Off Duty: The Sentence | Ep 6

0:00This is the Guardian. Why does every recipe I try need 18 ingredients, including a jar of something paste I'll never use again, but will sit my fridge for nine months. I just want dinner in the oven. Fast. That's why I love Blue Aprons new one-pan assemble and bake meals. They send you fresh ingredients that are already chopped. All you do is put it all together and bake. That's it. No chopping, no weird leftovers. Just delicious, easy to make meals. Get 20% off your first two orders with code apron20. Terms and conditions apply. Visit blue aprons.com slash terms for more. By August 2023, when Judge Lynn denied Alex a new trial, Jennifer and Eric had been obsessively working on his case for more than three years. But it hadn't been enough. In order to be successful in this job,

1:00you have to have a tenacity and a will to keep fighting and not give up. And for the first time, I really felt myself wanting to give up. Like just being like, why am I doing this? Why am I doing this to myself? Alex was in prison for life. And as they looked around their own lives, they discovered they'd become captives to the case too. I mean, it really determines, dug in at every level in our lives. Well, I started having thyroid issues. I think I was in fight or flight all the time. So I started having reading books about that. And I have jaw tension now that I used to and I have real bad TMJ. I gained 35 pounds, I think. So I was about 200, 210 pounds by the end of this. So I got depressed and it affected my relationship with my girlfriend. Because I was working all the time. Even if we were having dinner, I would be on my computer or I would be taking phone calls. I found that I lost my joy for doing things that brought me joy before.

2:02Working Alex's case was breaking them, physically, emotionally, and financially. And I think last year on my taxes, I made $25,000. Jennifer told me that working on the case pushed her back into therapy, where she found herself questioning everything she believed in as a lawyer. What I realized is it was impacting me so much psychologically because it was a total and utter complete failure on every level of the justice system. It felt like things couldn't get any darker. And then the unimaginable happened. From the Guardian, this is off duty. I'm Melissa Segura, episode six, the sentence. By the spring of 2024, Alex the sun Damien is 14 years old. He lives with his mom, Amanda, Alex's girlfriend.

3:05And she does her best to keep him safe and out of trouble. Both she and Alex are adamant that Damien have a different kind of upbringing than Alex did, that he steer clear of gangs. Get a good education. Amanda sends him to Catholic school. She buys him gym equipment for their home, so he could keep himself busy inside the house and not be out on the streets. In late March, Damien goes to visit his cousins, her brother's kids, in wiping Indiana, just 20 miles outside Chicago. As Damien and his cousins walk to a neighborhood park, a car pulls up. Then, bullets fly. Someone calls 911. The tape I'm about to play for you is excruciating.

4:05Amanda is at work when she gets a phone call. I remember when I was whole, my mom said, you got to go. You were somewhere shot. I'm like, I was so dumbfounded. I was like, my son was shot. Like, what? What do you mean he was shot? I couldn't make any sense to it. She rushes to the hospital. I couldn't get answers from anybody like the hospital. No one would tell me nothing until I get there. And I'm like, where did he get shot? Like, please say, it was like his hand is foot somewhere. I could be like, you're never leaving my side again. When she arrives at the hospital, she's brought into a room to talk to the doctor. He tells her he'd done all he could. But Damien is dead. I was at that moment, I honestly wanted to fight the doctor. Tell me he did all he could. And I was more like, I was more in the point of, how did this even happen? The best anyone could guess was that Damien wasn't the target.

5:05But no explanation would ever make sense to Amanda. Not now, and not as she stands in the hospital, struggling to take in the reality that Damien has been killed. This happens to our son. Like, and then to know, in the way that it happened is like, so unbelievable. Because there couldn't be a million years that someone could make me believe my son was shot. My son did not be around nothing like that. He was such a good kid. And then comes the realization she has to tell Alex. And I'm like, my God, in my head, I just kept playing over like, how am I even going to tell him? How is she going to hold it together enough to deliver this unbearable news? But also, literally, how is she going to reach him? Prisoners can't receive incoming calls. They can only call out. Amanda tries calling the prison, saying it was an emergency, and could they convey a message?

6:07But they don't. So she just has to wait for Alex to call her, which she does the next day. I just made a normal call. That phone answer is like, good morning. I just noticed. I noticed, uh, Amanda was, uh, sounded devastated. Her accident was wrong. And I just remember telling them, like, when I tell you, God, I promise to be, to be good, to be cool. And he just went off. Like, he was like, fuck to you mean, be good. Like, he's like a man, and he just kept saying like, Amanda, tell me how's wrong? Like, what? He's wrong, you know? And, and my only words that came out of my mouth was like, our son left us or something. And I said, our son, son's gone, our son left us. She's screaming. He's like, no. And dropped the phone and all was hearing, and the background was like, him faults of ground screaming like, no, not my son.

7:11And I didn't know what was going on, because like, I didn't get to explain anything. It felt like I was going to go in a panic attack, I don't know. But it's weird, because when, when she told me that, there was like a fight breaking down in jail, so through it all, all the noise, I couldn't hear nothing. I was just like, so, tunnel vision from what she told me. And I just kept saying, not him, God, not him. Making matters worse. The prison was put on lockdown. All the men had to be in their cells. No phone calls. No contact with anyone. Alex has to sit in his cell, with only a few scraps of information. Did he hear that right? The demon had left them.

8:16He spends the next couple days going over and over the call. Trying to remember exactly what Amanda said. When the lockdown ends, he calls her as soon as he's allowed. He's like, when I thought I heard you tell me I son left us. I thought maybe I heard something wrong, like if I just tweaked too quick and I just thought, thought wrong. And so I kept playing in my head like, no, that's not what she said. That's not what she said. Just keep myself sane in the cell or whatever. Amanda goes through it again. Tells him all the details. Listens as Alex takes it all in. Alex makes a request to attend his son's funeral. But it's denied. The funeral, like all that had to do without him. He should have been able to go see him. Like, might as any of us be in there. Like, he should have been able to do that. Prison officials allow Alex to watch a live stream of Damien's funeral. But the signal keeps cutting out. I was getting frustrated.

9:19I even, like, punched the screen. Last minute, it worked like literally at the last minute, the data holds up the funeral for a little while from me. I was a little grateful to be able to see it on a video visit. But I just feel like it's another thing that's taken from me. You know, not only my freedom has been taken from me. I couldn't attend my son's funeral. Just like every, every phase of this experience, it's something being taken from me. Alex and Amanda can't stop imagining an alternate universe. One where Judge Lynn had granted a motion for a new trial, or vacated his conviction, and finally released him from prison. In that universe, they leave Chicago for Florida, and Damien is still alive. If he would have allowed Alex come home, we wouldn't have been here. We would not have been nowhere near Chicago, let alone, indeed.

10:19Never, never, never, never, and then Alex would have been, they'd just been so different. All the things. So why waste time sending important documents the old-fashioned way? Mail and ship when you want, how you want, with stamps.com. Print postage on demand 24-7 and schedule pickups from your office or home. Save up to 90% with automated rate shopping. That's why over 1 million small businesses trust stamps.com. Go to stamps.com and use code podcast to try stamps.com risk-free for 60 days. After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned, but Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Cisanna Lipscomb, and this month,

11:21or not just the tutors, we're transported back to the age of restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on not just the tutors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. After the news of Damien's death, Jennifer and Eric throw themselves back into Alex's case at full throttle. You have to be a fucking idiot to do this job and win, right? Like, you've got to have some blind faith that requires some sort of fortitude that the average bear doesn't have of not quitting. You have to have something within you that does not quit in this work to be successful. Their next move is to take Alex's case to an appeals court. Jennifer is a mix of confident and apprehensive, or maybe a bit self-delusional when it comes to Alex's case.

12:24We're going to win, right? He's going to get out of jail. Period. His son was murdered while he was in jail, you know? Like, that's worse. It's the worst. It is the very, very worst. I guess he could be murdered there, right? And we wouldn't have a chance. They were searching for every chance they could find. But it's important to know, appeals are actually really narrow. You know, somebody would think, oh, if I learn new evidence, I can present that at the appeal and they'll let me go. But that's not the case. Appeals are almost always limited to evidence presented at trial. So if there's new evidence, court can't hear it. Which doesn't matter, really, because they don't have any new evidence. Then out of the blue, they get a call that changes everything. After the first prosecutors, Nancy Aducy and Andy Varga were removed from Alex's case. A new prosecutor named Kevin DeBoney was assigned to it. In October 2023, he's packing up some boxes of evidence to ship to storage.

13:28When he finds a computer disk, that he's not sure had been shared with the defense. DeBoney figures it's his duty to pass it along. He's like, Jennifer, so we found this disk. I don't think there's anything on it. It's not a big deal. But I just wanted to let you know that we found it. So we're going to be sharing it with you and just let you know, okay? Jennifer and Eric get the disk and pop it into the computer. We hadn't looked at it long and Eric is like, oh my god, oh my god, you know. And I don't know if I called the prosecutor back or I texted him. And I was like, there's nothing on this. Are you effing kidding me? Are you kidding me? It's a bombshell. One thing that discontains is the metadata from Alex's text messages on the night of Clifton Lewis's murder. Remember, he said he was in a fight with his girlfriend that night, arguing back and forth over text. Obviously, Alex's defense attorney argued who's texting their girlfriend right when they're

14:29about to go and do an arm robbery. So the prosecutor countered that argument with, oh, he could have just sent an emoji. Now with this disc, the metadata could show who was right. Eric found an expert who actually could say how many characters the text message was. It was a very long text message. The metadata, she says, backed up when Alex had been telling police since the first time they questioned him. Other files caught their attention too. Remember that 2012 cell phone map, Jennifer got from the FBI? The one the prosecution hadn't shared? The map was there on the desk. This was all great for their case, except they've been here before. Finding a piece of evidence that they think should be a slam dunk, like the PlayStation. And yet, Alex is still sitting in prison. But here was the kicker. The prosecution could claim, hey, we never saw this evidence. That there were so many moving parts to this case, so many files,

15:34the disc just got lost in the shuffle. We didn't even realize we had it. Except in the packet of information Kevin Duboni turned over, there was a photo of a sticky note attached to the disc with Andy's handwriting on it. The fact his handwriting was on it meant he couldn't argue, I never got that disc. Clearly he got the disc. And the fact that it said, a rebuttal meant that he couldn't say, oh, I got it in 2012, 2013, or something like that. And I forgot. I had it. No, he was prepared to use it at trial. And there's at one point during the prior proceedings, Nancy and Lucy makes a joke about how Andy loves sticky notes. He doesn't anymore. So, just to be clear, we don't know exactly when the sticky note was written, but we know that he had the disc by the time of Alex's trial in 2019.

16:37I told you last episode, prosecutors have to turn over evidence that could be helpful to the defense. A principal so sacred, a case can be thrown out if that rule is broken. The sticky note showed that Varga knew about the cell phone map, and it was never turned over. Over the four years they'd worked on the case, Jennifer and Eric had found so much evidence casting doubt on Alex's guilt. They'd uncovered that FBI map, suggesting that the suspect's phones weren't near the scene of the crime. They'd unearth phone records, showing they hadn't communicated. They'd poke gaping holes in the stories of the three people who said Alex had confessed to the murder. They'd revealed the edited police report, altered in a way that downplayed the injury to Alex's hand. The confessions from Tyrone in a gartho had been tossed, and none of that had been enough. Jennifer and Eric couldn't introduce new evidence for an appeal, but this was different.

17:41This was evidence that the prosecution had violated the rules in the original trial. This tiny sticky note, this three by three square of paper, opened a new pathway to bring Alex home. As I see it going forward, I hope it's only positive outcomes. I think we have enough to win. It's just a matter of time. The Guardian made repeated attempts to reach Nancy Aducey in Andy Varga and their lawyers. We did not hear back. Neither Aducey nor Varga have been formally accused of wrongdoing in connection with the prosecution of this case. In court papers, they deny any wrongdoing. In court filings, the Cook County State's attorney's office argued that there is no showing of bad faith by Aducey or Varga and has denied misconduct claims. It declined to answer questions posed by the Guardian, citing pending litigation.

18:45Judge James Lynn did not respond to our requests for comment. This is the Guardian. Shipping, building, admin, payroll, marketing, you're managing all the things. So why waste time sending important documents the old fashioned way? Mail and ship when you want, how you want, with stamps.com. Print postage on demand 24-7 and schedule pickups from your office or home. Save up to 90% with automated rate shopping.

19:45That's why over 1 million small businesses trust stamps.com. Go to stamps.com and use code podcast to try stamps.com risk-free for 60 days. After civil war, regicide and cromwells republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb and this month, or not just the tutors, we're transported back to the age of restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on not just the tutors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.