The Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee meets today and several bills are on the agenda that may interest Grits readers.First, a number of exonerees are coming into town to testify for Rep. Ruth Jones McLendon's HB 166 which would create an innocence commission to study the causes of false convictions and issue recommendations on how to prevent them. This always makes for dramatic testimony and should be the highlight of the hearing. My colleague Cory Session, the half brother of Timothy Cole, who famously was posthumously exonerated, will be testifying on behalf of the Innocence Project of Texas.Rep. Jim Murphy's HB 884 seems problematic to me, reducing notice for government to sell off property seized from people arrested for Class C misdemeanors. Requiring notice before the state sells off your seized property seems perfectly reasonable and hardly imposes as great a burden on the state as does the loss of property for the arrestee.Rep. Eddie Lucio III's HB 281 would require courts to allow an oral victim impact statement from immediate family members of deceased peace officers at the time the state enters into a plea bargain if the officer died from the defendant's alleged criminal conduct. The bill would allow those family members to be cross examined, let the defense comment on their statement, and even present additional testimony to attack factual inaccuracies. This bothers me for several reasons. First, an immediate family member can already submit a written impact statement so the bill is redundant and unnecessary. Second, why only police officers? If you're going to do it, why not for everybody? The answer is because if you do it for everybody it would gum up the process. By the time a plea deal is presented to the court, the die has been cast. The only purpose for allowing it would be to convince the judge to un-do the deal, dragging out the process and potentially sending the case to trial. Finally, we frequently hear victim families in death cases claim the process "re-victimizes" them, so putting them in a position where a defense attorney gets to attack their credibility and veracity may not have the cathartic effect victim impact statements are supposed to provide.HB 516 by House Appropriations Chairman Jim Pitts would allow judges to issue warrants for DWI blood draws outside their own jurisdiction, letting them issue warrants in contiguous counties. IMO, if they're going to do this, it should only be for rural counties with very small populations. There's no good reason larger jurisdictions shouldn't simply make their judges available if they want to do blood draw warrants.Those aren't the only items on the agenda but they're the ones that jumped out at me. Expect these agendas to grow longer as the session wears on.
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