Had she lived to go to trial on the signal infraction, is it possible the dash cam recording would have been withheld? Based on the experience of someone close to me from 2014, I believe there's a strong chance we never would have seen it because of what I believe to be an illegal portion of Texas law later in the diary.
I'm not a lawyer and I have not seen the code portion under which Bland was ostensibly pulled over, but I believe it to be this:
TEXAS TRANSPORTATION CODE
TITLE 7. VEHICLES AND TRAFFIC
SUBTITLE C. RULES OF THE ROAD
CHAPTER 545. OPERATION AND MOVEMENT OF VEHICLES
SUBCHAPTER C. TURNING AND SIGNALS FOR STOPPING AND TURNING
Sec. 545.104. SIGNALING TURNS; USE OF TURN SIGNALS. (a) An operator shall use the signal authorized by Section 545.106 to indicate an intention to turn, change lanes, or start from a parked position.
Link
In the spring of 2014, someone close to me bumped up against an almost adjacent provision of Sec. 545 having to do with making a turn (rather than a lane change) in Austin, Texas. It would take a lot of space to explain what transpired, but that's not the meat of my point, so I'll leave those details aside. I wasn't present, but her story was consistent for the six months it took to be adjudicated, and I believe she is actually innocent of the infraction although she now stands convicted of it. The other driver told her insurance company that he saw her and didn't brake - he switched lanes as he got to the intersection and hit her, totaling her pick-up. She was stunned to be ticketed as the responsible party. Immediately upon being ticketed, she requested access to the traffic cam recording at that intersection - it did exist at that time, although we came to learn months later that it needs to be flagged soon after the event so that it can be preserved. Best we guessed, it was not preserved, and she never got access to it even though she asked for it again before pretrial, at more than once subsequent to that and prior to the trial.
She chose to fight the ticket -and wise or not- she chose to represent herself. She had fines from the conviction and now has a debt for new transportation - appealing the conviction on top of all the other expenses was not affordable. I spoke with a handful of attorneys about the possibility of representing her on appeal, and at least one of them said it would have been unlikely that she would have gotten a different result with representation (not sure I believe that, but it was said to me).
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As I understand them, the protections afforded to U.S. Citizens as criminal defendants include the Fifth & Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution, and SCOTUS decision Brady v. Maryland:
The Brady Rule, named for Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963), requires prosecutors to disclose materially exculpatory evidence in the government's possession to the defense. "Brady material" or evidence the prosecutor is required to disclose under this rule includes any evidence favorable to the accused-- evidence that goes towards negating a defendant's guilt, that would reduce a defendant's potential sentence, or evidence going to the credibility of a witness.
Texas residents got an extra gift in the guise of the
Michael Morton Act which went into effect 1/1/14:
Requires prosecutors to permit the copying of police offense reports and recorded witness statements; requires prosecutors to disclose any exculpatory or mitigating material in their possession that could clear the defendant or reduce his punishment; does not restrict attorneys from sharing more discovery material than the minimum required under the act.
So, given all these protections, how can it remain legal that Texas has on its books a law which quite specifically (to my lay mind) appears to abridge these carved-in-stone rights?
TEXAS GOVERNMENT CODE
TITLE 5. OPEN GOVERNMENT; ETHICS
SUBCHAPTER C. INFORMATION EXCEPTED FROM REQUIRED DISCLOSURE
CHAPTER 552. PUBLIC INFORMATION
SUBCHAPTER A. GENERAL PROVISIONS
Sec. 552.108. EXCEPTION: CERTAIN LAW ENFORCEMENT, CORRECTIONS, AND PROSECUTORIAL INFORMATION. (a) Information held by a law enforcement agency or prosecutor that deals with the detection, investigation, or prosecution of crime is excepted from the requirements of Section 552.021 if:
(1) release of the information would interfere with the detection, investigation, or prosecution of crime;
Sec. 552.021. AVAILABILITY OF PUBLIC INFORMATION. Public information is available to the public at a minimum during the normal business hours of the governmental body.
Link
Got that? This appears to say that if you ask for information to help defend yourself, and the prosecution believes giving it to you may jeopardize the case against you, then they can withhold it under this section of the law.
Here's how it went down in the case I watched up close. The defendant in this case was invited to sit down with someone from the prosecutor's office to discuss the case, and she was given a form she used to request information she wanted for her defense at trial. They sat down with her because they wanted her to pay the fines and close the case. She was adamant about addressing the injustice of being wrongfully ticketed and wanted to plead her case to a jury of her peers. Someone from the City Attorney office then wrote a letter to the office of the Attorney General indicating that the defendant made an Open Records request (she made the request as a defendant, so that is odd). The letter stated:
The department believes the audio/video recordings responsive to this request are excepted from disclosure under section 552.108 of the Government Code'.
This letter was a request for a determination from the AG's office that the City be able to go ahead and withhold this information from the defendant.
If one reads the statute, a defendant can have evidence withheld from them if their having it would 'interfere with the detection, investigation, or prosecution of crime'?! In this case, the alleged crime had already been detected and investigated. What potentially stood in the way of prosecution was that the defendant was asserting her innocence.
According to the letter from the City, they had missed a deadline for deciding to keep the material confidential which should have made it publicly available:
The department acknowledges that it has failed to comply with the procedural requirements of section 552.301 of the Government Code. The submitted information is therefore presumed public and must be released, unless there is a compelling reason to withhold the information.
Their 'compelling reason' that the Chief prosecutor in the Municipal Court wanted the information withheld:
Section 552.108(a) excepts from disclosure "[i]nformation held by a law enforcement agency or prosecutor that deals with the detection, investigation, or prosecution of crime ... if: (1) release of the information would interfere with the detection, investigation, or prosecution of crime." Generally, a governmental body claiming section 552.108 must reasonably explain, if the information does not supply the explanation on its face, how and why the release of the requested information would interfere with law enforcement. See Government Code §§ 552.108(a)(I), 552.108(b)(I), and 552.301(e)(1)(a); see also Ex parte Pruitt, 551 S.W.2d 706 (Tex. 1977).
The letter does not explain how 'release of the requested information would interfere with law enforcement.' The letter does not explain why this is being made as an Open Records request, but they make clear it is an open criminal matter and indicate that the requestor is the defendant:
Thus, it is the department's position that the release of the requested audio/visual recordings would interfere with the detection, investigation, or prosecution of crime, and the department seeks to withhold this information under section 552.108(a)(I).
The letter specifically mentions "requested 911 call and dash cam video recordings."
The response from the AG's office includes the following:
Although the department seeks to withhold the submitted information under section 552.108 of the Government Code, section 552.108 is a discretionary exception to disclosure that protects a governmental body's interest and may be waived... (T)he need of a governmental body, other than the one that failed to timely seek an
open records decision, to withhold information under section 552.108 can provide a
compelling reason under section 552.302...You assert the criminal prosecution division of the City of Austin's City Attorney's Office (the "city attorney's office") has a law enforcement interest in the submitted information. Therefore, we will consider whether the department may withhold the submitted information on behalf of the city attorney's office.
Would really love to have clarification on what the 'law enforcement interest' was.
The disc with the 911 calls sounded cut-and-pasted which did not surprise me. And we only got ONE of the at least THREE dash cams at the scene. No way to know if the withheld information contained anything which could have been used for a successful defense. We did learn at about court time that when she requested to see the traffic cam recording that the officer *could have radioed in to have it tagged and copied for her. I believe that would have been proof positive to her jury.
We incorrectly thought we'd have access to the materials withheld once the case was concluded, so we're still baffled why the Attorney General's office was need to intervene in a rather simple left hand turn case. But hey, she's just convicted of and fined for a crime she did not commit and is not DEAD, after all - it had not occurred to me until seeing the other dash cam that she got off 'easy.'
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Had she lived and tried to assert her innocence, would Ms. Bland have had to endure similar legal circular logic as was used in the case here? I'm inclined to think so. What appears to be the case is that someone (or someones) decided to play judge and jury with her and then meted out a murderous sentence. I've been sick to my stomach about all of it, but having had an opportunity to spend a chunk of time trying to make sense of a different dash cam, the dash cam eye-ing Ms. Bland brought me on that last ride with her.
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Spending a few minutes looking at the two cases definitely blows my mind - it's evidence of the privilege of my skin tone that I had the luxury of being aghast at a mere wrongful conviction. I didn't expect to see corruption in my face, and I was dismayed at how blatant it was and seemingly pervasive (I didn't get really into it here). But most of the time, one can live through a wrongful conviction.
I can't imagine any circumstance other than that Sandra Bland was slaughtered to explain that she's now dead.
I've been trying to think of what could be said after that, and it all sounds trite. I don't like living in a country where such senseless cruelty takes place and isn't even shocking to many.
I was born in the mid 1960s and was raised to believe in the ideals of fairness and justice - in many ways, our country seems to have lost ground on that during my lifetime and I'm not feeling particularly grounded as to my perspective at present.
I do hope that someday we will get to a place in this country where all lives actually do matter and are treated accordingly. For the moment, it's insufficiently true to be more than a platitude. May we all live to see a new day.