QUESTIONS TO ASK DA CANDIDATES

It Is Time to Debate Policies, Not Personalities

For the first time in many years, the voters in Harris County will
have real choices in the race for district attorney. Republicans will
have a contested primary with experienced candidates, Jim Leitner and
Kelly Seigler, as well as Houston police Capt. Doug Perry and former
Judge Pat Lykos. The winner of that race will have to face former HPD
Police Chief Clarence Bradford on the Democratic ticket. Perhaps now
we can, or at least should, finally focus on the actual day-to-day
policies of this office, rather than the personal lives of its recent
occupant. Here are questions to ask these candidates to see if voters
can support more of the same or real change.

* Will the district attorney's office begin to work to find serious
alternatives to help the mentally ill who wind up in district and
county courts?

Yes, there is already a mental health court in place, thanks to the
work of some dedicated district court judges, defense attorneys and,
yes, assistant district attorneys. The question for the new
candidates is this: Will they support continuing and expanding
post-trial and pretrial alternatives for those charged in our system
who are mentally ill?

Yes, I am asking about actually diverting folks prior to trial as an
alternative to incarceration or permanent destruction of their
records when the accused have a demonstrated need for and a prior
history of psychiatric disorder. Right now there is a limited
opportunity for those accused of nonviolent crimes to have supervised
probation and community supervision with a final judgment against
them. There are only a limited set of chances for this due to court
docket size limitations.

Although under law some deferred adjudications can be sealed after
successful completion of community supervision, it is not available
in all crimes and then not available until some years afterward. By
the sheriff's own estimates, the Harris County jail houses up to
1,400 inmates with diagnosed mental illness on any given day. Can't
we do better for folks whose illness is their main problem?

* Will the district attorney's office continue to prosecute minor
drug cases with such vehemence, clogging our dockets and wasting
resources and jail space?

Right now, the DA's office brings thousands of state jail felony
crack cocaine cases each month. These are the so-called "residue"
cases, which typically involve one person caught with a crack pipe on
their person and whose pipe tests positive for the remnants of
cocaine (which is smoked in its "crack" form). The Supreme Court
recently permitted federal judges to be lenient and take the extreme
imbalance in federal court sentencing guidelines for crack into
consideration when they hand down sentences. To my knowledge, Dallas
does not even prosecute these types of crimes, simply because they
require the same amount of time and lab tests as other, more serious
dealer-oriented crimes.

Many assistant district attorneys would argue that in some cases
these charges permit them to take violent offenders off the street,
and that in others where a parent uses around their children it
permits them to intervene. In some cases they would be right, but in
most criminal defense lawyers' experience, the users of crack cocaine
are dangerous to one person, themselves.

Putting them behind bars does not rehabilitate them. Such action
merely destroys their life with a felony conviction and does little
to help them end their addictive habit. The recent addition of a drug
court among felony district courts is a welcome innovation in seeking
to treat, not punish offenders, but will the new DA support this?
Expand it? Remove their cooperation and effectively sabotage it?

The public does not know the answer to this, but someone ought to ask
these candidates.

* Will the new DA continue to support the serious and thorough review
of the HPD lab fiasco?

In fairness to Chuck Rosenthal, he has tried his best to clean this
ugly (and it keeps getting uglier) mess.

While we could and did disagree about methods, he has devoted
considerable funds, resources and some of his best personnel to
helping review the huge amount of cases where testing was done
incorrectly, not done at all or simply falsified. The scandals
continue; not only do we have cases like Josiah Sutton, a wrongfully
convicted man, but now we have learned that some technicians have
recently cheated on their proficiency exams!

There is much still to be done. Hundreds of cases are awaiting review
even now. The DA's office did not cause this mess. However, the
public's confidence in the truth of everything from forensic DNA
tests to drug testing to ballistics has been sufficiently shaken by
this scandal that the next DA can fairly be asked what they intend to
keep doing about it.

* When will we see the return of genuine second chances for
first-time offenders?

Right now an average young first-time offender has a better chance of
being picked up for the space program than he or she does of having
the district attorney's office agree to what is called a "pretrial diversion."

This is a type of community supervision in which the DA agrees that,
if a person completes his or her terms and conditions of supervision,
they can expunge their record and have no criminal history. This is a
godsend to many youthful offenders who, due to a minor crime or drug
possession, might well have the rest of their lives badly damaged by
a single mistake. (Stop and think about how many breaks you and I
caught when we were younger and made mistakes. Wouldn't you want your
kids to get the same chance?) Harris County has not permitted this on
any significant scale in years.

Since we have just spent a few lurid weeks learning that apparently
even grown lawyers elected to public office make mistakes, shouldn't
we all demand a bit more humanity from our elected DA toward others?

* How often and when should the death penalty be sought, and at what cost?

I am not going to rehash the arguments for or against the penalty
itself. Nor do I believe that Texas will stop using this punishment
any time soon. I am simply going to ask this question: Couldn't the
vast amount of prosecutorial and county resources now expended
against a tiny handful of cases be better used?

Seriously, just think about it. It costs millions to try, appeal,
hold and execute those selected for death. Those millions come
largely from the county budget, i.e. our taxes. If other counties
such as Bexar, Dallas and Travis can exist without spending quite so
much on death cases as Harris County, even allowing for the
differences in population, then what are we doing wrong? Apparently
they are able to fight crime without accounting for the majority of
the nation's executions.

Shouldn't the taxpayers get a better use of their dollar? Remember
that this is the office that spent more than $100,000 to bring in a
psychiatric "expert" against Andrea Yates in her first trial, in
which the DA's office sought death on charges stemming from the
drowning deaths of her children. That "expert" testimony was the
reason the case was overturned on appeal, forcing them to do it again!

Those millions could be spent on drug courts, gang courts, mental
health courts, well, take your pick. The DA has gotten a free pass on
this question for along time, and that pass should expire this election.

There are other questions to ask as well:

Why are there so few minority assistant district attorneys in
positions of authority? Has there been a tolerance of discrimination
in jury selection and what does the prospective new DA propose to do about it?

And why does the Harris County district attorney's office appellate
division still function as the de facto legal adviser to many of the
district court judges, and shouldn't that stop? After all, they are
supposed to listen to both sides. Did you know that when a person
gets arrested, they are taken before a supposedly neutral magistrate
to be given their rights and have bond set? Why is it then that only
the ADAs get to be present and advise magistrates when this happens?
Shouldn't a "neutral" magistrate either be by themselves or have both
an ADA and a defense attorney present when those decisions are made?

I don't care about personalties so much. I would, just once, like
someone to answer for the policies of the Harris County district
attorney's office. This is a rare moment for that to actually happen.
Don't you think we all deserve some answers?