After spending decades on Nevada’s death row, a 63-year-old inmate is now free.
Paul Browning walked out of prison Wednesday after spending 33 years on death row, and his mother, Betty Browning, was there to meet him with a warm embrace.
“I’m OK,” Browning said while hugging his 86-year-old mother.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that his mother, brother, and sister-in-law all made the journey to see Browning walk out of the prison gates. Browning, who was convicted in 1986 in the stabbing death of a Las Vegas jeweler, had maintained his innocence throughout the entirety of his lockup.
Browning was 30 when he went on trial, and after just an hour of deliberation, a jury convicted him of murder, and he was sentenced to death. In 2017, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that there were “extreme malfunctions” during his trial and determined there was a “mixture of disturbing prosecutorial misconduct and woefully inadequate assistance of counsel.”
Then, four months ago, District Judge Douglas Herndon dismissed his murder conviction, noting that Browning’s attorney failed to ask important questions of witnesses who are now dead. Herndon said, “a fair trial consistent with due process is no longer possible.”
Despite the conviction being tossed, prosecutors asked to postpone the ruling while they tried to appeal the judge’s decision with the Nevada Supreme Court. Although the Nevada Supreme Court has yet to make a ruling on the appeal, this month Herndon lifted the hold, essentially ordering the prison to release Browning.
“It wasn’t so much about me getting out,” Browning said. “It’s about me sitting there in court, starting with the preliminary hearing, and you see the witnesses testifying against you — all of the misconduct that occurred during trial. It’s just unjust. And it kind of hits you, right here in your gut. And that’s what has driven me.”
“I’m just happy to be here,” the now-former inmate said after his release.
