Texas man who said death sentence was based on discredited testimony is executed for 1990 killing
Texas man who said death sentence was based on discredited testimony is executed for 1990 killing
The execution was carried out after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected claims by Brewer's attorneys that prosecutors at a 2009 resentencing trial had relied on false and discredited expert testimony.
A Texas man who said his death sentence was based on false and unscientific expert testimony was executed Thursday evening for killing a man during a robbery decades ago.
Brent Ray Brewer, 53, received a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the April 1990 death of Robert Laminack. The inmate was pronounced dead at 6:39 p.m. local time, 15 minutes after the chemicals began flowing.
Prosecutors had said Laminack, 66, gave Brewer and his girlfriend a ride to a Salvation Army location in Amarillo when he was stabbed in the neck and robbed of $140.
Brewer’s execution came hours after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in over the inmate’s claims that prosecutors had relied on false and discredited expert testimony at his 2009 resentencing trial.
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Brewer has long expressed remorse for the killing and a desire to apologize to Laminack’s family.
“I will never be able to repay or replace the hurt (and) worry (and) pain I caused you. I come to you in true humility and honest heart and ask for your forgiveness,” Brewer wrote in a letter to Laminack’s family that was included in his clemency application to the parole board.
So did he do it then? Because it sounds like they were trying to get him off on a technicality, rather than because he didn't do it and was falsely accused.
You have to show sympathy and remorse to qualify for clemency or parole, so you say you're sorry for the situation and their loss but never that you're at fault.
Absolutely, I can understand why he would say he felt sorry for the family. But saying sorry for the pain he caused is an admission of guilt.
I think the timeline went like this:
- 1990 Brewer (then 19) and his girlfriend attack Laminack, killing him.
- 1991 Brewer is convicted and sentenced to death.
- 2007 Supreme Court overturns the decision because of a technicality on the jurors' instructions.
- 2009 Brewer is re-tried, and again convicted, in part due to expert testimony from Coons.
- 2010 In another trial, Coons' testimony was ruled as "insufficiently reliable".
- Brewer's lawyer then raises an appeal in Texas over Coons' testimony in 2009. Appeals court says "you should've said that in 2009".
- Brewer's lawyers escalate to the Supreme Court, however they decline to hear the case, deferring to the Texas Appeals Court's judgement.
Presumably, Coons' testimony could have been challenged in 2009 in exactly the same way as it was in 2010, but they didn't do this. I'm sure Coons is now seen as an unreliable witness, but he was considered reliable up until 2010.
It was actually the Texas Appeals Court that ruled that Coons was unreliable, however presumably the appeal in which they established that was granted for other reasons than his statement alone. Indeed, this is the 2010 case, there were 25 points in question. While the court ruled that Coons' testimony was unreliable, they still reaffirmed the conviction.
It's something they must do, read clemency pleas they're basically all the same because boards want to see the same thing. Factually not guilty people have said the same thing in clemency letters.
I dunno who exactly is at fault nor did I read that much into it, what I am saying is don't particularly base anything on clemency or parole letters, they're intentionally flawed so they can be used against the subject later, it's holdover slave shit that persists.
American justice in a nutshell.
"I didn't do it!"
"We know, but if you decide to go to trial, chances are you will spend the rest of your natural life in the salt mines. So just sign here and you'll spend only half your life in the salt mines, guaranteed."
Yep iirc is somewhere over 60% of all criminal charges are disposed of by plea I think it's actually 90ish% but I'm not certain.
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This is the 2010 trial in which Coons was declared unreliable: https://law.justia.com/cases/texas/court-of-criminal-appeals/2010/20229.html
In that appeal, they considered 25 points. While they agreed with points 3 and 4 regarding Coons' testimony, they still upheld the conviction and death sentence. It was the same Texas Court of Appeals that considered that hearing as well as Brewer's request for appeal.
Brewer and his lawyer were trying to get an appeal based on Coons' statement, but this almost certainly wouldn't be enough to change the sentencing, based on their 2010 ruling. I haven't dug up Brewer's appeal to see if there were any other reasons, but the fact that they were focusing on this one suggests that there wasn't much else they could have argued.
No, he was trying to say he would have been sentenced to life instead of death if the jury hadn't heard certain expert testimony.
I would guess the testimony would be along the lines of blood splatter or some other pseudoscientific forensics where the expert might say the crime was particularly vicious.
That didn't matter in the death sentence appeal where the court ruled the testimony as unreliable: https://law.justia.com/cases/texas/court-of-criminal-appeals/2010/20229.html
They ruled that the testimony was unreliable, but still let the sentence stand. If all Brewer was arguing was the testimony, then the court would have reached the same conclusion.