The Former Seminary Student Who Fights for the Wrongly Convicted

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American stories. Up next, we have a story from Jim McCluskey, co-author of the book entitled When the Truth Is All You Have. We start off with Jim sharing a bit about his childhood and early adult life.

00:00:29
Speaker 2: My brother and I were made to go to Sunday school, but Mom and Dad were completely unchurched, and so they would just drop us off and pick us up. So one day, when I was in fourth grade, I said to Dad, “How come Rich and I have to go to Sunday school, and you and Mom don’t even don’t go to church?” Well, that stung him. I guess maybe Mom and Dad were feeling a little guilty before that, but I provoked them by that question, and then they started going to the same church that I was going to Sunday school. They became stalwart and very active members of the Bethany Presbyterian Church in Havertown. Dad became a very important lay leader of the church. When I was a great in grade school, my Christian faith was very important to me. In fourth, fifth, and sixth grade, I was fearless at that time because of my Christian faith. In other words, I wouldn’t go along with the crowd. I wouldn’t. Peer pressure didn’t phase me in grade school, but once I hit junior high, then I fell into that wanting to please my peers, and their values became my values. My faith was really compromised when I was in high school. Never forget this. I saw a short documentary on the nightlife in Tokyo with all the bars and the beautiful Japanese women in their kimonos and geta shoes walking the streets and all the lights. I was fascinated with that mysterious city, and that’s where I wanted to go. I wanted to go to Tokyo. I wanted to be a quote-unquote international businessman. I always, always had this obsession to to work overseas. International, I thought that was, again, a great way to live a life. But I didn’t know specifically what I wanted to do. So I decided, “Well, I’m going to join the Navy,” and so I went to Officer Candidate Training School in Newport, Rhode Island, in the summer of ’64. Well, OCS, when you’re nearing graduation, which I did in November of ’64,

00:02:36
Speaker 3: you fill out what they call a dream sheet.

00:02:38
Speaker 2: My first choice — so I put on my dream sheet — was shore duty Japan, and that’s exactly what I got. That, in and of itself, is a miracle. The Navy gave me what I wanted, and they assigned me to the communications station in Yokosuka, Japan, which is about an hour’s train ride south of Tokyo along the Tokyo Bay. As a commissioned twenty-two-year-old Navy officer, I’m on my way to the land that I’ve always wanted to go to: Japan. Three years later, then I was separated from the service, and now I’m going to the American Graduate School for International Management in Glendale, Arizona, to get a degree to return to Tokyo in a business capacity. I graduated from the American Graduate School for International Management in October of ’68. You know, I wanted to go to Japan, but I couldn’t find a company willing to send me to Japan, and Tokyo in particular. So I borrowed $1,200 from my parents as a stake, and I flew to Tokyo without a job, no prospects for a job, but I did have the name of a man by the name of Bud Inglesby, who had started up this management consulting firm and market research firm called Coral. And he hired me, and so I worked for Bud for three or four years. As it turned out, unbeknownst to me or the staff of Coral, Inglesby secretly sold Coral to a joint venture between the Fuji Bank of Japan and, in those days, the First National City Bank of New York (now City Corp.). And it became readily apparent to me that I had no future in that firm. I decided it’s time to go home to Philadelphia. Now, here we are in the summer of 1974. I’ve come back from Japan disillusioned, disheartened, feeling betrayed by Inglesby.

00:04:49
Speaker 3: But now I’m looking for a whole new career.

00:04:51
Speaker 2: And I wrote a letter to twenty-five different consulting firms, including a local international management consulting firm called Hay Hay Hey Associates. Hay was the only company that was interested in hiring me. So I was one for twenty-five, but I struck gold with the one: Hay Associates. Now, at the same time, during those five years, I felt that an important part of my earlier life — my boyhood life, if you will — I had gone completely off track. I had left the church. I want nothing to do with the church. When I came home from Bucknell in my freshman year, I said to Dad, “I’ve never gone to church again,” and so I didn’t darken a church doorstep from when I was nineteen until I’m now working for Hay in the seventies, in my early thirties. But I felt the need to go back to church and rekindle my faith because I felt that my lifestyle was not a good one. My moral compass had gone south. So I joined the Paoli Presbyterian Church, which was very close to my house in Paoli, Pennsylvania, and the minister there was Dick Streeter, with whom I’m still close with today. His message was to wash others’ feet, to give of yourself to help others, to follow the Gospels of Christ, and that started to really take hold within me. I was starting to become disillusioned. Even though things were going well with the corporate life, I felt I was leading a shallow, superficial, self-centered life, and in reading the words of the Gospels, where, where Jesus talks about what it means to be a disciple and to follow him. Now, I’m — I felt I was a hypocrite leading one life in darkness at the same time steeped in the Scriptures. So this was a battle going on within me. And finally, I decided, after consulting only with Dick Streeter, that I think Christ was calling me to leave the business world and become an ordained Presbyterian Church pastor. Which I saw the Dick Streeter, the minister of this large congregation. He was touching the hearts and souls in a life-changing way of a lot of his parishioners and even people in the community. I wasn’t touching anybody’s heart or soul. I wasn’t serving anyone except myself. And this really started to bother me deeply that I wanted a life where I felt I was serving others in a purposeful, authentic, meaningful way, and I felt the church pastor was the way to do it. Just like Streeter, in ’79, I decided to leave, not only leave Hay, but leave the business world and go to Princeton Theological Seminary. And when I told my boss, Bill Dinsmore, who was the second top executive and affirm. I said, “Bill, there’s something I need to tell you.” His first words were, “Jim, I didn’t even know you went to church.” So I was still leaning two different lives. It was time for me — not that they cared all that much — but to it tell the world who I really am, what’s really important to me. So off to the seminary I went. So for the next three years, I’m going to be at the seminary to earn that degree. Two of those three years, all of those students — all of us — were required to do field education work: hospitals, churches. I chose Trenton State Prison. It was just a matter of curiosity. I’ve never been in a prison. I had no experience in any regard, in any way, with a criminal justice system. But who are these people? Who are these inmates? And so I said, “I’m going to join the program as a student chaplain.”

00:09:07
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Jim McCluskey tell the story of his journey from businessman, international businessman, to pastor, and in the end, returning to his youth and that connection between the soul, his heart, and the rest of his life. When we come back, we’re going to join Jim on that journey, the journey of becoming a pastor. More of Jim McCluskey’s story here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories. And we’ve been listening to Jim McCluskey tell his story; those words earlier in that segment, and in his story, “My moral compass had headed south,” and that was the swing and determining factor in this big pivot. We left off with Jim deciding to return to church and reignite the faith he’d had as a boy. Going back to church inspired him to leave the business world and pursue a seminary degree. While there, he had to choose required field education work, and he chose, of all places, Trenton State Prison. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

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Speaker 2: I was assigned to the maximum security unit. He assigned me to two different cell blocks, each containing twenty men in their cells, twenty-four-to-seven.

00:11:02
Speaker 3: Our role was to go cell to cell.

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Speaker 2: Two afternoons a week, every Tuesday and Thursday, from one to four o’clock in the afternoon, and just be their friend. Talk to them, not to evangelize, just talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. One of the forty men, there was a man by the name of Jorge Delos Santos, nicknamed Chiefy. He was the only one who was telling me that he was an innocent man, he did not do what he was convicted for, and that he was serving a life sentence for a Newark, New Jersey, murder. Now, we were forewarned, “Do not, under any circumstances, get involved in either their personal or legal problems situation, and if you do, you’re out.”

00:11:56
Speaker 3: “You’re out of here, never to come back again.”

00:11:59
Speaker 2: Up until my tenure as a student chaplain, that had been strictly enforced and obeyed by all those who came before me in years. Before Chiefy, when I arrived at his cell, which was midway down one cell block, all he would talk about was that he’s innocent. He got framed by the prosecutors and the police in Newark. He never killed anybody, and he was in prison for life for the botched armed robbery attempt of a used car lot in Newark, where whoever did this shot and killed the proprietor of that used car lot. Now, at that point, I’d never been a juror, I’ve never been in a courthouse. I had absolutely zero connection or experience with our criminal justice system. I believed at that time that if you were convicted, that certainly you were guilty, that the police and prosecutors would never countenance supporting perjury or in any way presenting anything other than credible, substantial evidence of guilt, that they were as honest as the day is law. And yet here this man is now. He was twenty; he was twenty-eight years old. One he was convicted. He’s thirty-four, thirty-five by the time I encounter him, and he was very honest and open with me about his lifestyle. He was a heroin addict of Puerto Rican descent, raised in the harshest of housing projects in Newark, New Jersey. Two witnesses convicted him and sent him away. One was an eyewitness who claimed that when he was driving his tow truck by the used car lot, he heard gunshots and then he looked at his rearview mirror and he saw Chiefy and another man, whom he identified as Lamont Harvey, fleeing the crime scene. The second evidence used against Chiefy was a man by the name of Richard Delasante, who claimed that while he and Chiefy were in the Essex County Jail, Chiefy, awaiting trial based only on the eyewitness account. Delasante claimed the Chiefy confessed the crime to him. Both witnesses against Chiefy were drug addicts. Delasante in particular had an extensive criminal record, although that was misrepresentative trial. As I said the Chiefy, I said, “Come on, are you telling me you told me not only that you’re innocent, but that the prosecutors framed you? Now, why in the world would they frame you, Chiefy? You were a junkie, you were basically a throwaway, and why would they conjure up and go to all that trouble to frame somebody like you?”

00:14:58
Speaker 3: He said, “That’s just the point.”

00:15:00
Speaker 2: The police convinced the eyewitness to identify me and Harvey because that helped them clear a case. That’s all they care about, a clearing cases. The prosecutors: when you’re a prosecutor, you want to get convictions. And if you don’t get convictions and you go to trial, then when you come back to the prosecutor’s office, you’re not coming back with what you were there for in the first place, a conviction. So I had a very difficult time believing that. Over time — three months: September, October, November — I finally said to Chiefy, “Look, I’m not supposed to do this, but I’m going to get your trial transcripts. I want to read what the state has to say.” So I did. I was able to get his trial transcripts, and I read them over the Thanksgiving holiday of 1980 — some 2,000 pages of documents — and basically what I learned in reading the transcripts was essentially what Chiefy had it confirmed. And then I learned that Richard Delasante had not only given a false, given a Joe House confession against Chiefy, but he did the same thing against his first cousin, Danny Delasante. He claimed at Danny’s trial that Danny confessed the crime to him, and Danny got convicted based on Richard Delasante’s Joe House confession and sent away to life. So I read the transcripts, and now I come back from Thanksgiving. Now we’re in early December, and Chiefy says to me — he said, “Look, you’ve asked me a million questions, and I’ve answered every question that you’ve posed as truthfully as possible. Now I have a question for you, Chiefy,” he said to me. I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Do you believe I’m innocent?” And I said, “Well, yeah, I do believe you’re innocent.” Then he threw out the $64,000 question: “Well, what are you going to do about it?” he says to me. I said, “Chiefy, what do you mean? What am I going to do about it? There’s nothing I can do? You know, this is this is this is way beyond my, my, my thirty-seven years of experience in life. I don’t know anything about murder. I don’t know anything about trials, criminal justice, and DAs and police. I know nothing about that. That’s a whole new world for me.” He said, “Well, Jim, I’ve been on my hands and knees praying to God for someone to believe in me and work to free me. Whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not, you’re that man. God brought you to my cell to work to free me and bring me home to my wife, Elena, who was stuck by me all these years, even in my drug addiction days.”

00:18:00
Speaker 3: “What are you going to do?” he said?

00:18:01
Speaker 2: “Go back to your nice, safe, little secure seminary and pray that somebody will help free Chiefy? He will help rescue him from this wrongful conviction that you believe occurred.” I said, “Well, yeah, that’s kind of what I was thinking about doing.” He said, “If you leave me behind knowing that I’m believing I’m innocent, then you’re not really a man of faith. How can you square that with God?”

00:18:32
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Jim McCluskey tell one heck of a tale, and it gets me to thinking about the two questions in the Bible. The first question God ever asks man — which of course he asked Adam — “Where art thou?” And the first question that man ever asked God, and that’s Cain saying, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” And here is Jim on his faith journey in seminary, trying to fashion an answer to both of those questions, God’s and man’s. We continue with this remarkable story, Jim McCluskey’s story here on Our American Stories. And we return to Our American Stories. We’ve been listening to Jim McCluskey, author of When the Truth Is All You Have, and founder of Centurion, an innocence project dedicated to freeing the wrongly convicted. Jim had begun his seminary field work in prison when he was confronted by a man who claimed to be innocent, and that’s Chiefy. Jim was challenging what he was going to do next. Let’s return to Jim McCluskey.

00:20:11
Speaker 3: And that shook me up. It struck me right to the core of my heart and soul. This man.

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Speaker 2: Was confronting me with: “Who am I? What do I really believe? What does God expect of me?” So I went back to the seminary, quite disturbed by this challenge. I prayed. I read Scripture. Then read. I came across the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 59, and Isaiah says in this chapter, “No one goes to law honestly; they lie.

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Speaker 3: It’s been their web of deceit.

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Speaker 2: We look for justice, but there is none. Truth has fallen from the public squares. The Lord saw this, and was

00:21:06
Speaker 3: upset and wondered why there was no one to intervene in seeking justice.”

00:21:09
Speaker 2: And I looked at that word “intervene,” and I said, “I wonder if this is God’s sign to me to intervene on behalf of Chiefy.” And I felt that it was; and so I went into prison the next week — actually, a little before Christmas — and I told him, “I have a Christmas present for you and Elena.”

00:21:37
Speaker 3: “You and Elena.”

00:21:39
Speaker 2: And so I said, “Chiefy, I’m going to take a year off, and I’m going to do what I can move the ball forward to try and free you. I’m going to start that in a month or so after we finish our finals exams. I believe that I was called by God to do this. So I’m doing it, and we’ll see how it works out.” We embraced through the bars, and silently, tears coming down. We were both moved by what was going to take place. I decided to do this investigation myself. I’m thirty-eight years old. I’ve been around the world. I know a little bit about how the world works. Nevertheless, I was a greenhorn. The first thing I did: I went to Newark and stood at the exact same spot where Pat Pascillo said he was when he heard the gunshots and saw these two men flee the scene in the crowd through the rearview mirror of his

00:22:40
Speaker 3: tow truck in darkness.

00:22:44
Speaker 2: And I determined very easily and quickly it was impossible for him to have seen what he said he saw, based on darkness and distance. Number one. So he’s out as a credible witness. It took ten minutes, which, by the way, Chiefy’s lawyer never did. Now I’m going to investigate Richard Dela S