“Ask and it shall be given…”

The Michael Morton story

A perfect example of the depths to which a person must fall comes from the story of Michael Morton. In 1987, he was called home from work to a scene of unspeakable horror. His wife, Christine, had been brutally beaten to death in her bed, in front of their 3 year old son, Eric, who was left unharmed.

Though vehemently denying any involvement in his wife’s death, within a week he was arrested by the police and charged with her murder. A jury convicted him and he received a life sentence. He would NEVER get out of prison!

By order of the court, the sister of his deceased wife raised his son. He was only allowed court-ordered visits with his son twice a year.

Not only was he grief-stricken over his wife’s death, but he was being denied the chance to raise his son.

Prison was a nightmare. Not only were their fights daily – sometimes to the death – but the noise was overwhelming all day and all night. In order to read a book in his cell, he had to wear ear plugs and turn on radio static to the highest level possible.

When he was first admitted to prison, he was strip searched right behind a “lifer” whose back had the scars from six previous stab wounds. He was confined to a 9 ft X 5 ft cell with another prisoner. The food was unpalatable, the noise was unbearable, and the danger from other prisoners was ever-present.

And virtually everyone in his wife’s family thought he was guilty, and they were indoctrinating his son to believe as they did. During the first 15 years he was imprisoned, he could tell during his once every 6 month visits, that his son was drifting away from him. The son truly believed that his father had brutally murdered his mother.

Here was a man who had lost his wife through a brutal murder. She was beaten to death. At the crime scene, blood was splattered over all the walls, and the ceiling, of the bedroom. He missed her terribly. In addition, his 3 year old son had witnessed his mother’s brutal death.

This man who claimed he was innocent was arrested and charged with her murder. During his trial he had to witness all the gory pictures of the death scene. He was hated by the press and the public, including his wife’s family because he “expressed no remorse for killing his wife.”

His freedom was taken from him, and his son was given to his sister-in-law who truly believed he was guilty of murdering her sister.

For the first ten years he was in prison, he admits that he spent most of his time contemplating murder of the district attorney and the investigators who put him there, and how he could get away with it. He was angry and bitter, and in human terms, he had a right to those feelings.

It was only then that Michael hit rock bottom. In 2001 a letter had arrived for him at the prison informing him that his son had decided to change his name. Eric was eighteen at the time. He had recently been adopted by his aunt, Marylee, and her husband, whom she married when Eric was twelve. That the boy had rejected his own name was too much for Michael to bear. Before Eric was born, Christine had wanted to name him Michael Morton Jr., but Michael had balked, telling her that he would rather their son have his own distinct identity. And so they had compromised on Eric Michael Morton. Now Eric Michael Morton no longer existed.

“That’s when I finally broke,” Michael said. “Nothing before then did it—not Chris’s murder, not my arrest, not my trial, not my conviction. Not getting a life sentence. Not the failed appeals, not the lab results that led nowhere. Eric was what I had been holding on to. He was the reason I was trying to prove my innocence. Once I found out that he had changed his name, I knew that reconciliation was not a possibility anymore. We weren’t going to be able to put this back together. That was a hollow, empty feeling, because getting out had never been the goal. It was getting out so that I could tell Eric, ‘Look, see? I didn’t do this.’

“I can’t remember if it was Marylee or Eric who wrote to tell me, but I remember being nearly catatonic for at least a week. It was like the bottom fell out. This wasn’t just another difficult thing to overcome, this was the end. This was a death. I literally cried out to God, ‘Are you there? Show me something. Give me a sign.’ I had nothing. I was spent, I was bankrupt. It was the most sincere plea I have ever made in my life. And I got nothing. A couple weeks went by and . . . nothing. No response.

“I was lying in my bunk one night listening to the radio on my headphones, and I ran across a classical station. I heard something you rarely ever hear: a harp. There was no slow buildup, no preamble to what happened next. I was just engulfed in this very warm, very comforting blinding light. I don’t know what to call it—an ecstatic experience? a revelation?—because it was indescribable. Any words I use to explain it will fall short. I had this incredible feeling of joy. There was an overwhelming sense of this unlimited compassion aimed right at me. Then I heard my alarm go off and it was over, and I sat up in bed. Outwardly, everything was still the same. But I knew that I had been in the presence of God.

“My life didn’t change right away. Everything didn’t instantly fall into place. I was in prison for another decade, so it wasn’t like God knocked open the doors for me. Becoming a believer was a slow, organic process that I had to grow into. But I was different after that. You can’t buy inner peace, but I had it.

Several years later, the Innocence Project became interested in Michael Morton’s case. They are a group of attorneys and investigators who take cases, for no fee, of those they believe have been wrongly convicted and imprisoned.

Through their investigation, they found that a bandana with blood on it, found in the yard behind the house, had not been tested for DNA.

During the five years that Michael and his attorneys sought to have the bandana tested and Mr. Bradley, the District Attorney who had previously been the assistant of the DA who had put Morton in prison, tried mightily to resist their efforts, and the bandana itself was locked up in the Sheriff’s Office. It didn’t look like anything extraordinary. The deep-blue Western-themed handkerchief was bordered by a white lariat pattern that repeatedly spelled, in loopy script, the word “Wrangler.” Scattered across the fabric, which was deeply creased, were a number of small brown bloodstains.

Whose blood was it? On January 8, 2010, after Morton had spent 23 years in prison, the Third Court of Appeals reversed the decision of a previous judge and allowed testing on the bandana to go forward.

in his decision that the unidentified fingerprints on the sliding-glass door of the Morton home and the footprint in the backyard did, in fact, suggest that there was a trail of evidence connecting the bandana to the crime scene. Further, he suggested that DNA testing could definitively determine whether or not there was a link. “If the bandana contains Christine’s blood, it is sufficient by itself to establish a trail.”

Still, the bandana was seen as a long shot. “I did not have high hopes.
“The bandana was shipped from Williamson County to a private lab in Dallas that could amplify small amounts of DNA using the most cutting-edge technology available. But District Attorney Bradley insisted that the bandana instead be submitted to the Department of Public Safety crime lab for analysis, even though the lab was not equipped to amplify DNA which would cause additional delays and minimize the odds that interpretable DNA results will be obtained.

Finally, after five months, the judge ruled that the bandana, as well as a single strand of hair that was found on it, be shipped to the lab that the Innocence Project had initially requested. By then the dried blood on the bandana was nearly 24 years old.

Testing small quantities of degraded evidence takes time, and private firms that specialize in the process are in high demand. For a full year, the blue bandana sat in the lab in Dallas. It was stored carefully, folded into a neat square, its secrets held within. In May 2011, it was submitted for testing, which was completed the following month. The results were breathtaking. Both the blood and the strand of hair matched Christine’s DNA profile. The DNA profile of an unknown man was also recovered, intermingled with Christine’s blood and hair. Michael’s DNA was absent.

Nina Morrison, the attorney for the Innocence Project, who already had plans to be in Dallas that week to work on another wrongful conviction case, met Raley, a lawyer who had also volunteered his services, at DFW Airport so they could tell Michael the news together.

The mood in Morrison’s rental car that morning was “euphoric,” Raley told me. “I don’t think the wheels ever actually touched the ground.” It was the first time during the eight years they had worked together that Raley had seen Morrison allow herself to be confident about their chances of getting Michael out. The dauntless Yale graduate had always met Raley’s enthusiasm with the cautious pragmatism she had developed after years of dealing with lost evidence, recalcitrant prosecutors, and a slow-moving justice system. That morning, she beamed as they headed east into the Piney Woods, toward Palestine, where Michael had been transferred to another prison after earning his master’s degree.

Michael suspected that the news was good when he learned that Morrison was coming. Although he had spoken on the phone with her for years, he had never actually met her in person before. “I knew this wasn’t just a grip and grin,” Michael told me. When Morrison and Raley were escorted into the cramped visitation booth where he sat waiting for them, he could see that they were elated. He pressed his hand against the glass that separated them in greeting and picked up the phone on his side of the partition. His attorneys talked animatedly, passing the phone receiver back and forth between them. “I don’t remember the exact words they said, but we were all bouncing off the walls,” he told me. “After a while Nina Morrison said, ‘Okay, sit down and take a deep breath. They’ve fought us all this way, and they’re going to keep fighting. This isn’t over.’”

Proving a DNA-based innocence claim requires showing that a jury would not have found the defendant guilty had the DNA results been known at the time of trial. Doing so, however, can take years. Michael’s lawyers understood that Bradley would almost certainly oppose any innocence claim and that years of appeals could follow. Even if Michael’s conviction were eventually overturned by a higher court, the DA’s office could still choose to retry him. The quickest way to clear his name would be to learn if the unknown man’s DNA profile matched any one of the millions of individuals with prior convictions that are stored in the FBI’s national DNA database, CODIS.

“Then there would be no question of Michael’s innocence,” Morrison told me. “When you have a name and a face to put to the DNA, it usually removes any possible hypotheses about contamination or tampering or accomplices.” Initially, though, it was unknown whether the DNA profile, which had been extracted from bloodstains that were old and fragile, was detailed enough to be compared with those in CODIS. “Among the many miracles in this case is that had the DNA profile on the bandana been missing just one more marker it would not have been eligible for a national search,”  Morrison said.

The DNA profile was entered into CODIS, and on August 9 Morrison was informed that there had been a match. His name was Mark Alan Norwood, a drifter with a long criminal record, including arrests in Texas, California, and Tennessee for aggravated assault with intent to kill, arson, breaking and entering residences, drug possession, and resisting arrest. Old mug shots revealed a man with a large, drooping mustache, his chin tilted upward, looking down at the camera with a cold-eyed stare.

Almost 25 years to the day after Christine was murdered, Morrison and Raley called Michael to tell him that the man whose DNA was found on the bandana had been identified. Michael could hardly take it all in. http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/innocent-man-part-two

After further bureaucratic maneuvering and delays in the courts, Michael Morton was finally released from prison and declared innocent of his wife’s murder. He and his son have now reconciled and his son and daughter-in-law’s new baby girl has been named Christine, after Eric’s mother.

Incidentally, the district attorney who purposely withheld exculpatory evidence in Michael Morton’s trial, had subsequently become a Judge in the area. However, he was tried and convicted of withholding evidence and sent to prison. Plus, he was disbarred and lost his job, and could no longer practice law.

This is the first time in U.S. history that a District Attorney has been charged, found guilty, and imprisoned for purposely withholding evidence from the defense in a trial.

Conclusion: The Michael Morton story is a perfect present-day example of what it takes to get us to cry out to God – utter destitution, hitting rock bottom. As Michael Morton told his story:

“That’s when I finally broke. Nothing before then did it—not Chris’s murder, not my arrest, not my trial, not my conviction. Not getting a life sentence. Not the failed appeals, not the lab results that led nowhere. Eric was what I had been holding on to. He was the reason I was trying to prove my innocence. Once I found out that he had changed his name, I knew that reconciliation was not a possibility anymore. We weren’t going to be able to put this back together. That was a hollow, empty feeling, because getting out had never been the goal. It was getting out so that I could tell Eric, ‘Look, see? I didn’t do this.’

“I can’t remember if it was Marylee or Eric who wrote to tell me, but I remember being nearly catatonic for at least a week. It was like the bottom fell out. This wasn’t just another difficult thing to overcome, this was the end. This was a death. I literally cried out to God, ‘Are you there? Show me something. Give me a sign.’ I had nothing. I was spent, I was bankrupt. It was the most sincere plea I have ever made in my life. And I got nothing. A couple weeks went by and . . . nothing. No response.

That’s what it means to “. . . search for God with all your heart.” Jer 29:13

That’s what Jesus Christ means when He says:

“Ask and it shall be given…”

What does that really mean?