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Max Soffar's Last Appeal Grits for Breakfast: Max Soffar’s Last Appeal 8/21/14 3:30 PM 1 More Next Blog» Create Blog Sign In GRITS FOR BREAKFAST WELCOME TO TEXAS JUSTICE: YOU MIGHT BEAT THE RAP, BUT YOU WON'T BEAT THE RIDE. TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2014 SOUTHERN, DAILY AND GOOD FOR YOU Max Soffar’s Last Appeal Michael Berryhill chairs the journalism department at Texas Southern University. He asked Grits to publish this extended guest post by him on the Max Soffar capital murder case, which also inspired this recent Dallas Morning News editorial. Soffar, who for decades has maintained his innocence and may GRITSFORBREAKFAST AUSTIN, TEXAS have falsely confessed, is terminally ill and likely will not survive until his execution. While on paper he has many years' worth of appeals left before the Grits for Breakfast looks at state can kill him, as a practical matter he probably has just a few months the Texas criminal justice remaining to prove his innocence before death overtakes him. system, with a little politics and whatever else suits the Mr. Berryhill is also the author of The Trials of Eroy Brown, the Murder Case author's fancy thrown in. All opinions are my own. that Shook the Texas Prison System, published by the University of Texas Press. The facts belong to Here's his article in full, with only minor copyediting by yours truly. everybody. Who is this guy? * * * VIEW MY COMPLETE PROFILE On the last Wednesday of July, a death row convict named Max Soffar gave what may well be his last news interview. Soffar, who is 59, has spent most of the last SUBSCRIBE BY EMAIL 34 years insisting he falsely confessed to helping another man kill three teenagers Subscribe via Grits' site feed at a Houston bowling alley in 1980. Enter Your Email to Git Yer Daily Grits! Harris County prosecutors, the leading experts in the nation at winning death penalty verdicts, insisted that no matter what his written confession said, Soffar acted alone. Although there is not a shred of physical evidence that links Max Subscribe me! Soffar to the murders, not a trace of blood, not a hair, not a fingerprint, not a gun, Preview | Powered by not a getaway car, they have twice convicted him of shooting a young woman, one FeedBlitz of the three victims of an execution-style murder and robbery. Soffar was convicted once in 1981, and after he won a second trial because of his SUBSCRIBE TO ineffective lawyers, a second time in 2006. During the final arguments, one of http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2014/08/max-soffars-last-appeal.html Page 1 of 15 Grits for Breakfast: Max Soffar’s Last Appeal 8/21/14 3:30 PM Soffar’s prosecutors gloated to the jury that his lawyers “didn’t bring you any Posts evidence that someone other than the defendant committed this crime.” Comments That is particularly galling to Soffar because the Harris County prosecutors and his judge, Mary Lou Keel of the 232nd District Court, did everything necessary to keep the jury from hearing a plausible story about who really committed the DONATE bowling alley murders. Now Soffar’s appeal lawyer has turned up a reliable Use these buttons to witness who has identified a convicted mass killer of seven people as being donate to Grits (Paypal present at the Houston bowling alley a week before the murders. payment) or donate $8 monthly (Paypal subscribe). “I hope my federal judge in Houston will let me put this witness on,” Soffar said. Alas, the system will charge “He was the one who saw this murderer in the bowling alley.” sales tax. Soffar’s lawyers need to hurry up to get that hearing, not because Soffar faces impending execution, but because he is terminally ill with liver cancer and has from five to eight months to live, maybe less. So many questions surround Soffar’s conviction, which a judge for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has called “fishy,” that he has never been scheduled for execution. Soffar has many years of appeals left: to the federal district court, to the Fifth Circuit panel of three judges, to the nine judges of the Fifth Circuit en banc, and to the Supreme Court. ADVERTISE ON GRITS! Such appeals could go on for several years. But Soffar is out of time. blog advertising is good for you. Soffar’s current pro bono appeals lawyer, Andrew Horne, has been feverishly working on new writs: an appeal for clemency from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and Governor Rick Perry, and an appeal for an expedited hearing from the Southern District Federal Court. The odds of winning clemency for a SITE SEARCH twice-convicted capital murderer in Texas from Perry, who is preparing to campaign for president, are about zero. The petition for an expedited federal Google Search hearing for a terminally ill inmate breaks new legal ground, Horne told me. He Web Grits for Breakfast said he hasn’t found any precedent for it. But he wants his client to have one more chance to clear his name before he dies. Horne, a young Scot with a Harvard law degree from the international firm of GRITS' NEWS LINKS Kirkland and Ellis, has spent the last six years and millions of dollars of his employer’s money to investigate Soffar’s complicated case. The files alone fill Texas jail Texas prison sixty boxes in a small room at his firm’s offices in midtown Manhattan. He had Fourth Amendment been warned that in a case that has been litigated for thirty years by dozens of pardon innocence project lawyers, the chances were slim he would find something new. forensic science Texas crime lab Vowing to touch every piece of paper connected with the case, he found a witness private prison immigration http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2014/08/max-soffars-last-appeal.html Page 2 of 15 Grits for Breakfast: Max Soffar’s Last Appeal 8/21/14 3:30 PM that anyone with a sense of fairness (but perhaps not a judge or a Harris County Texas border prosecutor) would want to hear. He was a bowling alley employee named Patrick Texas Gov. Perry booked on Pye, and two of his friends died that weekend. The case was widely publicized: it Foxabuse News of power charges, was a cold-blooded execution of some helpless teenagers that horrified the city. Perryvows tois 'prevail'facing charges of coercion and official On July 15, the Monday after the weekend killings, Pye told police that he and one oppression that carry a of the bowling alley employees who was killed had a “run-in” with a white man at maximum sentence of 109 the bowling alley a week before the murders. The man bowled alone and drank years in prison. A grand alone, Pye told Horne, and he and Steve Sims had thrown him out for not paying. jury in Austin, a liberal bastion in otherwise largely “Pye stated that he got a phone call from this man,” the police report days, “who conservative Texas, indicted stated, ‘You better be watching over your shoulder.’ Pye stated that he thought he Perry on Friday for carrying would be able to id this man if he saw him again.” out a threat to ... Related Articles » Even 28 years later, Pye could identify him as Paul Dennis Reid, the man with the droopy eyes, from a Ray Nagin to Serve Time in wedding photo taken a couple of weeks after the KATCTexas JailLafayette News murders. According to WDSU-TV, former New Orleans mayor If the Houston police had followed up on Pye’s story, Ray Nagin has been ordered they might have found Reid. For one thing, he had a to report to a federal prison criminal record. But more importantly, he resembled a camp in Texas by noon on police sketch of the murderer, drawn with the help of a Sept. 8. Nagin has been surviving witness, Greg Garner. Garner lost an eye when he was shot in the back assigned to a minimum of the head, but he had a strong recall of how the robbery happened. Detectives serurity camp in Texarkana, interviewed Garner seven times, recording and transcribing the interviews, and Texas, which is about a two- even hypnotizing him to see if he could retrieve further details. It had happened hour drive from ... quickly. There was one man, not two. The man said his truck had overheated and David Bonilla Headed To he needed water. He had a gun. He made them lie down. He said “good-bye,” and KRISPrison Corpus Christi News shot them one after another. According to a spokesman with the Texas Department Garner remembered a single, mild-mannered robber who was white, beardless, of Criminal Justice, an muscular and more than six feet tall. His hair was parted down the middle, inmate only has to serve a covered his ears and was down to his collar. It fit Reid. Within a few of days of the fourth of their sentence for murders, Houston newspapers and television stations were circulating this these particular crimes. drawing: That would be two and a half years. However, Bonilla can also reduce his sentence with things ... Related Articles » http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2014/08/max-soffars-last-appeal.html Page 3 of 15 Grits for Breakfast: Max Soffar’s Last Appeal 8/21/14 3:30 PM It was this drawing that led to Max Soffar’s downfall. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas Is A reward of $15,000 was offered for the arrest of the NewIndicted York on Times Charge of killer, and Soffar had a crazy notion that his running TheAbuse indictment of Power left Mr.
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