Today's Houston Chronicle carries Harvey Rice's report, "Ex-DA turns to court of public opinion."
The news item on KBTX (Channel 3) in Bryan-College Station was one indignity too many for former Burleson County District Attorney Charles Sebesta.
The television report about a death penalty case that has dogged Sebesta for nearly a decade prompted him to take an unusual step: paying $2,561 to defend himself in a 5,000-word double-page advertisement published recently in two Burleson County newspapers.
Sebesta, former district attorney for Burleson and Washington counties, has suffered criticism for his handling of a 1994 capital murder trial that ended in a death sentence for Anthony Graves of Brenham.
The criticism began in 2000 after co-defendant Robert Carter, whose testimony convicted Graves, said moments before his execution: “Anthony Graves had nothing to do with it. ... I lied on him in court.”
Five years later, journalism students at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, working for the University of Houston Innocence Network, issued a report saying the prosecution in the Graves case withheld evidence “in its desire to win at all costs.”
n 2006, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Graves' conviction and ordered a new trial, ruling that Sebesta withheld statements from the defense and elicited false statements from witnesses.
Sebesta's public defense of the case comes as Graves' attorneys prepare to ask a Burleson County district judge on Friday to delay a retrial while they wait to hear whether the U.S. Supreme Court will consider an appeal arguing that Graves can't get a fair trial because so many witnesses have died or forgotten the facts.
Legal experts, meanwhile, have raised questions about Sebesta's advertisement and whether the former prosecutor is trying to influence the outcome of Graves' retrial.
And:
The troubling aspect of the ad for Robert Schuwerk, law professor at the University of Houston Law Center, is that it could influence Graves' retrial.
“I would be persuaded that what he was trying to do is to convince a jury that this guy was really guilty,” Schuwerk said.
The Burleson Banner-Press is widely read in Lee County, where the retrial will be conducted after being moved from neighboring Burleson County, where the crime was committed and Sebesta was district attorney, said Katherine Scardino, one of Graves' defense attorneys.
Geoffrey Corn, law professor at the South Texas College of Law, said Sebesta had every right to defend his reputation, but questioned his judgment in running an ad that could influence the prosecution in Graves' retrial.
Early coverage of the Graves case begins with this post.
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