Ep40 Wrongful Imprisonment - Jeffery Deskovic

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Luke 00:00:06  Welcome to another episode of the Impro Pod podcast. My guest today is Jeffrey Kovic. Welcome to the podcast, Jeffrey.

Jeffery  00:00:15  Thank you very much for having me.

Luke 00:00:17  So would you like to introduce yourself a bit?

Jeffery  00:00:19  I'm an attorney. I'm the founder of the Jeffrey Kovic Foundation for justice. Our mission is to free people who are wrongfully imprisoned and to pursue policy changes aimed at preventing that from happening in the first place. Since opening our doors in 2011, we've been able to free 14 people. We have passed three laws and then another six as part of a national coalition group in the United States located in New York. if a master's degree, my master's thesis is written on wrongful conviction, causes and reform. And I got into doing this advocacy work because I survived 16 years of wrongful imprisonment and myself. I was arrested when I was 16 for a murder and rape, which I did not commit. I turned 17. The trial started, I lost, and I was in prison from age 17 to 32 with a wrongful conviction, despite the DNA not matching me.

Jeffery  00:01:13  It was caused by coerced false confession. Ultimately, I was exonerated through further DNA testing, through the DNA databank that established my innocence while identifying the actual perpetrator. So my life mission is to free people in the same position I was once in, and to prevent what happened to me from happening to others. And.

Luke 00:01:44  I'd like you to tell me a story of some kind. And then I'm going to break the story down into sections and improvise a soundtrack to the story.

Jeffery  00:01:54  I would like to share with you all the story of how I was arrested for the murder and rape, which I did not commit. The year was 1990. It was in Peekskill, which is a suburb in Westchester County, New York. It was a population of approximately 25,000 people. Murders were pretty rare, so when this murder happened, it created an atmosphere of fear, rumor, paranoia. Parents were concerned with their own safety as well as the safety of their children. In high school, I was quiet. I was telling myself I didn't participate in a lot of organized sports, so that made me seem strange to the kids in the high school and of course, of the police investigation.

Jeffery  00:02:34  The police interviewed many students from the school, and some of them told the police that they might want to speak with me because I didn't quite fit in. That's how I initially got on the police radar. I was a sensitive teenager and this was my first real brush with death, and so I had an emotional reaction to it. And so the police thought that my emotional reaction was suspicious. And given that I, you know, barely knew the victim. A reinforcing factor is that the Peekskill police got a psychological profile from the NYPD, which claimed to have the psychological characteristics of the actual perpetrator. And I had the misfortune of matching that. So for about six weeks, the police played this cat and mouse game with me, in which half the time they would speak to me like I was a suspect, and when they would push too hard and I would get frightened and I'd want to get away from them. The other half, the time they'd switch it up. And then Jeff is this junior detective helper thing was developed.

Jeffery  00:03:31  They would say things like, the kids won't talk freely around us, but they will around you. So let us know if you hear anything. I came from a single parent household. My father was never involved in my life in any aspect. And so that intersected with the good cop bad cop technique, in which the one officer would pretend like he was my friend, and I began to look up to him as a father figure. So eventually they got me to agree to take a lie detector test. So the next day, rather than report to the high school, I went to the police station for the test because it was a school day. My mother and grandmother thought I was in school. They had no idea that anything was wrong and therefore they did not call around looking for me. They drove me from Peekskill, which is in Westchester County. They drove me 40 minutes away by car across county lines to the town of Brewster. I didn't have an attorney present. They didn't give me anything to eat the entire time I was there.

Jeffery  00:04:29  The polygraph was a Putnam County sheriff's investigator, but he was dressed like a civilian. He never identified himself as law enforcement. He never read me my rights. He gave me a four page brochure which explained how the polygraph worked, but it had a lot of big words in it that I didn't understand. But then I figured I'm there to help the police. So what does it matter? Let's just get on with it. From there, he put me in a small room. He gave me countless cups of coffee in order to get me nervous. And then he literally wired me up to the polygraph machine. And then he launched into his third degree tactics. So he raised his voice at me. He got in my personal space. He kept asking me the same questions over and over again. And as each hour passed, my fear increased in proportion to the time. And he kept that up for six and a half to seven hours. Towards the end of the interrogation he said, what do you mean you didn't do it? You just told me through the test that you did.

Jeffery  00:05:29  We just want you to verbally confirm it. So when he said that to me, that really shot my fear to the roof. And at that point, the officer who had been pretending to be my friend came in the room and told me that the other officers are going to harm you. I told them off, but I can't do so any longer. You have to help yourself. And then when he added it up, I did what they wanted, that they'd stop what they're doing. That I was not going to be arrested. So being young, naive, frightened, 16 years old, I wasn't thinking about the long term. I was just concerned for my safety and the moment I was in fear of my life. Because the fact that I didn't know where I was, if no one else knew either, loomed large in my mind. And then there was the push pull dynamic of the the possibility of harm and the false life preserver that he threw me. And so I decided to take the out, which he offered.

Jeffery  00:06:20  And I made up a story based on the information he gave me that day and what I had been provided in six weeks run up to it. By the time it was all said and done, I had collapsed on the floor in a fetal position, crying uncontrollably. The interrogation was not videotaped. It's not audiotape. There was no sign. Confession. And as a result of that, later when they came to court, they left the threat and false promise out of their story. So that's how I was arrested for a murder and rape, which I didn't commit.

Luke 00:06:49  Wow. It's quite a story. It's quite a story of betrayal and manipulation.

Luke 00:06:55  I'm just going to go for this vibe of betrayal. You think it's all right to start with and you just want to help? And then slowly, after these courses of actions by the police, you begin to realise that you are being betrayed, manipulated. What did you think of that?

Jeffery  00:09:01  I liked the music at the beginning part, and I could feel the betrayal part of it when it came on, and just things started to go downhill from there.

Luke 00:09:10  Having a clarity of mind must become very difficult.

Jeffery  00:09:13  That's a great way to put it.

Luke 00:09:14  Yes. That piece of music in my mind, is sort of representing that cycle that must go on inside your mind. You can't get out of it constantly churning over these thoughts. It's almost like you're in prison already in your own mind. Correct. So I was trying to represent that. I've never experienced that like you have. I just have an idea of it. Sure. And that's what's interesting about this podcast, is often that I have to come up with something on the spot, so I have to bring my idea of it to the podcast, which can be very different to your idea of it.

Jeffery  00:09:50  But the whole premise is a very intriguing thing, capturing somebody's story in music, trying to represent that or come up with something musically that corresponds to that, and then to do it on the fly, as it were. Do you ever feel pressure as you're either before the show or even during the show, as someone's telling you their story and you're wrapping your head around it, and then you've got to simultaneously think about what musically can I put together with that? And while you're thinking that you're hearing a little bit more of the story and then the storytelling is over and now you've got to perform on the keys.

Jeffery  00:10:27  Do you ever feel pressure when you do that, though?

Luke 00:10:30  Yeah, I try and channel it. It's a very different experience to doing it live. I have done this live as well in an open mic, for example, especially if I'm not sure what to do and I'm struggling to articulate the story musically, then I feel the pressure and sometimes I have an idea, but I can't do it immediately. There's a particular scale which I associate with betrayal or just manipulation of characters. And I think that's because of the soundtrack in Talented Mr. Ripley, the film. There's a certain theme that comes through when the main character is being manipulative. And because I've seen the film many times and we've watched as a family, that theme is playing a part in what I'm doing now. So I'm kind of referencing films soundtracks. Right, right. Wow. So I tried to get a sense of that, but of course I can't remember it. I can't just play it off straight out of the bag. Sure. So I was trying to get that scale.

Luke 00:11:33  I'm not sure if I managed it. That was my interpretation of the priest instrumental from the film The Talented Mr. Ripley. The score was written.

Luke 00:12:00  By Gabriel Jared.

Luke 00:12:08  What did you learn from prison?

Jeffery  00:12:10  I learned the importance of just setting a goal and not taking no for an answer. I got an associate's degree in college. I completed another year towards the bachelor's before funding was cut. I learned to type, took a typing class. I took general business, which pertains to different applications of the computer and workforce setting. I went to computer repair. I learned about food service. I got six certificates in plumbing. I became a painter's helper. So I learned all those different vocational trades and educational things there. And then from 1998 to 2006, I read 3 or 4 nonfiction books a week. When I was released, I finished the bachelors, I got the masters, I became an attorney, and I learned about relationship dynamics and communication. And I think the biggest takeaway in terms of self-help is not really any one particular concept or not.

Jeffery  00:13:08  It was more just the ability to just do a deep introspection and look at yourself and analyze and think. And so I find that and here in society now, because I've been home for 18 years since I was released, I feel like I I'm able to empathize and I'm able to interpret and understand where people are coming from by what they say, even if they're not explicitly saying it to me. I can read between the lines and I can understand where they're coming from that way. And I think that it enables me to navigate through people.

Luke 00:13:51  Did you meet some interesting people in prison?

Jeffery  00:13:53  I did. I met somebody named Larry who was extremely talented at chess. Sometimes he would play like two people at the same time. He won like a ridiculous percentage of his games. He won maybe 99.2% of the games, and he would have all of this comedy routine and jokes that he would say while he was playing, he'd make a move where no matter what you do, you're going to lose a piece because he's threatened two pieces at once.

Jeffery  00:14:21  So he'd make the move and then he'd start saying, oh, he'd lower his glasses down and look at you in the eye, and you knew you were in trouble when that happened. So they had college education in prison before they took it away. And so we're in the computer lab there, and you're only supposed to do your work. But somehow or another, somebody had gotten Ahold of Pac-Man and loaded that game into there, and we would be playing. And the college had a proctor. Proctor role was to enforce through the rules. And so when we would be playing Pac-Man, you play two people at a time, use the arrow keys, and whoever wasn't playing would keep their eye open for where is the proctor? The practice name. First name is Jeff. Where's Jeff at? And yo, hurry up, he's coming. And we would push a key. A window key and or something else would pop up on the screen. It would cover the game. We would push the key and then pretend that we were doing legitimate work rather than playing.

Luke 00:15:18  Pac-Man just adds another dynamic to the game.

Jeffery  00:15:21  Yes it does. If you got caught, you would be banned from the computer room for a couple of weeks, so any assignments that had to be typed out to the computer would suddenly have to be handwritten.

Luke 00:15:32  I'm going to try and improvise a piece to this Pac-Man game. So you're playing Pac-Man, and because most of these games are blocked, but somehow the Pac-Man manages to get through. And so this is a game where you've got two dynamics, you've got the actual game itself, and then you're keeping an eye out for this guy who might be just around the corner. Yes. It's quite hard to do that. It was.

Jeffery  00:17:21  But I enjoyed it. I could see how that would be a musical representation. I interpreted. That last note that you hit was distinctly different from everything else. That's what he arrived. That's what he arrived at, came in the room, and we just did push that key in the nick of time so that he wouldn't see what we were doing on the computer screen.

Luke 00:17:42  It's quite interesting taking a computer game like that was obviously made in the 80s. And the music and those games there's no dynamics in it due to the technology that was around at the time. It's hard to make 80s music with a piano sound, but that 90s dance kind of theme is almost a bit ravey.

Jeffery  00:18:02  You know what else came to my mind just then as you did that just aired on the TV across the pond, as they say. But do you remember peanuts? Okay. Peanuts. It was created by Charles Schulz. It was a bunch of cartoon characters. And there was somebody in that name. Schroeder. And he had a mini piano that he used to carry around all the time. He'd play do to. Yeah. And it almost reminded me of that character here. Just doing a little free association with you here. He would carry this mini piano around and he would just start playing this familiar tune all the time.

Luke 00:18:38  I also wanted to get a sense of when Pac-Man dies. You have this quite distinct sound.

Jeffery  00:18:43  Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa.

Luke 00:18:45  But in fact, I played it in reverse because I couldn't quite remember what the sound was. I knew it was chromatic, I think. Yes. So it was something like that.

Jeffery  00:18:55  The music in the video games takes me back that part of life. When I was kind of naive, and the world was so much simpler then, and you were just young and learning and having fun was the only two real things you had to do each day when you were a kid.

Luke 00:19:16  So what did you get out of this podcast?

Jeffery  00:19:18  I'm a fan of most genres of music. If I'm in a wild mood and I might want to hear rap music, or if I'm being too rushed and maybe a fast paced, hard rock type thing. But I never really thought about music as a means of tranquility. And even though I'm supposed to stay a certain amount of mentally alert because I'm a guest on the podcast, I kind of allowed myself really to use the music as a calming, healing type of thing.

Jeffery  00:19:48  I kind of discovered that music can be used for that and that's important to me because in the course of doing my advocacy work, of trying to free people in the same position I was in, or trying to get one law passed or another, which is always like a long process, and there's always an urgency, and that can become stressful at times. I can see now that when I'm in those moments that as long as I'm not up against the hard and fast deadline, I can stop and maybe listen to some music that's just designed to calm a little bit. And then when it's finished, I can pick back up and go at a much more slower, tranquil rate.

Luke 00:20:32  Is there anything you want to promote?

Jeffery  00:20:34  There is a documentary short out about me. It's on Amazon Prime. It's called conviction. There's several works by that name. Obviously, I'm the one that'll have my picture on it. We're on Instagram desperate foundation, we're on Facebook, Jeffree Desk Foundation for justice. I have a public page there as well.

Jeffery  00:20:53  I have a dream of having a chapter of the organization in each state and ultimately in each country, because I really see wrongful conviction as a worldwide issue. Imagine if there were 25,000 people that were willing to sacrifice 3 to $5 a month on a recurring monthly basis towards freeing people. That would give close to $1 million. They could work on bringing so many more people home that way. So you'd be able to hire additional attorneys, investigators, paralegals, other essential personnel. I just would like to encourage people. We are on the website Patreon if you Google Patreon and Foundation. So if people could help me get the word out, share on social media and and contribute.

Luke 00:21:35  Thank you very much. It's been very insightful.

Jeffery  00:21:37  Thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Luke 00:21:41  Join us next week for another episode of Impro Pod.

Luke 00:21:44  Thanks for.

Luke 00:21:45  Listening.

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