ABA Journal: Alcoholic lawyer who was under criminal investigation gave poor capital defense, petition alleges
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Stefanie Faucher
Dec 5, 2014, 11:28:03 AM12/5/14
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Alcoholic lawyer who was under criminal investigation gave poor capital defense, petition alleges
ABA Journal
BY Debra Cassens Weiss
DEC 05, 2014
DEC 05, 2014
Appellate lawyers for a Georgia death-row inmate are arguing that his life should be spared because his trial lawyer, who drank up to a quart of vodka every night during the trial, did not present mitigating evidence or conduct a proper investigation.
The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles has scheduled a special clemency meeting on Monday to consider information in the case of Robert Wayne Holsey, who is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Tuesday for the murder of a deputy sheriff. The clemency petition seeks a stay of execution to allow for a full hearing on the request to commute Holsey’s sentence to life in prison.WABE and the Associated Press have stories; a press release by the parole board is here.
Lawyers with the Georgia Resource Center filed a clemency petition this week that says Holsey’s trial lawyer Andy Prince did not present evidence that Holsey had been abused as a child, and told the court that intellectual disability was not a factor, though records indicate Holsey was intellectually disabled.
During the trial, Prince was drinking heavily and was under investigation for stealing from a client. He was later disbarred and sentenced to three years in prison. Prince, who is now deceased, testified at a civil proceeding for Holsey in 2006, saying that he “shouldn’t have been representing anybody in any case,” reports the AP.
The clemency petition alleges that Prince “drank away the money the court gave him to hire a mitigation specialist to investigate and develop a penalty phase defense, and spent each night of Mr. Holsey’s trial swilling up to a quart of vodka in his hotel room while worrying about how to avoid detection and prosecution for embezzling over $100,000 of another client’s money. He relied on his inexperienced trial counsel to develop the penalty phase defense, but never bothered to tell her and provided her no guidance about how to do so.
“As a result, the jury never heard the compelling story of Mr. Holsey’s terrifically brutalized childhood in a home neighbors referred to as the ‘torture chamber.’ ”
The lawyers have also asked the Georgia Supreme Court for a stay of execution to determine whether Georgia uses the wrong standard to determine whether an inmate’s intellectual disability exempts him from execution.
A federal appeals court upheld Holsey’s conviction in 2012 in a 2-1 decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case in June 2013. Holsey’s appellate lawyers are Marcia Widder and Brian Kammer.
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