Dead dogs, shot owners, greedy clerks, phony risks, and a 'seismic change in police interrogations'

Here are a few odds and ends that each merit their own blog posts, or at least they would if I weren't spending my days writing Just Liberty emails and action alerts. (E.g., go here to send your state rep an email asking them to sign on in support of Rep. Garnet Coleman's "Sandra Bland Act.") So while Grits is focused elsewhere, check out:

• Eva Ruth Moravec, Houston Chronicle: "Unarmed people hurt when Texas officers shot at dogs." Includes slide show of dogs shot by cops!
• And from Mike Ward, also in the Chron: "State budget writers say four prisons may now be up for closure." (Hurray!)
• HB 1258 is a terrible bill that would stop Texas courts from providing internet access to the most public of public records in the government's possession: courthouse files. The bill was heard in committee yesterday. The real reason clerks want to deny people access to records which are public under the open-courts doctrine (which insists access must not be impeded by unreasonable  financial barriers)? After you wade through all the BS being thrown up about phony baloney "risks and liabilities," the bottom line is, clerks presently charge $1 per page for copies and fear the revenue stream from subscriptions won't cover the loss.
• Here's a headline for which Grits has been waiting for years: "Lawmakers, judges square off against bail bondsmen in push to end cash bail for nonviolent offenders." Chairman John Whitmire is holding a press conference this afternoon on the bill.
• See Raise-the-Age arguments from the Justice Policy Institute and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and coverage of an advocacy day yesterday on the topic (where the missus spent her day) from the Dallas News.
• It turns out, the people most likely to discover wrongful convictions are the ones looking for them. Who'd have thought? Oh yeah, every innocence project affiliate in the country.
• In El Paso, the Public Defender caseload is rising.
• Brandon Garrett, The Baffler: "Trials and Errors: Inside the Great Forensic Science Boondoggle."
• Marshall Project: "The Seismic Change in Police Interrogations." This is huge news: The group that developed the Reid technique is no longer teaching it. (For more background on the Reid technique, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) The Reid technique was developed after third-degree  tactics were outlawed in the wake of the Wickersham Commission in the '30s. By the 1940s, John Reid had famously developed an interrogation method deploying psychological instead of (as much) physical coercion, but attacking the same mental weak spots, and modern US interrogation techniques were  born. Most other nations' police use less accusatory, more fact-gathering-based interrogation methods, which produce just as many real convictions but fewer false ones.

Shackled to Debt, Forfeiture Fail, a Self-Interested Revolt, and other stories

Here are a few odds and ends that merit Grits readers attention at the legislative session begins to heat up.

Rebellion of the Clerks: A self-interested revolt
There's only one real reason that clerks don't want a statewide database of court records, and it has nothing to do with quality control. They currently charge a dollar a page for records and don't want to lose the revenue. Their argument is the same as newspapers complaining about online competition from Craig's List for their classified ads. And yet, these are the most public of public records. And there's significant public demand for them. There's really no good reason not to make them available online, and the legislators lining up to stop the rollout of the new system are doing their constituents a real disservice, placing the interests of local elected officials over the public interest. Grits doesn't do oppo work for campaigns anymore, but there's easily an attack ad to be had aimed at anybody who supported a bill aimed at keeping public records from the public via unjustifiably high fees.

More critics denounce forfeiture fail
Momentum for reining in asset forfeiture continues to grow, with prosecutors going on the defensive. Go to the Just Liberty site to send a message to lawmakers supporting reform.

Union bashing bill leaves out law enforcement
Critics at a State Affairs hearing raised the same criticism Grits did about legislation by Chair Joan Huffman to eliminate union-dues checkoffs for public employees - why leave out law enforcement, which are the most powerful public employee unions in the state? The bill was voted out on a 6-2 vote with the disparate treatment intact.

TDCJ chief exec interviewed
See an interview with new TDCJ chief mugwump Brian Collier from the Huntsville Item.

Raise the Age!
Three different newspaper editorials this week backed so-called raise-the-age legislation:

• SA Express News: Adult prison is not for 17-year olds
• Star-Telegram: Criminal Justice Needs Age Adjustment
• Austin Statesman: Legislature should reform age of responsibility in Texas

For more background, see the House Research Organization's primer on the topic. Go to the Just Liberty site to send a message to lawmakers supporting this legislation.

If you've got the money, honey ...
As I write this, there are folks scouring the budget to find money to eliminate the Driver Responsibility surcharge. For their benefit, here's a presentation from the Legislative Budget Board last year with a great deal of seldom-discussed detail about the program. (Send an email to your legislators asking them to abolish the surcharge.)

Shackled to Debt
New report via Harvard's Kennedy School and the NIJ: "Shackled to Debt: Criminal-justice Financial Obligations and the Barriers to Re-Entry They Create."

Harris Distict Clerk fails to collect court costs from bond companies

Remarkable. From the Houston Chronicle:

Harris County District Clerk Chris Daniel has not collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in court costs since taking office in January because, critics say, it would hurt business for bail bondsmen who contributed to his campaign.

"He's nervous about doing it because bondsmen supported him a great deal during his election so he wants cover," said Judge Mike Fields, chairman of the county board that licenses bail bondsmen. "No individual or group of individuals should come before your obligation to the citizens of this county when you're an elected official — no matter how tough it is."

The court costs are generated by lawsuits filed against bail jumpers and bondsmen to have bail money forfeited after a defendant fails to appear for court.

Fields said not collecting the money during tight economic times was "baffling." He said the court costs, now set at $8, are supposed to be about $230, a move that would raise more than $1.5 million a year for Harris County.

Fields said Daniel told him he did not want to "levy a tax" on bail bondsmen who contributed to his election.

Daniel acknowledged he has called the fee a "tax" because it raises the amount bail bondsmen charge defendants, but denied being influenced by more than $10,000 in campaign contributions from bondsmen.

Here are my questions: Have the bail bond companies been levying the fee on their clients and pocketing the difference? How would anyone know? And will bond companies be required to pay back fees or only those going forward? Bail bondsmen exercise a great deal of behind-the-scenes political clout in local criminal justice politics, but I've never heard of county officials' deference extending quite this far.

MORE: From Off the Kuff.

Harris District Clerk lets public search cases by attorney name

Mark Bennett at Defending People directs readers to new online tools making it easy to identify what cases an individual attorney has worked on in Harris County. Basically you can find the lawyer's bar card number at the State Bar of Texas website, then use this search function from the Harris County District Clerk to tell what clients they've represented. Bennett walks through the blow-by-blow of how to run the searches, including screen shots.

I just checked the web sites of District Clerks for Travis, Bexar, Dallas, Tarrant, and El Paso counties: None of them offered similar functionality, so kudos to Harris District Clerk Loren Jackson for putting the information online. Other counties should follow suit. As somebody who's used this type of information a lot in the past for a variety of purposes, IMO this should and could have been done in most jurisdictions a long time ago.

Mark suggests the information will be useful for clients who are told by attorneys, "I've handled a lot of these cases," and that's certainly true. But it also is useful for voters in judicial races in ways that may not be so obvious.

Judicial candidates often receive little attention, and frequently they're difficult races for campaigns to perform opposition research (a job I performed professionally for a dozen years in a past life), so often nominees are inadequately vetted. Partly that's because it's difficult in some counties to acquire a list of cases an attorney has handled; instead such lists often must be reconstructed, usually incompletely, from a variety of sources - especially in counties with poor computer systems. Larger counties frequently put information about defendants online or in publicly accessible databases, but searching by attorney usually is not an option, even though the district clerks have all that information.

With these tools it will be easier to document and debate Harris County judicial candidates' records as attorneys, which gives voters a lot more information about who they're electing.

That said, it still may be possible to get this information in other counties, it just takes a little more legwork. Get the attorney's bar card number online as described above and then go in person to the District Clerk's office. Sometimes a helpful employee will run the bar card number through their system's back end and generate a list informally; in other cases you'll need to file an open records request. (In smaller counties, I've on occasion been told they can't search the information that way; I'm not sure I believe it.)

Sometimes District Clerks can only provide this information for defense attorneys; for prosecutors, you can always file an open records request with the DA's office for a list of cases the attorney has worked on - they won't like it, but usually they'll give it to you.

Once you have the case list, then the District Clerk can let you see individual case files to evaluate outcomes and exactly what the attorney did and didn't do, what motions were filed, how many cases went to trial, etc..

Political campaigns might be willing to go to that extra trouble to vet a lawyer's record, but it's a good bet most potential clients will/can not. So I hope to see more District Clerks following Harris' lead. The justice system only benefits from greater transparency and the District Clerk maintains that information on behalf of the people; there's no good reason for not making it easily accessible to them.