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Those who find themselves behind bars for a crime they did not commit have few people to turn to. That’s where Dan Slepian comes in. A nearly 30-year veteran of NBC, for the past two decades Slepian has produced a fleet of award-winning pieces for Dateline, the network’s long-running newsmagazine. Slepian has racked up more than a dozen Emmy nominations and earned a Pulitzer Prize nod for documentary work that has exonerated several wrongfully convicted inmates and led to changes in laws. With a new book detailing his 20-year fight for justice titled The Sing Sing Files hitting shelves this month, we caught up with the kindhearted journo to discuss his impressive career and fascinating new book.
What inspired you to help the wrongfully convicted?
People often ask me: Why wrongful convictions and why am I always fighting for the underdog? That’s probably a good question for my therapist, but seriously I think one of the reasons is just that as a kid of divorce when I was so little, the idea of some people not having a voice is something that has always resonated with me. I’ve also had a video camera in my hand basically my whole life — or at least since they came out in the late ’80s, early ’90s — and I always found the power of video to be a very strong way to tell stories. In fact, in my college yearbook it says, “I’m going to work at NBC,” and I’m still there. So, I kind of always knew what I wanted to do.
Tell me about your new book, The Sing Sing Files.
This book is my 20-year journey investigating the cases of six people who were wrongfully convicted, but also what I came to learn through that process and the pathology of our system. You need a bolt of lightning to strike the courthouse door, if you have been convicted of a crime and are innocent, to even get another hearing, There’s a finality to it all. The other thing I learned, which this book is about, is how easily innocent people are convicted, and the tragic difficulty — almost impossibility — of anyone to be heard fairly after a conviction even when there’s pretty clear, obvious evidence of innocence.
Why do you feel the work you do is so vital?
This is a real crisis. Some experts believe as many as 200,000 innocent people are in prison right now. There are 2 million people in prison, so if the system works 90% of the time … that means there are 200,000 [innocent people imprisoned]. If it works 95% of the time, which most studies and most experts agree that there’s at least a 5% error rate, that’s 100,000 people. And just by way of comparison, in more than 30 years only about 3,500 people have been exonerated. So, the goal of my book is for people to understand how perverted this all can be in the face of obvious evidence of innocence. But it also poked a hole in a Pandora’s box, and what I saw inside was beyond just wrongful convictions and exonerations. I saw mass incarceration — and the humanity of everyone in prison, whether they’re guilty or innocent.
What’s next?
I am not taking any money from this book … and what I’m trying to get started is a not-for-profit where my proceeds would go. We’re thinking the name of it is going to be Closer to Justice. But whatever the name is, the idea is that if any teacher, professor, or instructor puts this on their required reading list, two things will happen: First, the students get the books for free, and the second is that we’ll pay an honorarium for an exoneree to come speak, in-person, to the class. That way they’re in front of human beings. That’s how you create generational change — because we need it.
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