#TEXAS LIGHTSMITH AUSTIN TRIAL#

He could not help wondering how Joe, who had no criminal record before he was charged with his wifeвЂ™s murder, had fared inside. Bounded by guard towers and crowned by barbed wire, the Walls is a foreboding sight, and as Smith surveyed the red-brick monolith, he was awed by its magnitude. Two days after SmithвЂ™s visit, a death-row inmate would be executed there by lethal injection. The maximum-security penitentiary, named for the towering ramparts that form its perimeter, houses what was then, and what remains, the most active death chamber in the country.

#TEXAS LIGHTSMITH AUSTIN TRIAL#

Smith, the editor in chief of The Clifton Record, had overseen the paperвЂ™s coverage of JoeвЂ™s trial and a subsequent retrial, but he had never stepped foot inside a prison, and as the Walls Unit came into view, he felt both excitement and apprehension. Though Joe has always insisted on his innocence and the evidence prosecutors presented was entirely circumstantial - Joe was attending a conference 120 miles away, in Austin, around the time of the killing - he was convicted and sent away to the Walls Unit in Huntsville. Once a beloved figure in the Central Texas town of Clifton, the former high school principal was serving a 99-year sentence for the murder of his wife, Mickey, an elementary-school teacher who was shot to death in their home six years earlier.

It was a warm September day in 1991, and Smith, a mild-mannered 38-year-old newspaperman whose wire-rimmed glasses lent him a slightly owlish look, had come to interview an inmate named Joe Bryan. IДЄs W.Leon Smith neared the East Texas town of Huntsville, he did not know what to expect. This article is Part 2 of a two-part investigation. This article is a partnership between ProPublica, where Pamela Colloff is a senior reporter, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a writer at large.

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