- The main story is about the difficulties of obtaining justice and being exonerated from wrongful convictions.
- The video highlights a court case where a woman is awarded a VIP moment and $5,000, but questions the legitimacy of the decision.
- The story then focuses on the case of Lamar Johnson, who was convicted of murder despite evidence from one of the real killers stating his innocence.
- The video discusses the challenges of being exonerated, including the limitations of the writ of habeas corpus and the need for new evidence or constitutional rights violations to appeal.
- It also highlights the issue of inadequate legal representation and the importance of skilled attorneys in post-conviction appeals.
- The story includes examples of Ricky Kidd and Edward Lee Elmore, who faced obstacles in their appeals due to technical errors and resistance from prosecutors and judges.
- The video emphasizes the need for a justice system that prioritizes getting the right outcome rather than finality.

- The video discusses issues with the post-conviction relief system in the US
- It highlights a case where a judge denied a new trial despite evidence of innocence
- It mentions that appeals judges often adopt the prosecutor's findings without question
- The video criticizes the high bar set by federal courts for granting relief
- It explains the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and its impact on appeals
- The video mentions that innocent black people are disproportionately convicted and that guilty individuals may go free
- It discusses a specific case of Melissa Lucio, who was convicted based on a false confession and is now facing execution
- The video criticizes the prosecutor's lack of accountability in the case.

- The piece criticizes various individuals and entities, including the cops, Texans who voted for a governor who doesn't intervene, Ted Cruz, senators who voted for EDPA in 1996, Hammurabi, and the person prosecuting based on a false confession.
- The author suggests getting rid of EDPA and addressing factors that lead to wrongful convictions.
- They emphasize the importance of electing prosecutors who prioritize conviction integrity reviews and governors who use their pardon power.
- The current system is criticized for allowing wrongful convictions and providing little help in the appeal process.
- The author believes the system favors the rich and lucky and calls for a change in prioritizing correct decisions over quick ones.

- The video discusses the difficulties of obtaining justice and being exonerated from wrongful convictions.
- It highlights cases where individuals faced obstacles in their appeals due to inadequate legal representation and resistance from prosecutors and judges.
- The video criticizes the post-conviction relief system in the US and the high bar set by federal courts for granting relief.
- It mentions the disproportionate conviction of innocent black people and the lack of accountability for prosecutors.
- The author suggests getting rid of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and addressing factors that lead to wrongful convictions.
- They emphasize the importance of electing prosecutors who prioritize conviction integrity reviews and governors who use their pardon power.
- The current system is criticized for favoring the rich and lucky and prioritizing quick decisions over correct ones.

John Oliver explains why it’s so difficult to be exonerated for a wrongful conviction, even when there’s compelling evidence to prove your innocence, and how we can correct the state’s mistakes.

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It's the thing best served by Steve Harvey.

This court is going to award you a VIP moment.

You and your girl finna give you an additional $5,000 and you take your girl to Vegas and party like it's 1999.

That's my verdict, and that's how I see it.

From awarding a woman a VIP moment, as if that phrase means anything, to the entire gallery clapping for the plaintiff, including the defendants, by the way, to demanding she organize a vacation with all of her friends, every Google Calendar's nightmare.

And that is, say nothing of the MVP of that clip, Steve Harvey's little golden gavel, which he is making a full five-course meal out of.

Honestly, I wish I had 1 of those, except, hold on, I actually do.

Sadly, though, not all courts are as infallible as Steve Harvey's.

As we've discussed many times on this show, trials can go awry for a number of reasons, from prosecutorial misconduct, to underfunded, no-work public defenders, to flawed jury selection, to how we elect judges, to problems with mandatory minimums, all the way to flimsy jizz analysis.

Luckily, though, as pop culture has repeatedly taught us, there is a remedy for wrongful convictions built right into the system.

I'll get the conviction overturned on appeal.

I'll appeal this all the way to the Supreme Court.

Okay, hold on, because let's just acknowledge Juliana Margulies there, because she is capital-A acting in that moment, doing absolutely everything with absolutely nothing.

Giuliana Margulies is doing more in this three-second clip than The Rock has done in his entire movie career.

The idea that you can simply fight a wrongful conviction and get exonerated runs deep.

But the truth is, it is far more difficult than you might expect, even if there's compelling evidence that you are innocent.

Take Lamar Johnson, who was convicted in 1995 of murder.

But, between his conviction and his sentencing, 1 of the real killers wrote him a letter that you would think would have changed everything for him.

The letter opens by saying it's pretty much messed up.

Johnson was convicted when he didn't do anything, then explains who did it and what happened.

Believe it or not, even with the letter, this is still a fight and the justice system is trying to figure out how to free an innocent man.

I never expected that this case would go...

The way that it did, that I would end up...

Charged with it, and much less convicted for it, and would have to be here for the last 20-some years trying to prove that I didn't do it.

Okay, so there's clearly a lot to unpack there, from the fact that that letter didn't say it was messed up, it said it was fucked up, to the fact that it opened with, -"What's up, dude?" which is a weird way to greet a person who's in prison for something that you did.

How do you expect Johnson to respond to that?

Both the real killers have now signed multiple affidavits swearing that they committed the crime and that Johnson was not involved.

And if life were a game of Monopoly, you'd assume that's it.

That's an automatic get-out-of-jail-free card.

Unfortunately, though, life is not a game of Monopoly.

For 1 thing, no 1 these days can afford to buy property, and top hats are only worn by Amy Sherman-Palladino and the Babadook.

So, as of now, Johnson is still in prison, and it's very much up in the air whether he'll get out.

And if you're wondering how the fuck that can be the case, that is what our story tonight is about.

It conceals all the reasons why, if you're wrongfully convicted, even if there is compelling evidence of your innocence, it's really hard to be exonerated.

Let's start with the fact that the Constitution guarantees the writ of habeas corpus, which is to protect against unlawful imprisonment.

Basically, you have a right to challenge your incarceration, and you can do that in both state and federal court.

But as this defense attorney explains, there's a major limitation on that right.

It's not just enough to be innocent, I mean, that doesn't get you anywhere.

You have to have something else to be able to get back in court on.

In general, Innocence itself is not an appealable issue.

A fact already so shocking, it might prompt you to go, -"The full Margulies." -$5,000.

She was in the background of that scene, giving it that kind of commitment.

Now, what you can appeal on is any shocking new evidence that wasn't available during your original trial, or a claim that your constitutional rights were violated during it.

But that's already a long shot, especially because while you have a right to an attorney at your original trial, you are not guaranteed 1 after your conviction.

Most states do provide 1 in death penalty cases, but even then, there is no guarantee that they'd be competent.

He represented a man named Edward Lee Elmore in a murder case, and he lost it.

Elmore was sentenced to death and, while on death row, appealed his conviction.

He petitioned for a different lawyer, but was told that he had to stick with Anderson, who had only spent 8 days preparing for his original trial, and who can only be described as the most Tennessee Williams of characters.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have asked for more time.

I never had proclaimed to be, you know, the best lawyer that ever graced the courtroom.

The only thing worse than being a bad lawyer is being a bad lawyer with low self-esteem.

In the words of RuPaul, If you can't defend yourself, how in the hell are you gonna defend somebody else?

And the thing is, you do need an exceptionally good attorney for an appeal.

Post-conviction law is incredibly difficult to understand, even for a seasoned attorney.

And you want to get it right, because any technical error can result in your appeal being dismissed.

So many wrongful conviction cases are won or lost on technicalities, even ones that are pretty compelling.

Take Ricky Kidd, a man wrongfully convicted of murder in 1997, despite the fact no physical evidence linked him to the murders.

The case against him was littered with police incompetence and prosecutorial misconduct, and his own lawyer failed to chase down exonerating evidence, such as the fact that around the time of the murder took place, Kidd was in a sheriff's office applying for a gun permit, which is a pretty fucking solid alibi.

Kidd's best grounds to appeal were that he had ineffective counsel at his first trial.

But unfortunately, when his new lawyers filed that appeal, they failed to include that argument, so the state fought to keep him locked up.

Which is both outrageous and something that the Assistant State AG was comically unwilling to discuss.

You don't have any concern that a police commissioner and former prosecutor say he's innocent?

I mean, according to your name is here right in the court document, And you're not even arguing that he's guilty, just technicalities that he missed his chance to properly appeal.

I mean, you're spending taxpayer money to fight this case.

Honestly, I'm a bit conflicted there, because obviously that man is a heartless monster, smirking like a wax statue of Paul Giamatti when a man's life is at stake.

But I do also respect his ice-cold attempt at ignoring small talk in an elevator.

Elevators are flying coffins that demand total silence from each of their pallbearers.

And while it's not important, quick shout-out to the guy waving at the camera in the background there.

Bet you had no idea at the time that your wave was underscoring a grotesque failure of our entire judicial system, but it was!

But that actually brings us to a key point here, which is when the whole criminal justice system is geared toward getting a conviction, it has very little interest in seeing its work undone.

So, for instance, I mentioned earlier that 1 of the few ways to get a post-conviction appeal is to argue that you have new evidence to introduce, but you still have to be able to show that it would have changed the outcome at your trial.

And prosecutors will fight that notion hard.

When 1 of the West Memphis 3 tried to get a new trial based on new evidence, including DNA, an assistant AG appeared before the state supreme court to try and talk them out of considering it, citing the harm that could do.

What harm is there in allowing him to present all evidence?

Well, the harm is in the finality of a criminal judgment that is not demonstrated to have any constitutional or procedural defect and just to try it again.

I mean, you're suggesting, it sounds to me, Justice Breivis, though, every 15 or 17 years or so, we really ought to try cases again to reestablish guilt.

It's to the criminal justice system's interest in finality.

But if the final decision could be wrong, you should want to make sure that you get it right.

There's a reason that La La Land didn't just keep the Oscar after Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty skin-smiled their way through that mistake.

But while thankfully, those judges were skeptical, many deferred to prosecutors.

That was the case with Edward Lee Elmore, remember?

The guy whose initial lawyer was insecure foghorn Leghorn.

The key evidence against him were hairs at a murder scene that police claimed were of African-American descent.

But there were no photos of those hairs at the scene, which was already suspicious, and the state later found a box of evidence, previously claimed to be missing by police, that contained Caucasian hair recovered from the victim's body during her autopsy.

But when the judge was presented with this pretty important new information, he simply wasn't interested.

This is a completely different case than what the jury heard.

If this is not enough to grant somebody a new trial, then when is post-conviction relief ever appropriate?

Unexpectedly, rather than adjourn and read the filings before ruling, Judge Kynard issued his decision on the spot.

Oh, it gets even worse, because that judge went on to say that obviously the evidence should have been disclosed to counsel, but as far as impacting the original verdict, I don't think it would have.

And in closing, he said, good luck to everybody, I'm out of here.

Which is a terrible way to wrap up a court proceeding.

But the thing is, a quick ruling like that is not remotely unusual.

Many times, appeals judges will just sign the state prosecutor's documents without even changing the heading.

1 study looked at post-conviction appeals in the largest county in Texas and found judges adopted the prosecutor's findings verbatim in 96 percent of their rulings.

And if at this point, it seems like our whole system is set up to preserve its process, even at the cost of human life?

Well, during 1 death row appeal before the Missouri Supreme Court, for this man, Joe Amrein, 1 assistant AG basically admitted as much.

There's a constitutional violation that even if it's fine that Mr.

Amrin is actually innocent, he should be executed.

You know you're on the wrong side of an argument when you're asked, should innocent people be executed?

That's the kind of question that only has 1 right answer, like, is the Queen dead?

The obvious answer to that being, yes, absolutely, she's been dead since 2007, and it's a good thing.

-♪ ♪ -♪ And so far, everything we've discussed has been at the state level.

But what about if you appeal up to the federal court?

Well, in some cases, they do step in to overturn egregious convictions.

But as this defense attorney will tell you, that's very much the exception.

an appeals court is to get it right, and if it gets it wrong, then it will be fixed down the road in the system.

That's the belief that we all have in the system.

If some court gets it wrong, another court is gonna come along and set it right.

Federal courts can only grant relief if a state court was unreasonably wrong, was so wrong that No other judge, no other fair-minded judge could possibly agree with the state court.

Because no fair-minded judge could possibly agree is a hugely high bar to clear.

Reasonable people disagree all the time on issues like which way the toilet paper roll should go, or how a tortoise would wear clothes.

There's a vibrant discussion to be had here.

The truth is, federal courts' hands are tied pretty tightly by something called AEDPA.

It stands for the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

It was passed in the 1990s in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing.

And at the time, the justification for it was, we cannot let terrorists like Timothy McVeigh or any prisoners on death row appeal their cases endlessly.

Here is the argument back then in a nutshell.

years and years with access to libraries and computers and everything they could possibly need so that they continue to drag out this process?

Okay, that's actually an even worse argument than it seems, because remember, this was 1995.

The only thing computers were good for back then were Minesweeper and still images of a Cal Ripken Jr.

I'm guessing that in 1995, if you typed post-conviction habeas corpus appeal into Lycos.com, your hard drive would spark into a full-blown house fire.

So prisoners sometimes having access to computers clearly wasn't the real problem here.

And although AEDPA sounds like it only applied to terrorists and death row inmates, it applies to everyone.

And in addition to that high bar that gutted federal view of state convictions, it also imposed a strict one-year deadline to file a federal appeal once your conviction is finalized.

Which I know might sound like a lot of time to you, but it really isn't.

A federal appeal is a massive undertaking, often involving doing new research, speaking to experts, witnesses, previous attorneys, and investigators.

As proven by the fact that post-EDPA, the deadline had been missed at least 80 times in death row cases.

80 times death row prisoners went to the trouble of filing an appeal only to be told, sorry, too late, it doesn't count.

And even when filings do come in on time, that high bar means that they're less likely to be successful to the point that while before AEDPA, 40 percent of death row defendants succeeded in getting their verdict or sentence overturned in federal court, a decade after it, that rate had dropped to just 10 percent.

And I will say this, there was 1 senator who saw all of these problems with EDPR pretty clearly at the time, and he warned against what might happen.

This just doesn't make sense in my view, Mr.

President, as a practical matter, or as a matter of principle.

We should not, in our haste to hurry up executions, lose sight of our commitment to constitutional values.

We should not endorse proposals that increase the chance that where execution is imminent, that an innocent person be executed.

We should not, I believe, sacrifice certainty in the name of speed or fairness in the name of vengeance.

I know it is weird to see Joe Biden actually on the right side of a criminal justice issue in the 90s.

It's like watching home movies and seeing your bitterly divorced parents passionately frenching each other.

It's just hard to imagine a world where that ever happened.

Because now I have to tell you that Biden actually voted for the bill in the end.

And you don't get to be surprised by that.

And all of that brings us to today, where many wrongfully convicted people are still locked up with a racially disproportionate impact.

Innocent black people are about 7 times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people.

And at the same time, those who actually committed the crimes are still at large, as the Philly DA points out.

Justice means that you try to do things that are proportional, and you try to do things that are accurate.

If you're trying to do things that are accurate, that means you do not want the guilty person who got away to continue to get away.

And you also don't want the innocent person to stay in jail.

You've probably already been screaming that at your TV for the last 15 minutes, along with, talk a bit slower, and this guy's a furry, right?

And that's my business, but I will say this, the clues are all there.

We know prosecutors are fallible, even when the stakes are incredibly high.

And if you want to see this whole maddening system In 1 story, consider the case of Melissa Lucio.

She went through the most horrific thing imaginable, the death of her two-year-old daughter after a fall down a flight of stairs.

But the police suspected foul play, and over the course of a marathon interrogation, the night of her daughter's death, lasting until 3 in the morning, they pushed her to confess to murder.

Basically, what they were doing is they were trying to...

..Make me admit that I was the 1 responsible for her fall.

And I kept telling them that I hadn't hurt my daughter, and they were very vulgar, very rough, very persistent.

This is your chance to set it straight, Because right now it looks like capital murder.

Right now it looks like you're a cold-blooded killer.

Or were you a frustrated mother who just took it out

Look, I know that's upsetting to watch, but it's really important to see just how aggressive and manipulative the system can be in someone's most vulnerable moments that lead to things like false confessions.

Because after all of that, she told those officers what they wanted to hear that she had, in the past, spanked her daughter.

The state then argued to the jury that that counted as a murder confession.

And she was convicted in a trial where not only did the prosecution keep the jury from hearing psychologist testimony that could have spoken to her mental state at the time, but her own defense attorney decided not to call her other children to the stand who testified that they never witnessed any physical abuse from her.

And yet, when she tried to appeal her conviction to state court, the judge was apparently in such a hurry, he initially tried to rule for the prosecution before the defense had even filed their response, and when it got to, once it got to federal court, a split ruling denied her appeal, but even the judges who ruled against her admitted there was expert testimony that, if jurors had only heard it, could have impacted the verdict, going on to acknowledge, we are all, though, working within the constraints of AEDPA.

Melissa Lucio is now scheduled to be executed on April 27th.

And to hear her prosecutor tell it, there's only 1 person to blame for that.

And people say, well, she shouldn't be there, she shouldn't be there, well, you know, she put herself there.

Whose fault is it that she's there, if it's not hers?

I mean, I can take a crack at that answer if you want, because it starts with, not hers.

And while it isn't a complete list, it includes the cops who badgered her, the Texans who voted for a governor who seems unwilling to intervene, Ted Cruz, I'm assuming, somehow, the 91 senators who voted for EDPA in 1996, Hammurabi for codifying capital punishment in ancient Babylon, and you, for prosecuting based on a confession that wasn't even a confession, you fucking asshole!

So, with a system so fundamentally fucked, what do we do?

Well, immediately, we can get rid of EDPA, and we should do that as soon as possible, especially as the will could actually be there, considering how against it Biden once briefly was.

In addition, we should continue to address all of the many factors that lead to wrongful convictions in the first place, and when they do happen, we need to make sure that we've elected prosecutors who will undertake conviction integrity reviews, and governors who use their pardon power to undo the state's mistakes.

Because right now we have a system where people can be wrongly convicted with bad defense attorneys, and left to fight in a convoluted appeal system with little to no help.

At which point, it really feels like our system is essentially guilty until proven rich or lucky.

And that has to change, because we cannot keep letting the most vulnerable be casualties of a system that cares more about quick and final decisions than actually correct ones.

That is my verdict, and that's how I see it.

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Wrongful Convictions: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)