(Houston) An American is to be executed Thursday in Texas, more than thirty years after a quadruple murder linked to drug trafficking, which he denies having committed.
Arthur Brown Junior, 52, is to receive a lethal injection in the evening in Huntsville Penitentiary.
If justice does not grant him a respite at the last minute, he will become the 5e sentenced to death executed since the beginning of the year in this vast conservative state of the South very attached to the death penalty, and on 8e in the USA.
According to the prosecution, he went in 1992 with two accomplices to the home of his drug supplier in Houston. After tying up the six occupants of the premises, they shot them in the back of the head.
Four of their victims, including a minor and a pregnant woman, were dead and two survived.
Arthur Brown Junior was arrested four months later and sentenced to death in 1994, although he has always maintained his innocence.
His alleged accomplices were also convicted for these murders: one of them was executed in 2006 and the other is serving a life sentence.
As his sentence approached, Mr Brown’s lawyers stepped up their efforts to try to save him.
Pointing to concerns with the investigation, which according to them is based on unreliable testimony, they called, in vain, for new DNA expertise.
They also asked the United States Supreme Court, which has barred the execution of people with severe mental retardation, to stay execution on this ground. The High Court’s decision remained pending as of the morning.
Their arguments have won the support of British billionaire Richard Branson who, on the Virgin website, calls for “stopping the execution” of Arthur Brown Jackson.
According to him, new evidence points to another suspect and “his intellectual disability should be reason enough not to carry out the execution”.
