This morning's Houston Chronicle has expanded coverage in, "Prisoner ordered free from Texas' death row," by Brian Rogers.
After 18 years of incarceration and countless protestations of innocence, Anthony Graves finally got a nod of approval from the one person who mattered Wednesday and at last returned home — free from charges that he participated in the butchery of a family in Somerville he did not know and free of the possibility that he would have to answer for them with his life.
The district attorney for Washington and Burleson counties, Bill Parham, gave Graves his release. The prosecutor filed a motion to dismiss charges that had sent Graves to Texas' death row for most of his adult life. Graves returned to his mother's home in Brenham no longer the "cold-blooded killer," so characterized by the prosecutor who first tried him, but as another exonerated inmate who even in the joy of redemption will face the daunting prospect of reassembling the pieces of a shattered life.
"He's an innocent man," Parham said, noting that his office investigated the case for five months. "There is nothing that connects Anthony Graves to this crime. I did what I did because that's the right thing to do."
An attorney for Graves, Jimmy Phillips Jr., said his client was released from Burleson County Jail, where he had been awaiting a retrial, at about 5:30 p.m.
Graves immediately went to see his mother in Brenham and reportedly spent the night near Austin. "The first place he wanted to go is to go hug his mama," Phillips said. "He is a free man, and he's home."
Graves called his mother to tell her he was coming home. Doris Curry left the house to pick up her youngest son, and by the time she returned home, Graves was already there, surrounded by family and friends.
"I hugged him and I hugged him and I cried and we both cried and we hugged and we cried," Curry said. "He said: 'Mama, it's over. Mama, 18 years we've fought this fight a long time. It's over. Justice has been done for me.' "
And:
Graves' appellate attorneys, Jay Burnett and Roy Greenwood, knew it was far less. They soon were convinced their client had no knowledge of or participation in the crime, just as he had claimed since the moment of his arrest.
Over the years, there was increasing evidence raised to doubt the validity of the conviction. Students in a University of St. Thomas journalism class worked with The Innocence Project at the University of Houston to review the Graves case in detail.
Nicole Casarez, the journalism professor who taught the class, and one of her students interviewed Carter's brother, whose affidavit along with other evidence they gathered helped persuade the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to order a hearing, which eventually led to the new trial.
"I think the dismissal motion filed this morning says it best: There is no credible evidence to inculpate this defendant," Casarez said Wednesday night. "I’m just thrilled that it has finally come to this. I think it was a lot of people working very hard, perhaps even divine intervention, so that it all worked out today."
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Graves’ conviction in 2006. A three-judge panel said he deserved a new trial after ruling that prosecutors elicited false statements from two witnesses and withheld two statements that could have changed the minds of jurors.
Graves eventually was returned to county jail with a bond set at $1 million, and Parham began to reassemble the case and review the evidence. He hired former Harris County assistant district attorney Kelly Siegler as a special prosecutor. Siegler soon saw that making a case against Graves was all but impossible.
Jordan Smith posts, "Anthony Graves Freed," at the Austin Chronicle.
And finally, on Wednesday, after nearly two decades behind bars, Graves was released from jail and all charges against him in connection with the Somerville murders were dropped. Importantly, prosecutors declared Graves actually innocent of the crime – a declaration that should help him collect some compensation for all the years of wrongful incarceration.
Finally.
The state's case against Anthony Graves was tenuous at best. For starters, there was no evidence to suggest he had anything to do with the crime – and there was ample evidence that he wasn't anywhere near the Somerville home the night the family was murdered. But the state ignored every single sign that their case was crap – even after the Fifth Circuit told them it was. Instead, prosecutors decided to retry Graves – intimating at one point that they were willing to use now discredited junk science in order to railroad the man.
Interestingly, although the case was fraught with problems, it never received the kind of media attention it deserved. We've written about it a number of times in the Chronicle, but it wasn't until last month, when Texas Monthly writer Pamela Colloff's story on the case was published that the entire tale was laid out in one place.
It's hard to imagine that the Colloff story didn't have some impact on the decision to finally free Graves. Regardless of the reasons behind the release, it was a move that was long, long overdue.
The list of stories on the case from our archives is here.
Earlier coverage begins with the preceding post from last night. Pamela Colloff's October 2010 Texas Monthly profile is "Innocence Lost."
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