Season two of Undisclosed wrapped up yesterday with a pretty amazing final episode. In fact, this season was satisfying enough that I think it deserves its own thread at this point.
For starters, if anything the Joey Watkins case is even more compelling than the the Adnan Syed case on Serial, which is how Undisclosed started back in 2015. It’s a crazy case, one that had me shaking my head constantly. Apparently in the right circumstances, it’s easier than I thought for a privileged white kid to go to jail for murder.
The particulars of the case are this: back in January of 2000, a young man named Isaac Dawkins was leaving his first day of classes for the winter semester. Class was shorter than usual because it was the first day. He probably left class around 7:00pm.
At 7:18 or so, a 911 call came in to the Rome, Georgia emergency line. A driver reported that a pickup truck had veered left across the traffic lanes, over a grassy median, across the oncoming traffic lanes and then skidding down a guardrail before running off the road. Concerned bystanders found Dawkins behind the wheel of the truck, unconscious. When an ER doc examined Isaac at the hospital, he realized in short order that Dawkins had a bullet wound to the back of his head. Dawkins died the next day.
Joey Watkins was a suspect early on. Dawkins had dated Joey’s ex-girlfriend, and police were told that Watkins had been threatening the victim and even gotten into verbal and physical altercations with him. The city detectives couldn’t find any evidence though. They moved on from Watkins as a suspect.
Floyd County (which is where Rome is) took over the case after 8 months, and quickly zeroed back in on Watkins. Using jailhouse informants, the Floyd County sheriff’s investigators were able to get eyewitness accounts of all sorts of goings on between Watkins and Dawkins. They got an arrest warrant.
What’s weird here is that this isn’t a case of a poor kid getting railroaded by the system because he lacked good legal representation. Watkins’ family had money (“had”; they’ve spent most of it on their son’s legal defense), and hired prominent Georgia attorney Bobby Lee Cook, the model for the TV character Matlock.
The prosecution didn’t have a gun. It had an “eyewitness” who was so sketchy that it was iffy they could even put him on the stand (and when they did so, they acknowledged the eyewitness as a serial liar by saying “Here’s this testimony, for what it’s worth”.) They had some cellphone evidence, but the prosecution, the judge, and jury all misunderstood it. Joey had an alibi that seemed pretty ironclad. The motive was sketchy too. Dawkins had dated Joey’s former girlfriend, but Dawkins and that girl had broken up months before, and Dawkins, Joey, and the former girlfriend were all in committed relationships with other people and seemed happy in them.
So what happened? Well, for starters, Joey Watkins was not a good person. He was an asshole and a bully, two things Watkins at age 34 full acknowledges from prison now. He had friends who swore by him, but also bitter enemies who wished the worst on him. Young people in town loved to gossip, and everyone seemed to have a Joey Watkins story about some fight he’d gotten into, some confrontation he’d been involved in. The state lined up a huge parade of character witnesses against Joey. That buttressed some weak and impeachable “witnesses” to the crime who were very lacking in credibility. All gave testimony in exchange for help in sentence reduction or reduction of existing charges.
There were three other pieces of evidence that doomed Watkins. The jury was told by the DA that Watkins killed Isaac Dawkins’ dog, Sally, by shooting her. The jury was then told that Joey had killed another dog, and dumped it on top of Isaac Dawkins’ grave. It didn’t matter that neither of those things were true. Guy shoots a dog, that’s proof of murder.
The second piece of evidence was cellphone tower evidence. The prosecutor and defense lawyers both presented experts. The two experts agreed with one another about what the tower evidence said. Unfortunately, no one in the courtroom understood their testimony: not the judge, DA, or jury. In fact, Joey’s own attorney’s didn’t understand it.
The last piece of evidence came from one of Isaac’s neighbors. She was the mother of one of his friends, and reported that just a month before Dawkins was killed, he’d come to their house in a state of fear. Joey was chasing him in Joey’s truck, spotlighting him and even firing shots at him. Could he stay there and hide out? He could, the mother said. She testified to that and it seemed to sway the jury greatly.
To make things worse: since being convicted, Joey’s exhausted all appeals. Without something new, he’s stuck in jail for life +5 years.
What’s amazing here is that through a 23 episode season, the Undisclosed folks (who are much more polished and professional this time around) pretty much dismantle every piece of evidence in the case. They tear apart witnesses, they show what appears to be either negligent (at best) or dishonest actions by the prosecutor, and they show how having even an expensive lawyer representing you doesn’t mean shit if that law firm can’t get its act together.
The buildup and payoff in the last episode is pretty goddamned amazing.
Spoiler:
No guarantees of anything, but for a guy who has no appeals remaining…Joey’s getting a chance at another one anyway, and the grounds for it getting the original trial called a mistrial seem pretty good.