Discussions with DPI Podcast: Earwitness Podcast Creator Beth Shelburne on Toforest Johnson’s Case

In this month’s episode of Discussions with DPI, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Beth Shelburne, a journalist who has reported on the criminal legal system for over 25 years and creator of the podcast Earwitness. Released in 2023 to critical acclaim, Earwitness tells the story of Toforest Johnson, a death-sentenced man who is facing execution in Alabama despite strong evidence of his innocence. On November 14, 2024, Mr. Johnson filed a petition with the Jefferson County Circuit Court requesting a new hearing, the latest in a series of appeals.

“I realized that this is such a protracted injustice with so many twists and turns over a quarter of a century. So many people have been exploited in the process that it really is a case that’s emblematic of many terrible issues in our criminal justice system, and I felt like in order to capture all of that in its totality, I wanted to slow down and really unpack this case in a meaningful way,” explains Ms. Shelburne on why she decided to create the Earwitness podcast. She shares the challenges she and her team faced, including the “fading memories of people … [who] just couldn’t remember the finite details that we felt were so crucial…to pin down. Luckily, we were able to get our hands on quite a bit of source material through.” 

Mr. Johnson was convicted in 1998 of the 1995 murder of Deputy Sheriff Hardy, who was killed in a hotel parking lot. Mr. Johnson has maintained his innocence for 26 years, and says he was at a nightclub across town on the day of the murder. His conviction relied almost entirely on testimony from Violet Ellison, the so-called “earwitness” who claimed that while listening to a phone call between her daughter and another person at the Jefferson County Jail she overheard a third person identify himself as “Toforest” and confess to killing the victim. In a 2018 hearing, it was revealed that Ms. Ellison received $5,000 from the state for her testimony against Mr. Johnson—a payment that the prosecution did not disclose to defense counsel and denied making for decades. Earlier this year, Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr filed an amicus brief in support of a new hearing for Mr. Johnson, saying that his conviction is “fundamentally unreliable.” Mr. Carr’s office previously completed an investigation into Mr. Johnson’s case in June 2020 and subsequently filed a motion requesting a new trial.

“I think that the case highlights many issues that are evident, not only in wrongful convictions, but in over prosecutions and over punishment that’s so prevalent across our country,” concludes Ms. Shelburne. “The issues of racial bias. The issues of the presumption of guilt when it comes particularly to young black men. I think this intersection of money and justice, whether it’s an appointed attorney not being paid what they deserve for their work, to meager offerings for mitigation work or investigative work in a capital case, to cash rewards being offered in criminal cases, and the state not being completely transparent with all sides about those cash rewards. I think that this case definitely demonstrates the difficulty in in all of those issues.”