Full Description
In April 1981, two white Texas prison officials died at the hands of a black inmate at the Ellis prison farm near Huntsville. Warden Wallace Pack and farm manager Billy Moore were the highest-ranking Texas prison officials ever to die in the line of duty. The warden was drowned face down in a ditch. The farm manager was shot once in the head with the warden's gun. The man who admitted to killing them, a burglar and robber named Eroy Brown, surrendered meekly, claiming self-defense.
In any other era of Texas prison history, Brown's fate would have seemed certain: execution. But in 1980, federal judge William Wayne Justice had issued a sweeping civil rights ruling in which he found that prison officials had systematically and often brutally violated the rights of Texas inmates. In the light of that landmark prison civil rights case, Ruiz v. Estelle, Brown had a chance of being believed.
The Trials of Eroy Brown, the first book devoted to Brown's astonishing defense, is based on trial documents, exhibits, and journalistic accounts of Brown's three trials, which ended in his acquittal. Michael Berryhill presents Brown's story in his own words, set against the backdrop of the chilling plantation mentality of Texas prisons. Brown's attorneys-Craig Washington, Bill Habern, and Tim Sloan-undertook heroic strategies to defend him, even when the state refused to pay their fees. The Trials of Eroy Brown tells a landmark story of prison civil rights and the collapse of Jim Crow justice in Texas.
Contents
Prologue: Victorville, 2010
Chapter 1: A Fishing Trip to Ellis Prison
Chapter 2: Death at Turkey Creek
Chapter 3: Estelle's Bitterness
Chapter 4: A Confusing Scene
Chapter 5: The Aura of Ellis
Chapter 6: The Witch and the Writ Writers
Chapter 7: The Question of the Gun
Chapter 8: The Shadow of Ruiz
Chapter 9: Weasel
Chapter 10: The Dangers of Testifying
Chapter 11: Old Thing
Chapter 12: Eroy as Aggressor
Chapter 13: The Defense Is Self-Defense
Chapter 14: Eroy's Story
Chapter 15: The Perfect Defendant
Chapter 16: The TDC on Trial
Chapter 17: The Arc of the Moral Universe
Chapter 18: The Shoes of Eroy Brown
Chapter 19: Politics and Prisons
Chapter 20: The State Tries Again
Chapter 21: A Cat Batters a Mouse
Chapter 22: Twenty-Three Jurors
Chapter 23: Still Not Protected
Chapter 24: Paying for Justice
Chapter 25: The End of an Era
Chapter 26: Free at Last
Chapter 27: Aftermath
Notes
A Note on the Sources
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
