welcome my name is that tasha sherman and i am your host and this is a second half hour interview i'm doing with my guests jeffrey deskovic and lorenzo johnson and the case you haven't seen the first half hour i want to tell you a little bit about who they are hundred ninety at the age of seventeen was wrongfully convicted of rape and murder and he spent the next sixteen years in prison he was one of the so called lucky ones who was exonerated and released from prison after sixteen years authorities knew his d n a did not match that of the actual perpetrator who three years later and this is where we have to get really serious about what happens when we put innocent people in jail three years later the real guilty party went on to murder another young woman and mother of two but rogue police officers prosecutors and other law enforcement personnel knowingly and maliciously accused prosecuted and eventually secured his conviction jeffrey is now in law school and he started the jeffrey deskovic foundation for justice which is committed to fighting wrongful conviction through raising awareness seeking legislative changes exonerating the wrongfully convicted both in d n a and non d n a cases and to the reintegration of exonerate welcome back thank you for having me want to be your willing to stay this extra half hour absolutely i couldn't think of a person i'd rather spend it with  so my next guest is lorenzo johnson and he spent almost twenty two years incarcerated for a crime that he didn't commit most of us can't even imagine this he was wrongfully convicted of a nine hundred ninety five murder in harrisburg pennsylvania and he won release from his life without parole sentence in two thousand and twelve after the third circuit federal court of appeals ruled that there was legally insufficient evidence for his conviction he remained free for four months after which the u s supreme court reinstated the conviction ordered him back to prison to resume the sentence his defense was not allowed to file briefs or make oral arguments for his position and he returned to prison on june fourteenth two thousand and twelve with the support of the pennsylvania innocence project to continue to fight for his freedom and five years later he was recent events and released from prison welcome back  i'm so happy that he able to give you a voice here so we ended the last show talking about the fact that you know you were released and then you get this call your lawyer is crying on the phone  you can't even understand him but the one thing you didn't understand was you have to go back and and then that process and then the drive back to prison and the choice that you made because you were innocent the choice not to run going back to trust the system that had failed you and walking in that prison door knowing that you were going to continue to fight and it took five years and in the end it wasn't even that you were exonerated you decided to take a plea so tell us about that when i when i went back to present the legal team did a top to bottom the from the get of the my case of the media you know you have to how great considering that you started out with an attorney who didn't even interview you before your trial exactly well that was part of reason why you decided not to run to in addition to your innocence but the of my innocence was right from the beginning from the beginning blockbuster evidence that you know warrants you know a new trial immediately are released immediately they force me to have the nel to this whole process know when i was innocent from day one to force testimony go uncorrected from the lower courts all we have tonight is a supreme court that even let the united states supreme court judges make a decision knowing that the decision that the bit was based on that th possession of these statements we were told that the only witness they had to the case never made a statement and it turns out they changed get later one of the people that was a suspect eighteen years later we found out that not only ninety days we'll give you a clean version of your discovery and they were all making you think like they were like if they reached the same conclusion that your legal team was saying that that meant they were going to go into court and agree that you should be released when actually they were never did that in fact they were saying hey that you're late you're sixty days late this you shouldn't be any to argue this and in my case it for two years they did this and every time they turn less you can shorten the line for everyone in time that said that that information is dead just basically and they kept asking you to postpone so that ultimately they get a plan together so what happened was they blame me and when you get evidence you hear is this leaning a case on these grounds is like yes i am big in the criminal justice system is not a little is like things could change instantly and many like you you look at it like that i don't know what was going on because the companies i was transported from state for instance of the county prison my lawyer was coming to see me were box as a legal work within the visit when we're go back and forth or was about to take place know it put me under pressure because my mother's older you know my mother in law just finished my chemo so is is you know it's a person pretty quite in the back of my head is this ring in the back of my head i again i can't imagine a being sent to prison being innocent spending all those years in prison knowing you're innocent fight in your case being told you're innocent having that taken away from you and then having to make that terrible decision of you know i want to stay and fight it there's no way i should have to take on this guilty plea ah but my family so like you said you took the plea but you're still wearing a guilty man suit because it the collateral effects of that are such that by law you are still on parole you still have a criminal record against you and all the stuff that happens to people who are sent to jail yet for example you know the runs or keep cannot he can't vote you know when you apply for housing you know do you have a conviction there's that there's on job applications have you been convicted you know of a crime i mean these are all the thing and then there's still the stigma which would be much different if you were exonerated so all these collateral effects are very real and on top of that you know he cannot be compensated right and i'm sure that's why they push it having taken the plea and i want to read something which i think you wrote actually having taken the pollie can you still fight for i'm glad i got a platform to talk about to educate society who who feel that this isn't a place yes yes when it was done speaking of that platform around so you know you done a number of speaking engagements and you've done a number of interviews some of them some of both of those with me some of them without me and my rhetorical question i would ask is what a guilty person be doing this now at this point your whole what is the point now but that's that but that's another thing just like a guilty person is not point to turn themselves back in writing but here's the thing most people aren't aware of some of the impact they think oh it's a story it's sad but it's his story and so that's what anyone way yes exactly but here's the damage that happens as a result of it as well so this is from two thousand and fifteen according to the new york innocence project fifty two percent of new york's d n a exonerations involved i witness mis identification forty eight percent of new york's d n a exonerations involved a false confession and of the three hundred thirty d n a exonerations one hundred fifty actual perpetrators were identified went on to commit seventy sexual assaults thirty murders and twenty five other violent crimes in new york eleven real perpetrators identified went on to commit five murders and three rapes so the people who are guilty are out there enforcement is concerned they're not out there looking for the actual perp that's right they that's right as far as you're concerned the case is solved as in your case the other guy went and killed someone else right so i'm going to jump ship for a minute and just get into the more personal aspect of this i hope people pay attention and you know i remember when i interviewed you and you said you know you were sixteen and you thought oh if people are in jail it means they must have done something wrong you know and i think society generally tends to think that although they're being awakened to some of it now especially since it's more in the news that you know people are exonerated because of d n a but i think we have to pay attention because as we all agree this could happen to anyone and also again real people innocent people are sent to prison and the real perpetrators are out there continuing to do with their doing but i want to ask you jeffery you know you've been out now for how many years phone ten ten years and you know your life will never be what it could have been and i remember listening to you being interviewed and use and you know you had legal cases and you got millions of dollars and you use that to create the jeffrey deskovic foundation but i remember somewhere along the way you said i'd give it all back and then some if i could get those sixteen years back so i don't think you ever fully recover right from something like this what for you what would you say is the main thing that might be missing in the way you experience life that you would have had if you hadn't been in prison wrongfully convicted you know my life cycle would have unfolded in traditional more and more more manner meaning that i would have went to the high school prom graduated high school finished  my education and a more traditional age put into a career perhaps been married maybe maybe i have have have a family and other things that i experienced much later in life i mean it was like at thirty three when i first started living on my own my own apartment to balance a checkbook together driver's license so even now i don't i mean i'm forty four physically but i don't feel like the emotional and the psychological i don't feel like i'm that age  was really interesting was that people embraced you and welcomed you but they also expressed some guilt in the fact that when you were on trial intend to jail that some of them believed you must have been guilty yes most of most of that because that's what you do in your thirty's of arrested you and then you know the news with the go presumptive oriented and it being a major media moment and then it and then of course that was facilitated by the fact that the police coerce the false confession out of me and of course only a guilty person can do that yeah so that yeah that was so there was that guilt that they very well but then also that i feel like something was missing from their life to lead when i was you know some of them were friends of mine or even just associates from a still in the struggle of it first of all i'm i have to acknowledge what kind of human beings you are first of all because unbelievable to have gone through what you went through and to be sitting here running successful lives fighting the good fight committed to making a difference i mean it just blows me away so i yeah just you know i want to acknowledge your for that but so in the innocent so they got something coming you know it might unfold different ways how they was framed to whatever but they share a certain bond of mean it isn't so i felt the platform that i was given that i must speak on thank you we're out of time thank you so much for telling your stories for being advocates for doing the work you're doing and good luck thank you my name is not a sherman thank you for joining us