How can you help us do that? Previously on Serial. That's fine, but you still have to go through this. I said, I went with the situation.
I said I went to court. You were ready again? There was a lot of talk that they would check in on him and hope that that means somehow protecting him. It's small.
It's small. Yeah. Why would you have any court dates? Why would you have a court date coming up?
From this American Life and W.B. E.C. Chicago, it's Serial. One courthouse told week by week.
I'm Sarah Cannock. Joshua was correct. The state was trying to invoke his S.Y.O. They wanted to send him to Adult Prison.
The morning after he called me, I'd inquired over at the Juvenile Justice Center to see what was what? So I'm actually at the courthouse right now. Are you? Yeah.
So they're just going to set a date for, I guess, the hearing or the next, whatever is going to happen next. But yeah, how are you doing? I was up all night like, I was thinking. Like my marriage was, I was thinking about it.
All I could muster was a solution that, when I was Joshua's age, I always found irritating. But, um, all right, try to get some sleep. It's nothing's going to be better if you don't get sleep. Be like, I'm like your mother.
Sorry. Be like it's on the sleep. I know you're worried. I know you're worried.
I know. It's not my job to comfort Joshua. Certainly not my job to tell him when to go to bed. But I happen to be the one on the phone right now.
Out of all the cases we watched, Joshua's got to be most. I could not fathom that the state would give up on him. After all, he'd risked for law enforcement. After all, the beatdowns he'd absorbed.
A 19-year-old kid. I did what I know how to do. I reported out every beat of this sucker. Every turn.
Spoke to Joshua almost every day, sometimes twice a day, per year and a half. So that the story of Joshua would exist. Not for posterity's sake, but for the sake of straight-up fairness. First thing I wanted to know, why Joshua?
What was ODIAS saying he'd done? That made the one who eject him from their facilities and put him into the adult system. I got a copy of the motion to invoke Joshua's SIO. It had been filed by the County Prosecutor's Office at the request of the Juvenile Prison Indian River.
The motion claimed that Joshua created a substantial risk to the safety or security of the institution. That despite all the therapeutic programming Joshua completed, he consistently chooses to make criminal decisions. Then there was a list of about a dozen specific incidents, just from the past six months. Assault, fights, disruptive behaviors.
He'd thrown urine on a kid. He'd thrown a remote control at a female guard. He'd smashed a video game console. I'd later find out the incident that triggered the motion to invoke.
Apparently Joshua had put out a hit on another kid, which usually means arranging for other kids to jump someone. The kid wasn't jumped, but still. The prosecutor's considered it a serious threat. I gotta say, I was taken aback by the list.
I had that anxious jolt of holdup, have I completely misunderstood who this person is. The list looked bad. The summary at the end. Extensive.
Sixteen fights, six menacing threats, 21 disrupted behaviors, etc. But I have another report, an internal OTYS report. The documents every incident involving Joshua, whether as victim or aggressor, for almost all his time in OTYS custody. And when I cross-referenced the request to invoke Joshua's SOIO, with that internal OTYS report, I realized, oh, these aren't isolated incidents.
Many of them are connected. In the request to invoke, there's an assault when Joshua hit a kid on February 3rd. What's missing is February 2nd, which you can see on that internal report. February 2nd, that same kid walked up to Joshua at the water fountain and punched him in the face.
There were a few sequences like this, Tid for Tats, in which only the Tat was included in the request to invoke his SOIO. Yes, indeed, Joshua did throw P at a kid on March 27th. The day before, the same kid had assaulted Joshua, and threw P on him. A common weapon in juvenile?
P. I ran the list of Joshua's offenses by people who've either worked in OTYS or worked on behalf of kids inside OTYS. And they said, it's not great, but, yeah, for a kid who's been in there three years, it's not exceptional. An OTYS guard who'd known Joshua for a couple of years should hold me overall, not a troublemaker.
Not even on the radar in terms of major threats inside the facility. He gets mad sometimes, she said, but usually for a legitimate reason. Joshua did throw a video game remot it a guard, for instance. Joshua told me that was because the guard discussed his case in front of other kids, saying snitches get stitches.
He said she apologized later, and they were cool after that. But there it was, and the request to invoke. Another incident on the list sounded as if Joshua had caused a guard to get hurt during a fight. He said, not accurate, he was trying to defend the guard.
The one time I visited Indian River, I met the same guard in passing, and she confirmed it. He was trying to protect me, she said. She called Joshua Honey. Again, I couldn't interview anyone at OTYS on the record.
They don't participate in stories about specific youth, but in a statement, they reiterated that they do investigate allegations of misconduct and take action when necessary. When I put the two reports side by side, what I saw was the raggedy, morally compromised chronicle of a kid at war. Joshua wasn't only a victim, nor was he only a perpetrator. Like a lot of kids inside OTYS, he was both.
The most powerful gang in juvenile prison was after him. Felt like guards couldn't be trusted. Every day, he felt unsafe. So he created alliances where he could, dominated where he could, took advantage where he could, sought protection where he could.
That didn't make his behavior right. Then again, OTYS prisons don't really spin on an axis of right and wrong. See previous episode. The prosecutors offered Joshua a deal.
If he didn't fight the bindover and transferred to adult prison, he'd get nine years. If he went forward with the hearing, put up an argument, he could end up with more than that, as many as 18 years. Joshua's assigned attorney was a guy named Jim Hoflick. Jim Hoflick hadn't done one of these SOIO invocations before, not many people in the county had.
Joshua didn't know whether to take the deal. What's Hoflick telling you? He wanted to fight it. He wanted to fight it.
He wanted to fight it. Everybody wanted to fight it. Who's everybody? Who's everybody?
My father turned on the term, and I wanted to fight it. My uncle, I thought he was going to have to fight it. Joshua tried to marshal support. He asked some OTYS staff members to write letters to the court on his behalf.
He says if you told them they were willing. Joshua's father, who lives in Jamaica, pledged to hire Joshua private attorney. He just needed to arrange for payment. In the meantime, Indian River declared that it wanted Joshua out now, while they waited for the final hearing on his SOIO.
The superintendent claimed Joshua was causing an environment of constant response and panic. A court magistrate okayed the transfer. Joshua was delivered to county jail. Adult, county jail.
A couple of weeks went by, and I could hear on the phone that Joshua was acclimating to the idea of an adult sentence in adult prison. He compressed the nine years in his head. It'd really be six years since he'd already spent a few years in OTYS. Probably less than six if he was granted judicial release.
Being in county with all these guys who were getting walloped with big sentences, Joshua had a fresh perspective on the number six. It's like, it's like, what's going on? You got three years, one of them got six years, one of them got seven years. So I know he'd rather be in my shoes than he was in my mouth.
So it's like, he was in that number. Like, they're the closest. Compared to double digits, he was saying, maybe six was a lucky break. When Joshua was brought to court the morning of his hearing, he still didn't know what he was going to do.
He met with Jim Hoflic, who'd laid out the probable truth that today, nine years was the best case scenario. Joshua took the deal. The actual proceeding was hard to stomach. Joshua stood there, crying.
A few of his umpteen yes-mams, fairly audible. And then you have demonstrated by your conduct that we have a rehabilitation during the remaining period of juvenile jurisdiction is unlikely. At one point, the judge asked someone to fetch Joshua some Kleenex. No one had come to his rescue.
His father hadn't hired the private lawyer he said he was going to hire. Joshua's civil attorney has never did file a lawsuit on Joshua's behalf. The Indian River staff who told Joshua they'd stick up for him, vouch for his progress, not here. I learned they'd been firmly reminded, you work for ODYS.
While we're at it, where were the FBI agents who'd seem to like Joshua back in 2014, when they told him they'd check on him? I got it. It was all too messy. Too much.
All those incidents on the list. The context, the tit for tats, the who started was too messy. Jim Hoflic had told me, sure we could have picked a part three or four of the incidents on that list. Explained.
Fights on paper are more intricate than they appear. But then what about the 40 other items, teetering just behind? They're going to be crushed, Jim Hoflic said, but the sheer volume of incidents. The one person who had shown up, Joshua's only witness, was Shayla Turner.
Joshua's mentor from Freedom School. She said Jim Hoflic had contacted her yesterday. She thought she might be called upon to testify. Miss Turner was upset.
I thought it could be fought, she said. I really thought it could be fought. In its letter to invoke Joshua's S.Y.O., ODYS had written that there was no more they could do to rehabilitate Joshua. No additional interventions and treatments that can be attempted.
It is unfortunate, they wrote, that he threw away the opportunity he was given. The idea that Joshua is unfixable, Mr. Turner said? That part of it is complete BS.
Ms. Turner isn't some wide-eyed advocate. She's worked with lots of kids in juvenile facilities, her masters in public administration, with a focus on youth policy. She's from East Cleveland.
She has a deep and personal experience with the good and the bad of gangs. She agrees that some of the kids at Indian River aren't ready to come out yet, but they are still works in not quite enough progress. Joshua though, she said he is not one of the ones she most worries about, and he's not one of the ones ODYS should be most worried about. She does not accept that he hasn't progressed.
Because to her, Joshua at 19, such a far cry from Joshua at 16. When he was the hothead, Eric and asshole that Judge Sweeney met at first, that I met at first, there's no doubt in my mind that that's when the conversation should have been had. The conversation of should be by Demo. Absolutely.
Because he's becoming a threat to the facility. And he was a child that I thought, could he be rehabilitated? You even had a question or the big head? I had a complete question and didn't think that he could.
Ms. Turner said the only fight they had in freedom school, inside the facility. Only one, Joshua. His first week in the program.
He stood up on a chair and spit on somebody. Like, I mean, just outrageous. Even in conversation with him after that, it was this arrogance to him. It was this hottiness.
And that literally doesn't exist in him anymore. So to now, hear his conversation completely changed too. I want to get out of here. I want to be a better person.
I'm asking to not be put into these situations. I'm asking to be put on a different unit. So you have a child that's been crying out saying, this is what I need. I want to get out of this.
And you ignore that. What most disturbed Ms. Turner, that it was Joshua, whose ethics and behavior were being scrutinized and punished. And now no one would look at what the state had done to him.
I think Joshua is the best case example of why it's so bogus when we have these expectations for kids to speak up about what's happening in the community and the testifier and things like that. And we see the ramifications and how we don't wrap around to protect that. I think the biggest issue isn't that Joshua hasn't held up his end of the bargain. Is that the state hasn't held up theirs.
They haven't protected him. Haven't protected him from the gang he inflamed by testifying for the state. More in a minute. After the hearing, Joshua was taken back to the county lockup.
He figured he'd be shipped out to prison within a few days. That's supposed to happen once you're sentenced. Joshua's understanding was that early on a Tuesday or Thursday morning, they were going to drive him from county jail to an intake prison about 40 minutes from Cleveland. And from there, they figured out where to put you.
What's going to be your home institution? But a couple of Tuesdays and Thursdays came and went, and Joshua sat in limbo. He wasn't getting either of the two medications he said had been prescribed for his brain injury. None of his personal stuff had followed him from Indian River, his papers and photographs and notebooks.
And also, I need to emphasize, county jail sucks. Go Google it. Kaihoga County Jail. See the headline?
Cleveland judge. I will not send people to jail after 6th inmate dies in four months. Granted, that was a post-Jashua headline. But it was true then as well.
County is not a place you want to spend even one extra day. Insulted injury, Joshua had no money on his books. He couldn't buy any edible food or an extra t-shirt or a normal toothbrush or minutes on a phone account. Why were they keeping him in county?
What did they want with him? I'm just sitting here for another life. Yeah. I think that's pretty much what's happening.
Yeah. After he'd sat in jail for a month of Tuesdays and Thursdays, I emailed Jim Hoeflick to ask Antinaj. Can you explain why Joshua's still in county? His response, Joshua's still in county?
Jim Hoeflick wasn't Joshua's lawyer anymore, but he said he'd look into it. Jim discovered a communication breakdown between the juvenile court and the county sheriff's office, which runs the jail. Administinstratively, no one knew or seemed to notice or care that they didn't know who had jurisdiction over Joshua. But Jim said they'd clear it up.
Joshua and I developed a new routine. He'd call me and ask anywhere from Mr. Hoeflick, and I'd say something like, So apparently now everybody knows what's up and maybe they'll transfer you. Alright, okay then.
Nope. That was early November. Late November, two months after he'd been sentenced, Joshua was still lousy in county. I'd run out of encouraging reports from the outside.
Uh, anybody at some point has to do something. That's all I know. Somebody at some point will have to do something. They cannot keep you in county jail indefinitely.
I don't know what they're going there. The metaphor could not have been clumsier. The government had forgotten about Joshua. In county jail, Joshua was bored.
Sometimes he'd be cooped in his cell. They all would be. From nearly 24 hours straight. But what I noticed was that Joshua wasn't raging.
He wasn't getting in fights. You know, you sound like you sound pretty good. I mean, it's a stress reliever. Like for a British, it's the best way to deal with it.
It's a stress reliever. Is it? Like, because it's so much drama down there too much. I get stressful down there.
It's less stressful there. Yeah, that's that. Haha. Being in county jail was a stress reliever.
The C.O.s just did their jobs. As far as you could tell, people were nicer to one another. More relaxed with one another. More supportive, he said.
He was noticing what I'd noticed in the shift from middle school to high school. Just because one person didn't like you. That didn't mean the whole pod was against you. It was something of a revelation to him.
Even white people do okay in here, he said. Even white people say white people don't hurt. Even got it like cool. They don't hurt.
And they were like white people just got a hard thing in your mouth. Don't hurt. They say cool. The other young men I'd spoken to, Leo, Malik, Devon, a white kid named Wave, who'd been in both ODYS and then an adult jail.
They'd all agreed. Bad as it was, dangerous as it was, was still better than juvenile. Less stress. That same feeling, less stress, more relaxed, would stretch out and hold true when Joshua arrived at adult prison.
He finally shipped 11.5 weeks after he'd been sentenced to a place called Allen Oakwood Correctional in Lima, Ohio, about a three hour drive from Cleveland, so his family couldn't visit. But Joshua was just happy to be sprung from his cell. He's walking back up. Because he cooperated and adult enemies lurked in adult prison, Joshua was put in protective custody.
No heartless felons on his unit. He wasn't feuding with other inmates or getting into it with COs. Joshua marveled. There were fewer guards, yet the inmates had more freedom.
Part of it was maturity, he said. People tried to get home, see their kids. But the main reason the adult system was better, he said, was because it was harsher. A tighter, less forgiving ship all around.
If you fight or act out, throw urine on a CO, say, severe consequences rained out. Yes, in juvenile. Come on. He was saying, in juvenile, the worst that had happened, you'd be shut up in your room for the day.
Try throwing kiss in adult prison. You know, you don't feel like a nation, you think to the whole, exactly a level, if I eat hard. Guards hero put their hands on you, he said. They do not play.
You could lose your phone calls or your visitation, and you could fester in the hole for months. The hole, especially, major deterrent, he said. In ODIUS, the longest you're held in seclusion is four hours. Joshua said, juvenile's take advantage of that shit to the max.
So if you were to propose juvenile justice reforms, it would be that they should be stricter. Right. And not just on the, you, the only, on the staff too, you feel me? County jail was better than juvenile.
Adult prison was better than county jail. Harsher punishment was better than lenity. Joshua's world had rotated a full 180. If he'd known what adult prison was going to be like, he said, he would have skipped juvenile.
He'd have said to those cops and prosecutors back in 2014, just find me over, I'll take my chances. Cooperation had gotten him nothing, he said, no real benefit. I said, what about a shorter sentence though? Three armed robberies in adult court?
Bit more in time in the teens or twenties even. He said, look at my codefinance. Half of them are already out. Yeah, you run your finger down the list of the 13 people named in the cutthroat indictment.
A bunch of them got two or three years. Only a few were serving more significant sentences. 11 years, 13 years. Joshua got nine.
Shouldn't have just come straight here, he said. He said, having my ass beat in ODIUS for three years. Now Joshua was in prison, his six years ticking. For my purposes, in terms of plot, his story had ended.
But he kept calling, kept calling, and I kept answering. I just took a 10 minute break in fact because he called me while I was writing these sentences. I learned day by day what Joshua's life was turning into on the cusp of 20 years old in protective custody. Yeah, I'm on the power like all with the eggs, eggs from their zioes.
What? If you're on a pond with former police officers and former zioes? Yeah. About 60 people who couldn't mix with the general prison population in a different building across the street.
Cops, zioes, and for reasons I never fully understood a lot of white supremacists, Aryan Brotherhood. Joshua said everyone seemed to get along okay. He was like, yeah, baby, they're cool, they're gonna no problem with them. Anyway, he said you kind of had to get along.
The unit was too small for anything else. During our phone calls from Indian River, I'd often hear hollering in the background. Now from Allen Correctional, I can hear the soft click of billiard balls. They had a pool table in the day room.
Joshua was the youngest on the pod, he said, that he didn't feel like the adults around him were dangerous. And the adults in charge of the prison didn't feel like Joshua was dangerous. ODIAS had tagged Joshua as a gang member. But he said the gang coordinator for the adult prison system, had a chat with him, checked out his history, his tattoos, did not tag him as gang affiliated.
On a scale of one to five, five being supermax material, Joshua was designated a level two prisoner. The sacrifice of being a prisoner in protective custody was the closeness of the unit and the tedium. Joshua says he couldn't take advantage of some of the programs and apprenticeships across the street where Gen Pop was housed. He was feeling the time, feeling the time with people.
Joshua's intensely social. He has a talent for gathering people, pulling people towards him, including people who can help him out, like me. I do him small favors. Favors that a reporter shouldn't really do.
Connecting him to the outside world, mostly by three way phone calls. My most immediate benefit to Joshua was that, unlike most of the people in his life, I could afford an endless supply of global telling minutes. Alright, what's the number? Uh, two or six.
Uh-huh. Joshua wanted contact, continual contact. Usually it was family. I became the operator.
Hey Joshua? Your granddad's on the phone. Hello? Hey, Granddad.
Joshua's troubles aren't news to his family, obviously. Incarceration isn't news to them either. Even so, it's heavy information when it comes. What's up, man?
I heard man and Josh, man. It's great in my heart, Dad. Your dad told me what happened to him, though. Joshua lived with his grandfather for a year.
He was about 12. What did you say? You say it's wrong? You say it's right.
Yeah, good right now. Joshua's relative said it was okay to use these recordings. His family's huge. They live all over, in Cleveland, of course, but also in Florida, California, Jamaica.
His little niece, his great-grandmother, his aunts, his parents, his sisters, his daughter. In every call, he tells them he loves them. And they say it back. When Joshua's four, his father was arrested by the DEA for conspiracy to distribute more than 1,000 kilograms of marijuana in the United States.
He got a long sentence in federal prison. His mother went to prison a couple years later. And once they were both locked up, what happened was what you might imagine would happen to a kid longing for his absent parents. He floated from house to house, miserable.
Probably the most stable person in his life is his grandmother. She was his legal guardian. He lived with her for long stretches growing up. I put you in the back seat, remember?
Yeah, and I was driving out the yard. At least I didn't go to the office. Man, I can dress. My mother bought me a car.
By the time he was 13, Joshua began to ping at the juvenile court. Initially for petty stuff, being unruly, fighting at school. And I got more serious. At 14, he was caught for strong arm robbery.
He and some friends mugged the guy they knew. Joshua was sent to an ODYS residential facility. He escaped, climbed over a wall with a friend, and called a sister from a gas station payphone. She drove out to collect him.
Once he was home, heartless felons, drug dealing, guns, some robberies. When he held up the two BPs and the Popeyes, he was 15. Just after he turned 16, his baby daughter was born. And two months later, the FBI came to get him.
Hello? Hey, son. Hey, mommy. Hey, mommy.
Hey, birthday. Thank you. My mom is 40 years old. That's old.
Sometimes in the calls, it feels like the master clock of Joshua's immediate family is the criminal justice system itself. The continual pulse of court dates and visitation forums and commissary money. Hey, we come down there to drop the money off. And hey, I don't have an idea.
I wouldn't let your mother leave. I'm already tired. I guess my idea. Bring it back.
We should go have to bring her back. Joshua knew I was recording these calls. Occasionally we discuss the content afterwards. Debriefs without his relationships.
He's open like that. Strikingly so. And he knew I was rooting for him. And so sometimes he'd call me just to call me.
I'm recording. I don't know why. In case you're feeling fascinating to tell me. I do.
I don't know if that's anything to say. What? Oh, come on, TV. What?
Yeah, I got it. That thing. He was relieved. Joshua wrestled with the language arts portion of his GED twice before.
A former O.D.Y.S. guard who knew Joshua was a younger teenager had described him as impressionable. The kind of person who'll do good if he's around good, do bad if he's around bad. The adult prison is filled by and large with adult criminals.
I kept an antenna up for signs that Joshua might be listening toward darkness. Sometimes I'd hear a hard blade of anger in his voice. He started swearing more on the phone. I couldn't really tell what that meant.
Maybe he was just more comfortable with me. Maybe he was just in a bad mood. On the positive side, Joshua'd become friends with an ex-cop on the protective custody unit. A big guy who Joshua laughingly told me it was making his huge muscles even huger, working out all the time.
This ex-cop, Denein Dixon, from East Cleveland, from Jesse Nickerson's case. The officer who'd taken Jesse to the park and pleaded guilty to a couple felonies as a result. Joshua really liked Denein, they knew people in common. And Denein liked Joshua, who's funny and charismatic Denein told me.
Feels like having a little brother around. I was interested in Denein's assessment. Once Joshua got out, did he think Joshua could have an okay future, one that didn't include perpetual incarceration? Right now at this point.
Because why? Because why? Because we have all enough. We have to do it.
I hated this answer. Because Joshua was bound over, he would now have an adult felony record. Joshua knew that would wreak the most long-term damage to his prospects once he got out. Tattoos began creeping back onto his hands and neck and face, all the places he had them removed before.
I spent many phone calls looking up people on the internet for Joshua. People he knew from Cleveland, who were in county jail. What were their charges he was asking? Were they going to trial?
Or else he'd ask about people who'd already been sentenced? How long they got? Which institution? Can you give me the inmate number?
Tell me the zip code again? Who's writing to them? Making contact. But some of the people he was having me look up, their cases sounded terrible.
A premeditated murder. Somebody shot and then burned in a car. I asked him, what are you doing? Look, like, can we no matter what situation the witness or path is?
Like, nobody was part of everybody and it's rather they got called for when not. Or someone was just a fellow. Right. He was being kind.
And I understood he was trying to give other people what he himself needed. A reminder that he wasn't a piece of shit. That he was forgivable. Or demable.
He was taking a position far more humane than the one the criminal justice system had taken with him. So I had to think for a minute about why I was getting angry. I realized this community of inmates he was stitching together was wearing me for when he got out. So I think my reaction I'm having is like, could you just please stay the fuck away from some criminals for a while so that you have a chance of not falling back into that world?
And I think that's why I'm having this reaction, which is it fair to you? Like the pain like like data people that understand the most sometimes. And it's like it's not that you don't have to be walking around. It's tempting to think that all of this prison and punishment lead somewhere.
But there's a goal we can point to. People who commit crimes, maybe if they turn their lives around, a civic reward awaits them back home. But for someone like Joshua, it's hard to imagine what that reward would be. Ms.
Turner had told me the young men she's worked with inside the prisons. Kids who have been able to crack open their feelings, make themselves vulnerable. She's watched many of them come home and then crumble because they're back in violent neighborhoods where they need armor to survive. She told me, the most successful ones I hate to say, the ones that are communicating that they actually feel joy, are the ones who went back to the streets.
Joshua knew he'd said it to me many times. His only chance of survival was to never go back to Cleveland. If he returned home, he was going to end up hurting someone or getting hurt. He'd end up right back at the Justice Center.
The year we were in Cleveland, 2017, more than 13,000 felony cases moved through the Justice Center. Brutalist Tower, downtown, 26 stories high. Hundreds of people coming in every day wound up emotional. And this is the Davis Day to do that while this is the famous.
Maybe watching a little TV will help them relax. That was the idea when the court had TVs installed in the waiting areas near the court rooms. On the 15th floor, an older woman's weeping. She retreats into the ladies room.
They can hear her howling in there. She comes back out, still crying. A young man, maybe it's her son, is folded over, head in his hands. Right above them.
Just top it off with a touch of vodka. Cheers kiddo. The Food Network. That's the courthouse soundtrack.
Clean kitchens, cupboards well-sought. The Administrative Judge auditioned other options. The news, the new upsetting, history channel, and boom, there was something about the Nazis and the concentration camps. You thought of animal planet, cartoon network.
In the end, the most reliably soothing, Food Network. It does lull you. You forget for a moment. How much is happening all over this building?
You have an attorney or the meeting is the hired attorney? In the space of a year, all those thousands of cases begin here in the arraignment room. Crucial decisions are made in the arraignment room. The judge chooses your lawyer if you can't afford one, usually.
The signs are case to a court room, reviews your bond. You buy the set $10,000 cash, sure, and you're prospelled properly. Adjust it up or down if he wants. Keeps you in jail or lets you out.
Have you received your diamond right in our study? What are you doing for that? I didn't really quite understand it. Dozens of people are waiting their turn with this judge.
The bailiff is at the ready, big pile of casefolders. I'm just asking you to understand what the charge means, not the facts. The arrested sentence in the hiring charge was given. Asking questions slows the rhythm.
The charges are given to the judge. So you understand what the charge is? Arrangement is the Justice Center's intake valve. The rush of cases now processed, they all whoosh upstairs into court rooms.
Has anyone made any promises or threats in order to initiate your change, truly? About 21, they're teeing up the three words that will button close many thousands of plea bargains this year. No, I'm late. Voluntarily.
Intelligibly. There are no week voluntary than intelligence. And I want to assure you during this voluntary. Envoluntarily.
Envoluntarily. Intelligibly. Envoluntarily. Envoluntarily.
A few floors down, Judge Daniel Gall, just reelected by the way, tells a defendant to pull up his pants. The guy's been in jail, doesn't have a belt. Pull down, pop. It should be.
Pull down. Pull up your trousers, pop. In the cases you're, you can decide. Nineteenth floor, a trial's just beginning.
Jury selection. The jury pool, all white. Save for one woman, who's black. She works in IT at a law firm.
The defense attorney starts asking her questions. She stops them. I think I could go pull the disclosure here. I am not emotionally ready to participate in our legal system.
I have so much personal disappointment in the inequities in our systems. Ground floor, in the hallway outside the doors to the county jail. A crowd is waiting for a man named Evan King to walk out. He spent 22 years in prison from her to do.
People are singing, crying. Then they see him. He's honorated. The man who was flying.
Outside, on the street. Police officers from all over the county, in the state. They're watching the annual memorial parade. On a...
Honoring two local police officers who died during the past year in the land of duty. Separate incidents, but both hit by cars while working on the highway. Back up on 18, in Judge O'Donnell's courtroom, a sentencing. The brother of a murdered woman gives a statement.
He talks quietly, angrily, for a few minutes. Says he's glad the defendant is going to suffer every day in prison. I'm just thinking about it anyway. We are.
Seems like maybe he's winding down and then he launches himself like a missile at the defendant. We are. We are. We are.
Another sentencing for triple murder in a barbershop. It's a capital case. The courtroom's crammed. Relatives of the victims and of the defendant fill the gallery.
The media set up in the jury box. They're cameras and microphones. A man named Alvin Wright comes forward. He was a victim in the case.
He'd been cutting someone's hair when shooting exploded the shop. He saw people in New Get Killed. Alvin Wright had testified for the prosecution at trial. Now, just before the judge issues her final decision.
Whether she's going to sentence the defendant, who's 21, to death. Alvin Wright addresses the court. How was the situation? It was fucked up.
I mean, I mean, this is what I'm dealing with though. The judge tells him to court of law. There's different words. Go ahead.
I mean, the situation is messed up. That's the situation man. I agree with putting them down like a dog. No.
That's just me. Ain't nobody win. You put them down. We don't get nobody back.
Nothing. It's like we just keep losing. Just black people period. We just keep losing.
We got all these white people right here. They look at us like me in a zoo. This is real shit. I win a zoo.
That's right. I don't. I'm just letting that be a picture of, like, look at this. Look at this.
That's life. We gotta do better than that. That's right. Thank you.
The best kept secret in the Justice Center is in the lobby. It's tucked between two pillars near the elevators. Looks like a wheel you might see at a raffle or a bingo game. But it functions as a suggestion box.
You can send kites to the staff. The administrative judge will get them. He's got the key. After hanging around this building for a year, I have many suggestions.
Just off the top of my head. I'd say, go minimalist. Don't pile six charges onto a single crime when one charge will do. Don't overcharge it or force a guilty plea.
Don't lock anyone up unless they're demonstrably violent. Admit that police officers lie under oath. Get out of the punishment business and turn toward the urgent problem of fairness. Keep obsessive track of who exactly is being charged with what crime, how their sentence shakes out, and what their life looks like in three years or five years.
Take note of the color of their skin and how much money they have. Don't shove what you learn in a drawer and forget about it. Don't be insensively tempted, as Charles Dickens wrote, into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course. Cops, prosecutors, judges, lawyers, call out the colleagues who degrade your profession.
Pay assigned attorneys and public defenders at least twice as much as you're paying them now. Judges, stop choosing those assigned attorneys. Citizens, mix up the bench. Stop electing judges countywide.
And overall, slow down. Doubt yourselves. And I know how corny this sounds, but imagine that every person in the elevator car is part of your own family and reflect on the far-reaching pain of prosecution. Also, don't tape anyone's mouth shut in court.
That happened. And consider getting rid of the grand jury. I could cram that wheel to bursting. But if I'm only allowed one suggestion, I'd say, let's all accept that something's gone wrong.
Let's make that our premise. Many times during our reporting in Cleveland, when I'd ask about problems or reforms, someone would throw out, well, let's remember, we have the best system in the world. County prosecutor Michael Amali said it to me. I just think people need to realize we have the best criminal justice system in the world.
The people who operate that system know about the words, and they concede we can always improve. But generally, they're not chomping for an overhaul. They're kind of extreme makeover that the data is screaming at us to undertake. We've all heard the stats that we hear in the United States in prison a vastly higher percentage of our population than any other country in the world.
We are number one. The numbers are well documented, wildly out of whack, and unprecedented in our history. Also well documented, inequity. Every joint in the skeleton of our criminal justice system is greased by racial discrimination.
Compared to white people who've committed the same crime and who have similar criminal histories, black people and other people of color are arrested more often, they're charged more harshly, given higher bales, offered worse pleadials, their handed longer prison sentences, and their probation is more often revoked. These numbers aren't floating above us in the sky. They're alive, all over the country. We looked at studies from New York City and Alabama and Wisconsin and Iowa's 6th District in Hampton Roads, Virginia and Harris County, Texas.
It's everywhere, in all our courthouses. Reporters often hear that we only report the bad stories, exaggerate and sensationalize, especially when it comes to law enforcement or wonky prosecutions. But we didn't go to Cleveland and sift through hundreds of cases, looking for the most egregious injustices we could find. We didn't have to.
The ordinary ones told us everything we needed to know. Cereals produced by Julie Snyder, Emanuel Jochi Ben Calhoun and me, with additional reporting by Edelius Koski, editing on this episode from Ira Glass and Nancy Update, tape transcription by Robin Smith, Whitney Dangerfield is our digital editor, research and fact-checking by Ben Phalen, Sound Design and Mix by Stonelson, Music clearance by Anthony Roman, Southland is our director of operations, the serial staff includes Emily Condon, Julie Whittaker, Cassie Howley, Francis Swanson and Matt Tierney. Our music is by Adam Dorn and Hal Wilner with additional music from Matt McKinley. Our theme song is by Nick Thorburn and Remixed by Adam Dorn.
This is our final episode this season, so we have some special thank yous. Our tape bloggers, Valerie Caesar, Beth Card, Nicole Richter, Sarah Stodder and Meredith Francis. Thanks to the entire staff at the Cuyahoga County Criminal Justice Center, thanks to Ed Farance, Kevin Bringman, Jillian Eckert, Joe Buckley, Ryan Mideyday and Kathleen Caffrey, and the juvenile courthouse, thanks to Mary Davidson and Gregory Moore. Thanks also to Kimberly Henderson, Lisa Adam, Sarah Adams, Ben and Epstein, Lisa Nohler, Melissa Georges, Ial Guten Tag, Itai Sücher, Ryan Iyengar, Kavi Mottamud, Christina Haggner, Annette Navi, Ad Resolce Media, Kisha Ladsen, Angela Ladsen, Ian Friedman, Kevin Cobain, Addison Riley, Tom Shaughnessy, Eric Norton, Wendy Finn, Danny Trafagnehu, The Ohio Highway Patrol and Amy Gifford at the Stark County Court Records.
Also a personal thanks to Jeff Melman, Ben Shire and Arlene Richmond. And a huge thanks to Rich Ores, who builds and manages our fantastic website, the talented team at Moth Studio did the Animation and Illustration for this episode, and it is great. You can check it out on our website at serialpodcast.org, that is serialpodcast.org, where you can also sign up for our email newsletter. Occasionally we'll take the show on the road and hold events at theaters and universities, so if you're interested, sign up for our newsletter, and we'll send you the details for those, and for our next season and new projects.
Again, you can sign up at serialpodcast.org. Serial is a production of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago.