The issue with the code above is the return statement, most likely inserted during development, with the good intention to remove it later, since the "bit of random junk" that follows would have validated the server's certificate.
But it doesn't. It's calling the exact same function. As your sibling comment remarked, it looked like someone really frustrated with why they were getting a stack-overflow error and gave up.
I'm not sure if things are different with the Android compiler, but javac will not compile code with an unreachable statement after a return like that.