Transcript
Ngozi Ndulue 0:02
Hello, and welcome to discussions with DPIC. I’m in Ngozi Ndulue, Senior Director of Research and Special Projects at the Death Penalty Information Center. Today, we’re talking about exoneration with Carine Williams of the Innocence Project. Welcome, Carine!
Carine Williams 0:15
Hi! Thanks for having me on, Ngozi.
Ngozi Ndulue 0:18
We’re so excited to have you on. A quick intro of Carine Williams: she is the Chief Program Strategy Officer at the Innocence Project.
She spent the bulk of her career as an attorney in private practice providing pro bono representation in capital and criminal post conviction and prisoner civil rights cases. She taught a seminar on capital habeas and prisoner civil rights litigation at Columbia Law School and she also has experience working on the white-collar end of the criminal defense spectrum. So, today we’re going to be talking about all that has been going on in the world of innocence and exonerations. In February, our organization, the Death Penalty Information Center, added 11 people to our innocence list as part of our research on all modern death sentences. This means that at least 185 people who were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death have been exonerated since 1973. Also, National Geographic magazine showcased the cases of death row exonerees in its March issue, and they use stunning portraits with the exonerees telling their stories in their own words. We also have milestone for one of Carine’s former clients: Albert Woodfox. He just marked five years of freedom after spending almost 44 years in prison serving a life sentence after a wrongful conviction. Carine, can you tell us more about Mr. Woodfox’s case?
Carine Williams 1:49
I absolutely can, with pleasure. I will just say first, before I get into the story of Albert’s case, that you are so right. It has been a tremendously busy time in our space… very exciting. And congratulations to DPIC on this new report and this collection with Nat Geo! I’m excited to dig into talking about that more. But before we do, I will say yes—I was lucky enough to represent Albert Woodfox. So I never tire of talking about Albert’s case. It has always been for me one of the most important cases that I’ve ever worked on, to talk about. I will also say that now, on this side of the saga, it’s not just important to talk about but it’s also fun and joyful to talk about. I mean, I always refer back to the proverb, “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.” And the last five years of Albert being home, has been watching this man who they tried to bury, but didn’t realize was a seed—just completely blossomed and bloomed, and bear fruit. And it’s just been fantastic. So, it’s been a great week to celebrate five years of him being home. And I’m also going to just say, because I think it was really one of the most poignant lessons that I learned from Albert—and there really were so many—so that’s saying something. But this anniversary of five years for him was really one of being home, not of freedom. Even way back when I originally met Albert in 2008, he would speak so eloquently about being free, even when he was incarcerated—mentally and spiritually. And he wrote about that, too, in his autobiography, “Solitary”, which he published in 2019, to all sorts of critical acclaim and buzz, including a Pulitzer finalist nomination! That’s what I mean by blooming.
Ngozi Ndulue 3:44
Wow!
Carine Williams 3:45
I want to honor that distinction for him… this was not what set him free, but what sent him home. And I’ll say that one of the reasons why this case has been so important for me to talk about from really the beginning of when I worked on it and never tired talking about it is because even though it wasn’t a death case, the arc of Albert’s case tells us so much about why the death penalty is wrong. And that story really starts with the underlying offense, or just before the underlying offense really, for which he was convicted. So, as you know, executions had stalled out through the ’60s. In 1972, in January, Furman versus Georgia comes out. That decision makes it the law of the land that the death penalty is recognized as unconstitutional until the guided discretion cases come out four years later, starting in 1976. But Furman happens in January of 1972. And it’s just three months later, in April of 1972, that a white corrections officer, Brent Miller, was killed at Angola prison in Louisiana. Angola, as you know, was just this hotbed of tension and strife at the time. It was on the heels of a federal desegregation order in the throes of structural reforms that were meant to address, really just horrifying prison conditions, obscene levels of violence. And Albert, along with Herman Wallace, had begun organizing prisoners as members of what, I mean, I think it has to have been the first ever Black Panther prison chapter.
Not sure if there were any others anywhere else. But in particular, they had organized folks to disrupt what was then a predatory, commercial, sexual violence trade that was going on at that prison. And it had really drawn the ire of prison officials, in part…no small part, because prison officials were in on the cut for this commercial, violent sex trade. And so when this young prison officer is killed, the Black Panthers become the automatic easy suspects. And anyone suspected of being a member or being a, you know, racial militant, was immediately thrown into solitary confinement pending investigation, including Albert. And yup, in less than a year, in March of 1973, Albert is convicted and sentenced to life—which is why his case is in part about the death penalty, even though he was sentenced to life. Prison officials decided that since they couldn’t execute him, since Furman was the law of the land, they would try to make him wish he was dead by continuing to confine him and his co-defendant… and several other Black Panthers who weren’t even charged with the crime, one of whom, Robert King, had been thrown into solitary, but they realized shortly thereafter that he wasn’t even at the facility when the murder happened.
So they’d thrown these folks into solitary 23 hours a day locked down, indefinitely. They said that explicitly to his co-defendant, Herman, “since we can’t execute you, we’re never going to let you out of CCR.” CCR is what they called the solitary tiers there. It was really used in Albert and Herman’s case, and in Robert King’s case, really was there because of his Black Panther Party affiliation as purely extra-judicial punishment. It was not for any administrative purpose, like pending investigation. It was not for any legitimate security concern. It was pure punishment—punishment that wasn’t meted out by a judge, but by these prison officials, who had lived with and worked with the corrections officer who had been killed. So every 90 days for the next four decades, Albert and Herman (King was actually released much sooner than they were. So he was out, I think, around 27 years.) They would get these pro forma board reviews and the board would always check out the same box for why released from solitary had been denied: “the nature of the original offense,” which of course, that’s never going to change, right? Angola did this to so many people. And it was 23. I mean, they camp, the CCR tiers housed up to 400 people. And so, many people were held in extremely long durations of solitary confinement. And it wasn’t just, wasn’t just 23 hours a day of lockdown.
There were just awful conditions. No climate control, Louisiana. So that’s soaring heat in the summers, and some very cold winter nights sometimes. Terrible medical care, really dehumanizing treatment, strip searches… there was a time period where the men would be fed on the floor, their food would just be put on the floor. And so while fighting to overturn the wrongful convictions, Albert, Herman, and King enter these conditions. Albert for almost 44 years before he was released in 2016, Herman 41 years before he was released in 2013. And speaking of terrible medical conditions, he actually had developed a liver cancer, which by the time it was discovered, was entirely untreatable, and so he died just three days after he was released after his conviction had been overturned. This is a case the one of the magistrate judges called at some point “so far beyond the pale,” and wrote that she could not find “anything even remotely comparable in the annals of American jurisprudence” was her language.
So the real like the two lessons for me that I feel like it’s important for us to talk about is one, death is irrevocable, right? The fight for Albert, Herman, and King. So many battlegrounds, not just their underlying conditions, but attacking their conditions. The suite of Angola three cases really was really a suite of cases that worked together, required Sisyphean litigation and Albert’s case in particular. Albert had his conviction overturned not once, not twice, but three times over the course of those 44 years. He was retried twice. And so it was heartbreaking to win relief on a Brady claim in the District Court and then have that relief overturned in the Fifth Circuit. And then we litigated a race claim in his case, which was based on the discrimination of Grand Jury forepersons by his trial judge. And we won that claim in the District Court, again, just a really terrifying time period in my life to be up in the Fifth Circuit on appeal on that. We had rolled that boulder up the hill and it had rolled right back over us, you know, on several occasions before then. But this time, the panel got it right this time. So that was just amazing. And here’s the thing about that experience is that we live to fight another day, you know, as heartbreaking and terrifying as those years were, we always live to fight another—Albert lived to fight another day. Were it not for this happy slip in American history between 1972 and 1976, when the death penalty was recognized as unconstitutional, Albert and Herman would have been executed, there would not have been another day to fight again.
So that’s one and then two, I think the thing that Albert’s case really tells us—yells at us—is ending the death penalty isn’t enough. Right, Louisiana’s aim at having Albert and Herman die a natural death in prison, under such horrifying conditions was to make them wish that they were dead. And Louisiana never got that wish they never broke those men’s spirits, but Albert will speak very candidly about people on the tier who were driven mad, who killed themselves who just were out of their minds, because of those conditions. And so, I think this case serves as a reminder of the both and, yes, we have to enter the death penalty—we also have to reimagine sentencing, we have to improve conditions of confinement for the far, far too many people that we incarcerate in this country.
Ngozi Ndulue 12:06
His case brings up so many of the issues that are continually a concern for people who are looking at our criminal legal system and the death penalty down to to the way that juries are selected and discrimination there. One of the things that I wanted to focus on in this case, is that role of race and the issues that they played in his case and the cases of many of those who have been exonerated from death row, in particular. So you know, when we looked at the cases, on our exoneration list, we noticed that there were really significant racial disparities in death penalty exonerations. First of all, that it takes much longer for Black people to be exonerated. The time between conviction and exoneration is, you know, more than four years longer, on average than than that for white people. And we see Mr. Woodfox this case where there’s decades being spent fighting for the ability to leave the prison walls. And we see that being really common with a lot of exonerations in the last decade taking 20, 30, even 40 years, and particularly for Black exonerees. And we also know that official misconduct, we’re talking about police, prosecutorial, government misconduct is much more prevalent in the cases of Black exonerees. Even though it’s, you know, prevalent among exonerations, overall, we see that distinction. Can you talk about the issues of race and racism that kind of kept come up as themes with your clients in general and or the criminal and capital cases that you’ve been involved in throughout your career?
Carine Williams 14:05
There’s no way to disaggregate this country’s history with chattel slavery and racism from any facet of the criminal justice system. Slavery was abolished in this country in 1865. And the country turned to criminal justice as a means of racial control. And as a means of really back-dooring in the status quo that was there before the abolition of slavery, right? So discriminatory black codes led to the imprisonment of Black men, women and children. And it led to them being returned to slavery-like conditions. It led to convict leasing systems and forced labor. And that lasted well into the 20th century and there’s a reason why the prison where Albert, King, and Herman were held in lockdown for decades is called still today all the time by many people, Angola, right? And it’s a sick story. But it bears repeating because it makes so clear that there’s just no way to disaggregate this history from our criminal justice system, right?
And it is that the land that that prison is today on was a slave plantation. And as the legend goes, the plantation owner thought that the best slaves, the most productive slaves, were from Angola, and so he tried to import slave labor from Angola. And in whatever sick sense like he thought that you know, I, they shouldn’t be homesick. So we’ll just call this place, Angola, right? Um, that’s today, like we go to Angola, like, that is you just see it right there in your face. And you hear it in your ears when people talk about the you know, Trustee inmates, right, they call they call them freemen, right? It’s, you know, there’s been so many folks - Bryan Stevenson at EJI, Sherrilyn Ifill at LDF, and Christina Swarns at the Innocence Project - so many folks have done a tremendous job over the past, you know, 10 years of really shifting the public conversation on this point. So I won’t belabor it, but I just, yes, yes, I have seen racism impact my clients. We all have. If we haven’t, then we’re just not looking.
I would say one thing about death penalty cases in particular, is that they just make… death penalty cases, when you talk about racing the death penalty, I think it just really makes crystal clear the point of why Black Lives Matter has to be said out loud, right? It is heartbreakingly new information for too many people. You see that when you look at the death penalty and race, right? The Supreme Court looked at proof of the impact of racial bias in death penalty cases in 1987. And the Supreme Court said in a sharply divided opinion, but that the law of the land is it doesn’t matter. Those lives lost that would not have been lost if they had been white defendants: they don’t matter. And all the other years of life lost, right, years waiting to fight to get your case to get the truth of your case heard and to be exonerated. The majority in that case, says one reason why they’re disregarding the proof of systemic biases out of fear that recognizing that proof would open the door to widespread challenges in all aspects of criminal sentencing, right? That’s what one of the dissenting justices called “the threat of too much justice.”
So you know, it’s that was 1987 at least know still today, half of death row exonerees are Black, right? You already talked about the finding about how long—how much longer Black people on death row spend exonerating themselves than white people. And even in non-death row cases, right, it takes Black exonerees far longer to prove their innocence than whites. I’ve never seen it. I’ve never seen racism not impact my clients. I would say I think it bears mentioning. But that is also true in my clients are white. Right, we have to talk about the advantages defendants who are white have, not because we want to see them treated worse, right. But because we want the same humanity accorded to Black defendants as is accorded to white defendants, right? We want to speak that truth to power. And I’ve worked on the white-collar end of the spectrum, the criminal defense spectrum, and I can tell you for sure, I have watched prosecutors treat white defendants more humanely, more decently when they’re white. And that’s what I want for white defendants, and it’s what I want for Black defendants. It’s every point on the prosecution continuum from suspect development to sentencing, every inflection point in between racial bias is working to the detriment of Black people. It’s working to the detriment of Black families, it’s working to the detriment of Black communities. And it is also working to the detriment of white folks and everyone else too. I mean, it is—when we allow for Black folks to be treated as less than human, fully human, it dehumanizes all of us.
Ngozi Ndulue 19:43
And I think the power of kind of our history and shaping our responses to times when there’s serious harm. When the time where a life is lost. We see that throughout our system and I like that you started bringing up that piece about our history kind of shaping the entire system, and that we have these really tangible reminders like, you know, Angola and thinking about its evolution we had in our Enduring Injustice report that was released last September, a picture of an early 1900’s picture of Angola, where you see prisoners kind of picking cotton and being kind of out in the fields. And then you have, I think, was a 2013 picture, as well, where again, you’re seeing guards on horseback and prisoners who again, are, you know, vast, vast majority Black working in the fields. And you think about that. We didn’t have any Civil War era or pre-Civil War pictures, but it just seems like the continuity between those moments are, we’re still talking about the place where death row is, where we’re still talking about the place where people are spending their entire lives, it is, is really crystal clear that we are still doing some of the same things and that the legal system is still engaging in some of the same work that has been part of that work of supporting racial hierarchies for our entire kind of nation’s history here.
Carine Williams 21:19
I will tell you, I mean, one of the most surreal experiences of my professional career was when I was a baby lawyer. And I was sent to do some depositions all by myself, but didn’t have my co-counsel with me.
Ngozi Ndulue 21:32
We’re thrown to the wolves.
Carine Williams 21:33
Right, right! And the government attorneys I think they thought, “oh, this is great!” Like, he didn’t normally we would do depositions at the prison facility. And we would be given trays of prison food to eat for our lunch and they would go off, the government attorneys would go off and have their lunch wherever—I didn’t know where. So I go by myself, and they invite me to join them to go to lunch with them. And so where they going off to lunch. It’s literally called the “Big House,” right? It is like, massive house on on the grounds of this prison facility. And you go in and it’s beautifully appointed. It’s where, you know, the warden has his fancy meetings, and, and there’s a huge lunch spread laid out that has been prepared by Black inmates there were there weren’t maybe sometimes there are white inmates who were working the kitchen or working the service roles in the Big House, but on this afternoon, there were none. I can tell you that.
And you know, of course, they’re asking me questions, hoping that this baby lawyer’s gonna offer them something or somehow give them something to work with. And you know, I’m just, it was just so surreal! And I remember, they had these cookies, they made these delicious cookies, which of course I was trying not to eat; I had one. And it was the sweetest, like it was just the sweetest gesture of one of one of the trustee inmates who was cooking like came and put some had wrapped some in like a paper towel with like a twine and like, slipped it in my bag. For me, you know, it was just like, so surreal. Like they knew what was going on. They were they were listening. And you just knew it was just like, it still gives me chills to think about but yeah, it’s the continuity is exactly right. It’s still there. It’s still in our face, we have to continue to reckon with it and grapple with it. It is I mean, as Bryan Stevenson says it, that the order of operations matter, right? Everybody wants to get to the reconciliation, but they don’t want to talk about the truth part, right? So we have to talk through the truth part to get to the reconciliation part.
Ngozi Ndulue 23:44
I think that’s so important. My next question is about something that’s new, but I think can shed light on things that didn’t have support that would seem ironclad to courts and the public. So one thing that we looked at in our new report is DNA evidence and exonerations based on DNA evidence. And we know that DNA in popular opinion about exonerations is a lot more prevalent than it has been historically. But it does shine an important light on issues that lead to wrongful conviction. So even if the minority of exoneration cases involve DNA, first of all, that’s a growing minority. And we see that the DNA exoneration cases are more likely to involve official misconduct, they’re more likely to involve false confessions, inadequate legal defense, and mistaken witness identification. So when we’re looking at this, we’re coming to the conclusion that these things are happening in a lot of cases where there’s no DNA to back up the fact that misconduct occurred, that the confession was false, that the legal defense was inadequate. But without the DNA evidence, people are just not believing the arguments about this. How does that line up with your experience looking at DNA exonerations and what role they play in innocence cases?
Carine Williams 25:15
Yeah, I mean, I think you’re absolutely right. I think decision makers certainly remain reluctant to bring a critical eye to these issues. But I would say “unwilling” is no longer true. I think there are decision makers who are reluctant. But I do think that when you look at the past 30 years, the advent of DNA and the development of the technology to exonerate people, at least maybe I’m being overly optimistic here, and I just hope that this is the case. But I do think I mean, look, I think we are in a historical moment where people are looking more critically and have a little bit more openness than they had when you and I started out as baby lawyers, for sure. And I just, I think that it is the glare of the DNA exoneration, right? What it really it’s just so stark, you talk about shedding light, and it’s a very bright, glaring light, right? It forces people to look even if they did not want to, right? Even if they have to kind of blink their eyes several times to adjust. DNA exoneration say unassailably to scientific certainty that our criminal legal system is unreliable.
And that’s, that’s just so powerful because we have pride and put on this pedestal finality, right? Like we have gotten it right—we have so many due processes and guardrails up in place that our system works, right? And DNA exonerations, they show that lie so clearly. It tells, I think, to your point, like the DNA cases tell us not just about what we see in that, one exoneration, but what we are not seeing, right? Like if you’ve ever lived in a house with roaches and I have, then you know, that when you walk into the kitchen at night, and you flip the light switch on, if you see one or two roaches scurrying away, you know, without a question that you have a whole lot more than one or two roaches in your house, right? Like that is and that’s the way it is with these DNA exonerations. Right? They, the light is just telling us what’s really hidden behind this fiction that we have that finality can be prized over truth because we get it right through our processes and all the other risk factors.
I think to a certain extent all exonerations do have this function, but because the DNA is so unassailable, the light is just so much brighter, even I mean, the new data on the one in eight reliability rate, right like that is that is telling us that there is no facet of our criminal justice system that is reliable, right. And this is one in eight death row cases result in an exoneration and and capital cases are where we have all the guardrails up where we take, you know, we have not just one lawyer appointed, but two lawyers appointed. Where we have, you know, purportedly, all these safety nets in place, right? So if that’s the reliability rate in capital cases, we just know that the error rates. I mean, what are they in misdemeanor cases, right? Like, can you even begin to imagine, right? And, yes, obviously, the irrevocability of death of course but like, a misdemeanor can also really devastate and disrupt a person’s life. And so, I mean, I think that that is the power and the leverage of the DNA exoneration and exoneration work writ large really is that it tells us about the vulnerabilities in our system, and all facets of our system and the unreliability of it.
Ngozi Ndulue 29:07
Two things I wanted to take up from that with these new additions to our exoneration list, that means for every eight, and it’s probably 8.2 or so, executions that we have, we’ve had one exoneration. So thinking about that and thinking about that as an indication of reliability, as an indication of the serious concern, I think is really important. Particularly when you think about how some of these exonerations have happened. And how many of them have happened outside of the normal course of just the usual round of appeals. That they took organizations like the Innocence Project, they took conviction integrity units that are growing in popularity now. They took journalists taking an interest in the case to actually get to exonerations, not just the usual appeals that we would expect.
One other thing when I’m thinking about DNA, Tennessee really jumps out to me right now. Right, so we have Pervis Payne, who’s a person on death row currently who is seeking relief based on, in part, on new DNA evidence. We also have, Sedley Alley, who was already executed and his family is seeking DNA testing to potentially posthumously exonerate him. And I think that question about the availability of, of DNA testing, and the ability for that to kind of shed a light on both a case of somebody who, who could face execution, and then of somebody who we’ve actually executed to actually talk about, you know, the fact that there’s many people that strong innocence claims that were executed. I think it’s really powerful to think about those in those two cases, in particular, where DNA exonerations can truly shed a light on unreliability here.
So I wanted to think about that that question about reliability and the amount of time that exonerations have been taking. We’ve seen that time between conviction and exoneration continues to lengthen and some of that is because, you said, Carine, in the 1970s, you know, there was a stop to executions, and to new death sentences. So our new death sentences kind of started up again, with new laws being passed in the ’70s. But we’re also just seeing people who have spent an extraordinary amount of time on death row 20, 30, 40 years and in the last decade, it took on average more than 20 years for a person to be exonerated. So could you talk to us about why exonerations take so long, and what that says about the criticisms, particularly in death penalty cases about the amount of process that defendants get the amount of appeals that they have?
Carine Williams 32:05
I mean, yeah, I’m saying they take longer. We’re also doing more of them, right? So I think that part of that is a function, I suspect of more people being willing to roll up their sleeves and grapple with the harder cases, right? I think in 2009, there were something like 100 exonerations. And in 2016 it was like the high point year of 180.
Ngozi Ndulue 32:30
Capital, non-capital overall, right?
Carine Williams 32:32
Yeah, that’s overall, right. I mean, look, these cases are hard. I mean, like, I always, you know, use the analogy of Sisyphus, because it is just truly grueling work. All of the forces are aligned against you and your client especially, right? Not only that, you know, just the typical forces that you face, even in the pre-trial posture.
(Dog barks) But now you get to hear my pup. Yeah, he’s also upset about how hard these cases are.
But you know, also the way our system prizes finality over truth, we talked about that. So there’s just this like, real resistance to opening the can back up and looking back into it—these cases. I worked on it at one point an amicus brief in McQuiggin v. Perkins. It was on behalf of what some might consider an unlikely ally of law enforcement officers. But it was law enforcement officers who had worked cold cases. They had solved previously, like very long term, unsolved crimes. And the point of the amicus was very simple and stark, which is that reinvestigating a case is always really hard. It takes a lot of luck and counter-intuitively, time can become your ally you know? All of the former, and current law enforcement officers who signed on to this amicus brief really made that point very, very clearly that time actually, at a certain point becomes an ally in the reinvestigation of innocence, right? Because people feel people who are scared to come forward before as witnesses after you know, so much time has passed after they’ve grown older, after you know, maybe somebody has died, who they were scared of before. They’re willing to come forward and talk even if it’s off the record, but now all of a sudden, they’re willing to come forward and talk. So that is like it is just the nature of the work, I think and then a function of because of the success of the sort of… I don’t want to say easier because none of these cases are easy. But, you know, the more straightforward exoneration cases that people are willing to roll up their sleeves and dig in on some of the more complicated ones. But these cases are just not easy.
Ngozi Ndulue 34:55
Yeah, yeah.
And one thing I wanted to make sure that we talked about is kind of the ripple effects of exonerations. It’s come up a little bit and some of your earlier conversation, but we can look at the issue of exonerations and innocence by itself and just say, okay, well, you know, it’s great to get people relief in court, it’s great to get people who have been wrongfully convicted out of prison and home. But I think that there’s a broader benefit to, you know, society to our legal system. Could you talk a little bit about the role that you see the Innocence Project playing in activism around criminal legal system reform?
Carine Williams 35:40
Oh for sure. It is… I know just the role that I see us playing, but really, I think central to our mission is systemic reform, right? Of course, exoneration is an end in and of itself, but it’s also a means to an end. Our mission is we exonerate the wrongfully convicted through reliable science. And we reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. And that mission, I think, is really driven by our clients in two different ways, right? So one is we use the data that we have from these exonerations, right? So we’ve now the Innocence Project, exonerated over 370 people. We use the data from those cases and those experiences to identify the real vulnerabilities in our criminal legal system. And then consider once we’ve identified these pain points in the prosecution continuum, how we can change the law, whether it’s through legislative reform or rule changes or litigation, but how we change the law to improve fairness and equity for everyone. And that’s one way that it’s client driven for us. But the other way really, is that it’s what our exonerees want us to do, right? What our clients need us to do. It never ceases to amaze me how often and how ardently people who have lost already so much of their lives to the gross miscarriage of justice that is wrongful conviction, and who get out and who opt to use whatever time they have left here, right on Earth, they opt to use that time to work on preventing injustice from happening to others. I mean, just see it happen over and over again. Exonerees are out in front of every single criminal justice reform issue out there, including abolition of the death penalty, right? And that, I mean, I would just say like, that is what, that’s why I love my job. Like that piece of it is what makes me excited to get to work on Monday. To be frank, work through the weekend sometimes, right?
You know, I always talk about Toni Morris—the Toni Morrison, quote that “the function of freedom is to free somebody else.” And our clients live that. And they remind me to live that. And I hope that what I do in the world, reminds the people around me to also live that.
Ngozi Ndulue 38:16
Thank you, Carine. Thank you for the work that you’re doing. We are so excited about learning more about what is driving wrongful convictions, providing people information about the real facts behind that, and highlighting the work that’s being done to uncover and end wrongful conviction. So it’s been a pleasure to talk to you today.
Carine Williams 38:41
Pleasure has been mine Ngozi. Thank you so much for inviting me on here. I so appreciate it. And congratulations again on the publication of this report.
Ngozi Ndulue 38:50
Thank you.
Thank you listeners so much for joining us today! To learn more about the death penalty, you can visit the DPIC website at deathpenaltyinfo.org. To make sure you never miss an episode of our podcast, you can subscribe to Discussions with DPIC on your podcast app of choice.
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