Grits for Breakfast

• Austin chief can't bypass officer for promotion who visited brothel on vacation

  Police accountability in this state is seriously hindered by the state civil service code, which governs police discipline, promotions and other departmental employment practices for the 70 or so cities which have opted in (including all of the big ones except Dallas and El Paso). Nearly all jurisdictions governed [...]
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  Posted: December 19, 2009, 10:49am EST
  

• 'Strategies for Hiring the Hidden Worforce'

  The headline of this post is the title of an education workshop for employers sponsored yesterday by the local chamber of commerce in Waco, as reported in today's Tribune-Herald:
  

  Dennis Brooks said he’s always looking to hire diesel mechanics, and he would gladly hire a disabled person or an [...]

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  Posted: December 18, 2009, 10:00am EST
  

• Can Dallas really trust declining crime statistics?

  Falling crime statistics in Dallas are great, editorialized the Morning News ("Crime statistics must be accurate," Dec. 16), but only if the public may have confidence that police aren't cooking the books:
  

  Specifically, there's reason to suspect that reporting procedures adopted by the department in 2007 undercount violent' [...]

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  Posted: December 17, 2009, 2:52pm EST
  

• Evidence-based practices described to judges at state sentencing conference

  I wasn't able to take notes during Ed Latessa's lively lecture to the recent state sentencing conference for judges, DAs and probation officials sponsored by TDCJ's probation division, so I'm pleased to see they put his presentation online regarding the current state of evidence-based supervision practices:
  What Works [...]
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  Posted: December 17, 2009, 10:01am EST
  

• Radnofsky responds defending open records stance

  After Charles Kiker forwarded her this morning's Grits post and my addendum in the comments that discussed her open records stance, I received the following response from Democratic Attorney General candidate Barbara Ann Radnofsky, printed here in its entirety with my initial reaction below:
  

  From [...]

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  Posted: December 16, 2009, 4:12pm EST
  

• Prossecutors' performance hard to measure: Excellent reporting out of Waco shows gaps in DA data

  The McLennan County District Attorney is facing his first serious electoral challenge in a generation next year, and the Waco Tribune-Herald offered up excellent coverage this week that are must-reads for anyone concerned with how prosecutors operate or what issues voters should care about in elections:
  "Data offer clues" [...]
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  Posted: December 16, 2009, 12:34pm EST
  

• AG Greg Abbott presiding over dark hour for Texas open records

  Over the years I've sometimes praised Attorney General Greg Abbot for being reasonably good on his open records decisions, but data published by the Corpus Christi Caller Times suggests Abbot's watch has not been an especially happy period for open records overall ("Increase in requests to withhold public data'" [...]
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  Posted: December 15, 2009, 8:29pm EST
  

• Eyewitnesses miss big changes in their environment, like the person in front of them

  An alert reader points to this remarkable video of an experiment regarding "change blindness" to judge how observant (or not) average people are in casual settings, via Boing Boing:
  
  
  
  If 75% of people in the experiment don't notice they're all of a sudden speaking with a [...]
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  Posted: December 15, 2009, 11:45am EST
  

• Travis County planning to launch veterans court

  Having written over the weekend about the rise of Texas veterans courts, I was pleased to see Travis County announce they'd also create one in addition to their existing mental health court ("Travis County looking to set up court for veterans," Dec. 16):
  

  Travis County officials say not' [...]

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  Posted: December 15, 2009, 8:45am EST
  

• Forensic Science commissioner resigns to avoid revealing public info

  Somehow I'd missed that one of Governor Perry's recent appointees to the Texas Forensic Science Commission - Bexar County Medical Examiner Randall Frost - had resigned in October just weeks after his appointment because he wouldn't reveal immediate family members' names or assets required on state ethics disclosures.
  [...]
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  Posted: December 15, 2009, 7:07am EST
  

• Rumor of the Day: Shanda Perkins for TYC Ombudsman?

  This is probably idle speculation and I ignored it as highly unlikely when I first heard the rumor (which is all it is right now), but no fewer than three normally knowledgeable sources on juvie justice topics have suggested to me in the last week that [...]
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  Posted: December 14, 2009, 4:11pm EST
  

• Duncanville's million dollar camera: Tribune expose' details red-light ticket revenue

  I mostly quit tracking minutiae regarding red-light cameras after I left the ACLU of Texas and nobody was paying me to follow what had become a hydra-headed, locally-driven mass expansion of surveillance cameras and electronically generated tickets. Since then, the number of red-light cameras throughout the state has exploded, [...]
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  Posted: December 14, 2009, 2:37pm EST
  

• US Department of Agriculture needs to stay out of jail building business

  I make an effort on this blog to track as comprehensively as possible all the various sources of expansion in incarceration capacity in Texas, from halfway houses and treatment centers to county jails, state prisons, federal lockups, immigration detention centers and privately run facilities. But the Texas Tribune's Julian Aguilar [...]
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  Posted: December 14, 2009, 11:10am EST
  

• Elections, Judicial Conduct Commission, provide too little accountability for judges

  In the Dallas News, Diane Jennings has an article on the state Commission on Judicial Conduct ("State Commission on Judicial Conduct has the job of judging Texas judges," Dec. 14) which normally receives little attention but was cast into the state spotlight this year when it initiated a fact-finding [...]
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  Posted: December 14, 2009, 9:05am EST
  

• Mixed messages on graffiti in Nueces County: Will 8 year sentence solve anything?

  I'm sure the judge who gave this sentence did so believing it would "send a message," but the message it sends to me is that the judge has no sense of proportion:
  A south Texas district judge has sentenced an 18-year-old man to eight years in prison for habitually' [...]
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  Posted: December 13, 2009, 11:35am EST
  

• Texas veterans courts an aggressive version of problem-solving jurisprudence

  During the 81st Texas Legislature a little-noticed amendment to SB 1940 may have launched the most comprehensive, aggressive brand of "problem solving court" I've yet seen in the Lone Star State: "Veterans courts."
  
  The bipartisan amendment authorizing them, which was essentially similar to SB 112 by Rodney Ellis,' [...]
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  Posted: December 12, 2009, 9:42am EST
  

• Exonerees, lawyers fees and innocence compensation: A personal perspective on an ugly dispute

  I'm going to speak out of school a bit to offer a personal perspective on a dispute covered today in the Dallas News involving my former employers. I've not spoken to anyone involved about the lawsuit described below. I claim no direct line to the truth on this and only [...]
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  Posted: December 11, 2009, 11:47am EST
  

• Tactics to reduce Nueces County jail crowding not so different from elsewhere

  The Corpus Christi Caller Times this week editorialized ("Jail population reduction should be a priority," Dec. 8) that Nueces County officials should focus more closely on reducing the jail population to avoid new jail construction:
  

  Over the past 17 years, only 36 beds have been added to the county [...]

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  Posted: December 10, 2009, 12:44pm EST
  

• Commissioner proposes inmate labor to reduce Harris jail crowding

  I'm glad to see folks in Houston finally getting serious - really for the first time in years - about finding solutions to jail overcrowding besides building more cells and hiring more guards. Via Kuff, I was pleased to learn from the Houston Chronicle ("Inmate labor plan on'" [...]
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  Posted: December 10, 2009, 8:19am EST
  

• Harris DA's drug-policy change will improve equity, jail crowding

  Pretty big news out of Houston today on the drug-policy front. Harris County DA Pat Lykos announced a change in her office's charging policy on low-level drug offenses that will put Houston in line with other Texas jurisdictions, but has the police union seething ("DA's crack pipe policy stirs" [...]
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  Posted: December 09, 2009, 12:53pm EST
  

• DOJ: Lower prison growth rate due to reduced incarceration of black people for drug crimes

  Texas ranks among national leaders at reducing state incarceration rates and probation rolls, according to the latest federal data summarizing state and federal corrections data.
  
  Here are two new reports (forwarded by a helpful reader) from the Bureau of Justice Statistics at USDOJ comparing state prison, probation and parole [...]
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  Posted: December 09, 2009, 10:58am EST
  

• Harris District Clerk lets public search cases by attorney name

  Mark Bennett at Defending People directs readers to new online tools making it easy to identify what cases an individual attorney has worked on in Harris County. Basically you can find the lawyer's bar card number at the State Bar of Texas website, then use this search [...]
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  Posted: December 09, 2009, 7:51am EST
  

• Women's theater in jail

  Here's an interesting sounding women's theater project in Austin sponsoring a program at the Travis County jail:
  Conspire Theatre is a sponsored project of the Austin Circle of Theaters, a 501(c)3 nonprofit. Our first project was a five week theatre workshop in Travis County Correctional Facility (Del Valle, Texas) [...]
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  Posted: December 08, 2009, 3:25pm EST
  

• Texas jurors sent only 8 murderers to death row in 2009

  An Austin Statesman report about Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg's decision to seek the death penalty in the sexual assault and murder of an LBJ High School student included this analysis of the Travis DA's track record on capital cases over the last ten years:
  Prosecutors in Travis County [...]
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  Posted: December 08, 2009, 1:28pm EST
  

• 2,383 and Counting: Felonies have come a long way, baby

  I've marveled frequently about the exploding number of crimes and particularly felonies in Texas statutes. After every biennial legislative session, the Board of Pardons and Parole must identify all new felonies created by the Texas Legislature and assign each offense a "severity" level for purposes of inmate classification and to' [...]
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  Posted: December 08, 2009, 11:30am EST
  

• Report: Bexar probation department poorly managed

  A staffer for the Bexar County Judge forwarded me a power-point presentation (pdf) from a new report by Dr. Tony Fabelo at the Council on State Government's Justice Center analyzing the Bexar County probation department. I thought I'd run through a few highlights before Fabelo makes a formal' [...]
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  Posted: December 07, 2009, 11:46am EST
  

• DNA could solve burglaries if crime labs were bigger, better, more trustworthy

  DNA evidence is still mostly used in violent crimes, and even for that purpose crime labs have large backlogs. San Antonio, for example, has more than 5,000 untested rape kits in storage regarding unsolved sexual assaults. But DNA potentially could be used in many other types of offenses. [...]
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  Posted: December 07, 2009, 10:27am EST
  

• Los Zetas investing drug profits in legitimate businesses

  Ever since the original founders of Los Zetas were trained by US Special Forces personnel at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA, they've been upping the ante and redefining the very model of a modern major drug cartel. Reports Alfredo Corchado of the Dallas News ("Mexico's" [...]
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  Posted: December 06, 2009, 9:13am EST
  

• Revocations down, crime down, county caseloads up after probation reform legislation

  Texas has received a lot of credit recently in the national press for efforts to reduce incarceration rates and stave off new prison spending. Here's an update describing which parts of those reforms are doing the most to reduce incarceration pressures, as well as where' [...]
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  Posted: December 05, 2009, 10:40am EST
  

• Cold weather odds and ends

  Here are a number of recent stories that deserve Grits readers attention as we all hunker down and wait for the cold weather to blow in:
  
  Fire and Innocence
  At the Texas Observer, read David Mann's essay on arson, innocence, and 72-year old, Cambridge educated arson expert Gerald [...]
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  Posted: December 04, 2009, 9:26am EST
  

• Test possible innocence cases among Bexar DNA cache

  I'd neglected to mention a remarkable story out of San Antonio last month ("SAPD to review previously untested rape kits," Express-News, Nov. 17), with the discovery of thousands of untested rape kits in unsolved cases which were retained but never tested:
  

  The San Antonio Police Department announced Monday it' [...]

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  Posted: December 03, 2009, 5:53pm EST
  

• Juvie diversion funds rolling out

  The Houston Chronicle recently published an early update on how county juvenile probation departments are spending new diversion money aimed at keeping more youthful offenders out of the Texas Youth Commission ("Breaking the cycle of youth crime," Nov. 28):
  

  State lawmakers this year approved $50 million over the next [...]

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  Posted: December 03, 2009, 1:29pm EST
  

• Craig Watkins talks innocence with Stephen Colbert

  Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins got some pretty sweet national press last night as a guest on Comedy Central's Colbert Report. He was there to brag on his office's Conviction Integrity Unit and their work getting innocent people out of prison. Here's the video (prefaced by a short ad) and [...]
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  Posted: December 03, 2009, 12:16pm EST
  

• Houston fingerprint lab plagued with errors, two-year backlog

  Stunning news this week out of Houston PD about errors and possible misconduct in their fingerprint analysis unit: First an audit showed errors and problems in more than half of 548 randomly selected cases, now the Houston Chronicle is reporting that the fingerprint unit is the focus of [...]
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  Posted: December 03, 2009, 10:19am EST
  

• Remembering Timothy Cole

  Timothy Cole's half-brother Cory Session had an op ed in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram yesterday on the 10th anniversary of his sibling's death. Timothy was falsely convicted of a rape based on victim eyewitness testimony, but DNA evidence (and the real perpetrator's confession) later proved his innocence - unfortunately [...]
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  Posted: December 02, 2009, 6:04pm EST
  

• Parole Board: Texas created 59 new felonies this year

  According to the "Offense Severity List" from the Board of Pardons and Parole, as a result of new laws passed by the 81st legislature, Texas now has 2,383 separate felonies on the books - an increase of 59 compared to the 2,324 they counted in 2007. (See the [...]
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  Posted: December 02, 2009, 12:58pm EST
  

• Sprint: 50 million customers, 8 million law enforcement requests for GPS data last year

  Check out this must-read blog post from a grad student out of Indiana University about law enforcement's growing, everyday use of personal data held by companies and the disturbing lack of documentation that makes it all hard to track. The author demonstrates convincingly that "publicly available law enforcement surveillance" [...]
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  Posted: December 02, 2009, 11:34am EST
  

• Whitmire: Latest escape shows TDCJ needs 'shakeup' over contraband

  After spending the last year trying to get the Texas prison system to reduce contraband flows, I'll bet state Sen. John Whitmire's head nearly exploded when he learned of yesterday's escape using a gun smuggled to an inmate. In an article by Peggy O'Hare in the Houston Chronicle, he [...]
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  Posted: December 02, 2009, 9:24am EST
  

• 'To really fight crime, raise number of investigators'

  The title of this post is the headline of a Nov. 28 op-ed in the Houston Chronicle by Bill King argued that spending more on patrol officers won't reduce crime but redeploying them from patrol to investigations might:
  there is one recurring theme I have encountered in my research' [...]
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  Posted: December 02, 2009, 2:33am EST
  

• Will Dems put up 2010 CCA candidates?

  Kirsten Gray of the Texas Democratic Party reminds me that "The candidate filing period starts this Thursday, Dec. 3rd and ends Jan. 4th, 2010," which makes me wonder if any Democrats besides Keith Hampton will sign up to run for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals? I'd like to' [...]
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  Posted: December 01, 2009, 6:23pm EST
  

• Schiraldi tapped to run NYC probation

  Congrats to Vincent Schiraldi, the juvie probation chief in Washington D.C. who was just tapped to head the probation department in New York City. See this Washington Post story on his new job.
  
  I got to know Vinnie a little when he ran the Justice Policy Institute out [...]
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  Posted: December 01, 2009, 3:49pm EST
  

• CCA calls David Dow on carpet for tardy capital habeas submissions

  Tomorrow attorney David Dow and the Texas Defender Service, a noprofit which handles post-conviction appeals in death penalty litigation, will be called to account at the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for filing a habeas brief for a death-row defendant past the 48-hour-before-execution deadline. The new rule was [...]
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  Posted: December 01, 2009, 2:48pm EST
  

• More on the fallibility of eyewitness testimony

  Mark Pryor over at the new blog DA Confidential supplies this example from personal experience demonstrating the fallibility of eyewitness testimony and the risks of making a case based primarily on eyewitness evidence:
  In a recent trial, our main witness was a self-confessed drug addict, a man aged about [...]
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  Posted: December 01, 2009, 12:59pm EST
  

• How Cameron County's entrepreneurial jail scheme costs taxpayers

  I've written before about the folly of counties building extra jail space in hopes of engaging in entrepreneurial incarceration, either taking in federal prisoners or inmates from other counties. The blog Texas Prison Bidness points out a terrific example out of Cameron County at the state's southeastern tip of [...]
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  Posted: December 01, 2009, 10:31am EST
  

• TYC Ombudsman indicted, resigns

  If you'd predicted this when Governor Perry appointed Judge Catherine Evans TYC Ombudsman earlier this year, I'd have said you were nuts. See Mike Ward's coverage at the Austin Statesman. [...]
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  Posted: November 30, 2009, 7:27pm EST
  

• Coming to grips with unscientific forensic practices

  The Fort Worth Start Telegram yesterday published a lengthy, remarkable piece from Yamil Berard titled "Stakes are high as doubt is cast on forensic lab techniques." The article is one of the first published in the MSM in Texas to fully explore the implications of conclusions published earlier this [...]
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  Posted: November 30, 2009, 4:26pm EST
  

• Mama Tried

  Gary Scharrar had a feature over the weekend in the San Antonio Express News on Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley, his political siblings and their liberal mom who disagrees with much of their politics. The story opens:
  Hard-nosed Texas prosecutor John “Marty” Bradley supports the death penalty. His [...]
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  Posted: November 30, 2009, 2:34pm EST
  

• House releases 'interim charges': What criminal justice topics on the agenda?

  Speaker Joe Straus last week issued the "Interim Charges" for standing committees in the Texas House. Since the Texas Lege meets only 140 days every two years, in the interim committees study lingering problems or emerging issues with an eye toward developing legislation in the next session. So issues studied [...]
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  Posted: November 30, 2009, 9:38am EST
  

• Dallas fake-drug informant shows how 'cooperation' benefits can promote crime

  The main informant involved in the Dallas fake-drug scandal, Enrique Martinez Alonso, served five years for his role collaborating with Dallas narcotics officers to set up two-dozen innocent people, then was deported in 2007. Now, reports Jason Trahan in the Dallas News ("Police informant in Dallas' fake-drug scandal faces'" [...]
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  Posted: November 29, 2009, 12:26pm EST
  

• Statesman plugs "D.A. Confidential"

  The Austin Statesman published a feature today on a new blog by a Travis County prosecutor, D.A. Confidential. According to courts reporter Steven Kreytak:
  

  Mark Pryor said that friends, neighbors and fellow lawyers regularly ask him about his job as a felony prosecutor in Travis County.

  And [...]

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  Posted: November 29, 2009, 10:33am EST