On Friday, June 19, 2020, 9 am ET, we hosted our special 2-Hour Season Three Wrap Show on the Criminal Justice Insider Podcast with Babz Rawls Ivy & Jeff Grant – The Voice of CT Criminal Justice. We invited all of our wonderful guests from our first three incredible seasons, guest list below! Live on WNHH 103.5 FM New Haven, rebroadcast at 5 pm. Live-streamed and podcast 24/7 everywhere, see below. Sponsored by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.
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The Criminal Justice Insider Podcast with Babz Rawls Ivy and Jeff Grant is broadcast live at 9 am ET on the first and third Friday of each month Sept.-June From the WNHH 103.5 FM studios in New Haven. It is rebroadcast on WNHH at 5 pm ET the same day. Live-Streamed and Podcast available 24/7.
An article about each show is published a few days later in the New Haven Independent (newhavenindependent.org).
Season One Guests:
Nov. 3, 2017: Robyn Porter, CT State Legislator
Nov. 17, 2017: Scott Semple, Former CT Commissioner of Correction
Dec. 1, 2017: Amy Smoyer (Asst. Professor of Social Work, Southern Connecticut State University) and Jackie Lucibello, New Haven Women’s Resettlement Working Group
Dec. 15, 2017: Lorenzo Jones, Co-Executive Director, Katal Center for Health, Equity and Justice
Jan. 19, 2018: Cynthia Farrar, Co-Founder of Purple States and Producer of Life on Parole
Feb. 16, 2018: Danielle Cooper, Director of Research for the Tow Youth Justice Institute, University of New Haven
Mar. 2, 2018: Joseph Ganim, Mayor of Bridgeport, CT
Mar. 16, 2018: John Santa, Chair of Malta Justice Initiative and Member of CT Sentencing Commission
Apr. 6, 2018: Brent Peterkin, CT Director, Project Longevity & Board Chair, The Phoenix Association
Apr. 20, 2018: Scot X. Esdaile, President of NAACP CT, Chair of NAACP National Criminal Justice & Da’ee McKnight, Family ReEntry
May 4, 2018: Earl Bloodworth, Director, Bridgeport Mayor’s Initiative for Reentry Affairs (MIRA)
May 18, 2018: Jacqueline Polverari, ED of Evolution Family Reentry Services
June 1, 2018: Mike Lawlor, CT, Former Undersecretary for Criminal Justice Policy & Planning, University of New Haven
June 15, 2018: James Forman, Jr., Pulitzer Prize Winning Author & Yale Law Professor
July 6, 2018: Bill Carbone & Erika Nowakowski, Tow Youth Justice Institute, University of New Haven
Season Two Guests:
Fri., Sept. 9, 2018: Kennard Ray, Blue Ribbon Strategies, CT Unlock the Vote
Fri., Sept. 21, 2018: Louis L. Reed, National Organizer for #Cut50
Fri., Oct. 5, 2018: Sue Gunderman (Hartford Interim Director of Reentry Services) & Beth Hines (Executive Director, Community Partners in Action), CT Reentry Roundtables
Fri., Oct. 19, 2018: Venezia Michalsen, Assoc. Professor of Justice Studies, Montclair State University
Fri., Nov. 16, 2018: Andrew Clark, Director of the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy, Central Connecticut State University and Bill Dyson, Former CT State Legislator and Justice Advocate
Fri., Dec. 7, 2018: Glenn E. Martin, Founder/Consultant of GEM Trainers and Past- President and Founder of JustLeadershipUSA
Fri., Dec. 21, 2018: Fernando Muñiz, CEO of Community Solutions, Inc. and Rosa Correa, Community Leader
Fri., Jan. 19, 2019: Peter J. Henning, Professor of Law, Wayne State University & “White Collar Watch” Columnist, NY Times
Fri., Feb. 1, 2019: Jeffrey Deskovic, CEO of The Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation who was Exonerated after Serving 16 Years in Prison
Fri., Feb. 15, 2019: Jeffrey Abramowitz, Executive Director for Reentry Services, JEVS Human Services, Philadelphia
Fri., Mar. 1, 2019, Rollin Cook, CT Commissioner of Correction
Fri., Mar. 15, 2019: Dieter Tejada, National Justice Impact Bar Association
Fri., Apr. 5, 2019: John Rowland, Former CT Governor
Fri., Apr. 19, 2019: Gregg D. Caruso, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Corning & Co-Director of the Justice Without Retribution Network at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland
Fri., May 3, 2019: Michael Taylor, CEO of Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center in the Greater New Haven area
Fri., May 17, 2019: Tarra Simmons, Esq., Director, Civil Survival and Candidate for Washington State Legislature
Fri., June 7, 2019: Louis L. Reed, National Organizer for #Cut50, Part Deux!
Fri., June 21, 2019: Marcus Bullock, CEO of Flikshop
Season Three Guests:
Fri., Sept. 6, 2019: Khalil Cumberbatch, Chief Strategist, New Yorkers United for Justice
Fri., Sept. 20, 2019: Aaron T. Kinzel, Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Michigan-Dearborn
Fri., Oct. 4, 2019: Charlie Grady, Outreach Specialist for the FBI CT Community Outreach Program
Fri., Oct. 18, 2019: Michael Kimelman, Former Hedge Funder and Author of Confessions of a Wall Street Insider: A Cautionary Tale of Rats, Feds, and Banksters
Fri., Nov. 1, 2019: Corey Brinson, CEO, Second Chance Firm, NY Policy Assoc., Legal Action Center
Fri., Nov. 15, 2019: Cathryn Lavery, Ph.D., Asst. Chair & Graduate Coordinator for the Iona College Criminal Justice Department
Fri. Dec. 20, 2019: John Hamilton, CEO, Liberation Programs
Fri., Jan. 3, 2020: Reginald Dwayne Betts, Lawyer, Poet, Lecturer on Mass Incarceration
Fri., Jan. 17, 2020: Serena Ligouri, Executive Director, New Hour for Women & Children – L.I.
Fri., Feb. 7, 2020: David Garlock, Program Director, New Person Ministries, Lancaster, PA, Featured in Movie “Just Mercy”
Feb. 20, 2020: Larry Levine, Talk Show Host & Criminal Justice Consultant
Fri,. Mar. 6, 2020, Hans Hallundbaek, Interfaith Prison Partnership
Fri., Mar. 20, 2020: Tiheba Bain, Founder, Women Against Incarceration, Director of Coalitions, National Counsel for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women & Girls
Fri., April 3, 2020: Rev. Dr. Chris Kimmenez, Minister and Criminal Justice Advocate
Fri., April 17, 2020: Icy Frantz, Activist, Columnist, Philanthropist
Fri., May 3, 2020: Eilene Zimmerman, Author of “Smacked: A Story of White Collar Ambition, Addiction and Tragedy”.
Fri., May 15, 2020: Scott Semple, Former CT Commissioner of Correction and Alex Frank & John Hart, Vera Institute of Justice
Fri., June 5, 2020: Children of Incarcerated Parents Show with Aileen Keays, Nishka Ayala & Isis DeLoatch
Jeffrey Deskovic was playing whiffleball with a friend the night his high school classmate was raped and murdered.Despite DNA evidence to the contrary, the state still thought he did it. So did a jury. Deskovic spent 16 years behind bars, until the actual killer’s DNA finally helped clear his name and set him free.
Deskovic told that story of his wrongful conviction and successful exoneration on the most recent episode of WNHH’s “Criminal Justice Insider with Babz Rawls-Ivy and Jeff Grant.”
Now the CEO of the Deskovic Foundation, a nonprofit that has helped overturn seven wrongful convictions and succeeded in advocating for the country’s first Commission on Prosecutorial Conduct in New York, Deskovic was just a 16-year-old sophomore in high school in 1989 when police arrested him for the rape and murder of a fellow classmate in his home town of Peekskill, N.Y.
Initially, Deskovic said, he and his family weren’t concerned about him being found guilty. He knew he hadn’t committed the crime, and pretrial DNA tests of semen found inside the victim didn’t match his own.
“They all thought the system worked,” Deskovic said. “Me being wrongfully convicted was the last thing on anybody’s mind.”
But, as Deskovic has learned over the past three decades, innocence sometimes has little to do with whether or not one is found guilty for a crime.
The medical examiner failed to disclose complaints from surrounding communities about his history of providing untruthful testimony. He also rushed to the grand jury and urged them to find Deskovic guilty even before the results from the DNA test were in.
The public defender representing Deskovic failed to bring up in court the teenager’s alibi, that he had been playing whiffleball in a friend’s backyard, and didn’t even interview the friend Deskovic claimed to have been with.
And the district attorney, eager for a conviction and unwilling to accept that a negative DNA test meant that Dekovic hadn’t in fact raped and murdered the victim, proceeded with the prosecution, and succeeded in getting a guilty verdict from the jury for first-degree rape and second-degree murder.
Besides his family, he said, “everyone else in the community turned on me. Everybody hated me.”
Still just a teenager, Deskovic was sent to a men’s maximum security prison. He spent the next 16 years bouncing between Elmira and Sing Sing, learning law, earning a GED and an Associate’s Degree, and urging his attorneys to keep fighting his case.
The first break in Deskovic’s case came in 1996, and had nothing to do with him. New York created a DNA databank designed to link DNA evidence from crime scenes with offenders. The second break came in January 2006, when the Innocence Project decided to pick up his case and test his DNA using new technology.
The third, and critical, break came in September 2006, when the DNA found inside the high school victim some 16 years earlier was matched with that of Steven Cunningham, who was in prison for a different murder he had committed over a decade prior. Cunningham eventually confessed to committing the crime for which Deskovic was locked up. Later in September 2006, Deskovic was released at the age of 32.
Since then, he has started his own nonprofit, helped overturn seven wrongful convictions, and worked on a campaign to establish a commission in New York to provide independent oversight of prosecutors.
“One of the most common elements that runs through many wrongful conviction cases is prosecutorial misconduct,” he said. That can be anything from withholding evidence of innocence to withholding evidence that has to do with witness credibility to making inflammatory statements over the course of the trial.
Sometimes misconduct stems from political ambition, he said, a prosecutor’s eagerness to get a conviction at all costs. Sometimes “it becomes kind of like a game, like wins and losses,” he said.
Now about to graduate from law school, and scheduled to take the bar this summer, Deskovic said he has no interest in slowing down his advocacy for the wrongfully convicted.
“Between now and when I drop dead,” he said, “I’ll be doing this work.”