When he did allude to the indignities of his daily life, he added a heavy dose of gallows humor, as when he dubbed a stomach flu that swept through the prison population one winter “the Brown Storm.” (“I live on a dorm with 56 guys and four toilets,” he wrote. “Do the math. It wasn’t pretty.”) He proudly described working toward his master’s degree in literature—he had already earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology during the early years of his incarceration—and he expressed how much he enjoyed reading Homer and Dante. He casually mentioned that he was at work on a novel.
Eric was a recurrent subject in his letters to Garcia. The boy was being raised by Christine’s sister, Marylee, who, along with the rest of her family, had come to believe he was guilty. “It seems hard to believe, but he’s eighteen years old,” Michael wrote that January. “This spring, he’ll graduate from a private Catholic high school in Houston. The Jesuits are supposed to be good at cramming info into the heads of teenagers, so I hope he’s ready for college. I say ‘I hope he’s ready’ because I don’t know. We’ve drifted apart. A few years ago, he reached the age where coming to visit his old man wasn’t at the top of his to-do list.” In fact, Eric—when he was fifteen—had cut off all contact with his father.
Michael never failed to express his gratitude to Garcia for taking the time to correspond with him. “No matter how my train wreck of a life ends up, I will always think of you as one of the best,” Michael signed off one letter. “Adiós for now, my friend.”
Amid the jumble of holiday mail that arrived at Bill Allison’s house every December, there was always one envelope that stood out, distinguished by the return address from prison and Michael’s familiar handwriting. The Christmas card inside—in which Michael thanked Allison for defending him so forcefully during his trial—left him flooded with emotion. He had always felt certain that Michael was innocent, and he was filled with regret that he had not been able to convince the jury of this. “I’ve practiced law for forty-one years,” he told me. “In terms of the psychological toll that cases have taken on me, Michael’s was the worst.” In the aftermath of the guilty verdict, he said, “I couldn’t get over it. I went into a three-year tailspin.”
In Allison’s opinion, something had gone very wrong during the six-day trial at the Williamson County courthouse in Georgetown. On the afternoon that Michael was convicted, Allison and one of the prosecutors in the case, Mike Davis, had lingered after the trial to talk with jurors. As they discussed the case, Allison overheard what he believed to be a shocking admission. According to Allison, Davis told several jurors that if Michael’s attorneys had been able to obtain the reports of the case’s lead investigator, Sergeant Don Wood, they could have raised more doubt than they did. (Davis has said under oath that he has no recollection of making such a statement.)
Allison had immediately hurried back to his office in Austin to write down Davis’s comments. While he puzzled over what the prosecutor might have meant, he thought back to an argument he’d had with Davis’s boss, Williamson County district attorney Ken Anderson, who had led the prosecution’s effort. During two pretrial hearings, the lawyers had clashed over what evidence the state should, or should not, have to turn over. As Allison remembered it, state district judge William Lott had ordered Anderson to provide him with all of Wood’s reports and notes before the trial so he could determine whether they contained any “Brady material.” (The term refers to the landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland, which holds that prosecutors are required to turn over any evidence that is favorable to the accused. Failure to do so is considered to be a “Brady violation,” or a breach of a defendant’s constitutional right to due process.)
Judge Lott had examined everything Anderson had given him and ruled that no Brady material was present. Afterward, as is the protocol in such a situation, the judge had placed the papers in a sealed file that could be opened only by the appellate courts to review at a later date. Thinking back on that series of events, Allison had a terrible thought: What if Anderson had not, in fact, given Lott all of Wood’s reports and notes?
It was this idea that prompted Allison’s motion for new trial, which was denied, and his first appeal, which he filed in 1988, one year after Michael was found guilty. That December, the Third Court of Appeals upheld Michael’s conviction and denied Allison’s claim that Brady material had been withheld from the defense. The language of the decision also made it clear that the court believed that Lott’s sealed file—which its justices had taken the time to open and examine themselves—contained the entirety of Wood’s notes. Still, Allison remained convinced that something was amiss. He appealed the ruling to the Court of Criminal Appeals, but the following year, its justices declined to reconsider the lower court’s decision. This was a major blow to Allison’s efforts. “I can’t say that I ever completely gave up,” Allison told me, “but I was pretty close.” Despairing, he called an old friend, noted criminal defense attorney Barry Scheck. “Bill told me that he was haunted by this case,” Scheck recalled. “He felt that Michael was innocent and that Anderson was hiding something. He smelled a rat from the very, very beginning.”
Scheck was an early proponent of DNA testing, a new forensic technology that was just emerging in the late eighties. Though the science was first used to match perpetrators to their crimes, Scheck and his law partner, Peter Neufeld, had become convinced that DNA testing could be used for another purpose: to exonerate the falsely accused. In 1992 the two attorneys founded a nonprofit legal organization in New York called the Innocence Project and began to take on cases in which biological material from the crime scenes could still be tested. In time this practice would transform the landscape for the wrongfully convicted, but litigating these cases was difficult at first. The technology was still in its infancy and required large quantities of DNA material, which were often unavailable. Despite these hurdles, Scheck and Neufeld managed to win numerous exonerations, and as news of their success spread, they were inundated with requests for help from across the country. “I badgered Barry and the people who worked for him for years to take on Michael’s case, but they were swamped,” Allison told me. “Barry would say, ‘We’ll get to it,’ but it took a long time.”
In prison, Michael had become well versed in the science of DNA analysis from the many magazine articles he had read on the subject. While he waited for Scheck to get to his case, he secured a court order, with the help of Allison and another lawyer, to permit DNA testing of a semen stain found on the sheet of the bed where Christine had been murdered. Michael still knew next to nothing about what had happened to his wife. He had returned home from work on the day she was killed to find their house overrun with law enforcement. The walls and ceiling of their bedroom were spattered with blood. Because she had been in bed at the time of the killing, in her nightgown, with the blinds closed, Michael believed that she had been attacked shortly after he left for work early that morning. But who had broken into his house and savagely beaten her was still a mystery, one he was determined to solve.
The technology proved to be too primitive to yield a result on such a small sample, however, and two rounds of testing—first in 1991 and then in 1994—were inconclusive. Over the next few years, the process grew more sophisticated as it became possible to “amplify” DNA, or duplicate even minute amounts of genetic material so there would be a large enough sample to analyze. Michael obtained another court order to have the sheet retested. The results, which he received in 2000, did not identify Christine’s killer, but they did directly contradict a sinister theory of the prosecution’s—that, after murdering Christine, Michael had masturbated over her dead body. It was a sadistic image that district attorney Anderson had repeatedly asserted during the trial, and it had helped turn jurors’ opinions against Michael. But the stain, it turned out, was not composed of semen alone; it was a combination of Michael’s semen and Christine’s vaginal fluid, indicating that something much more mundane had taken place: in the
days or weeks leading up to the murder, the Mortons had had sex.
In 2002 the Innocence Project was ready to take on Michael’s case. Staff attorney Nina Morrison—who, to date, has secured no fewer than twenty DNA exonerations—headed up the effort in New York; she tapped a Houston attorney named John Raley to serve pro bono as her co-counsel. At first glance, Raley was an unusual choice: he was a civil attorney—his specialty had long been medical-malpractice defense—and he had never practiced criminal law before. But he came highly recommended by a former colleague at Fulbright & Jaworski, in part for his facility with scientific testimony. He and Morrison would push for DNA testing on a wide range of evidence that had been gathered during the investigation: fingernail clippings; vaginal, anal, and oral swabs taken at Christine’s autopsy; her nightgown; stray hairs found on her hand; and a bloody bandana that had been discovered approximately one hundred yards behind the Morton home. Raley, a six-foot-three former University of Oklahoma offensive guard, had an optimistic, almost wide-eyed view of how Williamson County would respond to the request for DNA testing. “Had the murder happened in the present day, there’s no doubt that law enforcement would have tested the evidence to try and find Christine’s killer, so initially I didn’t think they would oppose us,” Raley told me.
By then Anderson had left the district attorney’s office—in 2001 Governor Rick Perry named him district judge—but he kept in close communication with his successor, district attorney John Bradley. For eleven years, Bradley had been Anderson’s loyal first assistant, and when Anderson was appointed to the bench, Bradley became his replacement. The Houston native was well suited to carry on Anderson’s tough-on-crime legacy. A brash and sometimes polarizing figure who had cut his teeth as a young prosecutor in the Harris County DA’s office, Bradley had honed his hard-boiled approach under the legendary Johnny Holmes, who had won more death sentences than any district attorney in Texas history. After becoming Williamson County DA, Bradley issued press releases he drafted himself that publicized the numerous convictions and often draconian sentences that his prosecutors won. He was notorious for bullying defense attorneys into taking pre-indictment plea bargains for their clients, which often required people who had been accused of crimes to enter guilty pleas before knowing how strong or weak the state’s evidence was against them. His unusually combative stance toward defendants was an easy fit in an office molded by Anderson. “John was Ken’s protégé,” Allison told me. “Every policy, every strategy, got handed down from Ken to John. The only difference between them is that John’s louder. He likes to be onstage more. That was never really Ken’s forte.”
While Raley hoped for cooperation, Morrison cautioned that they would probably meet resistance on their motion for DNA testing. Lawyers from outside Williamson County had never been made to feel particularly welcome in Georgetown, and a request for DNA testing—which by its very nature implied that Bradley’s mentor may have made a grievous error in prosecuting Michael—was certain to get a chilly reception. Though Anderson was no longer DA, his presence in the courthouse was still keenly felt. The motion would have to be filed with the original trial court where Michael had been sentenced, just down the hall from the courtroom where Anderson, now a judge, presided.
Before filing the motion, Raley called the DA to introduce himself. He let Bradley know that he came from a law enforcement family—his father, John Wesley Raley Jr., served as U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Oklahoma under two presidents, and his brother, Robert, is a federal prosecutor in Tulsa. “I said that I hoped he would agree to the motion or, at a minimum, not oppose it,” Raley told me, explaining that his overtures were rebuffed. “He was polite at first, but after we filed the motion, he made it clear that he would fight us. I couldn’t understand why he was opposing testing that we were paying for, that would cost the county nothing, especially if he was so certain that Michael was guilty.”
In fact, Bradley was generally skeptical of post-conviction testing, in part because it could undermine the finality of the legal process. One telling indication of his view on the matter came years later, in 2007, in a now-redacted thread on an online forum for prosecutors that was discovered by Scott Henson, of the criminal-justice blog Grits for Breakfast. Posting on the forum, Bradley had advocated a troubling strategy: that when obtaining guilty pleas, prosecutors should also secure agreements that would ensure that all physical evidence could be subsequently destroyed, so as to preclude the possibility of endless appeals. “Then there is nothing to test or retest,” Bradley wrote. (Bradley declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Unsurprisingly, when Morrison and Raley filed their motion in 2005, Bradley opposed it. As the DA stonewalled, Raley’s conversations with him became increasingly antagonistic. “At one point I asked him, ‘Why won’t you just agree to this? What harm can it cause?’” Raley said. “And he told me, ‘It would muddy the waters.’” (This phrase had previously been used in a 2002 Court of Criminal Appeals ruling that denied DNA testing to a death row inmate, holding that such testing could not definitively prove the defendant’s innocence and would “merely muddy the waters.”) Bradley’s response left Raley stupefied. “I said, ‘Mr. Bradley, truth clarifies,’” Raley recalled.
Yet despite Bradley’s resistance, a decision handed down by district court judge Billy Ray Stubblefield in 2006 gave Morrison and Raley a partial victory. The judge agreed to allow DNA testing to go forward on the evidence collected from the Morton home, but he denied the request to test the bandana. Bradley had made the case that the bandana’s connection to the murder could not be proved because it had been found too far from the crime scene. “They fought us the hardest on the bandana,” Raley told me, adding that Bradley had been willing to have only the hair sample that was found on Christine’s hand tested and nothing else. “We argued that the fingerprints on the sliding-glass door and the footprint in the backyard established that the bandana had dropped along the killer’s escape route. I could picture it—him wiping the blood from his hands and face on the bandana, sticking it in his back pocket, and running.” But Stubblefield did not see it the same way.
When DNA testing on the fingernail clippings, swabs, nightgown, and hair was completed, the results were discouraging. Only Christine’s DNA was detected, and Michael could not be excluded as the donor of one of the hairs.
Bradley would later scoff to reporters that Michael and his attorneys were “grasping at straws” in their search for a “mystery killer.” He used a similarly contemptuous tone when Michael came up for parole in 2007, having served the first third of his sixty-year sentence. “I am writing to protest parole and request that you put off reconsideration of parole for as long as the law permits,” Bradley wrote to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. “Michael Morton has never accepted responsibility for murdering his wife.” (In an aside Bradley added, “His nickname for Christine was ‘Bitch.’”) The district attorney was correct that Michael appeared to be unrepentant; Michael had been told by other inmates that he would be eligible for early release only if he showed remorse for his crime, but he emphatically refused to do so. He would not lie to get out, he told his parents. His innocence, he said, was all he had.
When the DA’s office received notice that Michael had been denied parole, someone—it’s unclear who—scrawled a note on the letter from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. In small, blocky letters, it read, “Victory.”
Six years earlier, Michael had hit rock bottom. In 2001 a letter had arrived for him at the Ramsey I Unit informing him that his son had decided to change his name. Eric was eighteen at the time. He had recently been adopted by his aunt, Marylee, and her husband, whom she married when Eric was twelve. That the boy had rejected his own name was too much for Michael to bear. Before Eric was born, Christine had wanted to name him Michael Morton Jr., but Michael had balked, telling her that he would rather their son have his own distinct identity. And so they had compromised on Eric Michael Morton. Now Eri
c Michael Morton no longer existed.
“That’s when I finally broke,” Michael told me. “Nothing before then did it—not Chris’s murder, not my arrest, not my trial, not my conviction. Not getting a life sentence. Not the failed appeals, not the lab results that led nowhere. Eric was what I had been holding on to. He was the reason I was trying to prove my innocence. Once I found out that he had changed his name, I knew that reconciliation was not a possibility anymore. We weren’t going to be able to put this back together. That was a hollow, empty feeling, because getting out had never been the goal. It was getting out so that I could tell Eric, ‘Look, see? I didn’t do this.’
“I can’t remember if it was Marylee or Eric who wrote to tell me, but I remember being nearly catatonic for at least a week. It was like the bottom fell out. This wasn’t just another difficult thing to overcome, this was the end. This was a death. I literally cried out to God, ‘Are you there? Show me something. Give me a sign.’ I had nothing. I was spent, I was bankrupt. It was the most sincere plea I have ever made in my life. And I got nothing. A couple weeks went by and … nothing. No response.
“I was lying in my bunk one night listening to the radio on my headphones, and I ran across a classical station. I heard something you rarely ever hear: a harp. There was no slow buildup, no preamble to what happened next. I was just engulfed in this very warm, very comforting blinding light. I don’t know what to call it—an ecstatic experience? a revelation?—because it was indescribable. Any words I use to explain it will fall short. I had this incredible feeling of joy. There was an overwhelming sense of this unlimited compassion aimed right at me. Then I heard my alarm go off and it was over, and I sat up in bed. Outwardly, everything was still the same. But I knew that I had been in the presence of God.
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