Bad bills rising, how to tell if debtors-prison reform works, TX police misconduct roundup, and other stories

Here are a few odds and ends as the final days of the 85th Texas legislative session wind down:

Lawyers to rep Harris defendants at bail hearings
Grits is interested to learn what effect it will have when Harris County deploys public defenders to represent indigent defendants at bail hearings. It's never been done before so all the suggestions about what effect it will have remain unproven. But in theory, it should reduce pretrial detention at the Harris County Jail more than enough to cover the cost of the lawyers. Glad we're finally going to find out!

How to tell if debtors-prison reform bill works
The House concurred to Senate amendments on HB 351, a bill initially generated from a GFB blog post aimed at limiting debtors' prison practices. The amendments included a small item applying property thresholds to check forgery and another that lets probation departments use treatment beds for pretrial diversion clients.

It'll be easy to tell if the debtors prison portion of the bill works. The Texas Tribune reported that 3 million warrants were issued for fine-only Class C tickets in 2015. However, "judges rarely used community service to resolve 'fine-only' cases – just 1.3 percent of the time. In fewer than 1 percent of cases, they waived fines or reduced payments owed because the defendant couldn't afford to pay." If those numbers don't increase substantially, and the warrant numbers don't go down, then the Lege will need to come back in 2019 to beef up protections against jailing indigent drivers. But this is a start.

Bad Bills Rising
Among bad bills passing this session, there was a massive "hate crimes"/enhancement bill for assaults against police that Grits has argued will increase pressure on defendants to plea guilty to false convictions based on police misconduct. The Lege also approved a strange little bill creating a specialty court for prosecuting police officers, treating active duty cops like veterans eligible for veterans court services. Both of these are bad ideas, reduce accountability for police, and deserve to be vetoed, though neither probably will be.

Fed $$ coming to prevent opioid deaths
Texas will  receive money to combat opioid-related overdoses, despite Gov. Abbott vetoing life-saving Good-Samaritan legislation in 2015 and moving the goalposts to stymie the bill from passing in 2017. Reported the Austin Statesman:

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission on May 19 announced that Texas would receive a $27.4 million federal grant to combat opioid-use disorders. 

The increasing rate of opioid use continues to be an issue nationwide, and of the more than 33,000 opioid-related deaths in the U.S. in 2015, 1,186 were in Texas. The grant funds will be used for prevention, training, outreach, treatment and recovery support services and will directly help an estimated 14,000 people over a two-year period, according to the agency.

Texas police misconduct roundup
While I've got you, here are a few stories related to police accountability which merit Grits readers' attention:

• Eva Ruth Moravec has perhaps her best feature yet at Point of Impact documenting Texas law enforcement shootings of unarmed people, this time a black man in Carthage who was shot seven times, five times in the back, by a DPS trooper. He was one of seven unarmed black men shot by Texas law enforcement last year. Scroll down to the end of her article for extensive backup documentation from the story. 
• The mother of an unarmed man shot to death by police in Laredo says police are lying about what happened during the incident.
• A video has surfaced showing a San Antonio police officer hitting a teenage girl. See the SA Express News coverage. 
• Cell phone footage also captured a Lampasas Sheriff's deputy punching the hell out of an 18-year old suspect at a traffic stop.
• A young woman who is currently Miss Black Texas and an intern at the Hunt County DA's Office has accused the Commerce police chief of arresting her after a motorist called her a "black bitch" in a road rage incident. Initially, she thought the chief was the driver, but he was the arresting officer. Regardless, by all accounts he took her in for evading arrest because she refused to apologize to the racist who berated her and tried to walk back to her car. What an embarrassment.
• In Baytown, an officer is under investigation for soliciting nude photos from female drivers in exchange for letting them off of traffic tickets.
• In Fort Worth, two police commanders were demoted for allegedly releasing bodycam video made secret under a bad 2015 Texas law. They claim they've done nothing wrong. The CATO Institute has commentary on what the punishments say about police priorities.
• Another leaked bodycam video shows that the Balch Springs officer who shot Jordan Edwards previously tasered a handcuffed man. Police are investigation the leak, instead of investigating how such a person was retained on the force after such behavior.
• An SAPD officer was suspended 45 days for disabling his bodycam and one additional day for telling a crime victim that police officers "hate citizens."
• An Ector County Sheriff's deputy pled guilty to tipping off a game room operator about investigations and raids.
• In San Juan, a police officer was arrested for stealing three packages of cocaine from a drug bust. See the federal criminal complaint against him. His partner was arrested last month for allegedly lying to the FBI about the missing evidence. 
• See Texas Tribune coverage of new legislation punishing law enforcement agencies which don't report officer-involved shootings to the AG with a $1,000 per day fine. Criminal penalties for failing to report incidents to the Attorney General's death-in-custody database - including about 25% of police shootings over the last decade - have never been used.

Bad enhancement bill boosts pressure for false convictions

On Monday in the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, Rep. Todd Hunter has a bill up - HB 2908 - that contains no redeeming qualities that I can tell. Grits dislikes everything in it below the author's name.

Essentially it makes offenses motivated by bias against a police officer hate crimes and jacks up up already-enhanced penalties for assaulting a cop. These penalties are already so high they can and do coerce false convictions. In San Antonio, Officer Matthew Belver beat Carlos Flores while handcuffed, then accused him of assaulting a peace officer. Flores pled no contest to avoid the possibility of a very long sentence, even though video of the incident shows he was not the aggressor and did not assault Belver. (The Bexar DA's Conviction Integrity Unit later discovered Mr. Flores was innocent and convinced the courts to overturn his conviction.)

So the penalties facing Mr. Flores were already so severe that he pled no contest rather than risk a trial. (Nobody outside the police department at the time knew video of the incident was available.) Increasing those penalties creates even greater pressure for innocent defendants to succumb and plea guilty to charges they didn't commit.

Similarly, HB 2908 creates a new second-degree felony offense of unlawful restraint if you're restraining a police officer "in retaliation or on account of an exercise of official power." So, for example, when Trooper Brian Encina reached into Sandra Bland's car to arrest her for failure to signal a lane change, she would have committed a second-degree felony under this bill for grabbing his wrist to stop him.

The bill repeats this pattern in several places throughout the law, senselessly boosting already boosted penalties. Terroristic threat - already enhanced from a Class B to a Class A if the target is a public servant - would be boosted to a state jail felony under the bill if the target is a police officer. Intoxication assault would be enhanced a second time to a first degree felony (up to life in prison) if the victim is a police officer; right now it's a second degree felony if the victim is a police, firefighter or EMS tech, third degree for everybody else.

These enhancements won't change behavior and won't make anyone safer. After all, all these crimes are already enhanced for police-officer victims and apparently that hasn't solved the problem. But if the only tool the Lege can find is a hammer, then everything apparently looks like a nail. So this legislation goes back to the enhancement well.

Finally, the bill mandates a rather ham-handed propaganda campaign by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement to "develop and implement a campaign to educate children in this state on the value that peace officers bring to a community." What this peace officer licensing agency knows about educating children is anyone's guess, but the point isn't really for the children to be educated - it's to pass something that leaves the public with an impression that the Legislature backs law enforcement. Hell, so do I. But this is not the way.

Epilogue to "The Guy With the Knife": Jon Buice was granted parole. Again.

In a timely epilogue to the screening last week of “The Guy With the Knife” at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, news comes today that the subject of the film, Jon Buice, was just granted parole after 24 years in prison. Buice was convicted of murder in the high-profile case involving banker Paul Broussard in Houston. The 1991 crime involved an apparent gay-bashing by a group of 10 youth from The Woodlands, and mobilized the Houston gay community to advocate for equal rights and for investigation and prosecution of this crime.

While on the surface, the case against the 17-year old Buice seemed cut-and-dry, and the outrage about the gay-bashing seemed fully justified, a closer analysis of the case revealed that the realities of the crime and its aftermath were far murkier. In fact, some prominent members of Houston’s LGBT community, including Ray Hill (the producer of The Prison Show and the original proponent of the “gay bashing” theory of the case) and Maria Gonzalez (the head of Houston’s LGBT Caucus and a University of Houston professor) came to be among Buice’s biggest supporters. Hill later admitted that he fabricated the notion that this was a hate crime in order to put pressure on law enforcement officials to solve the case. And Gonzalez went from fighting to keep Buice locked up to becoming a staunch advocate for his release.

Two separate deeper dives into the case—one by journalism prof Michael Berryhill and the other by independent filmmaker Alison Armstrong, who spent eight years making her film--raised serious concerns about a number of previously unexplored issues. Buice’s guilt is not in question, but both investigations raise serious doubts that there was any underlying intention to target a gay person and that there was any intent to commit murder; rather, it seems much more likely that it was a fight by teens, intoxicated by drugs and alcohol, that got out of hand. Notably, Buice’s case was resolved with a plea bargain for a 45-year sentence, so many facts never had the opportunity to come out at a trial.

Two of the most damning indicators that this was a gay-bashing withered under closer inspection. For example, the media originally touted the fact that the perpetrators used a wooden board studded with nails to beat the victim, but no such item was ever found in the evidence locker and there was no proof or testimony such a weapon ever existed. Similarly, the victim was supposedly “gutted like a deer" with a huge knife, but the only weapon involved turned out to be a knife with a two-inch blade that was used to stab Broussard. The victim’s especially gory “injury” was in fact the result of his autopsy. Another revelation in the film had to do with the fact that the victim, Paul Broussard, was awake and conversant when EMS arrived on the scene, and that his transportation to the hospital and treatment by a doctor were severely delayed due to fears about possible exposure to AIDS, at a time when that disease had the city in a panic.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the case, though, had to do with a development in 2011 when Buice was originally granted parole after numerous set-offs. By all accounts, Buice was deeply repentant, and had been a model prisoner, earning several college degrees and becoming a peer educator at the Wynne Farm. But shortly after the Parole Board announced its parole decision, in the days before Buice was actually released but after there was political pushback to its decision, Buice was accused of having an “inappropriate relationship” with a female prison chaplain.

No evidence was ever produced showing that such an inappropriate relationship existed. And indeed, the only inappropriate behavior was on TDCJ’s part. In an extraordinarily brazen move that would likely have a chilling effect on the chaplaincy program in TDCJ were it better known, TDCJ installed video surveillance equipment in Chaplain Linda Hill’s office, capturing footage of all her private communications with inmates and staff alike during a two-week period.

Despite the fact that the video showed perfectly ordinary encounters between Buice and the chaplain, Buice’s parole decision was rescinded and he was placed in disciplinary segregation for some period of time. And officials at the agency fired Chaplain Linda Hill and slandered her reputation, making her collateral consequence in this campaign to ensure that Buice stayed behind bars. Hill’s personal nightmare has only worsened in the years since her unfair dismissal. Berryhill’s account fills out many more details of this sordid story.

While it is tempting to focus any discussion of the case on these irregularities and injustices, in many ways those case-specific details detract from the larger issues and lessons presented here. Maybe we need to look at this case as a story of what it means for a perpetrator of a violent crime to become rehabilitated, or for a community to forgive a person who has hurt them. Perhaps we ought to ask hard questions about when someone has been punished enough, and what further purpose it could serve to keep someone locked up beyond the time that anyone could reasonably think he is a danger to society. And finally, the case should cause us to ask how the justice system can be so easily manipulated, whether at the investigation, prosecution, or parole stage.

One hopes that this latest parole decision--by a parole panel with full information--is the final chapter in Buice’s case, and that there will be no further twists and turns. And one also hopes that there can be some healing for everyone involved in and hurt by this tragic case: for Paul Broussard’s family; for the gay community in Houston and beyond; for Jon Buice, his family, and supporters; and for Linda Hill, whose own story has scarcely begun to be told.

MORE: Kuff disagrees Buice has served enough time, for reasons he explained here in 2013.