#583 Jason Flom with Carl Miller

**Connor Hall** (0:04)
Hey, it's Connor Hall, Senior Producer for Wrongful Conviction, back with another case update and more behind the scenes insights. And this story started just a few months after I was born in 1979 It's the murder of a prominent rabbi in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, and it finally came to some sort of closure this spring, 2026, with the exoneration of Carl Miller. And this story probably begins before 1979, and I suppose it'll never really end. And not just because justice is not going to be served to the victim or their family. Let me explain. Even saying the phrase, the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, it makes me hear a news broadcaster voice in my head. Not only because of the, you know, if it bleeds, it leads style of American media that colored my childhood, along with the peak of our city's murder rate during that time. But also, there was a race riot there in the summer of 1991 between the black and Hasidic populations that lived there. And I remember hearing about it on the news nightly. And once you hear this story, you know, it kind of becomes hard to ignore that this tension that was released through this riot must have been boiling under the surface of this neighborhood. Before even this murder in 1979
Have you been paying attention to recent manufactured outrage over this immigrant enclave map of New York City? It was at one time strictly self-segregated by ethnicity. Now it's just economics, but my people are at least ethnically Irish. When I was a teenager, I dated an Italian girl. A difference that now seems silly to even mention. But at the time, there were older folks in both of our families that definitely looked at it as some sort of interracial arrangement. So you can imagine that the religious and actual skin tone differences between the black folks and the Hasidim in Crown Heights, that was probably even more difficult to overcome even though both populations had something very deep in common. As refugees of European-style discrimination, the Jews escaping systematic annihilation in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Bloc, and then black folks escaping the Jim Crow South, only to come to places like New York where even the Irish and Italians still hated each other, many of whom climbed out of economic dire straits by joining the police forces that systematically tortured and wrongfully incarcerated people like Carl Miller, who became some sort of sacrificial lamb to kind of defuse the tension that came from the murder of a prominent rabbi in 1979, a tension that only would explode in 1991, while he had already been in prison for 11 years. Carl was later paroled after over 30 years in prison, just three years shy of the establishment of Brooklyn's Conviction Review Unit in 2013, under Ken Thompson, which I believe may have started in earnest to correct some of the terrifying history of police violence and misconduct, but it appears to have morphed into some kind of scene-washing apparatus that helps maintain the veneer of infallibility of our criminal legal system which is operated by flawed human beings just like everything else is despite the appearance of some higher calling in a commitment to public safety that is bastardized in stories like this one. And maybe you'll agree with my take when you hear Carl's story. The Brooklyn CRU accepted his case, turned over old investigative files, conducted an investigation including interviews with witnesses that the jury never heard from, as well as those who testified. After you hear this story, you're going to wonder why the hell they were ever believed. And all of it appears to support Carl's unwavering claim of innocence. But before actually doing what the CRU was established to do, the Brooklyn DA's office chose instead to meet Carl's team in court, proceeding to burn through over a decade of tax dollars in Carl's remaining years, fighting his innocence claims until April 1st, 2026 when a judge finally agreed with Carl, overturning his conviction on the grounds of actual innocence. Meanwhile, when asked for comment, the Brooklyn DA's office said, they're still reviewing the decision, like they plan to appeal or some shit. So let's just keep that in mind when you're listening to Carl's story, and ask why this alleged progressive city agency spends tax dollars on fighting to maintain convictions like these. Do they kind of look insane for doing it?
I mean, who benefits from that? Rabbi Okunov, the Hasidic community, the rest of us here in New York?
Anybody, anybody.
While we ponder that, for the first time in 47 years, Carl Miller's name is finally free from the stain foisted upon him by police misconduct and violence. Maybe that sounds too harsh to call it violence, but what else is it when you kidnap someone for 31 years, steal their youth, steal a father from his children, and then enslave him? And if that sounds like hyperbole, I mean, would we think differently when it happens to us?