Criminal Law

Spanking for Truancy? On the limits of corporal punishment in juvie corrections

Posted on June 18, 2008
I don't get too worked up at parental spanking (or even by school officials and such), but my own parenting experience tells me there are limits to its effectiveness. I grew up in a household that used corporal punishment quite liberally and consider it a legitimate parenting technique when properly employed...

Ombudsman is a useful tool for inmate families who know what an 'ombudsman' is

Posted on June 18, 2008
At a brand new blog called TDCJ and Your Loved One, a recent post focused on how to get help for family members on the inside for day to day matters and gives contact information for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Ombudsman.Seeing this reminded me of an incident yesterday in the neighbhorhood that's worth relating: A young mother approached me to ask if it were possible for her Mom, who's locked up in Gatesville, to get out to attend the funeral of her father, the girl's grandfather...

Charles Hood's execution stayed: Judge accused of tryst with death penalty prosecutor recuses herself at 11th hour

Posted on June 17, 2008
A former Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge whose old CCA colleagues yesterday found procedural cause not to delve into her extra-judicial antics (Judge Verla Sue Holland was accused of carrying on a tryst with the prosecutor in a death penalty case when she was a trial judge) finally did the right thing today about an hour before Charles Hood's scheduled execution and recused herself, delaying the execution indefinitely at the last minute...

Massive rate of federal immigration prosecutions in Texas' Southern and Western districts not sustainable given prison guard shortages

Posted on June 17, 2008
For a great primer on recent federal sentencing dynamics in Texas' Southern and Western districts driving national immigration detention policy, see this collection of recent data compiled by the wonderful (at least for data geeks) Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse out of Syracuse U...

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What, me to blame? Austin city council gets "wake up call" on police budget crisis they knowingly caused

Posted on June 17, 2008
The debate in the Austin Statesman today over why the Austin Police Department's costs rose more than other PDs in the last decade strikes me as utterly disingenuous. Despite officials' incredulous comments, everyone quoted knows full well why Austin police cost so much - an extravagant union contract spearheaded by then Mayor Kirk Watson that made Austin police the highest paid officers in the country...

Asset forfeiture funds may get more accountability, money diverted to drug courts

Posted on June 16, 2008
Why shouldn't money forfeited by drug dealers be used to finance drug courts and treatment programs? If a local DA misuses asset forfeiture funds, who can prosecute them? Have these monies simply become local political slush funds?Those were some of the questions posed at a June 5 hearing of the Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee (I was out of town that day and just got around to listening to the asset forfeiture discussion - the video archive is here...

Read memo spawning proposed CCA changes to privilege rule

Posted on June 16, 2008
In the interest of providing a complete record regarding the debate over deleting criminal defense lawyers' "special rule of attorney client privilege," I wanted to give readers access to the memo by UT law professor Stephen Goode which originally suggested the change to a committee of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals...

Accrediting handwriting "experts" may not prevent wrongful convictions

Posted on June 16, 2008
Some improvements mandated by the Legislature at Texas crime labs apparently are taking a while to filter down into daily practices, to judge by this notice (doc) from the Department of Public Safety, found at the Texas prosecutors' website. DPS says many prosecutors still aren't aware that only handwriting experts from accredited labs can have their forensic analysis presented in court:Texas law enforcement agencies and prosecuting attorneys need to be aware that anyone presenting court testimony in a criminal trial regarding handwriting examination must work in a laboratory accredited by the Department of Public Safety, under the auspices of ASCLD, Inc...

Writ Writer

Posted on June 16, 2008
See this review of the public television special aired last night featuring the life and work of Fred Cruz, a legendary TDCJ "writ writer" convicted of armed robbery in 1960 who insisted upon his own innocence until his death in prison. The documentary examines Cruz's legal work on behalf of himself and (more successfully) other prisoners through the lens of interviews with those who knew him, court records and Cruz's own journals...

View from the Piney Woods on proposed deletion of privilege rule

Posted on June 16, 2008
Jeff Rambin over at the Tyler Appeals blog summarizes the controversy over the Court of Criminal Appeals proposed deletion of what Judge Cathy Cochran called a "vestigal tail" with "no wag" - the attorney client privilege Rule 503(b)(2), and concludes the CCA shouldn't rush to change it...

"Home-grown" terrorists sprung from FBI snitch garden

Posted on June 15, 2008
A guilty verdict in Ohio this week is being hailed as the first successful prosecution by the feds of a "home grown" terrorist cell in the United States, and so it is. That observation begs the question, though: Who grew it?Law enforcement justifies its employment of criminals as "snitches" with the claim that frequently there's no other way to solve a crime, which is true enough...

Prescription drugs kill more people than illegal ones; new harm reduction strategies needed

Posted on June 15, 2008
Lately on this blog, discussions of "harm reduction" have centered around the Attorney General's nonsensical legal opinion and Bexar District Attorney Susan Reed's efforts to bully out of existence a legislatively approved needle exchange program in San Antonio...

Hampton defends privilege rule: "The vestigal tail you save may be your own"

Posted on June 15, 2008
Long-time Texas Criminal Defense Lawyer Association stalwart Keith Hampton offered up this response to Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Cathy Cochran's guest post yesterday in which she defended the court's proposed deletion of part of the attorney client privilege rule...

CCA Judge Cathy Cochran: Privilege rule proposed for deletion a "vestigal tail" with "no wag"

Posted on June 14, 2008
Here's an update straight from the source on proposed changes to Texas' attorney client privilege rule in criminal cases that's been in place since 1856. I couldn't be more flattered that Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Cathy Cochran offered up this guest post reacting to a recent Grits item quoting Dallas defense lawyer Robert Guest, a law blawgger who's been sounding the alarm...

Potter County Sheriff convicted of bribe taking; comprehensive audit needed of jail commissary contract awards

Posted on June 14, 2008
An all-woman jury yesterday in Amarillo brought back a guilty verdict against Potter County Sheriff Mike Shumate for taking bribes from the Dallas-based commissary manager, Mid-America Services. The "bribes" the state was able to prove were mostly meals, though quite a few of them, according to the Amarillo Globe News ("Shumate guilty," June 13): Shumate testified he never took any bribes, but did say he accepted meals from Austin and Jack Madera, the founder of Mid-America...

Tales from death row: Passion and intrigue marked two capital trials

Posted on June 13, 2008
To mind-blowing stories from death row deserve Grits' readers attention:At State of Mine, Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith reprints an email from reporter Mike Hall about the astonishing case of Charles Hood, who was sent to death row after a Collin County trial in which the judge and the prosecutor were secretly having an affair...

Cost per case at Dallas Public Defender much lower than private attorneys

Posted on June 13, 2008
Over at the Dallas Observer's blog, Unfair Park, Robert Wilonsky links to this 2005 "feasibility analysis" (pdf) from the Texas Task Force on Indigent Defense regarding creation of a PD offices in Texas that specifically compares the savings Dallas County enjoys because of it's PD office to the cost of hiring private attorneys (see Table 2, p...

Rothgery v. John Wiley Price: Move to slash Dallas public defender budget couldn't come at worse time

Posted on June 13, 2008
In the wake of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price's high-profile putsch at the county's public defender office, many in Big D are taking seriously Price's threat to fire large numbers of lawyers, slash the PD office budget, or even eliminate it entirely...

ACLU lawsuit challenges strip searches, punitive isolation of girls at TYC Brownwood unit

Posted on June 12, 2008
ACLU's national women's project and the ACLU of Texas filed suit this week over use of solitary confinement and strip searching among girls housed at the Brownwood unit, according this press announcement :a class action lawsuit [filed] today on behalf of five girls ? all of whom have histories of sexual, physical, or emotional abuse ? held in the Brownwood State School...

Recording full interrogations would have saved a lot of grief in Austin's Yogurt Shop case

Posted on June 12, 2008
It's been 17 years since the infamous Yogurt Shop murders rocked the Texas capital, and as time passes it's becoming more difficult to determine where investigators went wrong in building their case against Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott.But go wrong they did...

Former official voice of Texas death row now a defense witness

Posted on June 12, 2008
After serving as TDCJ's public spokesman for Texas' death penalty system for eight years, Larry Fitzgerald switched sides, earning him the label "traitor" from some of his former colleagues along with a new career as an expert witness. The Chicago Tribune has an interesting story today documenting Fitzgerald's new career ("Voice of death testifies for life," June 12) and the blowback its earned him from those on whose behalf he previously spoke...

Dallas public defender saves county money compared to neighbors

Posted on June 12, 2008
The main reason I think Dallas County Commissioners must have some ulterior motive in hounding chief public defender Brad Lollar out of his position this week is that their stated reasons - lazy lawyers and high costs at the PD office - make little sense on their face...

Odds and Ends

Posted on June 11, 2008
Several recent stories captured my attention that I haven't had time to write about, but I wanted to at least take a minute to point them out to Grits readers in case y'all had something to say about them:Dallas DA Craig Watkins accused of exchanging "face time" with the DA to corporations for office party sponsorship...

Judge to CPS: Shut down investigation of YFZ family

Posted on June 11, 2008
Now that the Texas Supreme Court has sided with the YFZ Ranch parents, other judges are beginning to step up to the plate to rein in overreaching policies by Texas CPS. In one of the child custody cases resulting from the Great Eldorado Polygamist Roundup, a San Antonio District Judge:issued the restraining order, which for now keeps Child Protective Services investigators from continuing their investigation...

Study: Mentally ill offenders account for 10% of homicides

Posted on June 11, 2008
Thanks to Kristin Houle at Prevention Not Punishment for pointing out this Wall Street Journal op ed ("Compassion, compulsion and the mentally ill," E. Fuller Torey, June 9) discussing new research on how much violent crime by mentally ill people may be attributed to underfunded mental health treatment:"The debacle of deinstitutionalization continues to worsen with each passing year...

Levin: Britain's Conservative Party pushing incentive-based prison models similar to Texas' probation reforms

Posted on June 11, 2008
One of the reasons I track jail overcrowding around the state is that many counties face the same problems, so it makes sense to compare different solutions that arise and share them with others facing the same challenges. Similarly, Texas' prison system isn't alone in facing an overcrowding crisis...

Dallas PD will implement steroid testing after David Jacobs' allegations

Posted on June 10, 2008
In the wake of allegations that deceased steroids dealer David Jacobs sold the drugs to officers at Dallas PD and four other area departments, Dallas PD had decided to implement random drug testing, the Dallas News reports, though they insist they've been planning it for some time...

Top Dallas public defender fired

Posted on June 10, 2008
Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price took some cheap shots at head public defender Brad Lollar as the latter man resigned today. According to the Dallas News, "The Public Defender's Office is not a retirement home for lawyers who don't want to work," Mr...

New Texas crime data available, but what do they capture?

Posted on June 10, 2008
Both violent and property crimes are declining nationwide, reports the Justice Department, though in Texas' city by city numbers (below) one finds a more mixed result.I never quite know what to make of raw, aggregate reported crime stats. One's gut instinct is to tally them up to determine whether crime is "increasing" or "decreasing," but there are so many variables to consider when deciding if that's accurate...

The Mechanics of a Wrongful Conviction

Posted on June 09, 2008
Two recent items regarding the possible conviction of innocent people deserve Grits readers' attention:First, see Rev. Alan Bean' essay, "The Mechanics of a Wrongful Conviction," from the Friends of Justice blog, in which he compares the recent conviction of Alvin Clay, a case he's been closely following, to the Tulia cases and others Alan has worked on over the last decade...

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