over $5 million. a devastating report released has damaged paterno's legacy, but the school is said to be leaning towards keeping the statue of paterno outside of state's stadium. as many as 180,000 capped crusaders, darth vaders, wall crawlers and everything in between. it is that time. comic conin san diego where heroes and villains share the escalator and the gathering brings sci-fi and comic book fans to see the latest and greatest in fantasy, film, and fiction. 100,000 people attending. now what we are working on tonight. going broke. from wall street to main street. now entire cities. the paychecks for firefighters and police in one town now minimum wage.

>> $7.25 an hour. >> sorry your town next? the black vote helped him win the white house. is the president's lock on those votes? >> you vote for people you can relate to. >> slipping. >> sex, drugs and olympic gold. what goes on in the village stays in the village, until now. swimming with sharks. idle chatter. and vacation or die. or both? on cnn saturday night. you know this well. the great recession hit wall street and then main street and now it's landing at the steps of city hall. this time public safety, your safety and my safety may take the hit. cuts in city service up for debate in cities large and small from camden to detroit to sacramento. cuts in fire and police

protection, is it making all of us less safe. a good place to look for answers is in scranton where police saw their salaries cut to minimum wage. earlier i spoke with the scranton firefighter who described what he and his colleagues are going through. >> i'm a very proud parent. i'm proud to be a firefighter, but also i am more proud to be a parent and be able to provide for my family. i am concerned that if this maintains, i won't be able to do that. it's very stressful right now. without w that being said, i am fortunate to have a job in this economy, but i need to pay the bills. >> that was bob who is a police officer in scranton. this new rule means he is getting 7:25 an hour. thank you very much for joining us tonight. i appreciate it.

>> this had to be a huge shock to you. >> a great shock, yes. >> how long have you been serving? >> 20 years. >> let's talk about the big picture and for you what this means. what do you think this means for the citizens that rely on you? a lot of folks are scratching their heads and if you cut pay that much for people like you that put their life on the line protecting citizens and make the same as if you were flipping burgers, are you doing your job? do you feel incentivized to risk your for minimum wage? >> we are sworn to do our job and we are proud and we will continue to serve people regardless. the financial issues are going on right now. >> how long can you sustain this for your family and retirement savings.

you have about an 80% pay cut, is that right? >> 80%. >> what is your plan long-term? >> it's day by day. we hope things get worked out and in a timely fashion that we can go back to worrying about our job instead of our finances, but i don't know. it's day by day. >> give me a sense of what this reality is like for you every day going home to your family. the mayor said we have a $16 million deficit and can't pay our bills. how does it change your life? >> you have to watch every penny. you live within your means this whole time and then you take a hit at 8% and we didn't have much warning. it was a week prior to our last pay that we were notified we were getting cut to minimum wage. you wouldn't prepare for it. you watch every penny and it's

summertime and you may not go on a vacation huh planned. you will be back to school shopping and i don't know. we will have to try to figure it out. >> do you have kids? >> i'm sorry? >> do you have children. you mentioned back to school shopping. do you have kids relying on you? >> i do. i have a son. >> it's hard as a father. that's what bob the firefighter was telling us earlier tonight. give me a sense of what citizens are saying to you. the people there in scranton. what are they saying about all this? >> everybody i dealt with have been supportive and they wish us the best and they hope it gets resolved and everybody has been great. >> as you said, this was a huge shock to you. do you think or do you fear this is the new reality for more cities across america? do you think you know an anomaly

and this could persist as the economy continues to be in dire straights? >> i don't know. i hope not. we saw what happened in california over the last couple of weeks. now this in scranton. i pray other people won't have to go through what we are going through. it's scary and all you think about. >> why is it scary? >> you don't know what tomorrow brings. you don't know. they cut us down to minimum wage and prior to that there was rumor of going payless on pay days. we don't know. the next paychecks are supposed to be july 20th and we have no information. we don't know what's coming. >> do you have an explanation of what needs to happen to get the finances back in order where you may get close to the pay you have been used to for the two decades you have been serving? >> the counsel and the mayor are battling back and forth whatever

is going on with trying to achieve a loan. as the employees we hope they decide to working to and try to work and expedite what they need to do. i am not involved with the political stuff. i want to go to work and work my full day and get a wage and be happy with what i do and provide for my family. >> sounds like you feel powerless. this need to serve the citizens at the same time you are getting so tight it's hard to provide for the family. >> right. when i go to work, my mind needs to be on my job and their mind needs to be on their safety and security. instead of having 100% focus on what you should be doing. this is in the back of your mind. >> of course. we are thinking about you and all the folks who work in scranton. thanks for joining us. scranton is one of several

cities in this melt down. big question. are they anomalies or are they the beginning for a lost cities? >> they had the wrong person and it took a while to straighten it out. >> thens of convicts are now under government review because they might be wrong. coming up, i will talk with a former fbi man about how this all happened. ce if there was an easier, less-expensive option than using a traditional lawyer? well, legalzoom came up with a better way. we took the best of the old and combined it with modern technology. together you get quality services on your terms, with total customer support. legalzoom documents have been accepted in all 50 states, and they're backed by a 100% satisfaction guarantee. so go to legalzoom.com today and see for yourself. it's law that just makes sense. fiber one. uh, forgot jack's cereal.

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you probably heard this in san bernardino, california declared bankruptcy after stockton, california did the same thing. scranton, pennsylvania police and firefighters are getting paid 7.25 an hour. is a wave of austerity about to sweep through america's big cities. who is to blame and what can be done? i want to bring in our guest and a professor at california irvine. a consultant specializes in distressed assets. i want to run through the numbers. when you look at san bernardino, reporting that 70% of homeowners in san bernardino are under water and owe more on their morgan their r than their home is worg. you have mismanagement of money in a number of these cities and questions about how the finances were handled there. professor, you say look,

bankruptcies are the tip of an iceberg for what you call failing american cities. >> yeah. 95% of the cities in america are having trouble. bankruptcy is literally the tip. every major city because of the economy is having pressure now on wanes and on pensions. potholes being filled and schools and police and fire. the tragedy is you can't fix this problem locally. the only thing you can do is manage a shrinking pie. over the last decade our economy is growing at a third of the rate it did in five decades. a guy like ron the firefighter, he can't have a job unless you also have manufacturing jobs generating good wages and having that ripple through. >> here's the issue on top of that. that's a fact that there is a

strong argument that those jobs and that growth that we saw that would explode for decades is not coming back to the united states. some of that manufacturing is coming back, but it's not coming back in the way it did. what do city dos and what can be done to help the cities? >> what can be done on a national level, trade reform with china. what the heck does china have to do with scranton? everything. they stole our jobs and we shut down 50,000 factories over ten year when is we opened trade with china and lost 6 million manufacturing jobs and 25 million people in this country who were underemployed and not earning a decent wage. the reason why is we don't make stuff anymore. we consume more than we make. the tragedy is they can't do anything. the only thing they can do is penalize people and cut pensions or make the bond holders take a haircut. that's the only thing they do.

bankruptcy a tool to do that. >> scranton is not in bankruptcy yet. would a bankruptcy filing really allow scranton to pay police officers, firefighters more than minimum wage or obscure a bigger problem because it will raise the cost of borrowing significantly. it will basket the muni bond market and affect investors and the people there. >> the city shouldn't be doing all of the borrowing. we have $100 million in outstanding debt and $55 million in the authority that they defaulted on. the problem and the reason we can't pay our public servants is because we are paying $8-10 million a year in debt service costs. we need to get that under control and restructure the debt. we need to address the pensions which are becoming a massive problem in your massive expense for the city. we can't just cut the salaries of employees and say that saves us money.

we are obligated to pay that money. they will win that lawsuit. >> it's an interesting thing. >> it's funny because it sounds like he is talking about the federal government. it's the same problem. we have an economy that is not performing and we can't pay our bills and nobody gets it. if you are in scranton, you think it's their problem. if you are in san bernardino, you think it's their problem. you go across america and our cities are dying because the economy is dying and we don't make stuff anymore. we need manufacturing jobs back and that's why we have presidential elections and i want to hear them talking about how it get them back. >> the reality is the manufacturing jobs that this country lost is in the millions if you look in the last decade alone. >> why do you say that? those jobs are not coming back? the problem we have -- >> i talked to the heads of the big, big companies.

general electric and others brought the jobs back here. a lot of them are not coming back. steve jobs said the same thing with apple. >> this is not going to be fixed overnight. >> the offshore and china. they make a bunch of money over there and take their jobs out and -- they tell you we can never get them back. >> professor, i want to give gary the last word here. gary, go ahead. i want to preface by saying it's interesting. the l.a. times and the mayor of vallejo, california they filed for bankruptcy and said it was a bad idea and cost $10 million in legal fees and didn't cut many of the costs significantly and said it hurt their reputation. that's something to think about too. >> it absolutely is, but if you look at the problem, we can't keep going the way we are. we need to address the deficit and creating jobs is a great idea.

it's t doesn't happen overnight. if we do it correctly and have a bankruptcy, we can reduce the debt service and the compensation. we can fund our pensions and cut the fat and get the city operating. they have an $86 million budget and $56 million of taxes. no reason we should have that kind of a gap. we need to do something immediately right now at the local level in and bankruptcy does that. >> appreciate you coming in. >> thank you very much. >> the fbi will review thens of criminal convictions because they might be wrong. i will talk with a special agent who helped free men who were convicted by mistake. is gone... but what about your wrinkles? neutrogena® rapid wrinkle repair. its retinol formula visibly reduces wrinkles in one week. why wait if you don't have to. neutrogena®.

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i dreamed for this day. the people that we did not do this crime. >> it has been a horrible long

road, but i had to stay positive. >> i am glad people have seen this for what it is. i just want to go on with my life. yeah. no amount of money can make up for six years that i sat in prison as an innocent man. >> it's a moment i couldn't even have imagined. >> it's overwhelming. an hour and a half ago i was in prison. i never gave up. i always knew one day i would walk out a free man. >> they had the wrong person. it took them a while to straighten it out, but all i care about is that they did straighten it out. now i can go with with my life. >> they found your dna and it was like oh, my god. i'm going home. >> those are the voices of the free. exonerated for crimes they did not commit. could see see thousands more in

years to come? the fbi and justice department have launched an undertaking like they have never done before reviewing thousands of cases trying to find out if defendants were wrongly convicted based on faulty forensic analysis. it's a fascinating story and we will talk about it with a special agent who joins us now from san francisco. thanks for coming in. >> thank you. >> you have really interesting perspective because you worked to help exonerate two individuals and reworked their cases and you were telling me you had to do it in your own time. you wouldn't be paid for doing that. give me a sense of how big of an undertaking, how massive something like this is. >> i can't begin to imagine what it would take. i know in the cases i worked at it was unbelievable the amount of time and the effort and the obstacles that you run into. if you think about the fbi doing

this, they do it in their field offices. i suspect they would create task force that would mean an agent and officers from local law enforcement. that's the only way it can be done. quite frankly it's maybe you can only do one or two a year. >> do you have insight into why this is happening now. the innocence project worked on this for years. this is their blood. this is what they do. why is the fbi undertaking this now? >> i can't answer that. i guess as all of us sitting across this great country, we can be thankful the bureau will move in that direction. it will sound cold, but i haven't met a person in jail that will tell you they didn't deserve to be. the problem you have is that there some that did not belong there.

i was either lucky or unlucky, however you want to say it and convinced to look at two cases and work those. both of these men had been in jail a long time and it's rewarding, but it's unbelievable. >> you left the fbi about 20 years ago, but in april they reported that justice officials had known for years about questionable forensic evidence or testimony in some trials and they didn't take a new look at the cases and notify the defendants or their attorneys of possible problems in the evidence. i wonder your reaction to that, did anything occur while you were working for the fbi? >> i did and i would venture to say most would not know. if that happened, that sounds

bad on the surface. we need to get that corrected. i will tell you that me and most of the agents i worked with would go out of their way to work real hard to make sure that the person that was potentially going to be indict and arrested and hopefully convicted that it was a righteous case, meaning that there was no doubt that that person was guilty. we are not talking 99% or some 99.9, it has to be 100. if it's not 100, it's not worth going. the justice system cannot be allowed to be broken that way. >> i think what's interesting is in the cases that you dealt with that exonerated these men, one of the biggest challenges was dealing with families on both sides. reopening that wound that the families thought was settled on both sides. explain. >> really there always going to

be at least minimum of two victims. if someone goes to jail, you have the person in jail who is the victim and the family members of the person in these cases. you have every one of those people and that extended family. they think the family does that justice has been served. all of a sudden something comes up and says we will turn this cart upside down and we will shake it up and somebody is going to walk away that means a lot of time has passed. how do we find the person who causes this prime and caused someone to maybe die? that's unsettling. >> that are brings up the issue of statute of limitation and if it is leaning towards one person if they can be tried depending on the crime. >> for does. it requires a lot of time.

it's not just investigative time, but attorney time and research. you have to go back in and hopefully uncover evidence that will allow the attorneys to create an appeal of new evidence. difficult task. >> absolutely. thank you so much for joining us. we appreciate it. >> thank you. >> coming up next, we will update you on the big stories of the day. and this -- >> the black vote helped him win the white house. is the president's lock on those votes -- >> you vote for people you relate to. >> slipping? >> you are out and about and you are not in front of a television to stay connected? you can pull it up on your cell phone like i do or watch it from your computer even at work. let's go to cnn.com/television and tell them don lemon sent you. a erum.

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