An affair to die for in Texas

Adam Liptak's latest Sidebar column in the New York Times is focused on the (in)famous Charles Dean Hood capital case from Texas.  The piece is headlined "Questions Of an Affair Tainting A Trial," and here are excerpts:

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 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.