Louisiana Voice

A petition for post-conviction relief in the case of Christopher Holder is currently pending before the Second Circuit Court of Appeal that addresses both the split-verdict held unconstitutional in the Evangelisto Ramos v. Louisiana case and the manner in which jury selection was carried out in Holder’s 26^th Judicial District trial in 2014.

Neither the petition for post-conviction relief nor the report of handwriting expert Peggy Walla is part of the appeal process in the matter, but the split-verdict and jury venire questions certainly are.

Shreveport attorney A. M. “Marty” Stroud, III filed the petition which also claims that Holder had ineffective legal counsel at his trial and that there was no opportunity for Holder’s expert witness to testify at trial as to Holder’s mental state brought on by a host of prescription medication he had been taking for years at doctors’ orders.

Stroud gained national attention eight years ago when he successfully campaigned to free a man whom he had sent to death row some 30 years before.

Glenn Ford, dying of lung cancer, was exonerated in 2014 after nearly 30 years on death row, sent there by Stroud. Stroud even wrote a newspaper op-ed apologizing for his role in Ford’s conviction but a judge denied Ford restitution for his years of wrongful incarceration.

Now Stroud is working on behalf of Holder to combat a legal system that appears to be deeply flawed because of Holder’s 10-2 split jury conviction of second degree of his murder in 2012 and of the way the jury venire was set in the 26^th JDC, which comprises the parishes of Bossier and Webster.

Louisiana and Oregon were the last holdouts in states that still recognized split-jury verdicts but that was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court on April 20, 2020. Now, the Louisiana Supreme Court must decide if the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision should be retroactive to some 1500 prisoners in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, including Holder, who were similarly convicted.

Stroud noted that state law requires a jury pool of no fewer than 250 PETIT JURORS from which the trial jury will be chosen but in Holder’s case, there were only 124 and investigations have indicated many potential jurors were excused without having ever been informed their names were chosen for the general venire. “The venire was not selected in accordance with applicable law,” Stroud wrote in his petition.

Ineffective legal counsel was claimed by Stroud, who noted, “there was no objection to the jury venire.”

“The trial court erred in finding that the jury venires were properly selected in accordance with state law and the Constitution of the United States,” he said, adding, “There was no certification in this case attesting to the selection of the general and petit jury venire lists.

Dr. Gary Meas was scheduled to testify as to Holder’s mental state but had a conflict on the trial date and the court refused to reschedule the trial, which meant he was unable to testify even though included with his testimony “would have been his insanity evaluation addendum and assertion and a spread sheet showing that the numerous drugs had black box warnings not to administer these drugs to children under the age of 18 and subsequently changed to the age of 26 per directive of the Food and Drug Administration,” none of which evidence ever reached the jury.

Strout also argues that the 10-2 verdict convicting Holder “violated the uniformity requirement of the Sixth Amendment and that the trial court erred in holding that Ramos was not to be retroactively applied.