HCCLA Blog

The keynote speaker at the 2008 HCCLA membership banquet is Lt. Col. Colby Vokey. Lt. Col. Vokey is the lawyer in charge of defending Marines in the western U.S.:

The same commander who accuses a Marine of breaking the law might also pick the members of the jury, which will decide if the commander is right. And that same commander might supervise the lawyer who defends the Marine against his accusations.

But Vokey teaches his defense lawyers that they have to fight commanders with every legal weapon they've got, even if it makes the commanders angry.

When he trains young Marine defense lawyers, he tells them "you have one loyalty, and that's to the client," Vokey said.

Vokey is on the cutting edge of criminal defense work. As a lawyer representing Marines, Vokey has extensive experience dealing with PTSD and traumatic brain injury in veterans of the Iraq War -- injuries that we're all going to see more of in our criminal defense practices.

Vokey has also defended a detainee at Guantánamo, and is an outspoken critic of the Government's actions there:

The U.S. has imprisoned hundreds of "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay in a military legal system that Vokey denounces as "horrific." Vokey saw the system first-hand when he agreed two years ago to defend a teenager there who had been charged with murdering a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. Vokey said he knew the case would be difficult, but he discovered that the legal system at Guantanamo is a "sham."

Vokey said the military staff constantly harassed him and interfered with his defense work by making it difficult even to meet with his client or show his client the government's evidence against him. The teenager confessed to killing the soldier, but he told Vokey he confessed after being shackled for hours in excruciating positions and bombarded by screeching music and flashing lights.

Vokey is, however, an Aggie.

For more about Lt. Col. Vokey:
NPR
MSNBC

You might think that the Houston Police Department would be eager to use video equipment to record DWI arrests. After all, the video will provide strong evidence of the defendant's physical and mental faculties at the time of the arrest. And if there's a video you can more easily protect yourself against complaints of misconduct. So if you were a police department making righteous arrests and not mistreating people, you'd be eager to have every stage of the arrest documented on video. Right?

Right.

So why is it that HPD DWI Task Force administrator Paul Lassalle is writing to Warren Diepraam and Eric Kugler of the Harris County District Attorney's Office and asking:

Now, [the law] states that we have to purchase and maintain the equipment of video taping a person charged with certain crimes but there is no requirement to actually do so, correct?

It looks to me like HPD wants justification for not using the video equipment that they are required to have. And Warren is giving them that justification.

Why, if you have to purchase and maintain the video equipment, would you not want to use it?

And why, if you were the lead prosecutor on DWI cases in Harris County, would you not admonish HPD that the better practice, to make sure that the jury has the best possible evidence, is to use the equipment?

See the email exchange, in documents obtained by HCCLA Past President Troy McKinney with a Public Information Act request.

Emails Between HPD and HCDAO Re Video Equipment

Video of the 2003 HCCLA Membership Banquet, at which John Ackerman was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award, and Stuart Kinard spoke.

Here are the Reasonable Doubt episodes featuring three of the four Republican DA candidates:

Jim Leitner

Kelly Siegler

Pat Lykos

Reasonable Doubt with Todd Dupont, Tate Williams, two Harris County Civil District Court candidates.