#558 Jason Flom with Antoine Day

Wrongful Conviction

Lava for Good Podcasts

True Crime

4.4 • 5.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2026

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On September 1, 1990, Thomas Peters and James Coleman were shot while shooting craps outside a liquor store on the west side of Chicago, IL at about 1:30 am. The men were taken to a hospital, where Peters died and Coleman was treated and released for a gunshot wound in the back. Day and a codefendant were arrested eight days later after a nephew of Peters and witness to the crime, told police they were the shooters. Despite several other witnesses willing to attest to Day’s innocence, both he and his codefendant were found guilty and sentenced to concurrent prison terms of 60 years for murder and 25 years for attempted murder. In this episode, Antoine Day is joined by Laura Caldwell, a former civil trial attorney who is now the director of Life After Innocence.

https://www.wrongfulconvictionpodcast.com/with-jason-flom

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Transcript

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0:00.0	with the police banging on the door open up the choice to be in that lineup was the last choice
0:12.5	i made as a free man a year later i ended up right in the system i'm going to be one of those people
0:19.4	who everyone in the world is going to think is a monster or suspect as a monster for the rest of my life, and I'm just going to have to come to peace with that.
0:26.6	Somebody was able to look at my picture in a database and say that I was somewhere where I definitely wasn't.
0:34.6	I overheard three of the jailers discussing what part they might have to play in my hanging.
0:39.0	They had been told that two prison officers would have to participate in my execution.
0:45.0	And I walked back inside that prison for the last time, man.
0:48.3	All hell broke loose, man. Welcome back to wrongful conviction with Jason Flom.
1:07.4	Today we have a very special episode, not only because of our amazing guest, Dennis
1:12.5	Mayor. First of all, Dennis, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Dennis, we'll get into his
1:17.6	story in a minute, but let's suffice it to say that he was a sergeant in the United States Army when he
1:22.5	was wrongfully convicted of three rapes and served almost 20 years in prison. I also want to introduce Hannah Riley,
1:30.2	who's the director of communications for the New England Innocence Project, and she's the first time
1:35.0	on the show, hopefully not the last. And then we have a very close friend of mine, Alex Spiro. He is a former
1:42.8	criminal prosecutor in New York and currently a defense attorney. He's also a professor at Harvard Law School.
1:50.3	Alex, it's great to have you on the show as well. Thanks.
1:53.3	So, Dennis, let's start with you. Your case is of great interest, I think, to anyone who's interested in this genre because it touches on a number of really important and tragically common problems in the wrongful conviction world.
2:09.6	The mistake in I witness identification is unique in your case because of the fact that there were three different women who identified you under dubious circumstances,
2:17.8	but nonetheless they identified you.
2:19.3	It touches on the storage of evidence because in your case the evidence had been supposedly
2:23.6	lost, but actually it wasn't.
2:25.3	And that's something that is really disturbing to anyone who's interested in justice.
	...

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