He spent nearly 25 years in prison before he was exonerated by DNA evidence which supported his claim of innocence and pointed to the crime being committed by another individual.

Morton was released from prison on October 4, 2011, and another man, Mark Alan Norwood, was convicted of the murder in 2013.

The prosecutor in the case, Ken Anderson, was convicted of contempt of court for withholding evidence after the judge had ordered its release to the defense.

[1] In 1976, while attending Stephen F. Austin State University, in Nacogdoches, Texas, Morton met Christine Kirkpatrick.

Eric had a congenital heart defect, which required open-heart surgery, which could not be safely attempted until he was three years old.

[4] Pro bono civil attorney John Raley of Houston, Texas, together with Nina Morrison of the New York-based Innocence Project, filed Morton's motion for DNA testing in February 2005.

Raley told the Texas Tribune about the conversation he had with Morton on the subject: "...Michael said that he understood that he would be paroled if he only showed remorse for his crime.

[8] Mark Alan Norwood, a Bastrop dishwasher who lived in Austin in the mid-1980s, was charged, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on March 27, 2013, for the 1986 murder of Christine Morton.

[9] In September 2016, he was convicted in a separate case for the January 1988 murder of Debra Masters Baker in her Austin home.

Baker's daughter said she was unmoved by Anderson's apology and held him partially responsible for her mother's death because he and investigators allowed a killer to escape detection by focusing so intently on Morton.

[13] The same day as Morton's formal acquittal, Morton's attorneys (including Raley, Morrison, Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, and Gerald Goldstein and Cynthia Orr of San Antonio) asked Harle to order a "court of inquiry" into the actions of Anderson, who was then a district judge in Williamson County.

[15][16][17] Morton's attorneys discovered this evidence while preparing a final appeal, and were able to get Anderson and others involved in the investigation deposed under oath.

[18] On April 19, 2013, the court of inquiry ordered Anderson to be arrested, saying "This court cannot think of a more intentionally harmful act than a prosecutor's conscious choice to hide mitigating evidence so as to create an uneven playing field for a defendant facing a murder charge and a life sentence.

[3] Eric had been adopted by Christine Morton's sister and her husband, and had cut contact with his father when he was fifteen because he believed that he was guilty of his mother's murder.