The AP filing by Michael Graczyk is, "Condemned killer wins hearing in triple slaying," via the Austin American-Statesman.
A Texas prisoner who came within a day of execution last year for a triple slaying in Amarillo has won a court hearing to determine if his trial lawyers' poor performance unfairly contributed to his death sentence.
Convicted killer John Balentine is entitled to an evidentiary hearing after his appeals lawyer argued trial attorneys failed to develop mitigating evidence to show a jury Balentine's childhood of poverty, domestic violence and abuse, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled.
Balentine, 41, was condemned for the 1998 slayings of Mark Caylor Jr., 17, and 15-year-olds Kai Brooke Geyer and Steven Watson. Caylor was the brother of Balentine's former girlfriend, and prosecutors said the slayings capped a feud between Caylor and Balentine.
And:
Last September, the 5th Circuit halted Balentine's punishment in a one-paragraph order a day before he was scheduled for lethal injection. The court's latest ruling Friday continues the reprieve and orders a hearing to decide if there were "serious concerns that constitutionally ineffective lawyering occurred" because of the trial lawyer's failure to investigate evidence at the punishment phase of his 1999 trial in Amarillo.
The appeals court also criticized Balentine's initial appeals attorney for making "a weak assertion" that argued the trial lawyer failed to present mitigating evidence.
Balentine's current lawyer, Lydia Brandt, who took her arguments to the 5th Circuit and won the reprieve last year, said Monday that the evidentiary hearing would be set before a federal judge.
In arguments as Balentine's execution date neared, Brandt said the claims about the lack of punishment phase evidence weren't raised earlier but had been blocked in the state courts because of a broken system.
"The state corrective process as a whole was ineffective," Brandt said.
The opinion in Balentine v. Thaler is available in Adobe .pdf format.
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