Revisiting Wrongfully Convicted: William Dillon and His Life in Prison

Episode Notes

Transcript

Kate Kenney Nutting:

Hi Lawyer 2 Lawyer fans. I’m Kate, producer of the podcast. While Craig is on vacation, we thought we’d bring back one of our favorite episodes from the Lawyer 2 Lawyer Library so you can re-listen or be introduced for the first time. If you’re a new subscriber. In this interview, Craig talks with William Dillon, a man who’s served 28 years of a life sentence for a murder he did not commit. William actually sings the music in one of our other shows on the Legal Talk network called For the Innocent, where we talk to exonerees about their wrongful convictions. If you want to add that show to your playlist, you can visit today’s show notes for a link. Craig will be back soon with all new episodes of Lo to lawyer, so make sure to stick around as we await his return. You can also get caught up on in dispute. Craig’s new podcast about famous trials that changed history and now please enjoy the episode.

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Welcome to the award-winning podcast, Lawyer 2 Lawyer with J. Craig Williams and Robert Ambrogi, bringing you the latest legal news and observations with the leading experts in the legal profession. You are listening to Legal Talk Network.

J. Craig Williams:

This is Craig Williams and welcome to another special edition of Lawyer 2 Lawyer on Legal Talk Network. Despite the many safeguards in our judicial system, there are many behind bars falsely accused and falsely convicted. For some, there’s hope through an Innocence project if their case is strong enough, but help might not arrive for decades. Joining us today is William Dillon, a man who served 28 years of a life sentence for murder he did not commit. State of Florida, set him free When DNA testing proved he was not linked to a key piece of evidence that was used to convict him. And surprisingly, William is a singer and a songwriter. His work was inspired by his long incarceration in one of the nation’s most dangerous prisons, and we’re sharing it today as part of our show. Welcome and thank you William Dillon.

William Dillon:

Great, great to be here.

J. Craig Williams:

And also joining us is Seth Miller. He is one of the attorneys who helped exonerate William. Mr. Miller works for the Innocence Project of Florida where he has dedicated himself to exonerating the innocent since 2006. Welcome to the show, Seth Miller.

Seth Miller:

Thank you for having me, Craig.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, William, can you give us a little bit of history about your situation? What year was it when you were convicted, how old were you and what went through your head 28 years ago or longer?

William Dillon:

I was convicted in 1981. August 26th. I was arrested at the age of 20. I turned 21 and six days later.

J. Craig Williams:

What was going through your mind when you didn’t commit this crime, but yet you were standing there convicted at the end of the trial?

William Dillon:

I was sad. It was truly devastating, but at the same time, I didn’t really give up on the justice system. I knew I hadn’t done anything and I knew eventually they would find a way to get whoever was really responsible for it.

J. Craig Williams:

Can you give us a little bit of the facts and circumstances surrounding the crime that you were alleged to have committed and why you think it was that the jury found you guilty?

William Dillon:

The facts are that a man was beaten to death. A 30 5-year-old man was beaten to death on the beach and they were saying that I was the one that went on the beach and beat a man to death in order to rob him and got up on the highway and hitchhiked and got in the car with another person. And while I was convicted, I believe was just the faulty evidence that was brought before the Courtroom itself. It was all a fabricated sense of evidence. There was nothing real because I committed no crime and wasn’t there at all. So there was no way possibly it could have any factual evidence that I committed anything. I just believe that that was the reason why I was convicted by the maliciousness of creating false evidence and maybe pushing people to say things that really wasn’t true.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Seth, let’s bring you into the conversation. How did you become involved with William’s case?

Seth Miller:

Well, we became involved in the case in a sort of unique way. Most of our cases come to us through folks, either the inmates or their advocates writing to us. We actually just found about Bill’s case because he had filed his own motion for DNA testing and there was a news story about it and we have Google alerts and things like that to keep us abreast of those sorts of things. When we found out about it, it was apparent to us from the reporting that there were some clear indications of actual innocence in the case. We knew DNA testing could potentially resolve the issue, so we reached out to Bill and the public defender had been appointed to him, and we were able to get involved in the case that way and lend our expertise to get the DNA testing and eventually get him out.

In terms of the factors that led to his conviction, I mean there was a number of them. As Bill said, there was a number of pieces of fabricated evidence, but ultimately the case boiled down to a few key points. There was a woman who Bill had known who said that she had saw him around the body near the time of the crime, and that was a fabrication. She actually had sexual relations with the investigating detective. So I mean obviously that was a real problem for the prosecution In the case. There was an eye witness, the person who picked up the perpetrator right after the crime who was actually legally blind, but then made an identification of Bill at the trial. There was some fabricated evidence or fraudulent evidence in terms of a dog handler that was used to connect Bill to key pieces of evidence and connect him to the crime scene. And that dog handler has been exposed as a fraud in a charlatan. And also there was a jailhouse informant who got favors in order to testify that bill had confessed to him and others in a jail cell or in a jail cell like a holding cell when he was in the county jail, which was also a fabrication. They sort of just threw this all out to the jury hoping they got a conviction and they did.

J. Craig Williams:

William, when you were released, what did you do to seek justice for what you had gone through? Or did you?

William Dillon:

No, I really didn’t to seek justice inside myself because I was very caught between the fact of being wrongfully convicted and having the emotion of finally being proven innocent to something I hadn’t fought for years in my mind, if nothing else to get released. I think for me it was just the gratification of being released from it. It was such a big weight lifted off me that the anger and the frustrations of being wrongfully convicted were justified, I guess in a sense now that I was free and it was sort of like a happy elation and hopefully that they would come to recognize who had actually committed the crimes. The basic sense of my mind was that I just wanted to be free. I deserve it.

J. Craig Williams:

How did you get through 28 years knowing that you were innocent?

William Dillon:

It was extremely hard. It was extremely hard. I was assaulted the very first day I was in prison. I was sent to Florida State Prison. I’d never been in prison before, and if anybody knows Florida Prison, it’s the worst prison that you can actually be in at the time. It was extremely dangerous. They were stabbings and killings all the time and assaults every day, every morning when the doors popped and I got through it. I think from the fact that just my constitution was, I kept trying to push myself and say that I can do this and eventually they’re going to find out. And granted though, through the years I lost, lost that faith and favor and because I had to live in my environment, I had to survive. I certainly didn’t want them to kill me or end up in that graveyard as a convicted murderer.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Seth, you mentioned earlier that you had found William’s case, having myself worked in a legal clinic, I imagine you get a lot of requests from people for assistance. Describe how that works in your organization. How can someone get ahold of you?

Seth Miller:

Well, anyone can write us, email us, call us, fax us. But ultimately we get about 1800 pieces of correspondence a year, about a thousand of which are new requests for assistance. And then some cases come to us through referrals, like Bill’s case or we see it on the news or read about it in the legal journals. And we have a very stringent difficult process to wean those cases down from about a thousand to about 10 to 12 that we take each year. And for cases that have a potential DNA component is really an objective criteria. We’re looking for cases that have biological evidence that exists today at some agency that if we were to test it, it would be indicative of the perpetrator’s identity. And then if we were to compare it to our client’s DNA and exclude them as a contributor of that DNA, then of course they would be exonerated.

That’s the template that we used in Bill’s case to test DNA that was found in the wearer areas of a bloody T-shirt that was left behind by the perpetrator in the truck in which he was hitchhiking in. And what it showed is that from the armpits in the collar of the T-shirt, there was another male’s DNA there that wasn’t bill’s. And we’ve come to learn now many years later that it actually matched someone who was a suspect even at the time when Bill was being investigated for this case that the prosecution knew about, or I’m sorry, the police knew about and they just sort of pocketed it in their file and never followed up on it. And so here they had a link, a lead to the actual perpetrator back in 1981, and instead they prosecuted Bill only to find out later that this other person was linked through DNA testing

J. Craig Williams:

Bill. Have you received any kind of an apology from the prosecuting attorney or the police or have you communicated with them at all?

William Dillon:

No, I haven’t heard any kind of apology. As a matter of fact, for three years after my release, they were still trying to tell people that I had escaped their conviction somehow through legal battles or some sense of whatever it was only through CODIS DNA testing did they actually get a hit on somebody else. And another person that was in the file actually confessed after some push by the police that four of ’em had actually committed the crime to some degree. And as far as an apology, the governor of the State of Florida Governor Rick Scott did apologize to me on national tv, but the prosecutors and the police have not. They’ve denied any wrongdoing.

J. Craig Williams:

How does that make you feel?

William Dillon:

I feel okay with it because I can’t live with it. They took already took almost 28 years of my life and I’m going to keep letting them take it from me regardless. It makes me feel that somebody recognized the fact that I was innocent, and that’s the gratifying point that just being released in freedom was most gratifying than anything.

J. Craig Williams:

You were a wise man, not to let them take any more of your life. What was your life like before you were sentenced to prison? What did you do? What were your hobbies, what kinds of things interested you and describe for us how you became a singer and a songwriter.

William Dillon:

My life in 1981, I was a young 2020 1-year-old kid and I was just chasing the girls and trying to enjoy life and not really knowing what life was. I was constituted, I was being scouted by the Detroit Tigers and life was all over the place for me. I was just that kind of a kid. I wasn’t bothering anybody, I was having fun and I really didn’t hunker down and say, this is what I want to do or want to be. I was everywhere. And as far as my singing and songwriting that basically came from, I’ve always been a singer to myself. I’ve been in school and sang and I’ve sang publicly in school, different songs and duets with girls and stuff in prison. I wrote Black robes and lawyers. Initially when I was first attacked within the first couple of years, it began to evolve as a poem, as a statement to the system about what they had done.

And that was nobody was really listening to me and it was helping gratifying to me that I could write this and just so it would be remembered because at that point in my life, I didn’t think anybody was ever going to hear or read the words, but it was gratifying to me to write it. And I basically came out thinking at my last institution, I was allowed to learn to play the guitar. They had a couple acoustic guitars and stuff, and eventually I worked my way into getting that job and I sat there and tried to play the guitar and had other guys that knew how to play teach Me. And I came out thinking, you know what? All these little songs and things that I’ve written maybe I can put down to music and have him record and make a cd. And I did Jim Tule out of Chicago, Evanston, Illinois. He gladly called up the Florida Innocent Project and said, Hey, I’d like to give a William a shot at recording a cd.

J. Craig Williams:

Excellent. What’s the name of the cd?

William Dillon:

It’s called Black Robes and Lawyers.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Seth, you mentioned that you have to sort through 1800 applications a year, and I’m sure as you mentioned as well, you as a group find some on the internet, but it’s a phenomenal list that you have to sort through. And how does that affect the Innocence Project and the people that work for it, and especially you knowing now that William’s life was taken away from him and he’ll never get it back, and there are other ones out there like him, but you can’t help him all. How do you sort through that? Well,

Seth Miller:

It’s a really, really daunting task. I mean, if I could give a metaphor, it’s truly like needle in a haystack type work. But the important thing is that the folks who are writing to us almost all are poor, have no means indigent in prison. Many of them have life sentences without the possibility of parole. And if not us, there’s no one who’s going to come after us to give their case a diligent and thorough review. So we take the job very seriously, understanding that when we reject someone and we do reject 96% of the requests that come through the door, that may be it for that person. And so that’s hard. On the flip side of that, when we do take a case and we litigate it, and sometimes it takes many years to achieve success, when we do reach that point where we’re walking someone like William or any of our other clients out of prison, it’s a special experience for that person and their family.

But it’s also this amazing experience for us. I liken it to giving someone life. So many of these folks are going to die in prison if we’re not able to get them out. And here we are with the opportunity to give them life and hand them over back to their families who they ripped apart from many years earlier. And that’s an experience that not only puts an indelible imprint on the lives of our clients, the people who we help, but the people who are involved with it on our end are forever changed by that experience. This is an experience that will affect the trajectory of my life and how I view the importance of the everyday experiences that I get to take advantage of and the time I spend with my family and my son. And so it’s a gratifying, important formative experience for us as lawyers and staff here at the Innocence Project of Florida, and we’re just so happy and privileged to be able to do it.

J. Craig Williams:

Thank you. And congratulations and welcome back to Lawyer To Lawyer. I’m Craig Williams, and returning with us is William Dillon and Seth Miller. And Seth, before the break, you were talking about what it meant to you to really have an understanding of what it’s like to set someone free, but there are many people in the country who can’t imagine given what they perceive to be the jury system and the safeguards that are there that there would ever be a false conviction. What are the most common reasons for false convictions and how do people wrap their minds around this?

Seth Miller:

There are a number of causes of wrongful convictions, and the reason that we know what they are is because we’ve had exonerations and been able to study the factors that led to those wrongful convictions. And the leading cause of wrongful convictions is eye witness misidentification, which accounts for about 75% of the wrongful convictions that where folks have eventually been exonerated. And 75% of those cases there was at least one eyewitness or victim who misidentified the person who was wrongfully convicted. It’s a huge problem and one that we’re trying desperately to address through policy reforms, but you have issues like false confessions. No one believes that someone would confess to a crime that they didn’t commit. Yet we know that there are all kinds of reasons that innocent people will admit to crimes they didn’t commit some because it’s beneficial for them to do so to avoid a worse off sentence.

But also some folks just are vulnerable and are more prone to falsely confess. And we’ve seen a number of cases like this in Florida and around the country where folks who are mentally retarded, children who again are prone to suggestiveness, confess to crimes and are later proven innocent by DNA testing. We have cases with jailhouse informants, we call them snitches. Bill Dylan had one in his case, a number of our cases have them where folks get favors to testify that the prosecution’s suspect confessed to the crime. And this is erroneous unreliable testimony. I think one of the other main things that’s coming about now as we advance in our understanding of science is that certain forensic procedures that were used to connect people to crimes in the eighties, nineties, or even a decade ago, are now being outstripped by more advanced science and understanding of how different sciences and forensic methods work. And it’s causing us to look back at these old cases and rethink whether evidence that was used to connect someone to a crime if it’s the main evidence in the case may have led to a wrongful conviction. So we have a nice, and that’s not all of them. We have a nice plate of potential causes or wrongful convictions to help us identify cases. And we’re constantly trying to rectify these miscarriage justice not only through litigation looking backwards, but also trying to reform criminal justice system to ameliorate these causes and prevent wrongful convictions going forward.

J. Craig Williams:

It’s interesting that you identify eyewitness testimony as the number one reason that people are falsely convicted. Our law school criminal law professor performed an exercise that in the beginning of the class that none of the students knew was being performed, he had a student, a graduate assistant, come in to the room, say something to the professor, and then turn around and leave, and nobody paid any attention to it because it was just a common everyday occurrence and it wasn’t out of the ordinary. At the end of the class, the professor told us what, sit down and write down what it is that you remember about the person that came in in the beginning of the class. A significant number of people couldn’t even remember that someone came in. No one person in the class got every characteristic about that person, male female, color of hair, color of shirt, color of pants, carrying a clipboard, not carrying a clipboard, nobody got it. All right. So it’s certainly understandable how that could happen. Well, William, I wanted to ask you a question about, you mentioned, or actually Seth mentioned that Florida Innocence Project found you as a consequence of a news item that had been written about your motion to get DNA testing. What prompted you to file that motion and describe to us how that occurred?

William Dillon:

The motion that I filed was in 2006. A man had approached me in the library of the prison and he asked me if I’d ever had a DNA test, and I told him that I’d been in prison almost 26 years and there probably wasn’t anything DNA testable in my case. And he said, that doesn’t matter. He said, just file the motion, fill it out and tell him that the evidence is in the sheriff’s department. So I eventually looked it up and went through some cases and found out that another individual in Bavar County, Wilton Edge had also been exonerated through processes, and it was also a dog handler case from John Preston. And I began to see some correlation between the two. So I filed the DNA motion and put all that information in my motion and sent it off. And within a matter of four months, the judge ordered the prosecutors to show cause and they seemed to have forgotten about me because their show cause was really mixed up and confused about all the evidence and everything.

And I rebutt that and the judge ordered me back into the county jail. And in the process of being put in the county jail, a news media that had done Wilton Dess News Media case, which was unknowns to me, I didn’t know it at the time, called me and asked me for an interview and I told my family and friends about the interview and they didn’t want me to do the interview thinking that it would cause the prosecution to get mad and stuff and really throw off my case. And I did the interview. I wanted everyone to know everything I was dealing with. And the man Dan Billow from channel two said, Mr. Dylan, if everything you say is true, you could be a free man because I’m the one that did the Wilton Edge interview and I really like the information I’m hearing from you. I hope all works well for you. So that’s really how it took off by putting me in there. And the Florida Innocent Project was able to pick it up because of DNA mentioned.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Seth, that’s the handoff to you. What happened after that?

Seth Miller:

We got involved with the case and worked with local counsel. It was Mike Pero from the Public Defender’s Office, a wonderful lawyer down in Brevard County, and we amended bill’s motion that he filed to sort of beef it up a little bit. He did a great job getting the ball rolling, and we perfected it. And from that point, we’re able to get DNA testing ordered out to a private lab in Texas. And it took them about six months to work on the case. And in August, 2008, they released a report showing again that bill was excluded as a contributor of this important male DNA, that was in this area of this very important piece of evidence, this T-shirt that was worn by the perpetrator that had the victim’s blood on it and was left in the car that he hitchhiked in. And again, it was indicative of the wear of that shirt.

So we filed a motion based on that DNA evidence to vacate his conviction and the prosecution, he and hawed a little bit, they were a little bit annoyed, how do we know that this proves innocence and all of that they were sticking to their guns. But the upshot of this is they eventually agreed in November to vacate, this is November, 2008 to vacate his conviction. And then they had some time to decide whether they were going to retry him or not. And just a month later in December, 2008, they agreed to drop the charges and that officially led to his exoneration. So Bill was released in a wonderful evening in November, 2008 and a month later, that was it. That was the end of it. He was truly a free man.

J. Craig Williams:

Bill, tell us what it was like from the time you got the news at the time you walked out of jail and what it was like to breathe air that didn’t have bars in front of it.

William Dillon:

Initially, October, I mean November 14th, 2008, I was taken to the county jail courthouse, didn’t know what was taking place at the point, and they pulled me in and says, we are going to vacate your sentence. I’m talking to my lawyers now, Mike Perillo, who in fact, Greg Kudos is an awesome lawyer. He really pushed hard just like the innocent project, they definitely pushed hard to get this free. And at that point, I honestly didn’t believe it because I firmly believe the prosecution was going to do something when they said they were vacating my sentence, it was like total. I mean, joy was building up, but at the same time, my mind was telling me, don’t get too excited. They’re going to try to do something they know they’ve done wrong here and they’re not going to just let you walk away from this. That was my point.

And then three or four days later, I had a bail hearing and they released me on November 18th under bail for $2,000. I think it was something like $200,000 bail or something. I’m not sure exactly what the bail was. I was kind of in a zone there. At that point, I was really exhilarated to be free and be pointed. I was disappointed that it didn’t work out the way I had dreamed it, that I was just going to walk free, but they were going to put this monitor on my leg, but I was still free. And I walked out on November 18th that night feeling like the angels were carrying me down there. I was just totally lost. I was almost dizzy with the euphoria as something that you can probably never experience, but one time in your life. And from November 18th to December 10th, I wore a little thing on my leg that says I was still a possible suspect to a murder that I had nothing whatsoever to do with December 10th, they faxed over a piece of paper to my lawyer saying that they were dropping all charges, which was he called me on the phone and says, you can go take that monitor off because they’re dropping all charges against you and everything.

They’re not going to retry you. And I thought it was really great the fact that if they didn’t retry me by Valentine’s Day that I was going to be free anyway at that point. And I thought it was kind of a beautiful thing that Valentine’s Day was the day that they were going to not be able to try me anymore. My lawyer had filed a FASTA Speedy trial.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, congratulations. I’m sure that that was, as you said, a once in a lifetime experience. Well, we’ve reached just about, reached the end of our program. It’s time to wrap up with your final thoughts and get your contact information. So Seth, I’ll hand it over to you. You can

Seth Miller:

Reach the Innocence Project of Florida to learn more about our project or seek assistance by going to our website, www.floridainnocence.org. And that’s all spelled out, all one word. And there you can find our blog and we update every day and information about wrongful convictions, about Florida exonerees like William Dillon, who you’ve heard here today and keep track of what’s going on with Innocence Project of Florida. We hope you visit our website.

J. Craig Williams:

And Seth, I forgot to ask you in the show, but what does it cost for this type of DNA testing? The

Seth Miller:

Cost depends on the case and how many samples we need to test. In William Dylan’s case, we spent about $16,000 on DNA testing because of the number of samples we needed to test and the type of DNA testing that we needed to do. In other cases, we’ve spent as little as three or $4,000, but you pay per sample, and if you have to have a hearing and bring an expert in, it can really drive up the cost. The big thing is that none of our clients pay even a dime. We pay for all of it, and we take a lot of pride in knowing that the folks we represent, regardless of what kind of means they come from, they get the highest quality representation presentation because they’re innocent. So innocent people are getting treated the very same regardless of their means, and we take a lot of pride in that.

J. Craig Williams:

Great. Thank you so much for your work. And William, we’d like to wrap up with your final thoughts and your contact information for people to reach out to you. And particularly I’d interested to hear about how music got you through prison.

William Dillon:

Well, music got me through prison. Just being able to express myself more than anything. It’s sort of that sense of I’m speaking in the Courtroom and I testified for myself and I was telling the truth and nobody seemed to be listening to me. So music was that expression where I could sing out and write out. Same thing with writing. It was an expression of eventually somebody will read this and there will be some gratification in it. But singing was the same way. I just want to thank the Innocent Project of Florida and Mike Perillo and the many people who supported me, and even after my release for years of constant hounding me in coming to my home and investigating this and going through changes and just almost literally terrorizing me again to the point to where I got to the feeling that I was still convicted of a crime that I had been released of a point.

I’m on Facebook, William Michael Dillon. I’d appreciate if everybody hit it up and liked the page and you can contact me through the Innocent Project of Florida at any time. I’m sure they’d be glad to help out in any way. And anything I can sponsor for wrongful conviction or participate in, I’d really like to, that’s my whole agenda. And I firmly believe that that may have come to a great thing because I don’t know how I was able to speak at this point until I was released. I just felt this overpowering sense of instead of getting angry about it, why don’t you just talk about it and teach people about how this stuff really takes place.

J. Craig Williams:

Great. Well, thank you very much, William, for being on the show and Seth Miller as well. This has been a great discussion that brings us to the end of our show in this special edition of Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m Craig Williams. Thank you for listening and join us next time for another great legal topic. When you want legal, think Lawyer 2 Lawyer