Anthony Graves Story on 48 Hours Saturday

The CBS news show 48 Hours Mystery will air a segment this Saturday with an update on former death row inmate Anthony Graves‘ story.

Graves was exonerated in 2010 after spending 18 years in prison, most of them on death row. He was wrongfully convicted in 1994 of six counts of capital murder and spent the better part of two decades fighting to prove his innocence. The state paid him $1.45 million last year for the time he was imprisoned, but getting the money he was owed required Graves to take on another fight with the state.

Texas law allows exonerees like Graves to apply for compensation for the time they spent wrongfully incarcerated. It provides exonerees $80,000 per year of incarceration in a lump sum and then another $80,000 per year of incarceration in a monthly annuity.

But Texas Comptroller Susan Combs initially denied Graves’ application for compensation because the court documents that freed him from prison did not declare his “actual innocence,” as the law required. Last year, 48 Hours reported, along with many other news outlets, on the state’s denial of compensation to Graves.

In response to the controversy over Graves’ case, state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston filed a bill that changed the law to make him and other similar wrongfully convicted ex-inmates eligible for state compensation while still weeding out weaker innocence claims. The measure also makes exonerees eligible for the same health benefits given to Texas Department of Criminal Justice employees for a period of time equal to the time they spent in prison. And it restricts fees lawyers for exonerees can charge their clients.

“If it hadn’t been for 48 Hours Mystery, I don’t think I would be getting my compensation,” Graves said in a CBS press release.

Check out a sneak preview of Saturday’s show here.

source : texas tribune and CBS News

Prison Diares – Confessions from death row

very interesting video

http://youtu.be/sYS_T72DhIs

Death Row Movies

1. “The Green Mile” 1999. This is a fine movie about a prison guard and an inmate with the gift to heal. A friendship seems to brew between the two as death lingers over head. Tom Hanks plays an exceptional role as the prison guard in this classic movie.
2. “Dead Man Walking” 1999. Based on a true story of a nun who becomes a spiritual advisor to death row. Never wavering from her Christian beliefs, she struggles to console those who have killed and one in particular who shows no remorse or regret for what he has done.
3. “Identity” 2003. A movie about a wrongly accused killer on death row. While others struggle to clear his name he has come to grips with his destiny. Will the phone ring at the last minute to save the innocent?  
4. “Monster’s Ball” 2001. Being in the family business isn’t Ledger’s cup of tea. After witnessing an execution he looses his lunch and his father looses his mind. Sent away to reexamine his life, ledger falls for Leticia (the wife of the one whose execution he witnessed).
5. “Black Angel” 1946. is a dark noir film very cleverly scripted. Just another innocent man on death row and the race to clear his name. This is still a wonderful and well directed dark film that even today it is one to review.
6. “The Thin Blue Line” 1998. A true docudrama about an innocent man on death row for the killing o Dallas policemen. A riveting story about the hardship and pain one man would go through for the sake of proving another’s innocence.
7. “Dead Man Out” 1989. What would happen if a convicted killer were to go insane while on death row. That is exactly the question this movie asks and sets out to answer it. This is a riveting and entertaining movie.
8. “Live! From Death Row” 1992. Yes, you read it right. This is a tabloid based movie about a live interview of a killer before his execution. Things don’t always go as planned however, even in television.
9. “Angels with Dirty Faces” 1938. Chronicles the lives of two friends, one chose the priesthood and the other a life of crime. One is set to pay for his crimes while the other the last rites.
10. “Beyond the Call” 1996. This movie centers on a housewife who finds herself in the midst of an inmate on death row. She feels compelled to help him based on his haunted past. This is a movie about the Vietnam era veterans and post traumatic syndrome.

TEXAS : Remembrance – Dominique Green “A Saint on Death Row “

On October 26, 2004, Dominique Green, thirty, was executed by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas. Arrested at the age of eighteen in the fatal shooting of a man during a robbery outside a Houston convenience store, Green may have taken part in the robbery but always insisted that he did not pull the trigger. The jury, which had no African Americans on it, sentenced him to death. Despite obvious errors in the legal procedures and the protests of the victims family, he spent the last twelve years of his life on Death Row.