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Thread: Raphael Deon Holiday - Texas Execution - November 18, 2015

  1. #11
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Condemned man’s lawyers stop helping, cite ‘false hope’

    AUSTIN — From his cell on death row, Raphael Holiday drafted letter after desperate letter to lawyers who represent the condemned. He begged for their help to plead for mercy from Gov. Greg Abbott, to try any last-ditch legal maneuvers that might stave off his impending execution.

    Holiday’s appointed lawyers had told him that fighting to stop his punishment was futile, and they wouldn’t do it. The 36-year-old thought he’d be left to walk to the death chamber with no lawyer at his side.

    Less than a month before his execution — scheduled for Wednesday — Holiday secured help. Austin attorney Gretchen Sween agreed to ask the court to find new lawyers willing to try to keep him from dying.

    But Holiday’s federally appointed lawyers — the ones who said they would do no more to help him — are opposing their client’s attempts to replace them.

    Now, just hours before he is set to face lethal injection for burning to death three children, including his own daughter, Holiday is awaiting word from the U.S. Supreme Court on his latest request for help.

    ‘False hope’ argument

    Lawyers James “Wes” Volberding and Seth Kretzer said they worked diligently to find new evidence on which to base additional appeals for Holiday, but that none exists. Seeking clemency from Abbott, a staunch death penalty supporter, would be pointless, they say.

    The two contend they are exercising professional judgment and doing what’s best for their client.

    “We decided that it was inappropriate to file [a petition for clemency] and give false hope to a poor man on death row expecting clemency that we knew was never going to come,” Volberding said in a telephone interview.

    But others say the law under which death row lawyers are appointed doesn’t allow that kind of discretion. It requires attorneys to make every possible effort to save a client’s life, if that’s what the inmate wants.

    “This seems unconscionable,” said Stephen Bright, president and senior counsel of the Southern Center for Human Rights and a teacher at Yale Law School. “Lawyers are often in a position of representing people for whom the legal issues are not particularly strong, but nevertheless they have a duty to make every legal argument they can.”

    So far, appeals courts have sided with Volberding and Kretzer. Last Thursday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a motion to have them replaced. On Monday, Sween appealed to the Supreme Court.

    Holiday was convicted of intentionally setting fire to his wife’s home near College Station in September 2000, killing her three little girls. He forced the children’s grandmother to douse the home in gasoline. After igniting the fumes, Holiday watched from outside as flames engulfed the couch where authorities later found the corpses of 7-year-old Tierra Lynch, 5-year-old Jasmine DuPaul and 1-year-old Justice Holiday huddled together.

    Volberding and Kretzer were appointed in February 2011 to represent Holiday in his federal appeals. They filed a 286-page petition in federal court, alleging dozens of mistakes in Holiday’s case, ranging from assertions that he was intellectually disabled to charges that clemency is so rarely granted in Texas that the process has become meaningless.

    On June 30, the Supreme Court denied Holiday’s petition for a review of his case.

    Such rulings are common; the high court declines thousands of cases each year. Still, it’s a major blow to an inmate whose life depends on the court’s mercy. Many lawyers for death row inmates deliver the news in person, knowing how devastating it can be when a last, scant shred of legal hope disintegrates.

    Volberding sent Holiday a letter.

    ‘The end of work’

    “I am sorry, but the Supreme Court just denied your appeal,” the Tyler-based lawyer wrote. “This marks the end of work for your appeals I regret.”

    The 11/2-page message informed Holiday that his lawyers would not file additional appeals or seek clemency from the governor. Neither option, Volberding wrote, presented a real chance of sparing Holiday’s life.

    In the letter, Volberding told Holiday he could seek the help of pro bono lawyers if he wanted to pursue those options.

    So Holiday blanketed the small community of Texas death penalty lawyers with letters seeking help.

    When none responded, he wrote to the court.

    “Your honor, I beg you to consider new appointment of effective counsels to my case,” Holiday wrote. “They have refused to help me and it is a disheartening conundrum I am not fit to comprehend.”

    Kretzer countered with a letter to the court insisting that he and Volberding were still working on the case despite its hopelessness. They refused to seek clemency or file additional pleadings not out of laziness or antipathy toward Holiday, Kretzer said, but because they recognized the “political realities” in Texas.

    In late October, Sween, an appellate lawyer from Austin who teaches writing and advocacy courses at the University of Texas School of Law, agreed to help Holiday obtain new lawyers, at no charge.

    Sween filed a motion alleging that Volberding and Kretzer had abandoned Holiday in his hour of greatest need. The law under which the two were appointed says lawyers for death row clients “shall” represent them in “all available post-conviction proceedings.” She pleaded with the court to assign new lawyers who would do so.

    Clemency petition

    Volberding and Kretzer opposed the motion and sent Sween a letter threatening to seek sanctions if she did not stay away from their client. They said they would agree to her involvement only if she would take on Holiday as her client pro bono. She declined, insisting that she was unqualified because she had never worked directly on a capital case.

    “If you can propose a course of action that stands a reasonable chance … we will pursue it,” Volberding said in a letter to Sween. “Otherwise, we respectfully ask that you take no further action in this case. We will respond firmly if you do.”

    Nevertheless, in an effort to mollify Sween, Volberding and Kretzer filed a clemency petition — hastily. In two places on the first page, the document cites the wrong execution date for Holiday. The petition painstakingly details the horrific nature of Holiday’s crime, while containing little evidence that might persuade the governor to show Holiday mercy.

    After the federal district court rejected her attempts to remove Volberding and Kretzer, Sween appealed to the 5th Circuit, calling the lawyers’ clemency petition a “sham” and asking the judges to stay Holiday’s execution. Additionally, she argued, the lawyers are now in conflict with their own client, opposing his wishes for new attorneys that he trusts to fight until the bitter end.

    A three-judge appellate panel denied the motion and warned Sween that future attempts to dislodge Holiday’s lawyers would be viewed skeptically.

    Jim Marcus, a UT law professor who specializes in capital punishment, said that while Holiday certainly has an uphill battle to avoid execution, federal law requires his lawyers to push ahead.

    “There’s a difference between saying that’s not a viable strategy or viable claim and abandoning an entire proceeding altogether,” said Marcus, who has represented condemned inmates for more than 20 years. “The latter is not really permissible under the statute.”

    The statute, though, is rarely enforced and judges provide little oversight of attorneys who represent indigent condemned clients, said Bright, of the human rights center.

    In decades of practicing, Bright said he had never seen a case like Holiday’s in which appointed lawyers so vociferously fought to keep a death row inmate from retaining a different attorney. In some cases, he said, new lawyers have discovered evidence others overlooked pointing to an inmate’s innocence or showing people’s intellectual disabilities made them incompetent for execution.

    “Most people don’t get executed for crimes they committed,” Bright said. “They get executed for mistakes their lawyers made.”

    http://www.dallasnews.com/news/state...false-hope.ece
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  2. #12
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    Wow. Looks like an strategy to stay the execution.

  3. #13
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    That seems crazy and unconscionable to me. I'm not saying the guy shouldn't be executed. He should. But I'd think his attorneys would be bound to try any legal avenues, no matter how slim the chance of success. And preventing someone else from working on his behalf? Once again, I'm not arguing that the guy should get clemency. I just don't understand why the attorneys aren't even going through the motions (no pun intended).

    I see what you are saying. And, well, if they are doing this as a strategy to stay the execution, I think that's unconscionable too, for another reason. It's really dishonest and a misuse of legal tools.

  4. #14
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    Fully agree. Clemency is part of the checks and balances, and it should be for the governor to decide on, not the lawyers. It's not like the governor has an official checklist what makes that you can 100% predict that clemency will be denied.

  5. #15
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    Seems like a maneuver to avoid execution. Hopefully he gets his pentobarbital tomorrow

  6. #16
    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    Texas man set to die for fire that killed 3 children

    By Michael Graczyk
    The Associated Press

    LIVINGSTON, Texas (AP) — Condemned Texas inmate Raphael Holiday insists he has no idea how a log cabin in the woods north of Houston caught fire, trapping and killing his toddler daughter and her two young half-sisters 15 years ago.

    "I loved my kids," Holiday, 36, said recently from a visiting cage outside Texas' death row. "I never would do harm to any of them."

    A jury found him responsible for the fatal blaze, however, and Holiday is set for lethal injection Wednesday evening in Huntsville for the children's September 2000 deaths.

    He would be the 13th prisoner executed this year in Texas, which carries out the death penalty more than any other state, and 26th convicted killer executed nationally this year.

    The U.S. Supreme Court in June refused to review Holiday's case and no additional appeals were planned because of "the reality that his legal options are exhausted," according Seth Kretzer, one of Holiday's court-approved attorneys.

    Holiday refused to accept that explanation, contended he'd been abandoned by his lawyers and complained to a federal judge in Houston, but his handwritten requests were denied.

    Another lawyer, Gretchen Sween, stepped in to try to get the execution stopped so new attorneys could be appointed to pursue appeals. Those efforts failed in lower federal courts and Sween, affiliated with the Texas Resource Center, a legal organization that represents some Texas death row prisoners, took her arguments to the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday. There was no immediate ruling from the justices.

    Kretzer described Sween's intervention as "frivolous." State attorneys have argued she has no legal authority in Holiday's case because he already has court-approved lawyers.

    Evidence and testimony showed Holiday, irate over a protective order obtained by his estranged common-law wife, forced the girls' grandmother at gunpoint to douse the interior of the Madison County home with gasoline. After it ignited, he sped away in the grandmother's car, hit a police car that had arrived outside the cabin about 100 miles north of Houston and then led officers on a chase that ended two counties away when he wrecked.

    "I was at the house, the house blew up," he said recently from prison. "I don't know how the fire started."

    At his trial, defense attorneys suggested an electrical problem or a pilot light started the blaze in the early hours of Sept. 6, 2000, killing Holiday's 18-month-old daughter, Justice, and his stepdaughters, Tierra Lynch, 7, and Jasmine DuPaul, 5.

    Evidence showed the girls' mother sought the protective order against Holiday after he was arrested for sexually assaulting one of the girls. Holiday contended he knew nothing about the assault.

    "He wanted his family back together," Frank Blazek, one of Holiday's trial lawyers, recalled last week. "In some unusual state of mind, out of desperation, he thought this was the way to go about it, by threatening them."

    The girls' grandmother told jurors she watched Holiday bend down and then the flames erupted, court records show.

    Blazek said evidence wasn't conclusive that Holiday started the fire.

    "It was a tough case," he said. "Three little children. They didn't deserve to die."

    Prison officials said the girls' mother planned to witness Holiday's execution. She declined to speak with reporters.

    Holiday said from prison that he was outside when the fire broke out.

    "I was panicking," he said, explaining why he sped off in a stolen car. "I think it was crazy for someone to say I spoke of harming my kids. That doesn't make sense."

    http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news...-3-6638269.php

  7. #17
    Senior Member CnCP Addict Richard86's Avatar
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    Doesn't he claim that no one actually saw him light the petrol, they just saw him pour the petrol and bend down with a match but not actually touch the petrol?

    If he hoping that the average person doesn't know that petrol will ignite before the match touches it or does he really not realise this himself?

  8. #18
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Why are the brothers always burning people?
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  9. #19
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Can anyone confirm if the "News" that this execution was stayed is true?
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  10. #20
    Senior Member CnCP Addict TrudieG's Avatar
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    I just checked SCOTUS nothing there two motions one is to Scalia seeking a stay that's it. This is going to be interesting considering his own attorneys can't be bothered trying to save him from his punishment this time.

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