Hello, I am John Cryer and welcome to the Undisclosed Dendom.

The first episode of our new series, Brilliant Disguise, focused on the, well, shall we say,

unique eyewitness identification procedure used to identify a 21-year-old man named Ronnie

Long. Suspected of a minor charge of trespassing, he ended up being convicted of rape and burglary

and has served over 41 years in prison. So with us today is Colin Miller, he's one of

the hosts of Undisclosed, and a law professor and associate dean at the University of South

Carolina School of Law. How you doing, Colin?

Great John, how are you?

I'm having some technical difficulties, but other than that, pretty good. Also with us is

Valena Beatie. She is a law professor and the director of the West Virginia Innocence

Project. Before coming to West Virginia, Professor Beatie was an assistant United States attorney

in Washington, DC and a senior staff attorney at the Mississippi Innocence Project. Thank

you so much for being here, Valena.

Thank you, my pleasure.

So, okay, I got to ask, and we had very few district attorneys on the show. Last time we

had one, it was one of my favorite episodes, actually, it had a little bit of controversy,

which was fun. But I wanted to ask you, what drove you to become an ADA?

Good question. I actually was a rape victim advocate in college, and I was a domestic violence

counselor, and that work was really rewarding, but I ultimately felt like it was a bandaid

for the problems instead of stopping the perpetrator and stopping the crime from occurring

again and again. So, that's what drove me to go to law school, and ultimately, what drove

me to become a prosecutor, to be able to prosecute domestic violence and sexual violence offenses.

...