The Federal Court of Appeals reverses the conviction of Texas death inmates

Texas (KXXV) – A Federal Court of Appeals launched the death sentence of a yellow woman after she discovered that local prosecutors had not revealed that her testimony of the main trial was a paid informant.

With a decision of 2-1, the Court of Appeals of the Fifth Circuit of the United States last week sent the conviction for Brittany Marlow Holberg in 1998 to the Court of First Instance to decide how to proceed.

Holberg has been in the death corridor for 27 years. By ensuring his sentence in 1998, Randall County prosecutors trusted a large extent in the testimony of a prison inmate who worked as a confidential informant for the Yellow City Police. That informant retracted his testimony in 2011, but neither a Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas nor a Federal District Court determined that prosecutors had violated Holberg’s constitutional right to a fair trial.

The Court of Appeals DisagreeSaying that the informant was critical for the determination of the jury’s guilt and that the Prosecutor’s Office violated the rights of due process of Holberg by hiding information that, according to a bankrupt of the United States Supreme Court, must be revealed. Writing for most, Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham issued the case of Holberg as a blight in the criminal justice system.

“We pause only to recognize that 27 years in the death corridor is a reality that mitigates the light that must attend the procedures in which a life is at stake, a marked reminder that the jurisprudence of capital punishment remains a work in progress,” wrote Higginbotham, a designated Ronald Reagan.

Holberg was sentenced to death by a yellow jury when he was 23 years old. The jury found his guilt of killing Ab Towery, an 80 -year -old man and former Holberg client, a sex worker. During the trial, Holberg said he acted in self -defense and stabbed Towey because he feared for his life and tried to protect himself after he hit her on the back of the head and refused to give in.

However, the Prosecutor’s Office presented the testimony of the cell companion of the Holberg prison, Vickie Marie Kirkpatrick, who alleged that Holberg had admitted to having killed Towery “to get money” and said that “he would do it again for more drugs.”

Kirkpatrick was working at that time as a confidential informant for the city of the Yellow Police, a fact that prosecutors did not reveal. Instead, they presented Kirkpatrick as a “selfless person who” wanted to do the right thing, “Higginbotham wrote.

Holberg had experienced severe and repeated sexual abuse during his childhood and fell into a cocaine addiction. She turned to sex work to support her addiction, according to judicial documents.

On November 13, 1996, he had a minor traffic accident and then sought refuge in Towery’s apartment. A heated argument became violent, leaving Towery dead with part of a lamp hosted inside his throat. Holberg left the apartment cut, bruised and bleeding from his head, where Towery hit her.

While in jail, the Randall County District Prosecutor’s Office approached multiple inmates to interrogate them about Holberg, offering them an agreement in exchange for testimony. Kirkpatrick, who was placed in the same cell as Holberg, produced a statement that details an alleged admission of Holberg. That same day, Kirkpatrick was released on bail.

In a lonely dissent, circuit judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, appointed by Donald Trump, wrote that the jury did not only trust Kirkpatrick’s testimony to achieve his guilt decision.

“The jury was presented by a graphic physical evidence that Holberg sisterly sorted to a sick old man, with a lamp hit by his throat like the coup d’etat,” Duncan wrote. “That evidence condemned Holberg’s self -defense theory and there is no possibility that Kirkpatrick’s accusation would have risen.”

Holberg’s lawyers did not immediately respond to the request for comments from Texas Tribune on Monday. A spokesman for the Texas Criminal Justice Department said the agency had no comments on the case of Holberg. Currently, Holberg is located in the Patrick L. O’Daniel unit, a Gatesville prison that houses women in the death corridor, among other inmates.

Texas leads the country in executions and is among the first three to impose death sentences. He The use of the state of capital punishment has decreasedHowever, and the number of people in the death corridor has decreased by more than half in the last twenty -five years. There are 174 people in the death corridor of Texas, and seven of them are women.

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune in https://www.texastribune.org/2025/03/10/texas-death-ROW-CASE-REDENED/.

The Texas Tribune is a non -legal writing room backed by members that informs and involves the Texans in state politics and policy. Obtain more information at Texastribune.org.