Anthony Graves is the kind of criminal defendant that keeps lawyers awake at night - the wrongfully convicted. Graves spent 18 years in Texas prisons, including 12 years on death row while he waited execution. Graves was convicted of capital murder for a horrific slaying of five children and their grandmother in Somerville, Texas. Although he presented evidence at trial that he was asleep at home at the time of the murders, a Texas jury convicted him of murder based upon the statements of a co-defendant, Robert Earl Carter, who stated that Graves, who had no prior criminal convictions and no connections to the victims, was present at the murder and participated in it. Neither the jury nor the defense team was told that the night before the trial, Carter informed prosecutor Charles Sebesta that he committed the crimes alone. Sebesta threatened to prosecute Carter’s wife as an accomplice, but after talking with Carter a few more hours agreed to leave his wife out of Carter’s testimony if Carter would testify against Graves.
At the trial Sebesta concluded his examination of Carter by asking him if his story had always been the same. Although Sebesta knew that Carter’s story had changed as recently as the night before, Sebesta allowed Carter to testify that his story had never changed. In doing so, Sebesta suborned perjury. Sebesta also threatened one of Graves’ alibi witnesses with charges as an accomplice (just before she was to testify), which so unnerved the witness that she never testified for Graves.
After the trial and up to his execution for the murders in 2000, Robert Carter recanted his statements at trial about Graves. He wrote letters to friends and met with attorneys working on Graves’ appeals to give statements about Graves’ innocence. Carter’s final words before his execution 2000 were to state yet again that he lied about Graves in Court, and that Graves know nothing about the murders.
However, not Sebesta admitted on camera during the taping of a television ship in 2000 that Carter had changed his story the night before the trial, did justice finally start to turn in Graves’ favor. After obtaining the evidence of Sebesta’s statements, Graves’ attorneys were able to mount a Brady claim in the appellate courts. Brady v. Maryland was a case where the Supreme Court ruled that the prosecution has to give to the defense and evidence in the possession of the government that would tend to show that the accused was not guilty of the crime for which he was charged, or that could possibly mitigate punishment for the crime. By failing to inform Graves’ defense team that Carter had made inconsistent statements the night before he testified, Sebesta violated the ruling of the Brady case.
A panel for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals set aside Graves’ conviction on March 3, 2006. Graves was moved from Death Row to the jail to await a new trial on the murders. However, despite prosecution - favorable rulings from the judge in the new trial, including ordering that that the prior trial transcript could be read to the jury in the new trial, and the appointment of a special prosecutor with several death penalty convictions, Texas was not able to make any case against Graves.
"After months of investigation and talking to every witness who's ever been involved in this case, and people who've never been talked to before, after looking under every rock we could find, we found not one piece of credible evidence that links Anthony Graves to the commission of this capital murder," stated prosecutor Kelly Siegler. Graves was finally released from jail a free man on October 27, 2010, after serving 18 years behind bars, 12 of those years on death row.
Texas law provides that a person who is wrongfully imprisoned receive $80,000 per year of their confinement. Graves is due to receive about 1.4 million dollars for his imprisonment. However the state comptroller refuses to pay the funds to Graves because the order which released him did not contain the words “actual innocence.”
To make matters worse, Attorney Genera Greg Abbot continues to garnish Graves’ income for child support arrears that accrued while Graves was on death row. For a crime he did not commit.
http://www.texasmonthly.com/2010-10-01/feature2.php
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7266470.html
http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Texas_Man_Freed_After_Years_on_Death_Row.php
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7544107.html