“This Chose Me”: Why Dateline’s Dan Slepian Can’t Leave Sing Sing Behind

Within moments of meeting Dan Slepian, he gets a call from a prisoner at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Slepian has known the man for more than decade, from his time volunteering at the New York State prison, and they talk about his latest court appearance. Though Slepian’s not working on an immediate Dateline story on this particular case, it’s one of dozens he’s following at any time. “My name might be written on bathroom walls in prisons around the country,” he says.

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You couldn’t blame anyone wrongfully incarcerated for trying to get ahold of Slepian, whose dogged reporting for NBC’s Dateline has helped free several innocent men and is the subject of his new book, The Sing Sing Files. It’s a riveting read—and an infuriating one. Throughout a two-decade odyssey reporting on the criminal justice system, Slepian encounters police, prosecutors, and judges who appear more motivated to put someone away for a crime, or uphold a questionable conviction, than to find the truth. Meanwhile, he speaks with jurors who describe the pressure they feel to deliver guilty verdicts. In one particularly galling case, Richard Rosario is convicted of a Bronx murder despite having been in Florida at the time it occurred and having 13 alibis—the title of a previous Slepian podcast. (Rosario’s conviction was later vacated, and a jury awarded him $5 million for wrongful conviction.)

It’s “really, really challenging when people in prison are calling you, and mothers are calling you in tears, begging you to help them,” Slepian, 54, tells me, 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 hobbies?’ I don’t have time for hobbies. I have a platform [and] I have a responsibility, given what I’ve seen, to speak for people who cannot speak for themselves, who society has thrown away.”

Slepian’s criminal justice crusade began while he was embedded with the NYPD after the 9/11 attacks. Up until this point, his trajectory was fairly conventional for a TV journalist; an ambitious kid hustles his way into a WNBC internship, gets accepted to NBC’s coveted page program, and works for the late talk show pioneer Phil Donahue before landing a booking job, in 1996, at prime-time newsmagazine Dateline, where he eventually becomes a producer and conducts a variety of investigations. In 2002, Slepian received a tip about the 1990 Palladium nightclub murder, a case in which David Lemus and Olmedo Hidalgo, who didn’t know each other and couldn’t be placed at the scene by any physical or forensic evidence, were nonetheless convicted of the crime. That experience shattered his innocence, Slepian recalls, opening up “Pandora’s box” and revealing “the pathology of mass incarceration as a whole.” Now he refers to himself as “an evangelist” for criminal justice reform.

“I’m an evangelist, because the same way that if you were around in the 1930s and went to Germany, you would come back to the United States and you would say, ‘You got to see what’s happening over there,’” he says. “You’re a witness to something that’s not right. For me, I grew up believing that the system worked just the way it was supposed to. I’m a white kid from a middle-class suburb in Westchester County, New York.”

It was while filming a story on the Palladium case in 2002 at an upstate prison that Slepian met the mother of Jon-Adrian “JJ” Velazquez, who becomes central to his journey in the book. Velazquez was imprisoned for almost 24 years, only receiving clemency in 2021, nearly a decade after Slepian’s Dateline special raised damning questions about his case. (Slepian also explored Velazquez’s plight in his podcast Letters From Sing Sing, which was a finalist last year for a Pulitzer Prize.)

Velazquez’s legal ordeal is truly harrowing, and it tested Slepian’s ability to demonstrate a type of journalistic detachment that, while well-intentioned, can come across as performative, even tone-deaf. Despite knowing Velazquez for more than a decade and believing he was innocent, Slepian, as he recalls in the book, still recited a rote speech about his objectivity following a devastating setback in court.

When I ask about this moment, now eight years after the fact, Slepian gets emotional. “The DA was standing there; I wanted to show my objectivity. I wanted to put it on display,” Slepian tells me. “And I said this mantra: ‘JJ, if I find anything showing your guilt, that’s coming out.’ And there was this long pause, and he just said three words…‘Really, Dan?’ Pause. ‘Now?’ I literally can’t really talk about it. So I realized at that moment that I was part of this game. I was part of the system where everyone’s just doing their jobs. There’s no bad guys.”

“Detectives make arrests, close cases. Prosecutors prosecute cases. Juries have to decide. Sometimes they want to go home because they’re tired. Journalists are just telling both sides,” he adds. “But I came to a point where there weren’t both sides anymore. There was only one side, and I said that anyway.” This led to “a realization that I have a responsibility to be a good human being before I have a responsibility to be a good journalist,” he continues. “Those two things should be not mutually exclusive. Those two things should come together.”

Still, Slepian balks at being dismissed as an “advocate” rather than a journalist. “I’m an advocate to hold up the standards that people in power took an oath to,” he says. “Guardians of the system. People who can take your liberty, disregarding facts, hiding information. So I knew all of that, and yet I said that anyway. I never said that again.”

Slepian’s book hits shelves next week, just as Sing Sing is having a pop-culture moment. The A24 film Sing Sing, starring Colman Domingo as a participant in the prison’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program, was released in July. Vanity Fair’s David Canfield noted that “Domingo may be headed back to the Oscars for his incandescent performance” alongside “several formerly incarcerated men.”

When RTA honored Slepian at a gala a few years back, he was sitting next to Sing Sing director Greg Kwedar, he recalls, who had already been working on a film about the theater program. “That was the night he met JJ, because JJ was there with me,” Slepian says. (Velazquez appears in the movie as himself.) “And so [Kwedar] had been working on it,” he adds. “They hadn’t named it Sing Sing. I didn’t even have a book deal.” Slepian says it was also before plans materialized for an upcoming Dawn Porter docuseries, The Sing Sing Chronicles, which is produced by NBC News Studios and will air early next year on MSNBC; Slepian is a character in the series but had no editorial role. “Sing Sing is going to be in the lexicon of America for a while,” Slepian says, “and justice is in season.”

Still, for all the increased attention around Sing Sing, and mass incarceration more broadly, the reality is that, of the roughly 2 million people in jail in the United States, at least 100,000 are innocent. Slepian cites estimates of a 5% error rate in convictions, though he believes, as some experts do, that it may be 10% or higher. “It’s never lost on me that there’s 100,000 people, at least, right now in their prison cells, snatched from their families, their kids, their wives, their partners, their husbands, without a future,” he says. “And not only does it affect their kids and generations to come, it affects all of society.”

And the path to freedom is a long and arduous one, with only 3,585 people exonerated since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Though “we’re still only emptying the ocean with a thimble,” Slepian says, “this is the beginning of a movement.”

The challenges are evident throughout The Sing Sing Files. Investigating cases can take years, and even when there appears to be overwhelming evidence of a prisoner’s innocence, like in Velazquez’s situation, there are numerous legal hurdles. Slepian is unique, too, in that much of the work he has done on this front, and continues to do, is extracurricular. Outside of his daily Dateline duties, he may spend many months, or even years, researching a case before amassing enough material to pitch a story. After he gets home from work and has dinner with his wife, Slepian will get on his iPad, he says, and read trial transcripts into the night. (Velazquez’s clocked in at more than 2,000 pages.)

But the work he and others are doing, Slepian says, is “more needed than ever, because to me, this is the next incarnation of the civil rights movement.”

“We’re in 1940 or 1950, trying to get Black people the right to vote,” he continues. “That’s where we are when it comes to the issue of wrongful convictions and mass incarceration, because people have no clue how bad it is, because most have never visited a prison and they don’t think they’re going to be affected by it. But we are all affected by it.”

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