Zero Margin of Error | BONUS | Season 2

Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams explains why prosecutors must prioritize justice over winning cases. And he discusses the dangers of relying too heavily on eyewitness testimony. 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/. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  Hi, I'm Carrie Hartman, a producer from Burden of Guilt. We've talked to a lot of people who made the story of Jermaine Hudson and Bobby Gumbright, but we didn't always have the chance to put them in a full episode. So we're dropping this bonus. When we wanted to get an understanding of Louisiana's changing legal frontier around 2020, we spoke to Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams. Within his tenure, he created a civil rights arm that worked diligently to change the state's reputation of being disproportionately punitive.

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  I grew up knowing that there are miscarriages in the criminal justice system. I was, it was not a situation where I was ever shocked or surprised to learn that. So, you know, cases like Jermaine really just confirm what I knew is that we often get it right and we often get it wrong, especially in the state of Louisiana and in the South broadly. I mean, the Southern criminal justice system is very different from the criminal justice system in other parts of the country.

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  The way states like Louisiana have handled and mishandled their criminal justice system motivates Jason Williams. He wants to improve what's long been seen as a broken institution.

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  It really just confirmed that for me, which is why it is vitally important to train young prosecutors in looking at everything, at looking for corroborating evidence of witness testimony, realizing that a case can make it from probable cause to our desk and there can be a falsehood that a story was based on. If they smell something that doesn't seem right, I've trained my young prosecutors to not be consumed with the idea of winning and losing as a metric of their success.

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  Justice is the goal. So that's, that's a hard sort of culture shift to make because we do want to be successful.

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  Making strides in the right direction of history is more than just ticking off a checklist. There are families and communities involved. Every move matters.

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  I think about the job as being a commercial airplane pilot, right? If a commercial airplane pilot says, I land most of my planes. Every now and then I'll run a few into a mountain. That ain't it. We have zero margin for error and we have to take it with that same degree of seriousness. All of those steps that have to be checked in that cockpit, all those steps that need to be checked with air flight control. That same degree of certainty and specifications needs to happen in a DA's office.

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  When it comes to witness identification, it can be tricky. Sometimes eyewitness testimony is the only evidence investigators have. But Williams says it's still important to look for corroborating evidence.

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  You know, witness identification, that shouldn't be everything.

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  Bobby and Jermaine's case isn't a typical wrongful conviction. Bobby wasn't a reliable witness in the sense that he completely fabricated the armed robbery that sent Jermaine to prison. So in that sense, Bobby wasn't a witness at all. But there are cases of true mistaken identity. One that sticks with Jason is a well-known wrongful conviction case from North Carolina. A woman named Jennifer Thompson-Kanino was attacked and raped in her home. When presented with a photo lineup, she misidentified the perpetrator. She picked out an innocent man named Ronald Cotton. Cotton spent 10 and a half years in prison before DNA evidence exonerated him.

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  The person who identified him, Jennifer, she has made her life's work to deal with misidentifications and injustices because she picked out the wrong person, not because she didn't, she studied his face. She studied his height. She studied his hands during her attack.

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  Her certainty was critical in Ronald Cotton's conviction. And yet Jennifer was mistaken. Then, 10 years later, a DNA match found the real perpetrator.

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  And it turned out that it was Mr. Cotton.

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  When Jennifer realized the mistake, she reached out to Ronald Cotton and formed a relationship with him. They've become allies in questioning the validity of eyewitness identifications.

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  And they wrote a book together called Pickin' Cotton. And so we shouldn't want to put that much weight on victims and witnesses. We should want to help support them in getting it right.

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  The city of New Orleans has spent years grappling with the consequences of its own justice system, one that produced both staggering incarceration rates and a growing list of exonerations. Jason Williams says that history is exactly why cases like Jermaine Hudson's deserve a second look.

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  So, you know, having had the unenviable distinction of being the murder capital of the country, as well as incarceration capital of the country, as well as the exoneration capital of the country, all at the same time, at different times over the past decade, with no public safety gains, I am most hopeful by the fact that we came in with a commitment to criminal justice reform and getting it right, being more accurate with our prosecutions, and looking back at cases like Jermaine's.

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  And something totally unexpected happened when Jermaine's case hit District Attorney Jason Williams' desk. You'll hear more about what happened in season two of Burden of Guilt.

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  Hey folks, it's Matt Altmaix.

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  And Joel Larsgaard from the How To Money Podcast.

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  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.