Civil Rights
A Top Cop Accused of Racism Forces Austin to Confront Bias in Law Enforcement
How Tea Partiers Fueled Texas’ Latest ‘Voter Fraud’ Freakout
Election-related crimes are rare, but activists like Aaron Harris have become both a legal and political weapon in Texas Republicans’ war on election fraud.
by Michael Barajas March 6, 2019 In August, a group of outraged conservative activists sent Governor Greg Abbott a letter that helped spark Texas’ latest vote...Read More
Why Doesn’t Texas’ Most Liberal County Have a Public Defender?
Judges and an aggrieved defense bar are derailing talks to build a public defender’s office in Travis County.
Austin is the largest city in the country without a public defender’s office to help represent poor people accused of crimes. In Texas, the only other big cit...Read More
Christian Conservatives Bring Alarmist #BanTheBible Message to Texas Capitol
The religious right’s desperate new messaging strategy speaks to the shifting dynamics around LGBTQ equality at the Texas Legislature.
In hopes of protecting their religious right to discriminate against LGBTQ people, Texas conservatives have turned to a perplexing new message this legislative ...Read More
Lost in Limbo in the Hays County Jail
For 45 painful, lonely days, I waited and waited to be convicted of a crime.
The cold bit through the thin wool blanket and climbed up the short sleeves of my Women of the World Poetry Slam T-shirt as I lay on the cement floor of the Hay...Read More
Civil Rights Groups Call Ken Paxton’s ‘VOTER FRAUD ALERT’ a Smokescreen for Voter Suppression
How a misleading advisory to county elections officials triggered fake news that Texas Republicans could use to bolster new barriers for voting.
Last month, after a double-digit increase in voter turnout during the midterms and the best election results Texas Democrats had seen in at least a quarter cent...Read More
The Tattooed Star of the ‘Progressive Prosecutor’ Movement Braces for His First Death Penalty Trial
Mark Gonzalez wants a jury to help him decide whether Nueces County should keep sending people to death row.
In mid-January 2017, a couple of days after Mark Gonzalez was sworn in as Nueces County’s new district attorney, a deputy prosecutor approached him to ask how...Read More
Abbott, Patrick, Bonnen Quietly Vote to Remove Slavery-Denying Plaque from Texas Capitol
“The reality is that plaque never should have gone up in the state Capitol in the first place, and it shouldn’t have taken 60 years to take it down,” state Representative Eric Johnson said.
Since the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville a year and a half ago, Texas officials have faced increasing demands to purge the statehouse of a plaque...Read More
‘Ignored to Death’ in the Bexar County Jail
Janice Dotson-Stevens' death is another tragic example of how bad the criminal justice system is at dealing with mentally ill people who enter it.
by Michael Barajas January 4, 2019 – Three days after Christmas, family and friends of Janice Dotson-Stephens packed into pews inside the Lewis Funeral Ho...Read More
Botham Jean’s Death Could Lead to an Overhaul of Police Oversight in Dallas
The outrageous shooting of a man in his own apartment has triggered calls to reform Dallas’ toothless, decades-old system of police oversight.
In the 1970s, the Dallas Police Department was pressured to diversify after a white cop killed a 12-year-old Mexican-American boy in a game of Russian Roulette....Read More
