Before the Ink Dries | EP 5 | Season 2

Bobby Gumpright’s confession surfaces as Jermaine Hudson’s case is under review. It comes at the moment Jermaine is ready to plead guilty to a crime he didn’t commit, just to escape prison. You can reach out to the Burden of Guilt team at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. For more Burden of Guilt, follow us on Instagram @glasspodcasts https://www.instagram.com/glasspodcasts/. Please continue to follow the work of the Promise of Justice Initiative online at https://promiseofjustice.org, on Instagram and Twitter at @justicespromise, and on Facebook and Bluesky at @promiseofjustice See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 1:03Speaker 03

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• 1:33Speaker 04

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• 2:17Speaker 04

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• 2:28Nancy Glass?

  Jermaine has told us about the moments he lost while incarcerated at Angola. But it wasn't only life that passed him by. He also missed moments of death. The chance to come together, to mourn, and to find solace in a community.

• 2:44Nancy Glass?

  Who died while you were incarcerated?

• 2:46Speaker 06

  I lost my older brother. I lost a favorite nephew. He got killed. He got murdered. I lost favorite aunties. My oldest sister. She used to bring my daughter. And she was like, I'm coming to see you after New Year's. I said, OK. I called home Christmas. We talked that morning. I called back home later. It wasn't even no more than four hours later. She was dead. They said she caught a heart attack on her job.

• 3:22Nancy Glass?

  How do you receive that news?

• 3:24Speaker 06

  The chaplain department would call for you and call you in the church. And they would tell you, your brother such and such passed away. It hadn't got to a point to when they called me, I wouldn't even go. Because I knew why they was calling me. But it didn't hurt me when they died because I was so numb to the fact of me being incarcerated. I didn't want that to affect me. If I were to start grieving over that, I don't know what I probably would have been involved in a day while I was at those moment in time.

• 4:00Nancy Glass?

  You needed to stay numb to stay alive.

• 4:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:04Nancy Glass?

  You had a steel box around your heart.

• 4:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:07Nancy Glass?

  And if you opened it for anything.

• 4:09Speaker 06

  It was gonna destroy me.

• 4:21Nancy Glass?

  I'm Nancy Glass. This is Burden of Guilt, Season Two, Episode Five, Before the Ink Dries.

• 4:32Nancy Glass?

  Jermaine Hudson didn't have a lot of hope of ever leaving prison. But in 2021, a confluence of events changed everything.

• 4:44Nancy Glass?

  Bobby Gumpright entered a residential Christian rehab called A Place of Restoration and told his entire story to the director, Jeremy Smith. Alarmed at the idea of an innocent man in prison, the director reached out to the DA's office, hoping they'd know what to do. He had no idea that cases like Jermaine's were being reviewed right at that moment.

• 5:09Speaker 07

  I called the district attorney's office and I asked for Emily Mall and whoever answered the phone said she was busy. He said, "Can I take a message? She'll call you back." And I said, "Can I just tell you in 10 seconds or less why I'm calling?" And so as fast as I could, I explained the purpose for my call. And his tone changed and the sense of urgency changed and he said, "Hold on one second." And it seems like in less than a second, she was on the phone. She proceeded to say, "This is so crazy. His case file is on my desk right now."

• 5:50Nancy Glass?

  While the director was talking with the DA's office, Bobby called his dad.

• 5:55Speaker 06

  I just told him, "You might see my picture on the front page of the New York Times as this horrible monster. And I'm sorry for embarrassing you, but I gotta do this."

• 6:14Speaker 06

  He just told me he loved me.

• 6:19Speaker 06

  And I just did what I had to do.

• 6:22Speaker 06

  That was the best response I could have asked for, really.

• 6:26Speaker 06

  Because I was always worried about what it was going to make him look like, you know, how it was going to reflect on the family.

• 6:34Nancy Glass?

  You've heard throughout this series that Jermaine was convicted of armed robbery in 2000 by a jury vote of 10 to 2. So here's the thing. When I started working on this series, I didn't know that a person in the United States could be convicted of a crime without all 12 jurors agreeing. I mean, that's a mistrial, right? I assumed unanimity was a given, but it wasn't.

• 7:02Nancy Glass?

  Two states allowed non-unanimous jury verdicts. Oregon, which began the practice in 1934, and Louisiana. That state started it in 1880. But in 2018, when Louisiana citizens voted to end non-unanimous juries, the state had a big problem. They had thousands of people behind bars because of non-unanimous verdicts. So Louisiana started offering many of them plea deals with the opportunity to get out of prison. And Jermaine was one of them. All he had to do was sign a guilty plea for the armed robbery of Bobby Gumpright, a crime we all know

• 7:47Nancy Glass?

  never happened at all.

• 7:49Speaker 06

  I was actually going to plead guilty to that crime. The DA, Jason Williams, was giving me credit for time served. And I was actually going to take that to get out of that place. I didn't care anymore. I need to get home to my kids. I need to get my life back on track. Y'all can have that conviction. I just want to get out of here.

• 8:16Nancy Glass?

  Jermaine had always maintained his innocence, but wasn't standing on ceremony anymore. And this deal, this plea agreement, was the reason that Jermaine's file was on the desk of Emily Maugh at the District Attorney's Office. She was overseeing a newly created civil rights division. One of her responsibilities was to identify cases eligible for post-conviction relief. Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe it was an act of God. But while she was reviewing Jermaine Hudson's case for the plea deal, she got a call from the director of the faith-based rehab I told you about, A Place of Restoration.

• 9:00Nancy Glass?

  Jeremy Smith had just heard Bobby Gumpright's story about making up false testimony. Here's Emily Maugh.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  He says there's a man in here who, when he was 19 years old, lied about a person who had committed a crime against him. And it's fueled a lot of his challenges over the years, his alcohol and drug abuse. And he just... Just really wants to speak to somebody about it. And I asked who the person was and he said it was Jermaine Hudson. And I said, that's interesting because that's a case that's on our radar at the moment.

• 9:31Nancy Glass?

  Emily and her team were looking at cases like Jermaine's and trying to find compromise solutions.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  One of the things that the Civil Rights Division was going to try to do was deal with the very extreme sentencing that had come out of abuse of what we call the multiple bill in Orleans Parish over many, many years.

• 9:49Nancy Glass?

  After Jermaine was convicted of armed robbery, prosecutors filed a multiple bill, Louisiana's habitual offender enhancement. The law was designed to remove people from society who were deemed dangerous. It allowed Jermaine's sentence to be dramatically increased because of his past. His priors included a juvenile case from when he was 14, when he was a passenger in a stolen car, and a carjacking conviction, the victim later told us, he never actually saw Jermaine commit. With the multiple bill in place, Jermaine was sentenced to 99 years, effectively life in prison, for a crime with no DNA, no physical evidence, and no one physically harmed.

• 10:36Nancy Glass?

  And Jermaine wasn't alone. Scores of young black men in Louisiana receive similar extreme sentences under the same law.

• 10:45Speaker 00

  People serving life without the possibility of parole for having a rock of crack, because it was their third rock of crack. And the district attorney had said, I'm going to invoke the multiple bill, which gave the judge zero to very little discretion at sentencing.

• 10:57Nancy Glass?

  In just three days' time, Jermaine was scheduled to sign the plea agreement and take responsibility for the crime. He had no idea that Bobby had recanted his testimony, and he never dreamed that the whole thing was fabricated.

• 11:13Speaker 07

  I get chills. I still get chills thinking about it. That's the thing that blew my mind, is like this man's been in prison for 22 years, and this was all happening right in front of me.

• 11:28Speaker 07

  Bobby Gumpright had been a drifter for 20 years, living all around the country, and found himself in New Orleans three months after a new district attorney takes over, wanting to confess and make his wrongs right. When, if he'd have showed up six months before, it might not even have been possible. And so it just all seemed very providential. Like, this was supposed to happen, and supposed to happen in this way.

• 11:58Nancy Glass?

  A lawyer from the DA's office took Bobby's statement, and then the office contacted Judge Nandi Campbell. The judge had heard the name Jermaine Hudson before. Here's Judge Campbell.

• 12:13Speaker 06

  The first time he came in front of me, he was part of this group, I think the DA's office was calling it the Jim Crow Project. He was one of 16 people that day.

• 12:26Speaker 06

  Jermaine was definitely on the list to come in and plead guilty, just to get out of jail. It was a really emotional day to do pleas and sentencing. In Jermaine's case, there was oppressive sentencing, it was a non-unanimous jury.

• 12:44Nancy Glass?

  Ironically, the DA's office had been looking for Bobby, the guy who at the time claimed to be the victim, to talk with him about relief for Jermaine.

• 12:54Speaker 06

  They were spending time trying to reach out to the victim in that case. And it was during that gap that everything started to unfold. Which is incredible, because the timing of that is really significant. Mr. Hudson was going to come in and plead, just to get out of jail.

• 13:20Nancy Glass?

  Judge Campbell was away on vacation when she first got the news and a copy of Bobby's statement recanting his testimony.

• 13:29Speaker 06

  I just was blown away.

• 13:31Nancy Glass?

  Meanwhile, the district attorney's office was hustling to get Jermaine's case resolved. We did our level best to verify.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  What this person had told us, but everything about the circumstances of it had seemed to ring very true. I think within a day or two, we managed to get the case back into court. I do remember Judge Campbell assembled all her staff on Zoom so that we could deal with Mr. Hudson's case immediately.

• 13:58Nancy Glass?

  Judge Campbell's staff moved quickly once they realized an innocent man was still sitting in Angola.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  And so I'm like, can we get this done today? And my staff was like, sure. And then my law clerk had to stop what she was doing because we needed somebody in the courtroom to do all the processing so that he can get out of jail right away.

• 14:26Nancy Glass?

  Judge Campbell had a visceral response to Jermaine's case.

• 14:31Nancy Glass?

  It brought her back to an experience she had when she was a defense attorney.

• 14:38Nancy Glass?

  One day, while she was climbing the steps inside the courthouse, she saw a man struggling to walk and to breathe.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  I could tell he was sickly. He was a young black guy, but you could tell he was ill. And I said, sir, I said, you, you okay? You need help? And he said, I'm going up to section G. I was a victim in a case and I'm dying.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  And I need to go and give my testimony before I die.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  It turned out that he was an inmate and he was a young guy.

• 15:20Speaker 04

  And somebody told him one of the ways he can get out of jail is if he accused somebody as rape.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  And then they would think he was in harm and he would get out of jail.

• 15:32Nancy Glass?

  Those three men were given life sentences following their convictions for rape.

• 15:38Speaker 04

  And so he had accused these three guys of raping him and that he was dying and he wanted to clear his conscience.

• 15:45Nancy Glass?

  And this story would become eerily relevant to her again.

• 15:50Speaker 04

  When the DA's office called me about Mr. Hudson's case, I thought, wow, this is the same thing.

• 15:57Nancy Glass?

  I just had flashbacks to the gentleman going up to Section G. Jermaine was ready to sign that plea agreement and be released finally from Angola. It was just a few more days. And then, something strange happened.

• 16:15Nancy Glass?

  Out of nowhere, dozens and dozens of emails flooded his inbox in prison.

• 16:22Speaker 06

  When I got on the kiosk machine, I seen almost sixty messages and I'm like, "Something is not right." Man, I don't even get these in a year.

• 16:37Speaker 06

  So when I finally called, they were like, "You've been exonerated."

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• 17:44Speaker 03

  Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. B21.

• 17:48Speaker 04

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• 18:32Speaker 04

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• 18:55Nancy Glass?

  to the technology actually making decisions. So you have to have a much better visibility of what AI is touching, data it is accessing and where. Hear the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts.

• 19:13Nancy Glass?

  Jermaine Hudson was ready to plead guilty to armed robbery and walk out of prison. The deal was set. What he didn't know was that Bobby Gumpright had already recanted his testimony and that a quiet coalition inside the district attorney's office and the courthouse was working behind the scenes on his behalf. And then Jermaine checked his email.

• 19:39Speaker 06

  When I got on the kiosk machine, I seen almost 60 messages and I'm like, something is not right. Man, I don't even get these in a year. So when I finally called, they were like, you've been exonerated. The white boy, that was the word they was using. The white boy come forward and say that he lied on you. And I'm like, I still couldn't believe it. Just right when I was getting ready to go take the time, I was honestly stunned.

• 20:19Speaker 06

  I was stunned because I used to always pray to God. I know I'm a good person. I know I have a good heart. But what could I actually have done to deserve this?

• 20:29Speaker 06

  I used to ask God, "God, whatever you do, please touch this man hard and allow him to come forward with the truth."

• 20:37Nancy Glass?

  For Judge Campbell, this case was also unusual because it moved so quickly.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Everybody was on board. This required the DA's office. They called the Department of Corrections. And of course, this is a testament to who Jermaine is, right? Because if he wasn't a model person in DOC, nobody in DOC was going to be shuffling along to get him out.

• 21:02Nancy Glass?

  Jermaine had told his family for years that he would be coming home, and now it was a reality.

• 21:09Nancy Glass?

  Kristen Motley, Jermaine's ex-girlfriend and mother of his daughter Jermia, found out about Jermaine's release through a winding game of telephone.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  My sister friend worked at the courthouse. She seen his paperwork and told my baby sister, Dewan. And then Dewan called me and she said, "Chris, it's real. He's coming home. His paperwork. He's coming home. Any day, he's coming home."

• 21:35Nancy Glass?

  Kristen and Jermaine had broken up years ago, but she still had feelings for him.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  I was excited. I was like, "Oh, I gotta get myself together." I said, "I gotta get it together." That's all I can say is like, "Yeah, you gotta get it together. Whatever you got going on, you gotta get it together. This man coming home."

• 21:57Nancy Glass?

  After the hearing with Judge Campbell and the district attorney's office...

• 22:01Speaker 06

  I went in the dormitory five minutes. Where they come in there, "Man, get all your stuff and let's go. We bring you to the hospital so you get your checkup, take your COVID shot, make sure you all right. Call your people. Let your people know to come pick you up."

• 22:17Nancy Glass?

  He had spent nearly 22 agonizingly slow years incarcerated at Angola. Now, his time was coming to an end. This was the moment he dreamed about, prayed about. And on March 26, 2021, Jermaine Hudson walked out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary a free man.

• 22:40Speaker 06

  That was...

• 22:43Speaker 06

  My defining moment,

• 22:48Speaker 06

  when I look back at that sign that said, "You're now entering a real prison. Welcome to Angola, Louisiana." I always said, "I'm leaving here the same way I came, out that front gate, and that's the same way I left, out that front gate."

• 23:10Speaker 06

  The feeling of walking out of Angola, it was like the whole United States was lifted off of my shoulders.

• 23:21Nancy Glass?

  Jermaine came to Kristen and Jeremia's home, one he had never been to before. Jeremia heard him come through the front door, her heart beating a mile a minute. Jeremia, the little girl he once carried everywhere as a baby, saw her father outside prison for the first time she could remember.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  When I first seen my dad, I ran down the stairs so fast and I hugged him and I jumped up, but I was shaking because I was so happy. I had to pinch him. Like, I'm like, "You real? Is this real?" And I was just, I didn't even let him go.

• 24:02Nancy Glass?

  Jeremia was over the moon. Kristen was also happy to see Jermaine, but she was cautious. A lot had happened over their 22-year separation.

• 24:14Nancy Glass?

  They had both become involved with other people. Kristen had another daughter with a long-term partner, and Jermaine had become involved with another woman while he was incarcerated. When he was released, he went to live with that woman. It was a strange time, feeling so much joy, but also trepidation. Kristen wondered if he was the same person she knew 22 years ago.

• 24:40Nancy Glass?

  I didn't know how we were gonna feel, actually, because he asked me one time before on the phone. He was like, "How you think we're gonna feel when we see each other again?" And I come on and I was like, "I don't know. I really don't know how we gonna feel." I then found out

• 24:57Nancy Glass?

  he came home to another woman.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  So they were together. I knew that all eyes was gonna be on me. They knew the love we had for each other. And I think everybody just was waiting to see like what's gonna happen. I didn't really want it to be about me. I really, really wanted to be about my daughter because she yearned for that day more than anything.

• 25:23Nancy Glass?

  But they did see each other, and it was strange for a bit.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  And he gave me a hug and he just held me and I was like, yeah, we're not done. I can feel his energy like, yeah, we're not done. It's not over.

• 25:44Nancy Glass?

  Kristen was right. It wasn't over. Decades had passed, but the feelings were still there. He and Kristen fell all the way back in love again.

• 25:54Speaker 06

  Once I actually got my family back, everything that I wanted to do was already in my mind. It was already in my heart. That's why the process was so smooth because I already seen this. I seen this vision. I seen this dream. I've really spoken into existence. I knew what I had to do.

• 26:17Nancy Glass?

  They were still Jermaine and Kristen, the kids who met in the 1990s, but now they were older and wiser.

• 26:23Speaker 06

  I got us. So to have my family back is one of the ultimate, one of the most ultimate blessings a man can ever receive after coming home after a 99-year sentence.

• 26:41Nancy Glass?

  Bobby Gumpright had thought coming clean after holding a lie for more than two decades would solve all his problems. He was still at the rehab, a place of restoration, when he found out Jermaine had been freed. The director of the program comes to me with a news article saying that Jermaine had been released after 22 years the very next day.

• 27:15Speaker 03

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• 28:34Speaker 04

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• 29:20Nancy Glass?

  Only a day after Bobby gave his deposition recanting his testimony, Jermaine was freed from Angola prison.

• 29:29Nancy Glass?

  Bobby, how did you feel when you found out about that? I fell to my knees.

• 29:36Nancy Glass?

  I just thank God.

• 29:43Nancy Glass?

  That's all I could do.

• 29:48Nancy Glass?

  Jermaine's release would not come without challenges for both him and Bobby. Jermaine learned that the world had gone on without him. It wasn't 1999 anymore. He was walking into a new world.

• 30:03Speaker 06

  When I first came home, everything was moving so fast. It's like when you incarcerated for 22 years, you used to seeing the same thing over and over again, day in and day out. So now you're entering the real world. Now you got to readjust. My toughest adjustment was technology. It was my toughest adjustment because we don't have technology incarcerated. Now we use the phone for everything. Before, you had to go to the company to fill out a job. Now you got Indeed and ZipRecruiter. You have those things where you fill out applications.

• 30:47Nancy Glass?

  Jermaine was starting a new life, but Bobby?

• 30:54Nancy Glass?

  After I heard Jermaine was set free, I just breathed a sigh of relief. I thought that I could move on with my life at that point. And I figured that that was the only thing that was holding me back all those years and that had been taken care of, and now I was good to go.

• 31:18Nancy Glass?

  So against their advice, I ended up leaving that rehab and going back to New Orleans. And within a few weeks, I was back to using drugs and drinking. Do you know why? Do you know what triggered it?

• 31:35Nancy Glass?

  My environment, yeah. I went straight back to the environment that I got sick in, thinking that I was gonna do something different. But...

• 31:45Speaker 02

  I hadn't changed any of my thinking.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  I still had a lot of baggage and there's still a lot of bad habits that I had to deal with.

• 31:56Nancy Glass?

  The rehab program was supposed to be nine months. There was still work Bobby had to do. Director Jeremy Smith knew Bobby wasn't ready to leave rehab, but there wasn't anything he could do.

• 32:12Speaker 07

  The program had to start with just dealing with his own issues. And I think in one way, letting go of the guilt of what he had done and confessing and the whole thing. It was obviously very freeing for him.

• 32:28Nancy Glass?

  But that confession had also gotten in the way of the help Bobby desperately needed.

• 32:33Speaker 07

  I knew that the reason that he accused Jermaine Hudson in the first place is that he was already in drug and alcohol addiction at a very young age. And I know that 25 years of dysfunction isn't healed in 25 minutes.

• 32:49Speaker 07

  There was a lot of growing left to be done.

• 32:54Nancy Glass?

  Bobby didn't realize that. He left the program after one month, eight months before he was supposed to. The director at the rehab saw the writing on the wall.

• 33:05Speaker 07

  He convinced himself pretty quickly that that was the reason that he had been using. And that once that had been dealt with, there wasn't much else to do. We could always assume that he wasn't going to make good decisions when he left.

• 33:21Nancy Glass?

  And he was right. Things were about to get much worse for Bobby. And you won't believe who came to his rescue.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  And at that moment, I just put my hands in the air. And then the police showed up and they arrested me.

• 33:44Nancy Glass?

  That's next time on Burden of Guilt.

• 33:52Nancy Glass?

  Thank you for listening. If you're enjoying Burden of Guilt, subscribe, rate, and review the series with five stars. Yay! It helps other people find our show. Check out our Instagram account @glasspodcast, where we recap each episode with show notes that include people, places, and court records. You can reach out to the Burden of Guilt team at [email protected]. That's [email protected]. Burden of Guilt is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group in partnership

• 34:31Nancy Glass?

  with iHeart Podcasts. The series is executive produced and hosted by me, Nancy Glass. This episode was written and produced by Carrie Hartman, also produced by Ben Fetterman and Andrea Gunning. Our story editor is Monique Leboard. Our associate producer is Jade Abdul-Malik. Our production manager is Kristin Melchurey. Our iHeart team is Ally Perry and Jessica Krychek. Audio editing by Zach Prouto. Scoring and sound design by Matt Del Vecchio. Mixed and mastered by Anna McLean. The Burden of Guilt theme is composed by Oliver Baines.

• 35:14Nancy Glass?

  Music library provided by MyB Music. And we want to give our special thanks to Jermaine Hudson and Bobby Gumpright. For more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeart Radio app or Apple Podcasts.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  Halloween's almost here and I've got plans. My first stop is Total Wine & More for cold beer, ready to drink cocktails, and a bottle of wine to share. And I know I'm getting the lowest prices. Get the fun started at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly, be 21.

• 35:51Speaker 04

  Quick break from the case. If there's a kid on your gift list this year, here's one you can close fast. Guardian is the number one kids bike on the market with over 1 million happy riders and the easiest way for kids to learn to ride. They're lightweight and low to the ground with a wide wheelbase for balance, so kids are riding in just one day. No training wheels needed. Guardian bikes are designed and assembled in the USA, and the New York Times Wirecutter has named them its top pick for kids bikes four years in a row. This holiday season, save over 40% on kids bikes and get $100 in free accessories with every bike: a lock, pump, bell, grips, and clamp. That's stocking stuffers covered. They've got helmets and adult bikes, too.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  Shop guardianbikes.com and it's case closed on the best kids gift this year. That's guardianbikes.com. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans, develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule, so you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.