Ken Klonsky & David McCallum - "Freeing David McCallum" - Steve Drizin

Ken Klonsky and David McCallum discuss Freeing David McCallum: The Last Miracle of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. They will be joined in conversation by Steve Drizin.

At 57th Street Books

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About the book: In April 2014, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter died after a long battle with cancer. David McCallum was exonerated and freed two months later, after serving 29 years in prison. This is the story of how Carter and his friend and coauthor Ken Klonsky worked for ten years to help free the wrongfully convicted McCallum. It details their struggles--from founding an innocence project, to finding lawyers willing to work pro bono, to hiring a private detective to sift through old evidence and locate original witnesses, and the most difficult part, convincing members of a deeply flawed criminal justice system to reopen a case that would expose their own mistakes. It eventually took a new district attorney, a documentary film, and a New York Daily News op-ed written by Carter on his death bed to secure justice. Freeing David McCallum tells a tale of frustration, agony, and undying hope, and the miracle that resulted in David's release. 

About the author: Ken Klonsky grew up in the Bronx, New York, and on Long Island (Long Beach and mostly Rockville Centre). He and his wife, Mary Ellen Belfiore, moved to Canada in the late 1960’s and, for twenty-seven years, Ken taught high-school in Toronto, mainly in special education classes. In 1983, he co-authored a play, Taking Steam, that was performed in New York (Jewish Repertory Theater) and Toronto. In 1992, a book of short stories, Songs of Aging Children, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in Vancouver. In 2011, he co-authored the spiritual autobiography of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Eye of the Hurricane. After joining Carter (wrongly convicted of murder in 1966) at Innocence International, reversing wrongful convictions has become a central mission in Ken’s life. “I got in touch with [Rubin] Carter after seeing the film The Hurricane, and we began working together in 2001.” Carter had moved to Toronto in 1988, where he helped to found the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted. He left in 2004 to found Innocence International. After Carter’s death, in 2014, Ken became director of Innocence International, participating in the freeing of David McCallum in October of that year. Ken used what he has learned in the Innocence project to write his novella, Life Without, published in 2011 by Quattro Books, and also his recent play with the same title. Life Without deals with a New York cabdriver who is wrongfully accused of murder and caught in a matrix of venality by corrupt cops, whining relatives, and an incompetent lawyer. He just completed an account of the McCallum case: Freeing David McCallum: The Last Miracle of Rubin Carter.

About David McCallum: David McCallum was born in Brooklyn, New York, lived in Bushwick until the age of 16 when he was arrested and wrongly convicted of murder. He survived 29 years in the New York State penal system and is now a father, an employee of Manhattan Legal Aid and a public speaker of some renown. David was the only exonerated prisoner asked to speak at the funeral of Brooklyn District Attorney, Ken Thompson, two years to the day of his release by the that very same district attorney. (Thompson died tragically of cancer at the age of 50, having served only two years in the office.)

About the interlocutor: Steven Drizin is the Assistant Dean of Northwestern Pritzker School of Law’s Bluhm Legal Clinic and the former Legal Director of the Clinic’s renowned Center on Wrongful Convictions (CWC) (2005-2013). In 2008, he founded the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, the first innocence organization focused exclusively on righting the wrongful convictions of youthful defendants. At the Center, his research interests involve the study of juvenile justice and false confessions; and his policy work focuses on supporting efforts around the country to require law enforcement agencies to electronically record custodial interrogations. Drizin’s scholarship in the area of interrogations and confessions has been cited by the United States Supreme Court and numerous federal and state appellate courts. Drizin lectures frequently on interrogation and confession-related topics throughout the United States, Canada and Japan. He has also appeared in several documentaries, including David and Me, West of Memphis, and most recently, Netflix’s Making A Murderer. Drizin has long partnered with social scientists in his work, co-writing articles with them, citing their work in his appellate briefs, and promoting their research in his advocacy and reform work in juvenile justice, police interrogations and wrongful convictions.