Michael Leonard

The trial was supposed to start Monday in federal court.

And they called and told us to our shock and disbelief that they were dismissing the charges.

They had gotten some additional reports, including from our expert.

and some they had conferred with their own expert and they made the decision to dismiss the case and I have to applaud them because that's hard to do.

You put all this time into it, you've got an indictment, you're supposed to go to trial, it doesn't make anybody look good and they had the guts to call us and say, we're dismissing this case.

It takes a lot, it really does.

Yeah, that's the crazy part.

Because, you know, remember, prosecutors too are generally, especially at the state level, they're generally elected public officials, right?

The chief prosecutor of the office.

And then that chief prosecutor is overseeing an office, could be two prosecutors, could be 500, right?

And so, you know, in most larger jurisdictions, there's usually a unit,

that reevaluates cases and looks at innocence cases.

There's lots of more liberal-minded prosecutors that have been put in office across the country, and they typically have something like a Conviction Integrity Unit, which reexamines cases that have been brought to their attention.

And again, Jack, you got a problem here because the prosecutors who are arguing to try to uphold this, in some ways they're defending their own offices, because think about that.

We don't know much about this detective, so we're just saying hypothetically.

But if it's true that detectives continue to work on cases for their office for a period of two years or 20 years, right, that's a lot of cases that might have to be looked at again.

There's all sorts of reasons and motivations why they would want to be fighting to uphold a conviction which everybody from any objective standard would say is absolutely unsupported.

Yeah, well, let's also not discount the fact that, look,

prosecutors, much like defense lawyers, you know, we're sometimes true believers, right?

So they, whoever the assigned prosecutors are to defend this case on appeal or on review, they may legitimately believe that the evidence was sufficient, that there's no reason to overturn it.