The Confession, Part 2

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1:05This episode picks up where last week's episode left off. If you haven't heard that one, you might want to go back and listen to them in order. Late one night in October 1993, when Trevelle Coleman was 18 years old, he shot a man three times. He'd been riding his bicycle around East Harlem He'd pointed a gun at a man and tried to rob him Travell says the man reached for the gun And then Travell shot him He rode away on his bicycle Without knowing what had happened to the man For years and years He didn't tell anyone about that night Travell never became a suspect for the shooting He eventually signed a record deal And became a well-known rapper He got married, had kids.

1:54But he could never stop thinking about that night in 1993. And then, in 2010, 17 years later, Travell walked into a police station and tried to turn himself in. He was 36 years old. He says the police officer he spoke with didn't take him very seriously, and Travell left. But a few weeks later, he went back and tried again. This time, he spoke with a different officer.

2:50Travell told them what he remembered, what the man had looked like, exactly where the shooting had happened, and what kind of gun he'd used. Then he signed a confession. The last line of the confession read, The reason I turned myself in was because I felt awful about what I did, and I wanted to make it right for this guy's family. And then afterwards, he says an assistant district attorney came in to tell him what had happened to the man What did he tell you? He told me that the guy died He was like, yeah, that God did die that night

3:32I'll never forget how I felt, I was like Just his words, it just echoed like the guy died

3:42The police had been able to match Travell's description of the crime to an unsolved case in their homicide logbook. The death of a 32-year-old man named John Henkel, who was shot around 1 a.m. on October 19, 1993. Travell Coleman was arrested for murder. You know, I know it sounds kind of strange, but at that point it was like, okay, well, you know, here we go then, you know? It kind of felt like, I know I'm going to be locked up, but at least mentally I won't be locked up anymore, you know what I mean? I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

4:38Travell was taken to Rikers Island and held without bail. Because of his music career, his confession and arrest were discussed on music blogs, where people made fun of him for turning himself in, saying, quote, nobody does that, and what a dumbass. Travell told the New York Post, the only thing I regret is that I have to leave my kids. His daughter was 12, and his twin sons were seven. The victim, John Henkel's stepbrother, Robert Henkel, told a reporter, quote, I think he's an idiot. He has three kids and a wife. It was years and years and years ago. Finally, we're not always thinking about it.

5:23And now, it has to be dug up all again. After all this time, he should have just shut up. Travell says other people in jail with him didn't understand what he'd done either. My family kind of understood, you know, where I was coming from. But, like, other people, you know, I spoke to, you know, that really didn't know me, used to say that, you know. Like, yo, why would you do that, you know. But people that saw what I was going through, you know, all of those years, they kind of, nobody even really asked me that. They were just like, yo, wow, are you all right, you know. Travell's wife, Crystal, said in an interview, quote, He's locked up, but he's free.

6:09He's a different person now than what he was before. Despite his confession, Travell pled not guilty on the advice of his attorney, who had told him he would likely be looking at a minimum of 15 years if he pled guilty. But if he pled not guilty, he'd get a trial and the possibility of being acquitted. But the jury convicted him of second-degree murder. The prosecutor in the case, Assistant District Attorney David Drucker, was the same lawyer who'd been at the police station when Trevelle confessed, and he argued for Trevelle to get the minimum sentence. The judge in the case told Trevelle, quote, the circumstance of your being before the court now suggests to me a maturity and decency.

7:00What was your sentence? My sentence was 15 to life. What did you think when you heard that? I mean, I really didn't know what to feel. I just, you know, I felt like, you know, that was where my life had been headed. You know what I mean? Like, I really felt like, you know, that was, that's what you get when you, you know what I mean? Do something like that. You know what I mean? It could have been worse. Just, you know, it was kind of, it was kind of like, it was kind of like I was going through the motions of, it's like, it's like all of that, all of this stuff that was happening seemed like it already was like, it was already meant to happen.

7:49So it didn't really even matter. It was just like, okay, I know, I know I'm going up north. I know I'm going to do a lot of time. So all of those are like just formalities to me, you know? It was kind of like, okay, you know, all right, I got the time now. So, you know. Were you relieved in any way? Yeah, I was kind of relieved. I was kind of, I was kind of, you know, ready to, you know, move on, so to speak, you know, with that whole chapter, that whole, you know, the whole thing, you know? I didn't know how I was going to do that, but I felt like that was going to help, you know, some type of way.

8:30After sentencing, Travell was transferred to Elmira Correctional Facility in upstate New York. His mother visited, and so did Crystal, but Elmira was about four hours away from the city, so it was difficult for them to come often. In 2021, he was transferred to Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, New York. That's where we spoke with him, in a small visiting room. I was interested in driving up here. It's a really old building. It looks like what you'd see in the movies of what an old prison looked like. Yeah, it definitely does. It has a lot of areas that's, like, not even used. And you'll be like, wow, it looks like a haunted house movie or something.

9:17You know what I mean? Fishkill is a complex of old, gothic-looking brick buildings. some with steepled roofs. There's not much air conditioning, none at all in the cells. It was built in the late 1800s and was originally the Matawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Today, it's a medium-security prison, and Trevelle is one of about 1 ,300 people incarcerated there.

9:48A year after being transferred to Fishkill in 2022, Travell learned that the man who had prosecuted him 10 years earlier was still thinking about the case.

10:05We'll be right back.

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12:37When did you first hear about Travell Coleman's case? Last, this would have been April in 2022, I received an unusual email. Attorney Steve Zeidman. The man who had prosecuted Travell Coleman, ADA David Drucker, asked Steve to look into Travell's case. David Drucker told Steve that Travell's case hadn't turned out the way he had hoped. He was so, I think it's fair to say, distressed about having to even have first prosecuted Travell years ago. He met Travell when Travell first walked into the precinct and confessed. And what he told me is he was hoping that he could convince the people above him to figure out some sort of a disposition that wouldn't involve Travell going to prison.

13:29But because there had been, and obviously it's a serious case, a life was taken, it's, you know, irreparable harm, his bosses determined that, no, you had to go ahead, indict him for murder and take the case to trial. And it clearly never sat well with him. So here we are, you know, 12 years later, him reaching out to me saying, what can you do to bring this man home? I mean, that's not something that must happen every day, a prosecutor. getting in touch. Mind-blowing. No, not only does it not happen, you know, in the course of doing this work, we reach out all the time to prosecutors. The original prosecutor who tried the case, the current elected DA, and it is beyond rare for us to get any kind of support when we reach out to them.

14:11So to have a prosecutor reach out to me, I nearly fell out of my chair. The New Yorker is called Steve Zeidman, quote, arguably New York's most well-known clemency lawyer. Will you explain what clemency is? Sure. Clemency is, it's an umbrella term. So there are two types of clemency. One is a pardon, and that's usually reserved for people who are home. And what that does is it erases the conviction, and it's usually for people facing something like deportation. Say they have an old conviction 20 years ago. and the only way to get out from under that is for a pardon to erase the conviction. The work that I do is a different form of clemency.

14:51It's sentence commutations and it's actually much more controversial because it's for people who are in prison. You're asking the governor, sometimes you're asking the president to commute the sentence and send somebody home. So you spend most of your time trying to reverse or change the course of an individual's fate, basically. That's right. And to me, this is perhaps the biggest problem with the criminal legal system. It's that once a sentence is imposed, there's an unwillingness to look back after five years, 10 years, 15 years and say, is the sentence that we imposed years ago, is it still necessary?

15:29Is it still just? Is it still appropriate? So that's what we're trying to do. That's what clemency allows you to do, is to say to the governor, for example, someone serving 50 life has been in for 30 years, saying this is a remarkably different person, they've accepted responsibility, would you use your vast constitutional power to send them home? There's really no purpose served by them doing another 20 years. How hard is that? It's pushing a boulder up a hill. You know, the irony of clemency is that in every state, the governor has some version of it. In New York, the clemency power here is vast and unfettered.

16:03I mean, there's no legislative involvement. There's no appeal. There's no prosecutor. There's no committee. The governor could sign off tomorrow and grant clemency, send home hundreds of people. I know she certainly has thousands of applications on her desk. And the frustrating part is that this power exists and it exists for hundreds of years and governors are reluctant to use it. That's the shame of it. Why did you want to become a clemency lawyer? so let's say someone got 50 life even 15 to life the trial's over it's three or four years later their appeals are over and they're left completely on their own and if we want people to accept responsibility we want them to to genuinely feel and express remorse to do everything they can to atone and repair do we value it do we even recognize it and that's what i began to experience So many people who have done so much to become better, to grow, to transform, that's what motivates for me the clemency work.

17:10Unless and until we get some sort of second-look legislation, some willingness to reconsider sentences once imposed, clemency is the only viable option.

17:21After David Drucker reached out, Steve Zeidman started reading about Travell Coleman's case. Had you ever heard of a case like that before where someone is turning themselves in? You know, I've heard of people turning themselves in, but it's usually soon thereafter the crime, or it's somebody who knows law enforcement is looking for them. So it's, you know, how much am I going to run or I can't run anymore? I've had enough. They're going to find me eventually. This, what makes this entirely unique is that Travelle was never a suspect in the first place. And now, all these years later, the case, you know, it wasn't just a cold case.

18:01It was, I mean, it was dead and buried. It was frozen. There was no ongoing investigation. So, no, I've never experienced anything like someone coming forward 17 years after the fact. Again, when they weren't on the run, meaning no one was looking for them. It wasn't like detectives were calling. They were leaving letters at his family's house. None of that. So, no, this is absolutely extraordinary. So what happened next? Did you reach out to Travell? Well, first I connected with the prosecutor and tried to get a sense of how invested was he? What was his office willing to do? And it turned out that what he said to me is, in the name of the district attorney, not just this individual, but they were willing to write a strong letter in support of clemency.

18:45So once I heard that, I went to meet Travell to see if, from his perspective, it's something he wanted to pursue. and again from my perspective. Did it seem like this was going to be a good working relationship? And spending a couple hours with Travell, it was clear from my perspective that I was ready to go full speed ahead and it turns out so was he. Why did he tell you that he had turned himself in?

19:12Travell told me that he was struggling to live with this for almost 20 years. I really think it's not an... This is what he said. It was agonizing. He just felt that there was something he had, a wrong he had to write. He had to face the music. And I know that's a cliche, but his conscience, it was overwhelming him. And I remember asking him, I said, Travelle, you know, when you went to the precinct, did you have any expectation that you were coming home? And he paused for a moment and said, you know, honestly, no, no, which is a remarkable thing. I mean, who does that? Who would walk into a precinct with the knowledge that the odds are that they're not going to see the light of day for decades?

19:50It's, I, remarkable doesn't even capture it. I mean, after spending more time with him, does it make more sense, his decision, just getting to know him and the type of person that he is? It does make sense when you get to know Travell, but I have to say it's still, it's still remarkable to me that somebody would do this. Most of us feel like we do something horribly wrong, regardless how horrible, We try and put it behind us. We try and move forward years after, decades after. So there's sort of the general how human beings act. But with Travell, yeah, you talk to Travell, it sort of makes sense.

20:32You know, when I think about some of the things that the prosecutor had said to me over the course of the time that I was preparing the clemency application, he said, you know, with Travell, he never wavered. There was no attempt at spin. He didn't try and justify. He didn't try and excuse. He wasn't trying to cut a deal. That's the other part of, I think, what captured so much of the prosecutor's heart. He said, there's nothing, there's no bitterness. I thought it was real interesting. He told me this, and I think he put it in his letter to the court as well, that while Travelle was in city jail at Rikers Island, while his case was pending, the prosecutors are able to, which is a whole other story, listen in on phone calls.

21:18And he said, it wasn't just to me and law enforcement that Travell was up front about what he did. There was no bitterness in his phone calls to friends and family. He was explaining why he did it, that it was the right thing to do, that he was comfortable with his decisions. So there's this remarkable, almost a serenity to him.

21:48In his letter included with Travell's clemency application, Prosecutor David Drucker wrote, Many defendants display remorse, but it is rarely clear how much they are sorry for their crime and how much they are sorry for getting caught. With Mr. Coleman, there is no doubt his remorse is as genuine as any I or others I have talked to have ever seen. A decision to release Mr. Coleman now would be a very safe as well as humane decision. On behalf of the New York County District Attorney's Office, I strongly urge you to do just that. The judge who presided over Trevelle's trial also sent Steve a letter to include.

22:32It began, In more than 34 years on the bench, I never previously submitted a letter in support of a clemency application. I enthusiastically do so now on behalf of Travell Coleman. He wrote about Travell turning himself in, In my experience, such an act of conscience is vanishingly rare. Steve Zeidman submitted Travell's clemency application in August of last year. And there's no timetable. And I know that's the hardest thing, not only on Travell, but every family I've ever worked with with clemency, As soon as I let them know the application is in, you can imagine, right? Weeks go by. Are we going to get a decision soon?

23:16There's no timetable. So we submitted a year ago. And I'm in touch with the governor's office, but has there been any decision one way or the other? No. It's just pending along with hundreds if not thousands of others.

23:34We'll be right back.

23:40Thank you.

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