Mercy

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an interview that I did with thriller writer David Lindsey. If you missed it, click here to learn about the man and his writing life.

At the time I didn't recommend one of his books, which I normally do on Thriller Thursday. I refrained for two reasons: 1. I hadn't finished the one I was reading, and 2. I wanted a second chance to plug his work (for those who still haven't read the interview, hint hint, he's not only an excellent writer, but a very nice man).

But here we are, two weeks later and I present to you MERCY. I won't say much more, just that I agree with all the accolades heaped upon this book. I will also add that my judge, Mike Lynch, just finished THE RULES OF SILENCE, which I plan to read next (though I found out today that his court coordinator and the bailiff are ahead of me in line to get the book).

Trial this week

147TH JUDICIAL DISTRICT/ JUDGE FLOWERS

DEFENDANT: ROBERT SHELBY

OFFENSE: INJURY TO CHILD

PROSECUTORS: ROB DRUMMOND and ANNA LEE MCNELIS

DEF. ATTORNEY: JIM SAWYER

167TH JUDICIAL DISTRICT/ JUDGE LYNCH

DEFENDANT: JOHN DALTON

OFFENSE: SEXUAL ASSAULT

PROSECUTORS: EFRAIN DE LAFUENTE and KELSEY MCKAY

DEF. ATTORNEY: GERRY MORRIS

331ST JUDICIAL DISTRICT/ JUDGE PERKINS

DEFENDANT: MILTON GOBERT

OFFENSE: CAPITAL MURDER

PROSECUTORS: ALLISON WETZEL and GARY COBB

DEF. ATTORNEY: KENT ANSCHUTZ and LEONARD MARTINEZ

DISPOSITION: TRIAL ONGOING, PUNISHMENT PHASE

Wait, what?

My trusty Tuesday guest blogger, known only as The Assistant, has this to say:

One of the common bits of gallows humor among prosecutors is “Thank God for dumb criminals, they’re the ones that keep us employed.” Bank robbers have been known to write stick-up notes on their own deposit slips. DWI defendants commonly tell police officers “I’m too drunk to do those sobriety test thingys.” Still, there are the occasional police reports that stop me dead in my tracks and make me wonder- “Wait. What the hell is going on here?” My very first trial was like that. The defendant was charged with Theft of Property, $50 - $500. Not such an unusual charge, in and of itself. But…

About 1 AM, a DPS Trooper happens to be driving on one of our smaller state highways just outside the city limits, when he sees a van stopped in the bar ditch with someone standing next to it. Thinking someone’s broken down late at night, he pulls over to help. As he stops, someone wearing camouflage runs away from the van, across a pasture, into the brush, and disappears. A woman standing by the van stays put, caught in the act of loading a 40 pound bag of dog food into the van. There’s one bag of dog food already in her van, one at her feet, 8 more by the fence line, and 4 more in the bed of a pickup. A county owned pickup, parked on the wrong side of the fence line. The Trooper detains the woman, and his partner follows the tire tracks from the pickup into the field, through some brush, across a ditch, through a now-broken fence and… into the yard of the county dog pound.

Wait, what?

The tire tracks lead to the back door of the dog pound, which has been forced open. There are a few other pickups matching the county truck that are parked in a row at the end of the yard. A row with an empty parking spot. None of this makes a damn bit of sense to the Trooper, but it’s now obvious that the truck was stolen, loaded up with dog food, driven through a fence, through a pasture, through some brush, along the bar ditch, and to the woman waiting with her van to load up the dog food. But wait! The dog pound just installed security cameras, surely that will explain what’s going on!

Camera 1, outside the building, records nothing but stars after the perp pushes it up to the heavens with a broom handle. Camera 2 records nothing after the perp *breaks* it with a broom handle. Camera 3 is inside the building, and well hidden. It records someone dressed up like a ninja, complete with headscarf, crouching on his heels, and crab walking through the building between the cages. Then he tries to steal a dog. Well, he tries to steal a pit bull while crouched down, holding a handful of dog food. Although he escapes with his hands, he is unsuccessful. Then he crawls away, never to be seen again. To this day I still have NO idea who that guy was.

The woman that gets arrested for theft of dog food sure isn’t telling either. In fact, despite being caught literally holding the bag, she pleads not guilty and goes to a bench trial. After the judge delivers her guilty verdict I find out why, as defense attorney discloses that she’s on felony parole for drug trafficking. So for her role in the great dog-food caper of 2009, the defendant spends 60 days in jail as a guest of our county, and 7 year in jail courtesy of federal parole revocation.

Sleep well, Texans. Your dog food is safe tonight.

Scouring the world for criminal news

We'll start Down Under... not the big Down Under with the shrimp on the barbie, but the small one that comes in two parts and has little kids who get sent to jail cells for pulling girl's hair.

Now back home, where Texas spring breakers will be breaking from tradition, if the cops have anything to do with it: No more Mexico!

Something fishy about this story: a heavy-set woman (presumably not very fast moving then) steals bags of coffee from a donut shop. . . but no cop is on scene to nab her? As if. . . !

I suppose if you have to have a burglar, you want one who breaks in just to eat and take a shower. What you don't want is to show up during the shower part. (Notice how happy he looks to be in clean prison scrubs.)

If you new neighbor claims to be from the planet Zambodia and says is 333 years old, you might even be relieved when the weirdest he gets is to hang women's underwear and pile up sand outside his house. I'm not even sure these things are illegal. Except being here from Zambodia without a proper visa.

I'll just have a cup of coffee, please. No, I mean it: coffee not "coffee."

Ask, and ye shall receive.

Amid the criminal news, and because this is a blog where writing is routinely honored, we find an example of illiteracy-related ironic-ness: a man who writes like an alien holding a dictionary, and apparently reads like an alien holding a dictionary upside-down. Not that I'm Shakespeare, but then I'm also not responsible for edumacating 90,000 children.

I have to believe that the brave men and women of law enforcement, with whom I work every day, are just as brave as the cops in Germany who face all manner of deadly (and heavenly?!) weapons in the course of duty:
"Daringly, and with the occupier's permission, one of the officers opened the drawer of a wardrobe where the noise was coming from. Underneath some clothes he found a very personal, battery-operated object which had obviously switched itself on... The tenant's face abruptly changed color."
My first thought (okay, second): Really? It switched itself on?

And finally, the escaping inmate who says, "Nyah-nyah, you can't catch me. . . . [pause for splashing sound]. . . Help me! Help me! I'm sinking!!"

Happy Monday all!

What do we DO?

Following up from The Assistant's wonderful post yesterday, I want to ask a question and invite the same kind of thoughtful response that my fellow blogger Grits for Breakfast gave in his comments.

Here's the comment that provoked the discussion was this:

"a criminal does not endanger society in the same way if he is isolated from it ... there is no surer way to take a habitual DWI offender off the road than to deprive them of their liberty."

Grits wrote an excellent response, which you can see here in full, but I think can be summarized by this:

"The practice of punishing DWI with no victim harshly (I'm guessing without any treatment while in jail) while the violent offender gets a lighter sentence seems like a perversion of priorities, with all respect."

Which got me thinking. I agree with so many of the positions taken by Grits, I really do, which may be surprising to some but not on this one. I hope others will chime in but my take on this specific issue is that sometimes people will simply refuse to admit they have a problem, refuse to submit to treatment, refuse to abide by the law.

I had a trial last year. DWI. It was the defendant's 5th or 6th conviction, I don't remember exactly. I do remember that he committed the offense while on parole for a 25 year sentence for DWI. He'd gotten out just a few months earlier and was at it again.

Thing is, he'd been on probation, he'd been given treatment, and he was still at it. More shocking to me was his attitude. He testified during trial, admitting that he'd been drinking, had taken vicodin, and was on his way to buy more beer to take back to his friends house (and then later drive home). He also admitted that for other people, mixing alcohol and prescription drugs was a bad idea and made them unsafe. Just not for him. He simply refused to see that he'd done anything wrong. And when he got the minimum, another 25 year sentence, he looked shocked.

So a couple of points, or questions:

1. What is the criminal justice system supposed to do with someone like that? Just slap his wrists and send back out on the road to keep drinking and driving until he kills someone, and then punish him? No thanks. As my trusty Assistant the new father points out, we have a duty to protect those around us. Is it a waste of his life that he goes to prison? Sure, absolutely. Is it anyone's fault but his own? No.

2. More of a point than a question, and I don't mean this to come across as patronizing so forgive me if it does: but I think many people who understand the theories of criminal justice and have absolutely the best intentions, bu who don't work in the system, don't get bitten by the reality sometimes. I have moved to the right since doing this job, a realignment I call it (my wife calls it treacherous, I think!). But take defendant above: what all the pro-treatment, repeat-the-probation folks don't get is that you can be an alcoholic and not be a danger to others, not break the law repeated times while risking others' lives. This guy wasn't being punished for drinking, or even being an alcoholic. He was being punished for driving his vehicle while drinking. An avoidable behavior that he has control over.

Ultimately, Grits is right that our resources are not always spent where they should be. And he's right that locking this dude up for 25 years is out of proportion to the crime itself, when that crime is looked at in isolation.

But the question remains: what do you do with someone like that?

Prison, probation, perspective

It's Tuesday, so another post from our weekly regular, known only as The Assistant:

The first post I read at D.A. Confidential was “What Exactly is Probation?” The questions of what probation is, what it does, what it should do, and who’s eligible are central to understanding what a criminal justice system should be. There are several reasons that people have restrictions placed on their liberty through prosecution- to reform behavior, to make victims whole, to prevent repeat offending, or to keep the rest of the community safe. Sometimes, the only way to keep everyone else safe is to isolate an offender from society.

How our justice system deals with incarceration is a source of great philosophical disagreement that I cannot hope to resolve. It has been debated since before the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham drew his first sketches for the Panopticon. Incarceration has been justified as societal retribution, an opportunity for reform through moral punishment, and a deterrent cost under an economic model of crime. None of these, however, are as important as the fact that a criminal does not endanger society in the same way if he is isolated from it. Prisoners may always escape from the most austere incarceration, but there is no surer way to take a habitual DWI offender off the road than to deprive them of their liberty.

Incarceration should not be taken lightly. It is expensive for the state. It carries drastic consequences for the offender. Victims are not made whole and offenders are deprived of a chance to provide for themselves and their families. And believe it or not, but many of us who prosecute find that there is a psychic cost to sentencing people to jail. I would enjoy nothing more than waking up tomorrow morning and finding that my job was completely unnecessary. But it is necessary, and this past month has only complicated my personal views regarding societal seclusion through incarceration.

Last month, my son was born. My first child. My son. There isn’t a moment that I spend at work that I’m not thinking about him. I am not intimidated or concerned by violent and dangerous defendants. I’m a solidly built guy, participate in combat sports, and drive defensively. I can take care of myself. But my son cannot. My son. He needs me to protect him, and sometimes the only way that I can protect him is to make sure that a drunk driver doesn’t get behind the wheel for 180 days. Or 365 days. Or has the most stringent probation conditions that I can come up with. I have a responsibility to protect him, just as I had a responsibility to the two children who watched their father get beaten by two strangers while he stood beside the family car. Those defendants both received probation instead of jail so that they could pay restitution for medical bills. I wonder every day if that was the right thing. I may never know.

I make no claim of moral clarity or certitude. I’ve second guessed every single exercise of prosecutorial discretion since he was born. I’m not the only one with a son. One father came to me in the hall last week wanting to know about *his* son. I had to tell him that the judge had rejected the plea bargain recommendation and his son was spending three more months in jail. That father just wanted his son to come home. I watched a mother sit with her son in the hallway for five minutes while we waited on the jail transport van to take him back. She had driven four hours for the hearing just to have those five minutes. I’ve had defendants show me photos of their son while sitting in my office not because they were trying to garner sympathy, but because they were *proud*. Every player in this whole system was someone’s child, and we were all once as vulnerable as my son is now.

So where do we go from here? I don’t know. I’ll continue to go to work every day and try to do the best that I can to see that justice is done. Sometimes a defendant goes to jail. Sometimes a defendant receives probation. Sometimes a case is dismissed. The only thing that I do know is that every moment I will be thinking about my son.

Trials this week

Just one, but a big one:

331ST JUDICIAL DISTRICT/ JUDGE PERKINS

DEFENDANT: MILTON GOBERT
OFFENSE: CAPITAL MURDER
PROSECUTORS: ALLISON WETZEL and GARY COBB
DEF. ATTORNEYS: KENT ANSCHUTZ and LEONARD MARTINEZ

DISPOSITION: TRIAL ONGOING