05/26/2014
In 1986, 32-year-old Michael Morton’s life changed forever the day his wife, Christine, was bludgeoned to death in their bed while their three-year-old son looked on. In this eloquent, page-turning memoir, Morton recalls his wrongful conviction of that murder and the 25 years he spent in the hellish Texas penal system before DNA tests proved his innocence. He describes his trial, in which, he explains, the prosecutor in the rural county outside of Austin blatantly withheld exculpatory evidence. Despite being railroaded and sentenced to life in prison, Morton’s attitude remains more positive than you’d expect: he’s determined to bring his wife’s real killer to justice, even as he’s exposed to some of the harshest prisons in Texas. With the help of the New York–based Innocence Project, a legal effort founded to overturn wrongful convictions through DNA testing, Morton pushed through years of blocked appeals until the courts finally approved testing a bloody bandana found near the murder scene (it revealed the DNA of another man, who would be found guilty of the murder in 2013). (July)
Getting Life: An Innocent Man's 25-Year Journey from Prison to Peace
Narrated by Roger Wayne
Michael MortonUnabridged — 9 hours, 53 minutes
Getting Life: An Innocent Man's 25-Year Journey from Prison to Peace
Narrated by Roger Wayne
Michael MortonUnabridged — 9 hours, 53 minutes
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Overview
Drawing on twenty-five years of recollections, court transcripts, and more than one thousand pages of personal journals he wrote in prison, Michael recounts the hidden police reports about an unidentified van parked near his house that were never pursued; the treasure trove of evidence, including a bandana with the killer's DNA on it, that was never introduced in court; the call from a neighboring county reporting the attempted use of his wife's credit card that was given to local police; and, ultimately, how Michael battled his way through the darkness to become a free man once again.
Editorial Reviews
In straightforward, thoughtful prose, surprisingly devoid of bitterness, from his personal journals as well as with court transcripts, Morton details his love for his wife and son, his loss of both, and his years spent surviving in prison and trying to prove his innocence. A powerful memoir and a powerful indictment of the U.S. judicial system and its potential to imprison innocent men and women.
"Riveting."
A true Texas story of how our system of justice can itself be criminal. Michael Morton’s powerful tale will take you with him into mourning, into prison, and finally, thankfully, back out into the light.
Imagine spending twenty-five years in prison for a murder you did not commit. Imagine the murder victim was your wife, the love of your life. And imagine it all happened because prosecutors and law enforcement officials cooked up a case against you and hid evidence that would have identified the real killer. Michael Morton doesn't have to imagine, because he lived it. It's usually a cliché to say someone has been to hell and back, but in Morton's case that is exactly what happened, and his stunning and lyrical account of the journey will break your heart, then make you mad, and finally fill you with hope.
"A tale of grave injustice and, finally, great strength and courage and intelligence."
Morton poignantly recounts half a lifetime spent behind bars and underscores the glaring errors of our justice system.
A lively and intimate account of his rise from pariah to celebrated survivor after DNA evidence and determined lawyers proved his innocence after 25 years in prison…What makes Morton’s story so intriguing is the ease with which most people can put themselves in his place — the victim of a crime treated like a criminal — and wonder if they could cope, let alone survive.
"Even for readers who may feel practically jaded about stories of injustice in Texas – even those who followed this case closely in the press – could do themselves a favor by picking up Michael Morton's new memoir…It is extremely well-written, insightful, infuriating, and, in places, quite funny."
A jarring testament that truth really can be stranger than fiction…the writing is snappy and clean, with more wit than one might expect.
"A stunning memoir...A great deal has been written about the shortcomings of the American criminal justice system, but perhaps nothing more searing than Morton’s book, 'Getting Life.' It is a devastating and infuriating book, more astonishing than any legal thriller by John Grisham...Morton is able to deliver this aching and poignant look at the criminal justice system only because he didn’t get a death sentence."
"In this absorbing first-person narrative, first-time author Morton shows readers how it is possible in our justice system to be convicted of a crime without substantial evidence." ---Library Journal Starred Review
In straightforward, thoughtful prose, surprisingly devoid of bitterness, from his personal journals as well as with court transcripts, Morton details his love for his wife and son, his loss of both, and his years spent surviving in prison and trying to prove his innocence. A powerful memoir and a powerful indictment of the U.S. judicial system and its potential to imprison innocent men and women.
"In this absorbing first-person narrative, first-time author Morton shows readers how it is possible in our justice system to be convicted of a crime without substantial evidence." —Library Journal Starred Review
2014-05-21
A man falsely convicted of murdering his wife shares his story.Already the subject of several articles, TV segments and a documentary, Morton chronicles his remarkable 25-year ordeal in a sweeping autobiography. The author’s family relocated from California to Texas when Morton was a teenager in the early 1980s, and while in college, he fell in love with and married Christine Kirkpatrick, a kindhearted, gregarious girl with whom he would conceive a son. The day after his 32ndbirthday in 1986, the author arrived home to discover his wife bludgeoned to death. Compounding his grief was an investigator who soon positioned Morton as a suspect, even though his brother-in-law found some “overlooked” bloodstained evidence and his son provided an eyewitness confession about seeing the real murderer. The author ably demonstrates the heinous result of a bungled investigation by police detectives desperate to collar a perpetrator and aggressively angling to tie Morton to his wife’s grisly murder. With few leads to go on, Morton became the lead suspect, and his personal depiction of the prosecution and ensuing laborious trial proceedings is riveting. More than a month after the crime, he was arrested, convicted by jury trial and sentenced to serve a life sentence in prison. As unsettling as his jail time was, Morton’s chronicle of his time there is a vicarious penitentiary tour for inquisitive readers. The author kept a diary during this time and remained surprisingly free of anger and acrimony, one day sure he would exonerate himself. His plight for freedom was bolstered by DNA evidence presented by a pair of humanitarian attorneys, including one from the Innocence Project. The conviction of both a misguided prosecutor who suppressed evidence and the real murderer, Mark Alan Norwood, allowed Morton, now almost 60, the freedom to remarry and live as a liberated man.An intimate, gripping portrayal of a grievous miscarriage of justice.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170689330 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tantor Audio |
| Publication date: | 10/13/2014 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Getting Life
Prologue
The door closed.
Not with a click or the sound of tumblers finally hitting their marks or the sturdy clunk of wood and metal meshing as if they were made for each other.
This was different.
It began with the long, hard sound of steel sliding against steel.
Like a train, the heavy door built speed as it barreled along its worn track, the portal to the real world growing smaller as the barrier of thick and battered bars roared into place.
It locked with a cold, bone-shaking boom that rattled me—literally—me, the guard outside my door, and any other inmates unlucky enough to be nearby.
I was alone in my cell, alone in the world, as alone as I had ever been in my life.
And I would stay there—alone—listening to that door close, over and over and over again, for the next twenty-five years.
Twenty-five years.
My wife, Chris, had been savagely beaten to death several months earlier. Before I had time to begin mourning, I was fighting for my own life against a legal system that seemed hell-bent on making me pay for the murder of the woman I would gladly have died for.
I was innocent.
Naïvely, I believed the error would soon be set right.
I could not have been more wrong.
As the years went by, I saw the three-year-old son my wife and I had doted on grow up and grow away. He believed his father was the murderer who’d killed the person he loved most.
And why wouldn’t he? That’s what everyone told him. On each of the rare occasions Eric saw me, my imprisonment—my inmate uniform, the guards and the guns, the bars and the buzzers—was a stark reminder that the world had decided I wasn’t fit to walk free.
Ironically, Eric was one of the two people who knew what had really happened. He was in the house when something evil entered and destroyed our lives. At the time, our son tried to tell others what he had seen, but no one believed him.
And through all my time in prison, through all of my son’s heartache, through our whole family’s grief, the man who killed my wife was free—free to travel, free to commit crimes, free to kill again.
And again.
As the years passed, I watched the world go on without me through the keyhole of a door I could not unlock.
For a quarter century—a generation—my life was lived in penitentiary television rooms where you could get killed for changing the channel and on hard labor farms where violent men would feign fainting just to get a brief break from the unrelenting Texas sun.
I ate every meal in chaotic and cavernous prison chow halls where, as the old joke goes, the food was terrible, but at least you got a lot of it.
Needless to say, my dining companions were much the same—they were terrible and there were a lot of them.
If I was very lucky, weekends were spent in packed visiting rooms that were either too hot or too cold, and were always overrun by shattered families—virtually all of them walking wounded, scarred by addiction, abuse, and ignorance.
While I was desperate for company from the outside, whenever I entered the visiting room, I knew there was a terrible downside for me, as well as for the people who had made the long trek to see me.
Everyone who visited had to try to act “normal” in an almost unimaginably strained setting. Because they loved me, they would ask that we pose for pictures together in front of the dirty, cracked walls washed in harsh fluorescent light. I would stand next to my family in their colorful street clothes, while I grinned grimly for the camera—year after year—getting ever grayer, looking more worn out, always in my poorly fitting prison whites.
Smile!
Click.
And on those visits, I would see my mom and dad—my biggest boosters, my eternal believers—spend year after year in shabby rooms surrounded by failure and sadness, aging before my eyes, struggling to smile through their pain, their shame, and their profound anger.
I was doing the same.
We spent all those visits and all those years talking about old times and planning for a future we could only pray would come to pass.
What none of us knew was that in the small town where I had stood trial, in a nondescript concrete warehouse where police stored old evidence—a dingy place packed with damaged cardboard boxes and haphazardly marked plastic pouches—was hidden the tiny piece of truth that would one day set me free.
Decades after I entered prison, a DNA test would change everything—not just for me and for my son but for the man who so unfairly prosecuted me. The DNA test would make huge changes, as well, in the broken legal system that tried to keep me behind bars.
For the cruel monster of a man who killed my wife, the truth came roaring out of the past with a vengeance.
This is the story of how I got a life sentence and survived what felt like a lifetime behind bars—only to have everything change again. I got my life back, and this time, I understood it.
Twenty-five years after I was swept away, the tide turned.
The wind changed.
The door opened.
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