Just last month, as Anthony Graves sat in a jail cell in Burleson County writing a letter, a guard came to his cell and after unlocking it, ordered Graves to follow him.

As Graves later told a reporter with Texas Monthly magazine, he found it unusual that he was being allowed outside the cell without handcuffs.

After all, Graves had spent the past 18 years in prison — 12 of them on death row.

Within minutes, he encountered one of his attorneys, Texas Monthly reported.

“God is good,” the attorney said. “It’s over. It’s finally over.”

With that, Graves was a free man, the latest in a sad string of Texas inmates who found themselves wrongly convicted of often-heinous crimes.

In the case of Graves, he was sentenced to die for helping to murder an entire family, including several children.

No evidence

The problem was that the man who implicated Graves in the murder — and who himself was later executed for the crime — later recanted his testimony that Graves was involved.

But a myriad of legal hurdles and a prosecutor who did not believe him laid out the real specter that Graves may have been executed at the hands of the state.

“There is not a single thing that says Anthony Graves was involved in this case,” said Burleson County District Attorney Bill Parham, who succeeded the man who convicted Graves.

“There is nothing,” the prosecutor said simply.

Texas has become the focal point of too many similar cases in which men have been vindicated after spending years in prison for wrongful convictions.

Just this month, DNA evidence cast doubt on the guilt of a Texas man who had already been executed.

Equally compelling in that case is that former Gov. George W. Bush, who routinely ordered stays of execution if DNA was involved, was apparently never even told that the evidence existed in this case.

It’s for all these reasons — and all of these men as well as a growing list of others — that we strongly support newly proposed legislation by a San Antonio lawmaker that would create what she wants to call the Texas Innocence Commission.

The nine-member commission would not be formed to determine anyone’s guilt or innocence, said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Ruth Jones McClendon, a Democrat.

Reasons why

Instead, the commission would evaluate the growing number of Texas cases in which innocent men have been sent to prison and later vindicated.

“When we convict someone based on invalid evidence, it wastes public funds on the prosecution and incarceration of a person who is not responsible for the crime,” McLendon said in filing the bill.  “This has happened often enough in Texas that we simply must identify and examine the reasons why this continues to occur, and take effective actions in response.  Public safety demands it.”

The commission she wants to create would evaluate law enforcement procedures and the state’s criminal justice process, then come back with a set of recommendations to avoid future miscarriages of  justice.

Texas has a well-earned tough-on-crime reputation and support for this legislation should not be construed as leniency for the guilty.

What it should do is acknowledge that new technology, especially as it relates to DNA evidence, provides for new opportunities to punish the guilty — and vindicate the innocent.