A quick status update on #cjreform bills at the #txlege

Let's take a quick moment to see where are the session's significant criminal justice reform bills at the Texas Legislature after a week of important House deadlines. Few bills of any stripe have been sent to the Governor yet, but a number of good bills are still moving throughout the process and have a decent chance of passage.

For starters, both the House and Senate budgets envision closing four more TDCJ prison units, continuing a happy and fortuitous trend. Since it's not a point of conflict, one would expect this to stick in conference committee barring unforeseen shenanigans.

Bail reform (SB 1338) passed the Senate. Judges must evaluate risk assessment data on defendants before making individualized bail decisions and use the least restrictive means necessary to ensure their return to court. This news comes on the heels of a major court victory by our friends at the Texas Fair Defense Project, along with Civil Rights Corps and attorneys at Sussman-Godfrey, in which the Harris County pretrial detention/bail system for misdemeanor defendants was declared unconstitutional. So this legislation now has a lot of juice. But it's also caught up in the House-Senate feuds which have left a cloud over unrelated bills of all stripes. UPDATE: This bill died after failing to make it out of Calendars in time for the final House calendar.

There have been a few other intermediate victories. The Senate passed a version of the Sandra Bland Act without the limits on arrests for non-jailable offenses. Bland's family is upset that the new version of the bill doesn't include the reform that would have prevented her death, a concern which Grits had also raised. But there's a possibility it could be added back in on the House side, and the pieces in the rest of the bill are all good public policy reforms worthy of support. (See a press release from advocates lauding the good aspects of the bill.) There's still time to put Sandra Bland back into the Sandra Bland Act.

HB 34 enacting innocence reforms recommended by the Timothy Cole Exoneration Review Commission passed out of the House and appears to have excellent prospects. This important bill has flown under the media's radar but makes important improvements related to eyewitness identification procedures and documentation related to confidential-informant deals.

Some good legislation limiting local debtors-prison practices has passed in both chambers. SB 1913 includes an array of reform provisions we support that were recommended by the Texas Judicial Council, while HB 351 would let judges waive fines or order community service for indigent Class C misdemeanor defendants at sentencing. Right now, municipal judges and JPs must order fine regimens for indigent defendants and wait until they've defaulted and a warrant has been issued to adjust the sentence. You could think of this as the Can't Get Blood From A Stone bill, and it's a particular point of pride for your correspondent that it was first conceived in a Grits for Breakfast blog post.

Raise the Age legislation (HB 122) passed the Texas House but is hung up in the Senate, where Lt. Governor Dan Patrick has refused to refer the bill to committee. Some observers fear this may be related to the House refusing to pass his "bathroom bill," so the problems may be more about politics than policy. Go here if you want to send the Lieutenant Governor a message asking him to refer the bill. UPDATE: This dead bill was never referred to committee by the Lt. Governor.

An excellent school-discipline reform I'm excited about passed the House unanimously: HB 674, a bill backed by our friends at Texas Appleseed which would eliminate school suspensions for very young kids (pre-K to 2nd grade). While not formally a "criminal-justice" bill, the research shows such a strong link between early suspensions and future behavioral problems that this evidence-based shift really is about criminal-justice reform. It just shows that there are more ways to prevent crime than punishing every minor offense and locking up people who aren't a safety threat.

The House passed a tiny little bill our buddy Amanda Woog likes a lot, HB 245, that would punish police departments that fail to comply with mandatory state reporting when police officers shoot people or are shot. This is an important cleanup provision to the new reporting requirement the Lege passed in 2015, but it's a small thing in the scheme of things and departments ought to be doing this, anyway. We need a complete and accurate picture of police shooting data and departments who hide the ball should be penalized.

On the flip side: A bunch of excellent legislation died in the Calendars Committee, either never being set for a floor vote or being set so late that the House never reached them (the so-called "consolation calendar" on the final day the House could vote on House bills was 27 pages long).

HB 81 creating a civil penalty for low-level marijuana possession was set for a floor vote but the House didn't reach it. Ditto for HB 574 eliminating arrests for non-jailable offenses (though that bill would look especially nice amended onto the Sandra Bland Act when it reaches the House floor. :)

None of the major decarceration or asset-forfeiture-reform bills made it through the sausage grinder before the House deadlines hit. Prosecutors appear to have successfully quashed grand jury reform. Bipartisan police reform bills which seemed promising at the beginning of the year went nowhere. We need to develop better long-term strategies on these issues.

But nothing's truly dead at the Legislature until the session ends and the members leave town, which happens on the last day of May. So there are still possibilities for living bills to die and for dead bills to be resurrected. We'll revisit all this again in a few weeks.