A man convicted in the 1993 slaying of four people in Houston is scheduled for execution on Thursday, March 9.
Arthur Brown Jr. and two others were convicted in connection to the 1992 murder of several family members and their neighbor. Recently, he is seeking a stay of execution, claiming Harris County prosecutors withheld evidence during his trial.
Both Brown and one co-defendant were given the death sentence. That co-defendant was executed in 2006. The second co-defendant is serving a life sentence.
The second man scheduled for execution in Texas this week, Gary Green, was sentenced to death in 2010 for stabbing his wife and drowning her six-year-old daughter in their home.
Richard Dieter is the Executive Director at the Death Penalty Information Center. He said there is a commonality between the two people scheduled for execution this week.
"They both have mental problems, whether it be intellectual disability or severe mental illness. It's what happens with the arbitrariness of the death penalty," he said. "You don't always get the worst. You rarely get the worst."
Green had a history of suffering from paranoia and anger issues. The Texas Observer writes he checked into a psychiatric hospital in Dallas a month before the murders. His defense argued he likely had schizoaffective disorder, although this argument was unsuccessful.
Brown was in special education classes as a child, and the Houston Chronicle writes records show his mother admitted to drinking alcohol on a weekly basis while pregnant with him.
"When you have a punishment or policy that is open to a lot of discretion, you sometimes see racial disparities as well. This is especially the problem with the death penalty," Dieter said.
In 2022, there were 18 executions in the United States. In the same year, there were over 20,000 murders.
Dieter said even Texas executes relatively few people, and often it's hard to predict who will be executed without knowing the geography of where they were convicted and the politics behind it. The information center's research shows execution is potentially used as a way to show toughness on crime.
"I don't know that it's chance or coincidence that before the 2020 elections, there was all of a sudden federal executions," he said. "There hadn't been federal executions in 20 years. But suddenly there were 13 in 6 months."
The information center's studies consistently find that the death penalty is more expensive than alternative punishments, as well. Dieter said life without parole is one of many alternatives that could avoid key problems with capital punishment, including the risk of executing an innocent person.
"The critique of the death penalty is not, ‘we shouldn't spend money on it', but we should decide whether it's an effective use. If it's an efficient use," he said.