Less than a year since the U.S. Department of Justice announced it would review the “highly unreliable” results of microscopic hair analysis in federal cases, the State Forensic Science Commission will do the same in Texas. In cases nationally where DNA has later exonerated the wrongfully imprisoned, microscopic hair analysis…
Anyone who follows Dallas Police Chief David Brown on Twitter or Facebook knows that during the department’s semi-regular disciplinary hearings he posts details about the punishment handed down to misbehaving officers. A Dallas Police Association attorney briefly raised a stink about it last March, but the practice has generally been…
Chung Kim might look like someone’s kindly grandpa, but the 76-year-old has a helluva mean streak. His former boss knew this; when Kim was laid off from his job in 2001, he allegedly pulled a weapon. So did his neighbors, several of whom he allegedly threatened with murder over the…
The Bob’s Steak & Chophouse on Lemmon Avenue isn’t the type of establishment that plasters its dining room walls with pictures of famous athletes, which explains how a $3,000 photo of Babe Ruth came to be hanging in the men’s restroom. When dinner began on Wednesday evening, the Great Bambino…
It’s been a while since we had occasion to skewer Dallas ISD Superintendent Mike Miles for a personnel move. Jennifer Sprague, the overpaid and underqualified strategy maven; Miles saboteur Rebecca Rodriguez; chief of staff and FBI target Jerome Oberlton — they are all long gone. But now that Oberlton is…
Roy Alvin Adams Jr. didn’t win much sympathy from a Tarrant County jury when his case went to trial in 2005. He had killed a cop, drunkenly running over veteran Grapevine police officer Darren Medlin as he performed a routine traffic stop along the State Highway 121, leaving Medlin’s two…
There hasn’t been a satisfying explanation as to why Michael Schmidt, a successful Dallas trial lawyer described by friends as a “good, good person,” barricaded himself in an Uptown apartment complex and opened fire on police while his 11-year-old daughter sat in his apartment. Probably, there never will be. But…
Just in case your resolve was slipping, or else that scene in The Wolf of Wall Street convinced you that crack is the gateway to fun and untold riches, we bring you the cautionary tale of Joel Flores. Flores, 36, and another man had were “kickin’ it” on Saturday night…
Dallas Police Chief David Brown has started coming down hard on officers who are too quick to resort to deadly force. He fired senior corporal Amy Wilburn, who shot an unarmed carjacking suspect last month. Same with Carden Spencer, the cop who opened fire on a mentally ill man in…
Update at 12:45 p.m.Police have identified the gunman as Michael Edward Schmidt, whom The Dallas Morning News describes as a “prominent” lawyer. Schmidt works for his dad, C.L. Schmidt, at The Schmidt Firm, a group of trial lawyers whose specialties range from car accidents to oil and gas litigation. The…
It was a chaotic scene overnight as emergency vehicles and news crews descended on the 3000 block of Hanger Avenue in Fort Worth. Details were scarce, but Fort Worth PD said that a 14-year-old boy had been shot in the face a few minutes before midnight on Thursday and that…
Earlier this month, the Dallas Police Department released figures that seemed to be encouraging for Dallas motorists. The DPD’s data showed that police have been slowly scaling down on traffic tickets over the years. In the most recent fiscal year, from October 2012 until September 2013, the DPD issued 37,000…
When, in the predawn hours on Christmas morning, a Grand Prairie police officer spotted a suspicious 1997 Honda driving through the Grand Peninsula neighborhood near Joe Pool Lake, he didn’t know the car was stolen, nor did he know the driver had a gun. “Whatever he was doing caught the…
Just before midnight on Christmas Eve, Gareth Long woke to a noise outside his bedroom door. He got out of bed, grabbed a handgun and went to investigate. In the hallway of his Cedar Hill home, Long’s attorney told The Dallas Morning News, he encountered a stranger. Several times, Long…
Something clearly didn’t quite wash with this Gian Carlo Donatelli guy. Here he was, inside a event-level area at the American Airlines Center, almost half an hour before the doors would open for the rest of Jay Z’s ticket-holding fans Saturday night. He flashed a Magna Carter All-Access World Tour…
In the this week’s cover story, we examined the case of Sonia Cacy, the Fort Stockton woman convicted in 1993 of setting her uncle ablaze with gasoline. In the years since, the evidence against her hasn’t withstood scrutiny. Cacy was paroled six years into a 99-year sentence based on expert…
On Thursday, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst became the latest Texas politician to insert himself into the debate over the sentence handed down to 16-year-old “affluenza” victim Ethan Couch, who killed four people during a drunken joy ride earlier this year. Days after gubernatorial candidates Greg Abbott and Wendy Davis chimed…
If you simply must have an authentic Hustle Gang T-shirt but can’t afford the $50 price tag, and if you aren’t put off by criminal activity, shoplifting isn’t a horrible option. If properly executed, a surprise grab-and-run operation, much like this 300-pound dude carried out at Mockingbird Station’s Victoria’s Secret…
Even after a wave of exonerations confirmed the fallibility of the criminal justice system, even after the state’s supply of lethal-injection drugs has been all but cut off by squeamish pharmaceutical companies, even as national support for capital punishment steadily declines, Texas remains enamored with the death penalty. In 2013,…
Dallas News | myFOXdfw.comKelvion Walker says he didn’t know he was sitting in a stolen car on December 9. He’d just hopped in the passenger seat of the Chevrolet Malibu driven by 19-year-old Reginald Robertson, whom he describes as a close friend. It came as a surprise, then, when Robertson…
Earlier this week, Tarrant County prosecutors were busy lamenting that they are unable to appeal the sentence handed down to 16-year-old Ethan Couch, who got 10 years’ probation and a stint in rehab for drunkenly running over four people in June. Under state law, only the defendant in juvenile cases…
Breath easy, North Texas. Come out of your fallout shelters and panic rooms. Let your children play in the front yard. After four months on the run, federal authorities have captured documented menace-to-society Lonnie L. Jones and locked him up. His crime? Stealing burritos. Federal prosecutors prefer to describe it…
