Moonlighting - have I got a second job for you!

Plenty of folks moonlight. Economically, plenty of folks have no choice. And even if they do have an economic choice, plenty of folks like having a little extra jingle in their pockets. (Who doesn't?)

I'm guessing that Ralph Petty, who in his last year working for the Midland (Texas) County DA's Office made over $150K as an assistant prosecutor, was in that little extra jingle category. Not that $150K is such a fortune these days. But I'm a guessing that you can get by pretty well in Midland (Texas) on that kind of a salary.

Petty didn't spend his freetime stamp collecting, bowlng, skeet shooting, making ships in a bottle, or putting his feet up and watching House Hunters International. 

No, siree!

For years, he moonlighted as a paid clerk for the same judges before whom he argued his cases on behalf of the state. In some cases, he helped write the judges’ orders on his own cases.

According to attorneys for at least one of those defendants, death row inmate Clinton Young, working as a judicial clerk gave Petty access to confidential information that gave him an unfair advantage as a prosecutor.

Even if he did not use this information, Young’s attorneys said, Petty’s special relationship with the judges shattered the appearance of impartiality, which is one of the keys to the constitutional guarantee of a fair trial.

All told, Petty – who is now 78 and left the DA’s office in June 2019 – performed legal work for at least nine judges involving the convictions of at least 355 defendants whom he prosecuted...

The sentences of those Petty helped convict range from probation to the death penalty. Seventy-three of them remain imprisoned. Many have since died. (Source: USA Today)

Petty wasn't sneaking around. His moonlit work was all above board "sanctioned by county officials and documented in public invoices."

I don't know about you, but even by Texas judicial standards, this sounds like incredibly bad judgement on the part of the judges and the assistant DA and those sancitioning county officials. I mean, "help[ing]write the judges’ orders on his own cases." Come the f on!

Petty was part of the legal team that convicted Young in a high-profile capital murder trial two years later. Petty’s roles in the case included amending Young’s indictment, examining witnesses at a pretrial hearing and writing the instructions that jurors took with them to deliberate.

On April 11, 2003, those jurors returned a guilty verdict and sentenced Young to death.

What neither the jurors nor Young’s attorneys knew at the time was that Petty was clerking for the judge presiding over the case, John Hyde, who since has died.

“It is a breach of ethical conduct by both of them,” said Elsa Alcala, a former Texas Court of Criminal Appeals judge referring to Petty and the judge. “I don’t know what they were thinking.”

Hard to believe that thinking had much of anything to do with this. It was all about the doing and the probably not incidental jingle in the pocketing. 

The good news is that, even deep in the heat of Texas, Clinton Young has been granted a new trial. He's out on bail.

It's not clear that anything - disbarment, prosecution, clawback of his moonlight loot - will happen to Petty. He's 78 now, retired. What are they going to do to him?

Petty has many defenders, even among defense attorneys he opposed in court. They claim that Petty's an honorable man, and never would have given a judge an opinion that wasn't throroughly based on the law. That may well be, but pardon me while I cough, cough. 

Especially given that, last winter:

...Petty declined to attend a hearing in Young’s case that was scheduled to determine whether his misconduct should result in a new trial for the death row inmate. In a letter to the court, Petty said he was in poor health and feared contracting the coronavirus.

“My appearance at a hearing on the Clinton Lee Young matter should not include a possible death sentence,” he wrote.

Clinton Lee Young's death sentence. Now that's a different matter entirely.

Petty could have attended from his own home. The hearing was held via videoconference. Through his lawyers, Petty also said he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to provide incriminating testimony at the hearing.

Not that there's anything even vaguely POS-y about taking he Fifth Amendment. No, siree.

Whatever happens to Clinton Lee Young, that's some jury in Texas' doing. But I'm pretty sure there's going to be some tightenting of the moonlighting rules for assistant prosecutors down there.