Thanks for commenting.

As the co-author who wrote in on the other blog, I can again clarify points you raise about the series.

To answer your questions, the reason we included people from outside the fair state of Texas was simple.

Various working prosecutors and defense lawyers in Texas made their assessment of the probation-for-murder practice clear in earlier installments of the series. We fully explored that long before the story quoting the out-of-staters. We even had a “sidebar” story on the first day that showed why a prosecutor might be open to offering probation in a plea deal.

As you noted, we indeed quoted Texas experts, some of whom found no issues with the concept of probation for murder but did raise the potential risks if a freed killers goes on to commit more crime and violence — which we found happened in North Texas.

We consulted experts who have worked in states other than Texas because they have broader insight into best practices used elsewhere. To limit the perspectives to only people inside Texas would limit the range of voices and views. We wanted a mixture. Thus, readers, such as yourself, could then decide whether what they said was BS or valid.

For all we knew, the out-of-staters might have remarked that Texas had the best possible system in place. As we wrote in our finale, we simply gave them the summaries of each probation-for-murder case we found in North Texas, and asked for their thoughts.

Furthermore, we noted that some experts didn’t see value in banning probation as a sentence. Instead, they saw a need for internal policies at DA offices that would keep the sentence possible but in more extraordinary cases.

Sincerely,

Reese Dunklin,
The Dallas Morning News