Today’s Conservative Barf Bag Award goes to Hugo Holland, a well-funded candidate for a judgeship. His campaign is led by the leader of the local Republican party.
From ProPublica
Hugo Holland’s aggressive legal tactics made him one of Louisiana’s most renowned prosecutors and helped turn Caddo Parish, a majority Black community in the northwest corner of the state, into one of the nation’s leaders in death penalty convictions.
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In at least two death penalty cases, Louisiana judges found that Holland withheld evidence. In a third, he secured the conviction of a Black 16-year-old, comparing the boy to a dog and telling the jury to “get rid of it”; prosecutors later admitted that Holland and his team had failed to turn over evidence.
Defense attorneys have also accused him of racism, pointing, for example, to a capital murder case several years ago in which Holland emailed one of them to say he was going to spend Veterans Day in his pickup truck looking for “a Black guy or a Mex-can.” Holland called it a joke. Holland, 62, is now running for judge in the First Judicial District Court in Caddo Parish, and his nascent campaign appears to have substantial backing.
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As an assistant district attorney in Caddo Parish from 1991 to 2012, Holland displayed a portrait of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, in his office.
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The doubts surrounding Holland’s death row convictions have taken on even more urgency since the election of Jeff Landry, who upon being sworn in as governor in 2024 said he wanted to execute every prisoner on death row as quickly as possible.
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In 1997, Holland secured a death sentence against Hampton for a murder that happened during a liquor store robbery in Shreveport. The Louisiana Supreme Court later found that Holland had withheld grand jury witness testimony that someone else fired the fatal shot.
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Holland withheld evidence in a third death penalty case, involving Corey Williams, a 16-year-old convicted in the fatal shooting of a pizza delivery man in Shreveport. Williams’ 2000 death sentence was reduced to life without parole because the boy has a severe intellectual disability, according to court documents. Fifteen years after Williams’ conviction, his attorneys alerted the court that Holland had concealed a trove of evidence that they said proved his innocence.
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Holland’s unprofessional behavior in and outside of the courtroom is also a grave concern, she said. During a 2018 postconviction hearing for a murder case, Carbia said Holland claimed he couldn’t hear when she was questioning a witness, so he began following Carbia around the courtroom as she spoke. “He’d come stand looming over my shoulder with his coattail pushed back so that you could see the firearm on his hip,” Carbia recalled in a recent interview.
End quote
Never ever underestimate the malignance of conservatives.