#581 Jason Flom with Pierre Rushing

**Connor Hall** (0:04)
Hi, it's Connor Hall, the Senior Producer for Wrongful Conviction with another update and more behind the scenes insights. And this one is another that we've been involved with for far too long, with not enough movement.
Pierre Rushing.
The first time I'd even heard about him was December 2019, and by the time I was approved to speak with him on the phone, COVID was in full swing and we were rapidly trying to figure out how to keep the podcast going. But it turned out that remote recording made it way easier to cover more stories and we ended up like nearly doubling our annual output. But I digress. Pierre and I, I mean, we were talking on the phone so much that my wife would just like come into the room and see me on the phone, she'd be like, who are you talking to, Pierre?
I mean, you know, we still talk, less so, but you know, every few months or so, he'll give me a ring, and I'll see that California prison number that I have saved as him in my phone. And every time there's like a mix of hope and despair, you know, is he finally calling with that good news?
Anyway, I pick up and just in the sound of his voice, I can tell that it's just another Tuesday. So we talk about, you know, what new information he's found out, or new strategies that, you know, we could try.
For a while, I was trolling everything the Alameda County DA's social media account was posting with hashtag free Pierre Rushing, and like, what are you going to do something? Now obviously that wasn't very effective, but you know, there were rallies and protests, and Jason went on the Breakfast Club, Joe Rogan, whoever would lend their ear and their platform. There's even a movie, Undefeated, The Wrongful Conviction of Pierre Rushing. In this case, it's an Oakland drug dealer named C who killed one of his customers, Dawone Taylor. Dawone had allegedly pocketed an iPod from C's apartment during a drug deal. So once C figured that out, he went with three others in a car to chase down Dawone and shot him. One of the three in the car, a guy named Robert Greene, eventually told the police who knows why, I mean, maybe he was picked up for something else. But he named the two others in the car while not naming C, and then gave varying descriptions of C over time, like wildly different, right? And then two weeks after the murder, Robert Greene comes forward again and says, Oh, I saw C at a BART station wearing a red hat. And around that same time, Pierre Rushing was stopped at a BART station. He tells you about it in the episode, and he was wearing a red hat. And despite not matching any of Robert Greene's varying descriptions, Greene picked Pierre out of a photo line up as C. Now, at the time of our initial coverage, the other two named accomplices had already sworn in affidavits that Pierre was not C, and another witness went as far as to name C.
Then by the time of our 2023 coverage, the star witness Robert Greene had recanted his testimony, clearing Pierre's name. So they had nothing left in this case. We thought the Alameda County DA, Pamela Price, might do the right thing. But at that time, she was another alleged progressive DA who had become the target of a so-called tough on crime recall campaign. So she chose to not rock the boat with an exoneration. But she still got voted out in a 2024 special election. Now, since that time, Pierre's team has uncovered even more. They finally were allowed to test crime scene biological evidence, namely the car seat where C sat, as well as cigarette butts said to have belonged to him, all of which cleared Pierre. And I'm going to guess it would match C if they just knew who he was. Oh, wait. It turns out that Pierre's team discovered that a witness had named C for investigators before Pierre went to trial. The same name that Pierre's team had during our initial coverage. But that report of an alternate suspect that appears to be quite inconsequential that was hidden from the defense at trial. You gotta wonder why they'd hide that information. This guy was known to operate out of the building from which this whole saga began. Maybe they were just so far out over their skis in this investigation and prosecution that they just buried it and plotted ahead. Maybe it was tunnel vision. Maybe they actually believed, well, this is inconsequential. Or maybe C was more useful to police on the outside. We'll never know.