One in three murder charges in TX a capital case

Now that the new Annual Statistical Report for the Texas judiciary is out, let's take a quick look at data on capital murder cases in Texas from FY 2017. (See p. 111 of the linked pdf from the Office of Court Administration.)

Texas prosecutors filed capital-murder charges in 446 cases last year, and gained capital convictions 249 times, including 162 by plea bargain and 74 by jury trial.*

Almost all of these resulted in LWOP sentences. The OCA reported that prosecutors announced plans to seek the death penalty in only three cases in 2017.

Six defendants were acquitted of capital murder at trial last year. Charges were dismissed in another 84 cases. (That'd be an interesting subset to review - that's a pretty high number.)

There were 897 capital murder cases pending statewide at the end of the year.

By comparison, there were 854 "regular" murder charges filed in 2017, with prosecutors generating 536 convictions. In addition, 31 murder defendants were acquitted at trial, with another 187 having charges dismissed.

One thought from these data: If prosecutors filed capital murder 446 times in 2017 and murder 854 times, then capital charges are not being reserved for the "worst of the worst." Not unless one believes one in three killers deserves that moniker. This overcharging is fueling an unnecessary shortage of capital-qualified trial attorneys statewide. While some have seen that shortage as a reason to reduce qualifications for capital-qualified attorneys, to me the better solution is for prosecutors to rein in this overcharging penchant and only use capital charges in truly exceptional cases.

*Obviously, these aren't all the same cases. Few capital murder cases are resolved within 12 months, and many if not most convictions were from cases filed in previous years. I'm analyzing overall patterns here, not claiming the cases in the "indicted" column are the same as those "convicted" in the same year.

Import of recanted informant testimony never evaluated in capital case

In the latest Reasonably Suspicious podcast, my co-host, Texas Defender Service Executive Director Mandy Marzullo, described the case of Juan Castillo, who is scheduled for execution on May 16. His conviction was based in part on informant testimony which was later recanted, but the courts have never meaningfully evaluated how this allegedly false testimony affected Castillo's case. Since there has only been sparse coverage of these events, I pulled this segment out as a stand-alone. Give it a listen:


Find a transcript of our conversation below the jump. MORE: From the indefatigable Keri Blakinger. AND MORE (5/7): See a plea for clemency for Mr. Castillo published in the SA Express News.

Most felony drug convictions in Texas get incarceration as a sentence

The new Annual Statistical Report on the Texas Judiciary from the Office of Court Administration is out.

Grits took a quick look at the data for felony drug possession cases in Texas District Courts. On. p. 112 we see that District Judges in Texas generated just more than 25,000 new felony drug possession convictions in 2017. Of those, nearly all were sentenced to incarceration of some sort:

Sentences Related to Felony Drug-Possession Convictions in Texas, 2017 

Prison: 5,281
State Jail: 7,243*
Local Jail: 8,554
Probation/Community Supervision: 3,859
Shock probation: 15
Fine Only: 58
Other: 410

Only 15 percent of drug-possession convictions resulted in a probated sentence in 2017, according to these data. (Clarification: these sentencing data are only for convictions and do not include cases resulting in deferred adjudication. See the comments for a discussion.)

In an additional 8,557 drug cases, a defendant with a prior drug conviction was revoked to prison in 2017. So probation revocations accounted for about 40 percent of drug offenders entering TDCJ last year.

*State Jails are Texas' euphemism for prisons which hold low-level offenders who committed what are known in the Penal Code as "State Jail Felonies," the equivalent of a 4th degree felony. The maximum sentence is 2 years, most offenders stay just 6-9 months, and there is no supervision upon release. Offenders who've been in state jails notoriously have the highest recidivism rates of all Texas prisoners.

Poll: GOP primary voters support #cjreform

The Texas Smart on Crime Coalition released a new poll today, let's review the highlights.

The most impressive finding in their survey of GOP primary voters? A whopping 76 percent supported reducing small-time drug possession penalties to a misdemeanor, following the lead of Oklahoma voters in 2016.

Legislation to that effect has been filed each of the last two sessions, but probation directors killed the plan. With polling numbers like these filling out it sails, however, some version of the Phil King/Senfronia Thompson legislation will certainly be back. Such a bill is also the shortest distance to closing more prison units and reducing long-term costs at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

In a related finding, 72 percent of Republican primary voters agreed that, "Changing certain crimes from felonies to misdemeanors will make our communities safer by allowing law enforcement to spend less time arresting people due to drug addiction and more time fighting more serious and violent crime."

The people remain way ahead of the politicians on these topics.

Finally, apropos of Grits' last post, "71% of GOP primary voters favor changing the way technical probation violations (such as missing a meeting with a probation officer, not committing a new crime) are handled, so those who have a minor infraction are not incarcerated but instead held accountable through enhanced curfews, electronic monitoring, or increased check-ins."

See the memo from Baselice and Associates for more details from the poll. MORE: see coverage from USA Today's John Moritz..

Related: See coverage of a national, Vera Institute poll on related topics.

Checking in on TX probation revocations: A major incarceration driver

Revocations from probation remain a major source of new entrants into Texas prison system (>23,000 on FY 2017). Here's the best report we have in Texas describing probation revocations, covering FY 2017. A few highlights:

The number of probation officers statewide is down more than 400 since 2010 (3,530/3,115). However, this decline tracks the overall reduction in probationer numbers, caseloads remain below 2010 levels.

Only 20 percent of probationers revoked to prison in Texas were serving time for violent offenses, according to the report. The others were on probation for nonviolent property or drug crimes (63%), felony DWI (6.2%) or other miscellaneous offenses (10.8%).

Technical revocations - or revocations for violating probation rules as opposed to committing new crimes - were up slightly since 2010 and accounted for 50% of all revocations statewide. These are the percentage of revocations which were for "technical" violations among Texas' largest counties:

Harris: 57.6
Dallas: 57.4
Bexar: 41.9
Tarrant: 56.8
Travis: 34.8
El Paso: 46.3

Said the report: "The majority of technical revocations were among offenders who were placed on community supervision for a property or controlled substance offense (66.0%)."

Despite crime declining overall during this period, felony probation placements have increased each year since their 2014 nadir. Similarly, early discharges from probation - where a probationer is rewarded for good behavior via early release from probation - decreased each year since 2014. Caseloads also began to rise slightly after 2014.

Bexar, El Paso, and Collin Counties saw big one-year spikes in their numbers of probationers revoked to TDCJ from FYs 2016 to 2017: Increases were 20.1%, 29.7%, and 28.2%, respectively.

Overall, about a quarter of probationers with the shortest probation sentences (up to two years) were revoked last year: "Revocations accounted for 38.9% of those offenders terminating community supervision with a probation length of up to two years and 25.3% of all offenders placed on community supervision in FY2015 for up to two years."

Even after they've succeeded on probation for more than two years, most probationers still face active supervision: "Less than a quarter of offenders remaining under supervision two years after placement were supervised indirectly. Most offenders were directly supervised, meaning they had face-to-face contact with a community supervision officer at least once every 90 days."

Justice system controls fewer Texans than a decade ago, but more than in other large states

Here's some good news, but then a somewhat deflating context for it. Still, let's begin on a positive note: The justice system in Texas oversees a significantly lower proportion of its residents than just a decade ago.

I ran across an old Grits post citing a Pew analysis of 2008 data. Back then, one in 22 adults, or 4.56 percent of all Texas adults, were in prison, jail, on probation, or on parole - in other words, in some way under the control of the criminal-justice system.

Updating with 2018 data (see below), Grits calculates that the comparable numbers today are 2.43 percent of adults, with one in 41 adults under supervision of the justice system. So the supervision rate has fallen nearly by half! 

Texas is a more free place than it was a decade ago.

While this is good news and should be appreciated, this is no time to break out the party hats. There's a tendency among Texans to embrace every bit of good #cjreform news with revelry and saturnalia, frequently declaring whatever we've done should be considered a "national model." 

This ain't that.

Texas still has the largest prison system of any American state. Moreover, our incarceration rates remain extraordinarily high compared to other states, particularly the other, most populous ones. California's per-capita imprisonment rate is 58 percent of Texas', for example, and we'd need to reduce our incarceration rate another 20 percent just to reach the national average (far more to reach the median).

Compared to where Texas was a decade ago, things look pretty good. Compared to other large states, we have significantly more incarceration and a greater percentage of our population under supervision by the government. And, despite our relative "tuffness," we still have more crime, too.

So things are better, but still not great. Indeed, most of the gains seem attributable to larger, national (probably international) trends from which Texas has received less benefit than other jurisdictions. There remains a lot of room for improvement.

(Sourcing for Texas' 2018 supervision-rate estimate: Three of the four datapoints for the numerator in the 2.43 percent number are listed on page 3 of this recent legislative handout. The fourth, county jail populations, may be discovered here. For population, I used official state projections for 2018 totals, estimating the percentage of adults from 2017 data.)

Stop the Train! An Epic Indigent Defense Fail in Travis County, execution scheduled without hearing on snitch recantation, new music from Just Liberty's decarceration campaign, and other stories

Here's the latest episode of the Reasonably Suspicious podcast for April 2018. You can subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud, or listen to it here:


In this episode, we discussed:

Top Stories

• Travis County indigent defense system producing terrible outcomes. 
• Texas Supreme Court to consider whether prosecutors can be fired for refusing to break the law. 
• Listen to Just Liberty's new anti-incarceration/prison-closure jingle!  (~9:00 mark.)

Death and Texas

• Juan Castillo may be executed next month but courts haven't considered informant recantation. 

Fill in the Blank

• Litigation in Galveston County made national press after a judge refused to pay for defense-attorney investigation in misdemeanor case. 
• Two Tarrant County cases show how politicized elections-based criminal prosecutions can be. 
• Former Congressman Sylvestre Reyes authored a clueless column on Texas and the opiod crisis.

The Last Hurrah

• Houston limits zoning for offender services. 
• The Tyler Court of Appeals declared Texas' "revenge porn" statute unconstitutional. 
• The Harris County Sheriff fired the deputy who shot Danny Ray Thomas, an unarmed black killed man amidst a psychotic episode while his pants around his ankles when he was killed. 

Find a transcript of this episode below the jump.

Eleven years later, San Antonio finally gets its needle-exchange pilot

Long-time readers and drug-reform afficianodos will recall that, in 2007, the Texas Legislature approved a pilot needle exchange program in San Antonio. But then-District Attorney Susan Reed vowed to prosecute government employees (or anyone else) associated with the program, then-Attorney General Greg Abbott agreed she could do so, even though the Legislature had authorized it, and so the program never got off the ground.

However, in the wake of losing his primary election, Bexar County DA Nico Lahood is reversing his predecessor's position and giving the go-ahead to a needle-exchange pilot in River City, the SA Express-News reported.

This is excellent news!

In 2015, the Texas House passed a bipartisan bill that would have allowed private charities to legally operate needle exchange programs without being prosecuted, but the Senate never considered the legislation. Now, the long-ago pilot championed in 2007 by the late Ruth McLendon-Jones and Dr./Sen. Bob Deuell can demonstrate the practice for the rest of the state.

Being Texas, of course, the fact that needle exchanges have proven effective all over the nation and globe won't convince our pols to do it, but a demonstration project in San Antonio might.

Travis managed-assigned-counsel program an unmitigated catastrophe

The Texas Tribune's Neena Satija authored an excellent story about the Travis County managed-assigned-counsel system, but IMO she cut them too much slack for truly crappy outcomes.

The new system was created due to "widespread allegations of favoritism and concerns that overloaded attorneys were providing poor representation." 

Judge Mike Lynch told her he "is confident that the new system in Travis County is far better than the old one."

However, the concentration of indigent defense cases among a handful of lawyers WORSENED after the move to a managed-assigned-counsel system, Satija reported. "According to data from the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, the 10 private Austin-area attorneys with the most appointments handled an average of 533 cases in 2017 — compared to an average of 428 in 2014, the year before the new system began."

We also know that those clients are getting worse outcomes as a result. A new analysis from the Council for State Governments Justice Center found that 80 percent of state-jail-felony drug defendants are convicted when represented by appointed counsel, compared to 48 percent of those who hired attorneys.

Further, Satija reported that defendants under the new system, "also spent an average of nine days in jail last year, up slightly from eight days in 2014. That’s still much longer than similar defendants who could afford their own lawyer: They spent an average of just one day in jail last year."

So lawyer caseloads are higher, not lower. Indigent defendants are sitting in jail longer. And people represented by appointed counsel in drug cases are a whopping 67% more likely to be convicted than people with retained counsel.

That's an unmitigated catastrophe! A failure on every level.

Former Texas Indigent Defense Commission chief Jim Bethke championed the new system when it was created but has no explanation for its persistent and obvious failures: “I wish I had a good explanation for that, but I don’t,” Bethke told the Tribune. "I believe in what that program's doing. Do I think it can be done better? Absolutely." 

For my part, I do not think it can be done better under a managed-assigned-counsel regime. Local lawyers wanted to control the process and, when control was given to them, they adjusted the system for their own benefit, not in the public interest.

Bottom line, when this shop was created Grits opined that Travis County should have created a public-defender office instead, and this news confirms that premonition. Yes, it would cost more, but Travis County will also  have to pay more to improve the system under a managed-assigned-counsel program. And we can already see that doubling down on this failed program would amount to throwing good money after bad.

Scam soliciting money for fallen officers in wake of Dallas shootings

Grits just got a scam robocall from something called the National Police and Troopers Association, which apparently has an affiliation with the national AFL-CIO' International Union of Police Officers, trying to collect donations in the wake of the shootings of two Dallas police officers, one of whom has now died. But there's almost no way any of that money would never end up in the hands of dead officers' families. A blogger who checked the group out a few years back found that:

for the year ending March 31, 2012, the union and its outside fundraisers collected $8.2 million and kept $7.7 million for fundraising fees and expenses, leaving about $500,000 for other purposes. That’s a fundraising efficiency of 6%–less than one-tenth the 65% threshold that charity watchdogs consider the bare minimum for a legitimate operation. 

But it’s really stinks even more. According to the tax return, out of that last $500,000, the union handed out charitable grants–scholarships, and a death benefit for one officer in Indiana–totaling just $35,000. That rounds to just 1/2 of 1% of the money raised.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see the group on the the Texas Attorney General's list of registered organizations licensed to do this sort of law-enforcement themed fundraising. Correction: They're listed as an AFL-CIO affiliate, and spend 77% of their earnings on fundraising, according to the AG.

Grits has railed against these law enforcement themed charity scams for years, but this is a new low. Sleazebags.

For the record, if you want to give a donation which will actually go to the Dallas officers' families instead of a bunch of scam artists, this is the link to use, via the Dallas Morning News.

TXDoT waived $1.3 billion in defaulted toll late fees; shouldn't old DRP surcharges also be waived?

The Texas Department of Transportation has announced it will waive $1.3 billion dollars in late fees on toll fines,  The agency had sent 2.2 million accounts to collections agencies last year, alone, reported KXAN.

The change comes after the Legislature capped late fees at $48 per year, so the agency waived old ones going back to 2007.

Grits' first thought: The anti-toll people got a bigger win last session than I knew!

My second: That's in the ballpark of the size of the unpaid surcharges in the Driver Responsibility program. If the Lege can suck up and eliminate that much bad debt on the toll side, they should be able to do the same thing for the surcharge program, which deals out a comparable amount of economic misery, plus the added legal problems arising from a revoked driver's license.

A lot of legislators are now aware of problems with the surcharge program, so Grits still harbors hopes that all Texas needs to get rid of it is a session with a little black ink in the budget to cover the on-paper losses. Unfortunately, that won't be the 86th session in 2019.

But news that the Lege eliminated this old debt last year in another red-ink budget makes me a tad more sanguine. It shows they can do it when they want to.

Judges explain need for bail reform; Exonerated, Exonerating; and other stories

Here are a few odds and ends which merit readers attention:

Judges explain need for bail reform
See Harris County District Judges Mike Fields and Darrell Jordan, a Republican and a Democrat, respectively, discussing the need for bipartisan bail reform on Reasonable Doubt, a cable-access program from the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association.

Exonerated, Exonerating
Congrats to Chistopher Scott, Steven Phillips, and the late Johnnie Lindsey for being featured on a PBS Independent Lens production. These Texas DNA exonerees are themselves investigating other potential wrongful convictions; those efforts are the subject of the film.

Equal Justice, or Justice Politicized?
So, a black, formerly incarcerated woman in Tarrant county got a five-year prison sentence for voting illegally, and a sitting jurist gets probation for engaging in fraud to get on the ballot! (See here and here.) Yes, the judge pleaded guilty. OTOH, he actually committed an offense with mens rea, as well as violated the public trust. So there's that.

Meaty sentence in South Texas corruption case
A juvenile detention officer in South Texas who was convicted of stealing $1.2 million worth of fajita meat over nine years was sentenced to a 50 year term. That's way too high given the nature of the crime; there's no real public safety justification for it.

Who are homeless?
Most homeless youth in Dallas County are girls, and nearly 60% are black, a study found. See KERA's report.

Incarcerated women
The Texas Criminal Justice Coalition issued a report based on a survey of incarcerated women in Texas. See a summary of their work from The Crime Report.

Do hospitals do deescalation better than cops?
The New York Times published a feature on what law enforcement could learn from hospital training on deescalating potentially violent encounters.

From the Shooting-Yourself-in-the-Foot Department
Eliminating food stamps eligibility for certain drug offenders resulted in increased recidivism, an academic analysis found.

Missouri modeling collections reforms, practices
After the Ferguson report from USDOJ criticizing the use of fine and fee revenue to bolster municipal revenue, the state passed reform measures and collections plummeted around the state of Missouri, spurring one local municipality to merge with another because the majority of its revenue evaporated. Among the new measures, "municipalities are now banned from piling on charges when a defendant does not pay a fine or show up in court. Some municipalities ... now treat unpaid tickets as any other unpaid bill and close the case after sending the ticket to collection."

On prosecutor associations and legislative power
Josie Duffy Rice at In Justice Today had a must-read piece on the legislative power of prosecutor associations and Radley Balko in the Washington Post followed up.

Levin: Rural counties need to get on justice-reform train

The Texas Public Policy Foundation's newsletter arrived in my Inbox this morning and their top story related to over-incarceration in rural counties, focusing on pretrial detention:

What to Know: Criminal justice reforms are decreasing jail populations and recidivism rates. 

“The American criminal justice system’s gradual realization that too many people are in jail needlessly just got a large, visible boost from the city of Philadelphia,” the Washington Post reports. “The city announced last week that it would close its notorious 91-year-old House of Correction jail because reforms begun two years ago have dropped the city’s jail population by 33 percent, without causing any increase in crime or chaos. 

Defense attorneys are working harder to get defendants released quickly with no bail or low bail, prosecutors typically don’t oppose that, and the city’s judges are releasing them. Philadelphia police are taking more defendants to treatment rather than jail. More petitions for early parole from longer sentences are being granted. More space is now available in the city’s six jails for rehabilitation programs, and less overtime pay is needed for jail guards.” 

The TPPF Take: Such reforms are making a real difference in many urban areas like Philadelphia, but some rural areas are lagging behind. 

“Rural jail populations are continuing to explode even while the last five years have seen sharp declines in urban areas and modest drops in suburban areas,” says TPPF’s Marc Levin, who heads the Right on Crime project. “The largest contributor to these jail populations are defendants awaiting trial. Fortunately, there is light at the end of the tunnel. As we highlight in a report to be released at the end of the month, many jurisdictions are stepping up to stem the tide of pretrial incarceration in rural areas.”

They then linked to a recent column in The Hill by TPPF's Marc Levin arguing that rural over-incarceration risks those areas being "left behind as the criminal justice reform train leaves the station."

Wrote Levin, "rural jail populations are continuing to explode even while the last five years have seen sharp declines in urban areas and modest drops in suburban areas. The largest contributor to these jail populations are defendants awaiting trial."

He could (and perhaps should) have also added, as the New York Times reported last fall, that rural counties are sending people for incarceration in state prisons at vastly greater rates than their urban counterparts. And of course, since people who can't make bail are sentenced to incarceration more often than those who are released pretrial, there's a strong correlation between excessive pretrial detention and over-incarceration at TDCJ.

These are choices being made by local officials in rural counties - it's not just them being left behind by the criminal-justice-reform train because they don't have the internet, or a ticket, or whatever. Not in 2018. 

The fact that the the tuff-on-crime ideology of rural over-incarcerators remains intractable has political consequences, explaining a great deal of the opposition to criminal-justice reform at the Texas Legislature.

The Texas Sheriff's Association, for example, is politically dominated by rural Sheriffs because they far outnumber their urban counterparts with the result that they're among the most regressive anti-reform advocates at the capitol. Same goes for the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. The big city DAs get more press, but as far as the Association's internal politics goes, they're outnumbered by their rural counterparts. That's why the group retains an essentially regressive agenda, even though the big-city DA offices who pay most of their bills are moving in a more moderate direction. (Related: From In Justice Today on state prosecutor associations: "Prosecutors aren't just enforcing the law, they're making it.")

Grits is glad to see TPPF focusing on rural over-incarceration; there's no other organization in Texas taking up the banner, and the conservative think tank is well-positioned to address the topic. 

At some point, reformers must also address rural law enforcement's regressive impact on both the state-prison population and its political culture. But journeys of a thousand miles begin with first steps.

Lessons for Texas legislators from an unconstitutional revenge-porn statute

As soon as it passed, Houston criminal defense attorney Mark Bennett opined that Texas' "revenge porn" law passed in 2015 was an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. Now, he's backed it up and the 12th Court of Appeals out of Tyler agreed. See coverage from:

• Techdirt
• Texas Tribune
• Austin Statesman
• Houston Chronicle

Here's the opinion. I am not a lawyer but, given its basis, Grits will go on the record right now to declare there's zero chance the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals as currently constituted will fail to back Bennett and uphold the 12th Court's ruling - even if the case is not decided until after Michelle Slaughter replaces Elsa Alcala.

These are issues the CCA has visited repeatedly, usually unanimously, as Texas prosecutors foisted a series of unconstitutional statutes on the state related to regulating online speech. Whether it's "revenge porn" or "improper photography" or "online solicitation of a minor," Texas legislators and their tuff-on-crime abettors keep tripping over the same thinking errors regarding the state's power to regulate online speech. (See oral arguments in one of Bennett's cases involving the same constitutionality issues before the First Court of Appeals earlier this year.)

Bennett told legislators in 2015 the bill was unconstitutional before it passed, and Grits warned legislators at the time:

Mark's the attorney who successfully convinced the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals - hardly a bunch of libertines - to vote 9-0 to invalidate Texas' online solicitation of a minor statute. So it'd be wise for legislators to consider Bennett's counsel. If they don't, he may well be the guy knocking the law down on the back end.

Now, here we are three years later and that's exactly what happened.

Bennett has tapped into a vein of First Amendment law which will remain an obstacle to expanding government power to criminalize online speech in the ways legislators and our prosecutor friends might like. The things they can criminalize are already criminalized, and the fact of a new medium doesn't change the same First Amendment rights that let Larry Flynt publish Hustler. They don't get to make up new rules and these statutes all ignore the old ones. The next time Bennett tells legislators one of their bills is unconstitutional, regardless of what the DA's association tells them, maybe they ought to listen.

'Firepower to the People!,' and More: Justice Issues Reading List

Using this post to record links to several notable academic papers I've seen recently, saving them for perusal later. Perhaps some of them will also interest Grits readers:

• Firepower to the People! Gun Rights and the Law of Self-Defense to Curb Police Misconduct
• The Scale of Misdemeanor Justice
• Police Disciplinary Appeals
• The Myth of a Reliability Test
• The Anti-Blackstonians
• The Exclusionary Rule in the Age of Big Data
• Terry Stops-and-Frisks: The Troubling Use of Common Sense in a World of Empirical Data
• Evidence Without Rules
• Strange Bedfellows: Can Insurers Play a Role in Advancing Gideon's Promise?
• The Excessive Fines Clause: Challenging the Modern Debtors' Prison
• Predictive Policing and Reasonable Suspicion
• Risk, Race, & Recidivism: Predictive Bias and Disparate Impact
• The News Media's Influence on Criminal Justice Policy: How Market-Driven News Promotes Punitiveness
• Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow
• Why Prison? An Economic Critique

Newsflash: "Touch DNA" doesn't necessarily require touching

Grits has discussed problems with DNA mixture evidence - particularly regarding so-called "touch DNA" - at some length. But conversations in Texas about the math have ignored an even bigger problem raised in this Wired magazine article: Touch DNA from an individual can be transferred to places to which the suspect has never been. 

The featured case involved an innocent man whose DNA wound up under the fingernails of a murder victim. But the crime was committed while he was hospitalized and could not have committed the offense. It turned out, the same paramedics treated the suspect and responded to the murder scene, somehow transferring his DNA in the process.

This may be more common than anyone - even innocence advocates - have understood. It turns out, for example, about one in five people "walk around with traces of other people's DNA on our fingernails," a study found. 

Or consider: Scientists have determined that a man who shakes hands with another person then goes to the restroom may end up with their DNA on his penis. Or, according to this Canadian study, a father's DNA may frequently wind up on his daughter's underwear because it "migrates there in the wash." (One wonders how often that latter circumstance may have contributed to false convictions in child molestation cases?)

The emerging questions around touch DNA - both the math surrounding the analysis and the assumptions surrounding what the results mean - are a lot more complex than anyone could have imagined five or ten years ago. Unfortunately, the criminal-court judges charged with sorting out the mess are ill-equipped and unprepared to do so.

Indeed, if these questions are resolved a decade from now, Grits will be pleasantly but seriously surprised. The Trump Administration shut down forensic reform efforts soon after Jeff Sessions became Attorney General, and it's doubtful state-level activities like the review at the Texas Forensic Science Commission can forge national or (really) international standards, which is what's ultimately needed.

On increasing prosecutor caseloads in an era of crime decline

On Twitter, TDCAA complained about Grits' observation in this post that, as the number of crimes with victims declined over recent years, police and prosecutors have shifted their focus to areas where they may maintain or even increase caseloads despite more than two decades of dropping crime.

The association is right that caseloads have increased. Grits has discussed before how the number of criminal convictions statewide continued to rise long after crime and arrests began to drop. In his book, Locked In, John Pfaff demonstrated the same trend occurred nationwide from the mid-90s to the late aughts, with the number of felony-charges-per-arrest over that period rising from one-in-three to two-in-three. So, even as crime and arrests declined, the number of convictions continued to rise.

On the ground, Grits sees this trend playing out as law enforcement shifting resources to activities that aren't particularly public-safety oriented and which certainly aren't responding to people's victimization.

For example, the Ector County Attorney authored a blog post in February detailing his 2017 caseload. (County Attorneys in Texas prosecute all misdemeanor cases.) The top two offenses prosecuted by his office were marijuana possession (19% of cases) and Driving With Invalid License (17%). At 16% of the caseload, DWI enforcement came in third.

I don't want to pick on Mr. Gallivan because his numbers are pretty typical - he just happened to have put his caseload data out there. But 36 percent of his office's caseload is either prosecuting people for paperwork violations (DWLI is about license status, not safety), or churning through low-level arrests for a nonviolent activity (user-level pot possession) which would be legal in nine states and the nation's capitol. (In related news: A Quinnipac poll out this week found that nearly 2/3 of Texas voters support legalizing recreational pot possession.)

These are the big growth areas in prosecutor caseloads. Similarly in the Travis County data that originally inspired the prosecutors' complaint, possession-level drug arrests accounted for nearly all of the increase in caseload; otherwise, jail bookings had gone down.

So when crimes with victims diminish, these sorts of evergreen offenses are where the system shifts its focus.

None of this is raised to blame prosecutors - the Legislature creates and defines crimes, not them, and often they are reacting to whom police choose to arrest. Rather, my point is to raise the question: Is that what we want the justice system to be doing? When crime goes down, is it a good use of resources to criminalize paperwork violations or prosecute pot smokers to justify high staffing levels? Would taxpayers be better off if Mr. Gallivan prosecuted all those DWLI and pot cases, or if he eliminated 36 percent of his staff and provided voters with tax relief (with additional relief coming from lower jail and court costs, etc.)?

These seldom-discussed questions are worth asking, even if the prosecutors' association takes offense. They're not the only ones to blame for a distorted and dysfunctional system, but right-sizing it will require significant changes to how they perceive and perform their duties.

Appointed counsel in Austin radically increases chance of conviction on drug charges; police pursuing victimless drug cases as crime declines

Defendants in Travis County were far more likely to be convicted of state-jail felony drug charges if they were indigent with an appointed attorney compared to those who hired their own lawyers, according to a KXAN-TV report based on a new Council of State Governments analysis. And police are making more arrests for low-level drug possession, even as jail bookings for all other offenses have declined. (Your correspondent was briefly quoted in the KXAN story.)

Perhaps the most disturbing finding was the effect an appointed lawyer had on case outcomes: The report found that, "80 percent of people in the past five years were found guilty on drug charges if they used a court-appointed attorney. If they paid for their own attorney, only 48 percent were found guilty on drug charges."

These are similarly situated defendants demonstrating radically different outcomes based on how (and how much) their lawyers are paid. Certainly, it's a bad look for the "managed assigned counsel" program in Travis County. Grits believes we'd see much better outcomes from a full-time public defender office. In Harris County, for example, the public defender office "achieved a greater proportion of dismissals, deferred sentences, and acquittals, and a smaller proportion of 'guilty' outcomes, than assigned counsel. HCPD secured acquittals on all charges at three times the rate of appointed and retained counsel."

The Travis County data demonstrate how failure to invest in one part of the system can create even greater costs for taxpayers down the line. By underpaying attorneys who then do not adequately vet cases, more people (2/3 more) are convicted, which then leads to extra costs for incarceration in state jail or supervision on probation. For that matter, some percentage of those sentenced to probation will also be revoked and eventually incarcerated, too.

The upshot: if indigent drug defendants in Austin received a comparable quality of defense as people who hire private lawyers, it would reduce incarceration costs significantly down the line.

In addition, the report cast light on the disturbing trend of law enforcement focusing on victimless drug-possession cases as crime overall declines. From the CSG report:

Bookings in Travis County for arrestees with SJF increased while overall bookings declined

• Overall jail bookings in Travis County decreased by 14% between 2013 and 2017, but bookings of arrestees with SJF increased by 9%

• SFJ-DP [drug possession] bookings increased by 34%

Why would drug arrests increase during a period when crime and jail bookings overall declined?

My theory: Crime may have declined but the number of police officers and prosecutors stayed the same or increased over the same period, and those people need something to do with their days. At the same time, there are FAR more people using drugs than are routinely arrested, so there is a deep pool of petty, low-risk offenders into which law enforcement may cast its nets. And even if they're only catching "little fish" - state jail felony drug cases involve less than a gram of a controlled substance - at least they're going through the motions of making arrests and enforcing the law. Essentially, this is rent seeking behavior on the part of law enforcement.

Together, this rent seeking activity, combined with institutionalized incentives for poor-quality lawyering among appointed counsel in Travis County, prioritize the interests of players in the system over both defendants' constitutional rights and systemic equity. Thus it's understandable why things would be this bad, just not acceptable.

An undocumented necropolis at the (former) Central Unit, TX Supreme Court Chief Justice inspired by the Ferguson report, and other stories

Here are a few odds and ends that merit Grits' readers attention:

Galveston sued over bail schedule
ACLU has sued Galveston County over its bail schedule, adding that county to Harris and Dallas as bail litigation sites. If your county still operates under a bail schedule, they'll soon have to change. Better to do it now before you're successfully sued. Ask the judges in Harris County.

Central Unit property an undocumented necropolis
Here's a postscript to the closure of TDCJ's Central Unit in Sugar Land, which long-time readers will recall was the first prison unit closed in the Lone Star State since the founding of the (Texan) Republic. When Fort Bend ISD began preparing a portion of the sight for a construction project, they began unearthing bodies. Lots of them - 22 as of when this Houston Chronicle story was written. These were inmates from the convict leasing era and later who worked for the Imperial Sugar Company as de facto slave labor through the early part of the 20th century. A cemetery on the prison site included only white inmates' remains, which led activist Reginald Moore to believe that black prisoners were buried in unmarked sites elsewhere on the grounds. Turns out, he was right. See related, earlier coverage from Texas Monthly and commentary from Grits. MORE: The number of unmarked graves discovered is now 79!

TX courts limit pretext stop searches
Following a reversal by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the First Court of Appeals issued a ruling limiting the scope of searches incident to arrest. The First Court ruling limits law enforcement's authority to arrest drivers for Class C misdemeanors as a pretext for searching their car.  The case involved a driver arrested for failure to signal a lane change. Police found drugs in his car trunk, but the courts have now ruled they had no reason to search there: "What police officers may not do, even when they conduct a search incident to a lawful custodial arrest of a recent occupant of a vehicle, is to search the vehicle when the arrestee is secured and not within reaching distance of the passenger compartment," according to the new opinion. See coverage from TheNewspaper.com and all the relevant court documents.

Looks like pot to me!
A Harris County crime lab employee was fired for drylabbing marijuana samples.

Is fast track a death-trap for innocents?
Check out an innocence-based argument against Texas' petition to fast-track death-penalty appeals. Anthony Graves has rightly pointed out that he would have been executed before he ever could have been exonerated under the new rules.

Ferguson report inspired TX debtors-prison push
Marc Levin of the Texas Public Policy Foundation interviewed Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht about his decision to champion debtors-prison and bail reform issues. See also a related blog post. Hecht was introduced to the debtors prison issue thanks to the USDOJ's report on overreliance on fine revenue out of Ferguson, Missouri, he told Levin.

Murder-insurance program notches LWOP verdict
The Regional Capital Public Defenders Office, which provides representation in capital cases for counties that participate in its so-called "murder insurance" program, won a life-without-parole verdict recently in a case involving the murder of a San Antonio Police officer - the first such trial verdict in their ten-year history.

SAPD to county: We hate your new jail intake facility
Grits doesn't know enough yet to tell who is right about the dispute between San Antonio PD and the Bexar County commissioners court over whether SAPD should use the new intake center built at the jail. But my gut leans toward the county: the redundancy makes little sense for taxpayers, and Chief McManus sounds like he's more worried about the officers' convenience than enacting best practices at the jail.

Ombudsman report tallies inmate complaints
Check out the TDCJ Ombudsman report for 2017. Visitation remains the perennial main source of complaints (6,389), with another 1,424 prisoners complaining they weren't being housed in accordance with medical restrictions (48 were reassigned). But 955 offenders complained of threats or intimidation by other inmates (offenders were reassigned in 140 cases), while inmates complained 720 times of physical abuse or threats by staff (26 of those cases were referred to the Office of Inspector General). In related non-news, we're still waiting for the TDCJ Annual Statistical Report for FY 2017, which ended in August of last year.

New Houston rules aim to limit offender services
Charles Blain from Empower Texans has an item up on new Houston zoning rules aimed at excluding facilities for ex-offenders. Wrote Blain:

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and City Council passed an ordinance that bans alternative housing and correctional facilities, including reentry homes, from opening within 1,000 feet of schools, parks, or other facilities. The new ordinance also requires reentry facilities, approved by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, to apply for a city permit. The permit will identify the type of facility so local officials can “monitor” the locations of ex-offenders living in private reentry homes across the city, allegedly in the name of public safety. 

Houston’s 99 currently operating facilities will be grandfathered in under the new provision. But once the owner sells the facility or passes away and wills it to an heir, the facility must come into compliance with all of the new regulations, including the distance requirement. So, as facilities inevitably change hands over time, many will be forced to close or open elsewhere. 

Supporters claim that the regulation will improve “public safety,” but like in many other zoning disputes, it evolved from small contingents of people who felt uncomfortable with the homes in their neighborhoods. 

Comments made during the public hearing for this regulation centered largely on a fear of ex-offenders, rather than statistical public safety data.

Tuff-on-crime cluelessness
Former Texas Democratic Congressman Sylvestre Reyes has a column in the Austin Statesman decrying "How fentanyl got its grip on Texas." This commentary ignores the best research out there which says Texas has mostly avoided the fentanyl-driven opiod death spike because the cartels that sell in Texas' market distribute "black tar heroin," which is less pure and not easily combined with fentanyl. See related Grits commentary on the same hearing Reyes is discussing.

Suicides among cops continue to outpace line-of-duty deaths
A recent spate of reporting reiterated that suicides among police far outpace line-of-duty deaths in shootouts with bad guys. This has been true for a long time, and is exacerbated by a lack of suicide-related treatment services for police.

Assessing Harris County bail litigation as it nears denouement

In last month's Reasonably Suspicious podcast, I interviewed Susanne Pringle, executive director of the Texas Fair Defense Project, about the denouement of the Harris County bail litigation, in which her organization was one of the plaintiffs. Since we spoke, Galveston County was sued by the ACLU over essentially similar grounds, and Dallas County already faced litigation over its bail system, so the Harris County domino falling may soon take down quite a few other county's pretrial detention regimens.

When Judge Lee Rosenthal issues her revised injunction in light of the 5th Circuit's ruling, in many ways it will be like firing off a starting gun. That document will set the parameters for bail systems throughout Texas, establishing a minimum floor for constitutionality. Any county continuing with a bail schedule or violating other shall-not portions of the injunction will find itself low-hanging fruit for a similar suit. So expect a lot of local-level activity on this front over the coming year, and probably a legislative reaction in 2019.

Here's the excerpt including the interview with Pringle:


Find a transcript below the jump.