Texas killed 53-year-old Brent Ray Brewer by lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville on November 9. And one week later, on November 16, the state executed David Renteria.
The state killed a total of eight men this year. It has executed 579 individuals since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Brewer was executed for the April 1990 death of 66-year-old Robert Laminack during a robbery. He was 19 at the time.
In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Brewer’s 1991 death sentence, finding that the court failed to give his jurors instructions that they could consider mitigating factors in his case and sentence him to life instead of death. Among those factors were Brewer’s history of abuse as a child and his mental illness.
Still, he was sentenced to death again in 2009. At his resentencing trial, Dr. Richard Coons, whose testimony in a different capital case in 2010 was found “insufficiently reliable” by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, testified that Brewer had no conscience and presented a future danger. His lawyers stated that this assessment was also “unscientific” and “baseless.” They noted that while Brewer was in prison awaiting his resentencing, he had no history of violence. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeal denied both their appeals, the first that his death sentence was the product of junk science, and a second appeal for a stay of execution.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 7-0 against commuting Brewer’s death sentence to a lesser penalty “despite a powerful plea from a juror who did not want to vote for a death sentence and evidence of Brewer’s personal growth and transformation over more than three decades on death row,” the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty reported.
Brewer’s “execution is the farthest thing from justice,” his lawyers said in a statement. “When those of us who know Brent Brewer reflect back on his life, the first word that will come to mind is redemption. He has worked every day on his religious faith which has been at the center of his life. He has cared for everyone who he came into contact with: guards, counselors, fellow inmates, medical staff and his attorneys. He has cared deeply for his family, particularly his sister and they for him. Brent will rest in peace.”
David Renteria was sentenced to death in 2003 for killing five-year-old Alexandra Flores while he was on probation for indecency with a child. Flores maintained his innocence and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the El Paso District Attorney’s office had failed to turn over case documents supporting his claims. “No court has properly examined this new evidence due to the woefully inadequate legal representation Renteria received during the appellate process. Moreover, El Paso prosecutors have fought to prevent the information from coming to light,” TCADP stated on its website before he was executed.
Like Brewer, Renteria “rededicated himself to his Roman Catholic faith,” the statement noted. “He was one of 28 men chosen for the first class of the Faith-Based Program for Death Row, through which he takes every opportunity to encourage and comfort people spiritually and to engage in positive, peaceful interactions. In his over twenty years of incarceration, Renteria has been a model inmate who has never once committed a violent or aggressive act.”
