Category: Criminal Defense
Every year more than 200,000 people report a rape to police in the United States. They are submitted to a lengthy, invasive and uncomfortable process as a rape kit is collected. What police do not inform victims is that it may take years for their evidence to be submitted to national databases, if at all….
Robert Wayne Harris looks set to be the eighth man to be executed in Texas this year after the Court of Criminal Appeals denied the death row inmate a stay of execution. The judges decided against stopping the execution, despite some disturbing evidence about the adequacy of the original defense case more than a decade…
In a high profile case in Arlington, Texas, the owner of a strip club that ran into trouble with the city, has pleaded guilty to plotting to murder the Mayor and a lawyer working for the city. KVUE.com reported 34-year-old Ryan Walker Grant faces serving 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, after taking…
Convictions based on the evidence of young witnesses or victims in sexual assault cases, can be unreliable in the absence of solid forensic evidence. This proved to be the case in the conviction of David Lee Wiggins, a man from Fort Worth, Texas, who spent more than two decades behind bars before he was released…
More people are being booked for criminal immigration offenses in border states such as Texas, even as the number of people being apprehended as illegal immigrants falls. A report by Fox News said while the number of illegal immigrants being apprehended has reached a 40 year low, more people are being charged due to a…
Concerns about the low IQ of a death row inmate in Texas didn’t stop the state putting him to death this month. Marvin Wilson was executed on August 7, 2012, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the arguments of his lawyers that he shouldn’t have been eligible for the death penalty because of his low…
It’s the job of a criminal defense attorney to keep innocent defendants out of jail. But irrespective of whether they are innocent or guilty, those who end up in jails have a right to expect humane conditions when they are incarcerated. That’s not happening in many of Texas’ jails according to a civil lawsuit filed…
Plots about wealthy people planning the deaths of love rivals feature heavily in TV crime shows but are rare in real life. Many homicides involve people who know each other and many are spontaneous rather than meticulously planned. However a case in Lubbock, Texas in which a plastic surgeon is accused of paying an alleged…
Michael Morton describes his life as “starting from square one.” That’s because he was wrongly convicted for his wife’s 1986 murder and it took a quarter of a century for new advances in DNA to exonerate him. Morton’s case is highlighted in the second installment of the Texas Tribune’s series that looks at how prosecutorial…
The supporters of so called “Stand your Ground” laws say they were enacted to make America a safer place. However, an analysis of these laws in states including Texas, suggest they have led to an increase in the homicide rate but no apparent reduction in crimes such as burglaries and robberies. An analysis by the…