Brent Brewer is scheduled to be executed by the State of Texas on Thursday November 9 2023 for the murder of 66-year-old Robert Laminack
According to court documents Brent Brewer would ask Robert Laminack for a ride which he would agree to. Somewhere along the ride Brewer would force Laminack to pull over and would rob and murder him by stabbing him to death
Brent Brewer would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Brent Brewer who has been on Texas death row for thirty years attempted to get his execution delayed due to a Doctor who testified at his trial who was later deemed unreliable
If Brent Brewer execution goes forward it will be the seventh person executed by Texas in 2023
Brent Brewer was executed on Thursday November 9/2023
Brent Brewer News
Texas death row inmate Brent Brewer is scheduled for execution on Thursday after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected efforts to stay his execution date to review an error in testimony, which has later been deemed “junk science” in its court.
Brewer was sentenced to death and convicted of murder in 1990 after robbing and killing 66-year-old Robert Doyle Laminack, a flooring store owner from Amarillo. Laminack offered Brewer and his girlfriend, a woman named Krystie Lynn Nystrom, a ride, and while en route, Brewer stabbed the victim, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
While the crime is not in dispute and 30 years later, a now remorseful Brewer has proven to maintain good behavior while incarcerated and shown patterns that counter the critical testimony from an expert witness during the sentencing for his crime, according to the Death Penalty Information Center website.
Brewer’s defense team argued his death sentence relied on testimony from Dr. Richard Coons an expert witness and practicing psychiatrist who was later deemed unreliable, the Death Penalty Information Center reports.
“Coons testified in dozens of capital cases,” a portion of the website reads. In 2010 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals noted that Coons, testimony was unable to cite any academic literature or research to substantiate his “self-developed” methodology, according to the Death Penalty Information website. The court acknowledged that while Coons’ practice may be intuitive, it is not scientifically reliable.
However, no courts have ruled that Coons’ testimony is a reversible error.
Brewer was initially sentenced to death in 1991 for murder during the robbery. He was granted sentencing relief by the federal courts in 2007. Coons testified at his 2009 sentencing retrial, claiming without ever having met Brewer that his then 19-year history of non-violence in prison was not a reliable predictor of whether he would be dangerous in the future, according to defense attorney Shawn Nolan.
Coons testified that he would “probably” join a prison gang while incarcerated, depicting him “as a terminally dangerous menace to society.” After hearing Coons’ testimony, the jury sentenced Brewer to death,” a portion of the Death Penalty Information Center website said.
Brewer is scheduled for execution this Thursday, Nov. 9. Upcoming state executions include David Renteria on Nov. 19 and Ivan Cantu, scheduled for Feb. 28, 2024.
https://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/article/brewer-tx-death-row-execution-18475562.php
Brent Brewer Execution
The state of Texas executed Brent Brewer, who spent three decades on death row on Thursday evening for the 1990 murder of Robert Laminack. It was the seventh execution of 2023.
In late appeals, Brewer’s lawyers argued that his death should be delayed to consider the issue of unreliable testimony, or what his lawyers called “junk science,” but late Thursday afternoon the U.S. Supreme Court denied that request. Earlier this week, Texas’ highest criminal appeals court declined similar motions to stay Brewer’s execution.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously rejected Brewer clemency appeal on Tuesday. Brewer’s legal team requested a lesser penalty for him on the grounds that one of the state’s expert witnesses used unreliable methodologies to testify and that a juror says they mistakenly sentenced Brewer to death.
At 6:23 p.m., Brewer was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital. He died 15 minutes later.
“I would like to tell the family of the victim that I could never figure out the words to fix what I have broken. I just want you to know that this 53-year-old is not the same reckless 19-year-old kid from 1990. I hope you find peace,” Brewer said in a final statement.
Brent Brewer was convicted of killing Laminack, who owned a business in Amarillo, according to court documents. Brewer asked Laminack for a ride to a Salvation Army with his girlfriend Kristie Nystrom. While en route, Brewer stabbed the 66-year-old Laminack and stole $140 in cash.
Brewer was sentenced to death in 1991 for the murder, but in 2007 the U.S. Supreme Court found that his jury was not given sufficient opportunity for the jury to consider a less severe punishment. Two years later, another jury also sentenced Brewer to death.
Michele Douglas was one of the 2009 jurors. After listening to the evidence, Douglas believed that Brewer didn’t intend to kill Laminack, “things simply got out of hand, with a tragic outcome,” she wrote in an Houston Chronicle opinion piece last week, requesting clemency for Brewer.
During the trial, Douglas did not want to vote in favor of capital punishment for Laminack’s murder, which she did not think was premeditated. Douglas said she misunderstood the jury instructions.
“Believing — incorrectly — that my vote was meaningless, I acquiesced in the majority’s death penalty verdict. I cried when it was read in court. I was haunted afterwards,” Douglas wrote last week.
A death sentence requires a unanimous vote from the jury in Texas. Over the years, jurors in different capital cases across the state have said the instructions are not clear and they would have voted for life sentences without the possibility of parole if they had known that was an option. Lawmakers in the Texas House have passed legislation during several sessions attempting to clarify the instructions but those bills failed to get support from the Senate.
“There’s nothing political about this — it’s about whether the awesome power of the government to take a life is given to it knowingly rather than by what amounts to trickery,” said Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, in a statement about the role of misleading jury instructions in Brewer’s case ahead of Brewer’s execution. “This simply can’t continue; it’s morally wrong. I call on leaders in both parties and both chambers to pass this legislation swiftly at the next possible opportunity.”
During Brewer’s 2009 sentencing, the state called on forensic psychiatrist Dr. Richard Coons to testify about the danger Brewer posed to those in prison. Coons was a regular expert, called on by the state in dozens of death penalty cases, to forecast how defendants would behave in the future.
Coons asserted that a significant amount of crime goes unreported in prisons, and while Brewer’s record was largely clean, it was likely the defendant would commit more acts of violence.
But three years after Coons testified on Brewer’s dangerousness, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the psychiatrist’s techniques for predicting the risks defendants posed were unreliable.
“We see this case as a kind of an outlier, based on all of these things that have happened in this case, including the junk science that was presented,” Shawn Nolan, Brewer’s attorney, told The Texas Tribune on Monday.
But on Tuesday, the same court rejected Brewer’s motions to stay his execution, which were part of his legal team’s effort to challenge the use of Coons’ testimony in Brewer’s sentencing. Coons never evaluated Brewer yet still told the jury that the defendant would pose a risk to those in prison. The appeals court maintained that Brewer’s lawyer at the time did not sufficiently object to Coons testimony.
“His execution is the farthest thing from justice,” Nolan said in a statement after the Supreme Court declined to intervene ahead of Brewer’s execution. “Texas used the unscientific, baseless testimony of Dr. Richard Coons to claim Brent would be a future danger, although the state and the courts have admitted for years that this exact doctor’s testimony was unreliable and should not be considered by juries in capital cases.”
Nolan filed a motion with the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to pause the Nov. 9 execution date to consider the issue with Coons’ testimony, according to court documents.
Last year in federal court, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk found that Brewer’s 2009 trial lawyers acted reasonably by not objecting to Coons’ testimony before his methodologies were ruled unreliable. Earlier this year the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Kacsmaryk’s opinion.
Nolan said Brewer joined the religious programming available to those on death row and since then he has grown as a person of faith, which was also cited in Brewer’s clemency application.
“Worries are kind of small when you’ve taken someone’s life, you know, when someone is permanently gone like that. But I am sorry for what I did,” Brewer said in a video included in his clemency application. “Even if it doesn’t change the outcome, at least they get to hear it before I go.”
https://news.yahoo.com/three-decade-death-row-inmate-110000815.html
