AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas father who spent nearly 25 years behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit is pressing for tougher penalties targeting prosecutors who withhold evidence, saying he wants to prevent other innocent people from falling victim to overzealous authorities.
“This isn’t about me because my case is finished,” Michael Morton said during an interview Thursday with The Associated Press. “But there’s no reason it can’t happen to you or to anyone.”
Morton was convicted in the fatal 1986 beating of his wife by a prosecutor who Morton and his attorneys believe knowingly withheld critical evidence. Morton walked out of prison a free man last October, after DNA testing cleared him and pointed to another man now charged in the murder and implicated in a similar 1988 slaying.
Morton was awarded nearly $2 million under the state’s compensation law, and a special prosecutor is investigating whether the lead prosecutor in his case — now a Texas judge — hid evidence.
But Morton said his fight isn’t over.
He plans to sit down with lawmakers and State Bar officials, and use the notoriety he reluctantly gained from his high-profile exoneration, to get tough new rules in place that would ensure prosecutors could be fined or even disbarred for concealing evidence in Texas, where more former inmates have been exonerated than any other state.
“We want to tell prosecutors, ‘Just play fair, follow the rules, obey the law,” Morton said. “I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve been around a whole bunch of them lately. They can do this and we can help get the Legislature to make it doable, too.”
Investigations of court officers are rare, and the one against Ken Anderson — a rising star among young prosecutors when he handled Morton’s trial in 1987 — is especially so since he’s now a Texas District Court judge.
Using an even and easy tone, his voice quiet and direct, the 57-year-old Morton said he’s moved beyond his hate for Anderson, then-Williamson County Sheriff Jim Boutwell and the other investigators who helped convict him while he was trying to grieve the death of his wife, Christine, and shield their 3-year-old son.
“This was intentional,” Morton said, betraying the only hint of anger he showed during his nearly 90-minute conversation with AP. “This wasn’t a slip of the tongue or a typo.”
Morton believes that Boutwell, who has since died, made up his mind early that he was guilty, and that Anderson was so fixated on successfully securing a conviction that he ignored the truth.
Rather than seeing Anderson punished, however, Morton simply wants him held accountable.
“I wanted revenge for a long time. I plotted the murder of Sherriff Boutwell and Ken Anderson, and a lot of folks involved with my incarceration,” he said. “At a certain point, I had to let that go.”
What he hasn’t let go is the last memory of Christine. Morton remembers kissing his wife of seven years before leaving for work at 5:30 a.m. the day after his 32nd birthday. Sometime later that day, she was beaten to death in her bed by an intruder in their Austin home. The couple’s son, Eric, was unharmed.
During his trial, Anderson told jurors that Christine Morton had fallen asleep instead of having sex with her husband after a dinner out to celebrate his birthday. Anderson said Morton flew into a rage and killed her, though investigators had little physical evidence and Morton had no criminal record.
Morton and his attorneys now accuse Anderson of not turning over all evidence, even after the presiding judge explicitly ordered him to do so. Among that evidence were statements from then-3-year-old Eric, who told his grandmother that he witnessed the murder and his father wasn’t responsible, and from a neighbor who described seeing a man park a green van near the Morton home and walk into a wooded area behind it.
Anderson apologized in November for what he called “the system’s failure,” but hasn’t spoken publicly about the case since. His attorney, Eric Nichols, noted it was DNA testing unavailable in 1987 that set Morton free, not witness statements and other previously undisclosed evidence.
“It is a terrible tragedy that Mr. Morton served over 24 years for a crime that he apparently did not commit and Judge Anderson has recognized the enormity of that tragedy,” Nichols said by phone. “But the fact that Mr. Morton was tried based on the evidence that was available at the time does not mean that there was prosecutorial misconduct.”
Anderson will face a proceeding called a “court of inquiry,” whereby court officials can face sanctions, in September.
For years, Morton filed appeals from prison and eventually began working with the Innocence Project, a New York-based nonprofit that specializes in using DNA testing to overturn wrongful convictions, and Houston attorney John Raley.
The district attorney’s office spent many of those same years arguing that additional DNA testing wasn’t necessary in Morton’s case — until last summer, when testing was performed on a blue bandana found near the Morton home shortly after the murder.
It revealed Christine Morton’s blood, along with DNA not from her husband, but of another man: Mark Norwood. He was arrested and charged late last year, and also has been linked by DNA evidence to the slaying of Debra Masters Baker, who was beaten to death in her home close to where the Mortons lived in January 1988.
When asked about Baker’s death, Morton said: “For me, there’s no doubt” that authorities’ fixation on him allowed a murder to kill again.
Morton said he’s slowly rebuilding his relationship with his son, who was raised by Morton’s sister-in-law and her husband. Eric Morton eventually cut off ties while his father was in prison and changed his last name when he turned 18.
“That was the darkest time,” Morton said, recalling when he was told of his son’s name change. “But if I’d been in his shoes, lord knows what I would have done.”
Morton now gets recognized on the street, and a stranger even gave him a 2001 Chevy Tahoe that Morton later gave to another exonerated former Texas inmate.
On Thursday, as he posed for AP photographs near the Texas Capitol, a woman pulled up and rolled down her window.
“Hey, I know you,” she cried thrusting her arm in Morton’s direction. “You’re the one who didn’t do it!”
Morton smiled, nodded and called out: “Thank you.”
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Rick Perry did something in Iowa he’s never done in three decades of public life: He lost.
But those who have known Perry for years expect him to take his fifth-place finish in Iowa’s caucuses in stride and keep campaigning, even as his chances of winning the presidential nomination shrink.
“He’ll go with the strategy of leaving the best image as possible even as he fades away, leave America with that as his legacy instead of all those debate errors that shot his credibility,” said Royal Masset, a former state GOP political director.
Iowa ended an unbeaten electoral streak for Perry that stretched back to 1984, when he won a Texas House seat as a Democrat. He switched parties and won his first statewide post as agricultural commissioner before being elected lieutenant governor, ascending to the governorship when George W. Bush left for the White House in December 2000 and winning election to three full, four-year terms.
Some who know him say the Iowa loss — it well could foreshadow a failure to win the nomination — has probably already had a deeper personal impact than Perry is letting on.
“I can’t imagine that it doesn’t affect your psyche a little bit, particularly with Perry, who he didn’t just win the last few elections, he blew his opponents away,” said Bill Ratliff, who served as lieutenant governor for two years under Perry. “It’s got to be a sobering experience, especially when he came out on top of the polls and riding so high, and 60 days later he’s struggling to stay in the race.”
Perry himself appeared rattled in the immediate aftermath of Iowa. In an emotional speech in Des Moines on Tuesday night, he said he was heading back to Texas to mull quitting the race. The next morning, though, still in Iowa, he donned a track suit from his alma mater of Texas A&M and claims to have had an epiphany of sorts while jogging.
He then tweeted, “Here we come South Carolina!!!,” such an about-face from the tone of the night before that it caught even some on his own campaign staff by surprise.
“I was out on the trail when it kind of came to me,” a suddenly upbeat Perry said of changing his mind during the run. He added, “This was not a difficult decision.”
His staying in likely benefits Mitt Romney since it means conservatives looking to vote for someone else to back might end up dividing their support among Perry, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Perry became an almost overnight front-runner when he strode into the presidential race in August, and made up for his late entry with strong fundraising. But his polling numbers both nationally and in early voting states went into free-fall because of his support for offering in-state tuition at Texas universities to the children of illegal immigrants and a series of increasingly embarrassing debate flubs that made him a national punch line.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal campaigned with Perry during the final, frenzied days in Iowa and says he’ll continue to support him despite the even poorer-than-expected result. “He’s got a lot of folks around him counseling him what to do,” Jindal said. “I’m just proud to call him a friend.”
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Rick Perry did something in Iowa he’s never done in three decades of public life: He lost.
Those who have known Perry for years expect him to take his fifth-place finish in Tuesday’s Iowa caucuses in stride, even as his chances of winning the presidential nomination shrink.
But others say the Iowa loss has probably had a deeper personal impact than Perry is letting on.
Iowa ended an unbeaten electoral streak for Perry that stretched back to 1984, when he won a Texas House seat as a Democrat.
He switched parties and won as agricultural commissioner before being elected lieutenant governor and ascending to the governorship when George W. Bush left for the White House in December 2000. Perry has since won three full terms.
BASTROP, Texas (AP) — Concrete foundations that have been cleared of rubble sit eerily empty amid charred remains of once majestic loblolly pines. Driveways, some still complete with patio furniture and basketball hoops, snake their way to nothing but a slab of stone.
More than three months after record-setting wildfires roared through this otherwise charming corner of central Texas, many of the hardest-hit areas stand largely abandoned by homeowners who have moved elsewhere. Others left homeless are starting to rebuild bigger and better houses — or vow to do so soon — even as the memories of the raging blazes remain fresh.
“I get to kind of build my dream house, I just haven’t been in the spirit yet,” said Denise Rodgers, a hospice chaplain. She was among an estimated 5,000 people displaced by the flames that killed two people, destroyed 1,673 homes and charred 33,000 acres — an area more than twice the size of Manhattan — in and around Bastrop, about 30 miles southeast of Austin.
Some parts of town are in the midst of a rebuilding boom, with streets crammed with trucks hauling in lumber or earthmoving equipment and carting away debris. Even ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” show got in on the action, taking a week to build a 2,500-square-foot home for a volunteer firewoman and her family who lost their bungalow.
But other areas have made little recovery. No one knows for sure how many residents have moved away already or still could.
“Certainly there are going to be a lot of people leaving,” Bastrop Mayor Terry Orr said. “But we certainly want to encourage people to rebuild.”
The city of Bastrop and surrounding county of the same name are home to 80,000 people, Orr said, meaning about 7 percent of residents lost homes.
In the days after the wildfires, some displaced families snapped up vacant homes for sale in the area. Others have moved in with friends or relatives, or rented homes while they decide what to do permanently.
Rodgers is living in a vacant home lent by a friend with only some rented basic furniture: “I have stuff only for one drawer.” She said her New Year’s resolution is getting her new home built — and that she may put a pool and garden where her original house stood and build on an adjacent lot.
“In the beginning, I was so horrified, I couldn’t think of living there,” Rodgers said of her home, which was reduced to ash and clumps of melted belongings. “But you get used to seeing certain things and you change ideas.”
Returning after the fire, she remembers, “I sat in the driveway and wailed. There was nothing that I could see and recognize.”
A Buddha statue, a cross, an angel Christmas ornament missing only a broken wing and a Hindu goddess statue survived the flames.
“Is it uncanny that an eclectic, non-denominational hospice chaplain would find only spiritual icons in the debris? I think not,” Rodgers said. “These were all divine signs that all would be OK.”
Some have already begun building improved homes, fitted with energy-efficient technology and other upgrades.
Marvin Beck and his wife Anne spent two years beginning in 1992 building their home largely by hand. The fire destroyed it, so the 79-year-old architect drew up new plans and bought a new plot 12 miles from the old one.
Construction will begin in January — though this time the couple is letting professional builders handle it.
“We had hoped the last house would be our last house,” Beck said with a wry chuckle. “Hopefully this one will be.”
The Becks said they had far too many friends in Bastrop to think of leaving. But they also conceded that going back to the same spot where their home once stood was too painful.
“We couldn’t digest that,” Beck said.
Insured losses from the fire should reach $325 million, according to the Insurance Council of Texas, making it the costliest blaze in state history. About 3,080 residents have applied for Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance, said spokesman Ray Perez, and the agency has paid out close to $9.4 million in housing and other relief funds. FEMA provided trailers to 52 displaced families across Bastrop County.
Eric and Cyndi Poe lost everything and wanted to stay but were undecided about rebuilding on their same lot — until the builder who constructed their original home told them he could do it again in record time. The couple moved into a new home the week before Thanksgiving, barely 10 weeks after the fire.
“It didn’t seem possible,” Cyndi said. “That’s how lucky we’ve been.”
Except for charred trees in the yard, it’s now hard to tell the fire even hit the Poe’s house. Their new house is virtually identical to the old one, except the Poes asked for a larger garage and said they could do without a bathtub in the master bathroom.
And, of course, their possessions are gone. Cyndi said that on Thanksgiving, she instinctively opened a cabinet expecting to see a family heirloom.
“I reached up to get the turkey platter we’ve used all of my life and it wasn’t there, and I had a little moment where I was sad,” she said.
The Poes live in Tahitian Village, a sprawling subdivision where the fires claimed 282 homes. Some 240 owners whose homes were destroyed have sought refunds for their water deposits — meaning they won’t rebuild.
Still, many leaving the subdivision could move elsewhere in and around Bastrop. Among them is Victor Gonzalez, a 59-year-old attorney who has yet to clear all the rubble of his Tahitian Village home because there’s still hope sifting could turn up spared valuables.
The fire leveled dozens of pines and melted a BMW in the driveway. Only the swimming pool survived.
“We had a very secluded portion of heaven,” Gonzalez said. “Now we’ve got a moonscape.”
Neighbors on either side of him lost their homes and won’t rebuild. Gonzalez is mulling a move to another part of the subdivision.
“Tahitian will be back,” he said. “It’s just not going to look the same.”
A Roman Catholic priest has been arrested on charges that he solicited a hit man to kill a teenager who had accused him of sexual abuse.
Authorities said John Fiala first offered the job to a neighbor, who blew the whistle and helped police arrange a sting. They said Fiala got as far as negotiating a $5,000 price for the slaying before investigators moved in.
The 52-year-old clergyman was arrested Nov. 18 at his suburban Dallas home and jailed on $700,000 bond. In April, he was named in a lawsuit filed by the boy’s family, who accused Fiala of molesting the youth, including twice forcing him to have sex at gunpoint.
The abuse allegedly took place in 2007 and 2008, when Fiala was a priest at the Sacred Heart of Mary Parish in the West Texas community of Rocksprings, a rural enclave known for sheep and goat herding.
The family’s lawsuit also named the Archdiocese of San Antonio and Archbishop Jose Gomez, alleging that church leadership should have known Fiala was abusive.
The suit was filed just a month before Gomez was introduced as the new incoming leader of the Los Angeles Archdiocese. He is currently serving as an assistant to Cardinal Roger Mahony, who will retire next year. Gomez then automatically becomes archbishop.
When he learned of the murder-for-hire investigation, the boy “was terrified and rightly so,” said San Antonio attorney Tom Rhodes, who represents the family. As far back as 2008, Fiala threatened the teen, and repeatedly brandished a pistol, Rhodes said.
Fiala “began saying, ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll hurt you. I’ll hurt your family, your girlfriend,’” Rhodes said. “It was more than once he threatened him with a gun.”
Fiala only recently rented a place to live in suburban Garland, where police say he initiated the attempted contract killing — even though his new home is more than 300 miles northeast of Rocksprings.
Rhodes said an anonymous informant who initially identified himself as a neighbor of Fiala contacted his office and said the priest had approached him about killing the accuser, who was 16 at the time and is now in his late teens. Rhodes urged the informant to contact the police, who then sent an undercover agent to meet with Fiala.
Rhodes said he had been told Fiala offered $5,000 to carry out the slaying. A spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety said he could not confirm the amount of money involved.
It was unclear how close Fiala might have come to putting any plan into motion or how he allegedly wanted the boy killed. A call to the Edwards County Sheriff’s Office, which headed up the investigation, was not immediately returned.
Jail records list Fiala’s attorney as Rex Gunter in Dallas, but he was in court Tuesday and did not return a call from The Associated Press. Fiala is charged with one count of solicitation to commit capital murder and two counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child.
San Antonio Archdiocese spokesman Pat Rodgers said Fiala has been removed from the public ministry, meaning he cannot present himself as a priest.
Authorities removed him in October 2008, before the accusations of sexual assault emerged, because of his interference with the custodial relationship between the teen in Rocksprings and his grandmother — a case the sheriff’s office investigated. Authorities have not disclosed the nature of Fiala’s interference.
“We were shocked by the allegations and saddened by the story,” Rodgers said. Since Fiala was removed from the public ministry, “we haven’t contacted him, and haven’t had any reason to contact him.”
Rhodes said Fiala originally met the accuser in 2007 and was a frequent visitor at his grandparents’ house, where the teen was living. He often came bearing gifts, including new a cell phone and MP3 player, and eventually gave the boy cash to help buy a car.
Fiala used the pretext of private catechism lessons to be alone with the boy, Rhodes said, and in 2008 took the teen to a youth event in the town of San Angelo, Texas, during which he raped him in a motel room at gunpoint.
“He’s a dangerous predator and has been since at least 1988,” Rhodes said. “The church has known how dangerous this guy is for many, many years. They had full knowledge, we believe, and the documents seem to bear that out — that they knew what a bad person he was and what a danger he was to children.”
Fidel Castro criticized Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for what he called his anti-Semitic attitudes and questioned his own actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 during interviews with an American journalist he summoned to Havana to discuss fears of global nuclear war.
Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, blogged on the magazine’s website Tuesday that he was on vacation last month when the head of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington — which Cuba maintains there instead of an embassy — called to say Castro had read his recent article about Israel and Iran and wanted him to come to Cuba.
Goldberg asked Julia Sweig, a Cuba-U.S. policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, to accompany him, and the pair spent portions of three days talking with Castro.
Cuba’s state-controlled media reported Aug. 31 that Goldberg and Sweig met with Castro and attended the dolphin show at Havana’s aquarium, but the blog was the first to reveal details of what they discussed.
Goldberg said their first meeting lasted five hours and featured appearances by Castro’s wife, Dalia, his son Antonio, and several bodyguards, two of which held his elbow to steady Castro when he moved.
“His body may be frail, but his mind is acute, his energy level is high,” wrote Goldberg, who also noted Castro’s self-deprecating humor.
The 84-year-old ex-president wore full military fatigues and an olive-green cap while addressing university students last week, and had previously appeared in public in a military shirt. But Goldberg saw Castro in a red shirt, sweat pants, and black New Balance sneakers.
He said Castro, who himself has been a fierce critic of Israel, “repeatedly returned to his excoriation of anti-Semitism,” chiding Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust. Castro said that Iran could further the cause of peace by “acknowledging the ‘unique’ history of anti-Semitism and trying to understand why Israelis fear for their existence.”
The gray-bearded revolutionary related to Goldberg a story from his childhood that has been detailed by some biographers: that he overheard classmates saying Jews killed Jesus Christ.
“I didn’t know what a Jew was. I knew of a bird that was a called a ‘Jew,’ and so for me the Jews were those birds,” Goldberg quoted Castro as telling him. Castro later added, “This is how ignorant the entire population was.”
According to Goldberg, Castro said, “I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims.”
Castro also said that the Iranian government should understand that the Jews “were expelled from their land, persecuted and mistreated all over the world, as the ones who killed God.”
After undergoing emergency intestinal surgery in July 2006, giving up Cuba’s presidency and dropping out of sight for four years, Castro has begun making near-daily public appearances to warn of a nuclear war pitting the U.S. and Israel against Iran and also featuring a Washington-led attack on North Korea.
“This problem is not going to get resolved, because the Iranians are not going to back down in the face of threats,” Castro told Goldberg.
Goldberg also said he revisited the Cuban Missile Crisis with Castro, asking if once “it seemed logical for you to recommend that the Soviets bomb the U.S.”
“Does what you recommended still seem logical now?”
Castro’s answer surprised him: “After I’ve seen what I’ve seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn’t worth it all.”
Online:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/09/fidel-to-ahmadinejad-stop-slandering-the-jews/62566/
Michael Morton, hugs defense attorney Jerry Goldstein, after speaking to the public for the first time since he was freed from prison, Thursday, March 29, 2012 in Austin, Texas. Morton, who spent nearly 25 years behind bars for a murder he didnt commit is fighting for tougher penalties targeting prosecutors who withhold evidence, saying he wants to prevent other innocent people from overzealous prosecutors/losing years of their life. (AP Photo/Austin American-Statesman, Ralph Barrera) MAGS OUT; NO SALES; INTERNET AND TV MUST CREDIT PHOTOGRAPHER AND STATESMAN.COM(Credit: AP) 
In this Jan. 3, 2012, photo, Republican presidential candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry pauses on caucus night in West Des Moines, Iowa. Perry did something in Iowa hes never done in three decades of public life: He lost. Those who have known Perry for years expect him to take his fifth-place finish in Tuesdays Iowa caucuses in stride, even as his chances of winning the presidential nomination shrink. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)(Credit: AP) 