Author’s Note: The audio recording of this conversation may be released as a podcast in the future, if the file can be salvaged from my amateur recording mishaps. Also, here’s a fun little exercise as you read along, see if you can figure out where the salty language has been replaced with G-Rated verbiage, it’s pretty tough [stuff].
This is the transcript from a conversation I had with Bob Ruff, the host of the Truth & Justice with Bob Ruff podcast as part of my ongoing series on the criminal justice system “The Ends Rarely Justify the Means”.
Before we get into the conversation I’d like to share the story of how it is that I found out about Bob’s podcast. I, like millions of people around the world was sucked into the Adnan Syed rabbit hole when the Serial podcast came out in 2014. I enjoyed the hell out of Serial but finished the series like many other people, very much on the fence. I wanted to believe Adnan was innocent, but I kept getting hung up on one very inconvenient detail…how did Jay Wilds know where the car was?
Several months after listening to Serial, I start re-listening to the podcast. Then one night as I’m looking for new podcasts to add, I come across this interesting looking podcast with a somewhat strange but mildly intriguing logo called “Undisclosed: The State vs Adnan Syed”. At this point I’m thinking to myself, this is probably going to suck compared to Serial, but eh, I’ll give it a listen. Good lord was I wrong in that prejudicial initial assessment. If Serial pulled me into the rabbit hole, Undisclosed was like tossing a black hole into that rabbit hole and getting sucked deeper and deeper in, possibly never to return.
Fast forward, it’s Summer 2015 and I’m spending a lot of time at the New York Public library and I am knee deep in everything Adnan Syed. What happens to come up in my search for a new podcast, but this interesting looking podcast called “Truth & Justice with Bob Ruff” (an extremely bold name if I do say so myself). I read the description and it reads something like this “Bob Ruff was a firefighter who uses his arson investigating skills to shed new light on the Adnan Syed case” or something like that. I just remember thinking, “oh lord, this will be good, let me listen to some random firefighter’s opinion on a murder case”. My expectations were not high. I was incredibly wrong in my underestimation of Bob Ruff. I was absolutely blown away by how knowledgeable and passionate Bob was for this case and his genuine and sincere desire to solve the Hae Min Lee murder case to provide justice for Adnan and Hae both of their families.
I became a Truth & Justice listener right as the podcast was beginning to find its voice and evolve into what it has become today. I have listened to Bob Ruff evolve from a passionate Serial fan and amateur podcaster into the force for the wrongfully convicted he has become today. I’m incredibly inspired by the work that Bob and the Undisclosed team have done, essentially creating an entire new genre of activism podcast that aims to help the most vulnerable members of our society, those that have been wrongfully convicted.
Inside the justice system and to the casual observer, the wrongfully convicted are more or less indistinguishable from the rightfully convicted. They are mostly forgotten about by all but their family members. For years, there was no one to fight for them, nobody to hold the police and the prosecutors accountable for miscarriages of justice. However, in 2016, the wrongfully convicted have gained a powerful ally. For the first time in history, thousands of passionate fans of Truth & Justice and Undisclosed can bring their talents, their passion and their time to bear in the fight for justice on behalf of those wrongfully convicted.
I am proud to be able to play whatever small part I may be able to play in the grander march toward a fairer and more robust criminal justice system. I am eternally grateful to Bob Ruff, Rabia Chaudry, Susan Simpson and Colin Miller for leading the way on this issue. Discussing the problems in America’s criminal justice system is a conversation that has been put off for far too long, so at the very least, Bob and I will have that conversation. I hope those of you reading this decide to have similar conversations with your friends and family. We can fix this broken system, but not without first having the conversation.
Chad: Bob, the rants I have been on over the past few days I cannot even begin to describe…
Bob: There’s a lot of that going around right now.
Chad: If you thought Serial was a cultural phenomena, which it was, but Making A Murderer has blown up faster than anything I’ve ever seen of its kind. I mean have you ever seen, have you ever seen anything from just a murder case, that’s all it is, it’s a murder case, but no murder case that I have ever heard has gotten this kind of traction, the number of people, the celebrities, it’s crazy.
Bob: It’s nuts, you can’t turn on social media, you can’t turn on the news, it’s everywhere.
Chad: It’s that, it’s on every podcast that I’m listening to, everybody is talking about it. It’s pretty nuts. Alright so given that this may or may not come out in podcast form, it’ll definitely become a written piece for a series I’m doing called “The Ends Rarely Justify the Means”, kind of an exploration of, at least what I believe to be the cornerstone issue leading to Adnan Syed, Brendan Dassey, Steven Avery et alia. So could you just introduce yourself to the readers, who may not be familiar with your work?
Bob: I’m Bob Ruff and I’m the host of the Truth & Justice podcast, which was formerly the Serial Dynasty Podcast and I am a firefighter by training and a podcaster by accident. I spent the last 16 years of my life as a firefighter, I was up until five days ago was the Fire Chief for one of our local fire departments here. I just took an early retirement as of the 31st of December in order to pursue this investigation and advocating for wrongful conviction cases full time. Starting in 2016, so that’s what I’m doing now.
It was quite a journey, the Serial Dynasty podcast started as a fan show podcast, it was a place for people to email in and share ideas on the case. It was really meant to be an outlet for people like me that were so engrossed with the Adnan Syed-Hae Min Lee case, that we had notes on our phone and notepads everywhere and all these thoughts with nothing to do with them. It was kind of an outlet and a place to put those ideas. As the show went on and the audience grew larger and I started getting deeper and deeper into the case, it sort of made a shift, around mid summer of 2015, where I started actually digging deep into the case and investigating beyond what I was hearing on the other podcasts. I started to reveal some pretty incredible things over the summer and actually started making some traction in the case that was actually meaningful.
About that time was when I changed the name of the show to the Truth & Justice podcast because just exploring this one case wasn’t enough for my research, I was finding that these wrongful conviction cases have occurred all over the country. I feel like what we are doing with Truth & Justice and Undisclosed and even Serial , to the extent that Serial brought this story to the public’s attention. , which was huge for Adnan Syed’s case. I think it’s meaningful work and it makes a difference.
When somebody gets arrested and they’re convicted, especially for something like murder, once they’re behind bars, the process of trying to get them out because mistakes were made is nearly impossible. There are programs like the Innocence Project that do a lot of great work in this field, but what I’m doing and what the Undisclosed team is going to be doing, starting next summer they’re going to be launching their second season, is to continue to find these cases, bring them to the public’s attention, try to investigate them using the large audiences that we have as a crowd source to find legal representation and legal remedies and fight for these people who can’t fight for themselves anymore because they’re locked up behind bars.
Chad: I think it’s a really sad sort of a sad thing that once somebody is convicted, especially of murder, they are more than less forgotten about, their families may continue to fight for them but more than likely their families resources have been drained trying to defend them in the first place, unless you are dealing with someone like a Robert Durst that has essentially unlimited resources with which to defend themselves, even upper middle class well to do families can be completely bankrupted by something like what happened to Adnan Syed.
Bob: You’re looking at minimum, probably $100,000 to fight a murder case, that’s going to bankrupt ninety nine percent, if not more of this country.
Chad: No doubt, I think there is something interesting, I’ve written about a couple of different subjects, I do some work on politics, some current events, economics, I think there’s is something unique about exploring the criminal justice system, I think what it is is the visceral feeling of injustice, I’m sure it’s what got you hooked It’s what got me hooked, it’s why we are having this conversation right now, it’s the outrage that just makes you want to scream at your television while you’re watching Making a Murderer or when you’re talking about all the issues that have gone on in Adnan Syed’s case, it makes you angry it makes you sad, it makes you feel sick, it’s literally one of the most visceral subjects I have ever encountered.
Bob: It is and I’m glad that it’s something that really just recently has become very popular. True Crime has always been a popular genre, people like to read books about it and listen to podcasts about it and watch TV about it, but most True Crime is…
Chad: Police Perspective
Bob: Right, either police perspective or it’s an unsolved or a cold case, and those things are incredibly interesting but I’ve never had much use for them because it’s very difficult to gain any traction in those types of cases, because in a cold case or an unsolved case 99.9 percent of the time you have good cops that are well meaning, that are using every resource they have available and they can’t figure it out. And so a reporter or a podcaster or a TV producer isn’t going to get any further with it, because they have far more resources than we do.
Chad: We don’t have the legal power to subpoena people, we can’t question them, there are so many things that they can do that we just can’t do, so if they [the police] are not able to find anything it’s either incompetence on their part, even if they are well meaning, or it’s just not there to be found.
Bob: Right exactly, and then suddenly when Serial becomes this blockbuster hit last year, we start looking at a case that is “solved”, in the books and a person has been convicted but there was some either negligence or malfeasance, there was misconduct and I personally believe that he was wrongfully convicted and is completely innocent of this crime.
When you start investigating a case like that, all the sudden the door starts swinging wide open and there’s so much information, there’s so much ground you can cover, there’s so much good that you can do because now we’re investigating something that wasn’t properly investigated by the police, either due to incompetence or negligence or purposeful misconduct. One of those three things, but in any case, there is evidence out there that was never explored. Take the investigation that I’ve done with Don, the boyfriend.
Chad: Oh yeah, definitely, we are definitely going to get to that
Bob: Yeah and all I want to say about that for right now is, that was information that, I mean myself a podcaster from Michigan was able to nail that stuff down and prove it, prove that [Don’s Lenscrafters] time sheet was falsified.
Chad: And it wasn’t that difficult
Bob: No, it really wasn’t, it was a few phone calls, couple people to talk to
Chad: It was more of just a noticing, once somebody noticed the two employee ID numbers, running down that stuff was very very simple compared to other areas of the investigation. It’s more just checking a box, getting other people to confirm that no this isn’t just standard operating procedure, of course the cops they never go down that path because hey, they got their guy.
Bob: Right, and that’s exactly, that’s why we’re able to make these leaps and bounds as far as progress in the cases, just because by definition, if this is wrongful conviction then there was evidence that was missed and leads that were not tracked down. There were witnesses that were not talked to, that’s why there was a wrongful conviction. And that’s why, I get a lot of people that send emails into the cases email address all the time that people want me to cover and I’ve got several that are on deck that we’re going to be getting to, but I get a lot of these that are unsolved cases and that’s not what I do here.
It’s for that reason because contrary to what it might seem like for those that listen to the podcast, I’m a huge supporter of law enforcement, I think the overwhelming majority of law enforcement officers are great guys, great cops, I know I said guys, I mean men and women, and they do great work and they’re doing their best.
Chad: You’re actually kind of leading into the general question that I want to explore with you, which is “How does this happen” how does Adnan Syed happen, how does Brendan Dassey happen, how does Steven Avery happen?
I’ve got a few theories on it, I’d like to hear yours, I’ll offer mine and maybe we can discuss it is that these gross injustices make their way through a system that is in principle not designed to carry out “miscarriages of justice” if you will, we like to think that the system is designed to prevent that but just look up Innocence Project statistics and you see that there are hundreds and thousands if not tens of thousands of these [wrongful convictions] given the, what is it like three million inmates we have in the United States. I’m not sure what the latest stats are, but it’s multiple millions of incarcerated people.
Bob: Yeah it’s a huge number of people that are certainly in prison that are innocent. I guess to answer your question “how does this happen”, for starters I want to say as far as the Making A Murderer thing, I watched that and I was like you, absolutely disgusted, as a matter of fact I watched the first three episodes with Shaun T, the fitness guy a friend of mine, my wife and I were on vacation with him and his husband who we’re all watching this together and we’re all ready to throw things at the TV. [Shaun T is a great guy, a huge supporter of Bob’s podcast Truth & Justice, and someone I highly recommend everyone check out. He’s got his own podcast called “Trust and Believe with Shaun T”]
Chad: Yeah I told my friend to keep his gun unloaded while watching this series, your TV will thank you.
Bob: The only thing that I want to preface with is that I have not personally investigated the case really thoroughly afterwards, I’ve done a little bit of research just out of curiosity because a lot of people have talked to me about it.
Chad: I think that the documentary did a quite fair job over covering it and granted, the title is Making A Murderer so they are already suggesting that he is innocent in the title, so yeah they have a point of view, they have to, they’re documentarians, they’re not doing the thing that the news media does where, in order to get an “unbiased perspective” they’ll just read what the prosecution says and then what the defense says and they won’t tell you who is making a credible argument because they want to just stray down the middle and seem like they’re impartial, but that doesn’t make any sense if one of them is lying through their mustache, Ken Kratz, and the other one is just speaking common sense.
Bob: Right, and the way it is presented it looks like probably the worst case of injustice that I have ever seen. I just only preface because one thing I noticed from the documentary is how it was very one sided and there’s always, there is always a bit of another side even if it is, and some of the things were just obvious. The key is obvious, the fact that they…
Chad: The blood stain in the car is not, I mean the blood’s in the car with no finger prints, the guy allegedly can sanitize his garage where they claim he shoots this woman in the head, and they can find no residual blood, but he can’t figure out to clean up obvious blood stains on a car? Those two things, they don’t hold.
Bob: Yeah and to park it at your house.
Chad: Yeah yeah, when you have a car, I was just going through the court transcript on Brendan Dassey’s case, I don’t know if you’ve encountered this, but I wish that the court stenographers didn’t have to record um’s and uh’s because it’s a nightmare to read anything that Ken Kratz says because he stutters like every six words it’s so hard to read, I want to take them and filter out all the um’s and uh’s so that I can at least read it, but he mentions “Oh Steven Avery left the car near the car crusher”, basically suggesting that he was going to crush it later, and he took all the time to pull the brush all around and put the hood on it, and take the license plate off, rather than just driving it into the car crusher that he had access to, knows how to operate, the framing of the narrative on behalf of the prosecution in this trial, it it strains credulity.
Bob: Right, the whole thing is just a mess. To answer your question as to how these things happen, I think it goes back to, from my perspective it’s one of those three things that I mentioned earlier, which is, a wrongful conviction is going to because of either negligence or incompetence on the police department’s part or intentional misconduct. I believe there are lots of people that have been wrongfully convicted due to the first two, due to incompetence and negligence and I would say the majority are just that the cops did a [lousy] job.
They didn’t investigate thoroughly. I think it’s got to be, it has to be rare that there are police that intentionally do this, but I do believe that it happens and it happens a hell of lot more than it should. The other side is how it happens, our criminal justice system is supposed to have a good system of checks and balances. You have the police doing their investigation and then you rest. The check on that is supposed to be the court system, where you have a prosecutor that is going to take that case to a jury of your peers and present the case and you get to have an attorney, you have the right to an attorney even if you can’t afford to have an attorney, but what we all know is that not all attorneys are created equal.
Chad: Well, Len Kachinsky, is a great example of an attorney that is not created equal, uh I don’t even know how that guy passed the bar.
Bob: Yeah, well you know at least the way it was framed in that show I believe there was some corruption there too.
Chad: Oh I’m sure, Kachinsky is the lowest quality of lawyer, which is why he’s a free court appointed lawyer so he’s not getting paid very much, there’s probably a handshake deal going on, since he’s going to see Ken Kratz in the future prosecuting some of his future clients. He was obviously trying to get rid of that case as fast as possible with as little effort invested as humanly possible, that was obvious from sort of jump street, when he starts talking to Brendan Dassey, he doesn’t really take the time to look at the confession tape which in my writing I said it reads like a false confession checklist.
Bob: Right
Chad: It’s got everything that you would see on a false confession checklist.
Bob: There were so many things wrong with that interrogation, as far as just basic things. A lot of people have said “that’s classic REED technique”, that was way beyond REED
Chad: I have every intention of going through the transcript of that confession and breaking down who the author of all the facts are, because it’s my guess is that Mark Wiegert and Tom Fassbender are the authors of 90 to 95 percent of the “facts” in that confession. They’re tossing things out and he’s going “Ya” or “No” and when they don’t get the answer they want, they just ask him again.
Bob: There’s also the fact that he was not only a 16 year old kid, but he’s a minor bordering on cognitive impairment
Chad: Exactly, that’s, that’s the thing, I was looking at sort of the parallels between him and Jay Wilds because both, in my opinion were leaned on into false confessions but the difference being, Jay Wilds knows his way around, he knows what he’s about to do when he cops, actually I think he stumbled into the confession of accessory before the fact, but by the time he’s copping to the crime, he knows exactly what’s going to happen, whereas Brendan Dassey has no clue, absolutely no clue of what he is doing while he is doing it, he’s digging his own grave and he has no idea.
It’s so hard to watch because you just go, “is that the freaking best we can do?” like seriously, this kid? He knows NOTHING, he knows nothing, the one significant detail that they try to get him to admit to, and they can’t even stay patient long enough to get him to, they’re leading him all over the place and they can’t even lead him to the detail they want, which you know, I guarantee if they get him to say “oh yeah she got shot” they cut before and after and that’s the clip they show to the jury, “Oh yeah we got Brendan Dassey, he knows she got shot, that’s a fact we hadn’t shared with anyone else, he’s guilty, done, end of discussion”, but they can’t even succeed at that.
Bob: No it was terrible, and the parallel is that while they were both false confessions and the difference is that they were for two very different reasons. Brendan Dassey, if that’s a false confession, and I believe that it is, he was manipulated into it because of his lack of intelligence whereas Jay Wilds I think was manipulated into his false confession because of his higher intelligence. I think him having experience and an understanding of how the Baltimore Police department works and he was smart enough when he got into the position to know, okay, if I don’t play ball here they’re going to charge me with murder. So he figured out a way to put it on someone else so that he avoided the death penalty himself. So it’s two completely different frames of mind with the same result. The final check on that is, we have the prosecutors, you have a lawyer to defend you, and the final check on them is the supposedly unbiased jury of your peers.
Chad: And the judge, the judge is supposed to, I mean the judge in this case, the fact that the judge was basically carrying water for Ken Kratz and the prosecution was not hard to see. His opinion at least in the Dassey case, his opinion that Dassey’s false was voluntary, once again, the arguments, the premises that have to be accepted in order to get to that place are ludicrous. You’ve got two cops, holding him in a room, he’s not allowed to leave, ergo, NOTHING IS VOLUNTARY, nothing is voluntary when you are being held in a room against your will, multiple times he asks them if he’s going to make it sixth period, “No sorry Brendan you’re not going to make it”.
And to say that the cops throwing out all of these lies did not effect his perception of reality is insane! It’s absolutely insane, because he’s got a very tenuous grip on reality as it is, just because biology is an unfair [female dog] and distributes intellectual ability very, very unevenly, you know and he and most of his family, they fall on that far left side of the bell curve. The whole time I was just like, the most important thing is not these general principle arguments if you’re talking about average guy, 100 IQ, holds down a job, etc. etc. First of all, 16 year old kid, take that into account, no attorney present, no adult present and a 67 IQ. That has to trump everything else, every other consideration; you cannot look at a story without considering just who the narrator is. In this case you have a very, very unreliable narrator in Brendan Dassey.
Bob: The fact that it was accepted at all is just insane. But then that’s the problem, we look at these cases, at least for me I can speak for myself, looking at these cases, looking at Steven Avery’s case, looking at Adnan Syed’s case, looking at Brendan Dassey’s case, I keep asking myself, “How did a jury fall for this?” How do they get a unanimous twelve person jury to convict?
Chad: Oh that boggles my mind, but at the same time I think there is a fundamental flaw in the jury system whereby people that are either the most charismatic or just the most stubborn can move other jurors off of their position without extreme amounts of difficulty.
Bob: Right, I just had a friend I was having dinner with the other night and we were talking about this exact subject and he was talking about a trial that he sat on the jury for last year and when they got back they were deliberating and there were two people that were holdouts, they didn’t agree, they were 100% dug in, they weren’t going to convict no matter what. After the second day he said one of the jurors said, and I quote “you know what, [Fudge] it I want to go home and eat, fine, guilty”.
Chad: That’s literally what happens, because they make you keep deliberating and nobody’s getting paid their regular wage and nobody really wants to be there, and the people that do really want to be there are the exact people you do not want on your jury. Just like politics, the first one to step up is probably the one you don’t want to be your politician, you want the guy that begrudgingly accepts the position because he’s qualified.
In New York, I volunteered for jury duty in the hopes that I could hang a jury in any drug case, even though drug cases mostly do not go to trial, but there’s a principle called jury nullification, where if you are sitting on a jury, and you do not agree with the law, and I fundamentally do not agree with drugs being illegal and do not believe we should incarcerate people for that, you are allowed to say “Not Guilty”. This is principle that very few people are aware of. Jury Nullification is fundamentally supposed to be another check, another one of those little checks on abuses of power. If the people see something that makes no sense, like the guys in Oregon that were charged with terrorism for setting a fire on their land.
Chad: So let me bounce my theory as to the whole how does this happen question off you and see what you think. So one of the things that I’m sort of interested in, I consider myself a general observer of the human experience and the human condition. So when I look at a situation like Steven Avery, like Adnan Syed, the first thing that I look at is, the individual involved, even if they are intentionally committing malfeasance, that is not what they are telling themselves when they get up in the morning to brush their teeth.
The human brain is a rationalization and a justification machine, nobody gets up in the morning and says “I’m a [not very nice] person”, ah I guess some people do, but very few. We almost always tell ourselves that we are doing things for the right reasons, that we have to do them, there’s always a justification. That kind of led me to the “Ends justify the means”, which I wrote a piece called “The Ends Justify the Means: Abstract” where I try to rip this argument apart because it, in my opinion, is the most dangerous argument that human beings have ever invented. Every war, every genocide, every murder, every anything comes down to a sort of “ends justify the means” because that’s what you use when you have NO better justification. So, Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, we’ve got to get rid of them, that’s an ends, so the means is, we have to invade Iraq. Purification of the Aryan race, ends, we’ve got to kill all the Jews, means. It’s one of those arguments that has so many flaws in it and yet it’s compelling to people from an emotional standpoint.
So when you’ve got an Adnan Syed, or you’ve got a Steven Avery or you’ve got a Brendan Dassey, I think what the officers involved in this are telling themselves (with Steven Avery this may not hold because there might be such a level of a frame up job that even the people involved in the conspiracy might not be able rationalize their way around it). Certainly with Adnan Syed what you’ve got is the cops saying “this guy is guilty, he’s guilty as all hell and we have to lean on Jay Wilds and get ourselves a false confession, we’re going to do that because, ends, Adnan in prison, means, Jay Wilds false confession, justified, we’ll do it every day of the week”. It’s one of those things where they say “It’s okay for us to do bad things to bad people”. If you start looking at it that way in the arena of law enforcement, you hear it all the time.
The way the prosecutors in both the Syed and the Avery case used negative framing of the situation is tremendous. With Syed, it was framed as a Muslim honor killing. That was the narrative underneath the entire trial the whole time. With Steven Avery it’s laughable but, they painted him as a sex criminal, as a serial rapist, basically they didn’t acknowledge the exoneration for the first crime because these are the same people that put him away the first time, but they tried to establish this pattern where Steven Avery is a sexual deviant, he rapes women and now he’s stepping on up to murder, I guess that makes sense and uh, he’s just a bad guy.
There may be some truth to this evidence, but the way they’re spinning it to the jurors is “the thing that really matters is did Steven Avery do it” and on one level, yes that’s very important and on another level that is irrelevant. The system is designed such that, with the presumption of innocence so that if the State cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you did it, even if you did do it, you have to be allowed to walk out of there. That is one of the most foundational protections that we have against these miscarriages of justice and they’re getting around that by saying “no, no that’s not important, whether he really did it is important, oh and by the way, we know he did it, we know, so you guys just go ahead and rubber stamp that for us”. There’s this weird assumption that I think all of us carry up until the point of disillusionment, where we assume that the cops do not arrest innocent people. We assume that.
Bob: Another piece of that is that people tend to inherently trust police and trust the prosecution. You walk into a court room and you assume that the cops are the good guys and the prosecutor, he or she is…
Chad: They call themselves “The People” for a reason, and they call it the “Justice System”, there’s so much positive framing that goes on before the jury ever steps foot in the court room that you are not on a level playing field.
Bob: On the police side the flaws start there, it’s the incentives. What are our incentives? A prosecutor that gets promoted and moves up the ranks to Assistant DA and DA, they get there by winning, they don’t get there by being the most just and by having the correct verdict every time, they walk into the court room just like Aaron Rodgers walks into a football game on Sunday, the mentality is “I have to win at all costs”. It doesn’t matter if the person is innocent or guilty, that was the cops’ job was to make sure they sent me the guilty guy, my job is to win. Once they get to that point, they are going to win. When the prosecutors are preparing the case before trial, they’re saying things like “this is going to be a tough win” or “this is a [not very nice] case” but they’re going to go out and prosecute it anyway.
Chad: And that’s their job and they will tell themselves, just like the cops, “I’m just doing my job” “That’s above my pay grade”, all the little rationalizations along the way and I don’t know where we get the idea, maybe it’s from the name of the system, maybe it’s from how they introduce the court system to us in school, but this idea that they are there to find the truth, is just fundamentally untrue. There is nothing in the system that is in any way designed to find the truth. When the Vikings play the Packers, they’re not there to find the truth; they’re there to beat each other.
Bob: Right, and the jadedness comes in where on the other side of the coin you have the defense, and we all know that everyone is entitled to a lawyer, meaning all the people in prison that are guilty had a lawyer standing there in front of them defending them, an actual guilty person. So there’s that cynicism where, just because they have somebody defending them doesn’t mean they’re innocent, guilty people have lawyers all the time.
It’s like well we trust the cops and we trust the prosecutors, so there’s that bias that’s there in the jury’s mind and then the other piece of this for the jury, its something that I’m talking to Texas Tech University right now about, is trying to put something together to try to educate lawyers in a way, up and coming lawyers, from a teaching perspective, that you have to as a defense attorney, you have to do a better job of teaching the jury what it is you are trying to get across to them. I read a lot of trial transcript, I listen to a lot of court audio, I’ve been on juries myself for weeks at a time and they’re presenting a case and they’re presenting evidence but it’s all in the blur of a six to eight week trial and there’s no way they’re going to remember all this.
It comes back to what you were saying earlier about who’s got the most charisma and who’s the better speaker. These are the people you work these biases toward, it’s like who do you like? Who you like is who you’re going to listen to. If one person’s a great speaker and the other person is Christina Gutierrez, who are you going to listen to?
Chad: I made a joke the other day about Christina Gutierrez, which was: I figured out how to write questions like Christina Gutierrez, first write a statement, “then add did you not” to the statement. That’s basically every Gutierrez question, which is basically a statement with “did you not” or “does it not” or “Something comma not” It’s super grating to listen to, I’m not sure who ever advised her that this was an effective way to speak, because it isn’t, at least in my opinion and I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think a lot of people were frustrated with having to listen to her; it sure confused the hell out of a lot of witnesses.
Bob: It’s so hard to follow, imagine yourself on the jury and trying to follow that. I mean for Christ sake when I was doing the episode on “Mr. S” and I was reading those trial transcripts, I wanted to smash my head against the table, because, between the way she phrased questions and that’s difficult to follow or understand, and Mr. S is kind of being a pain in the ass, which is kind of funny if you can imagine it, one question and answer was six pages of transcript.
Chad: Is it her just rephrasing them over and over and over again?
Bob: She’s staying with her “blah blah blah, did you not?” and Mr. S is like “I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about”, and Gutierrez responds “did you or did you not do this”, Mr. S “did not what, I don’t know what you’re saying” [Gutierrez] “Was it this street right?” [Mr. S] “I don’t know the street names” [Gutierrez] “But you know that there’s a street right?” [Mr. S] “Well yeah I know that there’s a street” [Gutierrez] “And you drove on the street did you not?”
Chad: I think that what it is is that she wants “yes or no” answers as much as possible, that’s the only thing that I could guess as to what she’s trying to get at.
Bob: It’s like these courtroom antics, and that’s what I’m trying to get at with the defense attorneys. She’s trying to do things, I don’t know if it’s because of the way she saw Matlock, where it’s like I’m going to lead you down this path, asking these questions and trapping them and not realizing that four pages ago, the jurors shut down, they’re done, they’re not even listening to what she’s saying . The point she was trying to make was, he took the long way back to school instead of going the normal route.
Chad: Which you just managed to phrase in a way that is easy to understand, in one sentence.
Bob: Yeah, and 20 minutes later, she never lands that punch. You have to realize that you’re speaking to those twelve jurors. I say that not as an attorney, but as an instructor, if I’m teaching a class of those twelve jurors, what is the best way I can present this to those jurors for them to understand and retain my point? They’re not going to have to think about this again until four weeks from now when they’re deliberating and what are the chances that they are going to remember it?
Chad: Without a sufficiently good “hook” to grab the attention, people zone out after about twenty minutes, that’s been scientifically validated over and over again. If you’re delivering a long presentation, if you’re giving an hour presentation, twenty minutes in, you have to use something, some kind of change of pace, something, they call it a “hook” in the books I’ve read, to re-grab the attention because everybody’s attention is starting to wane, unless the person is just endlessly fascinated in what you’re saying in which case you have hooks delivering themselves, but for the most part, you as the presenter have to get that into your presentation and Gutierrez just fails miserably at it. She actively makes you want to tune out because it’s too much work to try to figure out of what she’s saying.
Bob: Exactly, and the thing is, is that it’s not just her. She’s an example we’re all familiar with but I spend a fair amount of time as an expert witness, so I spend a fair amount of time in the courtroom testifying myself, one of the reasons that lawyers like to use me is because I speak plainly. I don’t…
Chad: You don’t get lost in abstracts?
Bob: Right. I don’t try to impress them with big words, I approach it as if I have twelve students that have no idea what I’m talking about, and so I need to be clear and concise and practical so that they understand it. To this point I’ve never been part of a case where the side that I was serving as an expert for lost. Now at the same time I won’t get involved in a case unless I believe that that side is correct.
Chad: That justice will be served?
Bob: Yeah.
Chad: It would be a weird thing to be the Truth & Justice podcast guy but on the side be taking gigs to lock up innocent people; I think that might hurt your brand a little bit.
Bob: Right yeah, the stuff that I do is mostly civil stuff involving administrative stuff with firefighting, if a Fire Chief gets fired somewhere, I’ll get called in to testify about their normal boring stuff like what their job should be and what the law says about it and how it effects actually being a fire chief, things of that nature. I testify also in arson cases that I’ve investigated but that’s not as an expert that’s just as an investigator.
Chad: On the subject of lawyers in the cases that we’re talking about, I had what I thought to be an interesting observation. Which is, if you comp the lawyers to one another, Dassey lines up with Syed and Jay Wilds lines up with Steven Avery, in that Jay gets Anne Benaroya who does a great job for Jay. She secures a phenomenal deal where he doesn’t go to jail. Meanwhile Dean Strang and Jerry Buting do what I thought was a very good job defending Steven Avery. They didn’t win, but that does not mean that they didn’t do a hell of a job.
On the other side of the coin you’ve got Syed with Gutierrez and Dassey with Len Kachinsky and the thing that I think is ironic is that Jay ends up with the good lawyer and he’s not paying her a dime. Meanwhile Syed’s family forks out thousands of dollars because they think they’re getting Dean Strang and Jerry Buting, but they’re getting Len Kachinsky in different skin. They’re getting an incompetent attorney that fails so many basic, basic moves that the whole ineffective assistance of council claim holds up apparently. As it should because, if I’m being defended by Christina Gutierrez, maybe I decide in the middle of the trial that I would rather defend myself. I’m sure he’s [Adnan] sitting there going “what the hell is she [Gutierrez] doing”? How is she not nailing these people down to their statements? She’s got the idea that she wants to nail somebody on and then she just flubs the execution or in some cases never even has the idea because obviously she’s winging it.
Her record would show, and granted, with the health issues and everything else, and my theories are drug problem or gambling problem as to where the $300k goes, or terrible investor, but that’s another interesting sort of side note. Her record shows that is a halfway competent attorney when she’s preparing, but she obviously does no preparation for this because she’s handling like nine cases simultaneously, which, that alone should get her disqualified because you cannot competently handle nine murder cases, they’re too big. The only person that does something like that is a person with an uber short term focus. There’s some reason that she has to get that money ASAP, it’s like there’s a mob hitman waiting to break her kneecaps with a baseball bat. That’s the only reason that, because when you’re an attorney, your reputation is all you’ve got. At the end of her career, Gutierrez reputation goes in the exact opposite direction from what she spent the entirety of her career building and she burns it down over the course of a couple years and stolen money.
Bob: It’s almost like she made this crest where, I think you’re right, I think there’s some underlying issue that she needs money for, but in order for someone to morally be able to do what she’s done, I feel like you have to hit that point where you hit a crest, I don’t know if it’s burnout or what it is, but you stop, you don’t have a mission anymore, you have a job. My job is how I get paid, I go into the courtroom, I do my thing, I get my money and I leave.
Chad: You’ve lost any ideological attachment to it; you’re going through the motions. Without a doubt the description of her lifestyle, I mean I was an investment banker for a couple years, so I know burnout about as well as anybody on the face of this earth. I did the whole working 110 hours a week for two straight years gig and it does, it can’t last You can hold out for a period of time, but you cannot succeed in the long run with a lifestyle like that. I’m sure she was well aware of that but you get in denial about these things. You kind of just tell yourself “well I have to do it for another day, I have to do it for another day, have to do it for another day”. I can only imagine how much stronger that urge gets when you have kids. I’m only 26, not married and no children so the only person I’m screwing over by not being a banker anymore is myself.
Bob: Right, yeah, less to worry about. It’s similar to my situation except where I made the move. I’ve been dedicated to the fire service for all these years and I say that that was a mission for me. Every day I go to work and I want to do the best for my department, do the best for my community, make sure that we’re the best trained, have the best equipment and that we do the best job to protect people when things catch on fire, when they crash their cars or have a heart attack or whatever happens. Then I started working on these cases and I got more and more and more invested in them and it got to a point where it was like okay I’m spending now, I get home from work, I have dinner with the kids, try to spend a little bit of time with the wife, then I’ve got a laptop on my lap in bed until 2 o’clock in the morning, then get up and go to work and focus on that for the time being.
Chad: That’s how you know that you made the right decision. You’re not forcing yourself to be on that laptop at two in the morning. You’re going where your interests are taking you. I think that ultimately everybody would like to get there but not everybody finds it, and it’s hard, it’s hard to find that thing, but when you do, it’s a huge waste if you don’t run with it because some people live their entire lives and never find it.
Bob: For me the ultimate decision was, because I love both jobs and I feel like they are both very important and it took a lot of thought to figure out okay, I cannot, the first step was to realize that I can’t do both and do well. So which one is it? Part of what became my ultimate decision was there are a lot of people that can step into the job as fire chief of my department and do a great job with it. The number of guys doing what I’m doing with these other cases, where can I be the most help?
I think that if I walked away from this work and stayed in the fire department, I don’t know that someone else would step in and do what I’m doing. So that’s when the decision was final. I’m a mission driven person and I think this mission is useful, it’s meaningful and it’s working, so I want to continue doing it, continue helping people, and continue trying to fix this system. The hope is that over time, I get enough of an audience, enough people getting involved and interested in this that people start to notice and say okay, we need change.
Chad: The most important thing is that we have to have the conversation. The change will come when we’re having the conversation, but this conversation has been actively avoided for fifty years at least, these problems have been there for a long, long time. Yet, when people see the Steven Avery thing, when people see the Adnan Syed thing, when people hear your podcast, the reaction is tremendous. You don’t really have to give them much of a push, just get them the subject matter and they’ll do the work, I think that’s the most encouraging thing from my perspective about what you’re doing, what I’m trying to jump on the bandwagon of.
There’s no better time than right now, we’re in an election year, the technology that exists right now is unparalleled, the fact that I can talk to you, I’ve never met you, just through something like Twitter, it’s tremendous. Twenty years ago, there’s a zero percent chance that I’m doing this and there’s a zero percent chance that you’re doing this. I’m a banker and you’re a firefighter for the rest of our careers and we’re never getting involved in anything like this. We might read in the newspaper about a kooky murder case, but once we put that newspaper down, that’s it. That person is forgotten by everybody except their family and friends.
Bob: You might get this nagging feeling for a few hours and say “Oh I wish there was something we could do” then it’s like oh the sports section.
Chad: Yeah and that makes sense twenty years ago because there was nothing you could do. How are you going to add anything to a police investigation on a dial up internet connection? It’s absurd, it’s an absurd suggestion, so that reaction makes perfect sense. So because the information was not there, the spark that lights the fire was not there, so it makes perfect sense that the conversation never happened.
But in 2016, they’re going to have to build a dam to hold back the river of people that are just pissed off. The overwhelming feeling that I get from my interaction with every day people. Every signal that I’m getting says something is not right. Something is not right in so many areas, but this a huge, huge area where something is not right. Just given the number of people that are going to have an encounter with the justice system over the course of their lifetime, we can’t afford to muck this one up, we can’t, we just can’t. I understand the rationale I understand the mindset of the average middle class white person that will go their entire lives and never have an encounter with the wrong end of the justice system for the remainder of their adult lives.
But what if? What if you happen to be Steven Avery, what if your kid happens to be Steven Avery, what then? Don’t you want a justice system that allows people that are not Robert Durst to get treated like Robert Durst? It’s a different justice system for Robert Durst than it is for Brendan Dassey. You would hope that the two would be the same in all practical ways. But right now they’re not, and almost nothing is being done to make them that way.
Bob: My hope is, I had somebody ask me the other day, aren’t you afraid that other people are going to get on the bandwagon and make other podcasts doing what you’re doing? My answer to that is, no that’s what needs to happen.
Chad: That would be the greatest thing that could ever happen to you, is a growth within the mini industry within podcasting, your niche, because you’re the first guy to start doing it. Plus, you couldn’t possibly cover all the case that you want to cover, so it’s not like they’re stealing cases away from you, there’s too many, there’s too many for a thousand Bob Ruff’s to deal with.
Bob: What I would love to see happen, is for prosecutors and police officers that are working a case like this to have that nagging fear in the back of their mind.
Chad: The accountability, the fear of being proven to have been corrupt after the fact.
Bob: Right.
Chad: It’s one of the only tools that we have, I was actually kicking around ideas the whole time I’m watching the Making A Murderer series, I’m thinking to myself “I know, I know, I know, I know that there is a zero percent chance that the justice system is going to hold the guilty officers and prosecutors accountable”, that didn’t happen in the first case and the first case was arguably more obviously egregious than the second. The AG’s report found no wrongdoing.
Bob: Right.
Chad: The prosecutors just don’t prosecute themselves, that’s not how it works.
Bob: Right.
Chad: So I’m thinking, what can we citizens, what can we do to hold these people accountable, because I, despite the fact that I am not a fan of the government, I’m also not a fan of lynch mobs, really not a fan of lynch mobs. That destroys any credibility we might have when we act in a kneejerk fashion. We become the bad guys in that case. So the idea that I came up with is: how about everybody that comes across Ken Kratz in his everyday life just bend over and tie your shoe, make him walk around you, just take a little bit of time from his day. Take 10 seconds, take 15 seconds, don’t touch him, don’t assault him, but he also can’t walk through you, that’s the beauty of physics. If you are walking through a door frame, he’s going to have to wait for you to walk through that doorframe. If you’re serving him coffee, maybe you make someone else’s coffee first.
We just need to take 60 seconds and if 60 people take 60 seconds, we’ve just taken an hour of Ken Kratz life. Just imagine if somebody added an hour a day to your commute, or added sixty seconds buffering time every time you wanted to use the internet. The crux of the idea is that these people have forfeited their right for us to be helpful to them. So we can decide to be actively unhelpful in our encounters with them and there is nothing that they can do about it because being a jerk, being unhelpful, stopping to tie your shoe while walking through a door frame is not illegal. It’s not violent and yet, time is the greatest resource that we have on this planet because we never get any more of it.
So let Ken Kratz have his money, I’d rather take Ken Kratz time. I’d rather take a year of Ken Kratz life than all the money that he has. It sounds a little malicious, but I don’t think it is, I think it’s a very just proposition. It’s the only thing that I can think of, other than us having conversations and ridiculing them and ruining their good name, which they did to themselves. I’ll still make fun of his mustache and still make fun of how Mike Halbach jerks off to photos of him, but I don’t really need too much help to ruin Ken Kratz image, he already did that himself, I’m just tossing an assist.
Bob: From my perspective and what I’m doing, I’m less interested in going after Ken Kratz and more interested in going after the system that allows him to be Ken Kratz.
Chad: For sure, for sure. From Making A Murderer at least though, everyone watching wanted vengeance, but I definitely agree that going after the system, prevention rather than cure is the way to go.
Bob: That’s what we need, we need to have so much momentum and it needs to not be just a flash in the pan. This needs to be consistent and keep going so that those prosecutors and those cops, every case they’re like “shoot, there’s about a 90% that if I [screw] this up somebody is going to broadcast this, whether it’s Bob Ruff or Rabia Chaudry or Chad Thayer or whoever”, that’s why I hope there’s more and more of these podcasts and TV shows doing this, we’re going to end up with shame throughout the country and attacked if I do this. It’s going to make them think twice about doing it.
I’m hoping that there’s some coming because I have listeners that will email me and say “I know it’s kind of a bad thing to ask, but I’m thinking about starting a podcast like yours, how do I do it?” I’ve gotten on the phone with those people, I’ll walk you through it, I’ll show you how to setup your iTunes account. For starters, there’s no competition in podcasting, people that listen to podcasts are always looking for more. I have about ten podcasts that I listen to regularly and by Wednesday I’m like [shoot].
Chad: I go through that problem on a daily basis when certain podcasts that I want to listen to are not up, I’m just like damn I need some content.
Bob: My folks had never heard of a podcast before this summer, it’s getting bigger and bigger, the audience keeps growing and I think it’s already effecting change on a smaller level.
Chad: Alright Bob, well I really, really appreciate your time tonight; it’s been awesome talking to you.