Criminal Law

Disbarment is readers' preferred punishment for lovebird judge and DA

Posted on September 17, 2008
Grits' week-long reader poll has ended and the results are in regarding what should be the punishment for Judge Verla Sue Holland and former Collin County DA Tom O'Connell, the pair of legal lovebirds from Collin County whose adulterous, years-long affair has left hundreds of cases in question...

Galveston jail unprepared for Ike aftermath

Posted on September 17, 2008
When the Galveston Sheriff chose to make jail inmates and deputies ride out Hurricane Ike despite warnings to evacuate or face "certain death," the justification was that the jail was on high ground and built to withstand hurricane force winds.That overlooked two important factors: First, the main risk was flooding; fortunately the worst of Ike barely missed Galveston, but here's the official pre-storm prediction of how a worst-case scenario would have engulfed the jail along with the rest of the island had it happened...

A closer look at the 'Missouri model' for juvie corrections

Posted on September 16, 2008
During the height of last year's debates over what should happen at the Texas Youth Commission, the state of the art best practices legislators were most often encouraged to follow - including by a "blue ribbon commission" appointed by the Governor - came from the "Missouri model," which was used as a catch phrase to describe a range of reforms that generally promoted smaller facilities and more therapeutic, less prison-like approaches...

On jailhouse snitches and access to courts for non-DNA innocence claims

Posted on September 16, 2008
A long list of DNA-based exonerations in recent years have overturned the convictions of innocent people locked up in prison, sometimes for decades. The reasons are pretty consistent - mistaken witness identification, faulty forensic evidence, prosecutors withholding exculpatory evidence, false confessions, and lying snitches cause the bulk of cases where innocents are convicted...

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FBI: US crime down overall in 2007

Posted on September 15, 2008
The FBI issued its annual report on crime data today; see their web page devoted to the new data. Let's walk through a few highlights from the topline numbers. Bottom line, reported crime last year was down across the board:Nationwide, violent crime fell for the first time since 2005...

TYC commitments to grow dramatically despite declining juvie crime

Posted on September 15, 2008
Having analyzed on Saturday the Legislative Budget Board's incarceration projections for the adult prison system, let's take a look at LBB's projections regarding youth crime and incarceration in their five year population estimate (pdf) which is used to set agency budgets...

Waiting for word on 1,000+ stranded at Galveston jail (Updated)

Posted on September 14, 2008
Still no word on what happened with the 1,000 inmates and their jailers stranded at the Galveston County jail during Hurricane Ike. Perhaps we may find small comfort in the notion that if full-blown tragedy had struck there it would likely have been reported by now...

LBB: Texas' prison population will dip next year for the first time in decades before rising further

Posted on September 13, 2008
Ever since the Governor fired Dr. Tony Fabelo and abolished the state's independent criminal justice number crunchers, the Texas Legislative Budget Board assumed responsibility for issuing population projections for the adult and criminal justice systems...

A call for prosecutorial shaming

Posted on September 12, 2008
Doc Berman turns us on to a new paper by Prof. Adam Gershowitz at the South Texas College of Law which:explores the unfortunately large number of instances in which appellate courts reverse convictions for serious prosecutorial misconduct but do not identify the names of the prosecutors who committed the misconduct...

Hubris: Galveston Sheriff leaves inmates, deputies, in hurricane's path

Posted on September 12, 2008
Galveston Island residents were told to flee Hurricane Ike or face "certain death," but the Sheriff has inexplicably decided not to evacuate 1,000 prisoners from the county jail, even though serious flooding has already begun.It's bad enough to risk the inmates' lives, but downright bizarre to me that the Sheriff is willing to risk his deputies...

Commissary vendor pleads guilty to organized crime charges

Posted on September 12, 2008
I should mention after reporting how Sheriffs in Bexar and Potter Counties were hounded out of office over allegations of commissary-related bribery, prosecutors finally nailed down a conviction of one of the companies alleged to have bribed them, reported the Dallas News ("Jail food provider based in Dallas found guilty in organized crime case," Sept...

Most Texas gun deaths are suicides

Posted on September 11, 2008
There's an old and wise saying, "Never bring a knife to a gunfight." Perhaps a corollary to that adage should be, "Never bring a gun when you're fighting emotional demons." Reports News 8-Austin: There are more suicide deaths by guns in the state of Texas than gun-related homicides...

Governing through Crime

Posted on September 11, 2008
I've been hearing good things about the book Governing through Crime, by Jonathon Simon, and was interested to see this review in Governing Magazine, which actually holds Texas up as a "glimmer of hope" against the trends described in the book, which may sound familiar to regular Grits readers:To be politically effective, elected officials believe they must be tough on crime...

Reasons for PD departures explored

Posted on September 11, 2008
The Dallas Observer has a feature titled "Broken Cogs" focused on the fallout from five attorneys resigning in recent weeks from the Dallas Public Defender office as a result of high caseloads, new bureaucracy and quotas that swamped even the most productive lawyers...

Latest Hood stay shows Texas CCA not adequately vetting capital cases

Posted on September 11, 2008
Rather than authorize investigation into misconduct by a former colleague, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals instead took one for the team this week, essentially admitting with its execution stay in the Charles Hood murder case that its members flouted recent Supreme Court precedents on jury instructions when they approved Hood's execution last spring...

Ike Evacuations

Posted on September 10, 2008
The weather has become a bigger story than usual for the Texas justice system in 2008. Some private prisons - especially the tent city down in Raymondville created to house immigration detainees - haven't yet gotten over damage from Hurricane Dolly, Texas Prison Bidness reports...

Judge and DA in Charles Hood case admit to sexual relations

Posted on September 09, 2008
Who is surprised that the affair between the Collin County DA and the judge presiding over Charles Hood's case definitely occurred, with both lovebirds admitting to the tryst in depositions over the last 24 hours. Now it's up to Governor Perry to decide whether that merits commuting Charles Hood's sentence as Attorney General Greg Abbott has requested...

Dallas may close jail to save money

Posted on September 09, 2008
Kevin Krause at the Dallas News Crime Blog reports that the new Dallas County budget includes provisions to close one of the county's five jails to save money on staffing costs.This should be a cautionary tale for communities like Smith County (Tyler) to the East of Dallas or McLennan (Waco) to the South which hope to solve overcrowding problems by expanding capacity...

Women in Crime Ink publishing Texan bloggers

Posted on September 09, 2008
I was pleased to discover via Prevention Not Punishment a relatively new (and new to me) blog called Women in Crime Ink, and especially grateful to find a couple of substantive recent posts from Texas writers. Today Jenna Jackson, who moved to Jacksonville at age 10 and now lives in Houston, has a thoughtful post about the KFC murder trial in Kilgore 25 years after a five people were abducted and murdered in one of Texas' most notorious unsolved killings, which investigators now believe they've solved via DNA evidence...

Plane used for CIA renditions also smuggled drugs

Posted on September 09, 2008
Nearly a year after it went down in the Yucatan jungle, a Mexican newspaper has obtained documentation that a US-owned plane previously used by the CIA for renditions and trips to and from Guantanamo Bay was also used to smuggle cocaine. Reports Agency France Press:MEXICO CITY (AFP) - A private jet that crash-landed almost one year ago in eastern Mexico carrying 3...

Ethicist: Judicial misconduct to blame for delays in Charles Hood case

Posted on September 09, 2008
Find below a guest post by Lawrence J. Fox, Professor of Law at University of Pennsylvania Law School and former Chair of the ABA Ethics Committee. He was one of the 36 legal ethicists who signed onto Professor Monroe Freedman's opinion stating that the romantic relationship between the judge and DA in the Charles Hood case created a "structural defect" rendering the conviction and sentence "invalid per se...

Hood hearing canceled: Interpreting Judge Holland's recusals

Posted on September 08, 2008
UPDATE: Charles Hood's attorneys won remand of the case back to state court. Judge Greg Brewer has granted Mr. Hood's Motion to Take Depositions and has ordered Mr. O'Connell to be deposed immediately. Judge Holland is scheduled for deposition on Tuesday morning at 10 a...

Houston appeals court: Church of Christ, other Protestants may have no privilege in communications with clergy

Posted on September 08, 2008
Are communications with your minister covered by the clergy-commnicant privilege? To find out you'd better first study up on your Church's detailed doctrines on the topic. Catholics and Jews seem pretty much safe, but if a new appellate ruling stands, most Protestants in Texas may no longer be eligible to claim the privilege...

Is TYC's central administration too top heavy?

Posted on September 08, 2008
If youth inmate levels are down, asks Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, why has the number of administrators gone up? And why are TYC administrators so highly paid? From the Houston Chronicle this morning, we see this story ("Bureaucratic ranks swell at TYC," Sept...

Dallas County slashing public safety budgets while $48 million rainy day fund sits idle

Posted on September 08, 2008
If Dallas County can't afford to hire enough public defenders to keep caseloads reasonable or pay enough staff to guard the jail, why does the Commissioners Court have more than $48 million in a rainy day fund they're refusing to spend? According to the Dallas News ("Dallas County likes to keep its fat reserve," Sept...

More on Mexico's legal reforms

Posted on September 07, 2008
Since radical changes to Mexico's legal system were announced earlier this year, I've been waiting mostly in vain for more detailed English language accounts of all the details. This AP account (Sept. 6) doesn't fully fill that gap, but gives a little more detail about the training going on and what reforms may look like upon implementation:Under the constitutional amendment passed by the legislature, approved by all 32 states and signed by President Felipe Calderon, Mexico has eight years to replace its closed proceedings with public trials in which defendants are presumed innocent, legal authorities can be held more accountable and justice is equal...

Why only athletes and bodybuilders? Plano steroid prosecutions ignore alleged police doping

Posted on September 07, 2008
With disgraced sprinter Marion Jones heading home to Austin this week from a federal prison and the feds prosecuting amateur bodybuilders in Plano for steroid use, I continue to wonder with each new headline when the same level of attention will be focused on steroid use by police officers, particularly in the Plano case?Steroid dealer David Jacobs and his body builder girlfriend died under suspicious circumstances that police ruled a murder-suicide soon after he accused police officers from five Metroplex departments of being his customers...

Research on happiness examines effects of punishment

Posted on September 06, 2008
Just as cutting edge brain science research has begun to force reformulation of many core assumptions in the justice system, modern punishment theories could be radically altered by new empirical research on happiness according to a new article which Doc Berman linked to recently, "Happiness and Punishment, by law and economics professors John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco and Jonathan Masur out of the University of Chicago,...

Two Texecutions scheduled next week, but will either one go through?

Posted on September 05, 2008
Texas has a dozen more executions scheduled in 2008, including two back to back next Thursday and Friday.The first of those, Gregory Wright, will receive a stay, reports the Dallas News' Crime Blog, to allow DNA testing the defendant hopes will support his actual innocence claims...

When, if ever, should police shoot at moving cars?

Posted on September 04, 2008
The Senate Criminal Justice Committee earlier this year held a hearing on causes of law enforcement officer deaths and ways to prevent them, so I was interested to see a discussion in the Dallas News about whether a law enforcement officer who believes a driver is trying to run him over should shoot at the vehicle ("Police policies on shooting at cars differ," Sept...

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