This unscripted background-sound-rich monologue spoken by a young black man wrongly convicted of murder is an eloquent social document. Sixteen-year-old Shareef Cousin (pronounced Ku-zan) was arrested one day after school and, following a botched trial, ended up on death row for nearly ten years.

In his quiet, self-effacing way Cousin describes how unreal everything seemed at first. He had been playing basketball the night of the murder, so how could his death sentence be real? When his jail cell door shut with a clang, though, he broke down and cried. Over the next few months he became close friends with a white guy, John Brown ("about 5'5", 112 pounds soaking wet, long brown hair, smoked cigarettes . . . brown teeth"), who'd been on death row for 17 years. The day Brown was led away to be executed, his last words to Cousin were, "Hey man, keep your head up. You blessed. You gonna leave from here one day."

Eight years later Cousin is a free man, exonerated, presumably because of a successful appeal. A little more than five minutes into this piece there is a brief pause. The rest of Cousin's monologue is an impassioned but never overwrought essay about our justice system. Rather than burning with rage at the Kafkaesque -- no, the racist -- machinations which cost him a decade of his life, Cousin is now studying full time as a college student to be an attorney. He's determined to represent people facing capital punishment, to organize families who have imprisoned relatives, and be part of a "new social movement" that will do away with the gross law-enforcement policies that have targeted black males and perpetuated a de facto system of slavery in America today.

Hats off to producer N. Christian Ugbode and the National Black Programming Consortium for a piece public radio listeners need to hear.