Legal News

Will the Supreme Court Hear Case Involving Prosecutor/Judge Affair?

By Ashby Jones

Last fall, when Texas’ highest criminal court — the Court of Criminal Appeals — denied Charles Hood’s request for a retrial, we figured Hood had reached the end of the line.

But perhaps not. Hood (pictured), who was sentenced to death twenty years ago by a Texas judge who had been sleeping with the prosecutor in his case, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case. And on Monday, a whole bunch of people — some 21 former judges and prosecutors and 30 legal ethics experts — signed on to amicus briefs supporting his request. Click here, here and here for previous LB coverage of the case; here for today’s story on the cert petition, from the NYT’s Adam Liptak.

In a 6-to-3 decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled in September that 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.

But according to Liptak’s story, the briefs filed Monday take strong exception to the ruling: "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 district attorney on the case, John R. Roach, has said that the case should not be reopened in light of the gravity Hood’s crimes — he was convicted of murdering a couple he’s been living with in 1989 — and in light of Hood's delay in pursuing rumors of the affair.

Will the Supreme Court bite on the case? Liptak seems to intimate the answer is perhaps, as 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."

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 23, 2010 (boomark / email).