Everyday Injustice

This is our first of our monthly podcasts with Mayor Brett Lee. Davis Mayor Brett Lee discusses critical issues facing Davis: homelessness, the respite center, traffic congestion at Mace, housing and economic development.

David Thorne is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for allegedly hiring an acquaintance to kill the mother of his son, however, he never hired anyone nor did the acquaintance do the crime.

Sometime between the evening hours on March 31, 1999 and 12:00 p.m. on April 1, 1999, Yvonne Layne, a mother of 5, was murdered in her home with one solid and steady slit to her throat.

David Thorne was convicted of complicity to aggravated murder/murder for hire on January 25, 2000 by a 12 person jury.

The police investigating the crime had tunnel vision throughout their investigation, narrowing in on David from the beginning.

The investigators were unable to get David to confess, so instead they went after his acquaintance, Joseph Wilkes, who was barely 18 years of age and a high school dropout.

After a lengthy interrogation, during which they told Joseph that David was “next door ratting him out”, he confessed, utilizing the story that the police had fed to him to what the police were telling him happened.

Joe took a plea deal and David went to trial. Despite the lack of physical evidence of either Joe or David being at the scene and a poor police investigation, with very weak circumstantial evidence, an innocent man was convicted.

Imagine you have been arrested and held in custody for years for a crime you did not commit and deprived the right to see an attorney. Incredibly that's what happened to James Faire and his wife Angela.

James Faire of Tonasket was originally charged in Okanogan County with several crimes after he allegedly ran over Debra Long of Issaquah and George Abrantes of Marysville with a pickup truck during a confrontation in Tonasket, Wash., in 2015. Long died and Abrantes was injured in the incident.

Faire maintained from the beginning that he and his wife were being attacked by Long and Abrantes and he was attempting to drive away from them when they suddenly surrounded his vehicle, and he was unable to avoid hitting them.

Finally in 2019, an appeals court tossed out the criminal charges - ruling that prosecutors couldn't disprove that he acted in self-defense.

Tio Dinero Sessoms was 19 years old when two Sacramento homicide detectives interrogated him about a deadly home invasion he says he didn’t participate in. November 1999.

He would be coerced into taking a false confession and even when the appellate courts overturned his sentence, he was forced to take a plea agreement for time served rather than receive his full exoneration.

Elizabeth Kim, the President of the Sacramento Branch of the National Lawyer's Guild talks about her arrest at the age of 19 for a small quantity of marijuana, how that turned into a felony drug conviction, and how she continues to pay for that crime even 15 years later as she has become an attorney and moved on with her life.

She also talked about her work with the National Lawyer's Guild and the Stephon Clark case and lack of accountability for police and prosecutors in the current criminal justice system.

In 2009, Ajay Dev was wrongly convicted of 76 counts of raping his adopted daughter and sentenced to 378. Now a decade later, he is having his Habeas Corpus hearing in Yolo County attempting to exonerate him.

Listen for the first time as he talks about his experience behind bars in a California Prison and listen to people around him talking about his case and how the jury got it wrong.

Joe D. Martin joins us live from his Tennessee Prision.

His story from a Change.org petition:

"Joe D. Martin, Jr., did not receive a fair trial in 1996. As a result, he was wrongfully convicted and has been wrongfully imprisoned for 23+ years. He was found guilty of first degree murder and two attempted murders for which he is innocent. His conviction rested on the use of perjured testimony, prosecutorial misconduct and closed-door deals made with State’s witnesses, as well as, intimidation of defense witnesses prior to trial. Joe had no connection to anyone involved in this case- he is innocent!

"The states theory was that the shooting at the market was the result of an ongoing “drug war” between his co-defendants and some unknown drug suppliers from California. The prosecutor told the jury that Joe was “a henchman for the Mafia Smith Family”, this was supposed to be his connection to the Smiths and reason for committing these crimes. However, Shaun Smith testified at trial that he had never met Joe. Dallas Smith and Vera (Virie) Ashby both testified at Joe’s post-conviction hearing that they did not know Joe and that he had never been to their home. Kevin Robinson and Tim Miller, victims, testified that they had never met Joe, nor had they seen him around the neighborhood. Joe had no connection or motive to commit these crimes."

Learn more on his podcast: http://discriminalnation.podbean.com/

This is from the Generation Why Podcast:

"Ronnie Long. April 25, 1976. Concord, North Carolina. A man enters a home through an upstairs window and rapes the woman who lives there. Detectives work quickly to solve the case. Within 15 days of the attack, the woman will head to court after being asked to go there to see if she could recognize the man who had raped her. After an African-American man named Ronnie Long walks by where she is sitting, she positively identifies him as the one responsible. Police had discovered strong similarities between her description of the man and Ronnie Long and what they were wearing. With that, they believe they have the right man in custody. Later, a jury will agree and find him guilty of rape and burglary. He was given two concurrent 80 year sentences."

Like so many of these wrongful conviction cases, it is only later that the truth starts to emerge including the fact that there were serious issues with the investigation and prosecution of Ronnie Long.

We speak to Ronnie Long's wife, Ashleigh about his story.

Paul Fullerton was a well decorated firefighter for over 20 years with the UC Davis Fire Department. A work-related injury led him to use medical cannabis and ultimately brought this law abiding citizen into the focus of agents of YONET, who targeted him and his business, until they finally found an excuse to arrest him and his wife, and threaten to take away his daughter and livelihood.

Having served his 90 days of house arrest, after a misdemeanor plea agreement, Mr. Fullerton came forward to tell the full story that never came out when his case resolved.

In 1995, Obie Anthony was 19 years old when he was convicted of murder and attempted robbery. Despite no physical evidence connecting him to the crime, prosecutors relied on testimony from an informant - a convicted killer and pimp who ran a house of prostitution near the scene of the crime, and who claimed to have seen the shooter.

In 2008, the Northern California Innocence Project working with Loyola's Project for the Innocent, took on his case.The court vacated Anthony’s conviction on September 30, 2011, after an 11-day evidentiary hearing. After 17 years in prison, Anthony was released on October 4, 2011, and prosecutors dismissed the charges on November 18, 2011. In August 2012, Anthony filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles, which agreed to settle the claim in 2015 for $8.3 million. Anthony was also awarded compensation by the State of California in the amount of $581,600.

Obie Anthony has become an activist and used his lawsuit to create Exonerated Nation.