Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
Guilty Until Proven Innocent
There were no witnesses to the murder. The evidence was circumstantial. The accused was black. The victim was white. The case was rife with racism. Now Clarence Brandley is on death row . . .
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In a recent interview Medina had a few more things to say about Robinson — and Gary Acreman. She said her child by Robinson was conceived in a rape when she was just sixteen. Pregnant and afraid to tell her parents what had happened, she had yielded to his apologies and moved in with him. But, she says, he beat her often, and by the time he came in and announced the he had killed the girl, they were sleeping in separate rooms and no longer having sex. Even Acreman, who says he began to socialize with Robinson that summer, was impressed by the violence of their “spouts.” “You would think they was going to have a war,” he recalled, shaking his head.
That wasn’t the only accusation of Robinson’s violence toward women. In March 1980 in Montgomery County court Robinson, then 19, had won an annulment of his October 1979 marriage to Berdie Allen Bridges of South Carolina. On June 16, 1980, a legal services lawyer in Greenville, South Carolina, wrote to Robinson’s lawyer on her behalf, describing her as “retarded and not overly aware of her legal rights.” The lawyer said his client was pregnant by Robinson and expected him to pay child support after the birth. She was in Greenville General Hospital being treated for a spleen injury that, the lawyer said, “I am informed … may be the result of repeated beatings given her by” Robinson. Robinson denies beating Bridges.
Brenda Medina says that Acreman and Robinson were frequent running buddies that summer and used drugs at the couple’s house. Once, she says, she came home to find both of them taking turns having sex with a young woman who was handcuffed to the bed. Acreman and Robinson say they didn’t use drugs and deny that that incident happened. But Acreman acknowledges that they visited in each other’s homes and that he frequently gave rides to Robinson, who didn’t have a car.
In the hearing last summer on Brandley’s habeas corpus motion, Acreman testified for the first time that Robinson had been at the high school on the morning of the murder. It had slipped his mind before, he claimed, but he was sure. He had remembered the night before the hearing, after a visit with defense investigator Reyna, who had told him about Robinson’s “extra-judicial confession” to Brenda Medina. Robinson, Acreman said, had “just popped in and just said, ‘Don’t work too hard.’”
Before Brandley’s first trial, during his voluntary appearance before the Montgomery County grand jury, Keeshan had asked if any of the janitors might “tell lies on you.”
“Only one,” Brandley said — Gary Acreman. “I’m not saying he would, but it’s a possibility.”
Immediately following Acreman in the 1986 hearing, his father-in-law, Edward Payne, told how he had met with district attorney Keeshan, a constable named Charles Hayden, and a sheriff’s captain in Hayden’s office in a fruitless attempt to tell authorities that Acreman had known that the girl’s clothes were in the school dumpster before they were found.
One of the men asked, he recalled, “if Gary Acreman was capable of committing this crime.”
“No,” Payne said he answered. “Gary was afraid of everybody and everything. The only way he might commit a crime like this or do something [would be] … maybe with somebody else.”
At that, Payne said, the constable jumped up. “He said, ‘That’s an angle we haven’t thought about. … It might have been three white men that did it.’” Then, Payne said, “the district attorney said, ‘No, I’ve built my case, and we know who did it.’ So I quit right there.” Keeshan had “more or less told me to shut up, so that discouraged me in trying to help.” Keeshan himself recently said, “I may have tried to convey to Mr. Payne that Gary Acreman was not under suspicion, but I am sure I did not discourage him from telling anybody anything.”
Toward the end of the hearing that summer James Dexter Robinson testified. He had not killed Cheryl Fergeson, he said. He had told Brenda Medina once that he had killed a girl, but he was just trying to scare her because she was hassling him about not making enough money. He had left Conroe a couple of weeks before the murder, he said, on August 6, 1980, the day after he cashed his last school paycheck, and had taken a bus to South Carolina. An investigator from the Montgomery County DA’s office had tried to help him document his whereabouts but could find nothing that confirmed the trip or his presence in Greenville before September 5. But family members had assured the investigator that Robinson was there and that he had attended a birthday party for his grandfather on August 18. Robinson said there were photographs from the party, but they weren’t dated.
Robinson had made a trip to Conroe the month before he testified, after investigator Richard Reyna had met with him in Greenville and told him of the statements implicating him. Reyna had persuaded him to come back to take a polygraph test and had paid his plane fare.
The polygraph examiner, a former state highway patrolman named David Raney, had earlier given Brenda Medina her lie detector test. Raney testified that after he asked whether Robinson had killed Fergeson, Robinson had paused four and a half minutes before answering: “Well, I don’t remember.” Next Robinson said he sometimes has memory lapses. “I cold have done it and forgot,” Raney quoted him as saying. Then, he said, Robinson added: “No, I couldn’t have done it. I’m not that kind of person. I’m innocent.” Robinson later passed a polygraph test in South Carolina purporting to clear him and later passed still another in Texas.
Polygraph tests aren’t admissible in court, and many lawyers distrust them for good reasons. District attorney Keeshan himself discounted their value the week after Brandley’s first trial, when a reporter asked about the lie detector test Brandley supposedly had passed. A lot of criminals are sociopaths with little conscience or remorse, Keeshan noted then, and it’s much harder to catch them on a polygraph than it is to catch the ordinary well-meaning person. Keeshan didn’t say, however, how authorities settle the conundrum of which person is well meaning and which a sociopath.
In addition to Medina and Acreman, one other witness in the summer of 1986 was able to place Robinson in Conroe two weeks after Robinson said he had left. Reginald T. Slacum, Jr., a former high school janitor, testified that Robinson and Robinson’s father had come to his house on August 20, 1980 — payday — to collect $100 Slacum owed the younger Robinson for some Amway products. Slacum also said that although Robinson wasn’t working at the high school during August, “he was coming around” there daily, at least until the twentieth.
The hearing adjourned in late August. Finally, on December 22, 1986, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, following Judge Lynn Coker’s recommendation, summarily denied Brandley’s request for a new trial. Last February 6 in a Conroe courtroom Judge Coker asked Brandley if he had anything to say before a new execution date was set. Brandley responded, “I’m innocent, Your Honor.” Coker scheduled execution for March 26.
In mid-February a private investigator named Jim McCloskey was in Monroe, Louisiana, interviewing a witness in an unrelated case, and he flew on to Houston to meet some of Clarence Brandley’s family. McCloskey, 45, is a slim, balding Philadelphian who left a career as an international business consultant in 1979 to enter Princeton Theological Seminary. There a stint as a student prison chaplain had cemented his chosen vocation as an advocate for the innocent in prison. Last November a flurry of newspaper, magazine, and television stories heralded his success in helping to free an innocent man serving a life sentence, the third such innocent lifer McCloskey had helped to spring from New Jersey prisons. That’s when Brandley’s brother Ozell heard about McCloskey and sought his help.
McCloskey’s trip also included a visit with Brandley’s Houston-based appeals lawyers, Percy Foreman’s protégés Mike DeGeurin and Paul Nugent. McCloskey was struck by their conviction that Brandley was innocent, and he told them he would return to Houston at the end of the month. On March 2 he met with Clarence Brandley on death row.
Afterward, McCloskey stopped off in Conroe, where he met two other members of Brandley’s defense team: Don Brown, a beefy, white-haired former state representative who, with his late partner, George Morris, had defended Brandley at his two trials; and private investigator Richard Reyna, a former Montgomery County deputy sheriff who had located most the of the witnesses who testified in the hearing the previous summer. McCloskey had worked alone on his previous cases, but he and Reyna decided to work together on the Brandley case.
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