Legal teams fight over death row case as execution nears

Attorneys reject claim that they have abandoned killer

Two teams of lawyers are caught up in last-minute courtroom wrangling over who will represent an intellectually disabled and schizophrenic Texas death row inmate just weeks before his scheduled execution in June.

The Houston office of law firm Hogan Lovells on Monday filed a request to let Marylandbased attorney Lee Kovarsky take over and bump the current lawyers off the case of Clifton Williams, claiming the existing legal team abandoned their client when they allegedly stopped visiting him or working on his appeals in 2015.

The East Texas man was convicted of robbing 93-year-old Cecilia Schneider before stabbing her and setting her body on fire. Now, lawyers say he may be too mentally impaired to be put to death.

“With his execution fewer than 65 days away, Mr. Williams is effectively without counsel,” Kovarsky’s team wrote in a motion asking to substitute as Williams’ defense counsel in place of Wes Volberding and Houston-based attorney Seth Kretzer.

Kretzer pushed back, highlighting his role in winning a stay of execution before a 2015 death date and adding that he’d already begun work on an appeal and was open to outside help.

“The only question is how many people want to get on that boat and row with us,” he said.

The standoff is not unfamiliar to those who follow death row cases. Kovarsky squared off with Kretzer and Volberding in a 2015 legal fight involving death row prisoner Robert Leslie Roberson, an Anderson County man convicted of killing his 2year-old daughter.

At first, the courts refused to let Kovarsky and the Texas Defender Service take over that case. Later, Kovarsky stepped in, Roberson was granted a stay, and the case was sent back to a lower court over so-called junk science.

This time around, Kretzer and Volberding initiated the request to let the other legal team take over the case earlier this month. Less than a week later a federal court denied that request, and that same day a Hogan Lovells attorney visited Williams on death row and asked him to weigh in.

“I thought Seth and West (sic) were off my case since 2015. I haven’t heard from them since then. They didn’t tell me when I got an excution (sic) date, not in 2015, and not this time. I don’t want them to represent me now,” Williams scrawled in a handwritten note. “I would like help getting new lawyers for my case and I would like Hogan Lovells and Lee Kovarsky to repersent (sic) me.”

Having a lawyer on the case, Kovarsky and his team argue, is especially important given the possibility that Williams’ low IQ and schizophrenia could render him ineligible for the death penalty. In addition to filing their request to take over the case Monday, the lawyers filed a motion requesting a stay of execution.

Also Monday, Kretzer and Volberding entered filings rebutting the other legal team’s claims, pointing out that they visited their client on April 13.

The case was tied up for a time in state court over DNA analysis issues, and another lawyer handled that part of the legal process, they said.

Those proceedings ended in fall 2017.

“It is simply untrue that Williams was ever abandoned or left without counsel,” Kretzer wrote. Reached by phone Tuesday, he questioned why Hogan Lovells was interested in taking on the case.

“If I were Hogan Lovells, I would not go moonlighting in death cases,” he said.

Though Kretzer and Volberding objected to the other legal team’s description of their handling of the case, they wrote in filings that they would be willing to work together.

“If the Court wishes for us to continue representation, we are willing and able to do so,” they wrote. “What we do not wish, is to do our best for Mr. Williams while defending our work against Hogan Lovells and Professor Kovarsky at each level.”

Williams is scheduled to die by lethal injection June 21 in Huntsville.

Texas already has executed four men this year. The next, Erick Davila, is scheduled to die Wednesday. He also is represented by Kretzer, who argued the case in front of the Supreme Court last year.