In his office on a recent afternoon, Reed Prospere, a Dallas criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor, pages through documents from a case he worked 30 years ago.
The case sprang from a rash of crimes that happened in the spring of 1982, when at least 60 women in Dallas area gyms, spas and apartment complexes were held at gunpoint and forced to take off their clothes and perform sex acts in what was a terrifying criminal tirade.
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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The victims gave a similar description of their attacker: He had striking blue eyes and wore a gray hoodie. He covered his mouth with a piece of cloth.
A similar crime wave had swept Kansas City, Missouri, around the same time, and women in both cities identified a man named Steven Phillips — some after police had released his image to media. Phillips had a history of peeping into apartments and revealing himself inappropriately.
Prospere's memories of the 1982 case are vague, mainly assembled by reading old documents. "It was just a no-brainer," he says. "You had multiple [IDs]."
But as the case went to trial, the actual assailant of one of the Dallas-area victims was in custody for similar crimes in Wichita, Kansas, which police documents demonstrated. The Dallas Police had concluded that her identification, which she provided after seeing Phillips' photo on television, was inaccurate, casting doubt on the other IDs. But the document never made it to Phillips' lawyers. Nor did another police report, which documented that a woman sexually assaulted in Garland identified a different attacker, Stanley Goodyear, who was wanted for similar crimes in Kansas City.
"I asked the State to turn over all exculpatory evidence," his trial attorney Edwin Sigel wrote in a 2008 affidavit. "Despite my request, I now know that the State did not disclose at least some very important exculpatory evidence."
Prospere, who came onto the case late, hasn't seen these reports before now. "That's news to me," he says, thoughtfully turning the pages. A short while later, he looks up.
"If you have a file where the victim identified somebody other than the guy we had on trial, that would be a major, 'What are we doing here?'" Prospere says. He speculates that the information never made its way from police to the prosecutors.
It's a common problem, he says. While police give prosecutors a thin file of relevant information, the complete, fat file stays in the department with documents that may be useful. As a prosecutor, Prospere made it a habit to get everything from the police, not simply what they deemed relevant. But he wasn't originally assigned to Phillips, he says, so he didn't have that chance.
In 2008, DNA testing cleared Phillips of all charges and implicated Goodyear as the true assailant. "Something obviously went wrong in Steven Charles Phillips' case," Prospere says. "I would bet my children's right arms that it wasn't in the District Attorney's office where the problems existed. ... You've got a detective somewhere that didn't bring that information to someone's attention."
Chris Stokes, who prosecuted Phillips' second trial, agrees. "If the reports you describe existed and were in the prosecution file they would have disclosed to the defense," he writes in an email. The Dallas investigating officer on Phillips' case retired in 2002, and the Garland officer who filed the report now works in real estate and barely remembers the case.
The prosecutor in Miles' case, D'Amore, claims his circumstances were similar to Prospere's. The police had reports that "were not given to the prosecution or the defense," D'Amore writes in an email.
That's why advocates need to be careful about pushing for more accountability and throwing around the term "prosecutorial misconduct," says Rob Kepple, the executive director of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. The term is used too broadly, he says, every time a prosecutor or the police makes a mistake rather than in cases of "dishonest or unfair or deceitful" conduct.
"What I've been hearing is prosecutors need to be held accountable. That implies that they've done something wrong," he says. "It does happen; there needs to be consequences. But that's a lot different than your garden-variety trial error."
He also argues that a wide swath of legal immunity is necessary for prosecutors to effectively pursue justice. It is meant "to encourage independence and courage for prosecutors to do the right thing," he says. If that immunity were ever compromised, "you're not giving Michael Morton and you're not giving Anthony Graves the right to sue prosecutors. You're giving everyone the right to sue prosecutors."
And if the pendulum ever swung too far in that direction, the "rich and powerful" could sue their way out of lawsuits while not much would change for anyone else.
Michael Morton often stresses that he is neither rich and powerful nor poor and criminal. "I'm incredibly average," he says. "I lived in suburbia. My wife and I had careers." He led a peaceful existence with his family until August 13, 1986, when Christine was murdered and he took the fall. A Williamson County jury convicted him.
But as Morton sat in prison, facing a life term, Houston attorney John Raley worked pro bono with the Innocence Project to prove Morton's innocence. Morton's mother-in-law had told authorities that his 3-year-old son had seen a "monster" hurting his mother — evidence Morton's defense attorney says he had never seen. Raley also never learned of evidence that neighbors had seen a man with a green van walk into the wooded area near the Mortons' house, or that Christine's credit card was used and her signature forged on a check after her death.
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