"God Sent Me." - Larry Lee Bledsue

One day, a prisoner approached me and asked if I was busy. I was. Not to be put off, he told me, “God sent me over here to ask you for help.” Did I believe him? Let’s just say that it was impossible to tell him, “No.”

In the case of Larry Lee Bledsue, the first mess I was up against were the previous 4 or 5 state habeas applications that had already been filed and denied by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals; this before the writ abuse doctrine was codified into Texas habeas jurisprudence. Several so-called writ writers had raised grounds challenging the sufficiency of the evidence, and every one missed the critical “evidence.” Indeed, they missed 30 years of Texas case law that unequivocally held that Bledsue was innocent of the indictment charge for which he was convicted and sentenced to Life.

Bledsue v. Johnson, was the first case where I developed and used my strategic skill to raise an unexhausted state claim in a federal habeas review. 

How anyone could miss what my research turned up I will never understand. Fortunately, the unexhausted claim fell under the umbrella of the Jackson v. Virginia standard of review for the legal sufficiency of the evidence. It was just different evidence than had been challenged on state habeas and now raised in federal court.

The State of Texas yelled foul play by the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas finding the evidence was insufficient under Jackson and well-established state law. Both the Magistrate and District Judge latched onto my unexhausted state claim, that I actually raised in a footnote, and dared the Office of the Texas Attorney General to tell a federal court that it could not review “all” the evidence under Jackson. The State appealed.

I handwrote the original federal habeas petition (as I did anything back then) and the appeal brief for Bledsue. The Fifth Circuit assigned the case to Kathleen S. Rose of Fulbright & Jaworski, Houston, Texas. New briefs and oral arguments later, the Fifth Circuit changed the issue on appeal and reversed the district court’s grant of habeas relief. Bledsue v. Johnson was bad case law for Larry, yet good case law on a proper interpretation of the Jackson standard. 

Kathleen Rose became my mentor and the standard by which I applied professionalism in my legal writing. Learning the law in prison, from in the trenches,  I often heard words of caution on what to say and not to say in a legal brief or other document. There was a rule of thumb that, as convicted criminals, we had to step lightly in our pleadings. One did not tempt the wrath of a judge and risk having a case throw out for saying the wrong words in the wrong way. Before Kathleen Rose, I stayed well back from the line of professionalism. Ever cautious of what I wrote and how I wrote it. Kathleen Rose took my writing to the very edge of that line and taught me how to cross it – professionally.