Mike Ward writes, "Brown case highlights reluctance to parole longtime offenders," for today's Austin American-Statesman. Here's an extended excerpt from this must-read.
Eroy Brown, whose acquittal on murder charges involving the deaths of a prison warden and a farm manager in the 1980s shook the Lone Star corrections system to its roots, is coming up for parole again.
Brown is serving 90 years as a habitual criminal for robbing a Waco convenience store of $12 and some candy bars. The graying, almost 60-year-old is serving time in a South Carolina prison because a federal judge thought his safety could not be guaranteed in a Texas lockup. If he's granted parole, he would be sent to a pre-release program in California.
If he's denied parole, he would be released within five years without any supervision under controversial early release policies enacted in the 1970s to ease prison crowding in Texas.
"He got more publicity for (the acquittal) than Christ on the cross," said Houston attorney Bill Habern, who was Brown's lawyer on the murder charges. "The (prison) system still to this day doesn't believe he should have been acquitted. ... What is probably going to happen is called getting even."
Brown's case highlights a long-standing issue with Texas' parole system: a reluctance to parole longtime offenders with high-profile cases, even those who soon will be freed anyway, and those with serious and costly health problems.
Brown is earning liberal credits for good behavior on his sentence, which he would finish by 2017, according to current calculations. At that time, he would be released free and clear, with no supervision.
Brown is among just 4,208 of Texas' 156,000 convicts who are still accruing such credits under old laws, a number that dwindles each year as more are paroled or released.
Within the prison system, he is most noteworthy for what happened during a deadly struggle on April 4, 1981, alongside a drainage ditch called Turkey Creek in the farm fields at the Ellis Unit near Huntsville. When it was over, the farm manager, Billy Moore, lay dead from a gunshot from the warden's pistol and the warden, Wallace Pack, was drowned. Brown claimed self-defense, saying that Moore had been stealing tires from the prison and was afraid Brown was about to snitch on him.
And:
Habern said Brown would be better off on supervision after his release. Sister Teresa Groth said Tuesday that Brown has been accepted into the Partnership for Re-Entry Program, an initiative that caters mostly to "lifers" like Brown. Since it opened in 2002, the program, which is affiliated with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, has a 100 percent success rate for participants not going back to prison, Groth said.
"He'll be going into a program where he'll be supervised. He won't be coming back to Texas. He'll be in an area where he has relatives and some friends. What could be better than that?" Habern said.
"It seems like that would be much better than squeezing another three or four years out of him and then dumping him out on a street in South Carolina."
Ward's article notes - and I want to highlight - The Trials of Eroy Brown: The murder case that shook the Texas prison system written by Michael Berryhill. It was published last year by UT Press and is available at the link. Berryhill is chair of the journalism department at Texas Southern University in Houston.
In November, the Texas Observer published an excerpt from the book. This is from Berryhill's introduction to the excerpt:
Last June, an administrator at the federal prison in Salters, South Carolina, must have been shocked when he opened the transfer file of a Texas inmate named Eroy Brown. For the past 26 years Brown has been serving a 90-year sentence in various federal prisons. He was sentenced for holding up a Waco convenience store in 1984. What was shocking was not the robbery, which netted Brown and two accomplices $12 and a couple of candy bars, but what happened three years before the robbery. In 1981, Eroy Brown drowned the warden of a Texas prison face down in a drainage ditch and shot and killed a prison farm manager in a struggle for control of the warden’s pistol. Federal prison officials immediately locked their new prisoner in solitary confinement as a dangerous murderer and a possible threat to prison officers.
It is unlikely that the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles placed the full story of those killings in Brown’s file, for that would have included the fact that Brown was acquitted of those killings by reason of self-defense. The full story is that in 1982, 23 of 24 jurors declared Brown innocent of murder in the drowning of Warden Wallace Pack. In 1984, another jury acquitted him of murdering farm manager Billy Max Moore. And the fuller story is that Brown has been kept in federal custody for a state crime because in 1984 Texas agreed to a civil rights settlement that keeps him from ever serving time in the Texas prison system—it might be too dangerous for him.
Brown’s parole attorney, Bill Habern, one of the lawyers who helped defend Brown’s murder charge, wrote a letter to the federal warden explaining that Brown was not the dangerous murderer he might seem to be, but the victim of two aggressive Texas prison officials. Habern thought Brown deserved the chance to live in the general prison population and hold a job.
If Brown were reviewed for parole on the basis of the crimes for which he was convicted, he would likely be out by now. Brown has served 26 years for a $12 robbery.
Related posts are in the Texas Board of Pardons & Paroles index.
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