It's not every day that a convicted murderer clears his name and then returns to court to argue that his prosecutor should be prosecuted. But that's what happened recently in a high-profile case in Texas that raises broader questions about the power prosecutors have and what happens when they're accused of misusing it. At the center of this story is a man named Michael Morton.
He was once an ordinary citizen with a wife, a child, a job. and no criminal record whatsoever. But then he was sent to prison for life.
The story will continue in a moment. In 1987, in a very public trial, Michael Morton was convicted of brutally murdering his wife. As he was led away to prison, He insisted he was innocent. I didn't do this. I'm sorry, what?
I did not do this. Hardly anyone believed him until last year when he was exonerated by DNA testing. Let's go.
By then, he had spent nearly 25 years of his life behind bars. What was it like for you to walk from the court a free man? It was so alien at first. It wasn't quite real.
We stepped out of the courtroom, and it was a beautiful sunny day, but the sun felt so good on my face, on my skin, I could just feel like I was just drinking in the sunshine. Had you felt it in 25 years? I'd felt the sun, but I hadn't felt the free sun.
And free sun feels different? It does. It sounds stupid, but it feels different.
His nightmare began on a summer afternoon in 1986. When he came home from work in Austin, Texas, and found the sheriff at his house, a neighbor had discovered his three-year-old son, Eric, alone in the yard, and his wife, Christine, bludgeoned to death in the bedroom. I didn't really have the opportunity to grieve for her. Because it, everything changed so rapidly away from her to me. So were you a suspect from the very first moment?
Yeah, all the questions were adversarial, accusatory. It became clear to me... that the sheriff showed up, looked around, and, okay, husband did this.
And not long after that, you were arrested. About six weeks, yeah. They literally pulled my son out of my arms because he was screaming for me, and the little hand is out, and he's being pulled away.
That was one of the worst parts. Williamson County District Attorney Ken Anderson prosecuted Michael Morton. He told the jury Morton killed his wife because she wouldn't have sex with him. There was no murder weapon or direct evidence linking Morton to the crime.
But Anderson argued persuasively that Morton was violent and unremorseful. It got sickening after a while to watch him cry at the wrong times, and he seemed only to cry for himself. Morton and his original trial lawyers always suspected there was evidence that would have helped establish his innocence that Anderson wasn't telling them about.
But they were never given full access to the police reports in the prosecutor's file. It wasn't until recently, after years of legal wrangling, that lawyers Barry Sheck and Nina Morrison of the Innocence Project and John Raley A private attorney in Houston finally got a look at Anderson's file from the original trial. It was one of those moments where you almost faint. To hold in my hand a copy of a document that the district attorney at the time had and didn't tell anybody about it on the defense side.
That document would have proved what? Would have proved that Michael Morton is innocent. He's talking about this police report in which Christine's mother told investigators that her three-year-old grandson, Eric, had witnessed the murder and described to her in detail how he saw a monster with a big moustache kill his mother.
He hit Mommy, Eric says in the report. Was Daddy there, his grandmother asks. No, Mommy and Eric was there. There was also this report, in which a neighbor described seeing a suspicious man park a green van on the street. and walk into the wooded area behind the Morton home.
Barry Sheck says this is precisely the kind of information a prosecutor is legally and ethically obligated to disclose. Sitting in the prosecutor's file and sitting in the sheriff's file, there was a set of documents which, if they had been revealed and the defense had seen them, Michael Morton would have been acquitted. Ken Anderson went on to be named Prosecutor of the Year in Texas, and since 2002, he's been a district judge in the same court where Michael Morton was convicted.
All those years, Morton languished in prison. My first cell, I could stretch out my arms, and before my elbows locked, I was touching both walls. And you got two grown men in there.
The food's abysmal. You're never alone. The system controls every part of your life. It's soul-destroying.
Yeah. It eats at you kind of like a rust. The one thing he told us that sustained him was the thought of his son. He was allowed to see Eric for two hours once every six months.
When he was about 12 or 13 years old, he wrote to you and said he didn't want to come and see you anymore. Was your heart broken? Can't really limit it to your heart.
Everything? It's just, when your child says they no longer want to come see you. And then when he turned 18, what did he do? I got notice in the mail that he was going to be adopted by my sister-in-law and her husband, both good folks, and he was going to change his name.
And what did that do to you? That was when I hit rock bottom. That was the end of it. That's when I had nothing left. What finally gave him back his freedom last fall was DNA evidence.
After fighting the district attorney's office for five years, the Innocence Project won permission to do DNA testing on a bloody bandana found near the crime scene. On it, the lab found Christine Morton's blood and the DNA of a known felon, Mark Allen Norwood. who's since been arrested for her murder. His DNA has also been matched to the crime scene of another young woman who was murdered after Christine. It's not just that an innocent man was put in jail.
It was that a killer went free. Yes, I think Eric described him well as a monster. They never looked for the monster.
So, just to be clear from both of you, you believe that Ken Anderson, the prosecutor in Michael's case, willfully, deliberately withheld evidence. We believe that there's probable cause to believe that he violated a court order, withheld exculpatory evidence, and violated other laws of the state of Texas. So the first thing that anybody wants to know hearing that is, why?
Why would he do that? You know, I've seen a lot of these cases, and I cannot get inside of his mind. I can just talk generally.
That, you know, sometimes people break rules because they want to win. I want to formally apologize for the system's failure to Mr. Morton. In his only public statement late last year, Judge Anderson told reporters a mistake had been made.
But he also said this. In my heart, I know there was no misconduct whatsoever. Under oath, Anderson has said...
there's no way he wouldn't have told the defense about those police reports in his file. But he couldn't specifically remember doing so. He wouldn't speak with us, but his lawyer, Eric Nichols, a former Deputy Attorney General of Texas, told us those reports in his client's file would not have been enough to acquit Michael Morton.
To suggest that my client did something wrong, or committed a criminal law violation, or violated the rules of ethics of the state of Texas or elsewhere, is completely unwarranted. Well, Let me read to you what one of Michael Morton's original defense attorneys says on this subject. Bill White, in his sworn affidavit, he says, I had absolutely no idea at the time that Eric had made a very specific statement about witnessing the murder in progress.
It is clear to me that conscious decisions were made to conceal evidence and or ignore the truth. In spite of the 25 years. That seems to be very clear to me.
Is it to you? And it's also clear to my client that he would have had some discussions with the defense counsel about Eric Morton. The precise details, unfortunately, are lost to the sands of time.
Take him out of the office. That's all you have to offer. It depends on what you're talking about, Laura. We are engaging in speculation about matters that occurred 25 years ago. All rise, please.
In February, a Texas judge agreed with Michael Morton's legal team that there was probable cause to believe Ken Anderson violated the law. And Anderson is now the subject of a special criminal inquiry. That's extremely rare. Studies have shown prosecutors are hardly ever criminally charged or disciplined for serious error or misconduct.
And one thing Ken Anderson doesn't have to worry about is being sued for damages by Michael Morton, because the Supreme Court has ruled that prosecutors have absolute immunity from civil lawsuits for their legal work. Doctors, lawyers, policemen, there are all kinds of people who do their job with limited immunity or no immunity. It just seems hard to understand why prosecutors have to have a different standard to everybody else.
Seeing that justice is done in many instances... requires very difficult judgments. And to come back behind those prosecutors and second-guess them or sue them would throw a wrench into that system of prosecutors seeking... justice. I have to say there's a certain irony in hearing you say it's the job of a prosecutor to seek justice, right?
Because in this particular case, that's exactly what Michael Morton did not get. With the benefit of hindsight, with the benefit of DNA test results that came available in 2011, you're absolutely correct. But the legacy of this case, the Morton case, should not be an effort to vilify prosecutors, either my client individually or all prosecutors individually. general. Now I want to make it very, very clear that I don't believe that there's an epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct in this country.
On the other hand, it does happen. And this is a very important moment. We've had a whole series of cases in this country that have focused attention on this issue.
Cases like the corruption trial of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. A special investigator found systemic concealment of evidence that would have helped the senator's case. In North Carolina, this man spent eight years in prison, even though someone else had confessed to the crime. His lawyers say the prosecutor never told them.
In Louisiana, this man discovered a few weeks before his scheduled execution that prosecutors hadn't disclosed a blood test that exonerated him. If you did those things, if you did the sort of stuff where you were hiding evidence from a homicide investigation, they'd lock you up in a minute. That's the first time I've sensed any kind of anger in you. I try to be very forgiving, but I'll be honest.
Not only the actual murderer responsible for this, but the people who put me there, I wanted to get back at them. And when I finally... Let that go and put it away.
It's like I dropped 25 pounds. I just felt... Michael Morton was recently reunited with his son. He's received nearly $2 million under a Texas law that provides compensation for people who are wrongfully convicted.
I don't have a lot of things really driving me, but one of the things is I don't want this to happen to anybody else. Revenge isn't the issue here. Revenge, I know, doesn't work.
But accountability works. It's what balances out, it's the equilibrium, it's the social glue in a way. Because if you're not accountable, then you can do anything.