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The Trials of Eroy Brown: The Murder Case That Shook the Texas Prison System. By Michael Berryhill. Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Pp. via, 239. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-292-72694-9.)
Eroy Edward Brown has lived mostly in prison, ostensibly because of repeated convictions for petty thefts. In 1981 Brown was one of the black convicts who made up half the inmate population of Ellis Unit, a sprawling enclosure near Huntsville, Texas, where the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC) held repeat offenders. One day in April, Brown was taken from his worksite after complaining about being denied a furlough. Billy Max Moore, the prison farm manager, drove with Brown away from the main prison building; Wallace M. Pack, the warden of Ellis Unit, drove out to meet them. They stopped near a drainage ditch. Minutes later, Moore was dead from a gunshot wound, Pack lay...