The Texas Attorney General’s office is throwing its own punches at the attorney who sued the state over its storage of infant blood samples, saying all he wanted was the headlines.
Attorney General’s Office
Posted inState Government
The Gay Divorcees
A same-sex couple, married in Massachusetts but now living in Travis County, has been granted a divorce by a state district judge. It’s the second time in five months that a same-sex divorce has been granted in Texas — and also the second time that Attorney General Greg Abbott has moved to block such an action. Ben Philpott, who’s covering politics and policy for KUT News and the Tribune, filed this report.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
TribBlog: TX Supreme Court To Consider “Pole Tax”
The Texas Supreme Court will consider the constitutionality of a $5 tax on admission to the state’s strip clubs — a measure lawmakers implemented in 2007 to raise money for sexual assault prevention and low-income health insurance.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
TribBlog: Send a Sext, Go To Jail
Attorney General Greg Abbott has a message for young, hormonal Texans: Sending your BF or GF naughty pics over the phone could be criminal.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
Case Open: The Investigation
It took a crew of eight Northwestern University students to bring national attention to questions about Hank Skinner’s death sentence. But his legal pleas for more DNA testing of crime scene evidence — and his lawsuit against the Gray County district attorney — have gone nowhere. Unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes, he’ll be executed on Feburary 24.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
Case Open
Hank Skinner is set to be executed for a 1993 murder he’s always maintained he didn’t commit. He wants the state to test whether his DNA matches evidence found at the scene, but prosecutors say the time to contest his conviction has come and gone. He has less than a month to change their minds.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
Guest Column: The 2010 Agenda: Open Government
Compared with other states, Texas alternates between merely OK and downright bad in rankings of how transparently government bodies conduct open meetings and respond to requests for public information. But we can fix that.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
TribBlog: Abbott launches trafficking task force
Twenty percent of the nation’s 17,000 human trafficking victims each year come through Texas, and Attorney General Greg Abbott said today the state should take the lead in collaboration among agencies to fight the scourge of modern-day slavery.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
Abuse of Power
State employees who commit heinous acts against Texas’ most profoundly disabled citizens rarely get charged with crimes, let alone go to jail. A Texas Tribune review of a decade’s worth of abuse and neglect firings at state institutions found that just 16 percent of the most violent or negligent employees were ever charged with crimes.
