The Collin County Observer™

Questions Of an Affair Tainting A Trial


By ADAM LIPTAK / Columnist, The New York Times Sidebar
The New York Times / Published: February 22, 2010

WASHINGTON - Charles Dean Hood was sentenced to death in 1990 by a Texas judge who had been sleeping with the prosecutor in his case. It took Mr. Hood almost 20 years to establish that fact.

But he finally managed to force the two officials to testify about their rumored affair in the fall of 2008. They admitted it.

Texas’s highest court for criminal matters, its Court of Criminal Appeals, considered all of this and concluded that Mr. Hood should be executed anyway. In a 6-to-3 decision in September, the court told Mr. Hood that he had taken too long to raise the issue of whether a love affair between a judge and a prosecutor amounted to a conflict of interest.

Mr. Hood has asked the United States Supreme Court to hear his case. On Thursday, 21 former judges and prosecutors filed a brief supporting him. So did 30 experts in legal ethics.

“A judge who has engaged in an intimate, extramarital, sexual relationship with the prosecutor trying a capital murder case before her has a conflict of interest and must recuse herself,” the brief from the ethics experts said. “Of all the courts to have considered the issue, only the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in this case failed to recognize this imperative.”

The affair itself, as described in the depositions of the two former lovers, sounded tawdry and sad.

Judge Verla Sue Holland, who presided over Mr. Hood’s case in a district court in Collin County, Tex., testified that she and the prosecutor, Thomas S. O’Connell Jr., had had sex at each other's homes when their spouses were away. This happened, she said, seven or eight times.

Mr. O’Connell did not seem especially romantic. Judge Holland testified that he once gave her a picture of a polar bear with a matching cup. Another time he gave her a chafing dish.

He never stayed the night. “I had a truck that everybody recognized,” Mr. O’Connell explained.

And he might have been more sympathetic when Judge Holland’s mother died.

“Tom didn’t send a card,” the judge testified. “He didn’t send flowers. He didn’t come by. He didn’t call. You know, I think that’s pretty callous.”

Asked if they had professed their love to each other, Judge Holland sounded wistful. “Yeah,” she said. “Yes. I loved him.”

Judge Holland was elected to the Court of Criminal Appeals in 1996, served for five years and sat with eight of the nine judges who considered her conduct last September. The exception was Judge Cathy Cochran, one of four women on the court and the author of the dissenting opinion.

Judge Cochran took a stab at characterizing the relationship in a footnote. It was misleading, Judge Cochran wrote, to say that Judge Holland and Mr. O’Connell had “an intimate sexual relationship,” though she conceded that the phrase was “literally true.”

“Theirs was hardly the torrid relationship of romance novels,” Judge Cochran clarified. It was, rather, “a close personal relationship that, on a few rare occasions, dipped into intimacy.”

Whatever the precise contours and intensity of the affair, Judge Holland did testify that she would have disqualified herself from Mr. Hood’s case had his lawyers asked. But she also said she and Mr. O’Connell had kept their extramarital affair secret. She said it ended in 1987, three years before Mr. Hood’s trial.

In her deposition, Judge Holland said she had lately become angry with Mr. Hood’s lawyers for “annihilating my reputation.” She said she had asked the attorney general’s office to represent her in Mr. Hood’s challenge to her conduct because she thought she needed to fight back. She was “tired of laying over,” she said, and “getting licked without any input.”

Mr. Hood was convicted of murdering a couple he had been living with, Ronald Williamson and Tracie Lynn Wallace, in Plano, Tex., in 1989.

The district attorney in Collin County, John R. Roach, has said that the case should not be reopened in light of the gravity of those crimes and Mr. Hood’s delay in pursuing rumors of the affair. Mr. Roach added that there was no need for a categorical rule against a little romance.

“The existence of a prior sexual relationship between a judge and a prosecutor is not cause to absolutely disqualify a judge,” Mr. Roach told the appeals court last year. “At some point, the past romantic relationships, of even public figures, become a matter that is entitled to some privacy.”

John R. Rolater Jr., a lawyer in Mr. Roach’s office, declined to elaborate. “We have no comment at this time because of the pending litigation,” Mr. Rolater said Friday in an e-mail message.

The Supreme Court has lately taken some interest in the integrity of the judicial system.

Last year, it ruled that millions of dollars in campaign spending on behalf of a West Virginia judge was reason enough to require his disqualification from a case involving his supporter.

“The probability of actual bias on the part of the judge,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, was “too high to be constitutionally tolerable.”

And last month, the Supreme Court ordered the federal appeals court in Atlanta to have another look at a case in which jurors in a capital trial gave a trial judge an odd gift — a penis made of chocolate.

“From beginning to end,” the unsigned majority decision said, “judicial proceedings conducted for the purpose of deciding whether a defendant shall be put to death must be conducted with dignity and respect.”

To review the bidding: Campaign spending may undermine the integrity of the judicial system. The same goes for a gag gift of confectionary genitalia. But a love affair between the judge and prosecutor in a death penalty case is, in Texas, at least, another matter.

link to this column in The New York Times....

======================================

Also see commentary from Grits for Breakfast.

And BRIEF OF FORMER JUDGES, STATE OFFICIALS, AND PROSECUTORS AS AMICI CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONER filed before the US Supreme Court. (Bill notes, this is worth reading. Look at who signed it.)