Criminal Law

Self-inflicted budget wounds: Police contract costs driving need for Austin library closures, new fee hikes

Posted on July 24, 2008
Criminal justice cost increases and rising fuel prices account for most of the increased expense in the proposed $620 million City of Austin budget, reports KEYE-TV:Many of the budget increases include hiring 24 new police officers and buying 61 new cruisers...

Eckhardt: 'Jailing 1 in every 83 of our neighbors is a failure of our community'

Posted on July 24, 2008
Drug and alcohol offenders and the mentally ill dominate the Travis County Jail population, according to an essay by Travis County Commissioner Sara Eckhardt titled "Criminal Justice and the Least Among Us" in her quarterly newsletter to constituents (pdf)...

Today in History: O. Henry leaves prison, launches literary career

Posted on July 24, 2008
Here's an interesting historical footnote for the literary minded among you; today's the anniversary of the release from prison of one of Texas' great short story writers:July 24 - O. Henry is released from prison on this day in 1901. William Sydney Porter, otherwise known as O...

With safety costs rising, why won't Austin use new citation authority for low-level offenses?

Posted on July 24, 2008
Since the Austin PD makes up so much of the city's budget and is driving cost increases and service cuts, you'd think the City Council and the Austin Police Department would welcome new authority from the Legislature to save money by giving citations instead of arresting for low-level misdemeanors...

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Hello Dolly

Posted on July 23, 2008
As Hurricane Dolly hits South Texas today, I intended to write a post about all the prisons - especially a slew of privately run immigration detention facilities around Raymondville - that may have to evacuate prisoners, but Bob Libal at Texas Prison Bidness beat me to the punch...

Will search warrants hold up in the Great Eldorado Polygamist Roundup?

Posted on July 23, 2008
It looks like we're going to get to find out if those search warrants hold up in the Great Eldorado Polygamist Roundup. A grand jury indicted six people yesterday including jailed FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs who's actually in Arizona. That's a far cry from the original allegations of sweeping, systematic abuse by dozens of men at the YFZ Ranch, alleged for weeks by CPS and prosecutors in the press.

Locals everywhere struggle to manage mentally ill offenders

Posted on July 23, 2008
Following up on this morning's theme of mental health treatment and jails, I found two items on a brand spanking new blog called Stir Crazy in Texas informing us of new initiatives in mid-sized Texas cities to manage the problem. Welcome to the blogosphere, Stir Crazy!First, in Lubbock officials received a $400,000 grant to create a public defender for the mentally ill, but with a twist - legal services will be provided by a nonprofit instead of a county office...

Using jails for mental health treatment an expensive, counterproductive approach

Posted on July 23, 2008
The Houston Chronicle yesterday published an excellent feature by Bill Murphy ("Finding escape behind bars, July 22,") focused on mental health treatment at the Harris County Jail, reporting that:During a recent survey, county officials found that more than 400 of the jail's 11,000 inmates were homeless and suffered from a major mental illness: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or a chronic depressive-psychotic disorder...

State indigent defense task force: Dallas public defender caseloads too high

Posted on July 22, 2008
John Wiley Price and the Dallas County Commissioners Court don't appear fazed by the news, but the Texas Task Force on Indigent Defense today issued a report (pdf) analyzing the Dallas public defender office appellate division and caseloads at the state's largest PD office...

Base price of running prisons and jails rises with cost of water and fuel

Posted on July 22, 2008
Texas has long boasted among the lowest per-inmate costs in the nation for housing inmates in both state prisons and local jails, but those costs are starting to rise thanks in part to .While salaries remain the largest cost driver, with healthcare costs trailing as a significant but distant second, increased costs for gasoline and water represent a significant and growing portion of operating budgets at prisons and jails...

Every snowflake is different except for the ones that are not: DNA not immune to forensic science critiques

Posted on July 22, 2008
No two snowflakes are alike, we're told, though clearly the possibility that duplicate snowflakes may have existed at some point throughout history remains unmeasured and speculative.Much of modern forensic science relies on the same unproven assumption...

Podcast interviews Grits on DEA license plate reader proposal

Posted on July 21, 2008
At the Houston Chronicle's Texas Politics blog, reporter R.G. Ratcliffe posted a podcast discussing the news broken here on Grits that the DEA wants spend $15 million installing license plate readers along Texas highways. Here's the audio file:In addition to posting excerpts from the hearing, Ratcliffe interviewed me for the podcast and as always I was a bit taken aback at hearing my own startlingly thick accent, demonstrating once again that your correspondent has a face made for radio and a voice made for blogging...

Three guys who couldn't be on a Harris County jury: Moses, Jesus, and the Apostle Paul

Posted on July 21, 2008
Houston criminal defense attorney Mark Bennett says one question Harris County prosecutors are particularly fond of asking prospective jurors during voir dire is:If we only present one witness, but based on that witness?s testimony you believe beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty, can you convict him?After which, "The prosecutors then gleefully challenge, for cause, all of the jurors who say 'no...

Meet the next great American diet book author ...

Posted on July 21, 2008
There was a young fellow named Green,Who grew so abnormally lean,And flat, and compressed,That his back touched his chest,And sideways he couldn't be seen.You've got to admit this was a brilliant escape plot:Texas police are searching for a man who slimmed down to escape from jail...

Amber Alerts and 'Security Theater'

Posted on July 21, 2008
Security theorist Bruce Schneier talks a lot about "security theater," or security measures aimed more at convincing the public they're safe than actually protecting them. He frequently cautions that it's important not to overlook the "for show" aspect of security because security is both a reality and a feeling, and the public seeks both...

Which lawyers should you fear?

Posted on July 20, 2008
Barbara Ann Radnofsky said yesterday in the Houston Chronicle that the lawyers the public should truly fear work for the executive branch.While I agree in part, I'd add that if I were indigent and accused of a crime I didn't commit, I'd be at least as concerned about the possibility of sub-par lawyering by a criminal defense attorney as misconduct by the state...

Open Thread: Stuff to Read While I'm Out

Posted on July 19, 2008
While much of the political blogging word has migrated to Austin for the weekend, I'm leaving town. Blogging will be slow till Monday, so until Grits gets back in the saddle here's some related reading for you.First off, in part to thank them for an enjoyable lunch outing yesterday, check out recent posts from blogger-attorneys Jamie Spencer from Austin and Robert Guest from Dallas...

New evidence in the internet age: Your Facebook smiley icons can and will be used against you in a court of law

Posted on July 19, 2008
After reading a post over at Doc Berman's shop about the use of Facebook photos and profiles to criticize defendants' character, reacting to this AP story, I was interested to read about a similar situation arising from a DWI case in Waco ("Drunken driving sentences hard to call," Tribune Herald, July 19), where FaceBook pictures were used to portray the defendant as uncaring and remorseless about causing the death of her cousin:A week before Lacey Kutscherousky went to trial for killing her cousin in a drunken driving accident, she wrote on one of her social networking Web sites that her mood was ?breezy...

Collin County judge approves search warrant for defense lawyer's files

Posted on July 18, 2008
Maybe the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals will finally find a use for that 1856 attorney client privilege rule after all!The CCA earlier this year postponed proposed changes to attorney-client privilege rules for criminal defense lawyers after a largely blog-generated outcry...

The Rise and Fall of Rockwall DA Ray Sumrow

Posted on July 18, 2008
The Dallas News yesterday published a feature looking back at the career of defrocked Rockwall DA Ray Sumrow, who was recently convicted of stealing public money:Ray Sumrow was a self-made success, a man who, despite holding elected office, didn't mind getting his hands dirty and enjoyed shooting the breeze with friends at the old Dairy Queen...

Board treasurer stole from Houston police union coffers

Posted on July 18, 2008
Trust no one, I suppose, is the unhappy lesson arising from this unseemly debacle out of the powerful Houston Police Officers Union:A retired Houston police officer and his former son-in-law were indicted Thursday on charges that they took money from the professional organization that once represented them both ? the Houston Police Officers' Union...

Mexican incarceration rate one fifth that of Texas, but growing

Posted on July 17, 2008
Richard Grabman at The MexFiles has some interesting crime stats from the Mexican Health Secretary that he compared to Texas' data, but as I pointed out in the comments to his post, the Texas stats were a bit off. Let's update them, however, because Grabman is pursuing a very interesting and important train of thought based on data published in the July 15 issue of Milenio...

Conyers in Dallas for panel on wrongful convictions

Posted on July 17, 2008
US House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers will be in Big D on Saturday (okay, really in Lancaster south of Dallas) to participate in a panel discussion about wrongful convictions and DNA exonerations. Here's the text of a press release I received today promoting the event, which is hosted by Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson: CONGRESSWOMAN EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON TO HOLD PANEL DISCUSSIONS ON WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS AND DNA EXONERATIONS SATURDAY Press Conference Will Immediately Precede Event Washington, D...

Forensic Roundup

Posted on July 17, 2008
I wanted to point out several stories this morning related to topics in forensic science that deserve Grits readers' attention:Response published to crime lab criticismsThe organization Crime Lab Report published this week a rebuttal to critics ("The Wrongful Conviction of Forensic Science," pdf) of crime lab errors, re-analyzing data on DNA exonerations first crunched by the Innocence Project in NYC...

Should inspector-general model be expanded to other Texas state agencies?

Posted on July 16, 2008
Will more Texas state agencies in the future have an Office of Inspector General modeled on the ones at TYC and in the adult prison system? The House Committee on Government Reform today focused on the role of inspectors general and issues of independence from the agency they're monitoring...

The case for steroid testing high school athletes if 2 in 10,000 are users

Posted on July 16, 2008
Since I've argued against continued steroid testing of high school athletes, maintaining that steroid abuse by police officers empirically poses a more significant threat, I wanted to point readers to a column by Donald Hooton, father of a steroid using teen who committed suicide for whom Texas' steroid testing law is named...

FBI: Border corruption increasing on US side

Posted on July 16, 2008
Coming on the heels of allegations that Los Zetas corrupted a deputy constable in Collin County, I was interested to see that Reuters has a feature on drug-enforcement related police corruption at the southern end of the state ("Drug smugglers bribing US agents on Mexican border," July 15):U...

Galveston ISD wonders why West Texas school district will provide correctional educational services for island boot camp

Posted on July 16, 2008
Galveston ISD never cared much about correctional educational services until the tiny Iraan-Sheffield ISD from West Texas bid to provide them at the Seaborne ChalleNGe Corps, "a military-style program for troubled teens" operated by the Texas National Guard on the island...

Chasing illegal cell phone use in TDCJ

Posted on July 15, 2008
The Back Gate, a Texas prison guards' blog, has this story from June about staff catching an inmate on a cell phone and the resulting chaos when the prisoner tried to flee:[Y]et another cell phone was discovered on the region 3 Clemens unit in Brazoria...

AG Abbott disregards Public Information Act to conceal Governor's daily schedule

Posted on July 15, 2008
While this isn't a criminal justice story, I can't help but indulge in an off-topic post to express disapprobation at the Attorney General's blatant disregard for their own open records standards to allow Governor Rick Perry to conceal his personal schedule from the public...

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