When Anthony Graves (pictured) was exonerated from death row in Texas in 2010, he decided that he would use his personal experience as a catalyst for redressing the “injustice of the justice system.” After receiving $1.45 million as compensation for the 18 years he was wrongly incarcerated, including twelve years on death row, the nation’s 138th death-row exoneree created the Anthony Graves Foundation. Over the past two years, Graves has personally contributed more than $150,000 of his compensation funds as part of the fledgling nonprofit’s expenditures towards freeing other innocent prisoners and providing health-care services to recently released prisoners who lack the means to pay for medical treatment. Graves was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death as a result of what the Texas State Bar described as “egregious” prosecutorial misconduct. Now disbarred for his actions, prosecutor Charles Sebesta presented false testimony from a witness implicating Graves in the murder while at the same time withholding from the defense a confession that the prosecution’s witness had actually committed the murder. As in most death-row exonerations, there was no DNA evidence in Graves’s case. Upon his release, Graves helped in the exoneration of Alfred Dewayne Brown, another no-DNA case, in which prosecutors suppressed a phone record that showed Brown could not have been at the scene of the crime when the murder occurred. The Graves Foundation then started The Humane Investigation Project, focusing on labor intensive non-DNA cases that Innocence Projects rarely take. “A lot of guys fall through the cracks because of the criteria of these projects,” Graves said. “I’d be dead today, because I had no DNA in my case.” Among other cases, Graves is currently working to exonerate still-incarcerated former Texas death-row prisoner Nanon Williams. When Graves was freed, doctors told him his arteries were clogged, the result of poor diet and health care. Because of his compensation settlement, however, he had money to see a doctor—a rarity for most people recently released from prison. Recognizing the severity of the health crisis faced by released prisoners, the Graves Foundation opened a small health clinic in March 2016 to provide low-cost and free care to those recently freed and to their families. Paul Cates, spokesman for the New York-based Innocence Project, said many exonerees feel like Graves, compelled to fight for change in a criminal justice system that wrecked their lives. “It doesn’t destroy their souls, and almost all of them somehow find a way to get beyond what happened,” Cates said. The prospect of helping those whose shoes he’s been in continues to motivate Graves. “I always stay positive,” he said. “That’s how I came home.” It is a worldview summed up in the title of Graves’s new book, Infinite Hope: How Wrongful Conviction, Solitary Confinement, and 12 Years on Death Row Failed to Kill My Soul, scheduled for release on January 16, 2018.
(B. Grissom, “Freed from death row, Anthony Graves uses compensation to help other inmates — including his best friend,” Dallas News, March 3, 2016; A. Graves, “Infinite Hope: How Wrongful Conviction, Solitary Confinement, and 12 Years on Death Row Failed to Kill My Soul”, Beacon Press (2018).) Read more about the Anthony Graves Foundation. See Books and Innocence.
