He Was Wrongly Imprisoned for 20 years, This is How He's Finding Justice | Isaac Wright Jr.

i was buried before i even went to prison i was buried then because the the the level of corruption uh that had engulfed me as a young man alone um you know the the book was written before the indictment came down and and that was really my reality my reality was that i was going to prison for the rest of my life and there was nothing no one was going to be able to do about [Music] it hey everyone this episode is brought to you by our sponsor betterhelp an online counseling company with the mission to make professional counseling accessible affordable and convenient i hope you enjoy hey everybody welcome to another episode of impact theory i'm here with somebody today that is going to blow your mind i cannot overhype this one enough buckle in we are here with somebody who has lived a life that you really can't imagine isaac wright jr isaac thank you so much for joining me man thank you tom thank you for having me dude seriously i i could not be more just absolutely mentally mauled by your story and it isn't even so much what you've been through which will lay out for people quickly here at the top it's how you approach problems so let's really fast you were wrongly convicted of a crime in the early 90s given a life sentence plus like an extra 70 years so you're never getting out of jail and i want you to pick up with um who represented you in court i represented myself and and you know not not because it was something that i wanted to do i literally tried to find an attorney that was going to do right by me but you know attorney after attorney uh was coming in and was just telling me that my best alternative was to plead guilty you know and take 20 years for something i didn't do and so my only course uh was to represent myself really fast would some of those people if you had pushed and said look i get that that's your advice and you think that i'm going to lose but will you not stand and represent me if you had said that would they have agreed or you just knew their their hearts not going to be in it they're not going to do what it takes oh they were going to represent me and i was going to go to prison without a voice and and that was that was the issue was not um the lack of representation i would have gotten representation but i would have gotten the kind of representation that would have sent me to prison for the rest of my life with no way out uh because at that point i was going to be a slave to somebody else's strategy somebody else's thought process and uh someone else's motives you know that passion and that drive and that belief for example i mean this is very very simple if you don't believe in something you're never going to be able to convince anybody else of it and so that was really uh where i found myself i found myself uh in a position where nobody believed in me i was the only one that believed in me dude it's so how old are you at this point i'm in my 20s and what's your educational background a high school diploma so here's a guy in his 20s with nothing but a high school diploma who decides that okay i've looked at my options from a representation standpoint and i am better off representing myself even though i don't know the legal system that already so one because i know how your story turns out um i know that it's brilliant in the moment though i would have thought i i would have wept at your feet and begged you to take an attorney and so what what was it in your mind that were you thinking i can learn this fast enough or or do you have to explain to us this idea of having a voice was more important than winning having a voice was more important than winning uh and that that's how it initially began but what happened is when i picked up that first law book it felt like i was doing it all the time there was an epiphany and and there was a there was a sense that i found myself i'm facing life in prison i came into the arrest and and the charges and the indictment and all these problems thinking that i actually had it down that i was on top of the world um you know because i had a flourishing career and my ex-wife at the time her career was flourishing so we were doing really well and you know as a 20-something year old young man you know with the little uh little baby girl a family i thought i just i thought i made all the right decisions i had to prom the world in the palm of my hand and i didn't realize until i went to jail that you know i actually found myself i mean that's where i found out who i really was when i picked up that law book for the first time and and from that point my strategy began to change on how i was going to move through the system all right so i think one of the um just to throw out some more of the the pieces of the story so we can get to the really interesting stuff uh corrupt judge ends up going to jail corrupt uh litigator who ends up committing suicide like these it wasn't like uh this was just you were being over sentenced or something like that like you were in the middle of like one of the most insane and corrupt um arrests and prosecutions i was ever immediately surrounded completely engulfed in corruption and at every i was i was when you when you look at it i was buried before i even went to prison i was buried then because the the the level of corruption uh that had engulfed me as a young man alone um you know the the book was written before the indictment came down and and that was really my reality my reality was that i was going to prison for the rest of my life and there was nothing no one was going to be able to do about it that was my reality the story that i would love for you to tell that will give people an understanding so here we have a young guy in his 20s who's thriving by the way he's got his own private record label uh his wife is one of his musicians and is selling millions of albums like you're really doing very well capitalizing on the the rise of hip-hop like you're really killing it but only have a high school diploma get framed railroaded in the extreme and now take us to that moment where you're being sentenced and sort of how this like epic battle that that was destined to be on tv plays out between you and the lead prosecutor so you know i obviously i i get convicted i go to trial and you know the trial is um it's about a month and a half almost two months and uh the jury goes the jury's out for a week or so and there's problems with the jurors and the judge tells them don't you know get go back in and don't come out to you and find him guilty and so they they find me he actually said that yeah yeah he said he told him to go back that's and that's that's public record i think there's some there's some articles online about that but he he literally told him to go back in and not to come back out till he found because i had a problem you know this wasn't just a fight this was a fight to the death and i i did everything that i possibly can even though my strategy was not to get a an acquittal you know i gave them my best that i had and you know they deliberated for a week they came out and said you know we can't find him guilty and that's what he did he sent them back in and they came back with the guilty verdict um about about 45 days later i'm sentenced and so you know i'm standing up at during my sentencing i'm you know i'm looking looking at the judge and as the judge is is handing down my sentence i notice that the prosecutor moves from his table so i i kind of turn to look to see what's going on and he's continuing to walk up towards the judge's bench and now the judge is actually sentencing me and and so that was really weird for me because i've never seen anyone uh at least a litigator an officer of the court moving around in the court going up through the gallery into the in front of the judge and actually in front of his bench while he's he's talking it was a little disrespectful so i you know it caught my attention so i'm looking at him and my head in my eyes is following him up to the front and he stands right in front of the judge right in front of the judge's bench where you can hardly the bench is a little higher so i can he's covering the judge up to like his his because he you know he's a tall guy but the judge was hiring him so i was able to still see the judge's face so he turns and he turns around when he gets to the judge's bench he turns his back to the judge so that he can you know he can look at me and he timed it he timed walking up to that bench in such a way as he was able to get there and turn around and look at me as the judge was handing down the life sentence and when the judge gave me the life sentence he started smiling at me he wanted he wanted me to see he it was important for him uh for me to see that not only did he defeat me but he took pleasure in what he had done to me and so i looked back at him you know i looked back at him and i smiled back at him and so we stood there i i couldn't i didn't even hear what was going on anymore i mean after the last sentence it was all a buzz anyway you know and so we stood there smiling at each other throughout the entire proceeding until the judge finished sentencing me and then he walked off and walked to his table and shook hands and everything and patted everybody on the back and all of that and then i was handcuffed and escorted out why smile i knew why he was smiling i smiled at him because i knew he didn't understand what really was happening you know i never i never decided to represent myself to escape being sentenced to life in prison i decided to represent myself because when i realized that i had a gift that i knew nothing about my strategy shifted to not going to prison because i was going my strategy shifted to making sure that when i went to prison they wasn't going to be able to keep me and so everything i did was not for the day everything that i did was for years down the line you know even some of the things that you're probably going to ask me about when i made new law while i was in prison you know i sat and waited for the right person for three years in prison i waited for three years to get that right person to put this argument in and i did it and i got him reversal i use that case in my favor after i made the newsletter right that that movement was so brilliant you have to explain to people why you didn't just use it immediately in your own case and like what it means to create new case law i i understood early on the corruption that i was facing even before i picked up that law book there was an incident that happened to me the day i was arrested and they took me to a holding cell in a jail to be processed before being transported to the county jail uh the day i was arrested i was in the cell and and i kind of fell asleep it might have been three o'clock in the morning i kind of dozed off you know because i was arrested at in the afternoon that day and i'm still just sitting there in the jail and it's two three o'clock in the morning and you know i happen to i think i dozed off because i heard my name in it you know i came to and when i heard my name i looked up i saw one of the detectives and a man in a suit coming towards me in the cell so in my head it was like okay a family member or a friend contacted an attorney and he's here to see me so i got up and i approached the bars and as i approached the bars the guy in the suit put his hands through the bars and i started shaking his hands and the in the the the detective that was escorting him and says i just wanted to introduce you to uh somerset county prosecutor nicholas l bissell and and as he was talking nick bissell says to me uh i wanted you to know mr wright that i'm here to let to to inform you that i'm going to be trying your case personally now he was a head prosecutor head prosecutors don't try cases head prosecutors are administrators their assistants try cases he gets out of his bed two three o'clock in the morning to come tell me that so even as a kid 20 something years old i understood that that move was something that was going to manifest himself itself in fact somewhere down the line because he was not going to turn against what he just said and he was not going to allow me to make him look like a fool so i knew by any means necessary i was going to prison it was over at that point fast forward and i've been convicted i've been i've been sentenced and i'm moving toward i'm moving through the system one of the things that i knew from that experience is that the more i know about them and the less they know about me the better off i am for example if they see me coming they're gonna cut me off at the knees and so the entire strategy that i used was to formulate legal positions and to formulate the direction that i was going to go into gathering evidence against him without letting them understand what i was actually doing i did a civil case and i fought that simple case like y'all you guys did me wrong i'm suing you but the purpose of the civil case was to get evidence i didn't care i could care less whether i won the civil case or not i could have cared less i knew that a civil case was um a door that opened you up to a fishing expedition for evidence and a criminal case was not you know and so i was fighting two wars on both fronts in order to stay ten steps ahead of them without them seeing me coming while they concentrated on keeping me in prison i was gathering evidence against them right up under their nose and they had no clue what i was doing dude it's so smart and you know i always tell people to play the long game and normally when i say that i'm talking about reputation and you know be a good person and just think how these things knock on but the thing that makes you so interesting to me the reason you've completely captured my imagination is that when you understand how the world works the system works the game works whatever it is you're trying to play and you don't act as if the world works the way you wish it does right you act the way the world actually works and now when you do that you can actually win because you're not fighting yourself right right and that you would go okay i get the game i'm playing i get that this is going to be a slow burn you have the cajones to rock seven and a half years in prison you wait three years to get the perfect case that matches yours right so you go to jail for being a drug kingpin you see an opening to get that thrown out but first you need somebody else whose case matches it so that you can get case law so you give him i'm not sure what exactly you had to give him um but you give him something that he uses in his case right i give him a legal argument and so so let me let me explain to you i i lived my life uh as two people uh moving through the system one person um his his core motive was to wreak havoc through the judiciary and when you when i talk about you know getting people 20 people out of prison when i talk about while you were in prison yourself while i was in prison myself my own life i set my fight aside to ensure uh that i got at least 20 people that were wrongfully convicted or sentenced out of prison uh during that time i also litigated civil cases on behalf of the prison for prison conditions mental medical issues you know a guy would would leave and go to ed said he'd come back with broken arms broken legs because you know the guards beat him up and so and so that one person was the person you know fighting these these fights on behalf of others um and and and being effective that was a person that was wreaking havoc on the system that was my core motive that individual was to wreak havoc through justice because one of the things about injustice if you fight injustice with justice you wreak havoc upon injustice it's like uh uh water and oil it's never going to mix you know and so and so that's that was one of the things that that person that was his that was his core existence in life the other person was the person who had an innate desire to write the wrong that was done to him and and that was an entirely different fight from the fight that i was fighting on behalf of other prisoners because when i fought on behalf of other prisoners i didn't have the worry about them seeing me coming but when i fought on my own behalf i had the emotional baggage that i had to manage i had to be clandestine uh in the way i was moving through the system and the things that i learned about the system and how i was going to use those things against them i had to be an entirely different person and so you had two distinct personalities uh that was moving through the system at the same time in one person and they cross collateralized those experiences to alter to bring in uh ultimate defeat through specific strategies that was laid out based on what that what i had to work with you know whatever it is that was in front of me i i use it against him talk to me about the emotional management how did you recognize the need for that and then how did you actually pull it off um there was there was two things that i dealt with and and one uh i was in a good place with it because of something that happened to me when i was a kid and that was fear um something that happened to me when i was a kid changed the way i dealt with fear and open to talking about what that is yes um and that was extremely significant because because fear is your greatest enemy and when you're going through what i went through you know the average person i shouldn't say the average person the greatest of us is engulfed in fear when they're facing a live sentence or when they get a life sentence and they go to a maximum security prison and there's dangers around them every day 24 hours a day but so when i was six years old there was one day when my father was was stationed in fort hamilton and this was like on a saturday and i had just collected enough bottles uh because i i did that at least once or twice a week to have money over the weekends as a kid i picked the bottles up out of the ditches and go knock on people's doors and i collect bottles and i had collected enough bottles that weekend uh where i was i was able to buy you know my myself some things from the store and and some of my brothers and so i was really happy that day i was i was on my way to the store to spend some of that money that i made collecting bottles and i remember skipping down the sidewalk going to the corner store and as i was skipping down the sidewalk there was a dog a german shepherd that was chained to a fence and i recognized the dog because it belonged to one of the guys in the neighborhood he was older than me i think he was about 13 or 14 years old his name was peanut and this dog was just barking at me as i was skipping i guess he thought i was running or whatever but he was just barking barking and i didn't pay no attention because you know he was tired of the fence so so i continued to skip and maybe 20 feet from the store it got silent subconsciously the dog wasn't barking anymore so i noticed it as i was walking through the store that the dog stopped barking and and when i looked over towards the dog he was straddling a car he was up in the air he had straddled the car jumped over it and he was coming he was getting on top of me so he knocked he attacked me he knocked me to the ground and as he knocked me to the ground he was viciously pulling up and i was screaming i mean i was i was horrified and i was screaming help screaming and as i was screaming i was slinging my arms and by mistake i hit him in the eye and he screamed and when he screamed he backed up and when he backed up the owner came peanut came out of nowhere mind you i think looking back as an adult he was watching it but when his dog got hurt when he saw his dog get hurt he jumped in and put his feet on the chain and pulled the dog back when i realized that i heard him something happened inside of me and it was like you hurt this monster as a kid and it was by mistake but what if you would have fought back what could have happened if you had just fought back from the beginning instead of screaming and so as a six-year-old kid i understood the importance of failure fighting back no matter how how much danger you're in and so at that point i dealt with fear differently the way i dealt with fear uh was more compartmentalized and was more controlled and so and so the things that were that i could perceive to be more dangerous to me never ever again i looked at it as something i couldn't defeat because i hurt this dog at six years old that had just attacked me by the time i became an adult i had mastered my ability to deal with fear and my ability to deal with with with confrontation and and issues that i you know uh encountered uh that were ultimately dangerous and that allowed me to think clearly in the midst uh of anarchy or in the midst of caution i was always able to think clearly this issue with other emotions however i was no different than the average person and and how you know you got pain that's a that's another very very uh difficult emotion to deal with the emotion of pain and the emotion of empathy when you seeing that what you're going through is also causing other people pain you know and you see the world that you built come crashing down around you and you see all the people that you love suffering behind what you're going through uh and so that was something that i never had to deal with before in this way um and so one day now i'm in this prison cell and these things are happening to me and i'm writing this motion i fall asleep riding the motion i may have been asleep for an hour or two and i get back up i wake back up papers are on my chest and everything in the cell and i pick up where i left off and as i pick up where i left off i'm reading what i had just wrote i'm reading it and i set it down and start looking for the emotions that i was writing because i didn't even recognize it was so emotional it was so bogged down with emotional baggage even the way that i was articulating myself it was hard for me to read and so i knew that if i it was hard for me to read no one else was going to read it no one was going to pay attention to it and i wasn't getting anywhere with it and so at that moment i had to figure out a way to become somebody else i i really i really became a third person that was a defining moment for me on how i needed to to separate myself from what i was going through in order to stay focused and it took me some time but i was able to master it i literally became a different person i was representing myself myself as someone else else and when i when it became something that i literally mastered i was unstoppable the issue of my ability to deal with fear different than other people and then now my ability to manage what i was going through i became a beast and you know at that point it just kept things kept just kept falling in place you know month after month year after year they continued to fall in place until ultimately seven and a half year years later i opened the door to my freedom hey everybody it's time to talk about all of our favorite subjects mental health is there something holding you back or preventing you from achieving your goals or even just interfering with your happiness do any of you suffer from depression or anxiety as a lot of you guys know i've suffered from anxiety for years and trying to tackle something like that on your own is not always the optimal strategy but a lot of people are super nervous to try out therapy or they don't really know where to start or they're just plain embarrassed but now there's a service called better help that makes therapy more accessible and affordable better help is professional counseling done securely online using your computer tablet or mobile phone through video calls phone calls or text messaging 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therapeutic help you need even if you have never gone to counseling before it's free to switch therapists it's more affordable than local therapy and they even have financial aid available if you need it betterhelp wants you to start living a happier life today visit betterhelp.com impact and again that's spelled better h-e-l-p and join over 500 000 people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional better help costs just 65 per week and financial aid is available for those who qualify during the sign up process as an impact theory viewer you can get 10 percent off your first month so visit betterhelp.com impact and get the help you need today all right guys if you need this one please give it a shot take care and be legendary man it's incredible i heard somebody um in an interview once say you know there was just something special about mike tyson because there were a lot of people that felt like they could win but mike felt like he couldn't lose and that mentality that you just you know talked about like of being able to smile at the corrupt by the way by this point you know that you've been 100 railroaded they've got people pretending to be your employees that you've never met in your life and you know you've been railroaded you're you're facing down the system which i can't think of anything more terrifying as a human it's just where do you push like what do you do and it just seems so impossible to overcome that and for you in that moment to smile and i heard you once say he was smiling because he was in the moment i was smiling because i was in the future and i knew what he was going to have to deal with in terms of my willingness to learn the law to get good at it you know and to be able to ultimately shut them down and i want to remind everybody this ends with the judge going to prison and the prosecutor committing suicide because he was facing 10 years in prison for what he'd done to you and to other people it's like dude it is the craziest victory ever of somebody who is just like ultra methodical now i wanted to walk everybody through that story which you've told many times before but it's so important to understand one thing which is once you understand how the system works and you don't give in to your emotion i've heard you say you have to turn anger into action so you learn how the system works not wishing it were a different way because that's a waste of time you learn it and then you turn your your anger what could become bitterness instead you make it usable and then you go in like a wrecking ball and you just you know create the chaos in the system it's it's extraordinary now having said all of that and setting people up when this like clicked into a new gear for me was when i realized you're running for mayor of new york yes now as soon as i heard you explain why you think you should be mayor of new york i was like this guy isn't doing anything by accident why are you running for mayor why do you think you're the right person to be the mayor of new york that's the right question well you know new york is in a is in a in a state that it's never been in in its history um you know one of the one of the the craziest things that i've ever seen in my life was driving into times square and it was completely empty times square out of every place else in the world times square had fallen asleep and you know new york is the city that never sleeps but it was sleeping and it scared me because there were certain things that i knew about new york and one of the things that i knew is that you know the city of new york and its mayor can't raise money and what the deficit spiraling out of control hundreds of thousands of jobs lost i knew that the next mayor of new york city had to be someone special it had to be someone that not only thought outside of the box it had to be someone that could make the impossible possible because when you don't have money you have no way to raise it you have to ask the federal government you have to ask the state or you have to raise taxes which that tax base is not there anymore thousands of businesses has gone hundreds of thousands of jobs lost where's the money coming from uh and so it it dawned on me that i was at a moment in time in history that i can trace my life back to that arrest the moment that those handcuffs was put behind my back and that day in times square i saw that as a sequence of events that led me down a road to this moment in time where i have was being prepared to do that next incredible thing for the betterment of mankind and when you look at everything that has happened to me when you look at my delivery i mean my delivery from prison was a divine delivery it was divine my god guided me through these issues and these problems and he gave me a gift in order to do that and so my decision to run for mayor was based on the same reasons why i decided to represent myself why i decided to help other people get out of prison why after i got out you know i spent the next seven years pursuing a law degree i was investigated after passing the bar for nine more years and waited it out those things did not happen to me for no reason they were preparing me for my next biggest challenge and and and i believe that next biggest challenge is being the mayor of the greatest city uh in the world so that even if it's four years uh when new york gets back on his feet and it will under my tutelage um any mayor coming after me you know will have us will have a small piece of pie to be able to deal with it when it comes down to the problems in new york but right now it's an incredible problem of a cake uh that any mayor coming in is going to have trying to eat all the issues and and dissolve it in ways world's palatable and so that the city can move forward that's that's going to be an incredible monster for any person to come in as mayor and slate and i think that i'm the one for the job and i think i'm the only one prepared for that man i i will say this i admittedly do not know who the candidates are that are running for new york but i will say this the way your mind works is all about problem solving and so that's what gets me so excited help people understand how is it that you think your way through novel problems um it's that's a difficult thing to explain because it's a natural phenomenon and and you're seeing things different than other people so you have to not only know that you're seeing things different than other people you have to know exactly what it is you're seeing different so that you can identify that for them and they can understand where you're coming from uh so that's a complex thing to do but but this is the way that i can say it uh the way i deal with with what i see um i see everything in pieces i'm very very detailed uh in the way that i understand the things that i'm that i'm experiencing with all of my senses it doesn't matter whether a smell touch hearing seeing i i i i always take a granular approach to the things that i'm experiencing in life and the reason why i do that explain this can you explain that with the story of how you ended up getting out of prison the final puzzle piece because that to me is the most chill-inducing example of your ability to break things up into small pieces okay so um so three years three and a half years almost four years before that incident happened i had won a motion the first that's ever happened it's never happened again in the history of american jewish prudence in the history of american law as a as a person serving life in prison i want a motion that required the state to transport me from a maximum security prison to the prosecutor's office and he was never happened before this is the first time something like this has ever happened right and and and he was forced to allow me to look through his files and i and this is this is extremely important for you to understand what this means i am a prisoner i i went to i was escorted to the prosecutor's office and changed i duct walked my way into the elevator you know escorted by five or six cops in in law enforcement officers into the prosecutor's office when all these boxes in a room and i sat there all day looking through this man's files as a as a prisoner while i'm looking through his files i knew that he was going to sanitize it in other words i knew that he was going to take out anything that i may need so in my mind i knew that i had to find something that was insignificant but i had to look at it in a way that i know they weren't going to look at it so that i can use that insignificant piece that insignificant piece of material insignificant piece of paper to entrap them in a way that was going to be devastating to them so so let me make that very much more simpler so i found a piece of paper it was an interoffice memo all it did was direct police officers to read the files in my case so that they could prepare for trial that's all it did it was one simple paragraph nothing crazy and that's why he left it in the file because it was nothing important there was four or five police officers that signed it so he left it in the files because it was insignificant they saw it as nothing as but an inner office memo when i saw it i saw that document as the document that was going to get me out of prison and and here's the reason why it was a two to two full process and this is when you when you look at detail so i knew at that time that the detectives that was that was on that memo that had signed it that had read all the files in my case and had signed it if i asked them whether they read anybody else's files i knew they were going to lie your background i knew that they weren't going to tell the truth i knew it then when i the moment i saw that paper i knew i knew two things number one they weren't gonna if i ever got a chance to confront them they wasn't gonna know that i had this paper and number two if i ever asked him them if they read the files other files in the case they were going to lie about it so i knew that that paper was a credibility weapon i knew that so i went to the prosecutor and asked him can you make a copy of this so i could take it with me he said yes he gave it to me he didn't see anything wrong with it he gave me a copy of it okay i waited it took me another week almost four years for the opportunity to use that paper four years right so now remember what i said earlier i understood the significance of the paper from a credibility standpoint that these officers even though they signed this document saying that they read all the files in my case if i asked them that i understand they were going to lie and the reason why i knew they were going to lie about it is because they were going to protect each other if i asked you as a detective understand whether you whether you knew of a discrepancy in another police officer's report the moment you tell me i didn't read that other officer's report i can't ask you about it anymore in other words i can't attack his credibility through you so you're trained that if you're asked about any other report to deny ever reading it because if you did i could then ask you about it so that was the atomic bomb for me that one piece of paper because i had the foresight to understand that they were gonna lie here's the problem here's a real challenge that i faced and this is this is the the the the intricacies of understanding human nature and the way they respond to difficulty there's a difference between challenging successfully a person's credibility and getting them to confess that's totally different so remember what i just said i knew that i had a credibility bomb the challenge was okay you okay you you know you challenged the police officer's credibility and you did it successfully but you need a confession to get out of prison because your appeals is over you still got these 70 years you're going to be retried on the life sentence you know and that was an issue that i talked about before about um making new law in this other guy's case and using it through mine out so now that your appeals is over and you got one chance at this guy if he doesn't confess you're gonna spend the rest of your life in prison so i needed a police confession so this is what i did and this goes down to detail i took out every law enforcement file in my case laid it out of my cell and i did a psychological profile through their own reports on each one of them and i chose one person because once that paper was out everybody was gonna know i had it i only had one chance to introduce it so i had to pick the right officer the right police the right detective that i believed if i got him in enough trouble he was going to confess so i did a psychological profile i read the reports and the records over and over countless times for years and i picked one person that i thought this is the guy that's going to confess so now i have to make sure that he not only his credibility is not only challenged but he's confessed but he it so seven and a half years later i'm at this hearing i'm at this hearing i'm calling witnesses and this is another thing you probably already know at that hearing before that hearing started i was offered a deal mind you i'm seven and a half years in prison i got the 70 years that i'm doing my life sentence was vacated because of this new law i created but the indictment wasn't dismissed i was facing a retrial on that so i'm facing a retrial on the life sentence and i'm still doing 70 years and at that hearing the prosecutor says listen we're going to offer mister out of deal he can't prove any of the things he's saying it's all nonsense it never happened he's lying johnny you've read it it's crazy nothing like that and law enforcement would do not none of the things ever that he's saying happen happen he's just he's just got an axe to grind and he's making things up but here's what we're going to do we're going to offer mr wright a deal so that he could be home in two years so that he could start his life over again get back and take care of his family and be a productive member of society if he doesn't take the deal we're taking him back to trial in the life and he's going to go back to prison with lifeless 70 years i turned it down okay i turned that deal down i would rather die in prison i would rather have died in prison i would rather have spent the remainder of my life in prison fighting to get out before i would give them another second of my life they stole it from me they stole seven and a half years of my life and you know you got to think about what that means because the people on the outside needed me you know my family they needed me um and and i needed them but the decision that i made was a decision of universal sacrifice and this is and this goes back to when people choose their leaders you know as mayors it goes back to that if a person is not willing to make sacrifices and to sacrifice his life for the people he's he doesn't belong uh to be the leader of the people and most people don't have that quality but not to veer off um i turned the deal down and we had this hearing and during the course of the hearing the judge is saying to me mr wright you turned down an incredible deal you have an uphill battle and you know i i want to be honest with you i don't see where you're going with this i mean i don't see you getting any lead weight with the things that you've mentioned in your papers i said your honor you know i appreciate i appreciate that but but with the court's indulgence i'd like to just i'd like to continue you know uh with my hearings he says well you have a right to do that go ahead so ultimately dugan came understanding the officer's name was james duggan right this is public record james duggan james dugan gets on the stand and here's another detail this this is about details so when he gets on the stand he walks he's walking to the bench i finally call him he's walking to the witness stand i noticed that his clothes his uniform was different and that bothered me i needed to understand why is your uniform why do i not recognize your uniform i'm in prison seven and a half years i've been dealing with law enforcement on a very very intimate level in order to understand the system in order to understand how law enforcement works in order to understand the culture of law enforcement and i've never seen that uniform you're worrying so that's bothering me i need to understand it the very first thing i did was ask him about what he was wearing officer dugan i noticed you're uh you're in uniform today yes yes mr right i've never seen that uniform before can you explain to the court what's your what's your job description now what police uh department you work for says mr wright i don't i don't work for a police department i am chief of the police academy okay so seven and a half years later this guy goes from a mere detective in the prosecutor's office running the entire police academy well because i pay attention to detail and ask that question that was a godsend for me and here's the reason why i know you're getting ready to lie to me i know i haven't asked you this question yet but i know you're gonna lie so guess what i'm gonna do to you i'm gonna build you up to make you look like an archangel police like god's own divine gatekeeper i went through his entire career and showed the court through him that he was not only a man of honor his integrity was impeccable he was a a god-sent when it came down to police work and it showed in his rise in his career and the moment i got him way up here i got him so far that i couldn't even reach i asked him that question did you remember the discrepancy and detective racist report he said mr wright i didn't read detective race's report mind you now i got the document that says he read every report i don't stop there then i asked him what about uh what about detective buckman did you read his report mr right out of it i went to three other police officers and he just says outright mr wright i didn't read anyone's report out but my own i write my report i read it i pass it on to the sergeant so i asked him three more times until i get an objection objection the judge screams on me mr wright is accident answered it's clear to this court that this detective has read no other report but his own okay mind you i need a confession i need a confession this is detail this is this is not only understanding the details but knowing how to pick those details apart in pieces and use them just like an atom think about this for a second the energy in an atom a single atom the things that we can't see can wipe out the entire earth the small details the power and details the smallest ones can wipe a man out so when i got that objection and the court said on the record that he didn't read any others report based on his testimony i pull out the piece of paper that i pulled out that document do i present it to him no i don't present it to him i need a confession you know what i do with it i turn it around i put it behind my back and i turn it around so anybody standing beside this behind me can read it so it's like this what do i do then i walk in front of the prosecutor's table so he can read it because i want him to know what i'm getting ready to do to his police officer witness understand i need him to know first and you can't do nothing about it you sat in here all this time and you listen to him live now what i'm doing is i'm gonna show you what i'm getting ready to do to him and the reason why i'm showing you first not only can you not do nothing about it the sign language is gonna go back and forth you know do all kinds of things back and forth understand you're gonna have to warn this man you're gonna have to find a way to warn him what's getting ready to happen but what you don't understand is that in warning him the only thing you're gonna do is put him on alert and he's not gonna know why that's all you're gonna do that's exactly what i want you to do because i need a confession i just don't need i'm starting with this confession with you you're my tool you don't even know that i'm using you right so he's reading it while he's reading it i got it behind my back and i'm in front of him he's sitting down reading it while he's reading it i'm asking the detective on the stand more details and he's and the detective is trying to look around me at him right so it's working everything is falling in place so i stepped to the side and i said excuse me detective do you uh you need to speak to the prosecutor something that you uh you want to say i you know i'm asking you questions but you're looking at the at the prosecutor you're okay yeah i'm okay that's okay i just wanted to make sure because i see you uh looking at the prosecutor he's still reading the paperwork so now when i walk away from him he asks me i walk far enough away that he has to ask me out loud can i have that for a second that's what the prosecutor asked me i want him to hear that's why i walked farther up the way so when he asked me can i have it i turn around to him and i say no just one word no and i walk further away now in the rules of court you have to let your opponent see what you're getting ready to show the witness but i'm not showing him yet so you're not seeing it when i said no he does the next thing that i needed him to do he objects and acts to approach the bench now my witness is seeing all of this he's seeing this commotion going back and forth he's seeing the eye and back and forth so he doesn't know what's going on but he's witnessing there's a problem somewhere he's playing in my hand so we go to the bench these are all details these are these are utilizing my new details as very very significant weapons without allowing your opponent to understand that you're actually doing that he has no clue that he's my weapon that this document and him is my weapon against the police now the judge is going to be my next weapon so he goes and he asks for a sidebar the judge and goes he calls the sidebar up we go to the sidebar and he's telling the judge judge he's getting ready to show a privileged document this is an inter-office memo from the prosecutor's office he can't show that witness that document that document is confidential so the judge says uh well mr wright yeah what product in the prosecutor's office you don't have any right to be showing a witness to the document i said your honor um you're absolutely right um would you like to see the document he says yes so i give him the document he's looking at it he looks at me looks at the prosecutor he says mr wright how did you get this document because he sees it's an inter-office memo from the head prosecutor i'm serving a life sentence in prison what the heck am i doing with a document an inner office member from the prosecutor's office so he's the judge the first thing the judge actually says how did you get this document so i said your honor prosecutor this was a different process this wasn't my head prosecutor he sent his his underling you know i was a nobody go to handle that he sent this underling you know to handle the first assistant which is really a second in command he sent him to handle it so i said your honor um mr bissell gave it to me in civil discovery he copied it and he gave it to me so the judge looked at the prosecutor he says if your office gave him this document it's no longer privileged what are you talking about if it was confidential and privileged you would have never gave it to me he's got it you gave it to him and there's nothing i could do about it but your honor it's still privileged we what are you asking me to do prosecutors this is what the judge says now this is important because remember it was a judge that put on the record the questions been asked and answered he read no other files it was the judge that did that so the judge asks him what is it that you're asking me to do prosecutor are you are you telling me that you want me to prevent mr right from questioning this officer on the document and he said over and over again that he's never read any of the files in this case is that what you're trying to get me to do now because now you say what he's asking him are you trying to put my head on the chopping block now i've always got on record saying it's been asked and answered and this man didn't read any other reports so the moment the prosecutor started to say somebody says no you know what sit down mr wright go ahead and continue to question your witnesses you can use the doc so and i'm gonna make this quick i'm gonna end it by doing this i approach the witness with the document and i gave it to him and i asked him to read it to himself and when i approached him and asked him to read it to himself i'm standing right next to him like over him i want i want to crowd his space now while he's reading that i want to engulf him i want to exert power over him make him uncomfortable so he's reading it and as he's reading it i'm seeing his adam's apple trembling i know now okay you know what's getting ready to come because you know what you just did you're god's law enforcement officer but now you just saw that i caught you in a lie and that's the reason why i wanted him to read it to himself first i just didn't want to come out and catch him i wanted him to understand what was getting ready to happen so so let me explain just just to say it like this right when a person i i know you you've probably heard this before and i know other people has probably experienced it you have people that when they get afraid they pee themselves they're they're they they lose control of some of their movements either urine some of us bowel and the reason why that happens is because they sit in fear too long when something happens quickly the way your body reacts to fear is different but when fear when you're engulfed in fear too long your nervous system begins to tie up on you and so the reason why i wanted him to read it is because i wanted to engulf him in fear for a period of time to continue to weaken him so he's reading it his adam's apple starts trembling and he's reading it too long it's only a paragraph i had to stop him and say are you finished you're done he says yes so i said do you recognize your name on that document his voice is trembling when he says yes i said okay this is what i want you to do i want you to read that paragraph for the record out loud he reads it and he's trembling as he's reading it and when he finishes he says to to all the detectives listed below please read all the files in state versus isaac wright pass it down to the detective below you make sure you sign it and date it that's what it said so after you read it out loud i says you just said your name was on it did you sign that document yes mr wright i signed it and you dated it didn't you yes i did and before he could say anything else i snatched the document out of his hand and walked away from him towards my table by the time i got midway to the table i turned around and i called him a liar so you lied today you're a liar aren't you i mind you this is a detective of honor and as i said to him as i call him a liar and he's explaining himself no mr wright i didn't i said yes you did because if you didn't lie today you lied to the prosecutor and as i'm talking to him i'm taking my files out my case files now i'm going to save him he's in trouble so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to save him and as he's trying to explain i slayed my file in right in front of him and i say redeem yourself tell the court what really happened and i walked away from him while i was walking away i heard this scream i've been holding us in for seven and a half years and he started telling everything it was that the the hearings lasted a little bit longer but but after he finished i knew at that point it was over it was and it was it was a snowball rolling down the hill every everything came tumbling down that confession was a prelude to the entire case falling apart the prosecutor running the jo i mean it was it was it was just it was done it's such an incredible story man your your fortitude your resilience your willingness to self-educate to stand up for yourself to fight an overwhelming odd and to never lose sight of where you're trying to end up and what you have to do to get there is one of the most breathtaking and inspiring stories i've ever heard dude like this is just absolutely mind-blowingly amazing and it's extraordinary to see that you've not only become a lawyer but you've become one of the most sought-after lawyers in america not only do you have an incredible life story but it's been turned into an incredible tv show called for life on abc um you know not only that but you're really trying to be a servant and bring your just deep wisdom in the way that you look at problem solving to a lot of people man it's it is really breathtaking um where can people follow along on your journey um i mean they can follow from a social media aspect you know it's it's uh isaac wright jr uh at isaac wright jr um that's my that's my personal uh social media handle and you know everything's there i lay out my life on social media to things i'm doing on a daily basis some of the things that i've gone through some of the things that's going to happen and you have my campaign website which is www.writefornyc2021 you can sign up there you can join you can you know you can donate you can follow the campaign um uh and you can you know ask questions uh there's a there's another site and i think this site is significant but it's it's specifically for people in new york called for dividendforgiveness.nyc it's dealing with a policy issue that i have uh to forgive as mayor when i become mayor i'm going to be forgiving uh those uh those people that are renters that are facing um eviction and those that are facing foreclosure because of covid um i'm looking to put them in in forgiveness programs where all those debts are going to be forgiven they start with their landlords and their mortgage companies anew and we make the landlords and and the mortgage companies uh whole so that they don't take losses uh i think that's going to keep thousands and thousands of people um off the off from off the street uh it's going to keep thousands and thousands and thousands of people in their home uh it's going to give them some comfort and some security and allow them to move forward in life without the anxiety of what's going to happen to them and their family tomorrow and so that's forgiveness.nyc they can start signing up now in preparations for me uh taking this office of mayor and giving it back to the people uh and getting new york city back uh you know back on its feet i love it guys trust me the more time you spend with isaac the more it will melt your brain in terms of what is possible what all of us can do if we take control of our own lives if instead of getting angry or bitter we turn that into action we figure out how the game works and then we just play it better than anybody else i mean it really is such an extraordinary tale and speaking of things that are extraordinary if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care each and every day i'm looking at at the blessings that have that that have come now look there's no way in hell i would have signed up for this right like i there's like not at all like it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't definitely no i wouldn't have gave up you know like all of my 20s essentially you know for for this not at all