Ronnie Earl (not to be confused with this Ronnie Earl youtube.com is leaving office.
Loose ends, mighty swings and rehabilitation
Ronnie Earle's legacy as Travis County district attorney
Friday, January 02, 2009
If Ronnie Earle were a fisherman, he might spend time talking about the ones that got away.
Others certainly do. Earle, who officially vacated his post as Travis County district attorney on Thursday, might be remembered most for the failed prosecutions of some of the biggest names in Texas politics. Indeed, his short-term legacy will be influenced heavily by unfinished business.
Yet to be resolved are indictments that caused former U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay — the no-compromise conservative firebrand — to step down. Then, of course, there are the unresolved Yogurt Shop murders.
The phrase "crime that shocked the community" is a cliche, but the 1991 killing of four Austin teenage girls was a hard slap at the laid-back image the city cultivates. The two convictions that Earle's prosecutors obtained in the slayings have been overturned on appeal. The appellate courts ruled that the confessions used to secure the convictions were tainted. It was subsequently revealed that DNA evidence found at the scene doesn't match either of the two men who were convicted.
Though Austin has grown a lot in the 17 years since the killings, the savage nature of the crimes still gnaws at the community psyche. If police and prosecutors got the wrong guys, did someone literally get away with murder?
DeLay was House majority leader when a Travis County indictment accused him of conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws. Pretrial maneuvering has consumed more than two years.
Given the personalities and the political stakes involved, it's almost a sure bet that a jury will decide the outcome. Just when a jury will hear evidence on indictments brought more than two years ago is not at all clear.
It falls on Rosemary Lehmberg, the new district attorney and Earle's longtime first assistant, to bring the case to a conclusion. The pretrial jockeying in the DeLay case is not necessarily of Earle's choosing, and as for the Yogurt Shop murders, he said: "We thought we had the right guys" when two defendants were convicted in 2001 and 2002.
Earle explains that he is not indifferent to the outcomes of either case, but as he leaves office, he focuses on a much larger picture.
Over the past five years, Earle's prosecutors notched an overall conviction rate of 85 percent. The conviction rate number, while so important to many a DA, has never interested Earle, and thereby hangs his tale.
When his prosecutors were racking up conviction rates in the 90s in years past, it told Earle that they weren't trying enough of the "right" cases.
In Earle's calculation, plea deals can run up conviction rates, but numbers games don't necessarily make the community safer.
Convictions alone, Earle said, don't solve the problems "that led to the crime in first place. We send people to prison and expect them to come out fixed."
Prisons, Earle is fond of saying, are just institution of higher learning for criminals.
That philosophy is easy to caricature, and Earle's detractors haven't missed a stroke. A Belton County prosecutor running for an appellate court cracked: "I tell Belton County defendants that I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that it isn't Williamson County. The bad news is it isn't Travis County."
Through it all, Earle has maintained a thick hide. When he's been criticized on this page, he registered his objections with a curious stew of righteousness, good ol' boy humor and self-deprecation.
"He's the perfect DA for Austin," noted state District Judge Bob Perkins, whose judicial career began two years before Earle took office in 1977. Given the choice between punishment and rehabilitation, Travis County jurors will lean toward rehabilitation, the judge notes.
Those choices aren't as clear-cut for Earle, but they're close enough.
"Our job is to see justice done, not just get convictions," Earle said. "I want to be remembered for fairness."
That, not his swings at an array of the state's most powerful politicians, is how Earle says he wants to be remembered. Those swings — and misses — include the late Bob Bullock, then lieutenant governor, the late Jim Mattox, then attorney general, and U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.
Fairness, like beauty, is always in the eye of the beholder, so the jury will be out awhile on that question.
What we can say for sure is that Earle's impact on the justice delivered in Travis County will remain long after he is gone. The concept of restorative justice is strong and won't be easily reversed. Neither will an emphasis on re-integrating ex-inmates into society.
Pushing both of those concepts were at the core of Earle's tenure, though it is impossible to enumerate whether those programs really work.
Like it or not, like him or not, the integration of those two concepts into the way criminal justice is administered in Travis County is a lasting one.
Who knows — they might even work. After all, if long sentences were the deterrent they are cracked up to be, we wouldn't have to keep building prison cells, would we?
statesman.com |
