The Independent, a British broadsheet, reports, "The death row prisoner, the judge who sentenced him, and the prosecutor who was having sex with her," in today's issue. It's written by David Usborne.
They are tough in Texas and perhaps it is not surprising there has been little sympathy for the whining of Charles Dean Hood about the odd "daytime soap" circumstances of his conviction back in 1990 for double murder. He is on death row in a US state that has no peer in its enthusiasm for executing prisoners.
The condemned and their lawyers will always look for ammunition at least to delay the moment of final dispatch. But Hood and his defence team have something slightly unusual to say and, even though the highest appeals court in the Lone Star State has still declared itself unimpressed, a remarkable array of the great and the good of the legal world are now pleading with the US Supreme Court to intervene.
The controversy is now garnering wider attention not least because it rests on a tale of illicit sexual trysts between the judge who presided over Hood's trial and sentenced him to death and the prosecutor who argued the case for conviction.
It is the stuff if not of a television soap, then certainly a bad romance novel. Both were married and both kept their affair a secret before, during and for many years after the trial.
There is keen interest also because it is Texas that once more finds itself under scrutiny for the alleged mishandling of a capital case. It risks becoming as infamous as the "sleeping lawyer" trial of Calvin Burdine whose death penalty was overturned 10 years ago because of the failure of his court-appointed lawyer to stay awake during the proceedings. But here "sleeping lawyer" has a different connotation.
Most importantly, in the eye of some legal experts, is the fact that the shenanigans of prosecutor and judge were kept secret from Hood's defence team. The judge, Verla Sue Holland, has since said she would have withdrawn from the case had she been asked to by the defence. But they didn't know to ask.
And:
Another loud critic of the handling of Hood's case is David Dow, whose work defending no fewer than 100 death penalty defendants over the years for the Texas Defenders Service, is outlined in his just published book, Autobiography of Execution. Once a supporter of capital punishment, Dow uses his widely reviewed new work to deliver a harsh indictment of capital punishment in Texas.
But now the affair, not a moment too soon perhaps, has reached the national stage.
In the wake of a request by Hood's defence team to the United States Supreme Court to overturn the Texas decision, a collection of no fewer than 21 former prosecutors, judges and politicians have filed a so-called "amicus" brief in support of Hood. Joining them in the unusual action were 30 of America's leading legal ethicists.
Earlier coverage of the Hood case begins with the preceding post; all coverage, available through the Charles Dean Hood index. More on David Dow's The Autobiography of an Execution, here.
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