Chris Rock is opening up about a regret that still weighs on him: he had the money to hire a lawyer for a man he grew up with who was wrongly imprisoned for murder, and he chose not to. In a recent interview clip that’s now going viral, Rock named the man as Roger Logan, the brother of one of his best friends.
Video:
“A guy named Roger Logan who I grew up with… he was one of my best friend’s brothers who went to jail for 19 years for a murder he didn’t commit,” Rock said.
Logan’s brother repeatedly asked Rock to step in. “His brother used to plead with me to pay for a lawyer for Roger and I never did it,” Rock said. “I always had like a no lawyer thing because a lawyer is like an open ended thing.”
Rock did not dodge it. He did not blame anyone else. He owned it.
“I always stay out of lawyers because it’s so open ended and it still messes with me,” he said. “I had the means to help him and I didn’t. I don’t know if we could have got him out or not.”
Logan was convicted in the 1997 shooting death of Sherwin Gibbons, who was killed over a dice game in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Years later, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Conviction Review Unit, which reexamines cases where people may have been wrongly convicted, found the woman who identified Logan as the killer was locked up in jail on the day of the murder.
Logan had been interrogated by former NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella, whose cases came under review after another man convicted of murder was freed on evidence that Scarcella had coached a witness. Logan reached out to the DA’s office himself, telling investigators Scarcella had framed him. His conviction became the seventh connected to the detective to be thrown out.
Logan, then 53, walked out of Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York after nearly two decades behind bars. His family only found out that morning that he was coming home. “It’s just a blessing to be home,” Logan told reporters outside the Brooklyn courthouse. “I prayed for 18 years.” He said he was not angry or bitter.
Chris Rock’s comments have sparked plenty of reaction online, with some fans questioning why he would share the story at all and others giving him credit for being honest about a choice he still carries.
