Harris, the woman went on, believes in pushing homosexuality, transgenderism, and “people acting like cats and dogs.” At her grandniece’s public school in Kentucky, students identify as animals and come to school on leashes. This, she insisted, is the future Democrats want: lawless, godless, and out of control.

It was late Saturday morning, two weeks since the near-assassination of Donald Trump. The woman from Kentucky, a nurse and preacher’s wife, had driven to Nashville earlier that day with her sisters. Outside the Music City Center, the sprawling convention center where Trump was scheduled to speak, the former president’s face appeared on a digital screen against a bright orange backdrop reading “Bitcoin 2024.”

The sisters knew little about bitcoin and, to be fair, neither did I. As for the conference, all they knew was that they couldn’t afford it. Tickets ranged from the basic festival pass for $699 to a VIP “Whale Pass” for $21,000. But it didn’t matter. They just wanted a glimpse of Trump. And if they didn’t get one, that was OK too: “We’re here for moral support.”

This was not how I typically spent my Saturdays. On weekends, the strip near the convention center known as Lower Broadway is clogged with tourists and bachelorette parties. Scores of mostly white women in cowboy boots fill honky tonks that have become dominated by bro country celebrity venues, from Kid Rock’s Big-Ass Honky Tonk Rock n’ Roll Steakhouse to a new bar by Morgan Wallen, the country star ostensibly “canceled” after dropping the N-word on video.

Nevertheless, I’d come downtown with a certain sense of civic duty. Trump had arrived as Nashville was increasingly attracting right-wing extremists, who seemed to feel too comfortable in the city I call home. Since I moved to Nashville in 2015, the Republican Party had been taken over by the MAGA movement and Tennessee’s politics have taken a hard-right turn.

Nashville has become a magnet for far-right media figures like Ben Shapiro, who moved his media company, the Daily Wire, to the city in 2020, bringing a wave of anti-trans activism that has made Tennessee increasingly cruel toward LGBTQ+ people. Meanwhile, Nashville, which is often described as a blue dot in a red sea, has seen aggressive assaults on its political power. A new congressional map recently carved the city in three, obliterating a Democratic district and distributing the pieces to a trio of Republicans. The East Nashville neighborhood where I live is now represented by a Trump loyalist from Cookeville, some 80 miles away.

In recent weeks, things in Nashville seemed to be taking an even darker turn. All throughout July, white nationalist groups had descended upon the city. The neo-fascist Patriot Front marched downtown over Independence Day weekend; a week later, neo-Nazis disrupted a Nashville City Council meeting. The weekend before the bitcoin conference, neo-Nazi provocateurs filmed themselves harassing a group of Black boys who’d been downtown playing bucket drums. The men hurled racial slurs, laughing and jeering when one child erupted in anger. As police officers escorted the kids away, one of the white supremacists gleefully faced the camera, calling them “little fucking monkeys.”

The ladies from Kentucky were unaware of Nashville’s Nazi problem. They had no idea why such people would share Trump supporters’ slogans, like “Let’s Go Brandon” or “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” They questioned whether the neo-Nazis were even real. They had probably been paid by George Soros, the nurse concluded. “I think that anything that’s going against America is paid by George Soros.”

The neo-Nazis were real, of course — certainly more real than students identifying as cats. Seven years after white nationalists marched through Charlottesville and Trump signaled his support for the “very fine people, on both sides,” his supporters were as eager as ever to either embrace or explain away his racism and authoritarianism. Now those supporters included crypto billionaires and bitcoin bros. Like the nurse from Kentucky, they were committed to an alternate version of the world. Why worry about Nazis when you’re forging your own reality? 

Orange-Pilled

The Bitcoin conference is a project of Nashville-based BTC Media, and, I heard again and again, not usually political. Cryptocurrency’s adherents have traditionally envisioned a utopia of free exchange unshackled by the bonds of the state. Yet the conference seemed to have gone full MAGA. On the steps outside the Music City Center, a tax lawyer in khakis handed out white bandages stamped with a red QR code while wearing one over his ear. This year marked a turning point, he said. Many within the crypto community were skeptical of politicians but “anything that pushes the price of bitcoin up, everyone here will be happy about.”

Until recently, that skepticism had gone both ways. Trump used to dismiss cryptocurrency as a “scam,” calling it fake money “based on thin air.” But he’d changed his tune after election donors opened their checkbooks. Fundraising events had been arranged around the conference; a VIP reception with Trump cost between $60,000 and $844,600 a head, while a rooftop meet-and-greet featuring Donald Trump Jr. and former Daily Wire pundit Candace Owens was more modest: $3,000 to $20,000. (Following complaints about her antisemitism, Owens was replaced at the event by Tucker Carlson.)

This year’s event boasted a who’s who of politicians — including four U.S. senators — as well as right-wing celebrities, from former GOP primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to British comedian and accused rapist Russell Brand. Famed whistleblower Edward Snowden spoke remotely, warning the audience, apparently in vain, “Cast your vote but don’t join a cult.”

Outside the convention center, a garishly decorated Cybertruck advertising something called THORChain parked behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tour bus while I spoke to a campaign volunteer who bragged that he refused to vaccinate his children. He said he was drawn to RFK Jr. because of his anti-authoritarianism. When I mentioned the neo-Nazis who had been coming to Nashville, he scoffed. “That’s got Feds written all over it.”

Inside, the line for Trump’s speech stretched from the Nakamoto stage — the main event space, named after bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto — down the hallway and into a yawning exhibit hall, where it snaked through a maze of vendors and crypto displays. There was “mining” equipment, bitcoin-inspired art — a startling amount of which featured Pepe the Frog — and meme-inflected merch, whose tongue-in-cheek references were largely indecipherable to me. One vendor was hawking sports and entertainment memorabilia, along with a framed poster of Trump with his raised fist after the assassination attempt, stamped with the word “FIGHT!” At $500, it was his most popular item.

I found the end of the line across from a booth advertising Moonshot Mining. (Men vastly outnumbered women at the conference, both in the audience and onstage.) Behind me a group of guys discussed Harris. Picking her as their candidate was the worst decision the Democrats could have made, a white man laughed. A younger Black guy said he’d seen on TikTok that she might choose Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly as her running mate. Now that would be smart, the white guy replied. “Mark Kelly’s like an American hero, dude. He’s a fucking astronaut, bro.” In a more somber tone, he warned that if Harris wins, “one of two things is true. Either the electorate are really, really, uninformed or there’s something suspicious about the process.”

The Black man was 25 and a Nashville resident. He wore an orange and black Bitcoin-themed baseball jersey. A finance and economics student in college, he’d been “orange-pilled” years ago, he told me, but he had plenty of other interests. “A lot of bitcoin people are like, ‘If it’s not helping bitcoin, it’s not helping anything,’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Uh, the world is much more complex than that.’” Still, he understood why some people felt so passionate about the issue. People see inflation and the doubling of grocery prices and become anxious about their future. “They can’t control what the banks do. So they think, ‘This is the only way I can escape what’s happening.’” Leaders embracing bitcoin made an alternative future feel within reach. Still, he didn’t like the energy Trump brought out in people.

Internalized Victimhood

By 1:45 p.m., the room was at capacity. What remained of the line dissolved as people scattered to the overflow areas in the exhibit hall. I found a spot in front of a stage sponsored by Gemini, the crypto company founded by billionaire twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. They had recently thrown their support behind Trump while declaring war on Harris, who had declined an invitation to the conference.

A white man in his 50s took a seat next to me holding a rolled-up sign reading “SCAMALA.” The enthusiasm for Trump seemed to strike him as both deeply stupid and very funny. “He’s here to raise money and get votes. It’s that simple,” he said. “Do I really want him to be our president? Not really.” But he was amused at how polarized the country became over Trump’s first term. “To me it was entertaining. And so when he lost the last election, I was bummed, and people are like, why? And I’m like, ‘The television’s gonna suck, it’s not gonna be fun anymore.’ … It’s exactly like the ’30s in Germany. The guy’s a complete narcissist. He says the craziest shit.”

Trump’s speech was detached from reality in the usual ways, veering across unscripted terrain full of exaggerations, insults, and lies. He praised the brilliance of the crowd as well as his own and commiserated over their shared sense of victimhood. “They slander you as criminals but that happened to me too because I said the election was rigged.” He took credit for Joe Biden’s departure from the presidential campaign — “We defeated the worst president in U.S. history” — and said that while he’d recently “won” his classified documents case, Biden, who was “guilty as hell” had been declared “incompetent.” (Biden has not been charged with stealing classified documents, nor has he been deemed legally incompetent for anything.) In short, Trump spun his own reality. And the audience willingly went along.

“This room is amazing, the people in this room — high IQ individuals. I’m running against a low IQ individual,” Trump said. The guy next to me cracked up: “He’s such an asshole.”

By the end, Trump had made some promises that resonated with the crowd. He vowed to commute the life sentence imposed on Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and to fire Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, whose crackdown on crypto has made him enemy number one. He promised new ways to fuel bitcoin mining, which currently consumes an alarming amount of energy. “You’ll be begging me, ‘No more electricity, sir, we have enough.’” And he painted a doomsday scenario if he loses in November. “If they win this election, every one of you will be gone. They will be vicious, they will be ruthless, they will do things that you wouldn’t believe. But right now, because of me, they’re leaving you alone. So please say, ‘Thank you President Trump, thank you very much.’”

“Is This 2024?”

Leaving the conference, the vibe was mild disappointment mixed with a shrug. Trump clearly did not understand bitcoin. And he’d ended the speech on a patronizing note: “Have fun with your bitcoin and your crypto and everything else you’re playing with.”

“He’s like, ‘Go play with your bitcoins,’ like they’re little toys or something,” one man said indignantly. When I asked him and his companions whether they would vote for Trump, they looked at me like I was stupid. Of course they would.

I’d met a handful of protesters outside the venue that day — a solo priest holding up a sign calling Trump “an antichrist”; a trio of young men disgusted by Trump’s misogyny and racism. But I soon realized I’d missed the main demonstration: a Black-led solidarity march in support of the children harassed by the neo-Nazis. Scheduled to coincide with the speech, the group had briefly clashed with Trump supporters. A video clip showed one man angrily shouting at police. “Make it make sense! You’re protecting them, but you won’t protect our kids?”

Outside, I found passersby yelling at another lone protester, a woman holding a handwritten “KAMALA” sign and another reading, “TRUMP = FELON.” Two men from the march were confronting the people harassing her. A white guy in his 20s yelled that Trump had done more for Black people than any other U.S. president. “What are your pronouns?” he screamed in mock fury, slamming his skateboard against the wall. “I’m a skateboard!”

One of the marchers was disgusted to see people reacting so furiously to the woman’s signs. He had not seen the same rage toward the neo-Nazis. Anybody has the right to protest, he told me. But white nationalists had freely intimidated kids from his community with barely a word from the police. “We go form up anything for Black Lives Matter and it’s a damn problem,” he said.

This wasn’t just about Trump. “We understand the dynamics of downtown,” he said. The bars and music venues weren’t designed for people like him. What did it say that white supremacists from out of town could come to threaten Black people who have been here all their lives? It felt like things were moving backward, he said. “This is the South. … Like hold on, is this 2024 or what?”

The post Bitcoin Bros and the MAGA Faithful Converge in Nashville — and Embrace an Alternate Reality appeared first on The Intercept.

More than that, Michel argues that the court should be willing to force Oklahoma to carry out an execution that even its attorney general opposes.

Ordinarily, a state’s attorney general would be the one arguing to the high court that an execution should move forward. But since virtually the moment he took office in January 2023, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond has taken unprecedented action to spare Glossip’s life. In Drummond’s view, the case against Glossip was so tainted by prosecutorial misconduct that his conviction should be overturned. 

Drummond told the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals as much last year, when he came forward to ask the court to vacate Glossip’s conviction and order a new trial. The court rejected the overture, however, clearing the way for Glossip’s execution. Glossip appealed to the Supreme Court for intervention, an effort that Drummond joined. As such, there was no one from Oklahoma arguing in favor of killing Glossip. Enter Michel.

Michel, a partner at the white shoe law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and co-chair of its national appellate practice, has argued before the court 10 times. He was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush and collaborated on his memoir. More importantly, Michel worked as a law clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts and to Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was a jurist on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. When it became clear no one would defend the Oklahoma court’s ruling, Roberts tapped Michel to take on the job.

While it is extraordinary for a state attorney general to decline to defend a death sentence before the Supreme Court, it’s not entirely unusual for the court to appoint an outside advocate for a position not otherwise represented in a case. Michel, a seasoned Supreme Court litigator with impeccable conservative credentials, was well positioned for the job.

In a brief filed on July 8, Michel took on the task with gusto — even if his recitation of the facts of Glossip’s case, and of the lower court’s ruling, was misleading and incomplete. Michel argues that the court should pay no mind to Drummond’s concerns about the legality of executing Glossip. “Nothing in the Constitution compels a state court to provide a particular measure of deference to a state official’s confession of error,” Michel wrote. In other words, it doesn’t matter how flawed Drummond believes the case is, the court is under no obligation to take those concerns seriously.

Oral arguments in the case are expected to happen in the fall, with a decision unlikely to come before spring 2025. For Glossip, the court’s ruling could ultimately determine whether he lives or dies. But it could also have far-reaching consequences for criminal defendants across the country. Michel relies on arguments that dismiss long-standing protections against prosecutorial misconduct and the courts’ obligation to address it. In doing so, Michel encourages the justices to, at best, disregard decades of legal precedent meant to ward off wrongful convictions or, at worst, to undo them. 

A Significant Omission

Richard Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to die for the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside a seedy Best Budget Inn that Van Treese owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. No physical evidence linked Glossip, the motel’s live-in manager, to the crime. The case against him was based almost entirely on the testimony of a 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed, who admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death but insisted it was Glossip’s idea. In exchange for testifying against Glossip, Sneed escaped the death penalty and was sentenced to life without parole. Glossip has always sworn he is innocent, and, over the last decade, evidence that he was wrongly convicted has steadily mounted.

Much of this evidence supports Glossip’s contention that Sneed — a chronic drug user prone to unpredictable bouts of violence — murdered Van Treese and only later set up Glossip as the mastermind. New witnesses have countered the state’s portrayal of Sneed at trial, where he was cast as a hapless follower who acted under Glossip’s complete control. Those witnesses have described Sneed as cunning, manipulative, and quite capable of killing a man on his own.

In August 2022, the state began releasing boxes of previously undisclosed case documents that included evidence of serious prosecutorial misconduct. The records show that Sneed gave false statements at Glossip’s second trial — and that prosecutors were aware of his misstatements yet failed to correct his testimony. While he was in jail, Sneed had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium to manage it. However, when he testified against Glossip, Sneed denied ever seeing a psychiatrist and said he had no idea why he’d been given lithium. 

This was a significant omission. Sneed’s frame of mind was central to the question of whether he was capable of committing such a brutal and reckless crime on his own. Moreover, Sneed’s mental health disorder combined with his chronic drug use could have negatively affected his ability to accurately recall what happened the night he killed Van Treese. Knowing about this combination of factors might have given the jury reason to be skeptical of his account.

For years, Glossip’s lawyers had been trying to unlock records related to Sneed’s mental health. A competency evaluation prior to Glossip’s first trial noted that Sneed was unstable, but when defense lawyers sought access to Sneed’s health records they were rebuffed by the state, which called their efforts a “fishing expedition.” 

Among the recently released case documents were notes from a meeting between Sneed and prosecutor Connie Smothermon that took place not long before Glossip’s 2004 retrial. In the notes, Smothermon wrote the name of a doctor — “Dr. Trumpet?” — and a reference to the powerful mood stabilizing drug lithium — “on lithium?”

The significance of those notes was immediately apparent to Glossip’s lawyers. As they later argued to the Oklahoma court, “Trumpet” was clearly a reference to Lawrence Trombka, the lone psychiatrist working in the Oklahoma City jail at the time Sneed was incarcerated there, and thus the only person authorized to diagnose Sneed’s disorder and to prescribe lithium. The notes made clear that Sneed had, at best, misrepresented the situation under oath — and that Smothermon did nothing to correct his misstatements. 

At Glossip’s second trial, Sneed testified that while in jail he had a cold and asked for Sudafed, but that “somehow they ended up giving me lithium for some reason. I don’t know why,” he said. “I never seen no psychiatrist or anything.”

“So you don’t know why they gave you that?” Smothermon asked.

“No,” Sneed replied.

This exchange was at the heart of Drummond’s 2023 motion to vacate Glossip’s conviction — and of the question currently before the Supreme Court. “There is no dispute that Sneed was the state’s key witness at the second trial. If Sneed had accurately disclosed that he had seen a psychiatrist, then the defense would have likely learned … the true reason for Sneed’s lithium prescription,” Drummond wrote in his motion to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. “With this information plus Sneed’s history of drug addiction, the state believes that a qualified defense attorney likely could have attacked Sneed’s ability to properly recall key facts at the second trial.”

“The state has reached the difficult conclusion that the conviction of Glossip was obtained with the benefit of material misstatements to the jury by its key witness,” he wrote.

In his brief to the court, Michel dismisses Smothermon’s notes as “cryptic” and “barely decipherable” and calls into question whether they mean what everyone else thinks that they mean. Glossip and Drummond’s argument relies on a “significant overreading” of the notes, Michel argues. Even if the notes do show that Sneed was prescribed lithium by a psychiatrist, he says, this information would not have made a difference to the jury. Sneed mentioned lithium in his testimony and everyone knows that lithium is prescribed for mood disorders, Michel argued, so knowing the full and correct story wouldn’t have changed the outcome of Glossip’s trial.

Widespread Violations

At play in the current dispute before the Supreme Court are three key legal principles designed to protect criminal defendants and to keep state actors honest. The first is a requirement that prosecutors turn over to the defense any materials that are exculpatory to the defendant or that could impeach a witness. The second obligates prosecutors to ensure that witnesses testify truthfully. The third requires courts to consider the cumulative impact on a case when prosecutors violate such rules.

In Glossip’s case, the state’s failure to turn over the notes regarding Sneed’s diagnosis and treatment violated the first principle, which comes from a case called Brady v. Maryland. Smothermon’s failure to correct Sneed’s false testimony about his use of lithium violated the second principle, which stems from Napue v. Illinois. Finally, Kyles v. Whitley enshrines the third principle.

As Michel presents it, Drummond and Glossip’s lawyers want to overturn Glossip’s conviction based solely on the “Dr. Trumpet” note and Sneed’s misleading trial testimony — neither of which he sees as a violation of Brady nor Napue.

But this mischaracterizes what Drummond and Glossip’s lawyers are actually arguing. In their filings to the court, they argue that the note and Sneed’s false testimony are part of a constellation of violations. “The state’s suppression of Sneed’s psychiatric evidence did not occur in isolation,” Glossip’s lawyers wrote. “It was part of an expansive effort to unfairly shore up the testimony of the State’s star witness and mask vulnerabilities in the State’s theory of the case.”

The eight boxes recently turned over to Glossip’s legal team contained a slew of additional materials that had been previously hidden from the defense. 

That includes documents revealing that Smothermon collaborated with Sneed’s attorney during the retrial to modify Sneed’s testimony to make it fit the forensic evidence. At the first trial, Sneed had denied attacking Van Treese with a knife even though there had been a knife found at the scene — and despite the medical examiner’s findings that there were puncture wounds on Van Treese’s chest. But at the second trial, Sneed testified that he had, in fact, stabbed Van Treese. 

A rolling independent investigation into the case by pro bono law firm Reed Smith LLC unearthed additional evidence. Among those records was a letter written by Sneed to his public defender in 2003 — a year before Glossip’s retrial — in which he suggested he wanted to take back his testimony against Glossip. “Do I have the choice of re-canting my testimony at any time during my life, or anything like that,” Sneed wrote. Four years later, Sneed wrote to his lawyer again, saying there were a lot of things “eating at me” that “I need to clean up.”

Glossip’s lawyers have raised these issues in various appeals in Oklahoma, all of which have been rejected by the state Court of Criminal Appeals. But it has done so without considering the cumulative impact of the prosecutorial misconduct. The effect has been to diminish those violations to individual errors that the Oklahoma court — and now Michel — claims would not have made a difference to Glossip’s fate. This was the very issue the Kyles case was trying to address by requiring a holistic review. 

“Absent this Court’s correction,” Glossip’s lawyers wrote, “the OCCA’s disregard of Kyles also heralds a powerful incentive for prosecutors to trickle exculpatory evidence just slowly enough that a defendant can never present a full-throated Brady claim.” 

Dire Consequences

Aside from the cursory dismissal by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, none of the evidence withheld from Glossip’s team has ever been fully vetted as part of an evidentiary hearing. Smothermon has never had to testify about the substance of her notes or her interactions with Sneed during Glossip’s trial.

Glossip’s team has asked for a hearing, but the Court of Criminal Appeals has rejected that request too. Yet even Michel’s brief suggests that an evidentiary hearing might be in order — and that could present a way forward that would allow the Supreme Court to avoid having to decide Glossip’s fate at this time.

“At a minimum,” Michel wrote, “the Court should remand for further fact development rather than vacating the conviction.” 

If the Supreme Court chooses to go forward with the case and to rule in a way that degrades legal precedent, groups that have filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the case warn of dire, national consequences. Nearly a dozen legal scholars say that “embracing the OCCA’s decision,” for example, “would give prosecutors and other attorneys free rein to make decisions, on which the integrity of judicial proceedings will turn, that attorneys cannot be expected to make objectively and reliably. The result will be to increase the problem of false testimony in judicial proceedings — and, consequently, to erode public confidence in the courts’ commitment to judicial integrity.”

Correction: July 23, 2024
A previous version of this article misidentified the source of a 2003 letter from Justin Sneed to his public defender. That document was not included in the boxes of previously undisclosed evidence the state turned over to Richard Glossip’s legal team. Rather, it was unearthed in an independent investigation by a pro bono law firm.

The post Supreme Court’s Hand-Picked Advocate Argues in Favor of Killing Richard Glossip appeared first on The Intercept.

On July 2, the court unanimously declined to review the case of Charles McCrory, who was convicted in Alabama in 1985 for the murder of his wife, based almost exclusively on bogus bite-mark testimony. Bite-mark analysis has been roundly discredited by scientists and, to date, is behind at least 39 wrongful convictions or indictments.

Bite-mark evidence is among a host of problematic, scientifically questionable forensic practices widely used in the criminal legal system. While a number of forensic practitioners have acknowledged the problem and sought to get their disciplines on firmer scientific footing, the law has not caught up. Ostensibly, courts are supposed to vet forensic evidence before trial, though because judges are not scientists — and most lack any science training — this is rarely effective, and they often allow even the most questionable science into evidence.

For people like McCrory subsequently convicted based on junk science, there is often no straightforward way for the courts to revisit or correct old cases based on outdated and debunked forensic practices. The law favors finality, so once someone is sent to prison, it becomes difficult to challenge a conviction based on junk science, and judges often deny appeals based on procedural matters without ever engaging with those flaws.

While the Supreme Court has occasionally acknowledged this problem, among her colleagues, Sotomayor was alone in calling out the crisis it has created. In a statement alongside the denial of McCrory’s appeal, Sotomayor described his case as a symptom of a broader problem.

“This petition raises difficult questions about the adequacy of current postconviction remedies to correct a conviction secured by what we now know was faulty science,” Sotomayor wrote. “Hundreds if not thousands of innocent people may currently be incarcerated despite a modern consensus that the central piece of evidence at their trials lacked any scientific basis.”

To date, a handful of states have created a direct avenue of appeal for defendants convicted based on junk or debunked science. Texas was first, and Sotomayor notes that the statute has been used to exonerate a man named Steven Mark Chaney, who was convicted on bogus bite-mark evidence. California has a similar statute, which was used to exonerate Bill Richards, also convicted on discredited bite-mark analysis. 

“These statutes,” Sotomayor wrote, “create an efficient avenue for innocent people convicted based on forensic science that the scientific community has now largely repudiated.”

A Flimsy Piece of Evidence

Throughout the nearly four decades since his wife’s murder, McCrory has maintained his innocence. In 2022, The Intercept published a lengthy investigation into McCrory’s case, detailing the flaws in the state’s case against him. The case has since attracted additional attention and media coverage, highlighting the problem of junk forensic science. 

Related

A Bogus Bite Mark Sent Him to Prison for Murder. Alabama Wants to Keep Him There.

Julie McCrory’s body was found inside her home in Andalusia, Alabama, on the morning of May 31, 1985. Her head was bashed in, and she’d been repeatedly stabbed in the chest. The couple’s young son Chad, then 3 years old, was found unharmed in his crib. Police quickly zeroed in on McCrory as their only suspect: He and Julie were separated, and McCrory had been having an affair. At trial, the theory seemed to be that he’d savagely murdered Julie to be free from her.

The police investigation was cursory at best. Detectives searched McCrory’s home and car and found nothing to connect him to the bloody crime. Meanwhile, they ignored some evidence altogether, including two bedroom windows that were found open, but which investigators failed to dust for fingerprints. Police also failed to consider an alternate suspect, a man who worked at an excavating company bordering the McCrorys’ backyard and who, just weeks after Julie’s murder, committed a home invasion rape of another local woman. He was convicted and sent to prison for that crime.  

Ultimately, the state latched onto a single piece of physical evidence against McCrory: a pair of small indentations on the back of Julie’s right arm, which prosecutors concluded was a bite-mark made by McCrory’s allegedly distinctive dentition.

To sell this theory, the state employed famed forensic dentist Richard Souviron, a star prosecution witness in the recent and sensational trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. Although Souviron initially said he couldn’t definitively link the two marks on Julie’s arm to McCrory, at trial he was unequivocal that they did indeed match. 

More than three decades later, Souviron recanted his testimony. He provided an affidavit to McCrory’s lawyers, Chris Fabricant of the Innocence Project and Mark Loudon-Brown of the Southern Center for Human Rights, who presented it at a 2021 evidentiary hearing in Andalusia. “As a forensic odontologist I no longer believe the individualized teeth marks comparison testimony I offered in his case was reliable or proper,” Souviron wrote. “I no longer believe, as I did at the time of trial, that there is a valid scientific basis for concluding that the injury found on the skin of the victim in this case, assuming that the injury is in fact teeth marks, could be ‘matched’ or otherwise connected to a specific individual, such as Mr. McCrory.” 

Fabricant and Loudon-Brown also presented testimony from two leading forensic dentists who were once bite-mark true believers but now admitted that the discipline lacked any scientific underpinning and was not valid evidence. They agreed to testify for free, they told the court, because they felt they had a duty to correct the record. Dr. Cynthia Brzozowski, a veteran forensic dentist from New York, told the court that she felt an “ethical and civic responsibility” to testify in cases like McCrory’s.

In response, prosecutors presented no evidence and instead insisted that McCrory was guilty based on the same case presented at trial, including the bite mark — which they now termed “teeth marks” — implying that this was a separate and valid discipline. It is not. Regardless, prosecutor Grace Jeter argued that, even if Souviron had not testified for the state, jurors could have looked at the marks on Julie’s body and the dental molds taken from McCrory and decided for themselves that the wounds were caused by McCrory’s teeth. In other words, the jury would have been free to engage in its own expert-free junk science. 

In the end, Covington County Circuit Court Judge Lex Short agreed with the state, denying McCrory’s request for a new trial. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld his decision. When McCrory’s lawyers asked the court to reconsider — in part because one of the justices had previously defended McCrory’s conviction while working as a prosecutor — the court simply reissued its opinion, complete with a typo that appeared in the original, along with a note saying that the judge had now recused herself.

McCrory’s team then appealed to the Supreme Court, which last week denied review.

Legislatures Need Not Wait

In their petition to the high court, McCrory’s lawyers asked the justices to consider two questions: whether the right to due process precludes a judge from deliberating on the appeal of a case they’d previously worked on, and whether there is a “due process right not to be convicted based on forensic evidence later shown to be fundamentally unreliable.”

Sotomayor joined her colleagues in declining to review the case, writing separately to explain. “I vote to deny this petition because due process claims like McCrory’s have yet to percolate sufficiently through the federal courts,” she wrote. “Legislatures concerned with wrongful convictions based on faulty science, however, need not wait for this Court to address a constitutional remedy.”

She notes that the “wholesale reevaluation” of forensics began with a congressionally mandated review by the National Academy of Sciences, which in 2009 issued a landmark report calling out nearly all forensic practices as scientifically unsound. The report included harsh criticism of bite-mark evidence. In 2016, those concerns were reiterated in a bombshell report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a body that provides nonbinding recommendations to the U.S. president. The advisory council noted that bite-mark analysis would never likely pass scientific muster. Since then, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has issued its own exhaustive report finding the same. 

For all intents and purposes, bite-mark evidence is dead — except in many courts, including in Alabama, which refuse to consider its status when evaluating appeals such as McCrory’s. In part, the problem is that statutes outlining post-conviction procedures were written prior to scientific advancements and do not contemplate the evisceration of an entire field of practice, leaving countless defendants convicted on junk science without any meaningful avenue to challenge their convictions. 

Alabama’s prosecutors argue, first, that courts approved the use of bite-mark evidence in the 1980s, and so, in theory, it remains legitimate. Second, they argue that McCrory should have raised this issue years ago — back in 2002, in fact, when his lawyers first found a Newsweek article that questioned bite-mark evidence. In other words, their argument isn’t necessarily that bite-mark evidence is good or even valid, but rather, that Alabama law still recognizes the discipline, and there’s nothing new in McCrory’s appeals that changes that. Souviron’s affidavit recanting his testimony is too little, too late. 

But just because some people were questioning bite-mark evidence in the early 2000s doesn’t mean that the scientific consensus had changed by then. It had not. And as The Intercept has reported, the battle over bite-mark evidence and other forms of junk science, continues to this day.

This makes it difficult for people like McCrory who seek to challenge their convictions based on new evidence. “Because science evolves slowly rather than in conclusive bursts,” Sotomayor wrote, it is hard to pinpoint when the science has truly changed and thus, when the issue should be raised on appeal. “Unlike a murder weapon left in an abandoned warehouse, forensic science does not lie around waiting for sudden discovery.”

And when scientific evidence is debunked, it’s a unique and ground-shaking event that needs addressing. “Evidence that an entire mode of forensic analysis has no scientific basis, however, is of a different category from evidence that might call into question a witness’s credibility or motive to testify.”

Sotomayor’s statement is a big deal, said Fabricant, who also wrote a book on junk forensic science. “Justice Sotomayor’s concurrence is the first time any Supreme Court Justice has recognized the appalling legacy of wrongful convictions attributable to the use of junk science in criminal cases, and the failure of lower courts to take remedial action to address these all too common miscarriages of justice.”

Fabricant and Loudon-Brown, McCrory’s other lawyer, have filed an appeal in federal district court raising the same concerns they brought to the Supreme Court. While Alabama is arguing that the appeal should be tossed out, Sotomayor seems to be nodding to the district court to give McCrory’s case a thorough vetting. 

“We appreciate Justice Sotomayor recognizing that Charles McCrory was convicted based on bitemark evidence that science has condemned and that the expert who testified against him has recanted,” McCrory’s lawyers wrote in an email to The Intercept. “But today an innocent man remains in prison, where he has been for almost 40 years. We will continue to fight for Mr. McCrory in the federal courts and call upon the State of Alabama to rectify this injustice.”

The post There’s a Junk Science Crisis in Criminal Convictions. Sonia Sotomayor Calls It Out in Alabama Bite-Mark Case. appeared first on The Intercept.

“This hearing didn’t have to take place,” he began. Prosecutors had offered a plea deal right up until the day of his 1985 trial; if he’d admitted to abducting, raping, and murdering his young stepdaughter, Layla Cummings, Rojem could have avoided a death sentence. But he refused: “An innocent man doesn’t ever plead guilty to a crime he hasn’t committed.”

Rojem spoke via video link from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. It was June 17, and his execution was 10 days away. At 66, he’d been on death row for virtually his whole adult life. He’d survived for so long in part because appellate courts had deemed his original trial to be unfair, upholding his conviction but twice overturning his death sentence. Meanwhile, fingernail scrapings taken from Cummings revealed an unknown male DNA profile and nothing from Rojem. This was potentially powerful exculpatory evidence. But a third jury, unaware of the DNA testing, resentenced him to die.

Cummings was only 7 years old when she vanished from her mother’s small apartment overnight in the small town of Elk City, located on the border of Western Oklahoma. After a 10-hour search, her body was discovered in a wheat field in an adjacent county on July 7, 1984. Her underwear was stuffed in her mouth, and she had been stabbed to death. Rojem, who had recently divorced Cummings’s mother, quickly became the prime suspect. He had previously been accused of molesting the child, which he denied. Prosecutors said he’d brutally assaulted and killed Cummings out of revenge.

Forty years later, Rojem had no illusions of mercy. He’d seen 124 people escorted to the death chamber. Some had received clemency recommendations only to be rebuffed by the governor, who gets the final say. Since resuming executions in 2021, Gov. Kevin Stitt has overseen the killing of 12 people. He has rejected clemency recommendations from the board three times. Amid overwhelming public pressure, he commuted a single death sentence to life in prison: that of Julius Jones, whose case became a cause célèbre.

Unlike Jones, Rojem is virtually unknown outside Oklahoma. He believes it is due to the nature of the crime. “Nobody wants to talk about it, nobody wants to get involved, nobody wants to seriously help a guy like me because nobody wants to risk lending their credibility to helping a guy with a case like this and be wrong,” Rojem wrote in a message to anti-death penalty activists last year. Although a handful of supporters submitted letters to the board, no one spoke on his behalf at the hearing apart from Rojem’s longtime attorneys.

The hearing lasted two hours. Rojem’s attorneys argued that the case against him had been thin from the start. “I think it would be a travesty to execute him based on the evidence presented in this case,” veteran death penalty attorney Jack Fisher told the board. The state, led by Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, rejected that characterization of the evidence while stressing one of the most damning strikes against Rojem. “While our focus here today is on Layla Cummings,” Drummond said, “past is prologue. In 1978, Mr. Rojem raped two girls in Michigan. The evidence was overwhelming. He even pled guilty to one of the charges. But he’s never accepted responsibility. He’s never said he’s sorry.”

Rojem did not claim to be innocent of these crimes. “I wasn’t a good human being for the first part of my life,” he told the board. “And I don’t deny that. But I went to prison. I learned my lesson. And I left all that behind. … My understanding is that this hearing is to decide my fate on only the case before us and nothing else. I did not kidnap Layla. I did not rape Layla. And I did not murder Layla.”

It took just a few minutes for the board to make its decision. The votes were unanimous: five votes to deny clemency. The June 27 execution would move forward.

An Insufficient Defense

If Rojem dies by lethal injection on Thursday, Drummond will almost certainly be in the front row. The attorney general has made it a point to attend each execution carried out on his watch, even as he has fought to slow down the state’s once-frenzied killing schedule, citing the burden on prison staff. Some of his maneuvering has undoubtedly been political: Drummond is widely understood to be planning a gubernatorial run in 2026, and his willingness to disrupt the state’s death penalty system has already cost him. He has especially enraged Oklahoma’s elected district attorneys by going out of his way to save the life of Richard Glossip, most recently filing a brief in his favor before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Drummond’s concern over Glossip’s innocence claim has not extended to others on death row. The same has often been true of people who have been outspoken about the state’s system as a whole. State Rep. Kevin McDugle has decried Oklahoma’s “sad history of pushing cases through the full judicial process and declaring them final and over, only to have many convicted men later exonerated.” Yet he is also firm that sex crimes against children keep him from rejecting the death penalty altogether. “If we have somebody who rapes a baby and slices the baby’s throat and outs him in a shallow grave,” he said at a press conference in 2019, “that person should be put to death immediately.”

The revulsion and outrage surrounding crimes against children make it easier to ignore red flags in a case like Rojem’s. Although prosecutors point out that his conviction has repeatedly been upheld in state and federal court, that is hardly the whole story. In Oklahoma as in the rest of the country, daunting procedural barriers stand in the way of revisiting the evidence in a given death penalty case. In Rojem’s case, the available record reveals significant problems that were either ignored or waved away by appellate courts and that were not brought up at the clemency hearing. Although Rojem’s resentencing trials provided a chance to present mitigating evidence that his original jury did not hear, courts refused to grant an evidentiary hearing to consider evidence that may have challenged the state’s theory of the crime but which his trial attorneys never investigated.

Some of the problems in Rojem’s case reflect the era in which he was tried. At the time of his conviction, Oklahoma’s death penalty had only recently been reinstated following a landmark Supreme Court ruling that forced states to rewrite their death penalty statutes. Although Oklahoma lawmakers were quick to pass a new death penalty law, they did not provide an infrastructure for the wave of indigent defendants who would soon go on trial for their life.

Rojem’s court-appointed defense attorneys were a husband-wife team who had never handled a felony case, let alone a death penalty trial. Like other private lawyers appointed to represent indigent defendants during the 1980s, their pay had been set by the state legislature, which allotted a maximum of “$200.00 for services rendered before the preliminary hearing, $500.00 for services rendered during the preliminary hearing,” and “$2,500.00 for services rendered from the time the defendant is bound over until final disposition in the trial court.” Attorneys who wished to hire an investigator or experts to examine the evidence in the case had to seek permission from the trial court, which routinely denied such requests. In Rojem’s case, not only did the court refuse to provide such funds, post-conviction requests to access the state’s case file were also denied.

The need for Rojem’s defense to investigate the case was especially crucial given law enforcement’s immediate focus on Rojem. Although the state today insists that all leads pointed directly to him, others close to the case felt strongly that this was not true. Among them was Cummings’s own father, who “apparently did not believe that his daughter was murdered by [Rojem],” as a federal court wrote in 1999. Donald Cummings suspected that it was a man on his ex-wife’s side of the family who was the true perpetrator and sought to share his suspicions with law enforcement. “In fact, Mr. Cummings apparently conducted some sort of investigation on his own into the case,” the court found. Just over a year after his daughter’s murder, Donald Cummings took his own life.

Easy Scapegoat

The story of how Rojem became a suspect is told in a 1985 article in the Detroit Free Press, which framed the case as the product of Michigan’s overly lax parole system. Violent people left prison too early, free to wreak havoc across the country. “Every state turns its problems loose on someone else,” one Oklahoma rancher told the paper. “That’s just what old Fidel did with his problems — put ‘em on boats to Florida.”

In fact, Rojem had arrived in Oklahoma to be with Cummings’s mother, whom he’d met inside a Michigan prison, where she was visiting her brother. “She was taken with Rojem, a young prisoner who seemed determined to turn his life around,” according to the paper. They got married shortly after, while Rojem was still incarcerated. He was released in 1982 and went to work in the oil fields in the western part of the state.

But things quickly went downhill. Rojem lost his job, drank heavily, and in 1983 was arrested while drunk driving. According to Cummings’s mother, Rojem was in jail following the arrest when her daughter accused him of abusing her. Nevertheless, she took Rojem back and the couple stayed together until splitting up in May 1984. After that, Rojem continued to see his ex-wife and her kids. Just a few days before Cummings disappeared, Rojem took her and her brother out for ice cream.

After Cummings was found, investigators searched Rojem’s home and took hair samples. Tire tracks at the scene were reportedly matched to his car. But there was no direct physical evidence linking him to the crime. Washita County District Attorney Steve Suttle, who prosecuted the case, conceded to the Detroit Free Press that the evidence was “circumstantial to be sure,” but promised there was much more to come. At trial he introduced condom wrappers found near the child’s body, linking them to a used condom found in Rojem’s home.

Rojem’s roommate swore to the Detroit Free Press that he was incapable of such a grisly crime. “They’re trying to build a case that a warped, twisted, pervert rapist from Michigan killed this little girl in a field. … I don’t believe it, not for a minute. Those kids loved Rick Rojem and Rick Rojem loved those kids.” Yet Cummings’s brother, who was 9 years old when his sister was killed, became a key witness for the prosecution. Although he’d told investigators that he did not see the man who took his little sister, on the stand he testified that he had seen Rojem — a fact that surprised prosecutors and defense attorneys alike.

Ultimately, the denial of funding to investigate Rojem’s case was devastating to his defense. There was no expert witness who could challenge the state’s key forensic evidence: a mangled plastic cup that had been found in the parking lot of the Cummings’ apartment, which allegedly came from a bar where Rojem had been spotted the night of the murder. A partial fingerprint was found on the inside of the cup and, despite its poor quality, matched to Rojem. “What better evidence in the world is there than a fingerprint?” the prosecutor asked the jury. Nor was there anyone to testify about numerous hairs that had been found on Cummings’s body, which were not matched to Rojem, and which Suttle himself conceded were “strange.” The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals would later conclude that the hairs had been deliberately planted “in an apparent attempt to lead investigators” to the wrong suspect.

In his own interview with the Detroit Free Press, Rojem’s lead attorney said his client was an easy scapegoat. “He has a poor record in Michigan and that was enough.”

Failure to Mitigate

Rojem had been on death row for almost 15 years when a federal district court overturned his death sentence. Although the court upheld his conviction, it found that Rojem’s constitutional rights had been violated when the trial judge failed to properly instruct the jury on the need to consider mitigating evidence before sentencing him to death. Rojem’s jury, it found, seemed to be under the impression that they only needed to find at least one aggravating factor and that weighing mitigating factors was optional.

A resentencing trial took place in 2003. By then, Rojem’s appellate attorneys had gotten a chance to test evidence from the case for DNA. They made a significant discovery. Scrapings from underneath Cummings’s fingernails had produced an unknown male profile that excluded their client. At the resentencing trial, Rojem’s lawyers were granted permission to call as a witness the state DNA analyst who did the testing. Despite the powerful evidence, the jury decided that Rojem should die.

But that outcome, too, was reversed on appeal when the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals found that the presiding judge had failed to dismiss prospective jurors who were unfairly biased against Rojem. Defense attorneys had been forced to use their limited peremptory challenges to remove jurors with inappropriate connections to the case, such as a man who had discussed the case with the local sheriff, whom he knew from church. The result was a jury that was skewed against Rojem, the court concluded, sending the case back for resentencing.

The third and last sentencing trial took place in 2007. Rojem’s lawyers presented 15 witnesses, many of whom spoke about Rojem’s positive traits. Among them were Rojem’s death row case manager, who highlighted his good behavior behind bars; a Buddhist minister who described Rojem’s religious conversion and deep faith; and a former Oklahoma state representative who favorably described how Rojem had pushed to win the right for the condemned to donate their organs after being executed.

Unlike the previous resentencing trial, Rojem’s attorneys were barred from introducing the DNA evidence, a major blow. But perhaps just as detrimental was the failure to present evidence of serious childhood trauma that might have led Rojem’s jury to spare his life, regardless of their belief in his guilt. An investigation into Rojem’s early life had revealed that he had been repeatedly molested and raped by a stepbrother beginning when he was 7 years old; the abuse lasted until he was 9. Rojem’s attorneys had planned to present this evidence through an expert who had prepared a PowerPoint presentation. The slides included bullet points describing the abuse. But the presiding judge refused to allow the presentation — and Rojem’s attorneys did not ask the expert any questions to elicit such testimony. Instead, the expert alluded to the abuse briefly during his time on the stand, referring to “other things that happened” to Rojem that had shaped who he’d become as an adult. He was sentenced to death for a third time.

Even if such evidence had not been persuasive to a jury, there is reason to believe that Rojem’s history of childhood trauma might have swayed at least one member of the Pardon and Parole Board to cast a vote to spare his life. The board had previously recommended clemency for a man based in part on the horrific abuse he’d endured as a child. But there was no mention of this history during last week’s hearing. Rojem’s life before and after his conviction was not described at all. 

Instead, the lawyers sought to persuade the board that the forensic evidence in Rojem’s case, which was weak to begin with, was even weaker 40 years later. Fingerprint evidence, like many other forensic practices, has been shown to have little basis in science, attorney Paul McCausland explained: “The infallibility of fingerprint evidence is a myth.” While this is certainly true and highly relevant to Rojem’s case, challenging the validity of longstanding forensic practices has been an uphill battle within the legal system for decades. He was unlikely to persuade the board within a half-hour. And he was no match for the victim’s side, powerfully represented by Cummings’s aunt. “The Cummings family has been forced to endure Mr. Rojem’s depravity for 40 years,” she said. “Layla and Don have both gone on and I have grown old. Nevertheless, it is my hope that through me you will see their suffering.”

Rojem’s attorneys did not respond to interview requests from The Intercept. Many of those who were involved in the original trial are now deceased, including his defense lawyers. Suttle, the original prosecutor, died earlier this year. In a phone message responding to a request for an interview, his widow said it was “a damn shame because he would have been gratified to see the completion of his case.”

Three days after the clemency hearing, Rojem was moved to death watch, the prison cell where he will stay until he is escorted to the execution chamber. In a message to an advocate, he said he was grateful to have had a chance to say his goodbyes. “I’ll neither confirm/deny the presence of mistiness in the ocular region,” he wrote, adding a smiley face.

Rojem’s advocates don’t claim to know the truth of his guilt or innocence. But they insist that his life has value regardless. Most of them call him Daiji, his Buddhist name, and describe him as more concerned with their well-being than his own. In my own brief correspondence with Rojem last year, he seemed at peace with his circumstances, joking wryly about his lack of confidence that state officials would be able to carry out so many executions without messing up. He described a lunch tray that had consisted of instant rice, improperly prepared: “So, if you can’t follow the instructions on the instant rice bag…”

He wrote about a former cellmate who had recently been executed. Rojem considered him to be a good, decent man even though he was regarded as a monster by the rest of the world. He knew this was how he was seen, too. “I’ve lost many friends since 1985.”

Update: June 27, 2024
Richard Rojem Jr. was executed by lethal injection on June 27. His time of death was 10:16 a.m. CT. Asked if he had any last words, Rojem said, “I don’t. I’ve said my goodbyes.”

The post Oklahoma Prepares to Kill Another Man Who Says He’s Innocent appeared first on The Intercept.

Mariah’s lifeless body had arrived at a local hospital covered in bruises, which authorities immediately assumed were evidence of abuse. Her mother, 38-year-old Melissa Lucio, who had a history of being investigated by the child welfare agency, tried to explain that Mariah had fallen down a flight of stairs. But the police subjected Lucio to a punishing late-night interrogation lasting more than five hours. After repeatedly denying that she killed her daughter, Lucio finally conceded that she was responsible. In 2008, Lucio was convicted of murder and sentenced to die.

The possibility that Mariah’s death was not murder but the result of a tragic accident was never investigated. Police ignored evidence that included a report compiled by the child welfare investigator, Florence Arreola, who interviewed several of Mariah’s siblings while Lucio was being interrogated in another room. The children corroborated their mother’s account, reiterating that Mariah had fallen down the stairs two days earlier. Lucio had never abused Mariah, they said, and the only injuries they saw on the toddler were bruises “from when she fell.”

Jurors at Lucio’s trial never heard these statements. Cameron County District Attorney Armando Villalobos withheld Arreola’s report from the defense, casting Mariah’s death as the violent culmination of “a cruel and brutal life” at the hands of her mother. Despite Lucio’s insistence that she was innocent, the DA’s office spent years defending her conviction, seeking an execution date in 2022. Lucio came within two days of execution before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals intervened, sending the case back to the trial court to consider whether withholding the evidence had violated Lucio’s constitutional rights.

In a dramatic reversal, the DA’s office now admits that Villalobos failed to disclose the exculpatory statements. Today, Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz agrees with Lucio’s attorneys that, had the records been disclosed, Lucio likely would not have been convicted. In a joint filing with the attorneys, Saenz told the trial court that Lucio’s conviction should be overturned.

On April 12, two years after Lucio narrowly avoided execution, Cameron County Judge Arturo Nelson signed off on the agreement. The case is now back before the Court of Criminal Appeals, which will decide whether to grant the joint request to vacate Lucio’s conviction. If it does, Lucio will have spent 16 years on death row for a crime that never happened. There is no timeline for the court to rule.

In a statement, Lucio’s family thanked her legal team and the district attorney’s office alike. “We hope and pray the Court of Criminal Appeals will agree with the District Attorney, the defense, and Judge Nelson and our mother can come home to her family. It’s been 17 years that we have been without her. We love her and miss her and can’t wait to hug her.”

The case against Melissa Lucio was full of red flags, from a coerced interrogation and reliance on junk forensics to lackluster defense lawyering and prosecutorial misconduct. “I’ve been doing capital defense work in Texas for 30 years,” Sandra Babcock, a Cornell Law School professor who is now part of Lucio’s defense team, told The Intercept in 2022. “And this is by far the weakest capital case I’ve ever seen.”

Lucio was prosecuted by embattled District Attorney Villalobos, who used the case to boost his tough-on-crime reputation as part of his reelection campaign. At the time of Lucio’s 2008 trial, Villalobos was facing corruption charges and a challenger who had taken him to task for failing to prosecute child abuse cases. In the wake of the conviction, Villalobos became known as the man who sent the first Latina woman to Texas’s death row. The district attorney was subsequently sentenced to 13 years in federal prison for racketeering and extortion.

Lucio was represented by defense lawyer Peter Gilman, who had never handled a death penalty case and went on to work at the DA’s office immediately after the trial. A mitigation specialist who worked for Gilman later said that the lawyer had refused to pursue exculpatory evidence that could have saved his client’s life.

Related

Is Texas Sending Melissa Lucio to Die for a Crime That Never Happened?

The state’s evidence against Lucio went mostly unchallenged until 2010, when veteran forensic pathologist Thomas Young reviewed the medical evidence. Young concluded that there had been a rush to judgment by medical examiner Norma Farley, who told the court that simply upon seeing Mariah’s body, she knew that the child had died from abuse. “This child was severely abused,” Farley told the jury at Lucio’s trial. “I mean, it would have been evident to a first-year nursing student.”

But Farley’s examination didn’t occur until after Lucio had been interrogated for hours and admitted to hurting her daughter, and it was conducted while one of the interrogating officers was present — meaning Farley was already aware of the cops’ theory of the crime before she conducted her review. These factors undoubtedly skewed her conclusions, according to Young, who said such dynamics are all too familiar in forensic pathology. “You develop a belief, and come hell or high water, you’re going to defend your belief,” he told The Intercept. Young found that the fall had likely caused Mariah’s brain to swell, which, left untreated, had cascading physical effects that developed over several days, including a coagulation disorder that caused widespread bruising. In his view, the medical evidence was absolutely consistent with an accidental fall — as Lucio and her family had always insisted. 

Nonetheless, the case flew under the radar until documentarian Sabrina Van Tassel took it up in her 2020 film “The State of Texas v. Melissa.” The film revealed additional evidence that Lucio was telling the truth about the fall that ultimately killed Mariah, including footage of interviews that child welfare counselors conducted with two of Lucio’s sons, both of whom said Mariah had fallen down the stairs. Interviewed for the film, Gilman was dismissive of the notion that the kids could have been crucial witnesses. “I didn’t feel like any of the children would be helpful,” he said.

In the years Van Tassel spent working on the documentary, she became convinced that the evidence the state had provided to Lucio’s defense attorneys was incomplete. A number of Lucio’s children told Van Tassel that they had been interviewed at the police station, yet there was no record of those conversations in the case file. “I knew there were things that were missing,” Van Tassel said.

Nevertheless, the film contained significant revelations that catapulted the case into public view. After Lucio’s 2022 execution date was set, the documentary became a critical organizing tool, fueling a campaign to save Lucio’s life. The group Death Penalty Action held screenings in the Rio Grande Valley and across the state, accompanied by members of Lucio’s family. Outside the DA’s office in Brownsville, activists put up signs in English and Spanish that read “Watch the Film.” At one point, Lucio’s son John approached Saenz, who succeeded Villalobos as district attorney, on his lunch break, urging him to reconsider Lucio’s case. “I know for a simple fact that my mother is an innocent woman,” he said.

Meanwhile, Lucio’s cause attracted a powerful and unlikely ally: North Texas Republican state Rep. Jeff Leach, co-chair of the House Criminal Justice Reform Caucus. Leach, a self-professed supporter of capital punishment, and his caucus co-chair, Democratic Rep. Joe Moody, rallied an unprecedented level of support for Lucio among an ideologically diverse group of more than 80 state representatives — more than half the members of the Texas House, a body that rarely comes to a decisive consensus about anything.

Leach vowed to do “everything I can … in every way possible” to stop Lucio’s execution. In April 2022, he and Moody convened a committee hearing to question Saenz, who had requested Lucio’s execution date. They implored the district attorney to step up and withdraw it. But Saenz brushed off their concerns, saying he had no reason to ask for the death warrant to be withdrawn.

With Lucio’s execution date looming, her lawyers, including Vanessa Potkin, director of special litigation for the Innocence Project, filed a new challenge to Lucio’s conviction before the Court of Criminal Appeals, pointing to the defects in the case and arguing that Lucio was innocent of killing her daughter. It was a long-shot appeal to a court known for its hostility to death row defendants claiming innocence. So it was welcome but startling news when the court issued a last-minute stay of execution, sending Lucio’s claims back to the district court for further vetting. Among the claims was that the state had withheld records from the defense, including the reports from Arreola, the child welfare investigator.

Related

Melissa Lucio’s Life Was Spared at the Last Minute. What Happens Now?

In a statement following the stay, Saenz said he welcomed the opportunity to prosecute Lucio again. But nine months later, he quietly signed a joint filing with Potkin acknowledging that his office had withheld exculpatory evidence from Lucio’s defense. “There are uncontroverted facts and the parties agree,” the lawyers wrote, that there was a “reasonable probability” that the outcome of the trial “would have been different had the evidence been disclosed.” 

The agreement, which was signed in January 2023, remained out of the public eye until earlier this month, when a local reporter broke the news, including a statement from Potkin and Saenz saying the case was now in the hands of the courts. The Court of Criminal Appeals “is the only court that can vacate a conviction,” the statement read. “We are hopeful that Melissa’s case will be resolved.” A week later, a district court judge signed off on the agreement, sending the case up to the CCA.

Van Tassel got the news in a message from Lucio. “I’m coming home soon, sis!” Lucio said.

“We were just overwhelmed, you know. Overwhelmed with joy,” Van Tassel said. Yet she is cautious not to celebrate prematurely. “Part of me doesn’t want to rejoice too much because we’ve been through so much.” After the exhilaration of the stay of execution, the surge of publicity faded. Lucio sometimes felt forgotten while she waited on a court system that showed no sense of urgency. Lucio’s mother, Esperanza, died last fall, shortly after Lucio herself was hospitalized with abdominal pain. Lucio was unable to attend the funeral. “She died without seeing her daughter again,” Van Tassel said of Esperanza, who had hoped to see Lucio walk free. “How horrible is that?”

Weeks before news broke about the agreement between Lucio’s lawyers and the state, Van Tassel started a GoFundMe in anticipation of Lucio’s release. Her family will need considerable help getting Lucio on her feet as she reacquaints herself with the outside world. Lucio hopes to get a fresh start, perhaps in a different town, where she can rebuild her life from scratch. “I have no clothes,” she told Van Tassel in one recent message. “I don’t even know what size I am.”

The post A Prosecutor Asked Texas to Kill Melissa Lucio. Now He Says She Should Be Freed. appeared first on The Intercept.

Pye was sentenced to die in 1996 for murdering his former girlfriend, Alicia Lynn Yarbrough. His conviction raised red flags, from Pye’s low IQ score to his trial attorney’s alleged racism toward his own clients. Yet Potek wasn’t arguing that Pye faced racial discrimination or that his sentence violated the Eighth Amendment ban on executing people with intellectual disabilities. As far as the law was concerned, those claims were null and void.

Instead, Potek proposed a novel argument. Of the 41 people on Georgia’s death row, Pye was one of several who had exhausted their appeals. Yet Pye alone faced imminent execution while the others were shielded by a legal agreement with the state that had placed executions on hold. “There is no meaningful difference” between Pye and these other men, Potek said.

In many ways, Pye’s predicament came down to bad timing. Georgia’s moratorium dated back to March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic led the Georgia Supreme Court to declare a judicial emergency, halting executions. As months passed, death penalty lawyers became concerned over the growing number of clients whose cases were reaching their final appeals — and who would be hamstrung by restrictions on prison visitation that prevented their attorneys from preparing for clemency applications and late-stage litigation once executions restarted.

The eventual result was a written agreement in April 2021 between the Federal Defender Program in Atlanta and the Georgia Attorney General’s Office, which promised not to seek any new execution dates until the judicial emergency had been lifted, normal visitation had resumed, and the Covid vaccine had been made available to “all members of the public.”

Still, there was a catch: The agreement only applied to people whose appeals were exhausted during the judicial emergency, which was officially lifted in June 2021.

Today, the same visitation restrictions remain in place. The Georgia Department of Corrections does not allow as many visits as it did before the pandemic, which has “impaired counsel’s ability to … prepare for clemency proceedings and adequately represent their clients,” as the Georgia Supreme Court found. Yet Pye is not protected by the Covid-era contract. Because his appeals were exhausted in 2023, his execution will almost certainly move forward.

It was not long ago that Pye stood a good chance of getting off death row. As the federal defenders were negotiating the April 2021 agreement, a panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was considering a legal challenge alleging that Pye’s trial attorney had provided ineffective representation. It was a long shot; although Pye’s attorney had failed him in profound ways, the barriers standing in the way of relief are hard to overcome. But that same month, the panel vacated Pye’s death sentence, sending the case back for resentencing. It was rare for a federal court to intervene when it came to such a Sixth Amendment claim, the panel acknowledged. “This is one of those rare cases.”

Pye’s victory was short-lived. At the urging of the attorney general’s office, the full circuit court reversed the panel’s order the following year on procedural grounds. Whatever the failures of Pye’s trial lawyer, it ruled, under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, Pye was not entitled to relief after all.

If the reinstatement of Pye’s death sentence was devastating, there was an additional irony that proved especially cruel. Had the 11th Circuit simply rejected his appeal, Pye would have been protected by the agreement between the federal defenders and the state. Instead, the temporary relief led his case to fall through the cracks, placing him in line for execution. His trial lawyer’s failures had doomed him a second time.

With few good options, Pye’s lawyers challenged the looming execution using a civil rights claim ordinarily associated with class-action lawsuits. Under the 14th Amendment, Pye was entitled to equal protection under the law. By excluding Pye from the agreement, the state had created “a distinct, disfavored class of death row prisoners, one without the baseline guarantee of adequate representation,” Potek wrote in a federal court filing. This further violated Pye’s Fifth Amendment right to due process and deprived him of the fundamental right to life.

An oral argument on the matter was set for March 15 at the federal courthouse in Newnan, Georgia. Presiding over the hearing was Timothy Batten, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. A former trial attorney nominated by George W. Bush, Batten had presided over Pye’s federal appeals since 2013. He did not hide his skepticism of Potek’s argument.

“He’s already lost his right to life, right?” Batten asked. Potek conceded that while it was a lawful execution order, Pye was entitled to constitutional rights as long as he was still alive — and his disparate treatment ahead of his clemency hearing violated those rights. “I’m sure you would have cited it if there was any case in the country that was like this,” Batten said.

“Every card was stacked against him.”

Potek tried to impress upon the judge how hastily and opportunistically the state had moved to execute his client. As recently as late February, Pye’s lawyers were negotiating a potential settlement with the attorney general’s office to apply the Covid-era agreement to his case. But on February 27, lawyers for the attorney general abruptly ended the negotiations. Two days later, “with no notice,” the state obtained an execution order. Pye’s date was set for March 20 at 7 p.m. “They didn’t have to provide any notice, did they?” Batten said. “Not statutorily,” Potek said, but it was nonetheless “alarming” behavior. “That wasn’t alarming to me,” Batten replied bluntly. “So go on.”

The hearing lasted less than an hour. Pye’s argument was nothing more than a delay tactic, a lawyer for the attorney general’s office told the judge. “All of it is about more time to get ready for an execution he has known about for over 25 years.”

Outside the courtroom, anti-death penalty activist Cathy Harmon-Christian expressed dismay. The executive director of Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, she was working to get word out about Pye’s case while organizing vigils for the night of the execution.

“There’s just so many problems with the case,” she said, none of which had been discussed at the hearing. And for all the ways in which the case was cast as unique, it was actually emblematic of problems that have plagued Georgia’s death penalty for generations. Pye’s trial attorney was not only ineffective. “He was a known racist,” Harmon-Christian said. “He spent very little time defending Willie.”

“Every card was stacked against him.”

The federal courthouse where the hearing took place is some 40 miles southwest of Atlanta, just off the historic town square in Newnan. The city has long boasted its claim as “the city of homes,” a nod to the antebellum architecture of its treasured old houses, a number of which survived the Civil War. A marble statue of a Confederate soldier still stands at the center of the original courthouse lawn. The memorial was vandalized in 2021, damaging the soldier’s musket. “It’s just there to piss off Black folks,” a county commissioner who proposed removing the statue told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “People are still fighting that war in their minds and in their hearts.”

The town of Griffin in neighboring Spalding County, where Pye was tried and convicted, moved its own Confederate monument to a cemetery in the 1960s, but local leaders have been loath to break with the past. In 2018, a video went viral of a former city commissioner repeatedly using the N-word while endorsing the designation of April as Confederate History and Heritage Month. The official, who was directing his comments at a Black commissioner, followed up by clarifying, “I don’t use that word anymore.”

Racism and the American death penalty have always been inextricable, particularly in the South, where historians have traced a line connecting slavery, lynchings, and executions. Georgia, whose earliest death penalty statutes applied to crimes committed by slaves or free people of color, has done more to shape the “modern” death penalty than perhaps any other state. It was a Georgia case that led to McCleskey v. Kemp, a Supreme Court ruling that insulated the death penalty from race-based legal challenges by forcing defendants to prove that racial bias had been intentional.

McCleskey was decided less than a decade before a jury dominated by white men sent Pye to death row. He was one of several Black men sentenced to death in Spalding County after being represented by Johnny Mostiler, a lawyer alleged to be openly racist toward his clients. In 2008, Georgia executed a man named Curtis Osborne despite allegations that Mostiler had repeatedly referred to him as a “little n–” who deserved to die. A lawyer who was briefly appointed to represent Osborne alongside Mostiler recalled a conversation in which Mostiler “said he thought young black men were lazy and asked me why I thought that was so.” In 2016, Kenneth Fults was executed despite accounts that Mostiler had slept through much of his trial — and despite statements from a juror who later said he was committed to voting for death “because that’s what that n– deserved.”

Mostiler, who died in 2000, was questioned by a trial judge about his use of racial slurs after one of his clients raised concerns. According to the transcript, Mostiler said that he did not “use those terms out in public.”

Colleagues and contemporaries of Mostiler’s have denied that he was racist against his clients. In a phone call, William McBroom, the former district attorney who tried both Pye and Fults, adamantly rejected the idea that racism infected the cases. “Johnny Mostiler did more for minorities in Spalding County than any other lawyer that I know of,” he said. Mostiler was always willing to give free legal advice, McBroom added. “I don’t see how he made a living until he got the public defender job.”

Whether Mostiler was motivated by prejudice or not, the record in Pye’s case reveals staggering failures. Pye was convicted after a three-day trial in which Mostiler called no witnesses apart from Pye himself. While he called several of Pye’s family members to testify at the sentencing stage, Mostiler failed to investigate and present crucial mitigating evidence that could have led the jury to spare his client’s life.

There is also reason to question the theory the state presented at trial. Pye’s previous appellate attorneys uncovered evidence showing that the star witness in the case — a teenager named Anthony Freeman, who agreed to testify against Pye as part of a plea deal — gave shifting accounts of the crime in the years leading up to Pye’s trial. Years after Pye was sentenced to die, Freeman told Pye’s attorneys that his testimony was coerced by the district attorney and law enforcement, who “made it clear that Willie Pye was the person they were after.”

In the early morning hours of November 16, 1993, a local farmer in Griffin went out to check on his livestock when he spotted a body lying on the dirt road. A sheriff’s deputy identified the body as Alicia Lynn Yarbrough, who was just short of her 21st birthday. She had been shot three times, the fatal shot tearing through her abdomen.

The mother of three young children, Yarbrough had struggled with addiction and abusive relationships. Police quickly zeroed in on her ex-boyfriend, 28-year-old Willie Pye, who was known to sell drugs around town. After hearing that police were looking for him, he went to the station to be interviewed the same day, telling investigators that he had not seen Yarbrough for about two weeks.

But this was a lie. As Pye would later admit, he’d seen Yarbrough the night before, at a local motel where he sometimes stayed under an alias. Pye had been hanging out that night with a man named Chester Adams and a teenager named Anthony Freeman. According to Pye, the pair dropped him off at the motel and later returned accompanied by Yarbrough. Although Pye and Yarbrough were no longer together, they still hooked up from time to time. Yarbrough had sex with all three of them that night in exchange for crack cocaine, Pye said. After that, she left with Adams and Freeman. Pye swore he never saw her again.

Adams was questioned on the same day as Pye. He denied his involvement but later pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to life. But Freeman, who was being held in jail on a separate charge, implicated both men and himself. Although he was 15, he was only in 8th grade and small for his age. “When I saw him, I thought he was about 12 years old,” one sheriff’s investigator later testified. Freeman said that Pye had gone to the house Yarbrough shared with another man, robbed it, and then forced Yarbrough to the motel, where all three of them raped her. Afterward, he said, Pye drove her to a field and shot her. On the basis of Freeman’s account, Pye was indicted for malice murder. Prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty.

Representing Pye was 49-year-old Mostiler, Spalding County’s lone public defender. The chain-smoking, handlebar mustache-wearing son of a Georgia lawmaker, Mostiler “never conformed to the stereotype of the public defender,” as The American Prospect recounted in a lengthy profile published after his death. “Decked out in flashy jewelry and a black cowboy hat, he arrived at the Spalding Courthouse in a mustard green 1972 Cadillac El Dorado convertible.”

“We’ll enter pleas all week, at a rate of about 10 to 12 every 45 minutes.”

Mostiler had made a lucrative deal with the county to take over the entire indigent defense docket for a flat fee. The goal, he said, was to save money for the county. But for many of Mostiler’s clients, the result was life-ruining. His caseload was preposterous even without the addition of private clients. Spalding County had higher crime rates than many neighboring jurisdictions, and Mostiler was handling up to 900 cases a year. He solved this problem through a steady stream of guilty pleas.

“We’ll enter pleas all week, at a rate of about 10 to 12 every 45 minutes,” Mostiler told the Prospect. Many of the pleas came at the last minute, he added, since “defendants don’t get the fear of God in them ’til a trial is coming up.”

Pye refused to make a deal with the state. “I’m guilty of … not turning in what I know that night about Adams and Freeman bringing Alicia Yarbrough to my motel room,” he insisted on the stand. “But I never considered making no kind of deal because I did not commit no murder.”

Prosecuting the case was McBroom, Griffin’s judicial circuit district attorney, who had a reputation for aggressively seeking death sentences. In his first five years in office, McBroom sent five people to death row, including three of Mostiler’s clients. In his opening statement, McBroom laid out the evidence, along with Pye’s motive: He harbored a grudge against Yarbrough and her live-in boyfriend, Charles Puckett, because Yarbrough had recently given birth to a baby and Puckett signed the birth certificate. “Pye thinks it’s his child, and he’s mad about it,” McBroom said. Pye decided to rob the two, then raped and killed Yarbrough in a brutal act of vengeance.

The evidence against Pye was considerable. There was DNA from sperm matching Pye, along with witnesses who saw him with a distinctive .22 caliber gun that allegedly matched the bullets used to kill Yarbrough. But the case turned on the testimony of Freeman, the only one who claimed to have witnessed the murder. In convoluted testimony, he said that he, Pye, and Chester abducted Yarbrough from her home, gang raped her at the motel, drove around, and then returned to rape her again. Later, they drove Yarbrough to a cow pasture. “All of us got out. He told her to lay flat on the ground, face down, and he shot her.”

Pye was swiftly convicted and sentenced to die.

Pye arrived on death row as executions were peaking across the country. During his first decade at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, the state killed 19 of his neighbors. Although executions have declined ever since, in the nearly 30 years Pye has spent on death row, 56 people have been put to death.

In the meantime, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision that might have allowed Pye to get off death row. In Atkins v. Virginia, the court ruled that executing people with intellectual disabilities was a violation of the Eighth Amendment. In a series of mental health evaluations, Pye’s post-conviction attorneys found that he had an IQ score of 68. But efforts to challenge his conviction on that basis were denied.

Post-conviction attorneys found that Pye had an IQ score of 68.

The question of Pye’s intellectual abilities was one of many things that Mostiler should have investigated before trial. But there was no record of a mental health evaluation or efforts to obtain Pye’s educational records.

The more Pye’s post-conviction attorneys learned about Mostiler’s work, the more disturbing it became. Despite his client’s insistence that he did not shoot Yarbrough, Mostiler did not appear to have investigated an alternate theory of the crime. The lawyers uncovered additional statements given by Freeman between his initial arrest in 1993 and Pye’s 1996 trial, which were never turned over to the defense. In one, given during a mental health evaluation, Freeman told a psychiatrist that he and Adams had picked up Yarbrough on the night in question, and she had gone with them willingly, later doing cocaine and having sex with them and Pye. The account echoed what Pye said at trial.

The lawyers also spoke to a friend and neighbor of Yarbrough’s, who said that on the night she was killed, Yarbrough came over to use the phone. “Lynn made some calls to a hotel and asked for Willie’s room,” the friend said. She assumed Yarbrough was asking to be picked up so that she could go get drugs.

Pye’s lawyers also collected dozens of affidavits from Pye’s relatives, neighbors, social workers, and others who filled in the harrowing details of his family history, which was marked by generational trauma, extreme poverty, and violence. Pye’s mother, Lolla Mae, was raised by her grandparents, who lived on a white man’s farm where her grandfather worked the land “in exchange for some of the food and a place for the family to stay.” By the time she was 8 years old, she picked peanuts and cotton alongside her siblings.

Pye’s father, who spent years working on a chain gang, was incarcerated when Pye was born. According to affidavits given to Pye’s attorneys, he drank heavily and beat his wife and kids. In one affidavit, a neighbor recalled seeing family fights spill outside. “You would see the boys attacking their father on the porch to get him away from their mother. … As the older boys grew up, they too began to drink heavily and that made the situation in the house more explosive.”

Uncovering evidence of family trauma is a critical component of any modern death penalty trial. Capital defense teams often include a mitigation specialist, who is tasked with investigating a client’s family history, particularly any evidence of abuse or neglect. But in the mid-1990s, most death penalty jurisdictions had not meaningfully incorporated such work into capital defense. In Spalding County, Mostiler handled death penalty cases without so much as a second attorney, let alone a mitigation specialist.

Billing records reviewed by Pye’s post-conviction attorneys showed a shocking lack of attention to the case. With the trial just weeks away, Mostiler had not yet pursued “a single lead provided by Mr. Pye,” the attorneys wrote in a petition challenging Pye’s conviction. “And it was not until five days before the scheduled start of jury selection that [Mostiler] began to identify mitigation witnesses.”

Pye’s case was described as “a shocking relic of the past.”

This work mostly fell to Mostiler’s investigator, a former cop named Dewey Yarbrough (no relation to Alicia). According to one of Pye’s sisters, Yarbrough asked her to think of good character witnesses for him. “It was short notice, but I tried,” she told Pye’s attorneys. In a deposition, Yarbrough estimated that he met with “maybe four” of Pye’s family members and “even tried to make arrangements” for them to attend the trial. But he did not find them particularly helpful. “I can remember thinking, and I want to say this was during, right before the sentencing phase, you know, I don’t care about going back over there and trying to get them here.”

Judge Jill Pryor, part of the original three-judge panel that vacated Pye’s death sentence, rejected Yarbrough’s characterization in a lengthy dissent to the 11th Circuit’s reversal. “The record unmistakably demonstrates that any failure to marshal family support … was due not to the family’s unwillingness to cooperate but rather to Mr. Yarbrough’s lack of care,” she wrote.

Yarbrough did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

McBroom vociferously denied withholding evidence from Pye’s defense, including the shifting statements from Freeman. “That’s a bunch of baloney,” he said. Besides, he added, the issue had been litigated and the courts upheld Pye’s conviction anyway. He rejected the notion that Freeman’s testimony had been coerced and defended his selection of a nearly all-white jury, pointing out that the victim was Black. “Race is not an issue in this case.”

As for Pye’s upbringing and concerns over insufficient mitigation, McBroom was unmoved. “The family was just a crime family,” he said. He knew plenty of people who grew up impoverished and abused and did not go on to commit murder. Finally, he dismissed the notion that Pye’s IQ should have precluded him from getting the death penalty. “The only intellectual disability he has is a condition called MAH — Mean as Hell.”

Barring any last-minute intervention, Pye, now 59, will die at 7 p.m. tonight.

Judge Timothy Batten denied Pye’s appeal a few hours after the hearing in Newnan. “While one might characterize Pye’s plight as unfair in relation to the few death row inmates covered by the agreement, it does not shock the conscience,” he wrote. Potek appealed to the 11th Circuit, which declined to grant a stay of execution.

On Tuesday, the Georgia Board of Pardon and Paroles held a clemency hearing for Pye. The board members have the sole authority to grant clemency — the governor cannot act alone. In a press release, the board rejected Pye’s appeal for mercy.

Clemency proceedings are closed to the public, but the Department of Corrections released the clemency application prepared by Pye’s attorneys. It called Pye’s case “a shocking relic of the past” and included letters from three jurors who sent him to death row but now oppose his execution. “Many of the jurors felt his attorney Johnny Mostiler did an inadequate job of defending him at trial,” one woman wrote. “It was a serious case but Mostiler could not have cared less.”

Another woman, who was the only Black member of the jury, said she wished jurors had heard about Pye’s background and cognitive impairments. “Mental health is so critical to why people behave the way they do,” she wrote. “How someone is raised matters.”

Through Cathy Harmon-Christian, the anti-death penalty activist, Pye’s relatives declined to be interviewed. According to the clemency petition, “Mr. Pye and his family were relieved and overjoyed” when the 11th Circuit briefly vacated his death sentence. Those who remain in touch with Pye described his positive impact on their lives and those of his neighbors on death row.

“I’ve spent 30 years or so in the prison visitation room with Uncle Will,” one niece wrote. “I’ve seen the way other inmates greet him with a smile, constantly introduce their visitors to him, and share with me how Uncle Will keeps them laughing and has been a source of hope and inspiration.”

“A child gets to a certain age where they need to know the story about what happened.”

Family members on the other side of the case feel differently about Pye. In a phone call, Alicia Yarbrough’s oldest daughter, Tawanna Bell, described how her mother’s murder impacted her and her siblings: “She got took away before she got a chance to even be a mom. Before she even got a chance to make memories with me.” Bell was just 5 years old and living with her grandmother when Yarbrough was killed. But it was her mom who did her hair and got her ready for her first day of school that fall. “She had me looking like a doll,” she said.

The murder devastated Yarbrough’s mother. Gernetta Starks, Bell’s cousin, said the crime “ate away” at her for the rest of her life. “When the police came to inform her that her daughter was murdered — the way she was murdered — the whole family had to console her,” she said. Now Pye’s looming execution was opening old wounds. For Bell, seeing the case back in the news has revealed horrific details of her mother’s murder that she’d never heard before. “I feel like they didn’t explain a lot of stuff to the kids because they wanted to protect them,” Starks said. “But a child gets to a certain age where they need to know the story about what happened.”

Although they support Pye’s execution, both women said his death sentence has done little to ease the trauma the family has lived with for 30 years. A few years ago, Starks launched an advocacy organization inspired by Yarbrough called When She Survives, which seeks to help victims of domestic violence and provide the kind of support they never received. Bell plans to witness the execution alongside her siblings. But she does not expect it to heal her pain.

“We are a forgiving family. But how do you forgive somebody that simply didn’t have any regard for your family member?”

Update: March 21, 2024
Willie Pye was executed by lethal injection on March 20 and pronounced dead at 11:03 p.m. He was 59 years old.

The post After Four Years Without an Execution, Georgia Prepares to Kill Willie Pye appeared first on The Intercept.

Growing up, Newson did not know the details of his father’s case. Ra’id was simply the dad with a playful sense of humor who loved Prince and kung fu movies and teaching his son to weightlift. Although his parents separated when Newson was young, he’d seen Ra’id frequently; the year before his father’s arrest, Newson traveled from his home in Atlanta to spend the summer in Michigan City, Indiana, where Ra’id ran a car wash and spent nights working security at the zoo. “We would look at all the animals and basically get like a backstage pass,” Newson recalled.

In 2002, Ra’id was arrested alongside several other suspects following a botched bank robbery that left two people dead and another paralyzed. His co-defendants pointed to him as the mastermind, which Ra’id adamantly denied. “I did not take part in that atrocity,” he told the court following his trial. “I did not shoot and kill anyone.”

Newson attended his father’s sentencing hearing, along with his mother, Jeannie Gipson-Newson. A death sentence would be “devastating to my child,” she remembered testifying. But it felt futile. The jurors seemed to have made up their minds. In 2004, Ra’id was sentenced to die.

Like many parents, Ra’id didn’t show his children he was struggling. “He never really liked to be a burden to anyone,” Newson recalled. After his first several years on death row, Ra’id stopped reaching out to Newson. When he later learned about his grandchildren, he was reluctant to form a relationship with them. “Even if they meet me, it will be behind glass,” Newson remembered him saying. “I couldn’t touch them. I couldn’t hug them.”

In the spring of 2020, however, the Federal Bureau of Prisons began allotting hundreds of free phone minutes to people in federal custody under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. Ra’id began calling his son. Soon, they were talking multiple times a week. Ra’id’s grandchildren eventually “won him over,” Newson said. Before long, Ra’id was sending portraits of the kids drawn in his death row cell.

Later that year, the Trump administration began carrying out the first federal executions in 17 years. One by one, Ra’id saw longtime neighbors taken to die. “It definitely was nerve-wracking for him,” Newson said. “He’s like, ‘People that I’ve been in here with for the last 10, 15 years … you see them get called and never come back.’” Like all his neighbors, Ra’id feared getting an execution date himself. In the end, he survived.

In 2022, Ra’id’s legal team told Newson about a new program to help families visit loved ones on federal death row. The initiative was started by anti-death penalty activists who raised money to provide financial support for travel, lodging, and meals. Ra’id, who had always been firm that Newson should not spend money on him that could be spent on his kids, seemed enthusiastic. A self-described procrastinator, Newson did not fill out the paperwork right away. But last May, he flew from Atlanta to Indianapolis, where he was picked up by volunteers, then driven straight to the penitentiary.

Things did not go according to plan. At security, Newson was told he was in violation of the dress code and would not be allowed inside. He called his ride and went to a nearby Walmart. By the time he returned in new clothes, there was only an hour left of visitation.

Newson’s agitation dissipated when he spotted his dad. “It was a flood of emotions coming over me,” he said. The last time they’d seen one another, Ra’id was in the best shape of his life. Now Newson stared at his gray beard, overwhelmed by the years they had lost. He wanted badly to reach out but was stopped by the thick plexiglass. He struggled to understand the rationale. “I’m his son. What is he going to do to me?”

The hour went quickly. By the end of Newson’s second visit that weekend, they had talked about virtually everything. Ra’id was eager to share what he was reading; he had recently finished “King Leopold’s Ghost,” about Belgium’s violent exploitation of Congo. He urged his son to pay attention to the state of politics in the U.S. “There are some things out there that should terrify you,” he said. “And you just gotta be ready for whatever’s coming.”

Saying goodbye was “gut-wrenching,” Newson said. He resolved to apply for another visit, this time with his wife and kids.

On the Monday after Thanksgiving, Ra’id turned 59 years old. When Newson wished him a happy birthday, he replied, “Ain’t nothing happy about this,” then changed the subject to his grandson, who was about to turn 10. He kept his son company on the phone the next day as Newson rushed to get his kids ready for school.

On Thursday, Ra’id called early in the morning. Newson was in the middle of a serious conversation with his wife, so Ra’id said he would call back. He never did. The next day, during a break at work, Newson retrieved his cellphone from his locker and saw a flurry of messages from family members. Ra’id had been found unresponsive at the prison that morning. He was declared dead shortly afterward. The cause, Newson later learned, was suicide.

“We Have to Do Something”

The Death Row Visitation Project was an attempt to make something good out of something horrific.

Even for veteran abolitionists, the execution spree that began in Terre Haute in 2020 was an unprecedented nightmare: twelve men and one woman killed in the federal death chamber over the course of six months. The killings were carried out amid a deadly pandemic, and the virus spread among those who traveled to Terre Haute. By the last executions in January 2021, prison staff, death penalty lawyers, reporters, and the condemned men themselves had gotten sick with Covid-19, while the Supreme Court did nothing to intervene.

Among those scarred by the executions was Bill Breeden, a longtime pacifist and Universalist minister who served as spiritual adviser to Corey Johnson, the 12th person put to death. Inside the execution chamber, officials refused to let Breeden deliver the statement he’d written with Johnson, words filled with love for Johnson’s family and remorse for his crimes. Breeden was especially haunted by the fact that Johnson had spent 29 years in solitary confinement without a visit from relatives. In the run-up to the execution, Breeden raised money from his congregation to bring Johnson’s family to Terre Haute. But Johnson’s legal team offered to cover the costs, leaving Breeden with unexpected funds.

It’s not unusual for people on death row to become estranged from their families. The stigma of a death sentence compounds the practical challenges of staying in touch. Phone calls, stamps, and emails get expensive quickly — and visits are often prohibitive. While studies have consistently shown the importance of maintaining close ties to loved ones while in prison, they tend to be framed around reducing recidivism, which does not apply to people the government intends to kill. And though the BOP boasts a “policy to place individuals within 500 miles of their release residence, as available and appropriate,” the policy is irrelevant to people on federal death row.

“No matter where that person’s from, they are housed here in Terre Haute,” said Barbara Battista, an activist and Catholic sister with the local Providence of St. Mary-of-the-Woods, which has a longstanding relationship with the penitentiary. “That’s a real burden for persons with minimal resources, not just financial but emotional, psychological.”

Like Breeden, Battista served as a spiritual adviser during the federal executions, accompanying two men, including Keith Nelson, who was among the first to die. “Keith was the one who said to me, ‘I want you to tell the world what goes on in here,’” she recalled. To her, this meant not only the chillingly sanitized ritual of lethal injection, but also the brutal isolation that generated so much suffering for the condemned and their loved ones. In conversations with Breeden, “we were like, ‘We have to do something about this,’” Battista said.

“So many local people would visit if they could. The system is set up to fail human beings.”

Helping families visit death row seemed like an ideal use of the leftover funds. Breeden and Battista teamed up with veteran death penalty lawyer Margaret O’Donnell, who had joined the execution vigils in Terre Haute and was well acquainted with the BOP’s myriad rules, some of which she had never been able to comprehend. Men on federal death row, for example, are prohibited from receiving visits from anyone who did not know them prior to their convictions, a policy that stifles new relationships. “So many local people would visit if they could,” O’Donnell said. “The system is set up to fail human beings.”

The group formed a committee to review applications and approve spending decisions. In June 2022, they sent a letter to everyone on federal death row announcing the Terre Haute Death Row Visitation Project. Battista’s name and email address were on the bottom of the form. She was soon inundated with responses.

Today, the burgeoning program has funded at least 18 visits for a quarter of the 40 men on federal death row. Applications are processed four times a year, with a small network of volunteers providing everything from airport rides to gift cards at local restaurants. With a shoestring budget sustained by small donations, the program has limited capacity. “Each guy can have one funded visit a year,” O’Donnell explained. Eventually, they hope to provide more.

To O’Donnell, the project is about “inserting a little bit of humanity into an inhumane system.” While it cannot undo the psychic toll of living under a death sentence, the visitation program provides a critical lifeline. In the wake of the execution spree, Ra’id’s suicide underscored the unseen trauma among those who survived. For families who lived through the executions, the visits are a chance to reunite with relatives whose future remains uncertain. With Donald Trump vying to return to office, many fear that their loved ones may not survive a new administration.

Yet the looming specter of executions is only one reason the visits feel so urgent. Families I spoke to expressed deep concern over the day-to-day conditions on federal death row, especially the impact of long-term solitary confinement on their loved ones’ mental health. After his father’s death, Newson has returned to this again and again. “We can’t even begin to imagine what the last 20 years for him has been like,” he said.

Invisible Grief

I went to Terre Haute a few weeks before Ra’id’s suicide, in November 2023. It was the first time I’d been back since the execution spree. Outside the Dollar General across from the penitentiary, anti-death penalty signs had been left by activists passing through town, one of which read, “Execution is not the solution.”

The presence of protesters was often the only hint of the killings being carried out at the sprawling prison complex. News coverage was relatively sparse, eclipsed by the coronavirus pandemic, national upheaval over the killing of George Floyd, and the chaos of the 2020 presidential race.

Through it all, the Dollar General became a gathering spot for demonstrators, reporters, and occasionally family members of the condemned, who were otherwise rendered invisible. Unlike victims’ loved ones, who received a range of support from the BOP and had a chance to address the press after executions, relatives of the condemned were not allowed in the media room at all.

This erasure was part of a larger experience known as disenfranchised grief, in which pain and loss are not socially validated. For many death row families, a loved one’s sentence is something they do not share with their employers, classmates, or neighbors. Executions become something to process in private. As the sister of Dustin Higgs, the last man put to death by the Trump administration, told me, “It’s hard to explain how you feel to people because this is not a normal grief.”

Many activists and family members felt a glimmer of hope after the executions ended. Although Trump’s killing spree had been mostly ignored during the presidential race, Joe Biden vowed to “pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level” and encourage states to do the same. In a letter written on behalf of 45 members of Congress, Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., urged then-Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland to stop seeking new death sentences and “direct the Bureau of Prisons to dismantle the federal death chamber.”

That didn’t happen. The execution chamber remains intact. And while the Biden Justice Department took the death penalty off the table in a number of cases inherited from the Trump administration, it has continued to seek new death sentences. Last year, a federal jury voted in favor of the death penalty for Robert Bowers, the man who killed 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. Last month, the Biden administration announced it would seek the death penalty against the 18-year-old mass shooter who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in 2022.

“It’s hard to explain how you feel to people because this is not a normal grief.”

Today, many death row families feel forgotten by Biden. Despite a new BOP director who promised reform of the notoriously dysfunctional federal prison system, conditions have not improved for the men in Terre Haute. In October, the population of the Special Confinement Unit had to be moved to a different part of the prison due to an electrical malfunction that was impacting the opening and closing of cell doors. Staff shortages often have prison guards working mandated overtime — 16-hour shifts that lead to burnout and frustration too easily taken out on the men in their custody.

I met Mark Issac Snarr’s family in a quiet corner of the Drury Inn and Suites on Route 41. Snarr’s younger brother, Zach, had just left the prison with his wife, Kelsey. The brothers’ father had died in August, just one month after being diagnosed with cancer, and the pain of the loss was written on Zach’s face. With blue eyes and a long, shaggy beard, he bore a strong resemblance to his brother and dad alike.

The Snarrs had spent the past three days visiting Mark. The days were long; they arrived around 8 a.m., went through security, and waited to be escorted to the top floor of the building, where visitation lasted until 3 p.m. Yet the time went fast — “too fast,” Zach said. He looked forward to buying his brother snacks and microwaveable sandwiches from the vending machine. “I got him a chicken cordon bleu today,” Zach said with a slight smile. “He liked it.”

Snarr was already incarcerated when he was convicted and sentenced to death for killing a man at a federal prison in Beaumont, Texas. He arrived in Terre Haute in 2010. Even by the standards of the Special Confinement Unit, Snarr has almost no freedom of movement, spending 23 hours a day in his cell. Zach calculates that he has spent almost 25 years in segregated housing, which is unheard of in the rest of the world.

Snarr’s survival is almost certainly rooted in strong ties to his family. He and his brother talk once a week, and he calls his mother every day. “She kind of reports back to the family,” Kelsey said. Through his relatives, Snarr receives reminders that he has not been entirely forgotten. “People from when he was a kid, 10 years old, you know, they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, please tell him I love him. I’m thinking about him,’” Kelsey said.

Kelsey was one of the first people to apply for the visitation program. After the family’s first application was declined for lack of funds, they were approved to visit in 2023 but canceled due to Zach’s father’s illness. As Kelsey recalled, the woman she spoke to reassured her that they would hold their spot. “She’s like, ‘Just contact us whenever the time is right.’ And that was very kind of them.”

Willingness to adapt to families’ changing circumstances is important for those who don’t have much flexibility in their lives. Although Zach and Kelsey would likely have found a way to visit Snarr on their own, many people are not in a position to do the same. “Most of these families are indigent,” Zach said. “Or health-wise, they’re not good.” The journey to Terre Haute is especially daunting for families who live as far away as they do. From their home in northern Utah, the drive takes some 22 hours, or about three days on a Greyhound bus. “Then you go visit four or five days,” Zach said. “It’s really exhausting.”

Zach was thankful that the program had allowed his father to come to Terre Haute before he died. Although he and Snarr’s mother split up when he was young, the two remained close; they visited their son together, staying at a lakeside cabin on the lush, leafy grounds of St. Mary-of-the-Woods. The cabins are secluded and designed for quiet contemplation, a welcome oasis after a day spent inside a prison. There was even an equestrian center nearby, which delighted his father, who raised horses. “It was paradise for him, honestly,” Zach said. “Couldn’t have asked for a better place for him to be for his last visit.”

From death row, Snarr sent the Catholic sisters a gift: a framed oil painting of two birds against a brilliant orange sunset. “I want to thank you all for making it possible to see my family,” he wrote. “I am forever grateful.”

A few days later, I met Mariette Mendez, the sister of Daniel Troya, who has been on death row since 2009. She had managed to make the trip to Terre Haute only one other time since his conviction. She drove with her parents and brother from South Florida, where she lived at the time. It took nearly 18 hours.

Troya and a co-defendant were sent to death row for killing a family of four in a drug-related shooting on a Florida highway. His sentencing judge lamented that despite growing up in a “wonderful family,” Troya had no regard for human life. But this didn’t capture the brother Mendez knew. And it was certainly not true of the man he’d become. Now 40, he had matured, she said, describing him as “an old soul in a young body.”

Mendez was being hosted by volunteers with the program. The basement guest area was spacious, with a large bed and sofa bed covered with quilts. There was a kitchenette with Zebra Cakes on the counter, along with microwavable macaroni and cheese. Mendez wore a weary smile, her long black hair pulled back in a bun. On her forearm, she had a tattoo that read “resilient.”

“I’m still not settled, you know?”

Mendez was drained after a long day at the prison. She had flown from Houston the night before with her two teenage sons and her 2-year-old, Jasai, then got up early to be at the prison. It was a lot for Jasai — “my little monster” — but Mendez was determined to make the most of the trip. “When I got that email, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is really happening,’” she said. “If it wasn’t for this, I don’t know when I’d be able to come and see him.”

Like other families who lived through the execution spree, Mendez had been gripped by the fear that her brother could be next. “I was terrified.” Any time Troya called, she would brace herself for the possibility that his time was up. It was on her mind “all day, every day,” she said. “I’m still not settled, you know?”

Mendez became emotional describing the moment she saw her brother. “It was pure, like, ‘Oh my God!’” she said. “You just want to reach out and touch, but you can’t.” His whole face lit up when he saw her youngest son, whom he’d never met. “It took my breath away to see his smile.”

For Troya, the opportunity to have a relationship with his nephews gave him a sense of purpose and pride. He recalled how his sister used to tell her boys to turn off the TV when he called. “I thought to myself, ‘These kids might think I’m important. I’m sure there’s not much of that from anyone else.’” The realization motivated him to improve himself, to learn how to “handle the responsibilities of being a loving and caring uncle.” He has tried to be a good influence, warning them to stay out of trouble and cautioning them about interactions with police. “I can’t claim to be an angel, but I know one thing. I am a great fucking uncle. … And the visiting project allows me to do that in person.”

“One Long Death”

A few weeks after my visit to Indiana, I got a press release from the Bureau of Prisons. It was titled “Death at USP Terre Haute.” At 9:25 a.m. on December 1, it read, “Odell Corley was found unresponsive” and pronounced dead. Ra’id’s biography was distilled into 78 words, listing his age, the crimes for which he was convicted, and the date he arrived on death row.

O’Donnell, the death penalty lawyer, heard about Ra’id’s death from his legal team, who asked if the visitation fund might be able to help Newson and his family attend the funeral in Michigan City. The committee approved it unanimously. Although O’Donnell was saddened by Ra’id’s death — there had not been another suicide on federal death row in her nearly 40 years of practice — it didn’t entirely surprise her. “Our clients live difficult, difficult lives,” she said. She was heartened that Newson had been able to see his father before losing him. “To have spent time with him even as limited as it was. … That’s why I wanted this program to exist.”

“You’re not living when you’re in solitary confinement. You’re dying.”

Ra’id’s death came as a gut punch to Breeden, the minister, who had spent time with Newson in Terre Haute. Breeden got the news from a close friend on death row, who himself had attempted suicide three times. “I think the general population can’t understand what solitary confinement is like,” Breeden said. “People need to understand that death row is really just one long death. You’re not living when you’re in solitary confinement. You’re dying.” For his friend, the temporary unit where they have spent the past few months has a silver lining. Unlike the regular Special Confinement Unit, which only affords a partial view of the cell across the way, “they can see each other.”

Two weeks after Christmas, I met Rose Holomn at her home in Atlanta. Her chihuahua, Goldie, was curled up on the couch while Holomn showed me photos of her son, Julius Robinson. Once a year for the past several years, Goldie has made the trip to Terre Haute alongside Holomn, usually in August — Robinson’s birthday month. In a set of recent pictures, he wore khaki pants, a brown jacket, and white sneakers. On the back of one photo, he’d written his age: 47. On another: “Lookin good and feeling good!”

Holomn had not heard much about the suicide in Terre Haute. Although she was in frequent contact with her son, he tried to shield her from things like that. She knew Robinson had been affected by the killing spree. “I could hear it in his voice. As a mother, you know when your child is hurting.” The executions had been traumatic enough watching from the outside. “Every month … it was like, God, Jesus,” she said. “That’s somebody’s child.”

Robinson was disturbed by the killing of Corey Johnson, who was intellectually disabled. “He didn’t even know why he was getting executed,” Holomn remembered her son telling her. And he was especially wounded by the execution of Christopher Vialva, who was an integral part of Robinson’s faith community and admired for his talent at crochet — a popular pastime on death row. For Holomn’s birthday last year, Robinson sent a large blue blanket displaying their family tree, the names of his relatives neatly crocheted with bright orange yarn.

Robinson was sentenced to die in 2002 for a series of murders tied to a drug ring in North Texas. He was 25 years old. For most of his first decade on death row, Holomn was living in Dayton, Ohio, which meant Terre Haute was relatively close. She tried to visit every weekend, sometimes driving out and back in a day. The no-contact visits were painful at first, but she got used to it. “I can’t touch my son, but at least I can go and see him,” she said. She kept going even when others could not keep up, like Robinson’s older brother. “When he did go, he would take it so hard. He just stopped going for a while.”

“Every month … it was like, God, Jesus. That’s somebody’s child.”

After nine years in Ohio, however, Holomn moved back to her hometown in rural Arkansas, just over the Mississippi border. Her visits dwindled to once a year. As she got older and moved to Atlanta, health and financial challenges made the trips even harder. But she stays in touch with Robinson via email and phone calls. When I visited, she was teasing him over her beloved Dallas Cowboys’ thumping of the Washington Commanders.

Holomn lit up talking about her son. She felt optimistic about his ongoing appeals, which she discussed with Robinson’s legal team the last time she was in Terre Haute. But there was sadness just beneath the surface. She felt betrayed by Biden. “He didn’t keep his promise,” she said. “As a mother, having a son on death row, it’s a hard, aching experience.”

Holomn was filled with gratitude for the visitation program. The drive from Atlanta takes about eight hours, and she could usually only stay for a weekend. Now she can stay a whole week. The program has also helped other family members visit, most recently Robinson’s 70-year-old father, Jimmie, who had not seen his son in four years. Holomn went with him; she laughed recalling a fevered argument father and son had over religion. “I could’ve stayed at home,” she said. “They had a marvelous time.”

Jimmie died of a heart attack a few weeks later. It was painful to break the news to Robinson, who was stunned. But Holomn was certain he would get through the loss the way he has survived everything else. “My baby has been so strong,” she said. “And if he hasn’t, he’s doing a good job of hiding it.”

A few days after visiting Holomn, I met Newson at his home south of Atlanta. “Welcome to our comfortable happy sometimes loud usually messy full of love home,” a wall decoration read.

To my surprise, Newson had only recently learned about the circumstances of his father’s death. No one from the prison had ever reached out to him, he said. He read the details in a news story, which pained and confused him. The article said his father had discussed his plans with loved ones beforehand, but he’d never said anything to Newson. He was still grappling with what to believe. “Parents put on masks for their kids no matter what’s going on,” Newson reasoned. “But I genuinely can’t remember a time that I saw him sad.”

There are signs in Ra’id’s case files that he struggled with his mental health. In a petition challenging his death sentence in 2010, Ra’id’s attorneys highlighted bouts of depression and jail records that suggested he’d attempted suicide once before. The petition also described a childhood marked by trauma, abuse, and racism, including at the hands of a grade school art teacher who told him he’d never amount to anything.

In fact, Ra’id’s artistic talent remains a point of pride for Newson, whose home is filled with lovingly rendered portraits of his family, including the grandchildren Ra’id never got to meet but reproduced from photographs. When Ra’id heard that his grandson had been accepted into a local elementary school for the arts, “he was ecstatic,” Newson recalled. He wished he could be there to nurture his grandson’s talent. Instead, he sent his pencils, erasers, and sketchbooks from death row.

In one of their last phone calls, Ra’id admitted that he wasn’t in the best headspace. “He didn’t call it a depression,” Newson said. “He said, ‘I’m kind of in this funk that I can’t seem to shake.’” He thought he might snap out of it if he tackled a new drawing he’d been planning. “But I don’t think he ever got around to it.” Ra’id’s final portrait, of his granddaughter and her cousin, came in the mail a few days after he died.

“I don’t want to say the word ‘closure,’” Newson said about seeing his father one last time. But he treasured the time they got together. He wanted people to understand that men on death row have families who love them. “And this is impacting them too.” Newson’s wife came home as our visit was wrapping up. For years, she had watched as Ra’id’s relationship with his son had blossomed. “His presence was felt,” she said. “I’m so happy that I got to witness it. It was a beautiful thing.”

The post Amid the Lingering Trauma of Trump’s Executions, a New Project Brings Families to Federal Death Row appeared first on The Intercept.

In May, the court blocked Glossip’s looming execution while it decided whether to take up his most recent appeal. The couple knew that a decision wouldn’t come before the fall. But fall came and went as they dutifully made their weekly docket checks. Glossip’s case just wasn’t there. The court kept putting off its decision. Over time, they grew comfortable not knowing, relieved to be able to enjoy the holidays in relative peace after a long and stressful year.

Then on January 22, there it was. “All of a sudden, I said, ‘It’s there. I see Glossip.’” The court had decided to review the case. “I told him, ‘It’s granted! It’s granted!’”

Lea felt a rush of emotion. “It was really overwhelming.” She told Glossip to call his lawyer, Don Knight. “We’re going to Washington,” Knight responded.

The truth is that the situation is both a blessing and a curse. Glossip has learned the hard way not to put his faith in the Supreme Court. Nearly 10 years ago, Glossip was the named plaintiff in a challenge to Oklahoma’s controversial new lethal injection protocol. After oral arguments in the spring of 2015, the justices quickly dismissed concerns that the method could amount to torture. The ruling greased the wheels for Glossip’s execution, which would have gone forward later that year if not for a last-minute revelation that the state had procured the wrong combination of drugs, forcing it to call things off. The state later revealed that it had already used the same erroneous protocol to execute a different man.

The fallout over Glossip’s near-execution was swift. The state issued a moratorium on executions and an independent bipartisan commission was formed to study Oklahoma’s death penalty from top to bottom. In 2017, the commission issued a sweeping indictment of the system. Among its conclusions: The state of Oklahoma had condemned innocent people to death. The commission also offered a host of recommendations for reform; to date, virtually none of them have been implemented. In 2021, Oklahoma restarted executions using the same three-drug protocol as before.

Meanwhile, Glossip’s case began to draw more national attention — particularly after Investigation Discovery aired documentarian Joe Berlinger’s four-part series on the case. “Killing Richard Glossip,” which was inspired by The Intercept’s reporting, revealed evidence that undercut the state’s case against Glossip, while prompting new witnesses to come forward with information that bolstered his innocence claim. It also galvanized an unlikely contingent of supporters: Powerful state Republican lawmakers became convinced that Glossip was innocent. Determined to save him from execution, they rallied support among their peers and convinced the law firm Reed Smith to undertake a sweeping reinvestigation of the case.

The resulting 343-page report, released in 2022, painted the clearest picture to date of Glossip’s wrongful conviction. Among its revelations were stunning instances of prosecutorial misconduct. Nevertheless, no sooner had the explosive findings been made public than the state set a fourth execution date for Glossip. 

That Glossip is alive today is thanks in no small part to the Oklahoma’s attorney general, Gentner Drummond, who took office in early 2023. In the first weeks of his term Drummond announced a separate independent inquiry into Glossip’s case by a former elected district attorney and GOP state lawmaker Rex Duncan. Duncan’s report highlighted additional instances of prosecutorial misconduct, prompting Drummond to conclude that the state could not stand by Glossip’s conviction — let alone his execution. In April 2023, Drummond took the unprecedented step of asking the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate Glossip’s conviction. But the court refused, setting the stage for Glossip’s appeal to the Supreme Court. In a statement, Drummond applauded the justices’ decision to take Glossip’s case. “As Oklahoma’s chief law officer, I will continue fighting to ensure justice is done in this case and every other.”

Glossip was twice tried and sentenced to death for the January 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside a seedy Best Budget Inn that Van Treese owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. No physical evidence linked Glossip, the motel’s 34-year-old manager, to the crime. Instead, the case against him was built almost entirely on the testimony of 19-year-old Justin Sneed, who worked at the motel as a handyman.

Sneed admitted to murdering Van Treese but claimed that he was coerced by Glossip. On Sneed’s word alone, prosecutors theorized that Glossip wanted Van Treese dead so he could take over operations of the low-rent motel. At trial, they painted Sneed as powerless to resist Glossip’s commands. In exchange for testifying against Glossip, Sneed avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to life without parole.

Glossip has maintained his innocence, and over the years, evidence of his wrongful conviction has mounted. New evidence suggests that Sneed, a chronic drug user with a violent streak, initially planned to rob Van Treese, then killed him when the plan went sideways. Sneed implicated Glossip in this scheme during a coercive police interrogation. Witnesses who were ignored by police and prosecutors have since come forward to say that Sneed was cunning and manipulative and quite capable of killing a man on his own.

The multiple inquiries into Glossip’s case have exposed startling police and prosecutorial misconduct. The state destroyed a box of crucial evidence before Glossip was retried in 2004, and prosecutors suppressed evidence that Sneed sought to recant his incriminating testimony. Notes found in the state’s case file also reveal that prosecutors knew that portions of Sneed’s testimony were false.

Sneed had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium to manage it by a psychiatrist who evaluated him at the Oklahoma City Jail. At trial, Sneed denied that the evaluation ever took place and said he had no idea why he was given lithium. “I never seen no psychiatrist or anything,” Sneed testified. The prosecutors, who knew about Sneed’s diagnosis, failed to correct his testimony. This failure is in part what animated Drummond’s conclusion that Glossip’s conviction could not stand.

“There is no dispute that Sneed was the state’s key witness at the second trial. If Sneed had accurately disclosed that he had seen a psychiatrist, then the defense would have likely learned … the true reason for Sneed’s lithium prescription,” Drummond wrote in his motion asking the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate Glossip’s conviction. “With this information plus Sneed’s history of drug addiction, the state believes that a qualified defense attorney likely could have attacked Sneed’s ability to properly recall key facts at the second trial.”

“The state has reached the difficult conclusion that the conviction of Glossip was obtained with the benefit of material misstatements to the jury by its key witness,” Drummond wrote.

The court dismissed Drummond’s conclusions, rejecting the idea that Sneed’s statement was false and suggesting that he was “more than likely in denial of his mental health disorders.” The defense didn’t cross-examine Sneed about his diagnosis, the court speculated, because doing so would have demonstrated that he was “mentally vulnerable to Glossip’s manipulation and control.” The ruling cleared the way for the state to set a new execution date for Glossip. Knight, his attorney, vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court, calling it “unconscionable” for the OCCA to “attempt to force the state to move forward with this execution” given the attorney general himself agreed that the state’s star witness had been discredited. The Supreme Court stayed Glossip’s execution just days before he was set to die.

In the rare number of death penalty cases that reach the Supreme Court, state attorneys general are typically in the position of defending the conviction. Glossip’s return to Washington is extraordinary in that Drummond has made clear to the justices that he supports Glossip’s bid to overturn the case.

“Regrettably, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals refused to accept the state’s confession of error, instead reaching the extraordinary conclusion that Glossip’s execution must go forward,” Drummond wrote. “That decision cannot be the final word in this case.”

Drummond argued that the OCCA was wrong on both the facts and the law. Since Sneed was the “sole inculpatory witness” against Glossip, the state had a constitutional duty to turn over information about Sneed’s mental health diagnosis to the defense and a similar duty to correct his misleading testimony.

“The OCCA’s decision cannot be reconciled with this court’s precedents, the record in this case, or bedrock principles,” Drummond wrote.

Without Drummond to defend Glossip’s conviction, the state’s powerful prosecutors group, the Oklahoma District Attorneys Association, has stepped into the void. In a friend-of-the-court brief, they argue that the prosecutors in the case did nothing wrong, Sneed’s testimony was immaterial to Glossip’s conviction, there were no constitutional violations, and the OCCA was right to dismiss the case as little more than a frivolous attempt to delay Glossip’s execution. They accuse Drummond of being duped by an activist agenda. “Glossip and his abolitionist supporters are attempting to create the specter of an innocent person being executed, so that they can further their campaign against the death penalty.”

“These people will not admit that they’re wrong.”

Former Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater, whose office oversaw Glossip’s prosecution, has staunchly defended the conviction, dismissing all evidence to the contrary as nothing more than a “bullshit PR campaign.”

Knight dismisses the DA’s brief as an unserious argument driven by political grievance. “This is us against the District Attorney’s Council,” Knight said. “These people will not admit that they’re wrong. And they can’t stand the fact that Drummond did admit that they were wrong.”

Oral arguments before the Supreme Court will likely take place in the fall. The court has never been solicitous of capital cases and has become even less so in recent years as its ideology has lurched to the right. Still, as he waits for his case to be presented a second time, Glossip feels perhaps more hopeful than ever. “Rich’s whole experience has been the ultimate loss of faith in the system,” Lea Glossip said. To see so many people willing to step up and fight for him has done much to restore his belief that he may finally walk out of prison one day. After the past year of unrelenting execution dates, “we are beyond grateful.”

For Knight, who has spent the better part of a decade fighting to keep his client alive, the court’s decision to take the case was a hard-won victory in a saga marked by exhilarating highs and devastating lows. But it’s not over yet. “I will feel vindicated the day Rich walks out of prison. I will feel vindicated then. Until then I can’t say because who knows what they’ll do.”

The post Will the Supreme Court Force Oklahoma to Kill Richard Glossip? appeared first on The Intercept.

1

---

Rat’s in the Trap

The day before Michael Beckcom was arrested for murder, a Texas Ranger spotted his red Ford Explorer parked in a small town not far from the Gulf Coast. On its tailpipe was a silver substance that looked like the remnants of melted duct tape. It was evidence that would link Beckcom to the grisly killing of a federal witness.

On June 4, 1996, Beckcom was jailed on a $10 million bond for his role in the slaying of George “Nick” Brueggen. Brueggen had been cooperating with federal authorities to build a fraud and tax evasion case against Beckcom and his associates, who fancied themselves a sort of South Texas Mafia. Beckcom and several others, including Mark Crawford, the former mayor of sleepy Ingleside, Texas, locked Brueggen in a large metal storage box. Using duct tape, they attached one end of a garden hose to the box and the other end to the tailpipe of Beckcom’s SUV. According to the Texas Rangers’ report, Beckcom then revved the engine, asphyxiating Brueggen.

Facing a capital murder charge, Beckcom cut a deal with prosecutors, becoming the government’s key witness against Crawford, the mastermind behind the murder.

Beckcom’s testimony was vivid. “Nick was kicking the box and making noise; he was panicking,” he testified in federal court, recalling one of his associates offering a pithy aside: “The rat’s in the trap.” When it was all over, his friends were eager to open the box, Beckcom said, while he “looked from the distance” as fumes wafted from its lid. Brueggen’s “eyes were open, and he had a blank stare. He was frozen there.”

Beckcom was critical to convicting Crawford, and while a federal district judge ultimately signed off on his plea deal, he also made clear that Beckcom had lied under oath. “The court believed you in part,” the judge said at Beckcom’s sentencing hearing. “But there were certainly areas where you gave false statements either to the investigating officers or your testimony on the witness stand was false.”

Despite the apparent perjury, Beckcom went on to play an equally crucial role in convicting Jeffrey Prible, who was sent to death row for the murder of his friends Steve Herrera and Nilda Tirado, along with their three kids. The family was found dead in their Houston home on April 24, 1999. Two years later, Prible was indicted for the killings while serving a five-year sentence at the federal correctional institution in Beaumont for a string of bank robberies.

There was no direct evidence tying Prible to the murders. Instead, Harris County prosecutor Kelly Siegler’s case was based on the thinnest of circumstantial evidence, which made Beckcom’s testimony indispensable even if his credibility was questionable: He was the only witness who could connect Prible to the crime.

Beckcom said that he and his cellmate, Nathan Foreman, had befriended Prible while imprisoned at Beaumont. One evening, according to Beckcom, the three men were sitting in a field on the rec yard when Prible confessed to the killings.

Once again, Beckcom’s testimony was cinematic. He described Prible as a modern-day ninja who boasted about his ability to carry out the murders undetected. “Anybody that can go in a house and take out a whole family and get out without being seen is a bad motherfucker,” Beckcom recalled Prible saying. “And I’m that motherfucker.”

The information Beckcom provided also sewed up the gaping holes in Siegler’s case. Prible lacked a motive — until Beckcom said he was angry with Herrera for hoarding cash from the bank robberies. Beckcom explained away the missing murder weapon by implying that Prible had buried it under some newly poured concrete. “Asphalt’s good sometimes for hiding things,” he said Prible told him. And he countered Prible’s alibi witness — a neighbor who saw Prible dropped off at home hours before the murders — by suggesting that Prible had snuck back into his friend’s house to kill the family.

In early 2017, Prible’s defense lawyers, James Rytting and Gretchen Scardino, sought Beckcom out to learn more about the deal he’d cut with Siegler. The first time he was scheduled to be deposed, Beckcom didn’t show up. Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise; when a defense investigator went to serve him with a subpoena, Beckcom was outwardly hostile to the notion of having to answer any questions.

The investigator persuaded Beckcom to meet him at a Starbucks outside a gated community in Florida. Beckcom rolled up on a Harley Davidson. Still fit, with his dark hair now graying around the temples, he was furious to learn about the subpoena. “If I have to,” the investigator recalled Beckcom saying, “I’ll kill the son-of-a-bitch lawyer and go back to prison, but I’m not going to get involved in this case anymore.”

The threat unnerved Scardino. She hired a retired federal marshal to sit outside the room when they finally got Beckcom in for his deposition. Scardino steadied her nerves as the questioning began, but it was Beckcom who broke the ice. Was he on anything that might impair his memory? Scardino asked. “Just age,” Beckcom joked.

For his role in the Crawford prosecution, Beckcom had been handsomely rewarded: just 11 years for a slaying that could have netted him the death penalty. Still, as he served his time at Beaumont, he hoped that his cooperation in the Prible case would swing the prison doors wide open. He expected as much from Siegler, he told Scardino. Instead, he got a year shaved off his sentence. Nearly two decades later, he was still vexed.

“You thought you’d be walking out the door?” Scardino asked.

“For a house full of bodies? Yeah,” he replied, crossing his arms. “Children? Sure.”

Still, Scardino could see why Beckcom made an effective witness; he remained unflappable and calm over more than five hours of questioning. He said he’d gotten Siegler’s name from Foreman but couldn’t recall how he knew that Prible was coming to the unit before he arrived. “Someone would have had to tell you that he was coming, right?” Scardino asked. “Yeah, I would assume so,” Beckcom replied. Nor could he recall whether Siegler had shared details about Prible’s case, like the problem of the alibi witness.

At some point, Beckcom said, he realized there were multiple men vying to inform on Prible, “like fricking 10 guys,” but “somehow I ended up with the information.”

“The details Jeff Prible gave me he gave completely and explicitly to me and Nathan Foreman one night,” he said. “He just rolled it out.”

At trial, Siegler had introduced a photo of Beckcom, Foreman, and Prible alongside their parents in the Beaumont visitation room. During his deposition, Beckcom acknowledged that the photo was staged to corroborate his story that the men were so close that Prible would confess. But while the photo was dated the same day as the alleged confession, it was taken hours earlier, before Prible had said anything. “You had nothing to corroborate yet,” Rytting said. “No,” Beckcom agreed.

Rytting asked Beckcom about the affidavit Foreman had provided in 2016, which characterized Beckcom as one of the men looking to sink Prible in exchange for a time cut. Foreman said that Prible never confessed in his presence, contrary to Beckcom’s trial testimony. “In fact, I never heard Prible say anything bad about the victims,” Foreman said. “When he talked about Herrera, he talked about him like he was a friend he had lost.”

“Wow,” Beckcom remarked. “I mean, it makes no sense. Why would he be trying to gather information and then say, ‘I didn’t get the information, no, that’s not true’? He either heard these things or he didn’t hear them, so he can’t have it both ways.”

“That’s correct,” Rytting replied. “And he states he didn’t hear them.”

2

---

Underground Market

Kelly Siegler sat in a leather office chair, a bottle of Diet Coke in hand, staring down a videographer’s camera. Throughout more than nine hours of questioning, her expressions traversed a spectrum of impassive to dismissive to haughty as she repeatedly denied doing anything wrong.

In her decades at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, Siegler had been the one asking questions. Now, during a sworn deposition in October 2017, Prible’s lawyers had the chance to confront her about the measures she took to convict their client.

It was a significant turn of events for the hot shot prosecutor-turned-reality TV star, but not unprecedented. A few years earlier, she’d spent five bruising days on the witness stand answering questions about her prosecution of David Temple, the high school football coach sentenced to life in prison for murdering his pregnant wife, Belinda. Temple’s conviction, based on circumstantial evidence, was Siegler’s final cold case victory at the DA’s office. Months later, in the wake of her failed campaign to become the next DA, she resigned.

More than just a personal defeat, Siegler’s election loss signaled the start of Harris County’s ongoing shift away from the lock-them-all-up politics of her mentors. And while it ultimately fed the narrative of Siegler’s phoenix-like ascent to a larger stage, the loss also seemed to animate her with the notion that subsequent allegations of prosecutorial misconduct were some sort of political payback.

In challenging his conviction, Temple argued that Siegler had withheld a raft of records from the defense, including those related to an alternate suspect. Confronted with the alleged improprieties in court, Siegler was pugnacious. She was only required to turn over evidence related to “truly, truly” alternate suspects, she said, not “ridiculous” information that came from sources she deemed “kooky.”

She intimated that the questions swirling around Temple’s conviction were all thanks to her opponent in the DA’s race years earlier, whom Siegler claimed had made a deal with Temple’s trial attorney to reopen the case, presumably as part of a plot to besmirch her reputation.

Siegler’s testimony did not sit well with the district court, which concluded that her actions had deprived Temple of a fair trial. The notoriously conservative Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed, vacating the conviction. While Temple would eventually be retried and convicted, the public rebuke was still fresh when Siegler sat down to answer questions about the Prible case.

Siegler insisted that the lawyers’ petition challenging Prible’s conviction was full of lies.

Can you name one of the allegations that “stands out as being false?” Rytting asked.

“Well, the overarching lie is that I orchestrated a ring of informants from the Beaumont federal prison,” she said. “That is a lie … that you made up.”

Siegler also denied hiding anything from Prible’s lawyers at trial. All the evidence the state had developed was in a file that was open to the defense, she said, including any notes.

It was an odd position given that federal District Judge Keith Ellison had only recently unearthed notes from Siegler’s files documenting her meetings with Nathan Foreman, who positioned himself early on as an informant against Prible and was later described as the ringleader of the Beaumont snitches. The notes also showed that she had consulted a forensic expert who undermined her assertion at trial that the sperm found in Nilda Tirado’s mouth could only have been deposited moments before she was shot.

Siegler’s colleagues, meanwhile, had different takes on her willingness to turn over evidence. “Kelly didn’t give up anything she didn’t have to,” Johnny Bonds, the DA investigator who went on to become Siegler’s “Cold Justice” co-star, said in a deposition. Vic Wisner, her co-counsel on the Prible case, said the DA’s office “always had an open file policy unless there was some extraordinary need not to,” but that it didn’t include notes.

There were other contradictions. Siegler denied that Beckcom played a “vital role” at Prible’s trial, even though that was the precise language she used to describe his participation. In a Rule 35 letter, Siegler had implored the federal prosecutor who handled the Brueggen murder case to advocate for a time cut for Beckcom. The prosecutor was reluctant; Beckcom’s plea deal was generous, he told Siegler. But her case “involved the vicious murder of FIVE people,” she wrote in a second letter. And Beckcom had “played a vital role in obtaining a conviction.”

Siegler conceded at her deposition that she and Bonds first met with Foreman to discuss Prible’s case in August 2001, long before the casual rec yard encounter presented at trial. Foreman offered dubious details of Prible’s alleged crime, which Siegler and Bonds memorialized on several sheets of lined paper. Still, Siegler insisted that Foreman played no role in the case, becoming increasingly hostile each time his name was brought up. “Mr. Foreman was not involved in Jeffrey Prible’s case,” she told the lawyers. “I know you want him to be, but he was not.”

Siegler claimed, for the first time, that she and Bonds left the meeting convinced that Foreman was not credible. “We walked out of there saying we didn’t believe a word he had to say.” This echoed what Bonds said in his deposition; as he recalled, Foreman could not even describe what Prible looked like. Siegler did not explain why she continued to meet with Foreman, who introduced her to his cellmate, Beckcom, the man she decided was credible enough to put on the witness stand.

As it turns out, Siegler had been talking about Prible with a Beaumont informant even earlier than her notes reflected. At the deposition, she revealed that in July 2001 she had discussed Prible’s case with Jesse Moreno, the informant who gave her Foreman’s name and later served as her star witness against Hermilo Herrero. The admission suggested it was Siegler who set in motion the high-stakes competition to inform on Prible. And all of it started before Prible had even been charged with murder or transferred to the unit where the snitch ring operated.

There was also the matter of the letters Siegler had received from three other men at Beaumont volunteering accounts of Prible’s jailhouse confession. Like Siegler’s notes, the letters were only disclosed via judicial intervention years after Prible’s trial. They would never have come to light without Carl Walker, one of the would-be informants who withdrew from the scheme after a crisis of conscience and prompted the lawyers to seek a review of Siegler’s records. Nevertheless, Siegler said that the letters would also have been in her “open” file.

She dismissed their significance, seemingly unfazed by the idea that so many people angling to inform on Prible might cast doubt on any confession narrative coming out of Beaumont. “Federal inmates audition for any role … on any case they can think of with any information they might hear to try to get a time cut,” she said. “That’s what federal inmates do all day long 24 hours a day.”

“So you knew that they were doing this before Mr. Prible’s trial?” Scardino asked.

“I’m not stupid,” Siegler replied.

Rytting questioned whether Siegler had engaged with the Beaumont informants in an effort to gin up evidence. Siegler was having none of it. “Your witnesses’ affidavits were lies,” she stated. “You have not one shred or iota or piece of credible evidence from a credible witness that supports any of these allegations.”

“And these are the type of witnesses that you used to put people on death row?” Rytting asked.

“I’m calling you a liar, sir,” she replied.

“And I’m calling you one.”

3

---

A Mark

In 2018, Scardino and Rytting filed an amended petition in federal court challenging Prible’s conviction. “For over 15 years, the state has denied any conspiracy to frame Prible for the murders of the Herrera/Tirado family through the use of false jailhouse informant testimony,” it began. “Now, lead prosecutor Kelly Siegler’s own handwritten notes … confirm that this was in fact the case.”

“Prible’s trial was a master class in obfuscation by omission,” the lawyers wrote. Had jurors been privy to the extent of Siegler’s interactions with the Beaumont informants, they would have seen the state’s case for what it was. “The jury would have figured out that the whole thing was a set-up.”

A year later, Ellison granted their request for a hearing to consider the evidence. For so long, Prible’s suspicions about the Beaumont informants had been dismissed as paranoid speculation. Now a federal judge was giving them a chance to prove their case. “We knew we had a story to tell,” Scardino said.

A few days before the evidentiary hearing was scheduled to begin in downtown Houston, Ellison convened a conference call with the lawyers for each side. The topic: Kelly Siegler.

“I am concerned with the fact that Ms. Siegler seems to be unavailable,” he said.

For months, Scardino and Rytting had been trying to serve Siegler with a subpoena to appear at the hearing. They tried her at her office and at home. She never responded.

Tina Miranda, the Texas assistant attorney general tasked with defending Prible’s conviction, spoke up: Siegler had contacted her to say that she “travels a lot for her taping of her show” and would be unavailable. The judge was irritated. “That’s the kind of thing that a witness avoiding appearing would say,” Ellison said. “I really would have expected much more from an officer of the court.”

On the morning of the hearing, Prible sat in a high-backed chair in Ellison’s courtroom. He turned to smile at his family, which was out in force. His three grown children were there, along with his mother, sister, and other relatives. Scardino had two witnesses waiting to testify: Nathan Foreman and Carl Walker. The judge assumed the bench at 10 a.m. There was just one problem. “Has anybody heard from Ms. Siegler?” Ellison asked.

Miranda had: Siegler was still out of town. “I wish she would cover this case on her TV show and explain to the nation why she couldn’t be present,” Ellison quipped. The hearing would start without her.

Scardino launched into Prible’s case. Prosecutors had declined to indict anyone for the Herrera and Tirado murders based on the limited evidence collected by the summer of 1999, she said. Yet, without uncovering anything new, Siegler asked a grand jury to indict Prible two years later. By the time she took the case to trial, there was only one additional element: Michael Beckcom.

To believe Beckcom’s story about Prible’s confession, Scardino told the judge, you’d have to place faith in Foreman, whom Beckcom said was by his side when Prible owned up to the crime. Siegler had met with Foreman at least twice in connection with Prible’s case, although she failed to inform the defense. Despite this, Siegler claimed Foreman was irrelevant and untrustworthy.

Siegler’s files showed that she’d heard from at least five men at Beaumont jockeying for informant status in the hopes of securing time cuts, which should have raised red flags. Yet Siegler simply buried the communications.

The “sordid backstory” of the prosecutor and the informants would never have come to light, Scardino said, if “one of the informants that Siegler decided not to use,” Carl Walker, hadn’t come forward and “spilled the beans on the ring of snitches.”

“There’s only one reason she would avoid being here in person today to clear her name,” Scardino said. “That is because her name can’t be cleared.”

Miranda conceded that “at face value,” it was “disturbing” that so many people were trying to snitch on Prible, but she said there was no proof that Siegler put them up to it or even understood what was going on.

The judge seemed skeptical of Miranda’s take. “What was the alternative thesis?” he asked. “Why would these inmates become so enthusiastic about trying to pin a capital crime on Mr. Prible?”

That’s just what they do, Miranda responded. If that were the case, Ellison said, “Wouldn’t that cause a seasoned prosecutor to be especially wary about this kind of evidence?”

Miranda insisted that Siegler was attuned to the problem. After all, she only put Beckcom on the stand as a witness against Prible — not the four others who also supposedly heard him confess.

After being released from Beaumont, Foreman had landed in legal trouble again with a conviction for aggravated kidnapping and robbery. When he took the stand at the evidentiary hearing, he was out on bond as his case made its way through the appeals process. Although he’d played an outsize role behind bars in the scheme to snitch on Prible, in court Foreman was almost timid; he spoke so quietly that the court reporter asked him to pull the microphone closer.

At Beaumont, Foreman had every incentive to offer up incriminating information about his neighbors, true or not. Now he was facing 50 years in state prison — the rest of his life — and no amount of self-dealing would change the sentence.

Foreman testified that he’d first heard the names Kelly Siegler and Jeffrey Prible from Jesse Moreno, the informant who met with Siegler about Prible’s case and became her star witness against Hermilo Herrero. It was Herrero who first alerted Prible that the same band of informants was behind their convictions. Two months before Prible’s trial started, Siegler traveled to Louisiana to testify in favor of a drastic time cut for Moreno, whose sentence was reduced from 78 months in prison to just one.

While incarcerated in Beaumont, Foreman and Moreno both wound up in the Special Housing Unit, where Foreman was working as a janitor and orderly, delivering meals. It was there that Moreno told him about Prible — before Prible had even arrived. Moreno suggested that he reach out to Siegler about becoming an informant. Foreman testified that what he knew about Prible’s case came not only from Moreno, but also from Siegler, who told him that Prible’s DNA had been found in Tirado’s mouth.

Foreman said he never heard Prible confess to the murders of Herrera, Tirado, and their kids. And since he was eager for a time cut, he’d remember a confession. Beckcom’s statement at trial sounded scripted, he added. “All I could say is that he should have been a book writer or something.” When Rytting read aloud Beckcom’s line about Prible being trained in the Marines for “high-intensity, low-drag” maneuvers, Foreman laughed. “I’ve never heard that one,” he said. “It really sounds like he got it off television.”

The judge wanted to know if men at Beaumont regularly discussed the crimes they had committed. Wouldn’t that be risky business? “That is correct,” Foreman replied. People might talk about past crimes — if they were of little consequence — but never about pending charges and certainly not about murdering children. That could get you killed.

As Prible recalled, Foreman winked at him on his way out of the courtroom. Prible took it as a conciliatory gesture, as if to admit he’d done wrong but tried to make it right. “So he’s OK with me.”

In contrast to Foreman, Carl Walker had created a prosperous new life for himself after leaving federal prison, becoming a tech entrepreneur in Houston. He was, Scardino thought, the moral center of their case, sharing what he knew about the ring of informants even when doing so might have put him in jeopardy. “He struck me as someone who has a very clear understanding of right and wrong,” she said.

“He was going to be a scapegoat for several individuals to have an opportunity to get out of prison sooner than later.”

The courtroom was silent as Walker testified. He’d been recruited as one of a handful of snitches who would inform on Prible, he said, and was told details of the alleged offense before Prible was transferred to the prison unit.

“It was already mapped out” by the time Prible arrived, Walker said. Beckcom and Foreman were the ones corralling things on the inside, but there was clearly someone pulling the strings on the outside: “The details they knew … was so vivid or so in depth that, like I say, I knew before he got there, and they knew even more than I knew.”

“Was Mr. Prible a mark?” Rytting asked.

“In every sense of the word,” Walker replied. “He was going to be a scapegoat for several individuals to have an opportunity to get out of prison sooner than later.”

Did Walker know anyone else at Beaumont who was the target of a similar plot? Yes, Walker said: Hermilo Herrero. A bunch of guys who tried to get a piece of the Prible case had eyed Herrero as well. “Some of them were working on the twofer aspect.”

By the time Terry Gaiser appeared at the hearing, he had nearly 50 years of criminal defense experience in Harris County under his belt. Gaiser represented Prible at his 2002 trial. Back then, he told the court, what was shared with the defense was “what they put in the file.” The whole discovery process relied on a foundation of trust, and jailhouse informants were “fundamentally unreliable,” Gaiser said. Had he known Siegler was communicating with a network of men competing to inform on Prible, as the undisclosed letters and meeting notes revealed, he could have used these items to dismantle the basis of the state’s case.

By the time the hearing convened again, arrangements had been made for Siegler to appear via video. It was a less-than-ideal setup. There were transmission delays, and Siegler was positioned so that part of her face was out of the frame, making it hard to read her expressions. At one point, the connection was lost altogether. “She do it intentionally?” Ellison asked. “Can we tell?”

Cheryl Peterson, Prible’s aunt, recalled this as the one moment Ellison seemed close to losing his cool. “He was so restrained,” she said. She had watched with growing disbelief as Siegler tested his patience in the run-up to the hearing. “Like, how the hell does she thumb her nose at a federal judge?”

Siegler was unapologetic about her failure to appear in court. Miranda hadn’t told her where to be or when, she said. And she claimed to have no idea that Prible’s team had repeatedly attempted to serve her with a subpoena.

Pressed about her failure to disclose her dealings with Foreman to Prible’s defense, Siegler again insisted that Foreman was not connected to the case. But he was her original snitch, Scardino said, and according to Beckcom, he was there when Prible confessed, which made him a corroborating witness even if he didn’t take the stand. “Because he’s standing there, it doesn’t mean he’s credible,” Siegler snapped. “It doesn’t mean he has information.”

Siegler seemed invested in painting Foreman as a liar, not just in their previous interactions, when he was angling for a time cut, but also at the hearing, when he was undermining the basis of her case against Prible. When Ellison suggested that Foreman’s testimony struck him as sincere, Siegler assured him she knew better. “Of all the inmates I’ve ever dealt with, he’s at the top of the list for not being credible.”

On cross-examination, Miranda pitched a series of softball questions: When Siegler got the case in 2001, there was already enough evidence to take it to trial, right? Was she even looking for an informant? “No, ma’am,” Siegler replied.

If her case was already solid, the judge asked, why did she use Beckcom at all? “There are five victims here,” Siegler said. While she believed her case was “strong enough for a jury to convict,” she worried that some of the jurors might not see it that way. “I wanted to be sure.”

Scardino pounced on Siegler’s statement as an admission that the case was too weak to prosecute without Beckcom. “Siegler didn’t just use Beckcom to testify that he heard a confession,” Scardino told the judge. She used his “highly scripted and choreographed” testimony to “explain away all of the problematic aspects of the state’s case.” Beckcom, she said, was Siegler’s case.

4

---

Ethical Duties

A year after the evidentiary hearing, Ellison vacated Prible’s conviction. The prosecution had engaged in a “pattern of deceptive behavior and active concealment” that could have changed the outcome of Prible’s trial, he wrote. The evidence Siegler withheld revealed an “orchestrated effort by a ring of informants to fabricate a confession from Prible in return for sentence reductions.”

Ellison concluded that Beckcom had acted as an agent of the state in working with Siegler to elicit a confession from Prible, implicating the prosecution in a violation of Prible’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

And while the evidence did not prove that Siegler knew Beckcom was lying nor “completely” verify Prible’s argument that she was running a snitch scheme, Ellison nonetheless found that Siegler had hidden the full extent of her dealings with the informants and “was far from credible in her federal court testimony.”

“This court does not endorse the cavalier attitude Siegler has displayed regarding her constitutional duty to preserve the fundamental fairness of the trial proceedings,” Ellison wrote.

Scardino was elated. She felt confident that the judge would rule in their favor, but she didn’t anticipate how powerful the ruling would be. “It really vindicated Jeff,” she said.

News of the order came in the early months of the pandemic. “We were all just stumbling into one of our first of many covid lockdowns when I heard the news about Jeff’s reversal,” Thomas Whitaker, the incarcerated writer who investigated Prible’s case, wrote. “I remember standing at my door, paper in hand, arms raised in triumph.”

Prible’s sense of vindication was bittersweet. His father, who suffered bouts of depression over his son’s wrongful conviction, had died without seeing the legal victory. Prible’s own son, 27-year-old Ronald Jeffrey Prible III, whom he called “Little Jeff,” was struck by a train and killed six months after attending the evidentiary hearing. For Prible, who had seen hundreds of neighbors taken to the execution chamber, there was no court order that could restore what he had lost.

Still, he began to imagine a life outside prison walls. Peterson, his aunt, used to send him photos of the sunsets from her waterfront property on Lake Conroe, north of Houston. Prible dreamed of working the grounds and watching the sun go down over the water. From his colorless death row cell, the images of future sunsets sustained him. But just when it started to feel like freedom might be within reach, a whole new nightmare began.

Ellison ordered the state to retry or release Prible within six months. Instead, Texas balked at the ruling and asked the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn it.

According to Texas Assistant Solicitor General Ari Cuenin, the allegations of the snitch ring were “incoherent and unproven,” and federal law barred the judge from even allowing Prible’s lawyers to present them in court. In the state’s reading, any argument Prible wanted to pursue about the Beaumont informants should have been made by his state post-conviction attorney, Roland Moore, back in 2004. At the time, Prible was only aware that a Black man named Walker might have some information about how he was framed for a crime he didn’t commit.

To Rytting and Scardino, this was absurd. Prible had no proof precisely because Siegler failed to disclose evidence of her communication with the Beaumont informants. After all, the state knew where the elusive Carl Walker was all along: His full name and inmate number were included on the letter he’d signed, which was sequestered in Siegler’s file.

It was the state’s actions that prevented Prible from raising the claims earlier, the lawyers maintained. If Prible’s trial attorneys had known there was a band of informants scheming to set him up — and that Siegler deemed Foreman unreliable, even as Beckcom testified that Foreman could corroborate his account of Prible’s confession — then they could have gutted Beckcom’s testimony, leaving Siegler’s otherwise circumstantial case in tatters.

In late 2021, the lawyers for each side traveled from Texas to New Orleans, where the 5th Circuit is based, for oral arguments. Presiding over the panel was Judge James Dennis. Now 87 and on senior status, he is one of a handful of judges appointed by a Democratic president left on the ultra-conservative court. Dennis, participating remotely amid the pandemic, asked no questions of either side; all queries would come from a pair of Republican-appointed judges who appeared to see the case in radically different terms.

A former Texas assistant solicitor general and Trump appointee known for his far-right views, Judge Kyle Duncan leaned into Cuenin’s position that Prible should have raised the informant issues years earlier. Duncan asked whether the defense had sent anyone to Beaumont to look for a man named Walker, prompting a long pause from Rytting: “That is not how the Bureau of Prisons works,” he said. “What, the investigator goes in and says, ‘You got a guy named Walker here?’”

Prible did what he could with the scant information available behind bars, Rytting said. But it all amounted to rumor and hunch, which was not enough to raise a concrete legal claim back in 2004.

Jennifer Elrod, who was a civil court judge in Houston before being appointed to the bench by George W. Bush, appeared to understand Prible’s dilemma.

She took issue with the state’s dismissal of Siegler’s note about the DNA, which Cuenin said had no bearing on the case given Prible had admitted to having sex with Tirado early on the morning of her murder. The note would have to say more than it did — “Pamela McInnis — semen lives up to 72 hours” — to be relevant to Prible’s defense, Cuenin argued.

“It is very relevant whether it happened on the edge of the killing or whether it happened several hours before,” Elrod said. At trial, Siegler asserted that the amount of semen on the swab proved that Prible had forced Tirado to perform oral sex moments before shooting her. The note showed that the director of a local crime lab she consulted would not have been willing to back up her argument. “That matters tremendously in inflaming the jury and … whether you get the death penalty because you’re such a monster that you have sex and then have just an overwhelming desire to kill,” Elrod said. “And that was ginned up to be very relevant.”

“Do we have any ethical duties if we believe that there’s unethical conduct?” Elrod asked Cuenin as the arguments came to a close.

“As lawyers we all have ethical duties,” he replied.

“I’m just wondering, has that been handled?” she pressed. “We don’t have any duty to report anything we learn in this case to the bar?”

“That’s not a part of this case,” Cuenin said.

Peterson remembers feeling encouraged by Elrod’s line of questioning. She was optimistic that the court might rule in Prible’s favor. Instead, nine months later, a unanimous panel ruled in favor of Texas, reinstating Prible’s death sentence. “That was devastating,” she said. “After that, we didn’t have much hope.”

Scardino and Rytting were dismayed. Elrod had expressed concern about unethical conduct on the part of the state. For her to join Duncan’s majority opinion, which fully embraced the state’s position, was confounding. The judges did not address whether Siegler had withheld evidence critical to Prible’s defense, ruling only that the lawyers had raised the claim too late.

“Jeff was gaslighted for years,” by Siegler, by the courts, by the attorney general’s office, Scardino said, “all of whom were saying, ‘This guy is delusional, this conspiracy is all a figment of his imagination.’” And once he was finally able to prove it, “the 5th Circuit says, ‘Too bad, it’s too late, he should’ve figured it out years earlier.’”

The lawyers asked the full court to reconsider the panel’s ruling, and when it declined, they asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. In June, it too declined to get involved.

5

---

Truth Will Come Out

If Siegler was paying attention to Prible’s case as it made its way through the courts, there was no sign of it on her Twitter feed. As Prible’s fate hung in the balance at the Supreme Court, Siegler posted a landscape photo taken from an airplane. “Hello America! First case, Season 7 we start working tomorrow,” she wrote. ““Wish us luck!”

The new season of “Cold Justice” is set to air next year. In the meantime, Siegler is promoting the inaugural season of “Prosecuting Evil.” At CrimeCon in Orlando, she was welcomed with uproarious cheers and a standing ovation. “When you’re not here you’re so missed,” said the Oxygen correspondent who introduced Siegler. “When you’re back here it feels like a reunion.”

Siegler took the stage with the showrunner from “Cold Justice” and the executive producer of “Prosecuting Evil.” They teased the new show’s premiere with a clip revisiting Siegler’s most notorious moment: straddling her colleague on a bloody mattress to reenact a defendant stabbing her husband to death.

“I can truly say that probably is what led to all this,” Siegler said of the bed stunt. It was the point where her real life as a hard-driving prosecutor produced the parallel life she would later inhabit, turning her into a reality TV star. There were members of the legal community who thought she went too far, she told the audience, but that didn’t bother her. “I care more about what people like you think.”

Asked about the advice she would give someone “passionate about a career in the legal system,” Siegler said it was all about ethics. “Every decision you make comes back to your own integrity.” From filing charges to “every time you talk to a witness,” she said, you’re “always really, really” trying to do the right thing. “And you don’t let your damn ego get in the way. And you don’t worry about winning or losing the trial, you just do what’s right. It’ll keep your reputation always intact.”

Five episodes in, “Prosecuting Evil” appears to be about fortifying Siegler’s reputation and ensuring her legacy as a prosecutor who pulled no punches in the pursuit of justice. The show prominently features the families of homicide victims, who show deep gratitude for the work done on behalf of their loved ones. In the episodes focused on her old cases, Siegler is more defiant than reflective, reveling in court victories and evincing scorn for defendants, defense attorneys, and attempts to overturn her convictions. “That’s inflammatory and that’s over the top and that’s grandstanding,” she said in the premiere, mocking her critics. “Gimme a break.”

To Prible’s supporters, Siegler’s continued celebrity is less disturbing than the lack of accountability she’s faced. Ward Larkin, the anti-death-penalty activist, has made it a point never to watch “Cold Justice.” “It’s obvious she’s extremely intelligent,” he said. “But she’s also a horrible person. … She has no compunction about the horrors she inflicts on people.”

Hermilo Herrero is now in his 50s. Despite Rytting’s efforts on his behalf, his appeals have been denied. He continues to insist on his innocence for the murder of Albert Guajardo in 1995. “Albert was a friend and never my enemy and I have been living with that lie they made up,” he wrote in a letter to The Intercept. He blames Siegler for her drive to win at all costs, even if it meant sending innocent people to die in prison and “stealing the justice from the victims or the victim’s families that they so much need and deserve.”

“It is not just Herrero and myself where the only evidence presented against us is a jailhouse snitch who says that we confessed to them,” Prible wrote in an open letter after his conviction was vacated. “There are others. … The truth will come out. It has already started.”

If the state wanted to reinvestigate Prible’s case, there are some obvious places to start. A man named Philip Brody shared recollections with The Intercept that could have been critical to law enforcement had there been a thorough investigation two decades ago. Brody was friends with both Prible and Steve Herrera in the years leading up to Herrera’s death. Some six months before the killings, Brody said, Herrera told him about a man in the “drug game” who owed him money. The man had been arrested before paying Herrera back. So “we took my truck and emptied out everything in his whole house,” Brody recalled. Then Herrera sold the man’s belongings.

The man was just one person who had a motive to kill Herrera. But there were others, Brody said. Shortly after that incident, Herrera asked Brody to do something that “kind of put the nail in the coffin for our friendship.” According to Brody, Herrera asked if he would be willing to arm himself with tactical gear and an assault weapon and break into a drug dealer’s house to steal money, drugs, and whatever else they could find. “And I was like, ‘Hell no.’”

To Brody, it seemed obvious that Herrera was making dangerous enemies. He believes this is what got him killed in the end. Murdering an entire family was something members of a drug cartel would do. Prible had children of his own. “I couldn’t see Jeff doing that to the innocent kids, you know?”

It should also have been obvious to police that Herrera’s drug dealing likely played a part in the murders. Among the documents the state failed to turn over to Prible’s defense before trial was an anonymous letter that Herrera’s parents received days after their son’s murder. “OK Fuckheads this is not a cordial greeting,” it began, before demanding that the couple get rid of the “thieves and drug dealers” living in a rental property they owned. The letter threatened to burn down 11 properties the Herreras maintained as rentals if the alleged drug dealing continued. “This is your only warning!!!!” the letter concluded.

Most Read

The Right-Wing Campaign to Purge Women From Women’s Sports

Natasha Lennard

Bitcoin Bros and the MAGA Faithful Converge in Nashville — and Embrace an Alternate Reality

Liliana Segura

What Tim Walz Could Mean For Kamala Harris’s Stance on Gaza and Israel

Sam Dean

The letter did not include the house where Herrera and Tirado lived. Still, the threats dovetailed with the circumstances surrounding the murders and appeared to offer a viable lead. But contemporaneous reports suggest police did nothing with the letter aside from putting it in a manila envelope and marking it as evidence.

It isn’t clear when Prible’s attorneys received a copy of the letter. When Gaiser, Prible’s trial attorney, was shown a copy during the 2019 evidentiary hearing, he testified that he’d never seen it. He said he would have used it as a jumping off point for his own investigation. “That was extremely relevant to whether there was another motive,” he testified.

Bill Watson, the state’s DNA analyst at trial, told The Intercept that he would testify differently if called to the stand today. He has more experience now, he said, and some of his answers sounded more “definitive” than they should have. As the state’s expert witness, he didn’t intend to endorse the theory that the DNA could only have been deposited at the time of Tirado’s death, but that’s how the state used his testimony. During his closing argument, Vic Wisner, Siegler’s co-counsel, told the jury that there was “no way in the world that semen wasn’t deposited either moments before or seconds after Nilda died.” Watson called that an “overstatement.” “‘No way in the world’ is not something I would’ve said.”

In a phone call with The Intercept, Johnny Bonds, the DA investigator turned “Cold Justice” star, defended Siegler, saying his longtime friend and colleague is one of the most “upstanding” people he’s met. Bonds said he was reassured when he learned that Prible’s death sentence had been reinstated. “I can’t imagine her doing anything like [what] she’s accused of.” Upon reflection, he believes Nathan Foreman was behind the allegations that fueled Prible’s litigation. Foreman was indignant that Bonds and Siegler wouldn’t let him on the “bandwagon” of informants against Prible, Bonds said. “He wanted something out of it, and when he didn’t get anything out of it, he said, ‘Well, I’ll show you.’”

Scardino, meanwhile, is hard at work on a new state court appeal. While the 5th Circuit ruled against Prible, it didn’t disturb the district judge’s findings that Prible had been denied a fair trial. Scardino plans to take those findings and the wealth of evidence backing them up to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. “I really do believe that in the end, the system will correct the colossal miscarriage of justice that has taken place,” she said.

Michael Beckcom has been out of prison for nearly two decades and lives a quiet life. He rides a motorcycle, plays in a band, and loves dogs. He still carries himself with confidence, though years of bodybuilding have left significant aches and pains.

He doesn’t like to talk about his time in prison or his turn as a snitch for Kelly Siegler. Working with her put him in danger behind bars, he said, netting him several years of solitary confinement, which was meant to keep him safe. Beckcom is still angry with Siegler. He expected that his testimony against Prible would spring him from prison. He was counting on that. And he needed to get home to take care of his daughter and aging mother.

It was Siegler who screwed him over, he said over a cup of coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, but it was Foreman who “roped me” into the whole mess to begin with. Foreman was working with Siegler on the Herrero case, he recalled, when he pulled Beckcom in on the Prible case. Foreman then told Siegler that Beckcom was the one who “knew the whole story,” he said. “And it all came to fruition.” Foreman did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for an interview.

Beckcom acknowledged that his testimony against Prible might have sounded fishy. He understands that it was the only new piece of evidence Siegler turned up after taking over the cold case. But he insists that Prible confessed to him. At least that’s how he remembers it. “It is what it is from my perspective, and that’s the way it happened to me,” he said. “Anybody can take that, do with it what they want.”

“Your ass is in a jam because she’s going to get 12 people to say you did it.”

At the same time, he believed Siegler provided him with a road map to the information she needed to convict Prible. “She may give you, I’m not going to say evidence, but she can give you certain things that he wouldn’t have given you,” Beckcom said. “It’s all in the framing.” She would say something like, “‘Did he mention anything about such and such’ and then maybe give you an idea. If you had more than one brain cell kicking, you could figure it out what she was talking about.”

“This was her forte,” he added. Which is “not good if you’re on the fucking receiving end. Your ass is in a jam because she’s going to get 12 people to say you did it.”

When asked if it was possible that his story of Prible’s confession wasn’t all above board — that it was embellished with information Siegler provided — Beckcom said no. But he also demurred, saying maybe Prible was just telling stories to make himself look tough behind bars. “If everything he said was a fabrication to make him look like a gangster because he was in prison, then that’s on him,” Beckcom said. “He shouldn’t have said anything.”

Prible has never stopped talking about his case. In correspondence, he often writes at a frenzied pace, joking frequently, alluding to literature and music, and peppering his emails with exclamation points.

Prible makes no excuses for his past. “I did drugs and was involved in criminal activity! I was a womanizer! I am not like that anymore!” He maintains his innocence and adamantly denies ever confessing to Beckcom, “an obvious fake” who carried himself like an Italian mobster, saying “stupid shit” like he knew who killed Jimmy Hoffa. Prible said he only tolerated Beckcom because he was friendly with Foreman. “I did not want to say ‘your friend’s full of shit.’”

Prible rejects the notion that the state never considered any other suspects in the murders, as Siegler emphasized to his jury. “They just got rid of anything that was useful to my defense!” While he’s eager to discuss aspects of his case that he feels have not been sufficiently investigated, he’s just as anxious to convey the urgency of his circumstances. Living on death row for 21 years has been a “rollercoaster ride through hell.”

Prible’s mental health has ebbed and flowed over his decades at Polunsky. During one period, Larkin said, “he was having episodes, mental health episodes, where it would just paralyze him.” Prible asked Larkin to research the impact of long-term solitary confinement — “he was convinced that there was something to that.” He was right. Solitary confinement has been shown to be psychologically devastating. Many experts consider it torture. The research became a survival tool for Prible, a way to recognize what was happening to his mind.

Prible’s earliest emails to The Intercept were strikingly upbeat. He was hopeful that the Supreme Court would take his case, even though it was a long shot, and seemed undeterred when it was rejected. “Jeff, in spite of all of this, is an eternal optimist,” Scardino said. “He’s able to recover from the repeated blows to his legal case — to his life.”

But more recently, Prible has struggled to ward off the torment of his surroundings. In early November, a series of panic attacks sent him spiraling. “You know I was fine until they locked me in a tiny cage for so fucking long and killed everyone around me I come to care for!” he wrote in one email. In another, he remembered a friend executed years ago, whom he believed was waiting for him “at the end of the Green Mile. … He comes to me in my dreams and always makes me smile like only he can!” In the wake of the panic attacks, Prible sent a letter asking the judge in his case for an execution date.

Legally, it would take more than such a letter to put Prible in imminent danger of execution. And he’s not actually ready to give up. “In the Marine Corps, they teach you contingency plans for everything,” he said in a recent phone call, discussing a possible hearing in state court. As Christmas approached, he shared recipes from a holiday-themed issue of Southern Living.

Despite bouts of rage and despair, Prible expresses constant gratitude for those who have helped him, whom he describes as heaven-sent. Though he does not consider himself religious, he takes comfort in passages from the Bible. One, from the book of Jeremiah, promises freedom from captivity: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to give you hope and a future. … I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you … and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.”

The post What Happened When a Star Prosecutor Was Accused of Running a Jailhouse Snitch Scheme appeared first on The Intercept.

1

---

Invisible Man

Hermilo Herrero, 35, had been stuck inside the Harris County jail for months. He was bewildered and angry. He’d been serving a drug sentence at the federal correctional institution in Beaumont, Texas, when he was indicted for a cold case murder he swore he did not commit, then dragged to Houston to face trial. There was no evidence linking him to the crime save for a pair of informants enlisted by prosecutor Kelly Siegler. On the stand, they claimed that Herrero had confessed to the 1995 murder of his friend Albert Guajardo. In April 2002, Herrero was sentenced to life.

Herrero was awaiting transfer back to FCI Beaumont when he saw that a man named Jeffrey Prible was about to stand trial down the road for murdering a family in Houston. The case was familiar — Herrero had read about it in the Houston Chronicle. Prible was charged at almost the exact same time as Herrero, and both cases involved murders gone cold. But the more Herrero learned about Prible’s case, the more disturbed he was by the parallels. As in Herrero’s case, an informant claimed Prible had confessed to him at Beaumont. And as in Herrero’s case, the informant made a deal with Siegler that could get him out of prison early.

Herrero had seen his share of legal trouble. But Siegler turned him into a cartoon villain at trial, comparing him to the notorious mobster John Gotti. Siegler told jurors that after running into Guajardo at a bar, Herrero had attacked him from the backseat of a moving van, slitting his throat and beating his head with a hammer. He rolled Guajardo’s body in a rug, Siegler said, and threw it on the side of the road. Although the lead investigator, Harris County homicide detective Curtis Brown, bluntly conceded on the stand that he’d found no evidence implicating Herrero, Siegler and her snitches convinced the jury that he had committed the brutal murder.

The informants who testified against Herrero were also at Beaumont on drug crimes. Their convictions came out of a tough-on-crime era that saw the federal prison population explode. Spurred by the war on drugs, sentences grew longer, and for those convicted after 1987, the sweeping Sentencing Reform Act eliminated federal parole altogether.

For people serving long sentences with no end in sight, providing information to the government became one of the only ways to win early release. Although Rule 35 had been part of federal criminal procedure for decades, the drug war transformed it from a provision that merely gave judges a chance to show mercy to one that required incarcerated people to provide “substantial assistance” to prosecutors for any chance at leniency. Informing on their peers was a deal many were willing to make — even if it meant lying on the stand.

Within such a population, men like Herrero and Prible were sitting ducks. Not only were they facing new charges while in federal prison, but both had been charged with murder — the kind of high-stakes prosecution that could yield significant benefits for anyone who offered intel.

Herrero knew the men who testified against him: Jesse Moreno and Rafael Dominguez. Moreno was the star witness, “pretty much the crux of this case,” Siegler said in her opening statement. Although she told jurors that she would only vouch for Moreno’s Rule 35 motion if he told the truth, to Herrero, this was a cruel joke. Like Prible, he swore the case against him had been blatantly fabricated.

It was only when Herrero was finally being transferred out of Houston, waiting in the holding tank to go back to Beaumont, that he happened to meet someone who had insight into just how connected the two cases were. The man was Black, in his late 20s, stocky and bald. He went by Brother Walker.

“He told me he knew everything about what happened to me and a guy named Prible,” Herrero recalled. According to Walker, Beaumont was home to a ring of informants who gave Siegler information to use against defendants in state cases in exchange for her help in their federal cases. Moreno and Dominguez were part of this ring, as was Michael Beckcom, the star witness against Prible. The head of the operation was a man who lurked in the background of both Prible’s and Herrero’s cases, someone who supposedly heard both men confess yet was conspicuously absent from both trials: Nathan Foreman.

A relative of the legendary boxer George Foreman, Nathan Foreman arrived at FCI Beaumont in early 2000 for federal drug crimes. He was placed in the Special Housing Unit, nicknamed the SHU, where he worked as an orderly. The job gave him some freedom of movement, allowing him to visit different cells. Some knew him as “Green Eyes.” Others called him “Bones.” To Herrero, Foreman was the “invisible man.” He was convinced he’d never seen him. Yet at trial, Siegler repeatedly characterized Foreman as one of Herrero’s associates in prison.

Walker told Herrero that he had firsthand knowledge of the Beaumont snitch ring: Foreman had recruited him too.

Herrero asked if he would be willing to put what he knew in a statement. But Walker was hesitant to get involved. Not long after their return to Beaumont, Herrero was transferred to a different prison. Although he lost touch with Walker, Herrero was determined to share what he’d uncovered with Prible.

Texas death row is located at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, some 70 miles north of Houston. The state has long been notorious as the execution capital of the country. By the time Prible arrived in November 2002, 29 men had been executed that year alone. Four more would be killed before Christmas.

As Prible tells it, he arrived on death row convinced that it was only a matter of time before somebody realized a mistake had been made. “As bad as this place was, I thought this would all get straightened out,” he said. Growing up on the border of Houston’s north side, Prible had not been raised to mistrust the criminal justice system. His parents were “just middle class, working people,” Prible’s aunt, Cheryl Peterson, said. “We used to believe the police were all righteous and good.”

Nevertheless, Prible would be the first to say that he wasn’t a model citizen. As a teenager, he partied and ran from the cops. “We were stupid as fuck when we were young but goddamn we had fun,” he said. Things got more serious as he got older. At the punishment phase of his trial, his ex-wife said he used cocaine and steroids, which compounded his mood swings. “He could be happy, completely happy one minute, and completely hysterical, crazy mad the next.” At his worst, she said, he was physically and emotionally abusive, threatening to hurt himself or her.

“Jeff was a handful from the time he was little,” Peterson recalled. She said there was a history of bipolar disorder in their family, which she suspected Prible shared, although he was never diagnosed or treated. This was the kind of mitigating factor that might have persuaded a jury to spare his life. But Prible’s lawyers focused instead on portraying him as a loving son, father, and uncle who would never hurt a child. That much was true, according to Peterson, who never believed Prible committed the murders.

Peterson carried guilt over her own unwitting role in the case. While awaiting trial, Prible asked her to send him a copy of the probable cause affidavit laying out the state’s evidence against him. He then recklessly showed it to his neighbors at Beaumont. “That helped set him up,” Peterson said. One man who was incarcerated alongside Prible testified at trial that he’d warned Prible to stop discussing it. “I told him to shut up.”

Not long after Prible arrived at Polunsky, a neighbor on death row named Jaime Elizalde asked him if he’d ever done time in federal prison. Prible said yes, he’d been at Beaumont. Elizalde responded that his good friend, Hermilo Herrero, was locked up at Beaumont. Herrero was innocent, Elizalde told Prible, and he knew this for a fact — because he was the one who had murdered Guajardo.

Herrero’s wife had recently visited Elizalde at Polunsky, and she recognized Prible in the visitation room. Prible said he almost fainted when Elizalde showed him paperwork from Herrero’s case and he saw the people involved: Kelly Siegler, Curtis Brown, and a pair of informants from Beaumont. Elizalde also shared a letter from Herrero, who described meeting a man who knew the whole story of how he and Prible had been set up. Herrero did not know much about the man, only that he was Black and went by Walker.

Correspondence between people incarcerated at different facilities is strictly forbidden. Most communication happens illicitly or by word of mouth, so there is no record of the information Herrero shared. Nor was there a way for Prible to write Herrero directly — any letters would be swiftly confiscated. Nevertheless, from his death row cell, Prible set out to find Walker.

It would not be easy. For one, he didn’t know Walker’s first name. And he got nowhere when he tried to tell his lawyers what he’d learned. After his direct appeal was rejected in 2004, Prible was assigned a new attorney to represent him in state post-conviction proceedings: longtime Houston criminal defense lawyer Roland Moore III. It might have been a reason for optimism; Moore had just won a new trial for a man who was misidentified by a woman coming out of a coma.

Prible was certain that Walker was the key to exposing the conspiracy against him. But to his dismay, Moore seemed unmotivated to find him. Instead, the attorney set about proving that Prible’s trial attorneys had been ineffective, often the most promising path to relief for people on death row.

Among Moore’s claims was that the lawyers had failed to challenge the state’s forensic evidence. A well-respected DNA scientist named Elizabeth Johnson provided a declaration disputing the testimony of Bill Watson, the analyst who claimed that sperm found in Nilda Tirado’s mouth must have been deposited right before she died. Watson did not conduct the microscopic examination necessary to support his conclusions, Johnson wrote. Nor was he apparently aware of studies showing that sperm could be found in oral samples of live individuals many hours after being deposited, including those who rinsed their mouths. Had Prible’s attorneys challenged Watson’s unscientific testimony, it could have been kept out of the trial.

Moore included Johnson’s declaration in a state writ challenging Prible’s conviction. But Prible was furious upon learning that Moore had filed the writ without finding Walker.

“What I don’t understand is what anybody could say that would help,” Moore wrote in a letter to his client. “If the ideal witness came forward like you would dream up in a movie and said, ‘Yes, Kelly Siegler told me to say all those things about Prible’s confessing,’ … then we could have a hearing where this dream witness would say all that. But nobody would believe it. I mean nobody.”

Prible decided to take matters into his own hands. It was one of his neighbors, after all, who provided the tip that could break the case open. Now he just needed someone on the outside to run it down.

2

---

Stroke of Luck

Ward Larkin doesn’t remember exactly when he received the first letter from Prible. As an activist involved in leftist causes, Larkin had been visiting Texas death row for almost a decade by the time they met. Some of the men just wanted someone to talk to. But from the beginning, Prible insisted he was innocent.

Larkin knew better than to roll his eyes. By that point, he’d grown close to a number of condemned men he believed were innocent. At least one had already been executed. Others would eventually be released.

Prible told Larkin that he needed help with something specific. There was a man in federal prison with the last name Walker. He was Black. And he had been incarcerated at Beaumont around 2001. That was all he knew.

Larkin, a computer programmer, scoured the Bureau of Prisons’ public database. He put together a list of men with the last name Walker. One of them, Larry Walker, seemed like a promising match. Larkin sent the man several letters but did not hear back.

He had found the wrong Walker. But by a stroke of luck, his letters made their way to the right man anyway. In 2005, Hurricane Rita pummeled the Texas coast, forcing the Bureau of Prisons to relocate hundreds of people previously housed at Beaumont. Carl Walker ended up at the federal lockup in Yazoo City, Mississippi. It was there, on the rec yard, that he spotted a friendly acquaintance he knew as Smiley. Smiley said that his cellmate, Larry Walker, had been receiving letters from someone trying to help a man on Texas death row. Smiley suspected the letters might actually be meant for him. Carl Walker said he immediately guessed what this was about. “I knew the whole thing.”

As 2007 came to a close, so did Siegler’s final cold case murder prosecution for Harris County, with the conviction of David Temple, a high school football coach accused of killing his pregnant wife, Belinda.

The investigation into Belinda’s murder had been dormant for years before Siegler dusted it off and, without any new evidence, got a grand jury to indict Temple, who was sentenced to life in prison. It was business as usual for Siegler, but that was about to change.

Siegler’s longtime mentor, Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal, who had announced his intention to run for reelection in 2008, became embroiled in a scandal after the release of emails from his work account, which included intimate messages he’d sent to a co-worker. Rosenthal withdrew his candidacy at the request of the local GOP. That same day, Siegler tossed her hat in the race, casting herself as a reform candidate. A campaign ad billed her as a “bulldog in a chihuahua’s body.” During a candidate forum at the Old Spaghetti Warehouse, Siegler acknowledged there were problems in the DA’s office but insisted that she was the one to fix them. “I am the only one who has worked there for the last 21 years,” she said. “I know how it operates.”

Reminders that she was part of the office’s entrenched culture peppered her campaign. Days after she announced her run, a new cache of Rosenthal’s emails, some involving racist jokes and explicit images, made headlines. A video of men forcibly stripping off women’s shirts in public had been sent by Siegler’s husband, who was Rosenthal’s doctor. Siegler brushed it off. “His sense of humor is crude, to put it mildly,” she said of her husband, but he could do what he wanted on his own computer because “he’s the boss.” She dismissed the incident as a distraction: “I would hope the voters are more concerned about qualifications of their DA than some inappropriate emails.”

Siegler’s qualifications were impressive, but the emails weren’t the only problem. Early in her career, she’d apologized for using the word “Jew” as a synonym for “cheat” in front of prospective jurors. She said she didn’t know it was a slur because she hadn’t grown up around many Jewish people. There was also an allegation that she’d struck a juror in a death penalty case because he was Black. Not true, she said; she’d struck the man because he was a member of the megachurch led by televangelist Joel Osteen. Its congregants were “screwballs and nuts,” she explained. She later apologized and said that by striking the juror, she was just trying to weed out those who would shy away from imposing a death sentence. “You don’t think an aggressive prosecutor hasn’t offended just a few people?” she asked.

Siegler’s campaign amassed a number of law enforcement endorsements, which pushed her through a crowded four-way Republican primary and into a runoff. But it wasn’t enough: She lost to the former chief judge of the county’s criminal courts. On the heels of defeat, Siegler resigned from the DA’s office. “All that this office stands for will always be a part of my heart,” she wrote in her resignation letter. She left her job feeling beaten up, she later told Texas Monthly. She’d imagined spending her career at the DA’s office, and now she was wondering if there would be a second act.

For a while, Siegler maintained an uncharacteristically low profile before blasting back into the headlines in 2010, when she was appointed special prosecutor in the case of Anthony Graves, who’d spent 12 years on death row for a crime he swore he did not commit. After years of legal wrangling, Graves’s conviction was overturned; Siegler was hired to determine whether the state should retry him. That October, she declared that Graves had been the victim of prosecutorial misconduct, “the worst I’ve ever seen.” It was an unexpected conclusion from a woman who for so long had been a poster child for the state’s aggressive and unreflective criminal justice system. And it came just as things were beginning to heat up in the case of Jeffrey Prible.

3

---

Birthday Cake

As an attorney in Houston, James Rytting was familiar with Siegler’s courtroom theatrics. Her most famous stunt, tying her colleague to the headboard of a victim’s bloody bed, expanded her brand beyond Texas’s borders. A TV crew shadowed her during the trial, and the bed scene was reenacted in “The Blue-Eyed Butcher,” a Lifetime movie about the case. “I was actually surprised that the scene caused as much uproar as it did,” Siegler said. “It was just something that seemed to be the right thing to do at the time.”

Rytting taught university-level classes in philosophy and logic before turning to law. Gracile in appearance and earnest in demeanor, he quickly developed a reputation for taking on some of Texas’s most difficult death penalty appeals. In 2008, Rytting was appointed to represent Prible as the case moved into federal court.

Prible had long stopped trusting his appointed attorneys. He’d filed a series of unsuccessful motions on his own behalf arguing that Siegler had colluded with a ring of informants to send him to death row. He sought material in the state’s file related to Beckcom, Foreman, and Walker, along with one of the informants in Herrero’s case. “Siegler went to great lengths to hide her ties to jailhouse informants in Beaumont,” Prible wrote.

On their own, Prible’s motions sounded desperate and conspiratorial. But Rytting took his new client’s claims seriously. “James Rytting was the first one that ever gave us hope,” Peterson, Prible’s aunt, recalled.

Prible’s trial featured some of Siegler’s dramatic charms, which Rytting equated to the talents of a B-rate actor. She’d played up what little evidence she had in a prosecutorial style equivalent to a radio shock jock, all while apologizing for being crude. To believe Prible’s claim that he and Tirado had engaged in consensual sex, Siegler said, “you’ve also got to believe that his semen is so tasty that she walked around savoring the flavor of it in her mouth for a couple hours.”

But as Rytting prepared to challenge Prible’s conviction, he saw beyond the cinematic reenactments and blustery rhetoric to something far more insidious.

Although several years had passed since Carl Walker learned Prible was looking for him, he remained reluctant to get involved. In early 2009, however, Rytting’s investigator managed to get Walker on the phone, documenting their conversation in an affidavit. Prible had been set up, Walker confirmed, and he believed Siegler was in on it. According to Walker, Siegler fed information about the crime to Foreman, who passed it to Beckcom, Walker, and others. As Walker understood it, Siegler was concerned about getting around Prible’s alibi: the next-door neighbor who saw Steve Herrera drop Prible off at home several hours before the murders.

Interviews Rytting conducted with other defendants Siegler had prosecuted in the early 2000s revealed additional allegations that supported Prible’s theory and suggested that Siegler’s reliance on jailhouse informants extended beyond Beaumont.

William Irvan was housed next to Prible at the Harris County jail while they were both awaiting trial. In an affidavit, he said that Siegler had offered him a deal via his lawyer: If he informed on Prible, she would agree to a 35-year sentence. Irvan refused. Siegler went on to deploy an informant at Irvan’s trial to help convict him of a cold-case rape and murder, sending him to Texas death row, where he remains.

In a separate affidavit, Tarus Sales told Rytting that while in jail, he was repeatedly placed in proximity to a man he didn’t know. At Sales’s trial, the man testified for Siegler that he and Sales were great friends and Sales had confessed to murder, all of which Sales denied. Sales was also sent to death row, where he remains.

A third man, Danny Bible, recalled seeing Beckcom at the Harris County jail in advance of Prible’s trial. Beckcom approached various men to ask about their cases, gathering notes in a folder, Bible said in an affidavit. He watched as Beckcom talked to Siegler outside court one day, handing her some papers from his folder. Bible, a serial killer who confessed to a 1979 slaying in Houston, was executed in 2016.

And then, of course, there was Herrero, who was serving a life sentence based on the dubious testimony of two informants from Beaumont. Were it not for Herrero’s efforts years earlier to alert Prible to what he’d learned about the snitch scheme, Rytting might never have gone looking for information about Siegler’s use of informants.

With the new intel in hand, Rytting filed a petition in federal court challenging Prible’s conviction. He argued that a band of snitches inside FCI Beaumont, seeking to reduce their prison terms, had conspired to frame Prible using information that Siegler provided to Foreman. But because a state court had never addressed Prible’s informant claims, U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison paused the federal action to allow the Texas courts to weigh in. The case landed back in front of the judge who had presided over Prible’s 2002 trial.

In the meantime, Rytting finally arranged to meet Walker in person. On an August morning in 2010, he waited in a room at a low-level federal prison in Oakdale, Louisiana, tape recorder in hand. Walker, wearing his prison-issued khakis, strode in, sat down, and laid it all out.

Walker was just 26 when he got popped on federal crack charges. Thanks to the racist sentencing disparity between powder and crack cocaine, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. When Walker arrived at Beaumont in the summer of 2000, he was scared and depressed, he told Rytting, according to a transcript of their meeting. “That’s more time in prison than I’ve actually been alive.”

Seeking solace, Walker gravitated to the prison church, where he sang in the choir. His devotion earned him the nickname “Brother Walker.” Being pious, a Houston native, and in prison for the first time put Walker on Foreman and Beckcom’s radar. It was a choice mix of factors that would signal credibility to a prosecutor vetting an informant. Foreman and Beckcom approached Walker with an opportunity, a “blessing,” he said. A guy named Jeff Prible would be coming to their unit. If Walker informed on Prible, he’d likely be able to get his sentence reduced. “That’s the pitch,” Walker explained.

Rytting intervened: Foreman and Beckcom knew Prible was coming to the unit before he arrived? “How could they possibly have known that?” he asked.

Walker replied that he didn’t know for sure, but “from what I understand, they were all in cahoots with the prosecutor.” Foreman handed out Siegler’s number to guys at Beaumont like mints after a meal. Walker wrote the number in his address book. Siegler was worried about the case, Foreman and Beckcom told him; where evidence was concerned, she had “little to none,” and she needed a confession to link Prible to the murders.

Foreman and Beckcom gave him details of the crime, Walker said, including where the bodies were located and the fact that DNA was found in Tirado’s mouth. They also told him that while Prible had an alibi, he had supposedly returned to Herrera’s house to slaughter the family.

“All of this was discussed before you even laid eyes on Prible?” Rytting asked.

“Before I even seen the man,” Walker said.

Walker was conflicted. Having been ratted on himself, he had little respect for informants, and being tagged a snitch in prison could be dangerous. At the same time, the crime Prible was accused of was heinous. If he was behind the deaths of three kids, then he deserved what was coming to him.

Walker decided to go along with the scheme. He joined Foreman, Beckcom, and several others in befriending Prible. They staged photos with him during visiting hours. Seven of them surrounded Prible in one shot, standing in front of a backdrop illustrated with palm trees and fluffy white clouds. In another, Foreman and Beckcom smiled broadly alongside Prible, all three accompanied by family members. The idea was to show how chummy they were — evidence that could go a long way toward corroborating their account of Prible’s confession.

Beckcom also scored some wine, expensive contraband made from commissary grape juice, and they got Prible drunk on the rec yard, trying to loosen his lips. It didn’t work; Prible got so inebriated they had to help him back to his cell. As far as Walker knew, Prible never did confess to the crime. But it didn’t really matter. They had enough details to sink him without Prible ever saying a word. “That’s the thing,” Walker told Rytting. “If I know your favorite color is blue, and I go through all this trouble to make you tell me blue, whether you tell me blue or not it still don’t change the fact that I know what your color is.”

“Whether you tell me blue or not it still don’t change the fact that I know what your color is.”

Foreman and Beckcom instructed Walker to send Siegler a letter expressing his willingness to testify against Prible. Walker didn’t write the letter, which someone else typed up for him in the law library, but he did sign it. He didn’t know if it was ever sent because in the end, he decided to withdraw from the plot. “Can I live with knowing that I am going to openly lie about information I have no idea about and send this man to death?” Walker asked. “I concluded that I could not do that.”

Rytting told him that in Beckcom’s version of events, Prible had confessed to Beckcom and Foreman on the rec yard. “That’s bullshit,” Walker replied. There are only three things to do in prison, he said: Watch, listen, and do your time. Private conversations are generally confined to cells, not public spaces. For Foreman and Beckcom, that posed a problem, Walker said. They lived in a different housing block than Prible, so there was no way to allege they’d ever had an intimate conversation with the man. Instead, they’d have to say Prible confessed in the open, among a throng of others, which, Walker said, was nuts to anyone with any clue how prison works. “Who talks about murdering somebody when any ears in the surrounding area could hear? It’s just not logical.”

Walker said he’d been apprehensive about coming forward, but the situation still weighed on him. He knew there could be serious repercussions for helping someone who might be guilty — and he didn’t have any idea if Prible was guilty. “Nobody’s going to give you a pat on the back for releasing somebody who was suspected of such a horrendous crime,” he said. “And it’s not that I am looking for a pat on the back. I just don’t want something else in the back.” But the bottom line was that he believed Prible had been set up, and that was wrong. “I just know these guys is guilty of conspiring against him,” he told Rytting. “I know that for a fact. I do know for a fact that Kelly Siegler was involved.”

“Prible was dead the day he hit the yard,” Walker said. “They had already baked a cake for the man. He just didn’t know it was his birthday.”

Back in Houston, Rytting asked Mark Kent Ellis, the state judge who presided over Prible’s trial, to inspect Siegler’s files for any materials that should have been disclosed to defense lawyers. Among the items Harris County prosecutors handed over was a sealed envelope marked “attorney work product.” Inside were three letters from would-be Beaumont informants, including Walker.

The sequestered letters were strikingly similar. Each referenced previous communications with Siegler and reinforced the idea that Prible had killed Herrera in a dispute over money. The formatting was identical, and all three contained the same misspelling of Prible’s name as “Pribble,” suggesting a common author.

As Siegler might remember from “previous conversations with Nathan Foreman,” Walker’s letter began, he and several other guys from Houston had grown close to Prible; sharing a hometown put Prible at ease. “At first Jeff would only talk about the bank jobs he had pulled, but later he began to open up about the murders and how he did what he thought he had to do. It was business, not personal,” the letter read. “I’m more than willing to testify to these things in court. … I will help you in any way I can and would appreciate any help you could give me.”

“Steve had screwed him out of some money so he did what he had to do,” read a letter signed by Jesse Gonzalez, who enclosed a photo of himself with Prible.

“Pribble confided in me of Steve owing him some money from the banks they were robbing together, and how he had gone back that night to get what belonged to him,” the third letter, from a man named Mark Martinez, read. “I am more than willing to testify to these things in court.”

Martinez later told his prison counselor that “some dudes” at Beaumont had “been pressured” to write letters to Siegler. He neither wrote nor signed the letter, he said, but would not elaborate. The counselor confirmed that Martinez’s signature did not match the one on the letter he purportedly signed, according to a defense investigator’s affidavit.

Rytting tried to persuade the judge that the state had gone to great lengths to conceal the plot to frame Prible. Only now, with the information Walker provided and the documents discovered in Siegler’s files, were facts emerging that could prove the conspiracy. But Ellis was unmoved. While he concluded that Walker was “present during the planning of the alleged conspiracy” to inform on Prible, he quickly dismissed the revelation. Prible’s allegations were “unpersuasive” and full of “speculation,” he ruled, noting there was no evidence that Beckcom had recanted his account of Prible’s confession.

After an unsuccessful appeal, Rytting prepared to revive his case in federal court.

4

---

Show on the Road

TNT aired the inaugural episode of its first reality show, “Cold Justice,” in 2013, starring Siegler and former crime scene investigator Yolanda McClary. Produced by “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf, the pilot investigated the case of a woman in Cuero, Texas, who died of what appeared to be a self-inflicted bullet to the head. In the span of a week, Siegler and her co-stars concluded that the woman had actually been killed by her husband; he was charged and pleaded guilty to murder.

“Cold Justice” was a hit. Fans were drawn to Siegler and McClary for their gumption, expertise, and empathy toward victims’ families. Critics liked that the series focused on small towns rather than big cities. “Siegler and McClary are attractive and photogenic, yet never ham it up on camera or glamorize their jobs,” one reviewer wrote. “They’re eminently professional.”

The show was Siegler’s idea. In her years as a Harris County prosecutor, she had served on a committee that reviewed cold cases across the state. “I realized that a lot of these agencies have cases that are really close to being solved,” she told Texas Monthly. “That’s where the idea started, and after I left the DA’s office, I tried to sell it to a couple of people out in the LA world, and one day I got hooked up with Dick Wolf. … He immediately loved the idea.”

The real-world impact was mixed from the start. After the pilot aired, an article titled “Lukewarm Justice” was printed in the professional journal of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. Authored by the DA who handled the Cuero case, he described how the publicity created a nightmare when it came to selecting a jury, leading to a mistrial. While he praised Siegler and her co-stars, he was disgusted with the producers, who refused to push the air date until after the trial. “‘Justice’ was out the window and ‘cold’ was all that remained,” he wrote.

Coverage of the show steered clear of such controversies. In interviews, Siegler pushed the lesson she wanted audiences to take from her work. If “Cold Justice” had a mantra, she said, it was: “There is nothing wrong with circumstantial evidence cases, oh my God! People, would you quit thinking that!”

By the time “Cold Justice” finished its third season, however, Siegler and TNT were facing the first of several defamation lawsuits. A man Siegler accused of murdering his wife, who was later acquitted, alleged that the show used coercive tactics by telling the local DA’s office that the episode would not be televised if the DA declined to seek an indictment. The producers denied the allegation, and the lawsuit was eventually dismissed. (To date, the other defamation suits have also been unsuccessful.)

In another episode, a Georgia prosecutor decided to move forward with the case Siegler assembled only for a judge to issue a scathing ruling years later, dropping all charges against the defendants and barring the state from pursuing them in the future.

“It is doubtful defendants would have ever been charged based on the record of this case in the absence of interest from a California entertainment studio 10 years after the crime was committed,” the judge wrote. The studio profited from the “scandalous allegations” but had “no burden of proof in a court of law,” he continued. “This order is the outcome that results naturally when forensic inquiry and the pursuit of truth are confused with entertainment.”

TNT canceled “Cold Justice” after the third season. After a brief hiatus, the show found a new home on Oxygen as part of the network’s pivot to true-crime programming.

“This order is the outcome that results naturally when forensic inquiry and the pursuit of truth are confused with entertainment.”

In the meantime, Siegler’s record in Texas started to come under scrutiny for the first time. In July 2015, a district court overturned the conviction of David Temple, the high school football coach Siegler had put on trial for killing his pregnant wife. The judge found that Siegler had withheld evidence dozens of times in violation of Brady v. Maryland, a landmark Supreme Court decision requiring prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense.

Siegler’s justification of her conduct was almost as stunning as the violations themselves. “Of enormous significance,” the judge wrote, was her testimony insisting that she was only obligated to turn over exculpatory evidence that she believed to be true.

“If Kelly’s bizarre interpretation … were ever to be the law, then all a prosecutor would ever have to do to keep any witness statement away from the defense is say, ‘Well, I didn’t believe it,’” Paul Looney, an attorney who worked on the Temple case, told the Houston Press. “If Kelly Siegler’s a lawyer in five years, I’ll be shocked.”

Before long, Siegler’s conduct in other cases was being questioned. The Houston Chronicle published a story citing similar allegations in the death penalty case of Howard Guidry. “Here it is — the same patterns and practices,” Guidry’s lawyer told the paper. She argued in court that Siegler had withheld critical evidence from Guidry’s trial attorneys, including fingerprints found at the crime scene that belonged to someone other than their client. Guidry’s appeals have since been denied.

For Prible and his neighbors on death row, the questions suddenly swirling about Siegler’s conduct were woefully overdue. While Siegler was promoting “Cold Justice” to a friendly press, an incarcerated writer at Polunsky named Thomas Whitaker published a sprawling series about Prible’s case on his blog, Minutes Before Six, with the help of supporters on the outside. Drawing on case records as well as conversations with Prible, Whitaker wrote in exhaustive and vivid detail about Prible’s legal saga.

While Siegler was basking in TV stardom, Prible was languishing, talking about his case to anyone who would listen. “I’ve watched his mental state deteriorate over the years,” Whitaker wrote. He recalled hearing thumping from outside his cell, only to discover that Prible had been slamming his head against the wall. “That is how I see him in my mind’s eye these days, alone, on his hand and knees, the wall splotched crimson, a dull knocking sound echoing down the run. And no one, no one, is listening.”

5

---

Ticket Out of Jail

As Rytting peeled back the layers in Prible’s case, he became convinced that it was inextricably linked to that of Hermilo Herrero. Herrero’s innocence claim had gotten a temporary boost in 2005, when Jaime Elizalde, Herrero’s friend on Texas death row, gave a sworn statement confessing to being the real killer in the case. Elizalde later pleaded the Fifth, refusing to answer questions on the matter in court. He was executed in 2006. But the records Rytting obtained supported what Herrero had long suspected: that he and Prible were set up by the same ring of Beaumont informants. Rytting took on Herrero’s case pro bono.

Some of the most important records were related to Jesse Moreno, the star witness at Herrero’s trial. As it turned out, it was Moreno who gave Siegler Foreman’s name in the first place. Moreno had a history of cutting deals with the state. In 1997, while he was serving a federal sentence for drug crimes, Siegler put him on the stand to testify against another man on trial for murder. Siegler wrote a Rule 35 letter on Moreno’s behalf, but it did not result in a sentence reduction.

In 2001, Moreno got back in touch with Siegler while at Beaumont, reminding her of his previous assistance, which he felt had gone unrewarded, and offering “some info that can be helpful for you on an unsolved case.” In a tape-recorded, in-person conversation that July, he told Siegler that Herrero had confessed to him more than a year and a half earlier, in 1999. Foreman and Rafael Dominguez were both present for the confession, he said. There was one problem: Foreman wasn’t at Beaumont in 1999.

By the time Moreno took the stand at Herrero’s trial, Foreman had disappeared from his account of Herrero’s confession. Meanwhile, Dominguez, the second informant Siegler called as a witness, testified that Foreman was present for two subsequent confessions by Herrero.

Although Siegler told jurors that Moreno had put his life on the line to share what he knew, Moreno testified that he didn’t have much of a choice: Herrero had put a hit on him after discovering that he had assisted authorities in other cases. The threat was so dire that Moreno was put in protective custody and eventually transferred away from Beaumont. Cooperating with Siegler in the hopes of receiving a time cut was the only way to get out of federal prison alive, Moreno said. “Either that or I’m dead.”

But memos Rytting obtained from the Bureau of Prisons dismantled this story. Records documenting Moreno’s transfers made no mention of Herrero, suggesting instead that Moreno feared for his life because he’d crossed a prison gang for which he’d been smuggling drugs. He was shipped out of Beaumont after cooperating with officials investigating the illicit activity. As Rytting later argued, Siegler allowed “false and misleading testimony from Moreno about when and why he decided to turn state’s witness against Herrero.”

Most Read

The Right-Wing Campaign to Purge Women From Women’s Sports

Natasha Lennard

Bitcoin Bros and the MAGA Faithful Converge in Nashville — and Embrace an Alternate Reality

Liliana Segura

What Tim Walz Could Mean For Kamala Harris’s Stance on Gaza and Israel

Sam Dean

As he worked to untangle the web of informants, Rytting realized he needed help and enlisted a civil lawyer named Gretchen Scardino. Born and raised in Texas, Scardino had worked on death penalty litigation as a summer law clerk at the California State Public Defender’s Office. “My eyes were opened enough to know that I didn’t know what I was doing and that I might be getting in over my head,” she recalled. After graduating law school, she turned to civil practice.

But the desire to return to capital litigation didn’t go away. She had never understood the logic behind the death penalty, that punishing someone for murder should mean committing murder in response. She’d also learned from a young age that deadly violence was rooted in complex problems, and those who killed were often vulnerable themselves. A family friend had murdered his parents after becoming schizophrenic. “Knowing him before he became mentally ill and before he did this crime probably had a pretty big effect on me as a young person,” she said.

Prible’s case was Scardino’s reintroduction to death penalty work. She started out by reading the case record and trial transcripts. “I really thought that there must be a volume of the transcript missing,” she recalled. “I couldn’t believe that someone could be convicted of such a horrible crime and sentenced to death based on what I had seen.”

Although the Prible case presented a steep learning curve, her lack of experience also served her well: Unlike civil litigation, which involves obtaining large amounts of discovery as a matter of course, in federal death penalty appeals, “you don’t automatically get discovery,” she said. A judge has to grant permission every step of the way. But Scardino didn’t know this at the time. “I just approached it as, ‘Let’s ask for everything that we would ask for if it was a regular civil case,’” she said. “And that’s kind of what broke it open.”

In early 2016, a critical piece fell into place. After leaving Beaumont, Foreman had been sentenced to decades in state prison. Thirteen years after his role in the snitch ring first came to light in a chance encounter between Walker and Herrero, Foreman decided to talk. The result was a pair of affidavits, one in Prible’s case and one in Herrero’s.

The affidavits did not address whether Foreman had been the leader of the snitch ring, as Walker described. But contrary to the claims made by the informants in both cases, Foreman said he never heard either man confess. “Prible did not brag in my presence about killing an entire family,” Foreman said. “Prible did not tell me that he was the kind of man who can go in a house and take out a whole family and come out clean or say that he was a bad motherfucker.” When Prible talked about Steve Herrera, “he talked about him like he was a friend he had lost.”

Foreman confirmed something Walker said: that men incarcerated at Beaumont joked about how Prible would be their “ticket out of jail.” Although Prible discussed his case with Foreman, “I learned information about his case from Kelly Siegler too,” he said in his affidavit. She “knew that FCI inmates wanted to testify against Prible in return for help getting their federal sentence reduced.” According to Foreman, his first meeting with Siegler took place in August 2001. “I think it was before I even met Prible,” he said.

Soon afterward, Prible’s attorneys asked U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison to order the Harris County DA’s office to hand over any trial material that was “withheld from the defense on the basis that it is work product, privileged, or otherwise confidential.” The DA’s office eventually agreed to submit hundreds of pages to Ellison for a determination on whether they should have been disclosed.

Almost five months later, Ellison issued his order. He had identified a number of records that “possibly contain exculpatory information,” including 19 pages of handwritten notes. The notes were written by Siegler and her investigator Johnny Bonds. Some were hard to decipher, but a few things jumped out immediately. The notes confirmed that Siegler and Bonds had met with Foreman to discuss the Prible case on August 8, 2001. At the meeting, Foreman had positioned himself as an informant, offering intel about an apparent confession by Prible. One note said Prible showed “Ø remorse.”

The notes suggested that Foreman might not have had his facts straight. He seemed to be under the impression that Prible’s own family had been murdered. But if Siegler was skeptical at the time, there was no hint of it in the records, which showed that she met with Foreman again in December.

The notes dramatically undercut the scenario Siegler presented at Prible’s trial, in which Beckcom and Foreman met Prible through a casual encounter on the rec yard. In reality, Siegler had discussed the case with Foreman before Prible was even indicted. “Oh my god. I cannot believe that this has been hidden,” Scardino remembers thinking. “This puts the lie to the whole story about Beckcom and Foreman just coincidentally coming into contact with Jeff.”

Just as damning were notes that appeared to undermine key forensic evidence Siegler presented at Prible’s trial. Prosecutors had elicited testimony from a DNA analyst who claimed that the sperm found in Tirado’s mouth had to have been deposited shortly before she was murdered. But the notes showed that Siegler had consulted a different forensic expert, the director of the police crime lab in Pasadena, Texas, whose analysis did not support the inflammatory theory she presented at trial. “Pamela McInnis — semen lives up to 72 hours,” Siegler had written.

“So much of the trial was just this really horrific narrative spun by the prosecution,” Scardino said. In her closing argument, Siegler asserted that Prible had shot Tirado moments after forcing her to perform oral sex. But Siegler’s own notes made clear that the evidence didn’t support this.

To Scardino, the revelations were a bombshell. “I thought, ‘Oh wow. We’re gonna win this case.’”

The post How Two Men Convicted by Kelly Siegler Uncovered the Dark Secret to Her Success appeared first on The Intercept.

1

---

Secrets of Stardom

Only a few bones remained and there was no clear cause of death.

In the realm of murder cases gone cold, this was a challenging one — even for Kelly Siegler, a veteran prosecutor from Houston, Texas, with a nearly perfect conviction record and an evangelical fervor for solving cold cases using circumstantial evidence.

There were a few facts to start with. Twenty-nine-year-old Margie Pointer had disappeared in 1987. What was left of her was found in a ravine near Alamogordo, New Mexico, 17 years later. Despite the best efforts of a local cop haunted by the case, it remained unsolved. The Alamogordo Police Department needed help, and Siegler, star of the true-crime reality show “Cold Justice,” was there to answer the call.

Siegler arrived in town with her co-stars, Yolanda McClary, a former Las Vegas crime scene investigator, and Johnny Bonds, a retired Houston homicide detective. They had their work cut out for them, but there was an additional hurdle: “The statute of limitations for second-degree murder has run out,” Siegler explained at the start of the episode. “So our job this week is to see if the evidence warrants a first-degree murder.”

“A first-degree murder in New Mexico has to be committed in a willful and deliberate way,” she went on. “Since we don’t have a crime scene or any DNA, we’re gonna need to find witnesses who can show that it was committed in a willful or deliberate way.”

In other words, determining what happened to Pointer wasn’t the aim so much as ensuring they landed on a scenario that would make her alleged killer eligible for punishment.

In the world of “Cold Justice,” identifying new suspects isn’t what Siegler and her team are there to do. Instead, they arrive in town with the objective of wrapping up a cold case within a week. They always have a couple of suspects in mind, individuals the local cops have previously investigated. In Alamogordo, they quickly latched onto Pointer’s former co-worker, a man with whom, rumor had it, she was having an affair. The day Pointer went missing, he showed up at a friend’s cabin 4 miles from where her bones were later found with a hurt thumb and a scratch on his cheek. In the absence of a body, cause of death, or any other physical evidence, these injuries convinced Siegler that she knew how Pointer had met her demise.

At the Alamogordo Police Department, Siegler reenacted her theory of the murder. She and Bonds demonstrated how Pointer could have been strangled to death and her attempts to fight back could have produced the injuries found on their suspect. With his hands around Siegler’s neck, Bonds explained that Pointer would have tried to pull the killer’s thumb off her throat. Siegler, pulling his thumb with one hand, reached toward his cheek with the other. “Scratch, scratch,” she said. Bonds said it would take 15 to 20 seconds for Pointer to black out and at least another minute to kill her.

“A minute and a half of consistent pressure without letting go, never changing your mind,” Siegler said. “How is that not deliberate?”

“All right, sounds good,” the police investigator said. They decided to take it to the district attorney.

The DA was less convinced and declined to seek an indictment. Siegler and the investigator returned looking crestfallen. Bonds sunk his head into his hands.

“Here’s the good news: Your case is strong, your case is great,” Siegler told the investigator. “It might be circumstantial, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s ready to go right now. But she doesn’t want to do it yet.”

The episode, titled “Sunspot Highway,” aired in July 2014 as part of the show’s second season. Although “Cold Justice” had been running for less than a year, Siegler had already attracted a devoted following, and the Alamogordo DA’s decision did not go over well. Fans were convinced that Pointer’s co-worker had killed her and Siegler had figured it all out. “This is a slam dunk case for everyone except the DA,” one viewer wrote on the show’s Facebook page. “WTF is with that idiot DA,” another wrote. “You guys handed her the killer on a silver platter and she refused to charge him!”

That a case so lacking in direct evidence could convince Siegler’s fans of the man’s guilt was a testament to her skill in crafting a narrative, whether for a TV audience or a real-world jury.

As an assistant district attorney in Harris County, Texas, Siegler was known for her courtroom theatrics. She once famously straddled her colleague atop a bloody mattress at trial to reenact for jurors how the defendant had stabbed her husband 193 times. Siegler’s flair for the dramatic was perfect for TV, while her reliance on circumstantial evidence allowed her to spin bare facts into a compelling theory that might or might not be supported.

While “Cold Justice” often boasts about its track record — it has helped bring about 49 arrests and 21 convictions over six seasons, the Oxygen network reported in May — the show has also weathered a series of defamation lawsuits. Many of the cases Siegler assembled eventually fell apart precisely because there was too little direct evidence to convict whomever she identified as the killer.

Siegler’s TV career has not suffered for the controversies. In September, she took the stage before a cheering crowd in Orlando, Florida, as one of the headliners at CrimeCon, an annual conference for true-crime fans and creators. She was there to promote two shows. Not only had “Cold Justice” begun taping its seventh season, but she would also be starring in a new series, “Prosecuting Evil With Kelly Siegler.” The program, which premiered on November 18, takes her back to her home state to examine “the most harrowing homicides and toughest trials in Texas history — all told with Kelly Siegler’s unique insight and unparalleled access.”

“Prosecuting Evil” will revisit some of Siegler’s old Harris County cases, offering fans a behind-the-scenes look at the celebrity prosecutor’s “superhero origin story,” as one of her fellow speakers put it. “Both of our shows are about reality. There’s no faking,” Siegler told the crowd. “We’re the real deal.” She waxed nostalgic for her years in the district attorney’s office. “All those big cases,” she said, “no one’s ever told those stories.”

On paper, Siegler’s record as a Harris County prosecutor is far more impressive than the stats boasted by the Oxygen network. Over her two decades in Houston, Siegler handled more than 200 trials, securing more than 60 murder convictions and 19 death sentences. But the stories behind some of those convictions raise serious questions about their integrity. While Siegler’s formula for closing cold cases might make for great television, it has left a trail of wreckage in its wake.

As Siegler’s TV star has been rising over the last decade, a parallel reality has been playing out in Texas courts, where allegations of prosecutorial misconduct have tarnished Siegler’s reputation. Appellate litigation in murder cases handled by Siegler has exposed a history of withholding exculpatory evidence from defense attorneys, including in death penalty cases. One prominent criminal defense attorney has called on the Harris County District Attorney’s Office to review all of Siegler’s convictions.

Some of the most disturbing evidence of Siegler’s conduct is documented in the files of a case that has largely gone unnoticed: the 2002 conviction of Ronald Jeffrey Prible. Prible was sent to death row for the murder of a Houston family. The evidence tying him to the crime was entirely circumstantial. He has maintained his innocence for more than 20 years.

In 2020, a federal district judge overturned Prible’s conviction on the basis of Siegler’s suppression of evidence, ordering the state to retry or release him within six months. Instead, Texas fought the order, persuading the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate Prible’s death sentence on procedural grounds. The court did not address Siegler’s actions. Prible appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in June, the justices declined to intervene.

Today, Prible faces execution despite the fact that the case against him has unraveled. A monthslong investigation by The Intercept — including a review of thousands of pages of court records — shows that Prible’s case contains numerous hallmarks of wrongful convictions, from a shockingly inept police investigation to unsupportable junk science peddled by prosecutors at trial.

But particularly alarming is the way Siegler weaponized a network of confidential informants to construct her case against Prible, as the federal district judge found.

The star witness was a man named Michael Beckcom, who testified that Prible confessed to the killings while they were imprisoned together in southeast Texas. Beckcom, who was doing time for the audacious murder of a federal witness, was part of a ring of informants at the same lockup in Beaumont, each trying to game the system in an effort to shave time off their sentences. Several informants offered information to Siegler before they had even met Prible, according to a petition challenging his conviction filed in federal court. The petition details how Siegler encouraged Beckcom to extract details from Prible that would help her convict him and hid the extent of the informants’ involvement at trial.

“American criminal law has essentially created an underground market in which we permit the state to trade leniency for information.”

To Harvard law professor Alexandra Natapoff, author of “Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice,” the role of informants in Prible’s case is emblematic of a deeper problem that corrupts the criminal legal system. “American criminal law has essentially created an underground market in which we permit the state to trade leniency for information,” she said. Prosecutors have wide discretion to avail themselves of informants who have an obvious incentive to lie about what they know — a leading cause of wrongful convictions.

“Because so much of these negotiations and transactions take place under the table, the likelihood that anyone will ever find out is extremely low,” Natapoff said. “And because we reward police and prosecutors for arrests and convictions, we have a baked-in, dysfunctional incentive for them to use bad witnesses, bad evidence, over and over again.”

Court records reveal that Siegler repeatedly used informants in murder cases despite reasons to doubt their credibility. Details of the Beaumont snitch ring only came to light after Prible and another man Siegler sent to prison realized that she had relied on the same network of informants in both their cases. Despite strict limits on communication between incarcerated people, the two men, whose cases were otherwise unrelated, managed to connect the dots.

Siegler not only gained a reputation as a prosecutor who was willing to help informants seek sentence reductions, but she also advocated for them even when she didn’t consider their information reliable, court records show. Taken together, the records paint a damning picture of a prosecutor who cut corners and betrayed her professional obligations in order to secure convictions in weak or shaky cases. At best, Siegler was reckless in her use of informants and careless about scrutinizing the information they provided. At worst, as Prible’s lawyers argue, she actively conspired to use dubious testimony from a ring of snitches to win a conviction despite knowing the case wouldn’t otherwise hold up — framing an innocent man for murder.

Siegler has denied any wrongdoing. She declined to be interviewed for this investigation. “A second grader could see that you are biased and in no way inclined to listen to the truth or appreciate what really happened with these prosecutions,” Siegler wrote in response to questions from The Intercept. “I took an oath to seek justice and justice is what these defendants got.”

2

---

House Full of Bodies

Gregory Francisco lifted his garage door before sunrise on Saturday, April 24, 1999, and immediately smelled smoke. As he rushed across the street toward the home of his neighbor Steve Herrera, Francisco could see it too, billowing from the turbines on the roof and curling out from the garage doors.

The night before, Herrera had invited Francisco to one of his regular get-togethers to drink beer, play pool, and listen to music inside the two-car garage. Francisco didn’t make it, but as far as he could tell, things looked like they usually did: The music was on, and the garage doors were raised to shoulder height. By the time Francisco headed to bed around midnight, the gathering appeared to be winding down.

Now, however, as Francisco rang Herrera’s doorbell, he could hear music blaring — “maxed out,” he later testified. No one answered, so he rushed to a side door, which was hot to the touch. Francisco kicked it open. Inside the garage, he found Herrera face down on the floor between the pool table and a washer and dryer. Francisco yelled for Herrera to wake up, but then he saw blood. His neighbor was dead.

Firefighters were the first to arrive on the scene. In a den just beyond the garage, they made a grisly discovery: Herrera’s girlfriend, Nilda Tirado, was slumped on a smoldering loveseat. Next to her charred body was a can of Kutzit, a volatile solvent; on the floor was a red gas can. The walls were covered in soot, and the couple’s big screen TV had melted.

First responders found the children in the bedrooms. In one, Herrera’s 7-year-old daughter, Valerie, was face down on a bed; Tirado’s 7-year-old daughter, Rachel, was nearby on the floor. In the master bedroom, firefighters found the couple’s 22-month-old daughter, Jade. The medical examiner determined that Herrera and Tirado had been killed before the fire was set, each shot once through the back of the neck in what she called an “assassin’s wound.” The children, whose airways were full of soot, had died from smoke inhalation.

Word of the murders spread quickly. Relatives of Herrera and Tirado gathered outside the brick home as investigators processed the scene. The house was tidy, and there were no signs of forced entry or a robbery gone wrong. Herrera’s wallet, with approximately $900 inside, was found in the back pocket of his shorts. No weapon was found, nor any shell casings, which led investigators to believe a revolver had been used to shoot the couple. They gathered bottles and cans from the garage to process for fingerprints but failed to preserve what appeared to be blood stains on the wall and washing machine — evidence that could have been left by the perpetrator.

Curtis Brown, a detective with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, led the investigation. Court records reflect it was a less than robust inquiry. At trial, Brown confirmed that he spoke to just four people the day of the murders, including Herrera’s brother Edward and his brother-in-law Victor Martinez. Those interviews led him to Jeffrey Prible, who had been a friend of Herrera’s since grade school. From there, Brown looked nowhere else.

According to Edward, Herrera and Prible were at the house playing pool Friday night and had paged him looking to score an eight ball of cocaine. Edward and Herrera were both dealers, Edward told investigators, and Herrera was a regular user. Edward said he tried to find some but never did.

Martinez had been at Herrera’s that night. He told Brown that he picked up cigarettes and a 12-pack of Bud Light on his way to the house, arriving around 10 p.m. Later, with the beer almost gone, Herrera and Prible loaded into Martinez’s white Ford Escort, and the three men made their way to Rick’s Cabaret, a nearby strip club. Prible was friendly, Martinez said, and nothing seemed off. After several drinks, the men headed back to Herrera’s around 2 a.m. They smoked a joint outside before Martinez headed home. Prible and Herrera went back into the garage to continue playing pool.

On Saturday afternoon, Brown and Deputy Ramon Hernandez made their way several blocks west to Prible’s home. Prible, then 27, had been honorably discharged from the Marines in 1995 and was living at his parents’ place along with his 7-year-old son. The deputy said Prible was shocked to learn about the murders. He agreed to go down to the sheriff’s station to provide a statement.

Prible’s statement largely mirrored Martinez’s. After Martinez left, Prible said, he and Herrera played pool until Tirado came into the garage, fixing Herrera with a “look” that Prible took as a sign it was time to wrap things up. He said Herrera drove him home around 4 a.m. Prible went straight to bed and slept until early afternoon. He was hanging around the house, playing with his son, until the cops came knocking.

The deputy later testified that he believed Prible’s statement to be “truthful.” Nonetheless the cops asked Prible to take a polygraph, the results of which indicated deception. They read Prible his rights, and he sat down to provide a second statement. There was something he’d left out, he told them: He and Tirado were involved in an affair and had sex in the bathroom after the men got home from the club. He failed to mention this, he said, because he worried it would “ruin” Tirado’s reputation.

Prible provided a DNA sample and let the cops photograph him naked. They did not find any soot, burns, or other wounds on his body. Investigators searched Prible’s parents’ house, collecting the clothes he’d worn Friday night, which had no traces of blood, smoke, or any accelerant. They collected firearms, magazines, and ammunition. They found paperwork related to a .38 revolver but didn’t find the gun. DNA collected from Tirado was soon matched to Prible, but given his story about their sexual tryst, there was an explanation for that.

On Monday, police took a statement from Cynthia Garcia Flores, a childhood friend of Tirado’s. It was the first in a string of statements that raised new questions, not only about Prible, but also about Herrera — and what the two were up to in the weeks before the murders.

Flores said Herrera had told her husband that he and Prible were involved in a bank robbery and Herrera’s take was $12,000. Herrera had paid her husband, Vincent, for a “job” with some of the cash from the heist. Vincent said Herrera used the money to pay him for cocaine. Another woman, who said she’d been having an affair with Herrera, told police that a month before the murders, Prible handed Herrera a bag full of money. And Edward, Herrera’s brother, said that he’d seen both Prible and Herrera with large amounts of cash.

As it turned out, Prible had robbed six banks since March. The robberies went down the same way: Prible donned a ball cap and drove his mother’s car to a bank carrying a stack of manila envelopes and a note for the teller. One read, “This is a robbery,” while later iterations included a warning that he had a gun or a bomb, though he never brandished a weapon. Prible would instruct the teller to put the cash in an envelope and wait 15 minutes before “doing anything,” he later told a detective with the Houston Area Bank Robbery Task Force, which had dubbed the serial robber the “15-Minute Bandit.”

The robberies were part of an absurd scheme Herrera and Prible had devised to come up with enough money to buy their own nightclub. Prible would rob the banks, then Herrera would launder and grow the cash by buying drugs that he would sell for a profit. “After we bought one club, we would then open some more,” Prible told a task force investigator. “I trusted Steve. … I thought he could use his drug connections to make us a lot of money. Steve was a smart guy when it came to things like that.”

In all, the robberies netted the friends about $45,000. In the wake of the murders, the cash disappeared and has never been found.

On May 21, 1999, Prible confessed to the robberies. Three months later, he was sentenced to five years and shipped east to the federal correctional institution in Beaumont.

The investigation into the murders of Herrera, Tirado, and the three children went cold.

3

---

A Real Trial Tiger

The day after Christmas in 1999, the Houston Chronicle published a glowing profile of a star prosecutor at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office: 37-year-old Assistant District Attorney Kelly Siegler. Titled “One shrewd cracker-barrel lawyer,” the article traced her evolution from a small-town girl from Matagorda County to a gifted prosecutor who’d shot through the ranks to “symbolize the aggressive and colorful spirit of a powerful office in a county that sends more people to death row than anywhere else.”

Born Kelly Renee Jalufka, Siegler grew up in tiny Blessing, Texas, “a wart of a town on State Highway 35 … surrounded by rice farms,” as Texas Monthly described it in a 1977 feature highlighting her mother’s homestyle cooking. Siegler’s father, known as Big Billy, ran a barbershop and worked as the local justice of the peace; he “went shoeless and held court between haircuts,” the Chronicle reported. Siegler played high school basketball and was valedictorian of her graduating class. At the University of Texas at Austin, where she graduated early after studying international business, she was known in her dorm as “the hick.”

Siegler joined the DA’s office straight out of law school in 1987. As an intern in the office’s family criminal law division, she had come face to face with domestic violence cases, which fueled a desire to seek justice for victims. The issue was personal for Siegler, who was just a child when she urged her mother to leave her abusive stepfather and watched helplessly as the system protected him. “I grew up in a world where ladies walked around all the time with black eyes,” she later said in a clip from “Cold Justice.”

Siegler arrived at the DA’s office as legendary District Attorney Johnny Holmes was becoming famous for seeking the harshest possible punishments. Before long, she was making her mark as an overachiever. Evaluations contained in her personnel file show that Siegler quickly gained a reputation as “a real trial tiger,” in the words of then-supervisor Chuck Rosenthal, who would eventually replace Holmes as DA. “I have seen her try a murder case based solely on circumstantial evidence and get a life sentence from the jury,” another supervisor wrote.

Siegler won her first death sentence in 1992. Her mother sat in the courtroom as Siegler urged jurors to send an alleged skinhead with a low IQ named Brian Edward Davis to death row for a crime he committed when he was 22. Despite her victory, Siegler cried and was sick to her stomach after the trial. “He was like every boy I grew up with,” she told the Chronicle.

But if she had any reservations about seeking the ultimate punishment, there was no hint of it in her record. Siegler was repeatedly lauded for securing convictions when the evidence was thin, or as Rosenthal put it, for her ability to make “a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Investigators and police detectives sent letters to Holmes praising her talent. “No average ADA would have gone to trial under the heading ‘Murder,’” one letter read. “‘Luckily, you don’t have an average ADA in Kelly Siegler.’”

Jurors were won over by Siegler’s folksy appeal and knack for weaving compelling stories from circumstantial evidence. She spent a ton of time preparing her witnesses — and it showed. Siegler credited her humble roots for helping her relate to jurors. “I practice every argument and time it out like I’m in that barbershop,” Siegler told the Chronicle. “I figure if I can talk to a jury like I’m explaining it to Daddy and his buddies, then I’m doing OK.”

At the start of the new millennium, Siegler was at the top of her game. Holmes, who retired in 2001, had transformed the DA’s office, putting Houston on the map as the most aggressive death penalty jurisdiction in the country. Siegler was both a product of the office and a trailblazer: a woman who thrived in a good ol’ boys club while pushing the boundaries of prosecutorial performance. She estimated that she’d won “at least 80 percent of the 150 felony jury trials” she’d handled, according to the Chronicle, although co-workers said the number was “much higher.” If there was anyone who could resurrect the cold case murders of Herrera and Tirado and win a conviction, it was Siegler.

It’s not entirely clear when Siegler first decided Prible was guilty of murder.

Brown, the lead detective, testified that he first brought his file on the murders to her office in late 2000. But it was another detective who helped Siegler revive the cold case: Harris County DA’s investigator Johnny Bonds, who would later become Siegler’s co-star on “Cold Justice.”

Like Siegler, Bonds started his career as an overachiever. Once the youngest Houston Police Department officer ever assigned to the homicide unit, he was immortalized in “The Cop Who Wouldn’t Quit,” a 1983 book chronicling his quest to solve a triple murder. After leaving the police force, Bonds did short stints working private security and home remodeling but quickly returned to detective work. In 1989 he joined the Harris County DA’s Office.

On March 1, 2001, Bonds received a fax from a Dallas-based DNA analyst named Bill Watson, who had examined forensic evidence submitted by the sheriff’s department, including the blood, hair, and saliva samples taken from Prible. The fax was a copy of Watson’s original two-page report from 1999. His findings were not revelatory. Scrapings taken from beneath Tirado’s fingernails had yielded only her DNA. A pair of white tennis shoes belonging to Prible was tested for blood, but Watson found none.

Still, one part of the report interested Siegler. Two male DNA profiles had been obtained from semen collected from Tirado’s body. Vaginal and anal swabs showed sperm that came from Herrera. Sperm from an oral swab was linked to Prible.

In his statement divulging the affair, Prible told detectives that Tirado had performed oral sex on him in the bathroom, which would explain the presence of sperm in her mouth. But Siegler was skeptical. Although Prible said the two had been “messing around” for some time, friends of Tirado’s rejected the notion that she was cheating on Herrera with Prible. Flores, the friend who told police about Herrera’s involvement in the bank robberies, said she’d known Prible since middle school and he gave her the creeps. Another friend said Tirado shared this opinion. “Nilda told me that she always thought Jeff was creepy,” the woman told detectives.

When these statements were first collected in 1999, the DA’s office did not consider the evidence strong enough to form the basis of a murder case. But with Siegler in charge, things changed. By the summer of 2001, Siegler had concluded that the DNA evidence from the oral swab could only be the result of sexual assault. In the absence of any other physical evidence against Prible, this would be a linchpin to her case.

In a probable cause affidavit, the DA’s office laid out the evidence against Prible, describing the bank robbery scheme and noting that Prible was the last person known to have seen Herrera and Tirado alive. The affidavit mentioned the weapons and paperwork recovered from the home of Prible’s parents; records from a local firearm retailer showed that Prible had purchased a .38 Taurus revolver in 1998, yet this weapon “has yet to be found among the defendant’s possessions.” A firearms examiner said that a projectile recovered next to Tirado’s body was “consistent with a .38 caliber.” The affidavit suggested that Prible shot Herrera and Tirado with the .38 Taurus, then successfully got rid of it.

Finally, the state cited the DNA evidence taken from sperm on the oral swab and the woman who said Tirado found Prible “creepy.” She “does not believe the complainant was having any sort of affair with the defendant based on what she thought about him.”

On August 29, 2001, a grand jury indicted Prible for capital murder.

4

---

Texas v. Prible

Opening statements in the State of Texas v. Ronald Jeffrey Prible Jr. took place on October 14, 2002, at a courthouse in downtown Houston. Presiding over the trial was District Judge Mark Kent Ellis, a former Harris County prosecutor-turned-defense attorney who was elected to the bench on a Republican ticket. Siegler was accompanied by Vic Wisner, an ex-cop and veteran of the DA’s office with whom she’d teamed up in previous death penalty cases.

Siegler kicked off the state’s case with a provocation: “‘What kind of a man can go in a house and take out a whole family and come out clean?’” she began, over an objection from Prible’s lawyers. “‘That kind of person is a bad motherfucker — and I’m that kind of motherfucker.’ Those are the words of this defendant. … That’s what this man said about what he did on April 24, 1999.”

Prible’s words, Siegler told jurors, had been revealed by a man named Michael Beckcom, who was incarcerated at the federal prison known as FCI Beaumont. “And I’m going to stand here today and tell you he’s a vile, disgusting man himself,” she said. “He’s going to make you sick to your stomach.” But his testimony was crucial. This man would describe how he befriended Prible at Beaumont — and how Prible ultimately confessed to the crime.

Siegler previewed the state’s other key piece of evidence: the DNA taken from sperm found in Tirado’s mouth. A forensic expert would prove that Prible assaulted Tirado just moments before he shot her, set her on fire, and left her children to die, Siegler said. That’s the kind of man Prible is, she declared. “And he’s guilty of capital murder.”

The trial lasted two weeks, with the first several days focused on the fire and the deaths of the three little girls. Amid repeated warnings from the judge, who urged people in the courtroom to control their emotions, prosecutors introduced autopsy photos showing soot and mucus on the children’s faces, emphasizing their struggle to breathe before they died. Yet basic elements of the fire remained unclear, including precisely how or when it was set. Also puzzling was the missing murder weapon. Despite the affidavit arguing that Prible had used a .38 revolver, the same ballistics expert now testified that the weapon had likely been a 9 mm pistol.

But perhaps the most confounding testimony came from Brown, who said that he’d never considered any other suspect apart from Prible, a fact Siegler saw fit to reiterate. Yet the detective could not explain why his investigation justified such a singular focus. He didn’t pay attention to Prible’s interrogation, he said. Nor did he remember the names of anyone he interviewed in the aftermath of the murders.

Among the people Brown apparently did not recall was the most critical witness for the defense: a 12-year-old girl named Christina Gurrusquieta, who lived next door to Prible’s parents. She told police that she had seen Prible and Herrera arriving before dawn on April 24, 1999. Although there was no record of her eyewitness account in the police reports — Brown said he did not document their conversation — Gurrusquieta’s testimony lent credence to Prible’s claim that Herrera had driven him home around 4 a.m.

Gurrusquieta had turned 15 by the time she took the stand. She said she knew both Herrera and Prible; Herrera used to curse at her and her siblings when they played kickball and accidentally hit his car. In the early morning hours of April 24, she said, she got out of bed to use the bathroom and spotted the two men from her window, which faced the front of the house. It had to be after 1 a.m., since that was when her parents came home after working at the Mexican restaurant they owned. Gurrusquieta and her sister waited up for them on Friday nights. That night, Prible and Herrera “were just standing outside beside Jeff’s dad’s truck talking. And then I saw Jeff walk into his house and I seen Steve leave.”

Siegler did her best to pick apart Gurrusquieta’s account. “Is it possible, Christina, that the night you’re remembering was Thursday night instead of Friday night?” No, Gurrusquieta said. Did she “look at the clock to write down or memorialize forever what time it was when this all happened?” No, Gurrusquieta said. “Because a 12-year-old little girl would never do that, right?” Siegler said.

Siegler asked Gurrusquieta to read part of Prible’s statement aloud. “I then asked Steve to take me home. It was about 4 a.m.,” she read. So if Herrera did drop Prible off, Siegler said, “you wouldn’t have been awake to see if Jeff snuck back out of the house to get back over to Steve’s house anyway, would you?”

If it seemed like a stretch for Prible to have left Herrera’s place after a night of heavy drinking only to return to murder the whole household, Siegler and Wisner didn’t push this scenario very hard. Instead, they left the timeline vague. Jurors sought clarity during deliberations, asking the court to read back testimony about what happened when. The jury also seemed intrigued by Gurrusquieta, requesting more detail on when she was first interviewed by Brown.

But in the end, the alibi provided by Gurrusquieta was no match for the two witnesses at the crux of the state’s case: Beckcom, the jailhouse informant, and Watson, the DNA analyst.

Most Read

The Right-Wing Campaign to Purge Women From Women’s Sports

Natasha Lennard

Bitcoin Bros and the MAGA Faithful Converge in Nashville — and Embrace an Alternate Reality

Liliana Segura

What Tim Walz Could Mean For Kamala Harris’s Stance on Gaza and Israel

Sam Dean

A 41-year-old former bodybuilder who once managed a Gold’s Gym, Beckcom was a smooth talker, fit and confident in his prison uniform. Siegler was upfront about Beckcom’s incentive to testify, asking him to describe his deal with the state. “We have an understanding that if I testify truthfully to this court that you will reciprocate by calling my federal prosecutor,” he said. The prosecutor would file what’s known as a Rule 35 motion to Beckcom’s judge. Under the federal rules of criminal procedure, the judge could reduce Beckcom’s sentence if he was satisfied that Beckcom had provided “substantial assistance” in the Prible case. But he had to be truthful, Siegler emphasized, or else no deal. Right, Beckcom said.

Beckcom testified that he’d gotten Siegler’s name from his cellmate at Beaumont, Nathan Foreman. After getting in touch with Siegler in the fall of 2001, Beckcom met with her and Bonds. She seemed skeptical of “another inmate maybe spinning a yarn,” Beckcom said. But after he laid out everything he knew in a letter, Siegler was convinced.

Beckcom said he’d met Prible through his exercise partner at Beaumont. Prible used to stop by while they worked out. One day he struck up a conversation with Beckcom directly. “I was sitting on the bleachers in the rec yard just catching some sun, listening to my radio, and Prible approached myself and Nathan Foreman,” Beckcom said. According to Beckcom, Prible was seeking advice on his case. Before long, they were discussing it every day, while also making plans to go into the asphalt business together.

Beckcom said that Prible’s account evolved over time. At first he said, “I didn’t do it.” He conceded that his DNA had been found on the female victim but said everyone knew they were having an affair. Did he say anything about a weapon? Siegler asked. Yes, Beckcom said. Prible said the cops were looking for a .38 caliber revolver he owned but that he’d sold it. That wasn’t even the murder weapon, Prible told him. Instead, he intimated that he’d successfully gotten rid of the weapon, telling Beckcom, “Asphalt’s good sometimes for hiding things.”

Eventually, Beckcom decided to get as much information as he could from Prible, thinking he could use it to his advantage. After becoming aggravated by Prible insisting on his innocence, Beckcom said, he told him, “I know what you did. … I don’t care.” After that, Prible spilled everything. The details Beckcom shared on the stand could only have come from Prible, Siegler told the jury. “How would Mike Beckcom know all the things that he does know unless the killer told him?” When Beckcom asked Prible how he got in and out of the house without being seen, he said Prible pointed to his time deployed as a Marine. “It’s a typical high-intensity, low-drag maneuver,” he said, in what was presumably special ops speak.

“It was over money,” Beckcom said Prible confessed. Herrera “fucked me out of my money and then he was going to kill me, so I handled my business.”

To illustrate the level of trust that had developed between the informants and Prible, Siegler displayed a photograph taken at the Beaumont visiting room in November 2001. It showed Prible with his mother, Beckcom with his mother, and Foreman with his parents. “He called us his brothers and said he loved us,” Beckcom said. Still, Prible was aware they might betray him. At one point he told them, “You’re the only ones that could convict me,” Beckcom said. “If you do that you’ll have to live with it. I’m prepared to die.”

He used those words? Siegler asked. “He used those words,” Beckcom said.

Prible’s lead attorney, Terry Gaiser, asked Beckcom if he had ever lied under oath. “Yes, I have,” Beckcom answered. In fact, Gaiser continued, hadn’t a federal judge in California explicitly found that Beckcom lied in a different case? “That’s correct,” Beckcom said. Yet Gaiser did not elicit further details about Beckcom’s apparent history of perjury.

If Beckcom’s testimony filled the gaps in the state’s case against Prible, Watson, the DNA analyst, gave prosecutors the tools they needed to conjure a final harrowing image of Tirado’s death. “Have you thought about what Nilda went through in the last moments of her life?” Siegler asked the jury. According to Siegler, DNA had unlocked this story.

Watson, 36, had spent two years as a forensic analyst for the Fort Worth Police Department and one year at the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office before moving to a lab called Gene Screen. In his years testing swabs for the presence of semen, Watson testified, he’d found that anal and vaginal swabs could retain usable quantities of sperm for roughly two to three days. But he couldn’t recall ever getting even a partial male profile from an oral swab, even in cases where the evidence was submitted quickly.

Watson drew a damning — and highly speculative — conclusion from this: Given the large amount of sperm on the swab, Tirado had not had a chance to eliminate Prible’s semen by spitting or swallowing before she was shot. Would the evidence “be consistent with the male depositing the semen in Nilda’s mouth moments, if not seconds, before she was killed?” Wisner asked. “It certainly would be consistent with that,” Watson said.

In his closing, Wisner exaggerated Watson’s testimony for maximum effect. “There is no way in the world that that semen wasn’t deposited either moments before or seconds after Nilda died,” he said. Prible shot Herrera, then “forced Nilda to orally copulate him at gunpoint and executed her as soon as he finished. As horrific as that sounds, that is the only logical conclusion that you can draw from that evidence.”

Siegler was even more dramatic: “She left this world with his penis in her mouth, knowing her husband was dead, hoping to God that her babies would survive the nightmare that is Jeff Prible.”

On October 23, Prible was convicted of murder. Two days later, jurors sentenced him to death.

It was another signature Siegler victory. “Her ability to do what few others can is a continual amazement to some, but not to those who watch her work,” her supervisor wrote in her next performance review. But while her colleagues in the DA’s office celebrated, others watched with a growing sense of alarm. For one man sitting in a Beaumont prison cell staring at a life sentence, the secret to Siegler’s success was starting to come into focus — and the picture looked eerily familiar.

The post Kelly Siegler Is a True-Crime Celebrity. Did She Frame an Innocent Man for Murder? appeared first on The Intercept.

Like many who knew Sanchez, Beattie couldn’t believe he’d committed such a horrible crime. She’d never known him to be violent — not like Glen, who could be terrifying. One Valentine’s Day, she said, Glen put a gun to his head at his home in Norman, Oklahoma, only to swing it around and put a bullet in the wall. Other times she saw Glen put a gun to Sanchez’s head. Although she said he never hit her — she threatened to stab him the one time he tried — Glen inflicted “mental abuse.” He was especially sadistic during sex, raping her repeatedly.

Still, it wasn’t until many years after Sanchez was sentenced to death that Glen started dropping hints that there was more to the story of his son’s case. On Friday nights, they would drink in a shed behind Beattie’s house, where Glen had put a warning sign: “WHAT HAPPENS IN THE MAN CAVE STAYS IN THE MAN CAVE.” It was there that Glen brought up Busken.

“He’d just all of a sudden start talking about her,” Beattie said. He said ugly things, calling her “the ballerina girl” or “that Busken bitch.” Perhaps most chilling, “He’d always say, ‘I should’ve done a better job at it.’” When Beattie asked Glen if he was saying what it sounded like, he deflected. She didn’t press him. But she came to call those nights “his confession time.”

Beattie always knew Glen had secrets. In the decades he came in and out of her life, he showed up when he needed a place to crash and refused to answer questions. He parked his black Trans Am behind her house so it wasn’t visible from the street. “Probably because he was running from something,” she said.

But in the spring of 2022, Glen was dying of cancer and spending his time on the couch in her home. Oklahoma was on the verge of setting a slew of execution dates, and Sanchez was likely to be among the men scheduled to die. One day Glen brought up the murder again. “He just made it sound like he was there,” Beattie said. He said his son didn’t know how to tie the knots that had bound Busken’s wrists. And he repeated something he often said: that he never could have survived prison like Sanchez. “‘He’s a bigger man than I am,” Glen said.

On April 24, 2022, Beattie was in her bedroom talking on the phone. The 10 o’clock news had just come on when she heard a gunshot. She ran outside to find Glen dead on her front porch. Beattie was still processing his suicide months later. “You sit here and wonder: Did you really want to die because you don’t want the truth out there? Are you making your son pay for what you did?”

Beattie told her story on an icy morning in late January, at her home outside Oklahoma City. Her adult son Charles played “Assassin’s Creed” in the living room. Charles had negative memories of Glen from childhood. “Whenever I knew that he was coming back, I had bad dreams,” he recalled.

Beattie first shared her account with Sanchez’s death row spiritual adviser, who persuaded Sanchez’s attorneys to look into it. Although the lawyers, Mark Barrett and Randall Coyne, had sought funds to hire an investigator before filing Sanchez’s federal habeas petition in 2011, their motion was denied. In an unusual arrangement, they agreed to use money raised by the abolitionist group Death Penalty Action. Last December, a private investigator named David Ballard came to Beattie’s home and took a statement. He also collected personal items belonging to Glen, including a cowboy hat and a toothbrush. They planned to test the items for DNA.

In February, Barrett and Coyne filed a state post-conviction petition with the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. It included an affidavit from Beattie recounting Glen’s “confessions” and explaining why she had never come forward before. “I was too scared of Glen while he was alive to even consider revealing what he admitted to doing,” it read. The attorneys asked for a hearing on the new evidence.

Three weeks later, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed a response. The office had obtained a blood sample from Glen through the medical examiner’s office, which was analyzed by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. The DNA “does not match” the profile from the case, the bureau said. The results confirmed “what the state and the courts have already known for many years now,” Drummond wrote. Sanchez — and Sanchez alone — was responsible for murdering Busken.

Now 44, Sanchez is scheduled to die at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester on September 21. He has insisted on his innocence for almost 20 years. His pleas have been dismissed by prosecutors, the courts, and, according to Sanchez, his own attorneys, who have never been able to overcome the incriminating DNA. Earlier this year, Sanchez asked a federal judge to replace Barrett and Coyne with an attorney introduced to him by his spiritual adviser, Jeff Hood. After his motion was denied, Sanchez waived his clemency hearing. A month later, Barrett and Coyne withdrew from the case.

The state of Oklahoma maintains that its evidence against Sanchez was overwhelming. Prosecutors say he abducted Busken from her Norman apartment complex early on the morning of December 20, 1996. He forced her into her car and drove to Lake Stanley Draper, where he raped her and shot her in the back of the head. The case hinged on two critical pieces of evidence: DNA taken from sperm found on Busken’s underwear as well as a leotard left at the scene.

Sanchez has long contended that the DNA evidence must have been planted or manipulated. He blames his court-appointed lawyers for failing to defend him at his 2006 trial and accuses Barrett and Coyne of abandoning him. The allegations have been amplified by Hood and Death Penalty Action, which launched a Free Anthony Sanchez campaign earlier this year. The activists insist that Glen Sanchez, not his son, killed Busken. Over the summer they placed billboards from Norman to McAlester urging people to watch a short film they produced called “Evidence Unraveled.”

In a state where 10 people have been exonerated from death row, the risk of executing someone for a crime they did not commit is real. “It is undeniable that innocent people have been sentenced to death in Oklahoma,” a bipartisan commission on capital punishment found in 2017. Poor lawyering, a lack of funding for capital defense, and overzealous prosecutors have contributed to wrongful convictions in the state. Particularly disturbing is the sordid history of misconduct within the Oklahoma City Police Department crime lab, where a forensic chemist named Joyce Gilchrist was fired for manipulating evidence — including in death penalty cases. Although Gilchrist was not the analyst in Anthony Sanchez’s case, she was a supervisor during the time that evidence from the case was examined and stored.

There are good reasons to question the forensic evidence behind any criminal case from that era. Yet some of the activists’ claims do not withstand scrutiny. “Evidence Unraveled” downplays and mischaracterizes the DNA. Ballard, the private investigator, now a vocal advocate for Sanchez, insists that the evidence was contaminated based on the fact that the DNA profiles for Busken and Sanchez, who were unrelated, shared alleles: the pairs of genes that appear on a specific location on a chromosome. Veteran DNA scientist Laura Schile, the forensic analyst who blew the whistle on Gilchrist’s misconduct more than 20 years ago, rejects this as egregiously misinformed. Ballard is not a DNA expert, she points out. “It takes a lot of years to understand DNA. And people share alleles with other people.”

Schile is one of dozens of people I interviewed while probing Sanchez’s case. A monthslong investigation and review of the available record — including trial and hearing transcripts, appellate briefs, and portions of the case file — left me with more questions than answers. But it also revealed significant problems that are all too familiar in Oklahoma death penalty cases. Sanchez, who is part Mexican and Choctaw, was convicted by an all-white jury, a fact his attorneys did not challenge at trial. No witnesses were called on Sanchez’s behalf at the guilt phase. And despite several mitigating factors that could have moved jurors to spare his life — Sanchez had just turned 18 at the time of the crime and grew up amid violence, abuse, and addiction — his trial team did little to develop such evidence.

“DNA is an investigative tool. It is not an investigation in and of itself.”

In Oklahoma, these problems have been eclipsed by the debate over Sanchez’s innocence and controversy over the Free Anthony Sanchez campaign. Local abolitionists have publicly disavowed Hood and Death Penalty Action for their incendiary rhetoric against the attorney general and lawyers appointed to represent people on death row. Barrett and Coyne have denied that they abandoned Sanchez. They accuse Hood of turning their former client against them and persuading him to forgo clemency. Sanchez has maintained that the decisions were his alone. He accuses his former attorneys of sabotaging his case by refusing to turn over his case files — a collection of more than 50 boxes. Last week, a federal judge reversed a previous order denying Sanchez the files but refused to stay the execution to give Sanchez’s new attorney time to review them.

With his execution imminent, unanswered questions still linger over Sanchez’s case. Among them is what role, if any, his father had in the crime. Sanchez’s trial lawyers either declined to be interviewed or could not be reached for comment. But documents in the case file show that his defense team suspected Glen was the real murderer — even if the DNA suggested Sanchez sexually assaulted Busken.

Indeed, even if the DNA implicates Sanchez, it is not at all clear what actually happened on the day Busken was killed. The rest of the state’s case was assembled from flimsy circumstantial evidence that did little to connect Sanchez to the murder. “Nothing else adds up besides the DNA,” Barrett told me. “I can’t believe that for so long the prosecution convinced the courts there was some meaningful corroborating evidence.”

“DNA is an investigative tool,” Schile said. “It is not an investigation in and of itself.” Even in a cold case, it is incumbent on prosecutors to close evidentiary holes that surround it. To forensic DNA expert Tiffany Roy, a death penalty case that relies solely on DNA is a red flag. “If it’s just the DNA, and that’s all you have, then it isn’t enough,” she said. If you can’t go back and put the DNA in context to ensure it is proof of the alleged crime, then it is certainly not enough to justify an execution. “The chances that you’re going to get it wrong, for me, the risk is just too high.”

Juli Busken’s murder was any parent’s nightmare.

Five days before Christmas in 1996, Bud and Mary Jean Busken drove a U-Haul from Benton, Arkansas, to Norman to help their daughter pack up her apartment. Busken had studied ballet at the University of Oklahoma, most recently performing in “Swan Lake.” She finished a semester early and was accepted to the University of Arkansas for a graduate degree in elementary education. Busken planned to go home for the holidays, then return to Norman so she could walk across the graduation stage with her friends.

Busken lived in an apartment complex on East Lindsey Street, just east of campus. As her parents pulled up around 11:30 p.m., they expected to see her red 1991 Eagle Summit parked outside. But it wasn’t there. On the door of her apartment, Busken’s mother found a note that said to contact the University of Oklahoma Police Department.

At the station, the campus police chief told them Busken had been reported missing earlier that day. He also said there had been a body found at Lake Stanley Draper, a large recreation area 15 miles north of Norman. He asked the Buskens for a photo of their daughter, then stepped out of the room. When he returned, he broke the news. The body at the lake was Juli. She had died from a gunshot wound to the head.

News of the murder shocked the college community. Some 300 people attended Busken’s funeral, and a scholarship was swiftly established in her name. Meanwhile, multiple law enforcement agencies began investigating the crime, including both the Oklahoma City and Norman police departments, along with members of the university police, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, and the FBI.

The overlapping efforts did not ensure all leads were followed. In the days after the murder, multiple tips to police were apparently missed, including calls from eyewitnesses who believed they saw Busken’s car on the morning she disappeared.

The last person to see Busken alive was her friend Megan Schreck, a fellow ballerina who spent the night with her on the eve of her death. Around 10 p.m., Schreck met Busken at a mutual friend’s apartment, where they exchanged Christmas gifts; Busken gave Schreck a pair of angel earrings. Busken planned to drive Schreck to the airport for an early flight the next morning, so the two decided to stay up all night, going out to eat around 2 a.m. They drove separate cars back to Schreck’s apartment, splitting up while Busken went to get gas.

Years after the case went cold, Schreck told a reporter that Busken seemed to take a long time filling up her car — and that she noticed a man’s name on Busken’s cellphone when she finally returned. For years Schreck wondered if this was important. When she was called as a witness at Sanchez’s trial, however, the name on the phone did not come up.

Instead, Schreck testified that Busken showed up with a cappuccino, then took a nap before heading to the airport before 5 a.m. “She drove me to the Delta check-in,” Shreck said. “She dropped me off and that was the last I saw of her.”

When a violent crime took place in Oklahoma County or its surroundings in 1996, the evidence went to the Oklahoma City Police Department crime lab. The lab had attracted good press over the years for its crop of forensic analysts — the “detectives behind the detectives,” as The Oklahoman put it. The year before Busken’s murder, the newspaper ran a flattering story about forensic analyst Joyce Gilchrist and two of her colleagues. “Criminals beware!” it read. “It’s getting harder and harder to go undetected.”

At the time, Gilchrist was in charge of opening the lab’s new DNA section. “We’ll be able to extract DNA from the root of one hair or a very small sample of semen or blood and establish a profile,” she told The Oklahoman. “It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that a single drop of blood will give us all the information we need.”

At first glance, there was plenty of potential forensic evidence in Busken’s case. Her unlocked car had been found at an apartment complex a block away from hers. There was reddish sand on the floorboard of the driver’s side. The car was messy, filled with papers, CDs, and a bunch of clothes, including pajama bottoms and multiple pairs of underwear. Half a dozen hairs were lifted from the car. Forty-nine latent fingerprints were found on the inside and outside.

At the autopsy, the medical examiner noted that Busken’s blue jeans were undone; her underwear was soiled and “slightly rolled down.” There was bruising on her thighs and labia and a small scrape on her anus. Her hands were bound behind her back “by a black shoestring ligature.” She had been shot at close range; a “significantly distorted” small caliber projectile was recovered from her skull. A ballistics analyst said it came from a .22.

Yet the murder weapon was never recovered. Neither were a number of key items: an opal ring belonging to Busken, as well as a radar detector, small stereo, and cellphone she kept in her car. Although phone records would provide critical clues — dozens of calls were made from the device following her murder — they did not lead to a suspect.

Evidence found at the lake was largely inconclusive. Shoe prints leading to the spot where Busken was found were not documented before the wind filled them with sand overnight, rendering them “useless,” as one evidence technician later testified. A discarded beer bottle and Coke can were examined for prints but yielded none.

Other items were disregarded, like a small purse found in some tall grass. It was red, with a square pattern that looked like a Native American design. “The sun kind of glimmered on it,” the sergeant who spotted it testified. “It was something that didn’t look like just some trash laying there.” The purse contained what appeared to be drug paraphernalia: a plastic-tipped cigar, two brass faucet screen aerators, and a pair of razor blades, along with a small jar of Carmex lip balm.

Authorities decided the purse had nothing to do with the case. But one item found a few feet away would prove vitally important: a crumpled pink dance leotard. It was marked with Busken’s initials, and according to a forensic analyst, it was stained with semen.

Police calls to Lake Stanley Draper were not particularly rare. With 34 miles of shoreline, the lake made an attractive place for illicit activity, from illegal dumping and drug use to more serious crimes. In 1980, at least eight women were reported to have been raped on the north side of the lake by a man dubbed the “Draper Raper.”

Not long after Busken’s murder, there was another attack at the lake. On the night of December 29, 1996, an 18-year-old woman was assaulted by a man in a 7-Eleven parking lot nearby. He forced her inside his car at knifepoint, “struck her in the face,” according to a police report, and drove to Draper Lake. He told her to “cooperate and you won’t get hurt,” ordered her to pull down her pants, and sodomized her.

The man was described as 6 feet tall and 180 pounds, between 31 and 35 years old. He had a medium complexion, medium build, and brown “short, shoulder length” hair. The victim briefly got ahold of the knife, according to the report; after struggling over the weapon, she managed to flee to the nearest building and call the police.

It’s not clear how much police probed a connection between the rape and Busken’s murder. But there are indications they tried to find a link. According to a report obtained by The Intercept, a detective submitted underwear and a vaginal swab from the rape case for DNA testing at the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, or OSBI, on the same day that he submitted a cutting from Buskin’s leotard.

An OSBI analyst later reported DNA results in both cases. From Busken’s leotard, a complete male profile was found. From the underwear in the rape case, there were only partial results.

The rape case was never solved. In a phone call, the victim told me no one ever spoke to her following her initial report to police. She did not learn the results of the rape kit or whether it yielded any DNA. “Nobody ever contacted me afterwards to follow up,” she said.

Left/Top: A forensic sketch of the suspect in Juli Busken’s murder based on the eyewitness account of Kay Keller Merryman. Right/Bottom: A forensic sketch of the suspect based on the eyewitness account of David Kill. Credit: Oklahoma City Police Department

The Oklahoma City police released the first in a series of forensic sketches of a possible suspect in late January 1997. All of them came from drivers who had spotted a vehicle resembling Busken’s car — small and red, with Arkansas plates — on the morning of December 20. Residents of Busken’s apartment complex had said they heard a woman’s scream at around 5:30 a.m., followed by a door slamming and a man’s voice. Investigators concluded that Busken had been abducted, driven to the lake, raped, and murdered within two hours.

This time frame was based on the eyewitness account of David Kill, an aircraft mechanic at Tinker Air Force Base, just north of the lake. Kill told police that around 7 or 7:15 a.m., he was driving along the lake’s perimeter when a red car with Arkansas plates suddenly pulled out in front of him. The driver looked over at Kill, who decided to follow him, driving as fast as 80 miles an hour. Although it was still dark and he only saw the man from behind, Kill described him as roughly 23 years old, with collar-length, light brown hair and a medium complexion. There was nobody else in the car.

Kill gave his description to veteran law enforcement officer Harvey Pratt, who was Oklahoma’s only full-time forensic artist. Pratt was renowned for his skills, drawing countless composites in high-profile cases. The resulting sketch was heavily publicized, appearing on “America’s Most Wanted.”

Forensic sketches are highly fallible. They rely on the memory of an eyewitness, as well as the interpretation of a forensic artist with their own unconscious biases. As with any eyewitness account, the most accurate descriptions are likely to come soon after an event; the more time passes, the more memories can be distorted by new information. In Busken’s case, most eyewitnesses did not share their descriptions until months or even years after the murder.

With few apparent leads, however, police relied on the drawings to solicit tips. In March 1997, they released a second forensic sketch that bore little resemblance to the first. It came via a man who said he was driving in Norman around 6:30 a.m. on December 20 when he did a “lane dance” with a red car with Arkansas plates. A white woman with blonde hair was in the passenger seat. According to the police report, the witness sensed that the people in the car “had just finished arguing or fighting and were stewing in it.” The driver was white, in his mid-20s, with brown hair “about one inch long.”

A third man, John Henderson, contacted police in October. He had tried to call 10 months earlier, the day after Busken’s murder. But no one called back. Henderson worked at a water treatment plant on the grounds of Lake Stanley Draper. He said he was driving to work between 11:30 a.m. and noon when he saw a red car with Arkansas plates driving erratically. “The driver acted as if he was looking for some place to pull off the main street and stop,” Henderson said. There was a blonde woman in the passenger’s seat, but he could not see her face; she was hunched over in such a way that he thought she might be performing oral sex on the driver. The man was white with a dark complexion, Henderson said. He wore a military-style haircut and a black baseball cap.

Henderson’s account didn’t fit with the timeline the state later presented at trial. Although Busken’s body was not found until around 1 p.m., prosecutors argued that by 7:30 a.m., she had already been killed and left at the lake. Police spoke to Henderson twice; he led them to the location where he spotted the car. But he was not asked to help produce a forensic sketch. Instead, they asked him to submit blood and saliva samples. “They were never really interested in much of anything I had to say,” Henderson told me. He was not interviewed by Sanchez’s defense attorneys, despite his account casting doubt on the state’s version of events.

The last forensic sketch was not revealed until the fall of 1999. Like Henderson, Kay Keller Merryman had tried to come forward with information in December 1996 but never heard back from police. When they finally got in touch with her, she said she was on her way to work at Tinker Air Force Base early on the morning of the murder when she pulled up at a stop sign next to a red car that she would later see on the news. The car was making a right toward the southern part of the lake. The driver was a man between 25 and 30. He looked unkempt, with hollow cheeks, a “day or two’s worth of beard,” and long, dark hair. He wore a stocking cap and looked angry, Merryman said. A young blonde woman next to him looked scared.

According to the police report, Merryman said it was 6:37 a.m. when she pulled up next to the car. She remembered because she was planning to get to work early, and she had been checking her watch. Lead Detective John Maddox wrote that, according to Merryman’s account, the suspect would have had “just had enough time” to drive from the spot, “rape and execute the victim Busken, then leave the crime scene between 7:00-7:15 and be spotted by the witness David Kill.”

Busken’s case had gone cold by the time Cleveland County District Attorney Tim Kuykendall ran for reelection in 1998. The veteran prosecutor found himself embroiled in an ethics scandal over a memo he’d sent to the homes of his staff. “Every employee should be doing everything they can to see that I get reelected and their job is secure,” Kuykendall had written. Defense attorneys called the memo coercive; Kuykendall’s opponent called for him to resign. The Oklahoma Ethics Commission reprimanded Kuykendall, but by then, he had already been reelected.

In an interview with The Oklahoman, Kuykendall was ready to leave the scandal behind. He discussed his love of beans and cornbread over steak and his habit of keeping raccoons as pets. More importantly, he emphasized his “tremendous success” winning murder cases. “We have gotten seven death penalties, 15 life without paroles, and nine life sentences,” he said of the three counties he represented as district attorney. Kuykendall did not discuss the Busken case. But it was never far from his mind. “This is the case I think about every week,” he later told reporters.

Kuykendall’s tenure as district attorney coincided with the advent of forensic DNA analysis in Oklahoma. The OSBI opened its DNA lab in 1994, the year he was first elected. In 1998, the federal government launched the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, which provided a national database of DNA profiles taken from people convicted of crimes.

Some experts sought to make clear that DNA was not a magic bullet. “We are not specifically identifying a person,” OSBI analyst Mary Long told The Oklahoman, explaining that results are expressed in terms of probabilities: the chance that an identical profile would appear in a given population. But such nuances were mostly lost on juries. As an expert witness on the stand, Long told me, it was important not to conflate the presence of DNA with the guilt of the defendant. “Unless you saw him do it, you don’t have any idea who did it,” she said.

From the earliest days of the Busken case, the one thing investigators had was DNA. In 1997, the OSBI used an early form of DNA typing that required a large sample of biological material. The pink leotard contained enough sperm for analysts to obtain a male profile using this method. Later, the OSBI analyzed the garment again using PCR testing, which is still in use today. The resulting male profile included alleles at 13 locations, or loci. If a suspect could be found whose profile corresponded with all 13 loci, it would be considered a match.

On March 20, 2000, Kuykendall held a press conference in Norman. He announced that he was filing charges of first-degree murder, first-degree rape, forcible sodomy, and kidnapping against a “John Doe” in the Busken case. In lieu of a name, there was a series of numbers and letters: the DNA profile found on the leotard.

Kuykendall acknowledged how unusual it was to file charges against an unnamed defendant. But he maintained that the evidence was strong enough for a murder charge, and the DNA would be the crux of the case. He hoped that the profile might produce a random hit in a DNA database.

In the meantime, the profile spurred detectives back into action. The Oklahoma City Police Department undertook a DNA dragnet, requesting blood and saliva samples from men in and around Norman. The sweep raised the concerns of civil libertarians. One criminal defense attorney criticized detectives for violating people’s right to privacy rather than doing a more thorough investigation. “Police are basically saying, ‘If we pop a needle into enough arms, we’re bound to get lucky sooner or later,” he told The Associated Press.

Bo Ireland, now an Oklahoma City pastor, was one of the many men who submitted to testing. He remembers being called to the OU campus to answer questions only to find himself surrounded by 75 to 100 others at the health center, all being asked for blood and saliva. “I was like, ‘Wait, What? … I thought you had to have a warrant for that.’” As he recalls, his reaction sparked the officers’ interest — “like, ‘Do we need to get a warrant?’” Like almost everyone else, Ireland agreed to give a sample.

Maddox, the lead detective, bluntly acknowledged that refusal would be viewed with suspicion. “For them not to cooperate with us,” he told CBS News, “it leaves an open end out there for us to look at.” Busken’s father told the media that he did not understand why someone would not willingly give their DNA. “If you don’t want to give your DNA, you have something to hide,” he said.

In the summer of 2004, Kuykendall finally got what he’d been waiting for. An OSBI letter to the Oklahoma City Police Department reported that an autosearch had been conducted of the CODIS database, seeking a match between a forensic item in the Busken case and a sample from a man named Anthony Sanchez. According to the letter, “a candidate match was obtained.”

Prosecutors in Kuykendall’s office were familiar with Sanchez. In 2001, he had been accused by an ex-girlfriend of rape. She told police that she had come home at 2 a.m. to find Sanchez in her living room, where he tied her up and assaulted her. Sanchez insisted it was a false allegation — and the rape charge was ultimately dropped. Sanchez pleaded guilty to burglary. But there was one detail that leapt out from the police report: The girlfriend said Sanchez had tied her up with shoelaces.

There is “no question that this is our guy,” Kuykendall told The Oklahoman.

Sanchez swore from the start that he was innocent. He said he had no idea how his DNA would have ended up at the scene, but he believed it could have been planted using evidence from the alleged rape. As he tells it, he had never heard Busken’s name until two detectives came to see him at the Lawton Correctional Facility, where he was incarcerated on the burglary charge. After he refused to speak without an attorney, he was escorted back to his cell. It was the prison guards who told him that he was a suspect in Busken’s murder.

Someone in Sanchez’s position had good reason to question forensic evidence that had been handled by the Oklahoma City Police Department lab. Just a few years earlier, the lab had been the center of a national scandal when Gilchrist, the lab’s supervisor, was revealed to have manipulated evidence in criminal cases, sending innocent people to prison. One man had already been exonerated and released after being wrongly imprisoned for rape.

The forensic analyst who blew the whistle on Gilchrist’s misconduct was Laura Schile, a DNA scientist who arrived at the lab in 2000 and took over from Gilchrist. Schile had worked with DNA at a cancer research center, then spent three years at the Texas Department of Public Safety. What she found at the OCPD lab was disturbing. “The evidence was scattered throughout the police department,” she later told the OCPD’s departmental review board. There were boxes in the hallway, in the lab itself, and in the old jail. “It was quite obvious that all of the evidence was being compromised, potentially compromised,” she said.

In the case of Jeffrey Todd Pierce, the man who was exonerated of rape, Schile found a box of evidence that also contained evidence from an unsolved homicide. The items were “loose and unsealed,” she wrote in a memo. “Trace evidence was being potentially mixed and evidence was being contaminated.” Gilchrist, she learned, had packaged the items together because she suspected that Pierce was responsible for both crimes.

“It looks like they killed someone who didn’t do it.”

Especially concerning was Gilchrist’s role in some two dozen death penalty convictions, including the case of Malcolm Rent Johnson. A Black man convicted by an all-white jury, he professed his innocence until his execution in early 2000. Schile later reexamined forensic slides in the case and found that, contrary to Gilchrist’s testimony at Johnson’s trial, they did not contain his sperm after all. Although prosecutors insisted the rest of the evidence against Johnson was strong, the case was full of holes. “It looks like they killed someone who didn’t do it,” a defense attorney who reviewed the evidence told The Associated Press.

Gilchrist was fired in 2001. Schile left the OCPD the same year, after getting the DNA lab up and running. She went to work for the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System as the organization’s first in-house forensic analyst. The office provided state-funded trial and appellate representation throughout Oklahoma. For defense attorneys who wanted to challenge forensic evidence in the wake of the Gilchrist scandal, there was no better resource. Schile knew what to look for; she helped with discovery requests, asking defense lawyers to get everything she would need to review forensic evidence, including chain of custody documents, testing methods, lab notes, and raw data. “I would have had no control whether they got it for me or not — that was often the problem,” she told me.

Court records show that Sanchez’s lawyers fought for almost a year to get the Cleveland County District Attorney’s Office to turn over materials related to the DNA evidence in his case. A private attorney who was initially hired by Sanchez’s family filed a motion for discovery in September 2004, only to leave the case a few weeks later because he was not being paid. Lawyers with the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System took over. In August 2005, they wrote that while multiple labs had been involved in “the collection, storage, and/or analysis of evidence in this case,” the lawyers had yet to receive records documenting their work. “Thus far, the information provided has been limited, scant, and obviously incomplete.”

Sanchez had an additional reason to harbor suspicion about the DNA evidence. The earliest filings in the case show that defense attorneys were under the impression that there was only one piece of evidence containing Sanchez’s DNA — and it was so small that further testing would completely consume it. But later they learned that there were multiple items containing DNA. Nobody ever explained the discrepancy, according to Sanchez and his family. To them, the evidence seemed to appear out of nowhere.

The fight over discovery was ultimately resolved at a hearing on the DNA, where Sanchez’s defense team told the judge they had reached an agreement with the state. According to the trial transcript, Schile met with OCPD forensic analyst Melissa Keith, who had tested the leotard and other items in the recently opened DNA lab. They examined the evidence item by item, Keith testified. “I believe we spent the better part of a whole day.” Schile said this would be consistent with her job at the time. Although she has no specific recollection of reviewing the evidence, she confirmed that she received the necessary items from Keith prior to Sanchez’s trial. “I looked at this case,” Schile said. “I can say that I did not see any issues in the DNA testing.”

Sanchez came to mistrust his legal team. He was especially outraged upon learning that one of his attorneys — who later went to work for the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office — was a member of the same church Busken had attended in Norman.

Today, Sanchez has a term for loyalty he sees among the network of people in Norman’s legal community: the “Crimson blanket.” “They all stick together,” he told me. “It’s like a gang. The cops all go to OU, the judges go to OU.” Sanchez had been raised on the east side of town, which he described as “the ghetto side.” Growing up poor in Norman meant being outside of this powerful, insular world.

Sanchez was born in Ardmore, Oklahoma, in 1978. His father, Glen, who was part Choctaw, had grown up in a large Mexican family in Lampasas, Texas. His mother, Gloria Faulkner, who was Choctaw and Chickasaw, was raised in Ardmore. Glen and Faulkner separated around the time that Sanchez was born. Both had severe substance abuse problems; Faulkner was addicted to drugs, Sanchez said. “I think I was like 6 or 7 years old when her house got raided the first time,” he told me. He was hiding under some covers when it happened, and the cops mistook him for someone trying to evade arrest. “That was the first time police beat me up.”

Sanchez’s older sister Lujuana remembers trying to protect him from their father as a child. “I tried to get him to run away with me,” she said. “Today it’s called abuse, but Daddy was just trying to make him tough.” At Sanchez’s trial, his grandmother recalled seeing Glen hit Sanchez in the chest when he was just 2 years old. “I said, no, you’ll make his heart fibrillate doing that,” she testified. But Glen responded that it would toughen him up.

“Today it’s called abuse, but Daddy was just trying to make him tough.”

When Sanchez was young, Faulkner suffered a disfiguring burn. Glen told Sanchez that his mother had been cooking meth. But Lujuana said that she had been burned by a man she’d gotten together with after the divorce. “Anthony was told that she was making drugs. And she wasn’t. She was trying to get away from an abusive relationship.” Sanchez remembers visiting Faulkner in the hospital and running away when he saw her. “She looked like Freddy Krueger,” he told me. “That’s how bad she was burned.”

Documents in Sanchez’s appellate file show that, according to family members, Glen tried to turn his son against Faulkner, taking him to live with Glen’s new wife, Cathy Hodge, when Sanchez was about 18 months old. According to Hodge, Glen wanted to save Sanchez from an unsuitable environment. But their own home life soon became violent.

“He was fine whenever he wasn’t drinking,” Hodge said about Glen. On weekends he would get drunk and beat her. During one particularly violent attack, Hodge tried to hide in a closet, but Glen found her; Sanchez yelled at his father to leave Hodge alone. Nonetheless, Hodge remembers Sanchez as a mostly happy kid. She showed me childhood photos of Sanchez wearing orange floaties in a swimming pool, sitting on Santa’s lap, and posing in a school football uniform. “The only time that I’d seen [Glen] really being ugly with Anthony was when he was trying to protect me,” she said.

Another one of Glen’s ex-wives remembers him treating Sanchez as “his golden boy.” But Beattie, Glen’s longtime girlfriend, said he “beat the crap out of Anthony.” As she described it, Glen was confident that Sanchez wouldn’t tell anyone.

According to his friends, Sanchez did not talk about his relationship with his dad. Adam Sheets, who knew Sanchez as a teenager, remembers Glen as a “mean, nasty” man who “talked to Anthony like he was a piece of shit.” Sanchez seemed to fear his father while also seeking his approval.

“I saw Anthony pretty much every day of my whole adolescent life,” said Kristina Bryan, Sanchez’s best friend. “We would just like hang out, smoke weed together. … I mean stupid teenage stuff.” Glen was clearly abusive, she said — he even pointed a gun at her once, which her mother also remembers. Bryan and Sanchez later had a temporary falling out over Sanchez’s drug use. As she recalls, he was doing crank, which “was changing who he was.” During a heart-to-heart, he opened up about physical abuse inflicted by his father. But that was the only time Bryan could remember him talking about it.

Hodge finally left Glen for good when Sanchez was about 15. That’s when Sanchez’s run-ins with police seemed to start. “I don’t know if he just didn’t have a family life,” she said. “I think he was just running the streets.” Before that, she said he was often followed in stores and wrongly suspected of crimes based on his ethnicity. One neighbor accused him of breaking into her house when he was actually in school. “She didn’t like them because they were Hispanic,” Hodge said.

The population of Norman was almost entirely white in the years Sanchez grew up there. As late as 1967, it was a sundown town: Black people were explicitly prohibited from staying out after dark under threat of violence. As Norman became more diverse in the early 1990s, racist backlash followed; The Oklahoman reported a rise in racist graffiti and police harassment of nonwhite residents.

Sanchez remembers facing plenty of racism growing up in Norman. “People would tell me to go back to my country, go back where I was from,” he said. He doesn’t remember it affecting him all that much. Most of his friends in Norman were Native American, he said. It was harder to feel like he didn’t fit neatly in either community. “If you’re not fully bilingual, you’re not Mexican,” he said. “If you don’t speak Choctaw, you’re not Choctaw.”

But facing a murder trial in Norman was a wake-up call. “It was all white people, even in the audience,” he said.

Sanchez’s trial began on January 30, 2006, at the Cleveland County District Court in downtown Norman. Media and spectators filled the gallery, including at least one local celebrity, famed football coach Barry Switzer, who attended almost every day. There was a heavy security presence; Sanchez remained shackled throughout. The Court of Criminal Appeals later found that the shackling was illegal but it would not have changed the outcome.

The jury was all white, which did not seem to faze Sanchez’s lawyers or the presiding judge. In a post-trial questionnaire, the judge acknowledged that there were no Hispanic or Native American people on the jury but said Sanchez’s attorneys had not objected. Asked if jurors had been instructed to “exclude race as an issue,” the judge answered only with a question mark.

Hodge brought a suit for Sanchez to wear but was barred from giving it to him. Along with the rest of his family, she was prevented from watching most of the proceedings. “We went and sat at restaurants or sat outside,” she said. She was distressed to realize that the lawyers did not plan to call anyone at the guilt phase of the trial. Like another person close to Sanchez I interviewed, Hodge said the lead attorney, Silas Lyman, told them that his goal was not to prove Sanchez’s innocence but to keep him off death row. Lyman declined to be interviewed about the case.

Representing the state was Assistant District Attorney Richard Sitzman, a veteran of the office who had been prosecuting homicides since the 1980s. As he described it, he did not want to rely too heavily on the DNA. “There are some people who think that DNA is hocus pocus,” he told me. “So it was very important to me and to the police department to prove this case without the DNA.”

“Evil sits right here in front of you today. And it’s Anthony Castillo Sanchez.”

In his opening, Sitzman emphasized how long it had been since Busken’s was killed. “Nine years, one month, and about 16 days,” he said. “That’s how long I’ve been waiting to tell you this story.” He told the tale of a ballerina with a bright future whose life was violently cut short. But instead of explaining how the crime took place, Sitzman described how DNA had finally identified the killer years later. “I call him ‘the cold hit guy,’” Sitzman said. “And the DNA is going to tell you what it’s told the rest of us, and that is that evil sits right here in front of you today. And it’s Anthony Castillo Sanchez.”

Despite Sitzman’s claims about proving the case without DNA, the additional evidence implicating Sanchez was elusive. One of Busken’s neighbors described hearing the scream at 5:30 a.m. on December 20, followed by a man’s voice saying, “Shut up and get in the car.” The state theorized that Sanchez was breaking into cars when he spotted Busken returning from the airport. But there was nothing placing him at her apartment complex that morning. Merryman, the eyewitness who told police she saw a blonde woman looking scared in the passenger seat of a red car, was not asked to identify Sanchez from the stand. Neither was Kill, the eyewitness who testified that a red car had cut him off later that morning. Of the 49 fingerprints found on the car, none of them matched Sanchez.

An acquaintance of Sanchez’s who allegedly told police he’d once seen Sanchez with a .22 caliber pistol testified that it was actually a .25. “I felt like they were wanting me to say something that didn’t happen,” the man told me, adding that he didn’t believe Sanchez had killed Busken. Sanchez’s former landlord testified that, after police tore apart the walls of Sanchez’s old apartment in search of a .22-caliber projectile, the landlord discovered a slug in the debris. Yet there was nothing directly linking it to Sanchez. His ex-girlfriend, Christin Martin Setzer, testified that Glen, not Sanchez, had shot bullets into the wall. “Glen was drunk, and Anthony made me stay in the bedroom,” she said.

Nor was there much linking Sanchez to the slew of numbers found in Busken’s cellphone records in the days after the murder. Prosecutors called a man whose phone number was on the list, but he testified that he did not know Sanchez or Busken — he couldn’t say why his phone would have been called by the killer. There was one compelling piece of circumstantial evidence pointing at Sanchez, however: an old day planner belonging to Setzer, in which she had listed the phone numbers of friends in their social circle. One of them was Melanie Crain, who had dated Sanchez. The number under her name matched one of the numbers in the phone records.

“I hadn’t spoken with Anthony in years by the point that he would have called that number.”

Crain now goes by Melanie Thompson. She remembers being bewildered when detectives contacted her to say that her number had shown up in the records. But she also said that the number in question was no longer hers in December 1996, which made her doubt that the person who used the phone was trying to reach her. When detectives contacted her again to say that the DNA matched Sanchez, “I was really confused,” she said. “Because I hadn’t spoken with Anthony in years by the point that he would have called that number.”

Of all the pieces of circumstantial evidence presented at trial, Sanchez is perhaps most adamant about debunking one: shoe prints found at the scene that investigators ostensibly linked to a pair of Nike sneakers he owned. For years Sanchez has argued that, according to the state, the prints were left by a man who wore a size 9. “I wear a size 11 1/2 wide and have since I was 12 or 13,” he told me.

There were other reasons why the shoe-print evidence was absurd on its face. OCPD officers testified that sand had blown into the prints on the lakeshore, making them impossible to examine. This was clear from a crime scene photograph entered into evidence, which captured a barely discernible shoe print with a vaguely waffle-patterned sole. Even if the print had been left by the killer, there was no way to determine which specific shoe had created the print — and the state did not call a footprint examiner to try.

Instead, OCPD detectives described how a pair of colleagues had taken the photograph of the print to local stores and compared the sole to athletic shoes in stock. “They believed it to be a Nike Max Air 2,” Maddox, the lead detective, testified.

Investigators contacted the Nike corporation and requested an overlay of the shoe model, which was presented to jurors. The visual insinuated a match between the shoe print and the Nike Air Max 2. Prosecutors then utilized Setzer’s planner to show that Sanchez had purchased a pair of Nikes in the months leading up to the murder. In bubbly handwriting on October 14, 1996, Setzer, who was pregnant at the time, wrote that Sanchez had given her a necklace, a baby bed, and a pair of Nikes. “He got matching shoes but boy style,” the planner read.

The link was tenuous. In an interview with detectives, Setzer was shown a photo of a pair of Nike Air Max shoes. “I can’t say they were identical,” she testified.

Left/Top: The Nike Air Max Tailwind, pictured, which had the same sole as the Air Max 2, was shown to jurors at Anthony Sanchez’s 2006 trial. Right/Bottom: A shoe print believed to belong to the man who killed Juli Busken found on the shore of Lake Stanley Draper on Dec. 20, 1996. Detectives said the print was unusable but claimed to match it to a Nike Air Max 2. Credit: Courtesy of Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office

The strength of the shoe-print evidence became strikingly distorted in the years after the trial. Sitzman remembers the prints at the lake as being “pristine.” Kuykendall, the district attorney, has attributed the match to the Nike corporation itself, claiming in a “Forensics Files” episode that “they were able to identify the specific shoe that they believed made this impression in the sand.”

The star witness for the state was Melissa Keith, the DNA manager for the biology unit of the OCPD lab, who laid out her handling of the leotard. “In 1996, when I originally received this item, I examined it. I marked areas for testing,” she said. When she found sperm on the leotard, she sent it for DNA testing at the OSBI. Later, she did DNA testing on the leotard and other items herself. She got a complete male profile from the leotard and the underwear. Sitzman asked her to go through the profile step by step for the jury. The results were decisive. The profile and the reference sample from Sanchez “were found to be the same at all loci tested.”

“If I find a sample to be consistent with a certain person, I can then take that DNA profile, put it into a program called population statistics, and calculate how, let’s say, rare that profile would be,” Keith testified. The probability of finding another donor with exactly the same DNA profile as Sanchez was 1 in 200 quadrillion Caucasians, 1 in 20 quintillion African Americans, and 1 in 94 quadrillion Southwest Hispanics, she said.

On February 15, 2006, Sanchez was convicted on all counts. Two days later, jurors sentenced him to die.

It wasn’t long after Sanchez was sent to death row that his aunt had an odd interaction with her brother, Glen, who came by her house while she was watching TV. “Out of the clear blue sky he said, ‘I might be a woman beater and a drunk, but I’m not a killer,’” she said. “And I thought, ‘Why would he say that?’”

Another time, he pulled up in his truck while she was smoking a cigarette. She can’t remember exactly when. But he gave her a black beanie-style hat and said something like, “Here, you do something with this.” Although his son’s trial was over, Glen seemed concerned that he might still be targeted as a suspect. “Before I know it, they’ll be trying to pin that on me,” his sister remembered him saying.

“Before I know it, they’ll be trying to pin that on me.”

Glen was not wrong to think he was suspected of being involved. Documents in the case file show that Sanchez’s trial lawyers believed that Glen might have been the real killer. Even if the DNA showed that Sanchez had sexually assaulted Busken, there was no real proof that he was the one who shot her. At least one of the crime scene photos also showed what appeared to be a print from a cowboy boot in the sand; Glen was known to wear cowboy boots.

Unlike the vast majority of men questioned by Oklahoma City police, Glen was not asked to give blood or saliva samples. During an interview in 2004, he was evasive and “difficult,” according to a police report. He couldn’t answer basic details about his son’s life, such as where he’d gone to high school or where he was living around Christmas 1996. When he was told about the DNA evidence implicating Sanchez, Glen got agitated, suggesting this was another false accusation, like the one by his son’s ex-girlfriend — “just because of a woman’s loud mouth, a lie.”

According to Glen, “Anthony wasn’t capable of killing at 17 or 18 years old,” the detective wrote. When he asked Glen if he ever went fishing with his son at Lake Stanley Draper, Glen said, “I think so.” The location he gave caught the detective’s attention. It was on the lake’s south side, “just west of the location where the body of Jewell Busken was located.”

According to Sitzman, Glen was investigated alongside the rest of his son’s friends and acquaintances. “I’m not aware of anything that ever raised him to the level of suspect or even a person of interest,” he said. Despite the trial lawyers’ suspicions, it is unclear how thoroughly the legal team investigated the theory. A defense investigator’s memo shows that Glen was interviewed only once before Sanchez’s trial. “After that, he has refused to talk to anyone on the defense team,” the investigator wrote. “Glen is paranoid, does not trust lawyers, cops, or white people.”

Nevertheless, Sanchez’s appellate lawyers argued that evidence of the murder pointed more directly at Glen than his son. To support the argument, they cited the forensic sketch based on Merryman’s account. In Sanchez’s direct appeal, his lawyers noted that Merryman had described the driver as older than the 21-year-old Busken. “Sanchez had just turned 18 at the time and looked quite young,” the lawyers wrote. The state’s own timeline also suggested that Busken was not raped at the lake. There was too much time between her apparent abduction at 5:30 a.m. and Merryman’s sighting well over an hour later. It was more likely that she had been taken to “some other location,” which opened up the possibility that someone else — possibly Glen — had driven Busken to the lake.

“I wish you could look into my eyes and see what I saw because it’s indelibly etched in my mind.”

If his lawyers’ theory cleared Sanchez of murder, it did not offer much proof against his father. What’s more, although the lawyers argued that the evidence was insufficient to convict Sanchez of first-degree rape, they conceded the “presence of what appears to be his DNA at the crime scene.” In a letter after his direct appeal was rejected, Sanchez assailed his attorney for arguing that his father had killed Busken. “What kind of demented lawyer are you?” he wrote. “I feel that you have done your best to help seal my fate at death.” The attorney replied that he had done his best under the circumstances. “The one fact that could not be overcome in your case was the fact that your semen was present at the crime scene.” He reminded Sanchez that they tested his DNA themselves, and the results were the same. “You wish to ignore this aspect of your case, but wishing it away won’t make it so.”

Sanchez’s advocates have continued to use the sketch based on Merryman’s account. It is prominently displayed by the Free Anthony Sanchez campaign — and it’s easy to see why. The drawing shows a man of possible Indigenous ancestry, who looks quite a bit older than 18. With long black hair, the man in the drawing bears a striking resemblance to Glen.

Yet Merryman remembers being frustrated by the sketch. In a phone call, she told me that the forensic drawing didn’t look much like the man she saw. “I said to the artist, ‘I wish you could look into my eyes and see what I saw because it’s indelibly etched in my mind. I don’t seem to be able to convey it to you,’” she said. Today she believes that the man was Sanchez and the frightened woman was Busken. “I couldn’t understand why she didn’t attempt to notify me or say help or something,” Merryman said. “It weighs on me to this very day.”

In November 2010, Sanchez was appointed a new attorney to challenge his conviction in federal court: veteran post-conviction lawyer Mark Barrett. In many ways, Barrett seemed ideally suited to litigate Sanchez’s innocence claim: He had helped exonerate two different clients from death row, including Ron Williamson, whose story was later immortalized by John Grisham in “The Innocent Man.”

Barrett was joined by Randall Coyne, a University of Oklahoma law professor and seasoned capital defense attorney who had been part of the legal team that defended Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Like Barrett, Coyne had a heavy workload; when he entered his appearance in Sanchez’s case in June 2011, he was facing deadlines for the fourth edition of his reference book, “Capital Punishment and the Judicial Process,” while also editing a professional journal covering death penalty trends.

Sanchez was hopeful about his new attorneys at first. In a letter to Coyne, he wrote that he and Barrett were the first lawyers to listen to what he had to say. “All of my other lawyers always say, ‘There is DNA, you did it, nothing else matters.’” Still, Sanchez admitted that he was leery of Coyne given his affiliation with the university. Sanchez asked him to answer questions, including “Where do you go to church?” In a P.S. Sanchez wrote, “For what it’s worth, I am innocent!”

Barrett remembers getting along well with Sanchez in the beginning. “He clearly was a person that had had a rough life in some ways but still wasn’t all that hardened,” he said. Given his age at the time of the crime, Sanchez was “barely eligible for the death penalty,” he said. Yet the state had gone out of its way to make him into a monster. “He was sentenced on 6/6/06,” Barrett said. “I’m almost certain they did that on purpose.”

Most Read

The Right-Wing Campaign to Purge Women From Women’s Sports

Natasha Lennard

Bitcoin Bros and the MAGA Faithful Converge in Nashville — and Embrace an Alternate Reality

Liliana Segura

What Tim Walz Could Mean For Kamala Harris’s Stance on Gaza and Israel

Sam Dean

Like any federal habeas lawyer in Oklahoma, Barrett was hamstrung by the work of Sanchez’s previous appellate attorneys, who themselves faced daunting procedural hurdles. In most death penalty states, a direct appeal and state post-conviction proceedings are two distinct phases of a capital case. When a direct appeal is denied, a person on death row has a couple of months to a year before their state post-conviction appeal is due. This is critical because the latter is the first opportunity for an appellate lawyer to investigate and present evidence outside of the trial record. When it comes to arguing that a client received ineffective assistance of counsel, often the most viable path to relief, an investigation is usually the best way to reveal a trial lawyer’s failures.

But in Oklahoma, the direct appeal and state post-conviction proceedings happen simultaneously. What’s more, the Court of Criminal Appeals has held that a claim of ineffective assistance of trial counsel must be raised on direct appeal. The practical effect is to prevent appellate lawyers from uncovering evidence that could have been presented at trial. “At the point we come in, if it wasn’t brought up by the lawyers ahead of us, it’s pretty much unusable by us,” Barrett said.

“There has to be another way that this has happened.”

Barrett and Coyne sought to build on the argument that there were alternate suspects. They met with Sanchez’s stepmother, Cathy Hodge, who shared documents that pointed to other potential perpetrators. “There has to be another way that this has happened,” she wrote. “I truly believe that Anthony is innocent.”

Among the documents were two letters from a man named Rocky Dodd, who was on death row when Sanchez arrived in McAlester. The two had known each other in Norman. The letters said that Dodd had spoken with his younger brother Shaun, who had information that Sanchez might be able to use. Around the time of Busken’s murder, Shaun said, two men named Tony and Scott showed up at his mother’s house looking nervous and “in a hurry to get out of town.” They asked Shaun to go to Tennessee with them and he did. There, Tony pawned a number of items, although Shaun did not know what they were. But he suspected the items might have belonged to Busken.

The Tony in question was Tony Reynolds, an acquaintance of Sanchez’s who had been identified by police as a “person of interest” in the Busken case. He had a long rap sheet and lived with his girlfriend in the apartment complex where Busken lived. They moved out shortly after the murder. An OCPD detective testified at trial that Reynolds had answered questions over the phone from Tennessee. Maddox, the lead detective, said they obtained DNA from Reynolds. But rumors persisted long after the trial that Reynolds was involved — and that he had pawned Busken’s opal ring and other belongings after leaving the state.

Dodd said it was possible that Shaun knew more than he’d shared in their phone conversation, which took place over the prison’s monitored line. “Are you wanting to have an investigator talk to Shaun?” Dodd asked Sanchez. “Just let me know and we can get it arranged.”

Barrett and Coyne filed a motion in federal court seeking an investigator. They planned to argue in Sanchez’s federal habeas petition that his trial attorneys had provided ineffective representation by failing to present any proof of his innocence, even though there was evidence pointing to alternate suspects. They also wanted to show that the trial attorneys failed to uncover “substantial mitigating evidence” that could have spared Sanchez a death sentence. Although the trial lawyers called some witnesses during the sentencing stage, they presented a limited view of the abuse and trauma Sanchez experienced as a child.

At the time of Sanchez’s trial, the American Bar Association had developed specific guidelines defining the importance of mitigation. Today, capital cases involve mitigation specialists — people trained to investigate a defendant’s family history to shed light on things like generational trauma, addiction, and violence. But Sanchez’s trial team did not include such a person. Family members mistrusted the lawyers; although a defense investigator interviewed Faulkner, Sanchez’s biological mother, she was “unable to provide the kind of testimony we needed,” according to a subsequent memo. Faulkner then asked to be released from her subpoena and threatened that if she wasn’t, she would “go to the DA and testify for their side.”

Federal District Judge Joe Heaton denied the motion for an investigator. Barrett and Coyne had failed to show why that was necessary, he wrote. Besides, the U.S. Supreme Court had recently decided a case that further restricted the right of petitioners to present new evidence in federal court. In light of this ruling, an investigator would “fail to serve any purpose.”

The lawyers’ resulting petition challenging Sanchez’s conviction was thin, largely reiterating points made by his previous attorneys. There was no new mitigation evidence or evidence pointing to different potential perpetrators. Although the petition mentioned Reynolds by name, it did not explain who he was or why he should have been investigated in the first place.

The following year, Sanchez’s petition was denied.

I first traveled to Oklahoma in January. At that time, Sanchez was set to be executed in April. But Drummond, the attorney general, asked the Court of Criminal Appeals to slow down the state’s frenzied execution schedule. After news broke that Sanchez’s date had been pushed to September, I wrote to get his reaction. He told me I was the first to share the news. He did not hear from his attorneys often.

At the time, Barrett and Coyne were still collaborating with Hood, Sanchez’s spiritual adviser. But after the Court of Criminal Appeals rejected the state post-conviction petition containing the affidavit from Beattie, Glen’s longtime girlfriend, the relationships fell apart. Sanchez and his family sided firmly with Hood. If not for his activism, they told me, no one would know about Sanchez’s case.

Much of my time in Norman was spent seeking records in the case. Some were at the Cleveland County Courthouse. Others were stored in dozens of boxes at Barrett’s office. Among the documents I hoped to review were the police reports, which the OCPD would not release, and additional records related to forensic testing. Barrett did not share them. Over time, our conversations gave me the sense that their contents would not necessarily help Sanchez’s case.

One of the questions I wanted to answer was not about Sanchez but about Busken. A woman who briefly worked as a defense investigator for Sanchez’s original trial attorney told me that she had uncovered evidence that Busken was involved in dealing drugs. She had found multiple witnesses who could testify to this. The red purse found at the lake was almost certainly Busken’s, she said.

The woman said she’d given all her materials to the trial lawyers with the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System. But they did not use what she found. This didn’t surprise her. Although presenting such evidence could have undermined the state’s case, it also could have backfired. “We go from this innocent ballerina OU student that does no wrong to ‘Oh my god, she’s into drugs,’” she said. It would have looked like they were attacking the victim.

Ryan James, a close friend of Busken’s, was the first to report her missing when she failed to meet him for a lunch date on December 20, 1996. James rejected the notion that Busken was dealing drugs. “She was the furthest thing from anything to do with any kind of drugs or alcohol,” he said. Barrett’s recollection was that Busken “was supposed to be a super clean, strait-laced lady.” He didn’t remember evidence pertaining to drugs, but he conceded that it could have been pursued by the trial lawyers if it offered an alternate theory of the crime. “If it helps the client, you have to use it, but you have to be very careful in how you use it.”

Documents in the case file show that at one point, Sanchez said Busken looked like a drug dealer he knew. When I asked Sanchez about this, he said he had no recollection of it. As for Reynolds, Sanchez said the two did not get along, but he did not know whether he was involved in Busken’s murder. “There’s a lot of people who say that he was bragging about it, but I don’t know,” Sanchez said. “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Reynolds did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment.

In the months I spent investigating the case, I was struck by the number of people who believed Sanchez was innocent. Most of his friends and family members said that he was not capable of murder but his father definitely was. Still, many found it hard to believe that Glen would have allowed his son to be executed for a crime he himself committed. And they balked at some of the wild claims made by the activists, like the open speculation that Glen might have been a serial killer.

I also came to wonder what, exactly, Glen told Beattie before he died. In our conversation, she described more insinuations than confessions. But the more she spoke publicly, the more detailed and vivid her accounts became. With no other direct proof of Glen’s involvement, it was impossible to conclude that he was responsible for the crime. But as in so many cases I’ve written about, it also seemed clear that Sanchez was profoundly shaped by his father in ways that led him to death row.

When I first asked Sanchez how he felt when the attorney general’s office released Glen’s DNA results in February, he said he felt “relieved.” He didn’t want his father implicated in the crime. “Don’t get me wrong, I know my dad had his flaws,” he said. “But if he wasn’t drinking, he was a really actually good guy.” Glen’s alcoholism made him act “like an idiot,” Sanchez said. “He was very violent.” But Sanchez had also been accustomed to it from an early age. “I mean, that’s my dad … that’s what I grew up knowing. I didn’t know no different.”

On September 13, the day before Sanchez was transferred to death watch, he went outside for the last time. He had already given away his belongings — mostly clothes and art supplies he used to send paintings and cards to his family over the years. Now he just had to pack up his cell, including the photos that decorated the wall. “I have a lot of family photos,” he said. “I have my three kids. I have my grandbabies. I have my mom, my dad.”

It was a beautiful day in McAlester, he told me. It had been nice to see other people, even if he could only talk to them inside a cage. The recreation yard looked like a “dog pound,” he said, but he was used to it. He’d been at McAlester for almost his whole adult life. “I know a lot of people in prison,” he said. Some of them were pretty cool. But “if I was to get out today, I would not take none of these people home.”

For a man so close to execution, Sanchez sounded calm, if not particularly hopeful. There had been a hearing in Oklahoma City earlier that day about the boxes of files in Sanchez’s case. Heaton, the same judge who denied him an investigator in 2011, had agreed to allow Sanchez’s new attorney access to the records. But he also denied a request for a stay of execution. There was no way the lawyer would have time to go through the boxes before Sanchez was scheduled to die.

Sanchez was looking forward to a visit from Hodge. She was supposed to bring one of his daughters and a grandchild he’d never met. But he refused to put any family or friends on the witness list for his execution: “I don’t want this being the last vision of me for people that I love.”

We talked about what he might say when it came time for his last words. He said he wanted to acknowledge the Buskens. The worst thing about his decades on death row was that it kept him away from his children, he said. The Buskens had lost their child too. “What happened to their daughter was a tragedy. It should have never happened. And if this is what they need to feel closure, then I hope it helps.” Still, he said, “I didn’t kill Juli Busken.”

Now he mostly seemed to want to shut out the world. For the past few weeks, he’d been watching movies on his tablet. “I can put my earphones in and turn it all the way up and I don’t hear nothing.” He’d watched the “Lord of the Rings” series and “The Fast and the Furious.” And he’d watched “Harry Potter,” but he didn’t like it. “I don’t believe in magic like that.”

The post DNA Evidence Sent Anthony Sanchez to Death Row. But Did It Actually Solve the Crime? appeared first on The Intercept.

Barry Jones rarely dared to imagine his release from death row. Sometimes, when he was feeling low, his paralegal, whom he called Ms. Jennifer, tried to buoy his spirits by promising that one day his legal team would drive up in the “habeas van” to the desert prison in Florence, Arizona, honking and celebrating, ready to take him home. It was never going to be like that, of course. But neither could they have predicted where Jones would find himself on June 15, in his first moments of freedom after 29 years: alone at a Del Taco near the bus station, being told he could not use the phone.

The previous 24 hours had gone mostly according to plan. He’d spent Wednesday giving away most of his things to friends and neighbors on death row. The next morning, around 4:30 a.m., Jones ate some instant oatmeal for breakfast and prepared to leave his cell for the last time. He boarded a van for the ride down to Tucson, the sprawling prison complex fading from view behind him. By 9:30 he’d arrived at Pima County Superior Court, where a judge would sanction his release at a hearing later that morning. Jones had hoped to walk out there and then. Instead, he was driven around by officers with the Arizona Department of Corrections who didn’t seem to know what to do with him. They eventually arrived at a probation office, where he was finally uncuffed and given a change of clothes. Then they dumped him at the Greyhound station downtown.

With no money, no cellphone, and no experience navigating the city in decades, Jones looked for a pay phone to make a collect call but found none. “Even at the bus station — this is a bus station,” he later said with disbelief. “Wow.” So he started walking toward the one downtown address he knew: the office of the Arizona Federal Public Defender.

In a blue T-shirt, dark jeans, and white sneakers, Jones made his way west. He carried a trash bag with a few belongings and an envelope with his release documents inside. It was a typically bright, hot Arizona day. But he was struck by how green Tucson looked compared to Florence, where there was nothing but brown desert as far as the eye could see. “You know, this ain’t so bad,” he thought. If he didn’t find anyone at the office, he could try to find his son’s house. He could even sleep under a bridge if he had to. What mattered was that he was no longer in prison. “I can do whatever I want.”

What Jones didn’t know was that people were frantically looking for him. His daughter, Brandie, had gone with her family to the Pima County Jail, where she’d originally been told Jones would be held until his paperwork cleared. At the federal defender’s office, Jones’s longtime attorney, Cary Sandman, grew increasingly agitated as he made calls and sent emails looking for his client. When Sandman finally got word that Jones had been left at the bus station, retired investigator Andrew Sowards rushed out to pick him up. But when he got there, Jones was gone.

A search party ensued. Members of the legal team and staff from the Arizona Justice Project split up to look for Jones. Finally, around 2 p.m., a voice came through on speakerphone at the office: “We found him.” Jones was just a block away. He had walked more than a mile. A few minutes later, Jones came through the door, sweaty, smiling, and wearing a can you believe this? expression. Jennifer Schneider, the paralegal, gave him a T-shirt she had been saving for that day. It read “Free Bird.”

The first wave of family filed into the office a little while later. In a large conference room with panoramic windows, Jones reunited with his kids, Brandie, Andrew, and James, along with their children and extended relatives, some of whom he was meeting for the first time. His niece recounted the rush to drive to Tucson earlier that day: “I did 80 and 90 all the way down,” she said. Jones didn’t miss a beat, “I don’t wanna hear nothing about breaking the law.”

Before long, the stress from earlier had melted away. Sowards, one of Jones’s biggest supporters, was amazed as he watched Jones joke and laugh surrounded by people. Jones had never liked crowds in prison; Sowards was nervous he might feel overwhelmed. “But it was the exact opposite,” he said. He saw a side of Jones that was lost in the decades he spent on death row. Jones had been a social guy before his wrongful conviction. “He loves people and loves these people in particular. I think he’s always wanted to be the friendly guy that he was way back then.”

People repeatedly asked Jones what he wanted to eat, but he didn’t have an answer — somehow, he wasn’t hungry. But he did say he’d like to grill burgers that weekend. There was a park he liked to go to back in the day. They could have a cookout for Father’s Day. Brandie said it would be hot; maybe they could plan something indoors. But Jones said he’d rather be outside. “I’ve spent enough time inside.”

“Innocence Isn’t Enough”

Jones’s release was the culmination of a harrowing saga that started almost 30 years earlier. After being sentenced to death in 1995 for a crime he swore he didn’t commit, Jones thought his nightmare might be ending in 2018, when a federal judge overturned his conviction. Instead, his case became an emblem of Arizona’s dysfunctional death penalty, the U.S. Supreme Court’s radical rightward shift, and the cruelty of a legal system that prioritizes finality over fairness — even if it means executing an innocent person.

Jones was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of his girlfriend’s 4-year-old daughter, Rachel Gray. The child had died from a sharp blow to her abdomen, which led to a fatal case of peritonitis. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department singled out Jones as the sole suspect before an autopsy had even identified Rachel’s cause of death. Prosecutors based their case on a narrow window of time during which Jones had been seen with Rachel before she died.

But no one investigated the medical evidence: not the lead detective, Sonia Pesqueira, and not Jones’s own court-appointed attorneys, who left the state’s theory unchallenged at trial. It was only when Jones’s federal defenders took his case years later that they discovered the state’s timeline was medically impossible.

The odds of Barry Jones getting this evidence into a courtroom were slim. Ideally, Jones’s state post-conviction lawyer would have challenged the trial lawyers’ failure to investigate the medical evidence, arguing that Jones received ineffective assistance of counsel — a violation of his Sixth Amendment rights. Instead, his state post-conviction attorney compounded the trial lawyers’ mistakes.

Under the burdensome rules dictating federal habeas appeals, if a defendant failed to challenge their trial lawyers’ performance in state court, they would be barred from doing so in federal court. But in 2012, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Martinez v. Ryan carved out a rare path to relief for people like Jones: If the failure to bring such a claim was due to the post-conviction attorney’s own ineffectiveness, the petitioner should have another shot at relief.

The ruling got Jones back into federal court. In 2017, U.S. District Judge Timothy Burgess presided over a seven-day evidentiary hearing in Tucson, where Sandman and his colleagues presented evidence that had never made it to trial. The testimony dismantled the state’s case against Jones, revealing not only the failings of his attorneys, but also law enforcement officials’ rush to judgment.

Burgess seemed disturbed by Pesqueira, who conceded that she never considered other suspects apart from Jones. And he seemed especially fed up with former Pima County medical examiner John Howard, whose testimony was critical to sending Jones to death row. Howard had previously estimated that Rachel’s abdominal injury was “most consistent” with occurring 24 hours or more before she died. But at Jones’s trial, he shortened the time frame to just 12 hours, which neatly fit the state’s theory of the crime.

In 2018, Burgess vacated Jones’s conviction. If not for the failures of his trial attorneys, the judge wrote, jurors likely “would not have convicted him of any of the crimes with which he was charged and previously convicted.” Burgess ordered the state to retry Jones or release him.

Instead, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich appealed, first to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the core of Burgess’s findings, and then to the U.S. Supreme Court. The state’s lawyers insisted that under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, Jones should never have been allowed to present the evidence that persuaded Burgess to vacate his conviction. The argument seemed far-fetched: It would mean gutting the Supreme Court’s own ruling in Martinez v. Ryan. But to the dismay of Jones’s legal team, the court took the case.

During oral argument, the attorney general’s office said that it didn’t matter if the evidence showed Jones was not responsible for the crime that sent him to death row. “Innocence isn’t enough,” the state’s lawyer, Brunn Wall Roysden III, said. In May 2022, the justices agreed, reinstating Jones’s death sentence and destroying a lifeline for incarcerated people whose lawyers failed them at trial.

“Some Measure of Justice”

I first wrote about Barry Jones in 2017, in advance of the federal evidentiary hearing in Tucson. One of the first people I met was a juror from his trial, who was haunted by her role in the case. As she recalled it, the evidence against Jones was weak — so weak, she thought surely his conviction had already been overturned. She was distressed to learn that he still faced execution. Before she died in 2020, she expressed hope that Jones would be exonerated.

Over time, I came to learn just how many people believed in Jones’s innocence, including current and former members of his legal team. They worried about Jones’s mental health, which had been ravaged by his time on death row. Before his conviction was overturned, Jones saw 34 neighbors taken to the death chamber. After executions were placed on hold in Arizona following a series of botched lethal injections, Brnovich pushed to resume them last year. In the months after the Supreme Court’s decision in Jones’s case, known as Shinn v. Ramirez, three more men were executed.

In the meantime, however, some critical shifts began to take place. At a hearing in September, Burgess urged lawyers on both sides to consider settling Jones’s case through mediation. “I do think it would be in everybody’s best interest, including society’s best interest, if we can resolve this case,” he said. A judge was assigned to oversee the process.

Two months later, Arizona voters elected a new attorney general, with Democratic candidate Kris Mayes defeating her Republican opponent by just a few hundred votes — one of the closest margins in state history. For Arizona’s death row, the result was literally the difference between life and death. In January, Mayes announced that she was putting executions on hold.

Throughout it all, Jones tried not to get his hopes up. He was encouraged by the judge overseeing the mediation; at their first meeting in December, she had spoken to him for an hour and seemed genuinely committed to a just result. But after almost three decades of wrongful incarceration, he knew better than to pin his hopes on any legal process.

As the months passed, Sandman tried to visit Jones in Florence once a week. In April, he told Jones that there was a tentative agreement that could allow him to walk free, but it would require him to plead guilty to failing to take Rachel to the hospital the night before she died.

The Supreme Court decision left Barry Jones with “a series of bad choices.”

Jones never wished to plead guilty to any part of his case. But as Sandman told Burgess at the hearing last fall, the Shinn decision left them with “a series of bad choices.” At 64, Jones did not have time to litigate for another decade — and even if he did, there was little reason to trust the courts. “The only way to get some measure of justice for him was to compromise,” Sandman said. Jones’s close family friend, Debbie Wheeler, urged him to agree to the deal. “I said, ‘Barry, just sign whatever you have to do to get out.’”

On April 19, Burgess approved the settlement agreement between Jones’s attorneys and the state. Two weeks later, Sandman filed a petition with the Pima County Superior Court requesting that Jones’s conviction be overturned. The state would agree to the request on the condition that Jones plead guilty to the agreed-upon charge. He would then be sentenced to 25 years with credit for time served.

On May 22, the one-year anniversary of the Shinn decision, Pima Superior Court Judge Kyle Bryson agreed to the terms. He set a hearing for June 15. Over the next few weeks, the reality that Jones might actually be released started to sink in. “You could tell he was believing it,” Wheeler said. “But it was just so hard for him to process it.”

Just before 11 a.m. on June 15, dozens of people packed a small courtroom on the eighth floor of the courthouse in downtown Tucson. In his orange prison uniform, Jones turned and smiled at his family and friends. Brandie, his daughter, blew him a kiss and cracked a joke about his thinning hair. Her dad looked happy, she said. Everyone seemed to know it was real this time.

Still, it was impossible not to be anxious. Sandman had felt like he was walking a tightrope for months. It wasn’t until the week of the hearing that he finally felt “99.9 percent sure” the judge would sign the order. Sitting in a row behind him was Sowards, the retired investigator, whose anxiety shot up as soon as the judge started talking. When Bryson said he was taking up Jones’s “potential change in plea and sentencing,” all Sowards could hear was the word “potential” ringing in his ears.

“I can’t give him back the 30 years that was taken from him. But I hope he can make the best of his freedom.”

Before the judge signed the order, a victim’s advocate approached the podium to share a statement from Rachel’s sister Becky. She was 10 years old when Jones was accused of killing her sister and testified against him at trial. I never managed to reach Becky, but in 2022 she was contacted by producers with the true-crime podcast “Conviction,” who made a two-part series about Jones’s case based on my reporting. It was then that Becky learned of the evidence that had emerged after Jones was sent to death row. By the end of her statement, several people in the courtroom were wiping away tears, including Jones.

“Your honor, I have spent the better part of almost 30 years hating the defendant for what happened to my sister Rachel,” the statement began. Although Becky had forgiven Jones for what she thought he’d done, she was shocked to learn about the Supreme Court’s decision in his case, which came down on her birthday. She no longer believed he was a murderer. In fact, she wished he could be released with no strings attached. “I can’t give him back the 30 years that was taken from him. But I hope he can make the best of his freedom.”

Free Bird

By the end of the day, Jones was settled into a rental unit overlooking a pool near the University of Arizona. Sowards had arranged for Jones to stay there for the next two weeks, and the fridge was stocked with food: burger patties, bottles of Pepsi, and ice cream. A jar of candy sat on the counter next to a Keurig coffee pot. Jones had never seen anything like it.

Schneider, the paralegal, had gotten Jones a flip phone, filling it with contacts. They discussed email and Wi-Fi — technology that he would learn to use. But there were so many other things to take in, the kinds of things that others take for granted. At the lawyers’ office, he’d walked by a bathroom and stared for a moment. He hadn’t seen a porcelain toilet in almost 30 years.

When we first spoke in 2017, Jones told me how nervous he felt contemplating life on the outside. Now, he said, “I just wanna be your average Joe.” He was immensely grateful for his legal team, who treated him like family. Sowards had posted a GoFundMe to help with housing and other basic needs. There were plans to take him shopping, out to eat, and to get him a state ID. One of his former attorneys was even planning to stay at the apartment with him that night, just to make sure he was OK. Still, Jones admitted, “I’m worried about most everything.”

Standing by the pool as the evening wore down, Jones joked that he would have to learn the names of all his grandchildren. It was hard not to think about the horror of what he’d been accused of and how unfathomable it seemed. Since 1994, family and friends had always said Jones would never hurt a child. Now the rest of the world could see what they knew to be true. Jones smiled as his granddaughter splashed around. “It does my heart good to see that,” he said.

The post After 29 Years on Death Row, Barry Jones Was Dumped at a Bus Station. But He Was Finally Free. appeared first on The Intercept.

Waiting for him outside the prison alongside his daughter were lawyers with the Tennessee Innocence Project as well as Claude’s most devoted advocates: his pen pal-turned-mentor, Denny Griswold, and his loyal friend and staunch supporter, veteran fire investigator Stuart Bayne. There were hugs and handshakes and some brief words for the press. Then he got into Deana’s car and rode away.

Claude spent the next few months making up for lost time. He swam in the ocean on Father’s Day and played basketball on the Fourth of July. He stared at the stars with Deana and wrestled and took selfies with his grandson. He went to church with Denny, whose prison ministry first brought them together. And he visited the grave of his mother, Betty, who had always hoped to see him exonerated.

Claude also got good at texting. He sent memes and funny messages and inspirational quotes. “Surround yourself with people who push you to do and be better,” read one he sent me last summer. “No drama and negativity. Just higher goals and higher motivation.”

I first met Claude at Riverbend while working on a piece about his case. Published in 2015, my investigation told the story of how he had been sent to prison for life for the murder of his girlfriend, Lorie Lance, who died in a fire in the couple’s home outside Nashville in 1992. His conviction was rooted in junk science — evidence once believed to indicate arson that had since been debunked. Eventually my coverage caught the attention of the local district attorney, whose conviction review unit reinvestigated the case. By the time Claude walked out of prison, we had been talking for nine years. But in many ways, I was only just starting to know him.

Early one morning in mid-September, Claude called out of the blue and asked if I wanted to meet for coffee. A couple of hours later, we were on the patio of a cafe downtown. It was a beautiful, clear day. One of Nashville’s major music events, AMERICANAFEST, was underway, and the place was packed. But Claude didn’t mind. He was taking it in, enjoying the scene. “Everybody’s out, moving around, enjoying life,” he said.

Claude had tried to keep a low profile after his release. He’d gone to North Carolina, where Deana lived, and had only recently moved with her family to Clarksville, northwest of Nashville. Deana, who ran a real estate agency, set him up in a rental property. He got a used car and a job doing plumbing and electric work — labor he’d done in prison for years. And he tried to help Deana when she needed it. She loved Halloween and started decorating well in advance. So that morning he’d gone to a Halloween store. He smiled mischievously revealing his costume for Deana’s upcoming party. “I want to go as a cop,” he said.

In early October, Garrett texted to say that the Tennessee Innocence Project was holding its annual fundraising gala. It seemed like an exciting opportunity to celebrate his release. But in truth, he was ambivalent about attending. For years he’d told people, “I don’t want to be anyone’s pet convict.” As proud as he was of his exoneration, he did not want to be defined by it.

In the end, he decided to go anyway. He took his friend Norman, whom he’d met in prison, as his guest. At the table alongside exonerees, Norman felt a little out of place (“I was the only one who was guilty”), but they had a good time. At one point the two accidentally locked themselves out of the enormous Music City Center and had to walk around the building. Norman, a lifelong smoker, was huffing and puffing. Claude teased him, asking, “Are you sure you’re going to make it?”

Three days later, on October 30, I was in my car getting ready to drive back to Nashville from New York when I got another text message. It came from Stuart’s wife, Gigi. Deana had called. “Claude passed away last night,” she said. He’d gone to the Halloween party and had a great time. Then he fell asleep and never woke up.

Just Starting Over

In many ways, Claude was luckier than most people who leave prison after decades. He had a job. He had a place to live. And he had the support of family and friends. “If every person that was released had the same opportunities that I had when I walked out that door, the recidivism rate would be 0.0 something,” Claude told me. Most of the time, “nobody is standing at the door to welcome them home and say, ‘Hey man, come with me, I’m gonna take care of you.’”

But even the best of circumstances couldn’t make up for the impact of incarceration. At 65, Claude carried untold physical and psychological trauma. Studies have long shown that prison ages people prematurely. For people who spend decades in prison under a wrongful conviction, the stress does not go simply go away after release. According to the Innocence Project, “Many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, institutionalization, and depression.”

Claude spent his first 30 days of freedom acutely aware that the Tennessee attorney general could appeal the decision to vacate his conviction. He went out of his way not to say anything publicly that could make him a target of backlash, especially about state authorities. When I told him I was struck by the fact that he had eaten his first strawberry in 30 years, he said he didn’t want to be quoted criticizing the Department of Correction for not providing fresh fruit. “That’s part of the system,” he said. “And that can be interpreted in many ways.”

A lot of stress seemed to dissipate after the state’s deadline to appeal passed. “All agree that it is officially official,” he texted me on June 11. “Free at last!” Yet the challenge of navigating his new surroundings was only beginning. On his first morning after leaving prison, he woke up before 4 a.m. and went to the garage to work out, only to set off the home security system. The next night, he was jolted out of bed by the sound of the ice machine. The house was just so quiet. He had not experienced that level of silence in 30 years.

Claude and Deana laughed about these things at the time. They told me about a failed first attempt to get a cellphone; Claude got fed up at the Verizon store after seeing a man appear to cut the line. “He said, ‘Shit, I’ll stop at a payphone,’” Deana said. “And I’m like, ‘No you won’t, they don’t work! They don’t exist!’” It didn’t dawn on Claude until later that the man probably had an appointment. He didn’t know it worked that way. There were a lot of situations like that. There should be lessons for people leaving prison, Claude told me. “A dinosaur like me? No idea.”

In retrospect, there were signs that Claude was struggling more than he let on. He was staying home at lot, he told me in September. “I still don’t feel comfortable getting out by myself.” If something bad were to occur in a place he happened to be, “Somebody’s going to say, ‘Well, he was here.’” And he avoided any potential run-ins with police, even if it meant driving 55 miles an hour on the highway. A lot of drivers are “just nuts,” he said, before conceding that the same could be said about him. “I’m not kicking dirt on them without getting dirt on me. Because sometimes I’m nuts too.”

He did have something motivating him: a new legal fight that he wasn’t ready to discuss publicly. He’d consulted with an attorney who planned to help him win compensation. In Tennessee, a person who is wrongfully convicted must be formally exonerated by the governor before they are eligible to receive money from the state. There was no way Gov. Bill Lee would do that in 2022 — an election year, Claude said. But this was his next big goal. It wasn’t just about the money, although “I do believe that they owe me.” They also owed Deana, who was 5 years old when he went to prison. By taking her father away for so long, “her life was stolen too.”

Otherwise, Claude was taking things one day at a time. He was thinking of getting a motorcycle and a dog; maybe chickens his grandson could chase in the backyard. And he was trying to stay healthy, just like he’d done in prison. The day before we met for coffee, he’d toured a Planet Fitness. He liked that it was open 24 hours (he was still getting up before 4 a.m.). But he hadn’t signed up yet. When he told the gym employee that he didn’t have a bank card, “he looked at me like I was an alien,” Claude said. “And I just told him, ‘Look man, I was in prison for 30 years for something I didn’t do. … I’m just starting over.’”

Only So Much Time

Claude’s memorial service was held on November 5 in Springfield, Tennessee. There were colorful index cards at the funeral home for people to share memories of Claude, “aka Shorty,” as he was nicknamed when he was younger. In lieu of flowers, Deana asked guests to consider donating to the Tennessee Innocence Project.

The funeral was packed. Country music ballads opened and closed the service (“Even Though I’m Leaving” by Luke Combs and “You Should Be Here” by Cole Swindell). Deana thanked everyone who had worked to exonerate her father. “You gave a man his life back,” she said. Members of Claude’s family in Kansas spoke; a nephew who had sent Claude a typewriter recalled how he typed all his letters despite having “amazing penmanship.” A cousin who had fought with Claude as a kid remembered the beautiful cards he mailed to her while she was being treated for cancer.

A month after Claude’s funeral, I visited Norman at the halfway house where he lives and works. There was a Christmas tree in the living room, a reminder of the holidays Claude did not get to see as a free man. For a long time while Claude was in prison, Norman planned to save a room for him there. He showed me some letters and leatherwork Claude had sent him over the years. Deana had also given him a bunch of Claude’s clothes, which were piled in his bedroom. “People come in here and don’t have nothing,” he said.

Norman was distraught by Claude’s death. The two had been trusted friends on the inside and outside. He was one of the few people in Claude’s life who understood how destabilizing it could be to leave prison and find the world around you changed. “You don’t see that when you’re in there. You think everything is just the same.” Norman remembered feeling completely overwhelmed. He didn’t want to go back, but “I didn’t feel like I belonged out here either.”

He was still grasping for explanations. He imagined that being wrongfully incarcerated would compound the stress of living behind bars. “You’re in a place you shouldn’t be. And you’re in there 24 hours a day thinking about it, trying to get out. I mean, he fought every day for 29 and a half years. So I imagine it did take a toll on him, some way or another.”

There was no such thing as preventative medical care in prison, Norman said. Norman, who is about two years younger than Claude, didn’t know he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease until he’d been out for two years. Today he sees a primary care doctor and lung specialist and gets regular blood tests. In prison, “unless somebody stabs you, you ain’t gonna get no blood test.”

A few days later, I went to see Stuart Bayne, the fire investigator, at his home in East Tennessee. He showed me his office, where he’d worked for so many years on Claude’s case. Since 2001, when he was hired as the expert witness for Claude’s retrial, Stuart had firmly believed in his innocence. After Claude was convicted again, Stuart became consumed with correcting what he saw as a profound miscarriage of justice. It had been his life’s mission ever since.

Like everyone who was still processing Claude’s death, Stuart was stricken by the unfairness of it all. Claude had been so patient — so hardworking and focused. He believed he would live another 20 years. “I haven’t told my poker group yet,” Stuart confessed. Claude was supposed to join one of their game nights. But he took comfort in the fact that Claude had gotten to come over for a home-cooked meal. Over years of phone conversations while Claude was in prison, “he wanted to know everything Gigi was making whenever he called.”

Stuart had no recollection of the moment he’d learned of Claude’s death. It was such a shock, his wife told me. Stuart could not grasp what Deana was saying until Gigi told him, “Honey, she’s talking about Claude.” They got the news while at a fire investigators conference in Alabama, where Stuart was supposed to speak about Claude’s case. Somehow, he moved forward with the presentation, deciding to close by revealing what had happened: a reminder that “we only have so much time we get in this here world and we better use it as best we can.”

A Chance to Grieve

In early January, I went to see Deana at her home in Clarksville. In the years I knew Claude, he never wanted me to include her in my articles. He wanted to protect her. But she had come to believe that families like hers needed to share their stories. His wrongful conviction had shaped her too. And as much as Claude wanted to move on with his life after prison, she told him, “If you don’t tell this story, nothing changes.”

Deana had given me a photo album that told the story of Claude’s last five months, from his first breath of fresh air outside Riverbend to the Halloween party. When he walked in wearing his police costume that night, “people were rolling laughing,” she said. He was still wearing it when she found him the next morning.

Deana was trying not to dwell on questions she couldn’t answer. The autopsy results had not come back yet. “I have not let myself think about this very much,” she said. But Claude’s family had a history of heart problems. When Deana went to clean out his house, she found blood pressure medication he’d brought from Riverbend that had not been refilled. She remembered him saying that he could not go to the doctor until his insurance kicked in, which would have been November 1, just two days after he died.

The thought that Claude had left prison only to find himself without the medication he needed felt like too cruel an irony. But Deana also knew that his death was not the result of any one thing. On his last night alive, he’d been “the life of the party,” talking to everyone and making s’mores with the kids, although he was wary of fires. She reiterated what she said at the funeral: He was the happiest he’d ever been.

Still, things had not been perfect. Helping Deana with her Halloween decorations, which included a pair of 12-foot skeletons, he protested in jest. “He’s like, ‘This is a sickness. … Did I do something wrong in your childhood?’” she laughed. “And I’m like, ‘I mean, you did go to prison.’” By October, they had begun arguing in earnest. Deana could see his anger and trauma surfacing in ways that were hard to comprehend. One day he said, “I can’t believe no one is talking about Lorie.” Deana realized he had only just started processing her death. He insisted on visiting her grave the day after he left prison, searching frantically to find it. When he did, he stood there for a long time. In all the decades he spent fighting, he never had a chance to grieve.

The findings didn’t bring much closure. Deana found more comfort in letters she’d sent him in prison, which she found at his house. She had written them in her early 20s, while trying to forge a relationship with a father she’d never really known. At that time, she could not have imagined all the things she would eventually do with him. If he ever got out, she wrote, she wanted to go to the beach with him. She just wanted to talk and have quality time. “I think that’s what I’m missing the most.”

The post Claude Garrett Was Wrongfully Imprisoned for Decades. He Died After Five Months of Freedom. appeared first on The Intercept.

After the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board denied Glossip’s clemency request last month, Lea was the person he turned to. “I called her the second I got back to my cell,” he said. “I told the guards, ‘I need to get back there.’ … Whenever things get really tough for me, and I feel at my lowest point, I know that I can talk to Lea and she can pick me up from that.”

Now they faced a dreaded ritual they’d already confronted multiple times: preparing for Glossip’s transfer to Death Watch, one of the final stages of the state’s death penalty protocol. Their last contact visit was scheduled for Friday, May 5 — one more chance to hug, kiss, and hold hands. Afterward, Lea would take Glossip’s belongings home, while he prepared to be moved to a holding cell adjacent to the execution chamber.

Lea arrived earlier than usual that day, around 9 a.m. She was accompanied by the legendary anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean, Glossip’s spiritual adviser. Three other high-profile advocates joined them: Republican state Reps. Kevin McDugle and Justin Humphrey, as well as GOP politico Justin Jackson. With Glossip’s May 18 execution date looming, the visit was more of a strategy session than a series of goodbyes. No one was ready to give up.

Around noon, Sister Helen and the politicians decided to leave in order to give Lea and Glossip some privacy, or whatever passed for privacy in a crowded visiting room. But first, they all stepped into the hallway to take some photos — a privilege not usually afforded to the men on death row, which the interim warden had arranged himself. In one photo, Lea stood in front of her husband wearing a wide smile, clasping his cuffed hand in both of hers.

Once back in the visiting room, it was harder to keep a brave face. As 3 p.m. approached, Glossip held Lea’s hands tighter. “He kept telling me, you know, something could happen,” she said. “We’re gonna get through it no matter what.”

“Then, all of a sudden, the warden comes in and says, ‘I need both of you. Come out to the hallway,’” Lea said. The room went quiet. Since their visit was coming to an end, Lea assumed the warden wanted to discuss handing over the box of property. Instead, he told them that the U.S. Supreme Court had just stayed Glossip’s execution. “And we just completely, completely crumbled into each other.”

Upon their return to the visiting room, they raised their arms up together and said, “We got the stay.” And the room erupted with cheers.

Confession of Error

The stay of execution was the latest twist in a seemingly never-ending saga that has seen Glossip come close to execution nine different times. Just one month earlier, the state’s attorney general, Genter Drummond, had asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate Glossip’s conviction and death sentence, saying he could no longer stand by the conviction.

But in a series of devastating blows, the court rejected Drummond’s motion and said it saw no reason to stay Glossip’s execution. By then, Glossip’s lawyers had filed a petition for certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the justices to address misconduct in the case that had recently come to light. But it was only after the legal team filed a second petition — and a request for a stay backed by the attorney general himself — that the high court intervened, blocking the execution while it considers whether to take the case.

Glossip was twice tried and sentenced to death for the January 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside a seedy Best Budget Inn that Van Treese owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. No physical evidence linked Glossip, the motel’s 34-year-old manager, to the crime. Instead, the case against him was built almost entirely on the testimony of 19-year-old Justin Sneed, who worked at the motel as a handyman.

Sneed admitted to murdering Van Treese but claimed it was all Glossip’s idea. On Sneed’s word alone, prosecutors theorized that Glossip wanted Van Treese dead so he could take over operations of the low-rent motel. At trial, they painted Sneed as powerless to resist Glossip’s command to kill the boss. In exchange for testifying against Glossip, Sneed avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to life without parole.

Glossip has steadfastly maintained his innocence, and over the years, evidence of his wrongful conviction has mounted. New evidence supports Glossip’s contention that Sneed, a chronic drug user with a violent streak, initially planned to rob Van Treese and killed him when the plan went sideways. Sneed implicated Glossip in this scheme during a highly suggestive police interrogation. Witnesses who were ignored by police and prosecutors have since come forward to say that Sneed was cunning and manipulative and quite capable of killing a man on his own.

Glossip’s defense team has also uncovered a cascade of police and prosecutorial misconduct. The state destroyed a box of crucial evidence before Glossip was retried in 2004, and it suppressed evidence that Sneed sought to recant his incriminating testimony. More recently, Glossip’s legal team found notes reflecting that prosecutor Connie Smothermon knew that portions of Sneed’s testimony were false.

Sneed had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium to manage it by a psychiatrist who evaluated him at the Oklahoma City Jail. At trial, Sneed denied that the evaluation ever took place.

Drummond had highlighted Sneed’s misstatements in his brief to the Court of Criminal Appeals seeking to vacate Glossip’s conviction. He argued that Sneed’s mental health disorder combined with his chronic drug use could have negatively affected “Sneed’s ability to properly recall key facts” at trial.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that the state got it wrong, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has routinely rejected Glossip’s appeals. In April, the judges all but ignored Drummond’s confession of error and explained away Sneed’s misstatements, finding that he was “likely in denial of his mental health disorders.”

The court’s ruling triggered the 35-day protocol preceding Glossip’s execution date, including a hearing on April 26 before the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board, whose members are empowered to recommend clemency to the governor. At the hearing, Drummond sided with Glossip’s defense team; it was the first time in Oklahoma’s history that an attorney general argued in favor of clemency for a person on death row.

The board was not swayed. To secure a clemency recommendation, Glossip needed a favorable vote from three members. Instead, the board deadlocked, voting 2-2. Under board rules, a tie is weighted in favor of the “no” votes, resulting in a denial of clemency.

The Oklahoma Constitution requires that the board be comprised of five “impartial” members, three appointed by the governor, and one each appointed by the Oklahoma Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeals. For Glossip’s hearing, however, just four were present; board member Richard Smothermon, who is married to the prosecutor at the center of Glossip’s misconduct claims, had recused himself from the case in July 2022.

Despite the advance warning, nothing was done to fix the issue: While the state constitution requires a five-member board, state statutes and administrative rules provide no mechanism for the designation of an alternate when a member is recused.

Two days before the hearing, Don Knight, Glossip’s lead attorney, filed a lawsuit in Oklahoma County District Court asking the court to permanently bar the state from executing Glossip absent a clemency hearing conducted within constitutional parameters.

By allowing the board to make clemency decisions without its full complement of members, the state was putting a greater burden on Glossip, Knight argued. Instead of winning three out of five votes, he would be required to secure three of four. Knight asked the court to declare the April 26 hearing “void of any legal effect.” The lawsuit remains pending.

The Fight Ahead

Both of the petitions pending before the Supreme Court deal with crucial evidence that the state withheld from Glossip’s defense. The first petition was filed in early January, when Glossip was facing a February execution date. The state responded quickly, asking the court to reject the petition. Notably, the court has repeatedly put off considering the case; so far it has been scheduled for discussion six times.

By the end of January, much had changed. The outgoing attorney general, John O’Connor, was replaced by Genter Drummond, who quickly launched an independent investigation into Glossip’s case and released to Glossip’s attorneys a box of prosecution records that O’Connor had refused to let the defense see. The box contained the records related to Sneed’s misleading testimony, evidence that prompted Drummond to conclude that Glossip’s conviction could not stand.

Drummond’s intervention may not have moved the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals or the parole board, but it is clear that the Supreme Court is taking his position more seriously. Not only did the attorney general join Glossip’s motion for a stay of execution, which the court granted on May 5, but there is also every indication that he will join Glossip’s appeal to the court.

To McDugle, the state lawmaker, Oklahoma’s response to Glossip’s case has damaged the credibility of key state institutions. “This case is no longer about justice,” he said at a press conference at the Oklahoma State Capitol the day before the stay was granted. “It’s about power, pride, and politics. That’s what it’s become.”

McDugle said that prior to getting involved in Glossip’s case, he didn’t realize how “deeply embedded” the state’s prosecutors are in all branches of government. Through the District Attorneys Council, they apply pressure across the system to protect their power.

This dynamic explained the presence of several district attorneys from across the state at Glossip’s clemency hearing: The point was not only to stare down the board and get them to vote “no,” but also to demonstrate their objection to the attorney general’s unprecedented intervention. Among them was former Oklahoma County DA David Prater, who took extreme measures to defend Glossip’s conviction — including orchestrating the arrest of a witness who came forward with information about Sneed.

The District Attorneys Council has actively sought to undermine Prater’s successor, Vicki Behenna, the county’s first female elected DA. In April, Behenna wrote a letter to the parole board noting that under new guidelines she had instituted, Glossip’s case would not be eligible for capital prosecution. Behenna’s position has further fueled backlash to the attorney general’s intervention. Prater and the District Attorneys Council know that if the courts agree that Glossip’s conviction should be overturned, it will be up to Behenna to decide whether to retry the case.

On Tuesday, Glossip’s supporters held a rally on the front steps of the Oklahoma Capitol. The featured speaker was Phil McGraw, whose coverage of Glossip’s case in 2015 prompted new witnesses to come forward. Knight, Glossip’s lawyer, reminded the crowd that the fight was not over. The Supreme Court stay represented one victory in a battle that will “rage on” until Glossip is freed, he said. Lea emphasized that there was still a lot of work to be done and thanked everyone for supporting their efforts. “We truly do need all of you — especially as Oklahomans — right now.”

As she told The Intercept, the last month has been a legal and emotional rollercoaster. “It feels like this really insane detour just happened. Now we’re just getting back on the road we were supposed to be on,” she said. “And I like to think it was a good vindication for Drummond also because he’s taken so much blowback.”

On the morning after the Supreme Court granted the stay, Lea and Glossip felt a sense of relief they hadn’t felt in a long time. “That was the first good night’s sleep we both had in a while,” Lea said. “Saturday was the first day we’ve woken up in 11 months without an execution date over us.”

The post The “Power, Pride, and Politics” Behind the Drive to Execute Richard Glossip appeared first on The Intercept.

But in a stunning rebuke, the court rejected the attorney general’s request, triggering the 35-day protocol that precedes an execution. Perhaps most critical: a hearing on April 26 before the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board, whose members are empowered to recommend clemency to the governor, serving as a final check against a wrongful execution.

There was every reason to expect the board would vote to spare Glossip’s life. Among the witnesses who appeared on Glossip’s behalf on Wednesday was Attorney General Gentner Drummond himself, along with prominent Oklahoma lawmakers who have come to believe in Glossip’s innocence.

Yet in another stunning reversal of fortune, the board voted to deny clemency. Barring intervention by the courts or Gov. Kevin Stitt, Glossip will be executed by lethal injection on May 18.

“It’s horrifying,” Don Knight, Glossip’s lead attorney, said. But “we’re not done, by a long shot.”

Glossip was twice tried and sentenced to death for the January 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside a seedy Best Budget Inn that Van Treese owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. No physical evidence linked Glossip, the motel’s 34-year-old live-in manager, to the crime. Instead, the case against him was built almost exclusively on the testimony of 19-year-old Justin Sneed, who worked as a handyman at the motel. Sneed admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death but claimed it was all Glossip’s idea. Prosecutors claimed Glossip killed Van Treese in a scheme to take over the low-rent motel and painted Sneed as a meek dolt who would do anything Glossip asked of him. In exchange for testifying against Glossip, Sneed avoided facing the death penalty and was sentenced to life without parole. Glossip has steadfastly maintained his innocence, and over the years, evidence of his wrongful conviction has steadily mounted.

Counter to the state’s fanciful narrative, the evidence supports Glossip’s contention that Sneed — a chronic drug user with a penchant for unpredictable bouts of violence — initially planned to rob Van Treese, killed him when the plan went sideways, and then later, during a highly suggestive police interrogation, named Glossip as the mastermind behind the crime. Witnesses who were ignored by police and prosecutors have since come forward with evidence that Sneed was cunning, manipulative, and quite capable of killing a man on his own.

Knight has spent nearly a decade investigating and presenting to the court new evidence that undercuts Glossip’s conviction. Still, at every turn, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has willfully ignored the myriad problems with the case — including prosecutorial misconduct and the state’s destruction of evidence. That same evidence, meanwhile, has led a contingent of conservative, pro-death penalty lawmakers to advocate on Glossip’s behalf over fears the state might execute an innocent man.

The State Got Away With It

The clemency hearing took place at the Kate Barnard Community Corrections Center, a women’s jail complex in Northeast Oklahoma City. The fluorescent-lit room was packed compared to most clemency hearings, with seven rows of chairs assigned to attendees in advance. As in all such proceedings, victims’ family members sat on one side of the room, alongside representatives of the state, while advocates for Glossip sat on the other. Unlike most hearings, both sections included current and former elected officials, most notably Drummond, who was there representing the state and advocating for clemency, the first time an Oklahoma attorney general has ever done so.

“If the defense would’ve destroyed that box of evidence, there would have been charges brought against them. But the state seemingly got away with it.”

Among the most conspicuous attendees was former Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater, whose office sent Glossip to death row. Before his retirement in January, Prater aggressively defended Glossip’s conviction, intimidating witnesses who came forward with new evidence in 2015 and accusing Glossip of waging a “bullshit PR campaign.” Prater also previously targeted the parole board for recommending clemency in other cases, accusing members of having an anti-death penalty bias. Wearing a dark pinstriped suit, an American flag pin, and a permanent scowl, Prater sat in the fifth row alongside prosecutors from other parts of the state. While he did not speak before the board, Prater shook his head as witnesses described the state’s destruction of evidence and other prosecutorial misconduct.

Each side had 40 minutes to present their case, followed by remarks by the Van Treese family and Glossip himself. A large digital clock faced the speakers, while TV monitors faced the board. One of the five board members, Richard Smothermon, was absent, having recused himself due to the fact that his wife was the prosecutor who sent Glossip to death row.

Knight told the board that Glossip grew up in a chaotic household where family members struggled with drug and alcohol abuse. Unlike a number of his 15 siblings, Glossip managed to avoid running afoul of the law, and after dropping out of school, he worked hard to build a quiet and successful life for himself. He became a manager at Domino’s Pizza before turning to management of a string of motels. “It may not seem like much, but for a guy with a seventh-grade education … it was pretty good,” Knight told the board. The idea that Glossip was scheming to take over the Best Budget Inn was inconceivable, Knight said. It was a fiction dreamed up by Sneed, “a man who now everyone, even the state, admits is a liar.”

“People rarely begin a life of crime at 34,” Knight went on. In contrast, Sneed had a long history of criminal behavior before he killed Van Treese at 19, including threatening to kill his middle school teacher. “The worst thing on Rich Glossip’s record? A traffic ticket.”

Republican state lawmakers described how they had come to believe in Glossip’s innocence. Each said he was skeptical at first; they didn’t believe that an innocent person could wind up on death row. But as they learned more about the case, and new evidence continued to emerge, they concluded that Glossip’s conviction was a miscarriage of justice.

Central to their conclusion was the work of law firm Reed Smith, which undertook a pro bono investigation into the case at the behest of a larger group of lawmakers led by Republican Rep. Kevin McDugle. Reed Smith spent more than a year on its investigation, interviewed more than 40 witnesses, and gathered records from multiple state agencies, producing five reports that paint the clearest picture yet of Glossip’s wrongful conviction. McDugle told the board that he asked the investigators to go where the facts took them. “I simply want them to find the truth in this case,” he said.

“In reading their findings, I was sickened that something like this could happen in the state of Oklahoma,” McDugle said. “Their investigation concluded that based on the complete record, old and new evidence, no reasonable jury hearing it all would have convicted Glossip of murder for hire.” McDugle was especially disturbed by the state’s destruction of a box of evidence before Glossip’s second trial in 2004, including the motel’s financial records and crime scene evidence that could have been tested for DNA. “If the defense would’ve destroyed that box of evidence, there would have been charges brought against them. But the state seemingly got away with it.”

Justin Jackson, a political ally of the governor’s, struck a more personal note. He said that he’d gotten to know Glossip during visits to death row at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. Today he describes him as a friend and “brother in Christ.” “Rich has never wavered once in his claim of innocence,” Jackson said. He held up a painting of a hummingbird that Glossip made for Jackson’s mother, who was dying of cancer. Glossip said that for him, the hummingbird represented freedom from death row — but for Jackson’s mother, he hoped it would represent freedom from pain and suffering. When his mother died in 2020, Jackson said, “Rich had no way of knowing of my mom’s passing but by happenstance he called me later that morning. And he spent the next 30 minutes consoling me.”

An Unprecedented Hearing

When it was the state’s turn to present its case to the board, Drummond began by acknowledging each speaker, along with Van Treese’s loved ones. “I know that this has been an extremely difficult process for the family to endure.”

“I’m not aware of anytime in our history that an attorney general has appeared before this board and argued for clemency.”

“I want to acknowledge how unusual it is for the state to support a clemency application of a death row inmate,” Drummond said. “I’m not aware of anytime in our history that an attorney general has appeared before this board and argued for clemency. I’m also not aware of any time in the history of Oklahoma when justice would require it. Ultimately that is why we are here.” As the state’s chief law enforcement officer, Drummond said, it was his duty to consider “what justice is for the state of Oklahoma.” That’s what led him to finally release evidence that had never been turned over to Glossip’s legal team. It’s also what led him to launch an investigation of his own into the case.

Christina Vitale, a lawyer who was part of the Reed Smith investigation, presented a PowerPoint laying out critical new evidence that had come to light in the past year. This included multiple letters from Sneed to his attorney expressing a desire to recant his testimony against Glossip. It also included the contents of a box of evidence belonging to the district attorney’s office, which was turned over to investigators in January. The box contained prosecutors’ handwritten notes revealing that after Van Treese’s murder, Sneed had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium to manage it by a psychiatrist who evaluated him at the Oklahoma City Jail. At trial, Sneed denied that the evaluation ever took place.

Drummond had highlighted Sneed’s misstatements in his brief to the Court of Criminal Appeals seeking to vacate Glossip’s conviction. He argued that Sneed’s mental health disorder combined with his chronic drug use could have negatively affected “Sneed’s ability to properly recall key facts” at trial. “The state has reached the difficult conclusion that the conviction of Glossip was obtained with the benefit of material misstatements to the jury by its key witness,” Drummond wrote.

“The state of Oklahoma can extract its pound of flesh from Richard Glossip, but I believe it has already extracted three pounds.”

Sneed lying about his diagnosis and prosecutors’ failure to correct the record were key factors for Rex Duncan, a former prosecutor whom Drummond retained to conduct the second investigation of Glossip’s conviction. Duncan was the last witness for the state. “This is a first for me, to agree with the defense attorney that their client deserves clemency,” he said. After 600 hours spent reviewing the case, Duncan said, he concluded that “Richard Glossip did not receive a fair trial and the state of Oklahoma cannot stand behind his conviction. Further, the state of Oklahoma cannot stand behind an execution given what has been discovered.”

“If anybody deserved to be on death row, it’s Justin Sneed,” Duncan said. “Richard Glossip has been on death row for most of his adult life, has been served his last meal three times and been within minutes of execution. The state of Oklahoma can extract its pound of flesh from Richard Glossip, but I believe it has already extracted three pounds.”

Enough Is Enough

When it was time for the Van Treese family to speak, their message was clear: They wanted their ordeal to be over and felt betrayed by the state’s call for clemency. Donna Van Treese, Barry’s widow, echoed her testimony from Glossip’s 2014 clemency hearing, describing the impact of her husband’s murder and the lasting trauma for her children. “We do not feel justly represented today,” she told the board. Barry’s son, Derek Van Treese, decried the years of investigation and publicity that had made Glossip’s case famous. “This case has been pushed from being a legal matter to being a political issue; has been pushed from the court of law to the court of public opinion,” he said. “Enough is enough.”

“Today has been a travesty,” Van Treese’s sister, Alana Van Treese Mileto, said. While she acknowledged that Drummond’s concerns should be considered, “at the same time, this is so one-sided.” The state’s presentation “feels like a giant stab in the back, to be honest with you.”

Asked if Drummond’s office had contacted the family prior to the hearing, Donna Van Treese spoke indignantly of a phone conversation with the attorney general. Drummond told her that he believed Glossip was guilty, she said. In response, Drummond repeated what he had previously stated: His personal belief was that Glossip was guilty of “at least accessory after the fact” for his failure to tell detectives about statements Sneed made following the murder. “More likely than not he’s guilty of murder,” he said. “But I do not believe that the evidence presents that he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” He maintained that the board should recommend clemency. “I believe it would be a grave injustice to allow the execution of a man whose trial was plagued by many errors.”

Glossip was given 20 minutes to speak on his own behalf. He spoke for less than three, appearing by Zoom from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. He wore maroon prison scrubs, and his wrists were handcuffed together, making it difficult for him to raise his hand to be sworn in by the board chair. Glossip dabbed at his eyes with a tissue while delivering remarks he had prepared on sheets of white paper. He told the Van Treese family that he was sorry for everything they’d been through. And he thanked all the people who had supported him, including McDugle, Jackson, and Drummond.

Unlike Glossip’s previous clemency hearing in 2014, where board members challenged his account of what happened the day Barry Van Treese died, this time the board asked no questions. Instead, they announced a 10-minute break to deliberate.

After several hours of careful, comprehensive presentations by advocates for Glossip and representatives of the state laying out all the reasons that clemency should be granted, the end was shockingly abrupt. Board members quickly announced their votes: two votes for clemency, followed by two votes against. Under the rules of the Pardon and Parole Board, a tie is weighted in favor of the no votes, meaning the default is denying clemency and blessing an execution.

The Van Treese family cheered, cried, and hugged upon hearing the vote, gathering before a line of TV cameras. Everyone else filed out of the room.

Knight, Glossip’s lawyer, vowed to pursue every remaining avenue to save his client’s life. On Wednesday afternoon, he filed an unopposed stay of execution with the U.S. Supreme Court. He is also challenging the makeup of the board, arguing that the fifth board member, Smothermon, should have been replaced to avoid a tie that would result in a denial of clemency. Knight also plans to challenge the appellate court’s ruling dismissing Drummond’s request to vacate Glossip’s conviction. Finally, he said, he would ask the governor for a reprieve to allow the legal process to take its course, “because the execution of an innocent man would be an irreversible injustice.”

In the meantime, Glossip faces the torment of yet another execution countdown. As his wife, Lea, told the board, they have already undertaken the excruciating task of planning for his state-sanctioned murder: deciding who will attend the execution, what Glossip will choose for his final meal, and where he will be buried. “He is now on the brink of his ninth execution date, all for a crime that he did not commit,” she said. “This ordeal has been absolutely psychologically terrorizing.”

Leaving the hearing, McDugle called the outcome “ridiculous.” “Oklahoma’s got some systemic problems with the judicial system,” he said. “Any reasonable person who would have been in that room would have voted yes for clemency.” Although McDugle has always maintained that he supports capital punishment, he reiterated what he has previously said about the case: If Glossip’s execution is carried out, “I will fight against the death penalty in the state of Oklahoma.”

The post Shocking Vote by Oklahoma Parole Board Clears the Way for Richard Glossip’s Execution appeared first on The Intercept.

“This court has thoroughly examined Glossip’s case from the initial direct appeal to this date,” the court’s five justices wrote. “Glossip has exhausted every avenue and we have found no legal or factual ground which would require relief in this case.”

The court’s move is a rebuke not only to the attorney general, who ordered a review of Glossip’s case earlier this year, but also to dozens of conservative Oklahoma legislators who have been fighting to stop Glossip’s execution over fears the state would kill an innocent man. The independent counsel who reviewed the case concluded that Glossip should receive a new trial — and that pushing for his execution did not “serve the interests of justice.”

Glossip was sentenced to death for the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside a seedy Best Budget Inn that Van Treese owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. No physical evidence linked Glossip, the motel’s live-in manager, to the crime. Instead, the case against him was built almost exclusively on the testimony of a 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed, who admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death but said it was all Glossip’s idea. In exchange for testifying against Glossip, Sneed avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to life without parole. Glossip has always insisted on his innocence, and, over the last decade, evidence that he was wrongly convicted has steadily mounted.

Much of this evidence supports Glossip’s contention that Sneed — a chronic drug user who demonstrated unpredictable bouts of violence — carried out the crime and only later set up Glossip as the mastermind. New witnesses have come forward to counter the state’s portrayal of Sneed as a hapless dolt who took direction from Glossip, testifying that Sneed was cunning, manipulative, and quite capable of killing a man on his own.

Most recently, the state disclosed evidence that Sneed made misstatements at trial that undermined his credibility. While he was in jail, Sneed was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium to manage it. However, when he testified against Glossip, Sneed denied ever seeing a psychiatrist and said he had no idea why he’d been given lithium.

Drummond highlighted these misstatements in his brief to the court seeking to vacate Glossip’s conviction. He argued that Sneed’s mental health disorder combined with his chronic drug use could have negatively affected “Sneed’s ability to properly recall key facts” at trial. “The state has reached the difficult conclusion that the conviction of Glossip was obtained with the benefit of material misstatements to the jury by its key witness,” Drummond wrote.

In rejecting Drummond’s request to vacate Glossip’s conviction, the court blithely concluded there was no reason to further stay Glossip’s execution. “Because Glossip has not made the requisite showing of likely success” in further appeals or “irreparable harm” from any denial of his claims, “he is not entitled to stay of execution,” the justices wrote.

“While I respect the Court of Criminal Appeals’ opinion, I am not willing to allow an execution to proceed despite so many doubts,” Drummond said in a statement. “Ensuring the integrity of the death penalty demands complete certainty. I will thoroughly review the ruling and consider what steps should be taken to ensure justice.”

Glossip’s attorney Don Knight said it was “unconscionable for the court to attempt to force the state to move forward with this execution” given that the attorney general himself agreed that the state’s star witness had been discredited. “We cannot permit this longstanding injustice to go unchallenged and will be filing for review of this manifestly unjust ruling in the United States Supreme Court.”

In February, the Supreme Court intervened in another capital case, Escobar v. Texas, in which prosecutors’ arguments in favor of a death row defendant had been rejected by a similarly hostile appeals court. There, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ignored the Travis County district attorney’s decision to join the defendant in asking the court for a new trial. As in Glossip’s case, the prosecutor found that the original prosecution relied on an unsound foundation and that the conviction should be vacated. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the CCA “for further consideration in light of the confession of error by Texas.” Drummond cited the Escobar case in his filing with the Oklahoma court.

“We ask all Oklahomans who believe in justice to stand with Mr. Glossip, and the state of Oklahoma, to stop this wrongful judicial execution,” Knight said, “and grant Mr. Glossip the new trial he so rightly deserves.”

The post Oklahoma Court: We Want Richard Glossip Dead and Evidence Be Damned appeared first on The Intercept.

“The state has carefully considered the voluminous record in the case, the constitutional principles at stake, and the interests of justice,” Drummond wrote in a filing with the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. “While the state has previously opposed relief for Glossip, it has changed its position based on a careful review of the new information that has come to light.”

The move by Drummond signals the possible end of a decadeslong saga that began on January 7, 1997, with the discovery of Barry Van Treese’s body inside Room 102 of a seedy motel on the outskirts of Oklahoma City.

Glossip, the live-in manager of the Best Budget Inn, was twice tried and sentenced to death for the murder of Van Treese, the motel’s owner. No physical evidence linked Glossip to the crime. Instead, the case against him was built almost exclusively on the testimony of a 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed, who admitted to carrying out the brutal killing but said it was all Glossip’s idea. In exchange for testifying against Glossip, Sneed avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to life without parole. Glossip has always insisted on his innocence, and over the last decade, evidence that he was wrongly convicted has steadily mounted.

The Intercept was the first national news outlet to thoroughly examine Glossip’s innocence claim. That investigation, published in 2015, brought widespread attention to the case and prompted a four-part docuseries by Joe Berlinger released in 2017. Last year, The Intercept’s coverage included exclusive interviews with key witnesses who were never contacted by police or prosecutors; the information they provided cast further doubt on Sneed’s account and bolstered Glossip’s innocence claim.

Glossip’s case also caught the attention of a bipartisan group of Oklahoma lawmakers, many of them rock-ribbed pro-death penalty conservatives, who became alarmed that the state planned to kill an innocent man. They sought out the law firm Reed Smith LLP, which conducted an independent investigation into the case. Since June 2022, the firm has released five reports, each containing bombshell revelations that paint a clear picture of Glossip’s wrongful conviction.

Yet until recently, it seemed unfathomable that the state of Oklahoma would concede that Glossip’s conviction was fatally flawed. Despite the ongoing revelations, courts and previous prosecutors refused to seriously consider the evidence pointing to his innocence. Things began to change course after Drummond took office in January. Almost immediately, Drummond slowed the state’s frenzied execution schedule and appointed special counsel to review Glossip’s case.

The appointed counsel, Rex Duncan, ultimately concluded that Glossip’s conviction and sentence should be set aside. In a 19-page report, Duncan touched on problems with the case that Glossip’s attorneys have been trying to draw attention to for years — including the state’s repeated failure to turn over key evidence to the defense and its destruction of additional evidence that cast doubt on the already flimsy case.

“The state’s murder case against Glossip was not particularly strong and would have been, in my view, weaker if full discovery had been provided,” Duncan wrote.

Duncan found that Sneed, the state’s star witness, made misstatements at trial that undermined his credibility. While it has long been known that Sneed was a heavy drug user at the time of Van Treese’s murder, evidence only recently disclosed to Glossip’s attorneys revealed that while he was in jail, Sneed was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium to manage it. However, when he testified against Glossip, Sneed denied ever seeing a psychiatrist and said he had no idea why he’d been given lithium. Both Duncan’s report and Drummond’s court filing highlight the significance of this misstatement, noting that Glossip’s attorneys should have been made aware of the full scope of Sneed’s diagnosis.

“There is no dispute that Sneed was the state’s key witness at the second trial. If Sneed had accurately disclosed that he had seen a psychiatrist, then the defense would have likely learned … the true reason for Sneed’s lithium prescription,” Drummond wrote in the court filing. “With this information plus Sneed’s history of drug addiction, the state believes that a qualified defense attorney likely could have attacked Sneed’s ability to properly recall key facts at the second trial.”

“The state has reached the difficult conclusion that the conviction of Glossip was obtained with the benefit of material misstatements to the jury by its key witness,” he wrote.

The Oklahoma Court of Appeals, which has been unsympathetic to Glossip’s appeals for years, has little choice but to agree with Drummond that the case should be sent back to Oklahoma City for further consideration. The former elected district attorney there, David Prater, was particularly hostile to Glossip’s innocence claims and called efforts to stop his execution a “bullshit PR campaign.” Prater has since retired and was recently replaced by Vicki Behenna, a former federal prosecutor and head of the Oklahoma Innocence Project.

In the meantime, Glossip’s execution date — his ninth — is still on the calendar for May 18. Drummond has joined Glossip’s attorney Don Knight in asking the court to grant a stay.

In a phone call, Knight was cautiously hopeful that the client he’s fought so tirelessly to save from execution may instead be freed. When he told Glossip that the attorney general had asked that his conviction be overturned, Glossip was “ecstatic,” Knight said. “It was like this moment washed over his face where he recognized that after all these years and after everything he’s been through, he was finally getting someone to listen to him.”

The post Oklahoma Attorney General Asks Court to Overturn Richard Glossip’s Conviction appeared first on The Intercept.

“Julie Bonds McCrory was my mother,” Chad said. “She was taken from me from a very early age. I’m 40 years old now.” Chad had no memory of the murder or his father’s 1985 trial. The crime had traumatized the tight-knit community of Andalusia, where Chad still lives, turning neighbors against Charles McCrory as soon as he became a suspect. But as long as Chad could remember, his father had insisted he was innocent — and most of his family believed him.

“I was raised by my grandparents,” Chad continued. “My dad’s parents. They loved my mom like their own child.” Although they supported Chad’s relationship with his incarcerated father, “they also encouraged me to make my own decision on supporting him.” As he got older, Chad said, he tried to keep an open mind about family members who believed McCrory was guilty. He spent hours talking to his maternal uncle, Barry Bonds, who consistently opposed his father’s release. Yet Chad said he was grateful for their time together. “I learned a lot of things about my mom growing up.” He could never get her back. But he hoped to reunite with his father before he died behind bars.

Chad’s wife and other family members watched the proceeding with a mix of attentiveness and resignation. “They’ve pretty much made up their minds,” Charles McCrory’s younger sister, Laura Grissett, said before the hearing began. “It feels just like a waste of time.” Although the board chair, former Birmingham prosecutor Leigh Gwathney, smiled encouragingly as Chad spoke, they knew better than to feel hopeful. The hearing had begun with a tense exchange between Gwathney and McCrory’s lawyer, Mark Loudon-Brown of the Southern Center for Human Rights, who reiterated a point he’d emphasized in McCrory’s parole application: that prosecutors in Covington County — the same office that convicted his client — had made clear that they no longer considered McCrory a threat to public safety.

“In April of 2021, the district attorney made Mr. McCrory an offer to time served that would have allowed him to leave court that very day and go home unsupervised,” Loudon-Brown said during his own two-minute presentation. The offer, which McCrory rejected because it came with the requirement that he admit to killing his wife, was made on the eve of an evidentiary hearing that would debunk the single most important piece of evidence that sent McCrory to prison for life: a supposed bite mark found on his wife’s body.

Although a famed bite-mark analyst insisted at trial that the mark conclusively linked McCrory to the murder, that same expert has since recanted, saying he would never deliver such testimony today. In the years since McCrory was convicted, bite-mark analysis has been roundly discredited as junk science. Nevertheless, the judge who presided over the evidentiary hearing was unmoved. He ruled against McCrory, keeping him locked up. McCrory is the last known defendant still imprisoned for a conviction almost entirely based on the faulty forensic practice.

Regardless of his client’s innocence claim, Loudon-Brown said, the offer from prosecutors reflected a belief that McCrory had been “sufficiently punished, that his release would be consistent with the safety of the community … and that his exemplary prison record justifies his release.” Gwathney bristled at this characterization. “Did the district attorney make those statements regarding his reasoning?” she asked pointedly. Wasn’t it possible he had different reasons for offering such a deal? Loudon-Brown conceded there were likely a number of reasons. But the offer still showed a willingness to free McCrory — the very question now before the parole board.

Gwathney’s posture made clear how she intended to vote. Under her tenure, the number of applicants granted parole has dropped precipitously. In Alabama, parole proceedings are cursory and notoriously stacked against incarcerated people, who are not even allowed to attend their own hearings. Yet in some ways, McCrory was luckier than most. Unlike the man whose case was called before his that morning, he had family members present, a legal advocate, and even the support of a retired Department of Corrections employee, who felt strongly enough to appear before the board in person. Retired after 35 years, she described McCrory as “a very skilled, very talented, and very intelligent person. I had no fears of him whatsoever.”

Chad was still speaking when the timer went off. “This has been the 12th parole board we’ve attended,” he said, urging the board to consider the many certificates his father had earned behind bars. Chad tried to make a final point: The prosecutors who made the plea offer were part of his community too; people he did business with, went to church with. “And I feel like —”

The bailiff stepped forward. “Your time is up,” he said.

Rush to Judgment

In 2022, The Intercept published a deep-dive investigation into McCrory’s case, detailing his long-standing claim of innocence. But the evidence pointing to his wrongful conviction was not discussed at the parole hearing. Maintaining innocence is rarely a winning strategy in front of parole boards, which expect contrition from the incarcerated people who appear before them. It’s the court system, theoretically at least, that is supposed to consider whether evidence supports a claim of innocence. When a trial judge rejects such a claim, as the Covington County judge did in McCrory’s case, then it falls to appellate courts to determine whether that was the right call.

So far that has not helped McCrory either. The courts that have reviewed his conviction have willfully ignored the discredited forensic evidence at the heart of his case, dismissing the bite-mark expert’s recantation and going so far as to craft an entirely new narrative of the crime in order to keep McCrory in prison.

Julie McCrory’s body was found inside the couple’s house on the morning of May 31, 1985. She was lying prone, her head was bashed in, and she’d been repeatedly stabbed in the chest. Chad, then 3 years old, was found unharmed in his crib. The police quickly zeroed in on McCrory as their only suspect: He and Julie were separated, and McCrory had been having an affair with a former co-worker. At trial, the theory seemed to be that he’d savagely murdered Julie to be free from her.

The police investigation was cursory at best. Detectives searched McCrory’s home and car and found nothing to connect him to the bloody crime. Police also found personal items that prosecutors sought to introduce at trial despite their lack of relevance to the crime: a VHS tape and a collection of photos featuring Julie and her husband in kinky scenarios. “There is more than one scene in which the young lady is — what is considered in bondage,” a defense witness testified at a pretrial hearing. The state apparently hoped to show that “bondage sex” could lead to “stronger and stronger acts of violence,” as one prosecutor put it. Although the items were barred by the presiding judge, rumors swirled in the run-up to the trial, and many came to believe that the murder was linked to some kind of sex ring.

According to the state’s star witness, the puncture wounds on Julie’s arm were a perfect match to McCrory’s unique dentition.

Ultimately, the state latched onto a single piece of physical evidence as dispositive of McCrory’s guilt: two small indentations on the back of Julie’s right arm, which they concluded was a bite mark made by McCrory’s allegedly distinctive dentition.

The state rushed the case to trial in October 1985, but there was little else in the way of evidence. McCrory and his father had been the first to discover Julie’s body that morning; they’d gone to check on her after she failed to drop Chad off at his grandparents’ house. Police decided that McCrory was acting strangely when they arrived on the scene. Detective Billy Treadaway testified that McCrory asked him if Julie had been killed by a “lick on the back of her head,” which he found odd since her injuries had not yet been documented. Under cross-examination, Treadaway acknowledged that Julie was found with her head in a pool of blood but insisted, “You couldn’t see the lick on the back of the head. You could just see her head splattered open.”

The most important witness for the state was Dr. Richard Souviron, a forensic dentist who rose to fame after testifying during the trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. Even though Souviron had cautioned prosecutors early on against using the bite mark at McCrory’s trial absent other solid physical evidence, when he got on the stand, he was unequivocal, saying that the two puncture wounds on Julie’s arm were a perfect match to McCrory’s unique dentition — and only .5 percent of people in the world had dentition like McCrory’s.

The next day, the jury found McCrory guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison.

A Star Witness Recants

Bite-mark analysis depends on two assertions: that human dentition is unique and that skin is a suitable substrate to record that uniqueness. Neither is true; research has revealed that human dentition is not unique, and skin, as malleable as it is, is a poor medium for preserving an accurate record of injury. In recent years, the scientific community has repeatedly interrogated bite-mark analysis, deeming it a random and purely subjective practice. To date, more than two dozen people convicted on bite-mark evidence have been exonerated.

In 2020, Loudon-Brown and attorney Chris Fabricant of the Innocence Project filed a petition with the court in Andalusia where McCrory was tried, asserting his innocence and asking that his conviction be overturned. They had powerful new evidence: Souviron had recanted his trial testimony. “I no longer believe, as I did at the time of trial, that there is a valid scientific basis for concluding that the injury found on the skin of the victim … could be ‘matched’ or otherwise connected to a specific individual,” he wrote in an affidavit. “I therefore renounce that testimony.”

Circuit Judge Lex Short convened an evidentiary hearing the following spring. Two forensic odontologists, Adam Freeman and Cynthia Brzozowski, former true believers in bite-mark evidence, testified about the discipline’s demise and said there was no basis to conclude that the marks on Julie’s arm were made by teeth, let alone McCrory’s teeth.

More than two dozen people convicted on bite-mark evidence have been exonerated.

Covington County Chief Assistant District Attorney Grace Jeter did not call any experts to rebut Freeman and Brzozowski, but she dismissed Souviron’s recantation, suggesting that there was a difference between bite-mark analysis and “teeth-mark” analysis, and that Souviron had engaged in the latter. She told the judge that even without Souviron, the jurors could have taken the molds of McCrory’s teeth and photos of Julie’s injuries and made the comparison on their own.

Jurors aren’t “allowed to engage in their own junk science,” Loudon-Brown responded.

Short issued a brief ruling in February 2022, which parroted Jeter’s arguments and denied McCrory relief. The judge ignored Souviron’s recantation, found that Freeman and Brzozowski offered little more than a difference of opinion — what’s known as impeachment evidence — and agreed that jurors could have decided for themselves that the injury to Julie’s arm was inflicted by McCrory. Even without Souviron’s testimony, Short concluded, there was enough circumstantial evidence tying McCrory to the murder, such as his comment about the “lick” on Julie’s head, to uphold the jury’s verdict.

McCrory’s lawyers contested the ruling before the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals. Souviron’s opinion wasn’t merely challenged by other dentists, they noted, but wholly recanted. The discredited bite-mark analysis was the only evidence tying McCrory to the murder; without it, there was nothing to sustain his conviction.

The lawyers argued that police had failed to consider evidence that pointed away from McCrory, including hairs found clutched in Julie’s hand. And while there was physical evidence from the crime scene that could have been tested for DNA, it was subsequently destroyed by the state. Today, all that remains in the evidence room at the courthouse is the dental mold of McCrory’s teeth.

Willful Ignorance

In its reply to the appeals court, the state, now represented by the attorney general’s office, amplified Short’s conclusions. It ignored Souviron’s recantation (save for a single reference to it as “alleged”) and leaned into the argument that McCrory’s challenge to his conviction was nothing more than a dispute over differing expert opinions amid the “shifting science” of bite-mark analysis.

The state also relied on a creative recasting of the facts.

In her brief, Assistant Attorney General Kristi O. Wilkerson dismissed the allegation that the cops had failed to pursue evidence of an alternate suspect and spun circumstantial elements of the case, like the fact of McCrory’s affair, into an elaborate narrative that bore little resemblance to the testimony offered at trial. McCrory was “passionately in love” with the woman he’d had an affair with, desperate to sever ties with Julie, and turned to murder as the only way out. Julie’s death, she wrote, would solve all McCrory’s problems.

Wilkerson’s brief tried to make it appear that the case against McCrory was about everything but the alleged bite mark — a position that the trial prosecutor does not share. In an interview with Loudon-Brown after the 2021 evidentiary hearing, the prosecutor said the bite mark was “key” to the state’s case and “clearly” the basis of McCrory’s conviction.

“Her decision not to recuse jeopardized the partiality of the entire court.”

The state’s reframing of the issue apparently sat just fine with the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, which denied McCrory’s appeal in December. The opinion was mostly cribbed from the court’s denial of McCrory’s first appeal back in 1986 and quoted extensively from Short’s ruling. It, too, failed to acknowledge Souviron’s recantation and suggested that while there might be issues with bite-mark analysis, the same could not be said of “teeth-mark analysis.”

McCrory’s lawyers asked the court to reconsider its position. “This court erroneously split hairs regarding a pseudo-distinction between ‘bite marks’ and ‘teeth marks,’ wrongly concluding that Mr. McCrory’s petition is based on mere impeachment evidence that would not have changed the result of his trial,” they wrote. “An unrebutted and unimpeached recantation of critical expert testimony is not merely impeachment evidence — the evidence no longer exists.”

And there was a second problem: One of the appeals court judges, Elizabeth Kellum, had previously worked at the attorney general’s office and argued against McCrory’s 1986 appeal. “Judge Kellum signed the state’s brief in Mr. McCrory’s original appeal,” his lawyers wrote. “This creates an appearance of impropriety that, under the canons of judicial ethics, mandates recusal. Her decision not to recuse jeopardized the partiality of the entire court and violated Mr. McCrory’s constitutional rights.”

The court agreed to rehear the case, but instead of actually doing so, it merely removed Kellum’s name and reissued its previous opinion.

“When Judge Kellum was an assistant attorney general, she advocated for the state, against Mr. McCrory,” Loudon-Brown wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “Her involvement as a judge hearing Mr. McCrory’s case after she litigated against him cannot be squared with the constitutional requirement that judges be impartial and objective decision makers.”

Loudon-Brown said that McCrory’s team will again ask the court to reconsider his case. If it declines, they will appeal to the Alabama Supreme Court.

Who Speaks for the Dead?

Outside the building where McCrory’s parole hearing took place, signs directed visitors to one of two doors. There was the “Victim Waiting Room” and the “Offender Waiting Room.” People like Chad — the victim’s son, who also supported his father — were assigned to the latter category.

The hearing room was similarly divided. On the left side, relatives who opposed parole sat alongside lawyers for the state. Also present was a representative of the nonprofit Victims of Crime and Leniency, or VOCAL, which attends all parole hearings and opposes release in every homicide case.

At around 9:30 a.m., Barry Bonds, Chad’s uncle, stood to address the board. “I am here to protest Charles McCrory’s release,” he said. “It’s a very long story, and I can’t get it all in in the time that I have.” As Julie’s youngest brother, Bonds said, he once looked up to McCrory, who was an EMT and auxiliary police officer. “He got me involved in the Andalusia Rescue Squad.” But then he pivoted, invoking the rumors that had swirled around McCrory’s trial. “There was a lot of wife-swapping, a lot of sex stuff going on in the community,” he said, without elaborating.

“The one thing that has stuck in my mind for many years,” Bonds went on, was the statement McCrory made at the scene: “‘Did the blow to the back of her head kill her?’ Only someone that was there would ask that question.” If McCrory would simply confess to the crime, Bonds suggested, he might still be able to “spend eternity in heaven.”

“I am the voice of Julie. … I never had the opportunity to know her.”

The next speaker was VOCAL Director Janette Grantham. Although she said she’d been asked by Julie’s family not to oppose parole for McCrory, she took it upon herself to speak anyway. “I am the voice of Julie,” she said. “I never had the opportunity to know her. But I’m sure if she had the opportunity to be here today, she would tell you she did not want to die.” McCrory had been convicted and sentenced to life by a jury of 12 people, Grantham said, therefore he should remain in prison. This was what his victim deserved. “And she deserves to have her voice heard today.”

There were two prosecutors representing the state. Nayla Contreras, of the attorney general’s office, reminded the board that parole is “a privilege and not a right.” The fact that someone “is doing exceptionally well in prison” does not mean they should be released. McCrory was behind bars because of acts he chose to commit, she said, things he’s never owned up to. “Yes, 40 years is quite a long time to serve in prison. But I would submit to the board this morning that 40 years is a long time to be in a grave as well.”

Finally, there was Nikki Stephens, an assistant district attorney in Covington County. “I’m honored to speak today on behalf of and for Julie McCrory’s family,” she said. She quickly rehashed the evidence the state had presented ad nauseam: McCrory’s “salacious affair”; the brutality of the murder and extent of Julie’s injuries, which she described in graphic detail; and finally, McCrory’s incriminating statement. “And I quote: ‘Was it the lick to the back of the head that killed her?’”

Stephens disputed Loudon-Brown’s characterization of the state’s rationale for offering a plea deal in 2021. The real reason was that the case was at a “particular posture at that point,” she explained. “I don’t know that, if the conviction were overturned, we would be able to retry the case because of witness issues.” Many of the people involved in the investigation were deceased, Stephens explained. She made no mention of the state’s star witness, Souviron, who is very much alive.

After a few minutes of deliberation with the sole other board member in attendance (a former state trooper), Gwathney, the board chair, announced their decision. Parole was denied. “It is also the unanimous decision of the board that parole will be reconsidered in five years,” she said, prompting the bailiffs to see everyone out.

It had stopped raining when Chad and his group got outside. They gathered in a circle while Loudon-Brown explained his team’s next steps. They would keep fighting in the courts, he said. A few minutes later, the group was asked to clear the sidewalk leading to the parking lot. Shortly afterward, Bonds emerged from the building flanked by security staff, who escorted him to his car. The implication that Bonds needed protection from the rest of the family angered Grissett, McCrory’s sister. In the eyes of the state, Bonds’s opposition to freeing McCrory made him the only victim that counted. “Chad has never been treated as a victim,” she said.

The post His Conviction Relied on Debunked Bite-Mark Science. Why Is He Still Locked Up? appeared first on The Intercept.

Rojo Bushnell was sitting in a Huddle House diner down the street from the prison. She’d been there all day with Megan Crane, co-director of the MacArthur Justice Center’s Missouri office, working on Taylor’s case. Rojo Bushnell realized that as she was waiting on hold, the execution was already underway. At 6:16 p.m. Taylor was pronounced dead.

Taylor was executed for the 2004 murder of his girlfriend, Angela Rowe, and her three young children in Jennings, a suburb of St. Louis. Taylor had always maintained his innocence. He was nearly 2,000 miles away when the bodies were found inside the home he shared with Rowe, shot in the head. Police seized on Taylor as their sole suspect, pursuing witnesses to confirm their theory of the crime while ignoring evidence to the contrary. At Taylor’s trial, the prosecution relied on a dubious statement provided by Taylor’s brother, Perry — a statement Perry had vociferously recanted — and on testimony from a medical examiner who dramatically changed his estimated time of death in order to implicate Taylor.

Despite lingering questions over Taylor’s guilt, his innocence claim was never fully investigated nor considered by any court. St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell declined to avail himself of a Missouri law that allows prosecutors to reopen possible wrongful convictions, saying there were no facts “to support a credible claim of innocence” in Taylor’s case. The office maintained its stance even as Taylor’s daughter, Deja, flew to St. Louis days before the execution to share crucial information supporting her father’s alibi, which could have confirmed that the victims were still alive several days after Taylor had left the state.

“They know that people have other avenues to vindicate their rights, but it doesn’t matter to them.”

As Taylor’s execution loomed, attorneys sought to stop it, asking Gov. Mike Parson to convene a Board of Inquiry: an independent panel tasked with vetting Taylor’s innocence claim. The governor declined to do so. As it became clear the execution would likely proceed, attorneys learned that the state was denying Taylor’s request to have a spiritual adviser and two witnesses, Rojo Bushnell and Crane, present during the execution.

After the Missouri Supreme Court and the federal district court in St. Louis declined to intervene, Rojo Bushnell and Crane were sitting in the diner working on an appeal to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court. Rojo Bushnell was calling to tell Taylor about the appeal when she was informed that it was too late.

It is not the first time that Missouri has executed a person in the face of a compelling claim of innocence, nor is it the first time the state has executed someone while litigation was still pending. “I think that’s something we were all thinking about,” Rojo Bushnell said. “They know that people are continuing to litigate; they know that people have other avenues to vindicate their rights, but it doesn’t matter to them.”

During her last visit with Taylor on Tuesday morning, Rojo Bushnell talked to him about his love of music. His favorite song, he told her, was The O’Jays’ “Family Reunion.” Rojo Bushnell and Crane listened to the song as they drove from Bonne Terre back to St. Louis after the execution. Taylor, a devout Muslim, “accepted his fate, that whatever was Allah’s will was Allah’s will,” Rojo Bushnell said. “He was positive up to the last time I talked to him.”

Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty held rallies in support of Taylor across the state on Tuesday, from Kansas City to Bonne Terre. “One day the truth will be uncovered, and Raheem Taylor will be vindicated and posthumously exonerated,” the organization’s co-director Michelle Smith said.

“This is an undeniable and irreversible injustice,” Crane said. “But in the words of Raheem, he will ‘live eternally in the hearts of family and friends.’”

The post “An Irreversible Injustice”: Missouri Executes Leonard “Raheem” Taylor Despite Doubts Over His Guilt appeared first on The Intercept.