Legal post-mortem
The odd, truly odd, events relating to Charles Hood’s on – again -off-again- on – again execution date Tuesday night is among the oddest events in capital litigation in recent memory. Two must read pieces come from ethics blogs, the Legal Ethics Forum & the Legal Profession Blog (as someone who is petrified of effing up and losing the bar card, these sites are tops of my RSS feeds).
more here
Alan Childress @ LPB notes:
I am flat wrung out a day after following minute-by-minute via emails the near-execution of Charles Hood in Texas, though I hope the twitter-like effort was worth it to some of our readers who were not getting updated info from regular media sources. It may actually turn out someday that twitter will not just be used to catalog the next time a cat sneezes (OMG!). But tired I am: the case leaves not just a weariness of seeing a society too quick to judge humans and not quick enough to judge authority figures, but also a sense of sadness for all of us who expect more from judges — and way more from a system meant to be about declaring guilt and innocence, or right and wrong, and not just powerful and powerless.Please read some extra-inning thoughts on this very odd night, wonderfully stated the day after by Andy Perlman (plus replies by John Steele and me, in comments) over at LEF here. His post is an EXCELLENT post mortem analysis, with interesting and useful links, and there’s a bonus: a nice bibliography by Patrick O’Donnell in comments (wouldn’t you just hate to be the one guy to write a book and no Patrick O’Donnell noticed?). Over there, I comment on why everyone should be disappointed in this spectacle, not just knee jerk liberals.
Andrew Perlman @ LEF likewise weighs in:
Mr. Hood’s execution did not take place last night, but not because the Texas courts recognized the seriousness of Mr. Hood’s judicial ethics argument. Rather, the prison had the legal authority to execute Mr. Hood only until midnight, and the legal skirmishes prevented the execution from taking place in time.
I wish I could say that I’m surprised that the Texas courts have failed to address Mr. Hood’s allegations that his judge secretly slept with the prosecutor during Mr. Hood’s trial. But I can’t.
Our country’s criminal justice system regularly produces disturbing law, particularly in death penalty cases. Consider that we have a line of cases that turns on how long a public defender can sleep through a trial before the proceedings are considered to be unconstitutional. (You have to sleep through quite a bit.) We have prosecutors frequently and willfully concealing exculpatory evidence from defense counsel, and we have a disciplinary system unwilling to punish prosecutors for doing so. We have public defenders and, more disturbingly, capital defender systems that are so woefully underfunded (see here and here) that lawyers can’t even conduct a basic investigation into serious felony cases. Judges will even jail public defenders if they aren’t ready to go to trial within hours of being assigned to handle a case. And we have television reporters who question the motives of criminal defense attorneys for protecting a client’s confidences, but those reporters fail to question why prosecutors and juries would have convicted innocent men.
So as disturbing as it is to discover that Mr. Hood’s judge was sleeping with the prosecutor in Mr. Hood’s case and as disturbing as it is to discover that the Texas courts (and the Texas governor) have so far been unwilling to do anything about it, I can’t say that I’m surprised. If you are, just dig a little deeper into the Wonderland of capital punishment and you’ll see just how deep this rabbit hole goes.
