Hi and welcome back to Undisclosed toward justice.

I am Rabia Chaudi.

I am your host and I'm here with my colleague Colin Miller.

Hi, Colin.

Hi, Robin.

How's it going?

It's going well.

We had to do some shuffling this week because this is a story that I thought really

clearly has some urgency, but I wanted to talk about this before next week, before the

middle of next week. So I'm really excited to get our guests on because it was very last

minute. So I'm going to introduce them. We're just going to get kind of right into it.

We have joining us today, attorneys Matt Schalls and Donna Venable, both who are attorneys with the federal defender's office. Matt and Donna, welcome. Nice to meet you. It's nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. I've met you a little briefly a couple of days ago, but it's nice to meet you again, and thank you for having us and giving us the opportunity to talk about this case. Yeah, a couple of days ago, I had the pleasure of doing a virtual

press conference, emceeing it, and Matt was on that press conference to talk about the case we're

going to talk about today, and that's the first time we crossed pads. But today we're going to be

talking about the fact that next week on March 12th,

a man by the name of Sonny Burton, who is incarcerated in Alabama, is on Alabama's death

row is going to be executed. He is slated for execution on March 12th. And Matt, Donna,

and an entire team of people are fighting hard to get his execution commuted and, you know,

save his life. So, Matt, I was told that you have been on this case for over 17 years.

Yes, yeah, 17 and a half years. As a matter of fact, when I started at the Federal Defender's Office in 2008,

and I was trying to figure out even what to do, his former first chair lead counsel knew that his case was being shifted over to me, and his was the first box of materials put on my desk.

Wow. You took over the case after the conviction, is what you're saying.

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