I hadn't realized that there had been any movement on this case since the prosecutors' concession.
HoustonChronicle.com - Tulia lawyer's long struggle rewarded today: Forty months older and $70,000 poorer, Amarillo attorney Jeff Blackburn will stand in a courtroom here today and, at last, watch his pro bono beneficiaries -- 13 people imprisoned on questionable drug charges -- set free. "There were plenty of times when I thought this day was never going to come," Blackburn said. "We fought a losing battle for two years. The only say we had was in the press." At a hearing at 1 p.m. today, retired state District Judge Ron Chapman of Dallas is expected to release the defendants without bond until their cases are resolved by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. It was Chapman who, after evidentiary hearings this spring, ruled that the convictions were tainted by the testimony and actions of an "unreliable" undercover officer and urged the appeals court to grant new trials. Even with that ruling, it took political action to bring the defendants to freedom. A bill sponsored by state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, was enacted late in the legislative session, allowing Chapman to release them before the higher court rules on Chapman's recommendation. "It is a terrible example of how far gone the court system in Texas is," Blackburn said.
In the meantime, Texas is having a fiendishly difficult time establishing a commission to study the problems in the Houston crime lab, which resulted in all HPD cases being purged from Texas and federal databases due to the unreliability of their data. Elsewhere, the Texas legislature did its level best to restrict access to the courts and redress in malpractice suits, kick kids off Medicaid and their Children's Health Insurance program in favor of big business enterprise zones, sharply lower the funding for trauma care, and further restrict the liability for companies having anything to do with asbestos. (Down at the bottom of that Texas Observer article, there's a fascinating little coda to the Flight of the Texas Ds -- Democrats -- to Oklahoma earlier this spring. Seems there's a Voting Rights Act violation lawsuit out there from one member of the lege against the Republican head. It won't go anywhere, of course; this particular federal Department of Justice has little interest in prosecuting such cases to the detriment of Republicans, no matter what the relative merits of the case.)
Justice in Texas would appear to be having a very bad year, indeed.
Posted by iain at June 16, 2003 10:33 AMComments
