Pablo Torre Finds Out - He Finds Music Stars. Now He's Helping Us Save the Life of a Wrongfully Convicted Man

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

He used his instinctual superpower to sign an all-star roster of everyone from Stone Temple Pilots and Katy Perry to, yes, Kid Rock. Now, record executive Jason Flom (with a little help from the spirit of Muhammad Ali) is performing a different kind of miracle, with his obsession to get innocent people out of prison. This is why the unbroken, indomitable grace of Charles Flores is far from alone inside our shocking American system — and how you can help, too.• Sign the petition to stop the execution of Charles Flores• Previously on PTFO: We Visited Death Row for the Super Bowl. You Can Help Save This Fan's Life.• Subscribe to "Wrongful Conviction" with Jason Flom Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. If you do get picked up and you're suspected of a crime, just say your name, your address, and they say the following words, I want a lawyer, and then shut the fuck up. Right after this ad. I have lots of people on this show who have absurd resumes.

You might be a gold medalist in this category. Wow, I'm rarely speechless, but, That introduction has left me at a loss for words. Jason Flom, thank you for being here, by the way. Of course. I'm thrilled to be here, actually. I'm thrilled to have you hopefully help me understand what it is that you do in your current act. But Act 1, can we just start there with music?

Yeah, of course. You're the guy who personally discovered and or signed. How should we do the list? Do you want to give me the chronology here? Yeah. If you want to do it in chronological order, it depends how old your listeners are, but it goes back to, wow, the 80s. The first artist I ever saw

as a band called Zebra. Big points to anyone who remembers them. Twisted Sister, Skid Row, Stone Temple Pilots, White Lion, Jewel. We're going way back. I'm in the memory machine, Tori Amos. Then I ended up, and I'm leaving some out, of course, just because memory, whatever, escape club.

That was a funny one. Wow, wow, West. Then I started my own company, which was Lava Records, and Lava Records, which was a division of Atlantic at the time, because I started at Atlantic. And Lava had a great run with Matchbox 20. And Kid Rock and Trans-Liberian Orchestra and Simple Plan and the Cores and so many different acts,

porcupine tree, et cetera, et cetera. And Edward McCain. And then ultimately I ended up running Atlantic Records for a little while and signed to Paramore back then. And then we move on to Virgin Records. I left Atlantic and went to Virgin where I was the 44-year-old Virgin.

And then during that time, Virgin and Capitol was Katie Perry and a bunch of other acts, 30 seconds to Mars. And then ultimately left there to join the number one company in the music business. Republic Records still number one to this day. And I've been with them ever since and have signed in the partnership with the Republic,

acts like Jesse Jay and Lord and Greta Van Fleet and many others. We have one called The Warning that's blowing up right now, which is really exciting. So, yeah, so it's been, the music business has been very good to me. I left out a lot of names. If you're listening and you're one of those names, forgive me. My memory's not what it used to be.

I've been very, very, very lucky in the music industry. Let's say that. You have a sense of taste and a skill, clearly, that I want to understand, like, why are you good at this? But before we get to that, I do need to acknowledge that the artist that has the most current-day present resonance is Kid Rock. And that is the sound of a man

who knows where I'm going with this. Yeah. I don't even know what to say. I mean, it's... He name-checked you in a song. The seminal album, Devil Without a Cause, he name checked me in the song I got one for you where he says,

hey, Flom, you want to hit money? Ha, ha, ha. It was a very, very difficult process trying to break him because he didn't fit into any sort of real established box, but it was fun for that reason. And we

knocked it out of the park. You know, now, now I don't know. I don't know what to say. I need you to imagine that you're me for a second. And it's last December and you're at this upscale holiday party in New York and you randomly get introduced to this guy you've never met before who's wearing a hoodie and glasses and he kind of looks like John Chaturro

and he kind of sounds like Ray Romano and the first thing this guy starts telling you about is his former life and obsession with sports. Having been to rehab and then AA, I ended up in GA as well. Gamblers Anonymous makes Alcoholics anonymous look like a picnic in the park with, you know, the glee club. It's not to minimize the problems that come from alcoholism and drugs, but gamblers anonymous, you really get a sense of how dark it can get when you're trapped in the throes of a gambling addiction. When I walked into the first meeting, they always asked the newcomers 20 questions. Have you ever, you know, lost a

thing this, this, that, all the things that gambling takes away from you. And the only question I answered no to us, have you ever considered killing yourself as a result of gambling?

And I think almost everybody else in that room had gone 20 for 20. When did you know that when it came to sports betting, you had a problem? When I walked into GA, I think I owed Buckees $35,000. And this was like, you know, in the late 80s, right?

Where that was a lot of money. And I didn't have money. I had nothing in the bank. What were you betting on? mostly baseball, but also basketball, football. And I was betting $1,000 a game. You know, it was only because I'm a huge Mets fan that, you know, I stayed alive in 86

because the Mets won over 100 games that year on the World Series. But, you know, I was betting more money that I had on those World Series games. And now, you know, I just don't do it. Now, instead, Jason Flom's time is spent making bets of a different kind. One of his portfolios, as you already heard, is in music. He's this insanely prolific talent scout and the head of Lava Records, and in the music industry, Jason believes. His superpower can be basically summarized in one word.

And that word is instinct. Now, of course, Pablo, it's become a business that is driven by data to a meaningful degree and it's very sophisticated data. When I started the industry, we didn't have access to any of that kind of stuff. Although, I used to call record stores just to ask, like, are there any local acts that kids are looking for? Is anybody I'd call clubs? I'd call anybody that might know about something that was brewing. Which is how his all-star roster of prospects includes everyone from Lord to the dude who performed at the Turning Point USA Super Bowl halftime show last week to a young hit band like The Warning. These three sisters from Monterey, Mexico who just, they played like Metallica.

I was like, what are they doing? It was nuts. But the night Jason Flom for scouted the warning, it turns out, takes us straight to this whole other set of calls that he spends his time making, calls about his most important prospects at this point. And lately, ours. And here's where the worlds collide, Pablo, this particular night. And it was, I think, maybe six years ago.

A woman named Devin O'Connor, who works at Lava, for me, she had said to me, you got to go to the Mercury Lounge tonight. It was the middle of the winter. This band called The Warning is playing. You got to check them out. I knew nothing about them. But I said, okay, I'll go. And it was a frigid night in New York City.

But on the way down there, I got a call from a guy who I had been trying to help because he had come to me for help. help because his father was scheduled to be executed for murdering his mother. So here's this guy who reached out to me and said the dad's name was Donnie Cleveland Lance. They were just kids when their father, Donnie Lance was convicted of brutally killing their mother. As adults, Jesse Lance and Stephanie Cape say their dad has always played a big part of their life despite being behind bars. We have always included daddy in every major decision in our lives. We are closer to our father in prison. than a lot of our friends are to their fathers who live near them.

The two wrote in a letter to the state parole board. But the relief they sought didn't come. On Tuesday, the board denied Lance's request for clemency. His execution is scheduled for Wednesday night. But I wasn't aware that this was the particular night that he was scheduled to be executed. And that night, I got a call on my way down to the Mercury Lounge from Jesse, who said they executed my dad tonight. And he said they dumped his last meal on the floor.

I mean, even now I'm getting chills thinking about it. Like six years ago, I was like, they did what? And he goes, yeah, you know, he tried to pick up some fries and stuff, but that was all he got to eat. And I was like, I was so disgusted. I was so fucking angry. And, you know, I get to the Mercury Lounge. And truth be told, I think I did a shot in his honor.

I don't do shots. I mean, I can't remember the last time I did one other than that. But I just was like, I had to do something. And so I took one shot at tequila. Didn't want to be there at all. I didn't want to be anywhere, honestly, after that. That was in the state of Georgia. I'm looking at the article now.

Yeah. The state of Georgia did that. Right. So it was Georgia. So both of the children, both of his children, who lost their mother, had begged the parole board not to kill their father. And the parole board didn't care. People said they say to me, don't you think that victims' family should have some say in the sentence? if they think a death penalty or this or that.

And I'm like, well, they don't have any say when it's the other way around. No one listens to them. I've seen so many cases where the family has begged for an execution not to go forward, even if a guy was guilty, right? But they don't want to see somebody else die. They don't want that.

And the state, no matter which state it is, is like, fuck off. We don't care about your feelings. But we should care about your feelings only if you agree with us that we should dole out the harshest punishment possible in almost every case. So I'm like, it's got to cut both ways. And Donnie's is an extreme case because it's the children who lost their freaking mother and wanted their dad not to be executed for not killing their mother

and wanted them to stay to go find who actually did it. But none of those things are ever going to happen. He's dead. But what you just said in that story, which I didn't know anything about, that is what your brain is like now. Yeah. You are on your way to, hit musical acts,

it turns out, while also managing an inbox that has become your current act. And I want to understand when you started taking an interest in wrongful conviction, which is the name of your show, as well as your passion.

When did that become apparent to you? I need to find a way to do this over here. I'm going to find the next story, Amos. And also, I need to talk to Donnie Cleveland Lance because no one else is giving a shit. This phase of my life began in a very unexpected and sort of sudden way in 1993 when I saw an article in the New York Post of all places, the New York Post, a newspaper that I

probably never bought until that day and have never bought again and no one should ever buy. But the, sorry, what can I say? But anyway, but this particular day, the other newspapers were sold out. So I bought the New York Post because I was getting in a taxi. crushed that you're disavowing the New York Post at this point. But I digress. So I was getting in a taxi and I wanted something to read. But this was when we didn't have phones to distract us constantly while we were sitting in the back of a taxi, 1993.

So I bought the post. And there was a story that I was obviously meant to read. And the story was a story about a kid named Stephen Lennon who had just been denied clemency by Governor Mario Cuomo in spite of the fact that the sentencing judge, the warden and even Geraldine Ferraro. And some of you remember her. She was the first woman to ever receive a nomination for vice president from one of the two major political parties in this country. So she had even written a letter on his behalf. And yet this kid had been turned down for parole. What was he in for?

Well, he was doing 15 to life on a nonviolent first offense cocaine possession charge in a maximum security prison in New York State. He was in Dan Amora. And he had gotten, you know, a college degree or two in prison. And he had done all these different things. He was 32. I was 32. He had been in prison for eight years. I had been sober by this point for almost eight years.

And I was like, I'm an atheist, but there but for the grace of something higher than me goes I. Right. So I felt like I got to do something about this because that very well could have been me. And I knew it. And so I decided to just try. And I called his mother, Shirley, because her name was in the phone book. She lived in Rome, New York. I offered my help.

I said, I don't have a lot of money, which I didn't, but I'll send you what I can in order to help you get a new lawyer. I don't know how this stuff works. I'm not a lawyer. Everyone thinks I am. I'm a high school graduate. So I called the only criminal defense lawyer

I knew at the time. The guy named Bob Kalina. He represented Skid Row and Stone Temple Pilots. His partner was their music lawyer. And they were getting busted frequently back. I was going to say, this feels like a useful person to have if you're those bands.

Scott Weiland and Sebastian Bach, he was on speed dial. I like that Sebastian Bach was one of the dominoes that tipped over to get you. I know, it's kind of perfect. So I love Sebastian. Anyway, so I called Bob. I said, what can be done? He goes, nothing you can do. He goes, this is a Rockefeller drug laws.

And it just is what it is. It's thousands of cases like this. And I said, well, Bob, do me a favor. Talk to Shirley on the phone, will you? Because it's really bugging me. So he came to my office, talked to her on the phone. He said, look, I'll read the transcripts of the trial. So he calls me up a month later and he says,

you know, I found a loophole, an angle. It's not going to work. But I've been meaning to take a case pro bono anyway, so I'll try it. I go, great. Six months later, we end up in Malone, New York, in the courthouse. And I'm sitting there holding Mrs. Lennon's hand. Her husband, Stan, was on the other side of her.

The judge was this old guy with white hair. I thought this is not going to. go well. And they bring Stephen in his shackles, right? His legs are chained together. His hands are chained to his waist. I'm like, didn't it say in the paper nonviolent first offender? I'm like, doesn't that seem a little extreme? Well, whatever. So the arguments go back and forth. I literally have no idea what anyone's talking about. I still had a mullet and purple Doc Martins. Okay. So that's what we're talking about here. And I have pictures to prove it. I don't like the odds of anything that's about to happen. No. So to judge,

after hearing whatever everybody had to say, bangs the gavel down and says the motion is granted. And so Bob, sort of chubby Bob in his three-piece suit, the lawyer comes scurrying over. And I'm like, Bob, what happened? And he goes, we won. And I was like, we what? I don't know if he was more surprised than I was. He was like, we won. And I was like, holy shit, that's the best thing I've ever heard.

And so I decided that in there that if this was my superpower, then I was going to use it. for as long as I could, as often as I could. And so that led me to join the Board of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, which I read about in Rolling Stone magazine. I became the first board member there. And then soon after that, I saw something on TV about a case that the Innocence Project had won where they had gotten a guy who was scheduled to be executed. They had found the DNA, these two geniuses,

Barry Sheck and Peter Neufeld, with their law books and their microscopes. The founders of the Innocence Project. Correct, right. So I joined the Innocence Project Board, and ever since I've been obsessed with helping people get out of prison. And you just met one of them who came home 10 days ago. So it's just what I do. Luckily, I'm good at it. And you're referring to Avi, who is behind the glass of a podcast studio now, which is a fantastic revelation to meet him.

And so the question of when you were looking at... at, is this person going to be a star? Is this a prospect worth signing? And now your self-imposed responsibility is, I got to figure out which cases I can turn my attention to and platform in the way that I am, you're a record executive in a different way, still dealing with records, different kind of executive. Was there any skill in what you used to do and still do and what you're doing with wrongful conviction? Well, this is why your show is one of my favorite shows to listen to, because you're only the second person that's ever drawn that connection.

And it was Jeff Kempler, my partner and great friend of over 30 years, who's the CEO of Lava Media, my company. So he runs the podcast, the Wrongful Conviction, and the whole Lava for Good podcast platform. And he said that it's a similar instinct that allows you to identify not just cases, but also causes. And I'm very proud that I've been able to identify future leaders in the criminal justice reform space who I've been able to provide some seed funding for or other assistance who've gone on to help move the needle dramatically in the fight to end the disastrous, failed social

policy and wildly expensive social policy known as mass incarceration. So, of course, my wife, Kalia, who, you know, is the daughter of Muhammad Ali, who's on your t-shirt today, which is so great. I didn't plan. My Thrillo Manila shirt has been featured many times on this show, never with one of his in-laws, as we are here today. Yeah, so she works with me on this stuff day in and day out. You know, the day after our wedding, we went to Texas to try to help prevent the execution of Robert Roe. In our first anniversary, we were on death row in Texas visiting a guy who's innocent has been in for 30 years, and we're hoping we're going to be able to help him come home.

Another horrible case. So, yeah, it's just a big part of our life, and we wouldn't have it any other way. And I'm just so lucky that she is her father's daughter in every conceivable way. She has her father's spirit, and she has his courage. And she walks into these places, and it's almost like the C's part. of course she's also super helpful because, you know, she can, well, it's got to the point, Pablo, it's so funny where, you know, when my phone rings, it's most of the time it's somebody calling me from prison or someone who's recently been freed. Many of the people who were advocating for

where if they call my phone and I don't pick up, they just call her phone or vice versa, right? But with the question of you could have a life that does not require you to go into these places and take these calls. And many people work their entire. lives to specifically avoid the very thing that you're running towards. And having now been a person who met you in a way that only reflects my ignorance, because I was like, oh, wait a minute, you're the wrongful conviction guy. Oh, wait a minute. And you're wearing, of course, your own merch and I'm like slow on the uptake at this fancy Apple podcast, like party, event, cocktail, past hors d'oeuvre sort of a thing. And I'm like, my show, we just started looking in

to the thing that it turns out you've done 560 plus f***in episodes about with the story of Charles Don Flores. The Charles Don Flores case. It's so crazy that in our crazy life where we're immersed in this stuff day in and day out and each time I think I've heard it all, right? And I'm always like, that's it. I can't. I mean, this is two nuts, right? But now I've heard everything. And then, of course, the next one

And of course, Kalia, we're together almost all the time. We travel together, we do everything together, we go to prisons together, we go to wherever we go. And during our recent snowstorm, we were having, I was watching the video on my laptop, on the couch, on the opposite side of the room from where she was, and I didn't even think she was paying attention. And 15 minutes in, because she was working on whatever she was working on, 15 minutes in, Kalia goes, this guy's got to be at the top of our priority list. Like, this is insane.

And so I hope everybody has that same reaction. I hope everybody watches that episode that you did. And here's our voices today and wants to get involved. Because this case, this man, it's all just, it's beyond. What jumped out to you about his case? Again, you've seen it all. What stuck out to you about him? So this is a really easy story to tell.

His presence is, I mean, he's an ethereal guy, right? I mean, he can talk football with the best of him. He is our Dallas Cowboys correspondent. He's dialed in on NFL stuff, way more so than I could ever be. But that's beside the point. He has this aura, right? I started hearing a bunch about meditation. reading about meditation. I was hearing about meditation on the radio. Everywhere I turned, it seemed

like meditation was coming at me. And I was like, I want to learn how to meditate. And I did. And with the help of friends and people sending me books and that kind of thing, that was the key. That was the key of putting space between the awareness that is me and my ego, which is pride, which is anger, which is all of those things, right? And the more you meditate, the more the space is in between that, right? And that was what gave me the handle on controlling. That makes sense? It's frankly the only thing that explains how you could be a Cowboys fan this long.

It's like a grace, you know, and again, I'm not a religious guy, but he is, and he doesn't come across that way either. has this spirit that is unbroken, not only unbroken, but it's indomitable, it's whatever you want to call it. He is transcending his circumstances. So much so that even though you're watching him in this, and I've been to death row in Texas four times.

Right, the Polensky Unit in Livingston. I've been in that room that you were in, right, with the vending machines and the whole thing. Yeah. It's shocking how many innocent people are on death row in Texas or all over the country or in a state where they have the death penalty still. But Charles, it's not unique because there are others that have this almost unreal ability to transcend their circumstances and their surroundings. But then when you get into the circumstances of his case and you go, what?

Like, and so what I mean by that, for people who haven't heard your episode already, I will summarize it very succinctly. So in the late 90s, the woman named Betty Black, 64-year-old woman who lived outside of Dallas, had her home broken into, and she was killed during this, I guess it was a botched robbery. Two guys drove away. One witness saw the two guys.

And she described them as white guys with long, Jesus-y type of hair or whatever, right? Tall white guys, long dark hair. Right. Charles is not a tall white guy with long dark hair. never was. Not even close. Not even close.

Charles Don Flores. Look him up. Look him up. He's always been more of a lineman than a wide receiver. Yeah. So they knew who the shooter was. He pled guilty to being the shooter. And there was no evidence connecting Charles to the crime.

And he had alibis. So all of this presents for a very difficult case to make against him. If the thing that you're wondering is, should this guy be killed by the same? state. He didn't kill the woman, no physical evidence at the scene, and doesn't match the description from the eyewitness. So far, it would seem logical to say probably shouldn't fucking kill this guy. Shouldn't convict him, shouldn't sentence him, and shouldn't kill him. All of it. Right. So here you have the actual killer, who I understand his father is a cop.

Is that correct? Yes, there is a depth to this story, yes, that we don't even have, we'd have time to even get into, but there is much more. Yeah, which makes it very similar to the Rob Will case, by the way, which is another innocent guy on death row in Texas, right down the hall from Charles. But so, so the state decided that they would allow Richard to take a plea, but they still had this problem of how the hell they were going to convict Charles with no evidence whatsoever. Well, they solved that problem by... hypnotizing the witness.

And you were familiar with forensic hypnosis before this whole thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen that before. In fact, one of the earliest episodes we ever did was a guy named Keith Allen Harwood, Newport News case, Virginia. And he ended up doing 34 years, narrowly avoided the death penalty. And it was the same thing. They hypnotized the witness.

But in this case, they use this forensic hypnosis technique. And there's a video, which we play in the episode. You can see these cops in Texas, like, do the, basically the you're getting sleepy. Like, it's not that far off from that. Have you ever seen a documentary film, like, on TV, like the, with the Animal Kingdom show? What we're going to do is, is when we get you into a deep data hypnosis, we're going to pick you into a theater. It's going to be your own private theater. and basically what it is, you're going to be seeing in a documentary.

You're going to be seeing the film of the events that occurred on that morning. Go ahead. And you're like, this is scientifically and legally allowed, or was? And that's another thing. So using this dubious is too kind of a word, but using this junkiest of junk science. And we did a whole season of wrongful conviction, where we call it wrongful conviction junk science,

where each week we delved into a different one of the junk sciences. Which ones you ask? Well, we did everything from arson to blood spatter to boot print analysis to forensic odontology, which is teeth marks, hair analysis. They're pure junk. But they're none more junky than the forensic hypnosis, which of course is just, it would be funny if it wasn't so sick and so devastating into consequences where it's so devastating in this case.

So they hypnotize this woman. You can watch it yourself a week after she had initially not identified Charles. And they managed to induce her, I would say, into identifying a guy who wasn't there. And sure enough, using that technique, they were able to secure his conviction. Well, fast forward to he's on death row. He brings a suit.

The Texas courts, they said, this can no longer be an acceptance. practice forensic hypnosis in Texas criminal cases. The crazy thing is, and this is not the only time I've seen this, not by a stretch, they refused to make this change retroactive. That part. That part. Like the Dallas Morning News, they do a long investigative series about forensic

hypnosis. They mention Charles Flores. This is part of the impetus to effectively shame the state of Texas into changing what is on the books, which is to say they officially rule that you can't use forensic police hypnosis in a criminal trial. You can't do it anymore, but it does not apply if it's already happened. And that is so illogical to me. It happens a lot in our criminal legal system. It's really weird how you can say that if you,

you did the same thing that we're now saying, like, for instance, with sentencing, you see this time to time, well, we'll reform sentencing laws, but we won't make them retroactive. It's like the old saying, how'd you like to be the last guy to die in an unjust war? How'd you like to be the last guy sentenced under the old sentencing laws? For instance, the old crack cocaine sentencing laws. And I was, you know, I was a big advocate for reforming those. Back when they used to be 100 to one, in 2010, they were rolled back to make them 18 to 1, but they weren't made retroactive. The Republicans wouldn't allow it to be made retroactive. So, So those guys who are unlucky enough to be convicted under the old laws were just left there to languish,

while some other guy would come into the same prison with a new conviction for the same crime that they committed, but be sentenced to 82% less time because they changed it from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1, the crack cocaine disparity. Again, that was the best deal that could be made with the Republicans at that time who didn't want that law changed. There's no way to make sense out of it. Both things can't be true, that it was okay before but not okay now or the other way around whatever it is. And as these changes are made in practices like this very welcome change to the forensic hypnosis practice in Texas, they absolutely should be done retroactively. It should be an automatic cause for relief or a new trial or something. A new trial, right? And so all Charles has been

fighting for is, can you hear my story? With regards to my case, man, I just, want a fair review. I just want a fair shot. The Dallas County Prosecution Office, the Dallas DA, they have a conviction's integrity unit. And I want them to look at my case. I want them to review the case. Give it a look. Let the evidence speak for itself. Can we go back into court and we can now, with light of day, after more than a quarter century of, again, almost entire, solitary confinement, can we allow me to get a new hearing? And let us not forget that the actual killer was paroled in 2016, right? He's been out for 10 years.

Yeah, while Charles has been sitting in a tiny cell, a dungeon, effectively, on Texas death row, where sometimes for a year or more they don't even see sunlight, not even allowed outside, you can't help but wonder how he maintains, how he maintains, how he, He hasn't lost his mind and the noise and the this and the terrible food and the, you know, just like the loneliness, the total lack of any type of appropriate human contact, right? You can't even visits from family you are done through bulletproof class if you're lucky enough to have any family that visits you, right? Right, right. And the resentment, which I would imagine is a necessary condition of all of this.

Just like Richard Childs is out, the guy who killed this woman and I'm in here because also, by the way, Another wrinkle on the legal system in Texas is that there is the law of parties, which means that if you were there allegedly, if you were there and were convicted to have been there, an accessory to this crime, you are treated sentenced as if you yourself committed capital murder. It's shocking to a lot of people, and it should be shocking to everyone.

The idea that the state can say, we know you didn't kill anybody, but we're going to execute you anyway. What would people be surprised? most by if they hadn't spent more than the time they've taken to listen to this episode about just how this system works. The fact is that 97% of felony convictions in this country around 97% are a result of guilty, please. The reason why so many people keep guilty, even if they're innocent,

is because they're smart enough to recognize that the odds are stacked against you. And when I say that, first of all, everybody watches these shows like Law and Order, and they get this impression that everything works fine. The authorities are doing their level best. They're going to get all the bad guys off the street. The bad guys are really bad. The good guys are really good. The scientists are great. The witnesses are great and courageous and brave.

And everything's perfect, more or less, right? Sometimes the cops are very horny, but we allow that because they're solving mysteries just like Sherlock Holmes. So unfortunately, that is a very, very far stretch from the truth. Then you add to that the fact that the overwhelming majority of the public are assigned public defenders. And they relatively quickly come to find out that that person doesn't have time to visit them in jail where they're most likely being held before trial because they're too poor to post bail, which is unconstitutional. Well, that's a separate story.

because judges have to, by virtue of the Constitution, they have to post bail according to your ability to pay it, but that's almost never adhered to. So there you are sitting in jail for a year, two years, more, and jails in many places, including New York, are worse than prisons. They're more chaotic. There's no recreation.

There might not be a law library, a toxic mixture of the most violent people, with the innocent people, with people who couldn't pay parking tickets, to you name it and everything in between. And so there's no sort of order at all. And most people will do anything to get out of that environment. And you've got to figure a lot of the people in jails,

a higher percentage of people in jails are innocent than people in prisons. But so now your lawyer maybe shows up to busy you. Maybe never does. It's a big schlep for them to go to the jail, go through the processing. It's a whole day. Right, basically. They make it difficult on purpose. Yeah.

So if you do get to visit your lawyer, you may quickly come to realize that even they may be doing their level best, but they're juggling a hundred or more cases. And that's not hyperbole. They're also juggling, figuring out how to pay rent. You know, in New York City, legal aid has many attorneys who drive Uber at night or DoorDash or they do whatever they do to make ends meet. they can't make ends meet on the salary that they're being paid. They're overworked. They're underpaid. They're exhausted. They're juggling a lot of cases. And they may tell you that your best chance is to plead guilty. You're going to be also looking at a situation where the state, Avi was just telling me this morning about a guy that he was in prison with in New Jersey,

who I think is still there who was offered three years and is serving 45. Messiah Johnson, who I spoke to this morning from Virginia, he was offered three years and got sentenced to 132 years in prison for a beauty salon robbery on 35th Street in Norfolk. No one was killed or hurt, and there was no physical evidence connecting Johnson to the crime, and there was also conflicting testimony at trial. Before leaving office in January, Governor Terry McCall have said there is credible evidence that support Mr. Johnson's claims of being innocent. A lot of people will say, you know what, I don't have a snowballs chance in hell against the state and its infinite resources.

Witnesses that may be incentivized to lie, cops, prosecutors who may be playing fast and loose, and that's probably a polite way of putting it out. And so they take the plea. So I think people really need to understand that if, you know, first of all, this could happen to you. It could happen to anyone. It normally happens to people who are poor, people of color, people who are disenfranchised, but it does happen to others as well. And it can happen to anyone.

Wrong place, wrong time. Big problems. Most important thing to know, and I'm so glad we've got a chance to tell your audience this, is if you do get picked up and you're suspected of a crime, just say your name, your address,

and they say the following words, I want a lawyer, and then shut the fuck up. Because nothing you can say, it doesn't matter if you're innocent. And most people, ironically, most innocent people waive their Miranda rights because they think,

why would I need my Miranda rights? I'm innocent. I'll tell the truth and just like on TV, I'll go home. Well, you know what? That's your first mistake. And it may be your last mistake. Because once they start talking to you, they have all sorts of ways of getting you to say stuff that you would never imagine that you would have gone and said because you didn't know. Because you're up against forces that you cannot control. And they may not be smarter than you, but they certainly are more experienced than you are. And they want one thing, which is to solve this case. The thing you keep on discovering over 550 plus episodes, right, is that it seems there are these incentives to convict. There are incentives to find guilty people. And there is no countervailing structural protection against what is the gravity of the state.

That's very well said. And I talk about that a lot how it is that we have reverse and even perverse incentives for people to close the case. You know, an attorney who's been practicing over 40 years, a defense attorney in California told me that he'll often at the end of his closing argument, he'll say to the jury, when the prosecutor goes back to his office, no one's going to ask. them, did you get justice? They're going to say, did you win? And we're in the culture in this world of winning. And when you think about it, they're getting pressure from their boss, who might be bringing pressure from their boss,

who's going, Pablo, clean this shit up. It's getting hot, right? I don't, I got a reelection coming, whatever it is. Do this. And this is very common. for police, prosecutors, whoever. At the end of the day, most cases don't get solved, right? When you get up to murder, it's still 50% of cases that are solved nationally.

And then even of the cases that they do solve, many of them are solved wrong. And when you solve the case wrong, and someone ends up on my podcast as a result, who's innocent, I think something that people don't think about, maybe it's uncomfortable to think about it, but when there's a violent crime, murder or otherwise, in which there's an actual victim, and you go and railroad an innocent person, you are working in service of the guilty person.

Whoever the second perpetrator was in the Charles Don Flores case was probably at the club popping bottles when he got convicted. because they know they're done. They're no longer, they're not looking for anybody else. They got their conviction. I'm straight. Now, who else are we going to go rob tonight, you know? Whatever your view is on prosecutors and public defenders and I have friends who became

prosecutors and friends who became public defenders and I like to think that everybody's in service of justice, of the truth, right? That's the best version of a system. There is a balancing act between a defense and a prosecution. And in that pursuit, we get to the closest thing we can get as flawed meat sex towards accountability for those who did wrong. The problem is that if you don't understand how unfair that fight is when it comes to people without resources especially, you are not doing something resembling, truth seeking, you are servicing money. And that is where I'm like, Charles Flores is a guy without resources, clearly. And the question becomes, how do you begin to give him what the state will not grant him as we sit here today, which is a hearing, both a consideration in general for the human suffering they've already enacted upon him, but also

something resembling the pursuit of justice and because of how we have outlined this whole story at the end of that, freedom. Like, you have answered this in 550 plus episodes. You're going to tell stories and interview people. I don't know how else to help beyond telling people that you should take some time to listen to this man's voice and listen to the story that the state of Texas does not really give a shit about that you need to hear. Well, look, the one thing that we've learned is that Lorenzo Johnson,

who was a dear friend of Kaliaz and mine, who was wrongfully convicted twice in Pennsylvania and served 22 years of a life sentence. And when he was in prison, he decided he was going to get as much, attention brought to his cases he could. He was going to get the newspapers writing about he was going to get TV. He was going to get whatever. And his lawyer's like, no, no, no, that's going to piss everybody off. Don't do that. And he was like, I'm doing it. Like, because I'm stuck here. I'm doing it.

And you know what? He got himself out. I mean, there were many people who helped him, but he got himself out. And he always says one thing they don't like is tomorrow's headlines. And so what we've learned is that when you're able to bring attention to these cases, oftentimes stuff starts to change. When they're allowed to exist in darkness, nothing seems to change. And of course, there's exceptions. But others who have created media around these cases have brought pressure to the bear that oftentimes causes the authorities to act or at least look into stuff, which can then start a domino effect. Or it leads to another outlet. publishing a thing or a newspaper. And so the reason I say this is you who are listening now are not

powerless. You may know of somebody who is wrongfully convicted, oversentenced, unfairly tried, etc. And by speaking up about it on social media, talking about it in any forum that you can get, talking about it in the diner anywhere, you never know who's listening. And stuff starts to change and it's amazing when it does you know you may know somebody who knows somebody maybe you can get a meeting with your local congressperson or you can who knows maybe you have a distant relation who knows the governor of whatever state you're in and you know you got to try i mean my story is a series of these type of miracles i didn't know what the fuck i was doing but i got stephen Lenin out and he's never gone back to prison and he's had a great life, raised a family, paid a lot of

taxes, built a business, you know, like he didn't need to be in prison. We need to take a different approach. We incarcerate people in America at a rate that is five times the rate of Western Europe or the rest of the Western world, 14 times the rate of Japan. What we do know is that what works locally is that if you devote a tiny fraction of the resources that we spend on these awful practices over surveilling people, brutalizing them, if you take a tiny fraction of that money and build a community center, or much less than that, you just pick the garbage up off the streets in the area where the violence is most concentrated. Every city has an area of probably two or three blocks where it's most concentrated square blocks.

if you fix the streetlights, if you put a taco stand, a little green space, it's amazing. Crime falls. We've known this for a long, long time. And my whole theory on it, Pablo, is it's very freaking simple. What causes crime is desperation. Prove me wrong, okay, desperation. And people say, oh, what about mental illness? That's desperation.

Untreated mental illness causes desperation. Extreme poverty. But, okay, what prevents crime is a much smaller word hope. If you are going to wield the power of execution, as our government does, as certain states still do in this country, you would imagine that they would wield it so carefully. And yet, when I listen to Charles Flores and when I go and read more about this, and these are just cases that are not even in dispute anymore, right? We're in the middle of the fight with Charles, but on the other side of it, there are so many cases. The Innocence Project has established how often it happens. The state doing it with our money to people who are innocent.

It's, it's, and I just don't think people understand how broken, let alone perverse, that concept actually is. Wasn't it Scalia who issued the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court that actual innocence is not about? valid reason for a new trial and that executions can proceed. And by the way, no other Western country has had the death penalty in generations, none. It's one of those deeply American things that we consider, oh, because it's in movies, we're used to it, but it's not normal. We kill people to show that killing people is wrong. Make it make sense.

At least one in 10 people that have been executed in this country have been innocent. Which is wild. It's just unbelievable. The great buying Stevenson says if one out of every 10 planes that took off crash, nobody would fly. But we don't even do any forensic analysis of these things. We don't even like when there's a plane crash, you don't have a whole slew of people that come in with all sorts of fancy titles and degrees. And they analyze every single thing and they figure out what went wrong. No, none of that happens here.

And we know that states that have the death penalty have always had higher murder rates than states that don't. So clearly the death penalty is not a deterrent. So I want to just get to the end here by returning to Charles, right? Because Charles is now for us here at Pablo Torre finds out in our audience the human face on a larger issue, clearly. But insofar as we can do anything, we would like to help him because time is running short. And so one of the things that I'm so glad to tell our audience is that you're also trying to get down. there to see him. We're planning on doing an episode of wrongful conviction as quickly as we can of the podcast, probably hosted

by Maggie Freeling, who's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist based in Texas, and just an amazing, amazing investigative journalist. So most likely she'll be the one going in to visit Charles. But we're working on it now, and I'm going to do everything I can to bring as much attention to this case as we possibly can, because he deserves it and his case cries out for it. Whenever I listen from now on, to not just wrongful conviction, but to Tori Amos and Matchbox 20 and Skid Row and Stone Temple Pilots and Twisted Sister and Katie Perry and Lord and, you know, the warning.

And also still somehow Kid Rock, I'm also going to think about Charles Flores. And it's an honor, really, to spend time with you and to make sure that both of us are making sure that people hear his story. Every one of my records gone number one or been big hats, whatever they've all given me, you know, great deal of satisfaction, happiness. You know, it's a great ego boost. When you're a kid and you have a record before your friends do

and you play it and then it becomes popular and it gives you social currency, I get to do the grown-up version of that. It could be a lot of happiness. But none of those number one records compares to walking one person out of prison. And that's the difference between happiness and joy. So, you know, go find your happiness, do whatever you do.

My dad told me and my brother do whatever. you do whatever you want to do, try to be the best out of it, but just make the world a better place. And ultimately, hopefully, if you're lucky, like I was lucky, to find a cause that really touched my heart, then you can ultimately find the same joy. And it makes me feel good to have Avi come over for breakfast and know that he's not, you know, calling me and, you know, from a freezing cell or, you know, horrible circumstances. And he's now going to be out here making a difference in the world. It's why we're here, man. And so thank you for having me. I appreciate it. It's been a long time coming. Let's do it again soon.

And just one quick post script. Because the day after our last episode with Charles published, Charles Flores' legal team did, in fact, file their Hail Mary cert petition at the U.S. Supreme Court. And we will monitor that as it makes its way through the highest court in the land. But there is also a different kind of petition that we still hope you can, personally sign. It's at actionnetwork.org slash petitions slash Charles

and we'll put that link in the show notes too. This has been Pablo Torre finds out. Produced by Metal Arc Media and we'll talk to you next time.