February 11, 2012

  • Michael Morton was freed last October, just around four months ago. He had served 25 years in jail for a crime he did not commit.

    Christine Morton was found dead in her home in 1986, after a neighbor saw the Morton's young child alone in their yard. Michael Morton was convicted after prosecutors presented him as a cruel, cold man who killed his wife in her bed for refusing to have sex with him, and then calmly went about his job as a grocer. A bandana was found near the house with bloodstains on it, but prosecutors argued that the bandana could not be linked to the crime. The couple's young son told Christine Morton's mother that a "monster" had hit her, and that no one was home except "mommy and Eric", but Eric's testimony had not been used in the trial. Michael Morton was convicted even as he screamed to the court that he was innocent.

    But last year, after several years of appeals, the bandana was tested using DNA technology unavailable at the time, and it was found to contain Christine Morton's blood, as well as the DNA of another man serving prison time for another murder. The newly-freed Michael Morton joked, "colors seem real bright to me now, and the women are real good looking."

    Beneath his cheerful dignity, there lies a great tragedy in his story. Michael Morton was 32 years old when he entered prison, and now he is 57, white-haired, with a third of a man's expected lifetime lost. "Colors seem real bright to me now." That is, upon second glance, heartbreaking: "colors seem real bright". Perhaps the most disturbing, motives are as easily manufactured as "he killed her because she refused to have sex with him." How ridiculous is that! Right up there with "it was a sex game gone wrong".

    His case teaches us that wrongful convictions do happen, that not everyone found guilty by trial is actually guilty. Robert Owen, a law professor, says "one lesson that defense lawyers should draw from it is that you should never stop demanding exculpatory evidence."

    Michael Morton himself is grateful and happy to be exonerated. He jokes he is lucky it is not a capital case: the average time between conviction and execution was 15 years as of 2010, but in this case, it did take 25 years for the truth to come out. He has never held a cell phone, but now, he will try to reintegrate into daily life after 25 years removed from society. Now that he is free, he can try to rebuild something of a life in his older years. He can collect $2000000 in damages. While we cannot correct for the injustice we have done him, we can at least give him the money and time to try to rebuild.

    But suppose, for a moment, that there was a single point of departure 25 years ago. Suppose that the case had been a capital offense, and a government acted in a way that admits no correction. . . .