That's the bottom line of State District Judge Greg Brewer's Finding of Facts and Conclusions of Law in the case of Charles Dean Hood. The review came in spite of the state's best attempt to cover up and bury a long-secret affair between Hood's trial judge and prosecutor.
CBS News' analyst Andrew Cohen writes, "Not The End Of The Affair."
Goeller’s belated act of courage - he had known about the affair for decades before he went public with the information - has begun to force the state of Texas, grudgingly it seems, to do the right thing. Hood’s scheduled execution was postponed. An appellate court authorized an honest review of the unthinking conduct of former judge Verla Sue Holland and former prosecutor Thomas S. O’Connell, Jr. On Friday, a judge formally confirmed Goeller’s story.
Holland, the judge, and O’Connell, the prosecutor, “were involved in an intimate sexual relationship prior to Hood’s capital murder trial,” reads the Collin County District Court order. Neither disclosed that fact to Hood or to his attorneys before, during or after the trial. In fact, Collin County District Judge Greg Brewer found the lovers, both of whom were married to other people, “took deliberate measures to ensure that their affair would remain secret” even when specifically confronted by others, including defense representatives, about their relationship.
Holland and O’Connell, the court ruled Friday, “wrongfully withheld relevant information from defense counsel prior to and during the trial, the direct appeal, the state habeas proceedings, the federal habeas proceedings, and the successive state habeas proceedings.” This, Judge Brewer unsurprisingly found, amounted to a deprivation of Hood’s constitutional right to a fair trial. So he recommended to his bosses at the appeals-court level that they grant Hood a new trial, 19 years after his last one, to fix a problem that is plain for all to see.
The Court of Criminal Appeals now has the matter and its record in capital cases is not a particularly auspicious one. This is the court, remember, that directly and deliberately defied the United States Supreme Court in Miller-El v. Dretke, an infamous capital case involving racial discrimination in jury selection. The increasingly-frustrated justices kept sending the case back down to Texas with instructions to better protect the defendant’s rights. And the Criminal Court of Appeals, and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, kept failing to take the hint.
Diane Jennings writes, "Old love affair gives death row inmate a new chance in 1989 Plano murder case," for the Dallas Morning News.
A judge has ruled that death row inmate Charles Dean Hood should get another chance to argue before the state's highest criminal court that he did not get a fair trial – even though it has been 19 years since his case went to court.
State District Judge Greg Brewer on Friday ruled that Hood had not waited too late to raise the issue of an improper relationship between the judge who presided over his trial, Verla Sue Holland, and then-Collin County District Attorney Tom O'Connell.
The state's "hands are unclean," said Brewer, who was instructed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to examine the issue.
"It is the appearance of impartiality that is damaging to the public's confidence in the integrity of the judicial process," the judge wrote.
Hood was convicted in the 1989 robbery and murder of Ronald Williamson and Tracie Lynn Wallace in Plano. For years, his attorneys had tried to raise the issue of whether the relationship between judge and prosecutor had affected the trial, but his attorneys said they had little to go on other than speculation.
Hood came within a couple of hours of being executed last summer when his attorneys raised the issue again in a last-ditch effort as his death warrant expired.
A couple of weeks before Hood's June execution date, the defense attorneys found a former assistant district attorney who filed an affidavit indicating he was aware of the relationship.
Then in September, Hood's attorneys finally got the proof they needed by forcing depositions from the two parties under a civil procedure. At that time, Holland and O'Connell admitted to having a sexual relationship before Hood's trial, which had not been revealed to the defense at trial or during years of appeals.
Prosecutors claimed Hood had waited too long to raise the issue of judicial bias.
In November, after staying Hood's next execution date to consider another issue, and after the case received nationwide attention, the court of criminal appeals asked the lower court to make a recommendation on the timeliness issue.
"Judge deems death row inmate did not receive fair trial due to sex scandal," is Stephanie Flemmons report for the Plano Star Courier. It was filed Friday afternoon, shortly after the document was issued.
In November 2008, Judge Greg Brewer of the 366th Judicial District Court of Collin County had been directed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to make his recommendation whether convicted killer Charles Dean Hood’s claim of an unfair trial was raised in a timely manner.
Today, Brewer issued Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law that concludes that attorneys for Hood discovered proof of Judge Vera Sue Holland and District Attorney Tom O’Connell’s secret, sexual relationship in a timely fashion and that Hood’s attorney are not at fault for not discovering this information earlier because the parties kept it secret for so long.
In his recommendation to the CCA, Brewer determined Hood should be able to raise judicial bias claims and that the affair between the judge and the district attorney violated his right to a fair trial.
Brewer found that Holland and O’Connell did not abide by their ethical and constitutional duties during the 1990 trial and conviction of Hood.
According to court records, Brewer states: “Judge Holland and Mr. O’Connell took deliberate measures to ensure that their affair would remain secret,” and “Judge Holland and Mr. O’Connell did not abide by their ethical and constitutional duties to disclose the fundamental conflict caused by their relationship.”
In attempts to keep their affair secret, Brewer states “Mr. O’Connell misled habeas counsel during the successive state habeas proceedings and Judge Holland resisted counsel’s investigative efforts.”
The ABA Journal reports, "Appeal Over Judge-Prosecutor Affair Should Be Heard, Texas Court Finds." It's by Martha Neil.
Not quite a year ago, Charles Dean Hood was on the verge of being put to death in Texas when an execution order expired. A few months later, a last-minute appeal was granted within hours of another scheduled execution.
Now he seemingly has some likelihood of overturning his conviction, based on an admitted long-ago affair between the judge and the prosecutor who tried his first-degree murder case. In findings of fact and conclusions of law filed today, a Collin County judge asked by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to consider whether Hood waited too long to pursue a habeas petition has found in his favor, both on this question and on the issue of whether Hood has a proper basis for a habeas appeal.
It was not the fault of Hood and his counsel that the affair between former Collin County District Judge Verla Sue Holland and former Collin County District Attorney Thomas S. O'Connell Jr. didn't come to light earlier, writes Judge Greg Brewer in his filing today. Both kept the affair secret, he writes, and Hood's defense team tried without success to substantiate rumors of the affair in 1995, 1996, 2005 and 2008.
Contacted by Hood's then-defense counsel, A. Richard Ellis, shortly before a 2005 execution date for Hood, Holland refused to comment about the alleged affair and O'Connell denied it, Brewer writes.
"Judge Holland and Mr. O'Connell wrongfully withheld relevant information from defense counsel prior to and during the trial, the direct appeal, the state habeas proceedings, the federal habeas proceedings, and the successive state habeas proceedings," Brewer finds. "Indeed, Mr. O'Connell misled habeas counsel during the successive state habeas proceedings and Judge Holland resisted counsel's investigative efforts."
After serving on the Collin County bench, Holland sat as a judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals until 2001, Brewer notes.
Holland and O'Connell had a "duty to disclose the fundamental conflict caused by their relationship," he concludes. And, "in the face of rumors of an affair, Hood was entitled to presume that Judge Holland's and Mr. O'Connell's behavior—refusing to recuse themselves from cases Mr. O'Connell personally prosecuted in Judge Holland's courtroom—indicated that the rumors were false."
Earlier coverage begins with this November 2008 post.and this September 2008 post.
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