johnson is sentenced to fifty years of criminal imprisonment for the murder of kristina brown. only one element was used against him the confession that he signed. martin believe that this is going to be. my fish and i would not want to be in prison on my that's something that i would wish him off worst enemy just being processed for you to go into a sale on the whole process of a stone i'm comfortable. you feel like your freedom is being siphoned away from me. and tell you one thing about them are. i think that the last time he saw his

daughters they were looking occurred to me. but everything he told me to do for her . in the matters and in his. everything he do for her she never had a word for anything because the father was not around. and she was upset and angry her mother too was because the mar was in here to help her train is daughter. and they could but he had the best interests in the world for his. he's just wasn't here to do it so why did it. and like us is in the world for nothing but missing of. twenty years later a single event changes the course of lamar monson's life just around the time that

bill proctor the journalist who followed his case is getting ready to retire he receives a call from an unexpected witness who claims to know the real identity of christina brown's murder. two months before i retired after thirty three years in terms of and she called me on the phone it was one of the more shocking calls i'd ever taken. as an investigator and you get many but this woman said to me on the phone. and me even if you don't remember that murder that you covered back then on boston you got it wrong. you got it wrong and i said ok i'm listening. and she explained that she was with the person who did the murder of the person in prison was not the killer that he wasn't there but she was with the man who did the killing and came back from the event dripping in blood and confessed to her that he

had killed the. ad the character life for twenty years twenty plus years and carried. and the made it and. i'm not here me i'm tellin om i'm not on hall and that. at the time of the offense shalane a bentley resides in the building where the crime takes place she shares her life with a certain mr robert louis both of them were regular crack users on the day of the crime showing a claims to have seen lewis return from kristina brown subpart meant covered in blood the the in. and then a little bit of my door open and the local piece of them out the way and

blood with it on his. boots on. the my blood and. blood and his nails. they he just killed. me. you know wrong as it is. whatever that he was charged with i feel like eighteen years that he. there was too much. i'm the one that told him that the girl was not fair she was beat. they had and he . no he didn't he be. sure lena bentleys witness statement changes everything a team of lawyers and students from the university of michigan decide to reopen

lamar monson's case they are part of a national network of dozens of american universities who fight against judicial errors over the course of a year they retraced the police investigation step by step trying to prove lamar monson's innocence the big problem right away with this confession was that it didn't match the crime scene so at the time they interrogated lamar and then extracted this false confession got him asinus false confession the police believe that christina brown had been stabbed to death they believe that because near her body in the bathroom sink there was a bloody knife and she had been stabbed so they extracted a confession or i wrote out a confession for lamar in which he says he stabs her to death the problem was is that she wasn't stepped but the police did know that time so a few days later when the autopsy report comes out it reveals that she had superficial stab wounds but actually she'd been bludgeoned to death with

a heavy object. it does not take the lawyers long to find the heavy object that allegedly killed the victim on the photos in the case file they notice that the toilet tank lid is not in the right place. the likely murder instrument was the ceramic toilet tank with a heavy ceramic toy thankfully that had blood all over it that was found in the bedroom not too far from christina brown's print. after this the lawyers are convinced that lamar monson did not kill christina brown as such he could not have written the confession himself the team from the university of michigan then asked the judge in charge of the case for access to the objects that were present at the scene of the crime twenty years earlier. and in september two thousand and sixteen two students and i went to the to the prosecutor's office where the toilet was brought there and it was unwrapped and it

was still covered in blood and amazingly now it was it covered in blood but there were bloody fingerprints all over it nobody had ever bothered to test and so this is you know saying hey look there's a bloody fingerprint right there and so i whipped out my i phone and i took photos of some of the bloody fingerprints on my i phone and then brought them back and blew them up and we could see that they weren't we had comparison samples a lot are and they look a lot like robert louis his fingerprints. and state police have new technology and they've. all of them belong to robert louis and none of them belong to the months. i was ecstatic because i know the power of forensic testimony improves versus what someone might

say because one is irrefutable the other can always be cut down by a nasty prosecutor. he couldn't do anything with this you should have seen the prosecutors struggle to answer the forensics that came from no less than the michigan state police crime lab. it was powerful stuff and it was a day for celebration. you're on his way into work being here and we are going to get it. in your room thanks to this new evidence the more monson is granted a new trial in january two thousand and seventeen after a one day hearing the court decides to exonerate lamar monson. surreal for me because these things i've been playing and asked for and seeing things develop and before my last witness come for five to twelve years evidence.

just by. a vendor kid in my spirit you know and i'm feeling good. i know the truth but now everybody knows the truth and so. blessed you know people that stood by me. feel good for them because now people know that they still back me and they were right to do so. lamar months and is out on bond and heads right over to his family and supporters at the wayne county jail. and i have prayed and i pray. and i ask. please let me live in them or come. in when february first came twenty seventeen and i was there and he was released. on holiday in credit. and i credit my

son is free at last. i just knew was a call to ask for is something being we've been waiting or something we've been it's just a point where the law of this folly came and i just said i can only get the glory to go out of the field you. mom always said she was in waiting to get that so hold your mom right now talk about that emotion. or words to express his warm a bit of mark or more my life was a lot more life and i'm just glad you finally got some help you can be happy about . oh it's a wonderful feeling. i've had now. twenty two of these cases all together seventeen since we started six i think and i had five four and it's never gets old is so wonderful when the person actually comes out of the door and they're

met by their family and friends and. the students who work on the case who work on the case. on the sea on the line circumstances. allowed for the emergence of this very vigilant violence i think that we may get the sons and even grandsons of guys at some point in the future it's primarily a political issue none of that has taken on minutes we. went on the traditions. tracking gave americans a lot of new job opportunities i needed to come up here to make some money i could make twenty five thousand dollars as a teacher or i could make fifty thousand dollars a year truck so i chose to drive truck people rush to

a small town in north dakota was an unemployment rate of zero percent like gold rush is very very similar to. this beautiful story ended with pollution and devastation a lot of people have left here i don't know too many people here and just slow down so much they lost their jobs that laid off the american dream is changing that's not what. used to be. and that's a tough reality to deal with. u.s. veterans who come back from war often tell the same stories. were going after the people who were killing civilians they were not interested in the wellbeing of their own soldiers either there are already several generations of them so i just got this memo from the circular defense's office that says we're going to attack and destroy the government and seven countries in five years americans pay for the wars with their money others with their lives if we were willing to go into harm's

way and willing to risk being killed for a war surely we can risk some discomfort or uneasy notice for. our monson's name is cleared for good. robert louis the man whose fingerprints were found at the scene has to this day still not been indicted. you have his ex-girlfriend saying he did it and then all the people in the world whose fingerprints could be on that. in blood it's him that's pretty good evidence i mean that's that's a case where i think the the dumbest prosecutor in the world could win

a conviction. they've made it clear they're not going to charge it because charging him would be admitting that they got it wrong with. christina brows been dead now for twenty two years but she. still deserves justice and her family still deserves justice and they won't get it because the prosecution is stubborn. they are free want to know well and they know that he's guilty so what does that tell you about the. system don't care about me about my. i'm a taxpayer i've lived in this city in this world over fifty years. they don't care . all they want to do is get away and hurt people. that try to keep families

together at separate or it doesn't matter how. the country is i'm sure. we live with certain notions of justice. of what the lost is what we all believe in our hearts. that the person really responsible for something as innocent as the murder of his will we will be sure to answer for that crime. yet over and over and over again i have been party to evaluating cases where there are innocence claims and the person responsible is known and named in the current police report where the made a mistake does nothing to go back and capture and charge the person who was

really responsible because it's difficult because it takes extra work because it takes new witnesses because it takes. harder examination of what really happened and that examination would show that the initial group of police investigators that only failed but walked away from certain facts they didn't fit in. can you put a price on twenty years spent behind bars for a crime he did not commit. this man received a figure and the subsequent compensation of twenty million dollars.

one rivera has just received twenty million dollars twenty million dollars for twenty years of imprisonment for a crime he did not commit one rivera was also forced to sign a confession. in one nine hundred ninety seven he confessed to the rape and murder of an eleven year old girl. turn is this and. decided see you know said i would as i was asked by the news media you know is the twenty million that is enough and i'll tell you as i tell them you know when you keep talking in my twenty years back i miss my son is. a minister my nieces and nephews a mother was at the time my father was lost my grandparents you know there's a lot of things that i miss and is family. that i can never get back no matter how much money i get you know they can offer me a hundred million dollars when they come from yes it has given me confidence but

there's nothing in my years we haven't used that i've lost the memories that often lost i mean to this day if you ask a pang as any of my telephotos she would say she has to because the court has them one of three trials and it's i'm going to try and nordstrom is the one new photos you want to show. if humans. i don't have no records of my upbringing because they took in. my life started january sixteenth two thousand and twelve that's when my life started that's when i have a record of who i am. surrounded by family members and cameras one repair i walked out of state bill correctional center a free man all i want to do is enjoy my time with my family my it's been twenty years of separation and this is a new beginning for me so this may be one of us. not

a few last months no more turn the conviction that end of the. twenty million dollars is not enough it never will be nor any amount because again is the memories that mean. not the money. one rivera is barely nineteen years old when his life turns into a nightmare on the seventeenth of august one thousand nine hundred two the chicago police force accuses him of the rape and murder of holly staker an eleven year old babysitter who was stabbed twenty seven times the case makes headlines across the country. in the space of a few hours the chicago police turns one into a publicly hated monster. i had a different sentence that's because then yes i was an innocent person going to prison is a natural a sense as for something that is new so that was this added bonus to my him going

into prison first of all i'm going to an environment that is a nexus unknown and very very scary. second i'm going into for murder. her rape. there for eleven years so as if they got three strikes against him in prison they don't like me. but if they do i've asked them twice when i was in prison. to its embrace on me of course i had to fight them off thank god that i defied them off. in prison records this is what i had so we do it when i was interesting. rivera was not far from being sent to the electric chair these years of violence in prison these years spent on the margins of society have forever destroyed his trust in others and in the system. for me to hear at that time

they were willing to kill in one thousand year old kid and understand what the hell was going on shows you the character of mankind you know on. to this day i still have difficulties in trusting him because he was willing to kill me then a mission i'm not willing to kill me now when i get death threats. are going to live my life by smiling and watching my back because people still want to hurt me just as in that i know that because they doing to me ask me while i'm walking in the street and i get in the branches the general approach is they know what i have a chance to kill you i would because you don't deserve to be alive i have free when i still think you killed and there is so this is what i want to live with but still yet i got to smile. in two thousand and fifteen with the results of d.n.a. analyses allowed want to be exonerated for good holly staker is

a real killer still roams free and no police officer seems to be searching for him out of the twenty million dollars that one rivera received two million dollars were paid in by reed following a legal agreement in spite of this compensation not a single police officer has been personally sanctioned. all the officers. that worked in my case as well it's attorneys all retired with pension pension there was no repercussions no richard dishing no criminal charges nothing i see extended into a job they need to hire and major tenants to his is very mike wallace retired and they gave him a plaque for good job. there's a culture of. unaccountability and police officers know

that they can engage in misconduct that has nothing to do with solving their crime and everything to do with. pointing the finger at perhaps the easiest person to point the finger at and there will be no consequence and so it happens over and over and over in their states. oh yeah it goes a victim. having clothes they did they still own big for me i might get credit i have credit me but what about her family do they even care no they're not even searching for the person they get these that already because they fell in they still feel that i'm guilty. in this theory our criminal justice system is designed to correctly identify perpetrators and bring them to justice where fails and where fails because of misconduct the reaction of the criminal justice system is really the opposite of

what it should be the criminal justice system tries to cover up the failure. retain its legitimacy instead of admitting its mistakes and finding the real perpetrators the law gives police officers what is called qualified immunity for their actions which means it's very difficult to sue their after the fact for their roles in obtaining false confessions and prosecutors have what's called absolute immunity. so unless they become part of the police investigative process. they are not going to be held responsible for their role in wrongful convictions. no one should be above the law. and police officers themselves should not be above the law.

reed has not responded to any of our interview requests however the firm has informed us that their training procedures now take the risk of false confessions into account. for its part the supreme court of the united states still allows police officers to lie during the interrogation stage. i mean we're asking a couple of these guys and depositions why they thought telling a lie was going to get the truth and they didn't have an answer for me they just said well that's what we do that's the way it interrogations go or allowed to why did them and i would again ask them why do you think lying to someone is going to get a truthful answer in response and they just couldn't answer it and i for the life of me i don't understand why someone would think that lying to someone is going to get a truth response back so it's a horrible practice that that goes on all the time in in the us and it's just

it doesn't really serve it doesn't serve justice at all. what state does the american judicial system find itself in today with corrupt cops and untouchable magistrates the american justice system is continuously producing more inequalities and more impunity in a country that is more divided than ever. dollars

. dollars. dollars. on the dollar of dollar bills what i would be. we got garrett over here we care the music with us that. we are here we were dragged here. by your love to get rid of those who will not go away we will not die quiet. real the hard work we do is the truth.

i think that everyone of us have but inside i'm. a dockside and i think. going down to your next side you can improve yourself. but it's also a bloody venture but i really believe this the bottom that we show up side is the we and the band. no one can be sure what a lot. of. good a place called camp sundown to get for people that can't decide and they're like so

vampire camp this is like a safe house i guess they don't have to talk about what they go through but that's because we understand her daughter katie was diagnosed with a very rare sun sensitive condition if i get sunburned i heal she doesn't feel patients and they have problems with the walk to talk to some of the brains that are actually shrinking inside the skull gets thicker in the brain still small. the pain is indescribable it's feels like a really really bad chemical burn but it goes through your skin in your muscles way down to the bone and there's no really. we're just not sure this is just.

the u.k. prime minister says her breaks it plan unlocks a bright future after easily disposed to endorse the deal treason may faces an uphill battle to get a hostile parliament on her. in the stories. making over.