I watched the jurors carefully. One man fidgeted with his glasses. A woman adjusted the shoulder pad of her shirt incessantly. I had become a master of observation, noticing and remembering details, because it was details that would save my life. I remembered perfectly the things I did, the words I said, and the food I ate on the night the crimes were committed. As my brother Arthur walked toward the witness stand, I wondered whether his memory was as clear as mine.
Arthur recalled that we’d all shared my mother’s apartment that night. He remembered the greasy brown bags of fast-food sandwiches we’d brought home. He even testified to the ribbing he sustained when I caught him cooing to his lady friend, Kaye, on the telephone. His memory was flawless. He painted for the jury a scene that was so routine, so mundane, it would qualify as unpublishable fiction had he made it up. His last words stuck with me. He spoke quickly and smoothly when he told the jury exactly how Yolanda and I were positioned on our floor pallets. He motioned with his hands like a builder explaining where various pieces might go. He had stepped over us, he said, recalling our sleeping bodies like immovable Tetris pieces on his way to lock the front door.
A series of witnesses followed Arthur. Yolanda’s dad, Bubba, recalled his girlfriend Bernice offering to babysit so that we could enjoy a night away. Bernice echoed his claims, recalling even more detail about the route we’d taken when we picked her up from work. They couldn’t testify to my whereabouts after Yolanda and I left them, of course, but their stories lined up with Arthur’s and those of the other witnesses.
The success of our case presentation turned more on what wasn’t said than what was. I’d learn later that Sebesta had investigated our phone records, hoping to find a call from Robert Carter to the residence. That never materialized. Calvin missed his chance too. He might have pulled the call log to prove that Arthur had actually spoken to Kaye in that clownish conversation. He didn’t do it, and we missed out on Kaye’s testimony too. She originally planned to testify on my behalf, to tell the court that late that night, I’d given her the most benign kind of trouble on the phone. But her feet cooled. Her family was racist, she said, and she could never have her dad know that she’d been on the phone with a black man late at night.
Kaye wasn’t the only witness to go AWOL. As Calvin prepared to call Yolanda to the stand, Sebesta jumped from his seat.
“Who do you intend to call next?” he asked. The question seemed odd given that each witness we called or planned to call was on the witness list that we’d provided him.
“I plan to call Yolanda Mathis,” Calvin said. Yolanda’s testimony was important, and not just because she’d slept close enough to me to feel my body heat the night I was supposedly involved in a murderous rampage. The fact that she had a boyfriend at the time that we were seeing each other worked to my advantage. It lent her credibility, being that she had no incentive to lie to protect me. Precisely the opposite, in fact. Testifying on my behalf would open Yolanda up to character assassination and might lead to consequences in her relationship. She would be testifying against her own interests, one of the legal hallmarks of veracity. She’d known this going in but had still agreed to take the stand in my defense.
Sebesta addressed the judge directly. “Your honor, we need to excuse the jury for a short recess. I have something for the record.”
I looked to Calvin, my head cocked and eyes squinted as I sought guidance on what was going down. My attorney shrugged, clearly puzzled himself about what the DA was up to.
Once the jury was cleared from the room and well out of earshot, Sebesta announced to the court, incredibly, that “Yolanda Mathis is now a suspect in this murder.” He continued, “Before she gives testimony in this case, she should be read her Miranda rights.” He told the judge that there was a strong possibility that Yolanda would be indicted for capital murder. My eyes widened at the prosecutor’s incredible statement, right there in open court. Calvin’s shock exceeded my own. He asked for a recess, so we could all leave the courtroom and regroup in private. Before the recess was granted, Calvin asked for a minute to relay the message. As a defense attorney, he had a duty to inform Yolanda of what had happened because she wasn’t represented by counsel. I sat alone at our table as Calvin left to break the news to her in the witness room adjacent to our courtroom. Calvin came back and told me that Yolanda began to shake at the news, and tears rushed down her face. Calvin told me she ran from the courtroom and clear out of the courthouse.
Court was still in session when he returned. “The witness has decided not to testify,” Calvin told the court in a sidebar with the judge so as to be outside of jurors’ hearing. “She has invoked her Fifth Amendment rights.” The Fifth Amendment states that a person can refuse to testify on the grounds that something they say may be used to incriminate them. In other words, you can’t be forced to become a possible witness against yourself. It’s just plain easier, and legally smarter, to refuse to say anything when you are told you are a suspect in a capital murder case, regardless of whether you had anything to do with it. You just can’t take the risk that something you say might somehow be twisted against you. Once she’d been named a suspect, Yolanda had little choice but to take the Fifth. In the end, this was merely a trial tactic by an overzealous prosecutor trying to win at all costs. Sebesta was trying to intimidate Yolanda against taking the stand, since she would have been a credible witness in my favor, and his efforts worked as planned. There was never any evidence against her, and she was never ultimately charged. It was all just part of the game.
As the court proceedings continued, the expressions on my attorneys’ faces told a story I didn’t want to read. Yolanda was our star witness and now she was gone. I summoned positivity because it beat the alternative. I held out the hope that my brother’s detailed testimony about my whereabouts that night had been enough to satisfy the jury.
Sebesta’s closing argument would haunt me during the long nights spent on death row. He had manipulated Yolanda, scaring her into silence with empty threats. We’d find out long after the trial that the DA had never previously named her as a suspect. It was all just a ploy, a veritable chess move that put us in checkmate. But the prosecutor wasn’t content simply to sabotage our case. He would use Yolanda’s absence to bolster his own. Rising from his chair to begin his grand salvo, the DA all but pranced around the room, his eyes shifting from the jury to me and back again.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he said. “Mr. Graves claims he was with someone that night. Where is this alibi witness? Why wasn’t she here to testify?” The jury never learned that Yolanda Mathis had fully intended to testify but had run from the courthouse that day out of fear of being charged with a crime. And why wouldn’t she be afraid? She’d been with me that night, so she knew firsthand my whereabouts at the time of the murders. She knew I was innocent, and that the state was railroading an innocent person. What would stop Sebesta from going after her? I couldn’t blame Yolanda. Sebesta didn’t care about innocence or guilt. He just wanted a conviction. His zealousness was matched only by his reckless disregard for the truth.
OCTOBER 27–NOVEMBER 1, 1994:
THE JURY MAKES A DECISION
THE WAITING IS THE WORST. An officer walked me back to the adjacent jail. There, I ate a sandwich and listened as two officers discussed my case like fans chewing over the first half of a football game.
“What do you think, man?” one of them said.
“I don’t know,” the other responded. “They didn’t prove anything to me.”
I agreed, of course, but they didn’t seem to care much what I thought.
My imagination churned as the jury went about its business in an adjacent room. I could hear them moving around every so often, the bottoms of their chairs scraping the hard floor. I heard the toilet flush as they took their bathroom breaks. Occasionally they raised their voices. Sometimes they’d be very quiet. It struck me that a raised voice meant someone was yelling about me, about my life. I wondered
what the quiet meant. Had they decided my fate? My confidence slowly eroded over the course of nine hours. I prepared for the worst. I wanted to believe in them, but I had heard too much during the selection process. For days, eleven white jurors had listened to a white prosecutor point the finger at a black man they didn’t know. I’d been dehumanized, made into the bogeyman they needed to fear. It was going to be hard for this jury in this town to return a not-guilty verdict. I figured they couldn’t do it, and even if they could, they wouldn’t. The hours ticked, and I watched the clock. It was like when I was a kid, waiting for Momma to get home after I’d done something wrong. You just knew she’d make you pick out your own switch.
Finally, the jury buzzed the bailiff to let the court know that they’d reached a verdict. Officers escorted me back to the defense table where I had spent the last week. I watched closely as the jurors entered the room. Several of the women were crying, their faces weathered from the preceding task. Maybe it had been harder on them than I thought. Calvin must have seen the same thing. He leaned over to speak.
“What do you think, Anthony? How do they look to you?”
“You’ve seen how they talked about folks who look like us,” I said. “They determined my fate a long time ago.” There was no doubt in my mind that they had come back with a guilty verdict. I was mentally exhausted and just wanted to get this part over with.
The foreman informed the judge that the jury had indeed reached its verdict. The bailiff approached the foreman and took possession of the piece of paper that held my fate. They all pretended the outcome was some great mystery. The judge shot the paper a passing glance.
“Mr. Garvie, will you and your client please stand?” the judge asked. I wasn’t afraid. An unlikely peace shrouded me. I had told the truth, and that was all I could do. My lawyers were green, but they’d worked hard and believed in me. It was a surreal resignation.
“Mr. Graves,” the judge said, “a jury of this court has found you guilty of capital murder.” Calvin shook his head, his movements a little faster with each oscillation. A waterfall erupted from his eyes.
“This is not right, this is not right, this is not right.” He muttered those words again and again for what seemed like minutes. I couldn’t react. I thought about the inevitability of it all. I thought about the trial that had taken place, and how I never really stood a chance in that courtroom.
That an innocent black man was convicted wasn’t a bug in the system, I knew. It was a feature of it.
Back at the jail, I just wanted some alone time. Avoiding contact, I went to where phone booths sat empty, awaiting prisoners making calls to their attorneys or families. I found a metal bench. It felt like every room I’d been in for the last two years had a metal bench. I stared forward. When I was arrested, I had rubbed my head, hoping it was all a dream. My reaction after the verdict was something similar. We had focused much of our attention on the guilt-innocence phase of my trial. Now my lawyers had to worry about saving my life. The same phrase kept running through my head: These people are trying to kill me. And it seemed they were succeeding. What about my children? What about my mom?
I slowly got up from the metal bench and walked into my cell to lay down on my bunk. I didn’t get back up until the next morning to go back to court. It was a long night.
The punishment phase got started the following Monday. The same officers who’d chewed the fat over my case the day before escorted me into the courtroom. I was the last to enter. The families of the victims sat quietly. Calvin and Lydia sat at the defense table. Sebesta was there, employing a winning swagger.
While the guilt-innocence phase of my trial had been an inquisition into the facts of the crime, the sentencing phase was an appraisal of me. The jury had a simple but weighty task: decide whether I was worth keeping alive. In Texas, this process means an exploration of aggravating and mitigating circumstances. The state’s goal was to paint me as dangerous, unredeemable, subhuman. Calvin was charged with convincing jurors who had just convicted me of murder that I had redeeming qualities. The first state’s witness was Tommy Genzer, the former foreman at the plant where I worked. We had been close friends. I could tell that he didn’t know he was there to testify in favor of the prosecution. It quickly dawned on him.
“Mr. Genzer, could you please tell us about an incident Mr. Graves had with another employee at work?” Sebesta was talking about an altercation I’d been involved in many years before. A coworker had slapped me, and when I hit back, I’d broken his nose. Sebesta wanted my foreman to talk only about what I had done, and not about why the fight started. All of a sudden, a scrap among friends took on a different character. To the jury, which had already decided that I was capable of mass murder, the seemingly innocuous fight revealed a pattern of violence.
Texas Ranger Earl Pearson came next. He talked about the crime scene and the effect it had on him. He said he’d lost sleep over it, a fact I don’t doubt. He said that he had to check up on his children as they slept in the days and weeks following the crime. It sounded scary. I thought about my three boys. I knew the jury would be doing the same with their own kids.
I drifted to thoughts of all that I was missing. My boys were just starting to get into sports when I was arrested. I missed seeing them trying their best on the ball field. I missed seeing them on my visits and hanging out with them during the summers when school was out. I missed staying on my oldest son Terrell about his homework, and the little stubborn attitude he was developing. I missed staying overnight with him at the hospital when his sickle-cell anemia got bad. Until my arrest, as his father, it was important for me to be there for him during the hard times.
With my middle son Terrance, I missed going out to the country. His mother’s side of the family called him Donut. They lived about fifteen miles outside the city limits of Brenham. We called it the Country. I would go out there and hang out with him and his family on the weekends. Country people knew how to enjoy life. His grandpa would be cooking stuff like rabbit and ’coon. I had never tasted wild food like that in my life. It was good though. I used to go out there hoping his grandpa had cooked some rabbit, and I would find them barbecuing and playing dominoes under the tree. My son’s grandpa would be playing blues music from the trunk of his car, while my little bucket-head son would be running around playing with his cousins and enjoying life.
My youngest son, Alex, was the shy one. Alex wouldn’t say two words to anybody. His own mother would have to make him talk to her. He would drive me crazy by not telling someone when he had to use the bathroom. I was at work one day when I got a call from the school asking if I could come pick Alex up. This boy had pooped his pants and had the whole front office lit up with a horrible smell. When I got there, he looked at me all quiet with big eyes. I asked him why he didn’t tell the teacher he had to use the bathroom. I took him home to his mother with the car windows rolled down. This little boy did things like that, and he was a light in my life. He was sweet and innocent, and a funny boy who made me laugh and laugh and laugh. I missed being with him.
I also missed my ex-girlfriend’s daughter, Echo. I’d grown to be like a father to her during the time I dated her mother. We had bonded over the years as father and daughter and no one knew the difference. She’d had a habit of waking up early on Saturday mornings on the weekends her mother had to work to ask me if we could go to McDonald’s for breakfast. I didn’t know how she knew which weekends her mother would have to work, but it never failed. And I’d always go get her.
Terrell, Terrance, Alex, Echo—I missed them all. But reality was staring me in the face, and the hearing continued.
The state’s sentencing case shifted rapidly from the horrific nature of the crime to the horrific nature of me, the man apparently responsible for it. In 1994, the Texas legal system was very much concerned with the concept of “future dangerousness.” A so-called future-dangerousness test was employed at this stage of the trial. Jurors were asked to consider whether I posed a f
uture threat to society. It was a distinction that seemed odd given that the alternative to death was life in prison without the possibility of parole. It also seemed like an elusive notion. Sebesta understood the value of framing difficult-to-grasp issues through the lens of science. That’s why he called a psychiatrist to talk about the threat that I might pose to society. Dr. Walter Quijano had never met me, never even spoken to me. He made grand claims about the nature of my character as jury members looked upon him with a sort of unquestioning adulation. The irony shook me in my seat. I peered at Sebesta, thinking only that here he was asking questions about my future dangerousness when he was the one asking jurors to kill an innocent man.
The state made its case simply: the crime was terrible, I was violent, and some pseudo-science doctor believed that I’d pose a future danger to society. Dr. Quijano made the same arguments about me that he would go on to later make about Duane Buck, another black man condemned to death row. Buck’s execution was stayed in 2011 after the Supreme Court took issue with Quijano’s claims that Buck was more likely to be dangerous because of his race. Quijano made similar claims about Latino defendants as well, contributing to their landing on death row.
My attorney and my family were climbing a steep slope, trying to chip away at the inhumanity the state built into its case. It fell on the shoulders of my family to convince strangers that I was worth saving. Their heartbreak over the verdict couldn’t last long. They couldn’t wallow in grief. They had to talk about my smile, my sense of humor, and how I once jumped for joy after hitting a go-ahead home run in Little League baseball. Anything to help the jury see that I was human.
My sister Demetria took the stand first. She told the court about the months I spent living with her and her husband in Austin. I would go to work, she said, and come home to help care for her children while she and her husband were at night school, trying to grind out a little opportunity for their family. As she spoke, I recalled helping my seven-year-old nephew with his homework. She talked about his struggles with reading and writing, and how I helped him work through the challenging words that second-graders might otherwise just skip over. I wasn’t an expert. Far from it, really. But, as she told the court, I did my best to make sure her two-month-old daughter had the food she needed. It must have been a challenging viewpoint for the jury members. They’d convicted me of killing children around those same ages. They must have wondered what changed in me between the time I cared for these kids and the time the state said I killed the others. I wanted to tell them that nothing had changed between those long-ago nights with my family and the night when the Davises were murdered in their house. I was the same, and I was never a murderer.
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