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Errors in Judgment: The Consequences of Prosecutorial Mistakes
The Texas Tribune analyzed 86 overturned convictions, finding that in nearly one quarter of those cases courts ruled that prosecutors made mistakes that often contributed to the wrong outcome. This multi-part series explores the causes and consequences of prosecutorial errors and whether reforms might prevent future wrongful convictions.
Click on each tab to view each part of the series.
From the moment 4-year-old April Tucker died, Debbie Tucker Loveless and John Harvey Miller told police and prosecutors that she had been mauled by dogs. But in 1989, the couple was convicted of murdering her and sentenced to life in prison.
Four seemingly endless years later, in 1993, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned their convictions, after a state district judge ruled prosecutors had withheld critical evidence that vindicated the couple.
Between 1989 and 2011, at least 86 Texas defendants including Loveless and Miller had their convictions overturned, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. In an extensive analysis of court rulings, news reports and pardon statements, The Texas Tribune found that in nearly one-quarter of those cases — 21 in total — courts ruled that prosecutors made mistakes that in most instances contributed to the wrong outcome. The wrongfully convicted in those cases spent a combined total of more than 270 years in prison. (See an interactive presentation with details about all the cases.)
In the cases, judges found that prosecutors broke basic legal and ethical rules, suppressing important evidence and witness testimony and making improper arguments to jurors. Despite the courts’ findings of some serious missteps, the State Bar of Texas reports very little public discipline of prosecutors in recent history.
The State Bar does not track discipline of prosecutors separately from other lawyers. But Linda Acevedo, the chief disciplinary counsel for the State Bar who has been at the agency since 1985, said she could recall three prosecutors who were publicly reprimanded. None of the reprimands were related to the 86 wrongful convictions.
“Right now, there is next to no oversight of what prosecutors do,” said Jennifer Laurin, a professor who teaches criminal procedure at the University of Texas School of Law.
Loveless was overwrought when Laura Ardis met her inside the Gatesville women’s prison in 1993. Four years after she had been convicted of beating and stabbing to death her 4-year-old daughter, Loveless still grieved for the girl and remained adamant that she did not kill her.
Loveless told Laura Ardis and her husband, lawyer Robert Ardis, the same story that Loveless’ husband had recounted from the Huntsville prison unit. A pack of frenzied dogs, they said, had attacked April Tucker, who was bleeding to death when the couple found her in the woods near their home.
Robert Ardis was appointed to represent the couple after their 1989 conviction. Laura Ardis, who was his legal assistant, was convinced of their innocence.
“John was a very sincere person, and he was very forthcoming,” Laura Ardis said. “I may have been naïve back then, but I did feel like that he was telling the truth.”
But Hopkins County Assistant District Attorney Alwin “Al” Smith had convinced jurors that the couple cut April with a hunting knife and beat her with a curling iron. The jury sentenced the two to life in prison.
Soon after he began investigating the case, Robert Ardis discovered 38 photos that prosecutors had not copied for the couple’s lawyers during trial. He tracked down doctors and animal experts who said the photos — which showed bruises in the shape of paw prints and dog hair on April’s body — confirmed Loveless and Miller’s version of what happened.
“This is not a case of child abuse unless you want to call it a case of animal abuse of a child,” said Dr. Charles Petty, a former Dallas County medical examiner, who examined the photos.
In a 1993 finding, state district Judge Lanny Ramsay said the couple fell victim to Smith’s decision to withhold critical information that made it impossible for defense lawyers to present an effective case. The prosecutor disputed the allegations, arguing he provided the couple’s lawyers with access to the evidence. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the convictions that same year.
Questions of immunity
High-profile cases have recently brought national attention to the issue of prosecutorial misconduct of the kind alleged in the Loveless-Miller case. In Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a $14 million jury award for John Thompson, who spent 14 years on death row because prosecutors withheld evidence. The high court ruled that prosecutors were immune from civil liability for their errors.
In Texas, the case of Michael Morton has sent shockwaves through the criminal justice system. Morton spent nearly 25 years in prison for his wife’s 1986 murder in Austin. DNA evidence led to Morton’s exoneration last year, and to the arrest of the man who is now facing trial in the murder. During their investigation, Morton’s lawyers say they discovered that the prosecutor did not disclose key evidence at trial that pointed to his innocence. This fall, an unprecedented legal inquest is set to determine whether the prosecutor-turned-state district Judge Ken Anderson will face criminal charges for his role in the wrongful conviction. Anderson says he did nothing wrong.
Williamson County State District Judge Ken Anderson and exoneree Michael Morton.
In the aftermath of those cases, lawmakers, defense lawyers and prosecutors in Texas are debating prosecutorial accountability and criminal justice reforms with an eye toward the 2013 legislative session.
Defense lawyers and reform advocates argue that attorneys for the state wield an immense amount of power that goes largely unchecked even in cases of egregious misconduct. The public, they say, is becoming increasingly leery of a justice system that safeguards the death penalty, yet doesn’t hold accountable the prosecutors who argue for it. They say it is just as disconcerting for people to see a system that allows killers to go free while innocent Texans languish behind bars.
“It does shake the public’s belief and confidence in their justice system,” said Bexar County state district Judge Sid Harle, who ordered the inquiry into allegations of misconduct in the Morton case. “Without jurors coming in and believing in the system, we don’t function.”
But many prosecutors say that serious, intentional mistakes are rare. Most of the court rulings have found only errors that are not tantamount to misconduct. And many prosecutors argue that internal mechanisms in the legal and judicial system already adequately punish bad actors in rare instances of misconduct.
“There’s a lot of folks out there really straining too hard to overstate the extent of the problem,” said Rob Kepple, executive director of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association.
Prosecutors’ rules
In Texas, as in most other states, prosecutors are generally bound by the same ethical rules and criminal laws as private lawyers. But the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct set out additional requirements for lawyers for the state.
“A prosecutor has the responsibility to see that justice is done, and not simply to be an advocate,” the rules state.
Among those is an expansion of the so-called Brady Rule, named for the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision that requires prosecutors to provide defendants with exculpatory evidence — information that could help prove their innocence.
In 17 of the 21 Texas cases where courts found prosecutorial error, the judges ruled that prosecutors failed to give defense lawyers exculpatory evidence.
In some instances, like the cases of Loveless and Miller, prosecutors allegedly withheld crucial documents. Judge Ramsay faulted Smith, the assistant district attorney, for failing to provide the couple’s lawyers with copies of autopsy and emergency room photos of the girl.
After Robert Ardis was assigned to the case, he and his wife visited Miller in prison. Miller told them that when he found April bleeding to death near their home, the girl said that dogs had attacked her. The Ardises promised Miller they would investigate his theory.
Robert Ardis demanded that prosecutors show him photos from the autopsy and emergency room where April was treated. The Ardises made copies and showed the photos to doctors and animal experts. Dr. Charles Odom, a medical examiner who worked in Hawaii and in Dallas, testified that a dog attack was the “only reasonable interpretation” of the evidence.
The Ardises also discovered testimony from a social worker, who said she witnessed attacks by the same dogs that were suspected in the girl’s death.
Because prosecutors failed to divulge that information, Ramsay ruled, the couple’s original defense lawyers were left with little ammunition to refute the state’s theory that the couple methodically carved the girl’s body and used push-pins to make the fatal abuse look like a dog attack.
“The jury got it right”
Nearly two decades later, Smith, the lead prosecutor in the case, said Ramsay was wrong, and that he objects to the allegation that he withheld evidence. In objections filed with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Smith said he never received reports of other attacks by the dogs. And he said in an interview that he allowed attorneys for Loveless and Miller to look at every photo he had.
The problem in the case, Smith said, was that during the trial, Ramsay did not provide the couple with funds to hire experts to review the evidence. That, he contends, is the real reason Loveless and Miller were freed — which he still believes was a mistake.
“I still believe that the jury got it right,” he said. “I’ve never had [a case] where a child was that injured. Never. Even as we’re talking about it, her images are coming back, and it is very unpleasant.”
Soon after the Loveless-Miller case, Smith moved on to become trial chief for the Bowie County Criminal District Attorney and an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Texas. Now, he is in private practice in Texarkana.
Smith said there’s nothing he would have done differently in the Loveless-Miller case, and he has talked with the current district attorney about trying the couple again.
“There’s no statute of limitations on murder,” Smith said. “He’s still free to prosecute them.”
Decades behind bars
More than half of the overturned convictions in which courts found prosecutorial error were murder cases, 13 in total. And in six of those cases, the defendant was freed from death row. Among the cases with findings of error, the shortest sentence any defendant received was 20 years.
In the case of Anthony Graves, who was exonerated in 2010, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Burleson County District Attorney Charles Sebesta never told defense lawyers that another man, Robert Carter, confessed that he was the sole killer in the massacre of a Somerville family. Both Graves and Carter were sentenced to death. Graves spent 18 years in prison — 12 on death row, where he twice neared execution — before prosecutors dismissed the case against him because of a lack of evidence.
In his final statement before his lethal injection in 2000, Carter again took full responsibility for the crime. Still, Sebesta has stood by his work in the case.
Despite the decades that innocent men and women have lost behind bars, none of the prosecutors involved were publicly disciplined.
“We have a good set of disciplinary rules on paper,” said Robert Schuwerk, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center who served on the committee that wrote the Texas Disciplinary Rule of Professional Conduct. “The question is, is anybody going to enforce them?”
Private and public discipline
The absence of a public reprimand, though, doesn’t mean none of the lawyers were disciplined. Lawyers can also be reprimanded privately.
A grievance process is triggered whenever someone files a complaint with the State Bar. Complaints, which can be filed by anyone, are screened, and lawyers are given 30 days to respond to misconduct allegations. If the bar determines misconduct may have occurred, a lawyer can choose to have a hearing in district court or with a local grievance committee.
The only time any of those proceedings become public is when the bar issues public sanctions, which include reprimands, suspensions or disbarments. The bar can also mete out private disciplinary measures, but because the proceedings are secret, there’s no way to determine how many times such measures have been taken in cases involving prosecutorial misconduct.
Betty Blackwell, an Austin criminal defense lawyer who has served on the State Bar’s Commission for Lawyer Discipline, said the oversight agency works hard to ensure that lawyers don’t abuse the public trust. But she said the nature of wrongful convictions combined with state laws that limit prosecutors’ liability for the errors make it difficult for the State Bar to take action.
Hidden exculpatory evidence typically isn’t uncovered until many years after a conviction is handed down. By then, the four-year statute of limitations on prosecutorial ethics violations has generally expired.
Additionally, because the cases are old, memories of the details have often faded. Prosecutors may have moved on, and, particularly in large district attorney’s offices with dozens of litigators, it’s hard to know who did what in a case and when.
And Blackwell said prosecutors aren’t publicly admonished simply for making mistakes, even when the mistake results in an overturned conviction. The bar rules require proof that the lawyer intentionally behaved unethically.
“Just because a case was reversed for failure to turn over Brady evidence doesn’t mean there was an ethical violation,” Blackwell said.
Heart-wrenching results
Whether the combined errors that led to the convictions of Loveless and Miller were ethical violations or not, Laura Ardis said, the result was heart-wrenching for the couple.
Not only did they grieve over April’s death, but the couple also spent four years separated from their older children, who lived out of state with relatives. After Loveless and Miller were freed, Laura Ardis said, the two separated and moved on with their lives. Over the years, they lost touch with the Ardises.
For Robert Ardis, who has Alzheimer’s disease, his work on the case remains one of his proudest accomplishments, his wife said. He keeps an award for it on the wall of his nursing home room.
And Laura Ardis holds fast to the memory of the happy day when the couple was released from prison. Reporters and TV cameras clamored around their small law office. The owners of the western wear store next door to the law firm told Loveless and Miller they could pick out any new clothes they wanted for the day. Loveless and Miller were reunited with their children, who had grown into teenagers.
Kerry Max Cook had been out of prison for about three years when his son was born.
As Kerry Justice Cook slept in his crib, his father would peer down at his tiny son and cry, battling back suicidal thoughts that have haunted him since experiencing unspeakable horrors during 20 years on Texas’ death row.
“I’d tell K.J., ‘You’ve got to hurry up so you can talk to me. I’m so alone,’” Cook recalled. “’Poppy’s not going to make it.’”
K.J. is 11 now, and talking seems to be one of the mature and articulate tween’s fortes. He introduces his father to crowds at speaking engagements across the world.
“I find it quite amazing that he was able to go there for 22 years and go through every obstacle which he had to go through,” the fifth-grader wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt said, brushing shoulder-length blond hair away from his face. “I think he’s the most respectable man that I know.”
Cook, 56, was convicted of the 1977 rape and murder of Linda Jo Edwards in Tyler. That conviction was ultimately overturned. A second trial ended in a hung jury, and a third ended with a conviction that was reversed after a court found it was tainted by prosecutorial misconduct. Before Smith County attempted to try Cook a fourth time, he agreed to a plea deal in 1999. He pleaded no contest and was set free. DNA testing subsequently revealed another man’s biological matter on the victim’s clothes.
Cook has written a book about his experience, actors like Tim Robbins have portrayed him in a play about exonerations and he teaches young people about overcoming adversity. In the eyes of the law, though, Cook remains a convicted murderer. Normal life, he said, is beyond his reach.
“This freedom means nothing with a conviction,” he said. “Because this isn’t freedom. This is another prison cell.”
Thirteen years after his release, Cook is battling with Smith County prosecutors to officially clear his name. Cook is seeking new DNA testing that he hopes will result in the addition of his name to a list of at least 86 Texas inmates whose convictions were overturned from 1989 to 2011. In an analysis of court rulings, news reports and pardon statements in each of the 86 cases, The Texas Tribune found that in nearly a quarter of the cases — 21 in total — courts found prosecutorial errors that in most instances contributed to the wrong outcome.
The State Bar of Texas, though, said it had publicly disciplined very few prosecutors in recent years. Some lawmakers and criminal justice reform advocates have called for increased accountability for prosecutors whose errors result in wrongful convictions that forever change the lives of innocent people and their families.
Cook says his efforts to clear his name are doomed if he must continue to fight in Smith County, where the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that prosecutorial and police misconduct has “tainted this entire matter from the outset.” He has asked an appeals court to move his case.
“Everything that could go wrong in the prosecution did, and has, and still continues to,” Cook said.
Smith County prosecutors past and present insist that Cook is guilty. Cook, they have argued, is simply after millions of dollars he would be entitled to from the state if he were officially exonerated. Current Smith County Criminal District Attorney Matt Bingham declined to comment.
During Cook’s first trial in 1978, prosecutors argued that he had beaten, stabbed and mutilated Edwards — who lived in the same apartment complex as him — in a sexual frenzy triggered by a movie that depicted a cat mutilation. At age 22, Cook was sentenced to death.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1988 vacated his first sentence because a state psychologist interviewed Cook without his lawyers present. Cook’s second trial in 1992 was declared a mistrial because the jury was deadlocked. His third trial in 1994 resulted in another death sentence.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed that sentence in 1996, citing the prosecution’s “numerous undisputed acts of misconduct” in Cook’s case, such as withholding exculpatory evidence — information that could help prove his innocence — and making a deal with a witness who lied and then lying about the deal to the jury.
The court ruled that prosecutors did not tell Cook’s lawyers that the 16-year-old daughter of James Mayfield, Edwards’ boss with whom she had been having an affair, had made repeated death threats against her. The affair became public after Edwards attempted suicide, and Mayfield was forced to resign from his job as a dean at Texas Eastern University (now the University of Texas at Tyler).
Mayfield, his wife and his daughter said they were together at home on the night of Edwards’ murder, and no one from the family was charged with a crime. Efforts to reach Mayfield through his former attorney were unsuccessful.
Prosecutors also misrepresented to the jury a deal they made with a jailhouse snitch, the appeals court ruled. Edward “Shyster” Jackson testified that Cook confessed to the killing. The prosecutor told jurors there was no deal, but the court found that Jackson’s murder charge was reduced to involuntary manslaughter. He later admitted his testimony was fabricated.
The court also found that prosecutors introduced misleading testimony about the age of Cook’s fingerprints at the scene. The officer testified that the age of the fingerprints put Cook in the apartment at the time of the murder. But the officer later said his testimony was a mistake that could not be scientifically supported and the prosecutor pressured him to falsely testify.
While most of the prosecution’s errors were remedied by the third trial, the court said, that proceeding too was tainted by the use of questionable testimony from a witness who was with Cook the night of the murder. Robert Hoehn told jurors that he and Cook had sex and that Cook was aroused at the mutilation scene in the movie. But prosecutors didn’t tell Cook’s lawyers that Hoehn gave contradictory testimony to the grand jury, saying that there was no sex and that Cook hadn’t paid attention to the movie that allegedly inspired his sexual brutality.
The court overturned Cook’s conviction but allowed Smith County to prosecute him again. In 1999, as Smith County District Attorney Jack Skeen prepared for Cook’s fourth trial, semen found on underwear that Edwards wore the night of the attack was submitted for DNA testing. Before the test results were revealed, Skeen offered Cook a plea deal.
Cook was 42 then. His brother had been murdered, and his father died while Cook was in prison On death row, Cook said he had been repeatedly raped and abused. He pleaded no contest, refusing to admit guilt but knowing that legally he would remain a convicted murderer.
Later, the DNA analysis showed that the semen belonged to Mayfield, who had previously testified that he and Edwards had not had sex for weeks before her death.
“I was wrongly convicted,” Cook said. “But you just have the stain, you have the scarlet letter, because you’re not judicially exonerated.”
After the testing, The Associated Press reported, Smith County investigators said the DNA results could not show when the semen was deposited and that the stain didn’t implicate Mayfield.
Cook has tried to move on after his release. He got married and started a family. He adores K.J. They ride bikes together, read books, go to movies and even take the occasional jog — K.J. said his once rail-thin dad is trying to lose a few pounds.
“As much as you can give that to one person or one thing in your whole life, this kid saved my life,” Cook said of his son. “Not me. Not God. K.J. saved my life.”
But finding regular employment with a murder conviction and a 20-year hole in his resume is tough.
“I can’t overcome that,” Cook said, sitting in the living room of the apartment he rents from a friend whose name is on the lease. “Today, I’m just as poor as the day I walked out.”
This year, Cook launched a final effort to clear his name, asking for DNA testing on the remaining evidence in the case. But if the decision about his ultimate guilt or innocence remains in Smith County, Cook worries the outcome will be unfair.
He sees a number of familiar names at the Smith County Courthouse. The wife of the original prosecutor in Cook’s case, A.D. Clark III, is a Smith County district judge. So is former District Attorney Skeen, who presided over Cook’s second, third and fourth trials and is Clark’s first cousin. And the husband of state district Judge Christi Kennedy, who is set to preside over the DNA testing, worked for Skeen in the district attorney’s office at the time of Cook’s second and third trials.
As in other Texas cases where prosecutorial errors contributed to overturned convictions, Clark was never publicly disciplined by the State Bar of Texas despite the Texas Court of Criminal Appeal’s rebuke of his office’s work. He is now a lawyer in the Texas attorney general’s regional office in Tyler. He declined to be interviewed for this story but has denied wrongdoing.
Cook and his lawyers allege they’ve uncovered more oddities in the Smith County prosecutor’s files. They learned that one of the lead investigators, Sgt. Eddie Clark, kept the knife used to murder Edwards at his home as a souvenir. And they were informed that much of the evidence in the case was destroyed without Cook’s knowledge just months after state lawmakers passed a law requiring that defendants be notified when such items were to be discarded.
“When I was thought to be a criminal, they put me in jail for 22 years,” Cook said. “Why can’t they be punished for their wrongdoings?”
While Smith County agreed to allow the DNA testing, Bingham, the current prosecutor, has fought to keep the case in Tyler. He argues that the prosecutors who committed misconduct are no longer with the district attorney’s office and that Kennedy has demonstrated no bias against Cook. In court filings, Bingham wrote that Cook and his lawyers have presented a “litany of unfounded and bad faith charges” against the county.
In an interview earlier this year, Assistant Smith County District Attorney Michael West questioned Cook’s motives for pursuing exoneration more than a decade after his release.
“It seems like if I was all fired up and gung ho about being innocent, I wouldn’t have waited so long,” West said.
Cook, though, said he doesn’t care about the potential $1.6 million he could receive in state compensation if he were exonerated.
“There’s not enough money in the world to pay me for what they’ve done to me,” Cook said. “I just want my life back.”
K.J., meanwhile, said the battle has been hard on his father. But he said he understands.
“To have a dad like this is like something that God did,” he said. “To have a dad that’s gone through this much, and to have a dad who went through this and is still alive today and standing tall, is quite amazing.”
It had been 14 years since their last meeting. Father and son sat uncomfortably last fall in the well-appointed home of the Houston lawyer who helped free Eric Olson’s father from prison.
The only clothes Eric remembered seeing his dad wear before were prison whites. Now, he noticed, his dad was dressed just like him: blue jeans, a button-down shirt, even similar shoes.
How should he feel about meeting the man who he had believed savagely killed his mother and felt no remorse? At age 28, with his pregnant wife at his side, Eric saw his father Michael Morton as an innocent man for the first time. Was this really happening, he wondered. It felt like a movie.
“I don’t know if I should feel tears of joy or laughter. I remember mostly being kind of numb the whole night, mostly sitting there, listening, just waiting for … I don’t know. Waiting for everything to make sense again,” Eric recalled. “Only months before that, we were still supposed to hate him.”
Eric was 3 years old and had recently recovered from open heart surgery on Aug. 13, 1986, when his mother, Christine Morton, was beaten to death in her bed in their North Austin home. Six weeks after her death, police arrested Morton, pulling his sobbing toddler from his arms as they led him to a police cruiser. Six months after losing his mother, Eric lost his father, too, when a Williamson County jury convicted Morton of murder and sent him to prison for life.
Unbeknownst to Eric, as he and his wife, Maggie, commemorated the 25th anniversary of his mother’s death last year with a visit to her grave in Houston, the truth as he knew it was unraveling. That day, Morton’s lawyers received DNA test results that ultimately proved his innocence and connected another man to Christine Morton’s slaying.
Morton’s lawyers — John Raley of Houston and Nina Morrison of the New York-based Innocence Project — had also discovered secreted in the files of the sheriff’s investigators and prosecutors critical evidence that they argue could have prevented the wrongful conviction.
Morton is one of at least 86 Texas defendants who saw their convictions overturned between 1989 and 2011 after spending years in prison. The Texas Tribune analyzed court rulings, media reports and pardon statements in those cases to determine how many times the courts decided that prosecutorial errors, such as withholding crucial evidence, played a role in the wrongful conviction. (See an interactive presentation with details about all the cases.)
In nearly a quarter of the cases — 21 in total, including Morton’s — courts found prosecutorial errors that usually contributed to the wrongful convictions.
Since his release in October, Morton has vowed to seek accountability for the prosecutor whose mistakes he said contributed to his wrongful conviction. Morton says his goal is to ensure that what happened to him does not happen to others. And Eric and Maggie Olson say they are determined to help, too.
“He may not be the first person or the last person to do something like this,” Eric said of Williamson County state district Judge Ken Anderson, the former district attorney who prosecuted Morton’s case. “That’s what’s really screwed up about the whole thing.”
In September, Tarrant County state district Judge Louis E. Sturns will lead a court of inquiry that will decide whether Anderson should face criminal charges for his work in the case.
Anderson, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has publicly apologized for the judicial system’s failures in Morton’s case. More than a month after Morton’s release from prison, in a press conference outside the historic courthouse where the 1987 trial took place, Anderson said he felt sick over the wrongful conviction. But he denied any wrongdoing.
Williamson County state district Judge Ken Anderson speaks to the press about the Michael Morton case on Nov. 16, 2011.
“In my heart, I know there was no misconduct whatsoever,” he said.
Eric has few memories of the life he shared with his biological parents. He remembers the hospital where he had surgery to correct a congenital heart defect and that the family had a dog. But, he knows now, it may be a blessing that other memories disappeared.
Among the withheld evidence that lawyers found in the prosecutor and sheriff’s files was a haunting transcript of a conversation between Eric’s grandmother and a sheriff’s detective. She recounted details of a disturbing talk she had with the 3-year-old about the murder one week after his mother’s funeral.
“Mommy’s crying. She’s — stop it. Go away,” his grandmother said he told her. She asked why his mother cried.
“’Cause the monster’s there,” Eric said.
Delicately, she pressed for more details.
“He hit Mommy. He broke the bed,” Eric said.
“Is Mommy still crying?”
“No, Mommy stopped.”
Then, she asked the question she was most dreading: “Was Daddy there?”
“No,” he said. “Mommy and Eric was there.”
Eric said that he has no recollection of those events now, and that after his mother’s death and his father’s conviction, family members did all they could to protect him and give him a normal childhood.
“I look back now, and I should have been really, really messed up,” Eric said during an interview in a hotel room not far from the courthouse where his father was convicted and where documentary filmmakers were working on a movie about the family’s nightmarish ordeal. He glanced across the room adoringly at his cooing, blue-eyed infant daughter. Her name: Christine Marie Olson, after Eric’s mother. “But everything came out pretty good.”
His mother’s sister, Marylee Kirkpatrick, who lived in Houston, won custody of her sister’s son.
The custody agreement required Kirkpatrick to ensure that Eric visited his father twice each year at the Wynne prison unit in Huntsville.
Eric remembers sitting at a picnic table in the prison yard. His dad always brought lemon drops. His aunt would sit at the table, too, quietly reading.
As he grew older, though, Eric said, he realized how weird the situation was. When he was a teenager, he wrote a letter to his father explaining that he wanted to stop the visits.
“I don’t remember it being as emotional to say I didn’t want to go anymore,” he said. “I just did. I didn’t feel connected to it much anymore.”
Around the time the visits stopped, Kirkpatrick married Paul Olson. To Eric, who changed his last name when he turned 18, they are Mom and Dad.
For his father in prison, news of his son’s name change was shattering. The hope of proving his innocence and reuniting with his son had kept Morton afloat in the grinding boredom and harsh reality of prison.
For Eric, though, changing his name was simply the next logical step in moving on with his life, being part of the family he loved.
And so, life moved on. Eric went to college at Texas State University-San Marcos. He graduated, moved back to Houston and began working at the Catholic preparatory high school he had attended. There, he met Maggie Mahoney in 2009, and they were married last year.
Not long after the wedding, Eric received an email from Raley, Morton’s pro bono lawyer in Houston. Raley, who Eric had never met, wanted to talk to him about developments in his father’s case.
“I thought it was just some whacko,” Eric said. “I just responded quickly: ‘I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what this means. Don’t ever contact me.’”
His outreach rebuffed, Raley contacted his own pastor, who knew the president of Eric’s school. The president called Eric into his office and explained that Morton was going to be released from prison. They did not want him to learn the news from the television.
For the first time, Eric said, he independently researched his father’s case.
“The story I was told my whole life was, ‘He killed her, and he’s in prison, and we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’ I didn’t want to, because I was a kid,” he said. “I rarely thought about it.”
It finally made sense, he said, why his father had been denied parole. When victims’ services workers had explained to Eric that his father was up for parole a few years earlier but had been rejected, the family figured Morton had done something wrong.
Michael Morton in the courtroom on Oct. 4, 2011, when he was released from prison.
The parole board, Eric learned, had told Morton that if he simply accepted responsibility for killing his wife, he could be released. Morton refused.
“It turns out he had said, ‘All I have left is my innocence,’” Eric said. “That’s pretty bold. I don’t think I would have done it. I would have gotten out. Get me out of here.”
With Morton, 57, now out of prison, the father and son are building the relationship they started to forge that night at Raley’s house. They see each other about once a month. Morton fawns over his granddaughter and marvels that his son is now a father.
“Fortunately or unfortunately, now I have to get to know him, because I never did. I never knew who he was, or what his favorite food was,” Eric said. “Being introduced to him was like remembering a movie I saw when I was a kid, like meeting a movie star.”
There are still challenges ahead, though, and many questions to be resolved.
For the family who raised him — Christine Morton’s sister, brother and mother — Eric said the discovery of Morton’s innocence was difficult. It brought a flood of terrible, long-buried memories along with new guilt and questions about how things could have gone so wrong.
The Kirkpatricks, Eric said, had a close relationship with Anderson, the prosecutor.
“He convinced everybody that’s what the truth was, and that’s what they thought forever,” Eric said. “They didn’t have any other source of truth.”
Their truth eviscerated, they must now endure another trial. The DNA that exonerated Morton was connected to Mark Norwood, a 58-year-old dishwasher from Bastrop. Norwood has said he is innocent, but his DNA has also been connected with another similar Austin murder from 1988. He is expected to face trial next year in the Morton case.
Mark Norwood being led into court on Jan. 18, 2012. He is charged with the 1986 murder of Christine Morton.
Eric plans to be present for that trial and for the inquisition into Anderson’s role in Morton’s prosecution. For Eric, one of the biggest unanswered questions is how such profound mistakes could have been made.
It goes beyond the transcript of the conversation about what 3-year-old Eric saw the morning his mother died that Morton’s lawyers did not see. When they dug through the old files, his lawyers discovered other clues that pointed to the very scenario that Morton had described from the start; he said that an intruder killed his wife after he had left for work early that morning. Neighbors told police they saw a man in a green van casing the Mortons’ home and running into the woods behind it. And there was a report that Christine Morton’s credit card had been used fraudulently after she died.
“Part of my life was taken away, first of all, because my mother was killed. Then I don’t understand why somebody would want to continue that chain of events by taking away someone’s father,” Eric said.
Eric Nichols, a former prosecutor for the Texas attorney general’s office and a former assistant U.S. district attorney, is representing Anderson in the court of inquiry. Morton’s lawyers allege that Anderson committed criminal prosecutorial misconduct by withholding evidence despite the trial judge’s order to provide it.
What has been lost in the debate over Anderson’s role in the case, Nichols said, was that the district attorney was following the lead of Sheriff Jim Boutwell, who had been the top lawman in Williamson County since 1978 and before that was a Texas Ranger. He famously flew an airplane above the University of Texas tower in 1966, exchanging fire with gunman Charles Whitman, and in 1983, Boutwell arrested Henry Lee Lucas, once thought to be the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history.
Eric Olson with his daughter, Christine Marie, named after his mother, who was killed Aug. 13, 1986.
Boutwell died of cancer in 1993.
In a nine-hour deposition, Anderson said he could not remember details of the prosecution. If he had known of information that pointed to Morton’s innocence, he insisted, he would have told defense lawyers.
“He has apologized not only to Mr. Morton but to all persons who have been affected by this, which clearly includes Mr. Morton’s son, Eric,” Nichols said.
Eric said it would be nice to see Anderson held accountable for his role in Morton’s wrongful conviction, but he refuses to dwell on the negative. His priority, he said, is reuniting his family — the one he grew up with and the father he never got to know.
“If there’s a better time to have this all come full circle, I can’t think of it. This is like a movie,” Eric said. “But it’s good now. It’s not like a scary movie anymore.”
Enlargephoto illustration by: Mark Graham / Callie Richmond / Todd Wiseman
There’s no balancing of the books when you lose two and a half decades of your life to prison, Michael Morton says. He can’t make up for missing his son Eric’s childhood while he was stuck behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit.
“We’re starting from square one,” he says. “Today’s a new day and it’s a new experience and it’s a new life, and you make the best of what you have.”
Eric was 3 when Morton was sent to prison for his wife’s 1986 murder. It would be 25 years before DNA exonerated him. When the murder charge was dismissed in December, it was Texas’ 86th overturned conviction since 1989. But had the district attorney who prosecuted Morton turned over all the evidence in his files during the trial, the former grocery store manager and his lawyers argue, the entire tragedy could have been thwarted.
Now, in a rare court of inquiry that is being watched statewide, Morton is pursuing criminal charges against Williamson County state district Judge Ken Anderson, the former prosecutor who tried his case — and who made errors a judge ruled contributed to Morton’s wrongful imprisonment. Morton is also urging legislators to implement new laws that hold prosecutors accountable for serious missteps.
“I can’t make up for those lost years, but what I can do is prevent what happened to me from happening to someone else,” he says.
Williamson County state district Judge Ken Anderson discusses the Michael Morton case during a Nov. 16, 2011, press conference.
Prosecutors have long enjoyed relative immunity for mistakes they make in their work. A Texas Tribune examination of 86 overturned convictions between 1989 and 2011 revealed that courts found prosecutor errors in nearly 25 percent of the cases. Most of the errors contributed to the wrong outcome, and the 21 men and women involved in those cases spent a total of more than 270 years in prison before their convictions were overturned.
The State Bar does not track prosecutor discipline separately from other lawyers. But Linda Acevedo, the chief disciplinary counsel for the State Bar who has been at the agency since 1985, says she can recall three prosecutors who were publicly reprimanded. None of the reprimands were related to the 86 wrongful convictions.
In the wake of Morton’s case and other high-profile exonerations, some lawmakers and reform advocates have joined his call for new laws to hold prosecutors accountable for mistakes that derail the lives of the wrongly convicted and their families.
Many prosecutors, though, argue that reform advocates exaggerate the problem. They say instances of true prosecutorial misconduct are rare and appropriate sanctions are in place to deal with them.
“You don’t just throw the baby out with the bathwater,” says Tarrant County District Attorney Joe Shannon. “All you’ve got is a few anecdotal situations where things went awry.”
What goes wrong?
Both prosecutors and defense lawyers agree that the vast majority of state lawyers are ethical and take the consequences of their decisions seriously.
“Human error is a natural part of any process,” Shannon says.
Prosecutors must often balance their constitutional duty to seek the truth with the demands of traumatized victims and a nervous public that wants to see a culprit apprehended.
And, Shannon says, district attorneys rely heavily on police investigations. If police work is sloppy or incomplete or if witnesses provide conflicting statements, the truth can be obscured even from prosecutors with the best intentions.
But tunnel vision can become a problem for both prosecutors and police, and it’s one that Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins says he has seen often in wrongful convictions. He created a conviction integrity unit that boosted Dallas County’s exoneration numbers to the highest in the state: 37 between 1989 and 2011.
Often, he says, police and prosecutors had made up their minds about a suspect too early in their investigation.
“As evidence comes in, we have to follow that path,” Watkins says. “There’s a failure to follow the other leads.”
Jennifer Laurin, an assistant professor at the University of Texas School of Law who teaches criminal law, says that when the brain is convinced of a particular scenario, people often have trouble processing incompatible information.
Under the Brady rule, named for a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision, prosecutors are required to provide defendants with exculpatory evidence — information that might prove they didn’t commit the crime. Under Texas law, prosecutors are allowed to decide which information in their files is exculpatory. But if a prosecutor is convinced that a person is guilty, he or she may be unable to recognize evidence that would be exculpatory, Laurin says.
In 17 of the 21 overturned Texas cases with prosecutorial errors, the courts ruled that exculpatory evidence was not given to defense lawyers.
“In the heat of that pursuit, it can become easy sometimes to do the wrong thing for the right ends,” Laurin says.
Sometimes, Watkins says, errors are made for even simpler reasons.
“Truth may not be the issue,” he says. “The issue may be winning.”
When prosecutors are punished
Even when a court rules that a prosecutor has made a mistake, that doesn’t mean discipline is in order, says Betty Blackwell, an Austin criminal defense lawyer who has served on the agency’s Commission for Lawyer Discipline.
To cross the line from prosecutorial error to prosecutorial misconduct that is punishable by the State Bar, there must be a determination of the prosecutor’s intent.
“The bar can only take action if a person knew it was [exculpatory] and didn’t turn it over,” she says. “It’s really a higher standard.”
The State Bar did not sanction former Burleson County District Attorney Charles Sebesta in the case of Anthony Graves. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Sebesta had violated the Brady rule by failing to disclose that another man had confessed that he alone had committed the murders for which Graves was convicted. But the State Bar dismissed a complaint filed against Sebesta for his work in the case, which put Graves in prison for 18 years, including 12 years on death row.
Even if the State Bar does decide that a prosecutor engaged in misconduct, the public may never know that a sanction was issued. That’s because the agency can mete out private disciplinary measures.
In a rare move, the State Bar acknowledged last year that it was investigating a complaint against Anderson for his work in the Morton case. Asked about the outcome of the State Bar investigation, Anderson’s lawyer Eric Nichols said that there was “nothing public to report.”
Discipline of prosecutors is also rare because of the four-year statute of limitations on ethical violations, says Robert Schuwerk, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center who served on the committee that wrote the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct. In many cases, it takes much longer than four years to uncover suppressed evidence.
In his own review of public prosecutorial discipline over the past 23 years, Schuwerk says he discovered only three instances of reprimands.
“Essentially, the disciplinary system has not done well by us,” he says.
Seeking solutions
Reform advocates say a few tweaks could help prevent prosecutorial errors and improve accountability for intentional violations.
Defense attorneys and many prosecutors agree that open file policies that allow criminal lawyers access to the state’s records would help prevent evidence suppression. The American Bar Association recommends reciprocal open discovery between the defense and prosecutors.
Nichols, who represents former Morton prosecutor Anderson, was previously a state and federal prosecutor. True open file policies, he says, would protect both the accused and the prosecutor.
“The prosecutor will not be in a position 25 years after a trial has been conducted of having to answer questions based on memory of what was disclosed to defense counsel,” he says.
In instances where prosecutors are found to have intentionally withheld evidence, reform advocates argue, lawmakers ought to extend the statute of limitations beyond four years.
Schuwerk suggested that prosecutors should be liable for intentional rules violations for up to five years after a person who was wrongfully convicted is released from prison.
“They need to stare that person in the eye and see what it’s like to be in prison for 18 years when you did nothing wrong,” he says.
But Nichols says the Morton case is a perfect example of why the existing statute of limitations is needed. Twenty-five years after Morton went to trial, he says, it’s nearly impossible to decipher exactly what went wrong and who is to blame.
“It is unfair to everyone involved to be presenting a case, civil or criminal, so far down the road,” Nichols says.
Rob Kepple, executive director of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, says the number of prosecutors who engage in misconduct is “exceedingly small.” Instead of changing the laws to require more discipline after mistakes happen, he says, training should be improved to prevent errors in the first place.
“My goal and our goal here is find a way to be better at what we do and to avoid problems,” Kepple says.
State Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, chairman of the New York-based Innocence Project, says that more education is not enough when the consequences of prosecutor mistakes can be so dire. When lawmakers reconvene in 2013, he says, they will remember not only that Morton lost nearly 25 years to prison, but also that errors in his case allowed the real murderer to remain free to hurt others. Authorities have linked the DNA of Mark Norwood, a 58-year-old Bastrop dishwasher who is awaiting trial for Christine Morton’s murder, to another Austin killing that happened in 1988.
Ellis says he would like to see the State Bar tighten its rules and become more transparent in its discipline.
“They could do a hell of a lot more than they are doing,” he says.
Meanwhile, Morton awaits the September court of inquiry that will determine whether Anderson faces criminal charges for his role in the trial that ruined his life. He knows that prosecutors statewide are waiting, too.
“If nothing happens, then they’re going to wipe their brows and go, ‘Shew! We can still do anything we want and not worry about it,’” he says.
Without some changes in the system, Morton says, the tragedy that befell his family, could happen to anyone. Before the murder, his life was just like any other Texas suburbanite’s. He had no criminal history. He worked and took care of his wife and toddler son. The couple was saving for a house on the lake, talking about having more children and Morton was starting his own business.
If prosecutors knew they could face consequences for their mistakes, like a fine or the risk of losing their law license, Morton says, they would play fair in the courtroom.
“I just can’t imagine this coming to naught,” he says. “Something’s going to happen. I’m confident of it.”
Michael Morton’s exoneration last year brought to a crescendo in Texas calls for change in the way that prosecutors are regulated. Morton, prosecutors and defense lawyers discuss whether there is a need for more accountability for state lawyers and how it ought to be accomplished.
At least 86 Texans’ convictions were overturned between 1989 and 2011, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. The Texas Tribune analyzed court rulings, media reports and pardon statements to determine the cases in which courts ruled that prosecutorial error contributed to a wrongful conviction. Use our interactive to learn more about each case. Yellow accents are used to highlight the cases involving prosecutorial error.
Click on a headshot to view information on the individual’s case in the sidebar on the right.
Additional data gathering and reporting contributed by Brandi Grissom, Taylor Cammack, John Wayne Ferguson, Emily Foxhall, Zoë Gioja, Shefali Luthra, Olivia Newman and Hollie O’Connor.
Randall Adams
Gilbert Alejandro
Billy Frederick Allen
Gilbert Amezquita
Jason Barber
Michael Blair
Clarence Brandley
Brandy Briggs
Stephen Brodie
Joyce Ann Brown
A.B. Butler, Jr.
Kevin Byrd
Charles Chatman
Timothy B. Cole
Robert Carroll Coney
Roy Criner
Richard Danziger
Muneer Deeb
Dale Duke
Cornelius Dupree
Hicks Elliff
Jerry Lee Evans
Hilliard Fields
Wiley Fountain
Larry Fuller
Ronnie Mark Gariepy
James Curtis Giles
Donald Wayne Good
Andrew Gossett
Anthony Graves
Michael Anthony Green
Ricardo Aldape Guerra
John Michael Harvey
Eugene Henton
Antrone Johnson
Morris S. Jones
Entre Nax Karage
Martin Kimsey
Carlos Marcos Lavernia
Johnnie Lindsey
Debbie Loveless
Federico Macias
Thomas McGowan
Billy Wayne Miller
John Miller
LaDondrell Montgomery
Brandon Moon
Michael Morton
Fredda Susie Mowbray
Arthur Mumphrey
Lacresha Murray
Christopher Ochoa
Steven Phillips
Johnny Pinchback
David Shawn Pope
Allen Wayne Porter
Ricardo Rachell
Jesus Ramirez
Anthony Robinson
George Rodriguez
Stephen Lynn Russell
Ben Salazar
Christopher Shun Scott
Michael Scott
Alberto Sifuentes
Claude Simmons, Jr.
Billy James Smith
Robert Springsteen
Richard Sturgeon
Josiah Sutton
Ronald Gene Taylor
Victor Larue Thomas
Michael Toney
Wesley Tuley
Keith Turner
James Waller
Patrick Waller
Gregory Wallis
Calvin E. Washington
Mark Webb
Joe Sidney Williams
Thomas Wayne Williams
Ernest Ray Willis
Richard Winfrey, Sr.
James Lee Woodard
Michael Anthony Woten
Click on a photo to view the information about his or her case.
// <![CDATA[ var data = { "entre-nax-karage": { "convicted": "1997", "last": "Karage", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "21", "exonerated": "2005", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Other", "summary": "Entre Nax Karage was convicted of the 1994 murder of his girlfriend and sentenced to life in prison. He served six-and-a-half years before DNA testing proved the perpetrator was another man. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned his conviction in 2005. (Source: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, The Innocence Project)", "slug": "entre-nax-karage", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Entre Nax" }, "allen-wayne-porter": { "convicted": "1991", "last": "Porter", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "18", "exonerated": "2010", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Harris", "race": "Black", "summary": "Allen Porter was convicted in 1991 of aggravated sexual assault — based solely on eyewitness testimony — and sentenced to life in prison. He was exonerated in 2010, after the two other convicted assailants said Porter had not taken part in the crime, naming instead another person whose fingerprints had been found in the apartment where the crime had taken place. (Sources: Court documents, Houston Chronicle)", "slug": "allen-wayne-porter", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Allen Wayne" }, "keith-turner": { "convicted": "1983", "last": "Turner", "proerrortype": "Improper questioning", "sentence": "20 years", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "22", "exonerated": "2005", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "Keith Turner was convicted in in 1983 of aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He was exonerated in 2005, after DNA tests proved his innocence. The Texas Fifth Court of Appeals, in 1985 ruled that the prosecutor had violated Turner's rights by questioning his silence upon his arrest, though the silence was part of his Fifth Amendment rights. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later ruled that although the questioning was improper, Turner's lawyers had not properly objected at the time. (Sources: Court documents, Innocence Project)", "slug": "keith-turner", "doccloudslug": "374479-keith-turner", "first": "Keith" }, "jason-barber": { "convicted": "1997", "last": "Barber", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "35 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "20", "exonerated": "2000", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Upshur", "race": "White", "summary": "In September 1996, Jason Barber was convicted of murder for allegedly shooting Johnny Escalante. A gun was found three years later that proved Barber had in fact not fired the deadly shot. Barber was exonerated in 2001, after serving three years of his 35-year sentence. (Source: The Dallas Morning News)", "slug": "jason-barber", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Jason" }, "muneer-deeb": { "convicted": "1985", "last": "Deeb", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Death", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "23", "exonerated": "1993", "crime": "Murder", "county": "McLennan (COV Johnson)", "race": "Other", "summary": "Muneer Deeb was convicted of capital murder in the July 1982 deaths of Jill Montgomery, Kenneth Franks and Raylene Rice. Deeb was first arrested in Sept. 1982, along with David Wayne Spence. Deeb was released from custody but then was arrested a second time in Nov. 1983 and was sentenced to death in 1985 based on testimony from Spence’s cellmate Darryl Beckham. He said that Deeb had hired Spence to kill a different woman who closely resembled Montgomery. The case was remanded in 1991, when the Texas Court of Criminal appeals ruled Beckham’s testimony inadmissible hearsay. (Source: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals)", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Muneer" }, "james-lee-woodard": { "convicted": "1981", "last": "Woodard", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "26", "exonerated": "2009", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "James Lee Woodard was convicted in 1981 of murder and sentenced to life in prison. He was freed after serving 27 years in 2009, when DNA testing excluded Woodard from the rape that had accompanied the murder. The court ruled that the state here withheld testimony from a witness about two other men who had partied with the victim and had been with her shortly before she died. The court later ruled that, had this information been available to Woodard or to his attorney, Woodard would likely not have been convicted. (Sources: Court documents, Innocence Project)", "slug": "james-lee-woodard", "doccloudslug": "374477-james-lee-woodard", "first": "James Lee" }, "ricardo-rachell": { "convicted": "2003", "last": "Rachell", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "40 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "45", "exonerated": "2009", "crime": "Child Sex Abuse", "county": "Harris", "race": "Hispanic", "summary": "Ricardo Rachell was convicted in 2003 of aggravated sexual assault of a child and sentenced to 40 years in prison. He was exonerated in 2009, after DNA testing showed his sperm did not match the sample taken from the victim. Rachell's conviction was based on identification by the victim and his mother. Though Rachell submitted his DNA, the district attorney's office hadn't performed a test. (Sources: Northwestern Law Center on Wrongful Convictions, court documents, Harris County district attorney documents)", "slug": "ricardo-rachell", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Ricardo" }, "wiley-fountain": { "convicted": "1986", "last": "Fountain", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "40 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "28", "exonerated": "2003", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "In 1986, Wiley Fountain was convicted of aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Fountain matched the description of the man the victim said raped her at knifepoint. In March 2002, Fountain was granted DNA testing, and the results showed that he did not commit the crime. He was released in Sept. 2002 and was pardoned by Gov. Rick Perry. (Source: The Innocence Project)", "slug": "wiley-fountain", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Wiley" }, "robert-carroll-coney": { "convicted": "1966", "last": "Coney", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "33", "exonerated": "2004", "crime": "Robbery", "county": "Angelina", "race": "Black", "summary": "Robert Carroll Coney was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted in 1962 of stealing $2,000 from a Safeway store. Coney, who had pled guilty to the crime, was exonerated in 2004, when a judge found that authorities had forced his confession. In addition to his plea, Coney had also been convicted based on eyewitness identification. (Source: New York Times)", "slug": "robert-carroll-coney", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Robert Carroll" }, "anthony-graves": { "convicted": "1994", "last": "Graves", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence", "sentence": "Death", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "26", "exonerated": "2010", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Burleson", "race": "Black", "summary": "Anthony Graves was convicted in the 1992 murder a family of six in Somerville. He was sentenced to death, along with Robert Earl Carter. Carter admitted shortly before his execution that he had lied about Graves' participation. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the prosecutor failed to disclose to Graves at trial that Carter had admitted then that Graves was not involved in the killings. Graves was freed in Oct. 2010. (Source: U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, National Registry of Exonerations)", "slug": "anthony-graves", "doccloudslug": "374464-anthony-graves", "first": "Anthony" }, "richard-danziger": { "convicted": "1990", "last": "Danziger", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "17", "exonerated": "2002", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Travis", "race": "White", "summary": "Richard Danziger and Chris Ochoa were questioned for the rape and murder of Pizza Hut employee Nancy DePriest. In 1990, Richard Danziger was convicted of aggravated sexual assault. Both men were sentenced to life in prison. Years later, Achim Marino, already in prison with three life convictions, wrote letters to authorities confessing to the crime. In 2002, both men were exonerated by DNA testing. (Source: Innocence Project) ", "slug": "richard-danziger", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Richard" }, "johnny-pinchback": { "convicted": "1984", "last": "Pinchback", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "28", "exonerated": "2011", "crime": "Child Sex Abuse", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "Johnny Pinchback was convicted of two counts of aggravated sexual assault in 1984 and sentenced to 99 years in prison. Both victims identified Pinchback in a photo line-up. He was exonerated in 2011, after serving more than 26 years, when the Innocence Project and Dallas County District Attorney had DNA tests done on pubic hairs from one of the victims. Semen found on the hairs indicated Pinchback was innocent. (Source: Innocence Project, court findings)", "slug": "johnny-pinchback", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Johnny" }, "cornelius-dupree": { "convicted": "1980", "last": "Dupree", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "75 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "21", "exonerated": "2011", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "In April 1980, Cornelius Dupree was convicted of aggravated robbery in connection with a robbery and sexual assault. Both in a photo line-up and in the trial, the victims of the 1979 crime identified Dupree as one of the perpetrators. After serving 30 years in prison, Dupree was exonerated in March 2011 based on DNA evidence that established his innocence. (Source: The Innocence Project)", "slug": "cornelius-dupree", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Cornelius" }, "antrone-johnson": { "convicted": "1996", "last": "Johnson", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "17", "exonerated": "2009", "crime": "Child Sex Abuse", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "In 1996, Antrone Lynell Johnson was convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to life in prison. He was granted a new trial after the court decided that prosecutors withheld evidence that indicated he was innocent. (Source: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, The Dallas Morning News) ", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "394475-antrone-lynell-johnson", "first": "Antrone" }, "john-michael-harvey": { "convicted": "1992", "last": "Harvey", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "40 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "24", "exonerated": "2005", "crime": "Child Sex Abuse", "county": "Tarrant", "race": "White", "summary": "On Oct. 30, 1992, John Michael Harvey was convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child and sentenced to 40 years in prison. In March 2003, the daughter who he allegedly assaulted said that Harvey didn’t molest her and that she was bullied into accusing him. On Dec. 10, 2004, Harvey was released from prison. (Source: National Registry of Exonerations) ", "slug": "john-michael-harvey", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "John Michael" }, "calvin-e-washington": { "convicted": "1987", "last": "Washington", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "30", "exonerated": "2001", "crime": "Murder", "county": "McLennan", "race": "Black", "summary": "Calvin Washington was convicted of capital murder in 1987 and sentenced to life in prison. In 2001, after he had served more than 13 years of his sentence, Washington was exonerated by DNA testing. (Source: Innocence Project, court documents) ", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Calvin E." }, "patrick-waller": { "convicted": "1992", "last": "Waller", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "20", "exonerated": "2008", "crime": "Kidnapping", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "Patrick Waller was convicted in 1992 of aggravated robbery and kidnapping and sentenced to life in prison. He was exonerated in 2008 after serving almost 16 years. Waller was exonerated based on DNA testing. His original conviction was based on faulty eyewitness identification, along with semen and blood tests that did not exclude him from the crime. (Source: Court documents, Innocence Project)", "slug": "patrick-waller", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Patrick" }, "thomas-wayne-williams": { "convicted": "1998", "last": "Williams", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "38", "exonerated": "2000", "crime": "Drug Possession or Sale", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "Joe Sidney Williams was convicted in 1987 of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison. His sentence was reversed in 2001, after a ruling that the conviction was based on testimony that was deemed inadmissible. (Source: Court documents, Northwestern University School of Law Center on Wrongful Convictions)", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Thomas Wayne" }, "johnnie-lindsey": { "convicted": "1983", "last": "Lindsey", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "28", "exonerated": "2009", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "Johnnie Lindsey was charged with aggravated rape and tried in 1983. Although Lindsey had an alibi, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The 1983 conviction was overturned on appeal because Lindsey had been indicted under a statute that was not in effect at the rime of the rape. In 1985, he was re-indicted, retried, and again convicted and sentenced to life. In 2008 Lindsey was exonerated by DNA testing, and in 2009 Gov. Rick Perry pardoned him. (Source: Innocence Project, court rulings) n", "slug": "johnnie-lindsey", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Johnnie" }, "anthony-robinson": { "convicted": "1987", "last": "Robinson", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "27 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "25", "exonerated": "2000", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Harris", "race": "Black", "summary": "Anthony Robinson was convicted in 1987 of sexual assault and sentenced to 27 years. His conviction was overturned in 2000, when DNA testing showed he was not linked to the rape. He had been convicted on faulty witness identification. (Sources: Frontline, court documents)", "slug": "anthony-robinson", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Anthony" }, "kevin-byrd": { "convicted": "1985", "last": "Byrd", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "23", "exonerated": "1997", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Harris", "race": "Black", "summary": "In 1985, Kevin Byrd was convicted of raping a 25-year-old pregnant woman. Though the victim had initially described the rapist as white, she later identified Byrd, who was black. Eyewitness misidentification and improper forensic science were the main reasons for Byrd's wrongful conviction. DNA tests proved Byrd's innocence in July 1997 and then-governor George W. Bush pardoned him in October of the same year. (Source: Austin-American Statesman, The Innocence Project)", "slug": "kevin-byrd", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Kevin" }, "mark-webb": { "convicted": "1987", "last": "Webb", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "30 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "22", "exonerated": "2001", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Tarrant", "race": "White", "summary": "In 1987, Mark Webb was convicted of rape and sentenced to 30 years in prison. After DNA testing, Webb was freed from prison in 2001. He was officially exonerated in 2002. (Source: Court documents, Innocence Project)", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Mark" }, "john-miller": { "convicted": "1989", "last": "Miller", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "42", "exonerated": "1994", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Rains (COV Hopkins)", "race": "White", "summary": "John Miller and his common-law wife Debbie Tucker Loveless were convicted in 1989 of the murder of Loveless' four-year-old daughter. Their convictions were overturned in 1993, when an appellate lawyer showed experts photos of the deceased girl. The experts determined that dog bites, not child abuse, caused her death. A trial court judge ruled that prosecutors erred by not giving copies of the photos, along with other reports that pointed to dog attack as the cause of death, to attorneys representing Loveless and Miller. (Source: Findings of Fact, Hopkins County 8th District Court, Houston Chronicle)", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "374471-debbie-tucker-loveless", "first": "John" }, "alberto-sifuentes": { "convicted": "1998", "last": "Sifuentes", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "22", "exonerated": "2008", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Lamb", "race": "Hispanic", "summary": "Alberto Sifuentes was convicted alongside Jesus Ramirez in 1998 of capital murder, receiving a life sentence in prison. The conviction was overturned in 2008, after the Criminal Court of Appeals ruled Sifuentes and Ramirez's attorneys had not adequately investigated the case or effectively questioned witnesses — many of whom were drunk or gave testimony that did not match videotape evidence. The court ruled that thoroughly investigating the case could have ultimately changed the jury's verdict. (Sources: Northwestern Law Center on Wrongful Convictions, Dallas Morning News)", "slug": "alberto-sifuentes", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Alberto" }, "josiah-sutton": { "convicted": "1999", "last": "Sutton", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "25 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "16", "exonerated": "2004", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Harris", "race": "Black", "summary": "Josiah Sutton was convicted of sexual assault in 1998. The victim, who was abducted and raped by two men, identified Sutton as one of the attackers. The DNA results initially used to convict Sutton, were later found to be unsound. After the DNA was retested, Sutton was excluded as a suspect, and he was released in 2004. (Source: Court documents, Innocence Project)", "slug": "josiah-sutton", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Josiah" }, "lacresha-murray": { "convicted": "1996", "last": "Murray", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "20 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "11", "exonerated": "2001", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Travis", "race": "Black", "summary": "LaCresha Murray was convicted in 1996 of murdering a toddler. Murray, who was 11 at the time, was sentenced to 20 years in prison before the conviction was overturned in 2001. Murray's conviction was based primarily on her confession, which was ruled involuntary — and therefore unusable — because she was "in custody" and misled by officers. (Source: Court documents, The New York Times)", "slug": "lacresha-murray", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Lacresha" }, "eugene-henton": { "convicted": "1984", "last": "Henton", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "4 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "16", "exonerated": "2006", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "Convicted in 1984 for sexual assault, Eugene Ivory Henton served four years before returning to prison in 1995 on unrelated drug and assault charges. Because of his status as a sex offender, he was sentenced to more than 40 years for the 1995 crime. In 1999, he requested a DNA test, which proved that he had been wrongfully convicted of rape. He was exonerated in Feb. 2006. (Source: The Innocence Project, Fort Worth Star-Telegram)", "slug": "eugene-henton", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Eugene" }, "thomas-mcgowan": { "convicted": "1985", "last": "McGowan", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "24", "exonerated": "2008", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "Thomas McGowan was convicted in 1985 of burglary and in 1986 of sexual assault — two counts stemming from the same incident. The convictions, which had resulted in two life sentences, were overturned in 2008 after DNA testing indicated that McGowan's sperm did not match that found in the victim. McGowan had been convicted based on faulty eyewitness testimony. (Source: Court findings, Innocence Project)", "slug": "thomas-mcgowan", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Thomas" }, "wesley-tuley": { "convicted": "1997", "last": "Tuley", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Probation", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "27", "exonerated": "2003", "crime": "Child Sex Abuse", "county": "Dallas", "race": "White", "summary": "Wesley Tuley pleaded guilty to aggravated sexual assault in 1997 and received 10 years probation. After breaking his probation, he was sent to prison. While he was in prison, his accuser withdrew her testimony, which led him to file an appeal. The court overturned his conviction in 2002 on the basis of the new evidence. (Source: Court documents)", "slug": "wesley-tuley", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Wesley" }, "michael-anthony-woten": { "convicted": "1982", "last": "Woten", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "55 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "Unknown", "exonerated": "1990", "crime": "Robbery", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Unknown", "summary": "Michael Woten was convicted in 1982 of aggravated robbery and sentenced to 55 years in prison. He was exonerated in 1990 after another man confessed to the crime and the Dallas Times Herald verified Woten's alibi. Woten had been convicted based on eyewitness testimony. (Sources: Pardon proclamation, New York Times)", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Michael Anthony" }, "steven-phillips": { "convicted": "1982", "last": "Phillips", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence", "sentence": "40 years", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "22", "exonerated": "2008", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "White", "summary": "Steven Phillips was convicted in 1982 and 1983 of burglary, sexual abuse and rape. He spent 25 years in prison before he was exonerated in 2008. Phillips had been identified by one victim as her rapist. Evidence also linked the crimes to another suspect, Sidney Goodyear, but Dallas police dropped a search warrant for him, and the court concluded that prosecutors failed to disclose evidence that they had another suspect in the case. Phillips finally was exonerated based on DNA testing. (Sources: Northwestern Law Center on Wrongful Convictions, Innocence Project, court findings)", "slug": "steven-phillips", "doccloudslug": "374489-steven-phillips", "first": "Steven" }, "gilbert-amezquita": { "convicted": "1998", "last": "Amezquita", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "15 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "21", "exonerated": "2007", "crime": "Assault", "county": "Harris", "race": "Hispanic", "summary": "Gilbert Amezquita was convicted in 1998 of assaulting Kathy Brigham, who identified him as the perpetrator after she awoke from a 10-day coma. In 2005, the court concluded that his counsel had failed to investigate evidence involving Brigham's cell phone, which would have proved Amezquita's innocence. He was freed in November 2006. (Source: Texas Judiciary Online, Houston Chronicle)", "slug": "gilbert-amezquita", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Gilbert" }, "roy-criner": { "convicted": "1990", "last": "Criner", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "21", "exonerated": "2000", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Montgomery", "race": "White", "summary": "In 1990, Roy Criner was convicted of raping and murdering Deanna Ogg. Criner was sentenced to 99 years. In Aug. 2000, Criner was exonerated by DNA testing. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously to release Criner after he had served 10 years. (Source: Innocence Project) ", "slug": "roy-criner", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Roy" }, "carlos-marcos-lavernia": { "convicted": "1985", "last": "Lavernia", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "29", "exonerated": "2000", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Travis", "race": "Hispanic", "summary": "In August 1984, Carlos Lavernia was arrested for the rape of a 24-year-old Austin woman. Authorities linked Laverina to seven other assaults and charged him as a serial rapist. In 1985, Lavernia was convicted and sentenced to 99 years in prison. In 2000, 15 years into his sentence, DNA testing proved Lavernia’s innocence. (Source: Innocence Project, Austin American-Statesman)", "slug": "carlos-marcos-lavernia", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Carlos Marcos" }, "george-rodriguez": { "convicted": "1987", "last": "Rodriguez", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "60 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "25", "exonerated": "2005", "crime": "Child Sex Abuse", "county": "Harris", "race": "Hispanic", "summary": "George Rodriguez was convicted in 1987 of aggravated sexual assault of a child and aggravated kidnapping and sentenced to 60 years in prison. He was exonerated in 2005, after DNA analysis showed that his semen did not match that found on the victim. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the prosecution unintentionally relied on faulty evidence in convicting Rodriguez. (Sources: Court documents, Innocence Project)", "slug": "george-rodriguez", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "George" }, "billy-wayne-miller": { "convicted": "1984", "last": "Miller", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "31", "exonerated": "2006", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "Billy Wayne Miller was sentenced to life in prison in 1984 for aggravated sexual assault with a deadly weapon. He was exonerated in 2006 after DNA testing demonstrated that his sperm did not match that found in the victim. Miller had been convicted based on a mistaken eyewitness identification. (Source: Court findings, Innocence Project)", "slug": "billy-wayne-miller", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Billy Wayne" }, "michael-morton": { "convicted": "1987", "last": "Morton", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "32", "exonerated": "2011", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Williamson", "race": "White", "summary": "Michael Morton was convicted in 1987 of the murder of his wife and was sentenced to life in prison. He was exonerated in 2011, after DNA tests proved his innocence. Morton's lawyers discovered that during his original trial, prosecutors suppressed exculpatory evidence that pointed to another killer, including a transcript that included an account of the murder by Morton's son, who said Morton was not there. In Sept. 2012, a court of inquiry will determine whether the prosecutor in the case should face criminal charges for his role in the wrongful conviction. (Sources: Court documents, The Texas Tribune, CBS)", "slug": "michael-morton", "doccloudslug": "394474-michael-morton", "first": "Michael" }, "michael-anthony-green": { "convicted": "1983", "last": "Green", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "75 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "18", "exonerated": "2010", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Harris", "race": "Black", "summary": "Michael Anthony Green was convicted in 1983 of aggravated rape and sentenced to 75 years in prison. He was exonerated in 2010 when DNA testing proved he had not committed the crime. Green was convicted based on inaccurate witness identification. (Sources: Innocence Project, Huffington Post)", "slug": "michael-anthony-green", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Michael Anthony" }, "billy-james-smith": { "convicted": "1987", "last": "Smith", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "34", "exonerated": "2006", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "Billy James Smith was sentenced to life in prison for a 1987 sexual assault. Smith lived in the apartment complex where the assault occurred and was identified by the victim. After numerous appeals, he was granted DNA testing, which excluded him as the perpetrator and was released in July 2006. (Source: Court documents, Innocence Project)", "slug": "billy-james-smith", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Billy James" }, "jerry-lee-evans": { "convicted": "1987", "last": "Evans", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "24", "exonerated": "2009", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "Jerry Lee Evans was convicted of aggravated sexual assault in Feb. 1987 and sentenced to life in prison. Evans requested DNA testing in 2007, and the results indicated that he was not the perpetrator. Evans was released in May 2009. (Source: Findings of Fact of Dallas County Criminal Court No. 5)", "slug": "jerry-lee-evans", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Jerry Lee" }, "christopher-ochoa": { "convicted": "1989", "last": "Ochoa", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "22", "exonerated": "2002", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Travis", "race": "Hispanic", "summary": "Christopher Ochoa was convicted in 1989 of murdering Nancy DePriest at a Pizza Hut in Austin. Ochoa was sentenced to life in prison and served 11.5 years before he was exonerated in 2002. His conviction was based on a false confession, in which he had agreed to plead guilty and testify against another man — Richard Danziger — to avoid the death penalty. Years later, another man confessed to the crime, and the confession, along with DNA tests cleared both Ochoa and Danziger of the crime. (Sources: Innocence Project, Dallas Morning News)", "slug": "christopher-ochoa", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Christopher" }, "richard-winfrey-sr": { "convicted": "2007", "last": "Winfrey, Sr.", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "75 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "49", "exonerated": "2010", "crime": "Murder", "county": "San Jacinto", "race": "White", "summary": "Richard Winfrey Sr., was convicted of murder in 2007 and sentenced to 75 years in prison. He was acquitted in 2010 after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the dog-scent evidence used to convict Winfrey was not reliable. The dog-scent was the principal evidence in Winfrey's original conviction. (Sources: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, The Texas Tribune, New York Times)", "slug": "richard-winfrey-sr", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Richard" }, "timothy-b-cole": { "convicted": "1986", "last": "Cole", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "25 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "24", "exonerated": "2009", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Lubbock", "race": "Black", "summary": "In 1986, Timothy Cole was tried and convicted for the rape of Texas Tech University student Michele Mallin. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. In 1995, a Texas prisoner named Jerry Wayne Johnson began writing to police and prosecutors in Lubbock County saying that he had committed the rape for which Cole had been convicted. Cole died in 1999 without learning that Johnson was attempting to confess to the crime. In 2008, Cole was cleared by DNA tests, and in February 2009, Johnson again confessed to the crime before a judge, Cole’s family and Mallin. A Texas judge officially exonerated Cole at a hearing on April 7, 2009. Texas Gov. Rick Perry pardoned Cole posthumously on March 1, 2010. (Source: Innocence Project) ", "slug": "timothy-b-cole", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Timothy B." }, "ladondrell-montgomery": { "convicted": "2010", "last": "Montgomery", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "34", "exonerated": "2011", "crime": "Robbery", "county": "Harris", "race": "Black", "summary": "LaDondrell Montgomery was convicted in 2010 of aggravated robbery and sentenced to life in prison. He was exonerated in 2011, when his attorney discovered Montgomery had actually been in jail at the time of the crime. Montgomery's lawyer and the district attorney both requested a new trial, where the conviction was overturned. (Source: Houston Chronicle, court documents)", "slug": "ladondrell-montgomery", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "LaDondrell" }, "donald-wayne-good": { "convicted": "1984", "last": "Good", "proerrortype": "Improper argument", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "21", "exonerated": "2004", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "White", "summary": "Donald Wayne Good served nine years in prison after being convicted of a 1983 rape and burglary. He was accused of raping a woman before hog tying her and her 8-year-old daughter, and stealing money from the home. Good was arrested on unrelated charges and placed in a photo line-up when an officer thought he resembled a sketch of the perpetrator. Both the mother and daughter identified Good as the assailant. Good's first trial in 1983 ended in a hung jury. He was convicted in a second trial in 1984, but the verdict was overturned because the prosecutor made improper arguments. He was tried a third time and convicted in 1987. Good was paroled in 1993, but was supervised as a sex offender. He was arrested for a minor property crime in 2002, to which he pled guilty, and was sentenced to five years. In 2003, Good requested DNA testing, which proved him innocent. (Source: The Innocence Project, The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals)", "slug": "donald-wayne-good", "doccloudslug": "374472-donald-wayne-good", "first": "Donald Wayne" }, "jesus-ramirez": { "convicted": "1998", "last": "Ramirez", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "48", "exonerated": "2008", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Lamb", "race": "Hispanic", "summary": "Jesus Ramirez was convicted with Alberto Sifuentes in 1998 of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison. His conviction was overturned in 2008, after the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals ruled attorneys for Ramirez and Sifuentes had not adequately investigated the case or effectively questioned witnesses — many of whom were drunk or gave testimony that did not match videotape evidence. The court ruled that thoroughly investigating the case could have ultimately changed the jury's verdict. (Sources: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Northwestern Law Center on Wrongful Convictions, Dallas Morning News)", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Jesus" }, "billy-frederick-allen": { "convicted": "1983", "last": "Allen", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "99 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "37", "exonerated": "2011", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Dallas", "race": "White", "summary": "On Sept.14, 1983, Billy Frederick Allen was charged with the murders of Dannelle Lashbrook and James Perry Sewell. In 2009, Allen was granted relief after a post-conviction habeas corpus proceeding, which held that the trial council had provided Allen with ineffective assistance. (Source: Texas Judiciary Online)", "slug": "billy-frederick-allen", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Billy Frederick" }, "hicks-elliff": { "convicted": "1982", "last": "Elliff", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence", "sentence": "55 years", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "23", "exonerated": "2007", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Nueces", "race": "White", "summary": "In May 1982, Hicks Elliff and two other men were convicted for murdering Michael Knight the previous March. In 2007, 25 years after his conviction, the charges against Elliff were dropped and he was freed. The judge concluded that the state withheld exculpatory evidence, undermining confidence in the verdict. (Source: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals)", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "374475-hicks-edward-elliff", "first": "Hicks" }, "joe-sidney-williams": { "convicted": "1987", "last": "Williams", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "19", "exonerated": "2001", "crime": "Murder", "county": "McLennan", "race": "Black", "summary": "Thomas Wayne Williams was convicted in 1999 on drug charges and sentenced to life in prison. His sentence was commuted in 2000, after the police officers whose testimony had led to his arrest were discovered to have falsified reports in multiple drug cases. (Sources: Dallas Morning News)", "slug": "joe-sidney-williams", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Joe Sidney" }, "james-waller": { "convicted": "1983", "last": "Waller", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "30 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "25", "exonerated": "2007", "crime": "Child Sex Abuse", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "James Waller was convicted in 1983 of aggravated sexual abuse, a conviction resulting in a 30-year prison sentence. He was exonerated in 2007, after new DNA testing indicated he could not have been the perpetrator. Originally, Waller's conviction was based on testimony from the child who had been raped—he identified Waller principally based on his voice and face, though he had never seen his rapist's actual face. (Source: Innocence Project)", "slug": "james-waller", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "James" }, "ronnie-mark-gariepy": { "convicted": "1992", "last": "Gariepy", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "12 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "32", "exonerated": "2000", "crime": "Child Sex Abuse", "county": "Hutchinson", "race": "Unknown", "summary": "Ronnie Mark Gariepy pleaded guilty in 1992 to sexually assaulting his 13-year-old stepdaughter. Gariepy pleaded guilty after authorities suggested that he might have committed the crime during an alcoholic blackout. After Gariepy was sentenced to 12 years in prison, his stepdaughter recanted and supported his innocence claim. On Aug. 15, 2000 George W. Bush officially pardoned Gariepy. (Source: Northwestern Law Bluhm Legal Clinic, pardon proclamation) ", "slug": "ronnie-mark-gariepy", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Ronnie Mark" }, "dale-duke": { "convicted": "1992", "last": "Duke", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence", "sentence": "20 years", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "42", "exonerated": "2011", "crime": "Child Sex Abuse", "county": "Dallas", "race": "White", "summary": "Dale Duke was indicted in 1992 and sentenced to 20 years on the charge of aggravated sexual assault of a child. His stepdaughter claimed he molested her. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned his conviction and he was released in Nov. 2011. Duke’s stepdaughter recanted her testimony in 1998. But he was exonerated only after evidence emerged that indicated prosecutors suppressed evidence that the stepdaughter's grandmother had told investigators in 1992 that she doubted the assault testimony. (Source: Findings of Fact of the 291st Dallas County District Court, Pegasus News) ", "slug": "dale-duke", "doccloudslug": "374470-dale-duke", "first": "Dale" }, "richard-sturgeon": { "convicted": "1999", "last": "Sturgeon", "proerrortype": "Threats to witness", "sentence": "50 years", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "32", "exonerated": "2009", "crime": "Robbery", "county": "Harris", "race": "Black", "summary": "Richard Sturgeon was convicted in 1999 and sentenced to 50 years in prison for aggravated assault. Sturgeon was arrested on Dec. 25, 2008 hours after a man was robbed and beaten. He was arrested because the car he was in contained the beaten man's wallet. However, two other men were also in the car, neither of him was convicted. Sturgeon was convicted on the basis of a witness identification. While Sturgeon was appealing his conviction, one of the men who was in the car confessed to the crime. But prosecutors threatened him with criminal charges if he did so. A federal judge, presented with the identification and blackmailing evidence, threw out the conviction in May 2009 and Sturgeon was released in August 2009. (Source: Court documents)", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "374488-richard-sturgeon", "first": "Richard" }, "ben-salazar": { "convicted": "1992", "last": "Salazar", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "30 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "23", "exonerated": "1997", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Travis", "race": "Hispanic", "summary": "Ben Salazar was convicted in 1992 of aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to 30 years in prison. He was exonerated in 1997 when new DNA testing indicated that Salazar's sperm did not match that found on the victim. Salazar had been convicted based primarily on faulty witness identification and incomplete forensic testing. (Sources: Court findings, Innocence Project, Austin American-Statesman)", "slug": "ben-salazar", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Ben" }, "ab-butler-jr": { "convicted": "1983", "last": "Butler, Jr.", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "27", "exonerated": "2000", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Smith", "race": "Black", "summary": "In 1983, A.B. Butler was sentenced to 99 years in prison on charges of kidnapping and rape.The victim identified Butler in mug shots and a line-up. Butler requested that the evidence collected at the crime be tested. In 1999, DNA test results showed Butler's innocence. Then-governor George W. Bush pardoned Butler in 2000. (Source: The Innocence Project)", "slug": "ab-butler-jr", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "A.B." }, "michael-toney": { "convicted": "1999", "last": "Toney", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence", "sentence": "Death", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "19", "exonerated": "2009", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Tarrant", "race": "White", "summary": "Michael Toney was convicted of the Nov. 28, 1985 bombing that killed three people in a trailer park near Forth Worth. Toney was arrested in 1997 when a cellmate accused him of confessing to the crime in conversation. Other witnesses, particularly Toney's ex-wife and his former best friend, also lied under oath that he was responsible. No physical evidence connected him to the bombing. The conviction was overturned on Dec. 17, 2008 because the court ruled that prosecutors had suppressed evidence relating to the credibility of its only two witnesses. Toney's defense team uncovered 14 documents that the county prosecuters withheld from the defense, including records that investigators may have crafted witnesses' accounts. He was released on Sept. 2, 2009. He was killed in a car accident on Oct. 3, 2009. (Source: Court documents)", "slug": "michael-toney", "doccloudslug": "374483-michael-toney", "first": "Michael" }, "victor-larue-thomas": { "convicted": "1986", "last": "Thomas", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "26", "exonerated": "2002", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Ellis", "race": "Black", "summary": "Victor Thomas was convicted in 1986 of the robbery, kidnapping and rape of a convenience store employee based on eyewitness accounts. He received a life sentence and served 15 years of the term. DNA testing on the rape kit led to his exoneration in 2002. (Source: Innocence Project)", "slug": "victor-larue-thomas", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Victor Larue" }, "stephen-lynn-russell": { "convicted": "1980", "last": "Russell", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "50 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "26", "exonerated": "1990", "crime": "Robbery", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Unknown", "summary": "Stephen Lynn Russell was convicted in 1980 of aggravated robbery and sentenced to 50 years in prison. He was exonerated in 1990 after Robert Wilkey confessed to the crime and the witness who identified Russell said police had pressured him to name Russell rather than Wilkey. (Sources: Court documents, The Dallas Morning News)", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Stephen Lynn" }, "robert-springsteen": { "convicted": "2001", "last": "Springsteen", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Death", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "17", "exonerated": "2009", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Travis", "race": "White", "summary": "Robert Springsteen was convicted in 2001 of capital murder and sentenced to death for his alleged role in Austin's long unsolved Yogurt Shop Murders of 1991. Springsteen's conviction was overturned in 2009, after the court determined that he and his co-defendant, Michael Scott, had not been given the chance to sufficiently cross-examine each other. The state decided not to move for retrial after new DNA evidence from the crime did not match either Springsteen or Scott. (Source: Court documents, Death Penalty Information Center)", "slug": "robert-springsteen", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Robert" }, "martin-kimsey": { "convicted": "1985", "last": "Kimsey", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "45", "exonerated": "1990", "crime": "Robbery", "county": "Dallas", "race": "White", "summary": "Martin Kimsey was convicted in the 1985 robbing of a Wells Fargo armored-car driver and sentenced to life in prison. Two years later, Kimsey read a newspaper account of similar robberies, and wrote a letter to one of the men convicted of them, asking him to confess to the robbery he had been accused of. The man, James Clayton Garrett, provided details only the robber would know. After he and Kimsey passed a lie detector test, Kimsey was recommended for pardon. He was freed in 1990. (Source: Writ application, The Dallas Morning News)", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Martin" }, "joyce-ann-brown": { "convicted": "1980", "last": "Brown", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence, false testimony", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "33", "exonerated": "1990", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "Joyce Ann Brown was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of a 1980 murder. Though police and prosecutors realized the murder suspect was a different Joyce Ann Brown, they prosecuted her anyway. Her conviction was overturned, and all charges were dismissed in 1990, after it was revealed police and prosecutors had failed to disclose material evidence favorable to Brown and used false testimony. (Sources: Northwestern Law Center on Wrongful Convictions, court filings)", "slug": "joyce-ann-brown", "doccloudslug": "374478-joyce-ann-brown", "first": "Joyce Ann" }, "andrew-gossett": { "convicted": "2000", "last": "Gossett", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "50 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "37", "exonerated": "2007", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "White", "summary": "In 2000, Andrew Gossett was convicted of aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to 50 years in prison. In 2001, Gossett began seeking DNA testing, which ultimately proved his innocence, and in 2007 he was officially exonerated. (Source: Innocence Project) ", "slug": "andrew-gossett", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Andrew" }, "christopher-shun-scott": { "convicted": "1997", "last": "Scott", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "27", "exonerated": "2009", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "Christopher Scott was convicted with Claude Simmons in 1997 of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison. Both were exonerated in 2009, after another man confessed to the murder. The conviction had been based on faulty witness identification. (Sources: Court documents, University of Texas School of Law, Dallas Morning News)", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Christopher Shun" }, "brandon-moon": { "convicted": "1988", "last": "Moon", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "75 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "26", "exonerated": "2005", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "El Paso", "race": "White", "summary": "Brandon Moon was convicted of rape in 1987 and sentenced to 75 years in prison. Memos circulated in 1996 in the Texas Department of Public Safety suggested the tests and testimony used to convict Moon were unreliable, and DNA testing in 2004 exonerated Moon. Moon later sued the City of El Paso, alleging that the district attorney's office had neglected to provide evidence that could have cleared Moon. The claims were dismissed, though, because the judge did not find the office had deliberately violated Moon's rights, and because state employees were granted immunity for actions committed as proxies of the state. (Source: El Paso Times and court documents)", "slug": "brandon-moon", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Brandon" }, "james-curtis-giles": { "convicted": "1983", "last": "Giles", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence", "sentence": "30 years", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "26", "exonerated": "2007", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "James Curtis Giles was convicted of aggravated rape in 1982. He was accused of breaking into a Dallas couple's house with two other men and raping a pregnant woman. The woman picked Giles out of a line-up. Giles was included in the line-up based on a tip to Crime Stoppers that alleged a man named James Giles was involved in the crime. However, after 10 years in prison and 14 as a registered sex offender on parole, it became clear the perpetrator was a different man named James Giles, who lived close to the victim. With the help of DNA testing, James Curtis Giles was exonerated in 2007. The court also found that prosecutors withheld statements that indicated that Giles looked different from the perpetrators. (Source: Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law and Order of Dallas County Criminal Court No. 3, Innocence Project)", "slug": "james-curtis-giles", "doccloudslug": "374476-james-curtis-giles", "first": "James Curtis" }, "hilliard-fields": { "convicted": "1997", "last": "Fields", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "05 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "25", "exonerated": "2011", "crime": "Child Sex Abuse", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "Hilliard Fields was convicted in 1997 of sexually assaulting a minor. Fields was already facing prison for drug charges and pled guilty to both crimes for a five-year sentence. He was exonerated in 2011, after the girl he allegedly assaulted said nothing had ever happened between them. (Sources: Dallas South News, Dallas Observer) ", "slug": "hilliard-fields", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Hilliard" }, "gregory-wallis": { "convicted": "1989", "last": "Wallis", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "50 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "27", "exonerated": "2007", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "White", "summary": "In 1989, Gregory Wallis was convicted of burglary of a habitation with the intent to commit sexual assault. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison. After serving 17 years of his sentence, Wallis was proven innocent by multiple rounds of DNA testing and was officially exonerated in 2007. (Source: Court documents, Innocence Project)", "slug": "gregory-wallis", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Gregory" }, "federico-macias": { "convicted": "1984", "last": "Macias", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Death", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "31", "exonerated": "1993", "crime": "Murder", "county": "El Paso", "race": "Hispanic", "summary": "Federico Macias was convicted in 1984 of murdering a couple in El Paso. His conviction and death sentence were both overturned in 1991, after a legal team successfully argued that Macias had not been competently defended by his counsel. They had not called several witnesses or presented evidence that would have cleared him. A federal court reversed the conviction, and the state dropped the case because of lack of evidence. (Source: Center on Wrongful Convictions, U.S. District Court ruling)", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Federico" }, "brandy-briggs": { "convicted": "2000", "last": "Briggs", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "17 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "19", "exonerated": "2006", "crime": "Child Abuse", "county": "Harris", "race": "White", "summary": "Brandy Del Briggs was sentenced to 17 years in prison in 1999 for causing the death of her two-month-old son. After serving five years of her sentence, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals exonerated Briggs, citing inadequate legal representation. Medical examiners declared the manner of the baby's death "undetermined." (Source: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, The Houston Chronicle)", "slug": "brandy-briggs", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Brandy" }, "claude-simmons-jr": { "convicted": "1997", "last": "Simmons, Jr.", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "42", "exonerated": "2009", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "Claude Simmons was convicted alongside Christopher Scott in 1997 of capital murder, resulting in a life sentence. Both were exonerated in 2009, after another man confessed to the murder. Originally, the conviction had been based on misidentification by witnesses. (Sources: Court documents, UT Austin School of Law, Dallas Morning News)", "slug": "claude-simmons-jr", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Claude" }, "stephen-brodie": { "convicted": "1993", "last": "Brodie", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "5 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "19", "exonerated": "2010", "crime": "Child Sex Abuse", "county": "Dallas", "race": "White", "summary": "Stephen Brodie was convicted in 1993 of sexually assaulting a 5-year-old girl. Brodie, deaf since birth, falsely confessed when questioned by the police for hours without an interpreter. In 2010, after Brodie spent 10 years in prison, a state district judge ruled that he had been wrongly convicted based on his false confession. (Source: National Registry of Exonerations, The Daily Mail Online, CBS News, Dallas Morning News)", "slug": "stephen-brodie", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Stephen" }, "randall-adams": { "convicted": "1977", "last": "Adams", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence, false testimony", "sentence": "Death", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "28", "exonerated": "1989", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Dallas", "race": "White", "summary": "Randall Adams was convicted in 1977 of murdering a police officer. His conviction — and death sentence — was overturned in 1989 after a criminal appeals court ruled that Adams’ due process rights had been denied due to prosecutorial misconduct. The prosecution had suppressed evidence of inconsistent statements made by a key eyewitness. That witness failed to identify Adams in a line-up, and the police officer told her which person she should have identified. The prosecution also allowed the eyewitness to commit perjury in testimony by claiming she had identified Adams in the line-up. (Source: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals)", "slug": "randall-adams", "doccloudslug": "374484-randall-dale-adams", "first": "Randall" }, "fredda-susie-mowbray": { "convicted": "1988", "last": "Mowbray", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "39", "exonerated": "1998", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Cameron", "race": "White", "summary": "Fredda Sue Mowbray was convicted in 1988 of the murder of her husband. Mowbray was released in 1998 when a judge ruled that the prosecution had knowingly used misleading testimony in the form of expert testimony about blood splattering. The judge also ruled prosecutors had suppressed a report that would have supported Mowbray's claim that her husband commit suicide. (Source: Court documents, San Antonio Express-News)", "slug": "fredda-susie-mowbray", "doccloudslug": "374474-fredda-susie-mowbray", "first": "Fredda Susie" }, "ricardo-aldape-guerra": { "convicted": "1982", "last": "Guerra", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence", "sentence": "Death", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "20", "exonerated": "1997", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Harris", "race": "Hispanic", "summary": "In 1982, Ricardo Adalpe Guerra was arrested for the murder of Houston police officer James Harris. Despite evidence pointing to another man as the shooter, Guerra was charged with the murder. In Oct. 1982, he was convicted and sentenced to death. In 1996, the U.S. Fifth Court of Appeals found that during Guerra's trial, the prosecution violated his due process rights, by, among other things, threatening and intimidating witnesses, using suggestive identification procedures to get witnesses to identify Guerra and failing to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense. A new trial was ordered, but the state to dropped the charges in 1997, lacking evidence. Guerra was released on April 16, 1997 and was killed in a car accident four months later. (Source: U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, The New York Times)", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "374487-ricardo-aldape-guerra", "first": "Ricardo Aldape" }, "morris-s-jones": { "convicted": "1998", "last": "Jones", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "15 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "16", "exonerated": "2001", "crime": "Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Unknown", "summary": "Morris Jones, a college student, was convicted in 1998 of shooting another college student. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Both Jones' sentence and conviction were overturned in 2001 when new testimony indicated that someone other than Jones had committed the crime. The testimony also convinced the Dallas County District Attorney not to retry the case. (Source: Dallas Morning News, court documents)", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Morris S." }, "michael-scott": { "convicted": "2002", "last": "Scott", "proerrortype": "Improper argument", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "17", "exonerated": "2009", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Travis", "race": "White", "summary": "Michael Scott was convicted in 2002 of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison for his alleged role in Austin's long unsolved Yogurt Shop Murders of 1991. His conviction was overturned in 2009, after a court ruling that a statement by his co-defendant, Robert Springsteen, had been improperly used and that it had contributed significantly to Scott's conviction. Scott was originally convicted based on Springsteen's statement and his own confession (Source: Court documents). ", "slug": "michael-scott", "doccloudslug": "374482-michael-scott", "first": "Michael" }, "debbie-loveless": { "convicted": "1989", "last": "Loveless", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "31", "exonerated": "1994", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Rains (COV Hopkins)", "race": "White", "summary": "Debbie Loveless and her common-law husband John Miller were convicted in 1989 of the murder of Loveless' four-year-old daughter. Their convictions were overturned in 1993, when an appellate lawyer showed experts photos of the deceased girl. The experts determined that dog bites, not child abuse, caused her death. A trial court judge ruled that prosecutors erred by not giving copies of the photos, along with other reports that pointed to dog attack as the cause of death, to attorneys representing Loveless and Miller. (Source: Findings of Fact, Hopkins County 8th District Court, Houston Chronicle)", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "374471-debbie-tucker-loveless", "first": "Debbie" }, "david-shawn-pope": { "convicted": "1986", "last": "Pope", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "45 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "23", "exonerated": "2001", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "White", "summary": "David Pope was convicted of aggravated sexual assault in 1985 and sentenced to 45 years in prison. He was exonerated in 2001, after DNA tests showed that the rape kit actually identified a convicted rapist, not Pope. Pope had been convicted after being identified in a live line-up — though he had not been identified in a similar photo line-up — and after "voice print analysis," a voice-matching procedure labeled as unreliable by an expert for the defense. (Source: Innocence Project)", "slug": "david-shawn-pope", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "David Shawn" }, "gilbert-alejandro": { "convicted": "1990", "last": "Alejandro", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "12 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "35", "exonerated": "1994", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Uvalde", "race": "Hispanic", "summary": "In October 1990, a Uvalde County jury sentenced Gilbert Alejandro to 12 years in prison for aggravated sexual assault. After serving four years, Alejandro was released when it was discovered that Fred Zain, the state's forensic expert in the case, had falsified the DNA test results. (Source: DNA Initiative, Northwestern Law Bluhm Legal Clinic)", "slug": "man001", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Gilbert" }, "michael-blair": { "convicted": "1994", "last": "Blair", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Death", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "23", "exonerated": "2008", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Collin", "race": "Other", "summary": "In Septemer 1994, a jury found Michael Blair guilty of capital murder and sentenced him to death. After Blair was sent to death row, Blair and his legal team sought DNA testing on the forensic evidence used in the conviction. A judge exonerated Blair in August 2008, based on eyewitness misidentification and improper forensic science. (Source: Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas, The Innocence Project) ", "slug": "michael-blair", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Michael" }, "larry-fuller": { "convicted": "1981", "last": "Fuller", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "50 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "31", "exonerated": "2006", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Black", "summary": "Larry Fuller was convicted of aggravated rape in August of 1981 and sentenced to 50 years in prison. In Fuller’s case, eyewitness misidentification was the primary reason for the wrongful conviction. 25 years after his conviction for rape, Fuller was proven innocent by DNA testing. In 1999, Fuller was released on parole after 18 years in prison, however, due to a violation of his release conditions, he was sent back to prison to serve the remainder of his sentence. (Source: Innocence Project)", "slug": "larry-fuller", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Larry" }, "clarence-brandley": { "convicted": "1981", "last": "Brandley", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence", "sentence": "Death", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "29", "exonerated": "1990", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Montgomery", "race": "Black", "summary": "Clarence Brandley was convicted in 1981 of the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl and was sentenced to death. His conviction was overturned in 1989 after a criminal appeals court ruled that the Brandley’s due process rights had been denied. The court said the state did not obtain hair and blood samples from the victim that later testing showed were not Brandley’s. The state also failed to investigate leads from two witnesses who said other men committed the crime. The court ruled the outcome might have been different had prosecutors informed Brandley's lawyers of the potentially exculpatory information. (Source: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals)", "slug": "clarence-brandley", "doccloudslug": "374468-clarence-brandley", "first": "Clarence" }, "ronald-gene-taylor": { "convicted": "1995", "last": "Taylor", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "60 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "32", "exonerated": "2008", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Harris", "race": "Black", "summary": "Ronald Gene Taylor was convicted in May 1995 of aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to 60 years based on witness identification. In 2007, items from the crime scene were retested for possible DNA evidence, which was found and ultimately proved his innocence. Taylor was exonerated in January 2008. (Source: Court documents, Innocence Project)", "slug": "ronald-gene-taylor", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Ronald Gene" }, "ernest-ray-willis": { "convicted": "1987", "last": "Willis", "proerrortype": "Suppressed evidence, improper forced medication of defendant", "sentence": "Death", "proerror": "TRUE", "age": "39", "exonerated": "2004", "crime": "Murder", "county": "Pecos", "race": "White", "summary": "Ernest Ray Willis was convicted in 1987 of murder and sentenced to death. His conviction was overturned in 2004. The court ruled that the state had given Willis antipsychotic medication without need and that the state suppressed evidence that would have influenced Willis' sentencing. (Sources: U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas)", "slug": "ernest-ray-willis", "doccloudslug": "374473-ernest-ray-willis", "first": "Ernest Ray" }, "charles-chatman": { "convicted": "1981", "last": "Chatman", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "Life", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "20", "exonerated": "2008", "crime": "Sexual Assault", "county": "Dallas", "race": "Unknown", "summary": "In Aug. 1981, Charles Chatman was convicted of raping a 52-year-old woman, who identified him as the perpetrator in a photo line-up. In 2007, results from a DNA test proved Chatman's innocence, and he was released in Jan. 2008. (Source: The Innocence Project)", "slug": "charles-chatman", "doccloudslug": "", "first": "Charles" }, "arthur-mumphrey": { "convicted": "1986", "last": "Mumphrey", "proerrortype": "", "sentence": "35 years", "proerror": "FALSE", "age": "21", "exonerated": "2006", "crime": "Child Sex Abuse", "county": "Montgomery", "race": "Black", "summary": "Arthur Mumphrey was convicted in 1986 for aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to 35 years in prison. He was then exonerated in 2006 after DNA testing showed his semen did not match that found in the rape kit or in the victim's underwear. Mumphrey was named by the other rapist and also named by his brother, who had recanted his own confession, claiming it had been made in an attempt to save his brother. He had recanted his confession after police told him he was lying and could be charged with perjury. The victim also did not identify Mumphrey as a rapist. 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