Austin American-Statesman :: The Trials of Eroy Brown

The Trials of Eroy Brown

by Michael Berryhill

Buy It Now

The Trials of Eroy Brown: The Murder Case That Shook the Texas Prison SystemBrown case highlights reluctance to parole longtime offenders
By Mike Ward

Eroy Brown, whose acquittal on murder charges involving the deaths of a prison warden and a farm manager in the 1980s shook the Lone Star corrections system to its roots, is coming up for parole again.

Brown is serving 90 years as a habitual criminal for robbing a Waco convenience store of $12 and some candy bars. The graying, almost 60-year-old is serving time in a South Carolina prison because a federal judge thought his safety could not be guaranteed in a Texas lockup. If he's granted parole, he would be sent to a pre-release program in California.

If he's denied parole, he would be released within five years without any supervision under controversial early release policies enacted in the 1970s to ease prison crowding in Texas.

"He got more publicity for (the acquittal) than Christ on the cross," said Houston attorney Bill Habern, who was Brown's lawyer on the murder charges. "The (prison) system still to this day doesn't believe he should have been acquitted. ... What is probably going to happen is called getting even."

Brown's case highlights a long-standing issue with Texas' parole system: a reluctance to parole longtime offenders with high-profile cases, even those who soon will be freed anyway, and those with serious and costly health problems.

Brown is earning liberal credits for good behavior on his sentence, which he would finish by 2017, according to current calculations. At that time, he would be released free and clear, with no supervision.

Brown is among just 4,208 of Texas' 156,000 convicts who are still accruing such credits under old laws, a number that dwindles each year as more are paroled or released.

Read more at statesman.com »

Austin Chronicle :: The Austin Chronicle Music Anthology

Austin Chronicle Music Anthology
Edited by Austin Powell
and Doug Freeman
Buy It Now

The Year in Books
Thirty-one titles that got us talking this year
BY KIMBERLEY JONES, SARAH SMITH, JAMES RENOVITCH, CINDY WIDNER, MONICA RIESE, AND WAYNE ALAN BRENNER

It's no wonder so many food-related metaphors extend into our reading nooks: Good books are not mere entertainment; they sustain, nourish, and enrich. I gleefully devoured these books, the bread and butter of my bookshelf, which made serving up this recipe for reading success a piece of cake, no matter what your cup of literary tea. (I'll stop now.)

Feed your mind: My two favorite music writers, Austin Powell and Doug Freeman, unleashed The Austin Chronicle Music Anthology (University of Texas Press) this spring (see "Off the Record," Music, March 4, 2011). Despite having had this book for eight months and having lived in this fair town six-plus years now, I know there's always something else in those pages I can learn about our collective musical history. It's a beautiful volume, and the only one I know of in which Joan Jett and Jay-Z make appearances five pages apart.

Read the full list of books at austinchronicle.com »

Houston Chronicle :: The Trials of Eroy Brown

Bookish picks: 2011 Texas Titles
Reviewed by Maggie Galehouse

We are encouraged to buy local and regional in grocery stores and farmers’ markets.

Why not buy books with the same philosophy — to support Texas authors, stories and presses?

All the 2011 books listed below have a strong Texas connection.

Happy reading!

100,000 Hearts
By Denton A. Cooley, M.D.
Buy It Now

100,000 Hearts: A Surgeon’s Memoir, by Denton Cooley, M.D. (UT Press) Cooley, who founded the Texas Heart Institute in 1962, grew up in Houston and attended the University of Texas. While in medical school at Johns Hopkins, Cooley assisted in an operation to help correct a congenital heart defect in an infant. This led him to specialize in heart surgery.

Crazy from the Heat

By James H. Evans

Buy It Now

Crazy From the Heat: A Chronicle of Twenty Years in the Big Bend by James H. Evans. (University of Texas Press). This photography book offers landscapes and panoramas — in both black and white, and color — of the biggest state park in Texas. People, plants, animals, objects, even an “exploded view” of ‘Shirley’s Fried Pie’ make this collection personal and universal.

The Trials of Elroy Brown

by Michael Berryhill

Buy It Now

The Trials of Eroy Brown, by Michael Berryhill. (UT Press) In 1981, a black inmate at the Ellis prison farm near Huntsville killed two white Texas prison officials. The man who admitted to killing them, a burglar and robber named Eroy Brown, surrendered, claiming self-defense. The Trials of Eroy Brown focuses on Brown’s defense and is based on trial documents, exhibits, and journalistic accounts of Brown’s three trials, which ended in his acquittal.




See the entire list at chron.com »

Texas Co-op Power Magazine :: We Were Not Orphans

We Were Not Orphans

By Sherry Matthews

Buy It Now

We Were Not Orphans
Book provides a stark look inside the now-defunct Waco State Home
By Joel W. Barna

First-person stories provide a stark look at a forgotten chapter of recent Texas history—as well as a warning for the future—in a new book about the defunct Waco State Home.

We were not orphans: Stories from the Waco State Home (University of Texas Press, 2011) tells the story of the State Home for Dependent and Neglected Children (renamed the Waco State Home in 1937), which housed and cared for thousands of abandoned and abused children from 1923 until it closed in 1979.
Through a collection of more than 50 interviews with former residents, author Sherry Matthews sheds light on the harsh realities of life at the home.

In the book’s foreword, journalist Robert Draper calls the Waco State Home “the de facto safety net for children who had committed no crime other than the offense of being born poor.” For many of its young residents (who were wards of the state but not orphans), the institution provided education and skills that helped the children establish successful adult lives. But, for others, Draper writes, the home was “part of a Dickensian saga that has remained untold until now.”

Credit for the telling of the story goes to Matthews, who was 3 when her three older brothers were taken away to live at the home. Matthews and her mother traveled from East Texas to Waco to visit the boys during their six-year stay there. As Matthews writes, the family tragedies that sent her brothers to the home are not included in the book’s collection of stories.

But her family’s story, nonetheless, carries great weight. She writes that her one surviving brother, Bing, “says he remembers his time in the Home as the most miserable years of his life and has no story to tell.”

In June 2004, more than 50 years after she had last visited the home, Matthews joined Bing at a Waco State Home reunion. Matthews describes former residents eagerly showing off their old living quarters to children and grandchildren, sharing memories of homemade rolls, fresh dairy ice cream and beloved teachers.

Read More »

Publisher's Weekly :: The Trials of Eroy Brown

The Trials of Elroy Brown

by Michael Berryhill

Buy It Now

Review:
The Trials of Eroy Brown: The Murder Case That Shook the Texas Prison System

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. Berryhill, chair of the journalism program at Texas Southern University, retells how Eroy Brown, a hapless criminal, was serving 25 years in prison for aiding in a convenience store robbery, stealing $12 and two candy bars. Witnesses tell several versions of how in 1981, while Brown was at the Ellis prison farm near Huntsville, two white Texas prison guards were killed by Brown, who was also shot, but it was claimed that after being threatened, he grabbed one guard's weapon and drowned the other guard, leaving the question of how Brown could have been shot. Brown was charged, and he pleaded self-defense. A court had earlier ruled that Texas inmates were treated with unusual cruelty, supporting Brown's plea, but he faced aggressive prosecutorial maneuvers and willing inmate testimony. After three trials ending finally in acquittal, Brown, now 59, remains in prison for his earlier conviction. Berryhill documents how the old prison rules are no longer in effect, with federal watchdogs looking out for trouble. 16 b&w photos; 3 maps. (Oct.)

Read More »

Dallas Morning News :: The Trials of Eroy Brown

The Trials of Elroy Brown

by Michael Berryhill

Buy It Now

Book on infamous prison killing case to be published by UT Press
By Diane Jennings/Reporter
Jun. 9, 2011

Thirty years ago the case of a Texas inmate, Eroy Brown, who was acquitted in the killing of two prison employees, shocked Texas prison officials. Now a book about the episode is being published by the University of Texas Press.

The Trials of Eroy Brown The Murder Case that Shook the Texas Prison system tells the story of the convicted burglar who admitted shooting a farm manager and struggling with a warden until he drowned in a ditch. Brown claimed he was acting in self defense and was tried three times. The first time he went to court ended in a mistrial, then two separate juries acquitted Brown of each death.

The publisher says defense attorneys Craig Washington, Bill Habern and Tim Sloan, "undertook heroic strategies" on behalf of Brown.
"I knew he was innocent," Habern says. "The evidence convinced the jury."

Habern says he's glad to see the publication of The Trials of Eroy Brown. "I thought the story would never be told."

The book by Michael Berryhill, chairman of the journalism department at Texas Southern University, costs $29.95 and will be released in October.

Read More »

Saveur :: Texas BBQ

Texas BBQ
Wyatt McSpadden
Buy It Now

Barbeque Bookshelf
... No title better captures that than Republic of Barbecue (University of Texas Press, 2009). Compiled by University of Texas professor Elizabeth S. D. Englehardt and a team of graduate students, the book documents what barbecue means to Texans via vivid oral histories from pitmasters, sausage makers, operators of cattle feed yards, and others. Photographer Wyatt McSpadden's Texas BBQ (University of Texas Press, 2009) takes a different tack, allowing its deeply affecting images to speak for themselves ...

Read more at saveur.com »
Download the article in .pdf format »

The Big Bend Sentinel :: Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers

Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers
by Thad Sitton
Buy It Now

the rambling boy – hunting the gray ghost and the red ranger
By LONN TAYLOR, May 19th, 2011

When I lived in Fayette County in the 1970s I knew several men whose passion was wolf hunting. This did not mean that they went out with guns to kill wolves. It meant that they kept packs of hound dogs and one or two nights a week they would take the dogs out and stay up all night listening to the dogs chase a wolf through the woods, following the chase in pickup trucks on back roads or, sometimes, sitting around a camp fire while the dogs circled around them through the woods.

The wolves that they hunted were actually coyotes, as wolves had been extirpated in that part of Texas since the 1930s, but the terminology had clung to the sport long after the wolves had gone. The quarry was not as important as the chase, because the point of the sport was to listen to the music of the dogs baying. An experienced wolf hunter could not only tell which dog was which by the sounds they made, he could tell where the dogs were and how close they were to the coyote, and he could relate that to his fellow-hunters in vivid terms. A wolf hunt was an exercise in translating an auditory experience into a visual one. One of my wolf-hunting friends, Paul Jaster, had a party piece that involved imitating the sounds of a wolf hunt on a harmonica, supplementing the chords of the harmonica with yips and yelps he made with his own mouth and interspersing them with comments like, “now here comes Old Rattler,” and “Little Bill’s almost got him.” He could be persuaded to perform this at barbecues and other outdoor occasions. Hearing him was almost as good as being there by the campfire.

Texas wolf-hunting had its origin in Southern fox chasing, or “hilltopping,” as some of its practitioners call it, a sport that was followed all over the South for two centuries but is now almost extinct. Thad Sitton, a Texas historian who has written several good books about backwoods life in East Texas, has recently published a book about hilltopping, called Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers: American Hilltop Fox Chasing (University of Texas Press, 2010). Reading it has enlightened me considerably about some of the things that I encountered in Fayette County and on forays into East Texas in the 1970s.

My West Texas News :: The Austin Chronicle Music Anthology

Austin Chronicle Music Anthology
Edited by Austin Powell
and Doug Freeman
Buy It Now

Chronicle's music anthology covers Austin's icons and unknowns
by John Boyd, Thursday, May 12, 2011
Midland Reporter-Telegram

Just as the flats of West Texas are known for their oil, Texas' capital city has become known for its own natural resource.

And while the superficial may say that resource -- live music -- has its own petro-like cycle of boom-and-bust in Austin, UT Press's new Austin Chronicle Music Anthology proves even in the seemingly lean years another generation of Texas talent pools just below the surface waiting to be tapped.

Spanning the early '80s through the summer of 2010,  Anthology crosses a variety of genres with a collection of archival pieces from the Chronicle's heralded writing staff.

Anthology smartly focuses on the staff's artist profiles (rather than reviews), allowing the individual style and contributions of each act to seep upward from beneath. Separated, the pieces pop from the page with the stylized prose that has made the Chronicle a must-read in Austin for more than three decades. Together, they create a sort-of photo album in words, telling the history of an entire scene (and in many cases, city) in a succession of brief glimpses.

Read more »