Weldon Ralph Petty Jr., a chain-smoking bespectacled attorney, was a quiet fixture at the Midland County courthouse for two decades. By day, he often appeared before judges as an assistant district attorney in the 11-story brown brick courthouse in the heart of the oil boomtown. But by night, he worked as a paid legal assistant for those same jurists—sometimes advising them how to handle criminal cases he also was prosecuting.
For more than a decade, Petty, 78, committed “brazen misconduct” by simultaneously acting as a prosecutor and a paid adviser to supposedly impartial judges, according to a scathing judicial opinion issued April 28. The opinion calls for overturning Midland County’s only death penalty case due to Petty’s prosecutoral misconduct and the judge’s failure to recuse himself, and opens the door for a new trial for Clinton Lee Young, who has been on death row since Petty prosecuted him in 2003.
A February expose by USA Today first reported that Petty was paid by judges as a clerk in at least 350 cases from 2001 until his retirement as an assistant district attorney in mid-2019. At least 73 of the people Petty helped to prosecute remain in prison. Dozens of those convicted recently received letters advising them of Petty’s conflicts of interest and his failure to disclose his side jobs with judges. It’s unclear whether any defense attorneys will file appeals necessary to air other defendants’ claims in court.
