Criminal justice

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.

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I interviewed Henry "Hank" Watkins Skinner, 47, at the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice — death row — on January 20, 2010. Skinner was convicted in 1995 of murdering his girlfriends and her two sons; the state has scheduled his execution for February 24. Skinner has always maintained that he's innocent and for 15 year has asked the state to release DNA evidence that he says will prove he was not the killer. Full Story 

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.

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Some deep-pocketed trial lawyers didn't make the Twenty Who Gave Plenty list. Why not? 

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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.

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Houston homebuilder Bob Perry tops the list of the biggest donors to Texas candidates in the last half of 2009. McAllen developer Alonzo Cantu and Dallas businessman Ross Perot Sr. also gave large sums.

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The governor's race candidates fill their campaign coffers disproportionately from some rural areas, according to a per-capita calculation. Each Dallas resident gave $1 to the race in 2009, for example, while those in Blanco donated $57.

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Sharon Keller, the presiding judge of the state's highest criminal court, will not be removed from the bench following a trial and review by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct.

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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.

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Now that she'll join Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison on stage at the second GOP debate — now that she's cracked spoiler-worthy double digits in the latest poll and will fundraise, Ron Paul-style, through an online "money bomb"  — it's fair to ask what longshot gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina is in it for.

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To better understand the geography of the money race, we mapped the candidates' contributions by city, using graduated symbols to highlight their most lucrative areas. The bubbles in the maps get larger based on the percentage of a candidates' total take. 

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Kay Bailey Hutchison says Texas government should be more transparent. Rick Perry says it already is. Let the sniping begin.

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In response to shrinking budgets, there's a risk that lawmakers might feel compelled to scale back funding for treatment and diversion programming. Instead, it's time for the state to seriously consider closing one or more of the 112 prison units it currently operates.

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Search more than $35 million in campaign donations and loans collected by the top candidates in the governor's race. You can also explore how they spent the money.

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A recent juvenile justice report finds drug-addicted TYC inmates who didn't participate in the agency's drug treatment program were less likely to reoffend than those who did. 

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Gov. Rick Perry appears willing to sign a posthumous pardon for the exonerated Timothy Cole after Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott today issued an opinion that said the governor could grant one.

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A posthumous pardon is possible after all, according to an opinion from Attorney General Greg Abbott's office. This clears the way for the possible post-death pardon of Tim Cole, who was exonerated of a sexual assault conviction in a Travis County court last year, but had died in prison many years prior.

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