Where's My Offense Report?
During the campaign for District Attorney one of the issues that probably meant the most to those of us working in the CJC (and probably the least to the general voting population) was the idea of Xerox copies of offense reports being provided to the Defense Bar on their cases. For those of you who don't practice criminal law and are just morbidly curious as to how the criminal justice system works, let me give you a little bit of background. Obviously whenever the police do a criminal investigation, they document their actions (some times better than others) in an offense report. Under the law and the rules of evidence, that offense report is considered to be what is known as "work product". Work product is basically privileged information because it is generated by a party to the lawsuit, namely the State of Texas (via the police agency) in a criminal case. Theoretically, the State of Texas (AKA the District Attorney's Office) doesn't have to let a defense atto