Meet Jerry Hartfield. He's 55 years old, and for 33 of those years, he's been housed in a Texas prison without a valid conviction or sentence.
Hartfield has been described by the New York Daily News as an "illiterate fifth grade dropout with an IQ of 51." In 1977, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death under auspicious circumstances. Those circumstances? A juror had been improperly excluded from the pool in violation of Hartfield's rights under the sixth amendment. In the original trial, state prosecutors excluded a woman who expressed reservations about applying the death penalty, a violation serious enough to earn Hartfield a reversal at Texas's high court. For those non-legal types and those unfamiliar with the Texas criminal justice apparatus, having a death conviction for a young black man overturned in a Texas appellate court is commensurate with a golfer carding a hole-in-one or a basketball player nailing a half-court heave. It happens so rarely that the reversal in itself must stand as evidence of the truly egregious nature of the original trial error.
Hartfield's experience in the Texas justice machine has been marked by waiting. He waited three years to have his conviction overturned by the state's high criminal court, which provided the state with the opportunity to re-try the case. Three years later, the court formally vacated the sentence against Hartfield. Not long after that, the Texas governor's office, then under the control of Mark White, moved to commute the sentence from the death penalty to life imprisonment, a move that would have been permissible had Texas followed the proper procedure.
But the state did not. In fact, it fumbled around so remarkably that few are really sure what happened. Grand confusion reigned supreme, as the governor's office failed to inform the Board of Pardons and Parole that the sentence had been vacated by the high court. The court's officials in the county where the original trial had taken place erroneously informed the Court of Criminal Appeals that its directive to give Hartfield a new trial had been observed and carried out. All the while, Hartfield wasted away in prison.
It was a comedy of errors, and Hartfield, probably because of his diminished intellectual ability, was unaware of what was taking place around him. He had won an appeal and a right to a new trial, but no one bothered to tell him. When the state took too long to file its motion to commute his sentence to life imprisonment, its only option was to re-try him. But the state did not want to re-try Hartfield. Re-trying him after six years would have been difficult, as physical evidence may have run dry and witnesses may have been difficult to find.
So Texas sat. In fact, it sat for more than two decades, until a few years ago, when Hartfield learned of his legal plight. He finally wrangled up a lawyer, and he's pressed Texas to make its choice - either re-try him or release him, as he currently sits in prison without either a valid conviction or a valid sentence. In fact, the high court of Texas declared that because his conviction had been vacated, his legal status is as if he had never been tried at all.
The sixth amendment guarantees the right to a speedy trial. After twenty-seven years of delay, there exists a strong argument that Hartfield's sixth amendment rights have been trampled on so severely that Texas has forfeited the right to try him again. At least, that is the argument that his attorneys made in a writ of mandamus filed in a Texas court last week.
The ensuing legal fight has taken a tone so fundamentally Texan that only those who practice in and follow the state's courts can truly appreciate it. The state has argued, repeatedly, that Hartfield's unwillingness to bring this issue up until now deprives him of the right to raise the issue. As Andrew Cohen deftly reports, their argument even takes on a more insidious vibe:
Worse, Texas argues, Hartfield committed a fraud on the court, deliberately keeping himself imprisoned so that one day, decades later, he could spring a speedy-trial argument upon an unsuspecting court. The argument isn't just facile. It's insulting.
Last week, Texas state judge Craig Estlinbaum sided with the state, finding that the state's more than two decade delay had benefited Hartfield, and in the alternative, he should have been more vigilant in asking the state to re-try him. Imagine a reality where in a case such as this in a state such as this, the judge writes:
There is no evidence that Hartfield has suffered any anxiety relating to his pretrial detention.
It happened.
Hartfield, the mentally challenged man who has spent nearly the entirety of his adult life in prison after the state's high court found that the state violated his constitutional rights in the original trial, was found to have suffered no anxiety through thirty-three years of pre-trial waiting.
In his latest appeal, Hartfield has been represented by one of my old professors, who ranks as arguably the most distinguished post-conviction lawyer in Texas, and perhaps in the country. That lawyer argued to the court that if a man like Jerry Hartfield, who languished away in a Texas prison for more than two decades without the help of a lawyer, could not establish a sixth amendment claim for a violation of his right to a speedy trial, then what exactly does that right mean? It'd be substantially similar to declaring Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt slow. If he's slow, then what does that mean for the rest of us, for the rest of the world?
In this case, we have the worst of the Texas criminal justice system. The state, in its zeal and blood-lust, violated a defendant's rights from the jump, poisoning the jury pool in direct contravention of the constitution. It then delayed for a substantial number of years, and even with the state's courts offering the state ample opportunity to either commute the man's sentence or re-try him, the state tripped over its own procedural hurdles in failing to do either properly. This is critical, of course, because Texas is the sort of state where a lawyer who files an appeal seven minutes late can expect to have that appeal rejected summarily without a review of the merits.
Given its failure, the state of Texas engaged in lawlessness, figuring that no one would miss a black man with an IQ of 51. And they were right for more than two decades. They preyed on Jerry Hartfield with full knowledge that he lacked the mental capacity to know he had been turned into a victim of the state. Rather than following the law, they figured they would accomplish what they set out to anyway - imprisoning Jerry Hartfield for life - without ever giving him his new trial. And when the state was called on it three decades later, its actions revealed that not much has changed between 1970 and 2014.
Jumping through procedural hoops, Hartfield's lawyers may find refuge in a federal court, which may grant the man his release at some point the future. As some pundits have noted, under a standard life sentence, Hartfield may have even been paroled by now. For more than 12,000 days he's been held, and he figures to spend at least a few more locked away. The state's lawless error compounded by its soulless and gutless insistence on standing by that error has proven once again that in states like Texas, the constitution is little more than wiping paper for an elected judge's overgrown hindparts, especially when that document's being used for its intended purpose of protecting the weak. Or as they call them in Texas, Prey.