Today in History: Innocent man released from prison after 25 years after DNA tests prove his innocence
No witnesses or physical evidence linked Morton to the crime, but nevertheless, he was convicted on 17 February 1987, and sentenced to life behind bars.
On this day in 2011, Michael Morton, who spent 25 years in prison for his wife’s murder, is released after DNA evidence implicates another man in the crime.
On the afternoon of 13 August 1986, a neighbour found 31-year-old Christine Morton beaten to death in her bed in the home she shared with Michael and their three-year-old son. Six weeks later, Morton, who had no criminal record or history of violence, was arrested for Christine’s murder.
At trial, the prosecution contended Morton had slain his wife of seven years after she refused to have sex with him on the night of 12 August, his 32nd birthday. Morton maintained he had nothing to do with his wife’s death and said an intruder must have killed her after he left for work early on the morning of 13 August.
In 2005, Morton’s defence team asked the state to test DNA on a variety of items, including a blood-stained bandanna found by police the day after the murder at an abandoned construction site close to the Morton home.
The Williamson County district attorney blocked all requests for testing until 2010, when a Texas Appeals Court ordered that testing on the bandanna take place. In the summer of 2011, the test results revealed the bandanna contained Christine Morton’s blood and hair, along with the DNA of another man, Mark Alan Norwood, a felon with a long criminal record who worked in the Austin area as a carpet layer at the time of the murder.
Michael Morton was released from prison on 4 October 2011, and officially exonerated in December of that year. A month after Morton was freed, Norwood, 57, was arrested for Christine Morton’s killing. In March 2013, he was found guilty of her murder and sentenced to life in prison.
In October 2012, after an almost year-long investigation, the State Bar of Texas filed a disciplinary petition against Ken Anderson, the prosecutor in the Morton case (who became a Texas district judge in 2002), alleging he withheld various pieces of evidence from Morton’s attorneys, including a transcript of an August 1986 taped interview between the case’s lead investigator and Morton’s mother-in-law, in which she stated that Morton’s three-year-old son had told her in detail about witnessing his mother’s murder and said his father was not home at the time.
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