After a week-long trial, 21-year-old Mauriceo Brown was sent to Texas' death row in 1997 for shooting Michael LaHood Jr., the son of a prominent defense attorney, in what prosecutors called a botched robbery.

At his capital murder trial with co-defendant Kenneth Foster, Brown took the stand and told jurors that he accidentally shot the 25-year-old law student in the head at point-blank range because he thought LaHood was going to shoot him first.

Less than an hour after the shooting, police arrested Brown and his friends, Dwayne Dillard, Kenneth Foster and Julius Steen, as they sped away from the crime scene. Officers found the .44-caliber handgun that was later identified as the murder weapon in the vehicle.

In exchange for a lighter sentence on a charge of aggravated robbery, Steen agreed to testify against his friends at their trial.

He told jurors that on the evening of Aug. 15, 1996, they were cruising the streets of downtown San Antonio, smoking marijuana and drinking, when they decided to commit a string of armed robberies.

He said they netted about $300 in their first two robberies. Then, as they were driving out of a residential cul-de-sac, they came upon LaHood and his friend, Mary Patrick, in the driveway of LaHood's home, and stopped the car.

Steen testified that he saw Brown emerge from the car with a gun and demand LaHood's wallet.

A shouting match escalated into gunfire, according to Steen, although he testified that he did not actually see Brown fire the weapon. Once the men were back in the car, Steen said Brown insisted that they get rid of the gun.

But police arrested them before they had the chance to cover their tracks, and at the police station, Brown signed a confession stating that he shot LaHood.

Both Brown and Foster were convicted and sentenced to death.

Since his conviction, Brown has attempted to recant his confession, claiming that the real gunman, Dwayne Dillard, threatened to kill his newborn son and mother unless he took responsibility for the shooting.

As they drove away from the scene, Brown claims that Dillard made a comment that he interpreted as a threat to his family. Then, after their arrest, Brown says he learned that his friends had identified him as the gunman to police.

"I'm starting to see what's going on, along with the threat made against my son and my mom," Brown told CourtTVnews.com. "I regret that I didn't put more trust and faith in the man upstairs to look over my family, but when you're in the streets and you've been around these people for a while, you kind of know it can happen."

Brown says he told his court-appointed attorneys about the false confession and the threats to his family, but they shrugged it off, he says, and "forced" him to testify anyway. Brown unsuccessfully attempted to appeal his conviction based on their handling of the case.

With Brown's scheduled execution within days, his appellate lawyers have stepped up their efforts to stay the execution by proving that Brown was not the shooter.

The bailiff who escorted Brown to and from his trial filed an affidavit Monday claiming that, during his trial, Brown told him that Dwayne Dillard had threatened to kill his son, who was 6 months old when his father was arrested for the murder.

"On one particular occasion, I found Mr. Brown crying very hard in the holding cell," Bexar County Sheriff's deputy Lorenzo Contreras said in a signed affidavit. "Mr. Brown informed me that Mr. Dillard, a co-defendant, had threatened to kill his girlfriend and new baby if he did not take the blame for the murder of LaHood. Mr. Brown stated he was, in fact, at the murder scene, but did not kill LaHood."

To prove this claim, Brown's appellate lawyer asked a judge last week to let him perform DNA tests on the clothes the four suspects were wearing the night LaHood was shot.

Brown's lawyer, David Sergi, told CourtTVnews.com that the tests would prove that blood spatter from the victim landed on one of Brown's co-defendants, proving that he was the gunman and not Brown.

A judge denied the request Friday, paving the way for Brown's execution on Wednesday, July 19, unless a final appeal succeeds.

On Monday, Sergi filed a writ based upon statements from Brown's cohorts, including Julius Steen and Dwayne Dillard, who was never charged in the shooting.

In a signed affidavit dated July 6, Dillard asserted that the shooting did not occur in the midst of a robbery, a factor that enhanced Brown's charges to capital murder.

"I maintained throughout that we had not been intentionally following the vehicles of Mary Patrick and Michael LaHood, but rather, we were just driving behind them coincidentally prior to the altercation," said Dillard. "This was neither a planned robbery nor a robbery, as we had no intention of robbing Mary Patrick or Michael LaHood."

Dillard also claimed in the affidavit that he was never charged in the shooting because his statements "countered that state's theory" of a planned robbery. He is currently serving a life sentence for the murder of a shuttle bus driver just weeks before LaHood's death.

Steen has also come forward to contradict his own trial testimony and lend support to the claim that Brown should never have been accused of killing LaHood during a robbery.

"There was no agreement, explicit or otherwise, to rob Michael LaHood or Mary Patrick," Steen claimed in an affidavit.

As Brown awaits the final outcome, the 31-year-old says he has always been prepared for the worst, and does not fear death. 

"My simple motto is: We're born to live, and we live to die ... We may not like the way we die, we can't pick and choose the way we die, but it happens," he said. "If I die here, at least I'll have time to get my life right with God ... That's the most important thing."