The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday affirmed Texas death row inmate Brittany Holberg’s sentence in a split decision among its full panel of judges, reversing the court’s previous ruling a year before.
Holberg was convicted of capital murder in 1998 by an Amarillo jury for the deadly robbery of A.B. Towery in his home. Holberg stabbed the 80-year-old 58 times before shoving an 11-inch piece of lamp post down his throat while he was still alive, according to court records. Holberg, once a sex worker, claimed she had acted in self-defense after her former client Towery had attacked her for using drugs in his home.
At trial, Holberg’s cellmate, Vickie Kirkpatrick, testified that Holberg had told her she enjoyed killing Towery and described how Holberg had gruesomely recalled the killing. But the district attorney for the case failed to disclose that Kirkpatrick was a paid informant for the city police at trial, which Holberg’s appeal said cast doubt on the legitimacy of her recollection. The appeal led to a three-judge panel on the Fifth Circuit reversing Holberg’s conviction in 2025.
The 18 judges comprising Friday’s ruling separated into six different opinions, split evenly on Kirkpatrick’s relevance and Holberg’s right to question the validity of her testimony. The written opinion affirming Holberg’s sentence on Friday cast doubt on Kirkpatrick’s testimony being the sole piece that convinced jurors to apply the death penalty.
The written opinion leading the ruling also asserted that Holberg’s lawyers knew her cellmate was an informant and deliberately chose not to challenge her credibility at trial to avoid testimony that could have proved the opposite.
“True, the State’s evidence of Holberg’s intent to commit robbery included circumstantial evidence. But that does not mean impeaching Kirkpatrick’s informant status would generate a reasonable probability of a different outcome,” Judge Andrew S. Oldham wrote.
The dissenting opinions expressed alarm that Kirkpatrick’s work as an informant was not told to jurors, noting that she had several charges dismissed a day after she gave her statement to police about Holberg’s alleged statements.
“Contrary to the concurring opinions, I see the materiality of the prosecution’s secret throughout this trial,” Judge Stephen A. Higginson wrote. “It crippled Holberg’s defense over and over again.”
Holberg can still appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court, although there is no guarantee the high court will take up the case.
Holberg is one of seven women on Texas’ death row, and no woman sentenced to death in the state has ever been exonerated. Texas has historically been the nation’s leader in executions, having put to death its 600th inmate in the modern era in May.
There are four executions scheduled in Texas through the end of 2026. The next two are scheduled a week apart from one another in mid-September for LeJames Norman and Ramey Ker’sean Olajuwa, who both were sentenced to death in Jackson County for a deadly apartment robbery.
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