The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that prosecutors improperly used a jailhouse informant against Brittany Marlowe Holberg, 52, who has spent the last 27 years on death row in Texas, NBC News reports. In 1988, Holberg was convicted of robbing and murdering 80-year-old A.B. Towery in his home in Amarillo, Texas. Holberg is being held at the Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit, a Gatesville prison that houses women on death row. The federal appeals court tossed out the murder conviction, ruling she'd been unjustly convicted on the basis of tainted testimony from a paid jailhouse informant. The appellate court ruling kicks the case back to the trial court.
Holberg had turned to sex work to support a crack cocaine habit when she got into a heated argument with Towery, her customer, at his home. Towery was found “dead with stab wounds and part of a lamp in his throat,” according to court records. Holberg had always maintained that she killed Towery in self-defense after he started beating her. But at trial, prosecutors brought to the stand Holberg's cellmate, Vickie Marie Kirkpatrick, who testified that Holberg confided that she murdered Towery for the money, court records showed. Holberg denied having ever spoken to Kirkpatrick about the slaying. During the trial, prosecutors knew that Kirkpatrick was a paid informant for the police – but they presented her to the Amarillo jury as a disinterested individual who 'wanted to do the right thing' and was attempting to be 'as truthful ... and complete as [she] could be,'" according to Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham, writing for the majority in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, which was published Friday. “The State did not disclose Kirkpatrick’s work as a paid informant until after Holberg was sentenced to death. Holberg’s counsel’s cross-examination of Kirkpatrick spanned only six pages of the trial transcript, a reality that speaks volumes,” he wrote.
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