State Editorial Rdp

A sampling of editorial opinion around Texas:

Nov. 13

The Dallas Morning News on parties in the judiciary:

By most reasonable standards, John Creuzot is considered an outstanding Dallas County judge.

Bar association polls are an imprecise measure, but Creuzot's have been consistently impressive, with ratings generally in the 80s or 90s for percentage of Dallas lawyers who find he works hard, knows the law, applies it fairly and displays the proper temperament for a judge.

He did it as a Democrat. He did it as a Republican. He does it now as a Democrat.

That's correct. Creuzot, because of a Texas judicial system that basically forces judicial candidates to run as members of political parties, has switched not once, but twice. When the only way to get elected in Dallas County was as a Democrat, that was his party. When the GOP swept into power, he became a Republican. Now that Democrats are back in charge, so is he, as a Democrat.

The evidence before us would indicate Creuzot is a judge first and a Democrat-Republican-Democrat second. Think of it as a win-win: He gets to pursue his chosen career; we benefit from him doing it so well.

Compare his choice to that of state District Judge Lana Myers, the last Republican presiding over a Dallas County felony criminal court. She faces a re-election campaign in 2010 but says she will not switch parties, even if that means surrendering a job she has held since 1995.

While it's not certain voters will turn her out -- despite solid evidence that she, like Creuzot, is rated highly as a judge -- she knows the score. Democrats won 42 of 42 contested judgeships in 2006, when she ran unopposed, and completed the sweep in 2008. Dallas County has trended more and more Democratic this century, thanks to demographic changes and dispirited GOP voters. Straight-ticket voting, then and now, only exacerbates the problem.

Simply, the odds are not with her. Why not switch parties to improve them? "I have to be true to myself," she says.

This is to neither praise nor criticize Creuzot or Myers. Each is a topflight judge; Dallas County residents are well served by their work.

Their decisions to ride the party tide or pick a side and stick with it are quite individual, not the answers to right-and-wrong questions. The shame is that they -- and other Texas judicial candidates -- have to make such choices.

The irony is that few judicial candidates express much admiration or support for the partisan selection process. As any number of them will tell you, there's no such thing -- or shouldn't be -- as a Democratic judge or a Republican judge. Justice is justice; the law is the law.

In fact, there are excellent judges, good judges, average judges and judges who deserve to be replaced as soon as possible. Each political party has its fair share of each.

Call us idealists, but wouldn't jurisprudence be better served by judges chosen on their qualifications and performance, rather than the R or D next to their names on the ballot? Granted, no system of selection is perfect, but perhaps Texas would gain from moving to one less imperfect.

URL: http://www.dallasnews.com

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Nov. 16

El Paso Times on border security:

Juarez businessmen are asking for United Nations intervention as out-of-control violence threatens lives and livelihoods.

At the same time, the Texas Border Coalition is asking for $6 billion and 5,000 new customs officers over the next four years in order to tighten security at ports of entry on the nation's borders. The coalition, made up of border city mayors, county judges and economic-development commissions, is concerned about human and drug smuggling at the ports.

There's no doubt that tightening up security at border ports of entry would be a good idea.

But there's a major question here: Who would pay for this effort?

Take Texas as an example. Gov. Rick Perry is constantly pointing out the necessity for the federal government to pay for border security, because the border is a federal concern.

This isn't a financial burden that should be visited upon Texans already straining to make ends meet during the current economic crisis. It is clearly a federal responsibility.

It's equally apparent that shoring up security at land ports of entry along the U.S. borders should be a federal responsibility. And that is true for both northern and southern borders.

There's good reasons for concentrating on the ports. A coalition report says, "In the present environment, the (drug) cartels are choosing to conduct their trade across the bridges and highways, through ports of entry and are rejecting the risk of crossing the Rio Grande and open spaces between the ports of entry."

It's hard to tell what the federal government's response to the coalition will be. Possibly the government will generate more high-profile, low-results border security conferences of which it seems so fond.

But what's needed along the border is solid, positive action, not empty gestures and hollow promises.

URL: http://www.elpasotimes.com

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Nov. 12

Fort Worth Star-Telegram on releasing the clemency report for Cameron Todd Willingham:

The Texas Public Information Act contains straightforward procedures.

When a member of the public requests public information from a public agency, the documents must be provided "promptly." If officials believe that the information is not public, the agency has 10 business days to ask the Texas attorney general whether it must be disclosed.

The agency must also tell the requester what's being withheld and that an AG’s opinion is being sought.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry and his staff must know this; the Public Information Act is neither new nor foreign to the governor's office. A 288-page handbook on the law is available on the Texas attorney general's Web site, and his staff operates a hot line for questions about compliance.

But when a Houston Chronicle reporter asked for a comprehensive set of documents about the 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, Perry's staff left out the clemency report he had reviewed before denying a 30-day reprieve.

The governor's office didn't request an attorney general's ruling on whether the document could be withheld and didn't even tell the reporter it wasn't providing all she had requested.

That's not the kind of public service Texans expect for their tax dollars.

Now the Chronicle has sued the governor's office, and if the newspaper wins, taxpayers will foot the bill for the governor's recalcitrance.

According to the suit, the governor's office gave reporter Lise Olsen 883 pages of material relating to Willingham in early October.

But it wasn't until she asked why the documents didn't include any "staff summaries, recommendations or commentary from the governor's staff" that she learned the clemency report was deliberately omitted.

She was told that the excluded material had been requested by someone earlier and that the attorney general's office had said in April it could be withheld under attorney-client privilege: "Once the AG’s Office has made a ruling on whether or not the PIA requires disclosure of particular documents, that ruling is dispositive as far as those particular documents are concerned."

Not exactly.

The April 8 letter ruling from the attorney general's office specifically says it is not meant to be precedent for any other case.

It reads: "This letter ruling is limited to the particular information at issue in this request and limited to the facts as presented to us; therefore, this ruling must not be relied upon as a previous determination regarding any other information or any other circumstances."

It's hard to swallow the notion that a key report informing the governor's decision not to stop an execution is confidential legal advice. That would be true even if questions hadn't been raised about Willingham’s guilt in the death of his daughters.

If, as the governor's staff maintains, everything in the report is already in the public record, there's no reason to keep the document secret.

And nothing in the law requires that it be withheld.

Like his staff's disregard for procedures, the governor's refusal to release the report is not the kind of public service Texans expect.

URL: http://www.star-telegram.com

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Nov. 15

Houston Chronicle on helping repeat offenders:

We call prisons and jails "correctional facilities," but the truth is, most of them do diddly-squat to correct inmates' tendency to commit crimes.

Consider substance-abuse treatment, one of the best ways to break repeat offenders' criminal habits. Earlier this year, researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse estimated that about half half! of the 7.1 million Americans now locked up or on probation have some sort of addiction. But only one in five of those addicts receives effective treatment. That figure represents a horrible waste of lives and of taxpayer money.

"For every dollar that you spend on treatment of substance abuse in the criminal justice system, it saves society on average four dollars," NIDA director Nora Volkow told Scientific American in January. Her review of the scientific literature showed that rehab programs behind bars are good at keeping prisoners from returning to drugs once they're back on the streets.

As an example, Volkow cited a prison program that treated heroin addicts with methadone. Addicts who received that treatment were seven times more likely than their unrehabbed peers to stay off heroin after their release, and three times more likely not to commit another offense.

How are we doing locally? Recently, Chronicle reporter James Pinkerton reported that the demand for drug treatment at the Harris County Jail far outstrips the supply.

"We are not even close to having enough resources," Leonard Kincaid, of the Council on Alcohol and Drugs-Houston, told Pinkerton.

This year, hundreds of inmates have languished on the waiting list for the jail's in-house addiction-treatment program. Matters are arguably even bleaker for an addict outside of jail, on probation. It can take up to 16 weeks to get into the county probation department's residential treatment program.

In 16 weeks, an addict on the streets can find a lot of substances to abuse, a lot of crimes to commit, a lot of trouble to get into. And whether he ends up in the county emergency room or back in jail, the taxpayer will pick up the tab.

It's not just humane to help substance abusers in jail or on probation to clean up their acts. Long-term, it's cheaper, too.

URL: http://www.chron.com

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Nov. 15

San Antonio Express-News on the swine flu vaccine:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has a consoling message for everyone who has tried unsuccessfully to get the H1N1 vaccine: Don't worry -- more vaccine is on the way.

That message might be more reassuring if the American people hadn't already heard it.

Public and government awareness of the swine flu pandemic is more than six months old.

In July, federal health officials predicted that 160 million doses of the H1N1 vaccine would be available by the end of October. They were only off by about 130 million. In fact, approximately 30 million doses have been made available to the states thus far.

In an op-ed published in the Nashville Tennessean last week, Sebelius wrote, "Without question, we need significant improvements in vaccine production."

That would be an understatement.

Both Congress and the Obama administration should be examining why production of the vaccine for a viral threat that was well known and that has caused nearly 4,000 deaths in the United States since April has been so distressingly sluggish.

The shortage has put state health departments in the position of rationing scarce vaccines. Texas, with a population of more than 24 million, has received only 3 million doses.

The process of determining how H1N1 vaccines are being allocated should be transparent.

Unfortunately, it isn’t.

As the Express-News reported, Bexar County received fewer vaccines per capita in the initial state allotment than Dallas, Harris, Tarrant or Travis counties.

Why?

The Texas Department of State Health Services says the allocation is based on the population of "priority vaccination groups, vaccine formulation, national supply, geography and other factors."

Yet it also refused to release records indicating which medical providers in the state had requested and received the H1N1 vaccine.

Last week, the department belatedly responded to an open records request from The Dallas Morning News and released the information. It shouldn't have required that.

When it comes to public health, information about where vaccines are going -- and why -- should be a matter of public record.

URL: http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion

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