I came from a beautiful neighborhood.
I had a beautiful life.
I went to sleep because September seventh was the first day of my high school year. I was going to be a senior. At twenty two, I was set to start college. I woke up and my life was never the same again. Cops came out with guns drawn, and I never saw freedom ever since after that.
It's like roach mode town once you get in and I can't now. This is Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm.
Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm today. I'm extremely pleased and honored to have someone I considered to be I guess, for lack of a better word, innocence royalty. Michael Morton, Michael, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Jason.
It's good to be here.
So Michael is an extraordinary person in so many ways. His case is extraordinary, his life post exoneration is extraordinary. I didn't know him before this all happened, because that's a long long time ago. But what he's been able to accomplish, both inside prison and outside, is the stuff of legend.
But let's go back. Michael.
You served twenty four years and seven months to the day in Texas Penitentiary for a crime he didn't commit.
The day that I walked in the penitentiary was on March fourth. Day that I walked out was October fourth.
So you were in prison twenty four to seven. Yeah, that's that for twenty four years and seven months. But first, I just want to give the audience a sense of, you know, what kind of a person you were before all this stuff happened.
I like to say that.
I was the statistical bid point in the American demographic and that I was incredibly average. I went to SFA Stephen at Foston State University in Acadocia, since where I met my future wife, right and Christine. Yes, I met Christine there. It began as some romances. Do you see somebody across the room, you know, and it catches your eye or she does in my case, make a long story short, the whole deal, married, had a child, thinking
about getting another child on the way here. You know, mortgage, suburbia, cars, credit cards.
All that stuff sounds pretty good.
It's the average. And that's why I call myself the statistical midpoint in American demographic because there was nothing unusual about my life. We had moved into our second home. We sold our first, made a nice little piece of that. We were doing well and moving up. That was the idea. And it's my thirty second birthday. And the next day, when I went to pick up my son from the sitters, which was part of my routine, the babysitter looked at me in a very odd way. What are you doing here?
She said that my son wasn't there, that my wife hadn't bought him in, which was very unusual for our routine. Every family has a rhythm that they live in. And the fact that I had not received any phone call from my wife, she hadn't bought him with the sitters, it was very bizarre. So I just snatched the sitter's phone off the wall and called home, and to my surprise,
a man answered and identified himself as the sheriff. And he wouldn't tell me anything except I needed to come home right away, and.
Your heart is now gone a million miles a minute. Yeah.
I literally ran to my truck and it's about a five minute drive home from there, and five minutes doesn't sound much time. I mean, even though you're breaking the speed limit and run the stop signs to get home, because the sheriff just answered, you're you know, you're running a mental inventory. What in the world could have happened, and you know you run through well, k could have been a fire, could have been a burglary, the wife may have been attacked, could be rape, and oh my god,
could be murdered too. And I knew something had happened to my wife. And as I literally slid up to my house, there were police cars all around the house, a very large yellow crime scene ribbon had been wrapped all the way around the yard. And saw a couple of cops in the front yard, uniform cops. And there were neighbors, you know, people I knew, were on the sidewalks across the street, little clusters, and as I slipped the curb, you know, they all took note of me.
It's almost a priferl awareness, you know, because oh my god, what's here happening at my house? But you also see the things going on around you, or you sense them. And I ducked under the crime and seeing ribbon, and I was hanging to the front door when the police stopped me because they didn't know who I was. And the sheriff showed up very quickly when they stopped me out in the front yard, and he identified himself and
he asked me to identify myself. The first words out of my mouth were actually about my son, and the sheriff told me that he was fine. He was at a neighbor's house shoot doors down, and when I asked about my wife, he informed me in an almost matter of fact fashion, that she was dead, and because the house appeared to look intact, it hadn't been burned. I asked if it was murder, and he said it was yes.
So when did you start to get the sense that they felt that you were a suspect.
Initially I did not. They were asking some very odd questions, and I was intellectualizing, Okay, they have to ask these rather pointed, uncomfortable questions because they're trying to piece everything together, and you know, they have to eliminate me as a suspect. I get that, you know, after all, I've watched TV. I know how this works. TV and reality don't always mesh.
But I got that. It wasn't until a few days later, when I was interviewed by the police again and again that I was quite frustrated with their line of questioning, and I was also frustrated with what I perceived to be their inability or unwillingness to do this, to do this investigation property and professionally. And in a moment of frustration, I volunteered for a polygraph test. I said, look, if I take a polygraph test, will you believe me? And
they lit up like very very happy children. And very shortly after that is when one of my neighbors, an attorney, suggested that I retain counsel. That he had a couple of friends who were very good criminal defense attorneys, Bill White and Bill Allison in Austin, Texas, and I went to see them, and it was shortly before that that
everything went south. They were gunning for me that, for whatever reason, they looked around the crime scene, before any interviews, before any lab tests, before a single thing had happened, as far as in an investigative sense, they decided that I was the guy I had done it.
So ultimately, how long was it before you were arrested and charged?
It's about six weeks, pardon me. Six weeks after my wife's death, I was home with my son, just the two of us, in fact, we were making as much as he could help. We're making dinner and we're in the kitchen and the knock at the door, and I picked up my son because you know, you leave him in the kitchen with all the you know, hot water boil and all that kind of stuff. This hot went to answer the door, and to my utter shock, it was the sheriff and number of deputies there to arrest me,
and I was flabbergasted. I did not expect them to do this. And as bad as being arrested is the worst part was having my son torn up from my arms because I tried to think about what was he going through. Basically got him there on my hip and they're wanting to handcuff me. And the last time my son has seen the police had been a really bad day, as the day as mother is.
Killed and or imaginable Africa.
And suddenly the police were back and I could feel me wrapped his legs around my waist and he didn't want to let go, but they, you know, they peel him loose. I was trying to comfort him and he's calling for me, and that was the worst part. As bad as being arrested is, as much worse seeing what I was doing to my son, Because any any parent knows that before you have a child, you are the center of your own universe, and then after you have that child, your perspective changes.
Now comes to trial, so you're in now in this bizarre dream NightWare world of the criminal justice system sort of working exactly the way it's not supposed to and this, uh, these prosecutors are up there painting you as a murderer and saying all sorts of.
Being on trial for murder. It's not what you think you know. Most everybody has their perspective of the way these things go because of TV and movies and books.
You read about it.
You think you know about it, but it's a completely separate world. It's a different universe. It's a subculture you're not familiar with. They have their own language and they have customs and they have rituals that you don't know anything about. And the only thing you can do is listen to your attorneys. I mean, they're supposed to know what's going on. They've done it before, they know the
way the system works. And you're torn between taking their advice from these experts you've hired as opposed to the way you feel about what you should do. And when you're torn like that between those two worlds, between what you think and what you feel, it's always a battle of what's in control. I mean, is it your head or is it your heart?
You have an example of that, Okay.
One of the purely fabricated issues in my trial was that the prosecutor came up with this idea that because there was a semen stained on our bed on the sheets, that in his mind that meant that I had masturbated with my wife's dead hand.
Wow.
Yeah, And I didn't know where that came from. And you want to jump up and scream and you know, deny it, maybe calling names or just you know that kind of insult. You almost want to jump on somebody. And yet you know that this is a sort of a binary adversarial kind of Okay, you'll get your turn, sit down, you know, be cool, don't make the jury think you're some kind of nut, and you know, we'll clean this up. And so that's the kind of thing
that you're torn between. Is you know that you should take your attorney's advice because of the stuff that said, steak here your very life and yet you have this visceral response to some of these accusations that are just bloney.
You know, where did this come from.
Let's talk for a second about the exculpatory evidence that was withheld.
Yeah, one of the great things that the Innocence Project does is their DNA exonerations. But you never know what a DNA test is going to reveal until you run the DNA test. And so before the tests were actually done, they had a parallel legal attack on my case, and one of them was a Texas Open Records Act, which is very very similar to the Freedom Information Act at
the federal level. And so we actually got access to the prosecutor and the sheriff's files from eighty six and eighty seven, and at this time, you know, we're in the twenty first century looking back in this is the appellate thing. And in those files we found out that, despite the request by my attorneys and a direct order from the judge, the prosecution and the shriff's department suppressed key pieces of evidence that would have pointed to my
innocence and would have helped immensely at our trial. And my attorneys were begging for this kind of stuff, but they had no mechanism to get to it because the prosecutor was between us and the evidence. And one of the things was a check that had been cash after my wife's death, a instance of her credit card being used, supposedly down in San Antonio few days after her death. And the biggie was this transcript of a phone call.
My son, unbeknownst to me, had apparently witnessed my wife's murder. Remember now, he was three at the time, and everybody, I mean even the police, were concerned about my son. And in the time between my wife's murder and my incarceration, I had taken him to several child psychologists and some he got along with some he didn't. But the gist of it all was that they all told me, look, he is obviously so offering from what you might call
separation anxiety because his mother's gone. But we don't believe that he has witnessed anything horrible, or more importantly, nothing horribly been done to him, and so that was a bit of release, but relief.
Rather.
However, unbeknownst to me, he had told my mother in law, his grandmother, that he mentioned a lot of things about my wife being murdered, to her, and he mentioned some very physical, distinct things about the crime scene that police had withheld from the media that only they knew, which is part of procedure because if somebody wants to come up and confess, they have to kind of prove that they did it, or they also want to be able
to prove or catch somebody who's being interrogated. So, you know, here's this transcript of my son's admissions about witnessing my wife's murder, which would have been huge because he talked about a man with a big mustache and red gloves and having to hit mommy and think, goodness, my mother law had asked him where why I was? You know, was Daddy there? And my son very distinctly said no, And so that would have been a wild wonderful thing to have a trial.
Well, it would have led to your exoneration.
So the jury is requestered the argument, the closing arguments have been done.
The jury goes out, how long were they out for?
I think it was about ninety minutes, but that doesn't mean they deliberated for ninety minutes because they also had lunch, so.
It could have been forty five minutes.
It could have been thirty. Yeah, it depending how fast you eat.
So they didn't deliberate it very long, not very long at all.
There wasn't how long was the trial. It was ten days, two weeks.
Right, so they were ready to go home. Oh yeah.
And while actually they weren't sequestered, they are instructed, as in all criminal cases, you cannot talk to anybody about this, don't watch TV, don't read newspapers, don't go in the internet, even though there wasn'tn internet back then for most of us. And so that was a really quick thing. They were back in no time, and you got to stand up
when they read the verdict. And in my mind anyway, I was expecting a not guilty verdict because everything that they had brought forward, for the most part, had been emotional pleased without any hard data, no irrefutable science. We had countered everything they threw out there.
It was purely circumstantial.
Yes, that courtroom there was standing room only. And here's the weird thing. When you're in these really intense, emotional, weighty situations, you're focused on the judge and the jury, and for just a moment you're not aware of the closest people to you being right behind you. You're not aware that there are a line of cops very nearby ready to seize you. You're not aware of the sounds,
you're not aware of the temperature. You're very, very focused on the people that are going to decide your fate for the rest of your life, right here and right now. And I had more than an expectation of being found not guilty. And when they said guilty, it knocked the wind out of me. And I didn't collapse on the ground, but my knees buckled and I sat down in my chair, and it was an involuntary act. If the chair had not been in there, i'd have fallen to the floor.
And I did hear the wails of my mother. I think some people were surprised, some people were glad. It was a real mixed bag. But once the di verdict was in, then you become the murderous perv, the boogeyman, the guy there that everybody hates.
So now you're found guilty and you're sent to Texas prison?
Right? Is it as bad as it sounds. Prison?
It's not what you think it is. It's a subculture. It's very insular. It's not like the outside world. And when you get there. I got some great advice while I was in County jail. There was an old guy in County jail before I went down to the penitentiary, and he told me. He said, you'll be okay. You know, you're a grown man. You're thirty two. You're not going down there at nineteen. But he said, in the beginning,
keep your mouth shut and your eyes open. And I found that to be some of the best advice I ever received. The penitentiary is a violent place, in terminal boredom and then absolute horror, and that's kind of what it's like. But after a while inside you become desensitized to the violence.
I've heard you talk about the noise.
Do you remember inside there's a constant din or roar. Gates are slamming, PA systems blaring, a lot of people talking at the same time. In the mornings, the TV's come on in the day room, and late at night they're turned off. In between, they're on different channels and they're on full blast, and you're in a concrete and steel room and the sounds bouncing off and people are slamming dominoes on metal tables and yelling at each other, and it's like Dante's Inferno. What keeps you going is
what keeps you going. My first year down there, because of a similar schedule, I started seeing one guy down at the gym whenever I would go to the gym, and just by convenience sake proximity, we started talking. Then I found out that he had already been there twenty years when I just drove up. And our personalities we're close enough where we formed something of a friendship to acquaintances.
And one weekend, somebody on our cell block hanged himself, died right there, and for a while that was the talk of the cell block. You know, so and so killed himself. And my new friend, Lonnie, had been there a while, he'd seen this happen quite a few times. And I mentioned it to him and he said, oh yeah. The guy didn't have anything to look forward to. And he told me, he said, you have to have hope. It can be remodeling an old house, restoring an old marriage,
that doesn't matter what it is. You have to have something look forward to. And in a very offhanded way, he said, like you, it's your son, And that's kind of surprised me. I didn't realize that I was being that transparent. But he said, without hope, without something to look forward to, no matter what it is, you won't want to get out of bed in the morning. You won't want to live in that place or the rest of your life. You'll either hang yourself or cut your
own throat, or jump off the third tier. And I've seen guys do all three.
Wow, So your son would visit and he was your hope.
Yeah, it is one of those wonderful, strange, I thank God moments, the kind of thing where you have something precious and wonderful that you're projecting onto and you're hoping for. And I got to see him about every six months, and then that changed. While that was a wonderful thing, at a certain point, my son reached early puberty, early team and he's getting tired of coming down there to see his dad, and the people raising him aren't saying good things about me, and he wants to end the
visits and he does. And I made him come down there and tell me that, and your schedule for to our visits in Texas depending on how far away you are. And when they came to see me the last time, got right to it. And asked him if it was our last visit, and he told me it was. And I turned to my sister in law, the lady raising him. I told him, told her to take good care of my son. And I told my son that he always knew where to find me.
And I walked to the visiting room.
That scheduled to our visit last about two minutes. And it's one of you hear that kind of news, You go through that kind of thing. And I'd been inside a while, and I'd already had something of that shell around me, that tough guy persona, but I still felt as if I'd been kicked in the face. I was numb. I was kind of walking through a haze. I knew the real pain would come later, just like being kicked
in the face. But it's the last time I saw him while I was inside, and I still had another Oh by then another twelve or fourteen years ago.
So now you your hope is gone. But you didn't take the let's call it the easy way out. You saw guys hanging themselves, jumping off tears, slitting their own throats.
What did what happened?
Well, I did something that was very uncharacteristic for me at the time, I was completely emotionally, utterly just empty, gutted, wounded, and I didn't know what to do or where to go, which way to turn. And the uncharacteristic thing that I did is I cried out to God, you know, show me something. I got nothing here.
But you are't a religious guy at the time.
Nah, nah, nah, and get I got nothing. You know, I didn't hear this voice from above, you know, Michael, it's gonna rain.
Build a boat.
It was absolutely nothing. And you know what, in all candor that not getting a response was sort of what I expected because things had been going so badly for so long. Yeah, why is it going to change in a heartbeat like this? You know, just because I'm suffering?
Boo hoo.
And then about a week or so later, completely normal day, nothing special, work, jim eat, sleep. It's late at nights, my usual bedtime. My cell partners on the bottom bunk, he's already sleep. I decided to kill the light and turn on the radio, go down the dial a few times, and call it a night. With your headphones, yes, with
my headphones on. That was that was my routine. I had done this thousands of nights Before this, this was just what you do in the penitentiary, and every indicator a pellet and otherwise is I was going to be doing this for thousands of more nights. This was my life, and so I did this. At the time, I was in a penitential a little south of Houston, and I picked up a classical station out of Houston, and there's a what sounded to me like a lady playing a harp.
You know, you might have been a guy, but in my mind, I'm listening to this lady playing a harp. And I don't know about you, but you don't hear too much harp music on the radio. It's just.
Or in prison, especially in prison.
And so I listened to him for a moment because that's something of a novelty. And now it's comically apropos But after listening to that for just a moment, with no warning whatsoever, just boom like that, I found myself bathed in golden light, inexplicable, wonderful, beautiful, reassuring golden light. And I could see nothing but this golden light. And I heard this roaring in my ears, and I felt wonderful. I don't know if I was, but I felt like I might have been floating on my buck I don't know.
I just this wonderful, fantastic, beautiful sensation, and I was sure, without having to be having it explained to me, it was self evident that I was in the presence of God. And I felt this reassurance and this undeniable, limitless focus of love aimed right at me. And it was profound and wonderful and reassuring and a fantastic and it changed
everything about me and my perspective and my life. And then I heard my alarm going off, and I reflexively just turned it off, like I did every morning, and I sat up in my bunk and I thought, WHOA, I'm not accustomed supernatural experiences. I don't have a psychistory. I don't you know all the stuff. And I'm going I knew what that was. But like all profound things in your life, I think why. It's probably the most important question you can ask. And I didn't have a clue.
Why did this happen to me? Here I am some guy just sitting the penitentiary. And I spent probably months chewing on this, thinking, reading, talking to people, giving a little praying about you know what's going on here. And the simplest thing is what you might call Ockham's razor, that philosophical notion that the simplest explanation, until proven wrong, is probably the best. And it hit me that the only thing that had happened is I had asked, you know,
help God, please show me something. I got nothing here.
You literally had nothing.
I nowhere to go. And he said, okay, look, And I knew this is real because it changed me inside. This wasn't some sort of, you know, intellectual conclusion I reached after, you know, some kind of investigation. This this is something that happened to me. And the reason I know that it's real and almost irrational but genuine, is that I'm different. After this happened to me, I wanted different things, and I disliked other things. In fact, my life did a point eighty. The things that I had
hated now I was loving them. The things that I had loved, now I was hating them, and the whole, the good, bad, the right and wrong dynamic. There the conundmum we all wrestle with was suddenly plain to me. It made sense, and things did get better.
It took a long time from there, right, But then the Innocence Project. Let's talk about the Innocence Project. You are, yeah, you're a big fan, you can say that. Yeah, what happened was early on.
DNA was just in its infancy when I got convicted, and as things started evolving, you started seeing these things in the newspaper, were on TV. And not only did I write a letter, but my parents did, my aunt did, my sister did. Thence to the Instance Project asking for you know, hey, look at my case. The Instance Project is very above board, very transparent.
Yeah, there's no jumping the line, so to speak, except for death penalty cases, which of course those have to go to the front because otherwise it's too late and there's no reversing that.
But so, but your case did make it to the top of the to the top of the pile.
Case got resolved because in essence of DNA evidence, there were lots of questions. We talked about that accusation of being the murderous perv with my wife's the dead hand. Well there was a stain on the bed sheet, there
are you know, there was an autopsy. So we start slowly getting incremental successes in court about okay, well, test that stain test, some of the the swaps from the autopsy, and we're and there's also like there's this bandana that was found behind our house that had human blood on it. But that's as far as they ever went because, you know, eighty six eighty seven, there was no advanced scientific way
of finding out what was what. So we're starting to get these tests done and the courts being I don't want to say biased, but you know, the the Pellet court seemed to lean towards the prosecution. You have, you know, you have a conviction here, and you're upsetting the apple a.
Bit, a perfectly good conviction.
Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, Well what are you trying to do here? You're trying to undermine the process. And so these things are being tested, but they're coming back either negative or inconclusive. For instance, like the stain on the sheet that came about with the whole murder's perv accusation, we'll come to find out that wasn't what they called a neat stain. That was what's in every marriage bed. It's what they called a mixed stain of both male
and female fluids. It's in every marriage bed. And so that kind of completely blew that whole pervert aspect of that accusation. But then also the swaps from the autopsy those came back negative, negative, negative, And so it's looking like there's less and less to happen here. Things just
aren't looking good. In fact, I even sent a letter to the Instance Project that you know, I understand you've been moving head on earth here, but it looks like we're not getting much results here and if you have to step away, I understand because the Instance Project has limited resources and they can't just throw good money after
bad on an unwin case. And the last piece of evidence that they fought, fought and fought and finally got access to was this blue bandana that was found behind my house that had some blood on it, and they finally got it tested and in a almost a supernatural revelation, the the are some project aways. Has to have an attorney of record from the state where they're where they're carrying out this appeal, and this one was John Rayley.
He was a pro bono lawyer out of Houston. He's a civil attorney, never done a criminal case in his life, but he and Nina Morrison with the Instant the Project did a lot of the underlying work of this and if the hearing before this blue bandana was tested, John really says something I was reading the record about it, that this bandana, he said, we should test it, your honor, because it might have the victims DNA on it, it
might have the assailants DNA on it. It might have the key to turning to turning this whole case around. But unless you test it or allow us to test it, we'll never know. And the Answers Project is willing to pay for everything, the lap test that transports everything. Just just let us do it and we will either confirm your conviction and make it unassailable or will free an innocent man. And in a wildly weirdly profought prophetic sort of statement, that's what was said in court. And that's
exactly what happened. Is that bandana had my wife's DNA on it, and it also had co mingled DNA with hers on that bandana belonging to a male, not me, And that's wonderful, But that wasn't a get out of JEO free card.
But there was another break in the case, which is that the actual killer who And this is tragic, another.
Tragic aspect of this, There.
Was a very similar murder nearby in the months after your wife's murder.
Yeah, I was inside the penitential about seventeen months when another murder was committed in Austin. What's bizarre is in a very creepy way. The victim of this murder was a woman named Deborah Baker. I like my wife. She was a woman in her early thirties, long dark hair, young child was home alone at the time. There was no forced entry at either home. They were both beaten to death about the head and very violent deaths. The houses were ransacked a bit, some things were taken, some
things were left behind. It was very unusual. And this it all had happened on the thirteenth of the month.
And it's a lot of coincidence.
When the DNA from that bandana was run through Cotis, I actually got news of it on my birthday, a few months after the DNA was first found, and there was a hit on Cotis and this guy named Mark Norwood was on the bandana and my attorney friend, John Rayley's wife and a an legal paralegal and RN had gotten together and they were on the Internet and they were looking up cold cases in Austin, and they found this woman's case that paralleled, if not mirrored, my own,
and they brought it to the Austin Police department and they said, look, we've got this case and the almost identical. We've got your perpetrator who in one case we think he's good for the other one. And here's his name, here's his DNA profile, and here's his address. We think he might want to look at him. And they did,
and they did the great credit. Oh absolutely, this was a different police department than had come after me, and they were gung ho and they match it up immediately, and within weeks they had after my release, they arrested this guy. And these two murders were frighteningly similar. And that was the impetus to make the prosecutor who was handling the Pellet situation for the county, agreed to let me out because there was another murder.
You're freed out into the sunshine twenty four years and seven days, twenty four hours a day. And then things take another interesting turn, right, which is that it's it's a crazy thing that in this country, no prosecutor has ever gone to jail until your case for a wrongful
conviction resulting in incarceration. But Ken Anderson was now a judge, right, he had been promoted, And that's that's a crazy thing too, Right, he won District Attorney of the Year after he wrongly convicted you and ralful convicted you, and it was ultimately became Ultimately he became a judge.
And so.
The prosecutor from misconduct was uncovered. Right, the fact that he had in fact had access and was aware of these pieces of evidence.
After I got out, they had a quarter of inquiry in Texas to determine whether or not anything had happened. Didn't rely on his memory, didn't rely on what other people said. There was a record of these things being requested. I mean when the judge asked to prosecutor straight up, do you have anything else, and they say no, that's against the law, that violates Brady. And what happened to Ken Anderson was here's this sitting judge and the state bar in the state of Texas. They're coming after him.
And at the end of it all, there were there were some issues with you know, statue limitations, some other things, but the bottom line was there was a plea. At the end of it all. He was removed from the bench, which was a great thing because he can no longer do to me what he did other folks. He also had his law license taken away. He had I think it was a five hundred dollar of fine, five hundred
hours community service. And for all the lawyers are telling me that, for the first time that anybody knows of in America, he was a judge was acted well, a prosecutor was sent to jail for misconduct and murder trial. And if you know anybody in the criminal justice world talks to the lawyers, this sent ripples all across the country. This hadn't happened before. And I was amazed at the
the way that the other lawyers were incensed. Not just the defense bar, but the prosecutors hated this too, because it's like when there's a bad cop revealed, the other cops dislike it because it makes them look bad. It makes their job more difficult, because when people don't trust the criminal justice system, they'll just opt out. And so this was a huge deal. This judge, the sitting judge, was held accountable for something he had done, you know, twenty five years ago, and took a huge chunk of
my life. And the family of the other victim, Deborah Baker, they were heartbroken and incensed at the same time because had this judge, who used to be a prosecutor, had he done a job properly, had he not gone after me by suppressing evidence, their mother, wife's sister, that family Mamber deb A Baker might be a life today.
She likely would be.
And it's really a terrible another terrible outcome of this whole situation, this whole crooked situation. There's one more wonderful aspect of this, right, which is that you've gone well, aside from being on sixty Minutes and having a movie made about you and getting remarried and re establishing your relationship with your son and a book then book is
called Getting Life, Getting Life. But on top of that, I think the thing that is really going to be a big part of your legacy it is the Michael Morton Act.
And let's talk about that.
This is a model law that Canaan should be used as a template across the country in each state because each state is ConTroll of it. O criminalisis system. The bulk of or the essence of it is that if you're a charge with the crime. God forbid that the state should and is required to turn over to the citizen the evidence they have against you at trial. They just can't make it up. They have to actually have hard evidence, and they have to share it with you,
just like it happens in a civil trial. That the criminal justice side of it should be like the civil justice side of it, and so sharing of files isn't undermining the prosecutor side. I've talked to a lot of prosecutors and prosecutor groups since I've been out. This actually
protects them from certain appellate review. It makes their cases stronger if they can prove, as a byproduct of the process that they've been transparent and they've shared everything, that they've been above board and it's been a legitimate prosecution. That they just share their files, the police reports, the lab reports. You know, if it shows that the time of death was something that would clear the defendant, that should be known. Or if that time of death really
nails the guy, that should be shown too. Because we're having public trials. And I did not name it, but the Michael Mortnack in Texas does that. It codifies Brady and it forces them to do what's right. I like using the analogy of you're playing cards and you're playing for money. The prosecutor gets to deal the cards. Well, it used to be that he would also or she would not just deal you the cards, but look at the cards beforehand and decide whether or not you should
get them. And that's not a level of playing field. They shouldn't be able to do that. Number one, it's not fair, but it also puts an unfair burden on the prosecutors that temptation to tilt the field towards them.
Don't forget to give us a fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts. It really else And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project, and I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocenceproject dot org to learn how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wartis. The music in the show is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph.
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