#582 Guest Host Conor Hall with Brian Pippitt

**Conor Hall** (0:04)
Hello again, it's Conor Hall, the Senior Producer for Wrongful Conviction, with another update and more behind the scenes insights. And today, we're talking about Brian Pippitt, an episode that I had the privilege of hosting. And that's not why we're listening to this today. That's just a coincidence. There's an actual update to be had. Now, this case came to me from another innocent man's advocate. If you remember John Jukka, his mother, Doreen, she is the total badass that is known as Mother Justice. She had sent me an article and introduced me to the journalist who wrote it, a guy named Ted Hamm. And it was all about, you know, Brian's case and how Minnesota's Conviction Review Unit under Attorney General Keith Ellison had done a two-year investigation and then concluded that Brian was factually innocent, but the local district attorney in Aitken County, a guy named James Ratz, can't make that shit up, had welched on his agreement to go along with the CRU's ruling. So the media started getting involved, including us. Now, this was all in the late summer, fall of 2024, when Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was running for Vice President, which likely made his team, and maybe the entire team, wary of weighing in on anything that could be controversial, like dispensing justice in Brian's case. Shouldn't be controversial. Anyway, now had they won that election, Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, who's half Ojibwe, same tribe as Brian, she would have become governor, and who knows, maybe she'd take an interest. But that's not how the cookie crumbled, so after the election, Brian's team filed for clemency with the Waltz Admin. And in April 2025, Minnesota's Clemency Review Commission, on the basis of Brian's credible evidence of innocence, voted 6-1 in favor of commutation to time served. Next step was a hearing with the pardon board, which has three members, the governor, the attorney general, and the chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. Now, we already knew that Keith Ellison was convinced of Brian's innocence, so this came down to the chief justice and Tim Walz. Now, after years of watching Jason at work, the guy is a master advocate. I mean, he basically took all the skills from his actual profession, advocating for artists, and he uses those skills for the innocent. It's amazing to watch, even being around him, he's like this vortex of connections in this world. I am not that, but it made me think, you know, what could I, what could little old me do, right? So I started thinking about how I could reach either one of them, the Chief Justice or Tim Waltz, right? Who the hell am I? Anyway, we had just covered Leonard Peltier, whose advocate, Holly Macaro, was very effective, and she is also Ojibwe, like Brian, and the Lieutenant Governor. Funny enough, Holly had just taken a consulting job with Peggy Flanagan's senatorial campaign. That primary is August 11th, 2026, but I digress. So I sent Holly the podcast and filled her in on everything and begged her to speak with Peggy, who maybe she could convince to lobby Governor Waltz on Brian's behalf. Or maybe even Holly could cross paths with him and corner him and give him the elevator pitch. Now, I'm not sure what she was able to do, what effect any of this had, but on September 24th, 2025, the pardon board held a hearing and Governor Waltz chose to commute Brian's sentence. Now, the Clemency Review Commission's recommendation was time served. But Governor Waltz, who had re-election on his mind, well, he chose to just make him parole eligible. It's a shame how electoral politics can cause so much caution and compromise when it comes to justice. Probably because, you know, the enemies of justice are so happy to manipulate low-information voters. But I digress again. At this hearing, Waltz made a comment that I'm going to paraphrase. It's something like, moments ago, Mr. Pippitt was serving a life sentence. Now he'll be home by the new year. Interesting that he was so confident in what the parole board was still yet to do that December, and then Brian was finally released on January 8th, 2026 Around that time, Minnesota was really going through it and still is. The current EOJ has made misleading and racially charged allegations about child care fraud schemes while withholding federal funding. And I guess we'll find out how much water any of these cases hold, but it's been so disruptive that Tim Waltz dropped out of the governor's race and perhaps even more consequential, the same DOJ has refused to renew the federal grant that helped fund Minnesota's Conviction Review Unit. So Attorney General Keith Ellison had to shut it down.