Defiant John Bradley rebuffed on secrecy pleas

Blogs play different roles in different types of news stories. Frequently Grits covers topics that receive very little attention from the press, in which case simply reporting what goes on provides a meaningful service. But some stories, like Gov. Rick Perry's replacement of the Texas' Forensic Science Commission chairman with Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley, take on a media life of their own. In those cases, nobody really needs me to give the blow by blow.

Yesterday's Texas Senate Criminal Justice hearing was attended by a full-blown media gaggle, whose coverage I compiled as comprehensively as I could at the end of this post. The whole thing was well covered in the MSM, so I won't give a soup to nuts account here, but rather offer my own after-the-fact impressions. All the usual suspects were there: Between the press, legislators, staff and the audience, it seemed like I knew about 2/3 of the people in the nearly-full hearing room, on both sides of the debate. (Even Judge Barbara Hervey from the Court of Criminal Appeals was kind enough to stop and say "hello.")

Mr. Bradley was the sole witness at the hearing. He seemed to thrive in the limelight with his ego swelling more and more as his performance wore on, to the point at the end of near-open defiance toward Sen. Rodney Ellis and state Rep. Tommy Merritt, the chairman of the House Law Enforcement Committee who sat in on the hearing. In many ways, it was quite an arrogant performance - answering nothing concretely and accusing (implicitly or explicitly) anyone who disagreed with him of bias. Several times Bradley spoke of the Innocence Project with a disdainful sneer as a "New York nonprofit," as though Jeff Blackburn of the Innocence Project of Texas weren't sitting just six feet behind him in the audience. As though Texans don't really care about innocent people locked up in prison.

To dredge up a quote from an old Terry Allen song permanently ensconced in Grits' sidebar, Mr. Bradley, "I don't wear a Stetson, but I'm willing to bet son that I'm as big a Texan as you are."

Bradley's main theme, to which he returned several times, was that the Forensic Science Commission had been "hijacked" by people with anti-death penalty agendas. I kept wondering which statewide GOP official who makes appointments to the commission - Rick Perry, David Dewhurst, or Greg Abbott - does he believe aided and abetted this "hijacking"? Apparently Gov. Perry's original appointees were to blame, since getting rid of them, we're now told, will somehow result in depoliticizing and professionalizing the commission. Sen. Whitmire and others reminded Bradley that those "third parties" of whom he was so dismissive were actually representatives of the public, but that did nothing to mitigate the DA's disdain.

Bradley claimed he's not a political "pawn" (perhaps he considers himself a bishop, knight or a rook), but his main agenda was clearly to justify an open-ended delay in pursuing the commission's pending work. Expect the denouement of the Todd Willingham case to be delayed many, many months - it could easily be after the 2010 general election before the FSC takes it up again, to judge by the timeline laid out yesterday. Bradley says the commission first needs to establish rules, which they'll begin to discuss at their January meeting. Assuming the earliest they might vote on rules would be at their next quarterly meeting, more likely even later, new rules won't be in place until, at the earliest, next fall to consider pending business.

Steve Saloom of the national Innocence Project said at a press conference after the hearing that the commission's enabling legislation does not authorize it to create rules. He later elaborated that former Chair Sam Bassett asked the Attorney General's representative who attended every FSC meeting whether or not they should create written rules, and the AG said they weren't authorized to do so. The reason, said Saloom, was that "The Legislature didn't want to create a behemoth bureaucracy. They wanted it to be composed of experts, and they wanted it to be lean."

Saloom added, "Does [Mr. Bradley] want to add a layer of bureaucracy? ... or is he just doing this to stall?" Whatever his intent, there can be no argument that the outcome is to stall.

Despite the obvious delaying tactics, the good news was that no one on the Senate committee seemed sympathetic with Bradley's request to create exceptions to the Public Information Act for FSC investigations, much less allowing the commission to meet in secret. Whitmire said his intent in authoring the bill was for the agency to be "very transparent, very public." Even Sen. Dan Patrick told Bradley he wants to see "transparency in all the work that you do."

Sen. Whitmire made a point that I brought up yesterday on Grits - the commission's role is to examine the science, not investigating and punishing individual wrongdoing like a law-enforcement or regulatory agency. Oddly enough, Bradley agreed (!), but it's easy to say so when his actions contradict that sentiment: Bradley told the committee he'd asked the Texas Rangers to suggest secrecy standards for investigations, even though the commission is investigating science, not necessarily criminal conduct. As the Houston Chronicle's Rick Casey pointed out, "the job of the commission is to investigate science, not crime. The investigative procedures for that should be developed by forensic scientists, not members of a police agency that will be subject to the commission's review."

Sen. Rodney Ellis gave out some data on arson cases I hadn't heard before: He said 742 people are currently locked up in TDCJ for arson, with 275 per year on average convicted statewide on felony arson charges. Ellis said there's no way to know right now if state of the art arson science had been used in all of those cases. (The short answer is: probably not, especially the farther back you look.) According to insurance industry data, Ellis said, about 43,000 fires per year nationwide result from arson.

Overall, the committee appears committed to increasing oversight of the FSC and making sure Mr. Bradley doesn't succeed in making the agency secretive and unaccountable. Of all the comments from senators, perhaps the most telling was one of the most low-key from Sen. Glen Hegar, a Republican who told Bradley he took the Senate's role confirming Governor's appointees "very seriously" and reminded him that they'd all be watching. I took away from the hearing that there's a bipartisan consensus on the committee, at least for now, that Texas needs to confront bad forensics instead of bury the problem under a mountain of bureaucracy, procedure and doublespeak. Mr. Bradley, by contrast, appeared to be promoting quite a different agenda. Time will tell how it all plays out.