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...

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...

NEWS (7/17/20) — Arizona: Former Maricopa County homicide prosecutor Juan Martinez, who has repeatedly been cited for misconduct in death-penalty prosecutions, has been disbarred.  Martinez consented to the action by the State Bar of Arizona, avoiding a public hearing on multiple charges of sexually harassing female co-workers in the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.  The disbarment trial was also expected to include evidence that, during the high-profile capital murder trial of Jodi Arias, Martinez leaked information to a blogger with whom he was having a sexual relationship and then lied to investigators about their relationship. Martinez’s disbarment comes less than three months after the Arizona Supreme Court had reprimanded him on findings of prosecutorial misconduct in five different capital cases.  Martinez is one of at least six prosecutors who have been named prosecutor of the year by the Arizona Prosecuting Attorneys Advisory Committee whom...