Category: Texas

Civil rights community divided as exonerees take their own lawyers to court

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By Alan Bean

I first discussed this story in December of 2009 when the controversy between exonerated Texans and their former attorneys appeared on the pages of the Dallas Morning News.  Lubbock attorney Kevin Glasheen signed a standard contingency contract with a number of exonerees that gave him 25% of the eventual settlement with the city of Dallas.  The clients eventually got their money, but it didn’t come from the city of Dallas.  Instead, Glasheen lobbied the state legislature to enact a dramatic increase in the amount the wrongfully convicted are reimbursed.  The contract says nothing about a fee for lobbying efforts and the clients say they don’t owe Mr. Glasheen (and Jeff Blackburn, the Innocence Project of Texas attorney who enlisted Glasheen’s efforts) a nickel.

A year and a half later, the issue is going before the state bar.   John Schwartz of the New York Times, summarizes the central issues thusly:

The word “lobbying” does not appear in the contracts, and perhaps with good reason. Much of the legal world operates on contingency fees, allowing people with no money to get to court. The lawyer takes on the financial risk and, if successful, reaps a healthy chunk of the reward. But in Texas it is a felony to lobby the Legislature on a contingent-fee basis, because it can skew the incentives underlying public policy.

(Over at Grits for Breakfast, Scott Henson takes issue with the accuracy of the Times article.)

But this isn’t just a dispute over billing fees and the interpretation of legal contracts; the issue has emotional and moral components.  No one should denigrate civil rights attorneys for charging a healthy fee for their services.  Law school is expensive and attorneys frequently invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in the cases they litigate.  But most criminal justice reform advocates wish to believe that, for those involved in the legal side of the justice fight, altruism and a sense of higher purpose is part of the motivational mix.  The advocacy community in Texas is divided over precisely this issue and there is no strictly legal answer.  (more…)

Texas Outrage: Not only has Anthony Graves been denied compensation, his paycheck is being garnished for child support

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Anthony Graves

Anthony Graves spent 18 years on Texas’ death row, the victim of a classic case of investigative and prosecutorial tunnel vision.  You would think that would qualify Mr. Graves for the $80,000 a year the wrongfully convicted are due under the Tim Cole Act.  But no.  According to a Houston Chronicle Editorial, Anthony Graves was denied $1,440,000.00 the State of Texas owed him and then, as if to pour salt in the wound, garnished his wages for the child support he didn’t pay because he had been wrongfully accused and convicted.

According to the Chronicle editorial, Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, feels Anthony Graves’ story is “truly troubling and deeply compelling” but felt he had no choice but to deduct the child support money.

Scott Henson has a good post on this truly disgusting development at Grits for Breakfast.

Tulia and the spell of mass incarceration

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Gary Gardner, moments before heading down to a protest at the state capital with Friends of Justice and a bus full of Tulia residents, September 2000

By Alan Bean

This is the text of a speech delivered at a Friends Committee on Legislation of California banquet in Whittier, California, March 26, 2011.

When I arrived in Tulia in the summer of 1998, I didn’t know very much about mass incarceration and the war on drugs. I had no idea that Texas, the state we had just moved to, had almost quadrupled its prison population between 1988 and 1998, or that the number of prisons had grown from 16 in 1980 to 108 in 2000.

Nor did I realize that the average family income of America’s poorest 20 percent increased 116% between 1947 and 1979 and had given back half of those gains between 1983 and 1998.

I didn’t realize that the American incarceration rate once mirrored western democracies like Canada, Great Britain and Germany, but had recently grown to six times the size of other nations.

For twenty years our family had been shuffling around the United States and Canada, and Nancy wanted our children to experience the love and support of family. Everything was going according to plan until we saw the headline in the local newspaper, “Tulia streets cleared of garbage.” (more…)

Tulia-style drug bust draws suspicion in Wichita Falls

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Alleged Tulia kingpin, Joe Welton Moore

The good folks in Wichita Falls, Texas are celebrating the arrest of 44 drug kingpins, with four or five additional arrests waiting in the wings. 

“It’s a good number of arrests, but the reality is there are probably still five-times as many of these types of criminals out there,” Sheriff David Duke told the Wichita Falls Times Record News. “It’s a scary thing to think that this stuff is being sold in our neighborhoods, near our children. A lot of these dealers are armed because of competition with other dealers. And many will steal, rob and commit financial crimes to facilitate their operations.”

No one associated with the infamous Tulia drug sting of 1999 can read these words without recalling the proud pronouncements of Swisher County Sheriff Larry Stewart and his undercover man, Tom Coleman. (more…)

The fine art of testilying

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By Charles Kiker

The ninth of the ten commandments: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” (Exodus 20:16)

In his “Grits for Breakfast” blog, Scott Henson has a recent post (March 16) on “testilying” raised to new heights of infamy: “Police prevarication in Austin overlooked with wink and a nod.” It regards an incident from a couple of years ago in which an Austin police officer manufactured out of whole cloth a probable cause affidavit for unlawful trespassing. The officer described in detail the area in which the defendant was charged with trespassing. It was described as a heavily wooded area with numerous signs against trespassing. In fact, the area described was a multi-unit rental area devoid of “no trespassing” signs with only one tree in view. The defense attorney took pictures of the area and the prosecutor, at the pre-trial conference, decided that it was in the best interests of justice to dismiss the case. Hurrah for the prosecutor. (more…)

Perry fiddles while Texas burns

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By Alan Bean

“This is an engineered crisis—a thing that was done on purpose by people who do not mean well for our community, our city, our state or nation.” Jim Schutze

Texas is facing an estimated $27 billion deficit.  Governor Rick Perry and his fellow ideologues gutted the state’s property taxes two years ago, then sat back and waited for the inevitable.  At the time, according to this terrific article by Jim Schutze of the Dallas Observer, Texas Comptroller, Diane Keaton Strayhorn, predicted that this radical decrease in tax money would create a deficit of $23 billion by 2011 unless new sources of revenue could be found. 

Ms. Strayhorn didn’t factor in the worst financial crisis since the great depression, but the accuracy of her numbers suggest that any thinking Texan could have seen the current imbroglio coming.  (Thanks to Gerald Britt at Change the Wind for bringing Mr. Schutze’s article to my attention). (more…)

Rick Perry’s Atheist Pope

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Eighteen months ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry appointed Williamson County DA John Bradley to head up the Texas Forensic Science Commission.  It was like turning over the Vatican to Richard Dawkins.  Bradley, like most Texas prosecutors, thinks forensic scientists have one role: helping the state convict bad guys; Perry’s atheist pope likes forensic testimony crafted to the needs of the prosecution.

Governor Perry put Bradley in charge of the TFSC to keep the Cameron Todd Willingham debacle out of the headlines during his primary fight with Kay Bailey Hutchinson.  Perry also tried to stack the commission with people who share Bradley’s worldview, but things haven’t worked out to the governor’s liking.  As Rick Casey demonstrates in this informative column in the Houston Chronicle, Bradley is unlikely to receive Senate confirmation. (more…)

Texas history texts ripped by conservative group

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By Alan Bean

“If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'”  – George Orwell, 1984

George Orwell learned how easily the past is misremembered as a combatant in the Spanish Civil War and during his years with the BBC in WWII.  Orwell is a hero to both the left and the right because he believed in relating historical fact as objectively and honestly as fallible flesh is able. 

As the culture wars rage, it is incumbent upon partisans on the left and right to police their own side of the conflict.  When 57% of Republicans believe the president is a Muslim, 45% believe he was born outside the United States, and 24% believe Mr. Obama may be the antiChrist, we’ve got a problem that only Republican leaders can effectively address.  We aren’t selling out when we critique our own people; we’re ensuring that the game is fairly played.

That is precisely what the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute has done in its report on the historical curricula taught in American schools.  Their dissection of the Texas State Board of Education’s distorted historical vision is utterly devastating.  I have pasted some of the pithy highlights below, but I urge you to read the entire report. (more…)

Grisham’s “The Confession” is captivating

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Reviewed by Charles Kiker

John Grisham, The Confession, Doubleday, 2010

John Grisham’s novels are always good reads. This one is—no other word is adequate—captivating. It is a must read for anyone interested in the injustice of the criminal justice system, especially in Texas and especially as regards capital punishment. It is a recommended read for those not interested in the injustice of the criminal justice system, in the hope that they might get interested.

It is a work of fiction, but not really. So many real events have been worked into this novel that I had to remind myself occasionally that I was not reading the Dallas Morning News, or watching the evening news on television. For example, the judge and the prosecutor are sleeping together—and they are not husband and wife—during the trial of Donte Drumm. The Court of Criminal Appeals closes at 5:00 PM and will not let attorneys in at 5:07 even though they know attorneys are on the way for a last minute appeal. Coerced confessions, jailhouse snitches, perjured testimony—it’s all here. (more…)

Budget Crunch Offers No Hope for Reduction in Incarceration in Texas

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By Dr. Charles Kiker

Some pundits have speculated that the budget crises in the states could result in reduced incarceration. After all, reduction in prison populations could save states a bundle. Alan Bean has a couple of recent posts on the Friends of Justice blog that deal with this prospect: “Why are Newt and Grover jumping on the prison reform bandwagon?” (January 8, 2011) and “Is mass incarceration history?” (January 18, 2011). Bean doesn’t hold out much hope, as indicated by his comment in the latter article: “We may see a year or two of minor decline in the prison population, but when happy days are here again politicians will start banging the ‘tough on crime’ drum? (more…)