- Texas is moving 1,000 prisoners out of the Pack Unit into air conditioned facilities. In addition, regular readers will recall, the water there is tainted with arsenic. Shouldn't the state simply close the unit now?
- An Austin Girl Scout troupe is centered on taking girls to visit their mothers in prison.
- Dallas Judge Rick Magnis is retiring, but the case of Ben Spencer, a man he believes was falsely convicted in his court, remains unresolved.
- When prosecutors bully defense lawyers: San Antonio edition.
- Sanctuary cities legislation causing confusion for police departments.
- Good trial lawyering has always been about storytelling, so Grits is less shocked by defense lawyers adopting nonfiction narrative approaches than our friends at the prosecutors' association, who tweeted that link in horror at being asked to justify the economic costs of prosecutorial choices.
- Speaking of critically important narratives which can determine the outcomes of cases, jury instructions that tell jurors to search for "truth" instead of "reasonable doubt" result in higher conviction rates, a new study found.
- In the federal system, "criminal defendants who are released pending trial earn a roughly 72 percent decrease in sentence length and a 36 percentage-point increase in the probability of receiving a sentence below the recommended federal sentencing Guidelines range," a recent paper found.
- Texas has been credited in recent years as an early adopter of criminal-justice reforms, but that hasn't necessarily extended to the reentry front. Pew's Stateline has a good roundup of reentry-related reforms being adopted in other states that should be considered here.
Friday, August 04, 2017
Competing narratives, reentry, girl scouts, when prosecutors bully the defense bar, and other stories
Here are a few odds and ends for readers' perusal while your correspondent is focused elsewhere:
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6 comments:
Sounds to me like "Masturbatory Gestures" would be a completely reasonable and appropriate response to San Antonio DA Nico LaHood.
Where's Reposa when we need him?
I know Ben Spencer from the Coffield Unit. Spence is clean in habits, has no addiction and continues to make a reasonable case for his innocence. I believe him.
Ah yes---the Texas reforms.
Elderly inmates with kidney problems from soft tissue strikes by fists, knees and elbows
hearing loss from contact with concrete floors and walls as their heads get banged while their hands are handcuffed behind them
memory loss and body tremors from non-stroke causes
shackles so tight that the forearms are almost gangrenous after the bus ride is over
and the bus rides have to be repeated often since the paperwork for the visit always seems to get lost
yet the perpetrators take pride as they go to church and sing to the baby Jesus
Whoa, whoa, whoa! .... I thought Nico Lahood was the darling of the defense bar? Democrat, Hispanic, former board member of the Bexar Co. Criminal Defense Lawyers Association and he had gotten busted for selling drugs to boot. What happened? Has he forgotten which side his bread is buttered on? Heaven forbid he actually take his job seriously as a prosecutor and become an advocate for victims in San Antonio! Oh the humanity!! Well at least the liberals still have Kim Ogg to coddle criminals over in Harris County. Keep hope alive!
@7:48, your weird conflation of Democrats with criminal-coddling doesn't really match history or reality in this state. Lawyers are lawyers. They may prosecute sometimes, defend others. Having done one doesn't put you on that side for life. And attorneys on BOTH sides can and do sometimes behave in reprehensible ways. Trying to make it a partisan thing is either disingenuous or just plain stupid.
About the girl scouts (Once a month, the group travels almost two hours to the Gatesville Correctional Facility). Some would prefer that the mothers obey the law, stay in the home and save the kids such a long road trip.
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