GEORGETOWN, Texas — A Texas grocery store employee who was wrongly convicted and spent nearly 25 years in prison in his wife’s beating death walked free Tuesday after DNA tests showed another man was responsible. His attorneys say prosecutors and investigators deliberately kept evidence out of cour
t that would have helped acquit him at trial.
Michael Morton, 57, was convicted on circumstantial evidence in the August 1986 death of his wife, Christine. Morton said he left her and the couple’s 3-year-old son to head to work at 5:30 a.m. that day and steadfastly maintained through the years that an intruder must have been responsible.
Prosecutors had claimed Morton killed his wife in a fit of rage after she wouldn’t have sex with him following a dinner celebrating his 32nd birthday.
The case in Williamson County, north of Austin, will likely raise more questions about the district attorney, John Bradley, a Gov. Rick Perry appointee whose tenure on the Texas Forensic Science Commission was controversial. Bradley criticized the commission’s investigation of the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 after being convicted of arson in the deaths of his three children. Some experts have since concluded the forensic science in the case was faulty.
Bradley did not try the original case against Morton. But the New York-based Innocence Project, which specializes in using DNA testing to overturn wrongful convictions, has accused him of suppressing evidence that would have helped clear Morton sooner. That evidence — including a transcript of a police interview indicating that Morton’s son said the attacker was not his father — was ultimately obtained by the Innocence Project through a request under the Texas Public Information Act.
Using techniques that weren’t available during Morton’s original 1987 trial, authorities discovered Christine Morton’s DNA on a bloody bandana discovered near the Morton home along with that of a convicted felon whose name has not been released.
Bradley agreed Morton should be freed from prison after the other man’s DNA was linked to a hair discovered at the scene of a similar slaying, that of Debra Jan Baker, who was beaten to death in her bed with a blunt object in January 1988. Morton was already in prison by then.
District Judge Sid Harle signed an agreement between prosecutors and Morton’s attorney Monday recommending his conviction be overturned. It was passed on to the state Court of Criminal Appeals, which will make the final ruling. That could make Morton eligible for $80,000 per year he was wrongfully imprisoned under a state compensation program — about $2 million total.
Morton had been held in a prison about 100 miles southeast of Dallas. He learned he would be released over the weekend but wasn’t actually set free until Tuesday, after prison authorities brought him to the court in Georgetown.
The case could become an issue for Perry, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president. Perry appointed Bradley to the forensic commission in 2009, but the Texas Senate refused to confirm him after he told reporters Willingham was a “guilty monster.”
Bradley, however, succeeded in getting an attorney general’s ruling limiting the scope of the inquiry into the Willingham case. The science commission is due to release a report Oct. 14, but it will only offer guidance on investigating arson cases, not a ruling on the evidence in the Willingham case.
A report indicating that the science in the Willingham case was faulty was submitted to Perry’s office as part of the appeals Willingham’s lawyers filed before his execution.
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