Odds and Ends

Here are a handful of odds and ends that merit Grits readers attention:

Third Court of Appeals reducing backlog
After lagging behind other courts in case backlogs for years, under its new chief justice Austin's 3rd Court of Appeals is making a dent in its older cases. The 8th Court of Appeals out of El Paso now has the longest delays.

Batson not just an issue in old cases
Racial discrimination in jury selection by Dallas prosecutors continued at least until 2002, according to a ruling by a federal appeals court. Judge Catarina Haynes ruled in a so-called Batson challenge that "the state's reasons for striking [black jurors] ... were implausible or invalid, and therefore were pretexts for discrimination." What's more, the story mentions "a 2005 investigation by The Dallas Morning News that found prosecutors excluded blacks from juries at twice the rate they excluded whites.

Pick 'em
Speaking of juries, The Jury Expert has republished Mark Bennett's 16 Simple Rule for Better Jury Selection, which includes an interesting set of responses from various jury consultants.

Steroid investigation ignores juiced cops to go after athletes
Reporters are still trying to link the late steroid dealer David Jacobs out of Plano to professional athletes - most recently Michael Vick - but everybody seems to have forgotten, and stopped investigating, Jacobs' allegations that he'd sold steroids to police officers at five Metroplex departments, only one of which later implemented steroid testing. It continues to amaze me that Texas mandates testing for high-school athletes but not for police officers, though there's a much greater demonstrated problem with the latter than the former.

The Junk Science Conundrum
Jordan Smith at the Austin Chronicle has coverage of the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee hearing a couple of weeks back on the standards for introducing forensic evidence into court.

Jailed in Wichita County
The Wichita Falls Times Record News published a detailed story walking through the intake process at the Wichita County Jail.

Dallas prosecutor allegedly coached witness, concealed other suspect
The sole witness in a 1995 murder case now says he didn't see the defendant and picked him out "because that was what I was instructed to do by the prosecutor and not because I recognized him as being the shooter." The defendant "was freed after Dallas County prosecutors began to re-examine his case when a memo was found in a police file identifying someone else as a suspect. That memo was never turned over to his defense team as required by law."

Bexar jail suicides up
The year 2009 witnessed the highest number of suicides at the Bexar County Jail in a decade - six, which is the same number they'd seen over the previous five years.

Snitching: Criminal informants and the erosion of American justice
Alexandra Natapoff as a post at TPM Cafe Book Club promoting the themes in her new book, an also provides a link to the excerpted introduction.

Death penalty for corporations?
Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are people for First Amendment purposes, a satirist wonders if companies can receive the death penalty when they kill?