Death Penalty News

Texas prosecutors have indicted former death-row prisoner Clinton Young for a 21-year-old murder in one county after his conviction and death sentence for another murder allegedly committed as part of the same criminal episode in another county was overturned because a lead prosecutor in that case also secretly acted as a paid law clerk to judges who presided over Young’s trial and state post-conviction appeals. On August 12, 2022, a special grand jury convened in Harrison County by the Texas Attorney General’s office indicted Young for capital murder in the November 25, 2001 shooting death of Doyle Douglas. That murder was part of the case prosecutors presented against him in 2003 in his capital murder trial for the shooting death of Samuel Petrey in Midland County during what prosecutors alleged was a two-day crime spree. Young (pictured with Clinton Young Foundation legal director Merel Pontier), who has long insisted that he was framed, was 18-years old at the time he allegedly par...

Former Texas death-row prisoner Clinton Young has been released from custody nearly twenty years after being sentenced to death for a double murder he has consistently said he did not commit. Young walked out of the Midland County Detention Center January 21, 2022, after the foundation posted bond to secure his freedom while prosecutors from neighboring Dawson County decide whether to retry Young on the charges.  The foundation crowdfunded contributions to cover 15% of the $150,000 cash bail to gain Young’s release. RELATED |  Texas | Former death row inmate Clinton Young released on bond The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) granted Young a new trial in September 2021 following revelations that his prosecutor from the Midland County District Attorney’s office had also secretly served as a paid clerk to county judges who presided over Young’s trial and post-conviction appeals. In a video posted on the foundation’s Facebook page, Young removed his left sneaker and sock an...

Former death row inmate Clinton Lee Young has been released on bond, after almost 20 years on death row. Young was released Thursday on a $150,000 bond after being transported in early November back to Midland County to await his new trial. The Clinton Young Foundation posted a video on its Facebook page with the caption "It’s not a win until my feet touch grass. After 20 years on death row, Clinton was finally released on bond today." The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Sept. 22 tossed a capital murder conviction and granted a new trial for Young, the death row inmate who was convicted by a Midland County jury in 2003, according to a previous Reporter-Telegram article.  Young was sentenced to death for killing Doyle Douglas, 41, and Samuel Petrey, 52, for the use of their vehicles during a 48-hour crime spree.  Petrey was kidnapped in his hometown of Eastland and killed in an oilfield near Midland. The appeals court overturned Young’s conviction because of a revelation th...

A judge called his actions in a death penalty case "shocking prosecutorial misconduct that destroyed any semblance of a fair trial.” Clinton Young was convicted by a Midland County jury of capital murder in 2003. He is being held at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit, where he is kept in solitary confinement. Weldon Ralph Petty Jr., a chain-smoking bespectacled attorney, was a quiet fixture at the Midland County courthouse for 2 decades. By day, he often appeared before judges as an assistant district attorney in the 11-story brown brick courthouse in the heart of the oil boomtown. But by night, he worked as a paid legal assistant for those same jurists—sometimes advising them how to handle criminal cases he also was prosecuting. For more than a decade, Petty, 78, committed “brazen misconduct” by simultaneously acting as a prosecutor and a paid adviser to supposedly impartial judges, according to a scathing judicial opinion issued April 28. The opinion calls for overturning Midland County...

Finding “brazen misconduct” by a prosecutor who withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense and then secretly served as the trial judge’s law clerk in the case, a Midland County, Texas judge has recommended that death-row prisoner Clinton Young be granted a new trial. In a 30-page factfinding order issued on April 26, 2021, Senior Judge Sid Harle excoriated former assistant district attorney Ralph Petty and the Midland County District Attorney’s office for “shocking prosecutorial misconduct that destroyed any semblance of a fair trial” in Young’s case. That conduct, which Harle said was known to at least 2 senior members of the District Attorney’s office, included serving as part of the prosecution team that tried Young for murder and defended his conviction and death sentence on appeal while simultaneously acting as judicial clerk and legal adviser for the judge who was presiding over the trial and subsequent appeals in the trial court. Harle said that Petty violated Young’s due pr...

29 April 2021 On Wednesday April 21, the closing arguments in Clinton’s case took place on Zoom and were live broadcasted on YouTube.  At the end of the hearing, the judge said that he would recommend a new trial, and yesterday he filed that recommendation! This recommendation will now be sent to the Court of Criminal Appeals who will make the final decision.  This is a major step towards justice!  We will have to wait for the CCA’s decision, but we are very grateful and happy about this outcome. Why a new trial? The prosecutor who worked on Clinton Young’s trial, Ralph Petty, was secretly working as a paid law clerk for two judges who presided over Clinton’s case.  In his capacity as a law clerk, Petty drafted rulings and advisory memos for the judges that were used for the judges’ orders and rulings in Clinton’s case.  To learn more, read this USA Today article . January hearing The hearing in January involved fact-finding around the issue of District Judge Hy...

For decades, Ralph Petty spent his days as a prosecutor for the Midland County District Attorney’s Office trying criminal cases before a slate of judges and winning hundreds of convictions in the process. The chain-smoking assistant DA was known as a legal scholar to his peers in this west Texas community where the wind blows hard and uninterrupted, and oil pump jacks dot the flat countryside. But in his free time, Petty did something that now casts doubt on hundreds of cases he prosecuted. For years, he moonlighted as a paid clerk for the same judges before whom he argued his cases on behalf of the state. In some cases, he helped write the judges’ orders on his own cases. According to attorneys for at least one of those defendants, death row inmate Clinton Young, working as a judicial clerk gave Petty access to confidential information that gave him an unfair advantage as a prosecutor. Even if he did not use this information, Young’s attorneys said, Petty’s special relationship with t...