From the ACLU, this is at Liberty.

I'm Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host.

In 2017, Arkansas announced a plan to execute eight people in 10 days because the state's lethal

injection drugs were about to expire. The first person executed was Liddell Lee. He was convicted

of murder in 1995 and sentenced to death, but his trials and appeals were plagued by problems

from the start, and a mounting

body of evidence now points to his innocence. Our guest today is Cassandra Stubbs, director of the

ACLU's capital punishment project. She and her team have spent the last two and a half years

investigating Lee's case, and today they're filing a lawsuit to finally uncover the information

necessary to prove his innocence.

Cassandra, thanks very much for joining us. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks.

Lidela Lee's case was a bit of a perfect storm. He was poor, he was black, he had an intellectual disability, and he had some shockingly bad lawyers.

Can you start out by telling me some of the ways that Liddell Lee's

case went off the rails? Yeah, I think the perfect storm is a really good way to think about this

case and that he had what I think of as risk factors for getting the death penalty. You know,

one risk factor is being black and poor. All too often, we see that race plays a role in who gets the death penalty.

And really, poverty does in the most direct way, which is that it's very difficult sometimes to get a qualified lawyer.

What we saw in Liddell Lee's case, while the problem of inadequate or poor defense lawyering is often a systemic

problem that affects far too many cases. What we saw in his case was really pretty shocking in

terms of the number of failures in his case. His lawyers who represented him at trial, the attorney

general in the case said that they had a conflict such that Liddell Lee couldn't get a fair trial.

The post-conviction lawyer who was charged with investigating Lidale Lee's life had just had four executions.

...