72 charged in Tulia-style long-term bust in E. TX

Most of what's wrong with drug task forces may be summed up by examining a recent, massive drug bust in Anderson County, TX by the Dogwood Trails task force that netted 72 defendants -- 56 charged in state court and 16 in federal court. Here's the DoJ press release bragging about it. That number dwarfs the 46 arrested in Tulia. It's so many they can't even fit them all in the county jail.

I grew up two counties over from Anderson in Tyler, TX, and can relate to readers that Anderson is quite a rural place. The notion that 72 crack dealers live there simply is absurd -- there's barely enough population density to support seven of them. (The blog Drug War Rant calculates that the entire Anderson County crack market, judging by federal statistics, totals about 165 people!)

Here's what the Palestine Herald Press wrote about it (no longer on the web):

Authorities bust crack ring 10-13-04

By PAUL STONE Palestine Herald Press Associate Editor

Local, state and federal law enforcement authorities began serving warrants on 72 drug defendants throughout Anderson County early this morning, culminating a two-year investigation into a crack cocaine ring.

At 7 a.m. today, authorities from multiple agencies began descending on residences throughout Anderson County to serve the warrants. "We're looking for 56 state defendants and 16 federal defendants," said Curtis Bitz, commander of the Dogwood Trails Narcotics Task Force, at 8:15 a.m. today. At that time, Bitz said authorities were in the process of seizing three residences. Four search warrants - two in the Palestine city limits and two in the county - had been executed, he added. ...

Last month, an Anderson County grand jury returned indictments charging 56 defendants with various drug trafficking charges. Also last month, 16 other defendants were indicted by a Tyler federal grand jury. The investigation, early morning arrests and searches were led by the Dogwood Trails Narcotics Task Force and the Tyler office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. ...

Today's arrests marked the final phase of a two-year investigation which began in November 2002. Two years ago, the Dogwood Trails Narcotics Task Force initiated an investigation into the sale and distribution of crack cocaine in Palestine. The investigation has been linked to suppliers and distributors of illegal narcotics in Dallas and Houston.

Court documents indicate several of the defendants were involved in building a crack cocaine distribution organization in Anderson County. Conspirators utilized various suppliers to acquire quantities of crack cocaine to sell and then recruited others to distribute the drugs. If convicted, many of the defendants could face a maximum sentence of life in prison. Other federal defendants face between 40 and 300 years.

If "several" defendants were involved in distributing crack, according to the article, how does that justify indicting 72 people? By definition, the majority of defendants in this case must be, at most, drug users, not dealers, since there's simply no market to support 72 different dealers in Anderson County.

These long-term "investigations" follow a pattern -- the undercover operative befriends non-dealers in the black community and after a while asks for assistance purchasing drugs. Most people netted never profited from any drug sale, but either referred or acted as a go-between for someone they thought was a friend. That doesn't matter to the drug warriors, though.

Of course, that scenario assumes some of the cases aren't utterly trumped up to begin with. In Tulia and Floresville, TX, drug task force undercover cops actually set up innocent people. In the most famous of the Tulia scenarios, a young woman was able to prove she was cashing a check in Oklahoma City at the time the officer claimed she sold him drugs in Tulia.

With 72 defendants in Anderson County, it's not out of the question something similar happened in some of these cases. The 2-year investigation focused exclusively on crack, meaning virtually all the busts involved black folks (powder cocaine and meth are more common among E. Texas whites, but obviously they're not the drug task force's focus). That's sadly no surprise. In Texas, 70 percent of those entering prison for drugs in Texas are black (see footnote 22 of this report) even though studies show all races use drugs at about the same rate. A whopping 1 in 20 Texans are in prison, on probation or parole.

It costs about $15k per year to house prisoners in Texas -- more than that for the feds. The notion that taxpayers will foot the bill for these folks for as many as 40-300 years makes little sense. Even assuming all 72 defendants are actually drug dealers -- almost certainly a false assumption -- it'd be cheaper, and probably more effective, just to pay each of them $10-12K per year not to deal drugs! At least then they could pay taxes on the income and be available to support their families. But prisons are the largest employer in the area (see the subhed, Healthcare, Prisons, and Water), and vocal, organized special interests like the correctional officers union and the drug task force, whose jobs depend on a steady flow of new people into the system, are unlikely to criticize such excesses.

Interestingly, the Dogwood Trails task force nearly disbanded earlier this year because officials in the neighboring county of Cherokee, which is also in the task force, complained that little or none of the task force's drug enforcement efforts were expended in that county. The commissioners court there split in a 3-2 vote over whether to keep the task force. Clearly Dogwood Trails is still not working in Cherokee county if none of 72 cases made occurred there. Perhaps the Cherokee commissioners court should reconsider that decision next year when they're asked again to contribute money and manpower to drug enforcement in other counties.

A task force in Lubbock disbanded earlier this year in part because squirrelly undercover operations like the one in Tulia increased insurance rates, and meant the main agency in the task force was liable for behavior of officers they didn't hire or manage. This extremist sweep by the Dogwood Trails crew raises similar liability fears, one would think. Hard to believe these guys get away with this stuff.

Featherlite tract surveyed but stagnant

My house in Austin backs up to the Featherlite tract that was purchased by former Dell Chief Financial Officer Tom Meredith. Meredith actually visited with neighbors one evening at our home last spring, and has been generous so far about accomodating reasonable community concerns. We've really appreciated that, all in all. Most significantly, he decreased the amount of impervious cover after concerns were raised about the effects of the development on neighborhood drainage (the property lies next to a creek at the bottom of a large hill).

Last we heard, the commercial section of the development is completely on hold. Originally Meredith and his entourage hoped that the Austin Children's Museum and KLRU (Austin's local public television station) would become anchor tenants for the commercial complex, and serve as a draw for other supporting commercial businesses like restaurants or small shops. Meredith offered to donate the land to those two entities, both of which obviously are non-profit organizations, but they would have had to build on it with their own funds. Both entities wound up passing, so now the commerical portion of the development is in limbo.

Meredith plans to move forward with a small development of condominiums, with its own binding homeowners' association contracts, that will go in betwen 14th and 16th streets, from the existing houses all the way flush up to Boggy Creek. Fourteenth St. would be extended, and 16th would be extended past Miriam St. to the East; 14th and 16th would be connected by a new road running along the edge of the railroad tracks. I always thought some of that was flood plain, certainly some of it floods sometimes, but the city maps insist the formal, legal flood plain only exists on the other side of the creek. We'll see, I suppose, once it's built out.

Survey stakes went up a few months ago, and the grass was mowed, making us think something might be happening soon. But most of the stakes have fallen down now, the grass is knee high, and there hasn't been much action beyond some neighborhood dog walking and kids racing up and down the odd concrete strips that dot the tracts' landscape. It's zoned, platted and ready to go, though, so once Meredith decides to move forward it could happen quickly.

Men in C&W music step up

Loving this new podcasting offering, "Takin' My Country Back." Listen to it now! Forward it to your friends. Call your local radio station and ask them to play it.

Performed by outlaw country star Tony Stampley, and written by David Kent (who wrote Blake Shelton's hit, Austin), it's a raucous, fun rant that lashes the president (while never naming him), even as it remains sympathetic and respectful to both the troops and mainstream sensibilities.

Glad to see the fellas in the country and western world aren't leaving my gals in the Dixie Chicks completely high and dry! For a while there it looked like they and Steve Earle were the only country stars out there with any cajones.

Police proliferation problematic

Presently Texas has 2,540 separate law enforcement agencies licensed with the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education. That's an average of 10 law enforcement agencies per county, including not just local police and sheriffs departments, but school district police, college campus police (universities, junior and community colleges), airport police, parks police, and a wide variety of other supposedly specialized units. In reality, these smaller agencies often aren't "specialized" at all, but merely marginal. They must pick from the bottom of the barrel for applicants and management after the bigger dogs get theirs.

The proliferation of small, specialized police forces threatens to undermine the credibility of law enforcement, especially at smaller agencies, and has caused accountability for police officers generally to decline. Here are the main problems caused by this explosion of specialized agencies:

1. Gypsy cops: Having so many special forces creates a problem with so-called “gypsy cops,” where officers move from small agency to small agency, typically after misconduct or other problems that may indicate their unsuitability to wear a police uniform. Officers in Texas know if they misbehave and get fired they can just move on down the road. Tom Coleman, the undercover officer in the Tulia scandal, is the most famous example of a gypsy cop (which is law enforcement slang popularized by the Tulia case). Coleman’s troubles at a prior agency came to a head in Tulia when a warrant was actually issued for his arrest while he was working undercover!
2. Resources: Smaller forces don’t have sufficient resources for modern, high quality policing, or for more specialized police work involving particular types of crimes.
3. Fragmentation: Having so many different agencies means information sharing is basically impossible, fragmenting potential for seamless intelligence gathering regarding criminal activity. After 9-11, the federal government changed its laws and policies to allow federal agencies to share more information with law enforcement regarding terrorism, but this local fragmentation makes that goal unwieldy at best and unachievable at worst.
4. Supervisor shortage: The pool of quality police supervisors in Texas simply is not deep enough to manage 2,540 different agencies. That means many of these special agencies are being led by managers who are frankly unqualified.
5. Qualifications not uniform: Having so many agencies means that a mind-boggling array of differing hiring, training and employment practices exist from agency to agency inevitably muddying the public’s ability to determine if an agency hires good officers.
6. Equal protection: Non-civil service agencies in cities whose main police department is covered under the state civil service code can find themselves in a situation where different labor rules cover different law enforcement employees, even when they have the same employer. E.g., in Austin APD is covered under the civil service code, while the parks and airport police are not civil service agencies, even though all the officers get a City of Austin paycheck.
7. Too expensive: Having licensed police officers in schools and parks is frequently overkill, a more-expensive-than-necessary overreaction to security problems. Security guards equipped to call 911 or a police dispatcher would be cheaper than commissioned officers, and could handle virtually every situation that arises, especially in school scenarios (for parks police, there’s a need to allow them to write tickets).
8. Mission creep: In schools, officers' presence has led to mission creep, where officers actually teach DARE programs in schools as though they were a regular teacher. Studies show these programs are ineffective at preventing drug use, and using commissioned officers as teachers is much more expensive than paying teachers to handle the same classroom duties.

One can't turn back the tide with a spade, but a few common sense reforms come to mind that state and local governments could take to begin to rein in the problem.

• Consolidation of specialized police forces should be a state priority, with both carrots and sticks employed to convince local agencies to cooperate.
• Where possible, alternative security arrangements to using commissioned officers should be implemented, with non-commissioned guards relying on 911 service in the event of occasional but rare need for actual police powers.
• A single statewide school police force could be created and run centrally, in Texas' case from the Texas Education Agency. All officers would still be locally funded. If a school district wanted officers in their school, they would pay for them, but TEA would formally hire, employ and manage the officers, who like DPS troopers might be transferred around over time according to state needs. Such an arrangement would provide more uniform hiring and disciplinary practices, and keep officers who get in trouble at one school from moving along to the next one, while relieving a significant security cost burden from the shoulders of local taxpayers.

Task force scandals mar D's stance

I noted earlier that drug task forces across the country are rife with corruption, despite the Kerry/Edwards desire to continue their funding in the face of utter mission failure. But it seems like there's always more.

An Indiana task force chief pled guilty recently to stealing drugs, $9,000, and a firearm from the task force, 13 counts in all. A judge revoked his bond and issued an arrest warrant when he failed to show up for a sentencing hearing.

A father-son officer team at the Butler County task force in Kansas based in El Dorado have been suspended (from two different employing agencies). The Kansas Bureau of Investigation was called in to examine possible criminal charges. "From the city's standpoint, we wanted an outside agency to look into some things we were not comfortable with in the task force," [El Dorado city manager] Collins said earlier. "The KBI was the logical choice, so I instructed Chief Boren to make the request. We felt a third party would be the best way to do this." The father has resigned. The article says the incident may result in the task force being disbanded altogether.

As another task force sex harassment case ramps up in New Mexico, an older incident in Kentucky winds to a close. The New Era newspaper litigated to open the contents of a sex harassment settlement involving the Penryville narcotics task force commander. The task force commander allegedly sexually harassed a task force employee in the Kentucky case, while the New Mexico case involved a confidential informant.

Meanwhile, John Edwards criticized Bush this week for trying to cut Byrne grant funding that goes to drug task forces, even though that's exactly the right thing to do! (See the Edwards link in the blog below.) One has to wonder whether the Dems are ignorant or opportunistic on this score. A massive wave of scandals have heaped disapprobation on the Byrne program these last five years, and its hard to imagine a well-intentioned person could continue to take that stance if they knew the history. On the other hand, no American politician has been harmed for demagoguing about drugs in the last three decades. Perhaps they're cynically relying on that fact to skate by on a bad position.

Kerry backs drug task forces

I was disappointed to find that John Kerry expressly backed Byrne-grant funded drug task forces when the Republicans tried to kill the program in January 2003. The Rs tabled an amendment by Tom Harkin to renew the funding, which in any event was ultimately reinstated in conference committee.

No surprise. The Rs in the Bush administration have consistently opposed the Byrne program as pork, and the Dems seized on it as an opportunity to seem "tougher on crime than thou." It wouldn't bother me if the Dems adopted the R position regarding the Byrne grant program.

Meanwhile, John Edwards has been demagoguing on "meth labs" this week, criticizing Bush for cutting Byrne money. Of course, the rise in meth lab busts stems largely from focus on users instead of dealers -- most "meth labs" are home kitchens where individuals make just enough meth for personal use.

New Gladwell book out in January

Having just included The Tipping Point in a review of two newer books, I was interested to see the new Malcolm Gladwell book is coming out in January 2005. Entitled Blink, it adumbrates the process by which people make instant decisions. Looking forward to it.

Tipping Crowds on the Internet

My friends at The Texas Observer published a 2,500 word three-book review authored by yours truly in their Oct 8, 2004 issue. Even though the topics were Internet related -- Joe Trippi's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, and James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds -- the Observer did not put the review in their online edition. But you can order a complementary copy or subscribe, or pick up a copy in your local bookstore.

Drug Task Forces in Constant State of Scandal

Friends and readers know that imbroglios involving drug task forces have occupied much of my time since the infamous 1999 Tulia drug sting. The most problematic task forces are funded by the federal Byrne grant program.

If you pay attention, drug task force cops misbehave all the time -- it's an egregious pattern extending well beyond Tulia or Texas, but which includes task forces all over the country. E.g., here's some typical, recent cases:

• In New Mexico, drug task force officer stands accused of sexually harassing a female confidential informant.
• In Indiana, a task force commander pled guilty to forging confidential informant payment reports in order to steal money.
• In Longview, Texas, a black narcotics officer sued the Northeast Texas drug task force for racial discrimination.
• In Colorado, a county candidate says a drug task force should be de-funded because of a botched raid in Frisco, CO.

Though it's more from incompetence than malfeasance, in Kentucky hundreds of cases may be tossed out because a drug task force was not properly constituted under the law. This California task force was sued for keeping its meeting closed during deliberations over whether to expand focus to include anti-terrorism work.

These multijurisdictional pseudo-agencies constitute a bureaucratic nightmare: They are federally funded, state managed, locally staffed and therefore doomed to fail. While law enforcement portrays the Tulia cases as enigmatic, anyone paying attention will spot misconduct cases cropping up near constantly among Byrne-grant funded drug task forces.

Design ≠ Art

Frequently it has occurred to me that the best political campaigns (I'm speaking of issue campaigns, not candidates, though it's true of both), the ones that, in the modern jargon, "go viral" and become widespread phenomena, benefit as much from the artistry of the political operatives as from technical proficiency. Content, style, timing and method of delivery are subjective decisions, but they determine whether a campaign is run with grace and nuance, or if it seems "klunky" and mechanistic, without effectively capturing the imagination of potential supporters. Even if your side has more money and resources, a luxury I've seldom enjoyed, one still has to piece together the electoral or legislative majority, which on every issue requires a balancing act that cannot be approached in a cookie cutter fashion.

After viewing an exhibit of furniture produced by artists in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in NYC last month, though, and thinking about the debate therein over the relationship between "design" and "art," I realized my assumption that what I was seeing in the better campaigns was "artistry" was incorrect. What distinguishes the top campaigns is superior design.

Consider the views of Mr. Tuttle:

"A great designer has to know everything (language, history, ethnography, anthropology, psychology, biology, anatomy, etc.), while an artist doesn't have to know anything. This polarity ... is the starting point. But ironically, to really appreciate design, it is not about knowledge, but about the experience of living with the work; you don't have to know anything, and you get its 'information' almost through osmosis. Whereas to appreciate a good artwork, you have to bring and apply absolutely everything you know. Why is that?"

Richard Tuttle,
Design ≠ Art, National Design Museum, 2004

That's a damn good question. It captures a quality that prevailing ideas and messages in politics also contain -- the determinative factor often isn't whether an argument is right in its details, but whether it "feels" true or correct.

Think about the common argument, "Putting more criminals in prison would reduce crime." It's patently false, because breaking up families makes it more likely their children will become criminals, thus increasing crime in the medium to long run, but it sounds instinctively logical, so the argument works even if the facts aren't on its side. Another popular one: "We have to fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here." That argument, though utterly fallacious and in fact precipitative of the worst possible outcomes (enraging the Arab world when they otherwise would have helped us fight Al Quaeda), can never be completely argued down because it feels correct. George W. Bush is a master of false statements that feel true, but it's a pastime for the entire political class, on both sides of the aisle. Alternatively, because it is so often "stranger than fiction," the truth itself may sound difficult to believe by comparison to a simpler, more comfortable lie.

Politics is not and cannot be art -- no political operative can become the god-like painter filling in a canvas with exactly the right colors in the right spot. Instead, those in politics must produce messages that people can understand and live with comfortably -- it's important to challenge assumptions, but progressive or other ideas cannot become dominant until they move beyond the challenger stage to promote messages with mass appeal. We must reach deeper into the core of issues to develop arguments so fundamental and powerful that they feel true without anyone having to think about it any more than they do the chair they're sitting on, even if it's a little on the artsy side.

Bad CIs Creating Crime

One of my biggest beefs is the use of drug enforcement strategies that create new crime instead of investigating current ones. A Tennessee drug task force roped in a Florida woman on money laundering charges recently, but it turned out she was uninvolved, and a confidential informant (who had a long criminal record) had manufactured the allegedly criminal situation.

This is very common, especially for drug task forces funded by the federal Byrne grant program. In Hearne, Texas ACLU is suing because a confidential informant set up innocent people and attempted to manufacture crimes where none existed. In response, the 2001 (77th) Texas Legislature passed House Bill 2351 requiring corroboration for testimony by confidential informants in undercover drug stings. To my knowledge, no other state has enforced that restriction. The requirement for corroborating evidence, though, is as old as the concept of justice itself -- in Mosaic law in the Bible, corroboration was mandated for the equivalent of criminal convictions, and both Jesus and the Apostle Paul confirmed the necessity for corroboration in the New Testament.

For more information about drug task forces, see Grits' full coverage.

Trailing Gypsy Cops

What can be done to solve Texas’ problem of “gypsy cops,” who float from department to department without their bad records ever catching up to them? The issue has been brewing around the state for several years.

Gypsies are officers who have been fired for cause and/or resigned to avoid termination, then secured employment at another department.

The classic “gypsy cop,” about whom this previously internal-law enforcement slang term was popularized, was Tom Coleman, on whose word 16% percent of the black population of Tulia Texas was imprisoned in the infamous 1999 drug sting. That case received international attention, but the term and the circumstances it describes are more common. Just last week, the October 2 Longview News Journal reported that a Longview patrol officer who was fired for excessive force got a job with the Rusk County Sheriff’s Department before his departmental appeals were expired. Other examples abound.

It has been suggested by Texas police unions that officers should only be considered “gypsies” after they’ve transferred agencies six or more times, but the public and the Legislature have a genuine right to be concerned the first time a bad cop is re-hired in another jurisdiction.

Making officer termination information public at the state peace officer licensing agency (the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education), would create a new set of incentives for agencies to avoid hiring “gypsy cops.” If the media, concerned members of the public or political opponents discovered an agency was hiring officers of questionable character or quality, it changes the context, and departments are more likely to take actions that will protect the public from a few bad eggs.

 

A bill passed in the 2001 Texas Legislature made termination information at TCLEOSE public for officers who engaged in excessive force or criminal conduct, but that should be expanded to make termination notices public for all cases when an officer was fired for cause or resigned while being investigated.

The Law Enforcement Committee of the Texas House of Representatives heard testimony on this topic August 19 (see their video archives), and may recommend reforms to address this problem in the committee's forthcoming Interim Report.

Who is this guy?

Grits for Breakfast is the private weblog and nom de plume of Scott Henson, a former journalist turned opposition researcher/political consultant, public policy researcher and blogger. Here's the short version of how I got here:

In college, I worked at The Daily Texan and afterward co-founded an alternative magazine called Polemicist with a max circulation of 15,000 that featured investigative journalism aimed at the university. For this work, my co-editor Tom Philpott, Jr. and I were inducted into UT-Austin's Friars Society.

After leaving UT Austin without a degree to become associate editor at the Texas Observer, as well as freelancing for a number of publications along the way, I grew weary of journalism and turned to more exciting electoral politics, performing opposition and defensive research for a total of 68 political campaigns in Texas between 1991-2004, as well as performing technical writing for several government agencies and nonprofits. In a brilliant stroke of planning, in 1995 a partner John Umphress and I launched a startup business called Paper Trail Research Services - an ill-fated name that seemed perfectly suited before a few years later the internet made "paper trails" an anachronism. In the early days of the web, our firm was among the first to perform overnight profiles of entire jury pools for law firms using available databases and public records That was lucrative but boring work, for a while.

I also served a brief stint in the mid-'90s as a data specialist (or some such title) at the Texas State Medicaid Office, where I was primary author of the second edition of a publication called "Texas Medicaid in Perspective," colloquially known as "The Pink Book," essentially a 150-primer for legislators, staff and opinion leaders on the sprawling, byzantine, multi-billion dollar program. (That's where many of those "technical writing" gigs came from.) For about five years during this period, I authored a column on health care finance for a now-defunct publication called The Good Life. And I performed contract research on behalf of Texas environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the Save Our Springs Alliance, including an early public policy report critical of the economics behind a low-level nuclear waste dump in West Texas.

Most of my criminal-justice reform work over the years was performed as a volunteer, and mostly in the political off-season. I became engaged in the subject after helping victims respond to a serious police brutality incident in my own neighborhood in Austin in 1995. That got me engaged on the issue at the city level.

In my role as an opposition researcher, during Austin's 1996 municipal elections I experimented for the first time with html and created a web site called the Austin City Council Candidate Hall of Shame, where I dumped opposition research regarding a slate of four establishment candidates. Though "the public" didn't necessarily see the site, insiders and journalists did and frequently cribbed facts and analysis from it in ways that indirectly influenced their reportage. A lot. By the end of the campaign, virtually every tidbit from the site had made its way into some media outlet's coverage and every targeted candidate lost. Emboldened, the next year, I created a now-defunct website called the Austin Police Department Hall of Shame which published excerpts from police disciplinary reports procured under the Open Records Act, and later, weekly media roundups of police misconduct cases from around the state. As my interests expanded beyond police misconduct and toward the state legislature, the now-shuttered site was renamed the bland, "Texas Police Reform Center.' In many ways it was a proto-blog, but all hand-coded in html.

In 1998, I co-founded of a local political action committee, the Sunshine Project for Police Accountability, which successfully campaigned for Austin's current Police Monitor and Oversight Board, for all the good it did. On behalf of that group, 1999 was the first year I began monitoring criminal justice legislation at the Texas Lege, where over the years I've helped originate, promote and/or negotiate a number of important pieces of reform legislation and fought (with mixed results) to kill bad bills.

From 2000 to 2006 I was director of the Police Accountability Project at the ACLU of Texas, at first part-time, and was the group's point person negotiating new security legislation post-9/11 at the Texas Legislature. While at ACLUTX, I worked on several pieces of successful legislation on their behalf, including a requirement for corroboration of undercover informants after the Tulia drug stings and Texas' racial profiling statute, which included provisions incentivizing and financing use of dashcams in police cars performing traffic stop. I helped push Texas' early probation reforms in 2003-2005. Also in 2005, I helped pass legislation regulating the sort of regional narcotics task forces involved in the Tulia drug sting. The following year, the governor de-funded and disbanded the task force system because so many brashly refused to accept DPS oversight - the serendipitous culmination of a five-year campaign by my Police Accountability Project to eliminate the drug task force system.

After leaving ACLU in December 2006, I bounced around taking contract work, including on some non-criminal justice projects. (I spent two years on contract part-time analyzing water rates.) My next regular, paid gig related to criminal-justice politics came in 2008 when I became a consultant for the Innocence Project of Texas, advocating on their behalf at the Legislature in 2009, 2011, and 2013 to help successfully secure expanded compensation for exonerees, reforms in eyewitness identification procedures, corroboration for jailhouse snitches, expanded access to habeas corpus writs, and other public-policy reforms. After a stint consulting for the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition and the Drug Policy Alliance, I did a short stretch as Executive Director of the Innocence Project of Texas before joining Just Liberty as Policy Director in 2016.

Grits for Breakfast remains an uncompensated hobby: All opinions are my own unless otherwise specified. I also maintain a seldom-updated personal blog called Huevos Rancheros. I've maintained Grits independently from any group or party because I want it to be place to discuss ideas in all their nuance, not just a spokesblog for this or that organization. The problems facing the criminal justice system are enormous, and we need unfettered, creative thinking to identify solutions that can work for everybody and keep us safe and free. It's my sincere hope that Grits contributes to that process in some small way.

Thanks for stopping by.

Last updated January 25, 2015

Grits for Breakfast Writer Bios

Here are brief bios of Grits for Breakfast writers.

Scott Henson, aka, Grits for Breakfast

Scott Henson is presently interim Executive Director at Just Liberty, a 501(c)4 focused on justice reform in Texas. A former journalist and political opposition researcher, Scott has labored for more than two decades in Texas' criminal-justice reform movement, having been involved in passing some of Texas' most celebrated 21st century reform legislation. He created Grits for Breakfast in 2004, having before then operated a criminal-justice reform site hand-coded in html beginning in 1997. After a brief but formative stint in journalism during and immediately after college, Henson worked for 14 years as a professional political opposition researcher for 68 campaigns, as well as performing technical writing and public-policy research for various attorneys, agencies and organizations. He began working on criminal-justice reform as a volunteer in response to a series of police shootings and brutality incidents in Austin, helping spearhead a years-long campaign which culminated in creation of the Austin Police Monitor's office in 2000. Henson served from 2000-2006 as Police Accountability Project director for the ACLU of Texas, helping pass numerous pieces of bipartisan criminal-justice reform legislation and spearheading a successful, five-year campaign to abolish Texas' system of regional narcotics task forces. From 2008-2015 he served first as Policy Director then Executive Director of the Innocence Project of Texas, helping secure legislation to provide compensation for exonerees, improve eyewitness identification procedures, and create a new avenue for habeas corpus relief in junk science cases. In addition, he has worked on decarceration and drug-policy campaigns for the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition and the Drug Policy Alliance, as well as volunteering for groups like the Texas Fair Defense Project, the Austin Justice Coalition, and the Prison Justice League. See his longer bio.

Rebecca Bernhardt

A long-time civil-rights activist, Rebecca Bernhardt works for the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault. She is formerly the Executive Director of the Texas Fair Defense Project. Before joining TFDP, she spent four years with Texas Defender Service working to ensure that individuals facing a death sentence received effective legal counsel and a fair trial. She helped draft and pass Texas’s 2013 criminal discovery reforms known as the Michael Morton Act and advocated for successful reforms of Texas’ prosecutorial accountability system. Becky is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and Yale Law School. After graduating from law school, she clerked for the Honorable William Wayne Justice, Senior U.S. District Judge of the Eastern District of Texas.


Michele Deitch

Michele Deitch is an attorney with over 28 years of experience working on criminal justice policy issues with state and local government officials, corrections officials, judges, and advocates. She holds a joint appointment as a Senior Lecturer at the LBJ School and at the Law School, where she teaches graduate courses in criminal justice policy and juvenile justice policy. Her areas of specialty include independent oversight of correctional institutions, institutional reform litigation, prison conditions and management, prison and jail overcrowding, prison privatization, juvenile justice reform, and juveniles in the adult criminal justice system. She holds a J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School, an M.Sc. in psychology (with a specialization in criminology) from Oxford University (Balliol College), and a B.A. with honors from Amherst College. See a longer bio.

Jennifer Laurin

Almost a decade ago, Jennifer Laurin was a civil rights lawyer in New York City, trying to figure out the right strategy in a case against the City of Houston for its stunningly, now infamously, inadequate crime lab. Jen started to depend on a little blog called Grits for Breakfast to send her the most salient Texas criminal justice dispatches from afar.  Six years later when Jen was a baby academic at UT School of Law, she assigned Grits posts to her first Criminal Law students.  Whether through Jen's inspired teaching or Grits's inspired blogging, one of those students - Amanda Woog - got a mean bite from the criminal justice bug. Now in another stage of the beautiful life cycle of teaching, Jen now gets to join forces with Amanda here at Grits.  For her other credentials, see https://law.utexas.edu/faculty/laurinje.

Eva Ruth Moravec

Eva Ruth Moravec is a news reporter well-versed in the art of covering crime, government and breaking news. She worked for the Associated Press covering the 2015 legislative session and before that was a metro reporter with the San Antonio Express-News for six years. She's presently a graduate student of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication, performs freelance work, and has had work published in The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, the Houston Business Journal, Silicon Hills News and others. In September 2016, she launched Point of Impact, a year-long reporting series funded by the Charles Koch Foundation to perform in-depth investigations on police shooting episodes involving unarmed victims. Passionate about criminal justice, she loves telling stories about the intersection of government and reality. See her longer bio.

Sandra Guerra Thompson

Sandra Guerra Thompson, an award winning teacher and scholar, is the Alumnae College Professor in Law and Director of the Criminal Justice Institute at the University of Houston Law Center. Before her teaching career, she served as an Assistant District Attorney in the New York County DA's Office where she practiced both trial and appellate criminal law. Professor Thompson’s research focuses on the systemic irregularities that cause wrongful convictions, reduce public safety, and undermine public trust in the criminal justice system. She has authored numerous articles on eyewitness identification evidence and published a book in 2015 titled, "Cops In Lab Coats: Curbing Wrongful Convictions through Independent Forensic Laboratories." Here's her CV.

Amanda Woog, aka, The Wooginator

Amanda Woog is an attorney whose research interest is in Texas criminal justice policy.  She is currently executive director of the Texas Fair Defense Project. She was a fellow for two years at the Quattrone Center at Penn law school and before that was a a postdoctoral fellow with the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin. Amanda served as Policy Director of the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence during the 84th legislative session. She is the creator of the Texas Justice Initiative, a research website compiling and analyzing data on deaths in custody and police shootings in Texas. Prior to her policy work, Amanda was a litigation associate at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, and served as briefing attorney to the Honorable Judge Cheryl Johnson of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.  Amanda received her law degree with honors from The University of Texas School of Law and her B.A. from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

Last updated January 25, 2017.