Here it is folks Straight out of the Rio Grande Guardian
AUSTIN - The chairman of the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence says he did not kill legislation to set up an Innocence Commission and pointed to his vote for the bill as evidence.
Criticism of Rep. Aaron Peña, D-Edinburg, and his handling of bills creating an Innocence Commission has come from Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, and Texas criminal justice commentator Scott Henson, among others.
SB 263, authored by Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, was the last bill brought up for a vote by Peña when his committee met Friday afternoon.
The vote was 4-2 in favor, with Peña in support, but unfortunately for Ellis and Thompson, the House sponsor, five votes were needed to secure passage to the House floor. With the session almost over, there is no time left for the bill to be resurrected.
“The much talked about Innocence Commission bill was brought to a vote today as I had promised. Although some refused to believe me that the votes were not there, as I represented, the votes were not there today and it failed for lack of a majority,” Peña wrote, on his Capitol Blog.
SB 263 would have created an independent commission to examine cases where innocent citizens have been wrongly convicted. Ellis said the bill would also have identified the causes of the convictions and recommended changes in the criminal justice system to prevent such future miscarriages of justice.
“The biggest tragedy when that happens is that the person who is guilty feels empowered because they are free and able to commit other crimes. It’s a law and order bill,” Ellis told the Guardian.
“When the system makes a mistake, we ought to do more than take the attitude, ‘well things happen.’ We ought to see what lessons we can learn when a mistake is made so we don’t repeat those mistakes again. We ought to do as much as we can to keep people’s lives from being shattered.”
Ellis filed similar legislation in 2005.
Rebecca Brown, a policy analyst at the Innocence Project in New York, told the Guardian that 200 people nationwide have been cleared through DNA testing after they were convicted.
“Setting up an Innocence Commission is less about finger pointing and more about identifying cases of wrongful conviction and recommending changes in the system,” she said.
Brown said 29 Texas men have been exonerated by DNA testing, with 14 of those cases coming out of Dallas County in the past five years.
Thompson said the irony of Friday’s vote is that four of the criminal jurisprudence committee’s nine members come from the Dallas area and all were in support of SB 263.
The four voting for SB 263 on Friday were Peña, Juan Escobar, D-Kingsville, Allen Vaught, D-Dallas, and Paula Pierson, D-Arlington. The two voting against were Reps. Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball, and Robert Talton, R-Pasadena. Absent when the vote was taken were Reps. Terri Hodge, D-Dallas, Barbara Mallory Caraway, D-Dallas, and Paul Moreno, D-El Paso.
Thompson told the Guardian she had six votes for Ellis’s bill and told Peña that on Thursday. She said that at different times during Friday’s hearing the votes were there to pass the bill out but Peña would not bring it up for a vote. She said it was clear he was waiting for members to drift away.
“I had enough votes for a significant period of time during the hearing,” Thompson said. “If you look at Chairman Peña’s actions this session, it is clear he sent the Innocent Commission bills on a slow boat to China.”
Thompson said she had an identical bill to Ellis’s, HB 3996, that was referred to the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee on March 30. “I could have had a hearing back in March,” Thompson complained.
Rep. Ruth Jones McClendon, D-San Antonio, had a similar bill to Ellis’s, HB 3745, which was referred to the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee on March 22. It never got a hearing.
Ellis’s bill passed the Senate in April 24 and was referred to Peña’s committee the next day. It was not considered by the committee until last Tuesday, but no action was taken.
“SB 263 was a significant piece of legislation. We all want to know what went wrong in our criminal justice system when an innocent person has been convicted of a crime and placed into a penal institution and served several years of their lives,” Thompson said. “A lot of those wrongly convicted are Hispanic and black.”
Thompson said Peña had told her he would bring the bill out when she had the votes.
“I got six people to agree to vote for the bill. I asked if he would be the seventh vote and the chairman said he does not normally take a position on a bill until he has listened to the views of his committee,” Thompson said.
“He told me to be sure that when the bill is brought up, I have all of my persons there. Later I learned from Senator Ellis that he had told him I did not have the votes. I did.”
Thompson added that she did not have a high opinion of the work of the Criminal Jurisprudence committee this session. “To be honest, I am shocked with some of the legislation that has come out of that Chairman Pena’s committee. It has been so anti-people,” she said.
Pena defended the work of his panel. “We have a very delicate balance of conservatives and liberals and if the liberals are not present for a liberal bill it’s not going to pass,” he said.
Pena said he was a strong supporter of Ellis’s bill. He said he went to dinner with Ellis on Wednesday night and told him the votes were there - provided everyone showed up.
“I think it (an Innocence Commission) is a good idea. I thought so when I heard the chief justice of the Supreme Court say so. Actually, I called him up,” Pena said. “And I called Senator Ellis’s office up to see if I could sponsor the bill. I think it is a great idea, in its current form.”
Pena said Ellis was not assisted by the “aggressive” nature of his own legislative staff.
“His staff has done a good job of trying to muddy up the water and cause trouble where there is no trouble. I’ve been told by a lobbyist shepherding this bill that they were intentionally trying to discredit the members who did not vote for it,” Pena said.
“This really is a non-story, except it’s a story that there are staffers who have free reign to cause trouble and to try to attack House members who don’t vote for their bills in the press. That’s offensive to me personally.”
Henson, who writes about criminal justice issues on his Grits for Breakfast blog, said it was remarkable that Peña and his committee “couldn’t kick bills on wiretapping fast enough” but could leave an Innocence Commission bill in the inbox for three weeks before giving it a hearing.
Reflecting on the brouhaha on his Capitol Blog on Friday evening, Pena said there had been “some pretty irresponsible behavior” by a number of individuals who have been following SB 263.
He said he was sorry to say that some bloggers were very much in that group. “When I have time I will expand on the troubling events surrounding this vote. I must make my way home but I thought I'd leave you with the answer no one was willing to listen to,” Pena wrote.
