Dave Fleming
speaker
69 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dave Fleming’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It started with me coming across a website, a database, where you can read the final last statements of every prisoner that's been executed by the state of Texas. Me being me, I went down that rabbit hole, started reading them. It is a gut-wrenching, awful, exhausting experience.
You can't stop scrolling. This is William Prince Davis, prisoner number 614. He was executed on September 4th, 1999. His last statement was, quote, I just thank the Lord for all that he has done for me. That is all. That is all I have to say, warden. Oh, and I would just like to say in closing, what about those cowboys?
No, no, there's a shockingly large amount of death row prisoners who used that final opportunity to shout out their favorite sports teams.
I think your initial reaction was the same as mine, which is just sports means too much. This is crazy. Why wouldn't you talk about the victim or your families or regrets or anything like that? You're going to shout out the Cowboys? It's like... what does sports really mean to people? Right.
How do they even have access to sports? Right. How can they be Cowboys fans and Raiders fans? Are they arguing about Dak Prescott? Right. Are they playing fantasy football? Are they, is there trash talk?
There are websites, there are databases where they will connect you to be a pen pal to people in prison, especially to people on death row who are exceptionally isolated usually. You get to look at their bio, sort of what their crime was when they were put in prison, what are their interests. And, you know, I came across a guy who had potential.
He was a lifelong Cowboys fan, grew up in Fort Worth. His dad was in the Air Force. They had a family ritual of going to church every Sunday and then coming home and sitting down in front of the TV to watch the Cowboys. You know, you just kind of knew right away. It was like, okay, this guy is a legit sports fan.
We correspond back and forth over several weeks. I would say about half a dozen emails in. This guy just said, well, if you're so interested in talking, why don't you just come to Texas and we'll talk in person?
Yes, and the next thing I know, I'm on a plane to Texas.
His name is Charles Flores. In 1999, at the age of 29, he was sentenced to death for his role in a burglary in the town of Farmers Branch, Texas, which is near Irving, which is actually where the Cowboys, their whole facility is. It's their headquarters. Yes. During this burglary, a 64-year-old woman named Betty Black was killed.
And Charles was then convicted for being an accomplice to that murder, which was part of the burglary. He was then sentenced to death row, where he has been for the last 25 years. And the default in Texas is solitary confinement for death row prisoners for up to 23 hours a day.
He was not the gunman and was never accused of being the gunman. There is no DNA evidence linking him to the crime whatsoever. Charles has always maintained his innocence and he's actually provided an alibi for the night of the burglary and the murder. But that's not even the craziest part of this whole story. The craziest part is that the actual gunman, Richard Childs,
He pled guilty immediately. He served 17 years of a 35-year sentence. And as we speak right now, he is free and out of prison. He's a free man. He was actually released in 2016, right about the same time that Charles got his execution date from the state of Texas.
Right. If you are part of a felony, it's like everybody pulled the trigger.
So this woman comes out of hypnosis. They draw a composite sketch. It looks like the guy who actually pulled the trigger and admitted pulling the trigger. Skinny, white, long hair. Charles is heavyset, Hispanic, and he had a buzz cut at the time.
So it wasn't until 13 months later in a court when the woman said, oh yeah, there he is. That's who she pointed out as being at the scene of the crime.
He was into some bad stuff, and he admits that. What we're saying is, it's very clear that at the very least, he doesn't deserve to be on death row or in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day for a quarter century.
Yeah, I had to go to the Polonsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, which is a notorious prison, always ranked as one of the most dangerous, worst prisons in the world. There are all kinds of hoops that you have to go through, right? You have to submit to a background check. You have to agree to all these restrictions. You are allowed exactly one hour of rolling cameras.
You have to submit a list of every piece of equipment down to pen and paper. So I was kind of freaking the f*** out and wondering why I couldn't go to the Family Feud or smoke celebrity weed. Like,
Where this really got real for me was when right before we arrived, they reminded us nobody can wear white. And that's because that's what the death row inmates wear. They're required to wear white. And so you step in and the first thing that happens in this guard shack, you get a big boy search.
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