What most people in the courtroom, including Miles and his lawyer, did not know was that an anonymous caller had told police that someone else was the shooter. And a second undisclosed police report detailed a fight between the two victims and a third man five days before the shooting.
These reports didn't surface until 2007, when Centurion Ministries, an innocence advocacy non-profit, asked for them. Evidence of Miles' innocence began building as advocates and Miles' lawyer continued digging. Finally, in 2010, Thurman recanted his original statement.
Mark Graham
Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins (left) and Russell Wilson of the Conviction Integrity Unit have made their names pursuing innocence claims.
Drew Gaines
Michael Morton was wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. He’s now trying to get the prosecutor on his case charged with a crime.
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But it wasn't the first time Thurman had balked at identifying Miles. When he recanted, he also revealed to the Dallas District Attorney's office that he had told D'Amore he would not be able to identify Miles during the 1995 trial. But D'Amore simply pointed to where Miles would be sitting and told him to single out the man he had already identified to police, Thurman said. (D'Amore denies that ever happened.)
The Court of Criminal Appeals published a lengthy opinion in February supporting Miles' innocence, noting the two police reports and Thurman's recantation, and explaining that the gun-residue science had proven unreliable in the time since the original trial. It was this documentation of his innocence that landed Miles back in a Dallas courtroom this year for the symbolic affair, and for his declaration that he would pursue the retribution that eludes most exonerees.
It certainly eluded Anthony Graves. On August 18, 1992, Bobbie Davis, her daughter, and her four grandchildren were murdered in a brutal stabbing in Somerville, their house set ablaze. Robert Carter was convicted of the crime, and he singled out Graves as his accomplice. Both men were sentenced to death.
But in 2006, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Graves' conviction based mainly on negligence by the prosecutor, Charles Sebesta, who never divulged that Carter confessed to committing the murders alone.
Special Prosecutor Kelly Siegler was assigned to reinvestigate the case. She turned up something that shocked her: nothing. With no evidence to retry the case, she became convinced of Graves' innocence.
"It's a prosecutor's responsibility to never fabricate evidence or manipulate witnesses or take advantage of victims," Siegler told reporters in dismissing the case, according to Texas Monthly. "And unfortunately, what happened in this case is all of those things."
The State Bar of Texas dismissed a complaint alleging misconduct. Sebesta has never been disciplined, but he maintains a website defending his actions in the case.
Then there's Kerry Max Cook. In 1977, Cook's neighbor Linda Jo Edwards was found dead, struck in the head with a statue, repeatedly stabbed and mutilated. Cook's fingerprints were found on her door. A jury convicted him and sentenced him to death.
But after a complicated series of trials, mistrials and guilty verdicts, in 1996 the Court of Criminal Appeals reversed his conviction and basically accused the DA's office of railroading him. Prosecutors had presented the testimony of a jail-house informant who said Cook had admitted guilt, but a deal to reduce the informant's sentence was never revealed. After the informant's release, he admitted that he fabricated Cook's confession — a fact unknown to the defense until years after the trial.
Prosecutors had also depicted Cook and his neighbors as strangers, which raised questions about the presence of his fingerprints. They failed to disclose that, according to Cook's friend, the two knew each other. She'd even invited him over for a tryst.
"In conclusion," the court ruled, "the State's misconduct in this case does not consist of an isolated incident or the doing of a police officer, but consists of the deliberate misconduct by members of the bar, representing the State over a 14-year period — from the initial discovery proceedings in 1977 through the first trial in 1978 and continuing with the concealment of misconduct until 1992."
Cook was released from prison, but he still has not been formally exonerated, as prosecutors continue to fight to keep him from being labeled innocent. Jack Skeen, the prosecutor who handled Cook's case, is now a Smith County district judge.
And on it goes. James Woodard was arrested for strangling and sexually assaulting his girlfriend in 1980, even though the victim's acquaintance told prosecutors that he'd seen her leave a night of partying with two men, including an alleged sex criminal. Woodard was released in 2008. His prosecutor, Luke Laman, was never disciplined publicly. He practices law in Plano.
Dale Duke was convicted of molesting his stepdaughter in 1992 and sentenced to 20 years, despite his mother-in-law telling prosecutors that her granddaughter had concocted the abuse. The prosecutor on the case, Kate Porter, never shared her statement with Duke's attorney. She had died by the time Duke was exonerated.
"A lot of times ... [prosecutors] will think, 'Well, that's not credible or that's not true,' and that's not their job to do that," says Duke's attorney, Robert Udashen.
Adds Jeff Blackburn, of the Innocence Project of Texas: "I'm actually more and more convinced that you don't get somebody wrongfully convicted without prosecutorial misconduct on some level."
Meanwhile, it's so widely understood that prosecutors will not be punished by the State Bar that Gary Udashen, president of the Innocence Project of Texas (and Robert's brother), says he wouldn't even bother filing a grievance. "I'm not inclined to file a grievance against a prosecutor when I know it's going to get dismissed," he says. "It's going to look like I was wrong and he was right."
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