No one wants to think about an innocent person going to prison for a crime they did not commit, and I like to think that it doesn’t happen very often, but I think there was a time when it was a little more common that it is these days. While it may not happen as often these days as it used to, more and more of these wrongful incarcerations are coming to light these days, because of DNA testing. Michael Morton (born August 12, 1954) was convicted in a Williamson County, Texas court in 1986, of murdering his wife, Christine Morton. He never gave up the fight. He maintained in innocence until the end, and in the end, it was proven that he was in fact, innocent. Unfortunately, that did not mean that he was spared a prison sentence. He actually spent almost 25 years behind bars, sadly.
On the afternoon of August 13, 1986, a neighbor found 31-year-old Christine Morton beaten to death in her bed in the Williamson County, Texas, home near Austin, that she shared with Michael, a grocery store manager, and their 3-year-old son, Eric. The investigation began, and six weeks later, Morton, who had no criminal record or history of violence, was arrested for Christine’s murder. At trial, the prosecution contended Morton had slain his wife of seven years after she refused to have sex with him on the night of August 12, his 32nd birthday. Morton stated repeatedly that he had nothing to do with his wife’s death and said an intruder must have killed her after he left for work early on the morning of August 13. No witnesses or physical evidence linked Morton to the crime. There wasn’t anything circumstantial or ever really anything alleged to connect him to the crime, except that he had access to the home. Nevertheless, Michael Morton was convicted on February 17, 1987, and sentenced to life behind bars. So began his nightmare.
During his trial and subsequent time in prison, Morton’s defense team asked the state to test DNA on a variety of items, including a blood-stained bandanna found by police the day after the murder at an abandoned construction site close to the Morton home. For whatever reason, the Williamson County district attorney successfully blocked all requests for testing until 2010, when a Texas appeals court ordered that testing on the bandana take place. The team’s persistence finally paid off. The test results revealed the bandana contained Christine Morton’s blood and hair, along with the DNA of another man, Mark Alan Norwood, who was a felon with a long criminal record. Norwood had worked in the Austin area as a carpet layer at the time of the murder.
Finally, after waiting almost 25 years for real justice, Michael Morton was released on October 4, 2011. A month after Morton was freed, Norwood, who was by then 57, was arrested for Christine Morton’s killing. In March 2013, he was found guilty of her murder and sentenced to life in prison. Based on DNA evidence, Norwood also was indicted for killing a second woman, Debra Baker, whose 1988 murder in Austin had remained unsolved. Like Morton, Baker was bludgeoned to death in her bed. She lived just blocks from Norwood at the time of her murder. Michael Morton was officially exonerated in December of that year.
After a yearlong investigation into prosecutor, Ken Anderson, the State Bar of Texas filed a disciplinary petition against Ken Anderson in October 2012. By then, the prosecutor was a Texas district, elected in 2002. The Texas State Bar alleged that Anderson had withheld various pieces of evidence from Morton’s attorneys, including a transcript of an August 1986 taped interview between the case’s lead investigator and Morton’s mother-in-law, in which she stated that Morton’s then 3-year-old son, Eric had told her in detail about witnessing his mother’s murder and said his father was not home at the time. Anderson managed to pull off a plea deal to settle the charges against him. He agreed to serve 10 days in jail, perform 500 hours of community service, give up his law license and pay a $500 fine. I think that is an outrageous miscarriage of justice. He had knowingly withheld evidence that cost another man 25 years of his life. He should have had to serve the same length of time.
Morton was later able to re-establish contact with his son, who had cut ties with him when he was fifteen, because he then believed that he had not remembered the incident correctly, and it was his dad who had killed 
his mom. A further miscarriage of justice that was handed down to the elder Morton. He had not only lost 25 years of his own life, but an additional 13 years of his son’s life. Thankfully, Christine Morton’s sister adopted Eric Morton, so his dad was able to find his son when he got out of prison. When his was released, Morton lived with his parents in Liberty City, Texas for a while, before moving to Kilgore, Texas. In 2013, Morton married Cynthia May Chessman, who he met at his church.
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