Coast to Coast - March 28 2017 - Wrongful Convictions - Final Words.nfo
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Coast to Coast - March 28 2017 - Wrongful Convictions - Final Words
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General Information
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More Info............: http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2017/03/28
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Release Notes
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DATE: Tuesday - March 28, 2017
HOST: George Noory
GUESTS: Laura Caldwell, Leslie Klinger, Lisa Smartt
In the first half, Laura Caldwell, the founder/director of the Life After
Innocence project, and author/attorney Leslie S. Klinger discussed how they've
combined their literary and legal expertise to explore the subject of wrongful
conviction which is happening with increasing frequency. Their book, Anatomy of
Innocence, rose out of Caldwell's experiences at her organization, and the
dozens of heartbreaking yet resilient stories that emerged from her clients who
had been wrongfully jailed. In their anthology, Caldwell and Klinger paired
fourteen exonerated inmates with a roster of well-known mystery and thriller
writers to narrate their stories, as well as including an essay by legendary
playwright Arthur Miller about Peter Riley, a man who was wrongfully convicted
of the murder of his mother.
While Caldwell and Klinger were not condemning the American judicial system,
they pointed out that mistakes happen around 5% of the time, which amounts to
over 200,000 inmates in the US prison system. The top causes for wrongful
convictions include bad expert testimony, bad science, false confessions,
mistaken identification, and problematic paid informants, Caldwell cited. For
instance, in the case of Gloria Killian, she was falsely convicted of her
husband's murder, based on the testimony of a man charged with another murder.
He got time taken off his sentence by testifying against Killian. "After 17
years in prison, the Ninth Circuit overturned Gloria's conviction, and she's now
involved in advocacy groups," said Klinger, who added that the Innocence Network
is a good online resource.
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Linguist, educator, and poet, Lisa Smartt, founded the Final Words Project in
2014, an ongoing study devoted to collecting and interpreting the mysterious
language at the end of lives. In the latter half, she detailed how a person's
end-of-life words often take on an eerie significance, giving tantalizing clues
about the ultimate fate of the human soul, and pointing the way to a
transcendent world beyond our own. Her interest in this area was sparked by her
dying father, who was a skeptic, yet described seeing angels as he grew closer
to death. She subsequently studied with Raymond Moody, who coined the term Near
Death Experience, and has recently written about "shared death experiences."
One of the commonalities she found in dying people's vocalizations is that they
seem to be having conversations with previously deceased relatives. There are
also occasions of "terminal lucidity," she reported, when patients are
completely unresponsive but then right before dying, they sit up and seem to be
glowing, and share words of forgiveness. In one intriguing account, a 22-year
old dying of cancer remarked "I know, I know. We agreed on twenty-two years this
time." But when his minister asked "Agreed with whom?" the man had already
slipped into unconsciousness. The dying may also use non-literal language, and
more metaphoric or symbolic phrasing to describe their transitioning or other
worldly experiences, she noted.
News segment guests: Jerome Corsi, Howard Bloom
WEBSITE(S):
lauracaldwell.com
lifeafterinnocence.wordpress.com
finalwordsproject.org
lesliesklinger.com
BOOK(S):
Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted
Long Way Home
Words at the Threshold: What We Say as We're Nearing Death
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