Criminal Law

'Imprisoned by Stereotypes'

Posted on April 26, 2009
From Doc Berman: Inside Out, the online magazine of the Prison Fellowship, has this interesting cover story with the same title as the title of this post. Here is how it gets started: When the average person conjures an image of a prisoner, what is pictured? Does the mind?s eye see a lone shadow with defiance and anger on his face and evil and ill-intent in his heart, prowling for trouble and poised to wreak violence? And who or what provides this image? Movies? The news media? Fear? When three people from Texas look into the faces of prisoners, they see an opportunity for repentance, a prospect for a second chance, a vessel of potential...

Lubbock reporter honored for Cole case coverage

Posted on April 26, 2009
Kudos to Lubbock Avalanche Journal reporter Elliott Blackburn on winning a statewide journalism prize for his three-part series titled "Hope Deferred" about DNA posthumously exonerating Timothy Cole, a Texas Tech student falsely convicted of rape who died in prison in 1999...

CPPP: Foster kids face more school discipline

Posted on April 26, 2009
It's not particularly shocking that abused and neglected kids in foster care are more likely to be disciplined in school (and thus more likely to wind up in the juvenile justice system), but according to a new policy paper (pdf) by the Center for Public Policy Priorities, "31 percent of all [Texas] students in foster care received at least one discipline action versus 17 percent of the general student population...

Probation fees a sleeper issue, barrier to success of reforms

Posted on April 25, 2009
At a moment in history where more than 10% of adult Texans have outstanding arrest warrants, the ever growing array of increasingly unmanageable fines for low level offenses and fees for probationers is a mundane "sleeper" issue, one that may have profound implications in particular for how well the probation-centered de-incarceration reforms approved by the Texas Legislature in 2007 work in the long term...

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More graffiti shennanigans in the House

Posted on April 24, 2009
Having added graffiti to the friggin' organized crime statute yesterday, today the Texas House will hear yet another bill boosting penalties for graffiti, HB 1633 by Walle et. al., making graffiti of any amount a felony on the third offense and boosting restitution and community service requirements, combining the contents of several different pieces of legislation...

House to consider exoneree compensation bill today

Posted on April 24, 2009
I'm headed to the capitol this morning on behalf of the Innocence Project of Texas to hear the Texas House consider legislation to boost state compensation for innocent inmates who've been exonerated by DNA evidence, and also expanding compensation claims to include the families of innocent people who die in prison, precluding civil ligiation if they take the settlement...

Consensus developing around juvie diversion programs

Posted on April 23, 2009
Here's a report from yesterday's joint legislative meeting on juvenile justice reform from Grits intern Tara Haelle. Thanks, Tara, for attending the hearing and providing this writeup. As always, none of the opinions expressed here in any way represent those of UT, the LBJ School, her teacher, nor anybody but the writer and editor...

Roundup: Judges, Journalists and Jails

Posted on April 23, 2009
While I'm focused elsewhere today, let me point readers to several items that might deserve individual blog posts if I had more time:No good answers for picking judgesI'm virtually certain nothing will change this session, but there's been a lot of debate this year over whether to shift from elected to appointed judges...

Graffiti as organized crime?

Posted on April 23, 2009
On the House floor today, Rep. Joe Moody had a perfectly reasonable bill that added people conspiring in prison and jail escapes under the organized crime statute. But the freshman Democrat accepted a "friendly" amendment from Rep. Dwayne Bohac to define graffiti offenses, of all things, as "organized crime" if committed by two or more people in combination...

"In my experience, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear"

Posted on April 22, 2009
At oral arguments in a case over whether a school in Arizona had the right to strip search a 13-year old girl to search for ibuprofen, US Supreme Court Justice Justice Stephen Breyer offered up this gem of a misstatement attempting to justify the school's actions: "In my experience, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear...

Crunch time: Bills dying right and left with little fanfare

Posted on April 22, 2009
If you're supporting a House bill this session that was assigned to the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee but has not yet received a hearing, chances are it's already dead. As sine die looms ever closer, this is the first week that committee will cease hearing House bills...

Cameras, crime reduction and cost

Posted on April 22, 2009
Do surveillance cameras in public spaces reduce crime and are they worth the cost?I've been highly skeptical of claims by Dallas police that new surveillance cameras downtown have radically reduced crime, mainly because their results dramatically contradict the experience in other jurisdictions that have used such cameras from a long time...

Crawford protesters earn First Amendment victory at TXCCA

Posted on April 22, 2009
Here's an unexpectedly positive ruling from Texas' high criminal court that shows how divided the court has become. Via the Houston Press' Hairballs blog:The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals -- the Supreme Court for criminal matters -- has upheld a lower court's decision to toss out the convictions of two protesters arrested outside of President Bush's Crawford ranch (Does he still go to that thing anymore?)By a 5-4 vote, the TCCA found that the arrests were not warranted...

Keller impeachment resolution to be heard on Monday

Posted on April 22, 2009
I've gotta admit, I didn't believe this idea would even get a hearing, but the articles of impeachment against Presiding Judge Sharon Keller of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals will be heard in committee on Monday, according to a press release by Rep...

Strange debate on recording interrogations

Posted on April 22, 2009
The Senate this afternoon passed Sen. Ellis' SB 116 encouraging police to record custodial interrogations on a 28-2 vote. The debate over the bill, though, was bizarre, with opponents raising strange objections that simply ignored what the bill actually does...

Bill would allow habeas appeals based on discredited science

Posted on April 21, 2009
Yet another piece of important new innocence-related legislation, SB 1976, passed the Texas Senate yesterday and is headed over to the House. According to the Austin Statesman's Mike Ward:Criminals who were sent to prison ? or sentenced to death ? based on discredited scientific evidence would be given a new way to challenge their convictions under a bill passed this morning by the Texas Senate...

Erecting barriers to in-prison employment

Posted on April 21, 2009
I've already lamented the bipartisan effort to scale back the too-small number of "prison industries" programs employing Texas convicts while they're incarcerated, so rather than separately analyze SB 1169 by state Sen. Robert Nichols, which is up today in the Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee, I'll just point readers to the item I wrote when the companion bill was heard in the House: "False claim of unfair competition could limit in-prison work programs...

"Partial" bail bill aims to reduce "hardship" on defendants

Posted on April 21, 2009
State Sen. Jeff Wentworth has an interesting bill up today in the Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee - SB 498 - which would allow counties to accept a partial bond from pretrial defendants "if the magistrate determines that requiring the defendant to deposit a cash bond or to procure a surety bond in the full amount of bail will impose an unreasonable hardship on the defendant...

SCOTUS rolls back police search authority at traffic stops

Posted on April 21, 2009
Here's some good news for liberty-loving drivers:The US Supreme Court today issued a rare pro-4th Amendment decision to restrict vehicle searches incident to arrest. In a 5-4 ruling, the high court held in Arizona v. Gant that "Police may search the passenger compartment of a vehicle incident to a recent occupant?s arrest only if it is reasonable to believe that the arrestee might access the vehicle at the time of the search or that the vehicle contains evidence of the offense of arrest...

Ethicists say Keller should be removed from bench

Posted on April 21, 2009
One of the signators forwarded me a copy of this document filed yesterday with the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct by two dozen of the nation's leading judicial ethicists. You can download the pdf file here:Expert declaration regarding alleged misconduct by Judge Sharon Keller to the Texas Commission on Judicial ConductThese lawyers and scholars accuse Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge Sharon Keller of failing to maintain impartiality and of "dishonesty" in both her financial reporting and attempts to obtain money from the state to pay for her lawyers...

Corrupt Dallas deputy facilitated multinational drug ring

Posted on April 21, 2009
Investigation of a corrupt Dallas Sheriff's deputy led to discovery of an international smuggling ring connecting Mexican drug cartels with the Italian mafia, Jason Trahan at the Dallas News reports ("Mexican cartels unloading drugs to Italian mafia," April 21): "We've got some of the major cartel members established here dealing their wares in Europe," said James Capra, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Dallas office...

Bill would expand oversight of state DNA labs

Posted on April 21, 2009
The Texas Forensic Science Commission would gain authority to audit DNA labs around the state if SB 1909 by Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa becomes law. The bill will be heard today in the Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee. Audits would include periodic, unannounced on-site inspections and off-site retesting of one or more samples from each laboratory...

The Judicial Immunity Community: 5th Circuit shuts down attorney suits over court appointments

Posted on April 20, 2009
What happens when judges improperly reject attorneys for the appointment "wheel" to represent indigent clients? Why, nothing, of course. They're judges, you see, so they're immune. Whadidya expect?Over at Texas Lawyer, John Council brings word of a federal court opinion shutting down litigation over judges' selection of attorneys under the 2001 Fair Defense Act ("5th Circuit rejects suit against judges over court appointments," April 20):Eight years after the Legislature passed the Texas Fair Defense Act, some lawyers still are not happy with how judges carry out the law, which requires judges quickly to appoint qualified attorneys to represent indigent defendants...

Innocence Project of Texas faces Madoff-spawned budget shortfall

Posted on April 20, 2009
This one hits pretty close to home:The Innocence Project of Texas faces potential economic oblivion later this year after a foundation whose funds made up the bulk of its income closed its doors due to an infamous Wall Street scandal. In a column in yesterday's Fort Worth Star Telegram, Cory Session, the youngest brother of the late Timothy Cole (who was exonerated posthumously this spring), writes:The Innocence Project of Texas fights daily for its survival...

Jurors from false confession case call for recorded interrogations

Posted on April 20, 2009
Three jurors from the infamous Richard Danziger case coauthored a column in the Houston Chronicle over the weekend arguing that interrogations should be recorded to give jurors better evidence ("Jurors regret convicting innocent man," April 18):When we were called to serve as jurors in an Austin sexual assault and murder case, we could never have predicted the ending of this story...

Texas Senate endorses penalty reduction for juvenile capital murderers

Posted on April 20, 2009
I'm as shocked to see the Texas Senate unanimously endorsed eliminating life without parole for juvenile capital murderers as I was to see Williamson County DA John Bradley testify in favor of the bill in committee. Congratulations to Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa for getting this landmark legislation through the Legislature's upper chamber...

A drug dealer registry? One unworkable, bad idea deserves another

Posted on April 20, 2009
Apparently because the sex-offender registration program has been such a glowing success (/snark), Rep. Larry Taylor has proposed HB 4411, creating a "Drug Dealer Registration Program."I guess we're going to skip over murderers in the Legislature's registry mania and go straight for the dope dealers? This is pure silliness - basically make-work for DPS...

Poor representation in capital cases rewarded with new appointments

Posted on April 20, 2009
With judges now fully empowered, according to the 5th Circuit, to exclude attorneys they don't believe are qualified, there seems to be little excuse for tolerating the kind of attorney performance described by Lise Olsen in a Houston Chronicle piece this morning, "Death row lawyers get paid while messing up," April 20):Texas lawyers have repeatedly missed deadlines for appeals on behalf of more than a dozen death row inmates in the last two years ? yet judges continue to assign life-or-death capital cases and pay hundreds of thousands in fees to those attorneys, a Chronicle records review shows...

Senate would let judges reduce misnamed 'driver responsibility' fees

Posted on April 19, 2009
It's not nearly a far as I'd like to see them go, but the Texas Senate passed legislation this week to knock off some of the rough edges on Texas' so-called "driver responsibility fee," which has been a complete public policy bust. Reports the Dallas News ("Texas Senate votes to ease surcharges on DWI, other driving violations," April 18):The Senate voted Friday to revamp the troubled Texas Driver Responsibility Program, under which more than 1 million Texans have been unable or unwilling to pay stiff surcharges on top of their regular fines for driving violations...

Why not just tattoo their foreheads and be done with it?

Posted on April 19, 2009
Drivers licenses are the wrong place to try to solve unrelated social problems, and here's a good example why.On Monday, the House Public Safety Committee will hear legislation - HB 1091 by Rep. Tan Parker - that would identify sex offenders as such on their drivers licenses...

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