This is a really fucked up story. The attorney who represented the deceased, Jesse Quackenbush, was so enraged and impassioned by the death of his client that he wrote and directed a movie about Johnny Frank Garrett's innocence, and about the inherent flaws of the system that prosecuted him for the death of a nun.
“It was a system-wide failure that caused this kid to die. It wasn’t just the legal system,” Quackenbush said. “The media played a part. The governor was looking more to her own re-election hopes. There was a dysfunctional family.
The Supreme Court wasn’t morally deep enough to realize that executing 17-year-olds and ‘mentally retarded’ prisoners was wrong. There’s the system in Texas that allowed the prosecutors to hand-pick the pathologists to provide junk science.
“It’s a multifaceted failure, and no one facet is more to blame than the others.”
When you look at the evidence presented against the man, the entire case gets even more ridiculous:
Garrett, a white teenager, disappeared into a Kafkaesque legal labyrinth, after the alleged supernatural vision of a local soothsayer acclaimed him the culprit in the murder of a nun named Tadea Benz. Corporeal indicia of guilt falls somewhere between circumstantial and laughable: fingerprints in a convent he had visited many times, the inevitable jailhouse snitch, and an unrecorded supposed “confession” that Garrett refused to sign.
This is a tragic and embarrassing failure of the entire system, from the ground up. He was proven post mortem to be innocent; DNA testing linked the murder to a criminal exiled from Cuba by Castro in 1980 in the Mariel boatlift.