Stuff You Should Know - How the Innocence Project Works

Episode Date: June 15, 2010

The Innocence Project is an American non-profit organization whose mission is to exonerate wrongly convicted individuals and reform the legal system. Josh, Chuck and a special "guest" explain how the organization works -- and why it's necessary. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode is sponsored by Teamistry, an original podcast from Atlassian, makers of collaboration software like Jira, Trello, and Confluence. Teamistry is an award-winning podcast whose new season, Making an Impossible Airplane, the untold story of the Concorde, is about the supersonic passenger jet that could fly so fast you could make it from New York to Paris in half the time it takes today. In six parts, Teamistry does a deep dive into this phenomenal airplane that was an engineering marvel. Search for Teamistry in your podcast player to hear Making an Impossible Airplane, the untold story of the Concorde, and thanks to Teamistry for their support.

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and money and have your meetings online with affordable and easy to use GoToMeeting. Use GoToMeeting for sales presentations, product demos, training sessions, collaborating on documents, and more. And at $49 per month for unlimited meetings, it saves time, money, and travel. Try GoToMeeting free for 30 days. Visit GoToMeeting.com slash Stuff. That's GoToMeeting.com slash Stuff. It's been suggested she should get her own Facebook fan page. And she's taken to smacking me on the bottom whenever I walk past her. And she tells me to go get her some coffee or something. Chief. Yeah. She calls you chief. Or guy. Yeah, so it's weird. Jerry's kind of blown up. Yes, it was hard to fit in this room with her head in here at the same time. No, it's a little warm in

here, isn't it? Yeah, it's hot. So Chuck. Josh. You and I had a rare opportunity recently, a perk I guess you could say of working for Mother Discovery. Sure. We spoke to Ms. Paula Zahn. Yes, legendary broadcaster, journalist, newswoman, newsperson. Yeah. And we were approached by our marketing people who said, hey, you guys want to talk to Paula Zahn? We said, of course we want to talk to Paula Zahn. Wouldn't you want to talk to Paula Zahn? They're like, you don't need to get all defensive. And we're like, well, would you? And it just kind of went on like that for a little while. Right. And then finally, we ended up on the phone with Paula Zahn and just started talking to her. She's got a show on Investigation Discovery ID for those of us who work for Discovery.

Sure. And it's called On The Case with Paula Zahn. It's on every Sunday at 10 p.m., shill, shill, shill. And we started talking to her about true crime, right? Yeah, it's pretty cool. I mean, we get interview setups like this sometimes that we're kind of like, I don't know about that, but I'm way into courtroom drama and crime and really a good hour-long show like that. So I was way down with it. Right. And she started talking about like, if you've gotten the impression that we weren't really certain what we were going to do with the interview, you were right. But she started talking about this one case that she did an episode on that the Innocence Project factored into. Yeah. And that kind of rang a bell, but we started looking into it. And

we remembered that last October, there was a big kerfuffle about the Innocence Project out of Northwestern University's Medill Journalism School. And I think the Cook County chief prosecutor, maybe? The state's attorney. Oh, okay. Yeah. Even stronger. More potent. Wanted to subpoena all of the notes and the grades of all the students on this case. Right. And it was just a big stinky deal. Yeah, because the deal was, is these were journalism students as opposed to law students. Right. So it's a bit of a fine line there between, you know, journalists aren't supposed to give up their sources telling these journalists, they have to, student journalists, they have to turn over all their information.

And so it's kind of a big deal as to where this thing ends up. Right. And as far as I know, it's kind of cold, right? Yeah, I think so. But it was enough to spur our interest in looking up the Innocence Project a little more and we realized, ding, ding, ding, this is it. This is what we're going to do it on. Yeah. This is just a cool program. Yeah. I'd heard of it before. Basically, the Innocence Project, if you haven't heard of it, is they are those, when you hear about a murder case where someone's been in prison for 20 years for a murder case or rape case or didn't really matter what kind of case it is. As long as there is DNA evidence that they can dig back up and retest with modern methods, they can exonerate

some, you know, an innocent person. Some mugs. Yeah, some mugs who've been in jail for a long, long time. And these are the people that you see on the news that's like, I was in jail for 28 years and now I'm a free man. And thanks to the Innocence Project. Right. The group themselves were, it was founded by a couple of guys named Barry C. Shek and Peter J. Newfield. Yeah. Shek was, he was on the OJ team for a while, wasn't he? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they founded this project in 1992 as part of the Benjamin Cardoza School of Law Yeshiva University, right? And basically, what they do is poor people, and by poor, I mean both senses of the word, literally and figuratively, who have been incarcerated wrongly, get really top notch quality legal aid for free

from law students, mostly law students, but then in the case of Northwestern University, it can also be journalism students who start pounding the pavement, interviewing old leads, coming up with new ones, trying to find the person who actually did the crime. Yeah. It's based in DNA evidence, but the students actually do a lot more investigating as if it was just an open case. Yeah. It's not only DNA. It's pretty cool. Out of the DNA exoneration cases, there's been 254 since the first one in 1989, but out of those 254, in 100, 111 of those cases, the actual perpetrator has been found from the DNA investigation. Yeah. And that's something that Sheck likes to point out,

obviously. He's hanging his hat on that. Right. So you say, well, why do you need a group of do-gooders? Could we do law school kids to go do this? The reason why you have to do is because you virtually need a law degree or to be well on your way to earning a law degree, to navigate the kind of legal waters it takes to file an innocence appeal, a post-conviction appeal saying, I'm actually innocent and I need you to go conduct some DNA tests that weren't conducted before. Right. Because my court appointed attorney was lazy or because there wasn't DNA testing before. Or because a lot of the original evidence was destroyed, which we'll get to, which happens way more than I was comfortable with. Yeah. That I think is the key takeaway

for me from researching the Innocence Project is that our legal system is fundamentally flawed. Yeah. In a lot of ways. Yeah. In more than one way, you're absolutely right. As anybody who saw the Tom Selleck movie, An Innocent Man, knows cops aren't always on the up and up. Yeah. A lot of times you'll get it. I mean, a lot of these cases that we reviewed and we're not knocking cops, believe me, are detectives. But there's often a lot of pressure on these high-profile cases to find somebody. And if there's some material evidence there or some eyewitnesses that may or not be too credible, sometimes there's a little coercion. Sometimes there's a snitch. And all of a sudden you have somebody that's going to prison for something they didn't do.

Right. There was this really big landmark deluge case out of the LAPD, I think in 2000, where one of the guys on this elite crash unit was busted with six pounds of stolen cocaine that he was dealing. One of the cops? Yeah. Okay. And he started dropping bombshells like nobody's business. He and other people on the force have been shooting innocent people and framing them with guns, stealing drugs, dealing drugs, stealing money, framing people. And as a result, between 100 and 150 convicted felons were released. They had their convictions overturned because they'd been framed. So it definitely happens. Yeah. It's not just in Los Angeles. And it's not just in Denzel Washington movies. Right. You kind of get the idea that there's a systemic kind of

informal procedure for railroading somebody that you are pretty sure is guilty. But you don't really have a slam dunk case. So well, that's the case with the Florida one, which we'll get to. Yeah. Remember how like they found out that several people had been convicted in the same manner right after this guy? Yeah, which is kind of chilling like because you're seeing how the investigators and the prosecutors down in Brevard County, right, functioned in like the early 80s. Right. You know. So Chuck, let's talk about how people end up wrongfully convicted. Right. Yes, there are many ways that this can happen. But here are a few. Eyewitness misidentification is a huge one. Yeah. It was a factor. They've got some stats here, which is awesome. It's this

kind of testimony has been a factor in 75% of post conviction DNA exoneration. So when they have let someone free with the innocence project or, you know, maybe not with the innocence project, 75% of the time there's been misidentification. And one of the big problems is involving race cross cross racial identification is usually the culprit. And they found in studies that people are less able to recognize faces of a different race than their own. Right. It's actually it's not. It doesn't even have other studies have shown that it's not linked to racial bias. It has nothing to do with racism. It's we our brains aren't wired right to recognize people of other races easily. Right. So it's called the other

race effect. Right. And it's it's it is it can be very problematic in court cases. So yeah, I can I can imagine that 75% is what you said. Yeah, that's that's a lot that makes it the number one factor right for for wrongful convictions. Yeah. The second one, Josh is invalidated or improper forensic science. And that comes in second at 50%. It played a role in 50% of the cases. And that's basically sloppy work to a large degree. Well, not just that. I was surprised that most of the stuff you see on CSI hasn't been scientifically vetted fully according to the Innocence Project. Right. You've got things like serology, which is like blood typing or semen sampling that kind of stuff. Right. Fluid sticky gross stuff. Right. Sure. That is vetted.

That is hard science. But they're saying like firearm tool marks. Right. Right. Shoe print comparisons. Uh huh. What else? Hair microscopy. Bite marks. Yeah. So all this stuff is basically based on good guesses rather than a hard science, which is one reason why the Innocence Project and others rely so heavily on DNA. It's cutting edges as it gets. It's the best we have right now. And it's gotten way, way better since it even started using DNA samples. So number three, buddy, is false confessions and incriminating statements. And about 25% of the time that's been a factor. And then 35% of the false confessions, the defendant was 18 years or younger and or developmentally disabled. Yeah. There's a kind of a there's a famous case of a woman named Victoria

Banks who was in prison for two years in Alabama. I think I've heard of her. Yeah. She was a mentally handicapped woman who confessed to killing her newborn child. Yeah. Thing was no one had ever seen this child or seen her pregnant. And she actually underwent a physical exam and they found that she had her tubes tied at the time that she supposedly was pregnant. She never had a kid. Yeah. Ergo, she never could have killed her kid. Right. And yet she was still in prison for two years before she was exonerated and released. Two years isn't that's pretty good for, you know, and you don't want to lose two years. But I think what was the average 13. Yeah. The average amount of time someone has been in prison and then released by the Innocence Project is 13 years.

Right. And I was also that's something that I've always kind of wondered about, but never got around to looking into why somebody would make a false confession. I understand being mentally handicapped or being under aging, either being badgered or misled by overzealous cops or basically like, look, just admit to it and things are going to go a lot more easily for you, you know. Yeah. Yeah. But there's another factor that's involved. If you're an indigent or poor defendant and you don't have money to make bail, remember we did our bail podcast, right? If you don't have money to make bail, you're sitting in jail until your court date. And if your court date is six months from now, right? Right. And they come to you at the plea deal and say, hey, we'll let you out

in three months if you cop to doing this crime. Right. Which one are you going to do? Right. Or cop to a lesser crime, maybe. Sure. That you still didn't commit. Right. So what are you going to do? Sit in jail for three months or six months? Right. Well, you're probably going to go for the three month thing. So that's a wrongful conviction right there too, based on false testimony or false confession. Well, and if you're poor and indigent, you might not know all of your options. You might not be the most educated person in the world. And, you know, you're between a rock and a hard place many times. Right. So number four, Joshua, snitches, snitches, snitches, 19, 19% of the cases involve dirty rotten snitches. And I say that because

most times or many times these snitches are flat out lying and they're trying to get themselves out of trouble in some way. Right. As was the case. And finally, we've arrived in Brevard County, 1981, Chuck. This case is, yeah, there's a guy named William Dillon. And he was, I think, like 18, 17, something like that down in Brevard County, Florida. He lived down there. He was a bit of a pothead and he already had a drug beef against him, but nothing heavier than that. Right. No, I don't think so. Some guy named James Dvorak winds up dead. He's found beaten to death on the beach at Canova Beach, Florida. Right. And the cops are trying to figure out who did it. Well, Bill Dillon happens to be sitting in his brother's car hanging out smoking a joint with his brother

when the cops come up and ask him what he's doing there. Right. And then they get a little suspicious when he knows a little too much about this case, even though the case has been all over the news for five days. And for some reason, the cops and the prosecutors liked William Dillon for this murder. So they started basically investigating him to make their case around his guilt. Yeah. Right. And one of the things that they used was a prison snitch who said that on the night Dillon was booked for this murder, he was in the holding cell and Dillon said, I totally did this and here's how I did it. Right. And no one else witnessed this confession. It was just that one guy. Right. And coincidentally or not, after this trial, Dillon's trial, the rape charges against

the snitch were dropped by prosecutors. Right. 27 years later, I think, the same snitch came into the courtroom for Dillon's exoneration trial, her hearing. Oh, really? And he said, I made this up or I didn't make it up. I was told to read this by a cop, by an investigator who gave me this story and I went ahead and did it and I'm very, very sorry. Right. Right. But Chuck, well, here's Paula Zahn talking about it. Right. She covered the case there. Here she is. It gets even more outrageous than that because another woman who testified against Bill Dillon, who was his girlfriend, ended up admitting that she had had an appropriate relationship with the lead investigator on the case and made it clear that she testified against Bill Dillon

because she thought that a potential federal drug charge she was facing was going to get dropped. So in exchange for having this relationship with the lead investigator, her charge would go away. And then, you know, when some total of four or five witnesses testified and then recanted their testimony a number of times as this woman did. So here's this poor guy, you know, basically convicted on lies. Lies indeed, Josh. And you want to hear some more? Yeah. The night of the murder, there was a guy driving down the road in Brevard County, Brevard County. And he told investigators that he picked up a hitchhiker and the hitchhiker was wearing a bloody yellow t-shirt that had the word surf it on it. He later told investigators

that the guy was sweaty and had blood on his shirt and blood smeared on his leg and shorts. He agreed anyway to drive the hitchhiker to a tavern, a bar, just three miles away. And this is what's the most startling part to me, believe it or not. In that three mile journey, the two men had, there was an oral sex act committed between the two of them, between the guy who just picked up the stranger and the stranger who was covered in sweat and blood. Yeah. What undermines my guy's credibility is the fact that he was blind in one eye. Yeah. And he still picked William Dillon out and said, this is the guy, even though he described the guy at first as having a mustache, meaning six foot. Bill Dillon didn't have a mustache and he was six foot four. Yeah. And in fact,

it said, which is, I love this part too, it says he's physically unable to grow a mustache. Yeah, which is pretty much a slam dunk as far as that I witnessed testimony goes. Still, that guy coupled with the prison snitch who really kind of shut the case. And the girlfriend who slept with the lead investigator, there was one more big player in this. And he was a guy named John Preston. And he was a scent dog handler. Yeah. And he and his dog harassed too. Yeah. Who has nothing on her ass one? Right. They were on Bill Dillon, like white on rice. Yeah. I always pictured him when I was reading this as the dude from First Blood. Remember the old guy with the dogs? Go get him. Brian Dennehy? No, no, no. The guy that brought the dogs. Remember through the woods and he

brought the dogs to chase after Rambo? The Colonel? No, he was a civilian. He was an old codger that had some bloodhounds. John Rambo? Anyway, that's who it reminded me of. So he brings her ass to and they conduct a couple of tests, one of which, well, we should say real quick that while in the car after the sex act, the guy, I guess, took his shirt off, which, oh yeah, you know, and leaves the shirt in the guy's car that picked him up. The guy realizes the shirt's in there and just throws it in the trash. Police come the next day, pick up the shirt from the trash. Right, which is pivotal because we should probably just cut to the chase here. Bill Dylan's sentence, he's convicted, sentenced to 26 years, right? Yeah. Or more. He's served 26 years.

And he's sentenced to life. Was he? Okay. Yeah. So he serves 26 years. In that time, fingernail scrapings, other kind of biological samples are just completely destroyed, lost, thrown away. The only thing remaining from this case, which was in 1981 long before any DNA testing was going on, was that t-shirt. Thank God for Bill Dylan. Bill Dylan starts representing himself pro se. And he's trying to navigate the seas of post-conviction appeal. And he keeps getting turned down because he's not following legal formalities, that kind of stuff. Right. Finally, the Innocence Project heard about him because they had exonerated another guy who had been convicted based on a prison snitch, fake eyewitness testimony, and John Preston, the dog handler.

Yeah. Who turned out to be, as the Arizona Supreme State Supreme Court put it, a charlatan. Yeah. Well, can I say real quick what the test was that he did with the dog? Yeah. I can't believe they convicted a guy based on this. He got harassed too, and they made him sniff the t-shirt, and then they made him sniff some paper that Bill Dylan had held in his hand. And I guess harassed too reacted in such a way where John Preston said, that's your man. Right. Harass to smell the two things and link them. That was it. He was convicted on a dog's sniff. Which, again, we should say. Partially. Dog scent identification has never been proven scientifically. And later on, when the dude called him a charlatan, they did some testing, and the dog

failed, harassed too, failed all these tests. Right. Yeah. Because, you know, he's got nothing against the guy. Right. And like I said, he has nothing on harass one. So, Bill Dylan sprung, right, because of the Innocence Project, and because of this t-shirt. I don't want to steal Paula Zahn's thunder. Chuck, I assume you don't either, right? Oh, no. Let's let her take us home on Bill Dylan. The key piece of evidence that actually freed this man was DNA evidence. And miraculously, a t-shirt that had been worn the night of the murder by the alleged murderer was kept in a courtroom by some court reporter. This was long, you know, 25 years ago. They didn't do DNA testing, and she just happened to keep this piece of evidence. William Dylan's attorneys

were able to test it, and guess what? It wasn't his blood on the shirt. So, that was the key part of overturning this murder conviction. But, you know, once again, you saw his countenance as he goes across the country telling people the legal system worked. I'm a free man today. Well, it worked, but in his case, I would argue very slowly and cost him 25 years of adult living that he could have enjoyed. That's unbelievable. I can't imagine anything like that. So, Chuck, you like to think that, okay, Bill Dylan, who, by the way, now gives lectures on how the legal system actually works or else he wouldn't have ever been sprung. Yeah, that's hard to believe. He's not a bitter man. Paul is on, right? Yeah, that's what she said. You would like to think that this guy is,

you know, he represents a very rare case. The evidence is that that's not true, that there's actually a lot of people in jail who are actually innocent, right? Yeah, I've got a few stats just from what the Innocence Project has done thus far. There have been 254, you might have said this, post-conviction exonerations thanks to DNA in 34 states. 17 of those actually were on death row or had served time on death row. Yeah, one guy came with him five days of being executed actually. That's crazy. Yeah. Could you imagine? No. No. 22% of the cases closed by the Innocence Project were closed because of lost or missing evidence. So these people might be innocent too, but there's nothing they can do about it because the evidence was destroyed. Right. The Innocence Project's

DNA exonerations, it's not the only way you can be exonerated. No. Right? I read a study that was written in 2004 and it was about exonerations from, I think, 1989 to 2003. The author of this paper was saying that death row inmates in 2001 hit a peak in the US, representing one quarter of one percent of the entire prison population. Right. Right. But death row inmates represented 22% of the total exonerations for the 15 years prior from 1989 to 2004. Wow. Okay. So what this guy was saying was, okay, there's two ways of looking at it. Number one, that death row inmates, death row cases are actually more likely of being wrongly imprisoned because of the pressure to catch somebody for a horrible crime, that kind of thing. And he's saying that's probably correct to an

extent, but he's saying the other hand is probably correct as well in that there aren't necessarily more death row inmates who are wrongfully imprisoned than in the general prison population. If that's true, right, that 22% of the total population of exonerations, that's true then between 1989 and 2004, there should have been 28,500 non-death row exonerations rather than 255. Wow. Yeah. So potentially that many people are rotting in prison right now. Tens of thousands of people. Unbelievable. Yeah. Another thing too, dude, is the Innocence Project is part of the larger Innocence Movement altogether, which is 59 affiliated law schools and programs that work with us. And a guy in Texas, David Dow, is a law professor at the University of Houston. And he's

seen that in the last five years, there are actually, he says, way fewer death cases and prosecutors are asking for death less and less because of the work of the Innocence Project. That's correct. And juries know about some of these exonerations. So he thinks beyond the exonerations that people are starting to become a little more careful in what they're trying to prosecute here. And well they should. I mean, we're talking about people's lives, you know? Absolutely. Let alone, they're being incarcerated for a couple of decades. Yeah. How they decide is they get thousands of letters from inmates that are sitting in prison that, you know, say that they're innocent. And they say they range, the letters range from really formal and well written

to one that came in in 2000 that said simply, I am not the man who did this rape. All I want is to go home. He couldn't even like spell. And he did go home. Oh, good friend. Yep, his name was Ricky Johnson and Angola Prison in Louisiana. And he was freed thanks to the Innocence Project and DNA. Wow. So they have basically a bunch of volunteers, including a high school teacher, an ACLU veteran, a former journalist and a poet who plow through these letters that they get and determine, try and determine if they merit and they don't do it on whether or not their heartstrings are pulled. They do it on whether or not there's actual DNA evidence still out there that they can work with. Right. If not, they're kind of, you know, fighting

a larger battle. The problem is there's only only about half of all of the states have laws in place that that say you have to preserve evidence after a conviction, right? Right. In most cases, a conviction is made and the evidence gets thrown away or most of it does. And there's also even in states where you have to preserve evidence. Yeah. Either there's a statute of limitations where you basically are just like, okay, it's been five years and we can throw it out to make room for more evidence. Right. Or there's no kind of penalty or, I guess, punishment for somebody who does throw away or destroy evidence from a case. Yeah, they passed, didn't Congress pass something on that? Yeah, but it's called the Justice for All Act. Right. It's the most metallica

of all the act. Sure. Of course. It was passed in 2004 and basically it offers financial incentives to states that have programs where evidence is maintained and then they withhold money from states that don't have these programs. So it's a pretty flimsy carrot and stick when you're talking about something as important as wrongful incarceration, you know? I've always thought though the metallica thing about the Ride the Lightning Act was the most metallica. No? It's close. Okay. Yeah. So innocence project, huh? Yeah, I think I had one more interesting note here. Oh, that's right. Barry Sheck, he is what he really wants, the feather in his cap out of this. Eventually he wants to prove that a person has wrongly been put to death after

the fact clearly. Oh, I'm sure he'll eventually be able to do that. And he's not done that yet. He came close a couple of times, but it has not yet happened. Yeah. And Chuck, look for a podcast from us on capital punishment sometime. Are we going to get into that? Yeah, man. I know. So there's tons more on the innocence project. Like we're just just scratching the surface. They actually have a database of every single DNA exoneration case person. You can read about them. You can read about the work they're doing. It's just really interesting, valuable stuff, right? Yeah. You can also watch the Bill Dillon episode of On the Case with Paula Zahn on the investigation discovery website, right? Yeah, it's a good one. I went and checked it out. It's from season two.

It's called Killing in Canova Beach. If you go to investigation.discovery.com and search Canova Beach in their handy search bar, it'll bring it up and you can watch it. And it's pretty cool. Yeah. And thanks to Paula Zahn for classing this turkey up a little bit. Seriously. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by GoToMeeting, the affordable way to meet with clients and colleagues. For your free 30-day trial, visit GoToMeeting.com slash Stuff. So Chuck, listener man. Josh, I'm going to call this Brightening Days for our listeners and taking names. Excellent. This comes to us from Becca. And Becca is a Facebook regular. She's a cool lady.

Hi, Josh and Chuck and Jerry, of course, she says. You know those days when everything you touch thinks say goes utterly and spectacularly wrong? Yes. That was my day today. Here was Becca's day. She gives a short version. Here are the highlights. I woke up as awoken, awakened at 2 a.m. by the teenage son of the friends that I'm currently staying with to save on rent because I'm sleeping on a couch where his friends need to crash. I'm not sure I get that, but when is she sleeping on a couch? Interesting, since I had gone to bed in my own room, apparently I've started sleepwalking again because I woke up on the couch. Now you get it? Yeah. I managed to make about 472 stupid mistakes at work while also being slighted, ignored, and or flatout insulted through email

and Facebook throughout the day. Hopefully not our Facebook. No, no. Then I was off for my hour-long drive to work to go to a nursing home until 10 p.m. She works at a nursing home so she can get her nursing assistance license. Wow. After five hours of being pooped on there figuratively and literally, I was finally the last student to finish my rounds as everyone had to wait for me, was quick to point out. Becca's having a bad day. Yeah, that's a bad day. At that point I was totally wrecked, didn't even make it out of the building before I burst into tears. An hour and a half drive ahead of me, I could barely see through the tears and I was beating myself up for fear that I made a huge mistake by quitting my teaching job and changing careers as I just happened to grab my

iPod. You see where this is going? No, not yet. If we made her feel worse, then this is gonna be the most depressing email ever. By the time I was finished with how midnight regulations work, I was actually laughing at your discussion on the number of syllables in Squirrel. Squirrel. Remember that? One syllable. Squirrel. Squirrel. If you're from up north, it's Squirrel. Two syllables. Apparently if you're Woody Allen, it's two syllables. Yeah, he's from up north. New York. I can honestly say I can't think of anything else that would have redeemed my otherwise crappy day. Thanks for making me laugh, guys, for giving me something to do while I wait to put my scrubs in the dryer so I can do it all over again tomorrow from Becca. Thanks for writing in Becca. At the

very least, you're quite a go-getter, so that's fantastic and we're glad we could turn that day around. Yeah, leaving her job as a teacher to work in a nursing home, so it's like she's covered either way. Yes. On the Good Samaritan front. Yeah, very much so. If you have an email about a bad day, Chuck. Or a good day. That's a good one too. If you have an email about the greatest day of your life, send it to us. We want to read it. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it along on its way to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Want more HowStuffWorks? Check out our blogs on the HowStuffWorks.com homepage.

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