At the end of February, a young New York lawyer was writing what may be the last appeal for a Texas death row inmate named Max Soffar.

Andrew Horne was in a hurry, but not because his client faced execution. Soffar is dying of liver cancer in a prison infirmary in Livingston. He has been tried twice and twice sentenced to death in connection with the robbery-killings of three people in a Houston bowling alley in 1980, yet he has never come close to execution. Too many questions have been raised about his confession and the lack of evidence to back it up.

Exclusive: Prosecutor discusses details from Soffar case

Horne has convinced a judge for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that Soffar's confession, signed after three days of unrecorded interrogation, is false. He can show that another man, a serial killer, was much more likely to have committed the crime. But innocence is not enough to win an appeal, either at the state or federal level. Judges don't necessarily consider whether the conviction is wrong, but rather if the process that won it was fair.

Horne has spent millions of dollars of his law firm's money trying to exonerate Max Soffar, or at least win him mercy, and he is getting nowhere.

"I've been working for six years, and he's innocent," Horne said. "Frustrating is not the word. Heartbreaking is the word."

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***

When Max Soffar confessed to participating in the killings, Andrew Horne was in diapers. Horne grew up in the village of Porrance, just outside of Glasgow, Scotland. After earning an undergraduate law degree in his native country, Horne spent a year at Harvard Law School under a John F. Kennedy fellowship for elite British graduates. He was only 22 when the New York office of Kirkland and Ellis hired him. His colleagues describe him as a smart, hard-working lawyer who then looked impossibly young.

Horne was not hired to file criminal appeals. Kirkland and Ellis employs 1,100 lawyers who handle corporate cases involving hundreds of millions of dollars. When BP needed representation for its Gulf of Mexico oil spill, for example, it turned to Kirkland and Ellis.

Horne caught the eye of the firm's leadership and made partner by 29. His bosses thought he had a knack for mastering facts and putting them together in a way that tells a story.

He was drawn into Soffar's appeals when Kirkland and Ellis decided to take on a complex death penalty case - pro bono - that only a firm with big resources could hope to win.

But the senior partners who first took the lead on the case left the firm, and Horne was suddenly in charge. He had never handled a criminal case. But each of the cases he undertakes, Horne says, requires researching a new set of facts and mastering a new area of law.

What has driven him, as an advocate for Max Soffar, is his sense of justice.

"Justice is where there's a fair (fe-air in his Scottish accent) system that was followed and offered an outcome that was rational," he said. "To me, Max is an injustice because there was never a fair system, and the outcome was completely irrational."

***

After Soffar was first convicted in 1981, lawyers from a large Washington, D.C., firm, Fried Frank, spent 15 years and millions of dollars to win Soffar a new trial. They succeeded, but he was convicted and sentenced to death a second time in 2006.

Two years later, 61 file boxes collected by Soffar's previous attorneys arrived at Horne's office in midtown Manhattan. Beyond that, the police and appeals files were extensive. The boxes filled the shelves of a small storage room, about 10 feet square. In that room, Horne set up a table and went to work. He vowed to touch every piece of paper.

He filed the first brief five weeks after his son was born and spent three months of his paternity leave reading about the case.

He knew what was at stake.

"I really hoped I could go to sleep at night, knowing that I'd done absolutely everything I could possibly do to save him," he said.

Horne organized a team of a dozen lawyers. Some worked on Soffar's mental health, his abusive upbringing, his stay as a child in a mental hospital, his drug abuse, his brain damage from birth. These factors, Horne would contend, played a role in signing a false confession. Others worked on the evidence that someone else had done the crime.

Kirkland and Ellis would have to conduct a fresh investigation, and there were expert witnesses to find and hire. Since then, Horne said, 45 lawyers, 50 support people and 17 expert witnesses have billed 19,000 hours. Horne alone has billed 3,700.

***

Horne's first task was to file a habeas corpus appeal with Soffar's trial judge, Mary Lou Keel of the 232nd District Court of Harris County. Horne wrote more than 200 pages outlining 30 points of appeal, trying to illustrate that Soffar's constitutional rights had been violated during the second trial. He appealed what he thought were mistakes by Soffar's lawyers and by Keel.

His team had discovered a police report that Soffar's trial lawyers had overlooked and detectives had never followed up on. It was a statement from Patrick Pye, given two days after the crime. A week before the slayings, Pye and another bowling alley employee had thrown out a man for not paying his fees. The guy had droopy eyes that made his face memorable. One of the men who threw him out, Stephen Sims, was later killed. Pye told police that the customer had warned them to watch their backs because he would return and blow them away.

The man's name was Paul Dennis Reid, and he lived near the bowling alley. He would later spend time in a Texas prison for armed robbery, then move to Nashville, where he was convicted of killing seven people in fast-food restaurant robberies. He talked his way into a place at closing time, took the cash register receipts and the workers' billfolds, and killed them. If he ran out of bullets, he used a knife.

Soffar's lawyers had tried to put on evidence about Reid through Stewart Cook, one of his partners in armed robbery. Cook had signed an affidavit that Reid had told him he had killed some people at the bowling alley, but when he offered to testify, prosecutors threatened to try him for murder. Keel wouldn't let the defense present the Tennessee detective who had investigated Reid, saying she didn't see any resemblance to the killings in Houston. Unable to present the jury with a plausible suspect, the defense couldn't overcome Soffar's confession.

Years later, Horne hoped Keel might grant an evidentiary hearing in which he could present Pye.

Horne also laid out, in painstaking detail, Soffar's childhood. Soffar's birth mother was a drug abuser and alcoholic. He was adopted by a couple that ran a second-hand furniture store in Alvin. He was difficult to raise and in constant trouble at school. He sniffed gasoline and glue. His father beat him. His mother ignored him. When he was 10, his frustrated parents committed him to the state hospital in Austin, where he was often kept naked and weeping in solitary confinement. His IQ was 20 points below normal. By his early 20s, he was taking every drug he could find and stealing from his parents and neighbors. When he was arrested on a stolen motorcycle in August 1980, he had been high on amphetamines and alcohol for days.

Soffar was impulsive and impatient. He had a crazy notion that he might collect a $15,000 reward by telling police that a running buddy had done the bowling alley kilings. The police interviewed the man and searched his car and apartment, then turned him loose for lack of evidence. But they kept after Soffar. His statement, they told him, wasn't believable if he said he had just witnessed the slayings. He had to say he had participated. Soffar gave in and signed a confession.

Horne and his team looked hard for physical evidence that might contain DNA. Most of the well-publicized exonerations in Texas and across the country have involved DNA. But there was nothing.

The appeal went nowhere.

***

Soon after, he signed the police statement admitting that he and an accomplice killed the three victims, Soffar obtained a lawyer and recanted. Not a trace of physical evidence links Soffar to the case, not a shell casing, a blood spot, a gun or an eyewitness identification.

"The only evidence against Max are the statements he signed," Horne said. "And if you read those statements with an open mind and read them in the context of the other evidence, it's clear they are neither credible nor reliable."

Under Scottish law, he said, there must be two corroborating pieces of evidence in order to convict, physical or circumstantial.

"Of which they have none," he said. "That's not rah rah Scotland. That's the truth."

The bowling alley killings were a big story in the summer of 1980. On a Saturday night in July, four teenagers who were closing down the business on Highway 290 and Windfern were shot in the head. One of them, Greg Garner, survived. Although he lost an eye and suffered brain damage, he would later describe what happened in a series of tape-recorded interviews, and none of what he said matched Soffar's confession.

The investigation was sloppy. Reporters were allowed to trample the crime scene. The bowling alley operators brought in a cleanup crew at 4 in the morning and opened for business at 9.

One of the things thrown away was a white plastic jug full of water. The jug appears in crime-scene photos, but no one seemed to know what it was doing on the counter where the employees checked out shoes and handed out score sheets.

Garner offered a consistent description of the crime, though he sometimes blurted out absurd answers, such as saying the killer was 20 feet tall. Garner said a man had knocked on the locked door at 11:30 and had asked Sims, the assistant manager, for water for his overheated truck, and the jug was put to use. Later, when Garner walked over to see what was going on, he saw that the man had a pistol at Sims' side. The stranger asked Garner if he knew how to open the cash register, and he told him no. He wanted to know if there was anyone else in the bowling alley, and they said yes. Sims used the intercom to call Arden Alane Felsher and Tommy Lee Temple to the front.

The robber never cursed or shouted or hit them, Garner told police. He ordered them to lie down. Then he said "Goodbye" and shot each one in the head. The girl must have looked up, for she was shot in the cheek.

Three weeks after the killings, police had few clues. A police artist drew a sketch based on Garner's description: a clean-shaven, white man in his mid-20s with collar-length hair that covered the tips of his ears. (Reid, who had a deformed ear, favored such a haircut.) Police sent the sketch to the media, hoping someone could identify the killer and collect the reward. Soffar watched the television news and read the Houston Post.

He would later tell police that he and an accomplice barged through the open doors, shouting and cursing and firing a warning shot. Both wore disguises. Both participated in the shooting, he said, tossing a single gun from one to another. Soffar didn't match Garner's description. He had a full beard and shoulder-length hair that made him look like what he was: a drug addict who didn't have a dime for a haircut.

The discrepancies between Garner's memory of events and Soffar's confession didn't strike prosecutor Lyn McClellan as strange. At the trial in 2006, he made sure the jury heard about Garner's statements. In a recent interview, he discounted Garner's account as the unreliable recollections of a brain-damaged man. McClellan said he could see the truth in Soffar's confession.

"And what he did," McClellan said, "which happens all the time with criminals, they tell you exactly what happened, they just put somebody else's name in it. That's nothing new. And that's exactly what he did."

***

In October 2012, a judge for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Cathy Cochran, wrote an opinion that was sympathetic to Horne's appeal. There was something "fishy" about this case, she declared. Three other judges signed the opinion, but the majority disagreed. The court ultimately rejected the appeal.

Horne read Cochran's opinion on the subway. It was encouraging. "I thought if only two other judges had agreed with her, we'd have had habeas relief."

Cochran retired from the Court of Criminal Appeals at the end of last year and talked about Soffar's case during a recent telephone interview.

"I am fully confident that Max Soffar did not commit this triple murder," she said. "And the reason I am so confident is because … he never talks about the white water jug. And that was really important because that was how the murderer got in the door of the bowling alley. And the police didn't know about the importance of that water jug, and they threw it out."

Cochran was convinced, but the jury hadn't been.

"Was there legally sufficient evidence to support the jury's verdict? Yes," she said, citing the confession. "And can judges come back years later and go behind the jury and say, 'Well, I wouldn't have found him guilty, and so therefore, we will reverse the conviction.' We just can't do that. The law is the law, and there is sufficient evidence, and the jury verdict stands."

False confessions are one of the hardest obstacles for appeals attorneys to overcome. Most jurors believe no one would confess to something he didn't do. But false confessions are not unusual.

In 1983, a drifter named Henry Lee Lucas started playing games with Williamson County police and ended up confessing to 350 killings. Police from all over the country descended on Central Texas. They drove Lucas across the country, giving him hamburgers and cigarettes and feeding him details of unsolved crimes. Soon, they had the biggest single serial killer in history, except it was all a farce, exposed by an investigative reporter, Hugh Aynesworth.

Investigators sometimes isolate suspects, most with a minimal understanding of what the Miranda rule means, and keep at them until they break. That's what happened to the Central Park five and the Norfolk four.

***

In October 2013, Horne filed Soffar's first federal habeas appeal with federal district judge Sim Lake in Houston. He hoped to at least get a hearing.

If Lake turned him down, he could climb the next rung of the appeals ladder, to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. If Horne got lucky, perhaps Harold DeMoss, the federal judge most sympathetic to Soffar's case, would be on the three-judge panel. DeMoss, a conservative Republican lawyer from the Houston firm of Bracewell Reynolds & Patterson (now Bracewell & Giuliani), was appointed to the federal bench in 1991 by the first president Bush. DeMoss has written three opinions on Soffar's case, in 2000, 2002 and 2004, totaling 142 pages. Twice, he included defense diagrams that illustrated the discrepancies between Soffar's confession and Garner's description. DeMoss was the judge who saw to it that Soffar had a second trial. It was a case, he wrote, that kept him awake at nights.

"The best we could ever hope for is that a judge like DeMoss writes a very, very, very strong opinion where he says: 'There's just nothing here. This confession's just false,' " Horne said. "Then you get relief for some other reason and in effect the penalty is canceled."

He no longer hopes for a new trial.

"It comes a point where it's ridiculous to even require or even allow another trial because so many of the witnesses now are dead," he said. "Maybe the DA would do a deal, and they'll give Max life, or we'll do a deal and have Max serve something. I'm sure they would want something to avoid a trial. They wouldn't just walk away."

***

By the end of last summer, it was apparent to Horne that he couldn't solely rely on help from the judicial system. He turned to the governor's office.

Clemency for death sentences all but disappeared under Rick Perry's long governorship. A Houston Chronicle study in 2009 revealed that Perry commuted 28 death sentences in 2005 because the Supreme Court made it illegal to execute people who had committed their crimes when they were under 18. But he commuted only one other death sentence to life, and that was because the man in question had been convicted under the Texas law of parties, which made an accomplice to a murder as guilty as the killer himself. Even when an insane inmate won a vote for clemency from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, Perry overruled the board and sent him to his death.

Cochran wonders whether an independent third party shouldn't review all capital cases.

"All we need really," she said, "is for enough public confidence that the executive will make good decisions. And for the executive to feel comfortable that he won't pay a political price for it."

In September, Horne went to the steps of the state Capitol with Helen Prejean, the Catholic nun and anti-death penalty activist, and presented the governor with a petition for mercy signed by 116,000 people. Perry took no action before he left office.

Fifteen months after Horne filed his federal appeal, Lake echoed Cochran's rationale about the finality of a jury verdict.

Lake's opinion, rendered last December, reads like a lecture on the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, passed in 1996 to speed up the appeals process. The law requires federal courts to defer to state criminal courts in almost every instance. As for the many examples of what Horne called unreasonable legal decisions - about Soffar's attorneys not hiring an expert on false confessions or not introducing Pye's testimony, Lake had a counter phrase: "not unreasonable." Lake repeated the double negative again and again. The actions of Soffar's defense attorneys and the judge were always "not unreasonable." All the claims for relief were denied.

***

Max Soffar lives now in the infirmary at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles found that since the state hadn't issued a warrant for his execution, Soffar isn't eligible for clemency. Horne sued the board in federal court in Austin, which turned him down in March, writing, "Soffar has not yet suffered an injury in fact and his injuries are now only conjectural and hypothetical."

Prosecutor McClellan doesn't believe that Soffar is near death. "I've had lots of promises-to-die resolutions," he said. " 'Don't extradite me from some other state, blah, blah, blah because I have AIDS and I'm dying, and I want to die here in my home state, and blah blah blah. Don't do this because I promise to die.' Let me put it this way, Max is not about to die anytime soon. Tell him you've got it on good authority. You're OK, Max."

In December, Soffar said he has made his peace with God. Although he was brought up by Jewish parents, he is a Christian now. He praised his medical care and the concern he has received from prison officials.

"I'm the person who started the lie whenever I told them I was involved in this crime," he said. "I have to live with that, and I have to make that right before my time ends."

His attorney is not at peace.

He has come to like Soffar, to see that he is not the same person he was when he confessed.

"It's very difficult to reconcile the articulate, polite, nice guy with the guy you hear on those (police) tapes when he's swallowing his words and can't really string a sentence together."

Horne no longer spends every bit of his time on Soffar's appeals. There are other clients, ones that pay his firm, and there's only so much he can do now.

In early March, he did file the application to appeal to the 5th Circuit. The brief ran 9,000 words over the court's 14,000-word limit. Horne had to file a motion to get the limit extended. It was granted, even though the state opposed him. If he wins, there's another step in the process, and he could be denied there, too. The whole thing could take two or three years, and by that time, Soffar will most likely be dead.

"For lawyers like me, litigators," he said, "you have success and failure. You win a case, you lose a case, and you reach a resolution. You put the case in a box. You go on."

But in the case of Max Soffar, he won't have that. The only resolution will most likely come in a phone call from the prison.