An ‘Utterly Bonkers’ Miscarriage of Justice in Texas

There are individual court cases that are perfect symbols of larger injustices, and earlier this month a Black woman named Erma Wilson lost a Court of Appeals decision that highlighted decades of judicial distortion of American civil rights law.

In 2001, a Texas jury convicted Wilson of cocaine possession. It was a nonviolent drug offense, and she was sentenced to eight years of community supervision. She appealed her conviction, but she lost. She never served jail time, but her conviction still had profound consequences on her life. Wilson was never able to achieve her dream of becoming a nurse.

Then, 20 years after her trial, she learned that she had been subject to a monstrous injustice. To quote a Fifth Circuit panel that reviewed her case, something happened at her trial that was “utterly bonkers.” A judge in the case called it a “DEFCON 1 legal scandal.” A prosecutor in the case, Weldon “Ralph” Petty Jr, was also working as a clerk for the judge during her trial — and hundreds of others.

As Jessica Priest reported in USA Today in 2021, Petty “performed legal work for at least nine judges involving the convictions of at least 355 defendants whom he prosecuted.” The defendants’ sentences in those cases “range from probation to the death penalty.”

Law clerks perform vital roles for judges. They frequently help both to research cases and draft legal opinions. In a very real sense, Wilson’s prosecutor functioned as both prosecutor and as part of the judge’s team, helping the judge decide the case that he tried. While moonlighting for local judges, he sometimes even “helped write the judges’ orders on his own cases.”

The violation of Wilson’s rights was so egregious that no one believes she received a fair trial. The prosecutor lost his law license. The truth is that it’s hard to imagine a more obvious violation of her rights.