Therese Apel

Mississippi Clarion Ledger

The conviction of a man on death row for nearly a quarter century for a triple homicide has been overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court.

Sherwood Brown, 49, was convicted in the 1993 killings of a 13-year-old DeSoto County girl, her mother and grandmother.

Exculpatory DNA testing results and false forensic testimony were the reason for vacating Brown's conviction, according to the court's ruling. The case has been remanded to DeSoto County Circuit Court for a new trial, the Supreme Court's website states.

"The relief afforded herein is extraordinary and extremely rare in the context of a petition for leave to pursue post-conviction collateral relief, and we limit the relief we today grant to the facts of the above-styled case," the en banc order reads.

2015:State Supreme Court affirms death penalty

In the sentencing phase of his 1995 trial, Brown got the death penalty for murdering 13-year-old Evangela Boyd because jurors found he had killed her while committing felony child abuse.

He got life sentences for the deaths of the child’s mother, Verline Boyd, 48, and 82-year-old grandmother, Betty Boyd, who were also killed on Jan. 7, 1993, in Betty Boyd’s home south of Eudora.

Court records from the time stated the bodies were found by a 5-year-old family member, who alerted her school bus driver. The home was said to be "totally ransacked," and Evangela's naked body was found in the laundry room.

Verline Boyd was apparently just getting home from work, as her body was found by the door with her jacket on and keys in hand.

All three victims were described by the medical examiner as having died of "multiple chop wounds to the head." He testified that something like a machete, an axe, a kizer blade," or a similar type weapon with significant weight and a sharp edge had been used.

Shoe prints led detectives down the road to where Brown, then 24, was staying with his parents.

A friend of Brown's testified that Brown admitted to sexual contact with Evangela, and that when she fought back, he hit her with "something he described as a joe blade." When she tried to leave, court documents say the witness told the court that he grabbed "whatever he grabbed and just stopped her, cut her, hatchet or whatever, he stopped her."

Brown was arrested in Memphis at his aunt's home four days after the homicides occurred, and his shoes, coat, two guns and an axe were taken for evidence. He told police that, on the night of the killings, he had done some drugs and gone to bed early.

Brown's attorney had argued he was not mentally fit to be executed. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 barred states from executing mentally disabled inmates.

Brown claimed for 17 years that someone else had sexually assaulted Evangela until in 2012 the Mississippi Supreme Court unanimously decided to give Brown his chance to prove it.

In the motion to vacate, Brown's attorneys stated the DNA found in blood on Brown's shoe was male DNA, and all of the victims were female.

Other important evidence was not adequately tested, they argued. Forensic odontologists had testified that a bite mark on Brown's wrist matched Evangela's bite pattern, but a saliva sample taken from Evangela Boyd did not show Brown's DNA present.

"As such, it is now known that the two pieces of physical evidence that the state alleged at the 1995 trial, linked petitioner to the crime scene — and upon which the state relied to gain a conviction and sentence in this matter — do not in fact link the petitioner to the crime scene, and are not what the state purported them to be," the document reads.

Brown is said by his attorney to have scored 75 on an IQ test. A score of 70 is widely accepted as a marker of mental disability, but medical professionals say people scoring as high as 75 can be considered intellectually disabled because of the test’s margin of error.