Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center

There were a couple of interesting things of note in this article  about the Darius Lewis case by Nicole Hensley in yesterday's Chronicle  that I thought were worth mentioning . . . Spoiler Alert:  it isn't really up to the prosecutor to decide whether or not a client is indigent enough to qualify for appointed counsel unless he or she is doubling as the judge or county auditor.   Also, when did prosecutors start sharing juvenile  criminal history?

I have always said that the best thing about working in the Harris County Criminal Justice World is that it provides us the opportunity to walk amongst giants.  Harris County boasts some of the most famous names in the history of Texas Criminal Justice:  Percy Foreman, Racehorse Haynes, Dick DeGuerin, Rusty Hardin, Kelly Siegler, Johnny Holmes, and Dan Cogdell, to name a few.  As impressive as all of those names are and the large volume of famous cases associated with them all, the name and face that I always though of when I spoke of giants was retired Harris County District Attorney's Office Bureau Chief Lyn McClellan. Lyn passed away this morning after a lengthy illness. Lyn was a career prosecutor who had been at the Harris County District Attorney's Office for at least twenty or twenty-five years before I started there in 1999.  He retired in November 2008, shortly before I headed out the door.  I wrote this post about him back on the occasion of his retirement. He was an

 So, as evidenced by the fact that I haven't written a blog post in several months, I don't have a lot of time to sit down and blog like I used.  That's not a bad thing.  In addition to having a busier work schedule over the past few years, keeping up with my kids' activities pretty much has me on the go all day long. There have been plenty of times that I've seen a topic that I wanted to do a blog post on (like, say for instance, my thoughts on the November elections) but by the time I have time to sit around and actually write  the blog post, its already become old news (like, say for instance, my thoughts on the November elections). I still love talking about the CJC and all of the things going on in it.  I just need to find a way to talk about it that doesn't involve hours of writing. So, I discovered this little-known medium called TikTok that nobody has ever heard of and decided that it really needed a pudgy bald guy to share his thoughts on a relatively o