Lifeless canine, shot homeowners, grasping clerks, phony dangers, and a 'seismic change in police interrogations'

Listed below are just a few odds and ends that every benefit their very own weblog posts, or no less than they'd if I weren't spendi...

Listed below are just a few odds and ends that every benefit their very own weblog posts, or no less than they'd if I weren't spending my days writing Just Liberty emails and motion alerts. (E.g., go here to send your state rep an email asking them to signal on in help of Rep. Garnet Coleman's "Sandra Bland Act.") So whereas Grits is concentrated elsewhere, take a look at:

• Eva Ruth Moravec, Houston Chronicle: "Unarmed people hurt when Texas officers shot at dogs." Contains slide present of canine shot by cops!
• And from Mike Ward, additionally within the Chron: "State budget writers say four prisons may now be up for closure." (Hurray!)
• HB 1258 is a horrible invoice that will cease Texas courts from offering web entry to probably the most public of public information within the authorities's possession: courthouse recordsdata. The bill was heard in committee yesterday. The true motive clerks need to deny folks entry to information that are public underneath the open-courts doctrine (which insists entry should not be impeded by unreasonable  monetary obstacles)? After you wade by all of the BS being thrown up about phony baloney "dangers and liabilities," the underside line is, clerks presently cost $1 per web page for copies and concern the income stream from subscriptions will not cowl the loss.
• Here is a headline for which Grits has been ready for years: "Lawmakers, judges square off against bail bondsmen in push to end cash bail for nonviolent offenders." Chairman John Whitmire is holding a press convention this afternoon on the invoice.
• See Increase-the-Age arguments from the Justice Policy Institute and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and protection of an advocacy day yesterday on the subject (the place the missus spent her day) from the Dallas News.
• It seems, the people most likely to discover wrongful convictions are the ones looking for them. Who'd have thought? Oh yeah, each innocence mission affiliate within the nation.
• In El Paso, the Public Defender caseload is rising.
• Brandon Garrett, The Baffler: "Trials and Errors: Inside the Great Forensic Science Boondoggle."
• Marshall Venture: "The Seismic Change in Police Interrogations." That is enormous information: The group that developed the Reid approach is now not educating it. (For extra background on the Reid approach, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) The Reid approach was developed after third-degree  techniques had been outlawed within the wake of the Wickersham Fee within the '30s. By the 1940s, John Reid had famously developed an interrogation methodology deploying psychological as a substitute of (as a lot) bodily coercion, however attacking the identical psychological weak spots, and trendy US interrogation strategies had been  born. Most different nations' police use much less accusatory, extra fact-gathering-based interrogation strategies, which produce simply as many actual convictions however fewer false ones.