Raphael Holiday (pictured) is scheduled to be executed in Texas on November 18 after appeals lawyers who were appointed to his case unilaterally decided not to seek clemency or pursue additional appeals and then opposed Holiday’s efforts to replace them with lawyers who would. James “Wes” Volberding and Seth Kretzer say that they were unable to find new evidence on which to base any appeal and that seeking clemency from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott would give Holiday “false hope” and is pointless. When another attorney, Gretchen Sween, stepped in to help Holiday find new counsel, his current attorneys opposed her efforts to replace them. They then filed a clemency petition prepared so hastily that it twice gives the wrong execution date. The lawyers say they were exercising professional discretion in abandoning efforts to spare Holiday’s life, but death penalty experts assert that counsel are required to pursue all available avenues to stop a client’s execution. Stephen Bright, a Yale law professor and president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, said that in decades of practice in capital cases he has never seen appointed lawyers fight so vigorously to prevent their client from retaining new counsel. “This seems unconscionable,” he said. “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.” Jim Marcus, a University of Texas law professor and veteran death penalty lawyer, agreed that Holiday’s attorneys are legally required to continue pursuing appeals: “There’s a difference between saying that’s not a viable strategy or viable claim and abandoning an entire proceeding altogether. The latter is not really permissible ….”
(B. Grissom, “Condemned man’s lawyers stop helping, cite ‘false hope’,” Dallas Morning News, November 16, 2015.) See Arbitrariness and Representation. [UPDATE: Texas executed Raphael Holiday on November 18, 2015.]
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