A Federal Court of Appeals has reversed the conviction for murder of a 52 -year -old Texas woman who has been in the death corridor for almost three decades.
In 1998, Brittany Marlow Holberg was declared guilty by a Yellow jury of murdering Ab Towery, 80, a former customer of the sex worker. Holberg said during the trial he was acting for his own defense, but Randall County prosecutors argued successfully against, even through the testimony of his prison partner.
On Friday, the Court of Appeals of the 5th Circuit of the United States decided 2-1 to send His case back to the District Court, saying that the Prosecutor’s Office violated his right to due process by not revealing that his testimony of “critical” trial was a paid informant.
Currently, Holberg is currently in the Patrick L. O’Daniel unit in Gatesville.
“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 Judge Patrick Higginbotham for most.
The Randall County District Prosecutor, Robert Love, said in a Wednesday statement that his office is “disappointed” by the ruling, but refused to comment on the legal aspects of the case until the office of the Texas Attorney General has decided how he will respond.
“The office of the Texas Attorney General has managed this appeal since 2010 and are currently discussing the legal options available for the state of Texas in this case,” said Love.
The OAG did not immediately respond to requests for comments by email on Wednesday. He Dallas’s morning news Nor did I immediately receive news from David Aberneshy, a lawyer who represents Holberg.
According to the judicial document, Holberg had a lower traffic accident on November 13, 1996 and sought refuge in Towery apartment. But the two put themselves in a violent argument that left Towery dead after suffering weapon wounds and had part of a lamp hosted in his throat, according to the judicial document.
Holberg, who said he feared for his life and acted in self -defense, was also bleeding from his head where Towery had hit her and took his hair.
He was then arrested in February 1997 and extradited in the Randall County prison.
During the early time of Holberg, in custody, prosecutors unsuccessfully interrogated several inmates about her and offered agreements in exchange for their testimony, according to the judicial document. Three months later, he became a cell partner with Vickie Marie Kirkpatrick, who would testify that Holberg admitted that “the altercation with Towery began to get money for a ‘solution'” and that “he would do it again for more drugs.”
But the Prosecutor’s Office did not reveal at the trial that Kirkpatrick was working as a confidential informant for the Yellow Police, but presented it as “a selfless person who” wanted to do the right thing, “said the judicial document.
Kirkpatrick also retracted his testimony in 2011, according to the document.
“This narrative, which the jury did not listen, razes Kirkpatrick’s credibility: or his testimony in the trial was supplied by the State or his retraction was a lie,” Higginbotham wrote. “In this context, the intentional dissemination of the state of the informant state of Kirkpatrick attacks the heart of the jury’s conviction, and surely his death sentence.”
However, Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, who disagreed with the majority ruling, wrote that the Prosecutor’s Office also presented a “wealth of other powerful evidence.”
“So Kirkpatrick had even accused, there is zero possibilities that a jury had accredited the ridiculous claim of Holberg personal defense or saved the death penalty for killing a sick old man,” Duncan wrote.
Holberg is one of the more than 170 people currently in the death corridor in Texas.
