The Justice Project - Profile of Injustice

Clarence Brandley’s Story
 

On the morning of August 23, 1980, Cheryl Dee Ferguson went missing during a volleyball tournament at Conroe High School. When it was discovered that she was missing, janitors searched the school. Two of the janitors, Henry “Icky” Peace and Clarence Brandley, discovered her body in the auditorium loft. Brandley was the only African-American janitor, the others were white. Police interrogated Peace and Brandley together when, according to Peace, an investigator said, “One of you is going to have to hang for this,” and then, turning to Brandley, added, “Since you’re the nigger, you’re elected.”

The Investigation

In the face of public pressure to solve the crime, investigators publicly announced that they would arrest a suspect by the first day of classes, August 31, just eight days after the murder had occurred. After an investigation that lasted less than three days, Clarence Brandley was taken into custody and charged with the crime. The only evidence linking Brandley to the crime were the statements of the janitors who worked with him. They claimed they saw Brandley follow the victim into the bathroom shortly before her disappearance and that he was the only janitor with a key to the loft where the body was found. Their statements were given after a “walk-through” of the crime scene with investigators, and there was evidence that they were intimidated into corroborating their stories. Peace reported abusive treatment from the lead investigator to the District Attorney’s office, but they did nothing to stop his testimony from being heard at trial, or to correct the behavior of investigators.

The Trial

Brandley was convicted of capital murder, and sentenced to death in February of 1981, after a hung jury had not been able to return a verdict in a trial in December of 1980. Eleven months after Brandley was convicted and sentenced to death, his appellate lawyers discovered that exculpatory evidence was not only withheld during the trial, but had since disappeared while in the custody of the prosecution. This included a Caucasian pubic hair (Brandley is African American) and other hairs recovered from Ferguson’s body that were neither hers nor Brandley’s. Also missing were photographs taken of Brandley on the day of the crime showing that he was not wearing the belt the prosecution claimed had been the murder weapon.

The withheld and missing evidence was all the more troubling in light of the pretrial destruction of the spermatozoa. During the autopsy, the medical examiner discovered the existence of semen on the victim, but the state failed to run an analysis on the sample. Even in 1980, it was police procedure to preserve vaginal swabs taken in sexual assault investigations in order to exclude suspects based on blood type, Rh factor, and other genetic characteristics. However, by the time of the trial, the vaginal swabs taken from the victim had been lost or destroyed.

Brandley’s attorneys effectively articulated the willful destruction and disappearance of the potentially exculpatory evidence in Brandley’s appellate briefs, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and death sentence in 1985 without mentioning the issue.

Another janitor, John Sessum, testified at the first trial, corroborating the story of the other custodians, but at the evidentiary hearing he recanted what he had said at trial. At the hearing he claimed to have seen Acreman, another janitor, follow the victim up a staircase towards the auditorium, hearing her scream “No” and “Don’t.” He testified that Acreman warned him not to tell anyone what he had seen on the night of the murder. Despite Acreman’s threats, Sessum told Wesley Styles, the lead investigator. Styles threatened to arrest him if he did not corroborate Acreman’s story.

The suppression of evidence continued in 1986. Brenda Medina told her attorney that on the day of the crime James Dexter Robinson, one of the other janitors, confessed to her that he had murdered a girl. Medina’s attorney informed the district attorney’s office of this development, but the district attorney did not pass this important information on to Brandley’s defense attorneys. When Medina’s attorney realized this, he took it upon himself to notify Brandley’s attorneys of the confession.

Cheryl Bradford, a student at the school, contacted authorities once shortly after the incident, and once after seeing a televised program questioning the validity of Brandley’s conviction and airing a picture of Robinson. She told authorities that she saw two men who fit descriptions of Acreman and Robinson, rushing through the gymnasium around the time of the murder. Investigators neither followed this lead nor shared this information with Brandley’s defense lawyers. The janitor who found the victim’s body also gave similar testimony placing Acreman near the scene of the crime, but this lead was ignored by investigators and hidden from the defense.

The Exoneration & Civil Suit

In a 1987 evidentiary hearing, State District Judge Perry Picket recommended that the Court of Criminal Appeals grant Brandley a new trial, declaring: “The litany of events graphically described by the witnesses, some of it chilling and shocking, leads me to the conclusion the pervasive shadow of darkness has obscured the light of fundamental decency and human rights.” He continued to say, “In the thirty years this court has presided over matters in the judicial system, no case has presented a more shocking scenario of the effects of racial prejudice, perjured testimony, [and] witness intimidation. . . .The continued incarceration of Clarence Lee Brandley under these circumstances is an affront to the basic notion of fairness and justice.”

The Court of Criminal Appeals, after sitting on the case for 14 months, finally accepted Picket’s recommendation with a sharply split en banc decision on December 13, 1989. In the majority opinion, Judge Berchelmann wrote: “The state’s investigative procedure produced a trial lacking the rudiments of fairness. The principles of due process, embodied within the United States Constitution, must not, indeed cannot, countenance such blatant unfairness. The violent end of Cheryl Ferguson’s young life is both senseless and tragic… Our outrage over her murder, however, cannot justify the subversion of justice that took place during the investigation.” Brandley was released on January 23, 1990.

The prosecution appealed, delaying disposition of the case another 10 months. But within hours of the U.S. Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari on October 1, 1990, the prosecution dropped all charges.

As late as 2002, prosecutors still maintained that Brandley was guilty. They have not apologized for his wrongful imprisonment, nor have they filed charges against any other suspects. In fact, no investigation into Acreman or Robinson was ever performed despite the strong evidence against them. Brandley filed a $120 million lawsuit against several state agencies, but the case was dismissed because of state sovereign immunity.