00:00I have to start with the fact that I was a boy. I was a naive 16-year-old boy who didn't understand
00:04the gravity that I was in. You know, when I heard the judge say, you will be in prison for 30 years
00:11to life plus life, you know, when you're a child, you can't even comprehend what that even means.
00:16You're still working on a very like week to week basis or month to month. You can't even foresee
00:21a year in your life at that age. But eventually when I got to, you know, the institution that
00:28was being held in, it became very real at that point. Luckily for me, I realized that I couldn't
00:33accept this. I couldn't just sit around and say, well, this is it. This is the end of my story.
00:38And so I began advocating for myself.
00:41The evidence used to convict me was an eyewitness who testified that they had seen me commit the
01:04crime. And the way that came about was they were showing a photographic lineup
01:09and it was just six pictures. And the witness was asked to pick one of the photographs. And so
01:15they did. And I was arrested for it.
02:08I see him as a victim as well. You know, having no power to say, no, I don't want to play along
02:18or having no influence on his own life to say, like, I didn't say anything. Instead, he was just
02:24doing what they wanted him to do. And so I've met with him. He and I, Scott Turner, he and I are,
02:30are, you know, not the best of friends, but, you know, we might have lunch every so often.
02:35And, you know, I think that he's also just one of the victims
02:40that was taken advantage of by the system.
03:04So
03:34I think the single biggest surprise to me in my story and or in the stories I directed about Frankie
03:49was that the general public, myself included, all raised on crime stories, movies, books,
03:58having an incredible misperception of the value of eyewitness testimony.
04:02And we are raised to think from years of watching shows about it and movies about it and just
04:08thinking about it and talking about it, that if someone stands or sits in a jury box in a courtroom
04:13and says, I saw him, he did it. He's the one that that's incontrovertible evidence. And how could
04:18that person be wrong? And the person that they're pointing to must be guilty. And the percentage
04:24of times that that's flawed and the reasons that it's flawed were really, really surprising to me.
04:42I think the work of the Innocence Project has been life changing for obviously for me,
04:47but also for a lot of people. When I, when I was first arrested, there was no Innocence Project.
04:52You know, there was that organization didn't exist. I think most people run away from
04:57big problems like this involving wrongful convictions, involving all the elements,
05:03the court, the constitution, law enforcement, witnesses, all the emotional components as well.
05:10But for these people to run towards it and to say we're going to defend these people is amazing.
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