What does it take for a condemned person to win a resentencing?
When people recount their alcohol consumption after a night on the town, or even a serious bender, they usually think about it in terms of drinks. Very rarely do they calibrate their intake in quarts. So most of us don't have a good sense of just how much a quart of vodka is—a bit more than 21 shots, as it turns out. That's the amount of alcohol lawyer Andy Prince consumed every night during the death penalty trial of his client, Robert Wayne Holsey, a low-functioning man with a tortured past who now stands on the brink of execution in Georgia.
When a person drinks that heavily, there's bound to be collateral damage—and for Prince and his clients the damage was profound. Once a skilled lawyer, Prince already had dug himself a very deep hole by the time Holsey went to trial in February 1997. But the signs of his downward spiral were clear 14 months earlier, back in December 1995, when a Baldwin County judge first assigned him the case. Prince had recently defaulted on a $20,000 promissory note, and Bell South and Vanguard Financial had won separate judgments against him totaling an additional $25,000. And then there was the probate fiasco: In June 1994, a client named Margaret Collins had hired Prince to handle the estate of her deceased common-law husband, which was valued at $116,000. Within a year there was almost nothing left—Prince had spent it all. He never really considered it stealing, he later insisted. He'd always intended to pay the money back when that one big civil case came along.
His deterioration emerged in other troubling ways. In June 1996, after six months as Holsey's lawyer, Prince got into an argument with neighbors at his apartment complex, cursing at them—"Nigger, get the fuck out of my yard or I'll shoot your black ass"—and threatening them with a gun. He was a white lawyer defending a black man in the high-profile murder of a white police officer, but nowhere in the Holsey case record was there ever a suggestion that he might be unfit to handle the case. He was simply charged with two counts of pointing a pistol at another, two counts of simple assault, two counts of disorderly conduct, and, of course, public drunkenness.
For Prince, it all came back to alcohol. Three months before he wrote the first of many checks against the estate, conduct that eventually put him in prison, he was hit with a complaint from the Athens Regional Medical Center for his failure to pay more than $10,000 for an inpatient substance abuse program he'd attended in 1993. But the drinking began long before that. By 14 he already had a problem with it, and by his late 30s, he'd lost his battle with alcoholism countless times.
Prince was by no means the first drunk to handle a death penalty trial. There are plenty of well-documented examples. Also of drug-addicted lawyers, lawyers who refer to their clients by racial slurs in front of the jury, lawyers who nap through testimony, and lawyers who don't bother to be in court while a crucial witness is testifying. There are lawyers who have never read their state's death penalty statute, lawyers who file one client's brief in another client's death penalty appeal without changing the names, lawyers who miss life-or-death deadlines, and lawyers who don't even know that capital cases have separate determinations of guilt and punishment. (See "
10 Ways to Blow a Death Penalty Case.")
There are enough of these cases on record that most people in the legal profession no longer find them particularly shocking. What is more shocking, though, is how commonly courts and prosecutors are willing to overlook these situations as they occur, and how doggedly they try to defend the death sentences that result. Trial judges, of course, are often the ones who appointed the lawyers in question. And prosecutors have little motivation to demand that their courtroom adversaries be qualified and effective. It's a flawed system that often results in flawed verdicts. For a clear window into it, we need look no further than the Holsey case.
Source: Mother Jones, Mark Bookman, April 22, 2014
