Hood's execution stayed
From Grits for Breakfast: On September 9, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed the execution of death row inmate Charles Hood, saying that it will reconsider the propriety of jury instructions in a claim that the Court had rejected last year.
Hood's attorneys asked the Court to stay the execution based on the revelations that Hood's trial judge was sleeping with the prosecutor in his case, but instead the Court dodged the issue and based its stay on the previously denied issue of improper jury instructions.
For some time, the trial judge and prosecutor had refused to answer questions about their undisclosed relationship during the time of Hood's trial, but after Hood's attorneys filed a civil suit seeking damages and a district judge ordered them to submit to depositions, they admitted the affair.
Despite the admission of a sexual relationship between judge and prosecutor, which seems would be an obvious denial of the right to a fair trial before an unbiased tribunal, a letter to the governor from 22 former judges and prosecutors, and the attorney general's request that the matter be looked into, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals held that the claim of impropriety came too late, instead ordering the stay based on new developments in the law on jury nullification instructions.
Grits points out that the new development in the law of jury nullification instructions is a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case Smith v. Texas, which came before the appeal was denied in Hood's case in June of 2008. Therefore, the Court gave the go-ahead for the execution despite U.S. Supreme Court precedent on jury instructions at the time. The politics of state-sponsored killings in Texas is truly a marvel.
