52-year-old Arthur Brown Jr who was handed a death sentence for
the June 1992 murder of 4 persons in a Houston home including a
pregnant 19-year-old woman, has finally been executed.
Brown
who carried out the drug-related murders, was part of a ring that
shuttled drugs from Texas to Alabama and had bought drugs from Jose
Tovar and his wife, Rachel.
He was executed
after being convicted of killing 32-year-old Jose Tovar; his wife's
17-year-old son, Frank Farias; 19-year-old Jessica Quinones, the
pregnant girlfriend of another son of Rachel Tovar, and 21-year-old
neighbour Audrey Brown.
His victims were tied up
and shot in the head. Rachel Tovar and another person were also shot
but survived. Jessica Quinones had been nine-months pregnant and had
named her unborn daughter Alyssa.
About three
hours before Brown's scheduled Thursday evening execution at the state
penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court declined an
appeal from his lawyers. The U.S high court had prohibited the death
penalty for the intellectually disabled.
However
Josh Reiss, chief of the Post-Conviction Writs Division with the Harris
County District Attorney's Office in Houston, called Brown's
last-minute appeals a delay tactic.
Reiss said
school records submitted at Brown's trial showed while the inmate was
initially thought to possibly be intellectually disabled in the third
grade, by ninth grade that was no longer the case.
The
prosecutor also said Brown's claims of innocence are problematic as the
other suspect alleged to be the killer was found by investigators to
not have been in Houston at the time.
