In 1998, prosecutor Hugo Holland stood before a jury deciding whether a 16-year-old Black boy named Corey Williams should be sentenced to death. “If the dog bites you once, you might keep it. If it bites you twice, you shouldn’t keep it,” he said, according to the court record as quoted by Atlanta Black Star. “But when it bites you hard the third time, you get rid of it.”
Williams was sentenced to death. Holland, 62, is now running for judge on the First Judicial District Court in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, and voters decide Tuesday.
The parish is about half Black. ProPublica reported that 80% of the people it sent to death row between 2010 and 2014 were Black. Holland served as an assistant district attorney there from 1991 to 2012, in the years that made Caddo one of the country’s leaders in death sentences per capita.
Louisiana courts found that Holland withheld evidence from the defense in at least three capital cases, according to reporting by ProPublica and Atlanta Black Star. In the case of Bobby Hampton, the Louisiana Supreme Court determined Holland withheld grand jury testimony that pointed to another person as the shooter. In David Brown’s case, Holland failed to disclose a jailhouse confession. In Williams’s case, courts found he withheld witness statements and detective notes. Williams’s sentence was later reduced, and he pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2018. The Louisiana Supreme Court upheld some of the convictions despite the findings.
Holland left the district attorney’s office in 2012, after the state inspector general found he submitted false information to obtain military weapons. ProPublica also reported that for years he displayed a portrait of a Confederate general in his office, which he said honored the man as a cavalry commander.
Holland is a Republican. His opponent is Treneisha Jackson Hill, a 40-year-old Democrat and former prosecutor who entered the race on Aug. 7. Holland has raised more than $61,000 from prosecutors, former judges and law firm members, roughly double what candidates in this district typically spend on an entire campaign. In the filings Atlanta Black Star reviewed, he had $44,318 on hand to Hill’s $12,219.
A judge in Caddo Parish would hear cases in a parish where Black residents are about half the population. Caddo elected its first Black district attorney in 2015 and its first Black sheriff in 2024.
Polls open Tuesday.
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