Part Two: Dr. Death: The Texas Death Row Psychiatrist Who Killed So Many People

Summary

Behind the Bastards: Part Two – Dr. Death: The Texas Death Row Psychiatrist Who Killed So Many People

Release Date: July 31, 2025
Host: Robert Evans
Guest: Steven Monticelli
Produced by: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

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Introduction to Dr. James Grigson

The episode delves into the life and actions of Dr. James Grigson, infamously known as "Dr. Death," a psychiatrist whose flawed assessments significantly impacted Texas's death penalty system. Robert Evans sets the stage by highlighting the broader issue of anti-science sentiment infiltrating various professional fields, drawing parallels between Dr. Grigson's practices and historical pseudosciences like Lysenkoism.

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Dr. Grigson's Controversial Practices

Dr. Grigson's notoriety stems from his aggressive use of psychiatric evaluations to predict future violent behavior in death row inmates. He employed a flawed 1-to-10 scale to rate sociopathy, often exceeding the scale with scores of 12, 13, or even 14, undermining the credibility of his assessments.

Notable Quote:

[02:55] Steven Monticelli: "Yeah, the sort of non expert expert. The person who is more than willing to set aside all of the good things about whatever field they nominally belong to in order to like push some sort of quackery or ideology."

Despite reprimands from the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and legal boundaries set by the Supreme Court, Grigson persisted in his methods, asserting with unwavering confidence that certain inmates would inevitably commit murder again if not executed.

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The Randall Dale Adams Case: A Turning Point

One of the most significant cases discussed is that of Randall Dale Adams, who was wrongfully convicted of murder largely based on Dr. Grigson's testimony. The case was riddled with prosecutorial misconduct, including perjured testimonies and suppressed evidence. Adams was sentenced to death in 1979 but was exonerated years later thanks to investigative journalism by Errol Morris.

Notable Quote:

[14:23] Steven Monticelli: "Come on."

The exoneration of Adams cast a severe shadow over Grigson's credibility, revealing the fallibility of his predictions. This case became a cornerstone for the Death Row Innocence Project, highlighting systemic flaws in the Texas criminal justice system.

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Systemic Issues and Professional Downfall

Despite mounting evidence against his methods, Grigson continued to influence death penalty cases throughout the 1980s and 1990s. His reputation suffered only minimally until professional organizations took a stand. In 1995, he was expelled from the APA, and the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians followed suit in 1996.

Notable Quote:

[26:19] Robert Evans: "That's way worse than a third."

A study by the Texas Defender Service revealed that predictions of violent behavior by experts like Grigson were incorrect 95% of the time. This stark revelation further discredited his work and underscored the dangers of relying on pseudoscientific assessments in life-and-death legal decisions.

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Impact on Other Cases and Colleagues

Grigson was not alone in his malpractice. Colleagues such as Dr. Eclay Griffith and Dr. Ralph Erdman also faced consequences for their unethical practices, including falsifying evidence and improper testimony. These actions led to wrongful executions and highlighted the pervasive corruption within the system.

Notable Quote:

[36:28] Steven Monticelli: "Lovely stuff. Lovely stuff."

The cumulative effect of these malpractices led to significant legal and societal repercussions, emphasizing the need for stringent oversight in forensic psychiatry.

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Decline and Legacy

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Grigson's influence waned as defense attorneys developed strategies to mitigate his impact. However, the damage had been done, with numerous wrongful convictions and executions leaving a lasting scar on the Texas justice system.

Grigson continued to testify sporadically until his death in 2004 from lung cancer. Posthumously, his legacy serves as a cautionary tale about the misuse of psychiatric expertise in legal settings.

Notable Quote:

[62:18] Steven Monticelli: "Don't need to worry about it, kittens. It's all good."

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Conclusion: A Call for Reform

The episode concludes by underscoring the critical need for reform in how psychiatric evaluations are utilized in capital cases. The tragic outcomes of Dr. Grigson's career highlight the catastrophic consequences of unregulated expert testimony and the importance of ensuring scientific integrity within the legal system.

Closing Remark: Robert Evans poignantly remarks on the aftermath of Grigson's actions, noting that while some cases were revisited and corrected, many innocent lives were irrevocably lost, serving as a stark reminder of the vetting needed for expert witnesses in the justice system.

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Additional Notes:

• Research and Sources: The episode references studies by the Texas Defender Service, articles from the Washington Times, and documentary works by Errol Morris.
• Impact on Death Penalty Movements: The Randall Dale Adams case significantly influenced movements advocating for the Innocence Project and reforms in death penalty adjudications.

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Listen to the episode on iHeartRadio or Apple Podcasts to delve deeper into the dark history of Dr. Death and his detrimental impact on Texas's justice system.

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

Call Zone Media. And we're back to behind the Bastards, the podcast that's about the people who are bad, which is Today, this week, Dr. James Grigson and the broader industry, cottage industry he helps ignite of psychiatrists who go to court and be like, yeah man, absolutely kill that motherfucker. Which is only slightly less direct than the actual job was. With us again, our guest, Steven Monticelli. Steven, how you doing?

[Steven Monticelli]

Ah, I'm doing.

[Robert Evans]

You're doing?

[Steven Monticelli]

I'm doing well. Yeah, I'm here.

[Robert Evans]

What are you doing?

[Steven Monticelli]

We're about to talk about some really, really uplifting, heartening, trust inducing stuff like makes me really love the system and the medical profession as a whole.

[Robert Evans]

It's good. I mean, you know, here's the thing. What's frustrating is the medical profession as a whole is trying to do the right thing here. Like they keep being like, this guy's a crank, this guy's a crank. It just doesn't matter for a long time. This is kind of an early example of the hell we're in now where it's like all of the people who know anything about for example climate or for example how infectious diseases work or anything else to do with like vaccines and medicine, all of these people who know things, space travel, people who know things about that are being like, nah, this is all, this is really fucked up. Like you're shooting us in the foot. All of these different cuts to research are horrible. Everything that's being done is going to make life worse for everybody. But the only people that matter are the ones who are saying nuh. And you kind of get an early version. This is like a prologue for all of the hell that we're in right now. This like anti science bullshit. Well, I feel like a good psychiatrist should be able to say, oh yeah, this man is definitely going to kill again. Because I've diagnosed him with something I believe, thanks to tv, is a real diagnosis. This is our like Star wars prequel of the anti science hell that we're all trapped in now.

[Steven Monticelli]

Yeah, the sort of non expert expert. The person who is more than willing to set aside all of the good things about whatever field they nominally belong to in order to like push some sort of quackery or ideology. Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's. We've seen it in a lot of fields unfortunately, and to horrible extents. Like the Russians with their. Was it Lamarckism?

[Robert Evans]

Oh God, no, no, no. Lysenko ism. Lysenko is.

[Steven Monticelli]

Think Lysenkoism. Sorry, sorry. Lysenko ism. I'm I'm certainly not an expert in the history of genetic research, but I digress. Yeah, really, really horrible person here that we're talking about today.

[Robert Evans]

It is interesting to compare it to Lysenkoism, which is like you had ob actual agricultural scientists in the ussr and then you had this guy being like, no, plants work the same way. We're pretty sure people do, you know, and you can like freeze a crop and it'll pass down cold resistance to it's like, no, that doesn't. And there were a lot of people saying no, that doesn't work. But the scientist who happened to be in alignment with the politics of the people you know, in charge was the scientist who got declared to be right and damn the consequences. And likewise here you've got the whole APA being like, @ no point should psychiatrists ever do what this guy is doing, right? But you've got people in Texas and prosecutors and the government of Texas being like, no, this is pretty much how we think it should work. So this guy's right and he gets to make a lot of money.

[Steven Monticelli]

It's conveniently a tool of the state and its interest at the time.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, it's great.

[Danielle Fishel]

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[Robert Evans]

So from this point forward in the story, our boy Dr. Grigson, aka Dr. Death, is going to continue to expand and extend his practice throughout the 80s, while also dealing with constant and mounting criticism from organized psychiatry as a field. Now, the core of the complaints against him have to do with his continued insistence on using the results of competency tests, which he's not supposed to be doing, right? But there's some evidence that he keeps doing it after he's told not to by the Supreme Court. And then kind of the bigger issue is again that he's making predictions about the future, which he shouldn't be doing. Even after being chided by the APA in that Supreme Court case, he continued to rank sociopathy on a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 being the worst. And as noted in an article by the Death Penalty Information center, he would regularly rank people higher than 10. Like the 1 through 10 seemed to be mostly pointless because he would always go above 10, right? And up to 12, 13, and even 14, which is just like again, if you're going to go above 10 on a 1 to 10 yeah, you just say, like, he's an 11, like a 14. So why even have a 1 to 10 scale if someone can be that high above it? What are you doing? Like, why even introduce that idea from the beginning? I promise I'm not gonna beat on that the whole time. It's just very frustrating to me. Now, these numbers are, again, infuriating if you know anything about psychiatry or probability. But they get even more sickening when you dig into the actual stories of the people that Dr. Grigson diagnosed as a 100% sociopath who would 100% kill again. He is often saying, a 99% chance they'll kill again. Sometimes he says 100% chance they'll kill again. Right. And we know that in a lot of cases, he was objectively wrong. And because we have examples like, and this is probably the most prominent case of him being wrong. The tale of Randall dale Adams. In 1977, Adams was convicted of the murder of a Dallas, Texas police officer, Robert Wood. Officer Wood was shot to death in late 1976, the same year that Texas finally established its new rules for deciding death penalty cases. And now we know who the actual shooter was. It was a guy named David Harris who framed Randall Adams to avoid being convicted of the crime. Adams conviction relied heavily on testimony from three witnesses who were illegally hidden from the defense until they showed up in court and said testimony we also know was at least partially perjured. So not only did the defense hide these witnesses when they shouldn't have, but the witnesses were coaxed and bribed into giving false testimony. And we know this. Right? So we're already starting with crimes on the part of the prosecution in this case. Now, that begs the question, why are the police and why is the prosecutor so gung ho to go after a guy with evidence that they know they're having to cook up? Right. That they know isn't true. And you would assume just knowing cops, it's because, like, you know, police just for whatever reason, decided this was the guy. And we're like, well, we can just kind of coax the truth into making sure that we are able to, like, make a stronger case. And the prosecutor went along with it. Right? That's actually not what happened. So what's really going on here is that David Harris, the guy who actually kills this person in this robbery gone wrong, is 16 years old. Right? And they know Harris does it from the beginning. He's the first guy they take into custody. They find that he, like the gun that was used in the shooting was his Dad's gun that he had access to that night. So it's very clear that this is Harris. But you can't give a 16 year old the death penalty in Texas, right? And it's a cop, he's murdered. And so the police, even more than making sure the right guy gets executed, the police want to make sure that when a cop gets murdered, someone gets executed, right? And when it becomes clear Harris can't be executed, Harris is like, well, I'll give you this other guy who like drove me there, right? And Randall Adams. Part of why Adams is a good patsy dependent on is that Daryl Harris is like a kid, he like lives with his parents. So he's someone who has something of like a normal life. And Randall Adams is a drifter, right? He's like doing day labor. He doesn't come from the state. He's kind of, you know, I think he has a car. But he's essentially a homeless man, right? And so it's really easy to kill him, right? And really easy to like kill him because he's not going to have any kind of money for defense and because he's not the kind of person anyone's going to care about, right? So this kind of fits what the cops want, which is we want to make a show of force against somebody for the death of this cop. Now, there's a lot of fucked up details in the case, everything that happens here. There's a lot of like rule breaking and illegality we don't have enough time to go into. But every detail of this case stinks about as much as it's possible for a case to stink from the get go. In the end, the jury declares Adams guilty after almost no deliberation. And as you know, because we've done our little clinic on how the Texas death penalty worked, the next step is they have to decide should this man die, right? And this always comes down to will he commit another violent crime if we leave him alive? Determining this case came down to Dr. Grigson and another colleague testifying about whether or not Adams was, in Dr. Grigson's terms, a maximum sociopath. Again, not a diagnosis, but Grigson testified that Randall would 100% kill again if left alive. Adams, he insisted, was an extreme sociopath. So he can't even keep his terms straight. Adams is sentenced to die in 1979. And the years tick by agonizingly, you know, from this court case until three days before his execution. The US Supreme Court stays it, right? They give him a stay of execution Because Justice Lewis Powell writes that there is grave concern regarding potential jurors in the case who were excluded for being anti death penalty, even though they promised to follow Texas law if appointed. Right. So that's the whole thing that saves his life initially is that there's an appeal based on, like, jurors who weren't pro death penalty were excluded illegally from service. Right. And so that's the only reason he saved initially. It has nothing to do with his innocence, nothing to do with other aspects of the case. It's just this issue with the jury. Now, by rights, because this has been found by the Supreme Court, Adams should have gotten a new trial. Right. It's been determined that his trial was, like, not valid because the rules were broken here enough that they stayed as execution. You should have a new trial. But the Dallas DA at the time, Henry Wade. And does that name sound familiar to you? Henry Wade.

[Steven Monticelli]

Yeah, we talked about him. I'm pretty sure. Dr. Phillips and I, on one of the episodes on It Could Happen Here.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Monica Wade from Roe v. Wade. Right. Like, that's. That's the end. He's on the bad side of the case. Right? Yeah. So Dr. Wade or Henry Wade, not Dr. Wade. The DA comes in and he's like, we don't need to give this guy a new trial. It would be a waste of money. Right. And it'll be a waste of money because I'm going to have the governor commute Adams sentenced to life in prison. Right. So he's not going to get killed anymore. So why do we care about giving him a new trial? Right. So Adams people are still like, we want a new trial because he's innocent and he doesn't want to spend the rest of his life in prison. But a Texas criminal court of appeals insists that, like, well, now that he's not going to be executed, there's no longer any error in the case. So it's fine. Right. Because those jurors were just being excluded because of their opinion on the death penalty. No death penalty. Everything's good here. So that's what the court of Appeals decides. Oh, my God.

[Steven Monticelli]

Come on.

[Robert Evans]

And so Adams, a man everyone knows, has been railroaded into a guilty verdict. A lot of this is out now and had been nearly executed due to a crooked case. Seemed set to spend the rest of his life behind bars. And this is the case that he stays in until March of 1985. And the reason why he gets another shot. And ultimately, thank God, I'm gonna spoil it a little bit. Gets freed Is because of. We can thank documentarian Errol Morris. So Errol Morris is paying attention during that 1983 Supreme Court case against Dr. Grigson. And he's like, this seems really fucked up. Like this. This Dr. Death guy seems like a real asshole who's killing a shitload of people. I wonder if we can do anything about that. You know, me being literally Errol Morris. So he starts working on a documentary that's initially supposed to be primarily about Dr. Grigson. And the documentary that comes out is called the Thin Blue Lion. Right. If you've heard of that. Like, that is the documentary that he makes about this case ultimately. So Morris starts working on this case, and that obviously brings a lot of attention to it. And, you know, he's able to put some resources behind it. And to talk about what happened next, I'm going to quote from an article by the center on wrongful convictions at Northwestern University. Morris's intent had not been to question the guilt of defendants in whose cases Gregson had testified, but only to question his psychiatric conclusions. When Morris met Adams, the focus of the project changed. Morris learned from Randy Schaefer, a volunteer Houston lawyer who had been working on the case since 1982, that Harris had not led an exemplary life after helping to convict Adams. Harris, which is the guy who gives Adams up, had joined the army and been stationed in Germany, where he had been convicted in a military court of a series of burglaries and sent to prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. A few months after his release, Harris had been convicted in California of kidnapping, armed robbery, and related crimes. So Morris is like, well, the guy who said Adams was guilty in the first place and had been the initial suspect really seems like the kind of guy who'd murder a cop, whereas Adams doesn't. And there's a bunch of other irregularities in the case. The more he looks into it, the more he finds. For one thing, it comes up again that Harris father had owned the gun that was likely used in the shooting and that Harris had stolen it. Now, this is all looking pretty bad, but what comes up next is even worse, and I'm going to continue quoting from that article. Morrison Shaffer discovered that Officer Turco, who's one of the. That's the officer that survives. Her partner is killed, and she testifies about the murder. That Officer Turco had been hypnotized during the investigation and initially had acknowledged that she had not seen the killer. Facts that the prosecution had illegally withheld from the defense. Morrison Shaffer also found that robbery Charges against the daughter of eyewitness Emily Miller had been dropped after Miller agreed to testify Adams as Woods killer. The new information, coupled with the fact that Miller initially had described the killer as Mexican or African American, became the basis for a new trial motion. Right, so they find all this shit is fucked up and like, there's not really any evidence whatsoever that ties Adams to the murder. And ultimately, you know, there's a new trial motion. The case becomes a major cornerstone for the death Row Innocence Project like movement. Right. For the people who are, are trying to, you know, especially as forensic science is advancing and we've got DNA now trying to look at a lot of these people who are definitely innocent and get them off death row, get them out of prison. So in 1988, during a three day hearing in a Dallas district court, Harris finally recants and admits that he killed the cop that Adams was convicted of murdering. The judge in that case recommends a new trial for Adams and that Adams be paroled immediately. In the meantime, the Board of Pardons and Appeals initially refuses to let Adams out, but agrees to a new trial. And then after like a couple of weeks, he gets released anyway. And then a few days later, all charges against him are dropped. And I think this is a case of, as soon as they looked back into it, they were like, oh, there's no case whatsoever without the shit that the cops and the prosecutors falsified. There's absolutely nothing. We can't even give him a new trial. Like, there's not enough to even try and accuse him of here. It's ridiculous. Yeah, I mean, it's good, right? This is an innocent man gets out of prison, you know, after having his life. It's ridiculous that it got that far. Had to get to that point. Yeah. So it's a major win. Obviously, Randall Adams and everyone who believed in his innocence, you know, scratch up a W. But this represents a serious problem for Dr. Grigson because he had guaranteed in court that this man was an incurable sociopath who would 100% kill again. So people start asking him, like, hey, you said this innocent guy was definitely a sociopath. Were you wrong? And this is part of why I love that Vanity Fair piece where Rosenbaum spent like weeks traveling with Dr. Death. Because this is written in 1990, but it's during a period of time in which he keeps getting questioned about Adams because Adams is just like freed in 88. So Grigson is still testifying constantly. And defense attorneys are using this against him. Unfortunately, it's less successful at hurting his testimony than you might imagine. Now, this part in that Vanity Fair article comes after Grigson has just testified in one of three death penalty cases. He's doing in, like, a long weekend with the goal of getting three people killed, right? He's trying to kill the most people that he's ever killed in his career in the shortest period of time. Like, that's what this article is about. He's got, like, three cases in a couple of days. He's got. He's like, can I break my record of, you know, getting people executed by the state? So during one of these cases, he's testifying, and the defense attorney asks, do you recall the Randall Dale Adams case? The doctor nodded warily and said, I recall it well, yes, sir. Are you as sure about this defendant as you were when you declared Randall Dale Adams was guilty and would kill again? Again, the courtroom tensed up. Even out on the prairie, the papers had reported on the Adams case. Looking totally unperturbed, the doctor said dramatically, those people that were involved in the case know that he is guilty. I examined Mr. Adams. There is no question in my mind, as well as the mind of the jury who convicted him, that he is guilty. And did you say of Randall Adams that he will continue his previous behavior? I most certainly said that. The doctor said defiantly. And he will. Right? So that's two years later. He's like, no, they were wrong. He's definitely still guilty. I know it because of my psychiatry brain. And I guarantee you he's gonna kill again. Right?

[Steven Monticelli]

It just hasn't happened yet.

[Robert Evans]

It hasn't happened yet, but it a hundred percent will. Right now, Rosenbaum talks to the doctor after this case, which the prosecution wins, even though this gets brought up. And he's like. Talks to him about Adams. He's like, it just seems really weird that you're insisting this guy is still guilty after all the evidence that Morris uncovered. And the fact that the legal system backpedaled. And Dr. Grigson is like, no, no, no. The guy's guilty. Harris only recanted and took credit for the murder because he wanted to jack the system around. Right? And in another trial a week later, when asked the same question, Dr. Grigson continued to insist that not only was Adams guilty, but again, he will 100% kill again like that. I am 100% sure this now free man will commit another murder like he testified. That. So that seems like a pretty good case to judge his credibility on, Given that this is happening in 1990 and we have 25 years of additional data into this guy's life, right? Seems like something we should look into, which we will after these ads. Wow. That was so professional.

[Steven Monticelli]

That was a good one.

[Robert Evans]

Thank you. I try.

[Danielle Fishel]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Steven Monticelli]

That's all it takes.

[Robert Evans]

Everyone loves me at the cancer. And then the Aries comes out and they said, who the is that? No, you're gonna come for me being an Aries and you have a sag Moon. Get out of here. But I'm a Capricorn Rising, so that honestly balances it out and makes me more lik. Okay, that is your Capricorn talking. Listen to High key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So you could say, I think it'd be fair to say that a lot of Dr. Grigson's credibility rests on the Randall Adams case. Right. Because, number one, this is a guy he said was definitely guilty who then got exonerated. And number two, he has now provided. In 1990, he said 100%, he'll kill again now that he's free. That's a falsifiable statement. And we have a lot of time since 1990 to kind of look at. And about 14 years after he made that statement in 2004, there was a study. I found an article about it based on the study by the Texas Defender Service into the records of 155 convicted killers to determine how often they actually engaged in violent behavior post conviction in what Dr. Grigson and other experts had predicted they would do. Right. So these guys are looking into, like, what can we actually tell based on the predictions made about these convicted killers and what they actually did, how accurate these predictions were? Right. So, you know, that's good. I'm gonna quote from that now. Adams55 is Exhibit A in a study to be released today that found experts, witnesses, predictions of violent behavior were wrong 95% of the time.

[Steven Monticelli]

Oh, God.

[Robert Evans]

So that's way worse than a third, Right? Exactly.

[Steven Monticelli]

That's like, you know, statistically significant confidence interval. Like, you basically can say, it's gonna happen.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Like, that is. You would think if you and I were just guessing, if we just got to go to court and, like, flip a coin and be like, yeah, that guy will kill again. Like, you'd expect us to be righter than that. Yep.

[Steven Monticelli]

Oh, boy.

[Robert Evans]

That's an incredible degree of wrong. Right. So of the 155 convicted killers studied, only eight engaged in later behavior that resulted in SER. So eight out of 155 seriously hurt another person after their conviction. A full 20% of these convicts had zero disciplinary violations while in prison of any kind. And 75% had only minor nonviolent infractions. Like owning lottery tickets, right? So, like, yeah, a bunch of them got in trouble after conviction, but it was because, like, they had an illegal lottery ticket. It wasn't because they were killing or hurting anybody. Not one of the 155 convicted killers ever murdered again, Right? So very bad, like, rate of accuracy here. Now, it's important to Note this is 2004, which is after Dr. Grigson dies and well after he stopped practicing. But it's important to note that even at the end of the 1980s, the early 1990s, there's good documented evidence that not only had Grigson been wrong on a case, but during his whole career, he'd very likely been wrong on a grand scale. I want to quote from a 2003 article for the Washington Times here. Andrea Kellen, an attorney with the Texas Defender Service, said she knew of dozens of former death row inmates whose sentences were reduced for various reasons and who have never been involved in any difficulties. Though Dr. Grigson testified they should be executed because they would likely commit murder again. In 1988, a report compiled by an assistant district attorney in Dallas concluded that after the study of 11 specific death penalty verdicts where the defendant's terms had been reduced, not a single one had been anything other than a model prisoner. Mr. Halperin, in a brief for other prisoners, concluded that despite Dr. Grigson's near identical predictions, that each inmate would, beyond any doubt, absolutely and without any question, commit acts of dangerousness in the future. That prosecution prepared report proved the psychiatrist was seldom accurate. So a DA report, this is a prosecutor did a study of 11 death penalty verdicts where Dr. Grigson said they will definitely continue to commit crimes if not executed. And these people were not executed, their sentences were reduced, and none of them did violence again. That's 100% wrong for Dr. Crixon. Right. Based on those 11 cases, you know, Jesus. So I'm not overly optimistic that he was right a bunch of the time that we don't have data on based on that and based on the Adams case. So, you know, going into the 90s here, though, despite the fact that there is evidence building that Dr. Grigson is wrong an awful lot, he is continuing to do a shitload of these cases and to be very prominent in the media. And the Adams case does nothing initially to slow his career or halt his body count. There was, however, A minor uproar as a result of Morris's documentary and Adams's exoneration. In 1993, the Texas State Supreme Court responded to the epidemic of junk science experts, but only in civil cases. So they ruled that expert testimony could only be admitted if it was proven to be both relevant and reliable, a bar that Dr. Grigson's work could not pass, as many psychiatrists not named Dr. Grigson were consulted on the matter. However, this only applied to civil cases, like I said, not capital cases. So there's an uproar, but it only stops psychiatrists from testifying in the cases that Dr. Grigson isn't testifying in. Now. There is still an uproar even in Texas about this. There are a lot of professionals that are angry about what Grigson is doing. It's just not able to stop things. One of the things I found that was really wild is John Edens, who was a professor of psychiatry at my alma mater, Sam Houston State, said, in the wake of this 93 decision of Dr. Grigson, it's hard to imagine this kind of testimony would be allowed. It does not meet the criteria of reliability. There is a known error rate which is remarkably high. So, again, Sam Houston State, not a liberal university. This is the criminal justice school in Texas. Right. Like, this is not. It's set. It's located right next to death row. Right. Why is there nothing? Why. Why are we just letting this happen, then? Because any ruling against Dr. Grigson could be seen as attempting to, like, slow the death penalty. And it's really popular, unfortunately. And these are. We're coming into the Bush years now. Right. Dr. Grigson is going to be really active during Bush's time as governor. And so, like, we're kind of ramping up in the 90s to the period where Texas is, like, considering its ability to continue its death row as. Like, this is, like, something that is really important to the state. Right. It's something we take a degree of pride in, like my family did, you know? So it's. It's not like the fact that all of these experts are very much saying, this guy is not reliable, is not hurting his business yet. So crazy. And it's also. Prosecutors have a lot of power, a lot of political power. Right? Right. Das have a lot of political power, and they find him useful. So.

[Steven Monticelli]

So he was too important of a cog in a broader, bigger machine.

[Robert Evans]

Right. He's really politically useful, and he's useful to all their careers. Right. Because a lot of these Prosecutors, part of what they're building their careers on. A lot of them want to go into other politics is like, not only do I have this many convictions, but I sent this many dangerous sociopaths to death row. Right. I made our state safer. Yeah. Okay.

[Steven Monticelli]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

Yep, yep.

[Steven Monticelli]

And it's one of those things where, yeah, if you put numbers up on the board, it sounds good. You can claim that you took dangerous repeat criminals who would have been threats to their communities off the streets. And then if you succeed in actually killing them, you don't face the scrutiny of what you just described, of whether or not they actually would live up to that potential future that's been predicted by this expert.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. Sheesh. Yeah. Okay, so this is cool, right? We're happy. Yeah.

[Steven Monticelli]

Works as expected, right? The purpose of a system is what it does.

[Robert Evans]

Right. And in this case, yeah, the system is doing exactly what the people who set it up want it to do. Dr. James Grigson, in 1995, was finally drummed out of the APA for his continued insistence on diagnosing subjects without ever talking to them. The next year, the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians expelled him. In 1996, New York University psych professor Michael Wiener wrote this. The problem with Dr. Grigson was not that inmates were placed on death row, but that he was fundamentally biased in his assessment and was performing cursory evaluations and drawing broad and damning conclusions from only limited information. A problem of credibility and objectivity. And, you know, I would say part of the problem is that people were being placed on death row based on bad evidence. But I think he's making the point that, like, Dr. Grigson isn't responsible for the way prosecutions work, for how bad, like, lying about the evidence is incentivized in these cases and stuff. He's responsible for this aspect of it, which is probably fair to say. Now, it is impossible for us to know to a point of certainty how often he was wrong. But something like a hundred of the people he testified about for money were put to death. And most of those cases were never revisited. However, we do have a few more case studies on times when he was proven wrong. Back in 1986, a carpenter named David Wayne Stoker was charged with the murder of a convenience store clerk north of Lubbock. Five months after the murder, a man described by prosecutors as low life scum snitched to police that Stoker had done the murder and handed over what he claimed to be the murder weapon. Well, this low life scum had the murder weapon and says this other guy did it. That's all I need to know.

[Steven Monticelli]

Case closed.

[Robert Evans]

Why would he have a bias? Right, so Stoker did have an assault prior, and he had a drug issue. Right. And was arrested in short order. Again, it's one of these, like, oh, yeah, this guy doesn't have any way to fight this. Yeah, let's go after him. Like many such death penalty cases, his was dogged by poor quality representation in a system in which people like him who are expected to be guilty get railroaded through to a conviction. Per an article by the Death Penalty Information Center, Felty, the lead lawyer, the defense attorney, and a former prosecutor, later gave up his law license in the face of disciplinary action. Felty forged the signatures of two clients on a settlement check, then pocketed the money. Records show he also pleaded guilty to felony charges for forging a judge's signature on a court order and falsifying a government document. He was sentenced to five years of community service. So that's this guy's defense attorney. And again, not shitting on the concept of defense attorneys, but it's a major problem that a lot of these guys in particular, these are like the kind of the lowest of the low, and they benefit from the very worst service on average. Right. They are very likely to get the defense attorneys who are not competent. It's, as we'll talk about, weirdly common for, like, death penalty cases for the defense attorneys to later get disbarred for incompetence or other similar issues. The guy who had snitched on Stoker claimed in court to not have been given anything for his testimony. That just like I wanted the truth to come out, I didn't get any kind of special deal. But the day he testified, charges he had for drug possession and for, like, possession of a firearm illegally in the next county over were dropped. And he received $1,000 from Crime Stoppers as a reward for turning this guy in. And further documents made it clear that there had been a written quid pro quo with the da. For one thing, that county didn't have a Crime Stoppers program until it was started for this by the da. And the check was sent to him by an investigator for the DA's office.

[Steven Monticelli]

Lovely stuff. Lovely stuff.

[Robert Evans]

Not bribery, though. Not bribery, no.

[Steven Monticelli]

Not picking cases that you think can win, even if it might not be the right guy. And certainly no shenanigans or bribery with regard to acquiring potentially suspect testimony or evidence. Not at all.

[Robert Evans]

Absolutely not. No. That would be unethical.

[Steven Monticelli]

There's no gambling in this casino?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's crazy in this casino. So there's much more that reeks about this case. But things really got nasty once Dr. Grigson entered the arena. Quote, during sentencing, the prosecutor called Dr. James P. Grigson, the psychiatrist nicknamed Dr. Death. Though Grigson never examined Stoker, he testified Stoker was a sociopath who would absolutely be violent. Again. With Stoker's life in the balance, Felty put on only one witness at sentencing. Stoker's mother. She testified briefly about the most superficial aspects of the Stoker family. Felty, who works as a supervisor at Home Depot, defended his work. When we went to trial, we were a hell of a lot better prepared than the DA's office, Felty said, so not a lot of winners. He's not necessarily wrong because the DA is just lying and bribing somebody. But also, when your lawyer gets disbarred for felonies and winds up working at a Home Depot, that's not a great sign in terms of the quality of, of representation you received.

[Steven Monticelli]

Yeah, the. Look at my lawyer dog.

[Robert Evans]

Look at my lawyer dog. I'm getting executed.

[Steven Monticelli]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Unfortunately, that is just such beautiful shade on that article too. Just noted that he says he's working at Home Depot now. Almost kind of unnecessary except for the point they're trying to make here.

[Steven Monticelli]

But it's good color.

[Robert Evans]

It is good color. Now, unfortunately, unlike Adams's story, this story does not end with an 11th hour stay of execution and eventual exoneration. Stoker was executed in 1997 during George W. Bush's governorship, when he pushed Texas to execute inmates at a rate not before seen in modern times. Even within the ranks of Bush appointees, though, the Stoker case was looked at as egregious. Thomas Moss had been appointed by the governor to the Board of Pardons and Paroles, and he voted to give Stoker clemency. That he only did this twice in his entire career and once was with Stoker. Cause he was like, yeah, this is just too messy a case. This is, you know, a lot kept coming out. The local police chief eventually testified that, no, the Crime Stoppers group wasn't real. We founded it expressly for this purpose. Basically, a DA's investigator made the payment. And as this stuff came to light, eventually the local sheriff testified that there was no direct tie between Stoker and the crime he'd been executed for committing. Now, had Stoker been put under life imprisonment, had his execution basically commuted, Right. But given life imprisonment at this point, he likely would have lived long Enough to get retried. Right. That probably would have happened eventually because there was just enough good evidence on his side of things for this. But Dr. Grigson helped to ensure that this could not happen. Right. By testifying he would definitely kill again. One juror in the Stoker case later said, you couldn't help but listen to what he was saying. He's a doctor. He had a lot of influence on what we decided. And several jurors later said, yeah, if I'd known these other facts about the case, I wouldn't have voted for the death penalty. So, yeah, this guy gets executed. And a big part of why is that Grigson said he needed to be. And we can say fairly confidently that this was an innocent man who Dr. Grigson helped put to death here. Yeah. Throughout the Bush years and the bloodiest period for Texas death row, Dr. Grigson was prolific and influential even in cases where he personally did not testify. That Death Penalty Information center piece Discusses another psychiatrist, Dr. Eclay Griffith, who often testified along the same lines as Dr. Grigson and had clearly built his profession in the other man's image. Like Grigson, he used a 1 to 10 scale for judging defendants and regularly went above 10 in order to make his point, as he did when reviewing the 1984 case of David Wayne Spence. Now, Spence again was not tied to the triple homicide that he was accused of committing via any evidence, just the testimony of seven informants, all of whom had good reason to lie about what had happened. Several of these people later confessed to being fed information by investigators and being shown crime scene and autopsy photos, as well as being bribed behind bars with privileges and leniency. Like Stoker, Spence was executed in 1987 or 1997. The issues we've discussed in all these cases have been proven via subsequent study to be rampant within Texas's criminal justice system, particularly death row cases. An investigation of the 131 executions during George W. Bush's time as governor showed that in at least 29 cases, the prosecution had presented testimony from a psychiatrist, often Dr. Grigson, that the defendant would commit future violence. In most of these cases, the psychiatrist had not seen or examined the defendant. Beyond the issues most relevant to Grigson. In 43 of those cases, the defendant was represented at trial by an attorney who was later disbarred or suspended. Again, I want to really go into that 131 executions of those. In 43 of the cases, the defendant's defense attorney was later disbarred. Or suspended.

[Danielle Fishel]

That's insane.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Steven Monticelli]

So like, he. He not only destroyed people's lives and got them killed, but then he also destroyed defense attorneys careers in the process.

[Robert Evans]

I think the point. No, this is more a broader point, about the fact that most of the people on death row did not benefit from a vigorous defense like they did. You were entitled constitutionally, and they clearly didn't get it. Right.

[Steven Monticelli]

I completely misunderstood. No, yeah, no, that makes a lot more sense that just you're. You're dealing with a very poor level of representation.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Steven Monticelli]

Where it is clearly falling underneath the bar time and time again at a very large scale. Okay.

[Robert Evans]

And part of the problem is that because in so many of these cases, at least 29 Dr. Grigson and others are testifying. You don't have these kind of checked out defense attorneys don't have the wherewithal and often don't have the funding to properly counter the expert that the prosecution has brought up. Right. They also found this is getting into another set of pseudoscience, but I think it's worth bringing up in 23 or more, at least of these 131 cases. The prosecution's case relied on the visual comparison of hairs, which is not real science and has now largely been banned as being wildly ineffective. One study of 62 convictions that were later cleared by DNA evidence found that in at least 18 of those cases, prosecutors had used hair analysis to get the initial conviction. Wow. And this brings me to an important point, which is that while Dr. Grigson is the most colorful of these experts testifying in favor of the death penalty during this golden age of executing people in Texas, he was not the only or the most obviously fraudulent one. In their review of the role fake forensic experts play in these cases, the Death Penalty Information center also cited the case of Charles Lynch. Now, this is an expert hair analysis guy, right? And his expert hair comparison analysis was used in the cases of two people who were executed under Bush. So he helps with two executions as a result of matching hairs. And this is not a DNA match. I really need to emphasize that he's looking at hairs and saying, oh, yeah, these hairs come from that guy. Right. Like that's what he's literally doing.

[Steven Monticelli]

So I just have to bring up this one bit that seems somewhat relevant to how much of a shit show Texas court systems and criminal law has been for some time. It wasn't until the past, like, five years or so. I'm trying to remember the exact year, but very recently that hypnosis as a tool for testimony and in criminal investigations was banned.

[Robert Evans]

So many people got convicted by. On the. With. With that as a factor.

[Steven Monticelli]

Yeah. Yes, yes. Someone allowed hypnotists to come in and then do hypnosis as if it were a legitimate, repeatable scientific approach for acquiring legitimate testimony or uncovering forgotten memories or whatever that is being used for. So, yeah, I mean, that was recently. That was in this century, not last century.

[Robert Evans]

No, it took a shocking amount of time for us to be like, no, we shouldn't be doing this. I mean, when did the FBI stop doing that fucking gene pattern thing where like they. This, mate, that FBI fucking shit. As we've talked about it, forensic science is rife with bastardy. But I want to talk about Charles Lynch a little more. I want to read another quote from that Death Penalty Information center piece because it's so funny again, this guy's hair analysis is used in the case to execute two people. The Dallas Morning News reported that lynch had been committed in 1994 to a psychiatric war Due to concerns about his depression and drinking. Lynch was considered a danger to himself and others. But he was temporarily released to provide incriminating hair analysis testimony against Kenneth McDuff, who was executed in 1998. The prosecution did not disclose Lynch's status to the defense, even though Lynch's residence in the psychiatric ward might have been used to challenge his credibility. It's incredible. I don't want to people who, you know, wind up in a psychiatric ward. That doesn't mean they can never do a serious job again. But you probably shouldn't be releasing someone from a ward to testify and then putting them back in because they're a danger to themself and others. But they can definitely testify. This guy needs to fry, right? That seems like a stretch.

[Steven Monticelli]

Listen, you gotta do what you gotta do.

[Robert Evans]

You gotta do what you gotta do. Yeah. Get this guy out. We can't let this guy have his own, like fucking butter knife. But let him tell this jury that a man needs to die. Like, holy shit. Insane. That's nuts. That's wild. Just coming across that story like, wow, it really was the wild ass west for a while, huh? You could get away with anything. Boy howdy.

[Steven Monticelli]

Kind of still can.

[Robert Evans]

Kind of still can, yeah. Now, another of Dr. Grigson's colleagues was Dr. Ralph Erdman, who testified in numerous capital cases until 1994 when he pled no contest to seven felonies over falsifying evidence and fucking up autopsies. He had claimed to have examined organs and decedents that had been removed in surgery before their deaths, for one thing. Right. Like in his autopsy reports, he's, like, writing about the appendixes of people who had no appendix when they died. Despite claiming to be a scientist, providing his unbiased opinion, no matter who hired him. A special investigator appointed to examine Erdman found if the prosecution theory was that death was caused by a Martian death ray, then that was what Dr. Erdman reported. Right? Yeah. Okay. Which is you're talking here about the same thing we're seeing with Dr. Grigson. Right. This is a guy who's not doing science. He's coming in and he's saying, like, yeah, based on my expertise, Whatever the prosecution says is true. Right now, because Erdman is working in autopsies, he gets caught. But there's no kind of. There's Nothing to catch Dr. Grigson on, really. Right. Because psychiatry is largely like, yeah, does the psychiatrist think this person has something? There's more rigor that's supposed to be built into the system. But when it comes to the way these court cases are working, it's really just this guy saying, yeah, I'm a doctor, and I say this is what's going on.

[Steven Monticelli]

It's kind of like the medical equivalent of a mob lawyer. They're playing this role that is predefined for them, and they know what they're supposed to do, and they just go along with whatever the request is, whatever the need is. They'll say, yeah, sure, go for it. I mean, in the case of Grigson, it seems like, yeah, he may have claimed there were cases which he was not eager to do so. But, yeah, I don't know. Maybe he just knew how to pick a winner.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe he knew how to pick a winner. And also, when he says, a third of the cases I didn't take because I didn't think, you know, the person. We don't know. There's no evidence of that. Sure. We're just trusting this guy, you know? Right. And I don't trust him. Now, Dr. Erdman did have to surrender his medical license, you know, Dr. Grigson never did. And we're gonna talk about what else happens with Dr. Grigson. But first, let's have our second ad break. Okay.

[Danielle Fishel]

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[Robert Evans]

High Key Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast. You better listen. That's literally the definition of being an Aries Moon.

[Steven Monticelli]

Just one little spicy off comment that's all it takes.

[Robert Evans]

Everyone loves me at the cancer and then the Aries comes out and they say who the is that? No you're gonna come for me being an Aries and you have a SAG Moon, get out of here. But I'm a Capricorn rising, so that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable. Okay, that is your Capricorn talk. Listen to High key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So over the years when he was pushed on this, he would repeatedly say, hey, I didn't always testify for the prosecution, right. And sometimes I just wouldn't take cases. And we can't back up the latter, but we can back up the amount of times that Dr. Grigson testified for the prosecution versus the defense. During his career he testified in 166 capital like death penalty cases in Texas. And in nine of those times he testified for the defense. So I think it's fair to say basically always a prosecution witness. And by the way, we'll talk later about what some of those other nine times would have been. Cause it's not like he just really thought the defense was right in that situation. So we'll get to that. During the busiest period of his career in the 1980s, he was making $150,000 a year with this business, which was equivalent to someone making somewhere between five and six hundred thousand dollars a year today. Right? Like he is making fucking bank in the 80s. That 1990 Vanity Fair piece finds him at close to the peak of his career and his sense of impunity over what he was allowed to do in thousands of words of recorded conversations. He refers to his colleagues in psychiatry as liberal fools and seems to take a great degree of joy and like righteous pleasure in getting people executed. His. His stated goal to the journalist in that article is that he wants to execute like three people in three days, basically, something like that. And break his personal record for most death penalty convictions scored in a short window of time. One of these cases was the case of Galen Bradford, who definitely shot and killed a security guard during a robbery. This is recorded on video. There's not doubt about whether or not he committed a murder, but. But once he wasn't in bars, the jail tested his IQ and found it to be 68. The defense psychologist who examined him said it was 75. Either of those. And again, I have my issues with iq, but this isn't the place to really bring it up. The point is that based on the way the system works, either of those findings could be low enough to count as diminished capacity and spare him the death penalty. Right? Both of those are potentially low enough to do so for sure. So during A dinner after winning his first two cases. But before the Bradford case. This is like the night before he testifies in this guy's case, Dr. Grigson, while hanging out with Rosenbaum, that journalist gets hammered. He has, like, four martinis in an hour, like, celebrating that he's gotten two people killed. And then he winds up hungover in court the next morning. And he kind of fucks up his testimony in the Bradford case a little. Because he doesn't just say Bradford is a sociopath, but he also insists he's of normal intelligence. I can tell he wasn't being asked this, but he's like, I know he's of normal intelligence, and I'll guarantee you he's killed more than one once. We just didn't catch him. Right. And then he tells the jury based on nothing. Literally nothing. Galen Bradford is one of the most dangerous killers I've ever examined or come into contact with. Right. And again, there's not any evidence of this, and he certainly did not do anything that would allow him to determine whether or not this guy was competent to stand trial. He just does not do that work. And in this one instance, the defense attorney calls him out on it and questions like, well, based on what aspects of Dr. Bradford's personality, since you have not talked to him, have you concluded all of this? That he killed someone before and is hiding it? And Dr. Grigson, ultimately, the only specific thing he cites is that the guy has a weird haircut with a lightning bolt in it. And the defense attorney, first off, holy shit. The defense attorney, Paul Broccoli, responds, pretty good reason to kill him, right? And there's like this silence in the courtroom. I want to quote from that Vanity Fair piece. The doctor himself was speechless for a moment, something I'd never seen before. Then lamely, plaintively, he volunteered, well, I'd never seen a haircut like that. Great medical science.

[Steven Monticelli]

Did you say the defense attorney's name was Paul Broccoli?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. B, R, A, U, C, H, L, E. Okay. I don't know how else it would.

[Steven Monticelli]

Be pronounced okay if I had a different spelling in my head. It's still really funny, Brockle.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe. I don't know. I'm calling it Broccoli. Go Broccoli. Go Broccoli. Yeah, I'm going with Broccoli.

[Steven Monticelli]

Yeah. For the justification to be, this guy looks fucking weird. I don't like him.

[Robert Evans]

Look at his fucked up hair. Yeah. Yeah, he's definitely criminally insane.

[Steven Monticelli]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Now, the bad news is, again, this guy still gets convicted. James Grigson in no way pays for his crimes. The best I can say is that his career does take a hit in the late 1990s, in part as a result of the fallout from the Adams case, and in part out of the fact that he has now been drummed out of every professional organization in his field. Now, another reason why he stops testifying as often is that some of the savvier Texas defense attorneys develop a strategy for mitigating the harm he could caus cause. Per an article by Mike Tolson for the Houston Chronicle, defense attorneys, fearful of the effect of Grigson's testimony, began to call him and discuss their clients, with the result being that Grigson could not be hired by the state in those cases. I love this shit. Like, well, look, if this guy's talked about this case before being brought on, he can't testify. So let's just call him and talk about it, and then we know he's fucked. It's very funny stuff. Grixon eventually, like, figures out what's going on, and he gets angry because this is costing him money. So several defense attorneys agree to, like, hey, what if we just pay you as a consultant as soon as we think you have a case you might get involved in? And that way you don't have to do anything. You're not gonna actually testify. You're not gonna do any work for the defense, usually. But once we're hiring you, the prosecution can't hire you, Right? And he's okay with this because he's still getting paid. Wow. This snowballs into prosecutors adopting a similar tactic out of fear that he might show up and help the defense. So. So he starts getting hired to not work as long as one side can lock him down first. He spends kind of the latter chunk of his career doing this, getting paid to not do his job. Eventually, this practice dies out. During the 2000s, particularly, the practice of bringing in forensic psychiatrists like Dr. Grigson declines in popularity. The kind of late 90s, early 2000s. And there's several reasons for this, but a big one is the constant professional animus that Grigson and others who follow followed his example started to get right. Like, this has just kind of been poisoned as a field. Now, another reason that's less optimistic for why this dies out is that prosecutors realize we don't need to spend money on these guys. Texas juries love killing people, right? Like, you don't actually need this guy to testify to convince them that someone needs to die, right? Depressing, you know, like, you could usually just kind of talk him into it, which is less optimistic.

[Steven Monticelli]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Okay. That's less fun. So in 2003, Dr. James Grigson, a lifetime chain smoker, Was diagnosed with lung cancer. In one of his last interviews, he told a reporter he had zero regrets about his life or career. He insisted he had just been there as a medical professional Separating the truly ill from the fakers who needed to be locked up and executed. By the end of his career, he was just working in civil law. But after his death in 2004, a number of experts came out to state that his impact on the legal system had been far reaching. Cynthia orr, president of the Texas criminal defense lawyers association, Told the chronicle, he had a tremendous impact on Texas death penalty litigation. He really provided ammunition to the state to try and establish one's future dangerousness, when ordinarily it would have been pretty tough to do. He was willing to go further than anyone else. Yeah. So horrible. Yeah.

[Steven Monticelli]

And he ended up just getting to chill.

[Robert Evans]

Just getting to chill. Yep.

[Steven Monticelli]

And get paid to not work.

[Robert Evans]

Get paid to not work. Nice retirement.

[Steven Monticelli]

Hate to say it kind of a dudes rock moment, but it is the dream.

[Robert Evans]

Right. He got to die of lung cancer. So that's. You know, he does die of lung cancer on June 3rd of 2004 after what his family described as 72 great years. Yeah. Alas, now, the nature of the death penalty and the time involved in clearing such cases Meant that a lot of people that he had helped to put there Remained on death row after his death. Death. And in fact, the most recent case I can find of someone he put there, basically winding up in the News, is In 2016, Jeffrey Wood, age 43, was scheduled. He was supposed to be executed in 2016 over a 1996 robbery in which a man was murdered. Grigson had testified against him and stated that wood would be violent in the future. And he obviously did not examine wood. Now, wood had never actually murdered in the first place. He didn't fire the gun in the 1996 robbery that he was being executed for. Right. But obviously, accomplices. He was, like, driving the car. Can be convicted of murder, but still the fact that he's saying he'll definitely kill again. Well, he never killed in the first place. Right. Not really. So Wood was supposed to be executed in 2016. The actual gunman was executed in 2002. But Wood's case is executed. Was stayed by the Texas court of criminal Appeals because of Dr. Grigson. Right. Because he had been part of getting the Guy on death row and the fact that he has been so burned, like, convinced the Texas Court of criminal appeals in 2016, like, yeah, we probably shouldn't execute this guy. Right. So the court ruled 7, 2 to stay the execution. And, yeah, that just, you know, this guy's impact outlasted him. But it is kind of at least nice that now he is. So he's been so discredited that in 2016, a court voted 7 to 2 that, like, yeah, we can't execute a guy based on this dude's testimony. So at least he's completely discredited. And dead. And dead.

[Steven Monticelli]

Yeah, and dead. He innovated in the field, rode the wave, and died before it became fully discredited. Sorry to say. But, yeah, he's at least dead.

[Robert Evans]

He's at least dead. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steven Monticelli]

I'm just glad to hear that we no longer have legal hypnosis as a form of testimony and that quacks like this guy are not being taken seriously anymore. So I guess there's a silver lining like you said.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. Things are good forever now. We figured out how to not do bad stuff with executing people, and there's no longer any problems with death row or capital crimes. It's all good now.

[Steven Monticelli]

Don't need to worry about it, kittens. It's all good.

[Robert Evans]

Don't look into it. Don't look into it. Yeah. You got anything to plug at the end here, Steven?

[Steven Monticelli]

You know, just follow me on Bluesky or. I don't post on Twitter anymore, so don't go there.

[Robert Evans]

That's good. Yeah. Bad to post on Twitter.

[Steven Monticelli]

I'm writing for a few different outlets. The Barbed Wire Texas observer just had something in msnbc.

[Robert Evans]

Hell yeah.

[Steven Monticelli]

I post all of it on Blowsky. It's probably the easiest way to follow my shit. So go there or go read the literary magazine I publish, Protean magazine. It's got some good shit in it.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, Protean has a lot of good shit in it, Stephen. You can also find on it could happen here from time to time talking about Texas, which continues to be one of the most important subjects in the country. Why is Texas the way it is? What's going on there? Yeah, like it's. It's been. It was happening there before. It's happening wherever you are.

[Steven Monticelli]

Odds are it's been happening. It's been happening. Do be happening still. And, yeah, if we can figure out what the fuck's going on here, I feel like we could figure out a lot. So working on it.

[Robert Evans]

Well, this has been behind The Bastards and you have been listening to a podcast. Shame on you. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia. Com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebastards.

[Steven Monticelli]

Honestly, honestly, honestly, no one wants to.

[Robert Evans]

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[Danielle Fishel]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

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