© Photo: Michael Graczyk / APIn this Dec. 11, 2012 photo, Jerry Hartfield speaks from a visiting area at the Hughes Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice outside Gatesville, Texas. Hartfield remains in the middle of a legal dispute between the Texas attorney general's office, which insists he's being legally held, and a federal appeals court that says he's been wrongly imprisoned for 30 years. Hartfield was convicted in 1977 of killing a woman in Bay City, Texas.
Not long afterward, he was moved off of death row.
"A sergeant told me to pack my stuff and I wouldn't return. I've been waiting ever since for that new trial," Hartfield, now 56, said during a recent interview at the prison near Gatesville where he's serving life for the 1976 robbery and killing of a Bay City bus station worker. He says he's innocent.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Hartfield's murder conviction in 1980 because it found a potential juror improperly was dismissed for expressing reservations about the death penalty. The state tried twice but failed to get the court to re-examine that ruling, and on March 15, 1983 - 11 days after the court's second rejection - then-Gov. Mark White commuted Hartfield's sentence to life in prison.
At that point, with Hartfield off death row and back in the general prison population, the case became dormant.
"Nothing got filed. They had me thinking my case was on appeal for 27 years," said Hartfield, who is described in court documents as an illiterate fifth-grade dropout with an IQ of 51, but who says he has since learned to read and has become a devout Christian.
