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Serving people with lawsuits or divorce papers can be a tricky business. Maybe they've moved. Maybe they haven't left much of a paper trail. Maybe they just don't want to be found. Chances are slim, after all, that they'll be delighted with what the process server brings them.

But this is the 21st century, when a sizable chunk of people's business takes place online, so why not make it easier to digitally serve people with legal papers? That's the idea behind a bill filed by state Representative Jeff Leach, a Plano Republican whose previous cameos on Unfair Park have involved his passion for social conservative causes, which would allow legal papers to be served via Facebook.

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Or something like that.

For 17 years, Tina Milton worked as a clerk at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Wynne Unit. Her job was to pore over inmate mail in search of coded gang messages, and she did it just fine until late 2006.

That's when she returned from a sinus surgery and found that she could no longer stand the plug-in air fresheners and scented candles that her colleagues used to mask the overwhelming mustiness of the century-old building. They aggravated her asthma and caused headaches, nausea, coughing and tightness in her chest.

She complained to the unit's assistant warden. When that accomplished nothing, she filed a formal request under the Americans With Disability Act, which requires employers to require "reasonable accommodation" to disabled employees. Her request mentioned, rather vaguely, "No plug in or candles. Strong [odors]."

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D. Christopher Capital Management

Delsa U. Thomas

The way she tells it on her website, Delsa Thomas decided to launch her own investment firm after Citi Smith Barney, where she worked, merged with Morgan Stanley. She left in February 2011, taking a decade's worth of experience as a stockbroker and financial advisor to her new outfit, The D. Christopher Capital Management Group, and its flagship Solomon Fund.

The Securities and Exchange Commission gives a slightly different version of events. While at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Thomas had been steering clients toward certain high-yield investment vehicles that were, in the SEC's estimation, fraudulent. Investors lost a lot of money. Several sued. Thomas jumped ship before MSSB could fire her.

At D. Christopher Capital Management, Thomas promised large returns extremely quickly. She told a San Antonio real estate investor that she could turn his $1 million into $7.5 million in 35 business days. To a couple of Canadians, she promised a 10-percent return in 10 days. Another, from the European principality of Andorra, was promised his investment would double in 35 days.

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Justice, it's all relative.

In the course of reporting the recent Observer feature on wrongful convictions based on wrongdoing by prosecutors and police, an interesting tangential point surfaced multiple times. It was the reminder by several lawyers that wrongful convictions are all cases that went to trial, but that there are many other defendants, in numbers impossible to determine, who took plea deals out of fear rather than face a jury.

A Supreme Court opinion published earlier this year by Justice Anthony Kennedy, points out "the reality that criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials. Ninety-seven percent of federal convictions and ninety-four percent of state convictions are the result of guilty pleas."

His opinion was quoted in yesterday's New York Times editorial noting that plea deals often wipe the appeals process out of the equation. With that, if a person agrees to a guilty plea based on a lawyer's bad advice or a prosecutor's purposeful or inadvertent withholding of evidence, that defendant has significantly diminished options for legal recourse. Specific waivers included in many plea bargains wipe out the ability to appeal.

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Every year, when temperatures in Texas inevitably hit triple digits, the inside of the state's prison cells heat up like an ovens. Only 21 of 111 units in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice system are fully air conditioned; the rest have some AC but mostly not in the inmates' quarters. Every year, there is obligatory news coverage of the outcry over soaring jail temps that "pops up every summer like crabgrass," in the words of a 2010 article in The Dallas Morning News. It's become a ritual that, like most rituals, has no real impact, which is why there continue to be stories like the one first reported yesterday by the Texas Tribune.

Larry Gene McCollum was serving an 11-month sentence at Hutchins State Jail in Dallas when, following a string of 100-degree days last summer, the 58-year-old suffered a seizure on the night of July 22. According to a lawsuit filed yesterday by attorneys with the Texas Civil Rights Project on behalf of his daughter, McCollum was taken to the hospital where his body temperature was measured at 109.4 degrees Fahrenheit. He fell into a coma and died six days later of what an autopsy concluded was hyperthermia "due to housing in a hot environment without air conditioning."

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Who's judging the guys who judge the judges? Well, nobody, really.

That's because the legislative agency charged with evaluating other state agencies' functionality and raison d'être, the Sunset Advisory Commission, got shut out of their meetings and denied access to confidential documents.

Now, it's easy to understand the juggling act the judicial conduct commission must perform -- protecting the reputation of Texas' 3,900 judges from baseless misconduct allegations while ensuring that these arbiters of law interpret it fairly. But when the Sunset Advisory Commission -- bound to respect confidentiality -- can't get access to some of the judicial commission's most basic functions, the balance has been tipped too far in one direction.

The judicial commission isn't subject to either of the Open Meetings, Administrative Procedure or Public Information acts.

"The Commission would not allow Sunset staff to attend its largely closed meetings to observe its enforcement process and barred staff from viewing the memoranda the Commission's legal counsel provides to Commission members for formulating rulings on cases. As a result, staff could not assess the Commission's primary duty," the report says.

An utter lack of transparency wasn't the only problem it found. Remember when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a 2007 Kentucky case arguing that the state's three-drug lethal injection protocol violated a constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment? A convicted killer here in Texas was set to be executed that night, and wanted to file an appeal based on the Supreme Court's decision. Texas' top criminal judge Sharon Keller refused to keep the Court of Criminal Appeals open past 5 p.m. that night. It was the judicial conduct commission who issued a public warning to Keller.

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Photos by Leslie Minora

Richard Miles second from left, with his lawyer Cheryl Wattley, left, Judge Andy Chatham, Miles's mother Thelma Lloyd and Jim McCloskey, founder of Centurion Ministries

The ever-expanding and always sharply dressed brotherhood of Dallas County exonerees once again lined the courtroom at the Frank Crowley Courts Building for an exoneration hearing this morning, this time in support of Richard Miles, who they already know quite well. After 14 years behind bars for a murder and attempted murder he did not commit, Miles has been free for more than two years, waiting for the state Court of Criminal Appeals to hand down its decision. Miles finally got his answer in a 52-page document supporting his innocence published last week. His relief was granted based on actual innocence, meaning he was a free man in every sense, including being eligible for state compensation for time served.

This morning's court hearing affirmed the Court of Criminal appeals decision that no reasonable jury, had they known in 1995 what the courts know now, could have found him guilty of the murder and attempted murder at a Texaco near Bachman Lake for which he spent all those years as an innocent man in prison.

Like the litany of exonerations before his, Miles's was a celebratory occasion, but not without acknowledgement of the years he lost. His father, instrumental in gathering evidence of his innocence, died just five months before Miles was released from prison. "There's no amount of compensation that can be given to any individual to compensate what was lost," Miles told a group of reporters before entering the courtroom for his final hearing.

Judge Andy Chatham told Miles, "You're a free man today. ... I'm not just the judge anymore. I'm proud to say, today I am your friend."

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Judge Teresa Hawthorne

Teresa Hawthorne, the Dallas County judge who ruled that the state's death penalty statute was unconstitutional, must recuse herself from a capital murder case, a judge ruled today.

Hawthorne was presiding over the capital murder trial of Roderick Harris, who's accused of killing brothers Alfredo and Carlos Gallardo during a 2009 robbery at a South Dallas mobile home. Dallas police also believe Harris may be responsible for another robbery and murder in Oak Cliff earlier the same month. Hawthorne's ruling had been lauded by the Texas Moratorium Network and others as a possible first step toward abolishing the death penalty in Texas.

Hawthorne didn't appear at this morning's recusal hearing, which was held in Judge John Ovard's courtroom. Harris was present, however, handcuffed and wearing a grey suit.

Assistant District Attorney David Alex argued that Hawthorne's bias against the death penalty was clear from statements she made during a December 19 pre-trial hearing. He quoted, in bits and pieces, things the judge said in open court that day, such as: "I remember when women and blacks could not vote. I remember when so-called witches were burned. I remember when gays had to hide to be in the military." Hawthorne said then she wasn't trying to engage in judicial activism; she insisted last month that she was not trying to "buck the system or stir the waters." Alex vehemently disagreed.

"The judge analogized the death penalty to some very heinous times in our American history," Alex told the court. It's obvious, he said, that she has "very strong emotional, personal feelings against the death penalty. ... But none of these things have anything to do with legal precedent."

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Photo by Anna Merlan

A years-long dispute between a woman who runs a dog rescue out of her home and her increasingly annoyed neighbors has resulted in hundreds of phone calls to Animal Control, a felony robbery conviction, one dead dog and, we're guessing, some pretty awkward block parties.

"This has been going on for ages," Raanel Steel says, sitting in her South Dallas home on a recent afternoon. "It's just nonstop."

Steel has lived in here for 11 years. Her neighborhood is tucked off a major road, but it feels almost rural: the street is winding and narrow, bordered with thick trees. Most of the houses sit on gentle hills. On a recent weekday afternoon, Steel sits in her kitchen with a niece and a close friend. She's almost 60 and has short blond hair; she wears a worn plaid shirt, her black glasses perched on top of her head.

Outside, 16 dogs race around the two lots she owns side by side. In a nearly two-hour visit, they are mostly inaudible. From the street, at least during these cold months, you also can't smell them. But inside the house, even with the dozens of cinnamon candles Steel had burning, the scent of dogs is so strong it seems on the verge of becoming a solid, something you could trip over if you weren't careful.

Eight years ago, Steel started volunteering at the Humane Society and doing dog rescue. "People just dump dogs everywhere" in Dallas, she says. She began bringing animals home from the shelter that were due to be euthanized, or taking in injured or abandoned dogs from local vets or that friends and acquaintances found and brought to her. At times she's had up to 27 dogs on the two adjacent lots she owns.

Her next-door neighbors, a couple named Brent and Nancy Thompson, were less than thrilled about her new mission. "They just didn't like that at all," she says.

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Via Gawker

Every decent-sized courthouse in the country has its own serial pain in the ass, the guy who thinks nothing of suing the kids who threw a ball over his fence or the cat who pooped in his yard. But there's a special subset of filing addicts: the inmates who while away their time in the pokey filing kooky pro se motions against Oprah, the CIA and Jesus. They undoubtedly belong in the hands of competent mental health professionals, but until our prison system learns how to deal appropriately with mental illness, we have stories like that of Lester Jon Ruston: a Dallas man crazy enough to believe that Katie Couric is stalking him yet just sane enough to file hundreds of often-coherent of lawsuits against seemingly everyone he's ever met.

Ruston's trouble with the law began in May 2004, when he was charged with threatening to kill North Texas magistrate judge Irma Ramirez. He had left her what court documents called a "rambling and profane" voicemail, telling her to "look out her window at the black helicopters circling her building from the U.S. Navy" and accusing her "of sending a Marine to to try to murder [the caller] for George Bush." He told the judge that next week she would be taken to Scotland, walked up a plank with a rope around her neck and "stretched from a red neck to a long neck." He gave her 24 hours to resign, uttered the word "die" several times and repeatedly called her a "'fucking whore' and a 'fucking cunt.'"

The call was traced back to room 102 of the Royal Inn in Carrollton, where Ruston had stayed for three days, including the night the call was placed. Ramirez told investigators that she knew Ruston's name. He was a "frequent filer" of suits in her court -- including ones against Dallas County, Bush and the city of Carrollton. In 2001, Ruston had been accused him of making threats against a Secret Service agent named Jeff Elmore. When he was arrested, Ruston was in the process of attempting to load a crossbow with "metal bolts to fire at the SS agents," records show.

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