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On Monday afternoon, Jerry Hartfield was released from Hutchins State Jail in Dallas, Texas, after spending 41 years behind bars for the murder of a woman named Eunice Lowe. Hartfield, an intellectually disabled African-American man, was arrested for that murder in 1976 after his fingerprints were found near the scene and he confessed to the crime. He was convicted by a jury and sentenced to death. Today, he says that he was coerced into confessing and maintains his innocence.
In 1980, Hartfield appeared to catch a break. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned his murder conviction because of a question of jury bias and ordered him retried. But prosecutors chose to effectively disobey those orders, and they came up with a clever tactic to essentially put Hartfield's conviction in a deep freeze.
Jeff Newberry has been Jerry Hartfield's attorney since 2012, and is a legal clinic supervisor at the University of Houston. Andrew Cohen, senior editor at The Marshall Project, has been following this case for five years and made it the subject of this week's Case in Point. Newberry and Cohen join The Takeaway to discuss how Hartfield's case evolved over decades.
