My name is Christopher Bernard Coleman and I am a 30 year old black man. I was born on December 28, 1971 in Houston, Texas. I am currently on Texas Death Row, convicted for the crime of Capital Murder and sentenced to death. I received the death sentence on June 6, 1997.

 

   The crime I was accused,charged, convicted, and ultimatly sentenced to die for involved the murders of a Columbian family, including a three year old child. There is no doubt that this was a brutal crime with the loss of an entire family that left one survivor, the mother of the child. In total there were three deaths but four shooting victims.

 

   This crime occured on December 14, 1995 in Houston, TX. I was arrested for this crime on December 29, 1995 in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. I was charged with Capital Murder along with two other individuals, Enrigue Mosquera and Derrick Graham (one was a Columbian national and the other was African-American), who were arrested prior to my own arrest. Both of these individuals were tried and given LIFE Sentences for this crime.

 

   While investigating this crime, the police gathered evidence which led them to file arrest warrants on both of the other individuals charged in this crime. After professing their innocence and then accusing each other, they finally implicated me as the perpetrator of this violent act. An arrest warrent was then issued for me.

   All evidence in this case leads to the two individuals that the investigating officers initially focused on and arrested. There is no physical or forensic evidence which proves I committed this crime: no gun, no fingerprints, no DNA evidence. Upon my arrest and subsequent extradition, many things happened which had a negative impact on my trial including the coercion of and threats to a witness by state prosecutors because said witness openly refused to lie about me on the witness stand. It even went so far as the judge and District Attorneys having the mother of two of the witnesses arrested and jailed. This was because she had informed her children that a lawyer from the NAACP advised her that her children had the right to plead the 5th Amendment against self incrimination. The witnesses and their mother were jailed and given a bond of $150,000 each. Notice such a high bond for attempting to exercise their Constitutional Rights as and American citizen! That is just what happened to these witnesses--there is still more...