The Crying Wolf Chronicles

Why I Said Yes

I’ve been writing off and on about the criminal legal system for a long time—about juries, punishment, policing, and the ways power shapes justice. But I didn’t expect podcasting to become part of that journey until the early days of the pandemic, when an email from journalist Steve Fishman landed in my inbox. He asked if I’d do some light reporting for a podcast he was developing. We lived near each other, so we met at his old neighborhood bar, Irv’s. That first conversation turned into a friendship, and what began as a small role grew until I was co-hosting The Burden. That series followed a disgraced New York City detective and the innocent men he’d helped put away—a four-year odyssey I never anticipated.

Last summer, another email arrived. This one from a producer and now dear friend, Naomi Harvey, inviting me into the story that would become Crying Wolf. At first, I hesitated. Did I really want to take on another wrongful conviction story, another dirty detective? Would that define me too narrowly?

But what The Burden taught me, what I learned sitting with men like Derrick Hamilton and Shabaka Shakur, who formed an Actual Innocence team from inside a New York State prison, is that these aren’t isolated cases. They’re part of a larger generational truth. We are living with a lost generation of mostly Black men, now in their 50s and 60s, who spent their 20s, 30s, sometimes 40s behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit. They were sacrificed to a system more interested in securing convictions than seeking truth.

Some are free today. Some have won settlements. But as a country, we’ve never reckoned with what was taken—not just from individuals, but from families, communities, generations.

That’s why I said yes. And over the coming weeks—leading up to Crying Wolf’s October 15 launch and throughout its run—I’ll be sharing pieces of the journey. Commentary and reflections. Artifacts and ephemera from the reporting. Glimpses of what’s going through my head and heart as I tell a story that is at once inspiring and tragic, a story about our country and about us.

I hope you’ll come with me.