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A Texas man who said his death sentence was based on false and unscientific expert testimony was executed today 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 6.39pm local time in the US, 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 the victim was stabbed in the neck and robbed of US$140.
Brewer’s execution came hours after the US 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.
Brewer’s lawyers had alleged a prosecution expert, Richard Coons, falsely claimed Brewer would be a future danger — a legal finding needed to impose a death sentence.
Brent Ray Brewer said his death sentence was based on false and unscientific expert testimony. Photo / AP
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had dismissed an appeal on that issue on Wednesday without reviewing the merits of the argument, saying the claim should have been raised previously.
“We are deeply disturbed that the [appeals court] refuses to address the injustice of allowing Brent Brewer to be executed without an opportunity to challenge Dr Coon’s false and unscientific testimony,” said Shawn Nolan, one of Brewer’s attorneys.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Wednesday voted 7-0 against commuting Brewer’s death sentence to a lesser penalty. Members also rejected granting a six-month reprieve.
Brewer, who was 19 at the time of Laminack’s killing, said he has been a model prisoner with no history of violence and has tried to become a better person by participating in a faith-based programme for death row inmates.
Brewer has long expressed remorse for the killing and a desire to apologise 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.
In an email, Laminack’s son, Robert Laminack jnr, said his family had no comment before the scheduled execution.
In 1990, Brewer and his girlfriend had first approached Laminack outside his Amarillo flooring store before attacking him, prosecutors had said.
Laminack’s son took over his father’s business, which was started in 1950, and has continued to run it with other family members.
Brewer was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 1991. But in 2007, the US Supreme Court overturned the death sentences Brewer and two other Texas inmates had received after ruling the juries in their cases did not have proper instructions when they decided the men should be executed.
The high court found jurors were not allowed to give sufficient weight to factors that might cause them to impose a life sentence rather than death. Brewer was abused as a child and suffered from mental illness, factors jurors were not allowed to consider, his lawyers argued.
Brewer was again sentenced to death during a new punishment trial in 2009.
Brewer’s lawyers allege that at the resentencing trial, Coons lied and declared, without any scientific basis, that Brewer had no conscience and would be a future danger, even though Brewer did not have a history of violence while in prison.
In a 2010 ruling in the case of another death row inmate, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals called Coon’s testimony about future dangerousness “insufficiently reliable” and that he should not have been allowed to testify.
Randall County District Attorney Robert Love, whose office prosecuted Brewer, denied in court documents that prosecutors presented false testimony on whether Brewer would be a future danger and suggested Coon’s testimony “was not material to the jury’s verdict”.
Brewer is the seventh inmate in Texas and the 21st in the US put to death this year.
