Framed

Guilty Until Proven Innocent#2

Standing up to the eleven took a lot of courage; it also took a lot out of him. He wasn’t Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men, who managed to bring the others around. This wasn’t Hollywood. This, he felt, was hell. In all his life he had never felt so reviled and lonely. Finally, Judge Robertson accepted the fact that he had a hung jury, called them in, and curtly dismissed them. In earshot of all, including the departing jury, he ordered Clarence to stand up. He then told him he was denying bail pending a retrial, “in that I find proof is evident that a dispassionate jury would not only find you guilty of capital murder but would assess punishment of death.”

As a devastated and beaten Bill Srack left the courthouse, he heard another juror tell the press, “There goes that son of a bitch.” And it wasn’t over. His phone rang incessantly from the minute he arrived home that Saturday. The calls went on for months, a steady stream day and night. The callers would either remain silent, call him a “nigger lover,” or threaten to “get” him. Eventually the calls became less frequent, but the stress he and his wife endured for months was almost unbearable.

Srack’s dissenting vote would also come back to bite him years later. In the late 1980s, he retired from corporate life and applied for a job as purchasing agent for Montgomery County. He was a finalist for the job, and was interviewed by a panel of three judges, one of whom was the Honorable Jim Keeshan, who’d been elevated to a county judgeship in late 1985. Keeshan peppered Srack with questions about his vote at Brandley’s trial seven years earlier. Among other blistering comments and questions, Keeshan questioned Srack’s rationality and ability to get along with people, since he had stubbornly clung to his lone dissenting vote against the wishes of his fellow jurors. Needless to say, Srack did not get the job. Another bitter pill to swallow for voting his conscience.

Fed up with Judge Robertson’s blatant favoritism toward the prosecution, Brown and Morris went after him in a recusal motion. Robertson’s prejudice and bias against Clarence was easy to document, they told him in a hearing, and they indicated that they would file the motion in court. To avoid public embarrassment, two days later Robertson stepped down, just as Judge Alworth had in November before the first trial. The next day, newly elected Judge John Martin was appointed to preside over the second trial. Since he was a criminal defense attorney whom Brown and Morris knew well, both men were happy with his selection. They saw it as a good omen for the new year, 1981, as they began to prepare for the new trial.

Little did they know. It didn’t take long for Judge Martin to show his true colors. In a pre-trial in-chambers conference he scolded Brown like a child, telling him to “shut your damned mouth so Jim Keeshan can talk.”

Then, on the eve of the trial, a crack appeared in the janitors’ story. Brown got a telephone call from John Payne, whose brother Ed lived on the same property as his daughter, Cynthia, who was married to janitor Gary Acreman. Ed told John that when Acreman came home from work the day of the Fergeson murder he was very nervous, pacing up and down. He told Ed that a girl had been murdered at the high school and her clothes were thrown in the school dumpster. This was explosive information, because Acreman had always told police and had testified at the first trial that he didn’t know a girl had been killed at the school, having been dismissed early by Brandley after he’d finished his work at the vocational center. Acreman said he didn’t learn about the murder until he read about it in the Sunday paper. Since police didn’t find her clothes in the dumpster until Monday, how did Acreman know they were there?

But by the time Brown got to speak directly to Ed Payne, Payne had reneged on the story, and refused to discuss it further. When Brown told Keeshan about the call from John Payne, Keeshan just smiled and said he felt “comfortable” with his case and saw no need to interview Ed Payne. Janitors Acreman, Martinez, and Peace gave essentially the same version of events that they had in the first trial. Sessum was reluctant to testify, so neither side elected to call him to the stand.

This time, Keeshan produced a new witness for the prosecution, a black teenager named Danny Taylor.

Taylor told the jury that he had worked at the high school for a short while during the summer of 1980. One day he happened to be with Clarence when a group of white high school girls walked by. Once they passed, Taylor said, Clarence had remarked, “If I got one of them alone, ain’t no tellin’ what I’d do.” Judge Martin allowed this testimony over the vociferous objections of the defense, who contended that it was not true, and that even if it were, it would irreparably impair the all-white jury’s view of the defendant. Clarence huddled with his attorneys and told them that this surprise witness had been fired for threatening their boss with a butcher knife. Although the judge allowed that information in, the damage had been done.

Ranger Styles testified that the reason he never obtained hair and blood samples from janitors Acreman, Sessum, and Martinez was that “they hadn’t been in contact” with the victim, Cheryl Fergeson.

The prosecution hammered home that Brandley must be the killer because he was the only one who had a set of keys to the doors that led from the restroom landing to the auditorium stage. Never mind that the doors were frequently propped open, that others had master keys, or that it had never been determined that the doors were actually locked at the time of the murder. Clarence’s attorney Morris brought in David Harris, the supervisor of the custodial staff, who knew of another set of keys in the possession of Clarence Robinson, a white man who was Brandley’s predecessor supervising the janitors. Those keys had not been returned to the school. Mr. Robinson’s son, James Dexter Robinson, had worked briefly at the school as a janitor until quitting a month before Fergeson’s murder. Neither man had been investigated or considered a suspect.

Attorneys Brown and Morris decided it was not in Clarence’s interest to testify. His timeline had contradicted the testimony of the other janitors at the first trial, and it was their version that had apparently been accepted by that jury. In their summation, the defense focused on the inept and prejudiced police investigation, the unidentified Caucasian hairs found on the victim’s inner thigh, the incongruity of Clarence hiding the body but then wanting Icky to find it, and the likelihood that two people killed Fergeson as suggested by the bruises on her upper arms.

In his summation, Keeshan went so far as to theorize that because Clarence worked part-time at a funeral home, he may have had a fascination with corpses. Keeshan concluded, “We know that whoever did this was not repelled by a dead body. Somebody stayed there and took the clothing off that body. Somebody had intercourse with that body, apparently after she was unconscious or dead.” Early on, when Morris saw where Keeshan was going with this preposterous theory, he strongly objected, but Judge Martin allowed Keeshan to proceed.

By the time he finished, Keeshan had painted Clarence not only as a rapist and killer, but also as a necrophiliac who lusted after young white girls and attacked Cheryl Fergeson with the “bestial rage of an animal.” The racism in his diatribe was flagrant. Keeshan closed by imploring the jury to “help make your community safe and a good place to live. A place where your children and grandchildren can go to a school function without fear that some monstrous person will commit an offense like this.” Shortly after that, the case went to the jury for deliberation. That day, Friday, February 13, 1981, after one hour, the jury reached its verdict: Clarence Lee Brandley was guilty of capital murder.

The next day, the jury was tasked with deciding on a sentence of life imprisonment or death. For this, they heard new testimony. Jo Ellen Parrish, a nineteen-year-old black woman, testified for the prosecution. She said that in March 1979 she was at a club in Dugan called the Doll House. When it closed for the night, Clarence, she claimed, with a sawed-off shotgun stuffed in the back of his pants, forced her to go to his house where he lived by himself.

They were in the back bedroom when her boyfriend angrily and loudly banged on the door looking for her. Clarence had his hands around her neck choking her, she explained, so she couldn’t cry out. Her account of what happened once her boyfriend left was confusing and contradictory. She said Clarence tried to force her to have sex, but “nothin’ happened.” Then he cooked her a meal and “wasn’t mean” to her. At some point, she said, she ran out of the house wearing only her underwear and a housecoat that belonged to Clarence, and went to a friend’s house. The next day she went home and explained her absence to her boyfriend by accusing Clarence of trying to rape her. He took her to the police and she made a statement.

No charges were ever filed concerning Parrish’s allegations, suggesting that the police did not find them credible. But now, in the punishment phase of the trial, her testimony was damaging. In the wake of Parrish’s accusation, the police had gone to Clarence’s house and retrieved an inoperable rusty old shotgun that his mother had found years before. Clarence pled guilty to possession of a prohibited weapon and was still serving out his sentence of a three-year probation, which did not leave a good impression. For purposes of cross-examination the defense asked the DA to produce Parrish’s statement and another one she’d made when Clarence was arrested in August 1980. Keeshan said that his office could not find them, giving the prosecution the last word.

Keeshan concluded by telling the jury that what was done to Fergeson was “an act of a beast.”

It took the jury only forty-five minutes to decide on death.

In March 1981, sheriff’s deputies transported Clarence to the Ellis Unit Death Row House in Huntsville. He was several months shy of his thirtieth birthday. “Scared” is inadequate to describe how he felt. Being confined in the county jail during the trials is one thing, but death row is quite another.

He was immediately stripped, shorn of all his hair, and issued an all-white set of clothes, the uniform for death row prisoners. The only thing that differentiated him from the others was the number 680 on his clothes, which became his name. His cell, which was nine feet by three feet, had a bed and toilet. The Bible became his constant companion, a refuge from which he drew inspiration and strength. He missed his family terribly, especially his mother, who was heartbroken over her son’s fate. He was particularly close with his twin sister, Florence, and his younger brothers Tim and Ozell. The four of them had lived with Minnie Ola when she divorced their father and moved back to Dugan from Houston.

While Clarence was in jail, his lawyers fought on. Don Brown submitted a motion for a new trial, arguing that they had testimony from new witnesses. Although Judge Martin denied most of Brown’s proposed witnesses, he did allow—over the strenuous objections of Keeshan—Oscar Johnson, the owner of the funeral home where Clarence had worked. Johnson told the judge that Clarence’s work there had nothing to do with dead bodies. He performed menial tasks. Corpses were solely Johnson’s province. Brown then argued to the judge that Keeshan knew that, but told the jury the opposite, trying to make Clarence seem like a necrophiliac. Regardless, Brandley’s new trial motion was denied, so the next legal step was an appeal to Texas’s highest court for criminal matters, the Court of Criminal Appeals, aka the CCA, for a new trial.

The next crack in the prosecution’s case emerged in the spring of 1981. The Houston City Magazine published a feature story that questioned the conduct of the police and prosecution as well as the soundness of the jury’s verdict. Included in the story was an interview with Icky Peace, who offered explosive information. For the first time he revealed that the Conroe police officer, in Icky’s presence, told Clarence that since he was “the nigger, he was elected.” Icky said he told Keeshan about this, and Keeshan told him to keep his mouth shut because it could jeopardize the case against Brandley. Icky also admitted that he lied at the Brandley trials when he denied that anyone had threatened him into giving incriminating testimony against Brandley. This confirmed what he had originally told a Brandley defense investigator, Lorna Hubbell, shortly after Clarence’s arrest.

Icky had told Hubbell that when he gave his affidavit right after the crime, he didn’t know what it said because he couldn’t read or write. The police scared him into signing it anyway, Ranger Styles choking him with the diabetic chain that hung around his neck to make sure he stayed in line. Despite telling the reporter, though, Icky refused to provide the defense with an affidavit describing the abuse.

As the calendar year 1981 dragged on, court personnel, particularly Peggy Stevens, the district clerk in charge of the court records, stymied Brown and Morris in their attempts to obtain the trial exhibits—the victim’s bloodstained clothes, the hairs found on the victim’s body, crime scene photographs, and so on—that were required for the appeal to the CCA for a new trial. Toward the end of the year the Brandley family, frustrated with the slow pace of the appeal and not understanding that the delays were no fault of Brown and Morris, decided to seek new attorneys. They succeeded in raising $25,000 to retain Houston attorney Percy Foreman, who had made his name representing high-profile clients such as James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Brown and Morris initially felt sidelined. They had worked hard on Brandley’s behalf through two trials on an almost pro bono basis. But their belief in Clarence’s innocence was such that they agreed to stay on and work with the Foreman firm, with an assurance from Foreman that he would allocate the fee equitably.

Courthouse insiders knew why Brown had not yet received the trial exhibits, and it deeply disturbed a few of them. One by one, independent of one another, three contacted Brown and secretly met with him to tell him what was happening. They could no longer remain silent, despite their fear that they could lose their jobs if discovered. The first to come forward was Frank Robin, newly working as Jim Keeshan’s assistant DA. He nervously told Brown on a confidential basis that the key exhibits had disappeared from court reporter Mary Johnson’s office while she was preparing the trial transcripts several weeks earlier. Worse yet, Judge Martin, DA Keeshan, and Peggy Stevens were working together to cover it up and not tell the defense. If the disappearance ever came to light, Keeshan was going to say that a janitor had mistakenly thrown out the exhibit box.

Soon after Brandley was sent to death row, Janet Dial, Judge Martin’s secretary, resigned. She didn’t like the coziness developing between her boss and Keeshan. Almost every morning of the second Brandley trial, she would see Keeshan go into Judge Martin’s office and huddle with him behind closed doors. This didn’t sit right with her.

Not long after Brown heard from Assistant District Attorney Robin, he got a phone call from Janet, who told him that court reporter Mary Johnson wanted to meet with him in secret in a remote place near Lake Conroe. She wanted Janet to be there as well. Brown brought his law partner Morris and the four of them talked in Mary’s car. The attorneys felt like they were meeting with Deep Throat, the informant of Watergate fame.

A frightened Mary told her story with the stipulation that the lawyers never reveal her to be their source. She said that when she’d arrived for work on Monday morning, January 11, 1982, the exhibit box had disappeared over the weekend. Scared to death that she would get blamed and recognizing the importance of the disappearance, she immediately told her boss, Judge Martin. Much to her surprise he instructed her not to tell a soul, especially the defense, because “they would just make a big deal about it.” She said Keeshan had the keys to her office; one night when she was working late she heard the key in the door and in walked Keeshan and his investigator Charlie Ray. Surprised to see her, they made some excuse and hastily retreated.

She also knew that Keeshan was going to blame the disappearance on a janitor if they got caught, which was ridiculous because janitors were forbidden to enter her office. She did her own cleaning.

Once Mary had finished her account, Janet told the attorneys that Judge Martin and DA Keeshan had met before each day’s proceedings during the Brandley trial. Mary piped up that she also knew about them; she’d heard them “rehearsing rulings and objections so they could get their way in court.”

Brown and Morris had heard enough. Without citing their sources, they dropped the hammer on Judge Martin, just as they had with his predecessors, Judge Alworth and Judge Robertson. They drew up a motion for recusal and presented its contents to him privately in his chambers, primarily focusing on his collusion with Keeshan to cover up the disappearance of the trial exhibits. One week later, Judge Martin announced to the local paper that he was departing the Brandley case because he had “personal knowledge of some missing exhibits.” The deeply corrupt affair was thus minimized so that he could avoid public humiliation.

A fourth Conroe judge took over the case, Judge Lynn Coker. The first thing Judge Coker did was deny a defense request for a hearing to determine the truth behind the disappearance of the trial exhibits. This denial protected his fellow jurist John Martin from scrutiny concerning his role in covering up the missing evidence.

In January 1983, Don Brown filed the appeal to the CCA. It detailed ongoing judicial and prosecutorial misconduct as well as the police ineptness that led to the conviction of an innocent man. He filed it alone, as his partner George Morris was ill and soon to die of lung cancer.

Two long years later, in May 1985, the CCA denied the appeal for a new trial. The decision affirmed the correctness of the prosecution of Clarence Brandley and the conduct of Judge Martin and DA Keeshan.

The next legal step for the prosecution was to set an execution date. Even though Judge Martin had been forced off the case three years earlier, he elbowed Judge Coker aside and insisted that he be the one to set the date. This was his revenge; it was payback time. As a way to demonstrate his appreciation for her twenty years of devoted service to courthouse administration, he picked District Court Clerk Peggy Stevens’s birthday, June 16, 1986, as the date for Clarence to die. Nonetheless, Clarence got a stay of execution when his defense team developed exculpatory evidence that pointed the finger of guilt at a new suspect. This led to an evidentiary hearing in the summer of 1986, in which Clarence’s lawyers presented evidence that they felt sufficient to justify a new trial.

By this time Mike DeGeurin, Percy Foreman’s law partner, was Clarence’s lead attorney, working with the continued assistance of Don Brown. DeGeurin was smart, talented, likeable, and highly regarded by the legal community. He had great people skills and could convince witnesses to tell him what they knew, both on the stand and in person.

Things had begun to unravel for the prosecution when DeGeurin received a phone call from a Conroe attorney, W. B. Etheridge, informing him that his client, Brenda Medina, had recently told him that her former boyfriend and the father of her child, James Dexter Robinson, had told her on the day of Fergeson’s death that he had killed a girl at the high school. He had hidden her body well enough to give him time to get out of town early the next morning and return to his hometown of Greenville, South Carolina.

Etheridge told DeGeurin that he had taken Brenda to see the new DA, Peter Speers (who had succeeded Keeshan), with her story. Speers had failed to inform DeGuerin of this, which legally he was required to do. This was egregious misconduct: Speers had ignored another man’s confession to a crime for which someone else was about to die; he had not disclosed this confession to the condemned man’s attorney; and he had made no attempt to investigate its veracity. DeGeurin was furious.

Brenda testified at the evidentiary hearing, telling the same story to the presiding Judge Coker. James Robinson testified as well, having been persuaded by Richard Reyna, a defense investigator, to come to Conroe to “clear his name.”

Robinson had worked at Conroe High as a janitor until July 29, 1980. He admitted on the witness stand that he had told Brenda he’d killed a girl, but that was months before Fergeson was killed, he said. It was just a story he made up to scare Brenda during an argument. He also claimed on the witness stand that he left Conroe for home on August 6, seventeen days before Fergeson was killed.

He agreed to take a polygraph. The polygrapher testified that when he asked Robinson if he’d killed Fergeson, he remained silent for four and a half minutes before replying, “Well, I could have done it and forgot,” before quickly adding, “No, I’m not that kind of person. I’m innocent.”

Gary Acreman surprised the defense when he testified that James Robinson did come to the high school the morning of August 23. He said James just popped his head in and told Acreman, “Don’t work too hard.” Acreman said he had never told anyone this because “it slipped my mind.” Ed Payne, testifying through a voice box after losing his larynx to cancer, affirmed what he had told his brother, John, during the Brandley trials. That is, that Acreman came home from school on the day in question, very nervous, and told him that a girl was killed that morning at the high school and that he saw someone throw the girl’s clothes in the dumpster.

John Sessum, one of the three janitors working together on the day of the murder, testified for the first time that Acreman had talked to the girl for “a good three or four minutes” before she went into the restroom. Then Acreman had disappeared for thirty to forty minutes after Clarence sent them to the vocational building. Sessum said that Acreman, on the way to the first trial, told him not to say that he had spoken to the girl. Sessum then added that he was afraid of the Texas Ranger, who’d threatened him with jail at the first trial if he changed his story from what was in his affidavit following the walk-through.

Believing that their witnesses had held up well at the evidentiary hearing and feeling cautiously optimistic, the defense was shocked and bitterly disappointed when on December 22, 1986, the CCA again denied a new trial for Clarence. The Court agreed with Judge Coker’s findings that the witnesses for the defense were not credible. Case closed. With that, on February 6, 1987, Judge Coker set a new execution date of March 26, 1987.

That was when I got involved. Clarence’s brother, Ozell Brandley, saw me on The Today Show in November 1986 with Nate Walker, a man Centurion had just exonerated. He asked me to come to Houston and help the defense team free his brother, who was soon to be executed. After I read the record of the case, Ozell introduced me to DeGeurin and a new lawyer at the firm, Paul Nugent. After several hours of discussion in their office, they invited me to join the defense team in its last-ditch effort to save Clarence’s life. Nugent put me up in an apartment above his home’s garage, and DeGeurin loaned me his mother’s old Chevy.

With three weeks to go, investigator Richard Reyna and I went to work, me dressed in black, wearing my priestly white collar, and Richard in neatly pressed jeans and cowboy boots. On March 7 we pulled up to Sessum’s trailer on the outskirts of Conroe. We figured if Robinson and Acreman had murdered Cheryl Fergeson, Sessum was an eyewitness, and maybe he would be willing to talk as the execution date loomed. Over the next ten days, in bits and pieces, he did tell us who killed Cheryl and how it happened.

It had been Acreman and Robinson.

Sessum recounted that he and Martinez had been at the bottom of the steps and had heard Cheryl’s screams for help as Acreman and Robinson dragged her into the bathroom near the top of the stairs. He had been having nightmares ever since about what he’d witnessed and felt tremendously guilty for not having stopped the attack. “I was the one who caused her death. I could have saved her if I went up there,” he lamented. But now he was resolved: “I let one innocent girl go to her death, I’m not gonna let an innocent man go to his. What do you want me to do?” On St. Patrick’s Day he told the story in a video statement.

On that same day, Richard and I caught up with Acreman. When we told him that Sessum had implicated him in the murder of Fergeson, he began to shake uncontrollably and agreed to give a video statement as well. In it, he absolved himself of any involvement and placed the blame entirely on Robinson. Both Sessum and Acreman exonerated Clarence, stating that he showed up ten minutes after the girl had been raped and killed.

DeGeurin and Nugent submitted the videos to Judge Coker and on March 20, six days before the scheduled execution, Coker reluctantly ordered its stay. Two weeks later Sessum courageously went on 60 Minutes and told what he had witnessed to Harry Reasoner and the nation. By that time, Acreman had recanted his video at the urging of the DA’s investigators, although he still maintained that he saw Robinson throw the girl’s clothes in the dumpster. Ignoring Sessum’s statement and Acreman’s information, the DA’s office refused to admit that they’d been wrong. Speers remained bound and determined to keep Brandley’s conviction intact.

For the first time, however, the CCA ruled in Brandley’s favor, granting him another evidentiary hearing, and appointed a new judge to hear the case. The new judge was Perry Pickett, retired after thirty years on the bench in West Texas’s Midland County and now serving as a CCA visiting judge appointed to hear special cases. Pickett was a tough and courageous judge who had escaped from a Nazi POW camp during World War II and hid behind enemy lines in Italy until the Allies liberated his location. The first thing he did was hold a change-of-venue hearing in the Conroe courthouse. He took testimony from a wide assortment of people, black and white, including the heroic Bill Srack, two prominent and eloquent black Conroe church ministers, and the gutsy Janet Dial. Each told a story of racism and cronyism plaguing the justice system in Conroe, currently and historically.

At the end of the hearing, Judge Pickett announced that “there exists here a volatile and explosive situation not conducive to the fair administration of justice. The ends of justice dictate that this case be transferred to Galveston County.” He ordered a new evidentiary hearing to begin in one week, on September 28, 1987. With that, the courtroom erupted in cheers, the African Americans in attendance letting out long-suppressed feelings. They knew that something right and good had just occurred for people of color, maybe for the first time in that courthouse. And Clarence Brandley finally could breathe a little easier as his case departed Conroe and headed for Galveston.

Judge Pickett’s evidentiary hearing covered every aspect of the case. For two weeks in a Galveston courthouse he took testimony from forty-six witnesses in order to determine if Brandley had received a fair trial and whether there was sufficient new evidence to give him a new trial.

Sessum told his story describing Acreman and Robinson grabbing the girl and dragging her into the bathroom. Ed and John Payne told of Acreman’s suspicious behavior when he returned home the day of the crime. Three new witnesses who worked at the City Cab Company with Acreman told of discussing the high school murder in the office one day, prompting Acreman to suddenly exclaim that Clarence didn’t do it and he knew who did. Two others told the judge they saw Robinson in Conroe three days before the murder. It was established that the blood on the victim’s shirt was type A, and that both Robinson and Acreman had type A blood. Cheryl Bradford, a volleyball player at the tournament, testified that she saw two white men fitting the description of Acreman and Robinson briskly exit the gym door twenty to thirty minutes after she saw Cheryl in the hallway on her way to the restroom. This same witness got “chills” when she saw the photo of Robinson on 60 Minutes, believing that he was one of the men she saw hurrying to exit the gym.

On November 19, 1987, Judge Pickett issued his opinion, recommending to the CCA that it grant Clarence a new trial based on his findings of fact. He stated: “The Court became convinced that Clarence Lee Brandley did not receive a fair trial and did not commit the crime for which he now resides on death row.” He went on: “The testimony at the evidentiary hearing unequivocally establishes that Gary Acreman and James Dexter Robinson are prime suspects and probably were responsible for the death of Cheryl Lee Fergeson.” He lamented the disappearance of the trial exhibits containing the Caucasian hairs found near her vagina—removing the possibility of comparing these to Robinson’s and Acreman’s hair. Pickett found highly suspect Keeshan’s testimony that he didn’t order Acreman or the other white janitors to provide hair or blood samples because it would have been a “needless imposition.” Nor was he impressed with Ranger Styles’s response to the same question: “Let’s say I didn’t do it, and it wasn’t done; and why it wasn’t done I don’t know.”

Citing credible details of testimony by Mary Johnson, Janet Dial, and Frank Robin, Judge Pickett found that Judge Martin and DA Keeshan had conducted constant secret ex parte discussions prior to Clarence’s daily trial proceedings, and conspired to cover up the disappearance of the trial exhibits. He characterized the testimony of Judge Martin and Peggy Stevens, in which they denied this, as “not truthful” and “not credible.” Mary Johnson paid a heavy price for her courageous and honest testimony against her boss, Judge Martin. He fired her soon after Judge Pickett’s opinion was issued. Additionally, she became persona non grata in the courthouse, where former colleagues considered her to be disloyal to the Conroe judiciary. Her career as a court reporter in Montgomery County was over.

Judge Pickett came down hard on the investigative tactics and mindset of Ranger Styles. Icky Peace and Sessum related Styles’s threats and his intimidation of them to get their false testimony. Both testified that they were still afraid of him. Sessum was threatened with jail if he didn’t cooperate after the walk-through. Icky spoke of Styles visiting his home one night and taking him to a local police station. Styles kept him there until 1:30 a.m. , all the while roughing him up and choking him with the neck chain Icky wore. When Icky had complained to the DA’s office, they told him he was “hallucinating” and “imagining things.”