SL&P has this story suggesting that the main problem in a Texas multiple child murder case from more than 15 years ago is that -- ready now? -- the defendant's lawyers aren't being aggressive enough in pushing a last minute clemency appeal. The story's first eight paragraphs amount to a hit on the killer's present counsel for declining to push the 16th year of litigation into the 17th (and beyond, I suppose).
You will not be surprised to hear that the story does not (1) advance any claim of factual innocence; (2) detail the prior multiple efforts to reverse the sentence, or (3) explain any plausible grounds for either judicial or executive hesitation at this late date. It's basically a hit piece on lawyers who decline to game the system out to infinity.
In that sense, it's an apt display of what's wrong with the administration of the death penalty, and of the insufferable self-importance of lawyers. It never seems to occur to the people quoted in the article that legal outcomes should depend on the behavior of the parties, not the behavior of the attorneys.
Still, far, far down the page, we get our first glimpse into what the case is actually about:
Holiday [the petitioner] was convicted of intentionally setting fire to his wife's home near College Station in September 2000, killing her three little girls. He forced the children's grandmother to douse the home in gasoline. After igniting the fumes, Holiday watched from outside as flames engulfed the couch where authorities later found the corpses of 7-year-old Tierra Lynch, 5-year-old Jasmine DuPaul and 1-year-old Justice Holiday huddled together. Volberding and Kretzer were appointed in February 2011 to represent Holiday in his federal appeals. They filed a 286-page petition in federal court, alleging dozens of mistakes in Holiday's case, ranging from assertions that he was intellectually disabled to charges that clemency is so rarely granted in Texas that the process has become meaningless....
Oh, OK. The problem is not that lawyers file absurd claims for years. The problem is that at some point, they stop.
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