The Corruption Runs Deep

Jeff Henderson was not the only instrument of corruption in Clarance’s case. He was one node in a network of compromised actors whose connections to each other, to the prosecution, made the possibility of a fair trial something close to a fiction.

As Clarance tells it, Detective Mike Denton of the Owasso Police Department was the one who persuaded Michelle to give false statements against him. The word “persuaded” does a lot of work there. Michelle’s early interviews, the ones conducted before Denton became involved, tell a different story. In those interviews, she told investigators again and again that Clarance had nothing to do with what happened. She asked, in so many words, why they kept bringing up his name when he wasn’t involved.

Denton’s background should have disqualified him from participating in a capital murder investigation. According to news accounts and department records, he had been fired from his position multiple times. He managed, through whatever processes govern the reinstatement of officers who should not be reinstated, to get his job back each time. Those same accounts describe footage of him elbowing a handcuffed defendant in the face. They describe footage of him, following a car chase, beating a man with the butt of his gun while the man lay on the ground, incapacitated. Most recently, by those accounts, he killed a neighbor’s dog. That act generated more public attention than the human beings whose lives he had damaged over the course of his career.

Eric Cullen was the investigator on Clarance’s case at trial. He was also a childhood friend of Jeff Henderson. When Henderson was prosecuted for his misconduct, for the same pattern of behavior that, as Clarance has always said, included planting evidence in his case, Cullen served as Henderson’s investigator. He sat on that side of the table too. He was connected, through the most personal kind of loyalty, to the man whose actions had contaminated the evidence in a capital case.

Cullen went on, after the trial, to build a career with the Innocence Project: fighting conviction injustices, helping free innocent people from the very system that operates the way it operated in Clarance’s case. He is out there, right now, doing that work. The man in whose case he failed is still on death row. Eric Cullen has recently signed an affidavit stating that, in light of new evidence Clarance’s legal team has obtained, he would have done things differently. The investigation at the time was based on the assumption that the officers involved had conducted their investigations in good faith.

When Clarance was removed from death row for a time under the McGirt ruling, his family found a federal attorney who worked in the same building as Cullen. They thought it was providence: that someone so close to the case, who knew everything about it, who had spent the years since building expertise in these issues, might be the instrument of finally getting Clarance’s case heard. His family went to the attorney meeting with hope. They were quoted three hundred thousand dollars.

The door closed.

The evidence that could have changed everything kept disappearing.