What’s that Roaring Sound?
Scott Greenfield of New York is all atizzy over my Lucky Stars post. Scott challenges his fellow lawyers in the third-largest state to comment on why the New York criminal liberty-rendering system sucks less than Texas’s. No response yet from the tassel-loafer brigade.
Over at A Public Defender, though, Gideon makes the case for the Duchy of Grand Fenwick 
being a better place to be arrested than Texas. He points out that (like Texas but unlike, as I understand it, the People’s Democratic Republic of New York) Grand Fenwick extends the right to a jury trial to anyone charged with a jailable offense. Even without knowing about Grand Fenwick’s probation eligibility law, I’ll concede that cute-as-a-bug Grand Fenwick might have a better system for protecting the accused than Texas or New York. With fewer people and more lawyers than Harris County, with two-hundred-plus years of experience with the Bill of Rights, and with property, sales, and income tax money, it damn well should.
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What do you mean probation eligibility law? Whether probation is available for every offense other than murder? If so, then no, it is not. There are some offenses for which there are mandatory-minimums.
Texas doesn’t have income tax? That’s really nice! Our state tax is only 5%, but still.
In Texas, probation is available for murder too.
For plain ole pre-meditated, cold blooded murder? That’s quite something.
Oh sure, probation is available. But then you gotta live in Texas. So what’s worse, life in prison or probation in Texas?
Quite right, Scott. Living in Texas is not for the weak or the soft. The rains we’ve been having would turn those tassel loafers into dog chew-toys.