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Salon scoop finally gets some bounce

By Mark Obbie

Freelance criminal justice journalist Alan Berlow (pictured here) and Salon magazine deserve a victory lap for exposing an injustice that spared, at least temporarily, a Texas convict from execution last night. The bizarre twist is that Berlow's article exposing the issue was published three years ago -- prior to an the convict's previously set execution date. Charles Alan Hood came within 90 minutes of being executed yesterday for a 1989 double murder. After a flurry of more than a dozen appeals in state and federal courts, the state called off the execution because it ran out of time before the death warrant expired. Just last week, Hood's lawyers filed papers challenging the fairness of Hood's 1990 trial, based on a reported affair at the time between Hood's prosecutor and the judge in the case. Journalists covering yesterday's events had mixed success in explaining why the controversy is only now getting a hearing -- after rumors of the affair throughout Hood's 18 years on death row, and three years after Berlow aired the evidence in his June 2005 Salon story (which he followed with this last week). Veteran AP Texas death row reporter Michael Graczyk, whose story gets the most mileage nationwide (and even in major Texas papers such as the Houston Chronicle and Fort Worth Star-Telegram), doesn't touch on this basic question. The New York Times' Adam Ellick and Austin American-Statesman's Steven Kraytak barely do. The Dallas Morning News' news story, by Diane Jennings, goes into more detail about it. But the most complete chronology comes from a Chron columnist, Rick Casey, who offers the lawyers' explanation for turning such old news into a new dispute -- because they only recently got enough on-the-record evidence that they could take it to court. That doesn't completely explain what's been happening for the past three, or 18, years. But at least it satisfies smart readers' curiosity.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on June 18, 2008 (boomark / email).