Hard-line leaders such as loopy Stephen Mansfield have taken their agenda to the Court of Criminal Appeals, where legal precedents--not prosecutions--get overturned
In a ruling Friday that flew under the radar until today, US District Judge Vanessa Gilmore overturned the capital-murder conviction of Mariano Rosales, because Harris County prosecutors had improperly rejected minorities from the jury pool.The technical term for the tossing-minority-jurors claim is a Batson challenge, after the 1986 case where the precedent was set.And when we saw the NAACP announcement about Gilmore's decision, our first reaction was "Man, we thought Harris County prosecutors
Photo courtesy Marshall WiceSusan Wright, the woman who killed her husband and whose trial featured a prosecutor tying another to a bed and pretending to stab him 200 times, may get a new sentence.Wright stabbed her husband for real and then tried to hide his body; her attorney argued that she had suffered years of physical and mental abuse from him and acted out of "sudden passion" when he again threatened her.District Judge Jim Wallace, who heard the original case, said this morning he will re
Former district judge Woody Densen was indicted today for criminal mischief after getting caught on video keying a neighbor's car. It's a state-jail felony charge, since the car damaged was expensive, so he's facing up to two years in jail.And around the courthouse, among veteran lawyers, there is much cackling. Schadenfreude is the Word of the Day.Densen came on the bench in 1983 with high hopes from his criminal-defense colleagues; he quickly squandered all that good will with ineptitude, a ha
Photo courtesy Marshall Wice​You know, when the Houston Press names someone the Best Criminal Defense Attorney, we expect that the high honor will result in further good works -- it's the whole Obama-Nobel Prize train of thought.So it should come as no surprise this morning that recent winner Brian Wice won a slam-dunk victory in a high-profile case, getting the Court of Criminal Appeals -- of Texas, no less -- to vote 9-0 that his client deserved a new hearing on the punishment given her.The
