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2000: Robert Earl Carter, exonerating Anthony Graves

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On this date in 2000, Robert Earl Carter was executed in Texas for slaughtering six people at the home of his Somerville ex, after the latter filed a child support suit against him.

The ex herself, Lisa Davis, wasn’t home at the time. But Carter’s stabbing-and-shooting rampage slew Davis’s mother Bobbie, Bobbie’s 16-year-old daughter Nicole, Robert and Lisa’s son Jason (the subject of the support suit), and three other small children that shared the residence. After murdering them, Carter set the house on fire: the burns he suffered to his own face and arms in the process helped connect him to the crime.

Pressed by interrogators, Carter at first admitted only that he was present with someone else who carried out the murders. Over time, he broke down and admitted to the slayings himself.

But Carter’s supposed other party also became a character fixed in the story that investigators were looking to tell — and that party’s identity became fixed on a casual acquaintance whom Carter eventually accused: Anthony Graves.

No forensic evidence implicated Graves, but Carter provided damning testimony at Graves’s 1994 trial. On that occasion, Carter claimed to have shot the teenage daughter Nicole, while Graves committed the rest of the murders, testimony that sent Anthony Graves to death row as well. (Graves’s brother Arthur Curry testified that Graves had been at home sleeping.)

But Carter changed his story again after both men were convicted.

As he prepared for his execution, Carter was keen to clear Anthony Graves before he left this mortal coil. Weeks earlier, he provided a sworn 85-page statement insisting that “Anthony Graves did not have any part in the murders and was not present before, during or after I committed the multiple murders at the Davis home.”

Even in his last statement on this date, Carter went out of his way to exonerate his supposed accomplice. “I’m sorry for all the pain I’ve caused your family,” Carter said from the gurney in his last moments, addressing the execution witnesses from his victims’ family. “It was me and me alone. Anthony Graves had nothing to do with it. I lied on him in court.”

Anthony Graves had been on death row for six years at this point. With Carter’s retraction it had become discomfitingly apparent that there was practically nothing to associate him with that horrific night in Somerville … butit would still be another decade more before he was officially exonerated and released.

After an appeals court ordered a new trial, a different prosecutor’s investigation of the case turned up just how scanty the case against him was.

“After months of investigation and talking to every witness who’s ever been involved in this case, and people who’ve never been talked to before, after looking under every rock we could find, we found not one piece of credible evidence that links Anthony Graves to the commission of this capital murder,” announced former Harris County prosecutor Kelly Siegler in a statement officially exonerating Graves. “This is not a case where the evidence went south with time or witnesses passed away or we just couldn’t make the case any more. He is an innocent man.” Siegler had been hired as a special prosecutor, and would have been the one to re-try Anthony Graves.

That happened in 2010, by which point Graves at age 45 had spent 18 years in prison, 12 of them on death row.

Today, Anthony Graves — you can find him on twitter at @AnthonyCGraves — is an activist and motivational speaker. He’s been outspoken especially on the torture inflicted by long-term solitary confinement, which he also endured during his years in prison.

Graves’s original prosecutor Charles Sebesta — against whom Graves has sought disciplinary action — maintains a site of his own with a page casting doubt on Anthony Graves’s innocence. (It’s also a minor monument to the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.)

On this day..