 Good evening. I'm Mark Uptegroff, the director of the LBJ Presidential Library, and I want to welcome you to another season of programming for the Friends of the LBJ Library. We've got some incredible events coming up. Certainly, I'm much looking forward to tonight's discussion, which I think we have a very powerful and moving evening in store for you. Later on in the season, we have Richard Norton Smith coming. Well-known historian will be here on October 28th with his brand new volume on the life of Nelson Rockefeller. We have three members of the Little Rock Nine who are going to be here. Those are the nine young men and women, actually boys and girls at the time, who in 1957 integrated Little Rock High School in the wake of the Brown versus Board of Education decision. 57 years after the integration, that very powerful story will be told by those three individuals. David Axelrod will be here in February with his new memoir about his life and times with Barack Obama. And we have LBJ's domestic policy advisor, Joe Calfano, who will be here with his memoir about the Johnson years, which will be moderated by his friend, our friend, Bob Schieffer. Just want to encourage you all to talk about the friends of LBJ, the LBJ library, with your friends to bring them into the fold. This is an incredible value. I hope you all feel that way. We strive to make this a valuable enterprise for all of you. And we would be honored if you would talk it up to your friends and bring them to us so that our ranks grow more and more. After this session, we will continue to sell Michael Morton's very powerful book in the lobby. And there will be a reception for friends of the LBJ library in the Great Hall. With that, I want to turn it over to a man who, both Michael Morton and Barry Shek, who will be on stage with me tonight, call a great hero in ensuring that innocent people are shown to be innocent when miscarriages of justice prevail. He is the 43rd governor of our state who reigned in the State House from 1983 to 1987. Our friend, Governor Mark White, thank you. Thank you very much, Mark. I would have been here earlier, but it appears you've rerouted all the streets around here so that the Baylor football team won't be able to get here on time. And there will be a forfeit. Otherwise, I doubt. I won't say more. I hope you like my tie. I've been thinking of you all day. My voice may not hold out. Tonight's a special evening. This venue has been the site of so many important conferences and meetings. Tonight will be another of those. I can remember the Ford Carter conversation. Some of you were here. Many civil rights convocations here for obvious reasons. Tonight, I think LBJ would be proud of what Mark up to Grove has done in bringing together people who are going to speak on the most basic of human rights, their personal liberty. This country was founded on such things as we're going to be discussing this evening. Blackstone said it was better for 10 guilty to escape than one innocent be punished. Tonight, we're going to hear a story of that. Many people say, well, how could this soul be innocent? He was indicted by a grand jury. He was tried by a jury of his peers. All the evidence, all the evidence was brought out. He had defense counsel representing him. And the jury found him guilty. Then we had appeals and other appeals. And we had rits filed and more rits and more appeals. And all the judges and all the courts have agreed he's guilty. How could that be that one soul could be innocent after all of those procedures? Well, you're going to hear about it tonight. This is a classic case because it really doesn't include any civil rights issues, particularly on race. It's not a racial issue. All the people involved were Anglos. Some of whom are neighbors. You're going to see the best of lawyers represented tonight with Barry Scheck. And there's one here in our audience that we must recognize. It's John Rayleigh, who's a participant and a leader on this. John, please stand up. John fought for five years. For five years. For one simple thing, let's DNA test the bandana. You'll learn more about the bandana in a moment. Before we begin, though, I'm going to ask you to do something. I want you to bow your heads and close your eyes. Not a Larry Temple. That means you. And I know if you're a Baptist, you know what's coming next. And if you're not a Baptist, you wonder what the hell's going on. That's a non-Baptist laughing. I want you to think just for a moment. Just meditate for a moment. Where were you and what were you doing? The day Ronald Reagan left office and George H.W. Bush took office. Think about all the things that have happened since then. Think about what you were doing then and what you did over those intervening years up until this very evening. And think how long ago that was. That was 25 years ago. And that's how long Michael Martin was in prison every single day. Now we're going to turn to the real participants and the real heroes because you're going to see Barry Schecht, who is a real hero, talking about problems that he faced in this case. And then you're going to hear from a guy named Michael Martin who finds it in his soul to forgive. Let's see the show. Thank you. Thank you. Go get him, Chuck. Go get him. Thank you, sir. Welcome to both of you. Thank you. This, as the governor alluded to, is an inspiring story of personal courage and grace. It's also a cautionary tale about the miscarriage of justice. Mike, I'm going to talk to you about the court case and your initial days in prison. And then we'll bring Barry into discussion when the Innocence Project factors into your journey. I want to talk to you about your trial for a moment. And many of us, I think, followed the trial on television. I wonder, when you were in that courtroom, did it ever occur to you that you would be found guilty in this case? The possibility was always there. But while I may have planned in a very small way what if, I think in my heart of hearts I thought I'd be found innocent. It was a surprise. And like a lot of high school kids who have been through a civics class, I thought the process would work out and I would be found innocent. What went through your mind when that verdict was sounded? When I heard the guilty verdict. And I will say that people have asked that before. And in all candor, there's not a lot of thought. There's not introspection and analysis. There's not what did we do right or what did we do wrong. It's more of a visceral sensation. It's not unlike being punched. You don't do anything but react. And some of the biggest challenges are just staying on your feet and breathing. It's like any brand new unexpected experience. You don't know how you're going to respond until it happens. And so whatever it is, whether it's pretty or not, it's genuine. So you hear the verdict. What happens next? Well, in Texas, the next process is a sentencing phase. And I knew we were in trouble because I just got found guilty. But I remember my attorneys, Bill White and Bill Allison, Bill Allison, here tonight, they had worked so hard and they'd done a really good job with what they had to work with. But they were scrambling, goes, what do we tell the jurors now? How do we convince them to lessen this sentence or to make it a minimal type thing? Because they obviously think he did it. And they didn't take too awfully long. They were convinced they had done the right thing and I got a life sentence. Then you wind up in prison. You talk about going to prison. And the word you use is serious. Serious stuff when you get in there. What was going through your mind when you showed up to be incarcerated for the balance of your life? In an odd way, I was fortunate because I'd had a couple of weeks to think about it. I was sentenced for life. But you have to wait in county jail until there's an open bunk because the prisoners were full back then, as they often are. And I ran into an old con in county jail. He was aware of me and my situation. And while our relationship was only a couple of weeks long, he told me the best I could do was to keep my eyes open and my mouth shut, stand up for yourself, and do not back down. There are a lot of things that are worse than losing a fight. And not to make a big deal about it, but violence has a very different currency here in polite society than it does behind the fences. And so it's not a big deal. What do you remember most about those first days in prison? The smells. Prison has a very distinct aroma. And there are sounds that are uniquely penal. I remember when Senator Whitemire received a phone call from Death Row. And I talked to him about this. And he knew right away that it was a real phone call from Death Row because he knew those sounds. And nothing sounds like the penitentiary. We talked about that. And Senator Whitemire knows those sounds. What sustains you? You're sentenced to life in prison. You know in your heart you're innocent. You've lost your wife. You're seeing your son every six months during planned visits. What sustains you during that time? For me, it was my son. But every prisoner has to have something. And it doesn't matter what it is. I learned this from a lifer that I met as soon as I got to the penitentiary. That everybody has to have something to look forward to, something to hang on to. And for me, it was my son. He was why I wanted to get out. He was why I wanted to get it overturned. I wanted to convince him I wasn't the bad guy that had killed his mother. And that's what made me get out of bed every morning. That's what kept me from cutting up my sheet and hanging myself. Because if you don't have hope, there's no reason to live. So you're contemporaries, you're cellmates. What would typically sustain them? Many of whom are guilty. You knew of your innocence. The vast majority of them are guilty. Right. Everybody's different. Some of them would have like an old car they wanted to restore, refinish, make it look like a brand new car. Some of them had an old house, some time of marriage they wanted to fix, relationship with some family member. It really doesn't matter what it is. But you have to have something, a friend of mine that had done 20 years, but not only done three months. He said he had seen enough of it that if somebody loses hope, that's the end of it. That's the end of life. You've said before that you befriended murderers before other criminals. Why? Well, I was incorrectly cast in that light. That was our common theme. But also, especially murderers who had committed a crime of passion or were not lifelong career criminals, they just had one or two brushes with the law. They didn't tend to be your run of the mill convict. They generally, this is a generalization, but they don't always deal in the low rank sort of lying and stealing and cheating sort of mode. The murderers in a bizarre sort of way are at the top of the prison hierarchy. It's like being a lifer or a guy that's down there for three years or DWI. Who are you? But it was a surprise to me and especially to my mother when I told her that some of my best friends were murderers. It's a different world. What surprised you most about prison life? I imagine you didn't have a great deal of time to contemplate what it would be like. But what surprised you as you settled into prison life? I think that I was like everybody in here, that the bulk of your understanding of prison is some movie you saw, a TV show or a book rather. But the thing that caught me off guard was that none of those descriptions of prison address the monotony and the boredom and the repetition. It will grind you down every day is the same. You know what to expect. You know what to do. You know what to not do. And even the things that are unusual that pop up over the years, you find out that they're not that unusual. It's just soul killing. We'll get back to your journey in a moment. Barry, let me ask you, what led you to begin the Innocence Project? You were a very prominent lawyer. Many of us knew you from the O.J. Simpson case. Well, we started before the O.J. Simpson case. You started in 1992, is that correct? Yeah. So we came to know you through that, but you had already established the Innocence Project several years before. What was the reason for you beginning the Innocence Project? Well, I was a remain, a law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. And that's how I knew Bill Allison. And he's been my friend for 34 years. And he's a terrific lawyer. So anybody that thinks that it can happen to you, even if you get a good lawyer, and there are rare commodities, think twice. But no, we started the Innocence Project, my partner and I, Peter Neufeld in 1992. But it really started earlier than that. We had in the late 80s, when DNA evidence had not even come into court, we tried to get somebody out of jail, Marion Coakley, who had been convicted of a sexual assault in the Bronx. But there were 17 alibi witnesses that he was at a prayer meeting. And we tried to do a DNA test to get him out. And it had not come into court yet. And the laboratories screwed it up to be totally frank. And we then proved reminiscent the old fashioned way by showing a palm print on the rear view mirror of a car and suppressed exculpatory evidence. But we then became really knowledgeable about DNA testing. And we're involved in the very early days of it, with people that helped map the human genome. Dr. R. Glander, who's on the board of the Innocence Project, been a great help to us and was a great teacher. So the truth is we knew from the very, very beginning that this was transformative, that it was going to be able to exonerate people that were wrongly convicted, and it was going to be able to assist law enforcement in catching the people who really committed the crimes. And most importantly, all the things that are the causes of wrongful convictions, whether it's eyewitness misidentification, and I should tell you, the National Academy of Sciences is coming out with a great report on that this coming Thursday, or false confessions. We should be videotaping those interrogations. We're going to get that soon in Texas. We have eyewitness reform, by the way, in Texas. Thank you, Senator Ellis. I got a great tour from Karen Carpenter today, and I was Senator Rodney Ellis. He's been helping get all this legislation through. We got the Michael Morton Act passed, and I'm sure we'll get to that in a minute. But when Rodney gets to the other side, LBJ is going to come over and say, Rodney, it's the Johnson treatment. You've really done good. So in any event, we got this whole thing started. And if there's 51 other projects across the United States, all doing great work, two of them here, three of them in Texas, I don't know how we count them exactly. But it all really started with Bill Allison calling me up and saying, I had a client that was convicted. I know he's innocent. I did everything I could. Maybe you guys can help me figure out how to get him out of jail. And to be honest about it, we started with a few DNA tests that were not as helpful or relevant as we wanted them to be. And we actually sat on the case for a number of years because we had some exculpatory information, but not all of it. And then it all really began to get moving when this great, great lawyer in our office, Nina Morrison, began taking over the case and hooked up with John Rayleigh. And we began a seven-year effort to get a DNA test. Can you make generalizations about those cases in which justice is not prevailed, in which innocent people are found guilty? Are there generalities that come into play as to why these things play out as they do? Yeah. I mean, being here at the Johnson Library, we've got to say it that race is an intractable problem in this country that perverts criminal justice system. Michael is the exception because he had a great lawyer. But we still, to this day, Gideon's promise is unfulfilled. We don't have defense lawyers properly funded in this country, certainly not here in the state of Texas. And if you don't have a lawyer that is competent or adequate to do the job, then you get forensic science that is junk and not challenged. I mean, we spent a lot of time when we got George Rodriguez out of jail changing the whole Houston Police Department crime lab, and the biggest audit that's ever been done of a crime lab. And my god, you ask yourself, how is it that 70% of the serology cases at that crime lab were incompetently or incorrectly performed with false results? And where were the defense lawyers to do it? Now, it's not to excuse the prosecution. It's not to excuse the crime lab. But if you don't put money into defending people, then the crime lab will be bad. The police that crossed the line will not be caught. The prosecutors that break the rules and have a lot to do with Michael's conviction will not be exposed. And a lot of the junk science doesn't get challenged. And Michael was convicted based on junk science, too. So we have a whole agenda. There's an innocence movement going on. We're making a lot of progress, by the way, in changing the system. But all the problems that LBJ was dealing with at the very beginning. And frankly, Robert Kennedy's Justice Department, let's not forget that because Eric Holder had a lot of good things to say about that this weekend. It's really true. There's a clear line from RFK's Justice Department through Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Civil Rights Movement to this day. There's a lot of work to be done. And why should anybody be surprised that our criminal justice system is riddled with error? The secret of the DNA movement is that we have this magic bullet that can suddenly prove that a guy like this is innocent and find the person who really committed the crime. But all these other problems, we fool ourselves, as Governor White said so eloquently at the beginning. All these trials and appeals and everything else, so it must be right. No, the error rate, as a scientific matter, is very high in this system. And we should have known it from the beginning. But we know it now. This is obviously not a factor in Michael's case, but you alluded to the fact that race plays a role in all this. We're sitting in the presidential library of the president who passed the Federal Jury Selection Act to prevent discrimination in the judicial process. That clearly does not happen all the time. How does race play a role in this? Race is the most intractable problem in the system. And it's only getting worse in so many ways. We know about the strange career of Jim Crow. We know about all these issues. But if you just look at the statistics on who gets executed and who doesn't, who gets convicted and who doesn't, if it's a white victim and an African-American defendant, the statistics are extraordinary. Now, yes, you have to look at it in each individual case. But here's another National Academy of Science report that just came out a few months ago on mass incarceration. And this is an extraordinary thing to think about, that in the 70s, when I first became a public defender, in a high school dropout who was an African-American who was a teenager, the chances of that individual winding up in prison was, I think, 20%. Now, it's 70%. Now, I mean, those numbers are just, that's got to tell you something. And so it's just remarkable to go through this library and see what was accomplished in terms of poverty and racial justice by the great society. But now, we have to face up to it. All these things going on in Ferguson, all these things going on in my city, New York, and racial profiling that we're trying to deal with, these problems in so many ways are getting worse again. And we have to come to terms with it. It's that simple. So race is the most intractable problem of all. We'll get back to your role in the Innocence Project. But Michael, let's turn to your remarkable story. There was a low point that happened to you in prison, and it was really a transformative moment. Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. I said before that we have to have something to hang on to to get through prison or any really dark time. And that my thing was my son. Well, about 14 years into my sentence, it was 2001. And I could count on the calendar he was turning 18, becoming a legal adult. Got a piece of mail. And it wasn't from my son, but it was about my son. And I hadn't seen him or heard from him in a long time. So I was very, very excited about the mail. But in it, I learned that he was legally changing his name and he was going to be adopted by the people who were raising him. And that broke me. Could have been a cumulative thing of all the bad that had happened or it could have been just the worst it ever did. It doesn't really matter, because that's what broke me. And I did something that was very uncharacteristic for me back then as I cried out to God. I got nothing here, show me something. I didn't know what to turn or what to do. I was completely, utterly gutted. And I got nothing back. I know no answer, just a uncomfortable silence that I sort of kind of expected. And then about a week or so later, I said, my cell, my cell partner was asleep. It was late at night. I was going to go to sleep. I decided to put on my radio headphones, go up and down the dial, listen to a little bit of music and call it a night. But on the radio, very unusual, almost comical, now looking back, heard a little bit of harp music. And I listened to that as the novelty of it caught my ear. And then without any sort of hint of what was come just with the instantaneous bam, I was bathing golden light and felt wonderful. It was warm. I felt as if I was floating above my bunk. I knew without having to examine it or make any big analysis that this was the presence of God. And more than anything else, beyond the excitement and the calm and the contradictory wonderfulness of it all, I felt the love of God, not at us, not for humanity, but directly pointed at me. And a few other irrelevant things happen for this venue. But I heard my alarm clock going off. And I distinctly turned it off this morning. And I sat up in my bunk. And I didn't remember setting my alarm. I didn't remember taking off my headphones, but they were hanging on the hook. I didn't remember turning off the radio. And I was wondering what was, well, I knew it was the presence of God, but why me? I was nobody special. I'm still nobody special. I'm just a guy. But I started asking why. Why is one of the most fundamentally important questions we have? And I wasn't sure. I was really chewing on it. I was really wondering. I had not heard a voice saying, Michael, it's going to rain. Build a boat. Nothing like that. All I had was this experience. And after a good deal of thought and reading and prayer and talking to people, I realized that the only thing that had happened was that I had asked. And I was shown like that. And from there, everything in my life changed. I had to forgive. I had to recognize that something fundamentally changed within me because suddenly I wanted different things. It's like waking up suddenly one morning and just craving Brussels Sprouts. It didn't make any sense. But I was on a different path in life. What did you want after that revelation that you hadn't wanted before? I wanted what was good in the Judeo-Christian sense, in the Western civilization sense. I wanted to do right. I wanted to be right. I wanted to improve. I was going to fall down and screw up and get up again. But I wanted to do better. I wanted to treat others the way I wanted to be treated. I wanted to have a relationship with the supreme being of the universe that may be a little ambitious. But even though I'm not accustomed to supernatural experiences and this kind of freaked me out, I wanted some more. You can't have something like that and not want more. So what does that grace look like when you're in the company day in and day out of murderers and rapists and thieves and the people that you were inhabiting prison with? Well, it puts you in the minority. But I already had a reputation. I had established myself. I'd been there while I knew who I was. And you start treating people differently. One of the things I started realizing that it's very hot during the summertime in Texas. And there were about half the guys and they don't have any money. They don't have any family or friends that will send them any money. And Texas doesn't pay the prisoners, so they're indigent. And I was fortunate. I have family and friends, loved ones that would send me money regularly, not a lot of money, but enough to get by. And when I would go to the store, commissary in the penitentiary, I would buy a lot of little bitty ice creams, like little ice cream cones or ice cream sandwiches, and go around the dorm or the cell block. And I knew who didn't have any money. And I would just sometimes have to keep their bunk, wake them up. And usually they'd kind of snarl. And they would see the ice cream and, ah, never mind. Thank you. And I didn't do it so they'd like me. But I knew what their lives were like. And when it's August in Texas and it's 110 degrees inside of a metal building, and somebody offers you an ice cream cone, it's a high point of your day. Yeah, yeah. Barry, when did you first become aware of Michael's case? Well, gosh, I was in the early 80s. It was not too long after his conviction, I think. Actually, let me put it that it's probably 1989, Bill would know, 1990, that he first contacted us about the case. And there was a first round of DNA testing coming. But I have to say something about this book. This is a great book. I wrote it forward to this book. I meant every single syllable. And just in listening to Michael, I think you'll see that he's such a good writer. I read some of his short stories before he was liberated. But he's really, really a great writer. It's so well-observed. But the one thing that I appreciate about him the most is such a humble man, such a sincere man. And he told you the story of his beatitude. Well, the truth is, as well, that he's got a lesbian, atheist, Jewish lawyer in Nina. He's got an atheist, well, agnostic. I flip around. Jewish lawyer in me. John Braley. He's a religious guy. Patricia Cummings, who should stand up, who's one of the great heroes and lawyers in this case. I've never inquired as to Patricia's religious beliefs. But when Michael found this wonderful, wonderful woman and they got married, I said, we couldn't make it. Nina and I couldn't make it down. What? Cynthia. Cynthia, I know. But I didn't know if she wanted to be associated with this story. So I emailed them. And I said, I know you're getting married. But just for the agnothics and atheists, break a glass for us. And then they did. And they sent me this wonderful email. So this foot, Mazelta. Michael has a great sense of humor, a dry sense of humor. And it's all through this book. This is really a great book. It's really important to read. So I just felt I had to get that out. On sale after the program. That's the challenge of the story. That's the story. Yeah. So what was your question, Bob? How did you get involved with this case? You had learned about it shortly after the very came down. Why did it come to your attention? Bill gave it to us. We had it. We tried to do some DNA testing. And then there was semen on the bed. And we were able to show that when the prosecutor got up and claimed it's so awful to even think about it, and Michael describes it so well, sitting in the dock as a defendant when he was suggesting that Michael had murdered his wife and staged it to look like a burglary and then masturbated over her body on that it was an old semen stain. And we had actually done an examination of the semen stain and showed that it really wasn't a mixed sample of semen, of sperm, and epithelial cells. And that's all we had. And that's not much. And then finally in 2005, the reason we brought John Raylian is that he knew a lot about medical malpractice cases. And we knew that they were predicting the time of death by summit contents with junk science. And so we found John at Fulbright and Jaworsky, and he was going to come in and do that. And that was the next part of our effort to get Michael out of jail. And then, of course, we had this DNA motion to test this bloody handkerchief that was found behind the house to show that there was skin cells on it from the real perpetrator and blood of Christine Morton. And so we sought DNA testing. And John Raylian, whose father and brother, United States attorneys in Oklahoma, absolutely could not believe it that the local prosecutor was objecting to the DNA testing, John Bradley. And of course, this was nothing new to Nina and I. We'd seen this before. But I loved it, John, that you were so outraged that they were refusing this. And then we had to go up on appeal and then finally got the right to do that DNA testing. And it, of course, identified the real perpetrator. The blood was from Christine. And it led to Michael's liberation. Now, I mentioned that because tomorrow we're going to hold a press conference in the well of the Senate over here because this will have to be the second time that the legislature passes a correction to the DNA statute that got Michael out of jail because we still have courts misinterpreting the statute and denying people DNA testing to get a DNA hit through the CODIS system, just as Michael was liberated and throwing ridiculous procedural blockages. I mean, now you have to prove that there's skin cells on a garment that you want to DNA test when you can't prove that the skin cells are there until you do the DNA test. So it's nuts. And this is the second time we're going to have to pass a bill to correct this law. So that's how it happened. And it was a long slog through the institutions. But the one thing that is just miraculous about this case, and that's where I've got to give it to Michael. I look back on this and figure, how did this happen? We sat on this case for a number of years. We went to get the DNA test. Thank God they didn't throw away that handkerchief. Then we do the testing on the handkerchief. And we are lucky enough to get that DNA hit. And we're lucky enough to find this real perpetrator within a day. And then with John Rayleigh's paralegal, I guess, in the office does a Google search on the real perpetrators. We had found him. And he said, I was living in Austin. I was a carpet layer. And he gives an address. We do a Google search. And we see another murder was exactly like this that took place two blocks away. And then we ask the police chief in Austin to go do a DNA test on that. And sure enough, we get a hit. And it's the same guy, Mark Allen Norwood. I mean, so I got to give it to you, Michael. That's a lot of coincidence. It defies the mathematical possibility. It defies the mathematical possibilities. It's a point against me. I understand. Let me go back to that bloody bandana. There was a bandana that was found in the Morton's backyard that contained a hair sample that was being held by the district attorney. You got involved in the case in 2005. You asked for DNA testing of that bandana in 2005. You didn't get it until 2011. What took six years to get DNA testing? Well, I think we have an affidavit from him now, or a statement that he gave to me that he says is true. John Bradley was the district attorney in Williamson County. And he opposed the DNA testing. He later said, essentially, because we asked for it. And he was not happy with the Innocence Project because we had been, we had established the Forensic Science Commission in Texas. We had brought a complaint in the Cameron Todd-Willingham case that he was an innocent man executed based on junk science when they were about to make a finding to this effect. Governor Perry removed people from the commission. One of them, it's beyond belief. Again, another point from Michael. The chair of that commission is a lawyer here in town named Sam Bassett. Sam Bassett was a law student working on Michael's case with Bill Allison. So Governor Perry removed Sam. He removed Allen Levy, a prosecutor in Tarran County, or if you remove some other commissioners. And he appointed John Bradley to be head of this Forensic Science Commission. He created a big brouhaha. And then I got into a kind of a contentious relationship with John. Who in a lot of ways I like. All right, so there's a movie about a cold incendiary. We yell at each other in a meeting. I think he tried to have me arrested or something. But the point is, is that as he is later said, I just opposed it because you guys asked for it. And then in addition to that, we had made a request. He opposed an open record act request for all the information that we later found were in a police report. There was all the exculpatory evidence that should have been turned over at Michael's trial warrant by John Bradley's mentor, Ken Anderson, who later became a judge in Williamson County. So why did they oppose the testing? No reason based on the merits. Let's just be honest about it. And John Bradley, in fairness to John, did call up at one point, myself and Rodney Ellis and John Raleigh. And I guess even, did he call you? Oh no. He didn't call you. But he called up and he apologized for it and has apologized that that was the wrong thing to do. But at one point, John actually had sent a memorandum around to all the district attorneys in the state of Texas with respect to DNA testing and said, anytime somebody pleads guilty, or you should ask that they consent to destroy the DNA samples and not to ask for testing. And that was an email that went around to every prosecutor in the state of Texas. And I think he regrets that now. So he did lose reelection based on the Michael Morton case. And based on Michael's activities and his incredible moral example, the new district attorney in Williamson County has agreed to conduct an audit of all old John Bradley cases where he denied DNA testing and an audit of all old Ken Anderson cases to see if there's suppressed exculpatory evidence. And John now has left the state of Texas. And I informed that he is a district attorney in the island of Palau. So again, Michael, you've got it. I can't, you can't make this stuff up, can you? Before we go back to Michael's journey in prison, talk about the other piece of exculpatory evidence that was revealed. Oh, you want me to? Well, I don't want to. Yeah. Well, what happened was is that you should only listen to him, believe me. But on a Friday before a Monday trial, Bill Allison and Bill White asked, they said, investigate a wood. We want to see his file, you know, because it's a big file. And we think there might be exculpatory evidence in it. And they asked Ken Anderson, the prosecutor, the judge said, well, is there any exculpatory evidence there, any favorable evidence? And he says no. Then the judge asks the entire file to be turned over for his in-camera review for the judge alone to look at it over the weekend. And on Monday, he comes back, the judge, and says, there's no exculpatory evidence in here. And then investigator Wood was supposed to be the first witness at the trial, but he's not called. If he had been called, then the whole file would have been turned over. So 25 years later, or a little around then, about the time we got the DNA hit, we get this file and we look in it. And we see that number one, probably the worst thing of all, is the day after the incident. They interviewed a witness who said that he saw a guy in a green van, a suspicious-looking guy in a green van pulling up behind the house in the wooded area, casing it. Now, Michael's defense is that somebody came from the wooded area into the house to commit a robbery burglary and beat Christine to death. So that is such obvious exculpatory evidence. It's mind-blowing, right? That was in investigator Wood's file. It was not turned over. And it was also in Ken Anderson's file. We've now established that. There also was this incredible, tight transcript of an interview between Michael's mother-in-law and investigator Wood, where she is saying, poor Eric, it's soon after the funeral, he's now saying for the first time what he saw, because everybody was worried about what Eric saw. And essentially, he said, I saw a monster hurt mommy. And she said, well, who was there? And Eric said it was just mommy, Eric, and the monster. Was daddy there? No, daddy wasn't there. And then she says, I think you should stop looking at my son-in-law investigator, Wood, and start investigating somebody else. And then he starts trying to persuade her, oh, he was wearing a skin diving suit in the middle of the summer. And his own son didn't recognize him. And that wasn't turned over. And then there was credit card receipts and checks. But that's enough. That's enough exculpatory evidence to choke a horse. And that's why Ken Anderson was found in contempt. That's why he was disbarred. That's why he had to resign from the bench, because anybody looking at that as a prosecutor, anyone should have turned that over. And the punchline, remember, that was supposed to be turned over in a file to the judge? Well, years later, when John Rayleigh and Nina Morrison went to court, and they said, well, judge, open that up. And I'll say this for John Bradley. He thought all that stuff would be in there. The judge opened it up. Not there. Not there. The exculpatory evidence wasn't there. And this judge who had banged his gavel and said, on Latin it says, truth will out, or the heavens may fall. This is my most important case. Why did I deny the DNA testing? I won't recuse myself. All of a sudden he said, I'm getting off this case. Because he realized he saw the handwriting on the wall. And then we were lucky enough to get a great judge from the city of San Antonio who is here with us tonight. Judge Sitharl, could you please stand, Judge Harle? And Judge Harle conducted the post-conviction proceedings and made a finding in a court of inquiry that Ken Anderson had, you know, it was probable cause to believe he committed a crime and got the entire process rolling that led to the first time in the history of this country that we know of that a prosecutor had been imprisoned, although only for a few days, only eight days. It was a misdemeanor for contempt. And Judge Harle, in one of the great moments I've ever seen, got off the bench and apologized to Michael in open court. It shook my hand. It shook his hand. Thank you, Judge. Michael, you were robbed of hope when your son changed his name and didn't want to see you in prison any longer, you then felt the presence of God and then you find out these lawyers have taken an interest in your case. Talk about that part of your experience. That's kind of a odd thing. And sometimes it's uncomfortable to talk about because even when you haven't done something and people on TV and the radio and the newspaper, they're saying these things about you, you're a murderous perv. You do these horrible, horrible things and it goes on for a number of years and even if the appellate processes move along, they still say that guy. And I found that sometimes I would receive the transcripts of a hearing and there was one in particular where John was talking. John Rayleigh was talking to the court and he didn't know this, but he was saying what might be on this bandana and he was saying good things about me, not really good things as you would think but just being elevated to the level of normalcy. Just this is a regular guy. And I found when I was reading something like that, I got to admit sometime I would kind of tear up. Even when you're innocent or I should say not guilty, you get some of that stuff. Whenever I would tell some of the interns or some of the people with the instance project or the phone, different facts of the case, I would always realize that they might doubt me because who they say I am and so I would try to buttress it with some sort of documentation, the copy of a polygraph test or something. And so even though the accusations were untrue, you end up internalizing some of that and when someone or someone makes good declarations about you in a public setting, it kind of gets you. I didn't expect that. So you know of the existence of this bandana. You know that DNA testing might exonerate you. You also know how long it's taking. How do you manage your own expectations? About what might transpire as a result of these lawyers getting involved in your case? Well, the same reason that they had asked for this Texas Open Records Act revelation of the files of the DA and the sheriff because they didn't know what the DNA test would reveal. So they had sort of a plan B in case. And I didn't know what was gonna be. Nobody knew what was on the bandana. John might have speculated that would have all these things that were actually there, but that was just hope. And so I remember writing a letter to Nina saying I could see some of these tests weren't really helping and our options were kind of coming down to just a few things left. And I told her that maybe I can see in the future if you guys have to step away from this because you have limited resources and there's no point in throwing good money after bad, I'll understand. But it's not the way those people work. Well that certainly speaks to your character and there's another part of this story that speaks volumes about your character too. At a certain point, you were offered the possibility of liberation through probation. Yeah, I was eligible for parole in 2007. And it may not be official that I know if I've never seen it writing, but every prisoner knows that when you go for that interview they're gonna ask you for some sort of expression of remorse. And if you give that, then the process will continue. And that's something of an implied admission of guilt if you have any remorse. And wanting to be that better person, I wasn't gonna lie. And I know that I know that I know that making a deal with God is a fool's errand. But I wasn't gonna lie. So you never know who God will use, you know? Yeah. Strange messages. Hey. You have a conversation with John Ray about not accepting parole. Can you talk a little bit about that conversation? I'd only met John once, face to face. So we'd had a number of phone calls. And when he told me that even if the DNA stuff didn't pan out, even if everything just went right down the chute, he was not going to give up. He said, everybody may walk away, but he said as long as he is living, as long as he's breathing air, he was gonna try to get me out. And it's been a long time since he said that, but it still kind of gets me. Not many people in this world can point to someone that they owe their life to. In many, many regards, I feel that way about John Ray Lee. When did you know you would be exonerated? Until it happened. It's a funny thing when the results came back in the bandana that my late wife's DNA was on there, the actual murderers was on there and they'd identified him. And there was still some debating and fighting and course trading going on. And apparently Mr. Bradley called the Instance Project and wanted to make a deal. And I was at a visit on, I believe it was a Saturday, visiting my brother-in-law and my sister. And the guy who runs the law library walked up the table and I'd never ever seen him outside of the law library and I'd never seen him in the visiting area. And he told me that whenever I was finished with my visit to come to the law library, because I had a phone call, I was taken aback because you don't get legal calls on the weekend. And I went down there and it's Barry and telling me the offer that they were making out of Williamson County that I could get out. And then this was the, I believe it was the first, it was on Saturday. They said Tuesday on the 4th, you can walk free if you agree that there will be no admission of wrongdoing in Williamson County. There will be no deposition or investigation of what happened. We will even help you get your state compensation, just take your money and disappear. And I didn't think about it as I probably should have. But Barry asked me what I wanted to do. Oh, I didn't ask you. I mean, you offered me the legal possibilities of what you can do here. Now, if this will happen, if you do that, that'll happen. I thought John was gonna faint because he was on the phone. But I mean, I had to tell you, this is only what happens when you've represented so many people in Michael's position. And this shows you what an incredible guy he is. I mean, and this is really what was said. I said, look, the way it works here in Texas is that even with the DNA results, even with all this exculpatory evidence, you cannot get out of jail without permission of the district attorney, even if they're gonna agree to vacate your conviction because you have to wait for the court of criminal appeals to finally rule on that. And that usually, part of this case, that you should take four or five months. And I said to him, listen, I can, based on my experience with this, I can tell you, I have a high degree of confidence. I was like a bond lawyer giving a statement. I can't, nobody can guarantee that you're gonna get out. And you've been in all this time and I know that this is a lot to ask. But in my experience, you will get out. But if you want to find out how you got framed, if you wanna be able to get the people that put you here and cheated and put you here as an innocent man, right, then you've gotta say no to this deal. And we have to have a hearing in open court and we've gotta put these people on the witness stand and you've gotta authorize me to tell that to John Bradley so that we can make an arrangement. And in fact, Michael's comments were, if I have to stay here another five to six months, if that's what it's gonna take, go ahead, let's play hardball. It came down to wanting to know why. Because I've never gotten a satisfactory answer, you know, why did they do this to me? Because if what happened to me, happened to me, it could happen to anybody. I had no criminal history, I was living in the suburbs, you know, we lived in a nice neighborhood, you know, a corner lot for a bedroom, back home. There was nothing about me that would suggest that, you know, I'm gonna go into the criminal justice system. So I wanted to know why. And when I told Barry to play hardball, he did. So was it tough knowing you could go free, going back to the mundanity of prison life? I didn't like prison. It's not any fun. But no matter how good or how bad your life is, you get used to it. And I was used to prison. And if it meant another six months, just to find out why, I could use six months down on my head, you know. You know what's extraordinary about this, is that, you know, what we were saying to Michael, is that eventually we did come up with an arrangement with John Bradley, and it led us to, you know, Judge Harlem, where we really did do videotaped depositions of Ken Anderson and all the people involved, and we were keeping that secret, because we always intended at that point forward, to get a record that we could, you know, bring, frankly, Ken Anderson to justice. And that, and to make this public. And we had in mind from the beginning that we were gonna change the laws here in the state of Texas on discovery, on the disclosure of exculpatory evidence. And it worked exactly according to plan. I hate to say this, but, you know, so you have to envision, you know, Michael on Saturday, you know, making this, giving him a choice, right? That very few people would ever have the guts to make. So by that Monday, we had the deal. So there, I meet him in the jail, and I had not met him in the flesh until that time. And so you, I said, well, here's how we're gonna do it. Here's how we're gonna do it. So we're gonna have a big press conference in this courtroom, right? And you make a statement, you figure out what your statement is, and then the first interview you give is to 60 minutes, right? And by the way, and that, the day after he got out, he gave this interview to 60 minutes. They have run this story three times, more than just about any other story they've told me. And it's the interview they put on the air is good. The interview that John Rayleigh and I saw for three and a half hours is amazing, right? And it's all in that book. But the bottom line is Michael gets out of, goes into the courtroom, right? His case is dismissed. The first thing he says is, thank God it's not a capital case. Now let's not forget that. We live here in the state of Texas, right? That's the first thing he said. And then after that, everything that we were hoping to be accomplished. Michael Mordech was passed a provision that says that prosecutors that commit wrongful acts that lead to miscarriages, that they can commit acts of misconduct that lead to wrongful convictions. Statue limitations get reset, all right? And those can be brought in front of a bar disciplinary committee. The Michael Morton Act on Discovery is passed, which is a landmark for the state of Texas. And this book is published and he's here at the LBJ Library. I mean, Michael is a very important moral force in the universe of criminal justice now in America. Now that people see him, you read this book, you'll never forget it. And let's be blunt. White middle-class audiences, right? Here's a guy that can say, I got up in the morning to go to work. I'm somebody just like you. And the ultimate nightmare happens. If it can happen to me, it can happen to you. And that people have to, they'll listen to him, where they won't listen to a lot of other people. And he is not disappointed. He is stepped up every time. He is making a huge difference. And the first moment was the moment that we asked him to stay in jail longer in order to expose the miscarriages of justice and all people accountable. And he did it and he keeps on doing it and he does it in a way that very few can. Even though Barry just said that, I didn't have to stay in very long because while I got that very unusual phone call with that offer, I got a second phone call that day from the same folks. You had to go to something, some meeting, but John and Nina called this later that day and Bradley caved and gave us everything we wanted. I still walked out on Tuesday. Mike, I want to give you the last word, but Barry, I want you to brag about the Innocence Project for a moment. Michael is not the only innocent man who you have exonerated. Talk a little bit about your records since establishing the Innocence Project in 1992. Well, the Innocence Project started off as, and still is, a clinical program in the Benjamin N. Cardoso School of Law, but it's really part of a movement and it can only be seen as now an international human rights movement. So projects sprung up in law schools primarily but also at law firms and in public defenders' offices all across the country. So now there are 51 projects in the United States as part of a network of innocence projects. And we are the mothership. We have a network support unit that we have to raise. Now we're committed to at least $500,000 every year that we give to help support all the other projects in the Innocence Network. And there are six projects right now internationally in other countries. So our project, I guess, you can measure it by DNA exonerations. I think we're up to, what is it, 316 post-conviction DNA exonerations of which our project, I think, is either directly represented or assisted in representing about 194 of those people. I may have that number a little off. But you also should look at the registry of exonerations that our colleagues at the University of Michigan and Northwestern have put together where you look at cases where there's both DNA evidence and non-DNA evidence where convictions were vacated based on new evidence of innocence and indictments dismissed. And we're still counting. It gets bigger and bigger because nobody had ever counted these things before. So now we discover more and more of them. But that's up to 1,600 cases since 1989. Now, admittedly, not every single one of those people in the registry of exonerations is stone-cold innocent because there may be a few that are guilty even though their convictions were vacated, but most of them are almost certainly innocent. Everybody on our list of DNA exonerations, we represent to you are innocent. And it's not hard because close to 48% of the time, the real assailant is apprehended where there have been pardons by governors or there's been compensation. So just the DNA list is sort of the gold standard. But the key thing is, is that we are moving on all fronts. And by saying we, I mean, the Innocence Project, we're up to over 70 people, a budget of $12 million and it's just getting bigger and bigger and it has to get bigger because we're moving in every state for eyewitness identification reform, for interrogation reform. We've done extraordinary things, I think, in changing forensic science. We now have a National Commission on Forensic Science and even more importantly, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is now set up a whole, what they call scientific area committee system to really change forensic science and put it on a more scientific basis the truth is DNA was the only validated forensic assay. 2009, the National Academy of Sciences wrote a report about this. So if you're wondering why innocent people get convicted, it's not just things like forensic pathology which needs changes, but when people came into court even and they said this bullet comes from that gun to the exclusion of every gun in the universe, I know that because I'm looking at striations on the bullet that was found at the crime scene and then we have this guy's gun and we fired another bullet and I looked it under a microscope and then the National Academy of Sciences said, well what's your measurement error? And they said, well, what are you talking about? We don't have, we just agree. And then they say, well, what's your database? Well, I don't have any. Well, what are the statistics on this? Well, we don't have any. So everybody knows it's a disaster. I'm not saying that there may not be, there almost certainly is some probative value to ballistics comparisons, but it's not what they were saying. We know this is true. It's from this gun as opposed to all guns in the universe and we have a zero error rate. That's what they were testifying to. So now it's all changing. It's all changing. And so, I think when you start looking at all the causes of wrongful conviction, frankly with the exception of indigent defense where I think we've made the least progress to be honest, were issues of prosecutorial misconduct. I mean, that is changing by leaps and bounds. In Michael's case, it's one of the leading reasons for it. We now have ethical rules that have been accepted in 10 states, including Texas, that prosecutors, if they find evidence, post-conviction, that is material that's very important, showing innocence, they have to disclose it. Ethically, they're obligated to and if they have clear and convincing evidence that comes to their attention, they should dismiss the case. Now, I know that seems so obvious, but that is not what the Constitution necessarily requires yet. Someday, I think the Supreme Court will say that has to be the law. But it's now the ethical rules and we have to enforce them and we're even creating conviction integrity units like our friend Craig Watkins has done a great job of that in Dallas where prosecutors will work with innocence projects and defense lawyers to look at all cases. Some of them have been frauds. They say it's a conviction integrity unit and it's nonsense. But some of them have been real in a number of jurisdictions and we're working on that. So I think that it's not just obviously our innocence project that Peter Neufeld and I started. It's all these projects and this entire movement, but it is a transformational force, I think it's fair to say, in criminal justice. So we're very proud of it. Thank you very much. Michael, let's go to the happy end to your story. What was it like to walk out of that courtroom of Freeman? There was a lot going on. It was the proverbial drinking from the fire hose. But there's a photograph that a guy from the statesman took of John and I walking out of the courthouse. And I'm so glad that John got a copy and blew it up in his office, but I'm walking out and he said something along the lines of Michael, breathe freedom. And it was one of those fantastic fall days. Nice and cool little breeze. Sun was out and it felt different on my face. I closed my eyes and just kind of felt it. And you can feel that sort of thing. And I've learned that no matter what you're doing, if you're a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or if you've been out of work for a couple years, life is good and that you need to revel in it and live it and appreciate it, whether it's a child's smile or just a pet that you have, good cup of coffee in the morning, whatever does it for you, live life. I wanna introduce Michael's wife, Cynthia, who's in the audience. Cynthia, would you mind standing up, please? And I would ask that all those people, some of whom have already been introduced, who had a hand in Michael's exoneration, if you all would stand again and be acknowledged. Ladies and gentlemen, we had many heroes grace this stage. Tonight we added to our rich history with Barry and Michael. And I wanna thank you both very much for being here. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.