Getting Life

May 26, 2014
In 1986, 32-year-old Michael Morton’s life changed forever the day his wife, Christine, was bludgeoned to death in their bed while their three-year-old son looked on. In this eloquent, page-turning memoir, Morton recalls his wrongful conviction of that murder and the 25 years he spent in the hellish Texas penal system before DNA tests proved his innocence. He describes his trial, in which, he explains, the prosecutor in the rural county outside of Austin blatantly withheld exculpatory evidence. Despite being railroaded and sentenced to life in prison, Morton’s attitude remains more positive than you’d expect: he’s determined to bring his wife’s real killer to justice, even as he’s exposed to some of the harshest prisons in Texas. With the help of the New York–based Innocence Project, a legal effort founded to overturn wrongful convictions through DNA testing, Morton pushed through years of blocked appeals until the courts finally approved testing a bloody bandana found near the murder scene (it revealed the DNA of another man, who would be found guilty of the murder in 2013).