Criminal Law

Gittin' tuff on graffiti spawns more of it in Corpus Christi

Posted on June 29, 2009
Threats and punishments from authority figures only go so far when dealing with rebellious teens, but in Corpus Christi, officials believe they can ramp up penalties high enough for graffiti to scare youth away from the behavior. So far, though, git-tuff policies have had exactly the opposite effect...

Texas criminal justice reform legislation passed in 2009

Posted on June 29, 2009
Though much positive legislation died in the 81st Texas Legislature's closing days, I never went through the good criminal justice legislation that did finally pass and become law this year. This isn't a comprehensive list; let me know what I missed in the comments:Eliminating LWOP for juvenilesPerhaps the bill passed with the most significant national implications was SB 839 by Hinojosa eliminating life without parole as a sentencing option for juveniles, substituting a 40 year minimum for juveniles convicted in capital cases...

New judge in TYC sex abuse cases

Posted on June 29, 2009
Finally, a new judge has been appointed in the TYC sex-abuse cases out of the West Texas State School, so we can likely expect a trial date to be set sooner than later. The state had been ready since last year but the district judge in Ward County had refused to set a trial date...

Fewer prisoners, more guards at TDCJ

Posted on June 28, 2009
According to AP:Texas prison officials plan to cancel contracts to house up to 1,900 state convicts in county lockups because the number of inmates in state prisons has fallen.Michelle Lyons, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, told the Austin American-Statesman that officials plan to move the convicts now housed in county lockups back into state prisons by the end of August...

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Texas Police Games: Maybe Grits needs a sports beat

Posted on June 28, 2009
It's occurred to me before maybe Grits needs a sports beat, and if so the place to be this weekend would be Conroe where reportedly 2,000 sworn officers have gathered to compete in the Texas Police Games. They've got quite an impressive list of events lined up...

Number of mentally ill in jail a community 'barometer'

Posted on June 28, 2009
The executive director of the Harris County MHMR Authority, Steven Schnee, has an effective op ed in the Houston Chronicle today declaring that the scope of mentally ill people in the Harris County jail foretells a coming crisis:The Harris County Jail is now the largest mental health facility in Texas...

Commission: Probationers, immigrant detainees may be subjected to sexual abuse

Posted on June 27, 2009
The problem of prison rape has been widely discussed and decried, but a major new report (pdf) almost six years in the making by the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission says the problem can also occur in community corrections settings, mostly as a function of coercion by probation and parole officers:As in other correctional settings, courts have found that sexual abuse in community corrections violates the Eighth Amendment of the U...

Crisis or gamesmanship behind proposed CA cuts to DNA testing?

Posted on June 27, 2009
California's forensic labs face an astonishing development as a result of that state's massive budget shortfall: The Los Angeles Sheriff has already halted the practice of sending rape kits out for DNA testing because the department has no money, plus, state crime labs are scheduled to have their budgets cut by half, forcing them to begin charging smaller jurisdictions for services like DNA and other forensic testing that they previously provided for free (as is the case with Texas' state crime labs)...

Clean Graffiti?

Posted on June 27, 2009
It may just be an advertising gimmick to sell cars, but "clean graffiti" strikes me as a pretty clever idea:

Texas Bribery Roundup

Posted on June 27, 2009
Somebody could launch a kickass blog devoted entirely to covering Texas-related bribery cases and it'd be a long time before you ran out of material. Just to mention a few recent examples:US House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers' wife, who sits on the Detroit City Council, pled guilty yesterday to taking a bribe from a Texas-based company:Prosecutors said Friday that Monica Conyers accepted two payments in late 2007 to support a city contract that would pay $47 million to Texas-based Synagro Technologies to recycle wastewater sludge and build a modern incinerator in Detroit...

'Just remember, you're paying for it'

Posted on June 26, 2009
County jails all over the country have many of the same problems, and in Salt Lake City they're considering copying an approach tried in San Antonio to divert nonviolent and mentally ill offenders from the jail. Reports the Salt Lake City Tribune ("Thinking outside the cellblock," June 25): Utah's most-populous county is straining under the inmate crush...

Houston jury awards $5 million for false conviction

Posted on June 26, 2009
A federal jury in Houston yesterday awarded George Rodriguez a $5 million verdict based on misconduct at the Houston crime lab that caused his false conviction. Said the Houston Chronicle:George Rodriguez, 48, gained his freedom in 2004 after DNA tests discredited the findings of the troubled Houston Police Department crime lab on his case...

Real splits on criminal justice not liberal-conservative

Posted on June 26, 2009
A common theme on this blog is that divisions on criminal justice issues - despite common stereotyping - don't typically fall along partisan or traditional ideological lines. The typical culture war debates that dominate American politics simply don't cut the same way when it comes to issues of crime and punishment...

Limits set on student strip searches

Posted on June 25, 2009
See the SCOTUSBlog analysis of today's US Supreme Court decision and the court's 8-1 opinion (pdf) placing new limits on when students may be strip searched by public school officials.

SCOTUS: Forensic reports require cross examination of analysts

Posted on June 25, 2009
The US Supreme Court today issued a new ruling in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachussetts that affidavits documenting the result of forensic testing were subject to the Confrontation Clause in the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution, meaning the lab analysts must be made available for cross-examination in court...

Time for DA to eat crow on Yogurt shop murder prosecutions

Posted on June 25, 2009
Big news yesterday in Austin's Yogurt Shop murder case. Reports AP, "Two men awaiting retrial in the 1991 murders of four teenage girls at an Austin yogurt shop were released from jail Wednesday while prosecutors search for a match to new DNA evidence that didn't come from either of them...

More falsified results from Houston crime lab

Posted on June 24, 2009
Let's continue on the Houston crime lab theme this a.m. and take a look at this recent story (June 8) from the Houston Press' Hairballs blog about apparently falsified lab results in a death penalty case:It's good news for death row inmate Charles Raby - and more bad news for Joseph Chu...

Jury to decide if Houston crime lab is liable for false testimony

Posted on June 24, 2009
Mostly due to a bit of post-session blog and politics fatigue, I've not been closely monitoring the ongoing civil rights trial in Houston over an egregious innocence case out of that city's troubled crime lab.Arguably the City of Houston would have been wise to settle its lawsuit with George Rodriguez - an innocent man who spent 17 years in prison because a lab worker apparently lied at his trial to secure a conviction - after Judge Vanessa Gilmore denied the city's motion for summary judgment...

'Permission walls' help bring graffiti art into mainstream

Posted on June 23, 2009
Rex Thomas, a writer out of Florida, has an excellent piece out on the relationship between street art and civic spaces, arguing that failure to bring graffiti into the mainstream postpones "treatment of the urban malaise." I was particularly taken by Thomas' discussion of "permission walls" and his analysis placing graffiti in context with more traditional, accepted art forms:In Orlando, the trend of giving street artists ?permission walls,? or walls where they have permission to paint their work, has tamed some of the sabotage...

Science undermining 'shaken baby syndrome' cases

Posted on June 22, 2009
So-called "shaken baby syndrome" is another area where it increasingly appears that flawed forensic testimony helped secure numerous false convictions over the years, particularly among parents and child care workers: According to an essay by Maurice Possley at The Crime Report:A soon-to-be-published analysis of shaken baby cases and recent developments in the medical community by University of Maine School of Law professor Deborah Tuerkheimer presents persuasive evidence and raises troubling questions about whether many of these convictions were of innocent people who were found guilty on the basis of faulty science...

Judge, not AG, responsible for TYC prosecution delays

Posted on June 22, 2009
Before deciding on the new comment policy announced at the end of this post, I was initially hesitant to blog about the minor kerfuffle last week when the Texas Civil Rights Project criticized the Attorney General for failing to yet take to court the West Texas sex-abuse cases that spawned the Youth Commission's recent troubles...

SCOTUS DNA ruling not a problem for Texas, but maybe for Sotomayor

Posted on June 21, 2009
A number of readers have asked my views on last week's Supreme Court decision in the Osborne case out of Alaska where a slim, 5-4 majority ruled there is no constitutional right to postconviction DNA testing.My first, admittedly parochial thought: Texans needn't particularly care...

Governor Perry's 2009 Criminal Justice Vetoes

Posted on June 20, 2009
Governor Perry announced this year's vetoes yesterday, although, since so much criminal justice reform legislation died in the waning days of the session thanks to partisan bickering over voter ID, not many bills that concerned this blog were even available to earn the Governor's wrath...

TDCJ population still creeping up, but tracking estimates

Posted on June 19, 2009
Here's the total number of people sent to Texas prisons and state jails on felony charges in FY 2008 from the six largest Texas counties and the number of prisoners released back to each of them, according to the Department of Criminal Justice annual statistical report (pdf):Sent to prison:Harris: 15,276Dallas: 7,405Tarrant: 5,363Bexar: 4,669Travis: 3,143El Paso: 1,164Released from prison:Harris: 14,654Dallas: 7,564Tarrant: 5,185Bexar: 4,550Travis: 3,084El Paso: 1,147 Overall, Texas sent more people to prison in FY 2008 than it released according to the report: 74,283 people entered TDCJ last year, while 72,002 were released and sent home (out of 156,126 on hand as of Aug...

Department of "Public Safety" or "Collections"?

Posted on June 19, 2009
According to a reader who attended, at yesterday's meeting of the Public Safety Commission there was a lengthy discussion, prompted by Commissioner Carin Barth, of the Orwellian-named "Driver Responsibility" program. Rather than criticize the draconian, regressive nature of the fee, though, which was created during the 2003 budget crisis expressly as an alternative to property tax hikes, Commissioner Barth wanted to know why there was only a 30% collection rate...

Judge Sam Kent impeached by US House; Keller's removal hearing moved to SA

Posted on June 19, 2009
Judge Sam Kent's impeachment by the US House of Representatives is not surprising news, but certainly welcome.Meanwhile, I'm disappointed to learn Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge Sharon Keller's removal hearing on August 17 will take place in San Antonio, not Austin - mostly because I'd hoped to attend and cover the spectacle...

"Keystone Kops at the Crime Lab"

Posted on June 18, 2009
The title of this post is the headline from an excellent piece in Miller-McCune about problems at forensic crime labs, in which naturally the Houston crime lab figures prominently. But they also mentioned another Texas connection:In West Virginia, criminalist Fred Zain showed just how much damage a compromised police forensics laboratory can cause...

What Texas traffic enforcement can teach the national healthcare debate about "individual mandates"

Posted on June 18, 2009
To veer slightly off topic for a moment, I wanted to record an observation about the national health insurance debate presently going on in Congress, and in particular the move to create an "individual mandate" for the uninsured requiring them to purchase health insurance...

Madden expects veto of bad CPS bill

Posted on June 18, 2009
According to an action alert from the Free Market Foundation urging Governor Perry to veto SB 1440 expanding CPS powers, one of the bill's co-sponsors, Jerry Madden, now think last-minute amendments were a "mistake" and he expects Governor Perry to veto the legislation...

Criminologists: Death penalty does not deter

Posted on June 17, 2009
Via Capital Defense Weekly, I was interested to see this new survey of top US criminologists (pdf) on the question of whether the death penalty deters murder, a debate refocused by several much-disputed studies (mostly by economists) in the last six years claiming to find a deterrent, after "scores" of studies by criminologists over previous decades had reached the opposite conclusion...

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