The high-profile case and clemency efforts of Melissa Lucio have brought renewed attention to the death penalty in Texas, including from a newly formed state House committee that grilled Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz recently about his office’s role in setting Lucio’s April 27 execution date — and how they might persuade him to undo it. Prosecutors, the committee made clear, have the power to request the trial court judge withdraw an execution’s date order.
They also have a unique responsibility to uphold justice throughout the process.
But today, across Texas, one of the strongest ways to ensure justice in critical cases such as Lucio’s lacks essential support from the state.
“Statutorily,” Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, vice chair of the committee, told Saenz, “the prosecutor, as well as being a zealous advocate, is seeking an abstract concept of justice.” A prosecutor who becomes aware of problems with a case, or of factors that might mean a defendant is innocent (such as those now alleged by Lucio’s defense team) has a duty to re-evaluate whether justice was done. If it wasn’t, that prosecutor should work to right any wrongs, Moody said.
Several large counties in Texas, including Harris and Dallas, have their own conviction integrity units, or CIUs, dedicated to reviewing innocence or wrongful conviction claims, but those efforts are voluntary and not supported with state funding.
In fact, Shannon Edmonds, director of governmental relations for the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, told the committee that Texas helped pioneer the units, starting with Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins’ conviction integrity unit in 2007.
The state does provide support for public law school innocence projects. A House bill that ultimately stalled in committee in 2021 would have gone a step farther, creating a conviction integrity unit at the state level in the Attorney General’s Office. Some worried that would duplicate the existing efforts at law schools and that it could create a conflict of interest when lawyers from the AG’s office assist local DAs on cases.
The staff of Harris County’s conviction integrity unit, which includes attorneys, a paralegal and an investigator, reviews claims that convictions were flawed, and if the evidence supports those claims, can refer the cases to a district court.
Harris and Dallas counties were both among the top 10 in the country for exonerations, according to the latest numbers from the National Registry of Exonerations, which identified 74 conviction integrity units across the country in 2020. But numbers have dropped in Harris County after a surge in drug case exonerations between 2014 and 2018. Conviction integrity units are responsible for only a share of all exonerations, but the registry shows that the number of cases cleared on the part of CIUs has climbed steadily since the first one in 2001.
Though Cameron County does not have such a unit, its DA told the Criminal Justice Reform, Interim Study Committee that, in the case of Lucio, his staff was reviewing the relevant clemency documents on its own.
That’s hardly ideal, and lawmakers took note of the lack of state support for conviction integrity units.
“If we expect better results from our prosecutors and for them to look at these things and they are willing to do it we should probably provide them the resources,” Moody said later.
There are important ways to strengthen CIUs to ensure that their work is given real weight and that they have the capacity to handle all cases that merit review. The committee should consider such safeguards in its recommendations for next year’s legislative session.
First and foremost, though, is the issue of funding the units. “They are only possible where the resources are available to do it,” Edmonds told the committee.
As Rep. Jeff Leach, R-San Antonio, who chairs the committee, said recently: “If you don’t fund it, you can’t say it’s a priority.”
Lucio’s case is one of the rare problematic cases that has garnered international attention, but there are, no doubt, many more deserving of another look.
We are encouraged by the committee’s early steps to protect justice in Texas and hope to see some serious weight behind expanding the use of effective conviction integrity units, safeguarded against conflicts of interest, across the state.
A good idea without resources is just a good idea. The question of whether a death penalty case rife with errors and bias gets reviewed should be answered solely in the interest of justice, not in the interest of a county’s limited resources.
Houston Chronicle
