"Mr. Bradley discovered that not only was he wrong about Mr. Morton’s guilt, but that there are questions about whether his predecessor committed the worst kind of prosecutorial misconduct: hiding evidence that ultimately allowed the real murderer to remain free and kill again.
Some of Mr. Bradley’s critics are skeptical of his self-professed transformation, pointing out that he is facing re-election next year, and they say it cannot atone for the years that his stubbornness allowed Mr. Morton to remain wrongly imprisoned. But some are hopeful that what he says he has learned will lead other prosecutors to acknowledge that science can reveal and help correct flaws in the state’s criminal justice system.
“He is, I think, a reasonably principled guy who is a complete product of a system that is finally giving way to a new day here in Texas and the rest of the country,” said Jeff Blackburn, general counsel for the Innocence Project of Texas."
REPORTER BRANDI GRISSOM; TEXAS TRIBUNE; AS PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES;
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BACKGROUND: (Michael) Morton was the victim of serious prosecutorial misconduct that caused him to lose 25 years of his life and completely ripped apart his family. Perhaps even more tragically, we now know that another murder might have been prevented if law enforcement had continued its investigation rather than building a false case against Mr. Morton,” said Barry Scheck, Co-Director of the Innocence Project, which is affiliated with Cardozo School of Law. “This tragic miscarriage of justice must be fully investigated and steps must be taken to hold police and prosecutors accountable.” In August, the Innocence Project announced that DNA testing on a bandana found near the Morton’s home where the murder occurred contained the blood of the victim, Christine Morton, and a male other than Morton. According to the papers filed by the Innocence Project yesterday, new DNA testing has connected the male DNA on the bandana to a hair that was found at the crime scene of a Travis County murder that was conducted with a similar modus operandi after Morton was incarcerated. Morton always maintained that the murder was committed by a third-party intruder. In the filing, the Innocence Project charges that Morton would never have been convicted of the crime if the prosecution had turned over as required evidence pointing to his innocence. Newly discovered evidence that was uncovered through a Public Records Act request that was not given to the defense includes: • A transcript of a taped interview by the chief investigator, Sgt. Don Wood, with the victim’s mother where the mother says that the couple’s three-year-old child witnessed the murder and provided a chilling account of watching a man who was not his father beat Christine to death. • A handwritten telephone message to Williamson County Sherriff’s Office (WCSO) Sgt. Wood dated two days after the murder reporting that what appeared to be Christine Morton’s missing Visa card was recovered at the Jewel Box store in San Antonio, with a note indicating that a police officer in San Antonio would be able to identify the woman who attempted to use the card. • A report by WCSO officer Traylor that a neighbor had “on several occasions observed a male park a green van on the street behind [the Morton’s] address, then the subject would get out and walk into the wooded area off the road.” • An internal, typewritten WCSO message to Sgt. Wood and follow up correspondence reporting that a check made out to Christine Morton by a man named John B. Cross was cashed with Christine’s forged signature nine days after her murder. The Innocence Project. (Morton's lawyers contend the Williamson County District Attorney at the time, Ken Anderson, withheld evidence that would have exonerated Morton. Lawyers have questioned Anderson, now a district judge, and others involved in the case to determine if there was misconduct involved. That process continues)
"GEORGETOWN — John Bradley says he is evolving," the Texas Tribune story by reporter Brandi Grissom published on November 17, 2011 in the New York Times under the heading "Williamson prosecutor asserts a change of heart," begins.
"A supremely confident and legendarily tough Texas prosecutor, Mr. Bradley says he is learning some of the most important — and humbling — lessons of his 24-year career. It is a painful process, he says. It is also highly public," the story continues.
“I have been through a series of events that deeply challenged me,” Mr. Bradley, the Williamson County district attorney, said during an extended interview. “I recognized that I could be angry, resentful and react to people, or I could look for the overall purpose and lesson and apply it to not only my own professional life but teach it. And I chose the latter path.”
In the last two years, Mr. Bradley and his trademark sharp tongue have been at the center of two of the most controversial murder cases in Texas. In 2009, as chairman of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, he and the New York-based Innocence Project battled over re-examining the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, the Corsicana man executed in 2004 for setting the 1991 fire that killed his three daughters.
For six years, Mr. Bradley also fought the Innocence Project’s efforts to exonerate Michael Morton, who in 1987 was convicted of murdering his wife by Mr. Bradley’s predecessor, Ken Anderson.
Mr. Bradley discovered that not only was he wrong about Mr. Morton’s guilt, but that there are questions about whether his predecessor committed the worst kind of prosecutorial misconduct: hiding evidence that ultimately allowed the real murderer to remain free and kill again.
Some of Mr. Bradley’s critics are skeptical of his self-professed transformation, pointing out that he is facing re-election next year, and they say it cannot atone for the years that his stubbornness allowed Mr. Morton to remain wrongly imprisoned. But some are hopeful that what he says he has learned will lead other prosecutors to acknowledge that science can reveal and help correct flaws in the state’s criminal justice system.
“He is, I think, a reasonably principled guy who is a complete product of a system that is finally giving way to a new day here in Texas and the rest of the country,” said Jeff Blackburn, general counsel for the Innocence Project of Texas.
Mr. Bradley grew up as a prosecutor in his hometown, Houston, working from 1987 to 1989 under an iconic figure, the Harris County district attorney Johnny Holmes. From 1992 until 2000, Mr. Holmes’s office sent 111 defendants to death row, according to a 2010 report by David McCord, a Drake University Law School professor.
“He was a true Texas lawman,” Mr. Bradley said of Mr. Holmes. “It was an honor to learn while working in his office.”
The workload was crushing, though. He worked 70 hours each week in an office where defense lawyers were viewed as hostile enemies.
“I always felt like I was swimming among sharks,” he said. “And you had to defend yourself, and you have to be the same predator back.”
When Mr. Bradley and his wife, Leslie, decided to expand their family, they moved to Williamson County, which was smaller but had a reputation for being just as tough on crime. Mr. Anderson hired Mr. Bradley.
“It was a tremendous culture shock,” he said.
And not only because his office consisted of a card table and a folding chair in the hallway. Almost immediately, Mr. Bradley said, he realized he could not treat defense lawyers like “sharks” in this small community. “Your professional relationship is an important part of being a lawyer, something I did not develop in Houston that I’m still working on,” he said.
Through the years, Mr. Bradley developed a close relationship with his boss, Mr. Anderson. They wrote two law books together. Mr. Bradley also began working with lawmakers at the Capitol, just a 30-minute drive south of Georgetown, and when Gov. Rick Perry appointed Mr. Anderson as a state judge in 2002, he appointed Mr. Bradley to take over as district attorney.
When Mr. Bradley arrived in Williamson County in 1989, Mr. Morton had already served two years of his life sentence.
Like many of those who are convicted, Mr. Morton maintained his innocence, arguing that an intruder must have killed his wife after he left for work in the morning. In 2005, Mr. Morton began asking the state to test DNA evidence on a number of items, including a bloody blue bandanna found near their home the day after the murder.
Mr. Bradley tenaciously fought the requests. In the news media, he berated the idea that DNA would lead to some “mystery killer,” and he said Mr. Morton’s lawyers were “grasping at straws.”
“Once a prosecutor has a case in which he or someone else has achieved a conviction where a body of people have been convinced beyond reasonable doubt someone is guilty and then sentenced them, the presumption becomes that that is a justified verdict that the prosecutor must defend,” Mr. Bradley said, explaining his opposition to Mr. Morton’s requests.
Mr. Morton’s lawyers also filed public information requests for investigative materials in the case, suspecting that prosecutors had withheld crucial evidence. Mr. Bradley fought those requests too, arguing that they would interfere with the DNA litigation.
Eventually, Mr. Bradley lost and turned over the files. Reports from the sheriff’s department showed that in 1987 investigators had several clues — including a transcript in which Mr. Morton’s mother-in-law told a sheriff’s investigator that the couple’s 3-year-old son saw a “monster” with a big mustache attack his mother and reports that Christine Morton’s credit card had been used and a check cashed with her forged signature days after her death — that pointed to another killer. Mr. Morton’s lawyers, though, had seen none of that information during his trial.
While the Houston lawyer John Raley and the Innocence Project fought with the prosecutor in court to get the scientific testing done, an unrelated conflict began to unfold.
The governor appointed Mr. Bradley to lead the Texas Forensic Science Commission, just as it embarked on a highly controversial investigation of the Willingham case. The Innocence Project had filed a complaint alleging negligence and misconduct in the arson investigation, and the commission was set to hear a report from the nationally recognized fire scientist Craig Beyler that raised questions about whether Texas had executed an innocent man.
Mr. Bradley canceled the meeting, and the pace of the Willingham investigation slowed. The Innocence Project alleged that Mr. Bradley was protecting the governor from potential political fallout during his 2010 re-election campaign. Mr. Bradley countered that Barry Scheck, the Innocence Project’s co-founder, and others were using the commission to attack their real target — the death penalty. Conducting such an investigation, Mr. Bradley said, was outside the commission’s authority.
There were finger-wagging shouting matches. Mr. Bradley called Willingham a “guilty monster.” Protesters lined up at commission meetings and carried signs with messages like “John Bradley is a tool ... of Rick Perry.”
While the Willingham controversy raged in 2010, an appeals court ordered Mr. Bradley’s office to allow DNA testing in the Morton case. In June, the test on the bandanna revealed that Mrs. Morton’s blood was mixed with the hair of a man who was not her husband. In August, a national DNA database search matched that DNA to a felon with a record in California.
The court also ordered the unsealing of a file that was supposed to contain all of the reports from the initial investigation of Mrs. Morton’s murder. During a dispute over evidence in 1987, the judge ordered Mr. Anderson to provide all of the investigator’s reports so he could determine whether there was any information that could help Mr. Morton prove his innocence.
When that file was opened two decades later, Mr. Bradley and Mr. Morton’s lawyers found only six pages of police reports. Both sides knew there were hundreds of pages more.
“I fully expected that that sealed file would contradict some pretty strong accusations,” Mr. Bradley said. “It didn’t.”
In September, investigators in Austin linked the DNA from the Morton bandanna to DNA found on a hair at the scene of the 1988 murder of Debra Masters Baker.
“It’s the kind of thing that happens only in Hollywood movies,” Mr. Bradley said. “I am still awed by the combination of circumstances that came together at the right time.”
Within days of the DNA match, Mr. Bradley came to an unusual agreement with Mr. Morton’s lawyers, including Mr. Scheck, to release Mr. Morton from prison and to allow an investigation of potential wrongdoing by Mr. Anderson’s office.
“Who would have thought that one of the strangest conclusions in all of this is I consider Barry Scheck a good friend,” Mr. Bradley said. For now, he said, his friendship with Mr. Anderson is over.
In his first public comments about the case this week, Mr. Anderson said the outcome in the Morton prosecution was wrong and that he was anguished, but he denied any wrongdoing.
Mr. Bradley said he regretted that his opposition to DNA testing resulted in more time behind bars for an innocent man. And he said that if he had known then what he knows now about the Innocence Project and Mr. Scheck, he might have handled the Willingham case differently.
This experience has taught him to be more open-minded, to try to see cases from both sides, he said. In the future, when defense lawyers bring him cases to review, Mr. Bradley said, he will have a new perspective.
“If I had to come up with a slogan,” Mr. Bradley said, “I don’t know that I would use it, but essentially the slogan would be ‘We are more than tough on crime.’ ”
Some of his critics, though, are skeptical of Mr. Bradley’s contrition.
Senator Rodney Ellis, Democrat of Houston and chairman of the Innocence Project, said, “The jury is still out on whether those words will manifest themselves into real actions to help fix what is clearly a broken justice system.”"
The story can be found at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;
