Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1993 - Josh Dubin & Bruce Bryan
Uploaded: 2023-06-01T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1993 - Josh Dubin & Bruce Bryan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-06-01. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1993 - Josh Dubin & Bruce Bryan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-06-01. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1993 - Josh Dubin & Bruce Bryan

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
What's up?
What's up, man?
Good to see you, my brother.
Great to be here, thanks for having me.
And thank you for bringing Bruce, and thanks for coming out last night.
That was a good time.
I had a great time, man.
For everyone to, like, guys started realizing while you were there, your story.
Like, the words started getting around the green room, and it was one of those
things,
like, what? He just got out three weeks ago, wrongfully accused for 30 years,
and here
he is having a good time.
It was a crazy experience to, like, be sharing the green room with you, because
you could
see everybody, like, you became, like, the celebrity of the green room.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, everybody wanted to hear the story, everybody wanted to talk to you,
everybody was blown away
by it, and by the grace that you displayed.
Like, the fact that you could be wrongfully accused to spend 30 years of your
young life
in a cage, and then come out and just be this wonderful, fun guy, having a good
time.
Everyone's laughing, having conversations.
It was beautiful.
It was beautiful.
Look, I'm standing next to him last night, you know, worried most of the night
because, you
know, we had got on a plane, and that was his first time flying in over 30
years.
There was a lot of stimulation, and, you know, I could tell you that I'm still
in shock, even
sitting here that we're sitting here now that we're sitting next to each other,
because I
spent the last several years visiting him at Sing Sing, which is, you know, not
a great
place.
Sing Sing prison in New York.
But I don't want to throw cold water on anything, but, you know, there's a lot
of stealing
yourself for the moment last night going on that people didn't see.
From you?
I think for Bruce.
I mean, there was one point where we were sitting in the balcony watching Attell,
and
by the way, congratulations on that amazing club.
Thank you.
Just an amazing, the comedy mothership is really a dream for the comedians,
love it.
The crowd was amazing.
It was just so awesome to see, so congrats on that.
Thank you very much.
How funny is Dave Attell?
He's a master.
My side hurts.
He's a master.
He's a master.
But we were sitting there, and some other folks came in, and at some point, you
know,
Bruce kept looking over his shoulder, and, you know, I realized that he was
uncomfortable,
and he switched seats very quickly so that he would be side to side, shoulder
to shoulder
with them.
I know, I think I know why you did it.
Yeah.
Why did you do it?
Well, I think in prison, you become accustomed to not wanting people behind you,
right?
And then I got this scar in prison from behind, so you're always conscious of
what's behind
you, you know?
Of course.
Yeah.
No one goes through that experience unscathed, right?
You come out with these idiosyncrasies or these quirks that you, these defense
mechanisms
that you develop while you're incarcerated.
You know, you're in an abnormal environment for decades, you're going to have,
it's going
to have an effect on you psychologically.
How old were you when they put you in?
I was 23, just turning 24.
And tell us the whole story.
What happened?
Well, I was arrested back in 1994 for a homicide.
I think that everyone knew that I didn't do this case at all.
Everyone knew I didn't commit the crime.
I mean, I literally woke up that afternoon because my girlfriend wanted to
change her niece's
costume.
And she also had a taste for chocolate cake.
So just imagine waking up to change a costume for Halloween, a child's costume,
and then disappearing
for the next 29 years of your life, right, and being charged with a homicide
while the prosecutor
involved in your conviction has a history of misconduct.
And it wasn't until some 27, 26 years later that he finally gets arrested and
gets convicted.
Former Queens prosecutor John Scarper, he gets convicted for the very same misconduct
that
I've been telling them about, that he's been doing for decades.
So he would just find someone, pin it on them?
Yeah, he would concoct the story, a theory, as he did in my situation.
And he did this just to convict someone?
Yeah.
Anyone?
Yeah.
So it wasn't that he was targeting you?
He just decided it was you?
Anybody that he felt was involved in a criminal lifestyle or in drug dealing.
It's easier to get someone that has a history of being involved in the streets
to put a case
on them than it is there's someone that doesn't.
So, you know, once they find out that you have a record, it's easy to say, all
right, well,
he did this homicide.
What kind of a record did you have at the time?
I had a drug sale prior to that.
So that's enough for him to say, okay, he's a part of a drug crew and, you know,
let's
arrest him and lock him up.
This particular prosecutor, his thing was bribery.
He would pay off witnesses.
And he ended up not only getting convicted, but went to federal prison for it.
You know, I should give some context here because to the extent that Bruce is
going to be guarded
about certain details of his case, I want to explain why.
Last time I was on with Derek Hamilton, we were, you know, sort of previewing
the center
that we would open.
So I left the Innocence Project.
I was the ambassador of the Innocence Project.
And I think that there was a real need for work being done on cases that didn't
just involve
DNA.
So we deal with cases that involve all manner of what we think is junk forensic
science that
we've talked about, ballistics, arson, bite marks, and so on.
But we also want there to be an aspect that dealt with clemency for people that
we think got
over-sentenced and deserved a second chance.
So, Bruce was our first client at the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice at
Cardozo Law.
And I got a call from a guy named Steve Zeidman that runs a clemency center at
CUNY Law.
And Steve said, you know, congratulations on the new center.
I have the perfect guy for you.
His name is Bruce Bryant with a T at the end of his name.
That becomes important in a minute.
And he said, I'm going to send you some information about him.
So he emails me this list of accomplishments.
It was more than most human beings can accomplish in seven lifetimes.
From the degrees that he achieved to starting a gun buyback program from inside
to starting of something called Voices from Within,
these community, these galvanizing sort of community outreach programs.
And, you know, I went to go visit him with the mindset that I was going to
support his clemency application.
And getting clemency in New York ain't easy from the governor.
And, you know, clemency is supposed to be all about rehabilitation and
transformation.
And historically, especially in New York, you have to express contrition and
explain to the parole board,
if you are granted clemency and it is a commutation of your sentence, that is a
shortening of your sentence,
you have to explain to the parole board, here's what I have done to transform
myself and accept responsibility.
So keeping that in mind, I went to visit Bruce for the first time.
And I said, nice to meet you.
He says, nice to meet you.
You know, I wrote you four years ago, he said to me.
And, you know, I felt ridiculous.
It was at a time where I didn't have the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice,
and I sort of was doing one-off cases, sometimes with the Innocence Project,
sometimes by myself.
And I was really struck by his presence, by how articulate he was.
One of the most well-read human beings.
He was telling me about, you know, how he finished the Viktor Frankl book, Man's
Search for Meaning.
And we had this amazing conversation about meditation and yoga.
And we turned a half-hour visit into three hours to the point where they told
me I had to, you know, go.
So I went back and I looked for the letter because I keep all the letters that
I get.
And I find this beautifully written, super articulate letter.
And I'll never forget how he signed it because it stuck with me.
It said, oceans of gratitude, Bruce Bryant.
And I just got curious.
I agreed to represent him along with Steve Zeidman in connection with his clemency.
But Innocence wasn't on my mind.
And then I read the trial transcript.
And I realized that this guy wasn't just innocent.
But I think what struck me was that the Innocence claim was so strong that it
didn't make, you know, it was hard for me to get behind a clemency petition
without him being able to say,
I'm innocent, you know, I'm innocent, you know, when he got before the parole
board.
So he his case is being reinvestigated right now by what's called the Conviction
Integrity Unit in Queens, which is a sensational arm of the district attorney's
office.
It's district attorney, Melinda Katz.
And we we have to be respectful of that reinvestigation of the case because it's
pending right now.
And that is, you know, to hopefully exonerate Bruce completely.
But, you know, and there's a great guy that runs the unit and they're involved
in an intense reinvestigation of the case.
But Bruce got clemency a couple of months ago by Governor Hochul in December,
and he got to stand before the parole board.
And it was a scary moment for me as one of his lawyers that when they asked him,
did you commit this crime for him to say, no, I didn't.
And to be granted clemency and to be then granted parole on an innocence claim
is extraordinarily rare.
So I think it spoke to both how powerful his innocence claims are and his
accomplishments.
The only there's only a few other people.
One of them is Derek Hamilton that went before the parole board and said, I'm
not going to, you know, admit to something I didn't do just to get out of here.
So I just wanted to give you that context because details of the case, specific
details of the case are going to be difficult to discuss.
And I think what what's amazing about Bruce is what he has been able to
accomplish from inside in the face of his innocence is mind blowing.
You know, a lot of times when we're on the show, we get inquiries about how
people can help and how how do people overcome this?
And I think why people are attracted to these stories of the wrongfully
incarcerated.
I had to search myself. It's because I like being around this kind of strength.
I don't know how, you know, people like him summon the strength to get through
it.
And, you know, in talking to Bruce the last couple of weeks, he and what he
endured in prison is something we haven't really talked about on the show too
much, like in granularity about like what it's like in these institutions.
And I was hoping we could talk about, among other things, some of that today,
because he was in some of the worst penitentiaries in New York, from Attica to...
I was in Clinton, Great Meadows, Sing Sing, all maximum securities, all maximum
security prisons way upstate in some towns that are essentially, you know, some,
you know, a lot of racism is pervasive in those towns.
And the prison is the, it's the only economic development in that town.
So you've got brother, cousins, aunts and uncles working in the same prison.
So you get into an incident with one officer, you got a problem with the entire
system.
And that's just how it is when you go deeper upstate, I mean, borderline Canada,
you know, Clinton, Dannemora, Great Meadows and different prisons like that.
So...
And the economy of the area depends upon the prison.
It depends upon the prison, because there's really nothing there but snow
during the wintertime and farming.
So there's nothing else there.
So the prison is the driving force behind the economy.
So everyone's there, right?
Siblings.
So nepotism is, you know, it's prevalent in these prisons.
And one of the things that you encounter is that, you know, it's not just cold
in those areas.
Prison is a cold environment, and it's up to you to create your own heat.
It's a dark environment, and somehow you've got to find that light, you know,
tha