It's been many years since Texas attempted two executions in the span of three days but the state will attempt to do just that next week. Without court intervention, Gary Green will die March 7 and Arthur Brown two days later, on March 9.
The attorneys representing the inmates have been reluctant to discuss the arguments they'll make in court to try to save their clients' lives. But, as is true for almost everyone on death row, there was little mitigating evidence presented at their trials to demonstrate the hardships these men endured. Such evidence could have persuaded their juries to sentence them to life.
Green, sentenced to death for killing his ex-girlfriend and her son in 2009, grew up amid violence and extreme instability. His current attorney, Michael Mowla, wrote in a 2020 appeal that Green's parents and grandmother were mentally ill. His father violently abused Green and his mother. During his childhood, Green's aunt was murdered. Another family member murdered his wife and committed suicide.
From an early age, Green talked about wanting to kill himself, of having nothing to live for. According to Mowla, at the time of the murder Green met the criteria for schizoaffective disorder, which causes breaks from reality. He had severe, chronic depression, manic episodes, and personality disorders. Green "talked nonsensically, 'heard demons,' and believed vampires followed him," Mowla writes.
Arthur Brown also had a terrible childhood. Convicted along with a pair of co-defendants for the deaths of four people in Houston in 2002, Brown grew up in extreme poverty in a segregated neighborhood of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His father severely abused his mother, physically and emotionally. He beat Brown and did not protect him from abuse by other family members. Brown's mother was an alcoholic who drank heavily during her pregnancy with him, possibly exposing him to fetal alcohol syndrome.
None of this was presented at Brown's trial. "No jury nor court has ever heard about Mr. Brown's horrific childhood, rife with violence and poverty, or about how before being charged and convicted of this crime, Mr. Brown was on his way to quietly living life with the mother of his children and being the father to them that he never had," his attorney Benjamin Wolff writes in a clemency application submitted Feb. 16.
Since entering death row 30 years ago, Brown has lived quietly with no record of violence. He has the support of Anthony Graves, a former death row inmate who was exonerated in 2010 and whose remarks at Saturday's annual meeting of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty riveted the audience. Graves is asking the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to reduce Brown's sentence to life without parole. "AJ is respectful of everyone around him, and he keeps to himself," Graves wrote in a letter to the board, reflecting on the friendship he shared with Brown during 12 years on the row. "AJ likes to be positive and exercise his mind, and it's hard to find people like that ... If you didn't know his situation and you just spoke to him, you wouldn't know he was on death row. AJ shouldn't be on death row."
Brown has requested a personal interview with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, but the seven members of the board, most of them former law enforcement officers, typically rubber-stamp any execution proposed by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
In over 500 executions since 1976, the BPP has recommended clemency just five times. There is no requirement that members read the clemency petitions they receive, and widespread doubt that they typically do. It's hard to imagine the board members will take the time to meet with Brown or give his application more than a cursory glance.
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde