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"Sometimes the little small-town stuff just doesn’t go away," Hannah Kunkle, Clerk of the Court, Collin County, Texas
“This man would be dead And these people stood silent,” Lawrence Fox, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a former chairman of the American Bar Assn.’s ethics panel.
Recall that death penalty case previously blogged by both Lotus and me where the trial judge was having a secret affair with the prosecutor. Well, the deposition of the lawyer and prosecutor has occurred, and both judge and prosecutor admitted under oath that they were in fact having an affair during the trial, that it had gone on for years, and never been disclosed to litigants.
A lawyer for Charles Dean Hood wrote the Governor of Texas seeking a stay of execution describing the confirmation of the affair. Here’s a copy of the letter describing the testimony about the affair.
One thing that the general media reports have not picked up that is described in a press release from Texas’s Defender Services: The judge had what is described (accurately) as a shockingly high recusal rate in the country where her paramour was the prosecutor: She recused herself from 80% of the cases in that county. It’s not clear why she didn’t recuse herself from Hood’s case.
Hood had come back to court raising two issues: That this business of the prosecutor and judge having an affair isn’t right and denies a fair trial, and that a jury instruction was ambiguous. And the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed Hood’s execution, ruling that one issue couldn’t be raised at this stage, but granting a stay of execution to consider the other. Answer to your guess about which one below the fold.
Unless you happen to have been following constitutional issues involving Texas death penalty jury instructions, you probably guessed wrong: It’s the instruction issue.
Here’s WSJ Law blog about this result and the NYT story with the first quote and the LATimes with the second quote.
