As George Soros-backed leftwing Democrats started capturing District Attorney offices across the country, a dangerous soft-on-crime ethos has taken hold in many blue-controlled cities. Prosecutors are letting violent felons back on the streets for minimal bond, no bond, or even failing to charge them entirely. Just this week comes news that Harris County Democratic Judge Josh Hill let a convicted felon accused of kidnapping, beating, and choking a woman out on $2 bail.
The Texas Republican majority in the statehouse has had enough.
In his victory speech on the first day of the Legislative session, Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan (R-Beaumont) said that “rogue district attorneys” who refuse to prosecute certain criminal offenses must be “rein[ed] in.” Legislation filed this week provides an initial glimpse at Texas Republicans’ plan to do that.
“Carte blanche public pronouncements by district attorneys that laws we have on the books will be ignored renders the authority of the Legislature to determine what is and isn’t a crime, moot,” state Rep. David Cook (R-Mansfield) said in a statement provided to The Texan. “It is my intention to rein in renegade district attorneys and ensure the rule of law is respected in Texas.”
Cook’s House Bill (HB) 1350 — with an identical version filed in the Senate by Sen. Tan Parker (R-Flower Mound) — would forbid district or county attorneys with criminal jurisdiction to “adopt or enforce a policy under which the prosecuting attorney prohibits or materially limits the enforcement of any criminal offense … [or] as demonstrated by pattern or practice, prohibit or materially limit the enforcement of any criminal offense.”
Enforcement of the law would be granted to the Office of the Attorney General, and violators may face civil penalties up to $1,500 for an initial offense and then up to $25,500 for ensuing ones. Offending prosecutors may also be removed from office and their replacement would be appointed by the governor.
Prosecutors and judges have a certain amount of discretion on when and what crimes to charge suspects with. But by ignoring the law entirely for far-left ideological reasons, Soros-backed DAs and judges are violating the equal protection rights of Texas citizens who are victimized by soaring crime. Securing the life, liberty and property of its citizens is the most basic and essential function of government.
If they can’t do their job, they need to be removed from office.
Tags: Crime, Dade Phelan, David Cook, Democrats, Harris County, Houston, Josh Hill, Tan Parker, Texas
Endorse with care — Gov. Pritzker in Illinois would love a law like this that would allow him to remove the county sheriffs and states attorneys who refuse to enforce the new idiotic gun law and the new even more idiotic no bail law.
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Want to fix what prosecutors do and don’t do? Simply remove immunity from their jobs, and make them responsible for their actions. Fail to prosecute someone for their crimes? Fine; let the next victim sue them in a court where they don’t work.
Much of the problem with our system is that we’ve removed accountability and responsibility from the people administering it all. Whether it’s a cop with “qualified immunity” that is violating people’s rights under the color of law, or some prosecutor making selective choices about what’s really a crime, it all needs to have accountability to the public put back in. Time was, you screwed up badly enough as a prosecutor, someone would likely put a noose around your neck.
I’d also make it so that if you want to serve on a parole board, then you get to have the people you put on parole live with you as roommates. You’re so certain they’ve reformed? So be it; live with them.
Here’s a major problem with our legal system; what we’ve lost track of is the actual social purpose it’s meant to perform, which ain’t the administration of “justice”. Justice is an abstract ideal, one that only God or whatever forces of the universe you happen to believe in actually has the ability to mete out. The purely human and highly flawed system we have enacted serves one purpose, and one purpose only: To modify the behavior of the participants. This flows in two directions; one purpose is to dissuade and modify the behavior of the criminal element, and the other purpose is to persuade the rest of the law-abiding public to allow disinterested third parties administer it all, such that nobody involved has their emotions engaged in the outcomes.
Our system is falling down on both accounts, failing to modify the behavior of the criminal class, and further failing to convince the rest of us to let the system do its job. Because of that, the whole thing is going to cave in on the criminal class and its enablers. Because, believe you me, when the rest of the public finally becomes convinced that the lawyers, judges, and cops are complicit in the whole thing? At best, they’re going to be out of jobs. At worst, they’ll be stacked up like cordwood on the same bonfires with their criminal co-dependents when the public finally has enough and decides to burn them all up. There ain’t nothing saying we have to keep on keeping on with how we’ve been doing things in this arena. We didn’t have a “justice system” when the country was founded, and we might well go back to that state of nature here in the nearer-than-you-think future.
Good idea, but impossible to put into effect.
Not that Boss Ogg is a model DA, but she’s hardly the problem in Harris County when compared to judges like Hill. This distinction is important, because it will be nearly impossible to do, as Kirk suggests above, hold judges accountable by removing qualified immunity. You have to impeach them, and that’s not easy.
Also, a problem is lack of jail space. The officers I talk to in Harris County talk about spending entire shifts at Harris County intake that they are reluctant to arrest for anything not yet violent.
Soros should be charged as an accessory, along with the DAs and freak judges, for crimes committed when the criminal reasonably should have been in jail.
Leland: I guess we know what to do with some of that big surplus that was just announced.
Removing ‘qualified immunity’ would have no effect on judges or prosecutors. They actually have ‘absolute immunity’ which is a different, but related.
In reply to Steve White: In Illinois County Sheriffs are elected by the voters of that County. It is explictly provided in the State of Illinois Constitution that County officers cannot be removed from office except in the case of “felony, bribery, perjury or other infamous crime.” The Governor can only remove those officials that he or she appointed. So any such law would violate the Illinois Constitution.
The removal from office provision sounds good, but as a commentator points out, what happens if the Gov is of the other political party? The Texas governor’s office under the post-Reconstruction Constitution of 1877 is weak by design, and that’s served the state well. I’d be loathe to change that.
The more measured approach would be to allow the AG to cite and fine rogue DA’s who refuse to enforce the law, *and* for the AG’s office (including special prosecutors appointed by the AG) to be able to take over prosecutions that the DA’s office refuses to undertake (with the bill for such prosecutions deducted from the County’s sales tax collections [which are collected by the state Comptroller’s office]). I.e., “if you won’t do it, AG will appoint someone who will, and the cost will comes out of YOUR budget.”
This was the approach the legislature threatened last year to deal with the Austin City Council defund the police nonsense: a proposal that would have had the DPS simply take over policing in Austin, with the costs deducted straight from the City’s share of sales tax receipts. Notice how quickly the City backed down?
One could even expand the law a bit to allow the AG, with the Gov’s approval, to take over ANY prosecution of any case in the state. E.g., Travis County DA’s prosecution of the soldier who nailed n Antifa type who leveled an semi-auto AK-47 at him could be taken over by the AG’s office and dropped.
But as another commentator notes, all of this still doesn’t solve another fundamental problem. Right now the trial judge slots in the major Texas metro areas are populated almost exclusively by Dem candidates, and these days the Dem judicial candidates are almost always hard leftists of a certain demographic. Making matters worse, many of these people have run for judge because they can’t hack it as lawyers, and are just looking for a public salary and a chance to play SJW.
Perhaps this could be solved by allowing a special prosecutor appointed by the AG to bring his cases in either the county when the crime occurred, OR in any adjacent county. Ergo, Boss Ogg and the gang of idiots that populate the Harris County Criminal District Courts could be supplanted by a special prosecutor, who could bring the cases in Waller, Montgomery, Liberty, Chambers, or Barzoria Counties. Travis County? Special prosecutor who can file in Burnett, Blanco, Bastrop, or Caldwell Counties.
>> Endorse with care — Gov. Pritzker in Illinois would love a law like this…
That is a good point. IANAL but maybe excepting new laws under constitutional challenge?
Either everyone ought to have this “immunity” thing, or nobody should have it, qualified or otherwise. You screw up? You do something unethical and knowingly wrong? You pay the price. Period.
Right now, in Houston, we have the spectacle of a private citizen being held to a different standard than the cops would, despite their much greater training and the fact that it’s their damn job. If a police officer had shot the criminal, even including the anchor shot, nobody would be questioning a damn thing about it at all. Private citizen does it, he’s going to be crucified.
Yet… Had a cop made a similar mistake? Even a worse one? He’d likely have an internal investigation done, and never see the inside of a courtroom or jail cell.
This points up a very telling and obvious to outside observation corruption of the system; which will be acted upon. You won’t see it, because people are just going to quit calling the cops and stop sharing the video evidence. Criminals and cops alike, they’re just going to start disappearing. Inexplicably. Watch for outraged parents to begin taking action against the prosecutors and judges that released the criminals that preyed on their kids.
One way or another, accountability will return to the system. You likely won’t like how it manifests, though.
In almost every state the Office of the Attorney General has jurisdiction to bring criminal charges and/or to take over prosecution of a criminal case. This is why you periodically see high-profile cases being removed from a local district attorney and prosecuted by the attorney general’s office. It would be much smarter for Republicans in Texas to require local district attorneys to report their proposed case resolutions to the office of the attorney general and to fund a section of the office to take over prosecution of flagrant abuses, like this.
Make DAs and judges that let people arrested for violent crimes out on little or no bail/bond personally liable for civil suits by victims of those criminals out on bond/bail. Also make the DAs and/or judges criminally liable – so they can be sued by the victims of violent crime AND can be criminally convicted (1st offense is 10 days in jail, 2nd 6 months in jail, 3rd is 5 years in prison. The 3rd offense would be considered a felony and remove them from the right to vote or to hold office in the State of Texas.
You can analyze this issue from the same one that explains/outlines why Russian military affairs are so direly f*cked up: The issue here is bad information.
The system does not allow for timely, accurate feedback to flow from victim to prosecutor; the prosecutors and other officials do not have any “skin in the game” vis-a-vis the criminals they release after failing to “reform” them. The criminals never, ever get honest feedback information along the lines of “If you keep doing this, someone is going to kill you…”
Because it’s all “bad information” flowing back and forth, well… The situation is what it is. A mess.
I doubt very much that any law authorizing the AG to ride herd on DAs is constitutional under Texas’s constitution, which gives DAs vast criminal enforcement authority and the AG none. The AG lost a case in the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals as to his ability to bring criminal prosecutions within the last year or so.
Just imagine. We could’ve had independent grand juries who’s job was to file true or no bill indictments to prosecutors who then do what they’re told by the people.
Somebody shoulda thought of that before.
Skeptical, if the Lege is serious, they’ll impeach a couple of TX SCOTUS judges FIRST.
Yeah, that’s the answer! Centralize more power in Texas’s state government.
Want Texas to become New York State? That’s how you become New York.
It’s already happened to California. Inevitably as a state’s population grows, the temptations to centralize power grow in both magnitude and number.
There’s an alternative: voters must exercise eternal vigilance. Texas’s voters already have the power to discipline rogue judges and prosecutors. Texas voters need only wake up from their slumber, look around, and act.
Will “Let someone else do it, send the problem to Austin!” become the motto of the Lone Shooter State? Hmm, probably. Texans are weak.
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