Previously on Bearbrook Season 2, a true crime story.

To cut you a break would utter a way undermine the public's confidence in the criminal justice system.

How do you prove something?

How do you prove that I didn't do it?

There's this belief that when you are a Catholic, the priest gives you communion that the bread turns into

the body of Jesus, like a literal human flesh.

This is essentially the same thing as what happens. Once this condition happens, it's like that story is what happened.

I like to think of was remember the TV detective Kojak.

The system, the culture that our detectives live in and are made to operate in sets them up for this specific kind of failure of not being able to realize that there's an innocent person in front of them.

It's been seven years since Jason Carroll first wrote a letter to the New England Innocence Project.

Kneepe, as it's called, is a small nonprofit, only about a dozen people on staff.

And for the first three years after Jason wrote, they didn't even have an attorney based in New Hampshire who could work on his case full time.

Then Knee pired Cynthia Musso.

Jason's case was on the top of the pile in her desk when she arrived in 2019.

And I remember thinking to myself, even when I started this job, how am I ever going to figure out these cases where people are innocent?

I was a public defender for a long time.

I've only had a few clients claim actual innocence.

And then Cynthia read the documents in Jason's case.

The way we want to think about our criminal legal system is that we don't have to rely necessarily on stories that people tell.

We want to be able to rely on hard evidence and science and observable objective fact.

So my hope is that when there is a statement made, that statement can be verified by objective scientific fact.

And in Jason's case, that's just not true.

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