Mike Ward of the Austin-American Statesman just published a storyabout Eroy Brown’s possibility for parole.
Brown’s parole attorney, Bill Habern, who was also one of his defense attorneys when Brown was acquitted of killing two high ranking prison officials in the 1980s, has found Brown a halfway house in Los Angeles if he is paroled.
Sister Teresa Groth said Tuesday that Brown has been accepted into the Partnership for Re-Entry Program, an initiative that caters mostly to “lifers” like Brown. Since it opened in 2002, the program, which is affiliated with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, has a 100 percent success rate for participants not going back to prison, Groth said.
“He’ll be going into a program where he’ll be supervised. He won’t be coming back to Texas. He’ll be in an area where he has relatives and some friends. What could be better than that?” Habern said.
“It seems like that would be much better than squeezing another three or four years out of him and then dumping him out on a street in South Carolina.”
Ward recounts Brown’s testimony in his story and points out that of the two commissioners who will vote on Brown’s parole, one is a former TDCJ warden and the other is a former correctional officer. I would not bet that they would contravene the the prison system’s story, that Brown’s acquittal by reason of self defense was a miscarriage of justice. In 2017, Brown will get a mandatory release if he doesn’t win parole sooner. He has been eligible since 1994.
