The US Supreme Court’s strained relationship with Texas and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals over death penalty cases — which was previously discussed here and here — is back in the news as the high court again takes up the case of LaRoyce L. Smith, who was convicted and sentenced to die for the murder of a former co-worker. The Supreme Court overturned the sentence in 2004, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals promptly reinstated the conviction on the ground that the constitutional error that the Supreme Court had identified was harmless. The main issue in the second appeal is whether the Court of Criminal Appeal’s response was an appropriate one to the Supreme Court’s previous mandate in the case.
As the article points out, the recent history of capital punishment in the United States is inextricably tied to capital punishment in Texas, where 380 prisoners have been put to death since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. That number is far more than any other state — Virginia is second with 98.
Meanwhile, this Ralph Blumenthal/NY Times story reports on a case that reflects the main reason why I oppose the death penalty (previous posts here, here and here) — a 50 year-old Dallas black man being exonerated by DNA evidence after serving nearly half his life in prison after being wrongfully convicted of rape. It is the 12th such case in Dallas County alone of a conviction being overturned by DNA evidence since 2001.
Finally, sentencing expert Doug Berman provides this post and related links explaining why the Supreme Court’s fixation on death penalty cases is not such a good thing.

I’ve written frequently about how a mob mentality took hold in a case familiar to Houstonians and led to a grave injustice for a large number of businesspersons, particularly two men and their families (examples here, here and here). The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz examines in this OpinionJournal op-ed how a similar dynamic resulted in the demonization of several young men in what will now forever be known as the Duke lacrosse team case. Rabinowitz analogizes the Duke students’ case to that of the phony child-abuse cases that she has previously exposed, but the dynamic is the same in many high-profile cases in which certain elements of the government, media and the public jump to a conclusion about guilt when a reasoned, objective and deliberate examination of the facts of the case would result in a far different and more nuanced conclusion. Larry Ribstein and the WSJ’s ($) Holman Jenkins have masterfully presented how the same dynamic has led to the unnecessary destruction of careers and lives in connection with the media-inspired scandal regarding the widespread policy of backdating options as a means of compensating corporate personnel (Larry analyzes today’s news of the newly-reported criminal investigation of Apple here). In the Duke lacrosse team case, it is particularly ironic that many in the media and on Duke’s faculty were enablers of abusive, dishonest law enforcement and prosecution tactics that are far more often used in cases against minorities that those enablers would decry. They now share responsibility for the continued use of such tactics long after the spotlight on the Duke lacrosse team case has moved on to the next fixation of the mob.

Awhile back, this post noted a Harris County criminal district judge who contributes to the chronically over-crowded Harris County jail by requiring jail time for any defendant convicted of a drug offense, no matter how inconsequential.
Now, another Harris County criminal judge is being called on carpet for his rather odd manner of administering justice. This Chronicle article reports that Harris County Criminal Court at Law No. 3 Judge Donald Jackson ordered more than a dozen criminal defendants who were late to court earlier this week to enter a guilty plea or spend the night in jail:

Jackson, who presides over County Criminal Court No. 3, ordered 16 people accused of misdemeanor crimes to sit in the jury box, told them that they were in custody and that their bonds were being revoked and raised, according to several Houston attorneys.
Jackson also told the defendants they would have to stay in jail overnight unless they agreed to plea bargain ó essentially to enter guilty pleas, the attorneys said. [. . .]
Houston attorney Kyle Vance, whose client was about 20 minutes late to court, said the man was “trying to get out of jail” Wednesday afternoon.
Vance said his client is facing a first-time charge of driving while intoxicated and had posted a $500 bond. Jackson raised his client’s bail to $2,500, Vance said.
“I was out of the courtroom for just a minute, and I asked the clerk, ‘Is their bond being revoked?’ And she said, ‘Both. It has been revoked and raised, unless you plea bargain.’ ”
Right after that, Vance said, another defendant entered a plea bargain. “And the judge said the revocation has been withdrawn since he pled.”

To make matters worse, the Harris County Criminal Justice building is a tough slog most mornings, with long lines at the x-ray machines slowing down traffic. The ACLU and the Harris County Criminal Defense Lawyers Association are looking into Judge Jackson’s behavior. Sounds as if it’s about time that the State Board of Judicial Conduct and Harris County voters did, too.

Awhile back, this post noted the sad case of Louis Conradt, Jr, the Terrell, Texas prosecutor who killed himself late last year as the police were knocking on his door to arrest him. Conradt’s arrest was a part of a sting operation set up by Perverted Justice, the group that NBC Dateline has adopted as a highly profitable vehicle for generating mass anxiety about child sexual offenders. A Dateline NBC camera crew was outside Conradt’s house when he killed himself.
As this recent Allen Salkin/NY Times article notes, this arrangement has been mutually profitable for Perverted Justice and NBC. Perverted Justice receives $70,000 for every hour of Dateline content, while Dateline uses the 9 million or so viewers per pedophile episode to generate more ad revenue (Dateline nets only 7 million viewers for non-Pedo Dateline episodes). Inasmuch as business is good, Dateline already has six more Pedo-Dateline episodes in the pipeline for 2007.
In this insightful post, Dan Filler over at Concurring Opinions wonders about the efficacy of the Dateline-Perverted Justice venture and where it is leading us:

I leave to the Times article, and the various policy advocates, a discussion of the utility of this joint project. Will it reduce internet child abuse? Hard to know. Will it cause innocent people to suffer? Unclear. But it is time that we come to understand that the trade in fetishized fetishes is if nothing else weird and discomforting. And perhaps – just perhaps – it twists our own culture in exactly the direction we most abhor.