Amid Contentious Inquiry, Morton Sees "Road to Accountability"

GEORGETOWN — It’s been a painful week at times, Michael Morton said, as a court of inquiry rehashes the details of the botched murder trial that led to his wrongful conviction more than a quarter-century ago.

“Sometimes you get angry, sometimes you get a little sad, sometimes you get a little numb from sitting through it all,” he said after 10-hour day of contentious courtroom testimony Wednesday.

But, Morton said, the pain, sadness and anger are just part of the journey he is on to find some accountability for the prosecutor who sent him to prison for life for a murder he did not commit.

“This is something I really feel needs to be done, not so Ken Anderson can be drawn and quartered, but this is a road to accountability,” Morton said.

Anderson, the prosecutor who oversaw Morton’s conviction, is the subject of a court of inquiry charged with determining whether he committed criminal violations during the prosecution. Anderson contends he committed no wrongdoing in the case.

On Wednesday, the third day of the court of inquiry, Rusty Hardin, the appointed attorney pro tem, attempted to show that the former prosecutor went to great lengths in Morton’s 1987 murder trial to keep information from the lawyers who were trying to defend him.

Attorneys for Anderson worked to show that defense lawyers did a poor job of chasing down the evidence that should have been available to them. They also sought to prove that the judge in the case ordered Anderson to provide only one report to the court, and he did that.

In some of the most dramatic testimony of the day, Hardin read from a pre-trial transcript an argument between Anderson and defense lawyers in 1987. The reading came during questioning of County Court at Law Judge Doug Arnold, a former prosecutor who worked under Anderson. Arnold said he had considered Anderson an ethical prosecutor, and he asked his former boss to swear him in when he became a judge in 2010. In the passage Hardin read, Anderson told Judge William Lott that he would rather strike his own witness than give the defense lawyers notes he would have to turn over if she testified.

As Hardin read through the court exchange, some of the lawyers in the courtroom audience gasped, seemingly taken aback by the extent to which Anderson appeared to go to keep information from Morton's defense team.

Hardin harkened to a statement that Anderson had made repeatedly in a deposition last year, that there was "no way on God's green earth" he wouldn't have shared with the defense team information that pointed to Morton's innocence.

"Is that fair on God’s green earth?” Hardin asked Arnold.

“No,” Arnold said.

Under questioning from Hardin, Bill White and Bill Allison — Morton’s trial lawyers — said Anderson turned over precious little information to them despite their requests. They also said that contrary to Anderson’s statements, the prosecutor did not tell them about critical evidence, either.

“It was sort of a no discovery case,” White said.

Among the items of evidence Anderson is alleged to have deliberately withheld is a transcript of a conversation in which Morton’s mother-in-law tells a sheriff’s deputy that the couple’s 3-year-old son saw a monster kill his mother. The boy said his father wasn’t home. Morton’s lawyers also argue that Anderson withheld a police report in which neighbors reported seeing a man in a green van who appeared to case the family’s home.

Those two items of evidence, Allison and White said, would have been critical to bolstering their theory — which eventually proved true — that a stranger had entered the home and killed Christine Morton. The evidence would have helped to explain unidentified fingerprints in the Mortons’ home and an unidentified footprint in the backyard.

“It would have made the defense,” White said of the green van reports. “Nobody knows what would happened if we had it. But we didn’t.”

Allison said that although he and White knew that young Eric had seen a stranger in the home on the morning of the murder, they did not know about the transcript of the conversation between Morton’s mother-in-law and Williamson County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Don Wood. They couldn’t put a 3-year-old on the stand to prove his father’s alibi, because they worried jurors would be disgusted by that strategy. But the lawyers said that if they had known about the phone call transcript, they would have fought to allow jurors to see it.

“It was a critical piece of evidence when I look at it 25 years later,” Allison said.

Knox Fitzpatrick, one of Anderson’s lawyers, attempted to show, through a line of questions to White, that Morton's defense lawyers did not adequately seek out evidence that was available to them.

He asked White why he didn't interview Morton's son, Eric, after his client told him that the boy had seen a man with a big belly in the shower with a blue-purple shirt. And he asked why they didn't ask family members or the boy's therapist about what he had said.

"We made the decision that we weren’t going to put on a 3-year-old in this kind of case," White said. "We thought it was just bad, bad tactics."

During questioning of Allison, Eric Nichols, another lawyer for Anderson, argued strenuously that the judge overseeing the 1987 case had ordered Anderson to only turn over a single report from the day of the murder.

Allison told Nichols that he couldn’t produce a written order from Judge Lott that would have required Anderson to turn over all the reports from the lead investigator in the case. And that is a key question in the case — whether Anderson violated a judge’s order to turn over evidence.

Morton, who has been watching the proceedings from the courtroom’s front row next to his fiancé and his mother, said he hopes that lawmakers in Austin are paying careful attention to the court of inquiry and the lessons learned from his case.

He said he has faith that Anderson will be held accountable. Asked whether he wants to see Anderson serve time in prison, he said, “The honest answer is I don’t know.”

Below, we continue the liveblog of the court of inquiry proceedings. Click here to read details from the first three days of the hearings. Click on the PDF to the left to view the cast of characters and orient yourself to the proceedings. On Thursday, court action will resume with testimony from Allison.