Forensic snafus, depressed DAs and judges, and the risks of risk assessments

In a few weeks, this accursed presidential election will be over and, the following week in Texas, state legislators will begin prefiling bills. Until then, there's little for the policy-minded to do but hunker down until the circus leaves town and plan ahead for what's next. To that end, here are a variety of recent stories which merit Grits readers attention more, IMHO, than the latest bloviations on the presidential campaign trail.*

Ask CCA candidate why she won't use public defenders
Texas Court of Criminal Appeals candidate Mary Lou Keel stopped using the Harris County Public Defender Office because of a dispute with some of their attorneys, and the HCPD won't say what it involved, the Houston Chronicle reported. Journalists should inquire and she should say. After this most wretched primary season which saw ignorance rewarded and qualified candidates punished, Grits harbors few illusions that people cast informed votes in these races. But in theory, at least, it'd be useful for voters to know the likely next CCA judge's views on public-defender systems and indigent defense, to the extent the conflict sheds any light on them. News of the conflict emerged in light of a new state audit of Harris County indigent defense systems, a document which Grit may delve into in more detail in a future post.

Another forensics SNAFU could affect thousands of DWI cases
In Dallas, "Thousands of DWI convictions in North Texas could be jeopardized after the testimony of a state forensic scientist recently came under scrutiny." Get used to these sort of headlines. In the coming years, many forensics historically admitted into evidence by courts will either be invalidated or, even where the science is valid, found to be performed by incompetent analysts using unjustifiable methods. The temptation to treat them each as isolated incidents should be ignored. In many cases, folks are looking skeptically at long-used forensics for the first time to assess their validity, and more often than not, what they discover isn't up to snuff.

What to do with a depressed judge or DA?
Resignations from Dallas County District Attorney Susan Hawk and 5th Court of Appeals Justice David Lewis raise questions about what should happen when public officials suffer from severe depression or other serious mental illness while in office. The office-holder leaving voluntarily solves the instant problem from the perspective of formally staffing the slot, often after months or longer of putting off the inevitable. But it's a near certainty the situation will recur. There was apparently a move underway to remove Justice Lewis (whom Grits first met when he was one of the attorneys in the Dallas sheetrock/fake-drug scandal, an outrageous frame-up job around the turn of the century in which informants and DPD narcotics detectives intentionally framed illegal immigrants). I feel bad for him and Judge Hawk, but I'm glad they're stepping down. It's extraordinarily difficult to oust someone from public office in Texas for a medical condition, as it should be; even writing the words seems wrong. Some will argue that behavioral health problems are different from cancer or a heart condition because they specifically impact cognition. OTOH, plenty of Texas prosecutors and judges without diagnosed mental illnesses have suffered from poor judgment and impaired cognition - sometimes to much more deleterious effects than in either of these two instances - and nobody but voters can take them out.

Documenting a dystopian, modern-day witch hunt
The documentary "Southwest of Salem" about the San Antonio Four aired on the Discovery ID network over the weekend. See Rolling Stone's writeup, which observed that transcripts from the trial "read like a dystopian nightmare."

Debating the risks of risk assessments
This assessment at the Washington Post of the debate surrounding whether "risk assessments" generate racially discriminatory outcomes more or less sums up my view: 1) There are no perfect risk assessments because some of the risk factors reflect societal disparities and interpreting their meaning involves value judgments and tradeoffs, not static, objective analyses. However, 2) risk assessment instruments overall pretty clearly generate more consistent justice for more people and discriminate less than judges and prosecutors.  So for now - depending on the instrument - Grits generally favors them, though I'd like to see not-for-profit models used which don't involve black-box analyses which defense lawyers can't refute nor cross-examine.

Conflict of interest and prosecutorial discretion
A new article for Grits' reading list: "Rethinking prosecutors' conflicts of interest." The authors urge in particular reconsideringprosecutorial discretion, opining that "Conflicts of interest are endemic to almost all prosecutors’ discretionary decisions, and are the source of many instances of misconduct and abuse."

* It's hard to imagine that, at this late date, anyone politics-and-policy-focused enough to read this blog is still an "undecided" presidential voter. And if you've already decided, reading the latest back-and-forth provides no new or useful information. If one can muster the mental discipline to ignore it, doing so frees up a lot of brain space.