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When Edgar Barrientos-Quintana left prison last November, he told reporters: “Happy to be out here. … It’s the best week. And more to come.” It was an understated moment from a man who had been in prison for close to 16 years for a murder that officials said he didn’t commit. And it provided a stark contrast to the reality television show that depicted the investigation that led to his arrest.
Barrientos-Quintana was freed after the Minnesota attorney general’s Conviction Review Unit found he had been wrongfully convicted and recommended vacating his conviction. The unit’s 180-page report cited failures by police, prosecutors and Barrientos-Quintana’s own defense lawyers. But it also mentioned something reporter Jessica Lussenhop had never seen before in a wrongful conviction case: the involvement of popular true crime show “The First 48.” The show begins each episode with the premise that the chance of solving a murder is “cut in half” if police don’t have a significant lead within 48 hours of a killing — which also creates a sense of deadline pressure.
In two stories ProPublica recently published, Lussenhop follows the show’s involvement in the murder investigation that landed Barrientos-Quintana in prison, and how the show’s two-decade history of filming in cities across the U.S. has left a complicated trail of problems and municipal regret.
I talked to Lussenhop about what she learned about how “The First 48” operates and why so many cities have stopped working with the show.
What did you find surprising while reporting this story?
Finding out that these episodes often air before a defendant’s trial. The show has disclaimers to the effect of “everyone is innocent until proven guilty,” but those words go by in a flash, and as a viewer, I certainly haven’t paid much attention to them. This person is still innocent until proven guilty, but the show does a good job of depicting them as guilty.
What else was surprising was just the sheer number of times there were problems. There are shows like “Live PD” that have had extremely high-profile controversies and have been canceled. But “The First 48” has been on the air for 20 years, and multiple cities ended their relationships with the show. It’s not just the defense bar that’s upset with it. It’s prosecutors, judges, mayors, city council people, all saying, “Why did our police department decide to do this?”
Why do police departments get involved with this show?
As far as we understand it, police departments don’t make any money off this show, and if you take into account the lawsuits, sometimes the show winds up costing cities money. Then the question becomes, well, why would any police department agree to do this? I think the answer is that police departments are often the subject of negative news coverage. They want a light shone on the work of their homicide detectives and everyone who supports their investigations.
But one of the other important things is these are often the kinds of homicides that are not going to get a lot of press attention. “The First 48” does often interview the victim’s family; they’ll show the victim’s picture on television and say a little bit about their lives. That might be way more media attention than these victims would otherwise get. They’re often poor, they’re often people of color, and the kinds of homicides that may get very little attention in their local media. So I think that it does, in a sense, provide a service.
How is this similar to and different from other wrongful conviction cases?
A lot of what’s in Barrientos-Quintana’s Conviction Review Unit report are the hallmarks of wrongful convictions: very young witnesses being interrogated for a very long time, sometimes without parents or lawyers involved; police not following photo lineup procedures; the defense claiming that the prosecution is withholding evidence from them. But to our knowledge, this is the first exoneration ever to be tied to “The First 48.”
Multiple people, including the Hennepin County prosecutor, told me that the very premise of the show is extremely problematic because it makes it sound like you have to rush. The show has a literal clock that’s ticking down in the corner of the screen. Obviously, you want good leads early on, but you have to keep an open mind to evidence that’s going to come into play later on. One of the big pieces of evidence in Barrientos-Quintana’s exoneration is the existence of surveillance tape of him at a grocery store with a girl roughly 33 minutes before the shooting happened. That was not a piece of evidence that they had within the first 48 hours, or even within the first two weeks.
There’s also just the notion that if you have a camera crew following you around, you’re going to behave differently. Especially if it’s a camera crew for a show called “The First 48,” which implies you better make something happen in 48 hours. That could have an effect on your actions as an investigator.
What did you hear from the family of Jesse Mickelson, the victim Barrientos-Quintana was convicted of killing?
Multiple members of the family have accepted that Barrientos-Quintana is not guilty. Those were some of the most fascinating conversations that I had. If you spent 15 years not only believing that he’s guilty but in a certain sense hating him for destroying your family, and to be presented with new evidence and then be like, “Wait a minute, I think we got this wrong” — that just takes a lot of courage and heart.
I spoke to Mickelson’s half-sister, Tina Rosebear. She thought of the show as sort of a document of this awful experience that her family had gone through, but it was something that acknowledged her brother’s life. She found it almost a source of comfort to watch the episode. But now she has very, very different feelings, and she draws a bright line connecting the television show to the fact that their family may never know who shot and killed Mickelson. Maybe these investigators didn’t do as good a job as they could have because they were rushing to meet this 48-hour thing. For a variety of reasons, the opportunity to catch whoever did this has passed, and she can’t help wondering if that’s in some way the show’s fault.
The companies that produce the show did not respond to numerous requests for comment or to a detailed list of questions. The detectives involved in the case also declined to comment. One prosecutor in the original case against Barrientos-Quintana is now a judge and thus precluded from speaking to the press by the Minnesota Code of Judicial Conduct; another took issue with many of the characterizations in the Conviction Review Unit report but agreed that “The First 48” had been a problem.
