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Wonder plus subscribers can listen to exclusive episodes of this Is Actually Happening by joining Wonder in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the Show Notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services.
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My fundamental passion is to look around the world for the most hated people in the world and get between them and the people doing the hatred. And the reason for that is because you always know you're right.
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From Wondery, I'm Whit Misseldine. You're listening to this Is actually happening, episode 379. What if you witnessed your client's execution?
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It's your man, Nick Cannon, and I'm here to bring you my new podcast, Nick Cannon At Night. Every week I'm bringing out some of my celebrity friends and the best experts in the business to answer your most intimate relationship questions. So don't be shy, join the conversation and head over to YouTube to watch Nick Cannon At Night or subscribe on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast.
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I'm going to start with one of my great, great, great great grandparents. His name was the King of Prussia. He was called the King of Prussia because he was a smuggler who operated out of Crusher Cove in Cornwall. He was sentenced to death when he was caught by the Customs and Excise people. And back in the day you could do what was called pleading the benefit of clergy, which meant simply that you had to read a verse through the Bible. And so the King of Prussia recited his verse of the Bible, got pardoned and came back to Britain and spent the rest of his life in Cornwall, spending what money he'd made. And I'm very proud of him. And I like to think that, you know, being sentenced to death in my family was probably a precursor to my whole life. My dad was a very handsome, very gregarious person. When he was very young, he was 17, he got his mother to lie about his age so he could sign up for the raf, the Air Force. It was in the middle of World War II. If you were 17 when you were bombing Germany, you know, what impact psychologically does that have on you? They label him bipolar, and I don't like those labels. But if you think of manic depression, my dad was manic most of the time. Time. It's very hard to think of my father without using the word psychotic. He was quite a philanderer and he was quite abusive, I mean, incredibly emotionally abusive to women. And it was just part of this Incredible chauvinism that he had. I didn't really understand it when I was very young, but as I got into my teens, I had an agreement with my sister Mary that if I started behaving like dad, she could section me, which what we call putting people in a mental hospital, because it was a real worry and dad was a real danger to himself and others just in terms of what he did. My father was very, very brilliant and my mother was just as smart as him. But she was born a woman in 1926. My mother, in 1944, really wanted to be part of the war effort. She'd just done really well in her French written exam and she thought that qualified her to be parachuted into France and join the Resistance. So she went down to London on the train from Northampton and she went to the Foreign Office and this young chap said her down for a cup of tea and she said, I'm ready to be dropped into France to join the Resistance. And this young man said, well, you're not 18 yet. This was the story of my mother's life, that she was very brave and courageous and smart, but she was never given the chance really to achieve. My dad, when I was seven, he sat me down and he said, clive, you're very immature. It's time for you to grow up now. Here's £200. Why don't you piss off and go and live by yourself? And by the way, you'll have to pay me back the £200 later. But, you know, I hope you have a good time. And I was sitting there very, very confused. Yeah, £200. I was actually, you know, pretty good at maths. I mean, this was a lot of money back in. That would have been 1960. Nevertheless, I'm excited about the money, but just a bit confused about being sent away to live by myself. My mom came in, took the money away from me and sent me to bed. But that was typical of dad in many, many ways. My father was not in touch with reality. Dad believed the crazy things he did. I am on the spectrum that my father was on. I think I'm really lucky that I haven't had the sort of breakdowns that he had. But I'm way out there. I'm way out there on the spectrum of believing things that most people don't believe. And I believe him passionately and I will argue to the death on him. I was 8 years old when I was sent away to boarding school, a place called Old Buckenham Hall. School is a miserable experience that I Think only the British would do to each other's children. Anyone you ever meet who says, oh, I love my school, it was all great is lying. We all blubbed our eyes out in these cold beds at night. I was the biggest person there. I'm six, three and a half. And it was really like Lord of the Flies. Everyone would challenge me to a fight every day. Then, you know, as you got a little bit used to it, I would just tell stories all the time because all the kids were miserable and I was miserable. And the good way to distract them was to tell ridiculous stories. So I would do that. But then you get caught. And if you got caught, you got beaten. So when you're sent away to school, when you're very, very young, right, then in your life, you think love is your teddy bear and your dog and your brother and sister and your bedroom and your home and all of that, and mom and dad say, we love you, so we're going to send you away to this school. And you're lying in this cold bed and you're crying and you're thinking to yourself, well, am I right that love is my teddy bear and all that stuff? Or are my parents right that love is to send you away, to give you a chance in life? And Obviously at age 8, you think, well, my parents are right. And what that means is that you learn to totally dissociate your emotions. And I do that. And I should have a government health warning on my forehead, because when you're thinking about dissociation, it's everything. I didn't cry from the age of 10 onwards, I didn't cry at all. I didn't get angry. And I don't think I had the slightest idea what love was until I had my own son. That's weird. And that comes from what this does to a little child to be sent away to boarding school. One of the things about dad is he gave me a button when I was quite young which said, question authority. And for me, that really summed it all up, you know, And I'm actually really disappointed and sad about the. The people I was in school with, because I just think we were taught totally the wrong lessons about privilege. We were taught that if you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you have a duty and a right for it to metamorphose into gold instead of a duty to help people who are less fortunate. I went on to Radley College and I went there. My brother was two and a half years ahead of me, so followed in Mark's footsteps. When I was about 10, I was reading a history book and it was about the Hundred Years War, you know, where the English were fighting the French. And you know, when you're a testosterone filled youth in one of these schools and you're a boy, yeah, it's cool you're killing French people. Why not? But there was a picture of Joan of Arc being burned at the stake. And the picture in the history book looked like my sister Mary. I had a very good relationship with my sister and I didn't think, you know, okay, Joan of Arc was fighting the English, but that wasn't a reason to burn her at the stake. And I found that pretty shocking. So when I was a bit later on and we had the opportunity to do another history thing, I thought I'd do a history on the historical abolition of the death penalty. It was abolished in England the year I was born. And there were lots of notorious cases in England of innocent people being killed. And I just thought it was ancient history, you know. And then I start looking into it and the Americans, they're still doing it to each other. And I was totally shocked. That was really my motivation to start looking at America. And I thought, hey, I'm going to go to America. I'm going to write this seminal book about the death penalty. The Americans will see the error of their ways and, you know, that'll be the end of that. Obviously totally ludicrous, but that's what I wanted to do. So I was going to go to UNC at Chapel Hill and I was going to sort out the death penalty. The project of scholarship that I was on at Chapel Hill actually had a series of things you were meant to do in the summers. And they were designed to make you into a good capitalist American. And they sent me to work with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. And I saw something that I'll never forget, which was out one night with the cops. There were eight of them. And you know, I like these people. We were having a nice chat. We were doing what we do best, which was in a donut shop, extorting donuts and coffee from the owner. And down there was a call that was some crazy guy. This was like 1981. We go out and there's this guy who's clearly high as a kite on something and he's got a knife. And there are nine of us. There's me and eight of them. They've all got guns. I don't have a gun, but we can take his knife off him. I Mean, that's not very difficult. And they put several bullets in the guy and just shot him in front of me. You know, those were the days long before cell phones. If I'd had a cell phone, that would all be on camera, and that would have been all around the world, you know, you really think. How often were those things happening before we had cameras? But it happened right in front of me, and I was horrified. So I'd heard about this group in Atlanta, and it was called Team Defense Project, Inc. And it was headed by a guy called Millard Farmer. And Millard had inherited some money, and he poured it all into just defending people on death row. And it was a tiny office, and there were three lawyers. And so they were actually glad to have some totally useless person like me to come and volunteer. And they could then give me some job, which generally was just to visit people on death row. You'd have a surprising number of people on death row who would get terribly depressed and drop their appeals and try to get themselves executed. And that was the lawyer's job then, to try and stop that happening. And I would go in and visit these people on death row, and I didn't know what to talk to them about. And it was just an extraordinary experience. You came to Claxton, home of the Fruitcake, Vidalia, home of the Sweet Onion, and then Reidsville, home of the Georgia State Prison. And I rented a place in Reidsville. I had no furniture or anything. I just had a mattress on the floor. And then I would drive from the prison. You know, this was totally foreign, and people were incredibly nice. You know, the people in the prison, and I love your accent. Where y' all from? It was just a different planet for me. So I had this intellectual opposition to the death penalty that then you meet people. These are just real human beings, and they've got human frailties. Some of them did it, some of them probably didn't. But why are we doing this? You know, what a lot of people talk about with the death penalty is about this notion of evil. And I had always objected to that because people said my dad was evil. I know my father. And he's not evil. He's mad, but he's not evil. And so I had this whole real antipathy towards people using the word evil. And it was quite early on in my days in the Deep south, as a kid, you know, before I went to law school, that I was much more interested in understanding why people did something bad than whether they did it, which is to understand people, not condemn them I had, in college, expected to be a fabulously famous author. And it was only when I realized that actually no one would read my book that I decided to go to law school. So I just went and took the lsat and I went to Columbia for one reason and one reason only, which is it was in New York City, and I always wanted to hang out there. When you showed up at Columbia the first day, everyone was in suits, and I thought, oh, my God, I've only got one suit. You know, I can't wear a suit every day. Turns out they were all interviewing to go to a corporate law firm, and I had no interest in that. I was only going to law school so I could go back to team defense and do death penalty work, which I thought everyone would want to do it, but actually no one did. And that was rather sad. So by Now I was 24, and I took the bar exam and then went to Atlanta. I had no money. I was staying in one room in Atlanta, and I had $3,500 to live on for the year, but it didn't matter because I spent 90% of the time in the office. And, you know, it's the beginning. You're suddenly thrown in the deep end. And I'm doing death penalty cases from day one. It should never have been allowed. And I did all my learning off the back of the people I was representing. But the truth is, they didn't have an option because they wouldn't get anyone else. But I loved it. And I would work 80 or 90 hours a week. This was 1984, and by 1987, that was when I first lost someone. It was a guy called Edward L. Johnson, and he was a young African American guy on death row and Mississippi. At age 18, he'd been convicted of killing a police officer and sexually assaulting an elderly white lady. I took that on. With just three weeks to go before he was due to get executed, I thought we were going to win. I'd never lost a case. I was young and arrogant, and I thought I knew everything, and I didn't know anything. And so in those three weeks, I probably slept two hours a night. And that was it. It was incredibly hard. And then we started losing. It was because I thought I knew best. And if I knew then what I know now, Edward would be alive today, and he'd be a granddad, and he'd be a lovely guy, and he was the same age as me, and it was just something I hope people never experience. It was set to happen around midnight as it Always does in the middle of the night. And everyone's a bit ashamed of it. I was with the family, and Edward and the warden was really nice and let us be together in the same room. And we get the final denial from the governor. And I had to deliver that to Edward. Then we're in this little waiting room outside the gas chamber, and there's all this singing about and people saying, God will look after you and all that stuff. And I don't believe that stuff. It's all mad. And we're going through this total barbarism. The warden was trying to be nice, and he was saying to Edward, put a word in with the man upstairs and all this stuff. And he let me. It was really decent of him. He let me go into the gas chamber with Edward, and I went in and gave him a hug. And Edward still didn't believe. And the phone rang, and he must have thought, oh, thank God, finally. But it wasn't actually. It was the people saying, go ahead and kill it. And then they gassed him with Zyklon B. The same stuff the Nazis used. When you think about sitting there watching someone you like being murdered in front of you, it's just so not of this world. It was horrible, and it took forever. And then I had to go break the news to the family afterwards. And then I had to talk to the journalists. And, you know, I don't blame them. It's their job, but. And I almost killed myself driving home that night because I hadn't slept for days, and I was really upset. I went to his funeral a few days later in Walnut Grove, and this woman Mary, comes up to me and says, well, Mary didn't do it because I was with him at the time. And I said, why the fuck didn't you tell someone? And she said, well, I did. I went to the police, and they told me the buzz off and mind my own business. You see, if I'd gone there and I'd talked to all those people like I should have, instead of thinking that all this intellectual bullshit was going to solve the case, I would have found her and we'd have got to stay. And it wasn't her fault. Because when you think about it, the big lesson I learned from that is Ghostbusters doesn't work in Mississippi. You know, who are you going to call? There's no one you can call. You can't call the FBI. They were part of the problem. You can't call anyone. It's ultimately up to those of us who are meant to be representing these guys that we do what needs to be done. Look, I don't sit here beating myself up because I suppress all that stuff like a good public school board. But I was wrong. And if I knew that then what I know now, he'd be alive. You know, I do think it's the ultimate honor. It's the right thing to do, to take a hopeless case every now and then, even when you know that you're not going to be able to stop it and do what you can.
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Today's episode is brought to you by Quince Even though the dog days of summer are still hot here in the Bay Area, I know cooler days will soon roll in like clockwork, right along with the thick morning fog. When it's time to switch over my wardrobe, I want pieces that layer easily, hold up over time, and are actually built to last. The Mongolian cashmere button sweater is the perfect layer for colder months. A hybrid of classic button down and a soft cashmere sweater, it's relaxed, versatile and easy to style. Fall is my favorite season and I've also got my eyes on the Mongolian cashmere shawl collar cardigan and I can picture sitting by a roaring fire with a good book while the wind howls outside my window. Layer up this fall with pieces that feel as good as they Look. Go to quints.com happening for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N c e.com quince free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com happening it's your man, Nick Cannon.
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And I'm here to bring you my new podcast, Nick Cannon at Night. I've heard y' all been needing some advice in the love department, so who better to help than yours truly? Nah, I'm serious. Every week I'm bringing out some of my celebrity friends and the best experts in the business to answer your most intimate relationship relationship questions. Having problems with your man? We got you catching feelings for your sneaky link. Let's make sure it's the real deal first. Ready to bring toys into the bedroom? Let's talk about it. Consider this a non judgment zone to ask your questions when it comes to sex and modern dating in relationships, friendships, situationships and everything in between. It's gonna be sexy, freaky, messy and you know what? You'll just have to watch the show. So don't be shy, join the conversation and head over to YouTube to watch Nick Cannon at Night or subscribe on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcast. Want to watch episodes early and ad free? Join Wondery plus right now.
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A few years later, in 1995, I was representing Nikki Ingram. Now Nikki, he was a British guy. He was born in the same hospital I was in Cambridge. He had had a miserable childhood. He had a real drug addiction. And he ended up being involved in shooting this guy in Georgia and trying to shoot a second person. You know, it wasn't a cold blooded Nicky Ingrams sociopathic bastard thing. It was a young guy who did something terrible. But I'd known him for 12 years, unlike Edward. I knew Edward Johnson for three weeks, but I knew Nicky for years. This was someone I knew who had been with me through my divorce. And that is a heavy burden too, when you lose because you've had much more opportunity not to. And the thing about Nicky was it was the electric chair. And. And whatever they say with the electric chair is just horrible, you know, 2,400 volts of electricity put through you to torture you to death in an unspeakable way. And Nicky was very afraid of it, as I would be. And you know, even when it came to things like this ridiculous protocol of what would you have for your last meal? Why would you eat just before you're going to be killed? And Nicky said that. And he said, look, I just want a cigarette. And the warden wouldn't give him one. I say, you know, warden, why not? And he said, we have rules. It's bad for your health. Oh, fuck off. I went out and told the media that, and they all laughed at him so much that he finally caved and gave him a cigarette. But then they tortured him to death. It was just horrible. And after that, I dropped everything. It was the only time it really got through to me. And I left the country and went back to England, sat in the pub for two weeks. That was awful. Awful. And it's something. If I close my eyes right now, I can see in black and white his bald head and him being tortured to death in the electric chair. The next one was Larry Lonchar. Larry was someone who everyone liked to hate because he was on death row for three. Three murders, supposedly, but really didn't happen like they think it happened. Larry was bipolar, just like my dad. And Larry was much more depressed than he was manic. He was from Michigan and he was in prison for three murders. It was a thing where he posed as an FBI agent because he owed money from gambling death debts. And he lost his biggest gambling debt when Unc Chapel Hill Failed him and lost a game. They thought he went in and shot these three people. That's not what happened. But, you know, he was involved in it, and he was going to spend the rest of his life in prison, and he didn't want to, so he just wanted to die. And so he kept dropping his appeals, and I took his case on, but someone asked me to, and I got a lot of flack for doing that, because here's a guy who wants to die, and I was stopping him dying. And this went on for eight years. And I put a lot of. Lot of time in it. Even my colleagues would say, why are you wasting your time? This guy wants to die. We got lots of clients who don't want to die, represent them. I agonized over it, but I finally decided it was my job to stop him. And I'm not sure, you know, this is a difficult one. I'm not saying saying that I'm 100% right on that, but I just think if you're not dying from a terminal illness that's fatal, then you're dying because of some human thing that we just need to stop. So we went through eight years of this, and we came within 40 minutes of his execution. Four dimes I got it. Stayed one time in the US Supreme Court with 58 seconds left on the clock. We won in the US Supreme Court, and he was going to have a chance, and we could have got him off death row, no question about it. But he got Christianity, and suddenly here is a totally different person. And he really believed that he was going to a better place. And he was totally calm about it all. And we were old friends at that point. And I'm sitting there thinking, look, Larry, you're not going to heaven. It doesn't exist. I'm sorry, I'm not going to say that. Because even though I believe it, it's just cruel to say something like that. I wouldn't say that. So anyway, this went on, and I was driving down to be a witness at his execution. Then I get down to the prison, and Larry was just totally calm. You know, we couldn't get a stay. And I'm there to witness, and Larry's in the electric chair. And at the other times when he'd been in that situation, he'd been utterly terrified. This time, he's totally calm. And they ask him if he has any final words. And he turns to him and he says, lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do. And I looked around and all these pseudo Christians witnessing his Execution, looked at their feet, and Larry went to his death totally happy. And I've got to say, bizarrely, that was one of the most human, most wonderful experiences of my life, was having Larry die in front of me happy. It was really extraordinary. The whole thing about a death penalty case is people try to depersonalize it and pretend it's all just a game. And if you have more aggravating circumstances than mitigating circumstances, then you give them the death penalty. And that's the right thing to do. No, it's not. One case. I brought a gun into the courtroom, toy gun. And I said, you know, if this prosecutor really thinks we should kill this guy, let's do it right here, right now. Here's the gun. I want her to come up to my client, put the gun to his head, and pull the trigger. And if she does that, it's only a toy. It won't kill him. But she's got to do that to show she means it. And if she does it, I want you to watch her and think, do I really want to be like her? And if she doesn't do it, then, you know, she's trying to get you to do something she doesn't have the guts to do herself. And that's the first question. The second question is WWJD. I want you to imagine that there's a 13th person in the jury room, and you turn to him and you say, hey, Jesus, what would you do? Honestly, Honestly, how many of you people think Jesus Christ, the person that you know from your Bible would say, I think we should fry the motherfucker? I mean, it's just not going to happen. This is deranged, what they're asking you to do. But the most important thing is Matthew 5, 7. And it's very real. I'm not a Christian, but I think the stuff in the Bible is really powerful, as it is in the Quran and in the Torah. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Means that if you don't show mercy, which is what this prosecutor wants you not to do, you go to hell. If you do show mercy, you go to heaven. So this is not really about the person I'm representing, it's about you. And it's your choice what you do. I get in trouble over the years talking a lot about pedophiles. And you know, the one group that people hate, hate, hate are pedophiles. And no one wants to be a pedophile. No one chooses to be a pedophile. It's obviously A mental illness of sorts. And the person who was most obviously that was Ricky Langley, and he was a guy represented in Louisiana. So Ricky's story was that before he was born, his mum and dad are driving down the road, and dad Alcide is drunk, and mum Bessie is in the seat next to him. And the two kids, Oscar Lee and his little sister, Oscar Lee's, while six years old, they're in the backseat, no seatbelts, 1965, and dad drives off the road into a telegraph pole. He's fine because he's drunk. The two kids are instantly killed. Bessie, his wife, is thrown through the front of the car and is in charity hospital. And she's in her body cast from her neck to her ankle. So then what happens is Bessie gets pregnant when she's in the body cast because her husband is abusive and no one believes she's pregnant, she's in a body cast. Ricky Langley is that fetus. And he's exposed for five months to his own personal Hiroshima of X rays. And one of the drugs that Bessie was taking is now linked to. You get being pedophile later in life if you were exposed in utero. And so Ricky is born. He's very, very mentally traumatized, but he's very intelligent. When he was a child, he's sexually abused himself. At age 10, he puts a sign on the notice board saying, I'm not Ricky Langley. I'm Oscar Lee, the dead brother. He becomes fixated that his dead brother is his alter ego who's making him molest children. And then he ends up going to prison in Georgia when he's about 21, and they give him therapy and they teach him he's a pedophile, and they teach him why. And they say, you're incurable, so you're always going to be a pedophile. You will always molest children. Ricky writes a letter to the Georgia Pardons Board saying, you know, you've convinced me. I want you to put me in a mental hospital forever. And of course, they don't do that. They let him go. And he goes back to Louisiana, where Lorelei Guillory, her son Jeremy was 6 years old, bizarrely looked just like Oscar Lee. I had picture of Oscar Lee and a picture of Jeremy. And their own aunt couldn't tell in the past. And Ricky ends up strangling him, thinking that he's strangling his dead brother Oscar Lee. Now, it's all crazy, of course. Finally, Jeremy's missing. They can't find him. As big search, they finally find him And Ricky then gives a confession to try and get himself killed, where he says he molested 250 children, that he wants to die. And I say, look, Ricky is really, really mentally disturbed, but he's intelligent and he knows what he did now and he wants to say sorry. So Lorelei goes down to the Calcasieux Parish jail in western Louisiana, spends three hours with Ricky, where Ricky, one on one in his jail cell, tells her what happened and why, and he's really sorry and reassures her that he didn't molest the child, he just killed the child. And this was a big deal to Lorelai. Now, the prosecutor obviously desperately wanted to say that Ricky had sexually molested the child because that helps him get the death penalty. But this is not what Lorelei wants to here, and it's not true. But anyway, at the end of these three hours, Lorelei says to Ricky, ricky, I'm gonna fight for you. And she goes down to the DA's office and talks to this guy, Rick Brandt, and says, I don't want this death penalty stuff. You can't do this. And Rick Brant says to her, you're a very strange victim, and then tries to take away her other child, is making her an unfit man mother. So we go to trial and Lorelei wants to testify at the penalty phase that she doesn't want the death part. And the prosecution fights tooth and nail to stop her doing that. And Lorelei, you have to understand, is an uneducated alcoholic from southwest Louisiana, very, very Christian. And she goes away and she prays and she comes back the next day and she says, you know, the logic of my position is he shouldn't go to prison, he should go to a mental hospital. And if you can assure me he'll never get out, I want to testify that he should go to a mental hospital. And then she testifies. So I said, Ms. Guillory, do you have an opinion as to whether that man over there who killed your six year old child was mentally ill at the time he did it? She turns to the jury and she said, yeah, as a matter of fact, I do. I think that Ricky Langley, he's been crying out for help since the day he was born. And for whatever reason, his family, society and other legal systems never listened to him. As I sit on this witness chair, I can hear the death cries of my son Jeremy crying out for help. He was mentally ill when he killed my child. It is the most amazing thing, and she is the most amazing woman. And she needs her stories we told because the Thing we need to do for victims is not tell them they should hate, hate, hate. The only people who are hurt by that are Ben. I want to make sure it doesn't happen again to someone else, but I also want to make sure that we try lowering a temperature. And this is what Lorelai is doing, and she's trying to understand. And I so admire that one. I've been a victim. I've been held up. So put in hospital on a tempted murder montage. I found over the years that all the terrible things I've experienced. Your pain can be a real possibility. And so, you know, when I was held up at gunpoint and put in hospital in New Orleans, that made me a much better defense lawyer, because I suddenly had experienced something really serious and unpleasant. And it made me think about two things. One is whether I could ID people, really? And how sure I'd have to be. And if I, as a liberal white person, said, those three black guys did it, they're going to get life in prison. And am I going to do that? No, I'm not going to do that. So that was a terrible experience. I was wide shut with broken jaw for weeks. Some people thought that was great. I couldn't talk so much. But it does make you a much better lawyer. So this was a case in Tangipaho Parish in Louisiana, and I was representing a guy who had killed his soon to be ex wife and her boyfriend, who happened to be the nephew of the congressperson. And so it was a bit of a big deal. And Charlie was this guy who was really pretty slow. I liked Charlie, but I was trying to work out how to present him to a jury. So I was sitting with him, and I was doing what I do to a law of people. I was saying, charlie, what's your dream in life? And Charlie said to me, he said, well, my dream is to have a job with health insurance, to have a house with a mortgage, to have a wife and children. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, Charlie, I'm not asking you about what basic standard of living is. I'm asking you what your dream is. What's your dream dream? And he just repeated the same thing. And I was thinking, oh, my God. And then I realized, of course, that I'm the weird one, not him. For most people, that really is their dream. And so I picked a jury. I picked 12 people who I asked them on, well, dear, I love picking juries. And I asked them, oh, what's your dream in life? And I picked 12 people who said, exactly What Charlie said. The story of Charlie's case was that he was married to this woman who was smarter than him, and he had the two kids, and he had the house with a mortgage, and he had a job at health insurance. And then his wife, she went off with this congressman's nephew, and so she took the kids, she took the house. He had a breakdown over this, and so he lost his job, and he basically lost his mind as well as everything else. And then he happens to be around at his own house, and he sees his wife with this guy and loses it because it's America who's got a gun. He ends up shooting both of them. So the whole of my theory of the case was not that he didn't do it, he did do it, but it was that this was the straw that broke the camel's back was seeing the two of them. And we went through loading onto the camel, the loss of the kids, the loss of the house, the loss of the wife, the loss of the job, the loss of the insurance. And then he sees this. And I'm doing the closing argument, and I'm telling this story, and the guy in the front row looks like he wants to execute me, too. And I'm terrified that I'm not getting through to these people. So at any rate, we finish, they go out to deliberate. They're out for less than 10 minutes, and they come back in our favor, and they say they don't want to talk to the prosecutors, they want to talk to me. So I go in there and I talk to this juror, and I say, man, I thought you were going to kill me, too. And he said, I was just trying not to cry. You were talking about me. It was just amazing. But the most amazing thing was the night before that closing argument, one of the prosecutors comes up to me and says, says, will you go for a drink? So we go to some bar, and he says, you know, I've handed him my notice. I've told him, I'm not doing this case anymore because you've convinced me it's just wrong and we just shouldn't be doing this. And, oh, God, I was so touched. You know, it was so lovely to have someone who had been fighting for weeks and months to kill Charlie to decide that actually Charlie shouldn't have. That. That was the case that taught me, really, really, that I needed to speak the language of the jurors instead of my language. The language of Christianity was a Christian. I need to speak the language of what they believe, not what I believe. And I think the vast majority of ACLU lawyers in America run away from religion. They run away from that. And they want to give lectures to jurors about how the death penalty is just wrong, wrong, wrong. And while I believe that that's not what these jurors believe, you can't say that. You got to talk to every juror the way they hear it. In November 1974, IRA bombs ripped through two Birmingham pubs, killing 21 innocent people. Hundreds more were injured. It was the worst attack on British soil since the Second World War.
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When a crime this appalling and shocking happens, you want the police to act quickly. And boy, did they. The very next day, they had six men in custody.
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Confessions followed and the men were sent down for life. Good riddance, you might think, except those men were innocent. Join me, Matt Ford, and me, Alice Levine, for the latest series of British Scandal all about the Birmingham Six.
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It's the story of how a terrible tragedy morphed into a travesty of justice and how one man couldn't rest until he'd exposed the truth.
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Follow British Scandal now wherever you listen to podcasts and binge entire series early and ad free on Wondery Plus. On Boxing Day 2018, 20 year old Joy Morgan was last seen at her church, Israel United in Christ, or iuic. I just went on my Snapchat and I just see her face plastered everywhere. This is the missing sister, the true story of a woman betrayed by those she trusted most. IUIC is my family and like the best family that I've ever had. But IUIC isn't like most churches. This is a devilish cult. You know when you get that feeling like you just, I don't want to be here, I want to get out. It's like that feeling of like, I want to go hang out. I'm Charlie Brent, coast cuff. And after years of investigating Joy's case, I need to know what really happened to Joy. Binge all episodes of the Missing Sister exclusively and ad free right now on Wondery Plus. Start your free trial of Wondery plus on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or in the Wondery app. When 911 happened, I was preparing a capital case in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and I was looking to go talk to a pathologist that morning. And I was driving around Lake Charles and it was just like a ghost town. I couldn't find anyone. It was really weird. So I went back to the place we were staying and the planes were flying into the building. And you know, to begin with, you thought it was just A little plane and whatever. I've got to say, I just totally misjudged America because I didn't remember that. You can name the three times the territorial integrity of America has been breached. I mean, it was September 11, 2001. It was Pearl Harbor. That's December 7, 1941. And then it was 1812 when the British banned the White House. That's it. So when they start, you know, George Bush starts talking about Guantanamo Bay, I thought, ah, let's sue him. So I start calling around my friends and saying, we got to stop this because everyone who is going to Guantanamo Bay, people forget this. They were all going to face the death penalty. And this is the new group of people that we're being told we have to hate instead of young black men. It's now most when people are bitch. So I called around all my friends. No one wanted to do it. And I couldn't believe it. And I finally got to. I got Joe Margolis, who's a friend who did capital work in Texas, and then Mike Ratner, who was with the center for Constitutional Rights in New York, were the only people that wanted to do this. So we sued for Guantanamo on February 19, 2002. And you know, we alleged because we started hearing rumors that everyone was being tortured and that our clients were, were not guilty. And you know, the media was interested in it. So I went on television to defend what we were doing. I did a five minute interview in which I was accused of being a traitor to America 13 times. I got amazing death threats that night. It was extraordinary. And then we sued and we lost in the District court, we lost in the Court of Appeal. And we get to the end, the U.S. supreme Court. That's when Abu Ghraib happened. Everyone thought that they could trust the President and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and them, and I didn't. It took two and a half years to get in. We got in in 2004 and I start meeting people and they're not terrorists. I was having a terrible time finding an honest to goodness terrorist. The first person I met was Murzen Begg. He's a British guy and Murazin is like 5 foot 2, incredibly well spoken. And I wrote up 30 pages of how he'd been tortured and how he'd watched someone be murdered in Bagram Air Force Base and how he was suffering from PTSD and stuff himself. And I submit 33 pages. I think of my notes and they censor every word. And I go talk to the CIA guy and I Say, what do you mean, what's this about? Why can't I tell people that Harry's been tortured? This guy says, well, that is the methods and means of interrogation. That's classified. I say, well, you can't tell me that murdering Dilawar the taxi driver was a method of means of interrogation. The guy sort of smirks and says, yeah, you can. I say, well, what about this stuff about his mental illness? So that we're censoring that because it's his privacy, but it's my fucking client and he doesn't want it censored. So they wouldn't let it out. So I wrote a letter to Tony Blair, then the Prime Minister of Britain. I said, dear Tony Imray, torture and abuse of British national by the Americans. And the British went apeshit. Because it's all very well if you trample on Muslims, but you can't trample on our Muslims, you know, this is what's gone on for the last 23 years in Guantanamo. They're crazy. And of the 780 prisoners, though we've got 765 out, they said these are the worst terrorists in the world. We've proved they're not in 98.5% of the cases. And this is why the rule of law is important. Because when they pick a group of people, people to hate, they want you to just hate them blindly. When I was flying on British Airways to Grantanamo a couple of years ago, I talked to the nice stewardess. I said, look, let's pretend you're on an airline and your flight landed at the wrong airport 98% of the time or maybe crashed 98% of the time. Would you fly that airline? Oh, no. But this is what Guantanamo Bay is and no one knows it. And we need to be there to protect not just the people, but the whole principle. I've learned so much over the last 20 some years in Guantanamo because honestly, when I thought of intelligence agencies, I thought, they're intelligent, they so aren't. And I'm talking about the British and the Americans. The MI6 came to the pub in my village and was trying to recover, recruit me as an informant and stuff. And I said, look, I'm not going to do that, but I'm happy to come to your office and just talk to you. I don't even have to have you say anything to me. I just want to tell you how wrong you are on all this stuff because you've never met these human beings. And if you do, you'll learn two things One is, you're wrong about most of them. But the second is Merzenberg, for example. My fan is your best friend. He doesn't believe in violence and stuff. He's a Muslim. He's the best person to help you achieve some peace. And my favorite, favorite, favorite was I loved my client, Muhammad Al gharami. He was 14 years old, right? He was a black kid in Saudi Arabia. And the question you have to ask yourself is, how do you prove you're 14 years old, not 26 years old, when you're in Guantanamo by yourself? It's quite difficult. But I asked that question of the CIA guy. I said, you know, how would you do it? And he starts humming and hammering and talking about testing your teeth and all that bullshit. I said, why don't we just get his birth certificate? And so we sent off and got his birth certificate. It took 30 minutes. By then, Muhammad had spent three years in grant Animo. So then some Schmidt in Guantanamo says that he was in the London cell of Al Qaeda. And they say that because I'm his lawyer and I've got a British accent. Then we had to prove that when the guy said he was leader of Al Qaeda in London, he was nine years old and had never been out of Saudi Arabia. I mean, it's just crazy stuff. And, you know, you can't help but love that these are the people making decisions. They tortured Ibn Shaikh Al Libius. Tilly said that Saddam Hussein had wmd, and that's why we went to war in Iraq in a big way. And lots of people got killed, and it was all bullshit. I love, love, love going to Guantanamo. I've been there 42 times. It's a nightmare of a place at one level, but it's when I get to go see the clients. And to me, what this is all about are the human beings. My whole theory, which is Guantanamo, is all a lie. And they've got it all secret because they want to pretend that they're doing something about 9, 11, and if we open it up to public inspection, they will close it down because it'll be too embarrassing. And that's been our principle all along. So I've represented 87 people. The courts ordered the release of one. The other 86 got out because we went in there. We got the truth out. We published it to the world. We embarrassed the US military so much that they said, let's send this guy home. So we won. And that's an amazing thing. When I got to be about 60, I thought, look, I'm just really about time I could teach some other people. So I set up a new nonprofit called the Justice League where I want to make all these young people superheroes. So the first principle is you got to figure out what your passion really is. And it's not, I want to do nice, good things. That's too vague. You got to get something quite particular. And that's why stories about your parents and people chose you are very important, because they inform who you are. For me, just to give you the example, through my mother and my father, my fundamental passion is to look around the world for the most hated people in the world and get between them and the people doing the hatred. And the reason for that is because you always know you're right. You know, people are going around hating, you know, whether they're hating people on death row, they're hating Muslims in Guantanamo, they're hating Palestinians, Palestinians, they're hating whomever, they're hating Jews. It's all wrong. The more hated the people you help, the easier it is, because the more hated, the more wrong it is. So then once you worked out what your passion is, and I have a process to try and help people do that, you then got to think, how do you move that forward? And you must never put your life in the hands of someone else. So this idea that you, as a young person are going to go up to someone and say, hey, I'd really like to do cool things. I'd like you to pay me for it, it's just not going to happen. You don't need to do that. And what I did was I learned at a very young age, you got to figure out how you create your own job is not hard. And so that means that you just have to raise some money to do it. You're never going to get rich. That doesn't matter. The average person is going to work, work 100,000 hours in her or his life. And if you're going to do that, it's got to be something you love. Otherwise you're going to be really bored. So you've got to figure out what your passion is and what you're going to do, and then you've got to create your own job. You know, my charity, the Justice League, is about helping young people figure out what they'd love to do and then helping them do it. So I've got 62 students working with me this summer in England, another nine who I sent to Texas. And I think my primary job is to let them see how much fun this stuff is how fulfilling it is, how you can take someone's life and give it back to them. It's just amazing. If I had to say what I find most surprising is that it's so obvious to me that you want to do something you actually absolutely love, and that to do that, you've got to make it happen for yourself. And this is the ultimate rule. And it's the ultimate rule for me. It should be the ultimate rule for everyone, which is we all have the same utopia, we all have the same ideal. So every decision you ever make has got to go one way or the other. It either takes you closer to your ideal or further away. Now, in my life it's really simple because I just always do what takes me closer. What's mad about these politicians and a lot of other people is they want to do things that takes them in the other direction. That's just total insanity. One of the principles that I think is obvious in life is that we should always try to be decent to other people. We should try to understand them. We should try to be kind. It really is about do to others as you would have done to you. The antithesis of that is hatred. And I just never see the point. Hatred is just always wrong. So for me, taking on hatred has got to be right. It's just that simple.
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Today's episode featured Clive Stafford Smith. If you'd like to reach out to Clive, you can find his email and socials in the show notes. Find out more about the important work Clive does at Justice League from Wondery. You're listening to this Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or on the Wondery app to listen ad free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host Wit Misseldine. Today's episode was co produced by me, Jason Blaylock and Andrew Waits with special thanks to the this Is Actually Happening team including Ellen Westberg. The opening music features the song Sleep Paralysis by Scott Velasquez. You can join the community on the this Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook or follow us on Instagram Actually Happening on the show website thisisactually happening dot com. You can find out more about the podcast. Contact us with any questions, submit your own story or visit the store where you can find this Is Actually Happening designs on stickers, T shirts, wall art hoodies and more. That's thisisactually happening.com and finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do, go to patreon.com happening. Even 2 to $5 a month goes a long way to support our vision. Thank you for listening. If you like this is actually happening, you can listen to every episode ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery. Com Survey.