It’s a busy week over here, so blogging has been light. Here are some things we’d probably have written about if we’d had more time:

Lester Johnson, the private investigator whose work helped clear David Lozano of attempted capitol murder charges after a shootout with APD, was honored at the Texas Association of Licensed Investigators convention this week. Interestingly, in the Statesman article’s comments section, Johnson continues to call out APD and the officer who filed an – ahem – unreliable report.

If you’re not totally clear on the backstory on Sharon Keller and her trial, there’s a good primer on it at the StandDown Texas Project. The veeeeery brief version is that Keller, the chief justice of Texas’ highest criminal court, is on trial for judicial misconduct after responding to an attorney whose computer problems were causing him to run a few minutes late while filing an appeal to stay an execution with the words, “We close at five.” He arrived at 5:20, the court refused to accept is filing, and his mentally-handicapped client was executed at 8:23 that evening.

Grits For Breakfast has another good post up – it’s like this is a trend or something – this time on the subject of DWI prevention via public transit and zoning for neighborhood bars. Expect some expanded commentary on this topic in this space coming soon.

The Statesman has an article about thousands of parolees who’ve been classified as sex offenders despite having never been convicted of a sex crime.

Gamso: For The Defense, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite legal blogs, has a smart primer on exactly what different types of pleas mean. It’s a really useful post for non-attorneys like myself, especially, who couldn’t understand that someone who pleads “not guilty” even though they know they did it wasn’t lying.

Houston defense attorney Paul Kennedy has better news for people who were outraged reading about Sharon Keller (which maybe should be everybody) – the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decided to allow an appeal that was filed a day late. The attorney in question blamed the problem on the county’s broken fax machine. Curiously, it appears their fax machine is usually broken when this court-appointed attorney – who takes on 355 felony appointments a year – tries to file appeals, and it usually fixes itself the next day.

Labels: abuse of power, APD, crime prevention, dwi, grits for breakfast, pleas, sex offender registration

posted by Dan   permalink   0 Comments

We may have more on this subject coming up here later this week, but I read the article in the Statesman over the weekend on the “bait car” that snagged an Austin couple for Burglary of a Vehicle. This article stuck out to me personally for two reasons:

1. It happened a block away from the house I moved out of last week. The green house in the photo? My dog’s peed in that yard three hundred times.

2. Some &$% broke into my car on Saturday and stole my stereo.

Even recognizing firsthand that breaking into cars is a very bad thing that has a frustrating impact on normal, hardworking people who just want to be able to listen to Prince as they drive to work, and being fully aware of the dynamics of the neighborhood in which the bait car was placed, I’m against the practice.

It reminds me a little bit of the NYC subway sting operation from a year or so back, “Operation Lucky Bag”, where the police were leaving briefcases and shopping bags and wallets on the ground, waiting for someone to pick them up, and then arresting them. The problem is that doing these things doesn’t necessarily get you wallet thieves (or car burglars) – at worst, it gets you people whose decision-making skills are weak when faced with an uncommon temptation (like a wallet with a bunch of cash and no ID or a car with the keys sitting in the ignition) and, as in the case of the couple from my neighborhood and several people in New York, it often snags people who were trying to do the right thing.

But even leaving those people out – maybe they’re just outliers and most of the people who pick up the wallet or check out the car are really doing so with bad intentions – it still doesn't seem like a good way to go about things. Because the person who broke into my car was a pro - he left the house that evening with a toolkit that would enable him to get into my locked car, pop open the dashboard, cut the cables, and yank out my stereo. And that's the sort of person I'd like to see the police focus on. It makes me question their motives, if they need to manufacture a set of circumstances that make committing a crime unusually convenient - are they really interested in reducing theft or in generating arrests? It seems like a bait car that just had a decent system in it would be more inclined catch the sort of people who go out of their way to commit crimes, as opposed to catching people who might, for a variety of motives - some of which are non-malicious - end up breaking the law when confronted with a strange set of circumstances. In that scenario, the car might be parked for weeks (or, in the case of my stereo and the house I just moved into, two days) before anyone is actually busted in the sting, which would probably make it hard to justify the expense of parking a car full of monitoring equipment and tracking what happens to it.

And if no one was breaking into cars that didn't have the keys in the ignition, maybe I'd see the point. But as it is, I'd feel safer knowing that, say, the police were driving around the poorly-lit streets of my neighborhood a few extra times a night than knowing that some people who seem to put everyone at zero risk were getting arrested for checking out a car abandoned under extremely unusual circumstances. I'm not all concerned with catching people who break into cars that are parked in front of their houses for weeks on end with the windows down and the keys in the ignition. Call me "soft on crime".

Labels: APD, bait cars, burglary, car theft, crime prevention

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Here’s a fairly ridiculous example of an ill-conceived plan:

TUCSON, Ariz. — A plan by the Pima County Sheriff's Department that would have stationed deputies at fast-food joints to sniff out drunken drivers appears to have fallen flat.

The department had hoped to target drunken driving by putting undercover deputies inside 24-hour fast-food restaurants to spot impaired drivers placing their orders. If deputies spotted someone with classic symptoms of impairment, they were to call a uniformed deputy stationed outside to pull the driver over.

But sheriff's Lt. Karl Woolridge says the department asked various fast-food chains if they'd agree to be a part of the program, but all of them declined.

Asking fast food drive-thru operators if they’d be willing to let the police hang out by the window in the middle of the night to arrest only the customers who appear to be under the influence of some sort of substance is like asking head shop owners if they’d be willing to let the police in to bust only the customers who aren’t actually going to observe the tobacco use only signs posted throughout the place. If they did it, they’d have no customers at all.

Anyway, what’s really silly about this is that it’s not the sort of thing that’ll have any impact on drunk driving. It’ll just have an impact on what drunk drivers eat. The odds of someone saying, “I know I really want a Carl’s Jr. burger at two-thirty this morning, I’d better not drink tonight” are pretty small. All a program like this would really accomplish would be to tell drunk drivers that the odds of getting stopped for DWI have just shrunk if they steer clear of the local Taco Bell. Thankfully, old-fashioned economics from the restaurateurs (if you can call someone who runs an A&W that) nixed this one.

Labels: crime prevention, dwi

posted by Dan   permalink   0 Comments

By Raman Gill

I was struck by a recent article in the Wall Street Journal on The National Network for Safe Communities, which is, essentially, an intervention program for future violent criminals. Much like substance-abuse interventions, the target (yes, target) is confronted and told that he must stop his offensive behavior. I call them targets because that's exactly what they are--targets of criminal investigations:

Under the project, law-enforcement officials and prosecutors in the cities identify individuals operating in violent-crime areas who haven't yet committed serious violent crimes, and build cases against them, including undercover operations and surveillance. The culmination is a "call in" when the case is presented to the would-be suspect in front of law enforcement, community leaders, ex-offenders and friends and family.

"The prosecutor talks to them and lets them know: 'we could arrest you now but we won't because the drug dealing stops today, the violence stops today,'" said Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay. "If you continue, you now know the consequences and you've seen the case against you but we don't want to send you to prison."

Here's the thing: Where's the defense attorney in all of this? I know, I know--there's no arrest, no case to defend against. No need for a defense attorney, right? But is there some sort of agreement about how statements and admissions that the target makes during these interventions are going to be used if - gasp! - the target reoffends? Can statements and admissions made during these "call-ins" be used against the target in future prosecutions? Because I'm guessing that, just like drug addicts who often have to go through rehabilitation many times before it sticks, a good number of people who've been regularly "operating" in high-crime areas don't stop doing so after one intervention.

I don't mean to be hyper-critical. Really, I don't. Instead of seeing these folks as targets of criminal investigations, they could easily be seen as recipients of a second chance. Not to mention that similar programs implemented in Boston, MA and High Point, NC in the 1990s significantly reduced homicide rates, which is fantastic. And we should all applaud prosecutors and law enforcement officials who are genuinely more interested in reducing crime than winning convictions and putting people in prison.

But still, it bothers me. I often find that defense attorneys are not included in projects and initiatives that focus on public safety. And that's really too bad, not only because initiatives like this might be skating a very fine line in terms of observing fundamental rights, but also because defense attorneys are sometimes in the best position to help offenders comply with the law.

What? Aren't defense attorneys the people in the system who help offenders "get away with it?" That's certainly one way of looking at it. But here's another: The defense attorney is the one person in the system whose undivided loyalty is to the accused. This means, in an ideal situation, that there is a solid relationship of trust between the accused (or, here, target) and the defense attorney. If a target, who might well be facing a host of pressures to continue his offensive behavior, feels he can talk about his predicament or predilections to his defense attorney, then the attorney can connect him to resources that can keep him on the right track. A good defense attorney, especially those that practice holistic advocacy like some of the best public defender offices in the nation, is going to have, or at least know about, tools and resources to help battle peer pressure, addictions, familial issues, and other issues that might sway even the best-intentioned people back to a life of crime.

In the end, defense attorneys, like everyone else, care about public safety. We can be assets, not impediments, to that end.

Labels: crime prevention, holistic advocacy, innovative tactics, risks and rewards, the role of defense attorneys

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