Decision on new murder trial awaited

Kim Smith

Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2001 | 9:03 a.m.

The wait for Paul Browning and his family continues.

The death row inmate had hoped to find out Tuesday if he was going to get a second chance to try to prove his innocence in the 1984 murder of a Las Vegas jeweler.

Browning, 46, was convicted in 1986 of stabbing Hugo Elsen to death in November 1995 during a robbery, but DNA evidence has cast doubt in the case.

After listening to more than an hour's worth of arguments, Senior District Judge Joseph Pavlikowski said he wasn't ready to decide.

Betty Browning, the defendant's mother, said she was disappointed the judge took the issue "under advisement." The 68-year-old Maryland resident was accompanied by a half-dozen relatives and friends, some of whom came from California for the hearing.

Prosecutors argued that Browning went into Elsen's Las Vegas Boulevard South store on Nov. 8, 1985, because he needed money to bail his girlfriend -- a prostitute -- out of jail.

Browning, then 30, was arrested after two acquaintances, Randy and Vanessa Wolfe, called police and said that Browning had confessed to them.

The Wolfes, both convicts and drug abusers, led police to the murder weapon, jewelry and a bloody jacket and later testified against Browning.

Browning, whose fingerprints were found inside the store, was also identified by Elsen's wife, Josy. The evidence against Browning was so overwhelming, then-prosecutor Dan Seaton told jurors, that the presumption of innocence was a "farce."

Jurors convicted Browning after deliberating an hour. It took them two hours to sentence him to die.

A DNA test performed in the summer of 2000, however, proves the blood on a jacket is neither Elsen's nor Browning's.

As a result, the California law firm of Brobeck, Phlegert and Harrison has asked Pavlikowski to grant Browning a new trial.

Defense attorney Brian Martin argued that jurors may not have convicted Browning if the prosecutorhadn't told the jury that the blood was Elsen's.