Criminal Law

Debating tobacco prohibition for 18 year olds

Posted on April 06, 2009
Over at the Lone Star Times, David Jennings offered a thoughtful reaction to SB 1049 by Uresti, legislation with bipartisan support that would raise the legal age to purchase tobacco from 18-19, concluding:Lots of questions on this one. The first one being the most basic, is it ?right? to tell an 18 year old that he/she is not old enough to make a decision about tobacco? And if it is ?right?, why not go all the way to 21?Texas youth can drive and get married at 16 with parental consent, but can't legally have sex outside of marriage until they're 17...

Penalty hikes represent failure of imagination

Posted on April 06, 2009
Here's a thought for the day while I'm busy at the capitol this morning - something I wrote in reaction to a blog commenter here about the effectiveness of increasing criminal penalties as social policy:Penalty enhancements almost always reflect a lack of imagination about other ways to influence human behavior...

Resources on Mexican drug war

Posted on April 05, 2009
A few items for those following topics related to combating Mexican drug cartels:See this detailed press release listing all US Department of Justice assets being used to combat Mexican drug cartels.The Washington Post has begun a year-long series focused on the Mexican drug war that has its own home page...

Was allegedly corrupt El Paso judge part of broader conspiracy?

Posted on April 05, 2009
Speaking of drug cartels, here's a high-profile judicial corruption that sounds like something you'd more readily expect on the Mexican side of the river:A newly elected felony District Judge in El Paso, Manuel Barraza, was arrested this week for allegedly dismissing or offering to dismiss drug cases in exchange for money and sexual favors...

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Where are champions for open government in online era?

Posted on April 03, 2009
Echoing concerns I'd raised about limiting information available on elected judges, the Dallas News' Reese Dunklin says legislation making personal information about state employees closed records limits accountability and would have prevented the News' investigative journalism on the Texas Youth Commission in 2007...

Enhancing crustacean-related crime

Posted on April 03, 2009
I've frequently made fun of the fact that Texas has labeled 2,324 separate acts "felonies," including eleven felonies involving oysters. As if on cue, then, Sen. Mike Jackson this session has proposed another oyster-related enhancement, this time from a Class B to a Class A misdemeanor in the Parks and Wildlife Code for repeat offenders who take oysters from restricted areas...

Abolishing, merging TYC, juvie probation, sort of

Posted on April 03, 2009
This, my friends, is why God created interns. Here's a slightly edited report on yesterday's House Corrections Committee hearing on TYC-TJPC Sunset legislation, filed by Tara Haelle, a grad student who's helping out the blog this session covering juvenile justice legislation that otherwise would fall by the wayside...

Romeo and Juliet, Abraham and Isaac: Who to criminalize?

Posted on April 02, 2009
While waiting yesterday in the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee hearing for a late bill on which I was testifying, Rep. Garnet Coleman brought forward two very interesting pieces of legislation worthy of note:HB 3564: Relating to the prosecution of certain conduct constituting the offense of indecency with a child...

House Corrections to consider TYC Sunset legislation today

Posted on April 02, 2009
This afternoon, the House Corrections Committee will be discussing the Texas Youth Commission and Juvenile Probation Commission's Sunset legislation, as well as at a "work session" tomorrow. Those interested can watch the hearing here after the House adjourns this afternoon.

Exoneree testimony is powerful stuff

Posted on April 02, 2009
I spent all day yesterday at the Texas capitol on behalf of the Innocence Project of Texas prior to and during a lengthy House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee hearing in which testimony was heard regarding several key innocence-related bills, most notably eyewitness ID and compensation for false convictions (see coverage from AP)...

Compensating the falsely convicted

Posted on March 31, 2009
Coming on the heels of news that Governor Rick Perry will meet with the family of Timothy Cole (the falsely convicted inmate who was posthumously exonerated in February in an Austin court), there are a slew of innocence-related bills up today and tomorrow in both the Texas Senate and the House...

Innocence bills, exoneree testmony, well received at Senate Criminal Justice Committee

Posted on March 31, 2009
The hearing on all the innocence-related legislation today in the Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee, I thought, was a rousing success (at least from the standpoint of the Innocence Project of Texas Policy Director) with scarce little opposition to most of the reform legislation proposed...

Keller's poverty pleas draw new scrutiny to high criminal court

Posted on March 30, 2009
Under normal circumstances, the media ignore the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which is Texas' highest criminal court. More attention is usually paid to the Texas Supreme Court, which hears only civil cases. But a series of high-profile squabbles with and smackdowns by the US Supreme Court over the death penalty, followed up by official misconduct charges against Presiding Judge Sharon Keller, have focused more scrutiny on the court than perhaps at any time in living memory...

More on innocence bills up in Texas Senate committee tomorrow

Posted on March 30, 2009
Check out a fact sheet from the Innocence Project of Texas in support of a slew of innocence-related bills up tomorrow in the Senate Criminal Justice Committee.

Another part of Obama's stimulus the Governor should oppose?

Posted on March 30, 2009
We've seen tons of media and blog debate about Texas Governor Rick Perry's decision to reject nearly $600 million in unemployment money from the federal stimulus package, arguing it would obligate the state and employers to continue paying for additional benefits after the short-term stimulus money runs out...

Why bother inspecting jails if the state can't enforce the rules? Jail Standards Commission Sunset bill up this week

Posted on March 29, 2009
The Dallas County Jail just failed its seventh straight annual jail inspection this week. The Montague County Jail failed its last inspection, exhibiting conditions later described as "Animal House meets Mayberry."Texas jails get inspected, they fail, but the problems never get solved...

Race, class and misconduct at a Dallas traffic stop

Posted on March 28, 2009
Having been focused on what's happening in Austin under the pink dome, I'd not found time to comment on the case of NFL player Ryan Moats , who was stopped by police while rushing his family to the hospital in Dallas to be with his wife's mother who they'd been told was near death...

Hundreds of new crimes, enhancements proposed at Texas Lege

Posted on March 27, 2009
On the Texas District and County Attorneys Association website, we find this unofficial statistical compilation of new crimes and penalty hikes proposed at the 81st Texas Legislature:The bill filing deadline is over and we've just about got all of the horses in the corral...

TPPF report encourages Ohio model for Texas juvie reformers

Posted on March 27, 2009
The Texas Public Policy Foundation has issued a new report, "Reclaiming Texas Youth: Applying lessons from RECLAIM Ohio to Texas" (written by two academics from the Center for Criminal Justice Research at the University of Cincinnati), which a senate staffer tells me is "similar to our proposal on TYC and TJPC...

Tables turned on Judge Sharon Keller and the right to counsel

Posted on March 27, 2009
Mark Bennett brilliantly dissects Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge Sharon Keller's sworn answer to charges by the Commission on Judicial Conduct, and pulls out some gems. He writes:She spends several paragraphs reiterating the facts of Michael Richard?s case (the ?he had it coming? defense), explains that Richard was not seeking not to be executed, but rather not to be executed using the current protocol (the ?only hastening the inevitable? defense) and points the finger at Court of Criminal Appeals counsel Edward Marty and Richard?s lawyers (the ?some other dude did it? defense)...

Raft of innocence bills hit Senate committee next week

Posted on March 26, 2009
Lots of innocence-related legislation posted on next Tuesday's Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee agenda. I'll be discussing several of these bills on the blog in the coming days. A number of them are under negotiation with law enforcement interests and will likely have "committee substitutes" which will substantially alter language currently posted online...

Obama's Mexico policy so far depressingly familiar

Posted on March 26, 2009
Though it's early, and certainly there are many other pressing issues confronting the new president, I'm increasingly dismayed with the Obama Administration's foreign policy toward Mexico.For starters, security matters aside, Congress should never have passed and President Obama should never have signed legislation banning Mexican truckers, which not only violated a treaty but immediately inspired new Mexican tariffs on US products...

Justice Project: Faulty eyewitness IDs are leading false conviction cause

Posted on March 25, 2009
I attended a press conference at the capitol this a.m. where The Justice Project announced the release of:a new report on Texas wrongful convictions exposed by DNA evidence. Convicting the Innocent: Texas Justice Derailed presents the cases of thirty-nine innocent men who served over 500 years in prison for crimes they did not commit...

Shackling, counting pregnant inmates

Posted on March 25, 2009
On its website, the Texas Jail Project is promoting two bills related to jail health care for pregnant women:? HB 3653: BANS the shackling of incarcerated women in labor and delivery (with some necessary exceptions for safety).? HB 3654: requires county jails to plan their MEDICAL CARE of pregnant women and also requires them to COUNT how many pregnant women they have incarcerated...

The best sobriety checkpoint bill I ever opposed

Posted on March 25, 2009
I'm not a fan, at all, of "sobriety checkpoints" on the roadways. Having grown up in the Cold War era, the whole idea has a bit too much of a "Can I see your papers, Comrade?" flavor to it for my tastes. Checkpoints where armed, uniformed agents of the state stop and question average citizens driving down the street were the kind of thing we used to point to under Communism in the old Soviet Union and say, "That doesn't happen in America...

Conviction upheld for only cop prosecuted in Dallas 'fake drug' scandal

Posted on March 25, 2009
Among the cases on the hand-down list from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals today is an opinion in the case of Mark de la Paz vs. the State of Texas - litigation growing out of the infamous Dallas "fake drug" case where an informant helped crooked Dallas narcotics officers set up 24 people The opinion, written by Judge Cathy Cochran, opens:Appellant, a former Dallas Police Department Narcotics detective, was convicted of (1) tampering with physical evidence for knowingly making false statements in a police report, and (2) aggravated perjury for making the same false statements under oath...

False claim of unfair competition could limit in-prison work programs

Posted on March 24, 2009
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has very few reentry programs, but one of its more successful ones is under fire at Thursday's House Corrections Committee meeting in the form of HB 1914 by committee chairman Jim McReynolds (with a companion bill in the Senate filed by Sen...

Senate reconsidering TYC budget cuts

Posted on March 24, 2009
According to the Statesman, a proposed 40% budget cut proposed in the Texas Senate for the Youth Commission "appears to be derailing." Reported Mike Ward:In recent days, the $430 million has re-emerged for inclusion in the Senate version of the budget...

Should have eloped

Posted on March 23, 2009
In Galveston last year, a bride's 19-year old brother got drunk and belligerent toward a police officer at her wedding, so he responded by calling in 30 more officers who decided to clear the room using "pepper spray and electrical shock Tasers to detain and arrest 13 people," including Houston Astros pitcher Brandon Backe...

Should postpartum psychosis be a legal defense when Moms kill kids?

Posted on March 23, 2009
The Dallas News reports on legislation (HB 3318) by Texas state Reps Jessica Farrar and Garnet Coleman that would make postpartum disorder a legal defense for women who kill their children, allowing jurors to hear testimony at the sentencing phase about the medical issues surrounding postpartum psychosis, potentially sentencing the offense as a state jail felony if they believe that's what spawned the tragic event ("Proposed bill would recognize postpartum psychosis as defense for Moms who kill infants," March 23): If lawmakers approve the measure, Texas would be the first state to have an infanticide law, said George Parnham, the Houston attorney who defended [Andrea] Yates...

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