In the moment of meeting Dan Slepian, He received a call from an inmate at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Slepian had known the man for more than a decade, from his time volunteering at the New York State Prison, and they talked about his most recent court appearance. Although Slepian did not immediately work Date line The story of this particular case, which is one of dozens he is monitoring at any given time, is that “my name could be written on bathroom walls in prisons all over the country,” he said.
You can’t blame anyone wrongfully imprisoned for trying to contact Slepian, the persistent NBC news anchor. Date line helped free many innocent men and is the subject of his new book, Sing Sing files. It’s a fascinating read—and an infuriating one. Over the course of two decades of reporting on the criminal justice system, Slepian meets police, prosecutors, and judges who seem more motivated to make someone getting away with a crime, or maintaining a dubious conviction, rather than finding out the truth. Meanwhile, he spoke to jurors, who described the pressure they felt in returning a guilty verdict. In one particularly harrowing case, Richard Rosario convicted of murder in the Bronx despite being in Florida at the time of the incident and having a 13-word alibi—the name of an earlier Slepian podcast. (Rosario’s conviction was later overturned, and a jury awarded him $5 million for wrongful conviction.)
Slepian, 54, told me that “it’s really, really challenging when people in prison call you, and mothers call you in tears, begging you to help them,” adding, “This chose me. You know what I mean? I didn’t choose this. I have to do this. People say, like, ‘Do you have a hobby?’ I don’t have time for a hobby. I have a platform.” [and] With what I have witnessed, I have a responsibility to speak up for those who cannot speak up for themselves, those who society has discarded.”
Slepian’s fight for criminal justice began when he was brought into the NYPD after the 9/11 attacks. Up until that point, his trajectory had been fairly conventional for a TV journalist; an ambitious kid who’d worked his way up to an internship at WNBC, gotten accepted into NBC’s coveted page program, and worked for the late talk show pioneer Phil Donahue before landing a booking job, in 1996, at a prime-time newsmagazine. Date line, where he eventually became a producer and conducted various investigations. In 2002, Slepian received a tip about the 1990 Palladium nightclub murders, a case that David Lemus And Olmedo Hidalgo, people who did not know each other and could not identify physical or forensic evidence at the scene, were nevertheless convicted. The experience shattered his innocence, Slepian recalls, opening “Pandora’s box” and revealing “the pathology of mass incarceration in general.” He now calls himself “an evangelist” for criminal justice reform.
“I was a missionary, because just like you lived in the 1930s and went to Germany, you would come back to the United States and you would say, ‘You have to see what’s going on there,’” he said. “You’re a witness to something that’s not right. For me, I grew up believing that the system works the way it’s supposed to. I was a white kid from a middle-class suburb in Westchester County, New York.”
While filming a story about the Palladium case in 2002 at a northern prison, Slepian met the mother of Jon-Adrian “JJ” Velazquez, who becomes central to his journey in the book. Velazquez was incarcerated for nearly 24 years, only being paroled in 2021, nearly a decade after Slepian Date line specifically raised troubling questions about his case. (Slepian also explored Velazquez’s plight in his podcast Letters from Sing Sing, (was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize last year.)
Velazquez’s legal ordeal was painful, and it tested Slepian’s ability to project a kind of journalistic detachment that, despite good intentions, can come off as artificial, even tone-deaf. Despite having known Velazquez for more than a decade and believing him innocent, Slepian, as he recalls in the book, recited a speech about his objectivity after a disastrous court defeat.
When I asked about that moment, eight years later, Slepian became emotional. “The DA was standing there; I wanted to show my objectivity. I wanted to show that,” Slepian told me. “And I said this mantra: ‘JJ, if I find anything that shows your guilt, it will be revealed.’ And there was a long pause, and he just said three words… ‘Really, Dan?’ Pause. ‘Now?’ I couldn’t really talk about it. So I realized at that moment that I was part of this game. I was part of a system where everyone was just doing their job. There were no bad guys.”
