2025-01-17
23 分钟Weakened by cancer and nagged by his conscience, a former Georgia prosecutor wants the courts to reverse the sentence he demanded for a man who didn’t physically harm anyone in his crimes.
Hey, I'm Joshua Sharp, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times, and I'm from Georgia.
I've done a lot of reporting on people in prison and particularly wrongful conviction cases.
I think a lot about how quickly things in the court system can become final.
I mean,
I've covered murder cases where people were convicted in five days flat and sent away forever.
And all the reporting I've done makes it utterly obvious that sometimes mistakes are made.
I have found it extraordinarily rare for someone like a prosecutor to come forward and say,
you know what?
One of those decisions that I made kind of in haste was wrong.
When someone does come forward like that, it makes you sit up and want to pay attention.
And that's what I discovered in this story that I'll read you in a moment.
One day in 2021, I got an email about this guy named Jesse Askew Jr.
Who was serving life without parole in Telfair State Prison in rural South Georgia.
And there was a shocking twist,
which was
that the prosecutor who sent him away for life
without parole thought it was the worst thing he'd ever done as a prosecutor.
Just a few years after the trial,
Jesse was convicted of a 1997 armed robbery at a restaurant where he'd previously worked.
He and a cousin carried unloaded shotguns,