Faith gave life to death row case
Call to serve drove lawyer in Brown’s exoneration
In 2003, Alfred Dewayne Brown’s going-nowhere life led to the worst somewhere imaginable: Death row. Brown was one of three men arrested after a botched robbery ended in two murders.
He insisted from the start he did not do it, that he was sleeping at his girlfriend’s apartment when the killing of a Houston police officer and a cashier took place, but authorities did not believe him. When they pressured his girlfriend to change her story, a key piece of evidence, he was doomed.
Given the efficiency of the Texas capital punishment machinery, Brown had every right to give up hope — or at least pray hard for an unlikely miracle. Indigent, illiterate, and sentenced to die, he had no one who believed in him, and precious few who even
acknowledged he existed.
Then, by little more than chance, appellate attorney Brian Stolarz showed up one day in 2007 to visit. From that moment forward, the lives of each man changed. Both say they were blessed by the accidental relationship, albeit in dramatically different ways.
Stolarz got the opportunity to live to his faith in the most profound way possible. He becomes emotional when he speaks about it today, how he rarely spent a day not thinking or dreaming about the case of the convicted cop killer, or the promise he made to him that he would get him out of prison. Brown simply got to live. Last week, he walked out of jail for the first time since April 2003. Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson had reviewed the case against him and acknowledged there was not enough evidence to convict him.
“We have a moral in our house that you never give up,” Stolarz said. “Even if it’s a one-in-a-billion shot. I can’t believe it happened.”
To hear Stolarz tell it, the path that led him to death row in Livingston began not so much when the case landed improbably on his desk, but more than a generation ago when he was growing up in a Franciscan parish in northern New Jersey.
No bars, no guards
Stolarz points to Father Michael Carnevale, the pastor at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, who stressed the importance of Christian service.
“It is in giving that we receive,” Stolarz said. “I’m not a super-religious guy out there quoting scripture, but I believe this.”
It’s not that he was opposed to making a buck. Stolarz, 41, was well employed in the D.C. office of a prominent Pittsburgh law firm doing securities work, and his clients paid well. But he had put in a couple of years as a public defender in New York, a type of practice that comfortable and high-end practitioners typically never see.
“I said to myself when I got out of law school that I would do what I could to serve others,” he said.
Stolarz never expected that commitment would lead him to Texas and certainly not to the Polunsky Unit, home to death row. He could not have anticipated an eight-year race against the perpetual motion machine that is the Texas capital punishment system, or the moment of national prominence and glory last week when his client emerged as one more name to add to the roster of ex-condemned inmates.
All he ever wanted to do was follow Carnevale’s in- junction. Find some way to serve others.
“Now I’m here hugging him,” Brown said last week, surrounded by his family. “And I thank him for that.”
Brown has enjoyed a handful of days and nights in which he could go where he wished and do what he wanted. No bars, no guards. Above all, no date with an executioner. Police still claim he is guilty, but for the moment he is not worrying about that.
Rescued on a hunch
Stolarz and the team of young lawyers he led steadily deconstructed the prosecution’s case that sent Brown to death row in 2004, just months after he and two others had been accused of killing a Houston police officer, Charles Clark, and a cashier in a robbery that went quickly and horribly wrong. The other two were guilty, little doubt about that. Brown, however, had insisted from the start that he hadn’t been with them that morning. Few believed him until Stolarz got involved.
“Something felt deeply inside of me that this guy was innocent,” said Stolarz, recalling his first visit see Brown. “I had represented more than 1,000 people and usually have a sense about them. I have represented plenty of guilty people, some of the worst of the worst. It was just a hunch or a feeling that he was not.”
Stolarz got the case out of the blue in early 2007. His law firm, K&L Gates of Pittsburgh, had handled a pro bono death penalty appeal that centered on a mental impairment issue. By chance, a Texas legal aid non-profit asked if they would handle another for an inmate named Brown.
At first glance, Brown’s case looked like a repeat. Stolarz was confident that Brown’s mental status was ripe for challenge. His IQ was borderline mentally handicapped. The state’s psychologist, who bumped it up a few points to claim Brown was eligible for the death penalty, had been discredited. Prosecutors no longer used him, or even defended his controversial methodology.
But it was not long before Stolarz honed in on the claim of innocence. The case against Brown was thin: no forensic or biological evidence, no surveillance footage, nothing beyond tentative IDs from a couple of witnesses and a statement from one of the others accused in the robbery. The case hinged on the testimony of Brown’s girlfriend, Er ica Do c k e r y, who had changed her story to undermine the alibi she had at first supported.
Dockery went even further, testifying Brown had admitted to her that he was part of the robbery.
“She was the key to the case,” Stolarz said. “Without her, there was not enough for a conviction.”
That much became clear when he read the transcript of Dockery’s grand jury testimony. She had at first held fast to her insistence that she had seen Brown on her couch when she left for work the morning of the robbery, and that he had called her at work from her apartment at a time when police say he was really with the other robbers.
“It was my personal, professional and religious duty to protect this man. Once I met him that first day and had that feeling, and then to see my gut was being backed up by evidence, I began to feel this was the purpose of my career, why I became a lawyer in the first place.”
Appellate attorney Brian Stolarz
‘True leverage point’
But Assistant District Attorney Dan Rizzo and several of the grand jurors spent hours bullying Dockery, calling her a liar, threatening her with perjury charges, repeatedly making references to her children, who would be without her if she was in prison. Dockery, in fact, was accused of perjury and jailed. She remained there for months, only getting out when she relented and told the DA she would change her story.
Years later, Stolarz knew he had to find her. Sometimes he got on a plane and came to Houston to ride with his investigator, Suzette Ermler, fruitlessly knocking on doors. The plane rides home seemed longer. Eventually, Ermler tracked down Dockery, who had tried to put the painful episode behind her, and persuaded her to tell the full story, start to finish. They all met at a Cajun restaurant.
“She told me with tears in her eyes that she had to choose her children over Brown,” Stolarz said. “She was in jail for four months. What do you think she is going to say? Her telling us the truth was the true leverage point — the fulcrum that took us to the point where I thought we would prevail someday.”
Final piece of evidence
Dockery’s recantation was crucial, if a court would buy it. But sometimes they don’t. There was a chance it wouldn’t be enough to get a new trial, and certainly the DA’s office wouldn’t agree to one no matter what Dockery said.
There was hope, but nothing beyond that, nothing certain. Stolarz moved onto a new job at another D.C. law firm, LeClairRyan, doing the same type of securities and regulatory work. He was no longer in charge of the Brown case, which remained with his old firm, but the lawyers working it kept him in the loop. Rare was the day that he did not think about it or the man he now considered a friend. Stolarz’s children would send Brown pictures they had drawn, messages of hope for a dark place.
“It was my personal, professional and religious duty to protect this man,” he said. “Once I met him that first day and had that feeling, and then to see my gut was being backed up by evidence, I began to feel this was the purpose of my career, why I became a lawyer in the first place.”
Stolarz and others involved in the case believed they would get the verdict and sentence overturned. Experienced Texas appellate lawyers, however, could have shown them cases aplenty of men executed with little more by way of evidence. Stolarz admits there were long nights when he wondered about the promise he had repeatedly made to Brown. He had known from the start it was an uphill battle. Maybe he had promised too much.
Then came the moment in 2014 that lawyers dream about, that Hollywood includes in its legal thrillers as a matter of course — a document solidifying Brown’s alibi arrives in a pile of old papers supposedly found in a detective’s garage, showing that a call from Dockery’s apartment had been made when she said it was.
“We checked it and double checked it to make sure we weren’t seeing things,” said Casey Kaplan, a former K&L Gates lawyer who had taken over supervision of the case. “We finally had documentary, exculpatory evidence that supported the alibi. Weknewwhat we had pretty quickly.”
So did Stolarz. And so did new District Attorney Mike Anderson, who agreed to a new trial but died before coming to a decision on whether to proceed with one. His widow, now DA, concluded the evidence is not adequate.
Though justice, as Stolarz sees it, has at last prevailed, anger is mixed with elation. He insists the evidence against Brown was manufactured, and that the insistence of the Houston Police Department and DA’s office that Brown remains their only suspect in Clark’s killing is irresponsible.
‘The right decision’
“To come out and say this is almost reckless,” Stolarz said. “They are attempting to re-manufacture evidence in the same way they manufactured it in the first place. I worry about what this says about the process. The district attorney made the right decision in this case. Mr. Brown is focused on rebuilding his life. (HPD) should in turn focus it’s energies on pursuing the actual perpetrator.”
Stolarz’s job is done, the legal part of it at least. Now he can be there for all his kids’ soccer games. He can focus his full attention on white-collar matters and federal regulations. But he worries, too, about Brown — how he will manage, how he will integrate back into a world where he has no clear role. He vows not to let him go down that road alone, either.
“I will always look out for him and be there for him, if needed,” Stolarz said. “I’m going to be there no matter what.”
It’s no longer so much a matter of obligation, or of service. Brown is family, he said. Simple as that. You never turn your back on family.