The execution was carried out after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected claims by Brewer's attorneys that prosecutors at a 2009 resentencing trial had relied on false and discredited expert testimony.

A Texas man who said his death sentence was based on false and unscientific expert testimony was executed Thursday evening 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 6:39 p.m. local time, 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 he was stabbed in the neck and robbed of $140.

Brewer’s execution came hours after the U.S. 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.

  • trash80@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    22·
    1 year ago

    It wasn’t a question of whether he committed the crime. The appeal concerned sentencing.

    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.

    • TWeaK@lemm.eeEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      This is the 2010 trial in which Coons was declared unreliable: https://law.justia.com/cases/texas/court-of-criminal-appeals/2010/20229.html

      In that appeal, they considered 25 points. While they agreed with points 3 and 4 regarding Coons’ testimony, they still upheld the conviction and death sentence. It was the same Texas Court of Appeals that considered that hearing as well as Brewer’s request for appeal.

      Brewer and his lawyer were trying to get an appeal based on Coons’ statement, but this almost certainly wouldn’t be enough to change the sentencing, based on their 2010 ruling. I haven’t dug up Brewer’s appeal to see if there were any other reasons, but the fact that they were focusing on this one suggests that there wasn’t much else they could have argued.