Anthony Graves Press Conference 
Justice Is Served 
Innocence Found
Why did Anthony Graves spend eighteen years behind bars—twelve of them on death row—for a crime he did not commit?
Eva Hobdy says: I would like for the State of Texas to do the right thing with all due haste. And if should come to pass that the right thing is not done, we the people should march, protest, and fight to put it to a vote. This man was harmed and we must rigth what we can as much as we can. Texans we can do this, we must do this for him and for us. (February 16th, 2011 at 10:14pm)
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“We’re mad. I’m not going to lie,” he continued matter-of-factly. “This could have ended ten years ago, when Carter was executed. We’ve had to relive this every day since then. I’ve seen Graves hundreds of times in court, and every time, I thought I was looking at the man who murdered my children.”
Thirteen days after Graves walked out of the Burleson County jail, I visited him at his brother’s apartment, on a leafy, shaded street dotted with genteel old homes south of Brenham’s main square. I had talked to him briefly at the defense’s press conference, held the day after his release in Houston, where more than fifty reporters and cameramen had squeezed into Katherine Scardino’s office to listen to what he had to say. Under the glare of the television lights, he had been remarkably poised. (“I never hesitated,” he explained of his decision in 2008 to turn down a life sentence in exchange for a guilty plea. “I said, ‘You either free me or kill me, but I’m standing on what’s right.’ ”) Still, it was a shock to see him that afternoon standing at the front door. My last visit to the apartment had been in June, to interview his brother Arthur Curry, back when Graves was still facing the possibility of another death sentence. Now he was home, dressed in a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt and jeans, a brand-new cell phone in his pocket. Gone were the handcuffs, the isolation, the fear of never being believed. It was a beautiful autumn day; a breeze rustled the oak trees above him, and he was free to go wherever he pleased. “Crazy, I know,” he said, breaking into a grin as I walked up the driveway and shook my head in amazement. “It’s crazy.”
He had just finished making himself a breakfast of sausage, grits, and eggs over easy: the second meal he had cooked in eighteen years. As we sat and talked in Arthur’s living room, he told me about his new life. “I’m a vagabond,” he said, explaining that he was living out of a suitcase, moving back and forth between his brother’s place, Cásarez’s house in Houston, and his sister’s home in Pflugerville, north of Austin. He had no car, no job, and only a few hundred dollars to his name. His first order of business was to get a new driver’s license, “so I can prove who I am,” he said. Once he had his ID and some spending money, he wanted to visit the Northeast, where he planned to move. “I have a friend in Boston who wants to help me get my life together,” he said. Although he hoped to seek compensation from the state—in theory, he is entitled to $1.4 million under the Tim Cole Act, a state law that grants ex-inmates $80,000 for each year they were wrongfully incarcerated—his odds of actually receiving money looked slim. The wording of the court order that resulted in his release referred only to the lack of evidence against him, not his “actual innocence,” a legal standard that must be met to receive compensation. The state comptroller’s office will likely render a decision by early 2011.
As we sat and talked, Graves seemed no different than when I had met him at the Burleson County jail—calm, self-possessed, and extraordinarily normal considering everything he had been through. But there were signs that his reentry had not been easy. I noticed that the blinds in the living room were half-drawn and the TV was tuned to the news, as if he were trying to approximate, in some small way, his previous surroundings. “I’m still adjusting,” he said. “I was by myself for so long that it’s hard to be around too many people right now.” Even visiting the grocery store or being at a large family gathering was overwhelming. Sleeping had been difficult, he explained, because he had become accustomed to the thin plastic mattress that covered his steel bunk at the county jail, where he had balled up his clothes into a makeshift pillow. “The first night I was out, I tossed and turned because I was on a real bed with all these pillows and a ceiling fan to keep me cool. My body wasn’t used to that kind of comfort.”
The previous night, he said, he had invited his sons over to watch football, and they had shared a beer together. His three boys—who were twelve, eight, and seven years old at the time of his arrest—were now grown men with families of their own. “Anthony is thirty, Terrance is twenty-seven, and Alex is twenty-six,” he said, gesturing toward family photos from which he was conspicuously absent. “I missed their ball games, the births of their children, all the big moments in their lives. So we can’t pick up where we left off. I don’t feel comfortable coming in and trying to play the role of dad. I’m just trying to be a good friend.”
I asked him about Sebesta’s comments to the Brenham Banner-Press a day after his release, in which the former district attorney—in a front-page story titled “Sebesta Sticking to Original Claim: Guilty”—said he remained certain that Graves had taken part in the Davis murders. To make his point, Sebesta disclosed that Graves had failed a 2008 polygraph exam. Polygraphs are not admissible in court because of their unreliability, but Graves explained to me that he had agreed to take one because he was confident it would clear him—and because special prosecutor Patrick Batchelor had promised to drop all charges if he passed the test. (Batchelor is best known for his prosecution of Cameron Todd Willingham, whose 2004 execution has come under scrutiny as new forensic science techniques have since called his guilt into question.)
Graves vividly remembered the day when he was driven to Dallas for the polygraph. The examiner, he recalled, spent seven hours with him before actually administering the test. “He would make small talk with me for a few minutes, walk out of the room, stay gone for about thirty minutes or an hour, then come back in and ask me another couple questions,” he told me. “This started at nine o’clock in the morning, and he didn’t give me the test until four o’clock that afternoon. That whole time, I’m sitting there waiting to take a test that could give me back my freedom. So by the time four o’clock rolled around, I was no calm, cool, collected person.” In hindsight, he said, he was cynical about the purpose of the polygraph. “When they told me I had failed, I knew it was a game, just another game,” he said. As for Sebesta’s publicizing it, Graves shook his head and smiled. “I think he’s on a sinking ship by himself,” he said. “To be honest with you, Charles Sebesta is the last thing on my mind right now.”
To listen to him that morning was to marvel at the fact that he had survived eighteen years of “hell,” as he succinctly described it, with his dignity, integrity, and mental health intact. He was hopeful about the future, not bitter about the past. But personally, as an observer, I couldn’t help but feel angry. As we talked, I shared with him what had been nagging at me ever since Siegler had publicly denounced Sebesta. To anyone familiar with Graves’s case, the notion that just one person was at fault for the wrong that had been done to him was too simple a story line. The truth, I thought, was much worse. Absent from Siegler’s critique was any mention of Ranger Coffman, whose flawed investigation had led to Graves’s arrest. (Rick Ojeda, an ex–FBI agent who was hired by the defense to reexamine the case, told me it was “by far the sloppiest, and most blatantly biased, investigation I’ve seen in twenty-two years of law enforcement.”) Also overlooked were the appellate judges who rubber-stamped his conviction for twelve years; his new trial judge, Reva Towslee-Corbett, who ruled that Carter’s perjured testimony could be entered into evidence and read to the jury at his retrial; Batchelor, who pursued a death sentence even though he had so little solid evidence that he offered to dismiss all charges if Graves passed a polygraph; and assistant attorney general Lance Kutnick, who relied on junk science (a “scent lineup” conducted by now disgraced dog handler Keith Pikett) to try and build a case against him.
The reinvestigation had left me with more questions than answers, I told Graves. Why had Batchelor and Kutnick, who jointly handled the case for three years, not examined the evidence with the rigor that Siegler had? Why had Coffman—who went on to serve as the chief of the Texas Rangers until his retirement, in 2009—not spoken up after Cookie’s indictment? Why had Coffman given conflicting accounts under oath as recently as 2007 regarding whether or not Carter had told him that he had acted alone?
Graves smiled as I grew more and more animated, citing problems with his case that I wished Siegler had delved into more deeply. He, by contrast, seemed remarkably at peace. And so I had to ask him: How was he not consumed with anger? “I’ll get angry if people don’t take what happened to me seriously enough to push for change,” he said. “I want prosecutors to be held accountable. But I’ve given too many years, and too much of my energy, to being angry, and I won’t let negativity defeat me. The people who did this to me, they have to look at themselves in the mirror. But me, I have to live.”
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