Man wrongfully convicted aims to resume lawsuit
Attorneys for freed death row inmate Alfred Dewayne Brown are seeking to resume a federal lawsuit against Houston and Harris County for allegedly hiding evidence that could have kept the Harris County man from going to prison.
Initially filed in June 2017, the legal claim had been on hold for more than a year while special prosecutor John Raley probed the case to figure out whether Brown was “actually innocent” and entitled to money for the years he spent behind bars for the slaying of Houston police officer Charles Clark.
Even after Raley’s report cleared the former prisoner and a Harris County judge formally declared Brown innocent, officials with the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts said Monday that Brown still won’t qualify for state compensation.
The state’s refusal to dole out the nearly $2 million Brown could have been entitled to under Texas law came as a surprise to the former prisoner’s legal
team — and now they’ve decided to forge ahead with the lawsuit.
“It’s been 16 years since Dewayne was put behind bars, and four since he was released,” said Brown’s North Carolina-based civil attorney, Cate Edwards, who filed the seven-page motion late Thursday. “He should not have to wait any longer to pursue his claims against the entities and people who unlawfully put him there.”
Although Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg filed the motion to formally deem Brown innocent, it’s not clear where her office stands on the move to reopen the civil case.
The defendants — the city, county, district attorney and some of the individual police involved in the case — haven’t yet responded in court, but Edwards’ motion notes that the parties “cannot agree” on reopening the case. The city, county and district attorney’s office all declined to comment.
Brown, 37, was sent to death row in 2005, when he was convicted of gunning down the police officer during a botched robbery of a check-cashing store. Two others were convicted in the case — one for killing store clerk Alfredia Jones and the other for driving the getaway car — but Brown long maintained his innocence, saying he was at his girlfriend’s home the whole time.
After years of appeals, he was freed in 2015 after a police investigator uncovered phone records in his garage that defense lawyers said corroborated Brown’s alibi.
Afterward, his attorneys embarked on a quest to get Brown money for his time behind bars. First, they filed for state compensation with the comptroller. But getting the state funding required a declaration of actual innocence, and when Brown was freed, then-District Attorney Devon Anderson never sought the declaration.
When the comptroller refused Brown’s request for money the first time, he switched tactics and instead sued the city and county for wrongfully sending him to prison.
Last year, in the process of gathering evidence for the lawsuit, the district attorney’s office found an email that heightened questions about whether prosecutors earlier in the case may have purposely failed to turn over evidence. Ogg appointed Raley to reinvestigate, and this year the longtime Houston lawyer determined that Brown was innocent of the crime.
Still, the only way that Brown could qualify for the state funds was if the judge revisited the case and signed a motion to dismiss that included the words “actual innocence.” But because the case was closed in 2015 when prosecutors dropped the charges, it wasn’t clear that the judge had jurisdiction to do that.
Eventually, the judge decided that he did, but the comptroller begged to differ and denied Brown’s second request for money. To attorneys involved in the case, that decision came as a surprise, especially in light of another recent wrongful conviction in which the comptroller agreed to give more than $500,000 in compensation to a Nueces County woman who was wrongfully imprisoned for killing her foster child.
As in Brown’s case, the judge went back to amend the dismissal to note that the woman, Hannah Overton, was “actually innocent.” The comptroller didn’t raise concerns about whether the judge was allowed to do that, and it’s not clear why the state handled the Brown case differently.
“This case is paradigmatic of the age-old adage ‘justice delayed is justice denied,’” Edwards wrote in this week’s court filing. “It is time for Mr. Brown to finally have an opportunity to fully litigate his claims.”