Hidden Brain - The Night That Lasted A Lifetime

Episode Date: July 7, 2020

Not long after his sixteenth birthday, Fred Clay was arrested for the murder of a cab driver in Boston. Eventually, Fred was found guilty — but only after police and prosecutors used questionable psychological techniques to single him out as the killer. This week on Hidden Brain, we go back four decades to uncover the harm that arises when flawed ideas from psychology are used to determine that a teenager should spend the rest of his life behind bars.

From NPR, this is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanthan. On the night of the murder, there's bad weather in Boston. It was raining night and I went back to the foster home. Fred Clay knocks on his foster mother's door. It's late autumn, 1979. Fred has been away for a few days, visiting his cousins and mother in a neighborhood known as Roslandale.

He knows he is probably in trouble with his foster mother. He hadn't told her he was taking off. I didn't run away. I just went out and they'd come back for a few days. A man opens the door. It's his foster mother's son. He let me in the house, and he was telling me that his mother wanted to talk to me about me not being there for the last few days.

Thankfully for Fred, his foster mother isn't home. She's a church. So he let me in, and I went back to my room. I watched a load of TV. I got some of the e and I eventually fell asleep. Around 9 30 as Fred sleeps, his foster mother returns home. She locks the front door from the inside. So none of the kids in the house can leave overnight. She's the only one with the key. So I was in that room all at all at

time, sleeping. I didn't know the door was locked. I didn't even know the murder was happening. Late that night, a man will be shot to death in Roslanddale. A sleep in his bed, three weeks past his 16th birthday, Fred doesn't know it, Three weeks passed his 16th birthday, Fred doesn't know it, but a boulder is rolling down a hill toward him. In a matter of days, it will make his life unrecognizable. He is going to be arrested for the murder. Various ideas in psychology will be used to decide that he is guilty. This week on Hidden Brain, we go back four decades to retrace the steps of Fred Clay's

arrest and prosecution. And we'll uncover the harm that arises when flawed ideas from psychology are used to to determine that a teenager should spend the rest of his life behind bars. Several hours after Fred Cleary returns to his foster home, cab driver Richard Dwyer is sitting in a taxi. It's around 4 a.m. He sparked in downtown Boston's Red Light District, better known as the Combat Zone. Three men approach the curb. It's late, but the street is lit by the neon lights of a theater and nearby pizza shop.

As they get closer, Richard sizes them up. This is something he likes to do with potential customers. For about 30 seconds, he watches them. All three are young black men. One is on the short side, the other two are tall, over six feet. Richard decides the three men look suspicious. He shakes his head at them, and the three turn toward another cab. 28-year-old Jeffrey Boyadgin is behind the wheel. Richard watches them get into the other cab, he's at the end of a 12-hour shift, and he doesn't give the incident any more notice.

And so they went over to Jeffree's cab and he agreed to take them. That's Jeffrey Boyage's younger brother, Jerry Boyage. Jeffrey and the three men drive across the city to Roslandale. They're going to a public housing complex called the Archdale Housing Project. When Jeffrey stops the cab, the three passengers make their real intentions clear. They ended up pulling him out of the cab to Robbym. Inside his apartment, a man named Neil Sweat is getting ready for work. He looks out his second floor window and sees a robbery in progress.

From a distance of about 75 feet, he watches the scene unfold. It's still just after 4am and dark out except for a single street lamp. The driver yells, leave me alone, let me go. Neil sees the man hitting the cabbie. Jeffrey Boyajin begs for his life. One of the robbers holds Jeffrey while another rifles through his pockets. The shortest of the three walks over to the cab, then walks back to where Jeffrey is lying on the ground. Then he raises his left arm and fires several shots into Jeffrey's head. They killed my brother. The three men vanish.

Minutes later police arrive. They find Jeffrey lying in a pool of his own blood near a dumpster. The cops soon discover Neil Sweat, the man at the second floor window. He's now standing in a nearby doorway. They question him. He tells them he cannot identify the killers. Later that day, Richard Dwyer learns about the murder. He's the cab driver who watched the three men get into Jeffrey's taxi.

He makes a connection to what he saw that morning in the combat zone. He calls the police and tells them. He gives a vague description of the three men. He remembers that two were tall and one was short. Two were wearing dark jackets, one was wearing a light jacket. All three were young black men. wearing a light jacket. All three were young black men. By 2 o'clock on the afternoon of the shooting, the police come up with a photo line up. The pictures are of 12 black men, most of whom either live at the Archdale Housing Project or are known to hang out there. Some of the men have had run-ins with the cops. Fred Clay is one of them.

The police ask Richard Dwyer to come in to see if any of the photos jog his memory. Richard will later testify that he has shown the photo line-up and picks out two photos. But Lisa Kavanaugh, a lawyer who has represented Fred in the case, says the evidence suggests the police did something else first. The police decided to hypnotize him. Richard has introduced to the director of the department's hypnosis investigation unit. His name is Patrick Brady. He had been a police officer for 25 years at this point and held a position called the investigative hypnotist. He was quite clear that he didn't consider himself an expert on the nature of hypnotic phenomena and this was only the fifth or sixth person that he had ever hypnotized.

A few other police detectives and assistant DAs gathered to watch the hypnosis session. Detective Patrick Brady tells Richard that the hypnosis would make it clear in his mind what he had seen the previous evening. A transcript of the hypnosis using police records gives us an idea of what happened next. We had actors recreate the scene. The detective shows Richard a ring. I want you to notice the rose stone in the middle. Uh-huh. Because as you are staring at it,

it is starting to become a little hazy. What I'm going to do is I am very slowly going to bring the ring down and your eyelids will follow it down. As they do and they come down with the ring, your eyes will be closed. They will stay closed and you will be very comfortable. He starts to countdown slowly from 20. At each level, Richard is supposed to get more and more relaxed. 7, 6, until 3, 2, 1, so beautiful and so comfortable, so peaceful. Your whole body is peaceful, so relaxed and so heavy.

Next, the detective tells Richard to imagine himself at home and then to turn his television on. Now, what is going to happen is I am going to turn the channel and when I do, you begin the documentary and you will see it clear in your mind. I am getting ready to turn the channel now. When the documentary begins, it will be of you sometime around 4 o'clock this morning sitting in your cap. I am going to slow the frames down now. They're going very slow, slow motion.

Under hypnosis, Richard begins to watch the scene unfold. He describes the three men, their height, what they're wearing. He is tall, skinny. When he arrives at the part where the three get into the cab in front of his, Jeffrey Boyageens cab, Richard starts to get agitated. I'm scared. Scared? There's nothing to be scared of. You're just watching this. They're going to do something bad to him. They're going to do something.

I just don't like them. The detective decides to bring Richard out of his trance. One. More relaxed. And more relaxed. Two. Higher. Higher.

Three. Four. Four. Four. Four. Relaxed, too higher, higher, three, four, and... Richard has shown the photo line up. He picks out two faces. One is a man named James Watson. The other is a 16-year-old boy, Fred Clay. Stay with us. In the movies, psychological techniques invariably elicit the truth.

A clever manipulation here, a trick question there, and suspects reveal all. Shortly before police hypnotize cab driver Richard Dwyer, here's what moviegoers are seeing. This is from the 1977 movie, Audrey Rose. Well, I have never participated in or witnessed such an event. I am here at the behest of the court to perform a function for which I have been trained and I'm licensed to perform. Now, I will be hypnotizing the subject who will be brought to me while you watch. Today you hear that kind of stuff and think okay it's Hollywood. But at the time hypnosis

seemed like a powerful technique to get at the truth. Police use hypnosis to calm crime victims who are so traumatized I can't tell a coherent story or to sharpen the recall of witnesses who can't remember details. The earliest case on record that used hypnotically elicited testimony was in 1897. Starting in the late 1960s, it became common for police to use hypnosis and some courts allowed it. But the method received national attention as a viable forensic tool, not long before Fred's case. In 1976, a bus driver who had been buried alive was reportedly able to recall his kidnappers' license plate number while under the influence of hypnosis. Still, even then, some experts pushed back against using hypnosis as a forensic tool. To tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is what witnesses are required to swear before giving testimony in court.

However, there is rising concern that one method of getting at the truth may in fact be undermining that pledge. The issue was debated during Fred's case. At the time, there was not a clear consensus about how valid it was to use hypnosis in criminal proceedings. It's an issue both scientific and legal, on one level and inquiry into the nature of memory. On another, a classic controversy over the use of scientific tools by non-scientists. By the 1980s, state courts started making it more difficult, sometimes impossible, to

admit testimony obtained via hypnosis. Around the same time, new scientific insights about the malleability of memory were becoming more widely known. They discredited the idea that memory works like a video recording. It's unclear how many people have been convicted on the basis of hypnosis. Today, 17 states still allow hypnotically induced testimony, even though most psychologists question the idea. Memory does not work like that, does not work like a video camera or a DVR.

Sam Summers is a psychologist at Tafts University. It's quite problematic when it comes to eyewitness memory. Your goal is to get people to get to their, to the actual memory for the actual scene in question. If they didn't encode them at the time, it's probably not there to be retrieved. Researchers have come to realize that memory is not just fallible, but is almost always reconstructed. We had an episode of Hidden Brain that talks about this idea. It's called, did that really happen?

Our memories are shaped by our expectations, imaginations, and preconceived notions. Even the conversations we have, or the media we consume after an event has occurred, can reshape our recollection of it. Of course, that's not the way it feels inside our heads. Many of us trust our memories, especially of significant events. Memory does feel like a hard drive that you can somehow search with the right key terms, or a DVR that you can somehow pull things back from.

And the subjective feeling that comes along with it perhaps is a large part why it's hard to disabuse some people, including attorneys and judges and jurors of the notion that that's how memory actually works. The gap between our intuitive understanding of how our minds work and the reality of how our minds actually work can sound arcane. Try telling cops or jurors that memory is reconstructed and fallible, and they will likely dismiss you as an out-of-touch egghead. But in very real ways, this gap drives some of the systemic bias we see in the criminal

justice system. There are a few things that are more persuasive to a jury than hearing a confident eyewitness say on the witness stand. I will never forget that face your honor. It's the guy sitting right there. It's incredibly powerful for a jury to hear that. I think we have this lay intuition that especially when it comes to the really important things like if I'm the victim of a crime or if I'm

a witness to a murder, I mean I'm gonna get that right I'm gonna remember that. After being hypnotized, Richard Dwyer became a very confident witness. I pictured in my mind's eye, I could picture the scene that was in the eye. Here he is, describing what he'd seen under hypnosis and the clarity it produced in him. It was very clear to me, it was almost like a TV screen. We reached out to Richard for our story, but he didn't respond to our request. Loyalisa Kavanaugh says he still stands behind his identification, four decades later. Once you've been told that, as an eyewitness, it's really hard not to believe the strength

of the memory that you have. Armed with their new leads into the killing, police go back to the housing project in Roslanddale to talk to their other witness, Neil Sweat. Remember, the first time police talked to Neil, he said he couldn't identify anyone. Police showed Neil the photo line up. Neil looks at the photos. No, he says't identify anyone. Police showed Neil the photo line up. Neil looks at the photos. No, he says. Still nothing. Police likely pick up a couple of things about Neil's sweat. One is, he appears to be intellectually disabled.

Later, according to public records, he is shown to be severely impaired. The second thing that police discover is that Neil and his family want out of the housing project. They've been on a wait list for alternate housing for five years. The next day, Sunday, the police come back with the same photo line up. And that's when detectives tell Neil two things. They tell him that they have a pretty good idea who the killers are and just need its

help in confirming things. And they also tell him, if you cooperate with us, we'll get you out of Archdale. Neil looks at the photos. Again, nothing. But the police don't give up. There was an effort after that meeting to hypnotize him. So although Mr. Sweat, having seen a ray now twice, was unable to pick any photographs, he agreed to undergo hypnosis. And so he went to the station that night and they attempted to put him under hypnosis,

but terminated the session after deciding that he didn't have his concentration was too poor. And so at this point they've shown the array to Neil twice. They've told him, essentially we know who was involved. The person who's showing it to him is the same person who was present for Mr. Dwyer's identification procedure and knows exactly which two people in the array had been selected by Mr. Dwyer so he knows who the target suspects are. Neal leaves the police station and heads home. The next day, Monday, police come calling again. Counting the night of the murder, this is the fourth time they are asking him to make an identification. They spread out the

photos before him on the kitchen table. The police offer another assurance that they will relocate the family that they had made specific arrangements and that it would happen at the city of Boston's expense. And it was at that point that Neil Sweat picked out Fred Clay and picked out James Watson and indicated that he knew one of them, Freddie, by his first name. I want to pause here a moment to draw your attention to something. Neil Sweat, new Fred Clay from Archdale.

He had been shown Fred's picture in the photo lineup on two previous occasions. This is the picture of someone he knows, and he said he could not identify the shooter. Imagine you saw a murder. Imagine also that the killer is someone you know. Police placed this man's photo before you on two separate occasions and you say you can't recognize the man. Then, on round three, you say you can. Now, you might say there is a simple explanation for this.

Maybe Nielswear did recognize Fred Clair from the start, but was afraid to identify someone to the police that he knew from the housing project. Maybe he feared for his safety. In fact, Neil did tell the cops he was afraid to get involved. Maybe. But Lisa Kavanaugh and other experts say there is a better explanation, and it has to do with three psychological errors that police made in the investigation, errors that many police departments still make today.

There's since the time of this investigation been extensive research on the importance of blind identification procedures, and of blind identification procedures. And what blind identification procedure refers to is a procedure in which the person who is displaying the photographs or displaying suspects in a live array doesn't know who the target suspects are. You don't need to leap to the idea of police misconduct to see why it's problematic when an officer has suspects in mind as he's asking a witness to make an identification. Even if the sort of assuming the best of intentions on the part of the police, there have been

studies showing that other more subtle cues including body language can lead the police to sort of guide witnesses toward a particular person or people in an array. The second problem potentially affected both Richard Dwyer and Neil Sweat. Both witnesses were white. Psychologist Sam Summers says that he has often struggled as an expert on courtroom stands to convince jurors that when a witness makes an identification, they need to factor in the question of race.

The way I've often explained this to a jury is there are two jobs basically that you ask a witness to do to accurately say yes, that is the person I saw, but also to accurately say no, that is not the person I saw when it's not. And researching just that for both of those jobs, we tend to do a better job of that as a witness when we're dealing with faces that are of our own racial and ethnic in groups as opposed to faces of the out group, other racial or ethnic groups. The third problem had to do with neo Sweat's cognitive impairments. The research shows that police interrogations are inherently coercive. Chris Henning is a legal scholar at Georgetown University.

She says Neil Sweat may have felt especially coerced by the persistent demands of the police. That's because of his intellectual disability. Folks who fit any of these categories are particularly vulnerable to the pressures of police interrogation. We reached out to Neil Sweat for our story but he did not respond to our request. The night before Jeffrey Boyajin was murdered, Fred Clay had gone to bed knowing his foster mother was upset with him. He had been away for a few days and had broken the curfew rules in his foster home. The next morning, she kicked him out and he was taken to a juvenile detention center in Halifax, Massachusetts. Fred remembers the moment the police came for him.

The door squeak all the time, the door opened, it squeaks. I saw some playing cozy tights coming there and they went to the main desk and they talked to the council for about 10 minutes and something like that. Then right after that the council got on the paging system and he called my name. I had a delay, come to the main desk please. So I went there and the police officer asked me, is your name Frederick Clay? I said, yes, my name is Frederick Clay. They said, well, we need to talk to you about something. So they took me into a little room off to the side.

They told me I was being arrested for murder of a cab driver and I said, excuse me, you got the wrong person. I was never in the cab. I said, I'm here for violation of probation. They said what we know about that, but we also got a warrant for your arrest for murder. I kept repeating them that they make a mistake. They got the wrong person. They should have called my probation officer.

They should have called my foster parent. They should have called my foster parent. They can verify where I was at. I just kept repeating that. They can try to make them understand that they got the wrong person. The police would have none of it. They were sure they had the right person. When we come back, how Fred Clay was blamed for a lack of remorse over a crime he did not commit. The Boston of Fred Clay's childhood was an unsettling place for a black boy. His neighborhood, Roslandale, was mostly white, but they had

osteoporjects and it was mostly blacks and Spanish and some white people as well, Caucasian people, but back then it was a lot of racial tension because it was in the bushing area. Boston was at the beginning of a court-mandated order to desegregate its public schools. Boston was found guilty of willfully creating and perpetuating a segregated school system. Students were bussed between predominantly white and black areas of the city. The effort fueled a backlash against desegregation from white people and a series of protests gripped the city. The anger has manifested itself throughout the desegregation.

In the first days, there were isolated incidents of violence when school buses carrying black children were stoned in South Boston. So I was being called the N word a lot. I was just being called that a lot and being chased a lot and being given to a lot of fights because of my color. I remember one incident that I was just being called out a lot and being chased a lot and being and getting to a lot of fights because of my color. I remember one incident I was coming back from Dorchester.

Fred was walking down the steps to the train platform when a group of young white men spotted him. One guy started talking to me asking me where I was going and what you're doing around here, you don't belong here. It was sort of just making me aware that I wasn't supposed to be there. We just started arguing and then one guy, he took a swing at me. He hit me on my side of my face. I was kind of days, I should have shook it off a little bit. I tried to run. And I ran right in the middle of traffic.

There was all kind of street traffic, cars going everywhere. I was trying to run to my house, but at the same time, I realized that my house was too far. I didn't want to run all that way. So I just stopped right in the middle of the street, traffic coming and everything else, and just stopped fighting them.

At that time, I was like 12 years old. Even at home, Fred did not find refuge. He lived with his mother and three siblings. On the oldest of four, and back then, my mother had an alcohol issue. She was alcoholic. She was always drunk. There was no food in the house. She was alcoholic. She was always drunk. There was no food in the house. It was just a whole lot of neglect. She was beating me.

She was beating my sister. She was beating my brother. She would hit me with a switch. She would hit me with a belt. She hit me with a stench record. She beat me one time with a golf club. She was just picking up anything that she can get and hit me with it.

So, just anything she wanted to pick up, she was hitting me with it. And me being the oldest, I sort of took the family role as the man in the house sort of speak. It was pretty much up to me to start making money and putting food on the table and stuff like that. So even at the age of 12, 11 years old, I was like sort of like a man in a house. Fred earned money babysitting, helping people load groceries into their cars and shoveling driveways. Sometimes he also stole clothes

or car batteries. I was just trying to help any way I could and I really don't know, I was just trying. Eventually Fred got into trouble with the police. One incident stands out in his mind. This gentleman, he was a French guy, he lived in the projects, and every now and then he would reach out to me to try to clean his apartment form. That's another way I was making money by cleaning his apartment. And one particular morning, I think it was in the summer time. I got up, I got dressed, and I went outside. And for some reason, I don't know what led me to this, but I ended up breaking into his house for some reason.

And the police came. And it was a big commotion. A lot of people in the project saw me. My mother heard about it. So that was an embarrassing moment. And I regretted it at that moment. And I still regretted it. doing it now, thinking about that now, I still regret it. Looking back now with the advantage of hindsight, what do you think was going on in that teenage boy's head? Well, that time I was smoking a lot of marijuana. I was in between

jobs and I needed some money not only just to get high but just to put to try to put some food on a table for myself as well as my sisters and brothers. I'm just trying to figure out a way to make money and for some reason I thought of him and I thought about breaking to his house. I can't tell you why that thought came into my mind, but it did. By the time Fred was 16, his interactions with the police got him committed to D.Y.S.

the Department of Youth Services. And I got committed. And I went to a long-term residential program. And after I stayed in that program for about six months, they placed me in a foster home. I guess the people, the psychologists, the therapists, they decided that the best place for me was to be in a foster home.

We already know what happened next in Fred's story. He went to live in a foster home, but was kicked out the morning after Jeffrey Boyageans killing. From there, he was sent to a juvenile detention center where police arrested him and charged him with first-degree murder. At the time of the killing, Fred was a few weeks past his 16th birthday. This is the next point at which flawed theories from psychology shape what happens to Fred. In court, Fred's attorney fought to keep him in the juvenile system where the consequences

would be less severe. Prosecutors had a different plan. They wanted to drive me as a doll. At the time, Massachusetts had a procedure called a transfer hearing. It meant that if a juvenile was going to face the full consequences of an adult criminal charge, there had to be a hearing in juvenile court first. During this process, a psychologist gave Fred a Rorschach test. This test was developed in the early part of the 20th century when Herman Rorschach came

up with a series of inkplots. The figures and shapes you saw when you looked at the inkplots supposedly gave experts a secret window into your mind. Fred had no idea why someone was asking him to interpret splotches of ink. He was a little past sixteen, being accused of first degree murder. There was a lot going on. He just did what he was told. I just gave him my ass so they told me, look at it and tell me what I thought.

I just told him what I thought, the picture looked like. Eventually, Fred's responses would supposedly reveal that his mind was twisted, that he was dangerous. A judge in the juvenile transfer hearing decided after looking at all the evidence that Fred wasn't really a child. It was better to think of him as an adult because he didn't show a capacity to change for the better. He said, I find that this juvenile Frederick Clay has exhibited no remorse, either by action or expression, since this event occurred. Remember, at this point, Fred had not been convicted of anything.

He was supposed to be innocent in the eyes of the law. Fred couldn't understand why he was expected to show remorse for something he didn't do. I know I didn't kill nobody. I know I was never in downtown Boston. I was never in a combat zone. So I thought that they make an terrible mistake. Again, psychological theories this time about culpability, would shape Fred's case. In the decades that followed, these theories would be revised. In 2012, a landmark Supreme Court ruling would say that lower courts made an error in treating adolescents like adults.

Chris Henning at Georgetown said the roots of the decision to try Fred as an adult, which opened up the possibility of a life sentence, cannot be disentangled from the question of racial bias and history. The notion of childhood was never afforded to black children from the start of our country. Black children were perceived as property, and women were used to reproduce black children to serve as manpower for white plantations. And so the deep historical thinking about black children starts from the outset at a very conscious level. And we've never really moved from that.

This idea that black children couldn't be saved or redeemed, that they weren't children, has seeped into cultural norms and into the courts. It is no coincidence that the youngest person in a modern America to be executed was a 14 year old black boy. It is no coincidence that Emmett Till was 14 years old when he was lynched, and it's no coincidence that Tamir Rice was 12 years old when he was lynched, and it's no coincidence that Tamir Rice was 12 years old

when he was gunned down by police. After the transfer hearing, Fred was sent to adult court. The severity of the potential consequences multiplied tenfold. In 1981, Fred and his co-defendant, 20-year-old James Watson, were tried together. There was no physical evidence tying Fred to Jeffrey Boyagean's murder, so the state relied heavily on its two eyewitnesses, Neil Sweat and Richard Dwyer. Both were called to the stand. Neil testified that as he watched from his window, he saw Fred bring his left hand across

his body and then heard at least three shots ring out. Neil also made an in-court identification of Fred. I remember Neil Sweat getting on a stand saying that he saw me shoot this person. Fred also testified on his own behalf. The perpetrator who committed his crime was a left-handed person. I'm right-handed. The perpetrator that the witness that they say saw committed his this crime, I did a person as 5-8. I'm not 5-8. I was 5-4 back then.

I might be 5-5 right now, so I was shorter. Fred's foster mother also testified. She backed up Fred's alibi. She explained that he was asleep at her home, that the house was under lock and key when the shooting took place. But the jury and prosecution preferred another theory. After the house was locked, Fred must have woken up and escaped through a window. So the only explanation was that he must have escaped out of the window, somehow gotten

himself physically to the combat zone, gotten into the cab, driven in the cab to the murder scene, committed the murder, and then gotten himself back and climbed back in through, I guess, the same window so that he was back in the apartment the next morning. That was their theory of how he could have participated in this crime. Fred was aware throughout the trial. The things were not looking good for him. I had a feeling my mind in my heart that I was going to go to prison. I just didn't know for how much time I was going to do, but I knew I was going to go to prison.

The jury heard the case. They excused jury to go deliberate. Maybe two or three days later, they came back with a verdict and they found me guilty. The first reading murder, which means I got an unnatural life sentence at the age of 17 years old. They put a kid in prison. At a 17-year-old, for a murder, he did not commit. People say they want to know the truth, but when you're telling the truth, they don't respect the truth. They not listen to the truth.

They don't accept the truth. And when I was growing up, they had this notions about kids should be seen and not heard. And I was being seen, but I was not being heard. At 17, Fred Clay was effectively sentenced to die in prison. For a little while, I thought about killing myself,

but I don't like admitting that, but I did. But that thought went in my mind quick, in the left, my mind quick. But that's how angry I was. Fred was given a grown man's sentence. Then he was sent to live in a grown man's prison. I was scared of my mind. So I was kind of not quite sure how I was going to survive prison, but at the same time protect myself and making sure that I don't get taken out of prison in a body bag.

A lot of guys that have been there for many years, they got certain tables that they sit in a childhood. People was getting murdered over seats in a childhood. I mean, they just do harm to you over a seat. So for three weeks when I first went to Walpole I didn't sit down nowhere. I ate my food standing up with my back against the wall, watching everybody while I'm trying to eat my food as quick as I can and get out of there. It was a dangerous place. And often I thought over the years that,

even though my life situation wasn't great back then, my family wasn't, my family life wasn't great, but they took me out of a bad situation and they put me in even a worse situation. Because they was telling me that they don't care about my life. I can get killed in prison. So in a way, they was put me in harm's way.

As Fred served his sentence, the misconception that he was twisted and incapable of change followed him. Many educational programs were close to him. As a prisoner with a life sentence, the implication was that there was no reason to rehabilitate him. He was never going to get out. Eventually Fred did get into a few programs that would have him. Once I started doing that, my ideas about myself, about my time, about who I was as a person changed.

He started to get to know other inmates who were also serving life sentences. They hung out sometimes and talked about what they would do if they ever got out. One time they were watching a TV show about extreme sports. They had skydiving, they had bungee jumping, they had a white water rafting, and then someone started talking about, you know, if I would get out of prison, I want a skydiving, I want a bungee jump, I want to go to a hot air balloon. And it just seemed like they was free. By this point, Fred had already spent 18 years in prison. He was in his mid-30s. He kept doing his time without any hope of ever getting out. Then, in 2012, in today's

program, we're covering three new rulings issued by the Supreme Court. One of them, a decision against mandatory life sentences for juveniles in homicide cases. The Supreme Court ruled that mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles in homicide cases was unconstitutional. In a five to four ruling, the justices said such blanket sentences violate the Aether Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. They said children who commit crimes, even serious ones, are different from adults. For the first time, Fred became eligible for parole. This was in April of 2015.

I had gotten some mail from the parole board that said that Fred Clay was going to be up for parole hearing in May. That's Jerry Boyajin, the brother of the cab driver whose murder led to Fred's conviction. When Jerry showed up at the parole hearing, he had his mind made up about Fred. Then something changed. They bring Fred in and he's sitting there and the in the parole board question in him. And as he talked about how, you know, as soon as he got settled in prison, he started working on getting his GED that he, you know, and he said every, you know, every counseling opportunity they presented him he took.

And during this whole time, I'm thinking, this is not the person I was thinking he was. I can't reconcile this person with the assumptions that I had made about him. A few years earlier, Fred had started working with Lisa Kavanaugh, who is director of the Innocence Program in Massachusetts. They filed a motion for a new trial and claimed that, among other problems through the case, Fred's trial lawyer had not investigated evidence that two other men at the Archdale Housing Project may have killed Jeffrey Boyajin. In the intervening years, one of those men had been convicted of armed robbery arrested on the same road where Jeffrey Boyagein was killed. He had been described as about 5'8", and is using his left hand to hold a gun.

The Suffolk County District Attorney reinvestigated Fred's case. DNA analysis of Jeffrey Boyagein's clothing turned up only his own DNA. Finally, in 2017, authorities agreed that Fred was entitled to a new trial. But the DA decided not to pursue charges, saying the new evidence raised significant doubt as to the fairness of his trial and the justice of his conviction, and that the interests of justice would not be served by the prosecution of this case. Instead of being released on parole to spend the rest of his life

with a murder conviction on his record, Fred's original conviction was thrown out, and he was exonerated. He is my honor and privilege to discharge you from custody. Nearly 38 years after he was arrested, Fred was free. To quote, say I'm cool. It's been a long time coming.

It's the first time I walked without shaggle, so it's strange, it feels strange. There's a lot of life I need to make up on. Just over a year later, Fred received a million dollars in compensation for Massachusetts. It was the maximum allowed under state law. Fred is trying to cope with the many changes that took place in the world while he was in prison. I'm doing okay, just trying to still learn how to deal with life out here. But as much as some things have changed, others remain exactly the same.

Every time I leave out my house now, I go to work. I go to store. No matter where I'm going, every time I leave my house, I wonder if something's gonna happen to me. Fred is afraid that he could end up getting killed by police. Sometimes I think being a prison, so to save my life in certain ways. Now I'm back out here, and my life can be taken for me, just by my and my life can be taken from me just by my business.

Walking to the bank, going shopping, going to try and get some eyeglasses, don't get my eyeglasses repairs and doing nothing wrong. And next thing though, I'm being shot or I'm being killed or I'm being choked or I'm having a need to mind neck. Fred also realizes that the feeling of being behind bars doesn't go away just because you are out of prison. He's had to work at feeling free. It's going to be frightening. I might feel like I'm falling. But there's no turning back. I have to deal with whatever life throws me at my weight. One of the first things Fred wanted to do after his release was to find a way to honor

some friends from prison. He decided to do it by going skydiving. Some of these people end up dying in prison, so it was a way for me to say, well, he didn't get a chance to skydive. I did, so I'm living this moment through them. So it was a way for me to acknowledge them and to dedicate that moment to them. The second time he went skydiving, it was for himself. Stepping out of the plane felt like a metaphor for his life.

When I opened the door and I felt that when I hit my face and I looked down and saw how high we was, I was scared, I was scared, but at the same time, it was one of my dreams for me to do that. So, I needed to do it. Once they open that door and you count down to jump out, and once you jump out, there's no turning back. You can't say, well, I changed my mind, I want to go back. There's no turning back. My journey back into my life right now is going to be scary,

it's going to be overwhelming, but I got to deal with whatever comes my way. I got to deal with that. And when I went skydiving, I had that thought. I got to deal with whatever life throws at me right now because I didn't think I was going to get out of prison. I thought I was going to die in prison. So my worst day out here is better than my best thing in prison. There were two distinct avenues through which ideas from psychology affected the Fred Clay case. Some of the techniques used, like hypnosis and Rorschach tests, have been largely discredited. But there were also implicit, unconscious issues that continued to play a pervasive role in the criminal justice system. Police pressure during interrogations, deeply embedded ideas about the criminality of black boys, leaping to assumptions about guilt, which produces the idea that someone who does not show remorse, must be remorseless instead of merely innocent. Fred is not the only one who was victimized by these errors and biases.

Today, we still don't know who killed Jeffrey Boyajin. Fred's co-defendant, James Watson, has been behind bars for about four decades. His sentence was based in part on the same eyewitness testimonies that put Fred in prison. Just as Fred has done, James Watson is seeking a new trial. Recently, he was temporarily released from prison. It was an account of the COVID-19 pandemic and because of the strength of his claim for a new trial. The judge wrote that he has a reasonable possibility of having his conviction overturned. This week's show was produced by Kat Shuknecht and Parthascha.

It was edited by Tara Boyle and Raina Cohen. Our team includes Jenny Schmidt, Thomas Liu and Laura Quarral. We had engineering help from Josh Nuewell and Josephine Neonai. Our unsung heroes this week are Alex Whiting and Scott Stangle. Alex and Scott helped us record Fred Clay's interview at their studio in Lowell, Massachusetts. This was the first interview we've done at the studio since the coronavirus pandemic began. Scott and Alex helped make sure Fred not only sounded great, but was also safe and comfortable.

Thanks to both. A big thank you to our voiceover actors, Graham Smith, Ristibo, and Dylan Scott. For their help tracking down the source material for this episode, thank you to Clark Francis Conelli and Terence Locke of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Chris Borrell at WGBH shared some of his own audio reporting about Fred Clay with us. We're very grateful. Thanks also to

the Test Neal at Arizona State University, Stephen Lynn at Binghamton University and Lawrence Petihis at the University of Potsmouth. For more Hidden Brain, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter. If you like this episode, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm Shankar Vedantantham and this is NPR. is NPR.