Framed

Guilty Until Proven Innocent#3

For his part, Sam Martinez stuck with his testimony, telling Judge Pickett that he, Martinez, had “got it straight” the first time—meaning after the walk-through with Ranger Styles. Martinez never admitted that he saw what Sessum saw, even though he was with Sessum when the girl was assaulted. The reason may have been that Martinez’s father was a janitor at the courthouse; Martinez may have wanted to protect his father’s job by not going up against the powerful Keeshan.

The judge made it clear that Styles had operated with “blind focus” by arresting Brandley even before he’d begun his investigation. This had led to “the inescapable conclusion that the investigation was conducted not to solve the crime, but to convict the Petitioner.” The judge added that “the state of mind that he [Styles] had already gotten his man precluded him from following any leads that might prove his preconception wrong.”

The Court also took evidence on the racist climate that pervaded the prosecution of Clarence, including the entire investigation and post-trial proceedings. He referenced the fact that the Montgomery County prosecutor’s office recommended in its internal manual that when a black person was on trial, prosecutors were to strike all prospective black jurors during jury selection. Bill Srack described his harrowing experience as a juror and its aftermath. Others described the frequent use of the term “nigger” by police and prosecutors, and the racism rampant in the courthouse.

In conclusion, Judge Pickett stated, “In the thirty years this court has presided over matters in the judicial system, no case has presented a more shocking scenario of the effects of racial prejudice, perjured testimony, witness intimidation, a predetermined investigation, and public officials who, for whatever motives, lost sight of what is right and just.” He then recommended to the CCA that it order a new trial for Mr. Brandley.

—

In Texas, only the CCA has the authority to vacate a conviction and order a new trial. It took the CCA two more years before issuing, on December 13, 1989, an opinion that affirmed all of Judge Pickett’s findings of fact. It ordered a new trial for Clarence, ruling that the “contrived” investigation resulted in a “subversion of Justice” and that the prosecution presented “false” and “inherently unreliable” testimony by suppressing evidence that favored the defendant. Nevertheless, DA Speers refused to give in and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. His appeal was rejected without comment.

With this, Speers decided not to retry Brandley, and all charges were dismissed. On January 23, 1990, Clarence emerged from death row an exonerated and free man.

By that time his case had become a cause célèbre. His freedom was celebrated not only by his mother, children, siblings, and a legion of supporters, both black and white, but also by the print and broadcast media nationwide.

Clarence went on to start up a storefront church and serve as its pastor. When he couldn’t sustain a living this way, he tried his hand at a variety of pursuits until finally getting a job as a mechanic with Houston’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. There he remained for thirteen years. He eventually moved back to a small Montgomery County town and retired to a quiet life with his longtime devoted companion, Dorothy Moore. On September 2, 2018, three weeks shy of his sixty-seventh birthday, Clarence passed away from pneumonia.

Clarence was never compensated for his wrongful imprisonment on death row. He initiated lawsuits against the authorities responsible for his false conviction, but a judge dismissed them, saying those agencies had sovereign immunity. In 2011 he was denied compensation under the Texas compensation statute for false convictions. The fund claimed that his application was made too late. To add insult to injury, Texas ordered him to pay $25,000 for child support payments in arrears during his nine and a half years of false imprisonment. His weekly wages were garnished for many years.

An interesting footnote to the case is the reappearance of the trial exhibits. When Charlie Ray, the former investigator for DA Keeshan, died in January 2018, his family discovered a box of the Brandley trial exhibits in their garage. Ray had been with Keeshan when they entered Mary Johnson’s locked office on the evening she was still at work. The exhibits disappeared from her office on a weekend shortly thereafter. The exhibit box was turned over to current DA Brett Ligon. To this day we do not know what was in the box and what happened to its contents. What we do know is that Ligon called in the Texas Rangers and the Conroe police department—the very agencies responsible for the miscarriage of justice that sent Brandley to death row—to look through that evidence and see if there was anything that could be retested.

I was privileged to be one of the eulogists at Clarence’s memorial service. I told the attendees that he was one of the bravest men I had ever known. He never panicked as the clock ticked close to his date of execution with no apparent progress in his case. He stood calm and strong in the face of almost certain death for a crime he did not commit. He came within a week of that fate and accepted it with a quiet dignity and courage that inspired all of us working feverishly to save him. His coolness under fire steadied us all.

Clarence was a good and kind man. A decent man. He was humble and reserved. If he had any hate or anger in his heart for those that did him wrong, I never saw or sensed it. From the beginning to the very end, after all the injustices he suffered during his imprisonment and in the years that followed, he never wore them on his sleeve. He was loved by all of us who came to know him.

—

Acreman and Robinson have never been charged for the rape and murder of Cheryl Fergeson.