With sex crimes, particularly those relating to children, the fair administration of justice sometimes takes a backseat to the urge to punish. Just glancing at the headline of the Tarrant County district attorney’s announcement of a 70-year prison sentence for failing to register as a sex offender might suggest 69-year-old…
Rodrick Tippett got off relatively easy for the pair of burglaries he committed in 2009. After six months behind bars, the judge changed what had been a six-year penitentiary sentence to six years of probation. The fact that one of his victims had been his sister does not appear to…
On March 20, 2012, a year before her filibuster against abortion restrictions catapulted her to national stardom and a gubernatorial bid, state Senator Wendy Davis had the singular distinction of having her Fort Worth office firebombed. Davis wasn’t in her office, and no one was injured, but the bag that…
The accusations leveled last week by Dallas Police Association President Ron Pinkston were serious: Dallas PD was relaxing standards for its driving- and firearms-training courses to allow unqualified recruits to become cops. More serious, certainly, than his assertion that keeping cops from shooting people, or allowing Avi Adelman to legally…
Yesterday afternoon, Dallas police were called to one of the dumber bank robbery attempts in recent memory. At 5:15 p.m. a man in his 40s pulled up to the drive-thru window (the sliding-drawer kind rather than suction tube) and placed what police described as a “suspicious device” inside along with…
Until now, there have been only vague hints of improprieties in Garland ISD’s H1-B visa program. There was an investigation serious enough to call in the feds, possibly involving foreign teachers paying fees they shouldn’t have had to pay, and a bunch of teachers’ visas were set to expire. Today,…
Pallavi Dhawan is still facing charges in the death of her 10-year-old son, Arnav, even though the final autopsy report ruled that “natural disease is most likely.” It’s for that and other reasons that the Frisco Police Department seems to have jumped the gun when it held a press conference…
Robbing someone is, without exception, a terrible idea. Robbing someone in broad daylight one block from police headquarters? About as dumb as ideas get. That seems what happened this morning in the 1200 block of South Lamar Street:…
The margins in the illicit cigarette trade are relatively low. Tobacco is legal, for one, eliminating the risk-based premium that comes with trading in illegal drugs, and there’s a lot of competition, which puts downward pressure on retail prices. But there is a margin, enough of one to attract entrepreneurial…
Update: Never mind. An appeals court overturned Gilmore’s decision. Original post: There have been two significant developments since the Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday that the state doesn’t have to say where it got the pentobarbital it will use to kill death row inmates Tommy Lynn Sells and Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas…
Meet Kris Gentz, 59-year-old Princeton resident, 14-year veteran of Plano ISD, and, according to the feds, a compulsive gambler and prolific thief. Federal prosecutors, along with the FBI and Plano police, announced this morning that Gentz has pleaded guilty to embezzling some $2.5 million from the district, most of which…
Your average U.S. truck driver in the makes something like $.30 or $.40 cents per mile. It’s enough to make a living but not much else. Swap the 18-wheeler full of widgets for one full of Mexican marijuana, and the job becomes way, way more lucrative. Reliable data are tough…
The last time the Texas Department of Criminal Justice secured a cache of pentobarbital, the drug it uses to execute prisoners, the Houston-area compounding pharmacy that supplied it had second thoughts. “[I]t was my belief that this information would be kept on the ‘down low,’ and that it was unlikely…
The speed limit on Irving’s East Pioneer Drive is 30 mph. Crystal Zuniga, 30, was going two or three times that — somewhere between 60 and 100 mph as she ferried an SUV full of kids past Gilbert Elementary on Saturday evening. Zuniga, police say, was drunk, her blood alcohol…
Highland Park police seem to have a pretty strong case that they were justified in shooting David Hartman last summer. Granted, they should have done a more thorough search of his cargo pants, which contained a gun, and made sure he couldn’t slip his handcuffs over his legs and reach…
The first Highland Park police officers to fatally shoot a suspect on duty are now also the first Highland Park police officers to be cleared of criminal wrongdoing for shooting a suspect while on duty. Town Public Safety Director Chris Vinson made the announcement at a Thursday afternoon press conference…
You might have heard the news yesterday: Quinton Ross, the former Kimball and SMU basketball standout-cum-NBA journeyman, was found murdered, his body found stuffed in a plastic trash bag and buried in a shallow grave in Queens. It was certainly news to Ross when he woke up Monday morning at…
The first three months of 2014 have been exceptionally peaceful ones in Dallas. Robberies have dropped by 15 percent compared with the same period last year. Aggravated assaults are down 12 percent, murders a whopping 30 percent. There are still nine months to go, but the city is on pace…
Well, here’s an even better argument to strap dash-cams on all cops. Dallas Police Department officer Rene Villanueva had claimed in November that a drunken-driving suspect tried to punch him. But footage from the police car showed that it was the officer who was doing all the punching. Chief David…
It was a domestic violence call that first brought Dallas Police Department officers to the 4300 block of Crozier avenue on Thursday night. A witness who lived nearby said he saw a man “beating the shit” out of his girlfriend. The witness, later identified by family members as Rubin Brown,…
A teacher at Kennedale High School was washing his hands when a camera suddenly fell from the underside of the sink and landed on the ground. He handed it to Kennedale Vice Principal Jeff Krieger, who promptly turned it over to the cops. The cops found the camera contained footage…
Back in January, when we did very hard math in an effort to identify which cities write the most traffic tickets, Dallas was well off the leader board, writing far fewer tickets per capita than most big suburbs. Now, a bonus, courtesy of WFAA: Whatever traffic tickets police have written…
