That's the title of Harvey Rice's report in today's Houston Chronicle. It's subtitled, "She and a colleague independently concluded that Anthony Graves was no killer."
Veteran prosecutor Kelly Siegler dreaded her meeting with the family of a grandmother and five children savagely slain nearly two decades ago. The news she was bringing them would not be welcome.
"I went by myself to tell them that things weren't going according to plan, that (the original prosecutor) had done some things, that it wasn't looking good," Siegler said, recalling her Oct. 15 meeting at a gathering of the Davis family in Houston. "I drove out there, and I tried to figure out ahead of time how to explain, knowing that for 18 years they thought this man had killed their mother and their babies."
As they pored over evidence and interviewed more than 50 witnesses in the case of Anthony Graves, incarcerated for 18 years before his exoneration and release two months ago, Siegler and investigator Otto Hanak found themselves in unfamiliar territory.
Siegler, who had tried many capital murder cases as a Harris County assistant district attorney, and Hanak, a state trooper and Texas Ranger for 28 years, were deeply embedded in the criminal justice establishment. But each new development in their investigation pointed to the conclusion that they reached independently: Graves was innocent, the victim of a prosecutor who had manufactured evidence, misled jurors and elicited false testimony.
"In all these years I've been in this business, I never thought I would be party to saving someone who was on death row," Hanak said.
Washington-Burleson County District Attorney Bill Parham had hired Siegler in February as a special prosecutor to retry Graves after a federal appeals court overturned his capital murder conviction. The appeals court found that the original prosecutor, former District Attorney Charles Sebesta, had withheld two statements from the defense and had elicited false testimony.
Earlier coverage of the Graves' exoneration begins with today's post, "Life After Death." More on Siegler's investigation in Pamela Coloff's "Innocence Found," from Texas Monthly.
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