Speedy Justice Can Be Dead Wrong, Texas Case Shows : Death Row: Clarence Brandley stands as living proof that an innocent a man could be executed.

On Death Row, it was Clarence Brandley’s habit to rise at 4 each morning. This was his prayer time, when Brandley could almost pretend that he was alone, that there were not several hundred other men around him who also were awaiting a state-ordered death.

For nearly 10 years, Brandley prayed that “somebody, somewhere, sometime would please do the right thing, would see that I was innocent,” that he, a black janitor, had not raped and killed a high school girl who happened to be white. Twice, he came so close to death--once, within two weeks, another time within five days--that he wrote a will, packed his books, moved to the execution cell and began his final goodbys.

Today, when politicians are calling for a speedier execution process, when the grieving families of victims are organizing to demand that judgment be swift and complete, Clarence Brandley stands as a living symbol that it is not inconceivable a man could be put to death for a crime he did not commit.

Released from Texas’s Death Row in January, 1990, Brandley, now 42, occupies a unique place in recent American penal history as one of the few condemned men set free.

Now pastor of a small church called God’s House, located in a former auto parts warehouse here, and a determined fighter against the death penalty, Brandley does not like to dwell on the dark years: the pain of his mother aging before his eyes, of watching his five children grow up from behind the wire-mesh cage of the Death Row visiting room. But he is still waiting, he said, for an apology from the state of Texas for the things that were taken from his life.

“The sad part about it is, after all I’ve been through, nobody to this day has come to me and said, ‘We’re sorry for what happened to you. . . . ‘ “ he said. “No money, no amount of money, could pay for what they took from me, which was the most important part of my life. I was still young then; I was 28.”

In America today, and especially in Texas--national leader in executions since their resumption in 1982--there is little sympathy for men and women convicted of capital crimes. That state, where 89 inmates have been put to death in less than 13 years, has scheduled 18 executions for the first six months of 1995.

On Jan. 4, Jesse DeWayne Jacobs, 44, a lifelong criminal, was put to death for a murder prosecutors conceded he personally might not have committed, although they insisted he helped plan it. The Jacobs execution drew a harsh denunciation from the Vatican.

Weeks later, two men convicted in separate murder cases were put to death by lethal injection in the state’s first multiple execution in 44 years.

In his second day as governor of Texas, Republican George W. Bush joined state Atty. Gen. Dan Morales, a Democrat, in backing a proposal that would consolidate appeals and set time limits for filing them. An inmate in Texas is incarcerated an average of eight years before execution.

Jim McCloskey is head of Centurion Ministries Inc., a Princeton, N.J., agency that has in 15 years succeeded in freeing 15 inmates, but only one, Brandley, who was sentenced to death.

“There are a lot of common characteristics that combine to create false convictions,” McCloskey said. “Prosecutorial and police (misconduct), lazy investigations, poor defense lawyering. These people get caught between a rock and a hard place, and they get swept away anonymously. . . . “

Bob Stearns of Round Rock, Tex., the head of a victims’ rights coalition, has another perspective. His son, Tom, was killed in a 1974 kidnaping and robbery. Stearns said he suffered greatly until 1991, when the convicted killer was executed. “The most important thing I felt,” he recalled, “is now he’s not going to hurt anyone else.”

The justice system might not be perfect, Stearns conceded, and a reconsideration of the death penalty might be wise if there were some way to ensure that capital murderers could never return to the streets. But he said he also believes death penalty foes are too quick to talk about “innocence.”

“It must be absolutely awful for the family (of the victim),” he said about the Brandley case, “because the murderer of their daughter has gone scot-free, whether it was Brandley or not.”

In 1980, on the late summer day when 16-year-old Cheryl Ferguson was raped and strangled during a volleyball tournament at Conroe High School, Clarence Brandley was the janitorial supervisor, the only black among four whites. Although he willingly gave police samples of his hair and clothing fibers and passed a polygraph test, he was charged six days later, based largely on the fact that the other janitors supplied each other with alibis.

“One of the police told Clarence, ‘You’re the nigger; you’re elected,’ ” said Mike DeGeurin, a high-powered Houston lawyer who took up Brandley’s case in 1983. “ . . . They began what I called a blind focus on Clarence Brandley, and any circumstance that was consistent with the possibility that he had done it was written in stone and any evidence inconsistent with that was destroyed or discounted.”

Brandley’s first trial ended with the jury split 11 to 1 in favor of conviction. A second trial, urged by then-Montgomery County Dist. Atty. James Keeshan, ended with Brandley’s conviction and sentence of death.

In 1989, after a wave of attention that included broadcasts on “60 Minutes” and the “700 Club,” the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the decision on a 6-to-3 vote, ordering a new trial that officials did not pursue. The appellate judges relied largely on a 1987 evidentiary hearing in which Presiding Judge Perry Pickett concluded that two other former janitors were the likely killers, and that officials railroaded Brandley out of racist motives.

Married for a second time to a volunteer who worked for his release, he has struggled to get a weekday job, to reassemble his life. His small congregation is unable to pay a regular salary.

“Anyone in this country in their right mind knows that somebody who goes into a penal institution, when they come out, they’ve got the mark of Cain on them,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether they’re innocent or guilty, especially someone who’s been on Death Row.”

Still, Brandley said, he has so many blessings: a family that never doubted him, friends who came out of nowhere, and his freedom.

“I was self-centered. I was impatient. Sometimes you’re moving so fast you can’t see life the way it really is,” he said. “People ask me now if time has a different meaning to me, and I say, ‘Yeah, and life has a different meaning too.’ ”