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HOUSTON -- A judge moved a condemned inmate's hearing date Thursday so that it's no longer scheduled after his execution date.
State District Judge Greg Brewer in suburban Dallas moved the date to Monday, two days before convicted killer Charles Dean Hood is set to die. Brewer's decision reverses a decision by another judge, who had set a similar hearing for Sept. 12.
The hearing will address arguments that Brewer's murder trial was unfair because of an alleged unethical romantic relationship between the judge presiding over the trial and the district attorney prosecuting the case.
Brewer ordered retired Judge Verla Sue Holland and former Collin County District Attorney Tom O'Connell to be ready to be interviewed by lawyers Monday -- if Brewer agrees with Hood's attorney that the pair should be deposed.
Robert Dry, the judge who had set the post-execution hearing date, took himself off the case Wednesday, citing a "previous business relationship" with Holland's ex-husband as the reason.
Hood's lawyers say a secret relationship between Holland and O'Connell tainted the 1990 trial in which Hood was convicted and condemned for killing a couple at a Plano home.
Holland, who in the mid-1990s served as a judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, and O'Connell, now in private practice, have declined to address the allegations of engaging in a secret affair.
"It certainly is the first step and what we've been asking for all along, simply the opportunity to argue in front of a judge that we should be entitled to these depositions before Charles Hood's scheduled execution," Greg Wiercioch, one of Hood's lawyers, said. "It doesn't mean we're going to get the deposition and, if we get them, that the state won't appeal.
"There's no telling what's going to happen."
Hood, 39, was scheduled to die June 17, but his lethal injection, which had cleared numerous lengthy last-day appeals to the courts, was aborted by state prison officials after they ran out of time to carry out the execution by midnight.
Hood is a former topless-club bouncer who was 20 when he was arrested in Indiana in the fatal shootings of Tracie Lynn Wallace, 26, a former dancer at the club, and her boyfriend, Ronald Williamson, 46, at Williamson's home in Plano in 1989.
Hood has maintained his innocence. He was driving Williamson's $70,000 Cadillac at the time of his arrest. Fingerprint evidence tied him to the murder scene. Hood said that his prints were at Williamson's home because he was living there and that he had permission to drive the car.
Evidence also tied Hood, who had served two years in an Indiana prison for passing bad checks, to the rape of a 15-year-old girl.
