Criminal Law

Sound staffing policies, lower inmate numbers, not high-tech gadgetry best solution to contraband problems

Posted on March 27, 2011
A combination of underfunding and ineptitude allowed a recent escape from solitary confinement at the Stiles Unit in Beaumont, according to Lindsay Wise writing in the Houston Chronicle ("Prison in need of security updates," March 27). The article opens:A half an hour without direct supervision was all it took for felon David Puckett to escape from solitary confinement at a maximum security prison in Beaumont, unseen by guards...

Grits hits 3 million visitor mark

Posted on March 26, 2011
Just to have mentioned it: This morning around 11 a.m. Grits hit the 3 million visitor mark (with around 4.9 million page views). I don't know whether that's a lot or a little compared to others, but it took six and a half years to get there. This is the 5,874th post since Grits launched in October 2004, and lately the blog has been averaging 15-16,000 visitors per week...

Rebutting the Austin Statesman on cutting vocational ed for prisoners

Posted on March 26, 2011
The Austin Statesman today editorialized against providing post-secondary vocational courses to Texas prison inmates, and made this flawed argument (rebutted over the last few days in the comments to this Grits post):So far, the state has spent $26.9 million on the program, which is based on the proven notion that recidivism rates can be lowered if inmates leave prison with more education than they had when they arrived...

Lies, damn lies and LBB fiscal notes: Why it's really not free to make K2 possession a felony

Posted on March 25, 2011
Marc Levin from the Texas Pulbic Policy Foundation emails to alert me to another absurdist budgetary claim on criminal penalty enhancements from the Legislative Budget Board: A "zero Fiscal Note for legislation making K2 possession a felony!" (K2 is a form of currently legal, synthetically produced marijuana...

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Debating, praising Marc Mauer: On reducing state spending through prisoner reductions

Posted on March 24, 2011
Brandi Grissom at the Texas Tribune yesterday published an interesting interview with Marc Mauer, the head of the national Sentencing Project. I respect Mauer's work and concur with almost everything he said. But there was one part of his commentary that I disagree is applicable to Texas' budget situation...

308 bills push tuffer penalties; cuts to DWI, domestic violence probation look like political suicide

Posted on March 24, 2011
Over at the Texas District and County Attorney's Association, Shannon Edmonds tallies the damage now that bill filing deadline and the midway point of the session have passed. Legislators have filed 106 bills enhancing (read: increasing) existing penalties, 88 bills creating new felonies, and 114 creating new Class A/B misdemeanors, for a total of 308 bills proposing new crimes or penalty increases...

Report: Whether youth offenders are certified as adults mostly depends on where they live

Posted on March 24, 2011
From Michele Deitch at UT's LBJ School comes a report on youth certified as adults in Texas, described in this email:Dear Colleagues,I am excited to announce publication of my new report, "Juveniles in the Adult Criminal Justice System in Texas" (LBJ School of Public Affairs, 2011)...

Central repository for TX racial profiling reports now online

Posted on March 24, 2011
Here's something cool: For the first time in a decade since Texas' passed its racial profiling statute, all the racial profiling reports from local agencies have been compiled in one place and put online. This is long overdue. For a number of years before the state created a central repository for this information, I helped analyze the data at the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, where Molly Totman performed yeoman's service to compile information on a nonprofit basis that really should have been a government function...

Cuts to vocational ed for prisoners will increase recidivism, future incarceration costs

Posted on March 23, 2011
I can't tell if it's part of the $34 million already slated to be cut from the Windham School District, but Mike Ward at the Austin Statesman reports that key legislative leaders (Shapiro, Whitmire and Madden) want to eliminate funding for post-secondary education of inmates...

911 budget reduction good public policy but shady budgeting practice

Posted on March 23, 2011
The Austin Statesman's Suzannah Gonzales has an article ("Small cities oppose cuts to 911 answering services," March 23) on proposals in Central Texas (which are almost certainly being discussed behind the scenes elsewhere in the state as well) to reduce funding for 911 services, putting off infrastructure upgrades and diverting calls from smaller agencies, some of which take as few as two 911 calls per day, to Sheriffs or larger police departments...

Time for Truth in Sentencing Budgets from LBB

Posted on March 23, 2011
I find it fascinating that other states, notably Missouri, are beginning to tell judges the cost to taxpayers of sentences they impose, as described in this blog post from Lauren Brooke Eisen at the Vera Institute.By contrast, in Texas legislators don't even get honest assessments of the costs of criminal penalties before passing them into law...

Eliminate school police for budget savings

Posted on March 22, 2011
If public school budgets will be radically cut in Texas, a prospect which for the moment appears all but inevitable, which employees should be eliminated first? Judging from the ongoing debate, maybe campus cops. Jason Embry at the Austin Statesman describes some of the debates surrounding school budgets thusly:One of the most important dividing lines in the discussion about the state's budget crisis separates those who think Texas schools need more money and those who think schools just need to make better spending decisions...

Dallas constable investigations of illegal towing should be replicated elsewhere in state

Posted on March 22, 2011
Here's an intriguing story out of Dallas where, despite murky details, on the surface the county's position on vehicle towing doesn't seem to pass the smell test. Reported Kevin Krause (whose articles on these subjects have been absolutely first rate):Accion America, a small Dallas-based group formed to protest restrictive laws proposed in Farmers Branch and Irving, threatened to file a class-action lawsuit against the county on behalf of vehicle owners...

TYC begins public meetings presaging facility closures

Posted on March 21, 2011
The Texas Youth Commission has begun holding local community meetings (go here for meeting dates) through which its management has said it will determine which units to close. See coverage of a meeting planned in Brownwood, and a local TV station reported from the meeting in Mart that:More than 100 local facility employees, members of the public, volunteers, and youth advocates showed up to the meeting to voice their concerns...

On expanding the death penalty, budgets, and unfunded mandates

Posted on March 21, 2011
State Sen. Joan Huffman has a bill up (SB 377) tomorrow in the Senate Criminal Justice Committee that would expand the option for prosecutors to pursue capital punishment in cases where a child under ten years old is murdered. Presently prosecutors can seek the death penalty when the victim is under six years old, as well as under a litany of other circumstances...

Vocational ed boosts ex-offender employment: The counterargument to cuts at Windham School District

Posted on March 21, 2011
At the Fort Worth Strartlegram, Jill "J.R." Labbe takes aim at the Senate Finance Committee's call for cutting prison education programs at the Windham School District. Her column closes with a response to Sen. Florence Shapiro's challenge to justify spending on prisoners' education when schools are closing and teachers losing their jobs because of free-world budget cuts:"When we're cutting funding for public schools and furloughing thousands of school employees, they're going to have to convince us why they should receive any continued funding," Shapiro was quoted in the Austin American-Statesman...

Note to Florida: Texas high criminal court not a model that should be emulated

Posted on March 20, 2011
Most of the criticism of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals involves its spats with federal courts over the death penalty, its belated conversion to allowing innocence claims, and the troubles of its Presiding Judge Sharon "We Close At 5" Keller, who was assessed the largest ethics fine in state history for failing to disclose real estate she owned and corporate boards she sat on...

Roundup: Assorted facts and heresies

Posted on March 20, 2011
Here are a few disparate items that merit Grits readers attention before I turn mine for the day to college hoops:Constable pursues truancy make-work to justify staff increaseUsually it's a mistake when the criminal-justice system seeks to solve social problems unrelated to traditional "crime," and that certainly applies to using constables to enforce truancy laws instead of investing in schools until the product they offer is valuable enough to students to make them want to go...

Juvie probation chief, officers in Upshur fired, convicted of records tampering

Posted on March 19, 2011
In East Texas, two Upshur County juvenile probation officers and former juvenile probation chief Milton Wylie all pled guilty to misdemeanor charges of tampering with government records after they were caught forging documents required to be maintained by the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission, including faked signatures of defendants and parents...

Merging public safety oversight agencies a pointless exercise

Posted on March 19, 2011
Here's another budget cutting suggestion that to me amounts to little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Reports Brandi Grissom at the Texas Tribune:A money-saving proposal to combine state agencies that oversee police and firefighter training and local jail operations has public safety officials statewide worried about their future...

Identity mix-ups at Dallas jail can take a week to sort out, or decades

Posted on March 18, 2011
At the Dallas County Jail, inmates who're arrested due to an identity mix-up, even in serious cases, have trouble getting the system to document and rectify the error. Kevin Krause at the Dallas News on Wednesday published the story of two jail inmates recently held for a week or so apiece when the system really meant to arrest somebody else...

Waste alleged, budget cuts sought at TDCJ's Windham School District

Posted on March 18, 2011
Senate Education Committee Chair Florence Shapiro called the budget of the Windham School District, which educates Texas prisoners at 112 prison units across the state, "the biggest waste of money I think I've seen," according to reports from the Austin Statesman and the Houston Chronicle...

Bill to abolish Driver Responsibility surcharge gets hearing on Tuesday

Posted on March 18, 2011
State Rep. Leo Berman's HB 299 repealing Texas' Driver Responsibility surcharge has received the chair's blessing for a public hearing on Tuesday (at 2 pm or upon adjournment), when the bill will be heard by the House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee...

Texas Senate approves eyewitness ID legislation

Posted on March 17, 2011
State Sen. Rodney Ellis' eyewitness ID legislation passed the Texas Senate yesterday unanimously, with Ellis moving to pass the bill in the memory of Timothy Cole. See coverage from:Lubbock Avalanche JournalThe Texas TribuneThe Austin American-StatesmanSan Antonio Express-News KCBD-TV LubbockThe bill plugs a gaping hole in the public-policy landscape at local police departments, requiring the creation of written policies (88% of departments don't have them) and airing the inadequacies of lineups in court when agencies don't follow them...

Texas prison problems pale beside Nuevo Laredo lockup

Posted on March 17, 2011
Grits tried for awhile to track what's going on related to law enforcement and drug cartels in Mexico, since it relates directly, if not always obviously, to what happens here. But I ceased regular coverage of the topic a couple of years back because the mainstream media to some extent finally awoke to the issue and the subject is too vast and opaque to cover from afar...

Police prevarication in Austin overlooked with wink and a nod

Posted on March 16, 2011
I ran across a story from a couple of years ago on a local Austin attorney's blog about alleged police testilying which, before the advent of attorney blogs, would undoubtedly have been silently ignored. Don't get me wrong, it was still officially ignored, by the police department, prosecutors, the judge, etc...

On the relationship between high employee turnover and contraband smuggling at TDCJ

Posted on March 16, 2011
The issue of contraband is back on center stage these days at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice after the latest escape was facilitated by a prisoner using an illegal cellphone and communicating through Facebook. Texas prison chief Brad Livingston has responded by calling for a test of cell-phone jamming technology, however the Attorney General has already told the agency that installing jammers on a permanent basis would require a change in federal communications law first enacted in the 1930s...

Drug, graffiti sentencing, criminal discovery highlight House Criminal Jurisprudence agenda

Posted on March 15, 2011
Here are some of the big issues up in the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee today:Discovery in criminal trialsChairman Pete Gallego has a bill up requiring mutual pretrial discovery for both the prosecution and the defense, with related bills up by Reps Guillen and Dutton...

Few bills proposed at Lege to remedy statewide crisis in competency restoration

Posted on March 15, 2011
Steven Kreytak at the Austin Statesman has an excellent article on the little-discussed topic of competency restoration for mentally ill defendants, focusing on an extreme Austin case where a murder defendant, James McMeans, has spent 11.5 years in and out of state hospitals and jails, with the courts and the medical system unable to restore him to "competency," whatever that would mean for a previously homeless schizophrenic who thinks stabbing people is the only way to tell if they're androids...

Copper theft: Case study in failed criminal penalty enhancements

Posted on March 15, 2011
Every two years, Texas legislators troop to the House Criminal Jurisprudence and Senate Criminal Justice Committees to promote a seemingly endless array of penalty "enhancements," i.e., creating new crimes or increasing the penalties for existing ones in a one-way ratchet that has filled the prison system to capacity...

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