Anyone catch this tonight? It was yet another hack-job story about the Texas death penalty. You know the story: mentally retarded, teen-age, non-white killer who might be innocent but had a sleeping lawyer too hopped up on cocaine to defend him just can't get no justice from the hangin' judges in Texas, where they have a separate criminal appeals court for the sole purpose of speeding up the killin', even though everyone knows 117 innocent people have been exonerated off death row by DNA, yada, yada, yada ...

To quote my wife, "this is almost comical when you know the truth." Too bad too many people don't.

I've never seen the show before tonight. I think it's safe to say I won't see it again. I prefer to get my fiction from CBS News and the NY Times ...

I saw the episode. I agree the usual hack job by the liberal entertainment industry/media. But, I have to say you are missing a very funny show when they don't get on their political high horse. James Spader & William Shatner are hilarious and normally the show is not so political.

What surprised me more than the unconcealed hatred that David Kelley seems to have for Texas was the unbelieveable sloppiness of the show.

For a show that set out to portray the Texas justice system as being full of knuckle-dragging hacks, they sure were careless in their description of the system.

My favorite might have been Spader telling the Court of Criminal Appeals in a death penalty case about the lower appellate court's opinion in the case. I also liked his co-counsel's statement that defense attorneys get $25,000 for a death- penalty appeal but the State can spend an unlimited amount of money. In my neck of the woods the appellate defense attorney gets a lot more than is spent on producing the State's brief. I just wonder what the State would spend an unlimited amount of money on for a brief on direct appeal -- I guess I should have put in that requisition for gold leaf for my brief.

I couldn't stay and watch the whole show, as it was very offensive. I did hear the defense attorney suggest that he had a hula dancer who could get the Governor, who was in Hawaii, to grant clemency to the death row inmate.

Apparently, bribery and sex for clemency are funny and OK if done for the right cause.

also the first time I ever watched the show, and most likely the last time.

I think the writers from the Clara Harris TV movie helped with the script for this episode.

I can brush off the humorous stuff -- after all, this show is for entertainment, and is apparently cut from the same cloth as Ally McBeal -- but that's what made it all the more shocking to see the main character give a two-minute monologue on the evils of the death penalty in Texas.

Now THAT's entertainment!

This show usually makes me grin. I didn't catch last night's episode, but I can imagine it was just as bad as everyone says it was.

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly the brutality of the murders and the memory of the victim fade from the public's memory after we get a capital murder conviction.

Are we not vocal enough about the good that we do? Does nobody want to listen to us? Or do we just lack pizazz?

Sometimes I wonder . . .

Fact is, Al Franken's views notwithstanding, persons of a certain viewpoint have stranglehold on most print, substanially all television, all film, and a substantial portion of radio media. They force feed their agenda in any way they see fit, victims be damned. Studios, publishing houses, screenwriters, and the like squelch anything resembling the truth.

Actually, it wasn't so much the slam of the Texas Courts that bothered me. The last thing James Spader's character said before he sat down was something about how he was from Boston, home of the New England Patriots, and they could beat any football team from Texas.

Ouch...

Somebody needs to point out to James Spader that TX has 174 homegrown players in the NFL and MA only has 18.

Also, MA can thank TX for their championship --7 TX high school or college players on NE's roster and only 1 Boston College player on the roster. I do not believe anybody on NE's roster is actually from MA.

California is making fun of US?!? Puh-leeze ... (fyi, I believe this guy used to write for the DMN)

Posted on Tue, Mar. 29, 2005

'Texas justice'? It's a punchline

By Ruben Navarette Jr.
San Diego Union-Tribune

SAN DIEGO - I'm worried about Texas. As someone who spent almost five years there, it concerns me that -- in matters of criminal justice -- the Lone Star State has gotten a reputation as the nation's problem child. Thanks to a flexible standard of crime and punishment, you don't necessarily have to commit the crime to get the punishment.

Such was the theme of a recent episode of the David E. Kelley TV drama Boston Legal in which a Yankee lawyer flies to Texas to handle the appeal of a mentally impaired black man.

The accused is on Death Row despite the fact that the state had no solid evidence against him. Yet the judges hearing the appeal don't seem to care that an innocent man could be headed for a lethal injection. (The theme comes across as believable given that Texas has such a deplorable record in administering the death penalty. Of all the executions carried out in the United States in recent years, about half took place in Texas.)

But what's really jarring is what occurs in real life. For starters, law enforcement officials in Texas have an atrocious record when it comes to informing incarcerated Mexican nationals of their right -- under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations -- to speak with a representative of the Mexican consulate. It's not like the authorities in Texas haven't had plenty of opportunities. Of the more than 50 Mexicans currently on Death Row in the United States, 16 are in Texas.

That negligence helped spark an international incident in the case of Jose Ernesto Medellin, a Texas Death Row inmate who was never told by authorities that he had the right to speak with the Mexican consulate.

Medellin is now petitioning the Supreme Court. His case has already been heard by the International Court of Justice, the chief legal arm of the United Nations. The ICJ said that, under an optional protocol on consular relations, Medellin and the other Mexicans on Death Row in the United States were entitled to new hearings.

The Bush administration said it would instruct state attorneys general to comply with the ruling, then did an about face and withdrew from the protocol.

It's a good thing that the state can't seek the death penalty for alleged drug dealing.

Consider the 2001 Dallas fake drug scandal. That fiasco has been back in the headlines recently now that the Dallas County district attorney's office -- which four years ago prosecuted and jailed at least two dozen innocent Mexican immigrants on bogus drug charges -- has begun its prosecution of Mark Delapaz, a former narcotics officer who, according to prosecutors, deserves most of the blame.

But from having commented on the story since it broke, I know it's far more complicated. At least 50 percent of the scandal belongs to prosecutors and to their higher-ups in the office, who were informed by both police and officials at the county drug lab that fake drugs were making their way through the system. And yet the office sat on this information -- while innocent people sat in jail -- before dismissing the bulk of these cases in January 2002.

At the time, Dallas County prosecutors had a dumb policy of not testing drug evidence unless the case went to trial. Many of the cases were plea-bargained, and so they never went to trial. But they still should have caught the red flags. We're talking about defendants being arrested with what was supposedly as much as 30 pounds of cocaine, and the accused were poor laborers with no criminal records.

What's more, before I left Texas in January, I turned up documents that suggested that a handful of prosecutors may have taken a more active role in the scandal by trying to induce guilty pleas from defendants in fake drug cases, perhaps in the hopes of deporting those who were here illegally and discrediting the rest.

I'd be happy if any of this came out in the Delapaz trial. But since it is the district attorney's office that is trying the case, I won't hold my breath.

All in all, it's just another day in the Texas criminal justice system -- a system designed to give people whatever they'll put up with. And so things will be this way until Texans decide that they're tired of being the national punch line and start demanding that those who represent them be more evenhanded and stop making a mess of Texas.

I knew Texas had suddenly become a better place to live recently, and now I know why. Good Ole' Ruben has left the building. California's loss is our gain

Seriously, we'd all be in big trouble if we didn't have some of those smart northern lawyers to tell us how to run our business down here. I guess since they solved all of the crime in the north and in california they're trying to make the rest of the nation a better place to live.

Someone needs to explain to me why failing to notify the Mexican consulate of a national's arrest make his later confession involuntary and why we should engraft that circumstance into an already broad exclusionary rule. In comparing procedure and rules of evidence, I find that defendants have much less protection in Cali than here in the Great State. Of course the difference is that, in general, our jurors ain't buyin'.

Perhaps instead of letting them talk to their consulate, we should give them the option of due process Mexican style or American style from the outset? I think most people would opt for our style of justice, where you get a trial by jury, rights of confrontation and cross-examination, and about a million other procedural safeguards rather than the Mexican style of due process. Forget the lectures from California. What really irritates me is that the Mexican government has the gall to rip the judicial system in our state and country. Someone needs to hold up a mirror for those folks if they think the Mexican judicial system compares anywhere near favorably to the one we have in Texas or elsewhere in America. I guess that since they don't have the death penalty that makes all their other flaws OK? Not in my book.

I like to think that Shannon's post led to this move:

'Grey's Anatomy' Keeps Key ABC Times Lot
By LYNN ELBER
AP Television Writer


LOS ANGELES � The new ABC drama "Grey's Anatomy," which has proved a strong Sunday night partner for "Desperate Housewives," will keep its time slot and cut short the season for "Boston Legal."


"Grey's Anatomy," about first-year surgical interns at a Seattle hospital, debuted March 27 and improved on the ratings in the 10 p.m. EDT Sunday time slot that had belonged to "Boston Legal."


Maximizing that period is key for ABC since the show preceding it at 9 p.m. EDT is "Desperate Housewives," the big freshman hit, and the network wants to keep as many of its viewers as possible tuned in.


"Desperate Housewives" and another newcomer, "Lost," have helped pull the network out of a ratings slump.


Both "Grey's Anatomy" and "Boston Legal," a reworking of the long-running ABC series "The Practice," were winning the time slot among total viewers and with advertiser-favored adults ages 18 to 49.


But "Grey's Anatomy" has averaged 17 million viewers compared with 12.5 million for the legal drama from veteran producer David E. Kelley ("Ally McBeal," "Boston Public").


Kelley had no comment Friday on ABC's plans, a spokeswoman said.


The blow for "Boston Legal" has been softened by the fact it will get a run of 27 episodes next season, which includes the five that were to air this season.


The network was in the "enviable position" of having two strong shows for the time period, Stephen McPherson, ABC Entertainment president, said in a statement Friday.


"However, with this embarrassment of riches comes a tough decision," he said. "Ultimately we decided that, without having adequate lead time or marketing dollars to devote to moving either show so late in the season, we'd continue to let 'Grey's' build on its tremendous momentum through May."

West Wing. It jumped the shark two or three seasons ago ...