07 May 2021 :

Court Recommends New Trial for Clinton Young.
The recommendation will now go to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which will issue a final ruling on whether Young will receive a new trial. Finding “brazen misconduct” by a prosecutor who withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense and then secretly served as the trial judge’s law clerk in the case, Midland County Judge Sid Harle has recommended that death-row prisoner Clinton Young be granted a new trial. In a 30-page factfinding order issued on April 26, 2021, Harle excoriated former assistant district attorney Ralph Petty and the Midland County District Attorney’s office for “shocking prosecutorial misconduct that destroyed any semblance of a fair trial” in Young’s case. That conduct, which Harle said was known to at least 2 senior members of the District Attorney’s office, included serving as part of the prosecution team that tried Young for murder and defended his conviction and death sentence on appeal while simultaneously acting as judicial clerk and legal adviser for the judge who was presiding over the trial and subsequent appeals in the trial court. Harle said that Petty violated Young’s due process rights by failing to disclose his dual role in the case and that trial judge John Hyde should have recused himself or been disqualified as a result of the conflict. “The bias created by Judge Hyde’s employment of Mr. Petty … deprived Mr. Young of due process of law” and required Hyde’s disqualification from the case as a matter of law, Harle wrote. “The appearance of impropriety in Mr. Young’s ease is clear: … the court’s law clerk was also the prosecutor for the State.” As a result, Harle recommended to the appeals court that all judgments entered against Young at trial be declared “null and void.”

https://www.mrt.com/news/crime/article/Midland-385th-Court-recommends-new-trial-for-16143212.php