All from the Houston Chronicle
- Third consecutive audit of inmate commissary accounts finds systemic failures, oversights.
A January audit of Harris County inmates’ commissary accounts identified critical oversights and financial control failures, including violations of state law and county policies.
- The Trump administration wants to help 'clean' Texas' voter rolls. What does that mean?
The Trump administration announced last month that it planned to help more than two dozen states, including Texas, clean their voter rolls. The process typically involves looking for ineligible voters and flagging them for removal.
The administration will be using data shared by Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, who in December struck a deal with the U.S. Department of Justice to hand over the names, addresses and partial social security numbers of almost all of the 18.6 million Texans registered to vote.
No removals are happening right now. There is a federal law, the National Voter Registration Act, that prohibits any major changes to the voter rolls within 90 days of an election.
- Harris County judge to challenge state reprimand over handling of Ronald Haskell's death row case.
A state district court judge is challenging a reprimand stemming from a legal dispute with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office over her handling of a death row inmate’s brain scan in Houston.
The two-term judge, Natalia Cornelio, will go before a tribunal of three appellate justices Tuesday in Austin to ask for a State Commission on Judicial Conduct reprimand issued last October be overturned, arguing paperwork related to a bench warrant she signed contained a nuanced clerical error rather than a show of favoritism toward Ronald Haskell. A jury convicted and sentenced Haskell to death in 2019 in the Spring killings of Stephen and Katie Stay and their four children in 2014.
