Lauren notes the NYT article on the Charles Dean Hood case. The first sentence of the article is:

Charles Dean Hood was sentenced to death in 1990 by a Texas judge who had been sleeping with the prosecutor in his case.

Only those readers who make it halfway down the article find out that the affair ended three years before the trial. Readers never do find out that the jury, not the judge, is the primary decision-maker on capital-case sentencing in Texas. Simply saying that Hood was sentenced to death by the judge leaves a reader with the impression that she made the discretionary sentencing judgment call in the case, which is not true.

That is not to defend what happened in this case, but there is no reason to make it sound worse than it really was.