Wow! Anderson going to Jail, Bradley’s cases will be audited

The embarrassment of “justice” is Williamson County is now complete, Anderson to serve 10 days in jail.

Disgraced former prosecutor Ken Anderson will serve 10 days in jail after pleading no contest Friday to contempt of court. He will also be forced to pay a $500 fine and serve 500 hours of community service for his role in sending an innocent man to prison for more than two decades. He has until Dec. 2 to turn himself in.

During his time as Williamson County District Attorney, Anderson withheld evidence in the 1987 trial of Michael Morton, a grocer accused of bludgeoning his wife to death in their Georgetown home. Anderson’s previous charge of tampering with evidence was dropped as part of the plea agreement.

After the hearing, Innocence Project co-founder Barry Scheck said Williamson County District Attorney Jana Duty has given him the green light to audit all of Anderson’s cases, as well as the cases of her predecessor, John Bradley. Bradley blocked DNA testing from the Morton crime scene for eight years—evidence which ultimately proved Michael Morton’s innocence.

[…]

Outside the courtroom, Scheck called Anderson a “disgrace,” and said he continues to be disappointed in the former prosecutors’ conduct and his refusal to admit any misconduct in the Morton case.

“To this very day he wants to say the system went wrong,” Scheck said.

It’s possible that more could be coming with Bradley’s cases being audited. But I sure hope this is the end of this sad chapter in Williamson County history.

[UPDATE]: The most important outcome from this is that Michael Morton got the justice he deserved.

“It’s a good day,” Morton, who was present in the courtroom, told media after the hearing. “When it began, when I was asked what I wanted, I said, ‘The only thing that I want as a baseline is for Ken Anderson to be off the bench and for him to no longer practice law,’ and both of those things have happened and more.”

The film on his experience is about to come out, A wrongly convicted man’s nightmare ends in An Unreal Dream.

Grits thinks this is weak tea, Ken Anderson’s punishment for Brady violations tepid justice.

A prosecutor going to jail for Brady violations may be a first, but compared to what Morton faced, it’s hard to say with a straight face that Anderson was “actually punished in a meaningful way.” Losing his bar license is surely a bigger deal than ten days in jail. And at his age, with his judicial pension intact, losing his license wasn’t as harsh a punishment as the national media disapprobation he’s endured. As justice goes, this outcome represents relatively weak tea compared to the monstrous injustice Michael Morton endured at Anderson’s hands.