Brown v. Head

James Willie Brown is a Georgia death row inmate who is facing execution tonight for a rape and murder he committed twenty-eight years ago. After his original conviction and sentence, obtained in 1981, were set aside in a federal habeas corpus proceeding in 1988, Brown was retried, re-convicted and re-sentenced to death in 1990. Following exhaustion of his state court remedies, Brown filed a federal ha-beas corpus petition in 1997 seeking relief from his conviction and sentence in the retrial. The district court denied that relief in 2000, and we affirmed that denial the next year. Brown v.…