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Our quarter-year of absence at the Texas Civil Rights Review has coincided with the electoral revolution led by Barack Obama, so we couldn’t be more pleased to have a picked a season during which little more needed to be said.

Yet the time of absence wasn’t chosen so much as it was delivered with a bundle of priorities that left not a spare minute to type in. At one point, it was only thanks to a delayed airplane that I was able to hammer out a fast note to a contributor. The competing priorities this past quarter were entirely welcomed, so worry not; our energies are well, our spirit intact.

In the short time I have to write tonight, I’d like to reflect upon what usually goes on here, and why we miss it.

The Texas Civil Rights Review was founded in 1997 as on online archive dedicated to racial equity in the Land Grant system of higher education in Texas, and, by proxy, across the USA. Thanks to that work in the 1990s some real progress was made for some real people. And as we look forward to Change, please remember Mr. President that equity in the Land Grant system is still possible, still worthy, and perhaps more than ever a timely theater for economic and democratic renewal of ourselves and our posterity.

After a few years of exile from Texas politics (perhaps not unrelated to our successes in the Land Grant establishment) we returned in 2003 with a hopping mad interest in what had happened to affirmative action policy, and we proudly outed a blue-ribbon report from a Land Grant college committee that recommended affirmative action in admissions. (We still like to call it integration, remember?)

As Summer turned to Fall in 2004 we covered the trial for public school funding in an Austin District Court, and documented the courageous struggle of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) to uphold the principles of equitable funding, especially for impoverished Hispanic children.

On Christmas Eve 2004 we posted our first of many letters from federal prisoner Ramsey Muniz. We still say it would be a righteous act to pardon Ramsey and set him free.

In the opening months of 2005 we covered the hearings that officially certified the election of Hubert Vo to the Texas House of Representatives. We followed up on the Vo hearings with a massive review of the hearing documents. (Rep. Vo has since been re-elected twice. In 2008 he won a comfortable 56 percent of the vote.)

In April of 2005 we reported on thousands of pages of documents that we reviewed at the office of the Texas Secretary of State regarding the construction of a statewide voter database that was built to satisfy the so-called Help America Vote Act (VAWA).

During the summer of 2006 we filed an open records request with the Texas Governor seeking documentation for the deployment of the Texas National Guard to the border with Mexico. We were told there were no documents. Later that year, we followed a rising flood of immigration issues that culminated in the federal roundup of several Palestinian families from the Dallas area who were cruelly treated regardless of age or pregnancy status.

In 2007 we let fly a few thousand words over the converging issues of immigration injustice in Texas, symbolized by the Hutto family prison and the border wall reflex. If Change means anything, it should make a difference on both of these issues.

Earlier this year we covered the federal harassment of Albanian refugee Rrustem Neza, who was finally released to live with this wife and children after a year of meaningless imprisonment at Haskell. And we reported on the shocking detention of Bujar Osmani who was nabbed by federal agents while taking a bathroom break at a law office.

As the summer of 2008 turned into record swelter, we reported the death, the federal documents, and the dreams of Riad Hamad, ebullient champion of Palestinian children.

In these stories and others, we have been very nearly alone in our commitment to documentation and detail. So yes, there was something to miss when we were absent during the Fall quarter of 2008. If you missed us, you weren’t alone. We kind of missed us too.

As for the future, we remain realistic. The amount of time devoted to the Texas Civil Rights Review these past five years will not be sustainable, but the reasons for this are good ones. Your editor has not given up or burned out. I’m just busy.

Whenever I do have a few spare hours, you’ll know it. I’m here. I keep my eyes open. I may be out of the office a lot, but I ain’t giving up the lease. — gm

Nick Braune
Mid-Valley Town Crier
by permission

Wouldn’t it be horrible to be 50 and have been in prison for the last 25 years, missing out on seeing your children mature and have children of their own?

Well, that is the story of Steven Phillips from Dallas, a new grandfather who was just freed. He had been accused of sexual assault and burglary in two different cases and convicted in two different trials. (Once the police nailed him for one, they charged him with another one.)

Phillips got 30-year sentences at both trials. While in prison he was then asked by the authorities if he would confess to nine other sexual assaults which fit the pattern, and hoping for some mercy if he cooperated, he confessed to them.

The Dallas police, 25 years ago, were so thrilled to be nailing Phillips for eleven cases of sexual assault that they didn’t pay attention to authorities in Kansas City who also had a suspect, one Sidney Goodyear. Because Phillips had been positively identified by Dallas victims, the police did not bother telling his lawyer about Goodyear and something quite important.

After the Kansas City police sent down a picture of Goodyear, the Dallas police had shown the picture to one of the victims, who said that Goodyear could be the rapist, but the police never told Phillips’ lawyer about the conflicting evidence.

Luckily, one of the cases in which Phillips was tried involved some stored material which could be DNA tested. When the tests were run a year ago, the evidence did not match Phillips’ DNA. But it did match Goodyear’s! It is now conceded by all that Goodyear was the serial rapist in Dallas and Kansas City.

Should we feel pleased that justice has finally been done and Phillips is home? Yes. Should we be pleased that the system has proven itself to work, that bad decisions of the past continue to be corrected? No. The system does not work. At least not well enough to deserve praise. There are millions in prison, but only rare cases, like Phillips’ case, have appropriate specimen material available for DNA testing. And the Steven Phillips case alone reflects three widespread and lingering problems.

First, our old nemesis: eye-witness misidentification. Some backward “red meat” prosecutors still dramatize eye-witness identification as a slam dunk. And juries fall for it. We now know that Phillips did not commit the eleven crimes, but ten witnesses identified him! The national Innocence Project which defended Phillips said in its press release, “It is impossible to know [twenty five years later] how those identification procedures were conducted or how certain the victims were in their identifications. In addition, police circulated Phillips’ name and biographical information widely in the media before most of the victims identified him — this made their identifications highly unreliable.”

Most overturned convictions in Texas have fit the Phillips pattern. Of the 32 total DNA exonerations in Texas — where there is no doubt the accused were innocent — 25 of those cases involved eyewitness identification, sometimes from multiple witnesses.

The Phillips case reflected a second pattern: overzealous prosecutors who ignore conflicting evidence. Dallas alone has had 15 DNA exonerations, and the new prosecutor there has been working with the Innocence Project to undo the damage of a ferocious and racist predecessor. (Texas Monthly, Sept. 2007)

A third pattern: plea bargainings and false confessions. The Phillips case was really bizarre: Although Phillips did not confess to the two crimes he was tried for, the prosecutor bargained him into confessing to nine other ones. Because we have the Innocence Project statistics now, we know a lot more about confessions. Of the 200 people convicted whose innocence has subsequently been completely established by DNA tests, one in four had confessed!

Why so many confessions? Well, interrogation has become a science. (Google “Reid Technique” and you will cringe.) Interrogators are taught techniques like standing too close to you, controlling your space, cutting you off anytime you start to declare your innocence. Interrogators can lie to you legally, make up evidence against you; they can yell at you, insult you, keep you a long time, and suddenly turn friendly and “understanding.” The spare interrogation room is designed scientifically to keep you off balance, while the experts — they practice the techniques and get good at them — list the things you might be charged with.

Emily Horowitz, a criminal justice professor, has a nice piece on false confessions in the latest Counterpunch; she mentions people who have become depressed, abject and “dependent” in a crisis situation. They are nervous wrecks before they are interrogated, and they are no match for scientific accusers. “Just admit you made a mistake, and maybe we can go easy on you,” can be a very enticing line at just the right moment.

Horowitz continues: “According to a raft of social science and psychology research done over the past two decades, techniques like these [check the now common “Reid Technique”] are especially likely to produce false confessions when used on juveniles, the mentally ill, the poorly schooled, immigrants, and those with impaired cognition.” (There is also some evidence that those who have been sexually abused when they were youth are quite susceptible to making false confessions, since part of their survival mechanism was to blame themselves rather than those they admired.)

Steven Phillips, now 50 years old, is fully exonerated now, and we should be joyous. But the current system of vigorous police work and prosecution is still dangerous to society, and we have a lot more work to do.

On Sunday, December 7, at 4 p.m. a peaceful coalition of individuals and groups opposing Willliamson County’s participation in the detention of asylum seekers will gather on the Williamson County Courthouse steps in downtown Georgetown.

Although federal law requires the “least restrictive setting possible” for immigrant families, in 2006 Williamson County contracted with Corrections Corporation of America, a private for-profit prison company, to incarcerate non-criminal women and children in the T. Don Hutto detention facility in Taylor. The contracts between ICE, Williamson County, and CCA are up for renewal in January.

Please help us show Williamson County, Homeland Security, and the private prison industry that imprisoning innocent children will no longer be tolerated in the United States of America.

We will meet in the parking lot on Austin Ave. between 4th and 5th Streets in Georgetown at 3:30 p.m. and walk 3 blocks to the County Courthouse to hear community leaders speak in support of alternatives to the incarceration of families awaiting asylum or immigration hearings.

There are currently 385 detainees in T. Don Hutto including 92 children. As a result of the lawsuits brought by ACLU and the UT School of Law Immigration Clinic, detainees are now allowed to wear their own clothing. Thanks to a recent intervention by the UT School of Law Immigration Clinic, ICE has also agreed to allow detainees to use phone cards given to them rather than having to buy the cards through CCA.

If you would like to bring a gift to the vigil, suggestions include new toys in their original packaging, books, music players, music, lotions, shampoos, candy, phone cards, and clothing such as sweaters and warm socks.

For further information or to sign up to speak, please contact Sherry Dana at sdana787@gmail.com. 512-868-5181

Nick Braune
Mid-Valley Town
Crier
by permission

I admittedly was caught off guard twice over the last week or so. Distracted by the gorgeous fanfare of the international Olympics, I did not expect Georgia to brazenly invade Ossetia. But another thing caught me off guard, right here in Hidalgo County: the conviction of Christopher Hughes.

Christopher’s conviction was surprising, and depressing. First, he was convicted of killing his mom and got 45 years; secondly, he was 16 when the crime was committed. I think 45 years in prison for something one does at 16 is excessive, nuts, but I admit I still live in the past, when there were proud juvenile courts and some commitment to saving youth from the adult criminal justice system. I know. I live in the years of Jane Addams and the advent of social work, not the fiercely retributive, zero-tolerance, sock-‘em world we live in now.

Although often a maverick, I am mainstream enough to condemn killing. And if someone kills his mom, I think the state should step in and take appropriate action. But Christopher was not an adult criminal, despite the prosecutor declaring him one; this was a kid in a very troubled moment in his teen years. A father figure in Christopher’s life died of cancer in February, 2007. He was the husband of Laura Doyle, the teen’s mom, and within months Christopher was in police custody.

The Monitor reported, “In the months after [the father’s] death, the relationship of Laura Doyle and her son quickly grew volatile. Deputies responded to several domestic violence calls at the trailer home they shared, where the sheriffs found mother and son fighting about his drug use and past attempts to steal a family car. In March, Laura Doyle received two years of probation for felony drug possession. She had previously been convicted of reckless conduct, resisting arrest and unlawfully carrying a weapon.”

February and March must have been insane months for Christopher. Let me play Jane Addams, the founder of modern social work and of the now fast-disintegrating juvenile justice system: Where was our state and the help from the brave authorities during those two months? It isn’t like Hidalgo County didn’t know…authorities responded to “several domestic violence calls” during that time. Christopher was 16 and his father was dead and his mother was wacko and maybe scary, and now Hidalgo County, which didn’t intervene properly with social workers, feels righteous giving the kid a “fair trial” and 45 years in lock-up, reminding everyone not to kill their emotionally disturbed mothers.

Since I started this column by saying I was surprised by things recently, readers might ask why I was surprised by the jury’s verdict. Didn’t child advocate Jane Addams die in 1935? Well, here’s more on the conviction. Toward the trial’s conclusion — I followed the excellent reporting from The Monitor’s Jeremy Roebuck — it became obvious that the prosecution’s case was disintegrating. First, there was no physical evidence against the kid, and the body had decayed badly before being found.

Secondly, Christopher’s lawyer made a brilliant case that the sheriff’s deputies were virtually fixated on Christopher, pressuring teen friends to testify against him. Several friends testified that the deputies coaxed them for evidence against Christopher, and they said that things they told the deputies were massaged in the written reports. “They came at me like they were trying to scare me,” said Christopher’s best friend. “Like I had done something wrong.” (The Monitor, August 8th)

Thirdly, the sheriffs and prosecutors dropped to the bottom of the barrel and used a jail house snitch against Christopher. (The national Innocence Project — see their site — claims this jailhouse snitch practice has contributed to many false convictions.)

A convicted killer being held in the juvenile center testified that he had heard Christopher admit to the murder. This sort of evidence is unacceptable and should be inadmissible, and the prosecution should lose the case for trying to sway a jury with it. A 16-year-old like Christopher is expected to act tough in jail. Part of surviving there is to say you are a killer. Jailhouse talk, reported by a convicted teenage murderer, is hardly a “confession.”

Fourthly, The Monitor reported other possible suspects: Laura Doyle had told police before her death that she feared someone was “watching” her and “breaking in.” Also a 22-year-old convicted drug dealer, who once sold drugs to her, was found with a gun which might have been the weapon used. And Christopher’s older half-brother, who “discovered” the corpse, took pictures of it and called friends before calling the police.

I was surprised…This case had “reasonable doubts” stamped all over the package. And another journalist told me that two “alternate jurors,” (back-ups who watched the whole trial) said they too were surprised.