Just wondering if any other County Attorneys received a public information request for your office policies or procedures re: discovery practice in criminal cases and implementation of the Michael Morton Act. If so, is there a sample response form that you'd be willing to share with our office?

Steve my office received the same request. I am providing all forms and letters we use concerning my office's compliance with the law that are responsive to the PIA request. We are not creating any new documents or letters in response to the request. Hope this helps.

If you're talking about a request from Texas Defender Service, we did pretty much the same as C. Martin. In our case, we just sent them all our new discovery forms as information responsive to their request. The Public Information Act doesn't require a governmental body to answer questions or prepare new information in response to a request.

Just FYI, the TDS sent a few of these out a couple months ago; we urged them to wait for a few more months until everyone had their systems in place, but they were in a hurry. Our recommendation is the same as the other ones here -- you only need to send documents that you have, and you don't need to be writing things in response to this PIA request. There will be plenty of time for us to see what is working and what isn't and discuss it at the Annual Conference...