Dear Friends, Each year at Texas Defender Service, we host students for their social work field placement. Field placement is a core component of the curriculum in graduate schools of social work. It gives students first-hand, real-world experience applying their classroom skills in the field. Our mitigation specialists train these students in the basics of conducting comprehensive […]
Dear Friends, Earlier this year, we shared an important new resource for incarcerated Texans and their families: Texas Defender Service’s Parole Website. The site is the first-ever clearinghouse of information on how people can advocate for themselves or their loved ones in the Texas parole review process. I wanted to share with you my favorite video from […]
Dear Friends, At Texas Defender Service, we have saved 50 lives from execution or a death sentence since 2018. A few years back, a filmmaker asked our team, “What do you wish more people knew about the death penalty?” The answers our team gave then are as true and powerful today as ever before. I hope you […]
Dear Friends, One of the hidden features of our criminal-legal system in Texas is its enormous impact on women. The number of women incarcerated in Texas has increased by 951% since 1980, at more than twice the rate of male incarceration. Texas incarcerates more women than any other state.Eighty percent of women incarcerated in Texas prisons are […]
Dear Friends, We wanted to pass along the thrilling news that House Bill 115— proposed legislation by Republican House Member David Cook that would reform Texas’s junk science law—passed the Texas House of Representatives this session by a huge margin. In our report An Unfulfilled Promise: Assessing the Efficacy of Article 11.073, published last year, we found that Texas’s […]
Dear Friends, I wanted to make sure you knew that efforts to roll back the Michael Morton Act—Texas’s landmark law protecting the actually innocent from wrongful conviction—have been defeated! Michael Morton was wrongfully convicted of the murder of his wife in 1987. Separated from his then-three-year-old son, Michael spent nearly 25 years in prison before […]
