Soffar v. State of Texas - Overview
On a night in July of 1980, the Windfern Fairlanes Bowling Center on Route 290 in Houston was burglarized. After closing time the following night, a robbery occurred there and four youths were shot. Three died, and one survived. Both the robbery murders and the seemingly-related burglary were highly publicized in the media, and a ten-thousand dollar reward was offered for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrator of the robbery murders. Three weeks later, Mr. Soffar was arrested. He falsely confessed to burglarizing the bowling alley with a "running buddy" named Latt Bloomfield, and fingered Mr. Bloomfield in the robbery murders the next night. (Mr. Soffar claimed to have waited in the car during the crime). The police immediately knew that Mr. Soffar was lying; they had already arrested the perpetrator of the burglary and knew that neither Mr. Soffar nor Mr. Bloomfield were involved. The police were not deterred by Soffar's lack of reliability. Instead, they kept interrogating Mr. Soffar over threes, ignored his requests for an attorney, and elicited two more statements from him. In Mr. Soffar's third statement – typewritten by the police and signed by Mr. Soffar following an unrecorded interrogation – he allegedly gave a dramatic account of the robbery murders, claiming that Mr. Bloomfield shot two people before throwing a handgun to Mr. Soffar and ordering him to shoot the other two people. The surviving witness did not identify either Mr. Soffar or Mr. Bloomfield in a lineup. Mr. Bloomfield was released from custody and has never been charged with any crime. Max Soffar was charged with capital murder, despite a complete lack of evidence corroborating his confession. As the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals would later find,
[n]o eyewitness testimony placed either Soffar or Bloomfield at the crime scene. No fingerprints lifted from the crime scene matched the fingerprints of either Soffar or Bloomfield. Nothing was taken from the crime scene and later found in the possession of either Soffar or Bloomfield. No blood or hair samples were found at the crime scene that matched those of Soffar or Bloomfield. The gun used to commit this crime was neither found nor introduced into evidence. Neither Soffar nor Bloomfield were linked to a weapon of the same caliber as the bullets recovered from the crime scene. Nothing Soffar told the police in his statements led the police to discover any evidence they did not already have relating to the bowling alley murders.
Soffar v. Dretke, 368 F.3d 441, 461 (5th Circ. 2004). In addition to the dearth of evidence corroborating Soffar's putative confession, the confession was completely at odds with the statements of the surviving witness and the physical evidence recovered by the police. The surviving witness described only a single perpetrator. Moreover, his statements to the police and the corroborating physical evidence differed with Soffar's putative confession in numerous crucial respects, including: 1) the perpetrator's method of gaining entry to the bowling alley after it had closed; 2) whether the perpetrator wore a disguise, 3) the position of the victims when they were shot; 4) whether the perpetrator took the money before or after the shootings; 5) the location of the money taken from the bowling alley; and 6) whether any of the victims had been physically assaulted before they were shot.
Notwithstanding the weaknesses of its case, in 1981, the Harris County District Attorney's Office obtained a conviction and convinced a jury to sentence Mr. Soffar to death. Many years later, in 2004, the Fifth Circuit granted Mr. Soffar habeas corpus relief because his trial attorneys were constitutionally ineffective for failing to interview the surviving witness, whose first-hand account differed so dramatically with Mr. Soffar's putative confession. Soffar v. Dretke, 368 F.3d 441 (5th Circ. 2004).
The State of Texas retried Max Soffar in 2006. At trial, the defense sought to introduce information that Paul Reid, who is on death row in Tennessee for killing seven people, committed the Houston bowling alley murders in 1980. Reid lived in Houston in 1980, strongly resembled the composite created from the description of the surviving witness, committed conspicuously similar robbery-murders at establishments in Tennessee, and committed similar robberies in Houston in 1981 and 1982. During a 1982 robbery in which he fired his gun at one of the victims, Reid told his confederate that he had shot four people in a bowling alley on Route 290. The trial judge would not allow the jury to hear any of this evidence pointing to Reid's guilt and committed numerous other errors resulting in an unfair trial. Mr. Soffar was again convicted and sentenced to death.
Max Soffar's case represents one of the most troubling problems with capital punishment. Voluminous evidence establishes that many people have been wrongly convicted in death penalty cases, and that innocent people have been executed. Execution is irrevocable. And the human judgment on which our system of criminal justice relies is fallible. The inescapable risk of executing an innocent person is unacceptable in a just society.
The ACLU Capital Punishment Project and the Texas Innocence Network represent Mr. Soffar on direct appeal to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Mr. Soffar's brief on appeal was filed on April 30, 2007.