Jerry Hartfield retrial: Prisoner to get retrial 35 years after murder conviction was overturned
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Version 0 of 1. For Texas inmate Jerry Hartfield, the wait for a second chance has been unfathomably long. Sent to death row for the 1976 murder of a bus-ticket agent, his conviction was overturned by a state appeals court in 1980, automatically entitling him at the time to a fresh trial. When did that new trial begin? Today. Just how it happened that Mr Hartfield was allowed to fester behind bars for another 35 years – though mostly not on death row – after the appeals court ruling, with nothing being done to set a new trial, is not quite clear to anyone. State prosecutors have acknowledged some fault but have also suggested Mr Hartfield himself, who has an abnormally low IQ, was partly to blame for not making himself heard earlier. “On one hand, the state’s negligence caused a 30-year delay in bringing Hartfield to trial,” state district judge Craig Estlinbaum, said before the start of the new trial over which he is presiding. “Nonetheless, Mr Hartfield failed to present a clear, unambiguous demand directly to the trial court for a speedy trial.” “Regardless of how the time is parsed out, the delay between the initial conviction in 1977 and the trial ... is extraordinary,” Jay Wooten, a defence lawyer for Mr Hartfield, stated in court documents. Potential trial jurors were due to report at the court in Bay City, about 60 miles southwest of Houston, for possible selection to serve. Opening arguments and testimony may get under way later this week. The crime was brutal. Eunice Low, who sold tickets at the Bay City bus station, was first beaten with a pickaxe, then stabbed with a broken glass bottle and robbed. Aged 55, she was also raped when she was dead. The evidence that convicted Mr Hartfield was a ticket found at the station with his fingerprints and a confession he gave to police, which he later said was made under coercion. The sentence – and by extension, the conviction itself – was overturned by the Texas Court of Appeals because a juror at his trial had been incorrectly dismissed for voicing misgivings about the death penalty. The then Texas governor commuted the death sentence to life behind bars three years later. It was only in 2006 when another inmate told Mr Hartfield that there had been no conviction to commute. He was not wrong. In 2009, US district judge Lynn Hughes confirmed that Mr Hartfield was still serving time for a conviction that no longer existed. “Hartfield’s position is as straightforward and subtle as a freight train,” said the judge. Yet it took six more years to get to this week. It seems, moreover, that even if Mr Hartfield is convicted of the murder again, he would be eligible for parole at once. Hartfield, who according to court documents has an IQ of 67, indicating mental impairment, told the Associated Press that for nearly 30 years he just thought his case was somehow on appeal when it was not. “I don’t hold no grudge,” he said from prison in 2013. “All I want to do is just get things right and get back on with my life again. Being a God-fearing person, he doesn’t allow me to be bitter.” Judge Estlinbaum last year turned down a request that Mr Hartfield, an African American, be released from prison pending his new trial, rejecting defence arguments that his constitutional right to a speedy trial had been violated, on the grounds that Mr Hartfield himself had not asked for one fast enough. The new trial is likely itself to be fraught with problems, however, because most of those who testified in 1977 have now vanished or died and nearly all of the physical evidence presented by prosecutors is also long gone. |