Ken Anderson is the former Williamson County, Texas, district attorney whose prosecutorial misconduct sent an innocent man, Michael Morton, to prison for nearly 25 years for the 1986 murder of his wife, Christine. Anderson concealed evidence pointing to another killer, then built a career on the conviction, eventually becoming a state district judge. After DNA testing freed Morton in 2011 and exposed the hidden evidence, Anderson pleaded guilty to criminal contempt, served five days in jail, surrendered his law license, and resigned from the bench. He remains the only prosecutor in U.S. history jailed for misconduct that produced a wrongful conviction.1
What Anderson Hid at the 1987 Trial
Christine Morton was found bludgeoned to death in the family’s home on August 13, 1986. Her husband Michael was charged, and at the February 1987 trial Anderson’s case leaned on a medical examiner’s time-of-death estimate that put the killing during a window when Morton was still at home. The jury convicted. Morton was sentenced to life.
Before trial, defense attorneys had asked for the police investigative file. Judge William Lott ordered Anderson to turn over all police reports and field notes so the court could screen them for exculpatory material. Anderson handed over a sliver of what existed. The rest sat in the prosecution’s files for decades.
Among the materials Anderson did not disclose:
- A statement from the Mortons’ three-year-old son, Eric, who told his maternal grandmother eleven days after the murder that a “monster” had killed his mother and that “Daddy was not home” during the attack. Lead investigator Sergeant Don Wood recorded the account in his notes.
- Neighbor reports of an unknown man in a green van who repeatedly parked near the Morton home and walked into a nearby wooded area before the killing.
- Evidence that Christine Morton’s credit card had been used by another woman in San Antonio after her death, and that a check made out to Christine had been cashed.
- Records concerning a bloody bandana recovered near the crime scene, which was never DNA-tested during the original investigation.
Anderson also exploited a gap in Texas law at the time: by declining to call certain investigators as witnesses, he avoided triggering disclosure of their notes and reports, which would otherwise have been open to cross-examination.
While Morton served his sentence, Anderson’s career climbed. He was named Prosecutor of the Year by the State Bar of Texas Criminal Justice Section in 1995, honored by the Texas Crime Victim’s Clearinghouse in 2000, and appointed to the Williamson County bench by Governor Rick Perry in 2002. He was sworn in on January 2, 2002, and served as a state district judge for more than a decade.
How the Misconduct Came to Light
The Innocence Project recruited Houston attorney John Raley to Morton’s case in 2004. Raley, Innocence Project attorney Nina Morrison, and co-founder Barry Scheck spent years fighting for DNA testing of crime-scene evidence. Prosecutors resisted testing the bandana, arguing it would “muddy the waters.” A court finally ordered the test in 2011.
The bandana carried Christine Morton’s blood and DNA from an unknown male. The male profile matched Mark Alan Norwood, a convicted felon from California who had been living in Texas at the time of the murder. Morton walked out of prison on October 4, 2011, and was formally exonerated by Judge Sid Harle on December 19, 2011.
Norwood was arrested on November 9, 2011, convicted of Christine Morton’s capital murder in March 2013, and sentenced to life. He was later convicted of the 1988 bludgeoning death of Debra Masters Baker in Austin, a killing that occurred while Morton sat in prison. Baker, like Christine Morton, was beaten in her bed, had a three-year-old child, and was attacked through an unlocked rear sliding-glass door. Had the evidence pointing away from Morton surfaced in 1987, investigators might have reached Norwood before Baker was killed.
Once Morton’s attorneys obtained the original prosecution file through a public information act request, the scale of what had been withheld became documentable. They petitioned the Texas Supreme Court to convene a court of inquiry, a rare Texas proceeding used to determine whether a crime has been committed. The court granted the petition in February 2012 and appointed Fort Worth Judge Louis Sturns to preside. Houston attorney Rusty Hardin was named special prosecutor on March 13, 2012.
The Court of Inquiry and the Charges
Hearings opened in February 2013. Hardin presented evidence that Anderson had actively concealed material supporting the defense’s intruder theory, the theory that turned out to be correct. A central question was whether Anderson had violated Judge Lott’s 1987 disclosure order. Anderson denied wrongdoing and argued the order was narrow. His lawyers called the proceeding a “political circus.”
On April 19, 2013, Judge Sturns found probable cause that Anderson had committed criminal conduct by purposefully concealing evidence. He charged Anderson with tampering with physical evidence (a felony), tampering with government records (a misdemeanor), and contempt of court, setting a $2,500 bond on each count. Hardin described the situation as essentially unprecedented: “We’re all kind of operating on a clean slate here.”
Guilty Plea, Jail Time, and Disbarment
Anderson resigned from the bench on September 23, 2013, sending his letter to Governor Perry. The State Bar of Texas had already filed a grievance after a ten-month investigation, alleging he violated five disciplinary rules by withholding evidence and making false statements to the court.
On November 8, 2013, Anderson entered a comprehensive settlement that resolved the criminal charges, a civil suit, and the State Bar case at once. Presiding District Judge Kelly G. Moore oversaw the proceedings. Anderson pleaded guilty to criminal contempt for failing to disclose exculpatory evidence. The felony tampering charge was dropped.
The sentence: ten days in the Williamson County Jail, with one day of credit for time served. He served five, receiving good-behavior credit. He paid a $500 fine and was ordered to complete 500 hours of community service over five years. He agreed to surrender his law license, and the Supreme Court of Texas accepted the resignation in lieu of disciplinary action in November 2013. His license was canceled, and he was permanently barred from practicing law in Texas. An independent audit of all cases Anderson had handled as a prosecutor was ordered, to be conducted by Williamson County with the Innocence Project and the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association.
Five days in jail and $500 for twenty-five years of another man’s life.
The Michael Morton Act
The case exposed how little Texas law required of prosecutors in sharing evidence with the defense. Before 2014, no statute compelled open files; access depended on local custom and prosecutorial discretion. On May 16, 2013, Governor Perry signed Senate Bill 1611, the Michael Morton Act, into law. It took effect January 1, 2014, and was the first significant change to Texas discovery law since 1965.
The Act gives defendants a statutory right to review evidence held by the state without a court order. Its core provisions:
- Prosecutors must produce offense reports, witness statements (including those of law enforcement), and material physical or recorded evidence as soon as practicable after a defense request.
- The state must disclose any information that is exculpatory, impeaching, or mitigating, regardless of whether it is deemed “material” to guilt or punishment. This reaches further than the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court standard in Brady v. Maryland, which required disclosure only of material evidence.
- The duty to disclose favorable information continues before, during, and after a case’s resolution.
- Prosecutors must document what they disclosed and file a certified list with the court before a plea is accepted or trial begins.
Why This Case Stands Alone
Anderson is the only American prosecutor to serve jail time for misconduct that caused a wrongful conviction. That is a statement about accountability, not about how rare the misconduct is. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, only four percent of prosecutors involved in wrongful convictions tainted by misconduct have faced any professional or personal discipline, and most of that discipline has been a reprimand or brief suspension. Among 729 people exonerated since 1989 in cases involving prosecutorial misconduct, Anderson is the sole prosecutor to have gone to jail.
The Innocence Project has pointed to the structural reasons: exculpatory evidence is often hidden on purpose and therefore hard to detect, and even when it surfaces, the legal system offers few mechanisms for meaningful sanctions. The Anderson case shows both halves of that problem: it took DNA, a court of inquiry, and the unsealing of a 25-year-old file to produce a five-day jail sentence.