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When the U.S. Supreme Court denied Charles Dean Hood's
appeal last week, it was done in a one-sentence, unsigned order. Hood is a
Texas death-row inmate who was convicted of murdering two people in 1990.
Long after the conclusion of the trial, it became clear that his trial judge
and prosecutor had been secretly involved in a years-long extramarital
affair. Because they were both married, they denied the affair—even to
Hood's death-penalty lawyers. After the clandestine relationship finally
came to light, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected Hood's challenge
in two curt sentences last September, finding that his lawyers had waited
too long to raise the issue on appeal. How Hood was to have raised the
conflict of interest when the existence of the affair was not conclusively
established until 2008, when the judge and prosecutor were forced to admit
it under oath, is not explained.
Hood has already been granted a new sentencing hearing because the Texas
appeals court has acknowledged that the jury instructions were improper, but
prosecutors say they will again seek the death penalty. In any event,
resentencing Hood doesn't resolve the fundamental problem with the case. The
issue here is whether any reasonable person would believe that a criminal
trial at which one's prosecutor and judge are secretly in love could ever be
fair. And that's the issue the courts keep refusing to address.
Last year, the Supreme Court handed down a blockbuster opinion in Caperton
v. Massey, a case testing whether a justice on West Virginia's highest court
should have recused himself from hearing an appeal in which one of the
parties—Don Blankenship of A.T. Massey Coal Co.—had just donated $3 million
to his judicial election campaign. Writing for a sharply divided 5–4 court,
Justice Anthony Kennedy called the appearance of a conflict of interest in
this case so "extreme" that the judge's failure to recuse himself undermined
the constitutional right to due process. The Hood appeal to the Supreme
Court essentially asked whether a judge might be as compromised by great sex
as by big money. In his filings, Hood argued that the trial judge's
"long-term, intimate sexual relationship and later close friendship with
[the prosecutor] attuned her to his professional and personal interests and
made those interests her own." Hood said that unlike the Caperton case, in
which Blankenship's financial support of the judge was a matter of public
knowledge, the Texas judge was more compromised because she kept her
relationship a secret.
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