Recent editorials from Texas newspapers

Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Feb. 7, 2016.

Governor finds a new cross for Texas to bear

If Gov. Greg Abbott insists upon defending the display of cross decals on a West Texas county’s patrol vehicles, he at least shouldn’t resort to deception.

The cross is a symbol of - what comes to mind first? This is not a trick question.

At least, we thought it wasn’t, until we read the brief Abbott submitted to Attorney General Ken Paxton. Abbott spent considerable time and verbiage pointing out all the things besides Christianity that a cross symbolizes.

To hear Abbott tell it, the cross is just one big history lesson about the traditions practiced in these here parts. Did y’all know, for example, that “the cross has a long history in America and elsewhere as a symbol of service and sacrifice”? Of course you did. You also knew that, as Abbott pointed out, military cemeteries are covered with rows upon rows of them. And you probably also knew that some of our military’s highest decorations include the cross - the Distinguished Service Cross, for example.

So it only goes to follow that when a Jewish or Muslim or Wiccan or atheist motorist is pulled over in Brewster County for speeding and sees the 12-inch cross decal on the back of the patrol vehicle, his or her first thought should be of Arlington National Cemetery or, as Abbott’s brief says, “the solemn respect all Texans should have for the courage and sacrifice of our peace officers.”

Seriously, Governor?

Abbott asserts that the Constitution “does not prohibit local officials like the Brewster County Sheriff from publicly acknowledging the religious beliefs and religious heritage of their communities.” OK, fine. When a deputy pulls over a speeding Wiccan, he or she can point to the church at the next intersection and say: “See that? That’s First Pentacostal, established in 1872. It’s where I go to worship.” And it won’t cost anything other than a half-minute of the Wiccan’s time.

But nowhere does Abbott address the rights of the taxpayers who bought the vehicle not to have it used as a display of - what was it? Oh, yeah, West Texas history. Nor does it address the chilling effect on non-Christians who feel persecuted by Christians - or by West Texas heritage or whatever meaning one wants to affix to the cross other than the obvious one.

Nowhere in Abbott’s brief does he address what Sheriff Ronny Dodson meant when he put crosses on vehicles. According to Dodson: “The cross just represents extra safety for these officers. Nobody is taking care of them, just me. And I can’t be there all the time.” Right, nobody can be there all the time - except the father of the son and the holy spirit.

Evidently the cross to Dodson is a protective talisman, which makes perfect sense to anyone who has seen a vampire movie. All joking aside, the intent of the cross-bearer is relevant, as our lawyer-governor knows but neglected to mention. How can that not be a sin of omission?

Abbott’s motive is no big secret - he’s trying to be a good Christian soldier. Playing lawyerly word games to separate Christ from the cross, in addition to not fooling anyone as to Abbott’s motive, dishonors Christ and the cross. It’s dishonest.

The job of governor being the light workout that it is, Abbott the immediate past attorney general apparently has more time than the attorney general to play attorney general. Texas leads the nation in percentage of population without health insurance, which Abbott didn’t mention in his guest column on the facing page about the accomplishments of his first year as governor. Not having health insurance is a terrible cross to bear. Abbott’s time and empathy would be better spent helping those folks than trying to help Dodson’s deputies by arguing that their protective talisman doesn’t establish a religion.

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Houston Chronicle. Feb. 4, 2016.

West’s warning: Legislative reforms in the wake of the catastrophe in town did not go far enough

Nearly three years after a massive fertilizer-plant explosion in a little Czech town north of Waco took the lives of 16 people, injured more than 260 others and destroyed homes and businesses, a similar danger still exists around the state. West has been working to recover ever since its catastrophe, but other communities are just as vulnerable. So says a recent report conducted by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.

As the 265-page report notes, the West Fertilizer Co. warehouse near the center of town held an estimated 30 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. A blast that registered as a 2.1-magnitude earthquake, one of the deadliest industrial disasters in Texas history, should have been warning enough. And yet, at least 19 facilities in Texas that store five tons or more of fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate are within a half-mile of a school, hospital or nursing home. Eighty-three percent of the 40 facilities in the state that store fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate are located within a quarter-mile of residences - and the people living in those residences usually don’t know of the potential danger nearby.

“The risk to the public from a catastrophic incident exists throughout the state of Texas,” the report warned.

Texas officials seem only mildly concerned. Lawmakers apparently are worried more about overweening government regulation than they are about potential danger to life and property.

Granted, the Texas Legislature got a bit interested last year. Lawmakers approved legislation that allows the state fire marshal to inspect agricultural businesses that store ammonium nitrate and to report violations to the state chemist for enforcement. The law also shifted regulation of ammonium nitrate from the Department of Health Services to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, among other minor reforms. A bill that would have imposed penalties for improper storage of ammonium nitrate went nowhere.

The safety board says the reforms that did pass don’t go far enough. If at least 19 Texas communities are still in danger zones, then neither lawmakers nor government regulators are protecting the public welfare.

Texas officials, whose disdain for government seems boundless, ought to ask the people of Flint, Mich., about government regulation, Flint being the struggling city where a similar disdain and a penchant for doing it on the cheap have resulted in irreparable damage. Or they might ask the people of West, where nearly 200 homes don’t exist anymore and where three of the town’s four public schools were destroyed or had major damage. Fifteen former West residents won’t be able to answer.

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The Dallas Morning News. Feb. 6, 2016.

Texas does the right thing in tackling enormous DNA review

Imagine if hundreds of thousands of criminal cases across America suddenly had to be reconsidered because they were predicated in part on faulty analysis of DNA.

Welcome to reality. In Texas alone, state officials say up to 50,000 criminal cases may have been influenced by statistical analysis that understates the probability that DNA used as evidence against a defendant actually belonged to someone else.

We’ve become accustomed to DNA releasing inmates from jail by proving they were innocent. Now we must confront the reality that it has also been used to convict the innocent.

The good news is that Texas is the first state to tackle this scary problem head on.

First, a word about the problem. Forensic labs across the country use statistics to determine the probability that a single strand of DNA found on a weapon, for instance, belongs to a defendant. But in cases of so-called mixed DNA, when strands from two or more people are on the same knife handle, for instance, new methods of statistical analysis are much more accurate.

In Texas, and elsewhere, labs have been slow to adopt the more precise methods.

As a result, DPS says the less accurate methods were used in 25,000 cases, and officials say the total in Texas could be twice that. Not all of them, of course, ended with convictions. And many that did had lots of other evidence besides DNA. And sometimes the probability that the DNA was not the defendant’s, even under the new methods, is still extraordinarily remote.

But in other cases the difference is extreme. Last year, judges and lawyers discussing the problem were left drop-jawed when they received word that the first re-test in a remote county had shown the chances that the DNA on the evidence belonged to someone other than the defendant fall from 1 in a million-plus to just 1 in 38.

How many convictions will actually be overturned? Too early to tell.

But just answering that question is going to be expensive and slow. For now, inmates have been told to send inquiries to Houston. The Harris County Public Defender’s Office has helpfully loaned one of its top appellate lawyers to work with a team of lawyers and law students to offer a non-binding evaluation of each writer’s case.

That’s a great start. But many questions remain. How fast can the state’s labs recalculate the probability in all those cases? How can it be sure to reach all the defendants potentially affected? Will they be entitled to attorneys? A day in court? What role will judges play?

Attorney Nick Vilbas of the Texas Forensic Science Commission concedes that the task is enormous. “It’s almost overwhelming. But if in the end we just find one case where someone who’s innocent gets out of prison, then it will be worth it.

“It’s about justice.”

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Austin American-Statesman. Feb. 8, 2016.

Effort to remedy, prevent false convictions a continuing one

The National Registry of Exonerations’ latest annual report tallies a record 149 cases in 2015 of defendants being cleared of crimes they did not commit. Texas again leads the list, with 54 exonerations last year.

The 2015 number of exonerations was 10 more than in 2014 and 62 more than in 2013. The 149 exonerated defendants had served on average 14½ years in prison, according to the report, which was released Feb. 3.

The registry, a joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, has recorded 1,733 exonerations since it began in 1989, with 273 of the overall number of exonerations - about 16 percent - occurring in Texas.

The police, prosecutors and courts that make up the nation’s criminal justice system have forced these defendants into a nightmare out of which there is no easy escape. No one can give back the time stolen from people wrongfully convicted and imprisoned. False convictions undermine confidence in our justice system and leave communities vulnerable to criminals who remain free because others are serving time for their deeds.

The good news is, the increased number of exonerations means police and prosecutors are showing greater concern about the problem of wrongful convictions. For example, 24 counties nationwide have established conviction integrity units to identify and correct false convictions, according to the report, including Travis, Bexar, Dallas, Harris and Tarrant counties in Texas. This is double the number of such units two years ago.

However, some of the units, such as Travis County’s, are less formally organized than others. And, as the report notes, the performance of these units “has been highly variable and some have been criticized as mere window dressing.” Several have no publicly available contact information.

The report singles out the work of Harris County’s conviction integrity unit for securing 73 exonerations since mid-2014 - the result of drug convictions being dismissed after lab tests determined the defendants never had illegal substances. In these cases, individuals pleaded guilty before a lab test was completed.

Inger Chandler, chief of Harris County’s conviction review unit, told the Associated Press that her office has since changed its policies and no longer allows pleas in drug cases until a lab report is completed.

Sixty-five exonerations nationwide in 2015 were based on guilty pleas, the study says. The need for attorneys to quickly dispose of low-level cases they don’t consider worth taking to trial coerces defendants who may not fully understand their rights or the charges against them to accept plea deals. In drug cases, defendants sometimes plead guilty, unaware the drugs they thought they had were fakes of some kind. Still, the fact is they did not commit the crimes for which they were charged.

Related to guilty pleas is the issue of false confessions. Twenty-seven exonerated defendants in 2015 had falsely confessed to a crime; 22 of the false confessions were in homicide cases. Because confessions can be forced, police departments everywhere should be required to videotape interrogations.

Which brings us to the issue of official misconduct by authorities: 65 exonerations in 2015 were attributed to official misconduct - 44 of 2015’s 58 homicide exonerations were attributed to official misconduct. Police, prosecutors and judges rarely are punished when it’s learned that official misconduct played a role in a false conviction. Further, prosecutors and courts continue to block and delay efforts to re-examine guilty verdicts rather than remove barriers to settle questions of guilt.

Remedies have been taken to help limit and correct wrongful convictions. Texas lawmakers passed the Michael Morton Act in 2013, for example, which requires prosecutors to share case files with defense attorneys. Last year, the Legislature created the Timothy Cole Exoneration Review Commission to examine wrongful convictions and recommend ways to make the state’s criminal justice system less prone to mistakes. But lawmakers did not set up the commission as a standing authority; its mission ends after it releases its only required report by Dec. 1.

States and local authorities can do more to correct problems with eyewitness identification procedures - the leading cause of wrongful convictions. State and county crime labs need more funding. More also needs to be done to eliminate the bad science that contributes to wrongful convictions.

It’s true that the vast majority of convictions are not in doubt. But one comes away from the registry’s annual report sure that an unknown number of wrongly convicted people continue to sit in prison.

“How many?” the report asks. “We don’t know. We have reliable statistical evidence that the rate of false convictions among death sentences in the United States is about 4%, but we don’t have comparable information about non-capital convictions. . But even a false conviction rate of 1% translates into tens of thousands of miscarriages of justice a year, and thousands more who were convicted in past years but remain in prison.”

And many of them will wait for an exoneration that will never come.

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Waco Tribune-Herald. Feb. 2, 2016.

Baylor strategy of stone-faced silence on sexual assaults damaging to everyone

At this stage of events, allegations that Baylor University took little if any corrective action in the wake of accusations by three women that former Baylor football player Tevin Elliott sexually assaulted them are surprising but hardly shocking. Similar charges arose late last summer involving former Baylor football player Sam Ukwuachu and the university’s questionable regard for his sexual assault victim.

The latter situation culminated after a prosecutor, outraged by Baylor Associate Dean for Student Conduct Bethany McCraw’s bungled testimony during the Ukwuachu trial, confronted McCraw in the hall and accused her of further victimizing the assault victim. This and other facts involving these cases can be found in some four years of Tribune-Herald reporting, archived for inspection. The claims aren’t entirely new, but they remain enormously disturbing.

Upshot: The silence by Baylor regarding these cases is becoming deafening, creating cracks and fissures in any effort to bolster its national profile. Baylor regents hired Philadelphia attorneys Gina Smith and Leslie Gomez last September to conduct an “independent review” of how Baylor handled allegations of sexual assault against Ukwuachu, but neither any insights into their progress or conclusions nor an earlier inquiry by Baylor law professor Jeremy Counseller have been revealed to the public and press.

Meanwhile, summer has lapsed into autumn and now winter with no indication anything more than silence is forthcoming from Baylor with the exception of some brief statements, even though the Trib regularly presses Baylor on the matter, as late as last week. What a colossal blunder for a Christian university that in many other ways has sought to demonstrate it has emerged from its so-called “bubble” into the light of day-to-day life.

Are Baylor officials hoping these allegations of inaction dissipate? If so, the strategy invests heavily in chance and ignores the outrage that victims, their friends and families understandably must feel. Some Baylor officials may conclude this is a private matter. But when an athletic player sexually assaults others and it spills into criminal court, it ceases to be entirely a private matter. It becomes a matter in which the university must explain what went wrong, why it went wrong and how it is correcting protocol.

The allegations aired on ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” showcased three women who say Elliott sexually assaulted them and Baylor failed to take the assaults seriously. One said that, even though she learned her accusation of rape made a total of six such allegations leveled at Elliott, she was told by McCraw the situation would require a court decision for any campus or team action because, otherwise, it was a “he-said, she-said” situation. This particular woman alleged Elliott hoisted her over his shoulder, kicked her dog down the stairs and hauled her away to be raped.

“As a Christian person, you strive to be the light on the hill that people look to as kind of a guidepost,” one victim told ESPN. “And in my mind, as a Christian university, that should be what you strive to be too.” Another interviewee outlined the ugly risk Baylor has thus assumed in its silence: “The football team is their priority. The money that comes to them is their priority. They don’t care about the victims.” One must question the logic of Baylor’s allowing such charges to stack up.

Elliott, who local prosecutors said was involved in several sexual assaults over a three-year period, is in prison after his 2014 conviction, but the stone-faced reaction by Baylor goes on. The university has put itself on the map through the talents of its athletes and coaches. However, demonstrating little transparency about how the university has handled sexual assaults in the past and how it will in the future is hardly how Baylor will remain at the pinnacle.