Police accountability bills bottled up by House leadership, and other stories

Here are a few odds and ends that merit Grits readers attention while mine is focused elsewhere:

Tragic shooting colors legislative debates
A Balch Springs cop who shot a fleeing 15-year old with a rifle has been fired from his job and faces murder charges. See the Dallas Morning News coverage. This news spurred the black caucus in the Texas Legislature to issue a stern complaint that none of the important police accountability legislation proposed this session has received a vote on the House floor. Their frustration surely contributed in part to the death of HB 2050, which expanded secrecy provisions related to police misconduct cases.

Sandra Bland Act gutted in senate
The Senate Criminal Justice Committee this week passed out a radically stripped down version of the Sandra Bland Act, but quite frankly it's hard to get too excited about the minimalist items left in the bill. Wrote the Texas Tribune's Jonathan Silver:

Whitmire's version most notably removes language that would ban arresting people for offenses that generally only have fines as a punishment. Earlier versions of the bill also tried to make it easier for nonviolent people in jail to receive personal bonds. Whitmire said fine-only offenses would be addressed in a separate bill, as the Sandra Bland Act is "primarily a mental health, accountability" bill.

The problem with that bit of reportage is that the "separate bill" was SB 271, which had earlier that day appeared on the same agenda with the Sandra Bland Act. But Chairman Whitmire pulled that bill off the agenda hours before the hearing, much to the consternation of the bill author and supporters who believed they had sufficient bipartisan support to pass it out of committee. So Whitmire was pledging to address a problem in a bill which he had already killed just hours before. SB 271's companion, HB 574, is in the Calendars Committee and has yet to be posted for a floor vote. Unless leadership adds the bill to a Major State calendar, it's probably too late for it to be heard.

Remembering (the real) Sandra Bland
Meanwhile, as Grits has pointed out before, it's a bit anomalous to pass a "mental health accountability" bill in response to the Sandra Bland story because she was not, in fact, mentally ill.

Pensions and bill killing
Governing magazine has a nice feature on Houston billionaire John Arnold's efforts to reform public-employee pension plans. Meanwhile, the House debate over Houston pensions ramps up Monday, and every minute it goes on, legislation on the other side of that bill on the calendar dies. The lower chamber, which yesterday ended their workday at 3 p.m., has mapped out a leisurely, care-free stroll toward the Thursday deadline for the House to consider House Bills, not the frenzied pace of work one would expect as hundreds of bills approach a very final deadline. At this point, the House doesn't seem to have much appetite for passing any more legislation and everybody just seems to want it to be over.

Who can settle Harris County bail litigation?
A newly elected Democratic District Judge in Houston has asked the commissioners court whether he can settle with plaintiffs in civil rights litigation against the county's money-based bail system. The commissioners courrt replied that they don't control whether or not he settles, but his lawyer was appointed from the county attorney's office and told the judge she could not settle without permission from higher ups. It's an interesting question: If individual judges start to settle, how long can the county's oppositional approach remain viable?

Of trees, ropes, race, judges and capital punishment
A decidedly un-woke judge faces retraining for lynching suggestion.

Coda to Willingham saga: Did prosecutor commit misconduct?
Jordan Smith at the Intercept has a story from a trial in Corsicana to determine whether the prosecutor in the Todd Willingham case engaged in misconduct when he concealed a deal with a jailhouse snitch who testified against the defendant.