EP309: Forty-Five Years Pt. 1

For more than forty-five years, Richard Phillips lived under a sentence that told him he would die in prison. Outside, his children grew up, Detroit changed, and the man whose testimony had helped convict him of murder died without ever facing charges for the killing. Phillips kept insisting that he was innocent, but insistence could not overcome a jury’s verdict. His appeals brought brief openings, then reversals and more years behind bars. When he finally walked out at seventy-one, the question was no longer simply whether an innocent man had been imprisoned. It was how a story with contradictions at its center had survived for nearly half a century—and why evidence that could expose those contradictions had taken so long to matter. Behind Phillips’s conviction lay the murder of twenty-one-year-old Gregory Harris, a witness with his own reasons to talk, and a truth the justice system would spend decades failing to uncover.