Tyrone Brown (born 1973) is an African-American man from Texas who, in 1990, was sentenced to a life term in a Texas maximum security prison and was kept incarcerated for 17 years after testing positive once for smoking marijuana while on probation for robbing a man of two dollars at the age of 17.
[1] Brown's case attracted some attention in the press in 2006, and he was later granted a conditional pardon by Texas Governor Rick Perry.
Brown was a high-school dropout and had been a victim of child abuse by his father, who had reportedly beat him.
[1][2] The other man had committed murder by shooting an unarmed prostitute in the back (and then taking money from his victim after shooting him), and had then violated his parole by repeatedly testing positive for cocaine use over a period of several years, breaking through the glass door of a woman's home to confront her in a dispute, living with at least two men who had multiple criminal convictions, and being arrested for crack cocaine possession while driving a congressman's car.
[1] In contrast with the way Brown was treated, the other defendant was never sent to jail and received an early lifting of all of the usual conditions of probation.