Held in Texas Prison for 33 Years Without Valid Conviction and Sentence

by GrizzardFollow, Daily Kos

Meet Jerry Hartfield. He's 55 years old, and for 33 of those years, he's been housed in a Texas prison without a valid conviction or sentence. Hartfield has been described by the New York Daily News as an "illiterate fifth grade dropout with an IQ of 51." In 1977, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death under auspicious circumstances. Those circumstances? A juror had been improperly excluded from the pool in violation of Hartfield's rights under the sixth amendment. In the original trial, state prosecutors excluded a woman who expressed reservations about applying the death penalty, a violation serious enough to earn Hartfield a reversal at Texas's high court. For those non-legal types and those unfamiliar with the Texas criminal justice apparatus, having a death conviction for a young black man overturned in a Texas appellate court is commensurate with a golfer carding a hole-in-one or a basketball player nailing a half-court heave. It happens so rarely that the reversal in itself must stand as evidence of the truly egregious nature of the original trial error.

Hartfield's experience in the Texas justice machine has been marked by waiting. He waited three years to have his conviction overturned by the state's high criminal court, which provided the state with the opportunity to re-try the case. Three years later, the court formally vacated the sentence against Hartfield. Not long after that, the Texas governor's office, then under the control of Mark White, moved to commute the sentence from the death penalty to life imprisonment, a move that would have been permissible had Texas followed the proper procedure.

But the state did not. In fact, it fumbled around so remarkably that few are really sure what happened. Grand confusion reigned supreme, as the governor's office failed to inform the Board of Pardons and Parole that the sentence had been vacated by the high court. The court's officials in the county where the original trial had taken place erroneously informed the Court of Criminal Appeals that its directive to give Hartfield a new trial had been observed and carried out. All the while, Hartfield wasted away in prison.

(More here.)