Last week, Innocence Files exoneree Alfred Dewayne Brown visited campus to share his story with attorney Brian Stolarz, a Bucknell ‘95 political science alum who defended Brown pro bono for over a decade. As an innocent man, Brown served 12 years on death row in Texas for the murder of a police officer at a scene of a robbery where he was not even present.
The false conviction was littered with evidence tampering, witness intimidation, and coercion by prosecutors. In 2013, Brown’s attorneys were notified about a discovery of ‘new evidence’ in the garage of a homicide detective that corroborated Brown and his girlfriend’s testimony that he was home at the time of the murder.
Two years later, in 2015, after a lengthy legal battle and a new trial, Brown was released, and the charges were dropped because of the prosecution’s insufficient evidence for conviction. However, it was not until he was declared ‘factually innocent’ in 2019 that he was able to receive state compensation for his wrongful conviction. Brown is the 154th death-row inmate exonerated in the United States.
Now, Brown and Stolarz travel all over the United States to tell Brown’s story, hoping that “we create accountability for fixing the system… by being persistent in what we believe in and sharing powerful stories like this one.” For more information about Alfred Deywane Brown’s story, check out the Netflix Docuseries The Innocence Files, a show following the stories of eight cases of wrongful convictions where Brown’s case is featured.
