From George Scott Reports
Chronicle’s Pulitzer Prize Winning Columnist Lisa Falkenberg More Conservative Than Phony-Baloney Philosophical Ideologues Who Call Themselves Texas Republican Conservatives
There is a very simple reason that Chronicle columnist Lisa Falkenberg’s columns on the gross abuses of the Texas grand jury system which have now earned her a rightful Pulitzer Prize and a lifetime of professional respect struck home with me.
Years back, I hung a criminal jury when a Harris County District Attorney’s prosecutor tried to cheat during the trial of a black defendant represented by a marginally competent court-appointed attorney to convict a guilty man of the despicable crime of raping a learning-disabled child.
Hanging that jury and forcing a retrial during which the defendant was appropriately convicted was and remains the most ‘gut-check’ moment I ever experienced in terms of my philosophy confronting reality. The man was guilty. Today, I presume he is still rotting in jail on his eventual path to burning in Hell.
But in that trial on that day, the prosecution’s case literally collapsed under the weight of a key witness. Frustrated and angry, the prosecutor cheated and found a way to tell the jury in her ‘personal de facto testimony’ that despite what we just heard, the man really was guilty.
With the reasonable doubt standard literally eviscerated, conviction in that trial was not an option for me. I forced a mistrial which was declared even before a full afternoon of deliberations had passed. On that day, I hung that jury and it was never going to be ‘unhung.’
The next day, I wrote the judge a three-page letter and posed a question that goes to the heart and soul of a judicial system: on which of the three oaths that I took to get in that jury box did she want me to have committed perjury in order to have a returned a guilty verdict on that day?
There used to be a time when the conservative philosophy internalized the concept of civil liberty and due process and fear that government’s abuse of its awesome power would be turned on its head absent the full commitment of every individual citizen to keep that power under rigorous check.
I hung a jury to keep the Harris County District Attorney’s Office (the State) from wrongly convicting a guilty man who was subsequently convicted fair and square.
What Falkenberg’s brilliant, masterful, poignant, and inspiring columns did was tackle an infinitely more disastrous-to-society problem: lying, incompetent, malevolent, callous, indifferent or all of them combined officials of our law enforcement and judicial systems conspiring to send innocent people to prison.
The fact that Falkenberg is presumed to be a liberal columnist on many issues working for a liberal-bent newspaper makes her Pulitzer award all the more meaningful and instructive to me.
More forcefully and coherently than any Republican ideologue on the state scene including those in positions of maximum authority, she has exposed the underbelly of a system gone evil.
The problem with conservative Republican leadership today in Texas in particular is the reality that whether it involves this issue or public education (vouchers) or public healthcare (screw Medicaid) is that so-called conservatives are so willing to apply philosophical placebos to reality.
Texas Republicans have decided it is easier to govern according to their comfortable mantras rather than do the harder work of determining how their philosophy should interact with reality.
It should not go unnoticed that on the eve of the Pulitzer being awarded to Falkenberg that the FBI announced that its agents had wrongfully testified for decades on supposed scientific evidence that sent people to prison.
It is yet another law enforcement scandal unfolding. The relentless power of government’s machines for law enforcement getting a pass because knee-jerk conservatives do what knee-jerk conservatives like to do: look the other way.
Where have the conservatives been?
I’ll tell you where they have been. They have been far too willing to turn a simple statement of philosophy upside down that conservatives should have never abandoned for even a moment. Today, philosophical conservatives have been far too willing to ascribe to the perverse notion that “better an innocent man go to jail than a guilty man be set free.”
At least on matters of civil liberty, justice, and due process for all, Lisa Falkenberg’s columns have given conservatives a chance to reacquaint themselves with a principle they should never have abandoned in the name of becoming cheerleaders and tough on crime groupies.
Imagine that. Lisa Falkenberg – more conservative than Texas Republican conservatives.
When we look back in a few years her columns will have produced change for the better. And, the Pultizer will be symbolic for something much more important – her great work.
