Falsely Convicted of Murder (Bonus Sample)
The Political Orphanage
Andrew Heaton
4.9 • 1000 Ratings
🗓️ 14 May 2026
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jeffrey Deskovic spent sixteen years in prison, from ages 17 to 32. Wrongfully convicted of raping and murdering a teenager. After obtaining exoneration he became an attorney, and now heads The Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice, which aims to free similarly falsely imprisoned innocents, while also pursuing policy changes aimed at stopping those injustices from happening in the first place.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Listener warning. There's some dark stuff in this episode. |
| 0:04.3 | Parents, if you have young or impressionable children in the car, |
| 0:07.8 | I advise you to listen to this by yourself before allowing them to hear it. |
| 0:24.6 | Today's guest lived through a horrible nightmare. Today's guest lived through a horrible nightmare. It's bad enough going to prison. |
| 0:26.6 | It's certainly bad to go to prison for 16 years. |
| 0:29.6 | Now imagine that you didn't commit the crime. |
| 0:32.6 | You are wholly innocent and are nonetheless convicted of rape and murder for nearly two decades. |
| 0:40.8 | How does that happen? How do you cope? What is life like when you finally get out and pick up |
| 0:46.9 | the pieces? And what can we do to stop that from happening? Wrongful convictions today, right here on a bonus episode of The Political |
| 0:57.3 | Orphanage. My guest today is Jeffrey Descovic. He spent 16 years in prison from ages 17 to 32. |
| 1:07.4 | After obtaining exoneration, he became an attorney, and he now heads the Jeffrey Descovic Foundation for Justice, which aims to free similarly, falsely imprisoned innocence while also pursuing policy changes aimed at stopping those injustices from happening in the first place. |
| 1:21.9 | Hello, Jeffrey. A pleasure to talk to you. Same here, Andrew. Excited to be on today. Yeah, and I'm late to the game, but one, congratulations on your exoneration. |
| 1:29.6 | Thank you. |
| 1:29.9 | And two, congratulations on passing the bar and becoming an attorney. |
| 1:32.9 | That's quite the other turnaround for you. |
| 1:35.5 | Yeah, it absolutely is. |
| 1:38.3 | You know, the work that I do around wrongful conviction, especially meaningful, |
| 1:42.6 | given that I'm helping a population from which I came. |
| 1:47.1 | That from which you came. Let's crack that open. What happened? Why were you in prison? |
| 1:50.4 | I was in prison for a murder and rape, which I didn't commit. I was 16 when I was arrested for a murder and rape in Westchester County, New York, a high school classmate that I, that I barely knew, |
| 2:02.5 | with the wrongful conviction being caused by coerced false confession, prosecutorial misconduct, |
| 2:08.1 | fraud by the medical examiner, terrible public defender with my losing the trial, |
... |
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