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Anyone who believes the criminal justice system in Texas is functioning properly should be locked in a room and forced to listen to Cory Session talk about his half-brother.

His name was Tim Cole. He was a Texas Tech University student falsely convicted in 1986 of rape. Tainted police lineup procedures led the victim to misidentify Cole as her attacker. He spent 13 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He didn’t live to see his name cleared. In 1999, Cole died in prison of complications from asthma.

On Oct. 13, some of the leading criminal justice experts in the state—including lawyers, judges, and policymakers—gathered for the first meeting of the Tim Cole Advisory Panel on Wrongful Convictions. It was ostensibly an organizational meeting. But the first order of business was Session. Sitting next to other members of Cole’s family at a long conference table, Session described Cole as a college student trying to live the American dream. “This was my brother,” Session said through tears. “This was my mother’s son. He never met my children. He never married.”

Session suggested that flags on all state government buildings be lowered to half-staff on Dec. 2—the date Cole died in prison—to acknowledge everyone who’s been wrongly convicted.

“Tim died in prison while being oppressed,” Session said. “Let’s not let it happen again. … If it can happen to Tim, it can happen to anyone.”

Last year, after DNA testing proved his innocence, Cole became the first person exonerated posthumously in Texas. His story made national news and prodded the Legislature to enact two bills in Cole’s name (one increased compensation for the wrongly convicted; the other created the panel). The panel is to deliver recommendations to the Legislature in January 2011.

Much of the first meeting revolved around reforms that didn’t pass the Legislature this year, including a bill to fix police lineup procedures. Had the bill been law in 1985, it might have saved Tim Cole.

Many panelists agreed broadly on the causes of wrongful convictions. There isn’t much left to study on the topic, and some panelists argued the committee should focus its energy on a political strategy to pass the reforms.

“We don’t need to study it anymore,” said Barry Macha, the Wichita County district attorney and the panel’s representative from the Texas District & County Attorneys Association. “We know what the problems are. We know what the solutions are. We just need to pass it.”

Macha said DAs support many of the reform bills, including those addressing lineups, videotaped confessions, and better access to the courthouse for wrongly convicted prisoners.

Others at the table disagreed. Rep. Pete Gallego, the Alpine Democrat who chairs the criminal justice committee in the state House, said the compromise versions of the reform bills this past session were weak. “It’s easy to support weak stuff,” he said. Gallego argued that the panel should debate the details and make specific recommendations.

The open question is whether the inquiry named after Tim Cole can lead the way to reform. Or will it be another blue ribbon panel that produces another well-intended report that ends up in a drawer?

Drew Ryun surveys the Dallas hotel conference room. He can feel the dissatisfaction—anger, even—radiating from the 40 or so newly minted conservative activists seated in front of him.

“You are all here because you are upset about something,” says Ryun, executive director of American Majority, whose mission is training a national network of activists committed to limited government. “You want to know what you can do to turn the tide in this country.”

There are a few murmurs and a boisterous, “Yes!”

“We all share common values as conservatives. We all want to hold our elected officials accountable,” he says, pacing the front of the room. “But here’s a test: Who here can name every member of your school board?”

Silence.

Ryun is practicing the ancient art of political organizing, a tradition once thought lost in the age of television campaigning. With the Christian Right and the Obama Left having reinvented personal politicking for the 21st century, the old wizardry is making a comeback. After the tea parties are over and the Fox News van has skipped town, American Majority is training activists to win elections at the grassroots.

At this Thursday-night meeting in late September, Ryun uses the audience’s ignorance as a teachable moment. He has demonstrated that angry chants and loud shouts do not an effective activist make. Like an Army drill sergeant, he’s tearing down these wannabes and building them up as political warriors with a full complement of weaponry.

“OK. So what are you so pissed about? The people that make decisions are the ones that actually get elected to office,” Ryun says. “If you don’t know who the people are that are making the decisions that most directly affect you, what are you so mad at?”

Ryun helped his twin brother Ned launch American Majority in January 2008. They are the sons of former Kansas Republican Congressman Jim Ryun, whom the National Review ranked as the most conservative member of Congress in 2006. Ned, president of American Majority, worked as a writer in President George W. Bush’s administration. Drew previously ran the grassroots operation of the Republican National Committee.

Nevertheless, the group claims to be nonpartisan—a requirement to keep its nonprofit status. The Ryuns say their efforts are ideological, not partisan; they consider most elected Republicans either insufficiently conservative or, worse, falsely conservative.

American Majority has a field office in Dallas. Since it opened in late May, the group has held 12 training sessions (half for activists, half for candidates), with six more on this year’s calendar. Ryan says American Majority’s goal for 2010 is a thousand new activists and 100 candidates running in Texas.

The training session makes it clear that the members of this audience are not the “crazy uncles” you see on TV. They’re the kind of folks who will work the call centers, walk blocks, and, potentially, translate the Tea Party movement into a political force.

For decades, fire investigators walked into charred buildings in search of the same clues, the same subtle traces, that they thought indicated arson: the furniture and windows buckled by extreme heat, the burn patterns on the floor scorched by gasoline. Their methods weren’t scientific. Investigators relied on a set of assumptions—inherited knowledge passed from one generation to another—about how buildings burn. They used those pieces of evidence to send thousands of defendants to prison. And much of it was wrong.

In the past 15 years, the science of detecting arson has undergone a revolution. Research has shown definitively that many of the assumptions fire investigators once employed to distinguish an intentionally set fire from an accidental one were false.

Yet those disproved forensics sent Cameron Todd Willingham to the Texas death chamber on Feb. 17, 2004. His final claims of innocence—that he hadn’t started the 1991 house fire that killed his three daughters—were dutifully recorded before potassium chloride pumped through his veins and stopped his heart.

More than five years later, Willingham’s execution lies at the center of the biggest political scandal in Texas since Tom DeLay was roaming the halls of power. Nine of the nation’s top fire scientists have looked at the evidence against Willingham and concluded it was based on flawed and outdated assumptions, a collection of “old wives tales,” as one put it. These experts say the fire was likely accidental. If there was no arson, then there was no crime, and Willingham was innocent.

The story became even more explosive in late September when Gov. Rick Perry—in the middle of a tough re-election campaign—replaced three members of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which was investigating the Willingham case, just days before an important hearing. Perry’s new appointees promptly canceled the meeting. John Bradley, the Williamson County prosecutor Perry placed in charge of the commission, has not committed to restarting or completing the Willingham probe.

Suddenly there was the whiff of a cover-up, and the makings of a national scandal. Critics accuse Perry of trying to subvert an investigation that might prove he oversaw the execution of an innocent man (he was told of the faulty forensics before the execution). Meanwhile, anti-death penalty activists—sensing that Texas (of all places) might become the first state to admit putting an innocent man to death—latched on to the Willingham case and began rapidly firing off email blasts and organizing protests.

Perry was all too happy to play along and frame the story as a debate over the death penalty. He told reporters recently that Willingham was a “monster” and that the analysis of the nation’s leading fire experts was nothing more than “propaganda by the anti-death penalty people.”

What has been lost in the heat of political scandal is the original and central issue: the veracity of the forensic arson evidence.

For a time, it appeared the Forensic Science Commission’s investigation into the Willingham case might improve the way fire investigators in Texas do their work. The Legislature created the commission in 2005 after scandals at crime labs around the state. The commission was charged with investigating innocence claims based on flawed forensics, and bringing to light any faulty practices that may have sent innocent people to prison. It’s one of the first such governmental bodies in the nation. For once, Texas was a criminal-justice innovator.

Arson cases seemed the perfect place to start. Like the cases of Willingham and Ernest Ray Willis, who like Willingham was wrongly convicted of setting a fatal fire— a 1986 blaze in West Texas—based on the same kind of flawed interpretation of burn patterns. (Willis, however, was luckier; he was exonerated in 2004 after 17 years on death row.)

Craig Beyler, a nationally respected fire expert hired by the commission to study Willingham and Willis, concluded in a recent report that he saw no evidence of arson in either case.

Nearly 800 people are serving prison sentences in Texas for arson-related crimes. Quite a few are probably innocent. This year, the Observer has investigated some of the state’s older arson convictions in its series, “Burn Patterns,” and so far found three men who were likely wrongly convicted and remain in prison. (You can read all three stories here, here, and here.)

It’s probably still happening. In some areas of the state, poorly trained fire investigators are no doubt still using some of the old, disproved forensics to accuse and convict innocent people of arson.

Sadly, there’s no helping Willingham now. His case has been closed irrevocably. But the Forensic Science Commission’s work might have (and hopefully might yet) help many people. The commission’s report could serve as a kind of official list of flawed and outdated arson evidence that could be applied to past and future cases.

And now it’s all in doubt. That may be the greatest injustice yet.

More sad evidence this week that reforming the troubled Texas state school system — the 13 large institutions for the mentally disabled — will be a long, difficult job.

A former employee at the Lubbock State School was indicted on Tuesday on manslaughter charges. A direct care worker named Doneil Smith allegedly killed a 45 year old resident. Smith allegedly suffocated the resident to death.

The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal has more details:

The medical examiner’s office ruled Nicholson died of suffocation during a struggle.

The autopsy report cited information from investigative reports which stated that Nicholson was on a mattress with someone lying over his upper torso when he died.

Lilly Nicholson told the A-J in August that several state school employees caused his death while trying to dress him.

She said her son suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder and refused to dress while his clothes were being washed.

The Department of Aging and Disability Services (DADS), the state agency that oversees state schools, has fired Smith and five other employees at the Lubbock facility, according to the paper.

As you may know, state schools have endured well-documented problems in recent years. (You can read our story on the facilities here.)

The Legislature passed several state school reform bills last session, including a 12-percent funding increase for the chronically underfunded institutions. (You can read our coverage of the reforms here.)

I should note that lawmakers did change the name of these facilities. They’re not longer state schools. They’re “state supported living centers.”

But lawmakers ignore one major issue: They didn’t increase the salaries for state school workers, who are among the lowest paid state employees.

Caring for the mentally disabled is a demanding, difficult job, and only certainl individuals are cut out for it.

But the $8-an-hour starting salary is why the Lubbock State School — now called the Lubbock State Supported Living Center — wound up with someone like Doneil Smith caring for a vulnerable patient with mental retardation.

It’s worth noting that this incident happened in June, before the recently passed reforms took full effect.

But the incident shows it will take a lot more than a name change to fix these facilities, and without the pay increase, it’s not clear that conditions will improve.

Must-read column today by Michael Schnurman in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He details how and why national health care reform would benefit Texas.

For one, when it comes to health insurance, the free market isn’t all that free. In many states, there are too few insurance companies to spark true competition for customers.

But here’s the catch: Even in states with lots of competition (states like Texas), prices have still gone up. Schnurman writes:

Lots of competition means lots of choice and lots of benefits for consumers — at least that’s the theory.Except that in health insurance, the results have often been higher prices and more cherry-picking of the best customers.”We have lots of choices, but they aren’t affordable choices,” said Anne Dunkelberg, associate director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin research group that supports reform. “Having a lot of competitors isn’t sufficient in itself.”

Free market principles just don’t graft well on to certain policy areas — such as education. Same goes for health care. It’s proven nearly impossible to create a pure health insurance market. With health care, more competition doesn’t necessarily reduce prices.

Schnurman also piggybacks on the excellent research by CPPP that shows how much national health care reform would benefit Texas, especially if there’s a public option:

Unfortunately, a lot of people in Texas don’t get insurance from large employers or from employers at all. Just under 49 percent of Texans have employer-sponsored insurance, compared with an average of 56 percent for the nation (and 88.5 percent in Hawaii).It’s part of this group that stands to benefit from a public option. The government plan would be added to a health insurance exchange that includes private carriers and offers several tiers of coverage. The public option would be offered to individuals, as well as employees of small companies whose plans were too expensive or limited in coverage….

Like it or not, reform is coming, and Texas stands to be one of the big winners. For people looking to the health insurance exchange — and there will be a lot of them in Texas — the public option could make it even better.