I think about Anthony Graves and the other men who have been to Death Row
only to find that they were really innocent. NOT just "Not Guilty"...but really truly innocent of the crimes that they were charged of.
What I found so compelling about this case was...a woman whose main mission was to send him to BACK to prison when there was a technicality that took him off of Death Row, increasingly saw that there was a grave injustice done.
On edit:
I ache for the injustices that are committed upon the black men in our society. It seems that no matter how innocent they are...their lives can be ended...like Trayvon or interrupted, like Mr. Graves.
http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/innocence-found
>>>snip
Eighteen years earlier, Graves had been arrested and charged with the most notorious crime in Burleson County history: the brutal slayings on August 18, 1992, of a well-liked Somerville woman named Bobbie Davis, her daughter, and her four grandchildren, each of whom had been stabbed multiple times before their home was set ablaze. The crime’s prime suspect, Robert Carter—a man whom Graves had known only in passing—had fingered Graves as the killer. Although at least three people could place Graves at his mother’s apartment at the time of the crime and no physical evidence linked him to the scene, he was charged with capital murder. With the help of Carter’s testimony, he was convicted in 1994 and sentenced to death. Graves would likely have been executed if not for a pivotal admission by the case’s lead prosecutor, district attorney Charles Sebesta, who let slip that Carter had, in fact, confessed to having committed the murders by himself. (Carter was executed in 2000.) That disclosure led a federal court to overturn Graves’s conviction in 2006, after finding that Carter’s statements had been withheld from the defense. Yet the ruling did not strike down the original charges of capital murder, so Graves was moved from death row to the Burleson County jail, in the Central Texas town of Caldwell, to await retrial; he was housed in solitary confinement because of concerns about his safety. At his new trial, slated to begin on February 14, 2011, prosecutors again planned to seek the death penalty.
>>>>>>>snip
After recreation time, Graves sat down to write a letter, in which he shared his certainty that special prosecutor Kelly Siegler would persuade a jury to find him guilty. The former Harris County assistant district attorney had sent nineteen men to death row and was known for securing convictions in old, difficult cases that were often based on circumstantial evidence. “She has a win-at-all-costs reputation,” Graves noted in his careful handwriting. “She’ll throw mud against the wall and see what sticks.”
>>>>>>>snip
“Common sense tells you that a person doesn’t stab babies unless he’s really mad about something, and Graves didn’t know the Davises,” she said. “It didn’t make sense.” She was particularly struck by the absence of physical evidence. “Why wasn’t Graves burned too?” she said, referring to Carter’s extensive injuries. “If he stabbed six people, why didn’t he have any cuts or marks? Why was there no blood on his clothes or in his car?” Siegler told me she had still been operating under the assumption that Graves was guilty, but she knew that she would need new information—such as a piece of evidence that could undergo DNA testing—to make her case.
>>>>>>>>>snip
On September 27 Siegler sat down with Graves’s attorneys for their extraordinary face-to-face meeting. During the wide-ranging discussion, which spanned two hours, Siegler focused her attention on Cásarez, asking her detailed questions about her research: What was the name of the polygraph examiner who had administered a test to Carter on the eve of his testimony at Graves’s trial? Exactly when did the Jack in the Box clerk see Graves on the night of the crime? Had she ever spoken with Cookie’s cell mate? Initially, Siegler told me, she had discounted Cásarez and her undergraduate journalism students at the University of St. Thomas, in Houston. “I thought they were exaggerating the facts because they were rabid anti–death penalty people who had an agenda,” she said. “But we wouldn’t have gotten to this point if not for their work. As we did our investigation, we found that they were dead-on. Every aspect of the case fell apart when it was critically examined.”
>>>>>>>>>>snip
“About halfway into this investigation, I had a sickening feeling,” Hanak told me the week after Graves’s release, as we discussed the case at the district attorney’s office in Brenham. He explained that he had begun his career in law enforcement in 1978, at the age of eighteen, as a prison guard, walking the halls of death row. “I never would have believed that an innocent man could end up there,” he said. “Never. Not until I worked this case.” He pulled out the legal pad he had carried with him during his investigation and flipped to a page on which he had scribbled two headings: “Evidence” and “Witnesses.” Below the headings, the page was empty. “I kept trying to fill in the blanks, but there was nothing there,” he said.
Here is the story before he was released:
http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/innocence-lost
