Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> Grits for Breakfast

Criminal Law

: Grits for Breakfast

Innocence Commission bill up this morning

I'll be testifying this morning at an 8 a.m. subcommittee meeting of the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee (live video here) to support legislation by Rep. Ruth McLendon on behalf of the Innocence Project of Texas to create an innocence commission in Texas to identify causes of false convictions and ways to prevent them.An innocence commission would provide a way to systematically vet the errors that cause false convictions, similar to the way hospitals hold a "morbidity and mortality" conference after someone dies in their care to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future.Texas' recent string of DNA exonerations have provided a unique window into the mechanics of false convictions. This bill would create a mechanism for formally identifying sources of error and suggesting ways to reduce their number in the future...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on March 09, 2009 (boomark / email).