#134 Jason Flom with Damon Thibodeaux
Wrongful Conviction
Lava for Good Podcasts
4.4 • 5.8K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2020
⏱️ 39 minutes
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Summary
In July of 1996, Damon Thibodeaux was visiting family, when his 14 year-old step cousin, Crystal, walked to the grocery store and never came back. When Crystal’s mother Dawn began to worry, Damon went looking for her daughter. Soon, neighbors and emergency workers would join the search that ended under the Huey P Long Bridge with a partially nude Crystal strangled to death.
However, even before the body was found, the police already had their sights on Damon for what they thought was a rape and murder. Returning guest Innocence Project Senior Staff attorney Vanessa Potkin and death row exoneree Damon Thibodeaux tell Jason this unbelievable tale of triumph over tragedy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This interview was recorded pre-COVID-19 at a fundraiser for the Innocence Project in |
| 0:04.0 | front of a live studio audience. It was July 1996. While on leave from his job as a river |
| 0:11.9 | barged at Cannes, 22-year-old Damon Tibido visited his relatives, the Champagnes. |
| 0:17.5 | Around noon on July 19, their 14-year-old daughter, Damon's step cousin, Crystal, |
| 0:23.3 | walked to a nearby grocery store and never came back. Damon joined would eventually became |
| 0:29.1 | the entire neighborhood on a frenzied search for Crystal that lasted through the night and into |
| 0:34.0 | the next day. When he returned home for some much-needed sleep, the sheriff came knocking at the door. |
| 0:40.5 | Inexplicably, Damon had become a suspect and would turn into a rape and homicide investigation |
| 0:46.2 | when they found Crystal's partially-new body strangled to death with a red extension cord. |
| 0:52.2 | Damon maintained his innocence agreeing to a polygraph which interrogators would tell him he had |
| 0:58.0 | failed. Now, if you've listened to our series about false confessions with Laura and I, |
| 1:01.6 | Rader and Steve Drizzon, a lot of the elements of Damon's story will sound familiar. |
| 1:06.1 | The polygraph, ploy, the false-fed facts followed by a false confession, in this case, |
| 1:12.4 | to the rape and murder of an underage family member. Even with no physical evidence connecting |
| 1:18.6 | him to the crime, the wild disparity between his confession to her rape and the fact that she |
| 1:23.8 | hadn't been raped at all, among a host of other inconsistencies, Damon Tibidot was nevertheless |
| 1:30.0 | convicted and sentenced to death. With the help of the Inesys project, DNA testing, |
| 1:35.6 | and a surprisingly cooperative district attorney, Damon was exonerated on September 28, 2012. |
| 1:43.2 | This is wrongful conviction with Jason Flamm. |
| 1:46.1 | Our 20s are often seen as this golden decade. Our time to be carefree, make mistakes, and figure |
| 1:54.8 | out our lives. But what can psychology teach us about this time? I'm Jermis Beg, the host of the |
| 2:01.3 | psychology of your 20s. Each week we take a deep dive into a unique aspect of our 20s, |
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