Michael Jerome Newberry was 17 years old when Janelle Haverkamp put him on trial for capital murder in a Cooke County, Texas courtroom. She prosecuted him aggressively, secured a life sentence, and moved on with her career. In 2005, she was elected judge of the very same district court where she had tried him. She has sat on that bench ever since.

Newberry, now 46, has been at the Beto Unit in East Texas for nearly three decades.

On Monday, June 22, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States issued an order that could lead to a new trial. The Court took up Newberry's case, threw out the Texas appeals court's ruling, and sent it back to be reconsidered. The reason: Haverkamp withheld evidence during the 1997 trial. Newberry's co-defendant had given grand jury testimony that directly undermined the prosecution's theory. Had the defense known, Newberry likely never would have faced a capital charge -- or a mandatory life sentence.

This is a story about a murder, a botched interrogation, suppressed files, and a judicial system in one small Texas county that spent 29 years protecting the very verdict it should have questioned.

The Night Granville Hanks Was Killed

On May 28, 1996, Granville Hanks, a 62-year-old man, pulled his stalled car to the side of a road in Gainesville, Texas, and asked a nearby group of young men for help. They refused. Minutes later, Hanks was shot and killed. Police quickly focused on two suspects: Newberry, 17, and his companion Lilton Deon Moore, 18.

Newberry turned himself in on June 3, 1996. What happened next at the Cooke County Jail shaped what came next. Before turning on a tape recorder, the interrogating detective spent 45 minutes alone with the teenager. At a pretrial hearing in 1997, the detective testified that Newberry had been unwilling to speak during those 45 minutes -- which is why nothing was recorded. Newberry told a different story under oath: he said he asked for an attorney repeatedly and was told that a lawyer would not help him.

When the tape recorder did come on, Newberry initially told detectives that Moore had approached Hanks with a gun, wearing a rag over his face to demand money, and had pulled the trigger when Hanks refused. Then came a 37-minute unrecorded break, during which the detective expressed his disbelief. When the recording resumed, Newberry changed his story and confessed to shooting Hanks himself. Years later, he testified that he fabricated the confession out of intense fear for his family's safety.

The Verdict That Should Not Have Been Capital

At trial in July 1997, the stakes could not have been higher. Under Texas law, a capital murder conviction tied to a robbery carried an automatic sentence of life without the possibility of meaningful relief. A straight murder conviction, by contrast, could have meant as few as five years. The difference between the two charges hinged on whether the jury believed a robbery was occurring when Hanks was killed.

The trial judge, Jerry Woodlock, was apparently alert to this issue. He issued a direct order to District Attorney Haverkamp: turn over any evidence suggesting that someone other than Newberry had possessed or fired the murder weapon. Haverkamp complied -- partially. What she did not disclose were the grand jury transcripts of co-defendant Moore, taken under oath shortly after the 1996 arrest.

In those transcripts, when Haverkamp herself questioned Moore, he told her plainly: "I didn't have no idea it was going to be a robbery. I thought we was going to sell some dope."

That statement blew a hole in the robbery theory that justified the capital charge. Under Texas law, Newberry's defense attorney only needed a small piece of evidence -- any credible evidence -- to ask the jury to consider a lesser charge. Without Moore's transcript, he had nothing. The judge denied the request. The jury deliberated for 80 minutes and convicted Newberry of capital murder. He received an automatic life sentence.

The state then negotiated a plea deal with Moore -- the older co-defendant who possessed the weapon -- allowing him to plead guilty to the lesser charge of aggravated robbery. Moore received a dramatically shorter sentence. Newberry, convicted on a robbery theory that his co-defendant had denied under oath, remained in prison for life.

The Files She Carried Into Court

The case went quiet for years. Newberry filed appeals, and they were denied. In 2008, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals threw out one of his filings after concluding he had forged letters to support a claim about a hidden plea offer. That ruling sealed the conviction against further challenge for more than a decade.

The landscape shifted in 2024 when Cooke County District Attorney John Warren, who had no role in the original prosecution, made an unusual decision: he opened his office's complete, unredacted files and turned them over to Newberry's defense team. Inside those files were Moore's suppressed grand jury transcripts, additional witness statements, and evidence of Moore's prior criminal history -- including a drive-by shooting -- that could have been used to challenge the state's reconstruction of the crime.

Warren reviewed what he found and publicly declared that his office no longer had confidence in the 1997 verdict. He stated that if the courts recommended a new trial, he would dismiss the capital murder charges entirely. In his petition supporting Newberry's appeal to the Supreme Court, Warren described what the case had become: "After a full investigation of the evidence and an exhaustive review of Petitioner's trial, the State no longer had confidence in the verdict."

That stance made Warren a target in Cooke County.

A visiting judge, Lee Gabriel, presided over two days of evidentiary hearings in February 2025. It was during those proceedings that Haverkamp took the stand -- no longer as prosecutor, but as a witness defending the conviction she had obtained 28 years earlier.

What happened in that courtroom was documented by observers and later incorporated into Judge Gabriel's findings. Haverkamp arrived carrying a thick stack of files. Defense counsel asked about them. She claimed they were personal notes. She refused to produce them. The presiding judge ordered her to comply. The files contained the original, undisclosed witness statements from the 1997 trial -- the same materials she had been ordered to turn over three decades earlier and never had.

When asked why she had not disclosed them at the time, Haverkamp said she "didn't think it was important."

Observers also documented what they described as a courtroom atmosphere charged with racial hostility. Haverkamp allegedly glared into the gallery throughout the proceedings and at one point pointed at community members in attendance and shouted, "THEY WERE ALL THUGS." Reports also described instances of racial segregation in the courtroom, where attendees were directed by court personnel to sit in designated areas based on race.

On April 10, 2025, Judge Gabriel issued a 43-page ruling concluding that Haverkamp had intentionally suppressed critical exculpatory evidence. Gabriel recommended that the TCCA vacate the 1997 conviction and grant Newberry a new trial.

A County at War With Itself

Gabriel's ruling exposed a deep fracture in Cooke County's political structure. The county sheriff and county judge publicly condemned DA Warren for siding with a convicted murderer. The Cooke County Commissioners Court convened an executive session and voted to hire private outside counsel -- using public funds -- to submit a brief to the TCCA arguing that the conviction should stand. The 53-page brief accused Newberry's defense attorney, Mark Lassiter, of being "reckless and cavalier" with the facts.

The personal conflict between Warren and Haverkamp shut down the local court system. Warren asked that she be removed from roughly 400 pending cases, arguing she had a vendetta against his office. On April 23, 2025, a regional judge agreed and barred Haverkamp from all felony and civil cases tied to Warren's office. Then things got stranger. A separate attorney, Lee Tatum, filed his own removal motion after Haverkamp allegedly called him on his personal phone from Ireland and accused him of "engaging in a conspiracy against her."

Despite all of this, on September 17, 2025, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected Gabriel's recommendation. Texas's highest criminal court gave no legal analysis and no factual findings. It wrote exactly one sentence: "Based on our independent review of the entire record, this court finds that Applicant has not met his burden to prove that he is entitled to relief."

Eight judges signed that order. Only one dissented. The court never explained why it overruled the visiting judge who had sat through the testimony, examined the documents, and found that a serious constitutional wrong had occurred.

The Supreme Court Answers

Newberry's legal team petitioned the United States Supreme Court. Warren supported the petition, calling the TCCA's denial "unprecedented, unreasoned, and requires correction." The petition argued that a state court cannot summarily dismiss a constitutional violation when the petitioner, the prosecutor, and the fact-finding court all agree that the violation occurred.

On June 22, 2026, the Supreme Court agreed -- at least enough to force the question. In a GVR order, the Court vacated the TCCA's judgment and directed the state court to reconsider the case in light of the state's own concession of error. While a GVR does not guarantee a new trial, it strips the TCCA of the ability to continue ignoring the uncontested Brady violation.

Newberry remains at the Beto Unit, waiting.

Haverkamp, meanwhile, faces a pending criminal contempt hearing over her failure to disclose evidence in 1997. Her attorneys have raised a statute of limitations defense, arguing that 28 years have passed since the original violation. Legal experts have noted that the physical discovery of the suppressed files in her possession -- files she carried into the 2025 courtroom -- complicates that argument considerably.

For 29 years, the Cooke County conviction of Michael Jerome Newberry survived every challenge thrown at it. On Monday, it ran out of room to hide.