Journalism, at its most elementary and selfish level, is the art of making readers care about stuff we journalists think matters. When I started out, writing about music in the late ’70s and ’80s, this meant stories about obscure musicians, such as the unknown east-side Austin blues guitarist who claimed to have been Stevie Ray Vaughan’s mentor or the LA post-punk band the Gun Club. I would stay up late with friends, arguing about the previous night’s Dream Syndicate show, writing reviews filled with righteous indignation: Why didn’t the world know about the new Fleshtones album?

The older I got, my meter for measuring important stuff changed. I still write about obscure music and musicians (I’m working on a piece now about obscure ’60s garage bands) but the stories that obsess me, that keep me up late at night, aren’t so much about some cool thing  a person did — it’s what a person didn’t do. I’m talking about the poor bastards who have been put in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.

I’m no crusader — if I were I wouldn’t be working for a magazine where I am regularly called upon to weigh in on the best barbecue and burgers in the state (which, by the way, I love to weigh in on). But these Wrong Man stories really chap my ass. How is it that decent, hard-working, church-going police, prosecutors, and judges send innocent men and women to prison? Don’t they know that it’s, well, wrong? These stories are unbelievably difficult, involving months of slogging through transcripts and affidavits, traveling to faraway prisons, and writing, calling, e-mailing, begging sources to talk. They also involve contentious relationships with powerful people. But the righteous indignation carries me through, because when these stories are done right, the possible payoff is huge: a tiny piece of justice in a system run on law ’n order.

Like many passionate causes, I stumbled into this one by accident. After getting hired at Texas Monthly as a staff writer in 1997, I was looking for a way to branch out from my typical bohemian rhapsodies. I set out to do a story on one of the big Texas issues of modern times, the death penalty. As a good liberal, I wanted to write a policy story about the problems with capital punishment: How ineffective court-appointed attorneys often doom clients, how zealous cops and prosecutors sometimes push innocent people through the system, how courts turn a blind eye to injustices. All I needed was a sympathetic character — an innocent man.

It was harder to find one than I thought. As I would eventually learn, the criminal justice system gets it right most of the time. I vetted several likely candidates that death-penalty advocates told me about. But they didn’t pan out. In the process I learned a lot about research, reporting, and making knee-jerk judgments about innocence. One case — involving a man convicted in 1998 of raping and murdering a woman — was particularly educational: Several papers were firmly convinced the guy sitting on death row was innocent. At first, I was, too. Then I sat down to read thousands of pages of trial transcripts. The further I got, the more these little red warning lights began going off in my brain: Uh oh, this guy isn’t the innocent lamb his defenders said he was. By the time I got to the end — when I read what witnesses in the punishment phase said he had done to them, painting a story of an increasingly violent sexual predator  — I was certain he had taken all those journalists for a ride. Lesson #1: Don’t believe everything you read in the papers. Lesson #2: Do read the court transcript.

I finally stumbled onto the story of Ernest Willis, who was convicted of murdering two women in the West Texas town of Iraan in 1986 by setting a house on fire. If there were a dictionary illustration for the “patsy” entry, it would be Willis’ face. He was a hapless drifter and former oilfield worker married six times, arrested for DWI three, a guy living on food stamps, struggling to find work. No physical evidence was presented at his trial, just arson theory. He was heavily doped with anti-psychotic drugs, turning him into a drooling zombie. His court-appointed lawyer did nothing for him.

I read everything I could about his case, including the lengthy trial transcripts. No red warning lights went off. The further I read, the more I wondered why common sense hadn’t led the judge to throw the whole case out. I interviewed the prosecutor. He claimed he never knew who was doping Willis. I interviewed his defense attorney, a recent law school grad when he represented Willis, trying his first death penalty case; he felt inept, confessing he should never have been appointed to represent Willis in the first place. I talked with arson scientists who said the evidence used to convict Willis had been nothing short of voodoo. Even though the trial court had ordered a new trial, the Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest criminal court in Texas, turned Willis down. It was like the Texas criminal justice system had decided to execute an innocent man. 

I drove to Livingston, deep in the woods of East Texas, to interview Willis on death row. He was a drawling, slow-moving redneck who was as confused in 2002 as he had been in 1986. He wasn’t a letter-writer or a rabble-rouser — he had just gone along with the system, as he had gone along with whatever his hard life had dealt him before drifting into Iraan. Willis was one of those classic poor bastards in the wrong place at the wrong time. I turned him into the main character of a 2002 article I wrote about the death penalty system, called “Death Isn’t Fair.” A year and a half later, a federal judge threw out Willis’ conviction, telling Texas to either retry him or set him free. The state chose the latter.Willis walked off death row in
December 2004.

Not long after that story came out I started getting letters from inmates all over Texas  — a    lot of letters, sometimes several a day. Sometimes I would open them right away; usually I stacked them in a pile and let it grow to a certain height before reading them. I knew most came from liars, thieves, rapists and killers. But I also knew some came from innocents. How could I possibly figure out which was which? Most proclaimed their innocence, and it ripped me up reading their forlorn pleas. Some I was able to set aside — those with, say, Satanic symbols in the margins, or conspiracy claims that were a little too perfect, or one too many exclamation marks at the end of every sentence.

The letters that laid out the facts with salient details and maybe enclosed a writ or a brief might merit a Google search for newspaper stories or court decisions. Usually at that point I would find certain things conveniently left out of the initial letter, such as an incriminating fingerprint or blood stain. But even after culling those cases, a handful of seemingly deserving stories would be left. All I could go on was a feeling: This guy may have a genuine case.

Sometimes the feeling pans out. A few years ago, I was working on a story about DNA testing and was looking for an inmate convicted before DNA tests became available (in the late ’80s) who was asking for one now — and who might possibly be innocent. I finally settled on a few letters written by a guy named Steve Phillips. He had been writing Texas Monthly for several years. His letters were rational, full of facts, quoting transcripts, pointing out contradictions in the witness testimony used in Dallas  to convict him of rape in 1983. One thing that all the recent DNA exonerations have shown us is that eyewitnesses make terrible mistakes, especially traumatized rape victims. Memories are fallible; the brain is not a camera.

Phillips seemed a perfect case for a DNA test. He had been asking for one since a 2001 state law allowed them for convicts. But the Dallas County DA’s office kept fighting his requests, saying it believed the eyewitnesses. So I used him as my main character in a 2006 story called “Why Can’t Steven Phillips Get a DNA Test?” to show how hard it was for inmates to get post-conviction DNA tests, even when it would help clear up troubled cases. I interviewed Phillips, who had spent half of his 48 years in prison. He insisted he was innocent, and though I wanted to believe him, I wasn’t certain. Give him a test, I urged the DA. Phillips finally got that test, after he was released in 2008 and a new DA, Craig Watkins, had been elected. The result: He hadn’t raped the woman. Phillips was exonerated after spending 25 years in prison.

Texas Monthly may have had a hand in both the Willis and Phillips exonerations, but the magazine prints other stories with no discernible effect at all. One that still bothers me is that of Richard LaFuente, convicted in federal court of murder on the Devil’s Lake Sioux reservation in North Dakota in 1986. LaFuente was a half-Indian, half Mexican-American man from Texas, and he and his cousin John Perez had visited the rez in 1983. While there, they had gone to a party at which a man named Eddie Peltier had gotten into a fight; his dead body was later found by the side of a road. On the testimony of four witnesses, LaFuente, Perez and nine local men were convicted of beating Peltier; the two Texans were also convicted of killing him.

All went to federal prison, though the sentences of the local men were soon thrown out and Perez was released. LaFuente remained in prison, even though two of the four witnesses recanted and two different federal courts ordered a new trial. He had proclaimed his innocence from the start. Even now, when he went before the parole board — which could set him free if he would show remorse for the murder — he refused. When I visited him at federal prison in Fort Worth in 2006, he told me, “I won’t ask forgiveness for a crime I didn’t do.” 

LaFuente is a short, slight, mild-mannered man whose anger occasionally bubbles free. And why not? Half his life has been stolen from him. And he had a good idea by whom. “I’m in here for a story James Yankton made up.” Yankton was a guy whose family had run the reservation for years, a kind of Native-American Tony Soprano, though even more imposing, at 6-foot-1 and 350 pounds. I went to North Dakota to find Yankton and to unearth the truth. First I stopped in Fargo and read the transcript of the trial. No red lights went off; indeed, it only shored up my belief that those witnesses had been intimidated into lying.

Then I drove west, out onto the desolate plains. I spent three amazing days crisscrossing the rez, tracking down other defendants (my guide was one of the original 11) and “witnesses”— all under the shadow of James Yankton. I tried to interview the man himself when I first got there, but he refused to come out from his post as head of security at the local casino. Every single person I interviewed believed LaFuente and the others were innocent. They also told creepy stories about the Yankton family’s violent history. Some allowed their names to be used; others were too terrified. I talked to one of the witnesses who had recanted; he broke down in tears in front of one of the men he had sent away. On my last day there, I knocked on Yankton’s door. He was there — or at least his car and his family were because I could hear them behind the door — but he refused to come out or acknowledge my presence. I left the rez convinced LaFuente was innocent.

The story came out in October 2006 — to absolute official indifference. We were dealing with the federal system here, and it is immune to outside voices. I went to a parole hearing and testified there was no evidence Richard had hurt anyone in North Dakota. I spoke with an old friend who had worked for President Bush about a possible pardon. No luck. Richard would remain in federal prison. I still get calls from him, and there’s always a lilt in his voice, a determination to show he has not given up. His attorney is hopeful the Obama administration may look at his case and give Richard a pardon. He’s 50 now. He’s been in prison for 23 years.

I just got finished doing one of the most complicated and maddening stories I’ve ever done, about a supposed child-sex ring in Mineola and Tyler, in East Texas. It’s a tragic saga of seven adults accused of horrible acts of pedophilia by five children; three were convicted in 2008 with four more to go on trial this year. The adults were said to have run the sex ring at a swingers club (which did exist for a few months in 2005), with middle-aged wife and husband swappers watching and even videotaping them.

But no evidence was ever found and none of those swingers ever came forward. The whole thing has the feel of the ritual abuse cases from the ’80s and ’90s, when all across the U.S., children accused adults of sex abuse, usually in tandem with dark acts of Satan worship. Those cases all involved false memories implanted in children during interviews. Though no evidence was ever found, many innocent adults were convicted and sent to prison.

The pattern in Mineola follows those cases to an alarming degree. Besides the lack of any physical evidence, a Texas Ranger interviewed the kids in a highly questionable manner, often allowing two of them to be in the room together and even allowing their foster mother in the room. Both techniques are egregious no-nos. The children’s stories were littered with outrageous elements. One little girl told of riding around on a broom; another told of six grown-ups dressed in black witch outfits with white face paint who jumped out to scare her brother when he danced “funky.”

I found plenty of other grounds for believing the whole thing had been a fantasy. I located many people in California who told me stories about the foster mother making up false stories and getting children to believe them. At first these people were frightened to go on the record. But the more people I found willing to have their names used, the more of them actually agreed to it. Seven eventually did so. I also interviewed the DA from the neighboring Texas county, who had done his own investigation — and found absolutely no evidence of any child-sex ring. Finally, I talked to the married couple who ran the swingers club, two middle-aged, salt-of-the-earth East Texans, who told me emphatically there had never been any children at the club. The wife had told investigators this.

But prosecutors never informed the defense, helping lead the juries to their guilty verdicts. These officials, through abhorrence of the alleged crimes, had put on blinders to the truth, choosing to believe the words of children, no matter how inconsistent or how absurd. The juries – made up of conservative, church-going citizens of East Texas – handed down guilty verdicts in just four minutes in the first two trials. The nature of the defendants didn’t help: All three had drug and alcohol problems and lived in trashed-out trailers. I had to humanize them — I had to make the reader care for them.

I attempted to do this mainly through Patrick Kelly, AKA “Booger Red,” the third defendant convicted. I visited his family, some of whom still live in trailers near the one he grew up in. I listened to them talk about his life there, his daily routine of drinking beer, watching “Deal or No Deal,” and mowing yards. They were perplexed that anyone could think Booger had been the mastermind behind a child-sex ring. I visited him in prison and ended the story with him sitting on the other side of the prison glass, rubbing his forehead and pondering the mystery of how he had been accused and convicted of something he hadn’t done. “At first I thought, ‘I ain’t done nothing, I ain’t got nothing to worry about.’ I was 40, had never been arrested. Why would a man my age all of a sudden start doing something like that? It makes no sense.” I’m as certain of Kelly’s innocence as I am that it will be brutally hot in Texas this August.

The Mineola story in our April issue hit the streets in mid-March. The initial silence was deafening — at least compared with the resounding certainty in my head. No national newspapers paid any attention to it and no politicians waved it high and decried the injustice. Oprah didn’t call back, neither did “60 Minutes.” I was frustrated but hopeful: Who knows who will read the story and get righteously indignant further down the line?

Besides, there’s a pile of letters on my desk that has reached a tipping point. After listening to some snarling garage rock — check out Zakary Thaks, the Rising Suns and the Thirteenth Floor Elevators — I’m going to get to it.