Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center

As I was totaling up my end-of-month bills this afternoon, I couldn't help but notice that our esteemed city newspaper, the Houston Chronicle,  had taken the liberty of billing me three separate times in the past thirty days.  Now, I'm not proud to admit that I subscribe to the Chronicle  on most days, but in my defense, I only get the paper on Sundays. For a "Sunday Only" subscription, I pay the sum of $14 a month -- in theory.  Assuming there are four Sundays in a month, that comes to $3.50 a paper.  That's not really all that great of a deal for something I can usually work through in the space of ten minutes on the average Sunday.  Not to mention, the newspaper lady routinely forgets to deliver the paper about once a month. As with most of my bills, I have it on a credit card with autopay. I noticed today that the Chron  had billed me $14 on October 31st, $19 on November 3rd, and another $14 on November 24th.   This seemed to boost my average bill to $11

This evening, I was contact by former District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal, who wanted to let me know that retired Assistant D.A. Ira Jones passed away over the weekend. Ira was a senior narcotics prosecutor in Special Crimes when I started at the Office in 1999.  I can't say that I knew him very well, but he had a reputation as a no-nonsense, hard-nosed prosecutor.  In all honesty, I was kind of scared of him the first couple of years I worked there.  Somewhere around 2002 or so, I ran into Ira at Fogo de Chao and I stopped by his table to say hello.  He had never been there before and he was really  enthusiastic about it.  Every time I would see him around the Office after that, he would always stop and talk about Fogo.  Apparently it was a life changing experience for him.  But I always enjoyed talking to him.  As it turned out, that scary, hard-nosed prosecutor was actually a pretty nice guy when you got to know him. I can't say that I ever got to know Ira well, but ever

As I was getting ready to go to court this morning, my e-mail inbox suddenly began lighting up with multiple e-mails from a "No Reply" address from the Harris County District Attorney's Office.  There were seven in total, and they all began with this: I was surprised.  Although Precinct Four has traditionally been the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to mishandling evidence, I hadn't heard about any new scandals involving them.  I knew they had lost some evidence during Hurricane Harvey, but I was pretty sure that all of the defense attorneys had already been notified on those affected cases.  If I, alone, had received seven notifications, this was a clear indication of a really widespread problem, right? So, I clicked on the the attachment to read what case was affected. The first thing I noticed when I read the attachment was that, although the defendant named in the attachment sounded vaguely familiar, I was pretty sure it wasn't a cas

I was very disappointed to learn last week that The Houston Press  was ending its printed editions and laying off almost all of its staff.  I had not seen that coming, but apparently the business clientele that traditionally advertised with The Press was the hardest hit by Hurricane Harvey.  The loss of advertising revenue caused them to shut their doors. Ever since I arrived in Houston for law school, I loved reading The Press .  It was a fun paper to read and the writing was great.  As a prosecutor, I often found myself disagreeing with some of the articles, but I had to appreciate the work that all of the writers did on their stories.  I also came to truly love The Press's  open contempt for the Houston Chronicle. Pound for pound, the writers for The Press  always seemed to get  the Criminal Justice System in Harris County, and writers like Meagan Flynn and Craig Malisow knew that the interesting issues couldn't be written up in a short article.  They took the time to g