Past week's committee action: TYC in the House, Senate taking care of business

In politics one must constantly look back, look forward and pay attention to where you are. So before completing my wrap up of legislation coming up in next week's committee hearings (see previews so far of the House Corrections, House Law Enforcement and Senate Criminal Justice agendas), let's look at what significant Texas criminal justice legislation passed out of committee last week.

Most of the action came in the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, but let's start in the House, where on Monday the Texas Youth Commission was the flavor of the day in the Corrections Committee. They passed HB 2686 ordering the agency into conservatorship, and HB 3309 which allows victims rights groups access to TYC youth - both bills were discussed in this post. The conservatorship became moot on Wednesday when the Governor finally agreed with legislative leadership and named former "Special Master" Jay Kimbrough the new "conservator."

On the Senate side, the Criminal Justice Commitee passed out quite a bit of legislation on Tuesday (see Grits' preview of that committee meeting), including a couple I didn't like: For starters there's no need for SB 823, which deregulates wiretapping to allow large cities to operate pen registers without DPS oversight - IMO it's a solution looking for a problem.

And the more I think about it, the less I'm a fan of Sen. Harris' SB 307 which allows driver license magnetic swipes to be used by vendors of pseudoephedrine products to verify the identity of cold-product users as part of the War on Sniffles. Do we want every convenience store vendor to have access to this data? People already have to sign a log and have their ID verified by sight - surely that's enough without letting vendors gather data that could be used for marketing or even more nefarious purposes. As I wrote when this legislation was heard in the House:

This perhaps bothers me more than it might otherwise after recently learning about an Austin man, a confidential informant for the feds who ran 3 Austin convenience stores and was found to have made hundreds of small, fraudulent transactions at or after the point of sale while he was working as their snitch. Checking my ID to let you see if the picture and the signature match is one thing. Scanning it into a computer means you've gathered that information electronically, can store it, and can use it for whatever you want.

I'm not sure I'm okay with that - banks doing it are one thing, but a convenience store requiring it starts to make me nervous.

On the other hand, the Criminal Justice Committee passed quite a bit of positive legislation on Tuesday. I was happy to see Chairman Whitmire's SB 1097 get through reducing penalties on the first offense for criminal trespass on residential property to a C misdemeanor, letting officers remain on the street reducing jail overcrowding.

The committee backed Sen. Duncan's SB 499 related to post-conviction DNA testing. Sen. Carona's SB 643 requiring District Attorneys to open up files to defendants (discussed here) received the nod, as did Sen. Seliger's SB 528 loosening probably too-tight restrictions on who can represent capital defendants. In addition, Sen. West's SB 166 expanding use of progressive sanctions to divert offenders from prison won the committee's blessing.

Finally, I was happy to see the committee back Sen. Duncan's SB 867, discussed here, which is the only significant bill I'm aware of this session dealing with the backlog of county jail inmates who've been declared incompetent to stand trial but can't get access to treatment.

That's not all these committees did last week, just highlights of things I've tracked on this blog. As always, if you're seriously tracking Texas legislation don't wait on me, go the capitol website and poke around for yourself.

The House bills described should receive perfunctory approval, but every bill in the Senate needs 21 votes to pass, which means every senator's vote always counts. So if you care strongly about any of this legislation, particularly the Senate bills, be sure to let your elected representatives know how you feel.

MORE: See also the prosecutors' association weekly legislative summary, which includes some items I missed.