Obel Cruz-Garcia, a 46-year-old Dominican man who did not speak English, sat in a Houston courtroom on a Friday in July 2013. He faced a jury that would decide whether to sentence him to death for the gruesome killing of 6-year-old Angelo Garcia a crime he has maintained he did not commit. His life, quite literally, depended on the outcome of the case.

Like most people who end up on death row, Cruz-Garcia could not afford to hire a lawyer for the resource-intensive process of a capital trial, and Harris County, Texas, doesnt offer public defenders in death penalty cases. Instead, he was appointed a private defense lawyer named R.P. Skip Cornelius, who made a living billing the county to represent more than 100 indigent clients a year. Cornelius was paid a flat fee to represent Cruz-Garcia, regardless of how much time he spent working on the case.

The states case against Cruz-Garcia had significant holes. It relied almost entirely on witnesses with changing stories, and on shaky DNA evidence that, at most, connected Cruz-Garcia to the scene of the crime but not the crime itself. Even if the state could convince jurors of Cruz-Garcias guilt, there was plenty of evidence that he was not the worst-of-the-worst criminal the kind of person the death penalty is supposedly reserved for.

But Cornelius was unable to persuade jurors that Cruz-Garcia was innocent or even deserved not to be executed. The first time a member of his legal team visited Cruz-Garcia in jail was in May 2012, more than eight months after Cornelius was appointed to the case. Cornelius only visited his client in jail twice. He declined to hire a DNA expert to testify at trial, despite how pivotal that evidence was to the states case. He also missed key opportunities to discredit the states witnesses, according to lawyers now managing Cruz-Garcias appeal. After his client was convicted, Cornelius found just three witnesses who knew Cruz-Garcia to tell jurors why he deserved to live. A fourth defense witness, who knew Cruz-Garcia from jail, heard about the trial and showed up on his own to help his friend.

Throughout Cruz-Garcias seven-week trial, Cornelius billed Harris County more than $33,000 for work on other cases nearly the base flat rate offered to defense lawyers for their work on an entire death penalty case at the time. Cornelius failed to perform basic tasks necessary for a competent representation, Cruz-Garcias current lawyers wrote last year in a 255-page petition for writ of habeas corpus , asking a federal court to vacate his death sentence.

The jury reached its verdict after one day of deliberations: Cruz-Garcia was sentenced to death.

Cornelius repeatedly blamed Cruz-Garcia for the outcome, claiming he did not do enough to assist in his own defense. He refused to give us any understanding of the facts, Cornelius wrote in an email to HuffPost. In 50 years I have never had that happen before or after.