When Anthony Graves was arrested for capital murder, he thought it was a practical joke. A surveillance camera in the Brenham, Texas, police station captured Graves shaking his head and smiling. “This is a big mistake,” he said. “Somebody’s messing with me, right?”
It was a mistake, but it wasn’t a joke. Graves, then twenty-six, didn’t know he was about to begin an eighteen-year fight to clear his name of a gruesome crime he did not commit. He would spend most of those years in solitary confinement on death row.
Graves was charged with the brutal murder of six members of the Davis family in Somerville, a small city northwest of Houston. Robert Carter, the absent father of the youngest victim, four-year-old Jason Davis, became the first suspect when he showed up to the family’s funeral with burns on his face and a shaky alibi. But from the investigation’s outset, the police worked from the assumption that Carter couldn’t have committed the horrific murders alone, because multiple weapons had been employed: the victims were attacked with a knife, a hammer, and a gun before the house was set on fire.
When his interrogators pressured him to name an accomplice, Carter, to deflect attention from his wife, also a suspect at the time, offered the name of someone he barely knew: his wife’s cousin, Anthony Graves. Though there was no evidence connecting him to the crimes other than Carter’s accusation, Graves was convicted and sentenced to death.
Carter was executed in May 2000. His last statement from the gurney was a declaration that Graves was innocent. “It was me and me alone…. I lied on him in court,” Carter said, just minutes before being dosed with a lethal injection. Graves remained on death row, his case unexamined.
I read stories like this and wonder just how often the state kills somebody for no reason.
Full story on the Texas Monthly site.
No comments:
Post a Comment