Lawyer’s Affair Wins Man a New Trial : Courts: The defense attorney had an off-and-on romance with the wife of his client, who was convicted of arranging her first husband’s murder.

A convicted murderer won a new trial Thursday because of his wife’s secret sexual relationship with the Woodland Hills lawyer who defended him against charges that he arranged the killing of the woman’s first husband.

A state Court of Appeal, in the first ruling of its kind, held that the “on-and-off affair” between attorney William C. Melcher and his client’s wife during the trial created a conflict of interest violating the right to effective counsel.

“(The) defendant’s attorney was involved in an affair, which introduced deception and duplicity into the advocate-client relationship, which by definition must be grounded in trust and fidelity,” Appellate Justice Jerome A. Smith wrote in a 3-0 decision.

Among other things, the panel noted, the conflict could have tempted the lawyer to allow his client to be convicted and imprisoned so the affair could continue. The conflict was heightened by Melcher’s additional role in advising the woman on her own potential for liability in the slaying, the court said.

Melcher, reached for comment on the ruling, emphatically denied that any sexual relationship took place. “These allegations remain totally unfounded and untrue,” he said. “There was no conflict of any kind . . . and I devoted monumental energy to his defense.”

The defendant, Robert Howard Singer, 55, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1982 for the contract killing of San Jose executive Howard Witkin, first husband of Singer’s wife, Judith. An earlier trial had ended in a deadlocked jury.

A hearing was ordered after Melcher’s secretary found and copied a series of letters from Judith Singer to Melcher revealing a sexual relationship. The letters referred to the attorney as “The Cowboy” and “Sharp Spurs” and described her as “The Princess.”

One such letter read: “My darling, as our animal friends might say: you make my quill quiver, hump hatch, wings wiggle, tail tingle, beak blister, hindquarters heat, antennas active, pouch puff.”

At the hearing, Judith Singer acknowledged that there had been a sporadic affair with Melcher as he commuted to the trial from Los Angeles, with a tacit understanding it would end once the case was over. Melcher denied impropriety, saying that he had become impotent and uninterested in sex after a 1978 vasectomy--a claim supported by his own wife but rejected by the hearing judge.

The judge found that there was a conflict of interest in the case but refused to grant Singer a new trial because there was insufficient evidence that he had been denied effective representation.

The appeal court found, however, that even the potential for conflict was serious enough to warrant reversal of Singer’s conviction. In such circumstances, the panel said, a defense attorney might be tempted to allow his client to be convicted or “pull his punches” to protect his lover as a potential witness in the case.

The court acknowledged the lack of precedent for such a case but noted that in 1985 another appellate panel had overturned a conviction because the prosecutor and defense attorney were dating during a trial. “Here the conflict is all on the defense side,” Smith said in a 37-page opinion joined by Appellate Justices John Benson and J. Clinton Peterson. “. . . (But) public confidence suffers equally when conflicts of the kind present here exist.”

Thursday’s ruling was welcomed by David A. Nickerson of San Francisco, one of the attorneys representing Robert Singer on appeal. “He is very, very happy and looking forward to going back to San Jose and getting a fair trial,” Nickerson said. Singer, now incarcerated at San Quentin state prison, would be eligible to seek bail at that time.

“This was a novel case--apparently not anything like it in the country,” said the attorney. “We think the decision was a correct one.”

A state lawyer representing prosecutors in the case could not be reached and it was not known whether the ruling would be appealed to the state Supreme Court.