it was run by machines, it would still be imperfect because they'd be coded by humans. There's no way to make it perfect, but that doesn't mean that we should not continually work towards that goal. But I'm wondering from your perspective, what are the underlying issues in the United States justice system that allow us to wrongfully convict the innocent or put to death the innocent or sentence them to incredibly long disproportionate sentences where somebody is being sentenced to six life terms plus 100 years for a nonviolent crime.

What are some of the underlying issues in your mind that contribute to those problems? I think it's an excellent question. And the fact is, there are many, many causes of the scourge of wrongful convictions. And, you know, I would say it starts with our addiction to mass incarceration as a nation. Right. In the last 40 years, our prison population has gone from around 300,000 to around 2.3 million. So we lock up more people, more people in cages right now as we're recording this podcast than Russia and China combined. We incarcerate black people in America at six times the rate of South Africa during apartheid. Many people know we have about 4.4% of the world's population and around 25% of the world's prison population. But it gets worse when you consider women, because we have 33% of the world's female prison population. But it gets worse when you consider women, because we have 33% of the world's female prison population. Little America, right? We're not that big of a country. There are lots

of countries bigger than ours. And yet we have one out of every three women in the world is locked up in prison in America. So the reason I bring this up, Sharon, is because when you churn so many people through a system that can't handle it, there is no possibility of actual justice because the machine has to keep moving. And the machine has found ways to make itself be able to continue to function and what i mean by that is guilty please for instance right 97 of felony convictions are america are a result of guilty please that's not because 97 of people are guilty it's because the power has been concentrated in the hands of the prosecutors so when they go to you and they say, look, Sharon, and they're allowed to lie to you in the interrogation room all over the country. Right. Which is not not loud in any other Western country.

But they go, Sharon, look, you seem like a nice lady, but you know what? We got a guy next door who witnessed a crime. We got your fingerprints on the knife. You can let your imagination run wild. And they say, so Sharon, look, we're going to offer you a deal. You got to make a decision right now. We're going to give you two years and you'll have a conviction on your record. But if you go to trial, you're going to get 40 to life or 50 life, or two life terms, or you might be facing a death penalty, anything. The rational decision is probably to take the deal, even though you didn't do it. Because, you know, who wants to roll those dice? You sit there, you go, I got a couple of kids at home.

The government has unlimited resources to go after you. And you have a public defender and no budget and no ability, especially if you're locked up pre-trial and you're, you, and you have a public defender and no budget and no ability, especially if you're locked up pretrial and you have no ability to be out there and mount a defense in any meaningful way. So that's one of the reasons, and one of the other promises, is that the system incentivizes the people who are in the positions of power to get convictions, not to get justice necessarily, but to get convictions. And this is even more true when the case is a high profile case. If you've got a case that we just about to cover on my podcast, about to release an episode on the Kevin Cooper case, which is a perfect example, a horrendous Manson style crime that happened outside in the Bay Area. So the newspapers are doing stories, the TV stations are doing stories. And, you know,

if you don't solve that crime, very bad for your career. And if you do, very good. And nobody pays attention to whether or not you're solving it correctly. You just need to get, they call it a body for a body, right? One thing that I emphasize often on my podcast, Wrongful Conviction, and anytime I give a speech anywhere, is that when we arrest, prosecute, and jail the wrong person, the right person remains free. And that is a danger to the community. Everybody in the community remains at risk. That is really interesting to hear about some of the statistics surrounding the number of people who take plea deals. And you are right that it's not illegal to lie to a defendant. It's not illegal to say, listen, your buddy has already told on you. He already gave us all the info. So confess now, or it's going to get a lot worse. It's not illegal

to do that. In fact, that's what happens all the time. So what do you view as some of the solutions to this problem? If we can all agree that it's a problem, that the wrong people are convicted. And I think we can all agree that we don't want innocent people in jail and the guilty people walking free. We don't want that. What can we do to address this issue as a nation? I understand that it's not going to be solved by one individual one afternoon in February, but what must happen in your estimation as somebody who's been working on this project for a long time, what needs to happen to fix some of the underlying issues? Well, it starts with you giving a platform to people like me and shining a light on this topic.

And then it starts with every single person that's listening to the sound of our voices right now. And how can people help? Well, first of all, like I said, serve on jury. Second of all, vote, vote, vote. I know you've heard this a million times. Oh, everybody tells me to vote, vote, vote, vote. You know what? Vote in your local elections. I'm talking about those can even be more important than the national election, which you should also vote in. But the DA's races, DA's are mostly elected. So are judges. And those elections, very few people vote in them.

And the difference that somebody can make in a position of power like that, it's a ripple effect. And so we need to get better people in these positions, not just people who are going to say, we're just going to lock up everybody or we're going to cheat, bend the rules or people who, you know, use all those racist tropes and courtrooms, which still goes on in this country, or we need to get people who are going to do justice because it could happen to you or somebody you love. It seems far-fetched, but it's true. And it does happen to millions of families every year where their loved one is convicted. And some

of those, the person absolutely did it. But nevertheless, we want to sleep well knowing that, listen, I hate that he did that, but he or she deserves to be punished because they're a danger to society. We want to know that we have the right person in jail. So voting, I totally agree with you that a huge percentage of the issues that affect our daily lives are carried out at local and state levels. And that certainly Congress makes some important decisions. The president is an important figure, certainly. But for example, the president is not involved in prosecuting crimes in your hometown. That's just not how the system is set up. The vast majority of crimes are state crimes.

And if this is an issue you care about, you have to care about local elections. Just picking up on that theme as well. We have tried this approach for generations now of locking, trying to lock up our way out of whatever this perceived crime, fear mongering thing that we have is right. perceived crime fear mongering thing that we have is, right? It doesn't work. It doesn't work on any level. What works is social programs, early childhood education, access to good food and clean water. When people don't feel so desperate, they don't commit these crimes because they have hope. When you take hope away from people, eventually, you know, you're going to end up with a crime problem. But the problem is if we spend, I think the last figure I saw was $277 billion a year on police and prisons in this country, then you're not going to have money left for the things that actually work. In New York City, for instance, the Comptroller just released a report that said that it costs $565,000 a year to keep somebody in Rikers Island, which is the horrendous jail here in New York City.

Super dangerous. Over a dozen people have died there this year. That's over $1,500 a day. A day to keep somebody locked up. You could send somebody to harvard for seventy thousand dollars a year seventy four thousand dollars a year and those places create crime consider one more little fact and i know i'm getting to be almost like a lecturer here in the college course or something but this is i think a really important thing for people to understand

the university of pennsylvania the quatt School there, did a study where they tracked people who were charged with the same crime, not convicted, but let's say two different people were picked up for shoplifting around the similar amount of money they shoplifted or value. Both of them had no record or a similar record prior to this, whatever. One posted bail, the other one didn't. What they found was that the people who remained free awaiting their trial were about 40% less likely to commit a felony in the following year than the person who stayed in jail awaiting trial after their release. can't pay bail, I say, to whose benefit? It disrupts their family. They lose their job. They lose custody of their children. They come out. They're desperate. They have no hope. And they haven't been convicted of anything. They've just been charged. To the point you were making earlier about voting, a lot of those laws about things like mandatory minimum sentences, like mandatory minimum sentences, videotaping interrogations, those types of things that are potentially very useful in making sure that the wrong people are not convicted and imprisoned

for something they didn't do. Those types of things are largely passed at a state level. And people don't realize that they as a private citizen in a state have far more access to their state level legislators than they do to their congressperson. So your ability to affect change on this issue where the most change is needed because most criminal convictions are done at the state level is actually greater than you realize. None of us can fix everything, but we can all do something to contribute because we deserve a criminal justice system that operates fairly. If people were going to do something small, if they were like, well, I don't have all day. I'm a school teacher. I got three kids at home. I can't quit my job to work on this issue, but I do care about having a fair criminal

justice system. What would you suggest to somebody as something they could do where they would feel like I'm at least putting one foot forward? I'm at least trying to be part of the solution. First of all, you know a lot about this stuff. You want to come host my podcast? I'll come talk on your podcast anytime. Some of the things people can do. I mean, first of all, follow me on social media if you want to. I'm posting about different things that you can do, signing petitions, making phone calls, doing things like that on individual cases all the

time. For instance, right now, you know, deep in on the Melissa Lucio case, a woman who's scheduled to be executed in Texas on April 27th for a crime that never even happened. And so we're encouraging people to write and call and sign petitions and do things like that. I think too, I hope people will begin to have a more, a kinder approach to people who have served time in prison, innocent or guilty. So if you work at a local organization or corporation, encourage them to change their hiring practices if they discriminate against people who have records. I think even if all you do is talk in your group, in your book club, grab, you know, Just Mercy or the new Jim Crow or one of these books, all these books are getting banned now. It's unbelievable, right? And educate yourself and then talk about it. Just, we have to start,

like you said, local, super local and get people in your friend group, whether it's on the social media or whatever, you never know who's listening. Our standard is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but it's really guilty until proven innocent. But like you said, Sharon, no matter who you are, you have the ability to make a difference. And this could happen to you or someone you love. Can I make a suggestion about something that I think needs to happen to make the system fairer and better that I don't see many people talk about? I thought you were going to say you should speak in shorter sentences. No, no. We need to change the way jurors are compensated, and we need to change the laws around jury service and employment.

jury service and employment. So right now we have the jury pool being very heavily skewed towards people of a certain demographic because they are the people, and again, no shade to them, thank you for showing up, but they're people who can afford to take time off of work. They generally have salaried jobs. They're not missing out on actual compensation. They can afford to only get paid $14 a day to sit sometimes for some trials, big high profile trials might last a month. Yeah. They might, they can afford to get paid $14 a day, to not be at their normal job, to have adequate childcare, to care for their children, potentially, et cetera. The list goes on. If you're a student, if you are a person of lower income, if you are a single parent, it is nearly impossible to serve on a jury. Being a juror is not a job. We're not looking for people to be like,

my career is juror, but it is unreasonable to ask people to give up wages they actually very much need to put food on the table for their families to do this. But yet we need that diversity of perspective. We need that diversity of life experience of viewpoint on juries. We need the jury speed juries of our peers and not just juries of people who have certain backgrounds and look a certain way. And if we want more people to participate and not be like, oh my gosh, how can I get out of jury duty? We have to address those underlying structural issues that perhaps require an employer to pay their day's wages if they work an hourly job or have some kind of pool that helps account for the fact that they can't afford to make $14 for the entire day sitting on a jury.

Yeah. And don't get me wrong. I mean, it's very, very rare for a trial to last, you know, more than a couple of weeks. And, you know, it's, there's a wonderful saying originally, I think it was said by a famous English jurist named Blackstone who said, it's better that 10 guilty men go free than that one innocent should suffer. And, you know, I think we have to recognize, and I have to talk about the death penalty for a second as well. I understand a lot of people listening, America is divided on this. I think it's less popular than it's ever been, but it's still approval for the death penalty still hovers around 47% or something. But I ask that people consider

that, for instance, in Florida, during the same period of time when they executed 99 people, 32 were freed from death row. And what I would ask people to say is, what percentage, if you're in favor of the death penalty, what percentage of innocent people is it okay to execute? Is it 1%? Is it 10%? Is it 30%? And if you can't come up with a number that's okay, then I ask that you reconsider your position on the death penalty. And I also have to say, you know, it serves no public safety benefit. States that have tougher laws on crime or tougher death penalty statutes or anything else have no, there's never been any evidence that it has a positive effect on deterring crime.

And how would you feel even if you say, well, 1% would be okay. What if that 1% was somebody you love? What if it was you? percent would be okay what if that one percent was somebody you love what if it was you what if it was your mother or father or brother or sister son cousin whatever so as you said sharon it's never going to be perfect there is no way for it to be perfect even if there's video evidence could there's always a possibility that you got it wrong and so I just ask that everybody go into this with a healthy degree of skepticism and say, you know, if there's not incontrovertible evidence, and that doesn't mean a confession, because people confess for all kinds of reasons. And that doesn't mean one statement from some

supposed expert. There has to be no doubt in your mind that the person in front of you committed the crime or else, you know, it's your duty. It's your moral obligation, I believe, to not vote to convict because it says right there beyond any reasonable doubt, even the people that we trust with our very lives, Even the people that we trust with our very lives, with our hopes and dreams for a just system, they're all subject to their own biases. They're not purely objective, even though they wear a lab coat, even though they're accredited from a million different universities or organizations. Tell me very quickly, what made you want to start a

podcast? What is it about it that gets you up in the morning? What do you love about it? Well, as you can tell, Sharon, I love to talk. It's hard for me to shut up sometimes. So, you know, and I probably had more caffeine than I needed today. But anyway, I wanted to start this podcast simply because I find the people who have served these crazy sentences and sentenced to death, served 20, 30, 40 years in prison for crimes they didn't commit. I've gotten to know hundreds of them. And they are the most extraordinary people. They've been to the depths of hell for reasons not of their own making. And they come out with a bounce in their step and a smile on their face and no bitterness. And I'm endlessly

drawn to them because I'm just like, how is this possible? And so I thought if we could tell the stories of these extraordinary people and what happened to them and how they got convicted and create a permanent record of these amazing humans and these awful miscarriages of justice then other people when they hear them would be less likely when they're serving on juries to make the same mistakes that those other jurors made, which then they have to live with for the rest of their lives as well, right? When they know that they convicted an innocent person who was executed or spent their life in prison or whatever. And so the beauty of it is, you know, I was early enough that I was

able to get the name that really explains what it is. It's called Wrongful Conviction. It's now been listened to over 30 million times. It's helped to resolve several cases by drawing attention. It's helped to get a bunch of pro bono lawyers to take cases and other things like that, wonderful people who volunteer their time. And it's inspired legislation in three different states, Washington, Indiana, and Illinois. It's an emotional journey for sure, but it's also uplifting.

And I think it gives meaning to the suffering for many of the people who are the guests on our show. And it's an amazing show, not because of me, but because of the people who I'm very privileged to interview, many of whom are still behind bars and who need attention brought to their cases. And we have opportunities at the links in the bio of the episode for people to sign petitions, to join forces in various different ways, to write letters to the incarcerated person if they choose to, and even to support people when they come out and are facing all the obstacles that we as a society put in their way, even though they're

free, even though they're exonerated and most importantly, get involved. Wrongful conviction. What a powerful podcast you have. I also think about it from this perspective, what a powerful historic record you are creating for future researchers, for future historians, being able to have the primary source data from the person, the convict themselves, that will be incredibly useful. I mean, it's useful now and will be incredibly useful, you know, decades in the future as sociologists, lawmakers, et cetera, study these kinds of issues. Having that primary source data is and will continue to be incredibly useful. So thank you for your service in putting that together for us now and for people

down the road. Thank you for giving me a chance to, you know, spout off about it because it really is. I think if we can save one person from going through an ordeal like these horrendous ordeals, then that would be enough for me. If I had a real superpower, I would pick up the country, shake it upside down. All the innocent people and the people who are serving time for crimes that, you know, shouldn't even be crimes or who are serving time for crimes that, you know, shouldn't even be crimes or sentenced to insane sentences would all go home. It's really time for us to take a kinder approach. And these are just people. I mean, let's not forget that the number one and two causes of arrest in America are homelessness and driving on a suspended license. A big percentage of the people

in prison are there just for no other reason than because they're poor. And the reason their license was suspended in the first place is because they're poor, you know, because they couldn't pay their court costs or whatever it is. Anyway, that's a whole nother podcast and I better stop myself and stop drinking coffee for the day as well. Where can people follow you on social media, Jason? So I'm at It's Jason Flom, which is I-T-S and then Jason, the typical spelling J-A-S-O-N. Flom is F-L-O-M. And then that's on Instagram. And I think TikTok is the same. I'm very happy. I did a video recently about not waiving your Miranda rights, which I hope people will check out. Follow me on TikTok or Instagram at It's Jason Fahm. And please do check out the podcast, Wrongful Conviction.

And Sharon, you're awesome. What can I say? I want to do more stuff with you. I would love that. Thank you so much. Thank you. Fantastic. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast.

I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.