The True Story of How a Series of Lies Sent an Innocent Man to Prison
On June 2, 2025, after 18 years, 9 months, and roughly 15 days of incarceration for a crime I don’t believe he committed, my brother Steve was finally released. It’s about time. Here he is in his son’s kitchen a few days ago. I don’t believe the book, Aggravated, was responsible for Steve’s release …
Over the years I have sent Steve books and subscriptions to magazines (all of which are required to be mailed from a bookstore or the publisher), and have printed and mailed him all sorts of articles (some because they describe legal issues pertinent to his case, and others just because I thought he might find …
As I mentioned in the previous post, Steve’s prison is often understaffed, but it’s not the only one. There are a variety of reasons why people don’t want to work in prisons (low pay, potential danger, etc.). Shortages of staff can result in inmates going hungry and being less safe. One of the reasons why …
About the time the coronavirus began reaching into US prisons, in early March, TDCJ put all of the units in the system on permanent lockdown, and stopped all visitations in hopes of keeping the virus outside the prison walls. It was a false hope, of course. Even though family members of inmates weren’t allowed inside, …
By 2010 or so, Steve and I were talking on the phone at least once a week, sometimes twice; long rambling talks about anything and everything (books, music, politics, religion, his circumstances, the law, television, and anything else that happened to surface), although we always discussed some aspect of his case, and that was usually …
I’m fourteen years older than Steve. He was born in 1960, in El Paso, Texas. We had lived there about six years by then, a record for us as a family, we moved a lot. We managed to stay there about two more years before we moved to Deep Springs, also in Texas, to live …