Miraculously, just under the wire of a court-mandated deadline, the special prosecutor handling the retrial of the capital murder case against Anthony Graves found a cache of physical evidence that last month was thought lost. In court April 13, special prosecutor Patrick Batchelor told Judge Reva Towslee-Corbett that crucial evidence – including the alleged murder weapons – was, simply, “gone,” and Batchelor was given a May 1 deadline to determine what happened and whether the evidence could be found. This week, however, Graves’ attorneys say they were told the evidence was located inside a welded-shut jail cell in the old Burleson County Jail. Among the evidence found were the skullcaps of the six victims, which Graves’ defenders want to have tested, in part, to determine whether the victims’ injuries are consistent with the state’s theory of the crime.
Graves was convicted and sentenced to death in connection with the grisly murders in Sommerville, but his case was tossed out last year after the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the state committed prosecutorial misconduct, in part by keeping from the defense crucial witness statements that could have affected the outcome of the trial. Amazingly, the state was ready to move forward with the retrial – where it will, again, seek the death penalty – even after it discovered that almost all of the evidence in the case had been lost. One of Graves’ attorneys, Jeff Blackburn, told the Houston Chronicle that the defense is still waiting for a complete inventory of the evidence found last week. Among the reportedly missing items Graves’ legal team has been eager to test are the victims’ clothing and fingerprints found at the scene. Graves’ retrial is scheduled to begin July 10.
This article appears in May 11 • 2007.