The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest criminal appeals court in the state, refused to grant Charles D. Hood a new trial despite the fact that the judge and the prosecutor were having an affair.

The affair had been rumored in Collin County, Texas for some time. But it was only confirmed last year when Hood’s attorney deposed the judge, Verla Sue Holland and the prosecutor, Thomas S. O’Connell, Jr. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the motion for a new trial was not timely.

After the 1990 trial Holland was elected to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals where she was a colleague of eight of the nine judges who upheld Hood’s conviction.

It should be noted that Sharon Keller. chief judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, is under investigation for ordering the clerk’s office to close at 5:00 pm. on the day Michael Wayne Richard, was put to death. Earlier that day the United States Supreme Court granted review in Baze v. Rees, a case questioning the same method of lethal injection that was to be used on Richard, despite Richard’s lawyers requesting that the clerk’s office stay open late so they could file a writ of habeas corpus. The filing was delayed due to computer problems.