A federal appeals court has tossed an Amarillo woman’s death sentence after it found that local prosecutors had failed to reveal that their primary trial witness was a paid informant.
With a 2-1 decision, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals last week sent Brittany Marlowe Holberg’s 1998 murder conviction back down to the trial court to decide how to proceed.
Holberg has been on death row for 27 years. In securing her conviction in 1998, Randall County prosecutors heavily relied on testimony from a jail inmate who was working as a confidential informant for the City of Amarillo police. That informant recanted her testimony in 2011, but neither a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals or a federal district court found that prosecutors had violated Holberg’s constitutional right to a fair trial.
That’s the thing. It does not and should not matter if she did the deed. Using corrupt means to convict her invalidates the entire process. And that’s because if they used corrupt means on her then they can use them on you. Prosecutors and police doing that are trying to usurp the role of the court.
That said SCOTUS will rule that she should be immediately executed in the most inhumane way possible.
It absolutely should matter if she did the deed, as that makes her a murderer, but I will concede that if they used corrupt means to convict her it does invalidate the whole process.
There is a very fine balance to be struck here that I don’t think I can do justice.
There is not a fine balance.
Innocent until proven guilty. The prosecution did not do a legal and lawful job of getting a conviction, so right now she’s innocent. In other words, if you’re trying to do reasoning based on “what if she’s a murderer”, then we already have that answer sitting in front of us.
That’s the basic premise of the legal system. Now, if you are some omniscient being, then you might be able to do other types of reasoning. But we aren’t, and we never will be, so we can’t.
In other words, there is no fine balance. The prosecution decided their case wasn’t good enough to be presented fairly, and they somehow got away with their evil actions for the past 27 years.
Ethically it certainly matters. But systems wise we cannot incentivize it. Which is why corrupt prosecutions are legally supposed to result in removing the conviction. She’s certainly not magically a good person. And iirc most states allow another trial.