Archive for the ‘TCDA’ Category

From the legal beat.

Thursday, March 28th, 2019

A mistrial was declared yesterday in the murder case against Charles Reedy.

Mr. Reedy was accused of stabbing his roommate to death. However…

…Travis County prosecutors discovered several hundred new photos that Austin police detectives had taken as evidence. Their discovery prompted state District Judge Brad Urrutia to order a mistrial after Reedy’s lawyers said the new batch of photos might have impaired the case they had planned to present to the jury.

I believe that is what lawyers call a “Brady violation”, also known as “bad move, space cadet”. But that’s not why this story is interesting.

You see, Mr. Reedy has been convicted of murder before:

In 2001, a jury found him guilty of killing John Teller in a wooded area near St. Edward’s University and Interstate 35. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
But in 2006, the 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin overturned the conviction. Chief Justice W. Kenneth Law wrote an opinion saying, “The jury’s verdict is unsupported by proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Kind of makes you go “Hmmmmmmmm”, doesn’t it?

Lord Nelson.

Thursday, February 21st, 2019

Item #1: the Circuit of the Americas is not going to get money from the state of Texas for last year’s Formula One race.

The stunning development means the track in Southeast Austin will forfeit $25 million or more in state funds through the Major Event Reimbursement Program. The state reimbursed the racetrack $27 million through the program after the 2017 U.S. Grand Prix, $26 million for the 2016 F1 race and $22.7 million for the 2015 U.S. Grand Prix.

Why are they being cut off? Would you believe…they didn’t file their anti-human trafficking paperwork in time?

According to an October 2018 letter from the governor’s office that was obtained by the Statesman, CELOC [Circuit Events Local Organizing Committee – DB] missed the deadline to submit a required human trafficking prevention plan by 30 days before the 2018 U.S. Grand Prix. Bryan Daniel, the governor’s executive director of economic development and tourism, wrote that because CELOC failed to meet the deadline, its application for reimbursement had been rescinded.
The plan was due Sept. 19, but CELOC did not submit it until Oct. 3.
“In this case, the law is clear that if a human trafficking prevention plan is not submitted 30 days prior to an event, a reimbursement from the Major Events Fund cannot be issued,” Abbott spokesman John Wittman said in an emailed statement. “The State of Texas and COTA have a productive partnership that has had a tremendous economic impact on the city of Austin and the state as a whole, and our office is already working with COTA on next year’s race.”

As much as I enjoy seeing these people cut off from their state subsidy, I have a feeling we haven’t seen the end of this, and that somehow somebody’s going to figure out an end run to get them their $25 million.

Item #2:

At a murder trial last week in Travis County, a defense lawyer for a woman accused of fatally shooting her fiancé approached the witness stand and began asking questions to an empty chair. The attorney, Brian Erskine, was expressing disbelief that forensic examiner Dr. Sam Andrews did not show up to testify about his autopsy on 37-year-old victim Bradley Sullivan.

Did the Honorable Mr. Erskine think he was Clint Eastwood? And why wasn’t Dr. Andrews in court?

Turns out…

…Andrews no longer is welcome in Travis County courtrooms. The district attorney’s office recently decided it will not sponsor his testimony amid an ongoing Texas Rangers and Texas Medical Board investigation into his work at his new job as the chief of the Lubbock County medical examiner’s office.

The basis for the investigation has not been revealed. However, a Lubbock County commissioner might have given hints in a letter to a judge Monday in which he alleged that Andrews had improperly harvested excessive body tissue from deceased children for research. The letter from Commissioner Jason Corley to County Judge Curtis Parrish also states that another doctor in Andrews’ office, Evan Matshes, had performed autopsies despite not being licensed to practice medicine in Texas. Similar allegations are outlined in a lawsuit against Andrews and Matshes by a former employee of the medical examiner’s office.

According to the Statesman, the DA’s office doesn’t think this is a huge problem: Dr. Andrews did a total of ten autopsies in cases that are still pending. But in eight of those, “the cause of death could not be reasonably disputed by the defense“.

However, prosecutors must appoint a second medical examiner to review Andrews’ autopsy reports in all pending cases. If the second examiner affirms Andrews’ previous findings, that doctor will then be permitted to testify at trial in place of Andrews.

Fizzle.

Monday, October 23rd, 2017

Travis County prosecutors dropped all of the remaining charges against longtime state Rep. Dawnna Dukes on Monday, court filings show.

I expect longer, more detailed stories tomorrow morning. In the meantime, quoted without comment:

Travis County District Attorney Margaret Moore pinned the prosecution’s collapse on conflicting statements given by a top official in the Texas House, who told prosecutors that travel to the Capitol was required to earn the per-diem payments but recanted that position in a statement to Dukes’s lawyers.

From the legal beat.

Thursday, October 12th, 2017

Two quick notes:

1) Remember our old friends Detective Jeff Payne and Lt. James Tracy? The guys who arrested a nurse for refusing to let them draw blood from an unconscious patient without a warrant?

Detective Payne has been fired. Lt. Tracy has been demoted to “police officer III”.

“In examining your conduct,” Brown wrote to Payne, “I am deeply troubled by your lack of sound professional judgment and your discourteous, disrespectful, and unwarranted behavior, which unnecessarily escalated a situation that could and should have been resolved in a manner far different from the course of action you chose to pursue.”
Brown was similarly critical of Tracy, saying his lack of judgment and leadership was “unacceptable,” and, “as a result, I no longer believe that you can retain a leadership position in the Department.”

Both men have five days to appeal the decision. The criminal investigation into their actions is ongoing.

(Hattip: Reason‘s “Hit and Run”, and Patrick Nonwhite on the Twitters.)

2) The Travis County DA has dropped one of the 13 felony charges against Dawnna Dukes.

Apparently, one of the analysts with the Texas DPS crime lab “examined the wrong date” when looking at Ms. Dukes’s travel activity, leading to “a felony count that erroneously stated Dukes turned in a falsified voucher for Dec. 22, 2013.”

It is unclear how prosecutors, DPS investigators and Texas Rangers failed to notice these holes in the case during an investigation that spanned more than 18 months.

From the flaming hyenas news desk…

Wednesday, September 20th, 2017

Some of you may recall my entry the other day about the Travis County DA’s decision to suspend pursuing felony charges against State Representative Dawana Dukes.

Now we have some clarity on the reasoning behind that decision.

The guy who runs the House Business Office (which I guess is responsible for things like cutting checks for expenses and reimbursement) apparently told Ms. Dukes’s lawyers that “his office does not require a House member to travel to the Capitol building in order to receive per diem payments when the Legislature is not in session.” Illegally collecting those payments, when she wasn’t present in the Capital, was part of the case against her.

Gee, that seems like a bad screwup by the Travis County DA. Why wouldn’t they have checked on something like that before filing charges?

Answer: they did. And were told something completely different. By the same guy.

Prosecutors said they learned about Adrian’s contradictory statement when they visited with him two weeks ago to prepare for trial. In a sworn affidavit, he had told Dukes’ legal team that she did not need to be at the Capitol to qualify for reimbursement because House District 46, which she represents, is within 50 miles of the building.
Adrian said the House personnel manual did not expressly require a representative to travel to the Capitol building to receive payments. The implication is Dukes would still have been eligible for reimbursement if she was performing legislative duties from another location in Austin.

That seems like an…interesting…interpretation.

A former Dukes staffer told the Statesman last year that the lawmaker did not travel to the Capitol for all of the days that she claimed but directed her staff to prepare the forms as if she did.
Dukes, according to the grand jury indictment, did make “a false entry in a government record, and present and use said government record with knowledge of its falsity, by instructing her staff to add a false entry to her State of Texas Travel Voucher Form.”

So, basically, it seems like the argument is: it doesn’t matter, because she was close enough for government work. Good to know.

But in the meantime, the DA’s office did a new filing outlining some of the other “extraneous acts” they plan to bring up at the misdemeanor trial, which starts in October. A couple of selected high points:

According to the filing, Dukes paid an online psychic $51,348 from December 2014 to January 2016, totaling nearly $1,000 per week.

Responded to a search warrant for her cellphone by providing investigators a phone that did not match the identification number on the phone they had requested.

Was noticeably impaired while trying to perform legislative duties at the Capitol and showed up late to a House Appropriations Committee hearing on March 29, stating, “I know I’m talking a lot. I’m full of morphine and will be headed out of here soon.”

Flaming hyenas watch.

Friday, September 15th, 2017

Sorry about the delay: this news broke last night while I was downtown at the cop shop and couldn’t blog.

The Travis County district attorney will not pursue, at least for now, the most serious charges against state Rep. Dawnna Dukes, saying prosecutors have renewed their investigation into the travel vouchers at the heart of the 13 felony counts the Austin Democrat is facing.

The DA is still prosecuting two misdemeanor charges “relating to allegations of her using legislative staffers for personal gain”. The charges the DA is not pursuing at this time are felonies related to misuse of travel vouchers.

I don’t quite know what to make of this.

District Attorney Margaret Moore confirmed to the American-Statesman on Thursday that prosecutors have obtained new information relating to the vouchers, which Dukes is accused of falsifying for financial gain. But Moore declined to elaborate on what the new information is.
“The district attorney’s office recently received new, unexpected information pertinent to that case and the new information has created a need for further investigation by this office and the Texas Rangers,” Moore said.

“New information”. Is it exculpatory? It seems to me that if there was exculpatory evidence, Ms. Dukes and her legal team would have offered it in her defense a long damn time ago, as well as spreading it to every media outlet they could find.

If it’s not exculpatory, is the DA playing hardball again, trying to get her to take a plea? “Look, we’ve got new leads. We’re turning the Rangers loose again. Take a plea now, resign, and we drop charges. Otherwise, we’re going to dig up even more dirt and you can spend the next 28 years experiencing the joy of busting rocks.”

I don’t have any idea, and I don’t think anyone outside of the highest levels of the DA’s office does either. Buy popcorn futures.

Bagatelle (#5).

Tuesday, June 20th, 2017

Could it be…SATAN?!

No. Actually, it wasn’t Satan at all. It was mass hysteria and a doctor who made a mistake.

I’ll throw this in just for fun: if you are a “dancer” who performs “in paint, latex, wax, gel, foam, film and coatings”, are you a nude dancer in the eyes of the law?

And why does it matter? Because clubs with “fully nude” dancers have to collect a state-mandated $5 entry fee.

…n January 2017 the comptroller amended its rules to include clubs that employ latex and paint-covered dancers as sexually oriented businesses.

Memo from the DA’s office.

Wednesday, April 12th, 2017

For a long time now, the policy of the Travis County DA’s office has been to present all cases involving police shootings to a grand jury for review, no matter what the circumstances where.

That was the case, for instance, for Austin police officer Carlos Lopez, who a grand jury no-billed 11 months after he shot and killed a gunman who was randomly shooting inside the downtown Omni hotel. The gunman had already shot and killed taxi driver Conrado Contreras by the time Lopez arrived.
It also happened with Austin police Sgt. Adam Johnson, who a grand jury declined to indict in 2015 for shooting and killing a man in downtown Austin who was standing in the middle of Eighth Street firing a rifle at police headquarters, and had already sprayed several government buildings with gunfire.

Not any more. The new Travis County DA, Margaret Moore, has decided that her office is going to review officer-involved shootings, and only present the ones that they feel require review to a grand jury.

She will only take cases to grand jurors if she thinks the shooting was unlawful or if facts about what happened are in dispute.
Unlike predecessors, who have viewed grand juries as independent reviewers best equipped to determine whether to indict an officer, Moore said she also will issue an opinion, with help from the new Civil Rights Division she has established, and provide a recommendation “as to the legal sufficiency of a case.”

Bad idea, as I see it.

There are a lot of problems with the criminal justice system, including grand juries. Jurors sometimes aren’t much more than rubber stamps for the DA’s office. But at least they are independant. At least grand juries offer some kind of outside review, flawed though it may be. This is going to backfire badly on DA Moore the first time a shooting that didn’t get reviewed blows up.

I’m baffled by the NAACP’s support for this: you would think they’d want the additional scrutiny, but perhaps the DA was persuasive. The support of the police union makes a little more sense:

Moore said those cases often have taken months to present to a grand jury because of workload and a backlog of other cases, leaving officers in limbo and sometimes preventing police officials from closing administrative investigations.

The people who have spoken to our CPA classes and that have been involved in shootings have said that there is some stress involved in waiting on the grand jury verdict. But they downplayed that specific part of it. Yes, the aftermath is highly stressful (and the department has good programs in place to deal with it). But it seemed to me that they felt the grand jury verdict was just the end: by the time that came in, they’d already been cleared by Internal Affairs and the Special Investgaions Division, and had usually moved on to other assignments.

(I can’t recall a case in…well, ever, where APD ruled a shooting okay and a grand jury indicted. Maybe the Kleinert case mentioned in the article, but I’m not clear on what action APD took in that case. In the most recent case that I know of where there was any controversy – the naked 17-year-old – the grand jury no-billed but APD fired the officer anyway.)

Annals of law (#12 in a series)

Thursday, March 23rd, 2017

Section 29.03 of the Texas Penal Code defines “aggravated robbery”:

Sec. 29.03. AGGRAVATED ROBBERY. (a) A person commits an offense if he commits robbery as defined in Section 29.02, and he:
(1) causes serious bodily injury to another;
(2) uses or exhibits a deadly weapon; or
(3) causes bodily injury to another person or threatens or places another person in fear of imminent bodily injury or death, if the other person is:
(A) 65 years of age or older; or
(B) a disabled person.
(b) An offense under this section is a felony of the first degree.
(c) In this section, "disabled person" means an individual with a mental, physical, or developmental disability who is substantially unable to protect himself from harm.

Seems mostly clear, right? Except: what constitutes “a deadly weapon”?

Is “a pellet gun” a deadly weapon?

Dustin Clark and two other men are suspected in a string of convenience store robberies in Travis County. They were stopped by the Lakeway PD in December of 2015, shortly after allegedly robbing a store in Spicewood, holding “pellet guns” to the clerk’s head, and threatening to kill him. The police found the pellet guns, money, ski masks, other identifying clothing, and a pack of Starburst allegedly stolen by Clark in the car. (The police also found “two deer rifles” in the trunk. I have seen contradictory reports about whether these were airsoft guns or real rifles. However, the “deer rifles” were not used in the robbery, and were not part of the criminal case as best as I can tell.)

Mr. Clark went on trial this week. There seems to have been little doubt about his guilt: his own attorney conceded that it was his client on the surveillance video from the store. The main legal issue was is it plain old robbery, or aggravated robbery?

The pellet guns were found unloaded and not carrying a C02 cartridge that would have made them operable.

Mr. Clark was offered a plea deal of 40 years before trial. The maximum for plain old robbery is 20 years, and 99 years for aggravated robbery. I don’t know enough about Mr. Clark’s background to be able to estimate what the likely sentences would have been.

Mr. Clark turned down the 40-year deal and chose to go to trial. His attorney moved to include robbery as a lesser charge for the jury to to consider, but the Travis County DA successfully fought that motion. So the only charge the jury was allowed to consider against Mr. Clark was aggravated robbery.

And they acquitted him.

But the jury could consider only one charge — aggravated robbery — and after more than six hours of discussion they finally united and ruled that the pellet guns the men used to scare two employees are not deadly weapons. Therefore, several of them told the American-Statesman, they had to acquit Clark. About half of the 12-person jury granted an interview request saying they wish they had the option to convict Clark of the lesser charge.
They said there was no proof the guns contained pellets or the CO2 cartridges that power them at the time of the robbery.

I personally wonder how the clerk was supposed to know that. I’d also really like to see photos of the pellet guns. And I wonder what else this means, legally? Not that I would, but if take the firing pin and cartridges out of a Smith and go hold up a Stop’N’Rob, is it just robbery? The gun can’t fire, right? So it’s not a deadly weapon, at least if I understand the logic here correctly.

[Travis County Assistant DA Amy] Meredith added she still believes aggravated robbery “was the appropriate charge.” State district Judge David Crain denied the defense’s motion to include the robbery charge after taking a break in chambers to research the law. Prosecutors had made Crain aware of a ruling from a case 11 years ago in which pellet guns had been found to be deadly.

I don’t feel too bad for ADA Meredith. Even though she didn’t get a conviction in this case, she did make an interesting legal point. I don’t think this rises to the level of precedent because Judge Crain’s ruling hasn’t been reviewed by a higher court, but perhaps this is something the Texas legislature could offer some additional guidance on. Also, Mr. Clark is still facing charges in six other robberies, so it isn’t like the TCDA whiffed on their only chance to convict him.

I thought about blogging this when the first story appeared Tuesday, but didn’t get to it (this is a busy week). But RoadRich emailed the print version of the story yesterday, which led to a lively discussion between him, myself, Mike the Musicologist, and Lawrence.

MtM observed that he recalls one of the northern states changing the law some years back so that if you brandish a fake weapon with the intent of making your victims think it is real, you get treated like it was real. Spray paint the end of that airsoft gun black and use it to hold up a liquor store? Big boy rules apply.

I think both MtM and I are on the same side of the divide when it comes to the increased tendency to criminalize everything and sweep up more people in the web. But I also think we’re both in agreement that this is the kind of “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” law that we could get behind.

(On a related side note, I’m halfway tempted to start a podcast with the four of us sitting around eating dinner and talking about legal issues. I even have a name for it: “I’m Not A Lawyer, But…”. I figure it should be easy to get sponsorship from SquareSpace, at least. If it proves popular enough, I might even offer to fly Ken and/or Patrick in as special guests for barbecue. That is, if their heads haven’t already exploded. Episode 1 is going to called “Rule of Parties be damned”.)

Half a million dollars.

Thursday, February 2nd, 2017

This is slightly old news that I’ve been meaning to note for a couple of days now. I still think it’s worth mentioning, because it seems to me there’s something buried in the press coverage.

The Travis County Commissioners Court has voted to pay Judge Julie Kocurek $500,000.

“Does this have something to do with her being shot?” you might ask.

Indeed, it does.

“But why? The county didn’t shoot her. The cops didn’t shoot her. She was shot by a bad guy.”

Indeed, this is true. The money is being given as a settlement for “any claims against the county that Kocurek could have sought in a lawsuit”. Some of this is spelled out in the Statesman stories, and some of this is me reading between the lines, but it looks like the argument is:

  • There was a credible tip that Chimene Onyeri was targeting a judge.
  • The tip was investigated by the Travis County DA’s office.
  • Apparently, the investigators thought that the judge being targeted was both a male judge and one that wasn’t in Travis County.
  • It isn’t clear to me if the investigators knew that Onyeri had an appearance coming up in Judge Kocurek’s court (where he likely would have been sent back to prison) and ruled her out as a target because she wasn’t a male judge, or if they weren’t aware of his upcoming appearance.
  • In any case, they decided there was no “credible threat to any Travis County district judge”.
  • Judge Kocurek was shot three weeks later.

It’s hard for me to tell if anyone was wrong here. On the one hand, it seems like there was a credible threat: was it dismissed because the investigators screwed up and didn’t realize the subject of the threat might not have a been a male judge? And a big question is: why didn’t they warn all the judges? On the other hand, there’s an argument that the investigators did the best they could with limited information. And if they sent out warnings to all the judges every time some jackhole shot his mouth off, pretty soon it’d be “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” all over again.

No matter what, though, taxpayers are going to be out $500,000. I don’t begrudge Judge Kocurek the money: if you offered me $500,000 to let someone shoot at me, my response would be three words (two of those being “go” and “yourself”).

But it still bothers me.

On the legal beat.

Wednesday, December 7th, 2016

Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg, as promised, did not seek re-election. Margaret Moore is the new DA, and will take over January 3rd.

But she’s already making her mark: she’s fired 27 people.

Seventeen attorneys, 12 investigators and six administrative staff are retiring or have been told they will no longer have jobs when Moore takes over on Jan. 3. Additionally, 13 lawyers are being bumped to a lower classification and will take paycuts. And more changes may be coming. Moore told the American-Statesman on Tuesday she still has decisions to make on some administrative positions after wrapping up interviews this week.
in all, 48 people in the 238-employee agency have been affected by the moves. Twenty-seven were told their services will no longer be needed; they will not receive severance pay.

Is this good or bad? The DA’s office seems to want to spin it as “good”:

The shakeup marks the most sweeping personnel shift at the DA’s office in decades, with Moore carrying through on her campaign promise to reorganize after 40 years of a continuous administration that began with Ronnie Earle and continued with Rosemary Lehmberg.

And it isn’t unprecedented for a new DA to want their own people. See Pat Lykos. Okay, maybe that was a bad example…

But there also seem to be some possibly legitimate concerns:

District Judge Karen Sage questioned Moore’s decision to reassign a prosecutor who had been tasked with handling complex mental health cases. Others in the legal community were surprised when Moore appointed defense attorney Rickey Jones to a key mid-management position despite Jones’s two bar sanctions — one for giving questionable legal advice and another for questionable advice as well as intermingling his money with his clients’ funds held in a trust account. The sanctions were lifted in 2007.

,,,

Moore said she will reassign the attorney who prosecutes mental health cases, Michelle Hallee, which caught the attention of Judge Sage, who says the move has her “deeply concerned.” Several years ago, Sage had a hand in creating a court program for mentally ill people accused of minor crimes that decreased the time they spent in jail by 50 percent. Sage said it would be a mistake for Moore to assign mental health cases to prosecutors who are not sensitive to the needs of the defendants and are more interested in securing a conviction than creating a path for rehabilitation and reducing recidivism.

In other news, here’s an idea: why don’t we separate the crime lab from the APD? This makes a lot of sense to me: one of my ideas for criminal justice reform is to make crime labs arms of the court system itself, reporting to the judiciary, rather than arms of law enforcement. I’m sure that the vast majority of people who work in these labs remain independent, but it still looks and feels unseemly to me to have that kind of reporting relationship.

It seems like Grits agrees, though he calls for the lab to be “truly independent, as was done in Houston“.

I could live with that. They might need a new building, which probably means more bonds and more taxes, which does not excite me. But I think I could vote for that, too, as long as they put two quotes over the doorways:

Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

(See also.)

Updates.

Friday, October 18th, 2013

Shon Washington is going to do four years in state prison. You may remember Mr. Washington as the man who looted the Christmas Bureau. (Previously.)

While searching for a good link on the Washington story, I ran across this:

The receipts from Twin Liquor stores all over town show [Travis County DA Rosemary] Lehmberg purchased 72 bottles – or 23 gallons – of vodka on her credit card over a 16 month period.

72 bottles over 16 months is 4.5 bottles per month, or a little over a bottle per week. Or, if you want to look at it another way, 23 gallons over 16 months is 1.4375 gallons, 184 ounces, or 5441.53 ml per month. Assuming a 30 day month, that’s a little over 6 ounces of vodka a day. Or somewhere between two and three stiff drinks.

He says he released the booze receipts in an effort to prevent Lehmberg and her supporters from pretending a problem doesn’t exist.

If you drive drunk with an open bottle in your car, you have a problem. If you have two stiff drinks a day, do you have a problem? I’m not so sure. (One of the current comments on this story calls out the hidden assumption that she drank it all herself, rather than having parties, having friends over, another family member drinking some of it, etc.) And it bothers me a little that the attorney was able to get records of her purchases from Twin Liquor. I buy from Twin Liquor; is some lawyer going to be able to subpoena records of my purchases? Should I start paying in cash?

(Another hidden assumption: she only bought from Twin Liquor, and not from Spec’s, or any of the dozens of other liquor stores around town.)

(Am I the only person who sees Debs Liquor and thinks to myself, “Well, good for him. I’m glad he found more honest work than running for president.”)