From Death Row to Exoneration: Former Texas Prisoner Anthony Graves on Surviving Solitary Confinement

In a rare interview, former Texas death row prisoner Anthony Graves joins us to recount his experience in solitary confinement and how he was fully exonerated and released from prison in 2010. Graves was convicted in 1994 of assisting Robert Carter, a man he barely knew, in the brutal murders of six people. There was no physical evidence linking Graves to the crime, and his conviction relied primarily on Carter’s testimony. Before he was executed, Carter twice admitted he had lied about Graves’s involvement in the crime. In 2006, an appeals court overturned Graves’s conviction and ordered a new trial, saying prosecutors had elicited false statements and withheld testimony. After 18 years in prison, most of them on death row, Graves was exonerated and reunited with his family after a special prosecutor concluded he was an innocent man. Graves is now an active member of the movement to abolish the death penalty. "My experience was hell," Graves says. "I always liken it to something that you would consider to be your worst nightmare. I had to go through that experience every day for 18-and-a-half years. And it was just no way to live." Urging an end to the death penalty, Graves says: "They’re killing in your name. And I say to you, stand up and tell these people, 'Not in my name anymore.'"

DEMOCRACY NOW LINK:
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/6/22/from_death_row_to_exoneration_fmr