I’d be incredibly curious to hear how someone like the National Review’s Kevin Williamson — who found a way to defend Rick Perry’s record on criminal justice issues, even when the question turned to the Cameron Todd Willingham execution — would respond to this newest example of misconduct and its connection to a Perry appointee on matters of criminal justice.

Here’s that Texas (in)justice we’re all coming to know and love:

[H]is grandmother asked the question she was most dreading: “Was Daddy there?”

“No,” he said. “Mommy and Eric was there.”

The next day, she called the lead sheriff’s investigator to tell him what the boy had said and that she no longer suspected that her son-in-law, Michael Morton, had killed her daughter, Christine. She urged the investigator to abandon the “domestic thing now and look for the monster.”

Days after Mrs. Morton’s badly beaten body was found in her bed in August 1986, someone used her credit card in another city. And a check was cashed with her forged signature.

The sheriff’s investigators who saw Mr. Morton as the prime suspect had that information and a transcript of the grandmother’s call. But when he was on trial facing a life sentence for murder, his defense lawyers knew none of it.

A quarter-century later, after six years of fighting for DNA tests that now almost certainly will result in the reversal of Mr. Morton’s conviction, his lawyers say prosecutors withheld this and other exculpatory evidence from his original defense lawyers and from the trial judge despite orders to turn it over. In court filings, the prosecutors have denied accusations of wrongdoing.

…

John Bradley, the Williamson County district attorney, whom Gov. Rick Perry appointed in 2009 to lead an independent panel charged with reviewing forensic evidence in criminal cases, was an ardent opponent of re-examining the Willingham case.

Mr. Bradley has also most recently been in charge of the Morton prosecution. For more than six years he opposed the DNA testing that led to Mr. Morton’s release from prison last week and an agreement by prosecutors to seek to have his conviction overturned. He also resisted efforts by Mr. Morton’s lawyers to use public-information laws to gain access to evidence in the original prosecutors’ files.

Mr. Bradley publicly derided the lawyers’ efforts to prove that a “mystery killer” killed Christine Morton.

Mr. Bradley said last week that he had resisted efforts to test the DNA for good-faith reasons that he could not discuss because of the continuing investigation.

The last time I brought up the issue with Williamson, I didn’t get a further response from him — perhaps because, in my lengthy and detailed comment, I didn’t come up with anything he found to be “original or interesting … about the death penalty or the CTW case.” Or perhaps because, as this further example indicates, I’m just right about these things and he’s wrong.