That's the title of Rick Casey's latest Houston Chronicle column. It examines last week's ruling in the Charles Hood case. LINK Here's an extended excerpt:
When the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals last November referred a thorny question in the case of convicted murderer Charles Dean Hood back down to a Plano district judge, the state’s highest criminal court gave more than a hint as to the answer it wanted.
The high court had already rebuffed the efforts of Hood’s lawyers to determine the truth of persistent rumors that the judge who presided over Hood’s trial was having a secret affair with the Collin County DA who helped try the case in her court.
The Court of Criminal Appeals had ruled that a sworn affidavit by a former assistant district attorney that the affair was “common knowledge” at the time of the trial was not sufficient to require the now-retired judge and former district attorney to answer questions under oath about their relationship.
But Hood’s lawyers got creative. Suggesting that they might sue the former judge and district attorney, they obtained a judge’s order to take sworn depositions for the two under a rule that applies to potential lawsuits but not to criminal matters.
The result: Former Judge Verla Sue Holland (who later herself served on the Court of Criminal Appeals) and former DA Thomas O’Connell admitted under oath that they had engaged in a sexual affair, though they claimed it ended before the 1990 trial.
That put the Court of Criminal Appeals in a sticky place. They decided to postpone Hood’s execution on an unrelated matter and order Judge Greg Brewer to determine whether Hood’s lawyers had waited too long to prove the affair. The last paragraphs of the order more than suggested the high court’s stance.
Noting that Hood’s lawyers had claimed that the affair was “common knowledge” and that the trial attorneys were aware of it, the order stated that Hood “did not try to obtain proof of the affair until some eighteen years after his trial.”
The order also noted that the rule Hood’s lawyers obtained to get the confessions had been available in civil matters since 1999, but the lawyers “did not utilize this tool until after he was given an execution date.”
Brewer is a conservative Republican judge whose law-and-order orientation is suggested by his financial support of Rudy Giuliani in the last presidential race. But it turns out that Brewer believes that the law applies not only to defendants, but to judges and prosecutors.
In a lengthy finding, he was brutally direct.
The State cannot argue that the defense waited too long “because its hands are unclean: Judge Holland and Mr. O’Connell did not abide by their ethical and constitutional duties to disclose the fundamental conflict caused by their relationship,” he wrote.
And:
Coverage of the Judge Brewer's Finding of Facts and Conclusions of Law is here., with a link to earlier coverage.
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