Bigamy, Integrity, Identity debated in senate committee

While I was busy elswhere on Tuesday, the Senate Criminal Justice Committee approved a number of bills worth mentioning at their weekly meeting (see video of the hearing here):

Polygamist Roundup Fallout: Enabling Bigamy Prosecutions
No testimony at all, for or against, accompanied Sen. Jane Nelson's legislation SB 787 extending the statute of limitations for bigamy from 3-7 years, and 10 years after the 18th birthday if one of the partners is a minor. Sen. Nelson particularly cited the Great Eldorado Polygamist Roundup as spurring her desire to change the law. She said she was concerned about "minors forced into polygamous situations," but of course the bigger issue arises with minors of legal marrying age who choose those relationships. They have broken the law, yes, but how long should those involved be criminally liable? Why does the statute of limitations on this crime, in particular, deserve extending beyond other offenses?

This legislation seems premature to me - a half-cocked, git-tuff response to a lingering social conflict between church and state. In many ways it mirrors the ham-fisted approach by law enforcement when they first invaded the ranch looking for a Waco-style confrontation.

Why not see what if anything prosecutors can prove under the current laws before clamoring for tuffer ones? They went through all the marriage and lineage-related documents at the YFZ Ranch, so if it occurred they should be able to prove it. Why not wait to see what happens in those cases and evaluate the situation afterward?

Not an "Integrity Unit," but still a good idea
Sen. John Carona amended his SB 388 to create a "Public Corruption Unit" within the Texas Rangers instead of a "Law Enforcement Integrity Unit" as the bill was originally drafted. (See prior Grits posts here, here, and here, plus coverage from the Houston Chronicle. Discussion of the bill begins at the 45:40 mark.) The bill was also changed to disallow the unit from investigating administrative violations.

In laying out the bill, Carona's main focus was on law-enforcement corruption related to drug cartels. His goal, he said, is not to accuse Texas law enforcement of being particularly corrupt but to "ramp up for the greater threat ahead" from Plata o Plomo style corruption/intimidation of police.

Ana Correa of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition saidthe bill isn't anti-law enforcement but "quite the opposite," because most good cops don't want their ranks sullied by criminals who're collaborating with those they should be trying to arrest.

Even Tom Gaylor of the Texas Municipal Police Association admitted it's "not the most comfortable position" to oppose the bill, but he worried in particular about creating a unit whose sole "performance measure" would be the number of police officer scalps they'd taken over corruption beefs.

In making his "performance measures" critique, Gaylor actually compared the agency to the old drug task force system, where drug units measured effectiveness based on higher arrest and seizure rates. It was an interesting argument, but Sen. Juan Hinojosa pointed out that no such performance measures were included in the bill.

Personally I don't think they're going to discover a shortage of cases to investigate and if DPS can't figure out the right performance measures for their employees, that's a question to be addressed at the agency rulemaking level. Hinojosa's right that the current bill doesn't speak to the issue one way or the other.

Identify yourself or go to jail
Finally, the committee approved a bill, SB 1175, that would allow police to give a Class C ticket for "failure to identify" when they detain a suspect. (Discussion of the bill begins at the 1:32:00 mark.) Currently, Texans don't have to identify themselves unless they're actually arrested, and it's not a crime if you don't do so. In practice, of course, police can't write a ticket without the identifying information, so this would give them cause to arrest you and cart you off to jail (under authority affirmed by the US Supreme Court in Atwater v. Lago Vista, a Texas case).

What kind of situations are we talking about? Under what circumstances might you be "detained" when police have no cause to arrest you? The examples given were things like "taking pictures in front of a nuclear power plant," but I think the new power would be used more widely than that, and mostly in non-terrorism related cases.

I wrote about a situation last year where I was detained on the street for, essentially, "babysitting while white." Some busybody called 911 because they saw me walking down the street with a two-year old of a different race. Three police cars were sent to detain and question me over this grave matter. That was a formal "detention" and Sen. Patrick's statute would have applied. More than a few commenters were offended that I wasn't more cooperative with police - though I did give my name and address when asked, I refused to answer detailed or personal questions. I thought a lot afterward about why I reacted the way I did. Mostly it's because the officer precisely didn'task for my name at first, but instead asked a series of questions aimed at determining whether I was some sort of child molester or kidnapper.

Sen. Whitmire asked why any law abiding citizen would refuse to identify themselves, and while I can't speak for others, I know why I wouldn't answer questions that day. As I said in reply to a commenter in that post, "Talking to cops who want to investigate you for false allegations of sex crimes has many potential negatives that simply refusing to speak to them wholly avoids." When the conversation starts out with an accusation, it's wholly justified and probably wise from the perpective of a potential defendant to not give police any information at all.

Whitmire himself identified another reason someone might not want to tell police who they were - if they were having an affair or some other "domestic situation." There are many possible scenarios where someone might not want their spouse, their job, etc., to know their whereabouts, but that wouldn't imply a crime was committed. The point is, in a free society, that person has free will to make bad choices as long as they don't harm others or violate the law. "None of your business" is still a valid response.

To demand, "if you don't have cause to arrest me, let me go" IMO is a reasonable exercise of one's rights and shouldn't require subjecting yourself to a check in the warrants database, which is the main thing this is really about at the end of the day. With more than 10% of adult Texans having outstanding traffic warrants, every time someone walks away without running them through the system, police miss a 10% chance they'll owe money that can be leveraged from them with a trip to the jail.

This is not a slippery slope toward a police state but a straight chute. I've joked before how, during the Cold War, we used to consider it the height of totalitarianism that Communist police might stop an average citizen on the street, demand to see their papers, and arrest them if they didn't comply. But that's exactly the kind of power Sen. Patrick's legislation would give police in Texas: Identify yourself or go to jail. "Can I see your papers, comrade?" That's unnecessary. The law's just fine like it is.