Pod Insights The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe 422: Darnell Epps—Where There's a Pulse There's a Purpose About this episode Darnell is the founder and CEO of Thurgood Industries https://www.thurgood.work/, a career-building platform for skilled workers. He shares his amazing story of how he grew up in New York public housing, served 17 years in prison, and went on to graduate from Yale Law School the same year he received a diploma in manufacturing technology and machining from Lincoln Tech.
Transcript 15,805 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Mike Rowe? Well, here we are, my friends, at the beginning of another new year with perhaps the most earnest title you're going to hear all year here on The Way I Heard It. This episode is called "Where There's a Pulse, There's a Purpose." I thought it was a decent quote.
0:19 Speaker 01 I thought it was a great quote. It was so great, in fact, that I totally missed it when it occurred.
0:25 Mike Rowe? I could see that when I glanced over and saw you just staring intently at nothing in particular in the near distance.
0:33 Speaker 01 No, that wasn't entirely true, but yeah, but close enough.
0:37 Mike Rowe? My guest is Darnell Epps. I don't know how interesting or eclectic your resume is, but I doubt it's as interesting or as eclectic as this guy's. He came across my transom because he launched something called Thurgood Industries, which is a career-building and a networking platform that's focused on skilled workers and creating a more persuasive case for the opportunities that exist in the trades today. If that sounds like MicroWorks to you, well, imagine being me and reading that.
1:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, and then add to it the fact that he went to Yale Law School.
1:13 Mike Rowe? Yeah, and Lincoln Tech at the same time. Yeah, so that's never happened before. My guest today has graduated from the most prestigious law school in the Ivy League.
1:26 Speaker 01 Arguably.
1:27 Mike Rowe? And a trade school that many of you have probably heard of. Consequently, he's taken his large brain and he's applied it toward closing the skills gap. And so I wanted to learn a little bit more about Thurgood Industries, which is why I invited him here and which is why he flew across the country to chat with us. I wasn't really up to speed with the 17 and a half years he spent prior to his admittance to Cornell, which then led to Yale, which he spent at, I believe it was Five Corners, maximum security penitentiary.
1:57 Speaker 01 And before that, Rikers for a period.
1:59 Mike Rowe? Yeah. This guy's story, zigs and zags, and there are times when you'll swear you're in the middle of an episode of Law & Order, and there are times when you'll swear you're in the middle of some kind of feel-good graduation unlikely story interrupted by lockdowns, but then weirdly morphing into a trade school play. It's just, you just can't make it up. And so there's no need to.
2:28 Speaker 01 No, and the one thing about Darnell that was really amazing is that there's just not a trace of bitterness in him. For a guy who spent seventeen and a half years behind bars.
2:40 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
2:41 Speaker 01 There's not a trace of bitterness for his circumstances.
2:44 Mike Rowe? No, and you could make a pretty good case, and he did make an excellent case as a jailhouse lawyer, self-taught. The guy didn't even make it through high school. This is really a story of a Yale graduate and an entrepreneur who didn't make it through high school and very nearly spent his entire life in prison, but got out early on account of his excellent behavior and his great big brain. You're gonna like him. Darnell Epps, right after this.
3:15 Mike Rowe? Can't believe it's been fifteen years since that headline first appeared in Slate Magazine, the one that said "The Greatest Hoodie Ever Made." That's the headline that put American Giant on the map, and that's the same year their CEO sent me one of these hoodies unsolicited in the mail. I didn't know Byrd Winthrop back then, but he was a fan of Dirty Jobs. He and his kids watched it, and he wanted me to have one of his sweatshirts, so I beat the hell out of it. I mean, I wore it, I don't know, on dozens of different Dirty Jobs. I just saw an old episode last week of me castrating lambs, wearing this hoodie. No garment in the history of the world, in my opinion, has ever been bespectacled with a
3:58 Mike Rowe? more curious array of unholy fluids than my American Giant sweatshirt, and it's still standing. Honestly, at this point, I'm less concerned about replacing it than I am deciding who gets it when I'm gone. But what made American Giant famous, of course, was not just a sweatshirt that refused to die. It was making that sweatshirt right here in America with skilled people doing good work. That's something I'm happy to support, especially when I can support it while wearing something comfortable. If you're looking for a gift that might outlast your relationship with the recipient, consider the hoodie that started it all. Go to American-Giant.com/mike. You'll save 20% when you drop my name at American-Giant.com/mike.
4:55 Mike Rowe? Darnell Epps is here. He's just traveled all across the country to sit in our humble little studio to tell us the story of his life. It's great to meet you.
5:04 Speaker 02 Nice to meet you, Mike. Huge fan of your work since Dirty Jobs and love your podcast. You know, I have some big shoes to fill here, but happy to be here with you and Chuck. Great opportunity.
5:15 Mike Rowe? Like I said earlier, you've got some big feet.
5:18 Speaker 02 I do. Size thirteen and a half.
5:21 Mike Rowe? How tall are you?
5:22 Speaker 02 I'm six, six. Yeah.
5:24 Mike Rowe? So you played football in college?
5:26 Speaker 02 No, I played in high school. I played high school football at Sheepshead Bay High School in Brooklyn, New York, where I grew up. And yeah, I was a defensive end. I played Pop Warner, too. So back then, I would say I was a pretty average. It was like my freshman year of high school when I actually put on all that height. It was that summer vacation between middle school and high school. And I came, when I seen most of my friends I hadn't seen over the summer, they were like, what happened? I just sprouted up like.
5:58 Mike Rowe? I've never heard anyone say they put on height. I feel like they put on weight. Sometimes you put on some width.
6:03 Speaker 02 Put on inches.
6:04 Mike Rowe? You put on some height.
6:06 Speaker 02 It was quite shocking to many of my friends. But yeah, I'm a tall guy. Tall guy. I'll admit. No doubt.
6:14 Mike Rowe? So are you in a, you're in Connecticut now?
6:16 Speaker 02 I'm in Connecticut now. Yeah, I work from Connecticut. My wife and I, we moved there. Our kids go to school in Connecticut back when I started law school, 2021, which was, you know, a huge achievement for me, given, you know, my upbringing and where I come from. And.
6:34 Mike Rowe? How many kids you got?
6:35 Speaker 02 I have four. I have four kids.
6:37 Mike Rowe? You ever think about what the world would be like if, like without Pop Warner?
6:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, Pop Warner, you know, taught me so many things, just ton of friendships that I, you know, developed there as an athlete. My dad was a coach at the time. It was at Kings Bay. We played Kings Bay football.
6:56 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
6:57 Speaker 02 Little fun fact is that Lombardi, Bill Lombardi, actually grew up in Sheepset Bay before he went on to, to coach the Green Bay Packers. I think he actually was an assistant coach for the Giants before he went to the Green Bay Packers, but some fun history there. So, the color of our team uniforms was gold and green, just like the Green Bay Packers uniforms at Kings Bay. I didn't like the color growing up, but it grew on me and I kinda now understand some of the history there.
7:31 Mike Rowe? You near New Canaan by any chance?
7:33 Speaker 02 New Canaan?
7:34 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
7:35 Speaker 02 No, that is.
7:36 Mike Rowe? I was just trying to think. I've been to Hartford, which is where you live now.
7:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, Hartford County. That's where we live now. And I haven't been to New Canaan. Where is that? That's in a.
7:47 Mike Rowe? It was the first time I ever shot in your state.
7:49 Speaker 02 Oh.
7:50 Mike Rowe? And it was a dairy farmer, a guy named Matt Freund. You know, I mean, since we're about to talk about reinvention.
7:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
7:59 Mike Rowe? You know, this was a guy. He was a dairy farmer and he was kind of a mad scientist and he had, like, his whole house and the whole operation was heated by the cow crap. He built these digesters and these fixed film reactors and all this crazy science. And then one day, the bottom fell out of the dairy market and he just couldn't make a living selling milk. And he realized in a way that the crap from the cows might be worth more than the milk. So, he started, he started making these flower pots. He called them poo pots.
8:36 Speaker 02 Poo pots, okay.
8:37 Mike Rowe? And so, you'd put your like geraniums in it and then just dig a hole and bury the pot with the, you know, the flour.
8:43 Speaker 02 Right.
8:44 Mike Rowe? And the fertilizer would just make the thing grow twice as fast.
8:47 Speaker 02 Oh.
8:47 Mike Rowe? So, I thought it was a great story. Yeah, we went and filmed there for Dirty Jobs and. The thing aired and like six months later, the guy had a deal with Walmart. He was selling poo pots in Walmart all over the country.
9:00 Speaker 02 Oh, wow.
9:01 Mike Rowe? And it's like, you know, one day, right? You realize the crap's worth more than the milk and.
9:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, sort of like my own pathway, right? Like, I don't want to characterize my legal education as crap necessarily, but I will say that, you know, when I went to law school, you know, I had followed really a non-traditional pathway into college anyway, right?
9:24 Mike Rowe? Well, look, that's why we wanted to talk to you. Like, you're the only guy I know who went through the Ivy League and through a trade school. And I just thought that that in and of itself would be a reason, you know, to get you out here so we could really understand what happened in your brain. But as it turns out, what happened in your life before that is every bit as interesting. So I know you told the story a thousand times. But give me the short version.
9:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, you know, I kind of write about it in a New York 2018 New York Times op-ed called The Prison Old Timers, who gave me life. And I mentioned there that, you know, March 8, 2000 was the most regrettable day of my life. It was a moment defined by poor decisions. I grew up in the housing projects in Brooklyn, New York. And it led to devastating consequences, including tragically, the loss of a life when things escalated between my brother and a man who had sexually assaulted his wife who was pregnant. And that landed us in prison for 17 long years.
10:25 Mike Rowe? Ooh, could have been worse, though. This guy was, uh, he was in a gang?
10:29 Speaker 02 Yes, so he was a gang member in the community, older than my brother and I. And New York, unlike most states, doesn't have a stay on your ground law. And, you know, my brother could have raised a justification defense or asserted self-defense. But in New York, there's called a doctrine called duty to retreat. And my brother basically didn't have a chance going to trial with that argument. And he pled guilty, took full responsibility for his acts. And when we, you know, went to prison.
11:03 Speaker 02 We just committed to accountability, personal growth, and, you know, helping others avoid the same mistakes we made. You know, we created programs that helped at-risk youth in Seneca County and other areas in that region of Romulus, New York, where we were at. We worked with the probation department to keep kids out of prison and out of jail and
11:29 Mike Rowe? I feel like you're probably
11:29 Speaker 02 Helping them make better choices.
11:31 Mike Rowe? I feel like you're probably skipping over some, some big stuff.
11:33 Speaker 02 This, yeah.
11:34 Mike Rowe? I mean, first of all, duty to retreat?
11:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, so duty to retreat means that when, um, if there's a threat made against someone and someone's gonna do them bodily harm, um, they can't act on that. They can't, if there's an opportunity for them to say, leave the scene, perhaps call the authorities or hop in a car, drive a couple of blocks away, you cannot engage in that confrontation. So in this situation, it was right outside of my apartment building where I lived in, in those housing projects. And there were threats that were made. And this followed the act
12:17 Speaker 02 that had happened to my brother's wife, uh, at the time. And again, she was pregnant and I happened to be with him, right? I didn't actually physically do anything. I didn't shoot anyone. You know, there was a struggle over a weapon, uh, and my brother was wounded in the process as well as the other individual. And I was charged as an accessory, eating and abetting.
12:46 Mike Rowe? And the gang member died.
12:47 Speaker 02 And he died, yes.
12:48 Mike Rowe? Of his wounds.
12:49 Speaker 02 Tragically, yes. And, um, I remember, you know, going to court as a 20-year-old, first time felon.
12:59 Speaker 02 Spending time on Rikers Island, not knowing if I would ever see the outside of a prison again. It was a very challenging moment in my own life and.
13:10 Mike Rowe? Your brother's with you at this point?
13:12 Speaker 02 My brother was with me. We were initially in the same dorm on Rikers Island for some time until we were separated. He pled guilty. He ended up going upstate New York to Five Points Correctional Facility, which is a maximum security prison in Romulus. And it was just built at the time, you know, so there were plenty of available beds there. And I was hoping that, you know, if, once, after I went to trial, I was, you know, eventually acquitted of some counts, but convicted of reckless homicide, or any eventing of reckless homicide.
13:50 Mike Rowe? Did you have an attorney, a public defender?
13:52 Speaker 02 At the time, I had a public defender. I call them, you know, today, sometimes, public pretenders in some respects.
14:00 Speaker 01 Oh, my gosh.
14:01 Speaker 02 I don't want to, you know, you know, my brother had a private attorney, you know, resources were scarce, you know, we didn't have the funds really to pay for attorneys for both of us. And we felt like my brother was in the most challenging situation in terms of liability and potential sentencing exposure.
14:21 Mike Rowe? He brought the gun?
14:22 Speaker 02 Yeah. And it was that, because of that, you know, I decided to go to trial. And when I went to trial, again, it was, I was found guilty. And we could get into some of the, the legal issues that stemmed from that conviction, but that could probably be its own podcast episode in itself, so.
14:44 Mike Rowe? We don't need to take a super deep dive, but I think there are a couple of things that are interesting. First of all, the stupid question, but, you know, I was a Law and Order junkie.
14:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:53 Mike Rowe? I watched every episode. And I can still hear, like, boom, boom, Rikers Island.
14:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:59 Mike Rowe? Was it like what we saw on that show?
15:01 Speaker 02 Worse, probably. Rikers Island was a terrible place. I mean, you have a lot of cuttings, a lot of, you know, violence, both on part of the guards and on part of the inmates who are there. And it's not an environment that I think is meant for any human being in many respects. It is a very tough and challenging environment. But, you know, my brother and I were together and we, we held each other accountable. You know, we never wanted to make a decision or a choice that would potentially separate us. We were in the same dorm, right?
15:38 Mike Rowe? Can I ask about your mom, your dad at this point? Because you said you had never had any issues with the law before.
15:43 Speaker 02 Right.
15:44 Mike Rowe? And so you're suddenly 20 years old, 20 and 21.
15:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:48 Mike Rowe? And in about the toughest prison there is, under circumstances. Most people can't really, I mean, all we know is from watching TV. Like, most people, that's all we know.
15:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:56 Mike Rowe? But if you can paint that, like, where were your folks in the scheme of this?
16:00 Speaker 02 Well, my parents had separated when I was in high school and divorced. And, you know, that was a challenging moment for, for us. There were four boys in the house, right? I had three brothers.
16:13 Speaker 02 Darryl, my older brother, was the one who I was incarcerated with. And then I had two younger brothers. So my two younger brothers moved in with my mother, who was a New York City police officer, believe it or not.
16:23 Mike Rowe? Really?
16:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, so, yeah.
16:25 Mike Rowe? I did not know that.
16:27 Speaker 02 And she, you know, so you can imagine just a mother's pain. It's not just me, there was actually someone who died. So I don't want to make it seem like, you know, I suffered as much as someone else did or their family. But I will say that, you know, it was devastating to my mother. And she was in court every day. She stuck by us. She was on a visit when we weren't, you know, five hours away. She was coming up every month with my nephew, with my sister-in-law, with my brothers to show us support, send us care packages and commissary money. And I always wanted to have the opportunity to make her proud again, given the amount of shame that I know that came with, you know,
17:12 Speaker 02 going to prison for such a serious offense. And I didn't know if I would ever have that opportunity, honestly.
17:21 Speaker 02 And when I entered, again, I had dropped out of high school. You know, I stopped playing sports in the 10th grade because I missed too many classes. I was kind of a knucklehead, like many at-risk youth in the inner city. And I dropped out. And so when I went to prison at the age of 20, I didn't even have a GED. I had to take a GED exam when I first entered Five Points Correctional Facility in 2021.
17:50 Mike Rowe? So how long were you at Rikers before? And were you transferred up there with your brother?
17:54 Speaker 02 Less than a year. Yeah, and my brother ended up in Romulus, at Five Points Correctional Facility. It took about six months or four months after he pled guilty, he ended up there. And then I ended up going to trial, and my trial took a little while, but.
18:12 Mike Rowe? I'm so, why didn't they try you at the same time?
18:15 Speaker 02 Well, my brother pled guilty. So because my brother pled guilty and took responsibility for the act, he was sentenced. And once you're sentenced, you can no longer stay in the city jail. So he ended up going to Five Points. And there was no guarantee that I was going to end up in the same prison. In fact, odds are you won't because, you know, for security reasons, they don't want two brothers or two co-defendants to be housed in the same correctional facility. And it just so happens, again, because this facility was just built, I ended up being transferred to that facility. And my brother was in a different housing unit, and then we eventually moved into the same housing unit.
18:56 Speaker 02 And then we bunked for 10 years before we were later paroled in 2017.
19:01 Mike Rowe? What was Daryl's sentence?
19:03 Speaker 02 It was 17 and a half years to life. 17 and a half years to life. Now typically, when someone goes to trial, you get the maximum sentence.
19:12 Mike Rowe? Forty?
19:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, I could have received upward of that if the judge, if I were convicted on weapons charges and in the top count, and ultimately, the judge chose to run those sentences consecutively. But the judge in my case. Didn't feel comfortable, uh, Dustin Reichback, he did not feel comfortable imposing a sentence higher than what my brother had received. Um, later on, New York law had changed and it was clear that the way that the prosecutor's office used a aiding and abetting statute in my case was overbroad and that the conviction in itself was wrongful. Uh, and the Court
19:55 Speaker 02 of Appeals, New York, New York's highest appellate court, had ruled on this issue and said, you know, under the circumstances of my case, case is similar to mine, the prosecutor, uh, we shouldn't have been charged as an accomplice. Uh, the problem with that was that the ruling was not made retroactive. So, anybody whose appeal was heard before October 14th, 2004 would not benefit from the court's new interpretation of the statute. So-
20:27 Mike Rowe? How close were you?
20:28 Speaker 02 2003.
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22:05 Speaker 02 And the District Attorney's Office even conceded, the Brooklyn or Kings County District Attorney's Office conceded that the conviction was wrongful under the correct interpretation of the statute. And we litigated this all the way up to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and argued that the 14th Amendment, you know, required that the proper interpretation of New York's accomplice liability statute be applied to my case regardless of when my appeal was heard.
22:35 Mike Rowe? Let me ask you this. You dropped out of high school.
22:38 Speaker 02 Yes.
22:38 Mike Rowe? Now, are you getting sort of a crash course in jurisprudence as you're going through your own hellscape?
22:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. At the time, you know, there were no longer Pell Grants for incarcerated students. So there was a dearth of college programming inside New York's correctional facilities. And that, you know, came with the enactment of the crime bill in 1994. One of the things it did was repeal Pell Grants for incarcerated college students. So all of these programs that existed in the 90s and maybe late 80s, they just died off. So when I entered the prison system in 2000, the highest level of educational attainment that was available was a GED. So where I learned, my university essentially became the law library.
23:29 Speaker 02 One of the conditions you-
23:32 Mike Rowe? At five points?
23:33 Speaker 02 Yes, at five points of you applying to be what's called an inmate law clerk at a correctional facility in New York is that you have a GED and you take a state course on basic legal research and you pass the final exam. And I did that and I was hired as a clerk and I worked as a law clerk in that law library from about 2002 until I was released in 2017.
24:02 Speaker 02 And it was-
24:02 Mike Rowe? So you did the full boat?
24:04 Speaker 02 I did the full boat.
24:05 Mike Rowe? You did seventeen and a half years.
24:06 Speaker 02 Exactly, because there's a federal law called the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, again, passed by the Clinton administration, just like, or signed by Clinton, former President Bill Clinton, along with the crime bill, but what that did was it restricted the great writ, or federal habeas corpus, so that state prisoners like myself could not avail themselves of that federal proceeding if the US Supreme Court has not clearly decided that legal question previously. So you cannot ask an Article III judge, a federal district judge, or a circuit judge
24:51 Speaker 02 to announce a new rule when the US Supreme Court has yet to decide that rule. And if ruling in your favor requires the federal judiciary to announce a new rule, then the writ is unavailable to you. So in my case, when it was heard by the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which was in New Haven, the oral arguments were in New Haven. That was represented by Jonathan Edelstein, who worked with a law professor from Fordham, Abraham Abramowski. That was the reason why the court ruled against me, not because the merits of my claim weren't viable, not because I was wrong on the law and what the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment meant.
25:36 Mike Rowe? It was timing.
25:37 Speaker 02 It was timing. It was that the US Supreme Court had yet to decide this question, and we cannot intervene here and announce a new rule that would affect your case.
25:49 Mike Rowe? Okay, so to sum up. Your brother is married, his wife is assaulted, you two confront that perpetrator.
25:58 Speaker 02 Yes.
25:58 Mike Rowe? Things go off the rails, he dies, your brother winds up getting shot as well. He pleads guilty, gets seventeen and a half.
26:05 Speaker 02 Yes.
26:06 Mike Rowe? You go innocent, but also get the same seventeen and a half, and somehow you wind up together in five points.
26:13 Speaker 02 Yeah.
26:13 Mike Rowe? Literally bunking together.
26:15 Speaker 02 Literally bunking together. And it took a couple of years before that happened. He was in a different housing unit altogether. You had four housing units at that correctional facility, nine block, 10 block, 11 block, 12 block. He was in 11, I was in 9. And we always wanted to get in the same housing unit, right? Let alone the same cell, but we would be happy if we got in the same housing unit. And over time, when the administration at the prison, seeing all the good work we were doing, they let it happen, you know? So it was the deputy programs at the time who had facilitated my brother moving into my cell.
26:57 Speaker 02 And for 10 years, we celebrated birthdays together. We ate, oh, I don't remember what time, we ate 16 slices of cheesecake because we didn't want it to go bad. There's no refrigerator, right? Like, and my, my family sent us, and we regretted it the next day, right? We totally did. I said, we'll never do that again. We'll just throw it out.
27:19 Mike Rowe? Well, yeah, because if you're sharing a cell, you're sharing a toilet.
27:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, sharing a toilet, sharing a shower. We had a shower in our cell, thank goodness. So it was bittersweet. Of course, you don't want to see your loved one incarcerated with you, but to have someone there to talk to who knows you. We were 14 months apart. He's older than me, and we went from the sandbox together, you know? And then to spend that time together in there and to talk about challenging things and to grieve together when we lost our grandparents, you know, shackled together, going to the funeral. It really gave me a different perspective on life in many ways.
28:06 Speaker 02 And my brother's doing great work today. He's the deputy director of SUNY Higher Education in prison. He just won the Robin Hood Award in New York City and was hanging out with Eli Manning. And I was like, wow, you're a Jets fan here hanging out with Eli Manning after the event. So.
28:26 Mike Rowe? You mentioned accountability early on, like we were going to be accountable to each other, but I, you know, I don't want to spend our whole conversation in five points, but I do, I do want to understand when you decided to, forgive me if I say this wrong, but make the best of it. When you decided, look, this is where we are. We're going to accept this sentence. We'll continue to. Take whatever legal avenues are available to us, but while we're here, you know, while we're here, let's learn, let's get better, let's like, how does that process work and when did you feel rehabilitated?
29:00 Speaker 02 That's a great question. Really, it came from the realization that our actions don't simply affect us, right? As simple as that sounds, when you look at your mother and you see the tears in her eyes, or you see your father, you see the tears in his eyes, and you see the impact that your poor decisions have had on so many people, you have to grapple with that, right? And when that cell, when that gate closes at night, you know, you're there by yourself and you're thinking about that. And, you know, I had my brother there, he was very,
29:36 Speaker 02 very spiritual, he was the chaplain's clerk, and he devoted his time to studying the Bible, right? And being grounded in his faith, and I did as well, right? And it was a great pastor bishop, Bishop Ronald Duberry, who was the chaplain at Five Points Correctional Facility. And every Saturday, we would attend services and it was always a message there that resonated with us. When there's a pulse, there's a purpose. You know, that you can always find purpose, even in your darkest moments. And, you know, my brother and I spent a lot of time under Bishop's tutelage and talking about life with him and grounding ourselves in our faith.
30:21 Speaker 02 And that helped spur us to where we're at today in many ways. I could reflect back on some of those conversations I had in a Christology class with Bishop Duberry or Reverend Stewart, who preceded Bishop Duberry as the chaplain at Five Points Correctional Facility. And it was really our faith and really finding a sense of purpose in helping others. My brother chaired the Youth Assistance Program. He was the youngest inmate at the time to chair that program. And that was the program that, you know, it's not scared straight. It was more therapeutic. It was when like Seneca County probation and
31:04 Speaker 02 the courts brought in some of the at-risk youth who were potentially going to, you know, You know, exposed themselves to a potential jail sentence or something to that effect, or they were involved in diversion programs. And we really let our life stories be a lesson for them, right? And my brother was a great leader of that program, a great chairman of that program. And he did that from 2002 until we were released in 2017. So while I was working in the law library and eventually joined the YAP program with him, that was where he was grounded.
31:44 Speaker 02 He was grounded in his faith, as I was, and he was working as a chaplain's clerk. And then he also chaired the youth assistance program. And we found a sense of purpose in volunteering, because we weren't paid to do any of this. And we weren't told that we would get a letter to parole if we participated in these programs. In fact, the employees were told that they couldn't. So we were doing it just for the sake of doing good, working with Project Hope out in Geneva and Mark Pittifer. And he would bring his students in and some of the youth who really needed to benefit from hearing about some of the decisions that Daryl and I made growing up. And it was rewarding in many ways. It was something we looked forward to.
32:27 Speaker 02 And, you know, I had the legal studies, right? I was working to help others in the law library, many people who just couldn't grasp the law, the complexities of it, the nuances of litigation, whether it's post-conviction appellate or doing something like a federal habeas corpus petition. And I found success there, writing briefs on behalf of some of the incarcerated people. Some were wrongfully convicted, and I helped get them out of prison. There was one gentleman, Louis Hairston, out of Westchester County, who...
33:03 Speaker 02 Had a Brady violation. A Brady violation is something that happens when a prosecutor withholds exculpatory evidence that can demonstrate someone's innocence. And he had been incarcerated for seventeen years at the time. And we did a FOIL request, a Freedom of Information Law request, and his mother sent it into Mount Vernon City Hall. And we ended up getting an affidavit or a statement that was made by a civilian witness that basically supported his defense and said that the victim in the case was actually armed with a firearm, and that the other two witnesses were armed with firearms at the time this encounter happened. He was convicted of manslaughter. This was not presented to the jury at his
33:48 Speaker 02 trial. The prosecutor never told the defense about this witness. And we ended up finding out about this through a FOIL request that we submitted. So I filed a 440.10 motion, which is a post-conviction motion in the Westchester County Courts at the time. And the judge felt like we raised a colorable claim. So the judge then assigned counsel.
34:10 Mike Rowe? Colorable?
34:11 Speaker 02 Colorable, meaning a meritorious argument.
34:13 Mike Rowe? Okay.
34:13 Speaker 02 We raised an argument that has merit to it. And the district attorney's office had no answer for what had happened, right? And they wanted to judge to hold the hearing, right? They were like, yeah, something's wrong here. We ended up getting an affidavit from his trial attorney, also verifying that this was not disclosed during the discovery phase of the trial. And it's rare when a district attorney asks for an evidentiary hearing in a criminal case. They typically just want the court to summarily reject the motion and not even hold the hearing. Here, they wanted a hearing. They wanted to try and justify what had happened. And the judge wanted no part of it.
34:54 Mike Rowe? Same judge?
34:55 Speaker 02 It was a different judge. It was a different judge at this time because he had been incarcerated seventeen years. The original trial judge had retired. So this judge said, "I don't want any parts of it. This is a clear violation of his rights under Brady v. Maryland." In fact, the two witnesses that the prosecution called were implicated by what this You know, civilian witness who lived across the street from where the crime had happened, sent to authorities.
35:25 Mike Rowe? So what happens, sorry to jump in, but what, what happens to a prosecutor?
35:29 Speaker 02 Yeah.
35:30 Mike Rowe? What are the consequences for willfully and deliberately sitting on exculpatory evidence?
35:36 Speaker 02 In some cases, you think of like the Duke Lacrosse scandal.
35:40 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
35:41 Speaker 02 That was one of the most, that was one of the most prominent instances where a prosecutor was held accountable for withholding exculpatory information. But in most cases prosecutors aren't disciplined. In fact, they eventually go on to become judges and it's hard to sue and to have something called absolute immunity in federal civil rights proceedings. So if you were wrongfully convicted like Louis Harrison was, he was eventually exonerated, but if you were wrongfully convicted and you tried to sue for what happened to you in federal court, absolute immunity would prevent you from suing the prosecutors for any acts
36:25 Speaker 02 undertaken in their official capacity. So it's not even qualified immunity. Qualified immunity applies to police officers. So there's still a window where you could potentially raise a successful claim in federal court if you could show that the acts of the officer were unreasonable. But in the case of a prosecutor or a judge who engages in misconduct, it's virtually impossible to sue in federal court. So, so then you have to rely on the disciplinary committee to take some action. But in most cases, the disciplinary committee does very little to hold prosecutors accountable for these acts.
37:04 Speaker 02 And that's a well-known fact within criminal law or justice community in New York that prosecutors typically aren't held accountable for acts like that.
37:16 Mike Rowe? Life would be so much simpler if we all had a dad who could just pardon us. Situations like this would be simple.
37:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, yeah.
37:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, we could. There are a lot of people who deserve pardons and clemency who don't get it. It's gotta be.
37:36 Mike Rowe? What did it feel like to get this guy out?
37:40 Speaker 02 His mother wrote me a letter. His mother wrote me a letter thanking me for what I did. And that was such a touching moment for me because I had never gotten a letter from somebody's mom in a card, like showing so much appreciation for the work I did. And that was something I held on to. And it really let me know that I was doing something very meaningful in the law library.
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39:50 Speaker 02 Who's teaching you this stuff?
39:51 Mike Rowe? Like, I'm just trying to get my, in my mind, you're wandering down to the library, you're like, "What's in this book?"
39:56 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
39:57 Mike Rowe? Oh, yeah, you know, this is good information.
39:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, great question. So, when I first entered Five Points in 2000, there was a gentleman named Harold Aglesby. He was, maybe, he had to be about 68, 69 at the time. He had been incarcerated for over 20 years. And he was very knowledgeable with respect to the law. He would type on a ribbon typewriter with one finger, but his grammar was impeccable. His writing skills were like, super impressive. I was like, "I want to write like that one day." But here's this guy, and, you know, he was the one who got me my first job there. Harold Aglesby, I'll never forget it. I gotta give him so much credit, because I used to bother him all the time.
40:41 Speaker 02 I would catch up to him in the yard, he's doing his walks, right? And I'd say, "On a claim of ineffective assistance and counsel, one of the two..."
40:51 Mike Rowe? I'm just trying to take a walk.
40:52 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah. And he showed me how to shepherdize cases, which is a way of updating cases.
41:00 Mike Rowe? Shepherdize.
41:01 Speaker 02 Shepherdize. Back then, you had print volumes in the library. It wasn't like now, if you're a Yale Law student, or even if you're incarcerated, many clerks now have access to LexisNexis or Westlaw Edge. But then, it was all print volumes. So, you had to get stacks of books. Shepherdizing a case was, say you get an older case from 1985, and you want to see how it's being interpreted today. By getting the Shepherd's Books, you can then update that case and see if the rule is still valid. So, there are little codes that are used to show what part of the holding might be questionable today, and you can then pull those cases and see how it's being applied.
41:41 Mike Rowe? It's so interesting, the fact that it's that fungible, and what was true... Ten years ago, might not be relevant today in the same way.
41:50 Speaker 02 Right.
41:51 Mike Rowe? I mean, and so to stay on top of that.
41:54 Speaker 02 The law is constantly in flux, like the very legal issue I mentioned about retroactivity earlier, you know, the court today, the US Supreme Court could decide that question favorably to, you know, that issue as I raised it and, you know, there would be no way for me to benefit from that today, but the law is something that's constantly in flux and you constantly have to check these cases and deep read them. Everything, I would read everything. I had, when I left Five Points Correctional Facility, I don't know how I fit all this case law in my cell. My brother, I had a typewriter in the cell. My brother used to get ticked off because I'd
42:35 Speaker 02 be up two in the morning typing and we would get instant coffee. You can, you can get a coffee pot, but make Folgers, I'd stay up.
42:44 Mike Rowe? Eating cheesecake.
42:44 Speaker 02 Reading this cable, eating cheesecake, reading case law. He's trying to get some sleep. And then when I decide to go to sleep, you know, I snore. So like, oh, come on, man. Like, you're killing me in here. But I don't know how I fit that much case law in my cell. So I think about, like, I kept those decisions very organized. I had them organized by date. I had them organized by subject matter and I had it written in margins, all these thoughts, right? And it became a way for me to kind of immerse myself in what I was thinking at the first time I read this decision, how it's being applied. It was always cool to kind of read some of my thoughts in the margins on these cases. I would copy them in a law
43:27 Speaker 02 library and I gave all these cases away when I left and the other guys in the cell block were like, super happy to have it. It was like giving them gold.
43:37 Mike Rowe? Like you are in, like, how many people are doing this? It's just so fuzzy, but over a seventeen and a half year period, somehow you're going to explain how a high school dropout winds up in Yale.
43:50 Speaker 02 Yeah.
43:50 Mike Rowe? And it sounds like during this period, it was just a constant revolving door of mentors.
43:56 Speaker 02 Yes.
43:57 Mike Rowe? New cases.
43:58 Speaker 02 Yes.
43:58 Mike Rowe? Constantly talking with people, testing theories.
44:02 Speaker 02 Yes.
44:03 Mike Rowe? It must have been consuming.
44:05 Speaker 02 So there were some of us who really devoted our time to wanting to study the law. And part of it was motivated by desperation and, you know, I wanted to get out. I wanted to win my appeal. I felt like I had a meritorious or strong argument. And I had opinions about that and it really, uh, there was a fair, a small community because not everybody is a law clerk inside a correctional facility. It's, you're talking about four or five people. You have an administrative law clerk, then you have about two counter clerks. And, uh, two research clerks that work in there as well. Someone is responsible for teaching the legal, basic legal research course.
44:46 Speaker 02 And that group typically is a small group. There aren't many people, but you do have jailhouse lawyers, so-called jailhouse lawyers, which is a term people often use to describe clerks who work in a prison law library, who are doing some great stuff today.
45:05 Mike Rowe? So is there like a, word gets around, okay, that you're, you're getting smarter and smarter by the day and somebody, like, what percentage of the population there was like in a queue to talk to you?
45:18 Speaker 02 Oh, well, yeah, I, oh, tell me about it because after a couple of people got out, it's like the whole prison wanted to come see me in a library. And I'm like, I feel like, yo, I can't keep my brother up that late. I gotta, you know, I gotta have some time to, you know, actually do some jogs in the yard too myself, but it was high demand. Like, once people figure out that's the guy to go to, uh, that's the guy who knows his stuff, then you have everybody. flocking toward you. And that's the experience I had for probably the last 10 years of my sentence, 12 years of my sentence, and I tried to help as many people as possible.
45:59 Mike Rowe? This is the ultimate OJT. This is the ultimate on the job training.
46:03 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
46:04 Mike Rowe? I mean, it's not a position you apply for.
46:06 Speaker 02 No.
46:07 Mike Rowe? You're not going to clerk your way to it.
46:08 Speaker 02 No.
46:09 Mike Rowe? But there you are.
46:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, and I end up at Yale later on.
46:14 Mike Rowe? No, no, no, no, no.
46:17 Speaker 02 I will. There's a lot to skip in there.
46:20 Mike Rowe? All right, well, just, I mean, give me the insight, like, when did you wake up? At what point, how many cheesecakes had you devoured? Like, where are you going to go, you know, something? Hell with it, man. I'm going to the Ivy League. I can do this.
46:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, so that's a great question. It was when college came back. So President Obama introduced Second Chance Pell, which was a pilot program that was going to restore Pell Grants for incarcerated students. President Trump ended up making it permanent when he signed the 2021 Consolidations and Appropriations Act. Huge shout out to both of them. But the fact that it was a nonpartisan issue and everybody's seen the benefit of this was, you know, I love it. So it was 2012 when Cornell, actually it wasn't Cornell first. It was 2012 Hobart and William Smith Colleges, which is a small private college,
47:17 Speaker 02 liberal arts college in Geneva, New York, started offering courses at Five Points Correctional Facility. We could only take one course at a time. So there were two volunteer professors, Professor Erasod, who had a strong French accent, and then Professor Vaughn, who taught math. I ended up taking Foundations of European Studies 101 with Professor Erasod. And then eventually they started offering more courses, right? And this at the time, this was before Obama signed the The pilot or announce the pilot of Second Chance Pal. At that time, this program by Hobart and William Smith Colleges was being funded by a student who devoted money to getting this program off the ground at five points.
48:02 Speaker 02 So the thing was, you had to take the courses that they gave. There was no course catalog, you couldn't select. So I was trying to get the most out of every class. I take a class on Jeffrey Chaucer or Christian de Trois, reading, you know, I read Jeffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and one of our assignments- The widow's wife. Yeah, and you know, one not a real with the sheriff so that attractive more than person to the rotor. We had to memorize this and we had to read the Middle English version. Right. And Professor Erosad held us accountable. And I thought I was a great writer until I went into her. I was like, I wrote all these briefs. So here I am, I won some cases. And she was like, your sentences are way too long. You need to put a period on it.
48:45 Speaker 02 I like my sentences short and crisp like my salad. And I was like, how am I gonna win her approval, right? And I remember when I got my first A plus on a paper that I wrote on Sir Gawain in a Green Knight, I was so excited when that happened. It was there, it was in that, you know, in those early days when I started taking college courses, that I began to think about, well, what are you gonna do with this once you get out? I love the law, right? I was reading about, or later on, I would read about someone like Dwayne Betts, who was incarcerated as well, who graduated from Yale Law School. The one thing my grandfather did was he paid for, before he passed away, he would make
49:28 Speaker 02 sure I got the Sunday Review to the New York Times, right? So I read that and I would read these stories about Sean Hopwood, Dwayne Betts, and I knew it was possible if I was able to get out. To actually enter the legal community and apply the skills that I've been self-taught over more than a decade. And so Cornell began offering courses at Five Points Correctional Facility in 2016. And it was the year that my brother and I were going to be considered for parole. And I enrolled in those courses. I took a course on public policy with Jamila Mitchner.
50:11 Speaker 02 I took some philosophy courses as well. And by this time, we're now taking four, three or four courses, right? So we're really ranking up credits there.
50:22 Mike Rowe? And these credits all will transfer.
50:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, so they did transfer. So when, so I wanted to go to Cornell and a mentor of mine, a legal mentor, Joseph Margulis, who wrote the book, What Changed When Everything Changed, which focuses on unity that we've seen in this country after nine 11 and then how that sort of collapsed later on during the, you know, the Bush administration, when Bush was re-elected and, you know, and so he sort of elaborates on that. But I, he was a Supreme Court attorney, argued a couple of cases before the Supreme Court successfully. And he came to see me one day on a visit. He read something I wrote about federal habeas corpus. And he was like, I gotta see this guy.
51:07 Speaker 02 So a friend of mine just took him right up to Five Points. And I had read his book and we were sitting there talking about the book for about three or four hours, right? And he's like, wow, you read my book better than any of my students did.
51:21 Mike Rowe? Well, I had some time.
51:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, he was like, you should come to Cornell. I was like, come to Cornell. I dropped out of school, I have a GED. He was like, no, I'm serious, you should come to Cornell. So what happened, when I finally thought about it, I was like, I would love to move to Ethica. We ended up getting parole, right? Which was rare because. For someone to make their first parole board for what's designated as a violent offense and you're serving an indeterminate life sentence, that is very, very rare.
51:49 Mike Rowe? Indeterminate, so seventeen and a half to life.
51:52 Speaker 02 To life.
51:53 Mike Rowe? And that is ultimately determined by the parole board.
51:56 Speaker 02 Yes.
51:56 Mike Rowe? As you go.
51:57 Speaker 02 Yes. So after you serve seventeen years, you're eligible to, because we ended up getting six months knocked off through a merit time law. So at the seventeen year mark, we were parole eligible and we went before parole board. And, you know, I remember when I first arrived at Five Points, there were folks who I met who had been denied parole multiple times after serving their minimum sentence. So some of these guys were serving sentences of twenty to life and every time you're denied parole, you can't see parole for another two years. So we called it the getting deuced. So there were guys who were deuced three or four times. I didn't know like what was going to happen when Daryl
52:41 Speaker 02 and I went to the parole board. It was scary.
52:45 Mike Rowe? You've seen Shawshank Redemption, I assume, when Red is just like over, he was deuced.
52:50 Speaker 02 Yeah.
52:52 Mike Rowe? A dozen times.
52:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
52:54 Mike Rowe? What a scene that is at the end when he's finally like.
52:56 Speaker 01 It just doesn't give a damn.
52:57 Mike Rowe? Sonny, I don't know what rehabilitated is.
52:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
53:01 Mike Rowe? You know, oh.
53:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, Shawshank, that was quite the movie. I remember seeing it inside. It was, but we didn't know what was going to happen. You know, we were in the cell at, in the same cell at that time. We basically had to support it administration, given all the work we were doing around the prison and with the local community, Project Hope, Seneca County Probation, the, you know, Seneca County Court System. So we didn't know what was going to happen. And Depp Laurie Jones, she was a deputy superintendent of programs. I remember we went through a sort of intense parole interview and we didn't know what was going to happen. It was Commissioner Alonich and Commissioner Krangel.
53:45 Speaker 02 And there were about, I don't know, maybe fifteen other people who were seated there. And my brother and I were probably seven and eight, if I remember correctly. And I went first. I was in there for, you know, some time, probably about fifteen or twenty minutes, which is long.
54:02 Mike Rowe? What did they ask you? Like, how's the conversation go?
54:05 Speaker 02 They were super impressed with our institutional record. So Commissioner Krangle was like, how could you stay at this prison and not have any disciplinary? Because we didn't have any misbehavior reports, like, which is very rare for someone in a maximum security prison. Typically, you get over seventeen year span. You're gonna get some type of misbehavior report. It doesn't matter if you, why you're hot pot, so it cooks at a higher temperature. Like, there are so many things you could be written up for. But we had no tickets. And that was something that stood out to them. And they also asked about the crime. They asked questions to kind of see if you took responsibility.
54:48 Speaker 02 And obviously, I took full responsibility for my acts, and my brother did as well. And it was just hard to read them. They asked some tough questions.
54:58 Mike Rowe? It must be tough, because you pled innocent.
55:01 Speaker 02 I pled innocent.
55:02 Mike Rowe? So, all right, time goes by, the guy pled innocent, but now he needs to assume responsibility for...
55:10 Speaker 02 And that came up during the parole hearing. Commissioner Ellenridge asked about it, and I made that point. But she said, so I made clear to kind of pivot and then say, like, that doesn't mean my actions weren't wrong, and I couldn't have handled the situation better. You know what I mean? Like, I could have handled that situation much better. There's no doubt in my mind. And I always go back to that day, and I regret it. You know, and I just, like, body slammed my brother, who shot it at me, and like, let's, this is stupid, throw our lives away, right?
55:42 Mike Rowe? But on the other hand, you probably didn't know about the duty to retreat.
55:46 Speaker 02 No.
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57:36 Speaker 02 I actually didn't know what was gonna happen, right? I didn't know, honestly, at that time, if the person who... Was still there, right, when my brother was going to confront him. So it was so much that was unknown to me. I never thought it would escalate the way it did. But at the end of the day, I could have made better choices, right? I could have made better choices. And I took ownership of that during that parole hearing. But I was in there for roughly fifteen to twenty minutes. And then when my brother, he comes out, he's like, how did it go? We had hot dogs for lunch that day. That's what they were serving in the prison. And you know, that's like the cuisine, you eat hot dogs, like, get some real meat. Cause most of the food is loaded with soy, soybeans, like baked meat.
58:20 Speaker 02 And so we had hot dogs, we, you know, and then he went in. And he was only in there for about three to four minutes. And one of the things that the parole board said was, you know, this isn't a package deal, right? If we let one of you guys go, that doesn't mean we're gonna let you both go. And he took that as meaning that we both weren't gonna get out, which would have been the most devastating news for me to give to my family, uh, who had been committed all these years and coming up to see us on a visit. So I didn't know what was gonna happen. Uh, my brother, he seemed a little depressed, but he wanted me to get out. He was like, he always used to say in his YAP presentation that, does anybody know what it feels like to wake up and see the worst choice you ever made right in your face?
59:05 Speaker 02 So he was, I didn't know it till I heard his YAP presentation. So he was saying like every day, him seeing me in the cell, he felt.
59:14 Mike Rowe? You were his accessory.
59:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, he felt like he was responsible for that, right? And I didn't know he was carrying that guilt with him till I actually enrolled in YAP and I seen what his presentation was. And it was hard not to be touched by what he was saying. I mean, when he would do his prison life presentation, you would see everyone in the room, uh, shedding a tear, from civilians to corrections officers to the youth that came in, so.
59:42 Mike Rowe? What's it stand for?
59:43 Speaker 02 YAP. Youth Assistance Program.
59:45 Mike Rowe? Okay.
59:46 Speaker 02 And then we created the Prison Community Awareness Program, which was actually for incarcerated younger people. So after we seen the parole board, you know, my brother had the short interview. I had the long interview. We didn't know how it was gonna go and it took about four days before we actually got a decision. How we got the decision was very weird. I knew that if you would deny parole, typically the envelope that you would get on the legal mail cart would be thicker than the typical envelope that you get because there would be appeal forms in there. So I was like, I'll know from the weighted envelope if we're denied. So we end up getting called
1:00:27 Speaker 02 to the school building. So we're in a school building and I have no business being there at this time, right? Because I have no classes. I'm supposed to be in my program in the law library and I get this random call out to come to the school building. So I get down there, I'm sitting on the bench. There's no officer at the desk. So I'm like, I'm just gonna wait. Here comes my brother down the hallway. I'm like, what are you doing there? He's like, what are you doing here? I was like, I don't know. They just told me I had a call out. They told me I had a call out too, he said. And he just left the chaplain's office, which was his assigned program. He was the chaplain's clerk. So I'm like, wow, what is this? Like crisis intervention? Is this gonna be like the deputy of programs
1:01:11 Speaker 02 and the superintendent saying, look, you guys didn't make it, but hold it together. It might happen the next time or whatever. I wasn't sure what to think, right? But I was like, this is a weird way of us getting a parole decision if we were getting a parole decision at the time. I just didn't know why we were there. So then I hear these heels clicking down the hall and it's Deputy Laurie Jones, Deputy of Programs, who we've always worked closely with in getting these programs off the ground that I mentioned from P Cap to Yap. And she said, she has two envelopes in her hand. She says, I got something for you guys. So she tells the officer who now showed up to open the door. And she tells him, shut the door. So she says, have a seat. She gives both of us envelopes. So we open
1:01:56 Speaker 02 the envelopes and we both were granted parole. And I was just like, and then here comes the chaplain and here comes the all, some of the other civilian staff who knew but were coy about it the whole week and didn't tell us.
1:02:10 Mike Rowe? Oh, my God. It's an episode of. Returning the favor or something.
1:02:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, I know. And we were, you know, we were too. So the first thing I do, I gotta run back to the gallery and now tell my family. So I call my mother. And now I didn't call her all week on purpose because I was like, well, I'm gonna wait till I get a decision, right? I'm not gonna have them come into the phone anxious. And so I heard a voice crack. She said hello, because you hear it's a prison call. You hear, you know, the recording that comes before you actually get to talk. And I heard a voice crack. So I think she was anticipating bad news. I was like, Ma, we made it. And that was, she just started going bananas.
1:02:58 Mike Rowe? Oh, my God. Was she retired at that point?
1:03:00 Speaker 02 She was retired at that point. And my stepfather, Louis, at the time, who passed away from cancer a couple of years back. He was like, wow, he was like, I guess I don't gotta get you anything for Christmas this year. And it was that moment that stands out as like such a monumental moment in my life when that had happened. And then back to the point of me wanting to go to Cornell. Typically, when you end up in the prison system in New York, you have to go back to the county or city where the crime was committed. So in this case, they wanted to send me back to Brooklyn. But all my family had moved out of Brooklyn.
1:03:45 Speaker 02 So I was gonna end up in a halfway house or something in Brooklyn. But my friend that I mentioned, who brought Professor Margulies up to visit me, had spoken with a judge who was friends with Mary Katzenstein. And the judge is named Jim Kerrigan. He's now probably in Hawaii somewhere, enjoying the sun. Great friend of mine to this day. And he was like, Darnell could stay with me, you know? And I was like, I didn't even know him. He's like, he opened up his doors to me. And, you know, so I ended up moving in into, he had a residence in West Seneca Street in Ithaca, New York. And I ended up moving there.
1:04:30 Speaker 02 I didn't know whether to call him your honor when he came in or how to greet him.
1:04:35 Mike Rowe? I'd go with your honor.
1:04:37 Speaker 02 He was a city court judge and then. I ended up getting a job as a litigation paralegal with the offices of Wiggins and Polino, and I landed a job through Professor Margulies at Cornell Law School. So I worked for the Cornell Center for the Study of the Death Penalty Worldwide. I wanted to prove myself so much. His wife, Professor Margulies' wife, was the clinical professor of law, Sandra Babcock, at Cornell Law School. And I wanted to prove myself to her and Delphine and Sharon so much. They gave me a writing assignment. I think it was based on Moore versus Texas, a recent criminal decision that came down from the US Supreme Court. And they wanted me to brief the case and to give an analysis of the case. So I did
1:05:22 Speaker 02 that. And I told them, look, I'll work for you guys for free. I'll work for you for free. Just give me a letter of recommendation so I could get into the undergraduate school, right, arts and sciences, right? And Sandra, Professor Babcock, was like, we pay people for their work around here. And she ended up hiring me. So I hadn't even been accepted to Cornell as an undergrad yet, and I was working with law students at the law school.
1:05:49 Mike Rowe? Oh, my God. That's unbelievable.
1:05:51 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:05:52 Mike Rowe? All right. We got to leapfrog a little bit.
1:05:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:05:54 Mike Rowe? Cornell to Yale.
1:05:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:05:57 Mike Rowe? How's that happen? How long are you there? What's your degree in? And then you got to get me to the trade school.
1:06:02 Speaker 02 Yeah. So I end up graduating from Cornell in 2020. The pandemic hit. So they kind of shut down classes and everything went remote. I took a gap year to study. You know, you got to take the LSAT and stuff like that when you apply to law school. And I also wanted to earn some income before I moved to Connecticut, because it's a big move, and I had a family. Started working for a nonprofit, Ethica S and R, doing research around academic libraries and stuff like that.
1:06:33 Mike Rowe? Sorry, I should have asked you. Did you marry when you were out or while you?
1:06:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, when I was out.
1:06:38 Mike Rowe? Okay.
1:06:39 Speaker 02 When I was out. I married. I married my wife, Jessica, who was a teach-in at the New York. And we met at Cornell. She worked at Cornell initially. And then she was an admissions count director at Kyoka College in Pennehan. So we were married. We got married. I took a gap year, graduated in 2020. I didn't get a full commencement like most students do because, you know, it was COVID. So I walked the art squad with my son, took some cool pictures, although we both had masks on, like, and I applied to law school. When I applied to law school, I applied to Yale because I had met Professor James Forman, James Forman Jr.
1:07:24 Speaker 02 So his father, James Forman Sr., founded SNC, or co-founded SNC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and was a huge activist during the civil rights era, you know, along with Martin Luther King and others. And he did a talk at Cornell in 2018 after I wrote my New York Times piece, and he encouraged me to apply to Yale. And he was a professor at Yale. He was part of the faculty. And I was like, he signed his book. He said, I look forward to seeing you at Yale. And I was like, well, that's the number one law school in the country. I don't know if that's even possible. But I applied to Yale after I graduated from Cornell
1:08:03 Speaker 02 and took that gap year. And I remember the day that the dean of admissions had called me, and she said, I seen, I hadn't even finished applying to all the schools I wanted to go to because, you know, it costs money to apply to each school. And I was like, I'm gonna pace this out. I'm gonna apply to about four, and then I'm gonna apply to another four. And I needed some safety schools too, because you didn't know if you were gonna get your boots smoked and not actually get into any of those colleges that were your top choice. So I got a call. It was December 7th of 2020, and it was Miriam Ingber, who was the dean
1:08:48 Speaker 02 of admissions at Yale Law School. And I had just interviewed for that job at S and R, actually. And it was a long interview where I had to, I did a writing sample early in a week, and then I had to speak with like three or four different people at the nonprofit, Kevin Guthrie and others. Who is the founder of J Store. And so I had a long interview. I was like, I'm gonna go for a jog. So when I get in the car, I see this call from Miriam Ingber and it's transferring over to my Bluetooth in my Toyota Camry that I had at the time. And I'm frantically trying to figure out like, why is Miriam Ingber calling me? I thought like, maybe my application was incomplete.
1:09:30 Speaker 02 Maybe they needed additional information on my character and fitness statement. Because if you have a criminal record, you have to then specify that and go into details about the crime and explain why the law school should admit you, you know, given the fact that you've been incarcerated before. So I end up getting on the call and the first thing she said was, I hope you're ready to move to New Haven. I was like, what? I was like, you gotta be kidding me. She was like, I'm very serious. And I got out of the car, ran back into the house. My son Chase was two at the time. I saw it jumping up and down. I'm like, I gotta accept the deal, gotta accept the deal. And he doesn't know how to interpret it. He just starts saying, happy birthday.
1:10:17 Speaker 02 Happy birthday. So, so then, you know, we got prepared for the big move. And I started law school in 2021. Small group professor was Una Hathaway, great experience with, with her and many of the students who were in my small group. Because every class, incoming class gets situated in a small group. And then you get Coker Fellows who are like student advisors. And then you get who your small group professor is. Who's someone you can ask for advice throughout your legal education and whatnot. And so I had Una Hathaway and I met some great people in that small group class. And, you know, I took a sports law course.
1:10:58 Speaker 02 I had met with Demore Smith, who at the time was the head of the NFL Players Association. I kind of thought about sports law. I was also thinking about appellate litigation and criminal law, because that's something I devoted so much of my time to all those years. But I was looking for something with a little softer or less, you know, intense bend to it. And I thought sports law could be something pretty cool. And I, I had met Peter Stern, who was the CFO of the Brooklyn Nets, right? So Peter Stern and I became good friends. And he wanted me to come over there and work with the Brooklyn Nets for the summer. And I worked with him and that was a very great. Opportunity that I had, but at the same time.
1:11:40 Mike Rowe? Were you thirty nine at this point, forty maybe?
1:11:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, thirty nine, forty actually at the time. So I had also met Matt Blodgett, who was an investor and general partner at Praxis Ventures. And I met him at a dinner that involved a nonprofit that he has called Put Me In, which provides funding to children with incarcerated parents to partake in athletic programming, you know. So he's, you know, they get some of these kids cleats and uniforms and anything they need to, you know, participate in Pop Warner Sports and other activities, athletic activities. So I met Matt and I met, you know, the supporting team from Put Me In and their ambassador,
1:12:25 Speaker 02 Julian Edelman, Super Bowl, you know, winning wide receiver from the New England Patriots and Robin Glazer, some of the folks from the Kraft Corporation. And I ended up learning that Matt was an investor in companies that are at the intersection or startups that are at the intersection of I T and manufacturing. And what he started talking about was the fact that was there was this skills gap, right? No employers could find top of the funnel talent, that the baby boomers were quickly leaving these careers after COVID, right? And many of the companies that he was associated with just couldn't find top of the funnel or entry level skilled labor. So I was like, wow, that's fascinating because
1:13:10 Speaker 02 I was doing clinical work with Professor James Forman at the time as well. And, you know, there were many people in New Haven who were in need of middle class jobs that didn't require four years of college because many of the job openings that Matt was talking about didn't require a four year degree. And, you know, some were union jobs, some weren't, but paid well above a living wage.
1:13:37 Speaker 02 I was like, wow, why isn't that messaging getting across to communities where the hunger for economic opportunity is greatest? And I ended up meeting another investor, Jacob Rittenberg, who's the general partner at Tonicum Incorporated. He's a senior associate there, but he was a general partner of Tonicum Venture Partners. So their investment wing at Tonicum Incorporated at that time, he was running that. And they had plenty of factories throughout the U.S. from Penn Engineering to Watlow to Dexter. And he kind of reiterated what Matt had said about this skills gap. And another fun fact is that part of the law school is named after Jacob's grandfather.
1:14:22 Speaker 02 So you have Rittenberg Hall at Yale. It's named after Darryl Rittenberg, who was a famous Yale attorney who then went into the manufacturing sector and founded Tonicum. So I wanted to know more about it. I had done some research. I read a report by Deloitte, which said that 2.1 million jobs in advanced manufacturing were expected to be unfilled due to the existing skills gap. I read that report. And, you know, at the time, there were half a million construction jobs that were unfilled. And I was like, wow, this is a tremendous opportunity to kind of connect people in underserved communities to some good careers.
1:15:06 Speaker 02 Because many of the people I was seeing in New Haven, which had a 26% poverty rate and a median household income of $42,000, you know, they were working in the food service sector or the retail sector, the gig economy, right? And they needed jobs and, you know, offered good benefits and a living wage. So.
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1:16:51 Speaker 02 I ended up, you know, going to the IMTS conference in Chicago with Jacob and Matt, and we did a panel on the main stage in IMTS. And then I went on sort of a
1:17:04 Speaker 02 a road trip with him and Matt, where we toured several of his factories throughout the Midwest. We went to Watlow, we went to Dexter. And we were in this small car, and we were like bumping Kentucky bluegrass and rap, listening to Loretta Lynn's Coal Miner's Daughter. And then we would play some rap music, like The Rizes from Wu-Tang Clan's Grits. And there were a lot of synergies between, you know, what we heard about, what we were listening to across these two genres, despite the different cultural contexts. And we were listening to Kentucky bluegrass,
1:17:44 Speaker 02 because our final destination was this place called the Gene Haas E. Kentucky Advanced Manufacturing Institute, which is in Paintsville, Kentucky.
1:17:53 Mike Rowe? Sure.
1:17:53 Speaker 02 And we were going to meet with their executive director, Kathy Walker, who was running a program, a boot camp essentially, that was initially launched to provide
1:18:06 Speaker 02 Skills training to people to dislocated coworkers and their families, but then it eventually expanded.
1:18:12 Mike Rowe? Are you done at Yale at this point?
1:18:14 Speaker 02 No, I did this in between classes. So I'm in Yale. So we ended up going on this tour. This was September 2022, flew out to Chicago for the IMTS conference. We take this road trip, go throughout the Midwest, small car, three big guys, all of us are tall. Matt used to play football for Yale. He used to play center. Jacob is about my height. So here we are, two investors and a guy who did, you know, 17 years in the can, right? So here we are.
1:18:46 Mike Rowe? Road trip.
1:18:47 Speaker 02 Road trip. And so we end up at, you know, the E Kentucky Advanced Manufacturing Institute. And it was a great program. And I mentioned it because it was something that really inspired me to do more work in this space. Kathy Walker, I would encourage you, you and Chuck, maybe one day to attend one of the graduation ceremonies there. It's a remarkable program. It's not only free, but they provide a stipend to all the trainees of $1,700 a month and all the cutting edge skills from additive manufacturing, CAD CAM modeling to, you know, mechatronics and machine industrial vision technology. You get eight NIM certifications when you're
1:19:29 Speaker 02 there. It's a remarkable program and I attended the graduation and there were so many tears that I seen from the families who were there and seeing the impact that these new career opportunities had on the folks in Eastern Kentucky. And I felt like, how could we replicate this elsewhere? Right? There's so much in common between the folks in Eastern Kentucky and the folks in East New York, Brooklyn, right? You know, Eastern Kentucky, you know, 80% of the population, working age population doesn't have a college degree. Same thing in East New York, Brooklyn. Why aren't we extending opportunities for people to achieve the American dream who haven't gone the traditional track of going to college for four years?
1:20:14 Mike Rowe? So it's a really good question, but why are you asking it? In the middle, I mean, you're getting close to graduating from the top law school in the country.
1:20:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:20:22 Mike Rowe? You're about to do something that I don't think has been done before. And now you sound all distracted by the fact that there's another course or another path.
1:20:31 Speaker 02 Well, yeah, great question. When I went to law school, I wanted to have a social impact through the work that I did. I either wanted to, you know, initially go into appellate litigation or constitutional law or focus on civil rights law, but I felt like this was an opportunity to achieve the same outcome through entrepreneurship. And it still holds true to what inspired me to go to law school. And I didn't see it as a distraction. I ended up working as an entrepreneurial resident because I wanted to launch a company. Initially, we were thinking about augmented reality or virtual reality. This is that, you know, at the time when Mark Zuckerberg is,
1:21:13 Speaker 02 you know, his avatar is showing up all over YouTube when he's talking about the metaverse being a new frontier for human interconnectivity and everything else. And I wanted to see if potentially we could provide free skills training to people in some of these communities to fill some of the openings that, you know, Matt and Jacob were talking about. We didn't feel like the hardware was where it needed to be. You know, we went through, tried the Oculus. It would be too capital intensive. I wanted to launch a company that would have, again, provided that kind of skills training to underserved people in underserved communities, but I just felt like VR augmented reality wasn't the way to go. And I also didn't know
1:21:55 Speaker 02 really what the skills were that employers were looking for. So that's why I ended up going to vocational school in my second year. I wanted to go to kind of investigate and identify what are the core competencies, what are the skills that can get someone in the door at a Sikorsky or at Electric Boat, which is building the Virginia class submarine, and they need, you know, 20,000 technicians over the next three years, right?
1:22:24 Mike Rowe? Right.
1:22:25 Speaker 02 What are the basic core skills that are needed? And so I ended up enrolling at Lincoln Technical Institute in East Windsor, Connecticut. First, I wanted to see if it was doable within my schedule. My wife was ready to strangle me, right? I was doing a lot. So I kind of tailored all my Yale Law courses. To be from eight AM to 12 noon. And from 12:45 on, I was at throwing on my Lincoln Tech uniform and hopping on a multi-axis CNC machine and, you know, machining some cool parts for my son. So, you know, I journaled all of this. I documented all of this.
1:23:09 Speaker 02 You know, I developed a lot of friendships during my time at Lincoln Tech. When I eventually launched my software, you know, with my two brilliant co-founders who worked at Indeed, Dan Selin and R.C. Johnson, Lincoln Tech gave us the opportunity to pilot the software there.
1:23:27 Mike Rowe? What's it called, the software?
1:23:28 Speaker 02 Thurgood. Thurgood, the app for workers.
1:23:31 Mike Rowe? So now we finally get around to the shirt.
1:23:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:23:34 Mike Rowe? The shirt you're wearing.
1:23:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of people ask, why is it? What's the deal with Thurgood? What does that mean? And, you know, I kinda, it was a way to blend my legal education with what I was doing in, um, in the trades. And Thurgood Marshall, I always considered him to be a legal engineer of sorts. He spearheaded the arguments in Brown v. Board to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson. So he was always a hero of mine. He also believed in the right to industrial self-determination. So I felt like who better to name the company after than Thurgood Marshall? The first.
1:24:13 Mike Rowe? And the airport in our hometown, Baltimore is now the Thurgood Marshall.
1:24:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, he was from Baltimore. Yeah, and deep history there. You know, he had, Thurgood Marshall is, you know, someone who I always had looked up to. And so I named the company after him. We launched at several campuses after our pilot with Lincoln Tech. We partnered with other schools from SUNY to Porter and Chester Institute to workforce development programs like MATCH that offer free skills training. And what we want people to do is to be able to showcase their work. One of the problems, I think, with the trades and advanced industry and the stigma that's associated with it is that, you know, it's not visible to everyone, right? Many of the students and skilled tradesmen that I encounter,
1:25:01 Speaker 02 they're not on LinkedIn showing what they're building. They're not. And we want to have a platform and a network where we can build that out. So you kind of think of a LinkedIn for the skilled trades. If I had to use another company to compare it. That's what we are, right? We want to bring attention to the meaningful careers that people can find in this space. We want people to showcase their work. We want to celebrate the achievements of America's skilled workforce. And that's the only way we're going to really appeal to the younger generation. Right? So we have a combination of skills assessments and a public feed where people could post videos and showcase some of the work that they're doing. But they can also apply for jobs on a platform as well.
1:25:46 Speaker 02 Search within a specific geo and look for a job as an electrician, look for apprenticeship opportunities. You can find that on a platform as well. So we give out some referral bonuses and stuff like that to incentivize people.
1:26:00 Mike Rowe? What's your business card say?
1:26:02 Speaker 02 Thurgood. What do you mean?
1:26:04 Mike Rowe? Like, what's your title?
1:26:05 Speaker 02 CEO and founder of Thurgood, co-founder, because I have two other co-founders who have much more product expertise than me.
1:26:14 Mike Rowe? Are they the big guys in a little car with you?
1:26:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, oh, yeah. So Matt Blodgett and Praxis did provide the pre-seed funding to get Thurgood off the ground. So that's when I recruited a founding team in RC Johnson and Dan Sellen, who used to run Indeed.com's internal incubator and know all the pitfalls and problems with the traditional resume when applying for jobs. And what we're trying to do is, you know, allow students and job seekers to showcase their skills and work and use that as a way to connect them with employers who are looking for people with the requisite skills to fill some of the needs that they have on the labor side. So, yeah, it's making hiring more efficient, giving students and job seekers a better way
1:27:01 Speaker 02 of applying for jobs in the construction trades and advanced industry, but also having an aspirational pull as well in trying to get more people interested in the trades. So we have a dual objective, right? To kind of make hiring more efficient. To streamline the process, do away with the traditional resume, but also to create that aspirational feel toward doing great work in the skilled trades. And that's where we need more seasoned veterans and technicians to come on to the platform and like showcase the work that's being done in this space. Some of the baby boomers who are leaving, right? How do you pass on that tribal knowledge to those gens here, right?
1:27:47 Speaker 02 So we're trying to create a network and a platform where that information can get shared, but are disseminated.
1:27:53 Mike Rowe? It's just so crazy, the fact that you and I have wound up in such a similar space.
1:27:58 Speaker 02 Space.
1:27:59 Mike Rowe? Coming from such completely disparate backgrounds.
1:28:03 Speaker 02 Loretta Lynn and Arissa, you know?
1:28:05 Mike Rowe? Yeah, man. What should people do? There's not a day goes by where somebody doesn't call me for some kind of quote around what you just summed up, really. And, and for me, it's just math, you know? Five leave, two come in. Five go, two come in. It's been going on now for over a decade. And the opportunities are so vast, people truly just don't understand. And so get, making a more persuasive case for the trades is something I spend a lot of time thinking about. It sounds like it's precisely what you're doing.
1:28:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:28:42 Mike Rowe? So if we could just leave people with a, what's the ask?
1:28:46 Speaker 02 Download the app, get engaged on the platform, showcase what you're doing. There's so many people who aren't in voc tech schools, but who are working on stuff in their dad's garage or who are building things with their hands that really demonstrate their skills and the great work that they're doing in this space. And be, get involved, right? Get on the platform. Share some information about, you know, what it's like to work at Sikorski for 30 years, the benefits of doing it, the types of opportunities that it opened up for you.
1:29:19 Mike Rowe? How about a welder? How about an HVAC guy?
1:29:21 Speaker 02 HVAC tech, yes.
1:29:23 Mike Rowe? Somebody who's just got it done right today.
1:29:26 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:29:27 Mike Rowe? Film it, put it up there.
1:29:28 Speaker 02 Exactly, so you have.
1:29:29 Mike Rowe? This is what I did.
1:29:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, you have electricians who've been sharing some of the work they've been doing in our public feed, because you have the option to just create a portfolio that's visible to employers, but also to post something in a public feed that anyone can see. So if you downloaded the app now, you would see some cool posts and videos from students and people working in the trades who just want to show some of the stuff that they're building. So that's the ask. That's the ask is to download the app, get engaged on the platform and help build out this community and bring awareness to the careers in this space.
1:30:04 Mike Rowe? Brother, you took the scenic route, but you got there, man.
1:30:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:30:08 Mike Rowe? You really did. You're the only former inmate, Yale graduate, lawyer, trades, apologist that I know. And it was super great of you to fly across the country to do this.
1:30:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, Mike.
1:30:23 Mike Rowe? It means the world to us.
1:30:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, totally. And I know you're working to bring awareness to the careers in this space and how I could be involved and team up to do that. I'm more than happy to do so.
1:30:36 Mike Rowe? We're singing from the same hymn book.
1:30:37 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:30:38 Mike Rowe? That's for sure. Something tells me we'll find a way to figure it out.
1:30:41 Speaker 02 I seen your tweet, by the way, about Elon potentially doing some work with Elon Musk. Let's get Elon Musk to build the Gigafactory in East New York.
1:30:50 Mike Rowe? There you go.
1:30:52 Mike Rowe? Well, look, man, that guy's just crazy enough to do it. He just does things, it seems. I didn't even tell you that. I saw a clip of him the other day. I put it on Facebook and all the normal places.
1:31:03 Speaker 02 I saw that.
1:31:04 Mike Rowe? Yeah, I mean, there he is. It's like.
1:31:07 Speaker 02 Saying what you say all the time.
1:31:08 Mike Rowe? It's like, hey, man, I mean, welcome to the party.
1:31:12 Speaker 02 I've seen that same clip.
1:31:13 Mike Rowe? Yeah, right? But look, it's the truth. People, I understand how important.
1:31:20 Mike Rowe? Law is, there is no order. It's law and order. Right?
1:31:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:31:25 Mike Rowe? You have to have it, but very few people are walking around today going, you know, God, if we just had a few more lawyers, things would be so much better. The need is elsewhere and the fact that you manage to inhabit both those worlds at the same time is super cool.
1:31:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, I mean, like I wrote about in the Washington Post piece, there were 50 students in my torts class at Yale and two in my machining class at Lincoln Tech, which was really showing where our priorities are.
1:31:59 Mike Rowe? Yeah, right.
1:32:00 Speaker 02 As a nation and like the work that needs to be done to really balance that out better. So definitely going to continue to be an advocate for the trades and vocational training and, uh, and hopefully get people engaged and, and active and on our platform.
1:32:18 Mike Rowe? Well, please give your brother my regards. Is your mom still around?
1:32:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, my mom's still around. She's out in Staten Island. She's, uh, super proud of our accomplishments.
1:32:28 Mike Rowe? I bet she is.
1:32:29 Speaker 02 She was at our graduation at Yale. I, uh, got to walk across the stage with my daughter and my son, carrying my daughter who's one in chase. And it was an experience I'll never forget. We had a wonderful dinner afterwards and, you know, that one thing I wanted to do was, you know, make my mother proud that I mentioned before, I can always say I did that. And that really, that means a whole lot to me. So, yeah.
1:32:57 Mike Rowe? What's your name?
1:32:58 Speaker 02 Denise.
1:32:59 Mike Rowe? Denise, you done good.
1:33:03 Mike Rowe? Thank you for your time.
1:33:04 Speaker 02 Thanks.
1:33:04 Mike Rowe? We sure appreciate it.
1:33:06 Speaker 02 Appreciate it. Yeah.
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