Death Row

by Katherine Scardino

I have recently visited someone on Death Row (Texas Death Row, pictured left). In my 24 years of working in the criminal justice field, I have never been there before. I have heard from other people how depressing it is, but it is impossible to put into words the immediate response your mind has to the meaning of this place. You know that you are walking into a space occupied by people who are looking at an "end date". That is something that none of us have to do. We all know, intellectually, that we will not live forever, and that at one point in time, we will die. But, we do not know when. Many of the tenants of Death Row have a date. They know when their heart will stop beating, when their lungs will no longer take a breath, when their brain will cease to function.

The Texas Death Row is located in Livingston, Texas, in the Polunsky Unit. It is about five miles off the main road and sits alone. It is a sad sight. I went there to visit an inmate named Michael Toney. I had been contacted by a lawyer working for one of the big law firms in San Francisco, the kind of law firm that is able to do free legal work for whomever they choose. It is the type of law firm that those who are involved with it just call it "the Firm". The Firm decided to dedicate free lawyer hours and effort to free Michael Toney off Death Row. The Firm, along with another lawyer named Jared Tyler, who works for the Texas Defender Service, have been successful in getting Mr. Toney a new trial. That is where I enter the scene.

Michael Toney (pictured right) was convicted in Tarrant County in 1999 for a bombing that occurred there in November 1985. Yes, I said "1985". He was accused of placing an explosive device in a briefcase and setting the briefcase down in front of a trailer and subsequently killed three people. He obtained a reversal from the Fifth Circuit and a new trial as a result of misconduct by the State prosecutors in Tarrant County during his trial. It seems that they withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense lawyers, not to mention the fact that witnesses have recanted their testimony and State witnesses had different version of facts used to convict him. You can imagine how bad the problems had to be in a capital murder case in order for the Fifth Circuit to reverse his prior conviction.

I went to see Michael Toney with one of his lawyers, Jared Tyler. Jared and I sat in a cold room waiting for him to be brought in, unhandcuffed, and sat down behind a glass partition on a concrete stool. (Everything that can possibly be made out of concrete is concrete in the Polunsky Unit.) Mr. Toney arrived looking like he had just spent the last 10 years on Death Row. His complexion was pale and unhealthy, which is what inmates look like who have spent many hours in their cell with no access to a regular walk to the store in the sunshine.

I have always wondered about sensory deprivation. Can you imagine not touching another human being for years at a time. There have been many studies about the effect of sensory deprivation on inmates who are segregated or other people who choose to just be alone. Sensory deprivation is the deliberate reduction or removal of stimuli from one or more of the senses. It is one of the most favored measures used by the CIA in its "war on terror". It has so far been used on many detainees at Guantanamo Bay to the extreme - to the point of hallucinations of sight and sound, followed by a breakdown akin to psychosis.

Michael Toney sits in his 60 square feet of space 23 out of the 24 hours each day. During his one hour out of his cell, he must do his errands - like go to the Commissary, bathe, brush his teeth, plus try to work in a little sunshine. Sensory deprivation can change a person’s attitude and personality. It can make you paranoid, psychotic and generally mess up your mind.

I do not want to discuss today the crimes that were committed to cause Michael Toney or any of the inmates to be living at this facility. We all are well aware of the type of crime that results in a death penalty. As I said before, the people who live on Death Row are going to be executed at some point - except for Michael Toney, and I am going to try and work on that. But, they are human beings, even though they are treated and kept as animals. We keep them isolated, alone, no human contact, and then complain when they turn into an animal. We put our captured animals in cages in the zoo, and for the most part, they surely look peeved when I go to visit them. They are angry. The caged animals act angry. We read about an elephant attacking his trainer, a lion mauling a child, or some other horrid act - by an animal who should be in the wild but for us humans who think we must have a sample of their species in a cage for us to look at and point at and laugh at. They act angry - we shoot them. In the Polunsky Unit, when an inmate acts angry, he gets "written up" or deprived of his one hour of sunlight each day. Does anyone other than me see how ludicrous this is?

Michael Toney has something to look forward to. He has hope now. He talked about other inmates being jealous of his new trial. He was ready to get off Death Row and shipped to the Tarrant County Jail, where he will stay until a jury renders a verdict in his next trial. This time, I know that the verdict will be a lot different than the last one and I know that for one reason - all of the evidence will be presented to a jury - not just a part of it.

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A Scary Possibility

By Jenna Jackson

A man who has been on Death Row here in Texas for nearly 30 years could be getting out.

Jonathan Bruce Reed (pictured left) was convicted and condemned for the November 1978 rape-slaying, of Wanda Jean Wadle at her Dallas apartment. But, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled Dallas County prosecutors improperly excluded black prospective jurors from Reed’s trial and ordered him released unless prosecutors choose to retry him quickly.Prosecutors haven’t yet decided if they will re-try him. They say they need time to “dissect” the opinion, according to a story by Mike Gracyk of the Associated Press. The real question will be, CAN they re-try him? After 30 years, it’s hard to imagine what, if any, evidence remains preserved. Witnesses are probably dead or gone, and who knows if the victim’s family is even still around.

If they are—this is a terrible day for them. They probably thought this case was closed, even though the man a jury said was responsible hasn’t yet been executed.It seems it was pretty much the policy of the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office, at the time, to exclude black people from a jury in the belief that blacks empathize with defendants. Reed is white – but the Constitutional efforts remain the same.“Although we do not relish adding a new chapter to this unfortunate story more than 30 years after the crime took place, we conclude that the Constitution affords Reed a right to relief,” a three-member panel of the New Orleans-based court wrote in the ruling posted late Monday.

Reed has been on death row since September, 1979 making him among the longest-serving prisoners awaiting execution in Texas.

The 5th Circuit said Reed’s case mirrored the capital murder case of Thomas Miller-El, on Texas death row for nearly 20 years until the Supreme Court overturned his verdict, citing racial discrimination during jury selection. Miller-El last year took a life prison sentence as part of a plea deal.

In that case, the Supreme Court cited a manual—written by a prosecutor in 1969 and used for years later, that advised Dallas prosecutors to exclude minorities from juries. Documents in Miller-El’s case described how the memo advised prosecutors to avoid selecting minorities because “they almost always empathize with the accused.”

“Reed presents this same historical evidence of racial bias in the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office,” the 5th Circuit panel said.It is a sad statement on our culture at the time that racial bias would be all but policy in one of the state’s largest district attorney’s offices. And I’m certain it wasn’t the only office in the state that followed such ridiculous notions. Thankfully, at least in most sectors, that sort of racial bias and ignorance is no longer tolerated.It does seem clear that—based solely on the racial bias issue, the Court had no choice but to overturn this case. The scary part is that it doesn’t seem like there was much doubt that Reed was the guilty party.

Reed, now 57, was identified as the man who attacked Wadle and her roommate, Kimberly Pursley, on November 1, 1978. He’d apparently entered their apartment by posing as a maintenance man. Pursley survived an attempted strangulation by feigning unconsciousness. Two other residents identified Reed as the man they saw in the apartment complex just before the time of the attack.

I’m sure nearly everyone in Texas knows the story of when serial killer Kenneth McDuff (pictured left) was released. McDuff was first convicted of three rapes and murders that took place in 1966. He was given the death penalty, but his sentence was commuted in 1972 when the U.S. Supreme Court abolished capital punishment. He was released on parole in 1989 due to prison overcrowding.That release had disastrous consequences.

He began killing again a year after his release. He was arrested for the murder of 22-year-old Melissa Ann Northrup , and was suspected in at least three other murders. McDuff was eventually sent back to death row and executed November 17, 1998.

It seems to me that the only good solution in this case will be if prosecutors have enough evidence left to convince Reed to take a plea deal, similar to Miller-El’s, that will keep him locked up.I don’t know much of anything about Jonathan Reed, but anyone who has spent nearly three decades on death row has had to learn to adapt in order to survive. And those same adaptation skills don’t transfer into too many careers on the outside.

It’s a scary possibility that he could be released into the free world and left to his own devices.

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Mystery Man:Kerry Max Cook (Part 4 of 4)

For Independence Day, Women in Crime Ink presents a four-part series written by Kerry Max Cook, a man who struggled for twenty-two years to regain his freedom. This is the fourth installment. Read Part 1, Part 2 , and Part 3 .

by Kerry Max Cook

After I’d lost everything that mattered to me most in the world my freedom, my self-respect, the person I loved the most, I came face to face with the fragility of humankind. And I dedicated my life to forgiveness: of myself, of those I had wronged, and those who had wronged me. I began living the truth that hate only hurts the person who is doing the hating.

In my heart I built a shrine that represented the love I had for Doyle Wayne and I promised him–and myself–that I wouldn’t give up, no matter what.

In defiance of my lawyers, I resumed a media campaign to the press. My lawyers had strenuously advised me against this, saying the press would distort my story and use it against me.

But I had nothing to lose now.

I’d been in prison for over ten years now, with no progress. I’d seen what happens when you let other people control your destiny. It was time I controlled my own, completely.

I wrote to David Hanners, a reporter at the Dallas Morning News. I told him that if he found anything untrue about my story, I would voluntarily walk into the execution chamber to be executed.

My persistence with David Hanners and the Dallas Morning News produced a gigantic break by bringing me and my story out of the darkness and into the light with the headline “Inmate Was Railroaded" splashed across the front pages.

For the next two years I worked exclusively with David Hanners, and this alliance produced over 40 front-page stories, such as “Convicted Man Called Innocent,” “Key Evidence in Cook Case said to be False" (the aging of the fingerprint) and many, many more.

This helped save my life.

My second break came when I persuaded Jim McCloskey (left) of Centurion Ministries to take on my case.

Centurion is a New Jersey-based, non-profit organization that investigates an inmate’s claim of innocence, and if they find evidence to support the inmate’s claims, they hire an attorney and go into the field to collect the hidden or undeveloped evidence.

I had written Jim McCloskey before, but had only been sent a form letter.

Armed with the Dallas Morning News’ front-page investigative stories, I stuffed an envelope full and again wrote Jim McCloskey.

This time, Jim McCloskey wrote back:

“Before I commit to any case, I require an honest, detailed account of your life and a detailed description of your conviction. An innocent man named Matt Connor once wrote us 60 pages. I know that is a lot, and that was an extraordinary case. I look forward to reading your story.”

All during the day, and well into the night I worked on my response. Finally, I wrote:

“Dear Mr. McCloskey: Enclosed please find my 61-page autobiography. I am one page more innocent than Matt Connor was.”

Jim McCloskey took my case. He hired a Houston attorney named Paul Nugent (on left with Kerry and attorney Scott Howe to his right) and for ten grueling years, it was a David and Goliath-like fight, but we prevailed as a united front.

Paul, Jim, and the Dallas Morning News literally saved my life.

So . . . who DID rape and murder Linda Jo Edwards? Twenty-two years lter, a law-enforcement crime lab discovered semen on a long overlooked piece of evidence and tested it in an effort to answer that question.

The DNA belonged to none other than the original suspect–Linda’s married ex-lover, James Mayfield.

But police and prosecutors had so corrupted their case against him in their blind pursuit of me for over two decades, it made it impossible to legally charge him–even in the face of his genetic fingerprints at the crime scene.

Those who prosecuted me were politicians first. They never admitted their mistake. The truth in this case was never as important as their careers. And their careers blossomed.

District Attorney Jack Skeen was nominated “Prosecutor of the Year” by the Texas State Bar, which is made up of county and district attorneys. Jack Skeen is now a District Judge overseeing justice in Tyler, Texas.

Doug Collard, the policeman who started it all by aging my fingerprint and making it the killer’s calling card? Years later, Collard told a fingerprint licensing board—in addressing a complaint filed against him by a fellow member, after the Dallas Morning News publicized his perjury regarding the "aging" of my fingerprint—he shouldn’t be held responsible for his perjury because the District Attorney’s Office made him do it. He finished out his career with honors and retired a few years ago.

It’s worth noting that Detective Collard’s Response to the Complaint filed against him was deliberately hidden while prosecutors fought up the appellate ladder to have me executed.

District Attorney Jack Skeen argued all the way up to the United States Supreme Court that the guilt of the accused was beyond any doubt because Doug Collard testified that the my fingerprint could only have been left on the patio door of the victim at the time she was raped and murdered, making it the “killer’s calling card.”

I did finally get an apology but it didn’t come from the police or the prosecutors–even in the face of DNA exoneration. Ironically it came from the only person involved in my case that had the courage to admit he really was a criminal: Shyster Jackson.

The most significant lesson I learned serving 22 years of a wrongful conviction is the power of forgiveness. The ability to forgive gave me the power to be free.

I was imprisoned on the worst death row in America and now I was free. Death row might have had my body, but it didn’t have my mind. As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. “

I never let go of mine.

Read Kerry's complete story in his book, CHASING JUSTICE: My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn't Commit

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Mystery Man: Kerry Max Cook (Part 3 of 4)

In honor of Independence Day, Women in Crime Ink presents a four-part series written by a man who struggled for twenty-two years to regain his freedom. Below is the third installment. Read Part 1 and Part 2 .

by Kerry Max Cook

When I arrived at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in the summer of 1978, I entered the most violent and primitive prison system in North America—a hate factory so dangerous and barbaric, a federal judge declared it “cruel and unusual punishment,” and said it offended principals of human decency in violation of the Constitution of the United States.

There was no security. From the petri dish of prison, the Administration culled the strongest, meanest convicts they could find and used them as inmate “guards.”

• These inmate “guards” used this privilege as power and ruthlessly ruled over the other prisoners with brute force.

• Everyone carried a homemade knife and used it to fight to the death.

• If you got stabbed, it was an inmate orderly who tended to your wound with iodine. If anything else was wrong with you, you got Tylenol, which was dispensed as the prison panacea.
  

The fight for my life was always on two fronts: the court system—intent on backing the police and prosecutors and executing me—and the prison system full of violent, crazy inmates determined to kill as many of each other it took to feel safe from one another.

Not a day went by that I wasn’t consumed by courtroom images of witnesses, police, and prosecutors all working together to ensure I was convicted and sentenced to death. These images often left me mentally and emotionally crippled with rage and despair.

“Truth-hunger is a hunger just as real as food-hunger,” H.P. Lovecraft said, and I was starved to understand how I could have been sent to this purgatory.

This is when my transformation began, from a ninth-grade dropout, a 22-year-old kid, really—and therefore, by definition, someone who expects someone else to come to the rescue—into the CEO of my own life, a grown-up who had to fight for himself. And when you’re fighting a legal system, that means getting an education.

In one empty cell, I found an old Webster’s dictionary. And I read it from A to Z, practicing new words on staff and prisoners who often didn’t know what I as talking about. My brother, Doyle Wayne, was my only outside support. He sent me educational books so I could learn how to write and speak effectively.

Because I was classified “Death Row,” which meant automatic Administrative Segregation, I wasn’t permitted to attend the prison school system. I persuaded them to at least allow me to be sent a GED handbook so I could study from my cell and take the exam directly, and I passed.

Then I enrolled in college correspondence from Sam Houston State University. I had a GPA of 4.0 when the Texas Legislature passed a law banning anyone sentenced to death from taking "in-cell" college courses. The logic was, I was there to be put to death—NOT to get an education. Nevertheless, following a more or less conventional path, after college I went to graduate school. Ignorance of our legal system helped send me to Death Row innocent, so I read law books voraciously.

My most prized possession was a Black’s Law Dictionary Doyle Wayne saved up and sent me for Christmas. He also paid for a paralegal correspondence course and eventually I received a paralegal certificate. Once I was educated, I stuck out my shingle and started practicing as a jailhouse lawyer.

I wrote writs for other prisoners in exchange for stamps and the writing materials I needed daily to fight for my life. I hammered day in and day out on a manual blue Royal typewriter to anyone empowered to help me: The President, the Governor, the Justice Department, and all media outlets.

I also wrote to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state's highest appellate court for death penalty appeals. After nine years, they finally wrote back: ruling 8-1 in favor of my conviction and execution.

The Court said my argument that the evidence was insufficient to support a jury’s verdict of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt was overruled because:

• The eyewitness to the murder had seen me in the apartment at the exact same time the pathologist testified the victim had died, and a policeman testified the fingerprints were left on her patio door.

• A fellow inmate testified that I had confessed the murder and told the jury things only the real murderer could have known.

  
  

In stunning fashion, the highest criminal court in Texas simply echoed the fabrications of the police and prosecutors. It became apparent the appeals court never even reviewed the actual transcripts in the case.

Announcing the high court had cleared the way for my execution, a Dallas Morning News photograph showed the transcripts of my case sitting in the basement of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals building. If you look closely, you can see the seal was never broken from when Smith County sent them up.

I had always assumed that anyone given the ultimate penalty was entitled to a meticulous judicial review.

I was wrong.

Darkness came to my Death Row cell, and this time, I had to draw strength from an empty well.

My whole life, my biggest inspiration had been my brother, Doyle Wayne. He was the person who made me believe that nothing was impossible, and no mountain was too high to climb.

Two weeks after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals cleared the way for my execution by saying nothing was wrong with my conviction, Doyle Wayne was shot and killed. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time and it cost him his life.

I found myself faced with this brutal irony: here I was in prison, branded a murderer, and now I had lost my only brother to a senseless, violent homicide.

I finally understood how Linda’s family must be feeling. It was awful.

I wanted to kill. I wanted to die. I wanted . . . to start over.

So I did.

Kerry Max Cook is the author of CHASING JUSTICE: My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn't Commit.

The story of Kerry’s struggle concludes here tomorrow.

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Mystery Man: Kerry Cook (Part 2 of 4)

For Independence Day, Women in Crime Ink presents a four-part series written by a man who struggled for 22 years to win his freedom. This is Part 2 of his story. Read Part 1 here.

by Kerry Max Cook

So I was charged with capital murder, for the sexual assault and slaying of a woman I'd met once in my life. Although I played no part in her death, the implications of the accusation meant my life was jeopardized. I wasn't a murderer.

But I wasn't an angel either. As a juvenile, I ran away from home a few times, stealing a car or two—usually one to get where I needed to go, and after I ran out of gas, another to get back. One of those cars happened to belong to the sheriff. Definitely the wrong car to steal.

As a result, I wasn’t the most popular person with law enforcement in the small East Texas Town of Jacksonville. Having a police record and a set of fingerprints in the law enforcement database drew attention to me.

At the scene of Linda Edwards' slaying, a policeman found 13 identifiable fingerprints inside the apartment that could have yielded the identity of the killer. “Identifiable” in that each print contained enough points to make a positive identification. But because whoever owned those prints didn’t have a record, police weren’t able to determine the owner. The 13 fingerprints found at the murder scene were destroyed and police and prosecutors settled on me as the suspect.

One of the murder weapons was an orange-handled pair of scissors. On the handle, pressed in blood, the same policeman found a “whorl fingerprint” (left), a type shared by 65% of the people on the planet – including the victim.

But not me.

All ten of my fingers are classified in fingerprint jargon as “tented arches” (right). I don’t have a single whorl digit on any of my ten fingers. Not surprisingly, the policeman dismissed the whorl fingerprint without establishing that person’s identity.

Other evidence was suppressed, bungled, or just plain conveniently lost.

Sworn statements to police, secret grand jury testimony, all told the story of how Linda and I had met out by the pool and I had ended up at her apartment as an invited guest. But the police and the prosecutors hid this critical exculpatory evidence and it wouldn’t be discovered until a new, dedicated defense attorney found it buried in the District Attorney’s files 15 years later.

A drop of blood was found by Linda’s patio door. Maybe it belonged to the killer. You’d think you’d submit it for forensic analysis. But not the police in my trial. They said the reason they didn’t submit if for comparison purposes was because, and this is a direct quote: “It was the same color as the rest of the blood in the apartment.

Then there was the case of the missing ankle stocking. Police and prosecutors contended I had snuck off into the night with one of Linda’s ankle stockings packed full of body parts as a souvenir. But law enforcement never found the stocking.

In Texas, as any other jurisdiction that uses the Death Penalty as a punishment, the crime of murder can be elevated to a capital offense punishable by death if and when the murder occurs during the commission of another felony. In my case one of those underlying felonies the state relied on to make the murder death-penalty worthy was “theft of a stocking.”

Fifteen years later another jury in a separate trial broke open the plastic bag that contained the victim’s blue jeans that had been sealed in a police vault since the first trial. Jurors shook them to determine the victim’s height and out fell the second missing stocking. Apparently it had been shoved up the pant leg of the victim’s jeans.

Evidence at the second trial would show that the prosecution had a win-at-all costs mentality:

• They coached the only eyewitness to the murder, Paula Rudolph, to change her initial eyewitness account of the murderer to implicate me, and guaranteed her new identification would go unchallenged until an ambush at trial when it was too late by making her unavailable to the defense.



• The District Attorney conspired with a policeman to fabricate “expert” testimony to make my fingerprint the killer’s calling card.



• They conspired with the pathologist to change the time the victim died and to create the most inflammatory aspect to the case – missing body parts, carted off in a missing stocking.

• They deliberately suppressed available evidence that Linda and I had known one another and met three days before she was killed.

• Finally, they persuaded a convicted murderer to commit perjury in order to guarantee my conviction. Edward “Shyster” Jackson was dubbed the “Star witness for the State.”

Records ultimately proved that prosecutors made him a secret deal: his freedom from a murder conviction and life sentence in exchange for testimony that I confessed to him while sharing a jail cell that I raped and murdered Linda Edwards. Shyster told the jury that the confession story took place in August. Jail records later established that at that time of the purported confession, I was kept in solitary confinement, unable to talk to any other inmates. Those records mysteriously disappeared without explanation.

It was crazy. It was like I was the main character in a John Grisham novel fighting against a corporation that was out to convict me at all costs to escape any appearance of wrongdoing.

After about my fifteenth year on Death Row and days away from execution, Shyster Jackson finally told the truth on an MSNBC Special Report with Geraldo Rivera: “Deadly Justice.”

I was essentially penniless—the $500 my Mom and dad scraped up to hire an attorney just wasn’t enough. I was powerless to counter a parade of perjury, coached testimony, shady agreements, and inflammatory theories.

In a five-day trial I was found guilty of all charges contained in the indictment, despite absolutely no proof to support the allegations of rape, murder, theft of a stocking, or burglary.

One moment I was in the courtroom crying as I reached out to say goodbye to my mama, daddy, and brother, Doyle Wayne, and the next moment I was being given the execution number 600 and pushed into a five-by-nine-foot concrete tomb.

Kerry Max Cook is the author of CHASING JUSTICE: My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn't Commit.

The story of Kerry’s struggle continues here tomorrow.

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Mystery Man: Kerry Max Cook (Part 1 of 4)

In honor of Independence Day, Women in Crime Ink presents a Mystery Man Marathon - a four-part series written by a man who struggled for twenty-two years to regain his freedom.

by Kerry Max Cook

Part of any job, whatever you do, is dealing with “bad days.”

The worst day of my life started at the end of the day. It was about 6 o’clock one night, when a co-worker walked up and said, “Kerry, can you come in here for a second?”

I stepped into an adjoining room, which was strangely dark. Suddenly, the room exploded in light. Handcuffs were slammed down on my wrists. I was arrested for the rape and murder of a woman whose name I didn’t recognize. Then things got really bad.

The officers drove me to a police station where I was ordered to remove all of my clothing in front of a young female dispatcher. Nude, I was pulled down a hallway and pushed into a restroom. As the door closed, a volley of punches rained down, slamming me to the floor. Dragging me by my hair into a stall where my head was pushed into a toilet bowl, a police officer screamed "Confess!"

Next I was put on a private plane in the middle of the night and flown to Tyler, Texas. At about 3000 feet up, a detective threatened: Admit to being a rapist and murderer, or be pushed out of a plane.

Twelve hours later, I sat naked in a freezing jail cell on a cold slab of steel, with a new job: to free myself.

At the time, I didn’t know I had 8030 more days to go in this new occupation: it would be 22 years before I’d be able to walk down the street a free man again.

And I didn’t know that meant that I would have to change myself into a completely different human being.

I needed to make sure I didn’t die by lethal injection—or get killed by a psychotic prison inmate before the justice system realized they’d made a terrible mistake. And if I screwed up—if I failed to change—I’d be dead.

Failure was not an option. You hear that all the time in corporate America, where the worst-case scenario means you’re fired. But in my case, if I failed, I would be executed. If I was going to have any hope of succeeding, I would have to become a whole new person.

This is the story of my transformation.

Like many of the best and worst stories in life, this one began with romance. Her name was Linda Edwards. She was 21 and I was 20 when I met her by the swimming pool at an apartment complex in Tyler, Texas, where we both lived.

We talked, we flirted, and Linda invited me to her apartment. We made out, she left a few passion marks on my neck, and we said goodbye. That was it: the first time—and the last time—I ever saw her.

Two months later, I was arrested for her rape and murder.

For the next year, I sat in a solitary confinement cell, awaiting trial—a year in which the police and prosecutors added to my story, by making up one of their own.

It took me 22 years to prove they completely fabricated their case against me.

In the police report, the victim’s roommate Paula Rudolph, the only eyewitness to the crime, stated that the man she saw in Linda’s bedroom at the time of her murder was the victim’s silver-haired, married, 45-year-old ex-boyfriend, James Mayfield. Paula knew what he looked like. She worked directly for James Mayfield at the local university.

But at my trial a year later, Paula changed her story and said that the murderer she saw was me even though the drivers license photo taken the day the victim’s body was discovered showed that my hair was long, brown, and to my shoulders.

The district attorney’s office had this photograph in their possession at the time of my indictment, but kept it hidden for 15 years, when a defense investigator discovered it.

Immediately after my arrest, the District Attorney placed Paula Rudolph under the “protective custody of the Tyler Police Department” and made it impossible for my attorneys to question her. Research shows that a witness’s best recollection is moments or hours after witnessing a crime, not a year later.

A local psychologist with no forensic experience was told that I once worked as a bartender in a gay bar in Dallas. He worked that into a profile and labeled me as a maniacal, homosexual killer and a misogynist.

The pathologist changed his original estimate of the official time of death, adjusting it to match the exact time the policeman swore my fingerprint was left on the victim’s patio door, making it the “killer’s calling card.”

Everything hinged on this policeman’s "aging" of my fingerprint. But there is no way to scientifically determine the age of a fingerprint. The technology didn't exist in 1977, and it doesn't exist today. Still, his claim was the only piece of evidence to support an arrest warrant based on “probable cause.” Later, he restated it under oath to indict me on capital murder charges and bind me over for trial.

Kerry Max Cook is the author of CHASING JUSTICE: My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn't Commit.

The story of Kerry’s struggle continues here tomorrow.

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Surviving Death Row in Texas

by Diane Fanning

When Kerry Max Cook sat down beside me at the Best Southwest Bookfest south of Dallas last week, I felt a little spooked. I was on the panel because of the role one of my books played in obtaining a new trial for Julie Rea Harper who spent a couple of years in prison after her wrongful conviction in the murder of her son. Now sitting next to me was a man who sat on Death Row in Texas for more than twenty years for a crime he did not commit. How did he survive? How could anyone survive?

At first, it was like sitting next to a figment of my imagination or a ghost from a haunted house. I was afraid to reach out and touch him as if that might make him disappear into thin air. Nonetheless, he seemed so normal. So warm. So human. What core of inner strength did he possess to make that possible?

Kerry credited the power of forgiveness. He said he couldn’t be free until he freed himself from the hatred and bitterness and forgave those who were responsible for his incarceration.

In June of 1977, Linda Jo Edwards was raped, killed, and sexually mutilated. Kerry was in her apartment a couple of days prior to her murder, leaving a fingerprint on the patio door. It was not enough to prove he was there at the time of the crime—not until an expert witness took the stand at the hearing and lied: "I would estimate that those fingerprints were approximately between six and twelve hours old.”

No one can date fingerprints and that was not the only dishonest testimony. The victim’s roommate told police that the man in Linda's room that night had silvery hair that feathered over his ears. At the time Kerry's hair was brown and to his shoulders. On the witness stand, however, she identified Kerry as the man she saw.

"Shyster” Jackson, facing a second-degree murder charge, testified that Kerry confessed the murder to him.

When Jackson recanted in 1979, he admitted the prosecutors showed him the crime-scene photos to help him create the story of the “confession.” His charge was reduced to involuntary manslaughter and time served.

Kerry was found guilty and sentenced to Death. Investigating Kerry’s case, Jim McCloskey of Centurion Ministries and David Hanners, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News uncovered the prosecutorial misconduct that lead to Kerry's conviction.

When Kerry finally got a new trial on these grounds, in 1992, the judge allowed the state to use tainted evidence but forbade the defense from presenting testimony to discredit that evidence. That jury could not reach a decision.

W new trial, in 1994, was even worse. This time, the respected co-founder of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, Robert K. Ressler, was not allowed to testify as an expert witness for the defense to counteract unscientific criminal profiling evidence presented by the state’s "expert."

This time, the jury found Kerry guilty and re-sentenced him to death.

In 1996, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned that verdict stating that: "prosecutorial and police misconduct has tainted this entire matter from the outset." The justices spoke of "fraud" being used to achieve “a conviction at any cost.” They referred to Prosecutor David Dobbs’ "reckless disregard of the law" in withholding exculpatory information and providing misleading information. They called the prosecution of Kerry Max Cook an "abuse of state power."

Even though the appeals court discouraged any further prosecution, the Smith County District Attorney's office moved forward. They sent the victim's panties to the state lab to get an expert opinion on whether they were cut or ripped from the woman's body. The state lab could not answer that question but they did find semen stains and were able to extract DNA evidence. As a further sign of prosecutorial persecution, the state objected to any delay of trial to wait for the results.

The state’s case, however, was falling apart. In an unprecedented move, they allowed Kerry to plead no contest and maintain his innocence. A month later, the results of the DNA tests were released. The semen did not belong to Kerry. It belonged to James Mayfield, Linda Jo Edwards’ lover, who testified that he had not seen her for three weeks prior to her murder—a man whose dubious alibi was accepted without question—a man with motive. Nonetheless, Dobbs dismissed the possibility of Mayfield’s guilt.

In 2005, police and prosecutors in Smith County lashed out once again, providing to Court TV the evidence the appeals court declared fraudulent. On Body of Evidence, host Dayle Hinman presented Kerry Cook as a guilty man with no mention of his exoneration. Repeated requests to alter the show or drop from the rotation have gone unanswered. The inaccurate episode continues to air in 2008.

Kerry Max Cook amazes me. I’ve interviewed serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells on Death Row. I know the darkness of his mind. I know the spiritual and physical bleakness of that environment. Despite the horrors of his life there, Kerry is a kind and gentle man.

To learn more about Kerry’s experience, read his book: Chasing Justice: My Story of Freeing Myself after Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn’t Commit. It is a powerful story.

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