Criminal Law

More border sheriff criminality ... this time on the Red River

Posted on January 27, 2009
The latest elected border Sheriff to go down in flames over corruption charges comes from the Oklahoma border instead of South Texas ("Former Montague County sheriff pleads guilty to sexually assaulting drug suspect," Jan.27): The former sheriff of Montague County has admitted sexually assaulting a woman after promising her he wouldn't arrest her when deputies found drug paraphernalia in her house...

Barack Obama's first Texas judicial appointment

Posted on January 26, 2009
Crim Prof Blog points out that when Barack Obama took office, there were 55 vacant federal judicial seats awaiting his appointments. Only one is in Texas, created by the retirement of Judge W. Royal Furgeson, Jr., who began his legal career in El Paso and spent most of his judicial stint in Midland, before moving in 2003 to the San Antonio division of Texas' Western District...

New Harris DA, Sheriff, judges may finally get serious about jail overcrowding

Posted on January 26, 2009
Harris County officials are coming to grips with the causes of jail overcrowding now that the tanking economy means building and staffing a new jail is not an immediate option.As has been discussed on Grits many times (see below), Harris County's main jail overcrowding problem stems from radical increases pretrial detention: "The number of people in [the Harris County] jail who are awaiting trial has grown by about 64 prisoners a month for the past two years and has more than doubled since 2001," reported the Houston Chronicle ("Harris County taking action to reduce jail overcrowding," Jan...

Secret police reports are anathema to justice

Posted on January 26, 2009
Kudos to new Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg for altering her department's longstanding policy of making defense lawyers copy police offense reports by hand instead of giving paper or electronic access. Keith Hampton, the legislative chair of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, wrote in the Austin Statesman ("Key legal reform would serve the interests of justice and taxpayers," Jan...

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Did Texas execute an innocent man over junk arson science?

Posted on January 26, 2009
The Texas Forensic Science Commission has hired a world-reknowned expert out of Maryland to decide.

Cell phones still in prisons after zero tolerance contraband policy

Posted on January 26, 2009
The Austin Statesman's Mike Ward reports that the state prison system's crackdown on cell phones and contraband have continued after a lockdown last fall supposedly began an era of "zero tolerance" ("Cell phone smuggling continues," Jan. 26):More than 200 cell phones have been confiscated in state prison cellblocks since a system-wide shakedown for contraband ended in November, almost twice as many as were seized during the lockdown...

An act of compassion that transcended sports

Posted on January 26, 2009
At the prodding of former Dallas Cowboys football great Troy Aikman, National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell will hold a press conference on Friday hailing the private high school football coach from Grapevine who engineered a surprise welcome for TYC football players from the Gainesville unit, including cheerleaders, vocal fans, a band, and a forty yard "spirit line" they ran through entering the stadium...

Juvie diversion grants helped keep youth out of TYC

Posted on January 24, 2009
The Juvenile Probation Commission has posted on its website this summary (pdf) of how Texas' largest counties spent grants given to their juvenile probation departments to divert chronic, serious offenders away from youth prisons as part of the 2007 SB 103 reforms...

Texas set to execute defendant who was in jail at the time of the crime

Posted on January 24, 2009
DNA may have identified another innocent man convicted and sentenced to Texas death row, says a Houston Chronicle editorial ("Room for Doubt," Jan. 23), but he'll die on Tuesday unless Governor Perry stays the execution:Larry Ray Swearingen has lived on Texas death row for eight years, convicted of the rape-murder of a Montgomery County coed in 1998...

More Madoff fallout

Posted on January 24, 2009
I was sorry to see this news from the Texas Observer:Ana Yañez-Correa, executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, says her nonprofit lost $119,000 in JEHT support for its juvenile justice program. ?I?ve got a short amount of time to fill that gap,? she says...

Kids guarding kids

Posted on January 24, 2009
While we haven't seen many staff prosecutions as a result of the contraband scandal in Texas adult prisons last fall, news arrives from Waco of a 23-year old TYC guard receiving a four year prison sentence for smuggling pot onto the Mart II unit. "Judge Matt Johnson of Waco?s 54th State District Court rejected a plea agreement between [Phillip Patrick] Spain and the McLennan County District Attorney?s Office that called for Spain to be placed on felony probation for 10 years...

Need for eyewitness improvements recognized

Posted on January 23, 2009
Reacting to news that Dallas police will change their policy to require "blind" administration of photo lineups and showing photos one at a time instead of in a group, the Corpus Christi Caller Times editorialized today that, "If blind sequential lineups can reduce eyewitness mistakes, as the studies indicate, then every police department in Texas should be using that procedure...

More things prosecutors hate about defense attorneys

Posted on January 23, 2009
Reacting to an anonymous Fort Worth prosecutor's list of the top ten things he hates about defense attorneys, over at the prosecutors' association user forum they've added quite a few more complaints to the list.

Proposed Michigan model would reduce Texas' incarceration costs

Posted on January 23, 2009
I'm on my way to Big D for a meeting and an overnight stay, and likely won't be posting again until the weekend. But I wanted to refer readers to this post from Doc Berman about a sentencing proposal in Michigan to save money on incarceration costs:The State of Michigan could save $262 million in prison costs by 2015 by bringing parole policies in line with other states ? and releasing thousands of prisoners earlier ? according to a yearlong analysis of crime and punishment conducted by national policy center...

What to make of last-minute Bush clemencies?

Posted on January 22, 2009
Quite a few of my favorite blogs are producing good commentary about President Bush's last-minute pardons of two Border Patrol agents convicted of shooting an unarmed drug smuggler in the back near the Mexican border in Texas' western federal district...

Budget Choices: TDCJ needs more money or fewer prisoners

Posted on January 21, 2009
More detail emerged yesterday on Texas' budget crisis and the implications for criminal justice policy. Reports the Austin Statesman ("Proposed budget shows $3.7 billion shortfall," Jan. 21):Maintaining basic state services over the next two years will cost Texas almost $84 billion, $3...

Prevention, punishment, mental illness and crime

Posted on January 21, 2009
The US Supreme Court has said executing the mentally retarded is unconstitutional, but the mentally ill are still fair game. Dr. Lucy Puryear, a clinical psychiatrist from the Baylor College of Medicine offers a thoughtful discussion at Women in Crime Ink regarding the astonishing case of Andre Thomas, a schizophrenic death row inmate who plucked out his only good eye and ate it (he'd pulled the first one out while sitting in jail awaiting his capital murder trial), adding a whole new dimension to the biblical adage, "an eye for an eye...

Herring, civil liability, and Texas' exclusionary rule

Posted on January 20, 2009
Smart folks are still trying to work out whether the Herring case decided last week by the US Supreme Court narrowing the exclusionary rule is a big deal or a little one, and several good blog posts by attorneys have helped me think about the issue more concretely...

False confessions here, there, and yon

Posted on January 19, 2009
Our pal Rage Judicata points to a Houston case where new DNA evidence appears to contradict a recanted confession by Charles Raby, who was convicted of murdering 72-year old Edna Franklin in 1994 and currently resides on death row. According to the Houston Chronicle, "recent DNA testing on genetic material found on Franklin?s blood-caked fingernails points to someone else, Raby?s lawyers contend...

Sundance Film Touted as Brokeback Mountain meets Catch Me If You Can, Set in Harris County Jail

Posted on January 18, 2009
Congrats to Houston writer Steve McVicker, whose nonfiction tale, I Love You, Phillip Morris, will premiere on the big screen at the Sundance Film Festival starring A-list stars Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor. Reported the Houston Chronicle:Signing Carrey to play Steven Russell, a family man and peace officer turned escape artist and one-man Texas crime spree, and getting McGregor to play his lockup lover, Phillip Morris, means the film will get plenty of attention at Sundance and should have good box-office prospects...

Senate committee: Asset forfeiture too often a 'profit making' venture

Posted on January 18, 2009
In criminal trials the burden of proof falls on the state, which is why Texas prosecutors prefer to get asset forfeiture cases into civil court, where the burden lies with the property owner.However, if the Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee had its way, says their interim report (large pdf), the state would change the asset forfeiture law so the burden of proof shifts to the government to prove property was tainted by illegality, where currently that burden lies on the property owner...

The Top Ten Things Prosecutors Hate About Defense Attorneys

Posted on January 17, 2009
An Anonymous prosecutor vents on Fort Worth defense lawyer Shawn Matlock's blog about attorney-bloggers who "complain about ignorant prosecutors that don't understand the lives of criminals defendants." He seems kinda lonely, though, and would benefit some reader reactions...

Williamson DA sees drug penalty debate as turf war

Posted on January 17, 2009
Speaking of venting prosecutors, what do you think is Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley's biggest beef with a proposal by Houston judges to reduce drug possession penalties from a felony to a misdemeanor?You guessed it: It would reduce the scope of his personal, bureaucratic turf...

Dallas PD implements sequential, blind lineups for eyewitnesses

Posted on January 16, 2009
Excellent news!

Houston judges from both parties say reduce drug possession penalties

Posted on January 16, 2009
Here's an astonishing development: Sixteen of 22 Harris County felony court judges, including seven Democrats and nine Republicans, say they favor reduction of low-level drug possession in Texas from a state jail felony to a Class A misdemeanor ("Judge request to decriminalize (sic) drug use gets support," Houston Chronicle, Jan...

Without exclusionary rule, negligent police are just 'wild and crazy guys'

Posted on January 16, 2009
I'd expressed concern that the new SCOTUS precedent from the Herring case decided this week - which says that the exclusionary rule does not apply to negligent errors by the police - will make the problem of rights violations based on database errors even harder to solve...

Obama shouldn't waste stimulus money on Byrne grants

Posted on January 16, 2009
Some bad ideas apparently just won't die, we learn from Radley Balko at The Agitator:President-Elect Obama?s stimulus package calls for $3 billion in new Byrne Grants, and $1 billion in COPS grants?both are federal block grant programs for local police departments...

Estimating false convictions: Thousands of Texas prisoners are likely innocent

Posted on January 15, 2009
The string of DNA exonerations witnessed in recent years has made everyone in the justice system aware that more innocent people are convicted of crimes than anyone previously thought. But what percentage of total convictions are false ones?This is a difficult question because it's hard to find an accurate denominator for comparison...

Sunset recommends TYC/probation merger

Posted on January 15, 2009
Last night around 10:30, the Sunset Advisory Commission voted 6-5 in favor of merging the Texas Youth Commission and the Juvenile Probation Commission. So that recommendation will be in the agencies' Sunset bill, though it will still be debated and possibly changed during the legislative process...

Justice News Roundup

Posted on January 15, 2009
While I'm busy today with other tasks, here's a roundup of current criminal justice stories that deserve Grits readers' attention:Lies and Damn LiesSix different Dallas police officers allegedly lied in a sworn statement about evidence in a drug case, and the defendant's defense attorneys came up with video evidence to prove the point...

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