Sitting in a Brazoria County courtroom in 1994, Anthony Graves, a Black man, looked at his nearly all-white jury. He was on trial for a murder he didn’t commit, and the state was seeking the death penalty. At that moment, he felt like nothing had changed in 150 years.
“I felt like Dred Scott,” he told the Texas Observer this week. “I felt like a person sitting in front of white people with no rights, knowing that I hadn’t done anything to anybody, but I could not control what they were trying to do to me.”
As in Scott’s case, the courts ruled against Graves. He was sent to Texas’ death row. Robert Carter, the co-defendant who had named Graves as an accomplice, repeatedly told authorities he had lied. Carter even used his last words from the gurney in Huntsville in 2000 to try to clear Graves’ name. But he wasted his breath—the state’s highest appeals court was determined to keep Graves on death row.
