Indigent defense is broken in Texas-and throughout the United States-and it has been broken for decades. Excessive caseloads and conflicts of interest are two of the most significant problems behind the notoriously poor quality of indigent defense services. Texas can address these problems through at least five changes to the state criminal justice system: reclassifying several offenses so that they do not trigger the right to counsel, increasing diversion to problem-solving courts, expanding the use of victim-offender conferencing, encouraging “open file” discovery systems, and providing vouchers to indigents for the selection of counsel.”
Fool Me Twice: Why the Texas Grid is Still Vulnerable to Winter Storms | Part 2: Projecting Winter Outage Risk Through 2030
Part 2: Projecting Winter Outage Risk Through 2030 As Texas approaches the five-year anniversary of Winter Storm Uri, the ERCOT grid faces growing vulnerability to winter power outages. This analysis projects that by 2030, the same type of storm that would cause approximately 12 hours of outages today could result in nearly 24 hours of...