Will Texas fork over $2 million to an exonerated death row inmate who is firmly believed to be a cop killer by the Houston Police Union?
By Leif Reigstad
Houston Press
February 23, 2016
A former death row inmate is seeking nearly $2 million from the state after he spent more than 12 years in prison following a wrongful conviction, the Houston Chronicle first reported yesterday.
In 2005, Alfred Brown was convicted of capital murder after he allegedly murdered Houston Police Officer Charles Clarke, "execution style," during a botched robbery at a check-cashing store in southeast Houston two years earlier. Despite his attorneys' claim that he was "borderline mentally handicapped," Brown was sentenced to death.
According to the Chron, Brown was released from jail in June and his conviction was overturned after a detective came forward with telephone records that could have helped Brown's defense. The Harris County District Attorney's Office dismissed the charges against Brown, finding that there was not enough evidence for a re-trial. Now, Brown's attorneys are claiming he is technically an exoneree, which, under a state law passed four years ago, would grant him the right to receive compensation from the state.
In 2011, state legislators passed the Tim Cole Act, which increased the amount of financial compensation Texas could give to exonerees to $80,000 per year served in prison. The legislation was named after a man in Lubbock who was falsely convicted of rape. In 1999, halfway through a 25-year sentence, Cole died in prison. It was later discovered that the actual rapist had confessed to Lubbock prosecutors four years before Cole's death, but it wasn't until 2008 that DNA evidence cleared Cole and the real rapist was finally convicted.
Cole was exonerated in 2009 and posthumously pardoned a year later by the state of Texas, and his story spurred the state to enact a number of criminal justice reforms, including overhauling eyewitness identification practices. (Cole's case was the subject of a lengthy feature in The New Yorker last month — you can read that here.)
Unlike Tim Cole, Alfred Brown's actual innocence is less clear. No official has ever asserted Brown's innocence, and to this day, the Houston Police Union apparently still thinks Brown killed Clarke. But according to Brown's attorney, that doesn't really matter; an exoneree is an exoneree.
"No 'magic words' are required anymore," Brown's lawyer, Neal Manne, told the Chron. "The magic is in the fact that you're released."
Brown's case is an interesting test for this rare progressive criminal justice policy in Texas. Should Texas fork over a couple million dollars in this case, then those in law enforcement who are convinced of Brown's guilt will likely argue that the state is paying a cop killer who got off only on a technicality. But if the state denies Brown's request, it could set a troubling precedent that the wrongfully convicted must be proven — rather than presumed — innocent before they are compensated for their time spent unjustly locked up. It's difficult to see the latter being what legislators had in mind when they passed the Tim Cole Act five years ago.
Whichever way Brown's request goes, the decision could signal just how committed the State of Texas really is to criminal justice reform and righting every wrongful conviction.
EDITOR’S NOTE: From the June 10, 2015 issue of The Washington Post:
Brown had an alibi for the crime for which he was convicted — an armed robbery that resulted in the death of a police officer. Brown said he was staying at his girlfriend’s apartment at the time of the robbery. But after a browbeating from a Houston cop who inexplicably served as foreman on the grand jury that indicted Brown, the woman changed her testimony. Grand jury transcripts would later show that during her testimony, the cop/foreman threatened to indict Brown’s girlfriend for perjury and threatened to take away her children. She was eventually jailed for seven weeks, then released when she changed her testimony to contradict Brown’s alibi. Without his girlfriend’s testimony, Brown was convicted and sentenced to death.
Seven years later, Brown’s attorneys discovered phone records confirming that Brown had called his girlfriend at her job from her apartment around the time of the murder. Not only were those records never given to Brown’s defense attorneys, the records were found in the garage of a Houston homicide detective.
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