Don’t miss this Chuck Lindell/Austin American Statesman that reports on the bizarre case of Jimmy Lee Page, a man who was acquitted of murder twenty years ago, but was never released from prison:

Now 52, Page is in prison today because state officials revoked his parole ó trumping the juryís verdict with their own finding of guilt. Itís a common practice. Last year, 91 Texas parolees were returned to prison after being charged with a new crime, even though the charges against them were later dropped or they were acquitted in court.
Bound by looser rules than a court of law, parole officials reached their verdict on Page after hearing testimony from only one witness, a police detective who declares Page is ìguilty as homemade sin.î In the years since, he was denied parole a dozen times, most recently in early 2006.

Page is certainly no saint. He was convicted of murder in 1975 and sentenced to life in prison, but he was paroled on that conviction after eleven years. Maybe he still ought to be serving time for that murder. However, he is serving time for a crime for which he was acquitted. That’s wrong.
Lindell goes on to address the lax parole hearing process, noting that the system gives undertrained and unprepared people mere moments to look at a case before making a decision and moving on to the next one. In such an environment, maintaining the status quo becomes the most convenient outcome. Constitutional guarantees such as due process, confrontation of witnesses, and a reasonably competent defense are mere afterthoughts.
This looks to me like a process that is ripe for a Constitutional challenge.