1999 SPECIAL REPORT: "LACRESHA MURRAY

11-year-old Lacresha Murray was the youngest person ever charged with capital murder in the state of Texas.

Take the case of Lacresha Murray, the eleven-year-old Austin girl twice convicted of causing the death of two-and-a-half-year-old Jayla Belton. On May 24, 1996, Belton died after apparently suffering blows that, among other things, cut her liver in two. The medical examiner’s estimation of Belton’s time of death led police to conclude that the last person with her—Murray, who had been looking after Belton—was the killer. Murray was arrested and convicted two months later in juvenile court. But in a highly unusual move, the judge presiding over the case threw out the jury’s verdict, questioning whether “justice was served.” At a second trial five months later, Murray was defended by new lawyers with almost unlimited resources, but she was once again found guilty. This time she was sentenced to 25 years in a juvenile youth facility.

For two and a half years Murray’s supporters criticized the conduct of the police and questioned the validity of the evidence against her. They pointed to her lack of motive, the absence of any witnesses, and the fact that her confession was extracted by two police officers after she had been interrogated for more than two hours without an attorney present. Still, coverage of the Murray story was mostly limited to the local press, despite her supporters’ best efforts to get it before a national audience. “The only thing that has stopped 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, Dateline NBC, and even the New York Times from doing it was someone saying, ‘Well, she’s been tried twice. She’s been found guilty twice,’” says Barbara Taft, an Austin community activist who heads Murray’s support group, People of the Heart. Then, on November 15 of last year, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert wrote the first of several columns defending Murray and brutally assailing Travis County district attorney Ronnie Earle. Now everything has changed: Thanks to that exposure, 60 Minutes, National Public Radio, and People magazine are planning stories on the Murray case, and other national media may join them.

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