The Innocent Man and The Guilty Man

The jury regarded him with what appeared to be both sympathy and fascination. One of the many strange aspects of The State of Texas v. Mark Alan Norwood was that at no point during the eight-day trial would the jurors hear that Michael himself had previously been found guilty of the crime, or that he had spent nearly 25 years behind bars. Before the trial, state district judge Burt Carnes had granted a request from the prosecution to exclude testimony about Michael’s conviction. Because his exoneration had wiped his record clean, he no longer had a criminal history, and the prosecution argued that any mention of his wrongful conviction might unfairly prejudice the jury against its star witness. To the people in the courtroom who were familiar with Michael’s odyssey, however, it was a mind-bending omission. In this alternate reality, he was only an observer to the events surrounding Christine’s murder, not the victim of a grotesque injustice that had derailed his life and allowed the real killer to go free.

Texas Monthly has published the latest installment in Pamela Colloff’s ongoing series about Michael Morton’s wrongful conviction for his wife Christine’s 1986 murder. (Morton spent nearly 25 years in prison and was released in October 2011.) “The Guilty Man” chronicles the trial of Mark Norwood, who was found guilty of capital murder in March and sentenced to life in prison. I don’t know if there are happy endings in this story, really, but Colloff’s pieces — found here, here, and here — are all incredible reads.