0:00 On October ninth, Andrew Hayes walked into a Memphis courtroom for an exoneration hearing, after nearly twenty years in prison for a murder prosecutors now say he did not commit.0:14 Last week, you and I sat with the story of Herman Williams, and how invented science and a detective's word could steal a man's life.0:25 What happened to Andrew Hayes isn't about junk science… it’s about something even more common, and in some ways, more corrosive.0:35 It’s about the people who are sworn to find the truth, who instead decide to bury it.0:42 There's a number that I can't get out of my head.0:46 The National Registry of Exonerations reports that official misconduct—by police, or by prosecutors—was a factor in roughly HALF of the nearly twenty-two hundred exonerations in this country since 1989.1:03 Half.1:03 That isn't a few bad apples.1:05 That's a systemic rot.1:07 And it's not an abstract number.1:10 It has a name.1:11 One of those names is Kurtzrock.1:14 He was a prosecutor in Suffolk County.1:17 In one murder trial, it was discovered—mid-trial—that he had hidden evidence that pointed away from the man he was prosecuting.1:27 He had even altered police notebook materials to cover his tracks.1:32 The judge had no choice but to dismiss the case.1:36 But it didn't stop there.1:38 The district attorney’s office looked back at his other cases and found four more convictions that had to be overturned because of evidence he'd concealed.1:51 This is the point in the story where you expect the system to correct itself.1:57 Where the person who broke the rules faces the consequences.2:02 But the feedback loop is broken.2:05 Kurtzrock was fired, yes.2:07 But he was never criminally charged.2:10 He was never suspended from practicing law.2:13 Today, he works as a defense lawyer.2:16 His firm’s website even touts his experience as a “former homicide prosecutor.” The very act of corruption becomes a credential.2:27 The harm he caused never circled back to him.2:30 It was absorbed by the men who lost years of their lives, and by the public's trust in the system itself.2:39 So you have to ask, WHY.2:41 Why does this keep happening?2:43 The answer is both simple and deeply unsettling.2:47 Prosecutors are arguably the most powerful and least understood actors in the entire justice system.2:55 They make life-and-liberty decisions every single day, and they do so with a shield of legal immunity that makes them nearly untouchable.3:07 Even when misconduct is obvious, courts are often unwilling to call it what it is.3:13 An Innocence Project study of the first two hundred fifty-five DNA exonerees found that even when misconduct was raised on appeal, courts only found it to be a "harmful error" in eighteen percent of those cases.3:30 Eighteen percent.3:32 The system is designed to uphold convictions, even when the foundation is cracked.3:39 It presumes the process was fair, and that presumption is incredibly difficult—and expensive—to overcome.3:47 This is the wall that people like Andrew Hayes have been trying to break through for decades.3:55 And it's why so much of this work feels like you're just chipping away at granite with a spoon.4:02 You get one person out, and it's a victory.4:06 A profound, necessary victory.4:08 But the system that put them there remains unchanged.4:13 Eighty percent of head prosecutors in this country run for election unopposed.4:19 There is no accountability mechanism.4:22 So this week, watching Andrew Hayes get his day in court, reminds us what's at stake.4:29 The fight for individual justice is paramount.4:33 But the next fight, the one this week sets up, is for systemic change.4:39 States like New York have started to move toward creating independent commissions to oversee prosecutorial conduct, to build a feedback loop where one doesn't exist.4:52 Because exonerating one innocent person is justice for them.4:57 But creating a system where a prosecutor can no longer hide the truth without consequence… that is how we ensure there are fewer names to learn, and fewer decades to reclaim.5:11 That is justice for everyone.
