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- [00:06]
Jake Halpern
Pushkin.
- [00:09]
Ryan Seacrest
Have you ever gotten sick on a very expensive, very non refundable family trip? AmazonOne Medical has 24, 7 virtual care so you can get help no matter where you are. And with Amazon Pharmacy, your meds can get delivered right to your hotel fast. It's kind of like the room service of medical care. Thanks to Amazon Healthcare just got less painful.
- [00:32]
James Forman Jr.
And now two pigeons who can't believe how good humans have it with DirecTV.
- [00:35]
Jake Halpern
These humans are hopping from streaming apps to live sports without batting a wing, all from the DirecTV home screen. With just one click, you could be watching a baseball game, a movie on Netflix, or a critically acclaimed documentary. You watch documentaries? I love the ones that leave you with a question.
- [00:51]
James Forman Jr.
What exactly directv A better way to watch whatever you want to watch. Visit directtv.com Internet connected, Gemini device, separate.
- [00:59]
Unknown
Netflix memberships and additional paid subscriptions required.
- [01:01]
James Forman Jr.
For third party apps.
- [01:02]
Amy Brown
Hey, it's Amy Brown from the Bobby Bones Show. Join me in supporting St. Jude Children's Research Hospital for a chance to win a trip to meet Megan Maroney at the 2025 I Heart Country Festival in Austin, Texas on May 3rd. Hosted by Bobby Bones, we're going to hook you up with tickets, flights, hotel, food credits and a meet and greet with Megan Maroney. Take action now to support St. Jude and help cure childhood cancer. And you're going to be entered for a chance to win. Visit iheartcountrytrip.com to learn more.
- [01:35]
Jake Halpern
I think the fear of journalists is always that we parachute into these realms that we actually don't know very much about and that we're going to get something wrong. And so I remember I reached out to you with my fingers crossed that you had basically agreed to be a consultant on this and I'm super grateful that you agree. Agreed to it?
- [01:55]
James Forman Jr.
Yeah, no, I was really glad to do it and really excited about how the story turned out.
- [02:00]
Jake Halpern
But James, you and I, this is not our first collaboration.
- [02:05]
James Forman Jr.
No, it's not.
- [02:06]
Jake Halpern
We actually had a far more stressful collaboration which was little League flag football where we, we went to the Super Bowl.
- [02:16]
James Forman Jr.
We did. We almost made it. We were like two minutes away from being the New Haven Area 10 and under champs.
- [02:28]
Jake Halpern
I'm talking here with James Forman Jr. He's a former public defender who now teaches at the Yale Law School. And also he's my friend. We even coached our kids flag football team together. I really trust James and so I brought him on to be our legal consultant for the Nameless Man. He listened to each episode in Draft form and gave us great notes that I think made the series much stronger. We had some really good conversations, and I wanted to keep that going. So one day we sat down at the Yale Porvoo center for Teaching and Learning to discuss his reactions to the series. The first thing that I wanted to talk to James about was the one guy I really wanted to talk to and couldn't. Craig Peterson. I want to talk about Craig because these agents pursue this, right? They drive up to Vermont. They say, you know, we believe you were involved with this. He denies this. He says, I don't know what you're talking about. He then, about a year and a half later, calls them. They have a subpoena ready for him, saying, we're gonna. We want you to testify. You are going to be required to testify by this subpoena in this grand jury looking into this murder that we believe happened. And at that point, there's this pivotal moment in this whole thing where he asks for immunity and confesses. How do you wrap your head around that sequence of events?
- [04:07]
James Forman Jr.
I mean, there's so many things about that part of the story that are, you know, unusual. I mean, it's unusual for somebody to confess under so little pressure. You know, what you've outlined was, you know, relatively mild. But then the immunity part is the part that just. I mean, the first time you told me about it, I had, like, 17 different questions because I've never seen anything like it. Normally, you would want to have more corroboration of what Craig is saying before you're gonna grant him immunity, because maybe Craig is more involved than he's letting on. And so I was surprised by how early it came. The whole process of immunity is normally just much more formalized. And, you know, things are different in different jurisdictions and practices are different everywhere. But particularly as this was a federal prosecutor, it was that, I think, was particularly surprising how informal the process was.
- [05:16]
Jake Halpern
We're getting ahead of ourselves a little bit. But it's on the topic of Craig, and this is a question I asked Scott Duffy to the FBI agent, how does it sit with you that Craig never faces prosecution?
- [05:28]
James Forman Jr.
I'm not a huge fan of him not being prosecuted, although I don't think that most people who are prosecuted need to go to prison. And those that do go to prison, I don't typically think need to go for very long. I like to separate my views of prison from my views of prosecution. And I know it's hard to do because in our society, they're so closely linked because we don't have other forms of accountability?
- [06:01]
Jake Halpern
Yeah. Like, I'm trying to wrap my head around that. Like, are you suggesting he be prosecuted and then just have, like, a very short criminal sentence and then have that on his record?
- [06:10]
James Forman Jr.
Yes, or some version thereof. What I'm really drawn to, which is in some ways is beyond the scope of the podcast in one sense, and the system that we in. But I'm very drawn to models of restorative justice. So I'm very drawn to the idea that what we really want to be thinking about is identifying harm and trying to remedy and respect and recognize that harm. Right now, what we do is we identify people that we label as criminals and we prosecute, and typically we incarcerate them. People who are victims of crime often are desperate to know, why did you do this? Why my child, my brother, my grandson? And how do you feel about what you've done, the harm that you've caused? Like, we could have very different models where people are called to account, where people who have committed harm have an opportunity to really dwell in the pain that they've caused and look directly in the eyes of people who they've hurt or family members of people who they've hurt, if it's a homicide, and acknowledge that pain and apologize. And I would like to see what that might look like in a case like this, and I would want to see how the Wood family would feel about that.
- [08:14]
Jake Halpern
There's a bunch to unpack there. But the first thought that occurs to me is, in this situation, you've got a kind of unusual or interesting situation because you, in theory, have two perpetrators of the crime. The guy that pulled the trigger and the guy that drove the car. The guy that drove the car is admitting to doing it. And according to Carmen Leinberger, is expressing to her deep remorse during the grand jury. And she said, remorse to his soul.
- [08:42]
James Forman Jr.
What if he were sitting in their living room telling them that? How would they feel? And they might also want to be involved with him in a conversation about, well, what could he do to make amends? I mean, saying you're sorry, looking somebody in the eye, looking that family in the eye, that's a courageous thing. That's a good start, right? Looking at them saying, here's what I did, here's why I did it. Here's what put me in that driver's seat that night. Here's how I feel about having testified. And I know that all those things are so small compared to the harm that I caused. So I'm not asking to be a hero, far from It. But I do want you to understand that I have taken some steps now. Can we be in dialogue about what else I could do? When you do restorative justice conferences, the kinds of ideas that come from the families of victims are much broader than what the criminal justice system says. Right. Which is basically either, like, incarceration or, you know, probation or conviction on your record for life. As you said, a lot of times, people, they don't want that. That doesn't make them feel whole. But I bet there are other things that could come which would at least begin to start to fill the hole that will never be filled.
- [10:24]
Jake Halpern
Yeah. It occurs to me that in talking to you, the Wood family, who is the one that was most profoundly impacted by this, they never had that. And when I think about that, that seems kind of crazy.
- [10:38]
James Forman Jr.
That's our system. It's completely crazy. And just to be clear, like, that could yet be rectified. Right. All these people that we're talking about are still alive. I mean, I've seen situations where victims would go with Craig, and they would go. And they would speak about the perils of white supremacy and the perils of getting drawn into that kind of lifestyle. Right. They would speak to people who maybe were in some ways at risk of going down that path. I teach a class that has law students and incarcerated students studying the criminal legal system together. When we talk about sentencing, one of the things that my incarcerated students talk about all the time is how the law prohibits them from having any contact with the victim. In many cases, they talk about how they've been locked up for years, and they have wanted to say some version of I'm sorry, but in a deep, complex, nuanced way that tells their story and really conveys that they've wanted to write letters to people so that they can know how sorry they are. They can know how every day that they're locked up, they think about the pain that they caused. They can't do that in our system. They're prohibited from doing it. And so there's just so. And again, you can understand why a system might say, well, you know, you can't have contact because they're worried that the contact won't be of the form that I just described. But this is in a lot of ways a tragic example of our system making choices that sometimes that there's a rationale that you can understand why we got here, but it then leads to all of these horrific outcomes.
- [12:47]
Jake Halpern
Well, I mean, we live in a system where it seems like the only metric for justice is days, months, years of punishment. Like, that's whether justice was served or not.
- [12:59]
James Forman Jr.
Yep.
- [13:00]
Jake Halpern
And in fact, I'm guilty of it. When I. When I asked Scott about this, Scott Duffy, how do you feel? Or even the question I posed to you, Craig walked free. I think the presumption is the only reckoning that can occur here is incarceration. And this leads to this other thing, which is that in this case, you had a lot of good people advocating and motivated by a desire to help first find the Wood family, to identify the victim, and then to do right by them. This is what Scott and Terry are motivated by. They want to put Tom Gibson away. And so everything is focused on that. Tom does spend time in jail, and then when he gets out, no one calls the family to tell them that he's been released.
- [13:49]
James Forman Jr.
That was one of the most difficult parts of this podcast to listen to for me, because to me, it's just a reminder of how prison and punishment centered our system is, but not victim centered. We justify the prison and the punishment in the name of caring about victims, but we don't do these basic, just decent things that you would want to do for a family, particularly where for so long, this case was uninvestigated and unprosecuted and unpunished. I just. I just thought, to me, it just exemplified so many of the things that are wrong with our system.
- [14:43]
Jake Halpern
It's interesting because when we had this conversation initially and I said, tom got seven years, your reaction was, if I recall, was something on what seven years is a good chunk of time. Like, you didn't think that was the injustice?
- [14:59]
James Forman Jr.
No, no. But I think my views on that are they're informed by how horrible I know that prison is. They're informed by this earlier conversation that we were just having, which is that I don't want to live in a system which measures the value of a victim, the worth of the victim, only by the number of years that the person gets for harming them. And so I guess for me, as somebody who thinks we should have dramatically shorter sentences across the board, I work hard to try to put that into practice. Now, I'm not gonna lie. I have cases, too, where, you know, my first reaction is, you know, lock him up for life. But then what I try to do is temper that. And so in this case, it seemed, based on the evidence, that he was guilty, and I wanted him to be convicted. But wanting somebody to be convicted, right, identified as the person who did this is different from wanting them to spend the rest of their Life in a dungeon. And that difference I tried to hold onto.
- [16:30]
Jake Halpern
You said you were hoping for a conviction, but where did you think this was going based on what you heard from our recreation of the trial?
- [16:40]
James Forman Jr.
I thought that the defense lawyer did a good job. What I liked about the defense attorney was how passionate he was. One of the many problems we have in our system is that sometimes defense lawyers don't have either the expertise or the resources or the commitment. So he seemed to have all of those things. And so it's felt to me like a robust defense, which I want to happen in every case. But to me, as the evidence came in, and of course, it was, you know, Craig, but also the ex girlfriend. Yes. That, to me, was crucial. Those. I remember when you first introduced those witnesses into the story, I thought, oh, those. That is a damning fact. The reason why those two witnesses were so important, I thought, is that they didn't have a motive to fabricate. And that's always the key thing. There's basically two kinds of defenses that you can put forward. One is they're mistaken, and the second is they're lying. The defense that they're lying is typically always a more powerful defense. But to make the claim that they're lying, you have to have a motive to fabricate why are they lying. And I never thought that the defense in this case had an adequate explanation for why they would be lying.
- [18:22]
Jake Halpern
Yeah, his line of argument was they were scorned lovers. In other words, he cheated on them or broke up with them. But that would be quite a grudge, right?
- [18:31]
James Forman Jr.
Yeah, that's a grudge. And then two separately. That was two independently, decide to take out their grudge in the same way by going to court and testifying from somebody from all these years ago who had a history of violence. Testifying in a trial is not an easy matter. Testifying in a homicide trial is especially not an easy matter. Testifying in a homicide trial against somebody who. Who had a history of violence in the way that Tom did, this is not something you do lightly. So it was not enough for me of a motive to fabricate. And it's why I remember thinking, okay, well, maybe Craig has some motive. Maybe the jury would think that Craig had some motive. But when you're there, like, the good news is you're there so you can testify to everything that happened. The bad news is, by your own account, you're an accomplice to murder. And so if you're willing to kill somebody for no reason, you might be willing to lie in court. Right. And so him by himself, to me, was never gonna be enough. But the two independent girlfriends with no motive that I found plausible was what made me think that Tom was guilty. The evidence was, I think, strong but limited. And so the jury wanted to ask a lot of hard questions about whether it matched up exactly. And, you know, they landed where they landed.
- [20:18]
Jake Halpern
We'll be right back with more from my conversation with James Foreman, Jr.
- [20:25]
Ryan Seacrest
The last thing you want to do when you're sick is go to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, because then you're standing in a long line with a whole bunch of sick people, and everyone is sick of being sick around other people who are sick. Amazon Pharmacy will deliver right to you fast so you can get meds without congregating among the contagious. Healthcare just got less painful. Amazon Pharmacy.
- [20:49]
Amy Brown
Hey, it's Amy Brown from the Bobbi Bones Show. Join me in supporting St. Jude Children's Research Hospital for a chance to win a trip to meet Megan Maroney at the 2025 I Heart Country Festival in Austin, Texas on May 3rd. Hosted by Bobby Bones. We're going to hook you up with tickets, flights, hotel, food credits, and a meet and greet with Megan Maroney. Take action now to support St. Jude and help cure childhood cancer. And you're gonna be entered for a chance to win. Visit iheartcountrytrip.com to learn more. You know, when the world gets a little crazy and everything is moving too fast, don't you just wish you could get away from all of it for a while? Well, that's exactly what the all new 2025 Nissan Murano can do for you. And to be clear, you don't even have to go anywhere. The Murano is the getaway. It was designed from the ground up to be a refuge from the daily grind. I mean, it has a Bose premium sound system, which can play your favorite, most relaxing music. And there's nothing like a world class audio system to just transport you to a better headspace. Then there's the Murano's massaging leather appointed seats. Yeah, massaging seats. Talk about melting away your stress. So could getting stuck in traffic become your happy place? I don't know. It sounds like it could in the all new Murano. You should probably check one out for yourself. You gotta drive the all new 2025 Nissan Murano today. Bows and massaging leather appointed seats are optional features.
- [22:18]
Jake Halpern
I want to talk a little bit about you because you've had an interesting career. Before you were a professor here at Yale, you were a Public defender. And I guess. Was it an interview that you had where you were kind of up for considering a position as a prosecutor? You want to tell us about that?
- [22:40]
James Forman Jr.
I remember this conversation really well to this day. So I was working as a law clerk at the time, so I was working for Justice O'Connor. And I was trying to decide on my first real job after law school. And I had applied to the public defender's office in Washington, D.C. and I had also applied to work for the criminal section of the Civil Rights division of the Department of Justice. What they do is they prosecute police brutality cases. So, you know, police officers who use excessive force, and then they also prosecute, you know, cross burnings or other forms of hate crimes. And that was the position that I was interviewing for. And that job had a lot of appeal to me because I was looking at this through a civil rights and a racial justice lens. And I remember interviewing with. And I won't mention her name, but she was. Had been a public defender herself. And it came up in conversation that I was thinking about taking a job as a public defender. And as soon as I said that, I could see her sort of connect in a particular way. And she said, all right, James, I want you to really imagine the following situation. You're the prosecutor in a case, and it's up for sentencing, and our office has told you, here's the sentence you need to ask for. And it's a certain period of incarceration. And the defense lawyer stands up, and the defense lawyer starts to make the case to the judge about his client's background. And he says to the judge, you know, your honor, my client was abused and abandoned as a child. My client had disabilities and special needs that were never recognized by the school system. So he fell further and further and further behind. His parents were addicted to drugs. Now, as a teenager, he's lost, and he feels like he has nowhere to turn. And there's a group of people that take him in, and they say, we'll be your family. You can be one of us. But there's a catch, right? The catch to be one of us is you have to go commit this crime. You have to spray a swastika on a church, or you have to throw a Molotov cocktail through the window. And he agrees to do it, and he does it because he wants to be accepted. He wants to be respected. He wants to find some validation somewhere. And the lawyer is turning to the judge and saying, so don't do what the Department of Justice is asking. Don't do what Mr. Foreman is asking. Don't put this young man in prison. Give him an opportunity. Give him a second chance. Understand all of the constraints and the limitations and the unfairness that put him in this place where he would do something wrong. And she looks at me and she says, okay, now you've got to respond. Are you going to be prepared to listen to a story like that and still ask for this long sentence? And I looked at her and I knew that the answer at that moment was no, I don't think that I could do that. And I even knew what she was doing. She was saying to me, look, the people we prosecute, you might think of them as a person who's committed a hate crime. And they are. They are. But most of those people, there's a story for how they became the defendants. They weren't born full of hate. They were taught that. And in many cases, they overcame their natural reluctance to do something like that, to cause that kind of harm to somebody else, because of the context, because of the situation they were in, because of the life circumstances they had been dealt, because the family that they didn't have, that they needed because of the way the system had abandoned them, that's their story, too. And if you're going to be a prosecutor in this section, you have to understand that those stories are real. And you still, even in the face of that, have to be prepared to ask for this person to be locked up. It was probably the most important interview that I've ever had in my life. I will be forever grateful to her for being so honest with me, because I knew in that moment I couldn't do it. And I left the office. I turned down the job offer, and that's. I attribute the fact of my becoming a public defender to that conversation.
- [27:53]
Jake Halpern
Wow. I have to say, I remember I had heard you tell this story once before, and I've thought about it so many times over the course of working on this podcast. When I heard the cold, hard facts of the case. Two white teenagers get in a car, drive to Philadelphia, and if the prosecution is going to be believed, murder this innocent man at point blank range. The first sight is like, what kind of depravity, what kind of monsters would do something like this? And I think it honestly wasn't until I heard you talk about this story that I even began to think that there is this other narrative. Not that it's in any means justified or to apologize for it, but that there's this other narrative that one could actually look at and see some humanity in.
- [28:43]
James Forman Jr.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, from the very first time you told me about the case and you gave me just those facts of two white teenagers drive to Philadelphia, kill somebody, my mind immediately went to what happened in their life. To have them be in that car driving to a city they don't know, to shoot somebody who they don't know, because people aren't born ready to do that.
- [29:17]
Jake Halpern
I keep thinking back to your point about what if it would have been the split verdict, but also there was a chance for Craig to express his remorse and whether that might not have made it feel like half justice to the family at the time. I want to talk. I want to talk about the Wood family, but I have one more thing that I want to ask about. This is something that I've been thinking of. When they were connecting the crime to the victim, they took that list of the particulars, the five particulars, the race, the. The nature of the wound, single shot ahead, the.38 caliber. And they looked over the unsolved murders in Philadelphia at the time. A thought that's always nagged me at the back of my brain is, should they have looked at the, quote, unquote, solved murders? And I don't know. But you maybe can provide some context, because if my sense is that they're. There have been some wrongful convictions that have come out of Philadelphia. Right.
- [30:21]
James Forman Jr.
For sure. I mean, everywhere. But, you know, Philadelphia is one of the jurisdictions that has people actually who got sentenced to death who have been exonerated. Right. So, yes, absolutely. There have been exonerations in Philadelphia. At such a good point, I'm kind of embarrassed that you thought of it and I didn't, because I think that's right. Of course, there's no incentive for them to do that, because that kind of case would be virtually impossible for them to bring, because now they already. Right. They have somebody who got convicted of it. If they found a case that matched this in all these ways that we just described, then that would mean either Craig's lying or mistaken and the girlfriends are wrong and that this prosecution shouldn't hold or that the previous one was wrong.
- [31:17]
Jake Halpern
Yeah.
- [31:19]
James Forman Jr.
And. But they. Absolutely. If they found that, they would not have gone through with the prosecution of Tom. So that would have been the end of that.
- [31:27]
Jake Halpern
But. But I see what your point is that I hadn't thought of, which is that there's no incentive to do that, because that if you're from. If you're looking from the law enforcement perspective, that's solved. You don't Want to take anything out of the solved case if you don't have to, Right?
- [31:38]
James Forman Jr.
No. I mean, when I was. Back when I was a public defender, you know, it's now been eclipsed by, you know, the Wire, but David Simon's first great television show was the Homicide.
- [31:49]
Jake Halpern
I know you're a fan of the show.
- [31:50]
James Forman Jr.
I love this show so much. I probably brought. I guess I brought it up before, but in homicide, they, you know, write the names of the victims, you know, in chalk. And if you're a homicide investigator and there's. You have a bunch of names on that list on that chalkboard, I mean, when you walk in every morning, it's like a badge of shame. Right. Because there's all these unsolved names.
- [32:16]
Jake Halpern
Yeah.
- [32:17]
James Forman Jr.
And then they take them off when they solve it. Right. They erase them.
- [32:21]
Jake Halpern
Yeah.
- [32:21]
James Forman Jr.
And you don't want to have any names. So once they're erased, as these cases would have been. Right. This would be a solved case. Nobody, no investigator, nobody's looking at it.
- [32:31]
Jake Halpern
We'll be right back.
- [32:37]
Ryan Seacrest
The last thing you want to do when you're sick is go to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, because then you're standing in a long line with a whole bunch of sick people, and everyone is sick of being sick around other people who are sick. Amazon Pharmacy will deliver right to you fast so you can get meds without congregating among the contagious. Healthcare just got less painful. Amazon Pharmacy.
- [33:01]
Amy Brown
Hey, it's Amy Brown from the Bobbi Bones Show. Join me in supporting St. Jude Children's Research Hospital for a chance to win a trip to meet Megan Maroney at the 2025 I Heart Country Festival in Austin, Texas on May 3, hosted by Bobby Bones. We're going to hook you up with tickets, flights, hotel, food credits, and a meet and greet with Megan Maroney. Take action now to support St. Jude and help cure childhood cancer. And you're going to be entered for a chance to win. Visit iheartcountrytrip.com to learn more. You know, when the world gets a little crazy and everything is moving too fast, don't you just wish you could get away from all of it for a while? Well, that's exactly what the all new 2025 Nissan Murano can do for you. And to be clear, you don't even have to go anywhere. The Murano is the getaway. It was designed from the ground up to be a refuge from the daily grind. I mean, it has a Bose premium sound system, which can play your favorite, most relaxing music and there's nothing like a world class audio system to just transport you to a better headspace. Then there's the Murano's massaging leather appointed seats. Yeah, massaging seats. Talk about melting away your stress. So could getting stuck in traffic become your happy place? I don't know. It sounds like it could in the all new Murano. You should probably check one out for yourself. You gotta drive the all new 2025 Nissan Murano today. Bows and massaging leather appointed seats are optional. Features.
- [34:30]
Jake Halpern
Talk to me about what your reactions were, thoughts were once you had had a chance to spend some time with the Wood family, Iran's two brothers and his niece.
- [34:42]
James Forman Jr.
In some ways, that was my favorite part of the story. What I found so distinctive about the story, the way you told it, was the role that the Wood family played, you know, in the narrative and their fullness and their humanity and the way that just came forward, like the richness of who they were as a family, their both individual stories and then their collective, you know, hearing them together and the laughter. I would dream of living in a world where I could tell you, well, you need to cut that because we've just like heard this story over and over and over again. But black families are often not portrayed in the light in which you portrayed the Wood family. And in particular, black families that have been victimized, like victimized by crime or victimized by the criminal justice system often can be kind of rendered in a very, kind of flat way, a very sort of a set of stereotypes. It's like, oh, we know, we know what this story is going to be. They fit into a stock set of characters. And what I really loved about the Wood family is the way they just didn't. The way they were. They were human. And again, you might be like, well, why is that such a big deal? But my answer is it is such a big deal. And I think that, you know, I think that black listeners especially will pick that up. We'll hear that family, the way they interact, the way they love each other, the way they love Iran, and are going to be lifted up by it on top of everything else that the podcast is all about.
- [36:43]
Jake Halpern
Well, I appreciate that and I have to be honest, I didn't do much. Sometimes as an interviewer, you have to work really hard to draw out. I didn't have to do that. They just had this warmth like we set up in this room. And the laughter was real. It was right off the bat, we were joking about football. They were just lovely, warm people. And, you know, there's some hard stuff in there. Like Tyrone, the younger brother, talking about, just matter of factly, that after his brother's death, he fell into alcoholism. And talking, you know, and. But talking about it in a way that was very, like, honest. And then how he kind of pulled himself out of that, you know, Michael, the middle brother, when we were talking about the restorative justice, I was thinking about him because, you know, as you probably recall, he had this moment where he had a relative come to him at the funeral and say, you must forgive the man that did this to your brother. And Michael and I were talking about this, like, how do you do that initially, at least when you have no idea, like, how do you forgive? A blank face. And then I just have to say it was, like, deeply moving to me. When he got to the trial and he looked at Tom Gibson and he said he felt certain that this was the man that killed his brother. And he said I had forgiven him.
- [38:16]
James Forman Jr.
Yeah.
- [38:18]
Jake Halpern
James, this has been great. I really appreciate you sharing this experience with me and giving me your insights and, yeah, it means a lot.
- [38:28]
James Forman Jr.
You. You didn't ask me your money question.
- [38:32]
Jake Halpern
All right. I got to the Hail Mary.
- [38:34]
James Forman Jr.
I'm waiting for the Hail Mary. I had something I wanted to say. I was going to bring it up.
- [38:38]
Jake Halpern
It's fourth down. The Bills are on their own five yard line. What is a question that I didn't ask, that I should have asked?
- [38:45]
James Forman Jr.
I wanted to just mention something that I mentioned. I think it was the first thing that I said in our first conversation, or it was very, very early on about why I thought this story was so important and why I was drawn to it from the beginning.
- [39:01]
Jake Halpern
Yeah.
- [39:02]
James Forman Jr.
And it's that there is such a long history of kind of under enforcement and under protection in black communities. And so when we think about discrimination in the criminal justice system today, as we sit here now in 2024. Right. Our minds are very drawn to the idea of over policing and over punishment and over prosecution. Right. And. And stop and frisk and excessive sentences and unfair imposition of the death penalty. Right. But there's a whole nother part of the story of discrimination in the system, which is crimes against black victims not being investigated, not being prosecuted, not being taken seriously by society. So the first time you told me about this case and you said you. You know, that it was gonna be. There was a black man that was shot in Philadelphia and perpetrators were not brought to justice, I thought, oh, good. This is. It is very important to have to lift up stories like this as well, and that's the last thing that I wanna say is that. And this is in some ways connected back to what I was telling you when I couldn't decide if I was gonna be the prosecutor for hate crimes or if I was gonna be a public defender. In my mind, they are two sides of the same coin, right? And so in my mind, it really is the fact that what they have in common is that we are not taking black life seriously enough. And so what that means is we don't take it seriously enough to protect it in the first instance. And then if somebody is put on trial or if somebody is facing sentencing, we. We don't see that life as capable of redemption. And so in both cases, it leads to again, on the one hand, either under protection or on the other hand, over punishment. And I think that this story that you're telling is a really important reminder for listeners that that part of the unfairness and the discrimination in the system remains.
- [41:28]
Jake Halpern
James Foreman, Jr. Is the skelly Wright professor of Law at the Yale Law School. I recommend you check out his book Locking Up Our Own. And his next book will be out on July 9th. It's called dismantling Mass Incarceration A Handbook for Change. Thank you to the Yale Pourvu center for Teaching and Learning where we recorded this conversation. This episode was produced by Amy Gaines McQuaid. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Our show art was designed by Sean Carney. Original scoring and our theme was composed by Luis Gale. This episode was mastered by Sarah Bruguer. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and Greta Cohn. I'm Jake Halpern.
- [42:29]
Amy Brown
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- [42:57]
James Forman Jr.
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- [43:26]
Unknown
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