The Trials of Eroy Brown
-
Michael Berryhill
About this book
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.
Author / Editor information
Recipient of the Texas Institute of Letters prize for nonfiction, Michael Berryhill has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times magazine, Harper's, The New Republic, and the Houston Chronicle. He chairs the journalism program at Texas Southern University.
Reviews
If ever there was a dead man, it was Eroy Brown, a black convict who killed two white prison guards. The story of [Craig] Washington’s successful three-trial defense of Brown should be a book and a movie. This one is going to live as a Gettysburg in legal history.
Concise, clearly written, and suspenseful. . . . The sensational Eroy Brown case has been waiting for a book for more than twenty years, and now it has one. Berryhill’s take on the prison homicides and the remarkable trials is comprehensively researched and well-contextualized in the history of Texas prisons and state politics.
Michael Berryhill is a very gifted storyteller, and this is a very powerful story.
Well documented and unsentimental, Berryhill's account of this infamous 30-year-old murder case that pitted one man's innocent plea against Texas's political might provides a jarring portrait of a once-medieval state prison.
Michael Berryhill tells Brown's side of the story with care and skill...the story contributes to the growing literature on Texas prisons and prison histories, and it resonates beyond this topic.
Topics
-
Download PDFPublicly Available
Frontmatter
i -
Download PDFPublicly Available
CONTENTS
vii -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Prologue: Victorville, 2010
1 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
1. A Fishing Trip to Ellis Prison
5 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
2. Death at Turkey Creek
14 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
3. Estelle’s Bitterness
21 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
4. A Confusing Scene
32 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
5. The Aura of Ellis
42 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
6. The Witch and the Writ Writers
49 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
7. The Question of the Gun
57 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
8. The Shadow of Ruiz
65 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
9. Weasel
72 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
10. The Dangers of Testifying
81 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
11. Old Thing
88 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
12. Eroy as Aggressor
96 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
13. The Defense Is Self-Defense
106 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
14. Eroy’s Story
110 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
15. The Perfect Defendant
121 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
16. The TDC on Trial
130 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
17. The Arc of the Moral Universe
137 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
18. The Shoes of Eroy Brown
144 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
19. Politics and Prisons
150 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
20. The State Tries Again
156 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
21. A Cat Batters a Mouse
162 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
22. Twenty-Three Jurors
171 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
23. Still Not Protected
176 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
24. Paying for Justice
181 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
25. The End of an Era
187 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
26. Free at Last
192 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
27. Aftermath
201 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Notes
208 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
A Note on the Sources
223 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Selected Bibliography
225 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Acknowledgments
229 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Index
231
