691 S.W.3d 532

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas. Filed: 6/19/2024

The legal issue here was actual innocence. Kerry Max Cook had been sent to death row in 1977 for a murder in Smith County, Texas. Before we came on the case, other lawyers had gotten his conviction undone with habeas petitions, and he had been out of prison since 1999.

Kerry came to us in June 2016 because he had a hearing scheduled in July on whether he was actually innocent. We took on the case with three weeks to prepare, and conducted the hearing in Tyler, Texas.

The Court of Criminal Appeals sat on the case for almost eight years—till June 2024—before finding Kerry actually innocent, which was moral vindication for Kerry (and also entitled him to compensation from the State for the 21 years he had spent in prison).

This was a very fact-bound case. There probably will never be another one like it. It doesn’t create any new principles of law, but applies existing law to a huge factual record.

It’s important mostly to Kerry and those who are morally offended by the idea that the State might get away scot free with what they did to him.

It also got Mark mentioned in a John Grisham book, which is one of the cooler things that has happened to him so far in his career.

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