good evening i will go through and welcome to another edition of focus on over the next couple weeks will be running a special and the special is on century and ministries and individuals who were exonerated based on the work of century ministries tonight  y guests are kate germano who is the executive director of century and ministries and richard miles who has founded the nonprofit organization miles of freedom and who spent fifteen years wrongly incarcerated behind bars was a seminary student and as part of his field education work he chose ministering to inmates a trance state prison in there and make told him he was wrongly convicted which to jim was a complete  and came to believe that mr dylan santos was indeed innocent and came back to the prison to tell mr de los santos i believe that you're an innocent man and the response from  well what are you going to do about it are you just going to pray for me and go on with your life or are you going to do something about it and jim being jim he dropped out of seminary invested gaited the case managed to bring forward the beginning of this work jim finished up seminary but his mission field was going to be working on behalf of wrongly convicted people and the amazing thing about this is nobody was talking save a few academics nobody was talking about wrongly convicted people and yet he blaze this trail he took on only local case only new jersey cases they were all murder or rape cases and he hired a lawyer named paul cast alero who is our legal director today and he continued to move forward and then in one thousand nine hundred eighty six of november with his fourth exoneration he got some national attention that's when i read about him and i joined him in january of one nine hundred eighty seven and censuring is primarily a field investigation work we don't  turn away from cases that have a scientific component in fact we love it because it makes the case move along much more quickly it's much less expensive and judges have come to love that science can tell them whether some he's innocent or guilty and they don't have to think about it but very few cases actually have that right and richard's case was certainly an example of that let's talk a little for you for from i was that you did not commit you know fifteen years in prison right so maybe to talk about what was the case and maybe you could tell us you know a little bit about the story i know we could talk a long time about it but tell us a little bit about the story from beginning to end is a part of dallas i stayed originally in off dallas i was with friends pretty much that whole day the buses stopped running so i paid my friend ernest five dollars to drive me from oak cliff to north dallas he was already going to his girlfriend's house which stated right around the corner from me wasn't too inconvenient for him to drive me home so we got to know dallas he got to his girlfriend's house first i paid him five dollars thinking that i could just walk home where that was the longest walk of my life it took me fifteen years to get around i got out of the car walked up the street in a route that i took i would walk in front of a saw a cadillac shop and then i would get to a payphone saka calmer f cut the lawn off the house because i was about one hundred one thirty i believe in the morning but right when i crossed the street a police car was right there next thing i know helicopter i was eventually arrested right there probably about fifteen twenty seconds from the house i was literally that close home they took me to a crime scene and i think there was one of the first arrows that the dallas police did  me straight to the homicide they took me to a crime scene took me out of the car to conduct a g s r tears gushed out residue test on my his knee and took me to homicide when i got to homicide and i gave the detective phone numbers of everybody who i had been with that day those five different phone numbers that i gave to him he went out stay gone for a couple hours came back in he said well your story checked out we have a witness that said he saw you keel one person to shoot another person and so at their point in time there was a furnace acknowledgement oh while i was arrested i don't know why they had arrested me i was the i'm booked for murder and attempted murder bail set at three hundred fifty thousand dollars my family did not have the resources to bail me out on the type of case or give me a free will returning and so that began the seventeen month county jail stay which led to a seven day jury trial i mentioned he got sixty years in the texas department of corrections for this murder and attempted murder the evidence was very fragile one witness and ironically this one witness was the only witness behind the texaco the other nine witnesses was in front of the texaco so he was the only one that sound me in handcuffs and he was only one who picked out my picture in this photograph of a rape in which i was only person in a white t shirt so a tainted identification from the j gun all of my alibis came to testify but i was still found guilty i think my i got encouragement when i left the county jail and i met a guy named benjamin spencer  everywhere i go i will always talk about him benjamin spencer is a k stats done by us interior ministry she had a c e o he's still in prison over thirty years now innocent and i was in the barbershop and he was x to me while i was you know was ten years to sixty and so there began a dialogue the a letters between myself and some tyrian in my case workers so that's kind of like the beginning stages of my wrongful incarceration sam brown my parents i think out of this coma native along with my caseworkers for them to really take my case in two thousand and seven and i was eventually released in two thousand and nine and fully exonerated in two thousand and twelve so richard's case took an unusual turn within our office because when we get a case we we do it top to bottom you know investigation within the office reading every single document analyzing it asking them questions and one of the things we do routinely is we filed a freedom of information act to the various agencies that were involved in putting a case together against  person and this is just routine that we do and here and there we hit gold and in richard's case we had gold and that's why you know it was like two years from the time we were working on it because in the freedom of information act we wound up getting witness an eye witness statement that was not in any of the documents that richard or his lawyer had given us or were in the routine police files and this witness was saying in a police report completely opposite from what he testified to trial and then just like in richard's world where you know he had he kept hearing our name in dallas they had a new d a name craig watkins who completely changed things in dallas and his thing was to go ahead and grant d n a testing on every case that his predecessor had denied and so dallas  enjoyed a large group of men being exonerated through d n a testing richard's case was not d n a but we brought it to him because it was such an egregious thing that clearly somebody in his office or his predecessor's office had done which was to hide next couple tori document and and also we had to figure out why this witness testified one way when a police report said he had something entirely different to say in terms of the eyewitness identification and so craig watkins sent his investigator out to talk to this witness and the witness admitted he lied at the trial and richard can take it from there you know so my case was the shortest fifteen months from the time of them except in the time that i walked out and then two and a half years later for dallas to accept it as the first you know on d n a no compression and we actually cases so well true hopes others too yes yes you know so tell us what was like what would you like to be in prison every day for you know fifteen years as you said knowing that you did not commit a seventeen years month most seventeen months so very similar cricket county jail is hell on earth for these guys it is a complete free for all it's not like prison which is a lot more ordered there's still a lot of chaos and violence and bad things that happen in the regular state or federal prison but county jail is insane and dangerous and so here's a nineteen year old man stuck there for seventeen months in this hellish environment and it never gets spoken about because people don't know but i want to put it on the record that he survived seventeen months as a know so i give a lot of credit to me surviving from what my structure was growing up so i grew up in a very spiritually guided household i wouldn't carlos for me just because we promise you with a lot of different people who nominations and so we were just spiritual from that context and so once i got locked up it was at that point to where as me personally everything that i felt was tangible my family my resources my freedom and so the only thing that same to see it exists was the scriptures and i remember one time sitting up in the story of joseph just set with me and i'm like in the hold over cell and i just heard the words as clear is this interview is this everything will be our right and that was it i never heard that again but i hail down to that was i went to prison meeting b and spencer i papers corpus eleven all seven which got denied but i would meet other people and all of us was innocent i was like there were about ten guys in all of them have been since they aren't being released oh actual innocence claims in dallas texas and so meeting all these people in prison show me that i wasn't fighting alone and i think that was also an encouragement i have my family on the outside there was great advocates in prison with me and they're also fighting for in i really gave up there is a state of institutionalism that you fall into because every day is the same day in prison you know you get up at two o'clock you go to break up with you come back at four o'clock you get ready to go to work you come back gave me a rundown on what i had accomplished while i was locked up i graduated from college to receive my degree i had stayed out of trouble and so they gave me freedom in prison they allowed me number and they pushed his big box and i'm like screw you know i don't know what it was and open it up and i pulled out a letter from centurion and there was my transcripts we didn't have the money to pay for my transcripts and so on all of this work that i have been doing all these years it wasn't with my transcripts and so i got a chance to relive my trial page by page and mark when i pulled the police records but this time i had pretty much learned a lot of legal jargon and so i'm reading and i know what brady versus maryland e mails which is exculpatory evidence that needs to be presented and i come across this document and it was at th that i've never heard of a person once you come in there and tell me you're the tortoise ok well let's roll our own let's let's roll along but it was you know to get that information from a group of people that i had never heard of it gave me a great consolation my dad passed six months before i got out but jim mccluskey was able to go see him on his baby and to inform him that i was getting ready to leave out walk out of prison but prison in itself is a whole different world which could take a whole different view but yes i know one of the things that you were impressed was their work as as far once a person comes out of jail yes you know getting something so that the person feels like they're a productive member of society so talk to us about the you know profit organization that and mr shiny which is one of their friends and supporters his birthday is coming up and so they're like hey we want to fly you to princeton to be a part of this event i'm like wow who does eating these mean essen done twenty four years thirty years forty years and i'm like wow but the network and the friendship that we were able to  appreciate is what i loved about us interior and soon tyrian does not just get a person out and leave amounts interior and gets us out and they work with us and they really walk with us and that was very important for me because of the lack of rehabilitative resources and support systems there are prison systems did not provide for the people incarcerated we exercise he expects for us to be successful but we don't have the tools to be successful with it you don't guarantee you and you beat us over the heads and over the backs because we're not successful but you could get that the institution that holds us is not doing that and so after i was fully exonerated in two thousand and twenty of dallas as kate miss kate was saying earlier we had over fifty three exonerated days and we would lobby and alston for compensation we would eventually get to and sation and so when i was exonerated i started miles of freedom and the work of miles of freedom is to work with anybody coming out of prison to get them the access and resources that they need whether it's an d social security card in rolling back in college or employment we also provide transportation for family members to stay connected with their loved ones because visitation is very essential for a person returning home from prison and so those are some of the systemic issues there really keeps individuals from being successful coming out of prison and so miles of freedom's mission is to equip empower and employ meaning women returning home from prison while we support the families and communities and their fun and we've been doing this for seven years so you've worked through a lot of individuals the last year we did one hundred if we were four hundred fifteen men and women returning home from prison i can truthfully say within seven years we've worked with over a thousand people within the dallas area assisting them returning home but it's quite a tribute to you you know and it's it's i think my value is in prison wow i'm valuable out here i don't i don't think society really sees our value they just see us as a wrongful one fully convicted person but to really see the value that we have a day we can bring to the table is overlooked and in prison that's where our value is truly seen because that's where the hope needs to be and so i just give credit to the people that supported us in the work to we're doing now so what what changes did you see i mean you win in zero nine you came out fifteen years later i don't know how that affects your family and your whole into dynamics with you know your family dynamics as well society to saw a lot of changes you know but you were part of yeah so i oftentimes say that i recognize dallas but i didn't know it right i recognize my family but i didn't know you know to go into prison and be present just came out and to come out i phones were everywhere i remember one time we was driving home and i seen everybody only a bus stop and i thought everybody was talking to herself they was and i asked my sister i say man trains in dallas and you get out and now trains is like the main source of transport public transportation to get a job you have to use a computer and they don't have computers in prison and so you got to fill out a job application online college everything is computerized you know even dealing with or conversing with women in prison you can't talk to women that you know you know and so it's it's a self esteem issue that mean or challenge when coming out of prison to even be able to look at a woman are or to look at a men who has a doctor or your degree or or something and  i have value or i can add value to this conversation it takes a lot for their person to feel valuable themselves and so not just the physical changes our society but the  now they come back and they don't know how to apologize and you really don't know how to accept them but the apology comes and you accept them so it's is how it is whole well i want to thank you richard for coming on the show tonight thank you kate you too and i want to thank you both for continuing the good work at centurion and also hopefully you continue the good work of moussa freedom yes and i'm sure everybody who's watching tonight will be reaching for their checkbooks right now and they will be donating yeah either century ministries or miles of freedom for the good work that's being done on behalf of a lot of people so i'm looking for steve thank you for watching tonight please continue as we continue our special seri with century ministers have a good n