Sitting in a Brazoria County courtroom in 1994, Anthony Graves, a Black man, looked at his nearly all-white jury. He was on trial for a murder he didn’t commit, and the state was seeking the death penalty. At that moment, he felt like nothing had changed in 150 years.
“I felt like Dred Scott,” he told the Texas Observer this week. “I felt like a person sitting in front of white people with no rights, knowing that I hadn’t done anything to anybody, but I could not control what they were trying to do to me.”
As in Scott’s case, the courts ruled against Graves. He was sent to Texas’ death row. Robert Carter, the co-defendant who had named Graves as an accomplice, repeatedly told authorities he had lied. Carter even used his last words from the gurney in Huntsville in 2000 to try to clear Graves’ name. But he wasted his breath—the state’s highest appeals court was determined to keep Graves on death row.
Graves was ultimately exonerated in 2010 after a federal court determined the prosecutors in the case had withheld critical evidence from the defense, including the fact that the star witness against Graves had repeatedly changed his story. In 2015, that prosecutor was disbarred.
As a new ACLU report shows, Graves’ experience is all too common.
Since 1973, when the modern era of capital punishment began, at least 201 people on death row have been exonerated—meaning cleared of any responsibility for a crime—according to data maintained by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPI). Eighteen of those people were in Texas. The ACLU report, released Wednesday, analyzed these cases looking for common threads. What it found was unsurprising but indicative of the habitual mistakes and misconduct that lead to wrongful convictions.
“In America, this risk [of wrongful conviction] is not only a defining feature of the modern death penalty, but it also results in the disproportionate conviction and execution of innocent Black people,” the report states.
The most prevalent contributor to wrongful convictions in these cases was official misconduct, where police ran shoddy investigations or state prosecutors withheld evidence that indicated the defendant might actually be innocent, like in Graves’ case. The report cites a DPI study that found that in 85 percent of death penalty exonerations of Black people from 1973-2017, police or prosecutors had committed some sort of misconduct in the investigation or trial. (This is compared to 70 percent of cases where the exoneree was white.)
In about two-thirds of total death row exonerations, someone gave false testimony on the stand. Non-diverse juries, also present in Graves’ case, were more likely to wrongfully convict. Mistaken eyewitnesses, unreliable scientific experts, and junk forensic sciences also placed many innocent people behind bars.
The report highlights that more than half of the people exonerated from death row in the United States in the past 52 years have been Black. But data shows innocence claims from Black prisoners are perhaps more difficult to prove—DPI found that Black death row exonerees have to spend on average four more years fighting their cases compared to white exonerees.
To Graves, the reality of this disparate treatment was evident to him from the beginning. “They used my Blackness as evidence against me to sentence me to death,” he said.
Megan Byrne, an attorney with the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project and the lead author of the report, told the Observer the report is meant to educate people on the throughline between historical lynching of Black people and the modern application of the death penalty. She said racial bias manifests at all levels of the criminal justice system: from the ways laws are written, to how policing is conducted, to whom prosecutors choose to seek the death penalty against.
“Who is believed and who isn’t at different stages of investigation and conviction?” she said. “The way that bias affects the system is such a multifaceted issue, the solution also has to be multifaceted.”
While the report only analyzes exonerations, Byrne said that there are many more people who have had their cases overturned for other reasons, or who are still sitting on death rows. The report also states that 21 people executed in the U.S. were likely innocent—10 of those cases came from Texas.
One man, Carlos DeLuna, was executed in 1989 for the stabbing death of gas station clerk Wanda Lopez in Corpus Christi. He had pointed to another man, Carlos Hernandez, as the actual culprit. Authorities knew about Hernandez, whose criminal record included assaults very similar to the fatal stabbing in 1983. They didn’t test, and later lost, evidence that could have revealed the real killer’s DNA.
In recent years, Texas legislators have passed laws aiming to reduce the chances of wrongful conviction in state courts. The 2013 Michael Morton Act, named after a man who spent nearly 25 years in prison after prosecutors withheld evidence, requires that the state turn over all evidence to the defense and to track what they’ve disclosed. The Richard Miles Act, which became law in 2021, requires police to ensure they’ve turned over all evidence to the state in the first place, including information learned after a conviction.
A Dallas county jury convicted Richard Miles of murder and attempted murder and sentenced him to 60 years in prison in 1995. He was released in 2009 and fully exonerated in 2012. Although not a death penalty case, Miles’ appeals lawyer Cheryl Wattley said Miles’ and other exonerations from Texas prisons prove the system can fail no matter what sentence is on the table.
“We shouldn’t exhale and say, well at least it’s not a death penalty case,” Wattley said. “By taking away someone’s life, be it by execution or by confinement, we still are depriving that individual through a wrongful conviction of their right to their life.”
Still, exonerations are incredibly difficult to obtain in Texas courts. They require costly and time-consuming appeals, and many people can’t afford post-conviction lawyers or can’t get the attention of organizations like the Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries, which offer free representation. In most cases, there is no DNA or forensic evidence that could back up someone’s innocence claims.
“DNA proved that [wrongful convictions] happened,” Wattley said. “On the other hand, DNA created such a high bar, such a high standard of almost absolute scientific certainty for demonstrating that it’s indeed a wrongful conviction.”
Recent high-profile innocence claims, including those of Robert Roberson and Melissa Lucio, indicate that there are more people on Texas’ death row who may have been put there for crimes that they didn’t commit—and who may see exonerations in their lifetimes.
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