The Innocence Case from Hell with Josie Duffy Rice

Friend of the pod Josie Duffy Rice joins Peter and Michael to talk about her new podcast, The Backfire Effect. Her show digs into the case of Temujin Kensu, a man sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Scott Macklem. Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time? Listen to The Backfire Effect wherever you get your podcasts. If you're not a 5-4 Premium member, you're not hearing every episode! To hear this episode ad-free and listen to Premium-only episodes, access to our Slack community, and more, join at fivefourpod.com/support http://fivefourpod.com/support. 5 to 4 is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Allison Rodgers. Leon Neyfakh provides editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Follow the show at @fivefourpod on most platforms. On BlueSky, find Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social, Michael @fleerultra.bsky.social, and Rhiannon @aywarhiannon.bsky.social. Our Sponsors: * Check out Mint Mobile and use my code mintmobile.com/fivefour for a great deal: https://www.mintmobile.com * Check out Quince and use my code FIVEFOUR for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Hey, everyone. This is Leon from Prologue Projects. On today's episode of Five to Four, Peter and Michael are talking to journalist and friend of the show Josie Duffy Rice about her new podcast series, The Backfire Effect. Josie's series dives into the case of Temogen Kenzoo, a man serving a life sentence in Michigan State Prison for the 1986 murder of college student Scott Macklem. But Temogen says he could not have killed Scott because he was hundreds of miles away when his murder took place. How can someone be convicted of a murder when they were halfway across the state when it happened? The answer includes, but is not limited to, corrupt cops, a drug-addled defense attorney,

• 0:45Speaker 00

  an imaginary ninja syndicate, and an amateur hypnotist. The Backfire Effect is the story of a truly wild case that also highlights some of the most insidious parts of our legal system. This is Five to Four, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court and the criminal justice system suck.

• 1:07Peter Shamshiri?

  Welcome to Five to Four, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have carried our civil rights to safety, like Donald Trump being carried from ground zero by firefighters. I'm Peter. I'm here with Michael.

• 1:20Michael Liroff?

  Hey, everybody.

• 1:21Peter Shamshiri?

  And our friend Josie Duffy Rice.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 1:24Peter Shamshiri?

  You guys up on the Donald Trump ground zero story?

• 1:28Speaker 03

  Listen, I gotta say, that guy's batting 100 for me. 1,000?

• 1:32Michael Liroff?

  1,000, yes.

• 1:33Peter Shamshiri?

  1,000, you're doing great.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  1,000, okay. He's doing great.

• 1:36Michael Liroff?

  He is. I might be the only person in the country who believes his story. I do believe Donald Trump would look at ground zero and be like, we should go walk around there. We should go in there.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  What can we build here?

• 1:48Peter Shamshiri?

  The story he tells is, quote, "I took the whole crew down there right after this happened." He says, "There wasn't too much we could do."

• 2:02Peter Shamshiri?

  Which seems like he's making it seem like we were going down to help. Like, Donald Trump in his giant silk suit was gonna somehow help out here.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Honestly, the only reason he's going is if he thinks one of his investments is at risk.

• 2:14Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  Which is sort of what he seems to be implying. Like, he's not like, oh, my children were done down.

• 2:21Peter Shamshiri?

  Well, no, no, no. Well, I mean, wasn't he, like, verifiably on the phone a couple hours later, like, talking to the news about how his building was the tallest now? So, like, when was this? Anyway, so then he says that he was hanging out at ground zero sometime immediately after 9/11, possibly on 9/11, and the US Steel building was creaking. He says, "We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big, strong guys, and I'm not a small guy, they grabbed me under the arms and said, 'Gotta get out of here.'" And they literally lifted me up, and they started running with me.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  And what happened to the building? Seems like it was fine.

• 3:00Peter Shamshiri?

  I guess the building was fine.

• 3:02Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 3:02Peter Shamshiri?

  Trump and, like, strong men, like...

• 3:05Speaker 03

  He loves them. He loves them.

• 3:06Peter Shamshiri?

  The psychosexual shit going on, on the right, it's so surface level now that you can't even really make jokes about it. But the layers of lies here is, it's fucking hilarious. Like, first of all, he's obviously lying about all of it, but then even in this lie, he's telling, he's getting carried by firefighters. Like, this is like, you're having a teenage girl fantasy about going down to 9/11 and then firefighters rescue you.

• 3:34Peter Shamshiri?

  Like, what are you talking about, dude?

• 3:37Speaker 03

  He didn't carry them. They carried him.

• 3:40Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. He's not a hero here. He's the damsel in distress.

• 3:44Michael Liroff?

  That's right.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  100%.

• 3:45Peter Shamshiri?

  Oh, man. All right. Well, so Josie, we're having you on because...

• 3:53Speaker 03

  You love me.

• 3:54Peter Shamshiri?

  Every couple of years, you do a podcast, and it's kind of right up our alley. And you've done one called The Backfire Effect, which is, what's the state of it? Is it out now? Is it about to drop? Where are we?

• 4:05Speaker 03

  So it's out now as of yesterday. First of all, you just kind of, like, did a devastating summary of my professional life, which is every couple of years, you do a podcast.

• 4:15Peter Shamshiri?

  What are you talking about? That's the highest calling, Josie.

• 4:18Michael Liroff?

  Having some of them win awards.

• 4:19Peter Shamshiri?

  We've been podcasting professionally for, like, six and a half years, and we win no awards. And every time you do one, you win like a Peabody or something.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  You've won awards to me spiritually, which are the only awards that matter.

• 4:32Peter Shamshiri?

  Now, every now and then, we get, someone emails us and is like, hey, would you like to pay us $150 to, like, be submitted to win, like, you know?

• 4:40Speaker 03

  Super Lawyers Podcast?

• 4:41Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, like, some shit like that. It's like, it's like how you could get your child published in a poetry book in the 90s if you paid money.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 4:50Peter Shamshiri?

  That's the sort of competition that we're in, awards-wise. But you put out a podcast every couple of years, and it will win a journalistic award. This one will probably win some award.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  We'll see.

• 5:00Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, and, you know, we wanted to talk about this podcast of Josie's because, you know, we talk a lot about the injustice in the system that flows from the top, from the Supreme Court, which has often wide-ranging impact. But that's not the only place where there are problems, where there's injustice, and a lot of it happens, you know, at the trial court level, at the state court level. And this is just a great look into one of those instances and a great window into broader issues like federal policy, like EDPA, which we'll talk about later.

• 5:40Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, the podcast is a great vehicle for discussing all of these different ways in which injustice manifests for normal people who are experiencing the legal system. So Josie, why don't you give us an outline of the show?

• 5:57Speaker 03

  So the podcast is called The Backfire Effect. It is about a case in Michigan where a man was convicted of murder. He was convicted of murder three days after I was born. And so our lives kind of, like, have this weird intersection, which is, obviously, his free life kind of ends of mine starts. And so he was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend's fiance. Ex-girlfriend, I think, being a big term for what we're talking about. I mean, they dated. They dated for five weeks. He's also dating other people. She's dating other people. They date for five weeks. They break up. They don't speak again. And then four months later, her fiance is shot and killed in the parking lot of a community college in Port Huron.

• 6:39Michael Liroff?

  Not only was he dating someone, he was engaged to somebody else when he dated this.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  He was engaged to someone else. He was engaged to someone else, to a pregnant woman.

• 6:46Michael Liroff?

  He had a pregnant fiance when he dated this girl. That's how unserious their relationship was.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  That's also, like, an example of what kind of guy he was, which I think really does end up mattering in this case, right? Like, he did not treat women well. He was abusive. He cheated. He was arrogant. And he, this was not his first child either, and he's 23, just, like, gallivanting around Michigan doing whatever. So, you know, he has kind of, like, created, I think, intentionally, a perception of himself as, like, a badass guy who's not to be fucked with, who, you know, could hurt anybody he wanted and, you know, do whatever he wanted. And then this comes back in a really kind of aggressive way to hurt him when he's, like, accused of murder. That honestly should have been, like, the beginning and end of it. Like, obviously,

• 7:36Speaker 03

  you should look at the ex-boyfriend because it usually is some, like, dick dude who does feel jealous, is who, like, ends up killing people in this country. But pretty quickly, it should have been clear to the police and prosecutors that it wasn't him. He was, like, demonstrably across the state at the time of the murder.

• 7:52Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  And yet, here we are.

• 7:54Peter Shamshiri?

  Before you go further, I mean, like, Michael and I have listened to the first half of the show, right? And that's sort of the story of the murder and how he gets convicted. And it almost plays out like true crime, except with no real mystery, because it's very obvious from the start that he didn't do it. And you're laying out the anatomy of this case, but it also just feels like the anatomy of, like, a certain type of case, like, a taxonomy of this very specific type of, like, small-town prosecution, especially a few decades ago.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  Yes, and police work, right?

• 8:29Michael Liroff?

  Yes.

• 8:29Peter Shamshiri?

  Where you have, like, unbelievably incompetent police work. You have corrupt and incompetent prosecutors and defense attorneys. There are, like, preposterous characters strewn throughout. The defendant, the suspect here, even though he's demonstrably innocent, he's a sort of ludicrous character in many ways.

• 8:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:51Peter Shamshiri?

  I feel like you don't meet that many normal people throughout this story.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  That's such a good way of putting it.

• 8:58Peter Shamshiri?

  Very early on, you introduce us to a piece of evidence, which is a witness statement borne by hypnosis.

• 9:07Michael Liroff?

  Yes.

• 9:08Peter Shamshiri?

  And when you start talking about it, I thought to myself, oh, we're about to, like, the rest of this podcast is about to be about how, like, hypnosis is fake, right? Like, about how this is, like...

• 9:21Speaker 03

  Like...

• 9:22Peter Shamshiri?

  But, but actually, that's just a tiny little sliver of the bullshit. As I was listening, I felt like I was listening to you describe, like, almost like this type of, like, Porky's-level case that could only happen in, like, a small town in the 70s and 80s.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. And actually, like, the way you described it, I think, is totally right. I mean, two things you said really stick out to me. One is, like, it is such a, like, relic of a time. I was telling a friend of mine about this case, who's a clerk, like, a permanent clerk for a local judge, and she was like, this doesn't make any sense to me because, like, our jury would never convict on this. And I'm like, yeah, it was 1986. Like, it was a totally different time in terms of, like, how people thought about the criminal justice system, how people thought about prosecutors as, like, political beings or almost like seers who had a gut instinct that couldn't be, like, questioned. And also, just the entire kind of concept of, like, what was acceptable was very different. I mean, like, the idea of mass incarceration, we were 10 years off from that being in anyone's lexicon.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  You know, we are at a point where, like, politically, the one thing that both parties just agree on beyond any sort of conflict is, like, you lock people up and you lock them for as long as you can, and crime is the number one issue and whatever. And crime is, like, higher back then, right? So this is, like, a weird, Port Huron is in this, like, weird place. It's between Canada and Detroit. A lot of drugs are coming through. Like, people are panicked, and here's this first murder in 18 months in this county, and people, like, act accordingly to the politics of the time. But I think it is also, like, the hardest thing about this story was just, like, how many weird things happen that, like, I can't give enough... Like, I'm like, this should be 20 episodes. Like, everything is bananas that happens,

• 11:06Speaker 03

  and you have to kind of, like, the hypnotism being one example, you just kind of have to, like... You can't really unpack like how insane it is to like have like done a like class on hypnotism and decide you want to do it. Yeah.

• 11:19Peter Shamshiri?

  With the hypnotist defending it to this day, right?

• 11:21Speaker 03

  I love that guy, though. I love him.

• 11:23Peter Shamshiri?

  Incredulous at the idea that you might question hypnosis in this context.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  You know, it's one thing that was really interesting that he said to me that I think you guys will find interesting. As I was talking about the case and he was like, I don't know, maybe this guy is innocent, but like also like he could be Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy said he was innocent. He convinced people. He was like, it was very much that's the tone.

• 11:41Peter Shamshiri?

  Could be Hitler.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  You could be Hitler. That was the tone of like everybody, right?

• 11:45Michael Liroff?

  Right. Like, we don't know.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  We don't know. And it's like, you guys are the bad guys.

• 11:50Michael Liroff?

  Right. Yeah. We don't know. That's, that sounds like doubt, like reasonable doubt, actually.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  Right, right. That's what I would call it. Right.

• 11:58Michael Liroff?

  The entire thing feels like a fever dream. Like the hypnosis, it was weird, but also the prosecution, one of their theories being that the defendant, Timogen, was a member of like an international ring of ninjas, crime fighting ninjas, and that as an agent of the anti prostitution, anti drug ninja cartel, he may have assassinated this boy.

• 12:20Peter Shamshiri?

  Guys, we, we need to slow down. We can't, we can't get to the ninjas yet. I, I will say that I, I believe it's the fourth episode introduces the idea of an international ninja syndicate that was a pretty significant part of the prosecution.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  Pretty, not small. Yeah. And it's funny because at the end, the prosecutor is like, it probably isn't real, but.

• 12:47Michael Liroff?

  But.

• 12:47Peter Shamshiri?

  Who knows?

• 12:48Speaker 03

  There's a lot of who knows.

• 12:50Michael Liroff?

  Yes.

• 12:50Peter Shamshiri?

  When I was listening to it, what I kept thinking was like, with a lot of these sort of like botched prosecution stories, you hear the same sort of things over and over again, and none of them individually are very surprising. Like you're talking about the police not securing the crime scene. They barely talk to witnesses. Instead of taking like, you know, hundreds of photographs of the crime scene, which is pretty standard, they take like 15, I think you said.

• 13:20Peter Shamshiri?

  That sort of thing is the kind of thing I think that you, you hear from time to time when you're looking at a prosecution like this. And then also you have, uh, you know, a defense attorney who is not, not exactly all there in the throes of cocaine addiction.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  And crack cocaine.

• 13:40Peter Shamshiri?

  When crack was fresh on the market, like this is.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  Like they had not perfected it yet. Real experimental shit.

• 13:46Peter Shamshiri?

  He just heard about it. He was like, yeah, I'll, I'll take some. And so, you know, you have the, the defense attorney who is, uh, drug addled, certainly not doing his best. You have like the prosecutor trying to make a name for himself. You have a corrupt cop, a corrupt, like, you know, piece of shit cop.

• 14:05Michael Liroff?

  The judge who might be indebted to the prosecutor in like a little ring of corruption.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:10Peter Shamshiri?

  That's sort of small town corruption, right? But yeah, you start adding these all up and it's like, this case has every archetype of the incompetent slash corrupt trial that you could possibly conceive of. And then you throw in like the hypnosis. You throw in the fact that this guy was on the other side of the state. And, you know, this is sort of the core of why we believe he's innocent, right? He's on the other side of the state. There are tons of witnesses who are not his friends, right?

• 14:43Speaker 03

  Who hate him. Yeah.

• 14:44Peter Shamshiri?

  Who, who dislike him, right? Um, who are like, no, he was on the other side of the state with me. And you have a prosecution who explains this with a ridiculous theory. Josie, I'll let you explain this. I'll let you explain what the prosecution says, because this is sort of the core of the case, right? That this guy was on the other side of the state. So whatever you think of him, whatever you think of the corruption of the trial, et cetera, all the incompetence, the prosecution has to explain why he, why there are like dozens of people saying he's on the other side of the state and how he could have possibly done it in that case. And, and the prosecution has a theory here, sort of.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it's like the prosecution presents their case. Their case is basically character evidence, right? We don't have a getaway car. We don't have a murder weapon. We don't have any physical evidence, but like this guy's a bad guy, right? Um, and then the defense, and again, the defense lawyer like is not totally with the program here. I mean, I've seen worse defense lawyers, honestly. It's pretty impressive for being on crack, but he is still on crack. So it's not what you would hope.

• 15:43Peter Shamshiri?

  Well, it's a stimulant, you know? So you're, you're gonna have bursts of energy, I imagine.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true. That's true. He's firing on some cylinders, right? Um, and he, uh, he presents not the entire alibi case, but some alibi case. And it's interesting because throughout the prosecutor is not really cross examining a lot of these witnesses. You can tell he's not that worried about the alibi case. And that's because as a rebuttal witness, he introduces his personal friend, a pilot who says, oh yeah, well, what he could have done is charter a plane. He could have gone to any airstrip in the country at any time. And you can just, there'll be a pilot there and you can pay them cash and they'll fly you where you want to go without any record of it.

• 16:27Peter Shamshiri?

  His theory wasn't just that you could go to an airstrip and, and pay someone, but that in fact every airstrip has at all times of the, of the day, pilots waiting to charter private flights so that they can like rack up hours toward their license or whatever.

• 16:41Michael Liroff?

  Like a cab dispatch for 24 hours.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Right. And you have to ask yourself, like, do you think Escanaba has a line of cabs waiting? You know, this place where he was in like the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It's like, you can't get a cab.

• 16:52Michael Liroff?

  Town of 200 people.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. You can't get a cab at 3 a.m. Much less a, a plane.

• 16:59Peter Shamshiri?

  Let alone a plane. So they throw out this theory where they just have a guy say like, well, it could have been a plane and private planes operate like taxis, right? Which is obviously not true. You can almost forgive the defense lawyer here for not even know, like for never having, having.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  Totally. You're like, what? How have I, how have I responded to this? It's nuts.

• 17:20Michael Liroff?

  And he did object. He objected that there's no factual basis for it, that it was like coming in too late. This was as a rebuttal witness to the, to the defense at the end of the trial. So he did object to, to his credit. He was like, what the fuck is this? This is totally inappropriate.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:38Michael Liroff?

  But the judge let it stay.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  The judge lets it in and the jury convicts. And it's interesting. I've been thinking about it a lot after the Lindsay Clancy kind of jury drama, because there are these studies that basically show that like this idea that 12 people will come to the right answer is only correct if you begin with more people who think the right thing than don't. Once you begin with more people who think the wrong thing, or it seems about half and half, it's like, like consensus is actually not a reflection of reality. And you can see being in that jury room, right? And being like, this doesn't really make sense to me, but then it makes sense to everybody else. I'm not sure this guy's innocent. You vote to convict, right? It takes them a few days, but they vote to convict. And, you know, there's so much about this case that's like

• 18:23Speaker 03

  batshit crazy, but in a lot of ways that actually ends up hurting him in the appeals process because it's all there.

• 18:30Peter Shamshiri?

  So this is sort of the namesake of the podcast, right? The backfire effect. Can you, can you explain this a bit?

• 18:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. The backfire effect is this idea in social psychology that actually is pretty controversial in social psychology for various reasons. But it reflects, I think, something that all of us sort of know intuitively is that when someone has a belief and then you give them information that contradicts their beliefs or, you know, disproves it, they're actually more likely to believe in it stronger, right? And that's not true for every belief you have, et cetera. But like when you are emotionally tied to something or psychologically tied to something, it's very difficult to change people's minds, right? And you find yourself kind of trying to like find the exception. Well, it could have been this. It could have been a plane. I mean, I think the prosecutor thought this guy was guilty. He's trying to let like the basic laws of physics keep him from prison.

• 19:18Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  I'm about to show how we, you know, how that shouldn't be an obstacle here.

• 19:22Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. There's something in the prosecutor's mind that I think you see in a lot of prosecutors' minds, which is that when the defense puts up a credible case, the prosecutors believe that like they're trying to get away with it.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 19:34Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 19:34Peter Shamshiri?

  They're trying to be sneaky. They're trying to use information in a sneaky way.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  Is there anybody that believes in their gut, who trusts their gut more than prosecutors? It's shocking to me.

• 19:44Michael Liroff?

  I remember having a drink with a former prosecutor.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  Oh, it's your first mistake.

• 19:47Michael Liroff?

  I don't know. 11 years ago or so, 10, 10, 11 years ago, when another podcast was out about a case like this and we were talking about it. And I was like, I don't know, man. It does sound like the cops like really planted evidence. They've sort of set this guy up, blah, blah, blah. And he was like, oh, no, I absolutely believe the cops like framed this guy. I just think they framed a guilty man.

• 20:10Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. Yeah. Which is obviously what cops generally believe themselves to be doing in these situations, right?

• 20:15Michael Liroff?

  Exactly.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  A hundred percent.

• 20:16Michael Liroff?

  There was no doubt in his mind about either the fact that the guy was guilty despite the obvious frame, but also about the morality of this. He was like, oh yeah, you know, you do this. Like you know, someone's guilty, so you gotta put them away.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  You have to do the ugly thing to do the right thing. Yeah.

• 20:33Michael Liroff?

  Exactly.

• 20:34Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. You need me on that wall.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, normally I don't do innocent stories. I'm just not that interested in innocent people. I'm glad, like someone should be, and I'm glad that they are. But for me, I'm like, innocence is just not as compelling to me as guilt because I'm interested in how we treat guilty people. I'm interested in what that means for us. I'm interested in all these things, right? And obviously this guy is innocent of this crime, but he's a mess. He's a complicated dude. But it is really fascinating to see kind of the inner workings of how people justify their own. Wrongdoing as a means to an end to lock up a guy they don't like. And how there is just no incentive, has done no incentive for 40 years to like, to step back and be like, I don't know, like, maybe I, just like, maybe I was wrong on this one.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  Maybe I was right on every other one, but this one, maybe I was wrong. Right? It's fascinating. I'm like, I think I'm wrong all the time. These people, it just doesn't even seem to.

• 21:28Peter Shamshiri?

  Well, I mean, the stakes are so high that if they, you know, if you let that barrier down, right? Where it's like, well, what percentage of the prosecutions that I led throughout my career, put away an innocent man? That's the sort of thing that might be tough to live with.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:47Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, you mentioned that this isn't usually the type of case you cover. And in the first episode, you talk about also like location, sort of identity of people involved. You're, you're from the South. You usually cover cases in the South. You're a black woman. You usually.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  There's usually someone black.

• 22:02Michael Liroff?

  That affect African Americans. Yeah, exactly. And here you are doing a case about a bunch of white people.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  You guys are thriving, by the way, just so you know. White people are doing great.

• 22:13Peter Shamshiri?

  You were upset. You saw a white boy in distress and you were like, I'm gonna, it's time to make a show.

• 22:19Michael Liroff?

  Do you find that like having sort of moved into different types of claims, different people, different geography, has changed how you think about yourself at all? Spending all this time on this case?

• 22:30Speaker 03

  So, yes, in that I've seen this guy through a lot now. Like, I've watched him through a lot. When I met him, he was married. He's now in the midst of a divorce. I'm seeing from a journalist perspective, so I'm not seeing the real him. He's not showing me the real him, and that's the nature of this job. But like, I have seen as wide of a range as I think I'm going to get from him. And one of the things that I find really interesting is how, and not just him, but Herb, the cop that we talk about, who kind of started investigating this case and others, like, how kind of formative this case has been for them? Because it really, like, it was like learning Santa is unreal, right? It's like, oh, these are bad, like, these guys could do bad things. Like, these people I work with, that I trusted, that I like repeated what they said on the evening news,

• 23:13Speaker 03

  that I like hung out with, they would do something like this? And it was a reminder that like, one of the benefits of like, growing up black in the South, is I was like, oh, I never, like, that understanding of like, these people could screw you over. I never had the opposite idea. And to see kind of like, you know, it's sort of like nationalism. It's like when people start to like, lose faith in their country. To not have any of those kind of preconceived notions is such a benefit in a job like this. It makes it, you know, people say like, if you think he's innocent, you're having an emotional response. I'm like, this is not, I mean, like, the case is upsetting, but it's not actually emotional, because it's so, I don't want to say predictable, but it's mathematical.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  I'm like, this is the incentive. This is the decision that people make. And that is not tempered by the belief that like, everybody's trying to do the right thing at the right time. They're just, they're not.

• 24:07Peter Shamshiri?

  It's sort of the organic output of like, the institutions as they are arranged in that place and that time.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  Correct, right. And that's the other thing is like, nobody, in a lot of ways, he's a lot like the prosecutors in that he's sort of like, everybody's evil, which, look, if I'm in prison for 40 years, was something I didn't do, that's, you get that right. You know, but it's like, I think the scary thing is like, nobody here is evil. There might be a couple of evil people, but mostly it's just incentives.

• 24:31Peter Shamshiri?

  There's some evil people. There's the cop. The cop's evil.

• 24:34Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  There's the cop.

• 24:36Michael Liroff?

  The cop.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  The cop's pretty bad. Yeah.

• 24:38Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, there's, there is a, there is a corrupt slash incompetent slash pretty distinctly evil cop, I think, in the, in the mix here.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Dude, some of the stuff I heard about this cop that like, I couldn't publish, because I don't know, it wasn't gonna muster like legal.

• 24:54Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  It wasn't gonna be reliable enough. But like, some of the stuff I heard about him was incredible.

• 24:59Peter Shamshiri?

  Well, what's the worst thing that the worst cop in a small town ever did is like, that's, that's, the answer to that question is gonna haunt you in almost every case.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  Every single town, right? One thing that people kept saying is they were like, he kept showing up to my door with a gold chain. Which is just like, so funny to be in your like, uniform and your gold chain, like, in like, the 80s. It just seems like such a dick.

• 25:22Michael Liroff?

  You don't come out and say it, but it feels, at least implied, or at least I inferred, that he had no leads, he had no suspects, and just sort of conjured in his mind, well, like, this guy was engaged.

• 25:33Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 25:33Michael Liroff?

  And she's pregnant, maybe she has a jealous ex-boyfriend. And went looking to find out if she did. And she was like, I had an ex-boyfriend and he was kind of sketchy. And he's like, that's it, that's it. Like, he just like, literally conjured this up out of nowhere.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  I mean, it seems pretty determinative that he made up full police reports about conversations he didn't have. He signed people's names for police reports they didn't do. He ignored evidence he didn't like. I mean, he just, he was just building whatever case he wanted. He was doing his own thing.

• 26:02Michael Liroff?

  Yep.

• 26:02Peter Shamshiri?

  It's interesting because the, like, not only is there no good police work done at the crime scene, but it almost feels like he doesn't believe, like, he doesn't believe that, that's not part of his process, right? Like, you don't, you don't even try to solve the case in that way, right? You just sort of pick a guy and bury it.

• 26:22Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 26:23Peter Shamshiri?

  That's his process. You don't need to take pictures of the crime scene. You don't need to interview witnesses. You'll fabricate that later, right?

• 26:29Speaker 03

  You'll figure it out later. Yeah. The other thing is, we started noticing all these kind of, the dates of conversations that he had, and when he filed the police reports would be like, weeks apart. You know, he's just sort of writing the police report whenever he feels so inclined. It's just no, and look, there are 50 people in this police department. It's his first murder, but nobody really knows what they're doing. Like, this is not the NYPD. This is not Chicago PD. This is a different kind of corruption.

• 26:54Peter Shamshiri?

  They're used to doing, you know, like petty larceny, just little scraps in the street, shit like that and all. And then they, you get hit with a murder and you've, you've got to frame someone. I mean, there's, you're never gonna solve this thing if you don't.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. What do you want me to do? Solve this murder?

• 27:11Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 27:11Peter Shamshiri?

  I had like this revelation in the, in the midst of this where I was like, I wonder if clearance rates are down because technology makes it hard to frame someone.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 27:21Peter Shamshiri?

  Because there is so many, and this is a completely speculative thing. Nobody fact-checked this. I'm sure that like, the timelines don't quite line up here. But it feels like there almost has to be some truth to this, because there are so many things in this case where you're like, damn, if this guy had a cellphone with GPS data on him, he'd be walking free.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  100%. If there was a single camera somewhere.

• 27:44Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  Like, I'm like, I hate, like, surveillance tech is bad. And also like, Flock might have been a little convenient for once. If like, we could just like, you know, it's like this weird situation where you're like, obviously, in the aggregate, it's bad, but in the specifics.

• 27:59Peter Shamshiri?

  I mean, it does make me think a little bit differently about that sort of thing, where it's sort of like, yeah, the alternative to being surveilled isn't just not being surveilled. It might also be cops just sort of winging it.

• 28:12Michael Liroff?

  Right, like, today, not just the cellphone stuff, like, he was in a parking lot for an hour at like 1 a.m. before the murder, there would be footage of that from the security cameras. You would be able to pull the security footage of all the nearby airports.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:27Michael Liroff?

  To be like, look, he didn't come charter a jet. We have the footage of it. Nobody is here. Not him, not pilots, nobody, right? Like, there would just be physical evidence that you could point to, but there just isn't.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  I don't know how much more evidence would have helped him. I mean, obviously, at some point, you cross the, like, you cross the barrier. But it's like, people, like, if this, if there's an unlikable defendant, the ability for people to tell themselves a story that isn't happening is remarkable.

• 28:52Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  And we see it all the time, right?

• 28:54Michael Liroff?

  You had an interview with the juror there who mentions like, I think he and a couple other people had doubts about the plane story and the ability of Timujin to be present for this murder. And setting aside that they were convinced, the first thing that jumped out to me is like, wow, there are only like two or three of the jurors who were, who were questioning this, right? Like, like, you would think it would be like 10 or 11. Like, maybe there's one guy who's like, trying to convince everybody else. But it's kind of shocking that like, no, this seems to have been the minority position. Where it's like, no, maybe he couldn't be present for this. Like, no, everybody just took the, the testimony at face value, right?

• 29:33Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 29:38Michael Liroff?

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• 31:08Michael Liroff?

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• 31:53Michael Liroff?

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• 34:22Peter Shamshiri?

  You know what would be a good way to end the podcast, and this is not for 54, Josie, but if you wanted to add a sort of Kaiser Soze reveal where it turns out like he's hopping on a private plane. He's like parachuting in.

• 34:38Speaker 03

  There have been times during this podcast where I've thought, I wish I could find out that he is guilty on some level, because it's been such a weird level of like depressing sort of, like, it's just so, nothing has happened in 40 years.

• 34:52Peter Shamshiri?

  There's a genre of fictional media that's built around this idea that you sort of build like the case that something horrible has happened, and then you reveal at the end that it was actually justified, that no injustice occurred.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:07Peter Shamshiri?

  I'm sorry for this tangent. There's this truly unhinged movie from early in The War on Terror called Rules of Engagement.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  I've heard of that movie, but I didn't know that that's what it was about.

• 35:16Peter Shamshiri?

  There are American soldiers in the Middle East, and they're sort of running along a wall. On the top of a wall, there's a protest below them. And from across the way, there are snipers shooting at them. So protest and snipers happening at once. This is early in the movie. And the soldiers freak out, and they unload, they kill everyone in the crowd. And then it's like, you know, pauses, camera pans across the crowd, no weapons. There's a child in the crowd, and everyone in the audience is like, then there's like a trial, I believe. At the end, it's revealed. The crowd did have weapons. They were shooting. In fact, there's a clip of the little boy, the little child.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  No, not the boy.

• 35:57Peter Shamshiri?

  Shooting at the soldiers.

• 35:59Michael Liroff?

  Oh, my God.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  Not the child.

• 36:01Peter Shamshiri?

  And then the terrorists who were doing the sniping, they ran and collected all the weapons that the crowd had before like, the media and everyone else could get there.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 36:11Peter Shamshiri?

  Never doubt our soldiers. That was the lesson of the movie.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  God, that's so good.

• 36:16Peter Shamshiri?

  I think about that movie all the time, and I'm sorry for bringing it up as soon as I have the opportunity.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  No, I'm thrilled.

• 36:21Michael Liroff?

  No, no, but it's like primal fear is like that, too, and very much like this case, right? Like, seemingly innocent, naive defendant, and then at the end, it turns out, oh, he's twisted.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  And who is it that has like, he's in the jail cell?

• 36:36Michael Liroff?

  Ed Norton.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, perfect.

• 36:39Michael Liroff?

  Yes. Playing like someone with like developmental disabilities, I think. But then it turns out, no.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  He's fine.

• 36:45Michael Liroff?

  You know, it reminds me of everybody being like, yeah, he could be innocent, or he could be Ted Bundy, right? These people who are like.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  Like Occam's razor says, right.

• 36:53Peter Shamshiri?

  There's a real like fear of being outwitted by a criminal in some circles. The idea that someone might be getting away with it is like intolerable to a certain type of person.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  100%.

• 37:07Michael Liroff?

  And getting away with it at your expense by fooling you.

• 37:11Peter Shamshiri?

  It haunts like the prosecutor brain.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  I think also there's this sense of like, just, you know, if someone said tomorrow, Peter killed someone, there are the people who would be like, there's no way. I know Peter, like, he wouldn't do that. I wouldn't be on that list, by the way. I'm sure he could kill someone.

• 37:27Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, and I was gonna say, nobody would say, I know Peter, he couldn't do that.

• 37:30Peter Shamshiri?

  If I kill someone, Josie, it'll be you. All right? So you won't have time to speculate.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  Everybody heard that. Doesn't matter how many miles away.

• 37:38Peter Shamshiri?

  Cut that, or you're next.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  But then there's also this thing where your brain starts to try to make sense of it. It's like, well, I did see him get really upset that time. And he did, you know, he did make this joke. And like, the way in which you can kind of like draw a conclusion.

• 37:54Peter Shamshiri?

  The supercut of my violent jokes is gonna be devastating at my trial.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  And the way that we all of a sudden, I think we will really underestimate what it takes. Because like, that is a big part of this case is that if you, there's all the logistics of like, he couldn't have done it, and he wouldn't have done it more. But like, then you step back and say, but why would he kill this guy? Like, why would he kill this guy? He like, doesn't know, hadn't really interacted with.

• 38:20Speaker 03

  Had seen maybe once, he had never spoken to him. He hadn't talked to this girl in four months. He lives across the state. He's having a baby with someone else. He's dating other people. Like, at the very, very core, it's like, but why? Just like, why would he do this?

• 38:34Peter Shamshiri?

  I feel like we need to talk about the portion of the podcast that Michael and I haven't heard yet.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:39Peter Shamshiri?

  So we listened to the, you know, part through conviction, but the rest of the podcast is sort of post conviction. So give us a little color. No spoilers, maybe some spoilers.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, it's very funny because right when he gets in, Tim McGinn's like, I'm appealing my case. Like immediately, he's applying for appellate counsel. He's

• 38:58Peter Shamshiri?

  Sensible.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  You know, yeah, sensible.

• 38:59Peter Shamshiri?

  Also what I would do.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Also what I would do.

• 39:02Peter Shamshiri?

  Wrongly convicted of murder.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  He files a direct appeal. Well, he files for appellate counsel, like, like right after he's sentenced in August of 87. It takes a year to get appellate counsel. It takes another year to file. The appellate court, state appellate court sends it back to the district court, who sends it back to the courtroom that he was in with the same judge. That judge affirms he gets back to the, and then basically it takes eight years for the Michigan Supreme Court to decide they're not going to take this case. It stands, right? So it's like, first of all, this is just eight years of hell. Like, you're waiting, you wait two years and a judge writes a four line decision. You, you know, it's just a not constant. At the beginning of his direct appeal, his attorney says, you know, only 10 to 15% of cases have any kind of semblance of success in the appellate process.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  These days, that would be a miracle. Like, this is before EDPA. This is before Oklahoma City. This is kind of before the crackdown on the appeals process that comes from the federal level, but also trickles down to the state level. That has just basically made appealing your case, especially a case like this, a pipe dream, like a fool's errand.

• 40:06Peter Shamshiri?

  For our listeners who don't know, EDPA is the shorthand for

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Anti-Terrorism Effective Death Penalty Act. Ridiculous name, but basically just was built after Oklahoma City to, it has nothing to do with terrorism and it just basically limits your ability to appeal. And it gives the federal system very little oversight over the state system. So now, you know, they can only kind of overrule a state decision if it's like egregiously wrong, not just wrong, essentially.

• 40:34Peter Shamshiri?

  In practice, we've seen it narrowed to the point where it's nothing. I almost feel like it's a continuation of the same sort of psychology where if you sort of default to the idea that someone is guilty, then any attempt by them to escape liability becomes almost inherently deceptive in your mind, right? You see this in popular media quite a bit where like the idea that defendants get out on technicalities all the time. They're using technicalities to get out.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  It's like, that's just the fucking constitution. Like, that's just like, I don't know what you mean. Yeah.

• 41:05Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. It feels to me like that's, that's on the same spectrum as like the prosecutor creating fraudulent evidence. Once you've convinced yourself that this guy is guilty, then nothing seems wrong.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  100%.

• 41:16Peter Shamshiri?

  And the opposite holds true. Once you've convinced yourself that this guy is guilty, affording him due process feels dangerous, right?

• 41:22Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 41:24Peter Shamshiri?

  I think I've talked about this before, but like, you have like the show Dexter, which is a fun show, but it's premised on the idea that so many serial killers get released on technicalities in Metro Miami that, that you can build a show around it. That Dexter's just killing like two guys a week. You know what I mean? That's in the popular consciousness, the idea that like these, all these evil guys are walking.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  100%.

• 41:49Peter Shamshiri?

  We need fucking Batman out there. Uh, we need sociopathic Batman.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  One thing that's interesting about this case to me is like, what has made me focus on like the violence of not acting, not doing anything? Like what it means that I think a lot of, and I know this from many of my conversations, that there are a lot of people on the state level in Michigan, high up people who know this guy's innocent and are unwilling to do anything about it. There are judges who have said, we think you have a good innocence case, but I'm sorry, we can't, you know, we're rejecting your appeal. We are overturning the district court's decision, et cetera. Like what you are functionally doing is keeping a man incarcerated who you say is innocent based on some rules. And the actual act of not doing anything, what the violence of that is.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  I mean, so many of this, so many of these kind of like crackdown on people over appealing has turned being a judge into like just rubber stamping

• 42:46Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  People's death sentences, right? Innocent people. It's, it's just monstrous. And yet you sleep fine at night because what you're actually doing is just following the rules.

• 42:57Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. And a lot of the popular narrative still revolves around judges who like refuse to lock away someone who committed like a misdemeanor.

• 43:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 43:06Peter Shamshiri?

  Because they later go on to commit a more serious crime or whatever, right? Like the very popular understanding of this is still that like, we're soft on crime.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  And that you should have seen it coming.

• 43:16Peter Shamshiri?

  Cause they're a bad type of dude.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  They're a bad type of dude and you should have known. And the ways in which we kind of impart the need to predict the future on the systems and the actors in this, in the system is so, it's, it's like astrology.

• 43:32Peter Shamshiri?

  You can only say that when Rihanna's not here.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  Well, she's allowed to believe in whatever she wants because she can predict the future.

• 43:37Peter Shamshiri?

  And she's a queen.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  She's a queen. Also, she'd never be a prosecutor. So there you go.

• 43:42Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  I just wonder how poisonous it is to a person's soul and self to believe that you can see evil in someone or that you have the right meter to be able to tell someone's dangerousness from, from reading their appeal. Like that, that just doesn't, it's just such a overestimation of our abilities.

• 44:05Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. I do put a lot of faith in my personal credit to fuck a moron when someone's, when I, when I hear enough about someone or see enough of their writing, I'm like, that person's stupid. I'm right so often.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  Stupid is one thing. Stupid you can see, you know?

• 44:18Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  Killers different. I'm not saying that nobody's future, that there's nobody where it's, you couldn't, but what I'm saying is that like against physics evidence, like reason, just thinking, I know he's a bad guy, so he must have done this and I can't let him get one over on me. Like, that's not critical thinking.

• 44:34Peter Shamshiri?

  No. It's not that you can't like decipher the character of a man or something, right? But I think there's situations in like the criminal prosecution context in particular, where a suspect is put in front of powerful people with the very direct, very clear implication, if it's not explicit, that this is the guy who did it. And all of the things that they do flow from that premise, rather than we're all working together to figure out who committed this crime.

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 45:03Peter Shamshiri?

  That's not how like the adversarial system ends up working. The way it ends up working is they have a name. Right. They become convinced, often through very little evidence, that that is the correct name and they move forward. And that leads to bizarre justifications for incompetence, corruption, fraudulence on the part of prosecutors. And in this case, it like, it all happens one after another. It's not even like dominoes. It's more like just a series of preposterous events.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:39Peter Shamshiri?

  Everything corrupt and fraudulent that could happen in the course of a trial seems to happen in this one.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Totally. There's like junk science. There's like everything that, like it just, you're just overwhelmed. Yeah, moral panic. Yes, exactly.

• 45:52Peter Shamshiri?

  I put it off, but I guess the last thing we need to mention, and we're now working out of order. But in the midst of this trial, a theory comes up that I couldn't believe. The theory is that the defendant belongs to a ninja syndicate. It is made clear that this man enjoys martial arts. He has complaints to you about the quality of Chuck Norris's work. And in the course of this trial, it's brought up that like, maybe he's a sort of ninja, which sort of, you know, helps close the gap, right? How did he get across the state? And this is ninja shit, right? This is this, yeah, you couldn't comprehend, but a ninja could.

• 46:31Peter Shamshiri?

  And you, in the podcast, sort of made me aware of something I hadn't really thought of, which is the idea of like ninjas as a moral panic. Because obviously ninjas in pop culture, very eighties, nineties, I caught the tail end of this as a, as a child, right? Obviously, seven year old Peter was like, yeah, in terms of careers, it's like professional basketball or ninja. That's where I was in 1992, but I didn't think of it as like a moral panic.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, talk about it, sure. I love this because some of the stuff I bet he did say, like, when it's like, he said he had to sell his Lamborghini because like the ninjas, it's like, oh yeah, for sure, dude. You know, like it sounds totally what like the weird guy you gotta date with like says, right? But there is like talked about extensively in this case, this idea that he could be a ninja. And it's almost like supernatural. It's like one day he jumped out of a bush and like right where I was, or like he could hear me from across the parking lot. There's all this sort of like discussion about what ninjas were doing, which kind of comes into this like anti-Asian, like, you know, this is like around satanic panic times.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Like it's sort of this alternative cult stuff that people are like really scared of. It's funny, my mom is a black belt in taekwondo, higher belt than Tim McGinn, just want to say.

• 47:50Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, he was a red belt.

• 47:51Speaker 03

  He went to prison, so can't blame him for not, you know, getting to finish. But, you know, I, like, I was asking her about this, like, cause she, cause she did taekwondo in the eighties and she was like, it was both like really popular. Like every time you turned around, there was like a new taekwondo studio, right? Like there were like, it was like such a thing. And then there were all these people who were like, they're gonna come get your kids. Like, you know, it's almost like an evil pickleball or something.

• 48:15Peter Shamshiri?

  Well, that's Brazilian jiu jitsu is right now, but there's no sort of like moral panic around. Even though there should be, just a different type, because every guy who gets into it is kind of a freak.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  They do get weird. And it's funny because it goes from being like, he was weird. Like he was weird and also like an asshole, right? To like, he was in touch with people who were telling him what to do, or he was super connected or, and that is really, I think, what leads people to believe he could have gotten there. Despite all like this, like he, we don't know how he got there, but we're not a ninja.

• 48:48Peter Shamshiri?

  It's very interesting that like fundamentally, the prosecution has a problem that he's on the wrong side of the state. And they're like, look, you could charter private planes, like taxis. He's part of a ninja syndicate. What do I know, right? It's up to you.

• 48:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:59Peter Shamshiri?

  Are you gonna let the ninja syndicate get away with this? That's on the 12 of you.

• 49:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 49:03Peter Shamshiri?

  Why didn't he, the defense call like a representative of the ninja syndicate to the stand?

• 49:09Speaker 03

  They called an expert on, on like martial arts who wasn't very helpful.

• 49:13Peter Shamshiri?

  The defense did?

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. It is funny how like at some point during the cross-examination of one witness, they're like, isn't this exactly like the plot of this movie? Like he describes this kind of scenario and then she's like, isn't this exactly this movie that you've seen this movie? I mean, it's all coming from this weird. It's, to me, I'm like, this is such an example of what, like, being a boastful

• 49:33Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  young dude, how it can come back and bite you in the ass. Because like, obviously, this guy's full of shit. If he said any of this.

• 49:40Michael Liroff?

  Also, we should talk about how absurd it would be for an international ninja syndicate to be targeting an 18-year-old college kid in a rural town in Michigan. Like, what are we talking about here? Like-

• 49:51Speaker 03

  They don't want Scott Malkin dead. And, you know, another thing that's like, really interesting about this that I had, I don't, I didn't really know, because I'm not a hunter, but like, hunting is huge in Michigan. And so like, he's killed with a shotgun, which to me is like, who kills someone with a shot? It's like, feels so unwieldy and like, but like, it actually makes it so much harder to figure out who did this, because everybody has shotguns, because it's, and it's, and hunting season just started, it's the beginning of November. But all of these people on stand are like, defense and prosecution, like, ninjas wouldn't use shotguns. Like, they would use all that. Like, you get into this crazy, which is like, it doesn't even matter what ninjas would use. There is no ninja in the general vicinity of this case. There's, is ninja even a thing? I don't know.

• 50:31Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  Anyway.

• 50:32Peter Shamshiri?

  Ninjas were like, type of samurai in like 13th century Japan or something like that. That's like, the origin of it.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  Right. Before this case, I thought it was like, a costume kids wore. Like, my son was a ninja for Halloween one year.

• 50:42Peter Shamshiri?

  It's, it's very interesting that adults were believing this, because you look back at 80s and 90s movies, ninja syndicates were playing the role of cartels now. Like, if you needed like, a drug runner, or like, human trafficking, or some kind of just like, ambiently evil criminal organization that wasn't Italians, who by the way are cool, like you-

• 51:00Speaker 03

  Right.

• 51:01Peter Shamshiri?

  If you do, if you do a movie about Italian organized crime, they're the protagonists. But if you need an antagonist, now you'd use cartels. And at the time, it would just be like, yeah, a pack of ninjas.

• 51:14Speaker 03

  Because it's kind of even before gangs, to your point. Like, it's kind of even before like, gangs enter like, the, you know, the national consciousness.

• 51:21Peter Shamshiri?

  There's something weird about being an adult and believing that that was real. You know what I mean?

• 51:27Michael Liroff?

  There was a string of movies in the 80s and early 90s called American Ninja, about a troupe who's also a ninja. And there's a different ninja syndicate cartel, like-

• 51:38Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 51:38Michael Liroff?

  -evil organization in everyone. There are like, five of them, you know? They're just like, they're all over. They're all over.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  To both of your points about what people will believe, it's really crazy how you suspend so much of your judgment when you were sitting in a jury box and a prosecutor is telling you something. Like, I actually think outside of the courtroom, maybe none of them would believe this. I don't know. I don't know the jurors. But like, it's totally plausible to me that if I was talking to them and telling them this story, they would be like, who would ever convict on that? And then they convict on it. Because you're just in an environment where like, you're told this person is the expert. You think there's all this stuff you don't know that they know. And in fact, there is, there's nothing that they know that you don't know. Nothing.

• 52:19Peter Shamshiri?

  The most well-respected man in town is wearing a suit and telling you this story.

• 52:23Speaker 03

  Right. It's like, remember the first time that you like, realized maybe your dad like, didn't know what he was talking about?

• 52:28Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  You know? It's a little bit like that. Like, you're like, oh, this is just-

• 52:34Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  Like, if he says it, I must believe it. It's very, very seductive, I think. And I have never been on like, a murder trial, or really have not had jury duty. They turned me away right away, as you guys can probably imagine. But like, I wonder, like, what could I be convinced of? I'm sure lots of things. Lots of things.

• 52:53Peter Shamshiri?

  I think I told you guys, I made it to like, the final 20 last year. I was like, hyped. I was so fucking excited.

• 52:58Speaker 03

  What kind of case was it, do you know?

• 53:00Peter Shamshiri?

  It was just like, like a hit and run kind of thing that was like, in my downtown area. They were like, are you familiar with this area? I was like, that's where I get my coffee. So, they're like, you promise not to do any detective work on your own? I was like, I don't care about this at all. Yeah, I'm just, it's like, yeah, dude.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  Can't.

• 53:17Peter Shamshiri?

  My problem.

• 53:17Speaker 03

  I absolutely, no problem.

• 53:19Peter Shamshiri?

  I-

• 53:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 53:21Michael Liroff?

  I actually think there's one more thing we should discuss, right? Quickly at the end, which is, does Timogen have any prospects for getting out? Or is he, is this-

• 53:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:31Michael Liroff?

  Are all his avenues exhausted?

• 53:33Speaker 03

  This is a good place to talk about this, because I think the most depressing part of this story for me has been like, the cowardice, or the like, unwilling to even consider by state officials. And all he has left is clemency. Like, unless someone comes forward and says, I did it, and then he could file another habeas perhaps, or whatever, but like, barring that, all he has is a governor letting him out at some point. And it seems just deeply unlikely that any of them are going to do that. I think part of that is because in many ways, he's his own worst enemy. You would not believe the kind of stuff this man posts on Facebook about Governor Whitmer.

• 54:09Michael Liroff?

  Oh.

• 54:10Peter Shamshiri?

  He likes her that much?

• 54:11Speaker 03

  He just adores her. He adores her. He loves women.

• 54:13Peter Shamshiri?

  There's no negative stuff that would surprise me. But, but if he was like, he was like, Whitmer, you've done it again, I love this. That would actually catch me off guard.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  I constantly have the feeling of like, stop doing that, but I can't blame him for doing it. Like, I don't think this is the right approach to getting out, but anybody who says it's an indication of his personality, I'm like, I'm gonna stick you in prison for 40 years and see how you come out. Because that's what, that's what we would all be. You'd be crazy not to be that way. Right? They're like, focus on his like, behavior is so fucked up to me.

• 54:44Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, it's not the question.

• 54:45Peter Shamshiri?

  I mean, imagine the mental state you'd be in-

• 54:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 54:48Peter Shamshiri?

  -after 40 years.

• 54:49Speaker 03

  And I'm supposed to be nice to this woman?

• 54:51Peter Shamshiri?

  Imprisoned on this bullshit, on the ninja private plane theory.

• 54:54Speaker 03

  Right. There was someone who said to me, someone in state government in Michigan, he said to me, you know, he's a big believer in like, the deep state. And I'm like, yeah.

• 55:01Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, dude.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  Like, he's like, where, like, look where he is. Like, what, who would you be?

• 55:06Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, of course.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  This is not a place where you get better, and especially if you're like, in there for 40 years and you didn't do a thing. But to your point, the governor is the only one who can do it. And it's a reminder of how like, clemency is just like, such an incredible concept, right? It's like, you alone to like, do this thing. Like, you can just do it. You can sign the thing. Donald Trump has had two good ideas in his life. New America, great idea, love it, let's change our channel.

• 55:29Peter Shamshiri?

  Instead of New Mexico.

• 55:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, instead of New Mexico. And like, the way he does clemency, like, I don't love who he gives it to all the time, but I like how he does it. He does it like, let's do it. He doesn't have a fucking pardon office, process every fucking, like, talk to the prosecutor and like, he's like, he has simplified the process.

• 55:45Peter Shamshiri?

  He calls someone in, he's like, who's the biggest pervert in federal prison right now? Let him out.

• 55:50Speaker 03

  Right. Imagine if you would just, if people would like, take that same liberty with like, different goals, you know?

• 55:56Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 55:56Speaker 03

  And they don't.

• 55:57Peter Shamshiri?

  Well, this is the thing where it's like, sometimes stylistically, you look at the fact that Trump does not ask permission from institutions-

• 56:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 56:05Peter Shamshiri?

  Right? Which is obviously, in and of itself, broadly speaking, negative.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 56:08Peter Shamshiri?

  Right? But you can see a ton of situations where you're like, yeah, that's-

• 56:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:12Peter Shamshiri?

  You know, it would be really useful to have someone who doesn't ask permission from institutions, who, that are largely captured.

• 56:19Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And, you know, the fact that like, we have this system, where it's like, well, now I have to ask the county prosecutor, now I have to ask the victim-

• 56:25Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 56:25Speaker 03

  Like, that's, like, this guy has served 40 years in prison, let him go. Just let him go. Like, it's, to me, and I kind of, and that's not an endorsement of him, as a person. That's just like, an endorsement of a process, right?

• 56:40Peter Shamshiri?

  When he gets out, he's gonna make wild-ass Facebook posts-

• 56:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 56:43Peter Shamshiri?

  You know what I mean? And it's not like, send him free so he can do charity work, or whatever.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 56:48Peter Shamshiri?

  It's just like, you know he didn't do this shit.

• 56:49Speaker 03

  And you know, that's like, the story of every innocent person. Like, you see the like, guy who was like, gardening at his mom's house, and then he gets, you know, he's arrested for a thing he didn't do, and then 30 years later, he gets out and he says like, I'm not bitter, I'm just glad to have a chance again, I can't wait to see my family. It's like, that's beautiful and also total bullshit. Like, you should be fucking bitter.

• 57:07Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 57:07Speaker 03

  They took 30 years from your life, right?

• 57:09Peter Shamshiri?

  And, yeah, and I think the, like, the idea that to be let out, you like, you need to, like, have it, like, your heart should be so pure. Like, you must be Christ-like in order to, to deserve it.

• 57:19Michael Liroff?

  You shouldn't have to be Gandhi to get clemency, or to get parole.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  And you shouldn't have to look at the people who convicted you to let you out.

• 57:26Michael Liroff?

  You shouldn't have to forgive them.

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:27Peter Shamshiri?

  There's like, an archetype of the guy who gets let out of prison, who like, you know, there's the press conference and he's like, you know, blessed to be here. Like, you have to achieve this Christ-like level of serenity, in order to be deserving of clemency. And it's like, no, like, a lot of these guys may or may not be total shitbags, but they didn't do the crime. Let them out.

• 57:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 57:47Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 57:47Speaker 03

  God only knows what Peter would be like, oof.

• 57:49Peter Shamshiri?

  No, I'd be chill. I'd be like, fucking Mamiya, just like, writing, writing beautiful pieces.

• 57:55Speaker 03

  You're not doing that now, but you would do it in prison.

• 57:59Peter Shamshiri?

  Thoughtful pieces about the system.

• 58:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:02Peter Shamshiri?

  Before we wrap, I guess the one thing we'll do is, uh, call upon the ninja syndicate to break him out. You know, it's been long enough.

• 58:10Speaker 03

  Seriously.

• 58:10Peter Shamshiri?

  Surely.

• 58:11Speaker 03

  They really left their comrade. Yeah.

• 58:13Peter Shamshiri?

  Right, they just left him there. In the movies, that guy's out in a week, right? He's like, you think you can hold me? When, when the Black Fist is supporting me?

• 58:25Speaker 03

  It's such a good point, that if he wasn't in a ninja syndicate, they really don't even care about him, because he's really, no one has, no one has done shit in 40 years. Not a thing.

• 58:35Peter Shamshiri?

  There's like, uh, there's a ninja syndicate, uh, board meeting, where they're like, by the way, uh, Temigen got caught in Michigan. Are we gonna break him out, or?

• 58:45Michael Liroff?

  No, we're gonna disavow. We're gonna disavow.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  Crosses him off the list.

• 58:48Peter Shamshiri?

  Disavow, do not, yeah, it's a, it's a splinter cell situation. All right. Josie, thanks for coming on. I don't know what promo you're gonna do for us in return, but I'm sure it will be valuable and worthwhile.

• 59:05Speaker 03

  Can't wait. I love coming on, thank you guys for having me. I remember the first time I came on, and the first thing out of Peter's mouth was about killing cops. And I was like, I was like, whoa, are we guys gonna keep that in? And you guys were like, you guys were like, no, we won't. And then you 100% did keep it in. Which really was quite hilarious. And, um, and I love you guys, thanks for having me. And everybody should listen to The Backfire Effect.

• 59:30Michael Liroff?

  Can't wait for the rest of the podcast.

• 59:31Peter Shamshiri?

  The podcast is called The Backfire Effect, uh, wherever podcasts are sold, is that right?

• 59:36Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. Or, yeah, or free. And I hope everybody gives it a listen. We have, we have touched on like, mere fraction of the weird things in this, in this case. It is crazy.

• 59:45Peter Shamshiri?

  Oh, yeah. If it felt like we were bouncing around from one crazy little story to another, uh, that's because there's so fucking much in this podcast, and, and I've only listened to half of it, so.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, it only gets weirder. Um, but thank you for having me.

• 59:58Michael Liroff?

  Thank you so much. Five to Four is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Alison Rogers. Leon Nefok provides editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations.