Texas inmate seeks stay of execution, says Harris County prosecutors withheld evidence in 1993 trial
Arthur Brown Jr. is on death row for capital murder following the deaths of four people during a 1992 drug robbery at a southwest Houston home.A death row inmate scheduled for lethal injection on Thursday is seeking to halt his execution, saying that Harris County prosecutors failed to disclose evidence surrounding a witness’ health and ability to recall details at the time he was tried for capital murder in 1993.
Joshua Reiss, chief of the post-conviction writs division for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, called the claims “meritless" and noted that laws governing evidence were different at the time of the trial. Post-conviction lawyers, he said, had access to the files in question during prior reviews of Brown Jr.’s case. The concerns, he said, are coming up far too late.
Two accomplices were convicted in the same capital murder case, Antonia Lamone Dunson and Marion Butler Dudley. Dudley was executed in 2006, for his role in the killings. All three men lived in Alabama at the time of the murders. Rachel Tovar, who was married to Jose Tovar, survived, along with a male victim. She testified in trial that she saw Brown Jr. at one point with a gun but did not know if he was the one who shot her. She crawled to a neighbor’s house with a gunshot wound to the head, pleading for help.
The investigator in the affidavit indicates that Tovar’s memory was compromised after the shooting because Tovar eventually told her son that “she had blacked out during the shooting and could not remember anything.” Brown Jr.’s defense team presented evidence during the trial that another man, Marcus Terrell Hill, a Tuscaloosa-area drug dealer, may have been involved. Hill died in 1993, according to court documents. He was shot and killed while “trying to rob a crack house in Alabama.” Police found a gun in Hill's possession that matched a weapon used in the Brownstone Lane shooting.
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