INNOCENCE: Alfred Dewayne Brown is Released from Texas Death Row; Nation’s 154^th Death-Row Exoneration

Harris County, Texas prosecutors announced on June 8 that they have dismissed charges against Alfred Dewayne Brown, who had been sentenced to death in 2005 for the murders of a Houston police officer and a store clerk during a robbery. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had overturned Brown’s conviction last year because prosecutors withheld a phone record that supported Brown’s alibi. Prosecutors in 2013 said that the phone record had been inadvertently misplaced. Brown had long maintained that he had been alone at his girlfriend’s apartment at the time of the murder, and that he had called her after seeing reports of the shooting on television. Defense lawyers argued that the time of the phone call established that Brown could not have been at the store when the murder occurred. There was no physical evidence against Brown, and a series of Pulitzer prize-winning columns by Houston Chronicle writer Lisa Falkenberg disclosed irregularities in the grand jury process, that Brown’s girlfriend had faced intimidating questioning and threats of perjury by a police officer who was the grand jury foreman, and that she had been jailed for seven weeks until she changed her testimony to implicate Brown. She has since recanted that testimony. District Attorney Devon Anderson said, “After very careful consideration, I have decided that at this time, there is insufficient evidence to corroborate the testimony of Brown’s co-defendant. Accordingly, we dismissed Alfred Brown’s capital murder case earlier today. It is the right thing to do.” Since 2007, Brown’s attorneys have compiled strong evidence that the murder was committed by another man with a history of robbery and connections to the co-defendants in the crime. Despite a 2008 motion to test the alternate suspect’s DNA, such a test has not been carried out. Alfred Brown is the 154th person exonerated from death row since 1973, the 13th in Texas, and the fourth in 2015.

(B. Rogers, “DA drops charges against Alfred Brown,” Houston Chronicle, June 8, 2015; L. Falkenberg, “Evidence mounts that wrong man on death row for killing HPD officer,” Houston Chronicle, December 20, 2014; L. Falkenberg, Cop was foreman of grand jury in cop-killing, Houston Chronicle, July 24, 2014; L. Falkenberg, Mother of 3 pressured into changing story, but jailed anyway, Houston Chronicle, July 7, 2014; image by Karen Warren, Houston Chronicle.) See Innocence.