Whipped Cream Difficulties

I’m a little behind on this due to last minute shopping, but I think it is worth noting.

Late last night, an APD officer shot and killed a man after a foot pursuit. The officer and his partner originally were trying to make a traffic stop; the suspect fled, the officers pursued on foot, the officer in question found the suspect, the suspect stabbed the officer in the neck (with a knife he took from the officer’s duty belt), and the officer fired one killing shot. (The officer is still in the hospital.)

This is weird enough to be noteworthy; things like this don’t happen very often in Austin. But the story gets even stranger; the dead guy was Maurice Pierce.

For those of you outside of Austin, or those who don’t remember, Maurice Pierce was one of four men who were charged in the 1991 murders of four teenage girls at a yogurt shop in north Austin.

The “yogurt shop murders” were, and are, a big deal in Austin. So far, nobody’s been convicted in these murders; the case against Pierce was dropped when prosecutors said they didn’t have enough evidence against him. One other suspect was freed before trial; the other two suspects stood trial, were convicted, and had their convictions overturned by the Court of Criminal Appeals due to “unexplained DNA” that didn’t match any of the four suspects.

I’m not sure what to make of this; Pierce had earlier violent run-ins with APD and Lubbock police officers, according to the Statesman. Clearly, he wasn’t a choir boy, but nobody’s been able to come up with enough evidence to pin the murders on him. The only thing it seems like we can say is that this is going to make the truth about the murders much harder to find; I’m hoping APD doesn’t seize on this as a chance for “exceptional clearance“.

Today’s HouChron has an interesting article about prosecutor Kelly Siegler, investigator Otto Hanak, and how the case against Anthony Graves fell apart.

Siegler, who had tried many capital murder cases as a Harris County assistant district attorney, and Hanak, a state trooper and Texas Ranger for 28 years, were deeply embedded in the criminal justice establishment. But each new development in their investigation pointed to the conclusion that they reached independently: Graves was innocent, the victim of a prosecutor who had manufactured evidence, misled jurors and elicited false testimony.

For those unfamiliar with the case, Graves was convicted of murdering six people (a grandmother and five children) in Somerville, Texas in 1992. The major evidence against Graves was the testimony of Robert Carter, who was also convicted of the crime and executed in 2000. There is a great deal of circumstantial evidence against Carter, as well as Carter’s own confession; Carter had motive and opportunity, while Graves had neither. Only Carter’s testimony, which he recanted before being executed, ties Graves to the crime, and there appears to be evidence that the local prosecutors made a deal with Carter; if he implicated Graves, they would not pursue Carter’s wife, who was believed to be involved in the crime as well.

(I’m glossing over a lot of detail here. The best account I’ve seen, albeit one that’s been overtaken by events, is Pamela Colloff’s “Innocence Lost”, in the October 2010 Texas Monthly.)

This is a disturbing case, and I find it even more disturbing that the original prosecutor is making threats against Siegler. Not that Ms. Siegler is a shirking violet: you may remember her from the Susan Wright case, where she tied up one of her fellow prosecutors in the courtroom and re-enacted Ms. Wright’s stabbing of her husband 193 times.

Bravo to her and to Mr. Hanak for acting out what should be the prosecutor’s motto: “Fiat justitia ruat caelum.“

I previously noted the case of the Austin Police Department SWAT officer who rolled his car and was arrested for DWI.

Over the weekend, the Statesman ran an article about some changes APD is making in the way the SWAT team is run; officers will no longer be on call 24-7, but will have a week of downtime every third week, among other things.

I don’t know if these changes are good or bad, but I did want to highlight one thing from the article:

Court documents have said that he refused all field sobriety tests, and investigators then sought a court order for blood samples. Results of the blood tests are not yet available.

I object to forced blood draws and to compelled field sobriety tests (and breath tests) as a 5th Amendment violation. However, given that the courts seem to disagree with me (stupid horse-brained Supreme Court), it does make me somewhat happy to see that, in this case, an APD officer got treated the same way as a regular Joe who refused the tests would have been.

This good feeling should last until Balko posts his next round-up.