By DIANE JENNINGS
The Dallas Morning News
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied an appeal Monday afternoon from death row inmate Charles Dean Hood, who said his sentence should be set aside because there were rumors the judge in his case was romantically involved with the district attorney.
Judges denied the appeal on procedural grounds, not the merit of the issue, without dissent, saying it was an abuse of the system because it had not been raised earlier.
Mr. Hood, 38, who was convicted in the 1989 murders of Ronald Williamson and Tracie Lynn Wallace in Plano, is scheduled for execution this evening.
“I’m flabbergasted,” said David Dow, director of litigation for the Texas Defender Service, which is helping with Mr. Hood’s case.
“I’m never confident in these cases, but I was confident we were going to get a stay based on this claim,” he said. “It’s the most appalling sort of relationship between a judge and a prosecutor that’s imaginable.”
John Rolater, assistant district attorney for Collin County, declined to comment because “it is a matter of pending litigation.”
Mr. Hood’s appeal alleged that Judge Sue Holland, then a district court judge in Collin County, presided over Mr. Hood’s trial while she was involved in a long-term intimate relationship with then-district attorney Tom O’Connell.
Mr. O’Connell was one of two prosecutors on the case.
Though rumors of the relationship had circulated for years, including in a 2005 article at Salon.com, the issue had not been raised in court by Mr. Hood’s defense team until late last week.
It was introduced at that time after a former assistant district attorney filed an affidavit saying the relationship was “common knowledge.” That former prosecutor questioned whether the relationship violated judicial ethics.
Judge Holland, who has retired, and Mr. O’Connell, who is now in private practice, could not be reached for comment.
The Court of Criminal Appeals, where Judge Holland later served for several years, ruled that Mr. Hood was not entitled to raise the claim because it was “old news,” Mr. Dow said.
“In one sense that’s correct,” he said. “It was old news in the sense that obviously the people having the affair at the time knew they were having it and there are other people, too. But we postponed raising this claim until we had some credible third-party assertion rather than just rumor and innuendo. ... I just think that’s a very peculiar and really unsound basis for denying this claim.”
In addition to denying the appeal on the basis of no new evidence, the court noted that the Defender Service was not listed as Mr. Hood’s lead attorney, so another motion raising the same issue was not acted upon.
Greg Wiercioch, a staff attorney with the Texas Defender Service, said he planned to refile today and hoped the court would then address the merits of the case.
If the court still refuses to take it up, Mr. Hood’s attorneys hope Gov. Rick Perry will step in by ordering a 30-day reprieve. If that effort fails, attorneys hope to find an avenue into federal court.
Last fall, the Court of Criminal Appeals was criticized harshly nationwide when Chief Justice Sharon Keller declined to keep the court open past 5 o’clock so attorneys having technological difficulties could file a last-minute appeal.
The condemned man, Michael Richard, was executed even though the U.S. Supreme Court had agreed earlier that day to hear a Kentucky case on whether lethal injection was cruel and unusual punishment.
Copyright 2008 The Dallas Morning News