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.”
Toward an Office of Parental Rights in Texas: A Legal-Political-Historical Approach to the Protection of the Fundamental Rights and Duties of Parents
Toward an Office of Parental Rights in Texas: A Legal-Political-Historical Approach to the Protection of the Fundamental Rights and Duties of Parents Key points: Changing legal images of the family, constitutional disputes, and state overreach threaten parental rights as a broad, actionable claim of parents over the direction of their child’s life. The Due Process Clause...