Техаста әділетсіз айыпталған адамның трагедиясы

Person wrongly convicted of murder in Texas
Clarence Lee Brandley (September 24, 1951 – September 2, 2018) was an American man who was wrongly convicted of the rape and murder of Cheryl Dee Fergeson in 1981 and sentenced to death. Brandley was working as a janitor supervisor at Conroe High School in Conroe, Texas when the 16 year old student Fergeson was a visiting athlete from Bellville, Texas. Her body was found in the loft above the school auditorium by custodians Clarence Brandley and Henry "Icky" Peace.

A total of five custodians were working at the school that day: Brandley, Peace, Gary Acreman, Sam Martinez, and John Henry Sessum. All of the men were classified as white except Brandley, who was African American. Efn|Martinez was Mexican American, but sources describe him as white. The other three custodians claimed to have seen the victim enter a girls' restroom near the school gymnasium, and soon to have seen Brandley walking toward the restroom with an armload of toilet paper. They claimed that they told Brandley there was a girl in the restroom, and that he replied that he was taking the toilet paper to the boys' restroom. They said that they did not see him again until about 45 minutes later, after a search had begun for the missing student. The fourth custodian, Peace, subsequently added that Brandley was insistent on immediately searching the loft. When they found Fergeson's body, Peace said that Brandley calmly checked for a pulse and then notified the authorities. All four said that only Brandley had keys to the auditorium where the body was found.

Before an all white Montgomery County grand jury on August 28, 1980, five days after the crime, Brandley professed innocence. Although he contradicted his white co workers in several respects, he acknowledged that he had disappeared for perhaps 30 minutes about the time the murder was believed to have occurred. He said he was in the custodian's office smoking and listening to music alone. He also testified that a number of other persons had master keys that would open the auditorium. He noted that doors near the stage usually were propped open with a two by four.

Brandley was tried in December 1980 before an all white jury. The prosecution's case was based entirely on circumstantial evidence and witness statements, as there was no physical evidence linking Brandley to the crime. One juror found the evidence insufficient to establish guilt and refused to convict, forcing Judge Sam Robertson, Jr. to declare a mistrial. The name of the holdout juror, William Shreck, was leaked, and he received anonymous harassing telephone calls. One man, whose anonymous communication was monitored by police, threatened Shreck, "We're going to get you, nigger lover."

Brandley's second trial in February 1981 was held before a different judge, but also had an all white jury. The prosecution did not call John Sessum, one of the original witnesses. Later it was discovered that the prosecution had decided against calling Sessum because he no longer was willing to support the other custodians' versions of events. The prosecution threatened him with a charge of perjury, but he still refused to comply. The prosecution presented Danny Taylor, who had not testified previously. A junior at the school at the time of the crime, he had briefly also worked as a custodian there but was fired before the murder. Taylor claimed that Brandley had once commented – after a group of white female students walked past them – "If I got one of them alone, ain't no tellin' what I might do." Dr. Joseph Jachimczyk, medical examiner for Harris County, testified that the victim had died of strangulation. He said that a belt belonging to Brandley was consistent with the ligature used in the crime. In closing argument, District attorney James Keeshan said that Brandley had a second job at a funeral home and suggested that he may have been a necrophiliac and raped Fergeson after she was dead. This, despite the fact that Keeshan had a report stating that Brandley did only odd jobs at the funeral home and had never been involved in the preparation of bodies for burial. The defense objected to Keeshan's remark as inflammatory, but Judge John Martin overruled the objection.

Eleven months after Brandley was convicted and sentenced to death, his appellate lawyers discovered that exculpatory evidence had disappeared while in prosecution custody. This included a Caucasian pubic hair and other hairs recovered from Fergeson's body that were neither hers nor Brandley's. Also missing were photographs taken of Brandley when he was arrested on the day of the crime. These showed that he was not wearing the belt that the prosecution claimed had been the murder weapon. The missing evidence was all the more troubling combined with the pretrial destruction of the spermatozoa. Appellate briefs stressed the willful destruction and disappearance of potentially exculpatory evidence in Brandley's case, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and death sentence without mentioning this issue. "No reasonable hypothesis is presented by the evidence to even suggest that someone other than [Brandley] committed the crime", said the court. Brandley V. Texas, 691 S. W.2d 699 (1985). Brenda Medina, who lived in the nearby town of Cut and Shoot, Texas, saw a television broadcast about the Brandley case. Saying she had been unaware of the case until then, she told a neighbor that her former live in boyfriend, James Dexter Robinson, had told her in 1980 that he had committed such a crime. Robinson had previously worked as a janitor at Conroe High School. Medina said she had not believed Robinson then, but with the current publicity, she did. At the neighbor's suggestion, Medina consulted an attorney, who took her to see District Attorney Peter Speers III. (He had succeeded Keeshan after the latter ascended to the Texas District Court bench.) Speers concluded that Medina was unreliable. He decided therefore that he had no obligation to inform Brandley's lawyers. The private attorney she had consulted thought otherwise, and brought her to the attention of the defense.

After obtaining Medina's sworn statement, Brandley's lawyers petitioned the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for a writ of habeas corpus. The court ordered an evidentiary hearing, which was conducted by District Court Judge Ernest A. Coker. Before calling Medina to testify at the evidentiary hearing, Brandley's defense team called Edward Payne, father in law of Gary Acreman. He was one of the school custodians who had testified at both Brandley trials, and the defense now suspected he may have been a co perpetrator of the crime with Robinson. Payne testified that Acreman had told him where Fergeson's clothes had been hidden two days before the authorities found them. After Medina related details of Robinson's purported confession, Brandley's lawyers called John Sessum, the custodian who had testified at the first trial but not the second. Sessum contradicted what he had said at the first trial. He stated that he had seen Acreman follow Cheryl Fergeson up a staircase leading to the auditorium and then heard her scream, "No" and "Don't." Later that day, Acreman warned Sessum not to tell anyone what he had seen. But Sessum said that he had told Wesley Styles, the Texas Ranger who was leading the investigation. According to Sessum, Styles threatened him with arrest if he did not testify consistently with Acreman's.

Judge Coker recommended that Brandley be denied a new trial. A date had been set for Brandley's execution. Coker's ruling was accepted by the Court of Criminal Appeals on December 22, 1986. But civil rights activists, including Reverend Jew Don Boney, had organized and raised $80,000 to help finance further legal efforts on Brandley's behalf. The Rev. Boney was the chairman of the "Coalition to Free Clarence Lee Brandley", based in Houston. He led community efforts to have Brandley receive a fair trial. Interviewed on numerous national news outlets, Boney attracted significant media and community attention to the case. National Advocate James McCloskey, of Centurion Ministries in Princeton, New Jersey, also took on the case. Working with a private investigator, McCloskey soon obtained a video taped statement by Acreman stating that Robinson had killed Cheryl Fergeson and that he had seen Robinson place her clothes in the dumpster where they were later found. That is how Acreman knew where the clothes were before law enforcement found them. Although Acreman soon recanted that video statement, two witnesses had come forward attesting that they had heard Acreman say he knew who killed Fergeson, and that it was not Brandley. They also said that Acreman had said he would never reveal the girl's killer. Based on these statements, with Brandley's scheduled execution six days away, Coker granted a stay.

Upon his release, Brandley discovered that he owed almost $50,000 in child support debt, which had accumulated in the years that he was wrongly imprisoned. This is because a federal law known as the Bradley amendment stipulates that once a child support order has been established, money owed cannot be retroactively reduced or forgiven, even in cases where the debtor was imprisoned and presumably incapable of paying. Brandley said: "It's like a double insult." As of 2011, Brandley's wages were still being garnished, and the debt stood at $12,683.