Unlike many other areas of criminal law, Evans says, car crashes do not lend themselves to "bright-line rules." "Because you can always come up with an exception to that rule," she says. "I don't think you can say, 'You must have this number of acts of negligence,' or 'This number of miles over the speed limit is the bright-line rule.' This sort of case just doesn't lend itself to that. That's why the judgment decision of the people making those charging decisions is so important — because you are protecting both the rights of the victims and their families, but you are also doing justice by the potential suspects in the case as well."
According to former Harris County assistant district attorney Murray Newman, the problem with criminally negligent homicide cases is that the word "negligent" implies an "accident."
Chris Curry
Catherine Evans, the new Chief of the Vehicular Crimes unit at the District Attorney's office, says that more extensive evidence-gathering will be key in avoiding roller-coaster rides like the one the Morrisons endured.
Chris Curry
Former prosecutor Murray Newman believes that the DA's office has shown an alarming inconsistency of late in prosecuting car crash cases.
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"Accidents happen every hour of every day, and the bad intent behind them varies," he points out. "We've all seen people flying down the highway and thought to ourselves that they would get themselves (or somebody else) killed. There's a big difference between that type of driving and the person who incorrectly estimates the timing of a stop light. The question becomes, 'Where do you draw the line?' on what is worthy of a traffic citation versus a felony charge."
A few years back, when Chuck Rosenthal was the district attorney, he helped create a specialized Vehicular Assault Team of DAs to help investigate lethal car crashes, whether or not those cases involved alcohol. Assistant DA Warren Diepraam then headed the DA's Vehicular Crimes Division, and his team of VAT prosecutors would make the scenes of fatal crashes and advise and aid police in their investigations. It's a policy she would like to change, but Evans says that they would often decide which charges to file then and there on the scene.
On his blog, Newman stated that the VAT teams were very useful in the drafting of warrants and helping to decide what charges to file, but that soon enough, the VAT team's decisions started to attract controversy. Few in the public would sympathize with drunk or otherwise intoxicated drivers, but when the sober started getting hit with felony charges, it was another matter. That controversy reached a flashpoint in the case of Pasadena schoolbus driver Jerry Cook, who ran over nine-year-old Ruth Young in a crosswalk one afternoon.
Diepraam initially charged Cook with murder, but after failing to win an indictment on that charge, the case was refiled as manslaughter and went to trial. Cook, who potentially faced 20 years in prison, hired top-shelf Houston defense attorneys Stanley Schneider and Robb Fickman, and won an acquittal in spite of an admitted impulse among some in the jury to reflexively want to punish someone for taking the life of such a sympathetic victim, no matter how accidentally that death came about.
After the trial, Diepraam told the Houston Chronicle that he prosecuted the case to "honor" the little girl. Local defense attorney and inveterate blogger Mark Bennett called the prosecution "an expensive, destructive publicity stunt."
"Honor the child?!?" wrote Bennett. "There is something primeval about the idea of 'honoring" the dead child by putting the driver in a box. He did all he could do. Nevertheless he killed a child. He will have to pay emotionally for that forever. The parents of the child had, to their great credit, forgiven him. I suppose that taking away his freedom, destroying his family, would be the 21st-century equivalent of propitiating the gods with a human sacrifice, but it's unworthy of us as human beings."
Bennett wrote that Diepraam's only tool [was] a hammer, [so] every problem look[ed] like a nail. "[A]nd if you're a rampant prosecutor with ambition every accident looks like a crime. Prosecuting the driver didn't honor the child; it dishonored her by using her name to serve the prosecutor's own ends."
Newman was a protégé of Diepraam's and regards him as a close friend, but tells the Press that "on that particular case he came on a little too tough." Newman does not see Diepraam's motivation as cynically as Bennett did; Newman thinks that Diepraam is simply extremely "victim-oriented."
"That being said, I personally wouldn't have gone after Mr. Cook as aggressively as he did when I was a prosecutor. It's tough when you are dealing with a dead child, and I think that weighed heavily on Warren. I think the backlash against him after that case unfairly diminished a lot of good work he did after that."
Diepraam departed the Harris County DA's office after Lykos's election and now runs the Montgomery County Vehicular Crimes unit. Some in the local law-enforcement community, including Newman, say that while Diepraam might have been a hard-liner, at least you knew where he stood.
Newman believes that the same cannot be said so far for the DA's office under Lykos. He is especially confounded by two more recent cases, both of which came about before Catherine Evans became Vehicular Crimes chief. In the case of Jeri Montgomery, the 24-year-old woman was convicted (by Brent Mayr, the prosecutor in the Villegas-Vatres case) of criminally negligent homicide after causing a wreck in part because she was talking on her cell phone while driving. She was sentenced to 30 days in jail as part of her ten years' probation, and Lykos herself chimed in, telling the Houston Chronicle that Montgomery's behavior had been both "selfish" and "narcissistic."
