Welcome everyone to another episode of the most notorious podcast.

I'm Eric Rivenes. It's so great to have Jason is Rollowitz with me today. He has been a practicing attorney for three decades and a giant cinema buff ever since seeing jaws and the omen on the big screen at the age of seven.

He also heads a New York high school mentoring program which pairs his firm with a Bronx school for moot court and mock trial competitions.

And he is here to talk about his book entitled Nothing to Fear, Alfred Hitchcock and the wrong men. Thank you so much for joining me.

It's my pleasure thanks for having me. Yes for sure. So let me start by asking you this. What were you first aware of the Alfred Hitchcock film the wrong man or the actual case it was based on.

It was the film for sure I was not familiar with the underlying case even though it was you know it did get a lot of media attention in New York at the time in the 50s.

But the book I have to say started more with my admiration for the films of Hitchcock than for my familiarity with the case. I mean I've always loved Hitchcock's movies and after going to law school I was interested in the way that he depicted issues of law and justice.

But it wasn't until I saw the wrong man. Oh I don't know about five years ago that the idea for this book was born and that's really what stoked my interest in learning more about the case.

The movie and the case date back to the 1950s and even though the movie was made in 1956 I was really struck by how urgent and timely it feels today it's really this haunting story of a miscarriage of justice and you know one of Hitchcock's more obscure films.

So you know I was interested from that just in order the idea of drawing attention to the film but it was really the case itself and the significance of the case that drew me into this project.

I mean the story is a universal story really a universal nightmare of what it feels like to be falsely accused of a crime.

And I wanted to learn after seeing the movie I really wanted to learn more about the underlying case and what led to the arrest and prosecution of the film's protagonist, many balesjero.

You know what what wrong with the criminal justice system that could lead to that result.

So that was that was it was really the film first that drew me into the case.

Right right so this is a story that centers around an eyewitness misidentification and to really put what happened into context you cover in your book examples of other cases involving misidentification that preceded this one.

Would you talk about the important ones and why they matter to this story.

Yes the balesjero case which is the basis of the film that took place in 1953.

But in sort of digging into the research if you look at the period leading up to the case and I kind of focused on the 15 years before that you can see that many balesjero's or deal reflected the continuation of a series of systemic problems with the criminal justice system.

That had been around for a long time.

So that was part of what I wanted to do with the first part of the book before I got to manny story.

I wanted to contextualize it. I wanted to talk a little bit about the legal environment at the time and what the legal environment was really all about at that point in terms of I witnessed identification was that it was it was not a very well developed system.

There were really no established legal norms governing the process by which I witnessed the identifications were solicited and so you had a number of cases that arose before manny's case that themselves were really became notorious wrong man cases probably the most famous the one I spend the most time on.

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