That's the title of an article in today's San Antonio Express-News by Maro Robbins detailing the case of Justin Fuller, who is scheduled to be executed this evening in Huntsville. In Fuller's post-conviction review, his state habeas lawyer filed a petition filled with errors. LINK
Texas is scheduled to execute a convict today whose lawyer filed an appeal with incoherent repetitions, rambling arguments and language clearly lifted from one of his previous cases, so that at one point it described the wrong crime.
While inmate Justin Chaz Fuller's last hope for a temporary reprieve now waits on the U.S. Supreme Court and the governor, his case is being cited as an example of the state's failure to adequately examine death penalty convictions.
The same lawyer, in another pending capital case, apparently copied his client's letters so that, instead of citing legal cases, the filed documents echo the inmate's unintelligible arguments, flawed grammar and even his complaint that he was about to run out of paper.
And:
Perhaps most striking, the pleadings for Fuller copied wording from an appeal Wilkinson filed for a different client, Henry Earl Dunn, in an unrelated case. As a result, it complains about testing for blood on a gun used by Dunn's co-defendant seven years earlier.
Wilkinson's brief "should have been submitted on a Big Chief Tablet using an eight-count box of Crayolas," Don Bailey, the lawyer who replaced Wilkinson when Fuller's appeal was denied, wrote in a subsequent appeal.
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