Shadowing Practice: Innocent on Death Row, Here's What You Actually Get When You're Released - Learn English Speaking with Video
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You enter your Death Row cell at the young age of 25.
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The door slams behind you, and for the next few months you hope in vain that somebody will realize what a terrible injustice has happened.
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Perhaps a new witness will come forward, you think, or video evidence will conclusively prove that you are an innocent man.
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But that doesn’t happen, and slowly but surely over the years you start to lose your mind locked down in that cell most of the day.
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Your friends, your family, well, you think they believe you, but you know that some have their doubts.
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Since you were accused of killing a child, the prison code means you’ve got a “kill on site” label attached to you.
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One day that almost happens, and you have to spend a few weeks in the infirmary.
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Finally, after 19 years, and with the help of some compassionate lawyers, you win an appeal.
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It turned out the cops were corrupt and you were badly represented in your initial trial.
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19 years, the madness, the beating, the loss of a real life; surely you deserve to be compensated…Well, that’s another battle you’ll have to fight, just like our subjects in this video.
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Anthony Ray Hinton On February 25, 1985, a fast food manager was shot and killed in the state of Alabama.
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On July 2 of that year, another fast food manager was shot and killed in a similar armed robbery not far away.
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In yet another armed robbery a person was shot but survived the ordeal.
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Police thought all the robberies had been committed by the same person, and so they asked the survivor to take a look at some mugshots.
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That person picked out Anthony Ray Hinton, a 29-year old man that worked at a supermarket warehouse and who lived with his mother.
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The cop’s dragged him in for questioning, and like any American citizen he was given free legal counsel if he couldn’t provide his own.
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Except that lawyer was hardly a suitable defense for the young man, once telling him, “All of y'all blacks always say you didn’t do something.” Police found a revolver at Hinton’s mother’s house, a gun they believed could have been used in the three crimes.
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Hinton managed to hire a ballistics expert with the little money he could raise, but the problem was that the expert was hardly trained at all.
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He failed miserably defending Hilton in court.
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Had he been a real expert, Hinton would very likely not have done any time.
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The gun was all the prosecutor needed.
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There were no fingerprints and no eyewitnesses.
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Hinton was sentenced to death.
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In 1988, he appealed but the conviction was affirmed.
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A year later at the Supreme Court of Alabama his conviction was affirmed again.
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The years passed, with Hinton spending most of his time in his cell.
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Death Row is solitary confinement for most the day, with just an hour a day that prisoners can spend outside their cells.
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To pass the time he read, and he read voraciously.
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Something he didn’t know back then was that this would have a huge impact on his life.
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Reading and the book club he created helped somewhat, as did regular visits from his mother and his best friend.
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Unfortunately, his mother died in 2002 while Hinton was still behind bars.
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He hoped that an organization called the Equal Justice Initiative might help him gain his freedom.
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This non-profit worked on his case for many, many years, but no matter how many forensics experts came forward to say that gun and the bullets didn’t match, the state of Alabama refused to overturn the conviction or at least allow him to go to trial again.
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Finally, in 2014, when Hinton was now a middle-aged man, the Supreme Court of the United States said that Hinton’s original counsel had been “constitutionally deficient.” It turned out that the ballistics expert his lawyer had hired wasn’t even a ballistics expert.
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He didn’t even have both of his eyes!
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In the new trial the prosecution admitted that the bullets that had been fired had not come from Hinton's mother's gun.
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The Jefferson County Circuit judge overturned his conviction and the state dropped all charges.
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Hinton’s lawyer said, “Race, poverty, inadequate legal assistance, and prosecutorial indifference to innocence conspired to create a textbook example of injustice.” Hinton said, “Everybody that played a part in sending me to death row, you will answer to God.” 28 years…what do you get for 28 years of wrongful imprisonment?
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What do you receive for being woefully represented?
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Well, the state said that he did not prove his innocence, and added he didn’t deserve any compensation.
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To this day, he has received nothing.
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To make matters worse, the state of Alabama recently passed legislation making it harder to get adequate counsel.
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It’s called the “Fair Justice Act”, but don’t let that fool you; according to the Equal Justice Initiative it’s more like Orwellian doublespeak.
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In fact, Hinton has said if it was enacted while he was incarcerated, he would have been executed.
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If there can be any good news, it is that Hinton has written a highly praised memoir called, “The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row.” He was also awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters degree.
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According to the Innocence Project, 17 states refuse to compensate the innocent.
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Why…well, we have no idea.
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Alabama isn’t one of them by the way, but the state still refused to compensate Mr.
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Hinton. Now for our next case, something equally as surprising.
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Kennedy Brewer The date was May 3, 1992, and in the early hours of the morning a three-year-old girl was abducted from her home.
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What happened to her was brutal, and we won’t go into details.
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She did not survive.
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The girl, Christine Jackson, was the daughter of Gloria Jackson.
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Gloria was the partner of then 21-year-old Kennedy Brewer.
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He’d been babysitting the child that night, along with two other kids that were biological children he’d had with Gloria.
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Since there was no forced entry to the house, police believed that Brewer was a suspect.
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This was despite the fact that one of the widows to the house was broken.
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It wasn’t until three years after Brewer's initial arrest that the case went to the court.
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There it was revealed that bodily fluids taken from the victim’s body could not sufficiently be DNA tested, but it was also revealed that there were bite marks on the body.
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Where did they come from?
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Well, the defense argued that since the body was found in a creek, they were very likely the bites of some kind of insects.
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The prosecution disagreed, with a forensic odontologist stating that the marks had definitely come from Brewer.
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It should be said that at the time of the trial that the bite mark expert was suspended from the American Board of Forensic Odontology.
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It should also be said that bite mark testimony is very controversial and has been proved to be unreliable in a slew of cases.
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On March 24, 1995, Brewer was sentenced to death.
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He always maintained his innocence, but the years passed and not much happened.
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Then in 2001, up-to-date DNA testing showed that the semen taken from the victim’s body did not belong to Brewer.
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So, you’d think that was enough for a quick retrial, but as you likely know, the cogs of the American justice system grind at a very slow rate.
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It wasn’t until 2007 that Brewer was released from prison, but we should say that he was only on bail.
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The prosecution wanted to retry Brewer.
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And then what happened, you might wonder.
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The answer is the DNA was tested again and it matched an original suspect in the initial investigation named Justin Albert Johnson.
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Johnson soon admitted to Christine Jackson’s murder, but get this, he also admitted to a very similar murder that had happened in the nearby area.
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In that case, again there were bite marks on the victim, and yet again the same forensic odontologist stood up in court and said they matched a man, this time a guy named Levon Brooks.
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Even worse, Johnson was the only man out of those three who had a history of violence matching the crimes.
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In 2008, both Brewer and Brooks were released.
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The former has spent 18 years in prison and the latter 15 years.
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Brooks died in 2018.
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In this case, the state of Mississippi paid Brewer $500,000 in compensation, but the sum was paid at $50,000 a year.
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The money ran out, so Brewer tried getting factory jobs and he also earned money by mowing lawns and working on a fish farm.
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Brewer said, “It's very hard to find meaningful employment after being locked up for something you didn't do.” In 2020, Brewer had a stroke not long after his mother died.
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A fundraising page was set up to help him pay for the medical bills.
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Ok, now for something a bit different.
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Richard Phillips This man spent 45 years behind bars and he was innocent all the time.
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We are cheating a bit here because he wasn’t handed the death sentence, but was given life without the possibility of parole.
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The reason we want to tell you his story is because 45 years is the record in the U.S.
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for the most time spent in prison as an innocent man.
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In 1972, the 26-year-old Phillips was handed his sentence for a murder in Detroit, a crime he said he didn’t commit.
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For many years he tried to get his sentence overturned, but on every occasion he failed.
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Then, in 2010, his co-defendant in the case, one Richard Palumbo, told a parole board that Philips had not committed the crime.
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He said another man had done it, a man named Fred Mitchell.
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Palumbo had said nothing at the time out of fear, but as the years passed in prison he was consumed by guilt.
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As his health got worse, he feared what he might meet on the other side having allowed an innocent man to spend so long in prison.
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We should also say that Fred Mitchell scared Palumbo and said that if he speaks up, his family would die.
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But when Palumbo heard that Mitchell was dead, he had nothing to fear.
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The case went back to court, and there Palumbo told the truth, but all the prosecution could offer Phillips was this: Say you did it, and you will get out because of the time you’ve served.
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Philips’ response was, “I’d rather die in prison than admit to something I didn’t do.” Aged 71, in 2018, Philips got out an innocent man, but a man that knew no one on the outside and didn’t really know how things worked in modern life.
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He said he was overjoyed, but also very scared when entering this new world; a world with computer technology, with strange cars and weird-looking gadgets.
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He looks well now and is getting used to his new life.
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For his 46 years of wrongful imprisonment he was compensated $1.5 million.
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Withholding evidence How much does a person get paid if the authorities have deliberately withheld evidence and they are found out?
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Let’s look at a case that involved a man named Nathson Fields.
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In 1984, this man was accused of killing two people in what was said to be a gang-related crime.
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Fields was innocent, and the police knew that, because it was later discovered that detectives had hidden evidence in a locker that proved Fields didn’t do it.
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A judge was also involved in the corruption and had taken a bribe.
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That’s how Fields got a retrial and how the new evidence came to light.
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He spent 18 years in prison, with 11 of them being on Death Row.
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In 2016, a judge ruled that police had hidden evidence and had also falsified incriminating evidence.
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Fields was awarded $22 million.
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The tragedy is, in the last reports we can find about Fields, he said he had not yet received a dime of the money.
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The 65-year-old man said he now devotes his life to helping death row survivors.
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The next man is John Thompson.
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In 1985 in New Orleans, Thompson was sentenced to 49 years in prison for an armed robbery, and also given the death sentence for a murder at a hotel.
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He was innocent of both crimes.
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What is criminally frightening about his case is the fact that just 30 days before he was going to be executed, evidence that had been hidden for 15 years by the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office, was discovered by a private investigator.
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That evidence proved without a doubt that Thompson was innocent of the robbery, but the robbery was connected to the murder conviction, so a judge ruled that Thompson should be exonerated.
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He was forty years old.
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He sued for the crime that had been committed against him, and although he was awarded $14 million, a Supreme Court later overturned that decision.
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This happened even though it was discovered that the District Attorney at the time of Thompson’s conviction had suppressed exculpatory evidence in nine out of 36 death penalty convictions.
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No one has ever been held accountable.
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Thompson later created a non-profit called “Resurrection After Exoneration”, an organization to help reconnect exonerees to their communities.
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He died in 2017, aged 55.
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A few years before his death he wrote: “I don’t care about the money.
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I just want to know why the prosecutors who hid evidence, sent me to prison for something I didn’t do and nearly had me killed are not in jail themselves.” Now you need to watch this, “How To Survive Inside Prison?” Or, have a look at this…
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 124 sentences and 2276 words to shadow. The speech runs for 11:16. The speaker talks fast, about 202 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 82% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| innocent adjective | /ˈɪnəsənt/ | Free from guilt, sin, or immorality. |
| conviction noun | /kənˈvɪkʃən/ | A firmly held belief. |
| robbery noun | /ˈɹɑbəɹi/ | The act or practice of robbing. |
| bite verb | /baɪt/ | To cut into something by clamping the teeth. |
| commit verb | /kəˈmɪt/ | To give in trust; to put into charge or keeping; to entrust; to consign; used with to or formerly unto. |
| prosecution noun | /ˌpɹɑ.sɪˈkju.ʃən/ | The act of prosecuting a scheme or endeavor. |
| innocence noun | /ˈɪnəsn̩s/ | Absence of responsibility for a crime, tort, etc. |
| compensate verb | /ˈkɑm.pənˌseɪt/ | To do (something good) after (something bad) happens. |
| refuse verb | /ɹɪˈfjuːz/ | To decline (a request or demand). |
| counsel noun | /ˈkaʊn.səl/ | The exchange of opinions and advice especially in legal issues; consultation. |
| forensic adjective | /fəˈɹɛn.zɪk/ | Relating to the use of science and technology in the investigation and establishment of facts or evidence in a court of law. |
| reveal verb | /ɹɪˈviːl/ | To uncover; to show and display that which was hidden. |
| hire verb | /ˈhaɪɹ/ | To obtain the services of in return for fixed payment. |
| compensation noun | /ˌkɑm.pənˈseɪ.ʃən/ | The act or principle of compensating. |
| bullet noun | /ˈbʊlɪt/ | A projectile, usually of metal, shot from a gun at high speed. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| get out verb | To leave or escape. | |
| turn out verb | To end up; to result. | |
| come forward verb | To offer help or information, especially about a crime. | |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. | |
| pick out verb | To remove by picking. | |
| run out verb | To use up or consume all | |
| speak up verb | /ˌspik ˈʌp/ | To talk more loudly or clearly. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 28 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, wasn't, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: conviction /kənˈvɪkʃən/, prosecution /ˌpɹɑ.sɪˈkju.ʃən/, compensation /ˌkɑm.pənˈseɪ.ʃən/, occasion /əˈkeɪ̯ʒən/, corruption /kəˈɹʌpʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: prosecution /ˌpɹɑ.sɪˈkju.ʃən/, compensation /ˌkɑm.pənˈseɪ.ʃən/, prosecutor /ˈpɹɑ.səˌkjuːˌtəɹ/, biological /ˌbaɪ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/, controversial /ˌkɑn.tɹəˈvɝ.ʃəl/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like innocent, conviction, robbery.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | were accused · be compensated · was shot |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has happened · has received · has said |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.