Pretrial & Defense

Obel Cruz-Garcia, a 46-year-old Dominican man who did not speak English, sat in a Houston courtroom on a Friday in July 2013. He faced a jury that would decide whether to sentence him to death for the gruesome killing of 6-year-old Angelo Garcia — a crime he has maintained he did not commit. His life, quite literally, depended on the outcome of the case.

Read the rest of this story from Huffington Post.

A Texas bill that would require a 10-year prison sentence for people who use a gun while committing a felony has drawn concern from two groups that aren’t usually on the same side of legislative debates: criminal justice reform advocates and gun rights groups.

Read the rest of this story from the Texas Tribune.

Like all teenagers, Fred Harris longed for freedom. At 18, he was small: 5 feet tall, 98 pounds. He also acted much younger than his age, which meant other kids bullied him. His mother, Dallas Garcia, told The Appeal and Type Investigations, “[He] didn’t understand, like, just extremely how different he was.”

Read the rest of this story from The Appeal/Type Investigations.

It'd be easy to make Jeanie Ortiz the poster child for all that ails the Harris County court system. After all, when you scroll through the indigent defense data for Texas, Ortiz is the only defense attorney in the county who raked in more than $1 million in taxpayer dollars representing low-income defendants last year. 

It’s been almost two years since Jaquaree Simmons died after being found unconscious in the Harris County Jail. Shortly after, 11 employees were fired and another six were suspended without pay. But in the months since, his mother LaRhonda Biggles has waited to see how many of them would face criminal charges in the death of her 23-year-old son.

Five other officers seen on video beating Nichols were fired and charged with second degree murder and other offenses. And locally, Galveston’s police chief Doug Balli has been placed on administrative leave after police botched a raid. While the cases are not related, the two incidents have sparked conversations about police training.

Andy Kahan is a familiar face in media coverage of crime and punishment in Texas, especially in Houston, where he was the police department’s longtime victim’s advocate.

In 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court opined that pretrial detainees maintain their right to vote, and in Texas, you do not lose that right if you are convicted of a misdemeanor offense. Nevertheless, localities and the state government have failed to effectively mobilize the necessary resources to create sufficient voting access for incarcerated, eligible voters to cast a ballot during elections.

The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Administrator Liz Ryan discusses sentencing reform during an event hosted by the Sentencing Project.

Watch the full webinar from C-SPAN.