A LEGAL scandal over a judge’s affair with a prosecutor in Texas has raised embarrassing new questions about the fairness of the state’s criminal justice system and its zeal for carrying out the death penalty.

Lawyers are demanding a new trial for Charles Hood, a convicted double murderer and death row inmate whose execution has been scheduled and postponed six times, most recently last Tuesday.

US legal scholars have been appalled by reports that Verla Sue Holland, the judge who presided over Hood’s 1990 trial, was at the time conducting a clandestine affair with Thomas O’Connell, the state attorney who was prosecuting the case. Several law professors agreed that however compelling the evidence in the case, it was unthinkable for a murder trial to proceed if the judge and prosecutor were romantically involved.

Hood’s lawyers announced last week that both Holland and O’Connell had admitted to the affair under oath in depositions given to a federal judge. “They had an intimate sexual relationship for many years,” the lawyers wrote in a reprieve request to Rick Perry, Texas’s Republican governor.

William Sessions, a former director of the FBI, was among a group of 22 prominent former judges and prosecutors who also urged Perry to halt the execution while the affair was investigated.

“I can’t understand how anyone could reach the conclusion that there’s no bias,” added David Zarfes, associate dean of the University of Chicago law school.

Hood had been working as a bouncer at a strip club in Plano, Texas, when he was arrested in 1989 for robbery and the murder of both his boss Ronald Williamson and Tracie Lynn Wallace, a former dancer at the club.

For the past 18 years Hood has been exhausting his avenues of appeal. As his latest execution date neared, his lawyers finally tracked down a former assistant prosecutor who claimed the affair was “common knowledge” at the county bar; but the appeals court dismissed the new evidence as hearsay that could have been presented earlier.

As an outcry grew in legal circles, Hood’s lawyers urged Perry to grant a reprieve on the grounds that a clandestine affair between judge and prosecutor amounted to “a shocking and devastating indictment of the Texas criminal justice system”.

A federal judge eventually agreed Holland and O’Connell should testify under oath. But to the dismay of Hood’s lawyers, their statements were ignored when the appeals court finally allowed a postponement of the execution on unrelated legal grounds.

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