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Today in the Machinery of Death

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Robert Wayne Hosley was executed Tuesday night:

Holsey was represented at his murder trial by an alcoholic lawyer who was under investigation at the time for stealing from a client and who drank a quart of vodka every night of the trial.

He was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of a police officer. The Georgia supreme court refused to stay the execution and the US supreme court also declined to intervene.

Even in a capital system that has seen its fair share of incompetent and negligent legal representation, the story of Holsey’s 1997 trial stands out as particularly egregious. His attorney, Andy Prince, had a history of heavy drinking since the age of 14.

Every night during the trial he drank the equivalent of more than 20 shots of vodka. He was also under police investigation at the time for having stolen more than $100,000 from a client – a theft for which he was convicted soon after Holsey’s trial ended, sentenced to 10 years in prison and disbarred from practising the law.

As a further indication of his mind not being entirely focused on Holsey’s life-and-death legal struggle, shortly before trial Price was arrested for disorderly conduct and accused of threatening to shoot three black neighbours to whom he was shouting racial slurs. Price was white and his capital client defendant black.

[…]

Holsey’s current lawyer, Brian Kammer, has argued that Price’s alcohol-sodden incompetence was not merely academic – it effectively put Holsey on death row. A key piece of information about Holsey, that should have been emphasised at the sentencing phase of his trial, was that he was intellectually disabled with a level of functioning equivalent to a nine-year-old.

Why should a little thing like the lack of effective counsel get in the way of a good execution?

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