A Texas man who said his death sentence was based on false and unscientific expert testimony was executed Thursday evening for killing a man during a robbery decades ago.
Brent Ray Brewer, 53, received a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the April 1990 death of Robert Laminack. The inmate was pronounced dead at 6:39 p.m. local time, 15 minutes after the chemicals began flowing.
Prosecutors had said Laminack, 66, gave Brewer and his girlfriend a ride to a Salvation Army location in Amarillo when he was stabbed in the neck and robbed of $140.
Brewer’s execution came hours after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in over the inmate’s claims that prosecutors had relied on false and discredited expert testimony at his 2009 resentencing trial.
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This is the 2010 trial in which Coons was declared unreliable: https://law.justia.com/cases/texas/court-of-criminal-appeals/2010/20229.html
In that appeal, they considered 25 points. While they agreed with points 3 and 4 regarding Coons’ testimony, they still upheld the conviction and death sentence. It was the same Texas Court of Appeals that considered that hearing as well as Brewer’s request for appeal.
Brewer and his lawyer were trying to get an appeal based on Coons’ statement, but this almost certainly wouldn’t be enough to change the sentencing, based on their 2010 ruling. I haven’t dug up Brewer’s appeal to see if there were any other reasons, but the fact that they were focusing on this one suggests that there wasn’t much else they could have argued.