Bonus | The Untold Story of the Beasley Death Case

Hello everyone, I'm Carol Costello. Many of you wondered why we decided to tackle this story and how in the world you start telling a story that's so complicated. Well, for me, the more complicated the better. I kind of roll that way. I'm simply curious about everything. The other reason is the interview you were about to hear, Emily EY prosecuted the Beasley case. You know that the murder case, she told me it was dark and fascinating, and then she introduced me to her co-counsel, Paul Scarsella. I thought I'm intrigued and I wanted to know more. So we all sat down in a studio in Columbus, Ohio and talked about what it was like to try a death penalty case. It was a fascinating conversation and at the end I was hooked and the God hook was born. What you are about to hear, as I promised you in episode 10 is the whole conversation. I'll warn you, it's a raw conversation, but I think you'll find it interesting. As always, thank you so much for listening now as promised the interview. So let's start by introducing ourselves.

My name is Paul Scarsella. I'm an attorney here in Columbus, Ohio, and for 10 years I worked with the attorney general's office and their special prosecutions unit traveling around the state doing mostly homicide cases and I tried a lot of cases with Emily. We worked very closely together over those 10 years.

And you survived?

I did. One way or another,

Emily Ey, former prosecuting attorney assistant prosecuting attorney, assistant attorney general. Worked with Paul for a number of years, worked at the attorney general's office for about 15 years total and started in Summit County. Did a lot of crimes against women, domestic violence prosecuted, child exploitation, a lot of homicides, and tried a majority of the probably toughest and hardest cases with Paul.

Wow,

And you're both still sane. That's

Debatable. I know as I'm digging deeper into this particular case that we're to talk about, which is the Craigslist killer, I just dunno how you maintain your sanity because it's such an, not that any murder has a point, but this was exceptionally pointless.

It was pointless from one perspective and to certain people. It was very pointed. Beasley had a very specific reason for doing what he was doing. I think Brogan Rafferty had just as specific a reason for doing what he was doing. But as far as homicides go, I think in the 10 years we worked together, I prosecuted it, I think over 60. And in my career, I've done, I think 85 at this point in time, both as a prosecutor and a defense attorney. So there's no real explanation as to any of it, but I think if you look at it from their perspective, they had a point. They had a reason for it, and that's what I think makes it as egregious as it was.

Emily brought this case to my attention. We were working on another case together for another podcast. And Emily, you said that this particular case, the Craigslist case affected you.

Why? It's just one of those that stuck with me. You have to understand that as a prosecuting attorney or defense attorney, you see a lot of really bad things and you see awful things that most normal people don't see and they think they see it because they'll watch law and order or they'll watch the news. So they think that they know what we have to see or what we saw, and it's just not the same. So it wasn't the worst stuff that I'd ever seen. I think what made it worse was, and made it memorable, was just how many different avenues this case touched on. So you had murders that were awful, you had planned murders, you had recruitment of a co-defendant, murderer. You had socioeconomic issues playing into it. You had stereotypes working into this case. You had family members that showed up that were just these kind of family members that you don't forget. You had colorful witnesses, incredibly colorful witnesses that the stories you just wouldn't believe. You can't make them up. You had a court that was home for us for essentially two months, and I was pregnant during this case. There was a lot of other stuff going on. So in my opinion, it hit on any level that I could have imagined. That is a lot. Oh my

God, that's a lot. So let's start at the beginning, like the Richard Beasley case. This name comes to your attention and how does that work when you're a prosecutor?

Well, what has to understand is when Emily and I worked for the attorney general's office, we didn't have any original jurisdiction, so we only got cases when prosecutors asked us to come help with cases. So when this all happened, the conniving person that I am wanted this case, right? It's a huge case. It covers multiple counties, it covers all kinds of media attention. So I wanted the case,

What was it in you that made you want this type of attention grabbing sensational

As a prosecutor or as a trial lawyer, you just want those cases. It's about testing yourself. It's about testing your abilities. It's about am I really as good as I think I am or can I be this good? So for us, we wanted this case and we could see that the feds were involved and we didn't necessarily want them to have it. We wanted this to stay as a state case. There's always that rivalry between the feds and the state, and we could see that there were some issues in southern Ohio that they didn't want it, right? Noble County had most of the homicides there, but smaller counties don't want to do death penalty cases just from the cost perspective, not that

It's noble counties. Very tiny,

Incredibly tiny. So I think the total population is maybe 15, 20,000 people in the county, in the entire county. So for them to handle two major murder cases, including a capital case, would've just bankrupted it. So we knew that they weren't going to be able to take it. So the goal was to leverage the relationships that Emily and I had developed over those years to get Summit County to ask us to come in and do it and to handle everything in Summit County because Tim Kern had been killed there. So we had jurisdiction in Summit County.

So you established

Relationships to accomplish this. And I think that was one of the things as a special prosecutor at the time, is we had to have a good reputation that we knew what we were doing when we went and tried cases, but we also had to know that we were going into someone else's county and we'd say to them, we can come in and try this case and we will make you look really good because you brought us in the additional help. It doesn't cost you money, and if we lose it, you don't look bad because we've taken the hit for you. So we took a lot of cases in a lot of counties building up this relationship, building up cases where we were just talking earlier about the one that someone made a Molotov cocktail out of a plastic bottle, just silly cases that you need to build up the reputation where they can then trust you with this case. And I think too, with the feds, I think the question is whether or not they were going to be able to do a death penalty case, they had to seek different kind of approval to get a death penalty case where we knew that Sherry Bevin Walsh in Summit County was very prepared for death penalty case. They'd done them multiple times. The court knows how to operate a death penalty case.

The other aspect was a juvenile case. The feds don't deal with juveniles. So with Brogan Rafferty being a juvenile in the bind over process in state court, the feds had no real ability to prosecute him. He would've had to stay at the state level. So keeping the two defendants together became very important. And the only way we could do that was by finding a state court where we had jurisdiction that would ask us to come in and handle it. And we did some finagling and ended up in Summit County with Emily and I as the lead prosecutor, which is what we wanted.

I'm just curious, so you accomplished this, and in hindsight, are you still glad that you went through this? Because it was a lot.

There were times that I thought we were the dog that chases the speeding car and actually caught it, and we didn't know what to do with it at that point. But looking back, I think Emily and I think we handled it as well as anybody else could have, but I think the ability to keep both cases together to handle the families in the matter we did is probably one of the things I'm proudest about of my career as an attorney.

But you've told me that this case kind of made you want to leave.

It was one of those, and I do have to give credit also to Jon Baumoell, who was the assistant prosecutor from Summit County. He was on paper, the lead, but he also had a full docket of other cases. I think he might have, I think he actually had another homicide case while we were working on this. So we did the legwork with the filing of the motions and the evidence gathering, which was so voluminous, and I don't know that we had ever dealt with that much evidence. There were so many discs and FBI in different jurisdictions. But yeah, this kind of case can test you and it tests your belief in humanity. But for all of the bad things that we saw, I just keep falling back on the relationships that were established with the families and with the court. And I've done other murder cases, I've done other capital cases. This one just stands out as something completely different. It had a different level to it.

So you get the case and then what happens? You start talking to the different agencies and gathering the evidence.

We had a meeting in Guernsey County where all of the agencies showed up and basically talked about how it was going to go forward from there, and then it just never slowed down from that point. It went on and on. And I don't believe that we did the arraignment at the time. I think that we started going up for the pretrials, but I could be wrong on that. We

Got the case. Brogan had already gone through the bind over process and had already been indicted as an adult. So then Jon ELL was covering most of the initial hearings. We were in the process of collecting all the information both from the FBI, from the Noble County Sheriff's Department, from Bureau of Criminal Investigation, with the Attorney general's office from the Akron Police Department, from Summit County Sheriff. There were so many different agencies and

Marshalls,

The marshal service, and just coordinating the emails from Google was just ridiculously large. The amount of information that came from Google because of the way that they track emails and story emails and everything else, and the FBI and everybody else was fantastic about collecting all that evidence, but there was just so much to go through. So

How long were your days? Oh gosh. I know when we were in trial, we would be at the courthouse probably by seven and wouldn't leave until

Six 30.

I mean, it depended on the day, but we were there late nights. I always had snacks.

Emily was the one that kept us fed. So

Did she bring bananas?

She did. She brought just about of everything. So she always had a food bag. But no, the days were crazy because we were also carrying dockets too. So these weren't the only homicides we were working. So Emily had her caseload with the attorney general's office. I had my caseload, the other cases that I was working. So it was a balance of, okay, keep your time moving and make sure we're getting this done and this done and this done. There were a lot of times we would talk in the office in Columbus and not be anywhere near Akron just about what we needed to do next and who we needed to talk to and where we were going and which interviews we're going to interview. And obviously the cases kind of take on a life of their own, and it generally is about a year from the time someone's indicted on a homicide until it comes up for trial. So that year is just pretty much constant prep.

Well, and at the same time, the attorney general's office also was dealing with the Steubenville rape case. So our office had two, three very high profile cases around the same time. So everybody was out on the road constantly.

There was also the Summer Inman case, which was another high profile homicide from Ohio at the time, where a woman had been kidnapped down in Logan and then found an septic tank.

What is it with Ohio? It all comes back to Ohio.

There's always something going on in Ohio. Oh my God. We put the fun and dysfunctional sometimes.

So you're dealing with all of this evidence in paper and electronic form, and at some point you start your interviews with people. Does that start with the investigators?

Oh my gosh. There are some interviews that stand out. I think there had been a lot of interviews done and a lot of reports. So we had to be careful with how many times we were interviewing. I think it came to the point though, where it was more of just witness preparation before we got to that point. So I think that we kind of split the witnesses up.

We did

And then went on our way to talk to whoever we were assigned. And I think some of the bigger ones that we had to spend time on were the forensics for the weapons DNA. We had to be able to explain that in a way that people would understand because just the extent of how much evidence we had was so overwhelming. Talking with the FBI about the computer forensics, how are we going to explain where they were able to find the IP address and locate that to an address and then quickly find out where the home is registered to that individual. And then, I mean, it was just constant and it never slowed down, but you had to find a simplistic way to explain it to everyone. And I'll say that in a lot of the higher profile cases that you see on tv, I think this is where people go wrong, is they over try a case. And that's a conversation we had multiple times. We had arguments about who we were going to call, who we weren't going to call. I think we voted on a couple of them. And of course Paul won on one of 'em and he was right. But a lot of people get these high profile cases and they want to over try and they want to throw everything they have. You mean put everybody on the stand that you've ever Yes.

Anybody you've ever talked to.

So as a defense attorney, now, it drives me even crazier, right? So my partner now, Olivia, we tried a murder case in a neighboring county and it really could have been done in about four witnesses and it took like nine days for the state to present all their witnesses. There was no reason for it. They don't understand what is persuasive. See, it's one thing to put on a trial, but your is to convince 12 people, I mean, it's a sales job for lack of a better term. So you can bore them with a whole bunch of people that don't really mean anything, or you can get your most persuasive witnesses that get all of the elements that you need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt and put those people in front of the jury. And that's what we focused on as we were paring down these thousand people that were interviewed, we had to pa it down as something that was going to be persuasive.

A thousand people.

It's a little high, but I mean,

I think we had 150 some

Witnesses on our final witness

List.

So who was the witness that you wanted that Emily didn't want? I had to ask?

No, it's,

I don't think anybody wanted this witness except Paul. He was the only one, and it was the last minute

Call. It was a rebuttal witness. So Beasley was a storyteller, and he told a good story and told a phenomenal story, and he testified about where the property was found was owned by a guy whose nickname in this motorcycle gang in Akron. His nickname was Country and his wife was township and his son was county, okay, country, township and county. Well, he's putting all of this on county on the son. Well, he knows he can't put it on country because country had fallen down the steps when he was drunk one night and suffered a brain injury and wasn't able to go out and kill people and bury them on the farm that they owned. So it had to be

So those are real people. Yes,

They're real people. Legitimate. The owner of the farm, the owner of the farm where we found the bodies, this is the guy who owned

The property. So there was an actual farm,

Actually was a farm that was owned by these people. And we debated whether or not to put county on the witness stand as rebuttal. And Emily and Jon were adamantly opposed. And I'm like, the jury wants to hear from him, and they're like, you're nuts. We, there's no reason to put him on a witness stand. I'm like, we got to put him on a witness stand. The jury wants to hear from him. He shows up, got his red ponytail, big beard wearing his khaki shirt that says United States Marine Corps and was a phenomenal witness and just got up there. I just

Sat there and scowled and pause, God damnit, seriously,

God, I got a

List of this, been so organized and put so much time into this. And this guy just flies by the seat of his pants and calls his witness in who is an active was. He

Had retired from the motorcycle club, wasn't with the club anymore, was involved with them in his younger days, but had come out of the Marine Corps and was just,

He's a great guy,

Kind of a guy, just your typical

Kind. And what was this guy's name again? Was

County was what he went by. His dad was country and mom was township, and I will remember his name at some point, but his family owned the farm where all the victims were found in Noble County.

So what did he say in his testimony?

He got on the witness stand and we went through exactly who he was and yes, that was his farm and that they knew Beasley and that he had spent some time with Richard and everything else. And I'm like, well, did you ever kill anybody from, he was like, no. The only people I ever killed was when I was in the Marine Corps and I was overseas, but most of the time I was on a computer in a tank. I didn't see anybody like that the whole nine yards. He goes, I'm like, do you know anything about a computer? He goes, I couldn't set up an IP address if my life depended upon it. The whole story was that he was the one who did this, and they were framing Richard for being a snitch about the motorcycle club and this story, the jury kind of half bought it, or at least they could have theoretically bought it. I knew the jury wanted to hear from somebody, and I think it worked when we talked to the jurors after, they're like, oh, thank you for bringing him in. That answered all of our questions right off the bat. Then I had to hear it from Emily again about, you have to be

Kidding me. But it's not just that there was so much evidence that there was no way that each of us could retain everything and he would pull receipts. He would say something like, someone would be on the stand. He'd say, pull evidence, 104 C or F or whatever. I'm like, I don't even know what that is. It'd be a receipt. And he would use it to cross examine someone. I'm like, how did you even know that existed? But that was just it. So it really was this team effort, and I think it goes to all of the law enforcement officers too, because to gather all of the things that they all had gathered in one place and make sense of it, it was just this team effort. Maybe that's another reason this sticks with me is because you hear about how a lot of agencies fight and they don't get along and feds versus state and all of that. This really was an effort where everyone kind of checked their ego at the door and cooperated. We had

Had everybody involved. So the FBI was there, and one of the questions we had during the course of the trial was one of the juror's kids played football or basketball or something with one of the FBI agent's kids. So then there became a whole issue as to whether or not that juror should be able to stay on the jury. So there was every little bit of it kept coming back, but the law enforcement involvement from the feds to the locals, everybody just cooperated. And while there may have been a rocky start to the investigation after Scott was shot, everybody just kind of put it together and worked. And the goal was to try and get these guys, they would not have stopped. I mean, even after Scott, we know that there was another shooting in another homicide even after Scott got away. Tim Kern was killed after Scott had been shot in Noble County. So

Do you think there are more victims too that

Oh, without a doubt, Beasley is killed? Yeah, there's more people that he's killed. I'm absolutely convinced of that.

Is there any way to find out who those victims are?

Not unless he decides to have a conversation with somebody.

Do you think he will one day?

Nope.

Even though he's chaplain rich,

He's something, the end of his existence is not going to scare him enough to ever have that conversation. He's diluted himself too much, in my opinion.

What about Brogan Rafferty?

No, no, no.

Jack, he will never talk either. He had his opportunity to talk and he told just as much as he law enforcement knew until they could prove that they knew more. But I don't think that we'll ever be able to find out. I just don't. And the property where all of this happened, it is so vast and in parts so dense, there's no way to go out and to look. We all have our theories that we believe there's no way to prove it, but I just don't understand how you can have your first homicide in such a remote location. And it's just hard to imagine the location unless you've been out there

Mean it was cold, it was brutal the way I just shot them. Point blank. Absolutely. Point blank. And that's unusual for your, I don't know, first

Assault,

I

Don't know. And not just, it was accurate. I think that was the other thing. In the first homicide, I think there might've been two bullets.

Geiger was shot twice a night. I believe Pauley was shot once. I believe it wasn't like the only one who had multiple gunshots was Tim. And there was a whole theory about that. It's funny how the jury, both juries came to the same conclusion given different evidence about all of that with Tim.

No, I wanted to ask you about Tim Kern. So he, Beasley was convicted on two murders, but not,

He was convicted of all of the murders, but he was not convicted of being the principal offender on Tim's murder. The way the death penalty specifications work, you can be convicted of murder for complicity. So if Emily and I went out and did a murder together and I was just a getaway driver and I knew she was going to whack somebody, I'm still guilty of murder, but I may not be the principal offender for the death specification. So Beasley was convicted of the murder, but he was not convicted as the principal offender on Tim Kerns. Rafferty was convicted of all the murders, but the only one he was found to be the principal offender on was Tim Kerns. So even though we presented different evidence in both of those cases or very similar evidence, but there were differences, both juries came to the same conclusion that that Brogan was the one who actually killed Tim Kern. He was the one who actually pulled the trigger.

I just want to back up a little bit to the place where now you are interviewing family members of the victims, and I just wondered what was that like and how do you prepare yourself to do something like that?

Summit County at the time had a really good victim advocate, so we worked through her many times. I know that I spoke with Deborah Bruce many times and I had her on the stand,

David Pauley's twin sister,

David Pauley's twin sister. And so I established a relationship with her and I have nothing but the utmost respect for her. I thought she was a wonderful woman. She was always present. She asked questions, and I think more than anything she trusted us. And so we always kept her up to date on what was happening. We were always honest about things too. We said, this is how this hearing is going to go. We did the best that we could alongside the victim advocate, because they're always going to go through the victim advocate first as to what the proceedings were going to be like, or if something was going to be difficult and we didn't want them to hear it. We played evidence of Brogan Rafferty's statement, I believe, both in the suppression hearing and then in trial. And it's incredibly difficult to hear. And so I believe that Tim Kern's dad stayed in the

Courtroom. Dad stayed and mom stayed because she was having her issues as well at the time.

So I think more than anything, when we prepared the families, we tried to be respectful. And I think that's another draw, though, honestly, when we talk about why did we want the case, I think from my perspective, I wanted to know that it was going to be done the right way and that people were going to get the respect that they deserved on all fronts. And that's not to say that the federal prosecutors, the assistant, US attorneys could not have done that, but I just wanted to make sure it was done the right way.

We as a group kind of broke up the victims. I don't remember it being intentional, but we all just kind of broke them up. So Jon tended to deal with Ralph Geiger, and that was kind of the focus of his as getting all the witnesses together that dealt with Ralph's homicide, and Emily kind of dealt with Deb and the Pauley family, and for whatever reason, the Kerns kind of fell to me. So that's kind of how it all broke out. The victim advocate was fantastic, Kristen. That's right. She was fantastic. But I think we all focused on, we each had kind of our own family that we were taking care of, so to speak, to make sure that they were advised of everything and kept in the loop with everything too.

From what Emily has told us, there were relationships established beyond just getting the family through this trial with the victim's families. And I wondered if you could talk about that.

Yeah, Tim's family, there was just his sons. There was something about that connection for me. There was stuff going on in my personal life at the time, and I had done, I don't know how many homicides up to this point, but Tim's kind of stuck with me more than that's the one that has affected me over the 10 years or so now that this case has been over.

Why? I mean, you don't have to go into the personal stuff. I just wondered why

Fathers and sons. I lost my dad in December, so this is, at the time, Tim was just a struggling dad.

He was working a couple hours a week at Speedway, was living in his car some nights,

But he loved his kids and he was always there. It's silly, but that one for

How long has it been now? Was 2000.

Well, my daughter's going to be 12, so about 12 and a half years now. So

You're both emotional?

Oh, always. Tim

Always gets to me, and it's a joke that, not a joke, but I've done so many murders and there's so many victims, and there's both as a defense attorney and as a prosecutor, but it's just fathers and sons as a dad. My kids ranged from 25 to six, so I had a great relationship with my dad. So seeing Tim struggle and just work and just the idea that this was going to be his chance to get back on his feet to take care of his sons and that prick, both those pricks, pardon my French, took that chance away from him. And for that, Beasley is exactly where he needs to be. And as far as I'm concerned, when Brogan comes up for parole, I don't care if I'm 90 years old, I'm going to be sitting there on behalf of Tim and his family as I don't care if I'm defense attorney of the year at that point, and I might be, but I'm going to be sitting there making sure Brogan stays exactly where he belongs, the one who put those bullets in his face and that's where he needs to be.

And Tim's dad was always there, and he was just the most colorful, just happy, kind of jovial man. And Tim's mom was always there, and she had dementia that she was starting to fight at the time. So it was just, again, I think it just goes to those relationships and Well, you still have a relationship with Deb. I have Deb on Instagram. I sent her messages every once in a while when there was just the shooting up in Maine. I texted her to make sure she was okay. When the weather's bad, I send her messages. She actually, I think I told you Paul, but I might've told Deb first that I was pregnant with my youngest daughter, and so she made blankets for my daughters and she'll send pictures. And it's just that connection that you have in such a moment of trauma, I think. And I mean everybody experiences trauma when they're in these cases, whether or not you're a defense attorney or prosecutor or the judge, the bailiff, everyone who's involved, some might just not know it yet until they're out, and then it can hit you. But everyone in that courtroom felt something for someone. And there was some relationship that stuck with 'em.

You're pregnant at the time

You told Deb.

Did you tell anyone else?

I think my trial table knew at some point. I believe I told the judge, because of course, in some vain respects, I just wanted to, didn't want anyone to think I looked super fat. So I didn't mean, I'm honest. I was so mad because some of the biggest trials I've done, I was pregnant and I will never forget. I went to buy a maternity suit and there were two in my size. I'm like two in the entire, I lived in Columbus, Ohio, the state capitol, and there are two suits for a pregnant woman irritated.

I bet they weren't that attractive

Either. They were awful.

You have to remember that this is the girl who as her supervisor, I had to approve her time off on the Friday before trial started so she could drive back to Akron to get her hair done because she had to have her highlights done before we picked the jury on Monday.

Did

I

Totally understand? Didn't matter which part of the state we were trying to case in,

She

Had to go. It was also get her hair done

It. It was always good luck, highlights. If I didn't get my highlights done, something was going to go wrong. But I wanted to be sure if I needed to take an extra restroom break or if I needed to eat something. I got a horrible case of morning sickness. Any of those things I just threw up, I think. And two, I just remember thinking, how am I going to hide this from the jurors? Because then, especially as a woman, when you're trying cases, it's very different because they judge women very differently than they do men in trial. So you have to take that into account. And I didn't want to stand out, even though I'm joking, I need highlights. And I did. I was like, what fun shoes am I going to wear today? And I work three inch stilettos, which now I'm like, I can't, no, that was that long ago. That doesn't happen anymore. But I didn't want to stand out from anyone, so I was like, how do I almost hide this but still enjoy it at the same time? So it was a very conflicted feeling going on with me.

So you didn't want to appear vulnerable to jurors who you wanted to see you as

A tough prosecutor. I was the only woman other than the judge. Now with Brogan Rafferty, they had a female attorney that was working. I think she was third seat

Second. Jill ended up being more second than third. They're going to argue no, we'll keep our comments about effectiveness to ourselves.

So I think that, again, I didn't, especially as a woman, you can come across as a number of things in trial. You can come across as too harsh and pure cold. You can appear to soft, and then you fall into that stereotype of, oh, you're the caring woman that's going to take care of everyone, so you do have to find this balance. So trying to juggle all of that, which I'd had experience with many trials figuring this out, but I had done it pregnant too. But just making sure that I kept that all on the even keel, all the while making sure I had snacks for the table and trying to keep some, and it sounds so silly, but trying to keep some kind of normalcy. You have to have some silly outlet when you're dealing with such awful things and you're seeing pictures of people who now you have relationships with their families and you're seeing awful pictures of them, or you're hearing awful descriptions of what happened or someone describe in the coldest, most callous voice what they did to them. And you have to just sit there and not cry. And I'm a crier. I cry over commercials, I cry over a lot of things. So you had to keep all of that in check.

And I think one of the things that was actually helpful for us is part of it's hard is that we both lived in Columbus at the time. So our families were here. Well, the trial's in Akron we're not driving back and forth from Columbus every day, but Emily got to stay with her parents. And I stayed in Youngstown with my parents. So at the end of the day, she would go to her parents. I would drive an hour to my dad's in Youngstown. So having that release valve, if you will, having that sense of home, that someplace, that touchstone, I think helped get us through that as well. So it wasn't, we had tried a kind of nasty homicide together down in Canton, and she still drove back to her parents. But I stayed at a hotel and that was just, there were a lot of nights in hotels for different murders throughout the case, but having that ability to go home I think was helpful for both of us throughout the course of these trials.

Better wine at home, cheap hotel cheap. Yeah,

My dad definitely had a good selection of anything.

Good dad, but a death penalty case in my mind, I would be conflicted. Right. Is it hard to know that you're going to try a death penalty case?

My answer is if it is the proper kind of case that is indicted as a death penalty case. So I should back up and describe what a case is that I think as a death, this would be a death penalty case. It's funny, I don't really like to look at the defendants. When I tried cases, I didn't like to look at them. In some respects, I wanted to keep them not personal, but not real. But in this case in particular, I never even looked at him. But this was the worst of the worst. And I think as prosecutors, I have religion in my life. I am a human. I know that every person is the child of a mother and a father and a sibling, a brother, sister. There are relationships there, but some are just bad.

Some folks just need killing. There's just no way around it. I mean, some folks just need killing. And I had done, I don't know how many death penalty. I started in Franklin County as an assistant prosecutor and worked a couple of death penalty cases here. I went to Delaware County. We had one homicide at the time I was there. I left there because arguing with defense attorneys about what was on sale of coals and whether or not it was a felony, I needed something a little bit more than that in my life as an attorney. And I went to the ags office and worked basically nothing but murders for a decade. So there were all kinds of cases, some death penalty, some non death penalty. I think during this streak, I had done, I want to say it was five death penalty trials inside of 18 months, which was just nuts. And of all of the cases that I tried as far as death penalty cases, I never really cared about who got the death penalty, who didn't. I wanted to make sure I put the right trial on and what I always used to talk to Emily about. So you do the right thing for the right reasons. The politics will take care of itself. The juries will take care of, make the right decisions.

Beasley, I wanted on death row, he deserved to be on death row.

There was never a plea offered to him.

There was never really a plea offer to Beasley. He deserved to be on the row. You killed this many people in the manner in which you did it. That's what the death penalty was designed for. And if the jury found that it was appropriate, then that's what was going to happen. And then I have one out of Erie County at Sandusky that I actually wanted him on death row too. But I've probably done, I think I did 25 capital cases. And those are the only two that I really actually ever really argued for the death penalty. Everything else was make the right decision, let justice find its way.

I hear you, because I, it's personally, I'm conflicted, but I'm not a prosecutor, so I don't know what that's like. But I teach at a Jesuit university, no death penalty. Everyone is a human being who has some dignity and life is precious

Coming from the Jesuits. That's kind of funny, but I'll leave the history to myself.

That's fair.

He's an Irish Italian. Oh God, yeah.

No choice am my Catholic upbringing.

I do think that some people might say, we haven't really figured out how to humanely kill someone.

Why does it have to be?

Because doesn't that make us as bad as the murderers?

I'm not saying it's about justice in my mind it's pure retribution. And I have absolutely no problem with that. There are some people that just need killing, and I don't have a problem with it.

My not be as strong in my opinion. But I think when it comes down to it, and that is something that I've taken through my cases, and when I've done them with Paul, we really do put faith in the justice system and the witnesses that we put forward and the evidence that we put forward. And I would like to think that we did not play politics with the cases that we indicted or that we tried. There's only one case that I can think of where I'm like, I don't think that we should have done it that way. But it wasn't a murder case. It wasn't anything death penalty related. But I think the cases where I've been involved, where the death penalty has been in the indictment, they were bad. However, could I sit and watch it? Not for all of them. And I think I could sit and watch Beasley. I might need therapy afterward or go to confession. It might catch on fire when I get there, but I say that, but I don't know if I could pull that trigger, so to speak, and actually go and watch that. Are you Catholic too? Yep. Oh,

Table full of Catholics. Some of us are more recovering than others.

So some people deserve killing. So let's talk about Richard Beasley. What was it about him that made him particularly evil in your mind, if that's the right word?

No, I think it is, and I think that's a discussion. We don't have enough as a society is that there is in fact evil in the world. And we don't want to admit that. And we want to think that everybody just kind of makes a bad decision, or there's this, but some people are just flat out evil. Having worked as many homicides as I have, I don't think every one of my defendants or clients that I've prosecuted that I've defended is evil. But Beasley was, they weren't humans to him. They weren't people to him. They weren't family members. To him, they were just a means to an end. So Ralph Geiger was just a way to take on a different identity. So he didn't have to worry about the cases that were going. David, Tim Scott, they were just ways to make money, ways to get a couple of bucks in his pocket so that he didn't have to go back to Texas.

It was just that calculation of, I'm going to take a life. I'm going to leave them somewhere where their family is never going to find them solely for my benefit. That to me, is the definition of evil. And Rafferty was right there with him at 17 years of age. He was right there with him because he was driving the car, he was carrying the guns, and he was killing Tim Kern. That is evil. In my opinion. Not every client that I've represented is evil. I've got several clients that I hate the fact that the jury made the decision that they did. I don't think they deserve the punishment that was given to them. But these two, I believe that the jury made the right decisions.

In your mind, I know the religious angle comes into it in your estimation of why Richard Beasley was such a bad person.

Well, he prayed on vulnerability and he did so using hope, the promise of something better and all under the guise that he was this religious man. And I get very skeptical, and perhaps this is part of the jaded part of the prosecuting world that has continued with me. When someone leads with I'm religion, so I'm good, religion has been the undermining of how many wars since the beginning of time. So you have this person who's using religion to say that he's good, and he's drawing people in and gaining their trust, and they're thinking, well, he's religious. He can speak the Bible. He can do all of these things. He's good. Therefore, I'm going to put my guard down even more and trust him. That's just the worst people that use religion and God as a means to gain trust and to have a position of authority over others, and then just to exploit that, that's the most evil in my opinion.

When you read articles about this case, Rogan Rafferty is often portrayed as somebody that Richard Beasley groomed from childhood, and he probably did.

No, we have a difference in opinion on Rogan.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean I don't think that he's bad or that he had a moment. He had a moment where he could have turned when he first saw what we know is the first murder, mind you, because we'll ever know the first one, we're aware of the first one that we are aware of as a 16, 17-year-old. You see that you either are okay with it and you're prepared or you're afraid and you retreat to a safe space. And he was fine with it.

It was more than fine with it.

He enjoyed it.

Beasley was a bully, and he used whatever terms he could and whatever method he could to get what he needed. And bullies are just, it's the one thing I can't say, don't be a bully. And he took it to the extreme, and Rafferty was right there with him. And I don't care how many articles end up in the New Yorker or Rolling Stone about his art or whatever. They want to talk about how the juvenile justice system, Rafferty put five rounds into Tim Kern's head and went home and wrote a poem about it and put the gun under his bed like a trophy. And I'm sorry, you watched two other murders in a shooting before that, and then you committed this homicide and you took a man for 15 bucks and a car that you jumped and a TV that wasn't worth $5. That's evil. There's just no other explanation for that.

I thought it was interesting. We interviewed Rhonda Konick, and she represented Beasley early on, and she described him as looking like Santa Claus, a biker, Santa Claus. He was a biker Santa Claus. And that benefited him in the, I don't know,

Comes across as grandpa. And he was, the beauty of it was at our trial, he was in the wheelchair the whole time because he was just so decrepit that he could barely walk and there's no way he was going to be walking out in the woods to do all this. He just wasn't healthy enough to do it.

So he was even playing a con in court every day,

Every day. Every word that came out of his mouth was a con.

But you said he was good on the stand, right?

Oh, he's a great, every conman has that ability, right? That's what makes him a conman. They can spin a yarn, they can tell a tale. And he told a heck of a story.

And people believed he was, I mean, he needed a wheelchair. And

I mean, he kept his head down in court. He looked old. And I don't know. I mean, you have to remember, the jury only sees what they are permitted to see from the judge. So they don't see the things that have not been admitted into evidence. They don't see the fact that we know that he's walking around in the jail as soon as that wheelchair goes away and that he's manipulating everyone in the jail to get a special mattress or food or whatever it is. So all they see is this man who looks old in a wheelchair, and it's our burden to prove what it is that we're alleging. And so we don't want them to know anything until all of the evidence is in. So fine, let him look like this in court, but then we're going to bring in all of these people to validate what it is that we're saying and talk about what he is so that they will come to the idea on their own that he's a conman. So we're letting them come to that conclusion on their own, through us introducing evidence.

So I want to focus a little bit on jury selection because Emily said that was quite the thing.

That's one word for it took forever.

We had the Akron Civic Theater where we filled it up with potential jurors and we sat on the stage because the jury pool had to be so large, not just because it was high profile, but because it was a death case. And some jurors, when they're going through the process, we'll say they don't want to sit on a death penalty case. So the best way to do it was pretty much to call in half of Akron, sit them in the Akron Civic Theater while we sat on stage.

I forgot we sat on stage. I had completely forgotten that.

And so that was the first phase where it was just, we're going to give you questionnaires and you fill those out, and then we have to go through all of them. And then we go into a smaller court where we do the, did we do the death voir dire first.

So the way it's generally done is you'll have, so if that panel was say, 500 people that came in and filled out questionnaires, and then we go through all the questionnaire and they break 'em down in groups of like, I think we did six or eight. So then they come in and we do small group or individual voir dire of those six or eight people based solely on the publicity and their views of the death penalty. The reason being, you don't want to have a courtroom full of people and someone stand up and say, yeah, he is guilty, or I can't, because then the jurors realize, well, that's how I go home. If I say this, I get to go home and I don't have to do this anymore. So you do small group for deer, and that took, I want to say two weeks to weeks to get through a small group. And then when you get about 60 or 70 people who are, the only word to say it is death qualified is how we describe it. You come in with those 70 people and then you do general voir dire from there, and then you come down to your 12 plus your alternates. So it was probably two and a half, almost three week process just to get a jury seated.

It was exhausting. And all the while, the attorneys are basically asking the same questions over and over,

And you have to keep notes on each individual. And then if anyone says they can pick a jury based off of this article or this CLE that I went to, they're full of it. So then between the three of us had to say, which people do we want to try to make sure to keep on or exclude? You get a number of preemptory challenges where you can just get rid of people for whatever reason, not withstanding certain restrictions that are part of the law. And then you have for cause. So it takes a long time. It's exhausting.

And then you have the issue of whether or not they're truly disqualified or not. So the defense attorneys are trying to kick anybody who even hints that they may be in favor of the death penalty. They don't ever want to run into the situation where they have somebody who's pro death penalty on their jury. So then they become the legal arguments of whether or not you can rehabilitate them to make them death qualified or non-deaf qualified. And you have the decision as a prosecutor too, alright, is this person going to be better for guilt and maybe they're a little weaker on death, so I want to make sure that I get my right person on the verdict rather than going for the death penalty. So there's just all kinds of different decisions that have to go into it. And with three attorneys at the table, we're trying to kind of team up and make sure we're making the best decision over 500 people to figure out how we're going to end up with the 15 that ended up on the jury.

So you get the jury, and I'm going to go to opening arguments because Emily, you decided to use a certain phrase that the judge didn't really like, but

The judge was fine with it. The judge was okay with it. The court of appeals may have had a comment about it. No, the defense attorneys objected. But to the opening statement, when you give your opening statement, we have a mantra that, and a lot of prosecutors do that you under promise and overdeliver. But because of the complexity in this case, we had to present probably more than we would've liked to have gone through. So I had a PowerPoint, and I don't mean that really makes me sound like a Gen Xer, but I had a PowerPoint. I was really proud. I figured out how to put pictures in it. So one of the phrases that I had, we had this theme, if you will, of what we wanted to present, and we wanted from the beginning that the jurors to understand that what they were seeing was not what it really was, and what this individual presented as was not who he really is within. So one of the phrases that everyone's always heard is it's a wolf in sheep's clothing, and this really shows you what a bad Catholic I am. I googled the phrase to find out where it was from. I was like, oh shit, it's from the Bible. And then it just kind of fell into place and I'm like, well, I'm going to use that as my theme. Because we had use the phrase a wolf in sheep's clothing

All the time.

All the time, but I just didn't know where it was from. So I put that on the screen in big letters in my PowerPoint, whatever font I used. And as I'm going through it pregnant, and I just remember my face was turning red because I was pregnant and I just had really hyper blood flow. And plus I'm nervous. It's kind of like an out of body experience when you give an opening statement. I got nervous every time just trying not to pass out, holding onto the table. And I knew that if I quoted the Bible in some ways, now that I knew what it was, I wasn't quoting it because I wanted the jurors to think that I was calling God to preside over this. It was a poke to the defendant, we know you. We see you, and we're going to put this up there. So as soon as I said it, objection, and we go to the sidebar. And so it was a deliberate poke at

Richard Beasley because he called himself Chaplain Rich and used God to attract these vulnerable people.

Correct? Yes.

Did he

React? Did he I didn't see him.

He was really good throughout the course of the trial of not reacting. Okay. If she doesn't look, I always watch. I always want to see what kind of reaction is going on. He was really very poker faced and did not react very much throughout the course of the trial. He did not like the Wolf in Chief's clothing. You could tell that he kind of fidgeted in his seat that it got to him.

He truly believes he is a,

I don't know what he truly believes, but he did not like being referred to in that fashion.

Interesting.

And so there was the objection and the judge sustained the objection and we moved

On.

So why can't you use

Biblical phrases and opening arguments?

It's stupid. There shouldn't have been sustained. It shouldn't have ever gone up to the court of appeals. But the idea is the prosecution is supposed to be, it's not supposed to be argument, it's supposed to be opening statements where I'm not be arguing. We're just supposed to be laying out what the evidence is. I used to joke when I was a prosecutor that what the defense attorney could do would be called zealous advocacy. But if the prosecutor did it, it's called prosecutorial misconduct. Now that I'm on the other side, everybody has sharp elbows. Everybody makes their arguments and you get caught up in the emotion sometimes, and you get caught up in the heat of the moment. But I don't think Emily got caught up in anything. I don't think what she did was wrong. I don't think having the evidence phrased in that fashion is anything but appropriate. But defense attorneys are going to jump at what they can jump at

When we also ran a very clean trial. From the objection standpoint,

I can't remember very many throughout the whole course of the

Case. No, we kept it and we wanted to play it very safe, very clean so that there would not be an appeal because there's going to be an automatic appeal because it's a death case. But we just wanted to do the best that we could to keep a clean trial. So when I saw that, that was one of the appeal issues, I had this just immense feeling of guilt. I'm like, oh my gosh, did I say something that's going to destroy this case and all of this work and disappoint the families? It's fine. It turned out not to be an issue, but at the time I think it hit harder than I thought it was going to.

Well, it's high anxiety the entire time. Yeah. So in your mind, when you put people up on the stand, who was the most difficult to ask questions of? I would say the survivor. Scott Davis.

Without a doubt.

Scott.

He was like pulling teeth.

Yeah. Oh, because he was not a talkative kind of guy.

No, not talkative, scared. Just trying to get anything out of him was next to impossible. He

Was the

Hero of this. He, he didn't see it that way.

Really. No. And we'd met with him a couple of times beforehand, and I just don't think it was in his character either to be very outgoing and talk. I think he was as comfortable with us as he was going to be. But there was a moment and we'd talked to him a number of times. We'd gone over things with him and had him explain things. We'd read all of the reports, and there was this moment on stand. And mind you, again, I'm standing there holding the podium not to fall over or pass out, and I have questions, but a good prosecutor never keeps a list of questions in front of them and reads them like a script. That's just poor taste in my opinion. And you're just not good, but you have things that you want to stick to and you want to be sure that you hit.

And this was probably one of the times I found myself going back to that list because he just didn't answer questions with more than a two word response. And I made the decision to ask a question. Is there anything else about him that you remember from the breakfast that you had with him? And out of the blue, he said, I remember that he had a really shitty looking Popeye tattoo on his arm, and I just sat there and froze. I'm like, what is he talking about? I have no clue what he's talking about. And he described the tattoo. And I look over at Paul and I'm just like, oh shit. What do I do? And I don't remember if I asked for a moment, but I always would go over to Jon and Paul and say, is there anything else I need to ask? I think at this point, because what if Richard Beasley doesn't have a tattoo? What if there's no tattoo there? What am I supposed to do? Because if the tattoo is there, and you have this man who's visibly upset and scared and intimidated on the stand, describing a really shitty Popeye tattoo is incredibly specific. If it's on his arm, this is the Matlock moment that never happens. This does not happen in real life. And so I was like, guys, do we ask the court to instruct him to pull his sleeve up? And we did. And it was there.

Oh,

That must

Have been, I was thinking like, praise Jesus, that I've just taken his name in vain a thousand times, but I was like, oh my God, it was there. That was really cool.

That had to be nerve wracking. I can't even imagine. What if it hadn't have been there?

I think we had known that there were a tattoos

There. We knew he had tattoos, but we pulled the jail booking sheets to look at them.

We weren't sure exactly where if the location lined up exactly. It was a gamble to have him do it. But Emily did it just like it was a gamble to put county on. It all works out. We'll

Back to that. But Scott did a great job. He did. He not only would,

He didn't fall down

Down. He didn't fall down. That is correct. And we have witnesses fall off the stand.

What? And their pants fall down

And their pants fall down. Oh,

Come

On. No, this happened. So a witness, as they walked up to take a seat or walk, he was walking. We delayed court because he didn't have a belt.

No. This is one of those stories that just sticks with you. He was set to testify, let's say on Wednesday, but he didn't have any pants that were suitable for court until he got his check, and then he was going to go get some pants. So we had to kick his testimony until he was lovely. Thursday. He was a great guy.

He was.

He comes in on Thursday and he had found himself some pants. And he comes into court and as he is walking up to the witness stand, he trips and falls and his pants fell out. And I was just heartbroken. I just felt so bad for the guy.

He still got up and testified.

Testified great.

He jumped right up. He was fine, fine. He got up there, testified to what he knew too. But I mean, it was just, there were moments like that that kind of broke the tense air. And again, we don't want it to sound cold that we were laughing at parts of this in court, but when you're seeing the things and you're talking about the things you have to laugh at something to You have no, you

Must. You absolutely must. So who questioned Beasley?

Jon Cross-examined Beasley. I cross examined Brogan and Jon cross-examined Beasley.

So what was it like to cross Examinee? Brogan?

It was fun. He didn't like me, so we went

At, you could tell from the get go.

Oh, we went at it right off the bat. My cross was not about actually getting anything from him. My whole goal was to piss him off.

Really? So how did you do that?

Just asked really short, direct questions. And he didn't like any of it. And I called him a liar on several different occasions. And it was probably not the most effective, but it was the strategy that I was going with at the time, probably could have done it much better. Kind of wish I had. But

We also had his statement where he confessed to everything.

So he had given a statement, everything he said, and then he gets on the witness stand and tries to show just how scared he was about everything. So my focus was on that he wasn't scared that he was enjoying this. And then at the end, I went through several people in his life that he had talked to and talked about, but that he never brought any of this up with him. I'm like, this is your coach or your teacher or your friend or your neighbor and all of these people that you've talked about on the stand, on direct about how they were part of your life. But you witness a murder and you never have think to go talk to them. You never think that they can protect you. And then you witness a second murder and you don't think that they can protect you. And then you witness a shooting and then you commit a murder, that kind of thing. And that was how it went. And it probably could have been better, and I haven't read the transcript in a long time, but I'm sure my cross-examination was probably more belligerent than it needed to be. Well, angry Paul came out, I think probably more than he needed to.

And then Jon, when he cross-examined Richard Beasley, you have to know that Jon was very calm. He was the calmest of the three of us. He was very quiet spoken, nice, nice guy. And when he got up to cross-examine Richard Beasley, there was an angry Jon. I'm like, oh my. Where has this been? All the whole first

Emotion we'd seen the whole time,

Really. It was a great cross-examination. It was controlled, it was poignant. It was all of the things that he needed to be because he didn't play into Richard's game at that point. Jon was prepared. He did a great job, but it just was so off from what we'd seen the rest of the, and he is a great attorney, but he was so calm. He was just like the quiet guy just sitting there showing us pictures of his kids

Who was getting ready to go to the Naval Academy. That's all he wanted to talk about.

Crossing evil,

Santa Brogan Rafferty's in prison. Now he will come up for parole. Do you know how he's doing in prison?

He has spent some time at Supermax in Ohio, the correctional facility in Youngstown.

So for those of us that don't know,

You get the Supermax because you are very gang involved and based upon the tattoos that I am able to see that come through on his picture, I believe he has, I believe there's a significant Aryan brotherhood tie that he has developed since he got to prison. And based upon some of the other information that I know since he got to DRC, that there's a definite Aryan Brotherhood connection there.

He's like a skinhead

Aryan brotherhood's, different than skinheads,

Worse,

They run kind of the dope and everything else in the prison. And he has a history. So you don't get the supermax by being a good inmate. And he spent some time in Youngstown, and now I forget where he is at this point in time. Trumble. He's a trumble. That's right.

Is it possible that he could get parole?

Theoretically, he was a juvenile when this happened. So whereas he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, based upon all of the evidence, the Ohio legislature changed the law and commuted all juvenile life without parole sentences to life with the possibility of parole.

I must ask about the prostitutes because that really bugs me, that he used God to lure these drug addicted women to his halfway house and then he prostituted them. I can't find any evidence that he was ever punished for those crimes.

Crimes. That was the case that he was out on bond on when the murders happened. So he's charged with that, gets out on bond. Texas wants him back for his parole violation. He decides that Ralph Geiger, the homeless guy, just kind of looks like him. So he is going to kill him and take on Ralph's life once he was sentenced to death. I think the courts in Akron just, he pled guilty and everything just ran concurrent with that. If he even pled guilty, they may have

Even, I don't think that he did. I don't know what happened with him,

Jon. They may have actually dismissed him. I can't remember off the top of my head. But once he was sentenced to death knowing that he was going to die in prison, they just kind of let it go with that. Whether or not that was the right thing to do, we can't say, Emily and I weren't involved in that case. We just had the homicides

On some level. I kind of want him to pay for. That's just not cool. I don't know. I just feel sorry for those women. And there's no way really to find out who they were or what happened to them.

But it goes to show that he knew the right people to prey on people that are either sexual predators or like a serial killer, what have you. They choose the people they do for a reason. They have a preconceived notion on, well, no one's going to miss this person. Or I can easily get this person to believe what I'm going to sell to them. And unfortunately, for a lot of people that are down on their luck or they are addicts or women going through a hard time that might be on the streets, he thinks people won't miss them. But what he misjudged for this case is that the men that he selected were missed and they did have families. So he just chose the wrong people at this time. You became a defense attorney.

Why

You want the nice answer or the real answer?

Oh, please. The real answer.

Politics. It's not about the cases anymore. Emily and I honestly lived by the idea that you do the right thing for the right reason and the politics will take care of itself. It's not like that. I used to think that every prosecutor did the job the way that we did six years out and working with people like Steve whose studio we're in right now, my partner, Olivia, I've come to the realization that I must've been a patsy as a prosecutor because nobody did it the way we did. Nobody does it now the way we did it. Okay. My favorite quote from a prosecutor in the last six years is, well, I knew the case was shit when I indicted it, but given his record, I figured he plead to something.

Oh wow. These are people

Just like Tim was a person and Ralph was a person, and David was a person, and even Beasley was a person. I spent 20 years as a prosecutor with the idea that I never wanted to wake up 10 years down the road and find out that I had put somebody in prison who didn't deserve to be there. That was the last thing in the world I ever wanted. Six years. Now on this side, I don't see many people who have that same idea. And it scares me. Politics aside, it's not the system that I started in.

So when you say politics, it's sort of like that law and order thing. And it doesn't matter who you convict,

Just No, it's about winning. And it's about making sure that I don't end up on a front page of Channel 10 because I did something that maybe I shouldn't have done. And we have to believe every victim and we have to just go along with every, and there's a whole podcast just in that, just in the transformation that I've made over the last six years of looking at how this system is. And frankly, it's broken in my opinion.

I would like to do that by, tell me

When. I'll happily sit down with you. I also had a tendency to run my mouth at the attorney general's office.

Really? I

Know it's shocking that I didn't necessarily get along with everybody. And apparently elected officials don't like being told that they're doing dumb shit. And eventually they came into my office when I had six homicides pending and said that I needed to go to workers' compensation fraud where I was going to be better suited. And I had left shortly thereafter. Good

For USA, good for you and Emily, this case, I know that it had an effect on the direction of your life.

So I did this case. And then I want to say I did one more cold case out of Ashtabula. You

And I tried one or two after this.

Which ones?

We tried the one what they did with all the highlighters.

Oh yeah, that one. That one, yeah. But for the most part, and then

We

Did there. Yeah. So Theresa Kamsky was a case out of Ashtabula. It was a case that I had pursued through two administrations. It was a cold case. A woman had killed her husband using antifreeze. And my co-counsel at the time had then left the office and I got to the point where I was allowed to indict the case. The family was happy, the detective was great. He was a phenomenal deputy detective up in Ashtabula. And what did that for me is I remember sitting across from the table, and I won't name names, but the elected official telling me that I wouldn't get past Rule 29, which is if the defense makes a motion, after I've presented my case saying, you have not presented enough to even give the jury anything to take back with you, there's no way you can prove this. I don't have to do anything. Just I should win now. And when I was told that, I was like, giddy up, let's go. We're going to do this case. And then after the case, they threw Paul on, I think you were in the ill graces at that point. So they threw him at me as a co-counsel. I'm like, all right, get here. Here we go.

Because it was so horrible working with me

At that. I know we convicted her and they took all the credit for it. And that was probably when the lessons, plus I had two small children. I was ready for a change too. But then I think,

Come on, you didn't enjoy it. When the elected attorney general came down at the verdict for Beasley and sat there and was the one who talked to the media and wouldn't even mention our names for the year and a half that we put in on this case.

It's part of the job when you're working under an elected that they take the credit for what the workers have done, but give credit where it's due sometimes to some of these people that are out sacrificing their mental health and building these relationships and just trying to do the right thing. But for me, that was it. I had done what I wanted. I felt fulfilled in the cases that I tried. I didn't think I had done anything where I would wake up in the middle of the night thinking I'd put somebody innocent in prison. I had let the juries do their thing and eventually COVID. I said, I'd like to try something new. And I took a summer off and spent time with my girls. I went to Europe and then I started teaching pre-law students at my alma mater. And the interesting thing now that I see is a lot of the students of this generation really want to be proactive with their communities. They want to go back to where they're from. They want to help. They want to build up all of the injustices that are going on. So they all want to be defense attorneys.

To which I tell them, why don't you start from the source so that you're not being reactive and go into the positions for the right reasons. Don't go in to be a DA because you want to work up the political chain. Go be a prosecuting attorney institute. Change at that level where you're indicting the cases for the right reasons, and not just to get a guilty verdict, but you're really using the system, how it's supposed to be used. And then you can work with a defense attorney, but don't be reactionary. So that's what I've taken all of my years of trial work and all of the lessons that I learned with working with Paul and other attorneys is trying to get people to do things for the right reasons, not paying attention to politics and all of the shiny nickels that kind of pop up when you do this kind of work.

Well, thank you for all you've done, and thank you for this amazing conversation.

Thank you. Our pleasure. Anytime.

Hide Transcript