The Jail Tapes in the Dumpster

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

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4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2021

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sixteen-year-old Myon Burrell was sent to prison for life after a stray bullet killed an 11-year-old girl in Minneapolis in 2002. Amy Klobuchar, who was Minneapolis’ top prosecutor, brought first-degree murder charges as part of a national crackdown on gang violence – a crackdown that engulfed young men of color.

Burrell maintained his innocence for 18 years in prison. Associated Press reporter Robin McDowell spent a year looking into his case and found that multiple people had lied about Burrell’s involvement in the shooting and that police didn’t talk to his alibi witnesses. In December 2020, the state commuted Burrell’s sentence, allowing him to walk free.

This end to a prison sentence is rare: Burrell’s case was the first time in at least 28 years that Minnesota commuted a sentence for a violent crime case. But the factors that put Burrell in prison are not rare at all. According to The Sentencing Project, over 10,000 people are serving life sentences in the U.S. for crimes committed when they were juveniles. Half of them are Black. Burrell’s long shot reveals just how difficult it is to right a wrong in our criminal justice system. How many others like Burrell are there?

This episode was originally aired on April 17, 2021.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Alan. I hope 2022 has been a good year for you. But to be honest, it's been a tough one for us.
0:08.0	This year, Reveal was struck by a financial crisis that jeopardized our very existence.
0:14.0	But we've rallied, and all the while that was happening, our staff forged ahead to produce ambitious investigations
0:22.0	that exposed corruption and abuses that the powerful interests did not want revealed.
0:27.0	Because that's what we do. If we're going to keep telling these kind of stories though, we're going to need support from you.
0:34.0	To support fearless investigative nonprofit journalism, please donate by December 31st.
0:41.0	Just visit revealnews.org slash 2023. Again, to donate to the show and to support our work into the future.
0:48.0	Please visit revealnews.org slash 2023. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you.
1:04.0	From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is reveal. I'm Al Etton.
1:11.0	James White was working as a maintenance man in Minneapolis in 2005. When his boss told him to toss out some junk left behind in a vacant office.
1:21.0	He wanted me to clean it out because one of the lawyers was leaving.
1:25.0	He started hurling boxes from the lawyer's old office into a dumpster. Then something at the bottom of the dumpster caught his eye. A big box of CDs.
1:35.0	I said, well, what are some tapes about? What are some CDs about? So I got the dumpster, got the CDs out.
1:42.0	And looked at them, didn't nobody. I didn't know no names at the time.
1:46.0	But the CDs were marked with something that James did recognize.
1:50.0	Because I see him in the county on there. I wonder, CDs. And I said, these must be jail tapes or something.
1:58.0	Jail tapes are the recordings of every phone call an inmate makes while in custody, often while awaiting trial.
2:06.0	Prosecutors are interested in these conversations because sometimes they contain evidence like people confessing to a crime or pressuring people on the outside to hide evidence.
2:17.0	The calls can also be things that point to innocence.
2:21.0	Got curious, you know, what people would be saying on the phone. So I took them home.
2:28.0	James news something about how the criminal justice system worked for young black men. In 1989, he pled guilty to something he says he didn't do in order to avoid a much longer sentence.
2:39.0	James and his wife started listening to the jail tapes, trying to piece together the story.
	...

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