The court granted permission to test some of the items, excluding the bloody bandana found near the Mortons’ house. In 2005, the Innocence Project and the law firm, Raley & Bowick, filed a motion requesting additional DNA testing on items of evidence from the crime scene. On February 17, 1987, Michael Morton was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. The prosecution presented no witnesses or physical evidence that tied Morton to the crime, but they hypothesized that he had beaten Christine to death because she refused to have sex with him on his birthday. Evidence concerning Eric’s eyewitness account, the green van, and Christine Morton’s credit card were all absent from the records given to the judge.
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The defense raised this concern with the trial judge, who ordered the prosecution to turn over all reports by Sergeant Woods so that he could conduct a thorough review. When defense attorneys learned that the prosecution did not plan to call Sergeant Don Woods, the chief investigator in the case, to the stand, they suspected that the prosecution might be concealing potentially exculpatory evidence. According to Morton’s defense lawyers, none of this evidence was turned over to them at the trial. Police records also indicated that Christine Morton’s missing credit card had possibly been recovered in a San Antonio, Texas jewelry store, and that a San Antonio officer stated that he could identify the woman who had attempted to use the card. Upon questioning the Mortons’ neighbors, police were told that a man had repeatedly parked a green van on the street behind the Mortons’ house and walked off into a nearby wooded area. Eric had told his grandmother that the murderer was not Michael but a “monster.” He described the crime scene and murder in detail, and specifically said that his “Daddy was not home” when the murder occurred.
The day after Christine’s body was found, police recovered a bloody bandana found at a construction site located about 100 yards from the Morton home.Ĭhristine’s mother told the police that the Mortons’ son, Eric, had been present during the murder. The sheets upon which she lay were stained with what was later determined to be semen. She had been bludgeoned to death with what appeared to have been a weapon made of wood. Later that morning, Christine’s body was found in their bed. The next morning, Morton left a note on the bathroom vanity expressing disappointment that his wife had declined to be intimate with him the night before, but ended the note with the words, “I love you.” He then left for work at about 5:30 a.m., arriving soon after. In August 1986, Michael Morton celebrated his birthday at a restaurant with his wife, Christine, and their three-year-old son. DNA evidence implicated another man, who has also been tied to a similar Texas murder that occurred two years after the murder of Morton’s wife. Michael Morton’s life, however, took a horrific turn that same year: his wife was murdered in their bed, and he was convicted of that murder, despite any evidence pointing to his guilt and tremendous evidence showing his innocence.Īfter spending nearly 25 years in prison for the murder of his wife, Morton was released on October 4, 2011, and officially exonerated in December 2011. As he says of his family, “I’ve often felt how almost excruciatingly average we were, a chunk out of a demographic study: the house, the yard, the kid, the car. In 1986, Michael Morton was a supermarket manager in Texas and a husband and father.
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