Criminal Law

Texas prison cell-phone scandal making national news

Posted on May 31, 2009
The latest issue of Wired magazine includes a feature on the problem of cell phone smuggling in Texas prisons by Vince Beiser, highlighting the much-ballyhooed case where a death-row inmate began calling state Sen. John Whitmire, launching a statewide lockdown that revealed dozens more phones at units statewide...

Odds and Ends

Posted on May 31, 2009
Here are a few odds and ends that would likely become full posts in their own right if I had more bandwidth to focus on the blog today:End of an eraAs of tomorrow, Americans must present a passport to cross the Mexican and Canadian borders. For my entire lifetime, a driver's license and a declaration of citizenship have sufficed...

Last ditch effort to salvage eyewitness ID reform

Posted on May 30, 2009
In the wake of yet another DNA exoneration based on faulty eyewitness testimony, the 20th out of Dallas, state Sen. Rodney Ellis and Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins held a press conference yesterday at the state capitol calling for immediate action by the Legislature, before it shuts down on Monday, to pass legislation requiring law enforcement agencies to have written procedures on presenting photo lineups...

Big Brother Watch: TX Senate would authorize license plate readers on TX highways

Posted on May 29, 2009
I've been busy elsewhere and neglected to mention that the Texas Senate approved an amendment authorizing the damn license-plate readers after TXDoT denied a request by the DEA last year, discussed previously on Grits here and here. In their blog post on the story, the San Antonio Current lets us know that "Texans who are concerned about Article 33?s Orwellian implications can use a form set up by the ACLU to ask their representatives to call for it to be taken out of the bill...

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Attack on in-prison employment based on phony claims of harm

Posted on May 29, 2009
With all the bills dying at the Texas Legislature, it's a shame to see ones making it through that do more harm than good, which IMO is the case with HB 1914 placing greater restrictions on the small number of "prison industries" programs (PIE) through which private employers pay inmates to work in a commercial business, allowing inmates to contribute to victim compensation, child support payments and even their room and board...

Innocence bills resurrected, doomed as Senate deadline tolls

Posted on May 28, 2009
Wednesday was a big day on the innocence front. It began with the announcement of the 20th DNA exoneration in Dallas (yet another case where an eyewitness picked the wrong person out of a photo lineup), saw the Governor sign the state's compensation bill for falsely convicted inmates, and ended with a couple of innocence bills that died in the House coming back to life as amendments in the Texas Senate...

Cockfighting, piracy, black helicopters and needle exchange

Posted on May 28, 2009
Here are a few more odds and ends from yesterday's Senate proceedings wrapping up the narrative on bills this blog has covered at various times throughout the session:Cockfighting and highway piracySen. John Whitmire tacked on his SB 1529 regulating asset forfeiture "waivers" to an enhancement bill on cockfighting, the Statesman's Mike Ward reports...

Exoneration punctuates need for eyewitness ID reform

Posted on May 27, 2009
As if to punctuate the gravity of the error, the day after the Texas House killed legislation to require eyewitness ID reforms among police, Texas will see its 40th DNA exoneree (the 20th from Dallas) walk out of court a free man today. The Dallas News ("DNA testing clears Dallas County man in 1986 rape of SMU student," May 27) reports that:Jerry Lee Evans matched the description of the man who abducted and raped a woman in Deep Ellum in 1986...

'Chubbing' kills innocence bills, and many others, in Texas House

Posted on May 27, 2009
Given that yesterday was a rare weekday when Grits was silent (due to work and familial duties), it was an awfully big news day both in Texas and nationally on the criminal justice front.I'll post something later about Barack Obama's new US Supreme Court nominee once I know enough about her to have an opinion...

Carona's law enforcement integrity unit another victim of Chubfest 2009

Posted on May 27, 2009
The reform bills mentioned earlier weren't the only good criminal justice bills that died in the House at midnight yesterday.It looks like John Carona's SB 388 - creating a law enforcement integrity unit at DPS to investigate police corruption - was another victim of what Harvey Kronberg called the "Tommy Williams Memorial Day Chub...

Drug war corruption deja vu

Posted on May 25, 2009
I had a serious deja vu moment last night watching 60 Minutes' expose on a bizarre case involving a multijurisdictional drug task force in Missouri in which some 20 people were arrested in an undercover drug sting before it unraveled in a web of lies and scandal...

Voter ID fight puts criminal justice reform bills at risk

Posted on May 23, 2009
In some ways, the comeuppance seems fitting - the Texas Senate early in the session used a parliamentary loophole to get around the so-called 2/3 rule to pass Voter ID legislation, and now House Democrats have created a de facto 2/3 rule to block it. An example of smart political chess, if I ever saw one...

Exploring Texas crime data

Posted on May 22, 2009
Having posted an initial reaction to press coverage of the new Uniform Crime Reporting data (which showed so-called "index crimes" declining by 3% overall in Texas), let's adumbrate a few more details from this new dataset out of the Department of Public Safety:Despite declining crime last year and for most of the decade, according to the UCR, the number of adult Texans arrested increased by 2% in 2008, just as it increased in six of the last seven years...

Declining crime would be better news if data weren't corrupt, incomplete

Posted on May 22, 2009
As has been discussed many times on this blog, data in Texas about both ongoing crime and criminal histories are incomplete and often corrupt, with wide variations from county to county and department to department regarding what gets reported and how...

Dallas News: Pass innocence bills

Posted on May 21, 2009
In an editorial titled, "Legislature, pass these bills," the Dallas News this morning encouraged the Texas Legislature to approve several innocence-related bills still awaiting final votes this week, three of which could be heard as early as today on the House floor: Despite advances in lineup techniques in recent years, many Texas police agencies have failed even to adopt internal guidelines or practices...

Only a hit dog hollers: Brady violation at root of latest Dallas exoneration

Posted on May 21, 2009
I've read this story though several times now, and I think former prosecutor Patricia Hogue protests just a bit too much in her shrill accusation that Dallas DA Craig Watkins and his Conviction Integrity Unit misled the Court of Criminal Appeals and let a rapist free...

Guard pay, 2 TYC units snubbed in budget

Posted on May 20, 2009
The Statesman's Mike Ward has a couple of budget updates that will interest Grits readers:Prison guards get 3.5% raiseTwo TYC lockups on closure list, againBoth these are half-a-loaf solutions. Prison officials last year said they needed a 20% pay hike to solve their understaffing crisis, so one supposes this amount won't do much to fix that problem in the near term...

Harrell out as TYC Ombudsman; Senate to discuss TYC/TJPC Sunset

Posted on May 20, 2009
Emily Ramshaw at the Dallas News reports that my former boss Will Harrell will leave his post as TYC Ombudsman and become "director of special projects" under Cherie Townsend at the Youth Commission. Good luck to Will, and to TYC. If history is any guide, you'll both need it...

Bill requiring corroboration for jailhouse snitches heads to Governor

Posted on May 20, 2009
The Texas House this afternoon (on third reading) passed the same version of SB 1681 (by Hinojosa/Gallego) as did the Senate, so legislation requiring corroboration to secure a conviction based on jailhouse informant testimony will now head to Governor Perry's desk...

Tweaking the machinery of death

Posted on May 19, 2009
There's a bill up on today's Texas House calendar which I've not tracked closely - SB 1091 creating a capital writs committee for indigent defendants (by Senators Ellis and Duncan) - that deserves Grits readers attention. See the House Research Organization report for background on the bill...

UK to police: Cameras in public spaces don't reduce crime

Posted on May 19, 2009
After learning recently that Dallas crime declined less in areas covered by surveillance cameras than in the city overall, I'm unsurprised to see more longitudinal research out of the UK - widely considered the world's most surveiled society - showing that surveillance cameras in public spaces don't reduce crime...

Prosecutors justify opposition to DNA testing

Posted on May 19, 2009
Several readers forwarded me a copy of The New York Times' piece yesterday about prosecutors blocking access to exculpatory DNA testing.It's a good read and covers the terrain well. One point I'd add from Texas' experience (particularly in Dallas), is that there's a potential unintended consequence for the state avoiding DNA testing: If the defendant turns out to be actually innocent, the clock may be ticking on the statute of limitations for prosecuting the real offender...

Can't take a hint: Shanda Perkins back for Round Two

Posted on May 19, 2009
I'd seen this article in her hometown paper declaring Shanda Perkins, who the Texas Senate recently rejected by a 27-4 margin for a $95K per year slot on the Board of Pardons and Parole, thought there was still a chance for her nomination to get through this session, but it seemed like piling on to make too much of it...

Regard for Keller plummets among Houston lawyers

Posted on May 18, 2009
According to the Houston Chronicle's Legal Trade blog, respect among Harris County lawyers for Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Sharon Keller has plummeted in recent years:The Houston Bar Association's judicial evaluation poll released [May 8] (see it here) shows some big losses in confidence in jurists who have been in the news - especially Sharon Keller on the state's highest criminal appellate court and David Medina on the state supreme court...

Bill creating repository for traffic-stop data needs to move if it's going to pass

Posted on May 18, 2009
As the 81st Texas Legislature winds down, everyone around the capitol is busy surveying the terrain for the few, remaining bills among the 7,000+ filed that survived the carnage, and in doing so this morning I notice that a good bill many years in the making: SB 1120 by West, which would reduce and standardize the amount of data gathered for so-called racial profiling reports at traffic stops and create a statewide central repository to gather and compile them...

Habeas writs by the numbers

Posted on May 17, 2009
Discussing post-conviction habeas corpus writs, a topic about which I've been learning much more this session, Doc Berman says he'd like to see more state-level numbercrunching:US District Judge Lynn Adelman's new article titled "The Great Writ Diminished" aspires to "stimulate a discussion about the current state of habeas corpus...

'Born Behind Bars'

Posted on May 17, 2009
The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal today published a nice piece by Logan Carver ("Born Behind Bars") exploring what happens to pregnant women in the Lubbock jail and in Texas state prisons. About 250 women per year give birth in a Texas prison hospital, the A-J reports, and dozens more pregnant women (nobody knows how many) are housed in Texas county jails at any given time...

'Is there credibility in citizen journalism?'

Posted on May 16, 2009
At Digital Journal last week, the question was raised, "Is there credibility in citizen journalism?" But from my perspective, that turns the question on its head. Instead I'd ask, "Would citizen journalism exist if the mainstream media had more credibility?"Don't get me wrong, I think we need the mainstream media, but as one of these so-called citizen journalists (that's just a "blogger" for those of us in the flyover states) I can tell you part of my motivation for doing this is precisely a reaction to my own criticisms of how the MSM cover stories...

Chatman prosecutor: 'Let's get this system fixed'

Posted on May 15, 2009
James Fry, a former Dallas ADA and protoge' of District Attorney Henry Wade who prosecuted recent DNA-exoneree Charles Chatman's case nearly 30 years ago, reflects on his role in the false conviction and the implications of recent DNA exonerations for the justice system in an excellent Dallas Morning News op ed titled, "I put away an innocent man," which concludes: Chatman's case was not a capital crime, but the problems that led to his wrongful conviction raise the question: How can we continue carrying out executions in Texas when we know the system is so prone to error? For years, Texas has led the nation in the number of executions...

Revenge of McLovin: Bills good and bad try to sneak in under deadline

Posted on May 15, 2009
Taps played in the Texas House last night as the clock struck midnight, signaling the death of several thousand bills filed in the lower chamber that didn't make it out by the deadline, at least for this session. (Now, of course, begins the biennial sport of tacking on dead bills to still-moving legislation...

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