HOUSTON — A former Texas judge and prosecutor agreed to serve nine days in jail and surrender his law license Friday for withholding evidence in his prosecution of a man who was exonerated in 2011 after serving 25 years in prison for his wife’s murder.
The hearing took place at the same courthouse north of Austin where Ken Anderson once heard cases as a district court judge.
Anderson agreed not to contest a judge’s criminal contempt order after he was arrested in April on a felony charge of tampering with evidence, a misdemeanor charge of tampering with a government record, and the contempt finding that as a prosecutor he lied to a judge during a pretrial hearing for Michael Morton, who was eventually convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
“This is a big day for a lot of reasons. We have never heard of any prosecutor being punished for deliberately refusing to turn over exculpatory evidence,” said Barry Scheck, one of Morton’s attorneys and a founder of the Innocence Project in New York.
Prosecutors are granted immunity and rarely prosecuted for alleged misconduct, including withholding exculpatory evidence favorable to the defense.
The case against Anderson was spearheaded by attorneys for Morton, who was freed after DNA tests implicated another man in the murder of Morton’s wife, Christine, who was found beaten to death in the bedroom of their Williamson County home in 1986. Mark Norwood was convicted of the murder in March and received a life sentence.
Morton was in court Friday and celebrated after the hearing.
“I said the only thing that I want, as a baseline, is Ken Anderson to be off the bench and no longer practicing law — and both of those things have happened, and more,” Morton said.
As part of Friday’s agreement, the judge dismissed the two charges against Anderson, who agreed to complete 500 hours of community service and pay a $500 fine.
He was ordered to surrender by Dec. 2.
Anderson, the district attorney for 16 years in Williamson County before he became a judge in 2002, surrendered his law license to settle a related civil suit filed by the State Bar of Texas, accusing him of professional misconduct.
His attorney said after the hearing that Anderson had no comment.
Morton’s attorneys, including a team from the Innocence Project, argued that Anderson withheld two key pieces of evidence during Morton’s trial: first, a police interview with Morton’s mother-in-law, who said his 3-year-old son witnessed the murder and said his father was not home during the killing; and second, a police report saying the driver of a green van had parked and walked behind the Morton house before the murder.
