A federal appeals court has erased the capital murder conviction of a Texas woman who has spent the past 27 years on death row, saying her trial was tainted because of information prosecutors hid.
Brittany Marlowe Holberg, a drug user and prostitute, was 23 when she was sentenced in the slaying of a former client.
A jury convicted her and then sentenced her to death. But the appeals court, in a 2-1 ruling, said the jury was never told that a witness against her had been working for months as a paid police informant.
The court erased both the murder conviction and death sentence and sent the case back to lower courts to decide how to proceed.
Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham, a Reagan appointee who authored the key opinion for the court, said Ms. Holberg’s conviction is a stain on the capital punishment system.
“We pause only to acknowledge that 27 years on death row is a reality dimming the light that ought to attend proceedings where a life is at stake, a stark reminder that the jurisprudence of capital punishment remains a work in progress,” the judge wrote.
He said prosecutors were overly aggressive from early on in the case, trying to feed “false narratives” to Ms. Holberg’s cellmates in jail to get them to pin a willful gruesome attack on the young woman. She contended the killing was self-defense.
Cellmates refused to corroborate the police view until one, Vickie Marie Kirkpatrick, was arrested for burglary and placed with Ms. Holberg.
At the time she was also working as a paid informant and, just two days after being placed with Ms. Holberg, Ms. Kirkpatrick fingered her in the killing, corroborating police conclusions that it was an intentional and brutal slaying. That same day, one of Ms. Kirkpatrick’s charges was dismissed and she was released on bond.
Judge Higginbotham said Ms. Kirkpatrick would go on to be a key prosecution witness but was portrayed at trial as a disinterested individual seeking to “do the right thing.”
Ms. Kirkpatrick later recanted her testimony and say she was pressured.
“There is a reason Brittany Marlowe Holberg has been on death row for over 27 years. The state denied her right to due process by keeping from the jury evidence favorable to the defendant, and this suppression prejudiced her case,” said Judge Higginbotham, joined by Judge Stephen Higginson, an Obama appointee.
Dissenting was Judge Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee who said whatever Ms. Kirkpatrick’s role, the evidence proved the slaying wasn’t self-defense.
He pointed out that the victim was “a sickly 80-year-old man.”
“No jury in its right mind would believe that a 23-year-old cocaine-addled prostitute ‘defended’ herself against a frail old man by (1) stabbing him 58 times, (2) bludgeoning him with various objects including a steam iron, and (3) ramming a lamp base down his throat while he was still alive,” the judge wrote.
He said the attack turned the man’s face “into unrecognizable red pulp.” He pointed to the victim’s supply of drugs, which apparently disappeared in the attack, and a bloodstained wad of $100 bills Ms. Holberg had with her after the killing, as evidence the slaying was intentional.
Judge Duncan said Ms. Kirkpatrick’s testimony was not the critical witness in her conviction and played even less of a role in her sentencing.
