Her incarceration may be over, but Rosemary Lehmberg’s problems are far from it. Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg was released from jail early Thursday after serving half of a 45-day jail sentence for pleading guilty to driving while intoxicated. Lehmberg, who was sentenced April 19, served half of her jail term under a law [...]
Posts under ‘Crime and Punishment’
What to do with a problem like Rosemary?
The Austin Chronicle has a great overview of the Rosemary Lehmberg situation. All speculation aside, Lehmberg has vowed that she will not resign. In a letter to Travis County residents (apparently dictated to friends from jail and posted to her official website and to her Facebook page), Lehmberg reiterated that she intends to stay in [...]
Who resigns after a DUI arrest?
The Statesman asks the question and gets some answers. In 2006, District Attorney Tim Cole had a decision to make. The then-chief prosecutor for Montague, Clay and Archer counties had been arrested for drunken driving after a day of July Fourth celebrating at a lake across the state line in Oklahoma. It didn’t take him [...]
Court of inquiry issues arrest warrant for Ken Anderson
Wow. A judge issued an arrest warrant for former Williamson County District Attorney Ken Anderson Friday, after finding probable cause to believe Anderson withheld critical evidence in Michael Morton’s 1987 murder trial. Judge Louis Sturns concluded his court of inquiry by charging Anderson, who is now a state district judge, with tampering with government records [...]
Lehmberg pleads guilty, gets 45 days
Off she goes. District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg has pleaded guilty to drunken driving, was sentenced to 45 days in jail and immediately taken into custody. Lehmberg’s blood alcohol level registered at 0.23 when she was arrested April 13, her attorney David Sheppard said. Sheppard said the the punishment is “without a doubt” the “harshest” sentence [...]
Should Travis County DA Lehmberg resign?
Perspectives on that are colored by politics right now. While Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg sought to put her weekend drunken driving arrest behind her, debate over her political future reached the State Capitol on Monday, where lawmakers weighed in on whether she should resign and how a replacement might be chosen. Some officials [...]
Travis DA Rosemary Lehmberg arrested for DUI
Oops. Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, arrested and charged with drunken driving overnight, plans to remain in office and will not resign, according to a spokeswoman. According to county records, Lehmberg, 63, was arrested by Travis County deputies in Northern Travis County near RM 2222 and FM 620 and booked into the county jail [...]
Romeo and Romeo and Juliet and Juliet
This is a small step forward, but it’s an important step. In a state where attempts to expand gay rights have hit a wall of conservative Republicans, a Senate committee on Tuesday approved a bill to provide a new legal protection for sexually active gay teens. Under Senate Bill 1316, gay and lesbian teens who [...]
Going after human traffickers
This is a great story about Ann Johnson, the Democratic candidate in HD134 last year, who is now back with the District Attorney’s office fighting against pimps and traffickers who prey on kids. Johnson, a 39-year-old juvenile law attorney, is fluent in the language of the street, rattling off facts about Houston’s tracks, where pimps [...]
No increase in jail population as yet
Good to hear. When Harris County District Attorney Mike Anderson toppled incumbent Pat Lykos in last year’s Republican primary, some county budget hawks got fidgety. The campaign’s central issue, after all, was Anderson’s opposition to a Lykos policy that treated cases with drug residue of less than 1/100th of a gram as misdemeanors. Lykos was [...]
Reciprocal discovery
There’s a bit of controversy brewing over one of the criminal justice reforms that have been proposed. The bill at issue was filed on deadline day. Senate Bill 1611 would enact uniform discovery requirements in criminal cases across Texas. It would require prosecutors to give defense lawyers evidence in their files and to include essentially [...]
Where does the crime lab go from here?
Now that there’s a plan in place to clear the longstanding crime lab backlog, the question is what should we expect from the crime lab going forward? “It’s sort of hard to build a house when you’re trying to dig yourself out of a hole,” said Scott Hochberg, chairman of the Houston Forensic Science Local [...]
Treating rather than jailing the mentally ill
Very good news. Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia and his medical staff wholeheartedly support a bill filed this week to reduce recidivism by the mentally ill who wind up in the county jail, a $5 million pilot program to transition them into community treatment facilities. “These individuals are principally in our custody because they are [...]
Sobering center opens up
Good. Mayor Annise Parker joined council members on Thursday to unveil the innovative Houston Recovery Center, a place where people who are intoxicated can sober up instead of being arrested. Officials say there’s only one other similar facility in Texas. “Turns out that a significant percentage of the people we were putting in jail, were [...]
I got those empty prison cell blues
There’s a lot of excess prison capacity around the state, which is a big problem for a lot of communities that once thought building prisons, to be operated by private entities, would be a boon for them. Just over a decade ago, prisons were a growth industry, and Texas was the undisputed king. The state [...]
What to expect from clearing the rape kit backlog
As you know, two weeks ago Mayor Parker announced that the city would allocate funds to clear the backlog of rape kits, thus bringing to a conclusions one of the city’s longest-standing issues. City Council has now unanimously approved the plan, in which out of state labs will provide the analyses. What was fascinating to [...]
Report recommends against privatizing the Harris County jail
Very good news. Privatizing the Harris County jail would be risky and may not result in savings, according to an internal county memo recommending that Commissioners Court keep the state’s largest lockup in Sheriff Adrian Garcia’s hands. The confidential Feb. 11 memo, obtained by the Houston Chronicle, comes after more than a year of study [...]
Court of inquiry concludes
The court of inquiry that was examining the behavior of then-prosecutor Ken Anderson has concluded with Anderson’s testimony in his defense. Having seen what he had to say for himself, I find myself not terribly sympathetic to him or his situation. At times fighting back tears, Anderson called Morton’s case his “worst nightmare” but defended [...]
The court of inquiry
Going on this week is a court of inquiry in the matter of Williamson County Judge Ken Anderson, who was the District Attorney that won a conviction against Michael Morton for the murder of his wife, Christine, which as we know has since been overturned after DNA evidence cleared him and implicated another man. The [...]
Trace cases to be prosecuted as felonies again
So says our new DA. Newly elected Harris County District Attorney Mike Anderson said Thursday he will prosecute as felonies drug cases that involve trace amounts of crack cocaine, reversing his predecessor’s stand on the so-called “trace cases.” “If there is enough evidence to test in a lab, then we’ll take the charges,” Anderson said. [...]
Mental health court coup
Interesting. Citing problems with the administration of Harris County’s mental health court, a board of judges has ousted the court’s founder and presiding judge, Jan Krocker, officials confirmed Friday. “There were a lot of valid complaints about Judge Krocker’s administration of the court, and she didn’t like the idea of oversight,” said Michael McSpadden, Houston’s [...]
In praise of CODIS
We’re catching more crooks thanks to DNA. Not exactly an earth-shattering revelation, but it’s always nice to have some numbers. The number of Texas crimes solved after a suspect’s DNA matched with offenders’ DNA samples stored in the national repository known as CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) recently passed the 10,000th mark. The state averaged [...]
Anderson’s DWI proposal
You may recall that former Harris County DA Pat Lykos’ DIVERT program for DWI offenders was a major point of contention in the GOP primary fight that was eventually won by new DA Mike Anderson. (If you don’t recall, see here and here for some background, or review the interviews I did with Lykos and [...]
Murder by numbers continued
There are two ways to look at this. Houston averaged slightly more than four murders a week during 2012, unofficial figures indicate, inching up from 2011 when the total dropped to the lowest point since 1966. In unincorporated Harris County, an early total suggests a three-year decline in murders may continue. Houston police reported 216 [...]
You can donate your jury duty pay to charity
As you probably know if you have been called to jury service in Harris County, jurors get paid $6 for showing up, and $28 per day after the first day if they are selected to serve on a jury. What you may not know is that you can donate that pay to charity if you [...]
Former HPD lab supervisor files sues Lykos, county
Here’s a nice little going away present for District Attorney Pat Lykos. Two former Houston Police Department crime lab supervisors have filed a federal lawsuit against Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos, saying the county’s top prosecutor retaliated against them after they spoke out about problems with HPD’s breath-alcohol testing vans. The lawsuit, filed Monday, [...]
On school shootings
I have four things to say about this. In the national collective grief rising from Friday’s mass shooting in Connecticut, one apparent trust seems to have completely shattered: that an elementary school was sacred and safe ground. Left in the wake of 20 children and eight adults massacred by a lone gunman is a renewed [...]
Jail privatization update
Grits, from about two weeks ago: In a conference call last week with investors (see the transcript), Corrections Corporation of America said it expects to find out by next spring whether they will receive a contract to operate the Harris County Jail. Said President and CEO David Hininger: The final update I wanted to give [...]
Harris County and court costs
Grits has some interesting local news. An appellate court has ruled that all court fees in Harris County criminal cases, going back for some indeterminate amount of time, are invalid if the county did not produce a written “bill of cost” documenting their source, as the county apparently, routinely failed to do. Moreover, the issue [...]
Arson review moving forward
Good. A long-awaited review of old Texas arson cases — an unprecedented search for wrongful convictions based on bad fire investigation science — is picking up speed and will probably produce the first results in January, participants said [last] Friday. One suspect case has been identified and about 26 others are being scrutinized for evidence [...]
The felony mental health court
I’d celebrate, too. [State District Court Judge] Krocker and others celebrated the official opening of Harris County’s felony mental health court, which started putting mentally ill defendants on probation instead of sending them to jail in May. Krocker has been working to get a special court to oversee felony cases of defendants diagnosed with schizophrenia, [...]
The Sheriff’s Crisis Intervention team
It’s a really good idea. Crisis intervention teams, tagged to respond to calls involving mentally disturbed subjects, reflect a new wave of law enforcement thinking pioneered by the Memphis, Tenn., Police Department in the 1980s. Such efforts have received renewed attention after a Houston police officer last week fatally shot a mentally ill double-amputee who [...]
Yet another reason to expand Medicaid
Grits: A friend forwarded me a handout being circulated at the Harris County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council detailing a pair of studies of “Kendra’s Law” out of New York, which provides court-ordered outpatient mental health treatment to a small subset of probationers in the “most desperate need for psychiatric treatment.” According to the handout, “Taken [...]
Once again on bail and jail overcrowding
Grits returns to a familiar topic. Harris County has successfully reduced its jail population in the last couple of years to the point where they no longer must ship inmates to jails in Louisiana and other Texas counties due to overcrowding. And despite Chicken-Little pronouncements from the police union and tuff-on-crime zealots, the sky didn’t [...]