Criminal Law

NBA official agrees to rat, if he can find somebody who hasn't already ratted on him

Posted on May 21, 2008
While it's not a Texas case, as a sports fan I'm fascinated by the recent turn of events in the prosecution of former N.B.A. referee Tim Donaghy, who faces allegations that he betted on NBA games he refereed.Donaghy, though, could be transformed through the magic of a federal 5K agreement from a cheating sleazeball gambling addict into the state's star witness - against whom, we cannot say yet...

Make Schleicher County pay its own portion of YFZ raid costs

Posted on May 20, 2008
As individual custody hearings continue this week in San Angelo, down the road in Austin this morning the Senate Finance Committeee at 10 a.m. will hold a hearing that will include discussion of how the state will pay for the Great Eldorado Polygamist Roundup...

Facts continue to erode overhyped statistic on YFZ teen moms

Posted on May 20, 2008
Have those watching the civil litigation over the Great Eldorado Polygamist Roundup (see The Common Room for blow by blow coverage) noticed that, of the 26 "disputed minors" that made up the bulk of alleged teen moms, every time one goes to court, CPS admits they're really an adult?I'd already concluded the statistic was "phony," a slanted calculation resulting from a concerted DFPS PR campaign, and slowly but surely that early assessment is bearing out...

Senator gives personal story of DFPS drugging foster kids

Posted on May 20, 2008
I learned something about Bryan state senator and Finance Committe Chairman Steve Ogden today that I didn't know: He mentioned in response to testimony before his committee that he'd been a foster parent and adopted the foster child into his own family...

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Support grows for Texas innocence commission, but other reforms needed too

Posted on May 20, 2008
To judge by the public attitudes of the top state officials, Texas may enjoy an important opportunity in the next legislative session to pass key reforms preventing more wrongful convictions. The Fort Worth Star Telegram's Max Baker featured a story Sunday ("Top Texas jurists support idea of innocence commission," May 18) dissecting the politics of a possible "innocence commission" in Texas...

California may follow Texas shutting down drug task forces

Posted on May 19, 2008
With large cuts proposed at the federal level and a state spending crisis, in California a state Senate subcommittee last week approved a plan to eliminate funding for that state's system of regional narcotics task forces. According to The Daily Triplicate (May 16):Included in this half-billion-dollar decision is all money for a rural law enforcement program that gives $500,000 a year to each of California's 37 sparsely populated counties, as well as $29 million to combat methamphetamine...

DNA cleared them, but they'll never be free

Posted on May 19, 2008
That rarest of rarities: A must-read CNN story telling the sad story of Willie Fountain, who was cleared by DNA evidence five years ago of an aggravated rape charge. Today he's homeless and recently has disappeared. Also, here's an earlier related story featuring James Woodard, another Dallas man who was recently released after spending more than 27 years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit...

Author reacts to forensics post

Posted on May 19, 2008
I forwarded the Grits post on forensics from earlier today to Roger Koppl, who authored the Forbes magazine article it was based on. He was gracious enough to react via email, so with his permission I thought I'd post his response as a stand-alone:Thanks for sending me an email notice of your blog and thanks for the blog...

Children's Defense Fund calls on Congress to intervene on youth prisons

Posted on May 19, 2008
Read Marian Wright Edelman's column at the Huffington Post calling to expand recourse for youth who are abused in youth lockups, citing Texas and Mississippi as her prime examples. See also Edelman's recent testimony to Congress (pdf) regarding "The Prison Abuse Remedies Act of 2007...

Use adversarial system, redundancies to prevent wrongful convictions from faulty forensic science

Posted on May 19, 2008
The main solutions to faulty forensic science causing convictions of innocent people may lie, I've long believed, in using the adversarial system to create redundancies in forensic testing. It's needed because, for the most part, forensic science just isn't as accurate as most watchers of TV crime dramas may believe...

Crime and Punishment in Mexico: The big picture beyond drug cartel violence

Posted on May 18, 2008
While the YFZ Ranch mess out in West Texas has gobbled up much of this blog's routine bandwidth, the hot war in Mexico between the government and major drug cartels, not to mention between the cartels and one another, appears to be spinning wildly out of control...

Dallas court identifies "deadly weapon" that can't kill you

Posted on May 18, 2008
According to the Center for Disease Control, reported The New York Times ("Prison for man with HIV who spit on police officer," May 16), "Although there have been rare cases of transmission through severe bites, 'contact with saliva, tears or sweat has never been shown to result in transmission of H...

Valor Redefined

Posted on May 17, 2008
One day you're a hero, the next you're a goat.Austin PD Officer Roger Boudreau was given the Medal of Valor after what he described as a dramatic shootout last year with David Lozano during a domestic disturbance call.Lozano was sitting in the Travis County Jail charged with attempted capital murder until May 2 when he was released on a personal bond...

Most evidence for possible FLDS criminal cases seems tainted

Posted on May 17, 2008
I'm now fairly convinced Texas will never see any successful criminal prosecutions from the Great Eldorado Polygamist Roundup. They've just screwed it up too badly. Whether the child seizures will stick on the civil side is another matter, but nearly all their evidence for possible criminal prosecutions appears tainted...

Authorities ignored leads, evidence that should have shown Eldorado accusations were a hoax

Posted on May 16, 2008
There's so much we still don't know about what went on in the days leading up to the massive raid by authorities on the YFZ Ranch, but a habeas corpus petition filed in San Antonio on behalf of monogamous FLDS moms who are all above age provides this new tidbit: Authorities knew before hand not only that Dale Barlow wasn't on the ranch (they'd spoken to him by phone and confirmed he was in Arizona), but they knew the supposed caller wasn't from Texas...

My homies, for good or ill: 14 year old in Tyler explains Constitution to dumb redneck

Posted on May 16, 2008
Having grown up in Tyler, there are moments when I must admit to finding myself embarrassed of my hometown, and others when I'm quite proud of people there.On the embarrassed side, this letter to the editor wishing harm would come to the families of criminal defense attorneys struck me as one of the most mean-spirited things I've seen in a while...

Local DAs in two counties keep no-billing TYC abuse cases

Posted on May 16, 2008
One of the main criticisms of the Texas Youth Commission's current structure has been the location of facilities in rural locales, making it hard to hire staff, nearly impossible to find specialized services, requiring overuse of "telemedicine" instead of on-site doctors, and boosting transportation costs during times of high gas prices...

Surveillance cameras and crime

Posted on May 15, 2008
Having written before about longitudinal research showing that, except for a handful of specific circumstances (like car parks), surveillance cameras don't reduce crime, I was interested to see a study described by the blog Judgement Day about camera use in Philadelphia, where researchers claimed cameras reduced crime in target areas by 13%...

Speak for Yourself: FLDS voices trickling into the blogosphere in response to YFZ raid; most Grits readers say 'send kids home'

Posted on May 15, 2008
Not surpirsingly, I suppose, given the stances I've taken on this blog, 75% of Grits readers who responded to last week's survey (out of 465 respondents) said that all or most of the FLDS kids should be sent back to their parents. Thirty two percent of readers thought all the kids should be sent home, while 43% of readers said only kids who have been physically or sexually abused should go into foster care...

Frequency of mentally ill youth in juvie detention twice as high as previously believed

Posted on May 14, 2008
America has reached the point, sadly, where we treat prisons, jails and youth detention as substitutes for mental health treatment or else the only place where indigent people can access mental health care.For adults the issues can be more complex, but for kids they're pretty simple: Criminalizing mental health problems only makes sense from a bureaucratic perspective (to get the person access to treatment), not from any viable theory of justice anyone could possibly describe...

Phony statistic on pregnant teens clouds YFZ Ranch debate

Posted on May 14, 2008
Mark Twain famously said that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can tie its shoes, and ample proof of that may be discovered by analyzing the claim from the Texas Department of Family Protective Services that 31 of 53 teens found on the YFZ Ranch were pregnant or had children, even though in court the agency only claimed five teens were discovered who fit that description...

Around the blogs

Posted on May 14, 2008
While I tend to other affairs for a while, check out recent posts at these fine blogs:Texas Prison BidnessNot GuiltyStand Down TexasSimple JusticeThe Underdog BlogLife at the Harris County Criminal Justice CenterThe Deception Blog

Are crime lab reports "testimonial" documents? SCOTUS will decide

Posted on May 13, 2008
Doc Berman over at Sentencing Law & Policy recently asked what "sleeper" cases at the US Supreme Court people were watching, and I mentioned that, though not a sentencing issue per se, I was interested in the outcome of of Melendez-Diaz v Massachussetts, which was granted cert this spring and will be argued this fall...

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history" - Hegel

Posted on May 13, 2008
Salt Lake Tribune reporter/blogger Brooke Adams' coverage of the Great Eldorado Polygamist Roundup continues to outclass all of the Texas media by a country mile. Yesterday she published this wonderful historic image on her blog at the paper, The Plural Life, along with links to various present-day cartoonists' portrayals of the Texas raid...

Don't Jump, And Here's Why

Posted on May 13, 2008
The state of Texas might want to kill you later, Bethany Anderson notes wryly at the Eleventy Billionth Blog, so after all it would be rude to commit suicide out of remorse after beating your wife to death with a baseball bat. Read her open letter to alleged killer Brent Douglas Stephens on behalf of the State of Texas.

YFZ kids abused and neglected under CPS care

Posted on May 13, 2008
I've not kept close track lately of the goings on with the ever changing number of "kids" seized from the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado, but wanted to round up recent links and sources that are slowly beginning fill out the picture.For starters, it's becoming clear other states don't see Texas' child seizure action as a model...

Dallas News backs innocence commission

Posted on May 12, 2008
Reacting to last week's "Innocence Summit" (see Grits coverage here and here), the Dallas News on Sunday editorialized in favor of the state of Texas creating and "innocence commission," an idea that I think has merit but which is also vague enough to become a mere do-nothing PR stunt if it's not given sufficient authority...

Dropouts and Crime: Dallas using GPS in pilot truancy program

Posted on May 12, 2008
I've never been a believer that GPS tracking systems are a serious alternative to incarceration in most cases, but for certain offenders they make a lot of sense. The New York Times this morning focuses on the use of GPS to combat juvenile truancy in Dallas, which might just be one of those areas where the technology is worth the bang for the buck ("To curb truancy, Dallas tries electronic monitoring," May 12)...

Wishing a Happy Mothers Day to FLDS Moms

Posted on May 11, 2008
This Mother's Day, take a moment to think about the mothers and kids from the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado who've been separated from each other by the state of Texas, and perhaps give a prayer that, by Father's Day, CPS has separated any actually allegedly abused kids from those where the state just dislikes their parents' religion, and returned the rest to their families, as about 75% of Grits readers appear to favor in the ongoing reader poll...

Many arson convictions based on invalid science

Posted on May 11, 2008
My recent conversation about arson cases with Innocence Project of Texas director Jeff Blackburn left me more interested in the issue of how and why people are wrongly convicted of arson based on faulty forensic science, and how many innocent people may be implicated...

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