Life sentence follows guilty verdict
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on July 20, 2017 5:56 PM
Holloman
Yquan Dashay Holloman, 21, will spend life in prison without parole after being convicted of first-degree murder this week for killing 22-year-old Diamond Montrece Sampson in June 2015 at the Jefferson Court Apartments.
Holloman was also found guilty of discharging a weapon into occupied property inflicting serious bodily injury.
For that conviction, Holloman was sentenced to 73 to 100 months in prison at the expiration of his life without parole sentence.
Holloman and his attorney, Walter Webster, filed an appeal after the conviction and sentencing Wednesday.
Webster said his defense strategy rested largely on the lack of physical evidence presented by the prosecution directly tying Holloman to the crime.
"In this particular case there was ultimately no physical evidence linking Yquan to the crime," Webster said. "They had no fingerprints, no DNA, they did not find anything in his possession, so it was a situation where there literally was no physical evidence tying him (to the crime) whatsoever. We focused to some degree on the fact that some of that was due to sloppy crime scene work and investigation by the GPD (Goldsboro Police Department)."
Webster said he also tried to undermine the credibility of witnesses who testified.
He said two of the witnesses claimed to have seen the murder unfold, and his "supposed girlfriend" gave testimony that she'd seen him load the gun, he told her he was going to go and do it, and then said he thought he'd killed Sampson after the fact.
Webster added that some of the witnesses had also been smoking marijuana before seeing anything.
"One of them testified to something that, physically, I just don't think she could've seen what she claimed to have seen," Webster said. "I tried to highlight that for the jury on my closing argument, and then the other two -- the ones who had been on marijuana -- they had changed their story multiple times, and one of them had pending charges at the time this all occurred, and has pending charges now, and every time she's ever talked to anybody about the case, she's had her lawyer in tow."
Webster said he also chipped away at the credibility of an expert witness called by the prosecution.
He said the expert witness -- called from the Cumberland County Sheriff's Office -- claimed the bullets and shell casings were fired from a gun found behind where Holloman was arrested shortly after the homicide.
"When the expert testified, I undermined him to the point the jury just didn't believe him," Webster said. "He essentially admitted he had no scientific basis to say that those bullets and the shell casings came from that gun, that it was just his personal opinion, and he didn't even bring photographs to say what he matched and how it matched."
But, Webster said, the jury chose to believe the witness testimony in the end, despite the lack of physical evidence tying Holloman directly to the crime.
Assistant District Attorney Davis Weddle, who prosecuted the case, did not return a phone call requesting comment on the case.
"I thought he (Weddle) did a very good job in presenting what he had and keeping the jury focused on what he had," Webster said. "I disagree with the outcome, but it's always nice to try a case against a good lawyer and really battle it out."