Texas Report Finds Noncompliance With State Defense Laws

A review of death penal­ty defense poli­cies in Texas has uncov­ered wide­spread non­com­pli­ance with state laws that require each region to adopt qual­i­fi­ca­tion stan­dards for cap­i­tal defense attor­neys. Only two of the nine judi­cial regions in Texas have adopt­ed the stan­dards. A report on the find­ings has been pub­lished by the Equal Justice Center, a Texas orga­ni­za­tion that advo­cates for greater fair­ness in the jus­tice sys­tem, and the Texas Defender Service, an orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to improv­ing the qual­i­ty of death penal­ty rep­re­sen­ta­tion. (Houston Chronicle, October 29, 2003) Read the report. See DPIC’s report With Justice for Few: The Growing Crisis in Death Penalty Representation.