Years in Texas prisons after conviction voided

From The New York Times, an article by Richard Pérez-Peña about injustice in Texas:

The legal record shows that Jerry Hartfield’s first murder conviction was thrown out on appeal, and for the next thirty-two years, he was not officially guilty of anything, nor sentenced to anything. Yet he spent that time in Texas prisons, in what an appellate court now calls “a criminal justice nightmare”.
He was finally tried and convicted again in 2015, but, on Thursday, Hartfield (photo) moved closer to freedom than he has been in decades. A state Court of Appeals ruled that he was not only denied his constitutional right to a speedy trial but, to a degree the court had neither seen nor imagined before; it noted that the important precedents dealt with delays of three years, six years, eight years — not thirty-two.
The three-judge panel dismissed the indictment against Hartfield, who is developmentally disabled, in effect erasing the recent conviction. But it is still not clear whether, or when, he will get out of prison.
Prosecutors could appeal the ruling to the Court of Criminal Appeals, Texas’ highest criminal tribunal. The state Attorney General’s Office, which has argued against Hartfield, referred questions to the Matagorda County District Attorney’s Office, which did not reply to requests for comment.
“We are deeply mindful that our conclusion today means that a defendant who may be guilty of murder may go free,” Judge Gina M. Benavides wrote for the Court of Appeals. “However, based on the United States Constitution, it is the only possible remedy.”
All told, Hartfield, now sixty, has spent more than forty years behind bars for the murder of a bus station ticket clerk.
His case can seem like something out of absurdist fiction: a court ruling ignored or forgotten, an appeal dismissed by a court that agreed with the substance but said it had been filed under the wrong statute, a retrial after most of the evidence had been lost and witnesses had died, and an argument by prosecutors that Hartfield, himself, was to blame for the delays, and caused them intentionally.
“Once you call this Kafkaesque, you can’t really call anything else Kafkaesque, because there’s nothing else remotely like this,” said David R. Dow of the University of Houston Law Center, one of the lawyers who represented Hartfield on appeal. “This was the perfect storm of everything that could go wrong with the criminal justice system.”
On 17 September 1976, Eunice Lowe, a 55-year-old white woman, was killed at the the Continental Trailways station in Bay City, Texas, southwest of Houston. The killer bashed in her head with a pickax, stole money from the station and took her car, and there was evidence of sexual assault after death.
Hartfield, a black man, signed a confession that he later disavowed, and, crucially, investigators said he told them where to find Lowe’s car. Experts placed his IQ in the 50s or 60s, which his lawyers contend made him easily coerced by detectives, and unable to understand his rights or his confession.
A jury convicted him and he was sentenced to death. But the Court of Criminal Appeals later overturned that verdict, ruling that a potential juror had been improperly dismissed for having doubts about the death penalty, and ordered a new trial. After years of legal wrangling, the high court ruling took effect in March 1983.
Under Texas law at the time, prosecutors had a way to avoid a retrial and preserve the conviction, but only if they acted within a time frame set by the court. Because the trial error had to do with capital punishment, if the governor commuted the sentence to life in prison, then it would be as if the appellate court had never ruled, and the guilty verdict would remain in effect.
That was apparently never communicated to the prison system. Dow said that Hartfield thought he was awaiting a new trial, but did not have the capacity to understand the delay or what to do about it.
Whether the District Attorney’s Office understood what had happened at the time is unclear, but it never took steps to retry him, and the case lay dormant for the next twenty-three years. Prosecutors have argued that Hartfield had legal representation all along, because his original defense team remained his lawyers of record until a court formally dismissed them in 2013. But Hartfield’s new lawyers say he had no legal counsel from 1983, when the original team thought they were done with the case, until a Federal court appointed a lawyer in 2008.
Starting in 2006, a fellow inmate helped Hartfield file motions in various courts. Some were rejected outright, and at least one apparently went to the wrong office. One Federal judge ruled in his favor, but another said he had to keep trying in state court.
Finally, in 2013, Texas’ Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Hartfield’s conviction and life sentence were void, but his motions were also void. The motions were filed under a law applying to people who have been convicted, the court said, and there was no valid conviction on record in his case. He refiled under a different provision, and prosecutors finally sought a new trial.
Hartfield’s lawyers said the charges should be dismissed because he was denied a speedy trial. Prosecutors argued that, while the government was negligent, the defendant was partly to blame for the delays. For more than two decades, they said, he acquiesced in his imprisonment without trial, as a ploy to avoid the death penalty and to make it harder to mount a case against him. (The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that intellectually disabled people cannot be executed.)
The District Attorney’s Office was able to locate just one of the sixteen evidence exhibits used at the original trial, several witnesses had died, and at least one had dementia. The murder weapon was lost, along with blood and semen samples that could have yielded DNA. Lowe’s car no longer existed.
But the trial court ruled that the case could proceed, and in 2015, thirty-eight years after his first trial, Hartfield was convicted again and sentenced to life in prison. If that sentence were counted from the start of his time in prison, he would have been eligible for parole long ago.
If he is released based on the recent ruling, he would probably live with one of his two sisters, Dow said. “I’m not sure if he knows about this ruling yet,” Dow said. “I think it’s unlikely he really understands it very well.”

Rico says, even for Texas, pretty stupid, and the guy's totally unprepared for life on the outside...