Wrongful conviction panel has GOP backers, too

It’s one thing for a Texas Democrat to file bills calling for a permanent commission to study and make recommendations on preventing wrongful criminal convictions. Houston Sen. Rodney Ellis has done that for six consecutive legislative sessions. San Antonio Rep. Ruth Jones McClendon has in the last four.

Across the aisle in conservative-leaning Texas, “tough on crime” has become a stock Republican talking point. Even so, it’s hard to imagine that includes “whether he did it or not.”

So what’s notable today is an increasingly bipartisan push to examine prosecutorial error or misconduct or slipshod defense work that led to 117 Texas exonerations — including a U.S.-high 47 by DNA testing — over a quarter century.

McClendon’s HB 166, like Ellis’ SB 89, would create such a commission on wrongful convictions. McClendon came close to passage in 2011, and now she has Republican joint authors from two of the state’s most conservative counties.

Myra Crownover is serving her sixth full term representing Denton County; she voted for a similar McClendon bill in the previous session. Freshman Jeff Leach, a lawyer himself, won his Collin County seat on a “tea-party-approved” platform but has shown a strong interest in prosecutorial misconduct from the start.

“One person convicted of a crime he or she didn’t commit is too many,” Leach said. “The goal in the courtroom should be to seek and find the truth, and any person who knowingly stands in the way of that goal ought to be held accountable.”

Leach’s words echo those of Wallace Jefferson, a Rick Perry appointee to the Texas Supreme Court and Republican re-elected to a full term as chief justice in 2008.

In his biennial address to the Legislature this month, the “State of the Judiciary,” Jefferson put his weight behind a commission to investigate wrongful convictions. Importantly, he noted that Texas has a “top-notch judicial system” — for those who can afford top-notch legal services. Too often, poorer Texans are stuck with an overwhelmed public defender system or left hoping in vain for competent pro bono assistance.

Jefferson’s timing could not have been better. Today is the 50th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Gideon vs. Wainwright, which was intended to guarantee the right to counsel in state courts for those too poor to afford it.

High-profile DNA exonerations cast a harsh light, but the problem of dubious justice is far broader, as we’ve seen in Dallas. Witness the uniformly poor or working-class defendants in the 2001 fake-drugs scandal and the current morass of dozens of pending and settled drug cases possibly tainted by police officers accused of lying about evidence.

Justice for all obviously remains a work in progress. For too long it has been a political argument between right and left, when it should be a moral distinction between right and wrong.

The price of defense

“For those who can afford legal services, we have a top-notch judicial system. Highly qualified lawyers help courts dispense justice fairly and efficiently. But that kind of representation is expensive. A larger swath of litigation exists in which the contestants lack wealth, insurance is absent, and public funding is not available.”

Original report here



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