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Asked to appeal capital sentence, BigLaw lawyer gets pro bono client freed from prison

A BigLaw attorney credits his Catholic upbringing and a hunch that a pro bono client in a death-penalty sentencing appeal was actually innocent for a stunning success that saw his client walk free last week.

Meeting his client, Alfred Dewayne Brown, in a Texas prison in 2007, Brian Stolarz of K&L Gates had been asked to focus on whether Brown’s borderline IQ was too low to permit his execution. But after he talked to Brown, Stolarz took the case in another direction, reports the Houston Chronicle (sub. req.).

“Something felt deeply inside of me that this guy was innocent,” Stolarz, a former public defender in New York, told the newspaper. “I had represented more than 1,000 people and usually have a sense about them. I have represented plenty of guilty people, some of the worst of the worst. It was just a hunch or a feeling that he was not.”

He and the rest of the K&L defense team went to work, reinvestigating the prosecution case that put Brown on death row in 2004 for the killing of a police officer and a cashier in a botched 2003 robbery. There appeared little doubt that two other men were guilty. But authorities also focused in on Brown, although there was no forensic evidence connecting him to the crime, only tentative witness IDs and a claim from a co-defendant implicating Brown.

Supported by his girlfriend, Brown insisted that he was innocent and had been at her home at the time of the crime. However, she was jailed for perjury and recanted her original statement to get out, the newspaper reports.

Eventually tracked down by a K&L Gates investigator, the girlfriend, Erica Dockery, “told me with tears in her eyes that she had to choose her children over Brown,” Stolarz told the Chronicle. “She was in jail for four months. What do you think she is going to say? Her telling us the truth was the true leverage point–the fulcrum that took us to the point where I thought we would prevail someday.”

Dockery also said Brown had called her at work from her home when Houston police said he was with the two other defendants. And, as if scripted for a Hollywood movie, the appellate investigation discovered a document that proved the phone call between Dockery and Brown had taken place, just as she said, the attorney says.

Armed with this evidence, Stolarz persuaded the Harris County District Attorney to agree to a new trial for Brown, and the office eventually decided there was not enough evidence to try him again. However, although Stolarz says his client is clearly innocent, the DA’s office says the evidence does not prove that.

Stolarz, who works in Washington, D.C., and now heads a white-collar defense practice group at LeClairRyan. He says a Catholic priest taught him an important life lesson about Christian service when he was growing up in northern New Jersey.

“It is in giving that we receive,” Stolarz said. “I’m not a super-religious guy out there quoting scripture, but I believe this.”

Related coverage:

Dallas Morning News: “Editorial: Another big reason to rethink capital punishment”

Houston Chronicle: “Appeals court resets murder trial after finding evidence withheld”