Death Penalty News

Hood, Holland, the judge, O’Connell, the prosecutor Charles Dean Hood, the death row inmate who insisted he was innocent in the 1989 killings of a Plano man and his girlfriend, has pleaded guilty instead of facing a new sentencing trial. He was sentenced to life and cannot appeal. He will not receive credit for the 23 years he has spent on death row. John Schomburger first assistant district attorney in Collin County said prosecutors felt “vindicated in the sense that he acknowledged what we knew he did is murder those people. “Our goal was is to see that he’s never released from prison and this plea deal is the best way to achieve that goal.” Hood’s case created a legal furor several years ago after his attorneys waged a last minute battle to keep him from execution by raising allegations that the judge in his trial had been involved in a longstanding romantic relationship with the district attorney. The former judge and prosecutor eventually acknowledged the affa...

A good way to end up on death row in Texas is to be accused of a capital crime and have Jerry Guerinot represent you. 20 of Mr. Guerinot's clients have been sentenced to death. That is more people than are awaiting execution in about 1/2 of the 35 states that have the death penalty. "People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said. So what is Mr. Guerinot's secret? It seems to boil down to a failure to conduct even rudimentary investigations, said David R. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston and the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service, which represents death row inmates, including not a few of Mr. Guerinot’s former clients. "He doesn't even pick the low-hanging fruit which is hitting him in the head as he's walking under the tree," Mr. Dow said. Mr. Guerinot did not respond to two messages seeking comment. In 2007, he told The Observer, a London newspaper, ...

WASHINGTON — The US Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear the case of a Texas man who learned after being sentenced to death that the prosecutor and judge at his murder trial were having an affair. The highest US court declined to intervene in the case of Charles Dean Hood (pictured), 40, who filed a petition in the case last September. Hood was convicted in 1990 of a notorious double murder carried out the year before. His execution has been delayed five times over the years amid various appeals. He filed his most recent pleading to the Supreme Court upon learning of the affair between judge Verla Sue Holland and prosecutor Thomas O'Connell. His attorneys expressed disappointment Monday with the court ruling, calling it a "fundamental injustice." "We are disheartened that the United States Supreme Court ruled not to hear the case of Charles Hood in which the trial judge and district attorney who prosecuted Hood engaged in a secret, long-term, extra-marital a...

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected appeals from five Texas Death Row inmates, including Charles Dean Hood , who was condemned even though his Collin County trial judge and the prosecutor were having an affair. The justices did not comment in turning down Hood's appeal. The decision does not change the ruling by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that Hood should get a new punishment trial. The state court made that ruling on a legal point unrelated to the relationship between Judge Verla Sue Holland and Tom O'Connell, former district attorney in Collin County. The state court denied Hood's request that because of the affair, he should have a new trial. Hood, 41, has insisted that he did not kill Tracie Lynn Wallace, 26, and her boyfriend, Ronald Williamson, 46, in 1989 at their home in Plano. "No one should be prosecuted for a parking ticket let alone for capital murder by the district attorney who has had a sexual affair with the judge handling the case, ...

Charles Dean Hood, the death row inmate whose case has drawn national attention because of a relationship between the presiding judge and prosecutor at his trial, has been granted a new punishment hearing by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The new hearing was not ordered because of the acknowledged relationship, but because the court ruled that the jury was not given proper instructions on how to consider Hood's background when determining his punishment. Hood's attorneys claimed that Hood didn't deserve death because he suffered from mitigating circumstances, which included learning disabilities and abuse as a child, including being beaten with a pipe, and that these things resulted in his poor "impulse control." Hood, 40, was convicted in 1990 of murder in the shooting deaths of Ronald Williamson and Tracie Lynn Wallace at Williamson's home in Plano. Hood had lived at the house and worked for Williamson. Julie Wallace, Wallace's sister, was resigned...

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals threw out the death sentence Wednesday of a convicted killer whose case has been dogged by admissions of an affair between his trial judge and the prosecutor. The court, in a split decision, said Charles Dean Hood was entitled to a new punishment trial because jurors were not allowed to properly consider mitigating evidence that could have convinced them he didn't deserve a death sentence. The ruling made no mention of the affair between Hood's trial judge and prosecutor in Collin County in suburban Dallas. Last year, the same court refused Hood's appeal for an entire new trial because of the affair admission. Hood, 40, a former topless club bouncer, insists he's innocent in the 1989 fatal shootings of Tracie Lynn Wallace, 26, and her boyfriend, Ronald Williamson, 46, at their home in Plano. A day before he was scheduled to die in September 2008, the Austin-based appeals court gave Hood a reprieve based on the faulty jury instruction ...

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. Click here to read this feature in full. Source: The New York Times , Feb. 22, 2010 - Photo: Charles Dean Hood, left, was convicted of murder in 1990 and sentence...

WASHINGTON - Earlier today, 21 former judges, government officials, and prosecutors filed an amicus brief in support of Charles Dean Hood's petition to the United States Supreme Court, asking the Court to hear the case. Hood was sentenced to death in 1990 for a double murder, but has long protested that his constitutional right to a fair trial was violated due to the romantic relationship between the prosecutor in his case and the judge presiding over his trial. In 2008, a Texas court ordered both the judge and prosecutor be deposed after years of their refusing to do so, and both finally admitted the relationship. Nevertheless, in September 2009, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Hood's habeas petition as untimely based on state procedural rules. Today's brief, organized by the Constitution Project, requests the Supreme Court review the decision of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, based on the clear due process violation that occurred in Mr. Hood's case. T...

Twila Busby was Hank Skinner’s soul mate. “We just fell together. We just clicked, man,” he says. The two were hardly apart after they met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. They would kiss in public and cuddled up on the couch to watch thrillers. They were “sick in love,” Skinner says through a telephone receiver behind a Plexiglas window on Texas’ death row unit in Livingston. A jury found that Skinner (pictured) was so sick in love that, in a jealous rage, he strangled Busby, bashed in her head and face with an axe handle and then stabbed to death her two mentally disabled adult sons on New Years Eve 1993. He was sentenced to death for the three murders. His execution is scheduled for February 24. The 47-year-old doesn’t deny he was in the small house in the tiny West Texas town of Pampa on the night of the murders or that the blood on his clothes that night belonged to 41-year-old Busby and her sons. But Skinner and his lawyers say there’s no way he could have killed anyone; he wa...

Confidence in lethal injections is dwindling, thanks to cases such as that of Romell Broom. The gruesome botching of an execution in Ohio on Tuesday, when technicians tried but failed to find a vein in a Death Row inmate through which to administer the required mortal fluids, is casting a fresh spotlight on the flaws in America's system of capital punishment system at a time when public support for it may already be flagging. Lawyers for Romell Broom, convicted in the 1984 rape and killing of a 14-year-old girl abducted in Cleveland, were successful in blocking the state's plans to have a second go at dispatching him by lethal injection in three days' time, for the surreal reason that one week is not enough time for him to recover from his near-death. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order yesterday, effective for 10 days. The Broom case is one among several that in recent weeks have galvanised anti-death penalty campaigners. Others have included a grand...

Texas' highest criminal court's latest dismaying ruling in the scandalous Charles Dean Hood murder case can be interpreted with five words: "Anything goes in Texas justice." The ruling somehow manages to waltz past the fact that Collin County's trial judge in the capital murder case had been cavorting in bed with the district attorney. Instead, the split decision by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals turned on a procedural issue in letting the death penalty verdict stand against Hood. The clearly compromised impartiality of the trial judge, Verla Sue Holland, thus is rendered legally beside the point, in contravention of the Texas Constitution. This is not a plea to save the life of a man who may be innocent of the charges against him. Indeed, the state produced overwhelming evidence against Hood in the cold robbery and murder of Ronald Williamson and Tracie Lynn Wallace in Plano. Rather, the issue is the integrity of the Texas court system and the appeal...

A death row inmate in Texas does not deserve a new trial even though the judge in his case was having an affair with the prosecutor, a state appeals court ruled Wednesday. Charles Dean Hood was granted a last-minute reprieve in June 2008 when a former district attorney came forward to confirm long-rumored reports of the affair. The judge and prosecutor later admitted to the secret affair under oath. In a 6-3 opinion, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Hood's request on the basis that his defense team did not raise the issue in their initial appeal despite the fact that they were aware of the rumors. "Accordingly, the application is dismissed as an abuse of the writ," the court ruled. Hood's defense team called the decision an "outrage" and vowed to appeal. "This decision by a court where 8 of the 9 judges once shared the bench with Judge (Verla Sue) Holland will only add to the perception that justice is skewed in Texas, that obvious and outrage...

The last time we checked in on law and justice in Collin County, Texas, Matthew Goeller had almost single-handedly stopped an execution less than two hours before it was scheduled to begin. The former assistant district attorney had sworn under oath in an affidavit that the trial judge in Charles Dean Hood’s capital murder case in 1990 had been having an illicit affair with the prosecutor in the case. Goeller’s belated act of courage - he had known about the affair for decades before he went public with the information - has begun to force the state of Texas, grudgingly it seems, to do the right thing. Hood’s scheduled execution was postponed. An appellate court authorized an honest review of the unthinking conduct of former judge Verla Sue Holland and former prosecutor Thomas S. O’Connell, Jr. On Friday, a judge formally confirmed Goeller’s story. Holland, the judge, and O’Connell, the prosecutor, “were involved in an intimate sexual relationship prior to Hood’s capital murder trial,”...

Recent confirmation of a long-rumored romance between a former Collin County district attorney and a former judge could lead to allegations of unfair trials in hundreds of cases, but legal experts differ over what should happen next. In court depositions sought by attorneys trying to get a new trial for death row convict Charles Dean Hood, Judge Verla Sue Holland and prosecutor Tom O'Connell reportedly admitted to a years-long affair that Mr. Hood's attorneys say prevented him from getting a fair trial in 1990. At least one other man, Timothy David Nixon, was found guilty of murder while Judge Holland was on the bench and Mr. O'Connell tried the case. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison for allegedly killing his mother. Some legal ethicists say prosecutors have a responsibility to identify cases from the years the two held office and ensure that the convicted have their day in court. Others doubt that is the prosecutors' role. "They do have a proactive responsib...