Texas completes its second execution of the week

As reported in this AP article, “Texas has executed an inmate convicted of the drug-related killings of four people more than 30 years ago, including a woman who was 9-months pregnant.”  Here is more:

Arthur Brown Jr., 52, received a lethal injection Thursday evening at the state penitentiary in Huntsville.  He was condemned for the June 1992 slayings, which took place in a Houston home during a drug robbery.  Authorities said Brown was part of a ring that shuttled drugs from Texas to Alabama and had bought drugs from Jose Tovar and his wife Rachel Tovar.

Killed during the drug robbery were 32-year-old Jose Tovar; his wife’s 17-year-old son, Frank Farias; 19-year-old Jessica Quiñones, the pregnant girlfriend of another son of Rachel Tovar; and 21-year-old neighbor Audrey Brown.  All four had been tied up and shot in the head. Rachel Tovar and another person were also shot but survived.

“I don’t see how anybody could have just killed a pregnant woman and then made her suffer so much.  It’s just beyond words,” Quiñones’ older sister, Maricella Quiñones, said before the execution.

Brown was the fifth inmate put to death in Texas this year and the ninth in the U.S.  His execution was the second of two in Texas this week.  Another inmate, Gary Green, was executed Tuesday for killing his estranged wife and her young daughter.  Brown was defiant in his final statement before the lethal injection was administered. “What is happening here tonight isn’t justice,” he said. “It’s the murder of another innocent man.”

The U.S. Supreme Court earlier Thursday declined an appeal from Brown’s attorneys to halt the execution.  They had argued that Brown was exempt from execution because he was intellectually disabled, a claim disputed by prosecutors.  The high court has prohibited the death penalty for the intellectually disabled….

One of Brown’s accomplices in the shootings, Marion Dudley, was executed in 2006.  A third partner was sentenced to life in prison. Brown, who was from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, had long maintained another person committed the killings.

Brown’s attorneys had previously filed other appeals that had been rejected by lower courts.  They argued he was innocent and that a witness actually implicated another suspect.  They also claimed Brown’s conviction was tainted by racial bias, alleging one of the jurors decided he was guilty because he was Black.

A judge in Houston on Tuesday denied a request by Brown’s attorneys for DNA testing of evidence that they said could have exonerated their client.  Josh Reiss, chief of the Post-Conviction Writs Division with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in Houston, called Brown’s last-minute appeals a delay tactic….

Brown was one of six Texas death row inmates participating in a lawsuit seeking to stop the state’s prison system from using what they allege are expired and unsafe execution drugs.  Despite a civil court judge in Austin preliminarily agreeing with the claims, five of the inmates have been executed this year.