Criminal Law

Texas' criminal justice challenge in 2010: Find solutions for the coming budget crunch

Posted on January 18, 2010
I have a guest column today over at the Texas Tribune on the subject of Texas' 2010 criminal justice agenda, in which I took the opportunity to make the pitch for planning now how to safely cut corrections spending in ways that protect recent investments in strengthened probation and parole supervision...

Texas should strengthen standards for admitting forensic evidence

Posted on January 17, 2010
The Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee hearing last week included an interesting debate on the subject of the proper standard for admitting forensic testimony into evidence. Committee Chairman Pete Gallego opened the hearing by declaring he was looking for a "milepost or guidance" for when and how forensic evidence is admitted that would "rebuild some of the faith, some of the credibility of the system...

Travis prosecutors will vet cases 24-7

Posted on January 16, 2010
Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg announced yesterday her officer would begin staffing prosecutors 24-7 to more rapidly vet cases brought by police, reported Steve Kreytak at the Austin Statesman:Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg said today that she would soon assign a prosecutor to work overnight with police to evaluate new arrests and ferret-out any that are not legally and factually sufficient...

TX prison phone installation complete

Posted on January 16, 2010
A press release from the company installing the new Texas prison phone system announces that the massive project was completed in December:Securus Technologies, Inc. a leading provider of inmate communications services and innovative offender and case management software design, today announced that it, in a partnership with CenturyLink ? completed the installation work at all Texas state-operated prison facilities in December, 2009...

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Confronting SCRAM

Posted on January 15, 2010
With the US Supreme Court this week revisiting at oral argument the question of requiring confrontation at trial for lab reports (i.e., giving the defense the right to cross-examine the lab worker), I found this anecdote from DA Confidential a particularly compelling example of why the right to vigorously question forensic evidence is important, regardless of complaints about "inefficiency" and cost...

Odds and ends

Posted on January 15, 2010
Here are a several items worthy of Grits readers attention while I'm focused elsewhere today:Texas Senate interim charges outThe Lieutenant Governor issued the interim charges (pdf) for standing Senate committees and the Criminal Justice Committee's plate is particularly full (see pp...

The convenient failure to prosecute instigator of Great Eldorado Polygamist Roundup

Posted on January 14, 2010
A reader helpfully forwards an article from Colorado Springs about Rozita Swinton, the hoax phone caller whose claims to be an abused polygamist bride launched the Great Eldorado Polygamist Roundup. You may recall Swinton's false claims resulted in what courts later said was the improper seizure by authorities of more than 400 children from the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado, claiming their parents had all abused them...

Might 2011 budget crunch bring TX prison closures?

Posted on January 14, 2010
This morning I stopped in for a panel discussion sponsored by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative Austin-based think tank, on the topic of "Corrections Solutions for a Tight Budget" at their big annual conference, and was pleased to hear state leaders tentatively embrace a suggestion I've been promoting here on Grits: Closing some of Texas' most expensive or difficult-to-staff prison units to make prisons safer and cheaper...

High turnover at small-town police departments poses logistical, accountability challenges

Posted on January 13, 2010
Via CLEAT, I noticed this recent item from the Waco Herald Tribune ("Small town police officers face different challenges," Jan. 4) describing high turnover rates among rural police departments. The story opens:Working for small-town Central Texas police departments has its advantages, but a high turnover rate among officers in rural areas is one issue that many of those departments regularly contend with...

Forensic Science Commission grudgingly releases complaint info on crime labs

Posted on January 13, 2010
After months spent fighting over whether the Texas Forensic Science Commission would release the documents, the Fort Worth Star Telegram this week reports on results from an open records request filed in October regarding complaints against Texas crime labs...

Massive overtime costs at Harris County Jail

Posted on January 13, 2010
Kuff has been helpfully tracking the latest budget debates surrounding the Harris County Jail after the Houston Chronicle reported that: The Harris County Sheriff?s Office is projected to overspend its annual budget by $51 million, the third straight year it has blown past its planned expenditures by at least $40 million...

Report: TYC substance abuse treatment increased recidivism

Posted on January 12, 2010
Though the agency has recently changed (and supposedly upgraded) most of its treatment programming, I was interested to see this new, legislatively mandated report on recidivism rates (pdf) associated with various types of pre-reform treatment programs for youth exiting the Texas Youth Commission...

Meth hype by DEA Agent, prosecutor, gets life sentence overturned

Posted on January 11, 2010
Some 3-1/2 years ago I highlighted a case out of my hometown in Tyler wheretwo newlyweds were sentenced to life in prison for possessing 255 grams of meth. A DEA agent testified at trial that 255 grams was enough to get 45,000 people "high" -- "If those people were lined up side by side, they would form a line from downtown Tyler to Bullard about 17 miles, he said...

TX Senators blocking US Attorney nominations

Posted on January 11, 2010
After a year in office, Texas still has no nominees for US Attorney and the Houston Chronicle's Mary Flood has the story why:President Barack Obama enters his second year in office having filled only a third of the 93 top federal prosecutor spots in the nation, and no one's even nominated for the four open positions in Texas...

Would bank accounts for ex-prisoners reduce crime?

Posted on January 11, 2010
Here's an issue that arguably merits consideration when Texas' new reentry task force meets later this week, via Dr. Karen Franklin's excellent blog on forensic psychology: Establishing bank accounts for offenders when they're released on parole. In a post last month Franklin wrote:Ever thought about how hard it would be to take care of basic business without a bank account or credit cards?In the UK, an experimental project to open bank accounts for paroling prisoners has led to a remarkable finding: The ex-cons who got bank accounts were only half as likely as other parolees to reoffend...

Manufactured Memories

Posted on January 10, 2010
Notes Paul Kennedy at The Defense Rests:According to this article in the new issue of Scientific American, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, were able to manufacture memories for 25% of the subjects in a memory study. The ability to "create" memories of events that never took place places further doubt about the reliability of identification testimony by eyewitnesses...

Public tired of Willlie Horton? Whither 21st century clemency?

Posted on January 10, 2010
Referring to the case of Maurice Clemmons - the mentally ill man who was pardoned in 2000 by former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee for crimes committed in his youth and who last year killed four Washington state police officers in a coffee shop - former US Pardon Attorney Margaret Colgate Love offers up an item in the National Law Journal titled "Goodbye to Willie Horton" (Jan...

TDCJ: 'Freakonomics' too racially charged

Posted on January 09, 2010
Steven Levitt was surprised when TDCJ rejected his book "Superfreakonomics" on the grounds that it's "sole purpose" was to "Achieve the breakdown of prisons through offender disruption such as strikes, riots, or security threat group activity." Eric Dexheimer at the Austin Statesman followed up and determined that a mistake had been made: TDCJ meant to ban the book's predeessor, "Freakonomics," for the same reason, and confused the two books...

Forensic psychologist inflated IQ scores to secure death penalty

Posted on January 09, 2010
According to an excellent investigative article in the Texas Observer by reporter Renee Feltz ("Cracked," Jan. 8), seventeen men currently on Texas' death row were evaluated by a forensic psychologist using "junk science" who improperly inflated IQ scores to make them eligible for the death penalty despite Supreme Court caselaw banning execution of the mentally retarded...

Bexar and Collin DA's races: Who gets to wear the bandoliers?

Posted on January 08, 2010
Having recently rounded up some of the more interesting criminal-justice related and appellate judicial elections in the offing in 2010, I should add two District Attorneys' races to the list that I failed to mention:Bexar County DA: Dems' time?A couple of different folks have now told me to watch Democrat Nico Lahood out of Bexar County as a strong challenger to incumbent Republican DA Susan Reed...

Weighing benefits and detriments of US public information policies about crime

Posted on January 08, 2010
A couple of recent items related to making police information public caught my eye. First, from Matt Kelley at Change.org's Criminal Justice Blog:Arrests are public information, but exactly how public should they be? Twitter is testing the limits. Every arrest in Denton, Texas, is chronicled on an unofficial twitter feed, built by an art student seeking to explore the possibilities opened by social platforms like twitter to share public information...

Top 5 TX private prison stories of 2009

Posted on January 07, 2010
The blog Texas Prison Bidness recently published its list of the top 5 stories related to private prisons from 2009:Family detention ends at T. Don HuttoProtests of conditions at Geo Group's Reeves County Detention CenterPrivate prison proposals defeated in Texas communitiesSmall companies, big scandals81st Legislature ends without increased oversight

AG: Governor may issue posthumous pardons

Posted on January 07, 2010
Via Kimberly Reeves at the Quorum Report, I learned that Attorney General Greg Abbott issued his first opinion of 2010 in response to questions from state Sen. Rodney Ellis declaring that, contrary to his earlier assertions, Gov. Rick Perry has full powers under the Texas Constitution to issue posthumous pardons in cases like Timothy Cole's...

Feds: 12% of youth in custody sexually abused; 2 TYC facilities among worst offenders

Posted on January 07, 2010
In light of the TYC sex abuse scandal a couple of years ago, it's remarkable to see this new survey of youth in custody from the Bureau of Justice Statistics which found that "About 12% of youth in state juvenile facilities and large non-state facilities ...

Reentry Task Force ramping up

Posted on January 07, 2010
The first meeting of Texas' new Reentry Task Force authorized by the Legislature last year will meet in Austin next Friday. See:Reentry Task Force AgendaReentry Task Force MembersThe task force launches its work just as new federal money becomes available for reentry work...

Public Defender Revolution

Posted on January 07, 2010
A pal from my days at The Daily Texan, Carol Huneke, who is now a public defender in Washington state, emailed today to let me know she recently launched a blog titled "Public Defender Revolution," which "advocates for the rights of public defenders and our clients...

FBI investigating corruption allegations at Bexar Sheriff's narcotics unit

Posted on January 06, 2010
Over the holidays, the SA Express News reported on a possible brewing corruption scandal at the Bexar County Sheriff's Office narcotics division. According to reporter Guillermo Contreras ("Bexar narcotics deputies probed," Dec. 27):The FBI is investigating the Bexar County sheriff?s narcotics unit over allegations that some of its deputies might have been unlawfully taking evidence or stealing money and property from people they detain or arrest, the San Antonio Express-News has confirmed...

Most appellate court races not competitive outside Houston

Posted on January 06, 2010
Now that filing deadline has past, I'm disappointed to see that Dems fielded no additional candidates besides Keith Hampton for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals this year, though they've got horses in all the Supreme Court of Texas races, including Bill Moody who topped all Democratic statewide vote-getters in 2006...

'Texas parole reforms lowered crime, costs'

Posted on January 06, 2010
The title of this post is the headline of an effective op ed in the Dallas News by Marc Levin of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Here's how the piece opens:Public safety is job one, but recent improvements in Texas parole outcomes demonstrate that we can be safer while saving money...

Transitioning from Prison to the Community

Posted on January 05, 2010
A helpful reader pointed out that Texas is among the states chosen by the National Institute of Corrections for the second round of their Transitions from Prison to Community initiative. According to NIC:Six Sites Selected to Participate in the National Institute of Corrections? Transition from Prison to the Community (TPC) Initiative Six jurisdictions have been invited by the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) to participate in its Transition from Prison to the Community (TPC) Initiative, a project designed to help states articulate a comprehensive and strategic approach to transition from prison...

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