Texas’s Efforts to Roll Back Protections for the Innocent Have Been Defeated
Dear Friends,
I wanted to make sure you knew that efforts to roll back the Michael Morton Act—Texas’s landmark law protecting the actually innocent from wrongful conviction—have been defeated!
Michael Morton was wrongfully convicted of the murder of his wife in 1987. Separated from his then-three-year-old son, Michael spent nearly 25 years in prison before a dedicated team of attorneys, and advancements in DNA technology, finally led to his exoneration in 2011. After Michael’s exoneration, the Texas legislature did the right thing: they passed the Michael Morton Act, a common-sense, bi-partisan initiative to protect the innocent and uphold the constitutional rights of defendants.
The law required prosecutors to share all information related to a defendant’s case, which created transparency and significantly reduced the chances of wrongful convictions.
A new bill introduced this session, HB 3330, would have gutted the Michael Morton Act and put innocent people at risk. The Michael Morton Act prioritizes truth and justice. Prosecutors have a constitutional duty to disclose evidence favorable to the defense. Yet prosecutorial misconduct is responsible for over half of the nation’s wrongful convictions. While most prosecutors do not intentionally withhold evidence, they do make mistakes, and even the unintentional withholding of evidence is a miscarriage of justice that deprives juries of the full picture of a case. The Michael Morton Act addressed this problem head-on, and has reduced the number of wrongful convictions in our state.
We are grateful that Texas legislators stood with Michael Morton and the innocent this session, ultimately rejecting this Michael Morton roll-back bill. Thank you to our partners at the Innocence Project of Texas, the Innocence Project, the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, and others from all over the state. Most of all, we are grateful to Michael Morton for his powerful op ed in the Houston Chronicle, and to the exonerees who shared their stories with Texas legislators: Richard Miles, Anna Vasquez, Elizabeth Ramirez, Kristie Mayhugh, and Butch Martin, who together spent 74 years in prison for crimes they did not commit.
With gratitude,
Burke Butler
Executive Director
Texas Defender Service
