Criminal Law

Statesman plugs "D.A. Confidential"

Posted on November 29, 2009
The Austin Statesman published a feature today on a new blog by a Travis County prosecutor, D.A. Confidential. According to courts reporter Steven Kreytak:Mark Pryor said that friends, neighbors and fellow lawyers regularly ask him about his job as a felony prosecutor in Travis County...

Most Houston police suicides received no treatment

Posted on November 28, 2009
According to the Houston Chronicle (Nov. 28), 90% of HPD police officers who commit suicide had not previously received counseling, even though a psych unit was created at the department in 1979 after six officer committed suicide in two years. Four HPD officers have committed suicide in 2009...

Colorado may reduce drug-possession sentences to lower costs; should Texas?

Posted on November 28, 2009
Colorado is considering reducing drug sentences as part of an effort to reduce prison costs, reports the Colorado Springs Gazette ("Prison Crowding: $700 million is too much; release nonviolent offenders early, panel says," Nov. 22):Colorado prisons are overflowing with inmates, at a cost of nearly $700 million a year to taxpayers, in part due to mandatory sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, a panel of state lawmakers and sentence reform advocates said at a town hall meeting Saturday...

NY Times sees new bipartisan consensus on criminal justice, ignores old one

Posted on November 27, 2009
A story by Adam Liptak published on the front page of the New York Times Tuesday has been getting a lot of attention: "Right and Left Join Forces on Criminal Justice." It described growing "signs of an emerging consensus on the right that the criminal justice system is an aspect of big government that must be contained...

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'Chairman of Texas forensic science panel oversteps his authority'

Posted on November 27, 2009
The title of this post is the headline of a Fort Worth Star Telegram editorial today chastising Williamson County DA and Forensic Science Commission Chairman John Bradley for an array of recent moves aimed at clouding the commission's work in secrecy...

James Woodard pardoned!

Posted on October 01, 2009
Congrats to James Woodard, Texas' longest-serving DNA exoneree (28 years) who finally received his formal pardon yesterday from Governor Perry. AP notes that "The official declaration of James Woodard's innocence clears the way for the Dallas man to collect millions of dollars from the state...

More jail inspections unannounced, TCJS creating catalog of best practices

Posted on October 01, 2009
Texas Commission on Jail Standards chief Adan Munoz spoke to a group of Rotarians in Sherman and the writeup in the Herald-Democrat contained several interesting tidbits. For starters:Tom Nuckols and Denis Cowhig asked Munoz if he could give any examples of any counties that had adopted policies to reverse increasingly high incarceration rates...

Craig Watkins learns the Golden Rule of politics

Posted on September 30, 2009
I've been ignoring the tit for tat feud between the Dallas County Commissioners Court and District Attorney Craig Watkins because it has become personal, petty, boring, and I hoped it'd go away after the county budget passed. But apparently the hard feelings engendered during that and other recent spats have continued to escalate and yesterday the Commissioners Court decided to show Watkins who's boss, hiring private counsel to advise them on an investigation of two constables over Watkins' bitter opposition...

Perry scuttles Willingham arson inquiry with new Forensic Commission appointment: John Bradley

Posted on September 30, 2009
Outrageous!It'd be hard to make this up; it seems more like caricature or some tale from days of yore out of Tammany Hall, but it's actually today's news: Governor Rick Perry has ousted the head of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which had displeased him by soliciting what turned out to be damning expert opinion regarding the Cameron Todd Willingham case (in which supposedly expert arson testimony used to convict Willingham and justify his execution was later debunked by modern science)...

Autopsy caseloads rise thanks to shortage of forensic pathologists

Posted on September 30, 2009
Here are two new stories in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's series on forensic errors in Texas autopsies:Autopsy caseloads require stopgap measuresPathology shortage poses concern about autopsiesThe issue of a pathologist shortage was raised prominently in Chapter 9 of the National Academy of Science's report from last spring critiquing the non-scientific basis of modern forensics...

Chief Harold Hurtt: Move along, nothing to see now at Houston crime lab

Posted on September 29, 2009
Houston police chief Harold Hurtt had an editorial in the Houston Chronicle recently declaring it a new day a the Houston Crime Lab, that by achieving accreditation the organization had professionalized to the point where it should be cut slack for past abuses...

Add autopsies to list of frequently shoddy forensics

Posted on September 29, 2009
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram yesterday launched a series on shoddy forensics in Texas autopsies with a story titled "With little oversight in Texas, autopsies often careless." Here's a tasty excerpt:.over the years, Texas medical examiners have misidentified bodies, botched examinations and had to do a double take on cases of individuals later exonerated by law enforcement...

Harris County Commissioners Court approves public defender office

Posted on September 29, 2009
Via press releae from state Sen. Rodney Ellis' office: (Houston , TX )// Harris County Commissioners approved the creation of a public defenders office at today's mid-year review hearing. The decision came after both the District Courts Administrator and the County Courts Manager recommended its creation...

Data don't match Austin police policy claims on investigating citizen complaints

Posted on September 28, 2009
It's interesting to learn that the percentage of sustained complaints against police officers has gone up under Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo, but there's something a bit squirrelly about attributing the increase to a new policy having supervisors investigate low-level complaints instead of Internal Affairs...

Collin 'restitution center' closing as failed experment

Posted on September 28, 2009
Following a statewide trend toward getting rid of them, Collin County's probation department will soon close its in-house "restitution center," reports the Dallas News. Here's how the story opens:Pay the fine or do the time. That's been the philosophy behind the Collin County Restitution Center...

Meet Phillip Linder: Craig Watkins' 2010 Republican opponent

Posted on September 28, 2009
The Dallas Observer has an interview with the only serious, announced Republican in the 2010 Dallas District Attorney's race who will apparently be the guy competing with Craig Watkins for the slot next year: Meet Phillip Linder.Espeically after rookie DA Pat Lykos in Harris County held serve for Republicans while Democrats took judgships countywide in the 2008 elections, the GOP will likely see this race in Dallas and the 2010 county judge contest as their last, best chance for a countywide pushback in Big D...

Elected officials' guide to jail population management

Posted on September 28, 2009
Via Bob Cushman, here's a new publication from the National Institute of Corrections, prepared in cooperation with the National Association of Counties, to help counties better cope with jail overcowoding through more aggressive use of pretrial services:Jail Population Management: Elected County Officials' Guide to Pretrial Services (pdf)There are more than a few counties in the state that could stand for their leaders to read and implement the jail-population reduction strategies described in this short manual...

"How to end the slaughter in Juarez?"

Posted on September 28, 2009
The title to this post is the headline to a troubling Houston Chonicle story about how resistant drug violence in Juarez has proven to military and police interference. It's also arguably a much more pressing foreign policy question for the United States than anything happening in Afghanistan...

Too little data to draw conclusions about spike in Houston police shootings

Posted on September 28, 2009
One of my all-time favorite lines from a Simpsons episode came at the abrupt end of a chaotic story when the family tried to discern what the "moral" to it all was. Finally, Lisa suggested, "Perhaps there is no moral to the story," to which Homer eagerly agreed, replying it was "just a bunch of stuff that happened...

More people accused by dog 'scent lineups' freed, but FBI now using technique

Posted on September 27, 2009
Yet more people were identified this week who'd been falsely accused by dogs in "scent lineups"after the Innocence Project of Texas released a new report (pdf) on Fort Bend Sheriff's Deputy Keith Pikett and his bloodhounds. The Houston Chronicle describes the case of Curvis Bickham ("Scent lineups may be failing smell test," Sept...

Politics push toward expanded fingerprinting, biometric profiles

Posted on September 27, 2009
Three thematically related stories related to fingerprints caught my eye this morning and may interest Grits readers:Fingerprint database obscures histories, Houston ChronicleConflicts over San Jose police fingerprint network, San Jose MercuryFBI building system that blows away fingerprinting, ComputerworldA common theme for all three is that there's intense political pressure to expand fingerprint systems and integrate them nationally...

I Am Art Acevedo

Posted on September 27, 2009
Could the headline to this post, especially if written anonymously in a critical blog comment, lead to third degree felony charges? I didn't mean to harm Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo, but certainly I'd like to bring to ruin his plans to pursue anonymous commenters for potential criminal charges or civil litigation...

DOJ grant pays for peer mentors during post-TYC reentry

Posted on September 27, 2009
Here's something they're doing with federal grant funds in South Texas that merits expansion statewide. According to the San Antonio Business Journal:The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention will award Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Texas $625,000 in grant funding over the next three years to provide mentoring services to juvenile offenders being released from Texas Youth Commission facilities...

"Brick City"

Posted on September 26, 2009
Last night we watched the first episode of a new documentary from the Sundance Channel, "Brick City,"about fighting crime in Newark, N.J. produced by Forest Whitaker (available in the free movies on demand section for Time Warner subscribers).It had been billed as Newark meets The Wire, though it's not living up to that yet...

Battered escapee was TYC alum

Posted on September 25, 2009
In 2007, the Texas Legislature changed the max age for Texas Youth Commission inmates from 21 to 19, sending 19-20 year olds who committed their crimes as juveniles to state prisons. But perhaps in 2011 - after the administration has had time to implement the Sunset bill and get its feet under them after a period of rough transition - lawmakers should rethink that decision...

"How does the governor think Willingham killed his kids if not by arson?"

Posted on September 25, 2009
Michael Landauer at the Dallas News Death Penalty Blog poses two absolutely excellent questions about the Cameron Todd Willingham case, where arson testimony used to convict Willingham was later debunked by modern science after his execution for killing his children:"How does the governor think Willingham killed his kids if not by arson?," and "Why is the prosecutor who took Willingham's life smiling?"The question for the governor referenced this story where Perry actually put air quotes around "latter-day supposed experts" when describing to reporters why he still thought Todd Willingham was really guilty, something he said he believed even if the conclusion of arson was wrong...

Prosecutors ask SCOTUS for 'absolute immunity' when fabricating evidence

Posted on September 25, 2009
I'm very much looking forward to the oral arguments forthcoming at the US Supreme Court on November 4 regarding Pottawattamie County vs. McGhee, et. al., in which SCOTUS will decide whether prosecutors have "absolute immunity" when they fabricate evidence and present it at trial...

Harris County has big financial incentives to create new public defender

Posted on September 24, 2009
The Harris County Commissioner's Court next week (September 29) is scheduled to consider a proposal to create a public defender office, and in preparation the Texas Fair Defense Project yesterday issued a new "white paper" (pdf) detailing benefits the county could expect if it establishes one...

Taser death in Laredo

Posted on September 23, 2009
When Tasers first came out they were billed as a non-lethal alternative to firearms.In reality, both parts of that claim were false. People have died from Taser shocks, and far from being an "alternative" to firearms, most police Taser discharges occur in situations where shooting the suspect with a gun would not be justified under standard police policies...

Emptying prisons makes Wired magazine 'Smart List'

Posted on September 23, 2009
Earlier this year I was asked by Texas Monthly to submit a "Big Idea' for Texas and I suggested radically reducing the state's prison population:Texas should dramatically slash its prison population and eliminate a majority of felony crimes. We have criminalized too many different activities: Texas has 2,324 separate felonies on the books, including 11 involving oysters...

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