For the first time in the 11-year history of his case, Tim Brown testified in his own defense on Tuesday, saying that Broward sheriff’s detectives hit him and forced him to falsely confess to murdering Sheriff’s Deputy Patrick Behan. Brown, who has an IQ of 56 and was 15 at the time, said he wrongly admitted to the 1990 shooting of Behan after Broward sheriff’s detectives slapped him around and threatened him with the electric chair. “I thought they was going to beat me again, sir, and I really didn’t think I was going to get out of that room alive,” Brown testified in federal court in Miami. “I did it out of fear because they hit me,” Brown said of the confession that turned out to be the only evidence against him at trial. Brown said that Detective James Carr, who resigned earlier this year, hit him twice — once across the face with an open hand and a second time with a closed fist in the side of his body. Carr and his partner, Eli Thomasevich, who retired this year, also gave Brown details about the deputy’s murder and showed him pictures of the crime scene, Brown said. Later, when they took a taped confession from him, the detectives nodded their heads up and down when they wanted him to agree and shook their heads from side to side when they wanted him to disagree, Brown said. Brown was not expected to take the witness stand during the post-conviction hearing. Attorneys rarely want a murder defendant, particularly one with a very low IQ, to risk testifying and being cross-examined. Chance for freedom But Brown’s attorneys clearly thought U.S. District Judge Donald Graham should hear Brown’s account in his own words. If Graham rules in Brown’s favor after this hearing, he could overturn the conviction. Now 26, Brown has served 11 years of a life sentence for Behan’s murder. Earlier this year, Brown got his first real chance of being released when it was revealed that another man, Andrew Johnson, admitted on undercover tapes that he had shot Behan. Johnson, a former Broward sheriff’s corrections deputy, said shooting Behan was a mistake. He said he intended to kill another deputy, Brian Montgomery, who had filed an internal affairs complaint against Johnson that got him fired and derailed his plan to become a law enforcement officer. Behan was working Montgomery’s shift on the night he was killed. Johnson later dismissed those statements as “fool’s talk” he made up to impress undercover officers who he thought were criminals who might hire him. The Broward Sheriff’s Office decided there was insufficient evidence to file charges against Johnson after the investigation became public in February. But Judge Graham ruled last month that if a jury were to hear all of the evidence against Johnson and Brown, that jury could reasonably doubt Brown’s guilt. That ruling allowed Brown’s attorneys, federal public defenders Tim Day and Brenda Bryn, to argue that Brown’s constitutional rights were violated. They say he was beaten and forced to confess; that the mentally challenged teen did not understand his legal rights when they were read to him; that he should have been allowed to have his mother present when he talked to detectives; and that his trial attorney did not represent him properly. On the witness stand, Brown spoke slowly and deferentially as attorneys questioned him for an hour. Dressed in light-blue prison scrubs and with shackles clanking on his legs, he occasionally seemed confused by questions and had to ask for them to be rephrased more simply. He remained calm, pausing a few times to remove his glasses and run his hands over his face. On cross-examination, Broward prosecutor Tim Donnelly pointed out that in a published report last year, Brown said detectives showed him a photograph of Behan slumped over the wheel of his cruiser. But no such photograph exists, Donnelly said, because Behan was quickly removed from the cruiser as emergency workers tried to save his life. “I might have said that, but I said it in the wrong manner,” Brown said. He said he saw pictures of the crime scene and a photograph of Behan’s body with a bullet hole in his cheek. Those photographs do exist. Coercive tactics? Brown testified that he did not recall detectives reading him his rights and that he did not understand the word “lawyer” at the time. He would not learn to read until he got to prison, according to testimony from Brown, his family and another inmate. Brown also testified that he told detectives he wanted to see his mother, Othalean Brown. “They told me I didn’t need her up there with me,” Brown said. Othalean Brown testified that detectives told her she could not see her son and she was not permitted to visit him until about four days later, when she saw a bruise on his face and his split lip. Brown was arrested in July 1991, nine months after Behan was shot in the cheek as he wrote a report in his police cruiser in the parking lot of a Pembroke Park convenience store. Jailhouse snitches told detectives that Brown, who was 14 at the time of the murder, and another man, Keith King, had bragged that they killed Behan. The detectives took Brown to an interrogation room, where he said they shackled him to the floor and told him he was being charged with the first-degree murder of a deputy. “I told them they was crazy, I didn’t kill nobody,” Brown said. When he continued to deny any involvement, Brown said that Carr slapped him in the face, bruising it near his nose and splitting the inside of his lip, and then punched him in the side. Among the details Brown said the detectives told him to help him describe the murder was that the weapon was a .38-caliber gun. They also suggested that Brown and King went to the scene on a bicycle, Brown said. He said he made up some of the details himself when he said they fired the gun twice, that they rode across Hallandale Beach Boulevard on a bike and that he had stopped and taken off his shirt. Brown told detectives that King shot Behan, but he said he did that only because detectives said King had implicated Brown and that he was being questioned in the next room. Keith King pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges and was released after nine years in prison. “Did you ask [Carr] why he was hitting you?” Donnelly asked Brown. “No,” Brown replied. “I confessed to the murder because I was scared.” Informant’s testimony In other testimony on Tuesday, inmate William Hawley testified that a man whom he identified as Andrew Johnson told him in 1992 that he had killed a deputy by the name of “Behar” or “Behan.” The man also said the wrong people were locked up for the crime and that he was considering turning himself in or committing suicide. Hawley, who has a long record of offering information that could lighten the punishment for his own offenses, testified that he attended a church service in south Broward County in about March of 1992. There, a man who identified himself as “Andy” sobbed through the service and later confessed to killing a deputy. During their one-hour conversation, “Andy” also said he got the wrong person, but only realized that when the victim “spun around, put his hands up and screamed,” Hawley said. Hawley, who testified he had a cocaine habit and has charges pending against him in Broward and Palm Beach counties, said he told law enforcement officers about the conversation in 1992 but did not try to use the information to get a lighter sentence when he was arrested. Hawley also said he mentioned that conversation to Detective Carr at least twice in late 2001. At that time, the investigation of Johnson was under way but no details had been revealed publicly. “[Carr] kind of laughed it off and said, ‘We don’t put the wrong people in jail,’” Hawley said. Paula McMahon can be reached at pmcmahon@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4533.

PHOTOS Brown Jul 24, 2002

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