The True Story of How a Series of Lies Sent an Innocent Man to Prison
My Investigation Begins While I was researching Steve’s trial, I was, of course, doing regular “real life” things (helping my wife care for her elderly parents, working at Rice University until late-2009 and then retiring, writing novels, etc.), but Steve’s situation, was always in the back of my mind. I felt like there should be …
Getting More Data For the next couple of years, on and off, I worked on breaking the transcripts down and analyzing them. I found a great deal of useful information that helped me understand the trial, and why it worked the way it did (or didn’t work the way it should have), but it would …
Parts of this post were used in Aggravated. The prosecution called two expert witnesses. We’ve already covered Ada Dixon. This post is about the other one, Blake Goudy, the man who gave the speech that day at Hanna’s school. Goudy said he only spoke to Hanna for fifteen minutes, so all he could say was …
A Conversation About Steve’s Appeals Steve usually calls me every Saturday, and we talk for a half hour or so. Recently, we spent much of our conversation talking about the two posts before this one (read Part 1 here and Part 2 here). Here is an abridged version of part of our conversation. I’ll pepper …
Parts of this post were used in Aggravated. What the Court Got Wrong Much of the following is directly quoted from court records (with names changed, of course). Just to recap, Argument 2 concerned Steve’s marijuana conviction. Steve thought it shouldn’t have been admitted because of its age (24 years before). Argument 3 charged that …
Parts of this post were used in Aggravated. Two Arguments the Court Got Wrong In Steve’s first appeal (to the 19th Court of Appeals, in Keegan, Texas), he made four arguments, all of which the court ruled against. I’m only going to deal with Arguments 2 and 3 in this post, but here’s a quick …
Parts of this post were used in Aggravated. Bolstering Truthfulness – Gonzo’s Trial In the previous post, we looked at Blake Goudy’s and Ada Dixon’s testimony in Steve’s trial, and I wondered if Dixon’s insistence that her clients were always truthful was typical of her trial behavior. In the court’s opinion for the appeal for …
Parts of this post were used in Aggravated. Bolstering Truthfulness – Steve’s Trial I’m not a lawyer, and if I’ve interpreted this incorrectly, someone please tell me, but I believe that a federal rule of evidence (Number 608) precludes a witness (like an expert witness) from being able to say that they know someone is …
Texas v. Munsen – Dixon’s Testimony On Day Four of the 2013 Munsen trial, about 9:00 am, the prosecutor began by having Dixon list her qualifications (RN, licensed professional counselor, in business for 21 years, gives lectures, wrote a book about abuse, etc.). When he asked her what her work as a counselor was like …
Parts of this post were used in Aggravated. Texas v. Munsen – Dixon’s Excuses The Gonzo and Munsen cases happened five and seven years, respectively, after Steve’s 2006 trial (2011 and 2013). As I said in the last post, Dixon said that she had testified in 30 or 40 trials by 2006. So I wondered, …