A Moral Indictment

By Ronnie Earle, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, November 23, 2004

Austin, Tex. - It is a rare day when members of the United States Congress try to read the minds of the members of a grand jury in Travis County, Tex. Apparently Tom DeLay’s colleagues expect him to be indicted.

Last week Congressional Republicans voted to change their rule that required an indicted leader to relinquish his post. They were responding to an investigation by the Travis County grand jury into political contributions by corporations that has already resulted in the indictments of three associates of Mr. DeLay, the House majority leader.

Yet no member of Congress has been indicted in the investigation, and none is a target unless he or she has committed a crime. The grand jury will continue its work, abiding by the rule of law. That law requires a grand jury of citizens, not the prosecutor, to determine whether probable cause exists to hold an accused person to answer for the accusation against him or her. Read More…

The Impact Players: The Earle of Democracy

By Mark Donald, Texas Lawyer, December 20, 2004

At 62, veteran Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle has been called a partisan “crackpot,” “a runaway prosecutor,” “a persecutor who silences his critics to accomplish his own political purposes” — and that’s just in the past few weeks.

But Democrat Earle, who is just as likely to quote W.B. Yeats and Albert Einstein as he is Bob Bullock, seems remarkably unscathed by the fevered pitch of these attacks. He half-expected these and more after his two-year investigation into alleged violations of Texas campaign finance laws led to 32 indictments spread among three political associates of U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, and eight corporations.

“There is a basic rule that the Mafia follows,” Earle says. “And it is used as a template by most politicians that I have investigated: Deny the allegation and attack the allegator.” Read More…

Spotlight on Prosecutor

By Ralph Blumenthal, The New York Times, October 11, 2004

A man who once thought he recognized Ronnie Earle in a restaurant sent a waitress over to ask “if you’re the district eternity of Austin.”

It can sure seem that way to voters here in the Texas capital. Mr. Earle, 62, has been the Travis County prosecutor since Jimmy Carter won the White House and is now running without major opposition for an eighth four-year term.

In that time, Mr. Earle, a onetime Eagle Scout who is not above sharp-elbowing his adversaries, has collected the scalps of prominent fellow Democrats as well as Republicans, while managing to fend off attacks on his own. And as if an embodiment of the city’s unofficial slogan, “Keep Austin Weird,” he once even prosecuted himself.

Now, having put off dreams of retirement and a return to his small ranch outside Austin to chop cedar, Mr. Earle is in the spotlight as he pursues a case with ties to one of the most powerful Republicans in the country, Representative Tom DeLay, whose ethical problems in Washington — the biggest faced by any House majority leader since Newt Gingrich in 1998 — could help Democratic House candidates. Read More…

Guarding Death’s Door

By John Cloud, Time Magazine, July 14, 2003

On March 20, a man named Keith Clay died in Texas. His death was largely unremarkable except for one thing: he was the 300th person executed in Texas since the U.S. Supreme Court reauthorized capital punishment in 1976. One need not ignore the savagery of his crimes–prosecutors said Clay stood by while a friend murdered a father and his two kids on Christmas Eve 1993, 11 days before Clay himself butchered a store clerk–to pause at his execution.

Three hundred is an impressive milestone, not only because it exceeds the number of executions in the next five top death-penalty states combined, but also because it was reached so quickly. It took nearly two decades for Texas to consummate its first 100 death sentences after 1976–but only five more years to pass 200 and just three after that to hit 300. (The total has since climbed to 306.) Read More…

Drug war is eroding tradition

By Thom Marshall, Houston Chronicle April 17, 2002

RONNIE EARLE felt danger in the room.

He had invited a group of people to discuss problems in their neighborhood in Austin, where Earle has spent the past quarter-century serving as district attorney.

Neighbors had complained to police about drug dealers, and the cops responded with an operation that led to many arrests, and Earle said he met with the neighbors to ask, “What did they want me to do with them?”

The quick and popular answer was “lock ‘em up.” But then it was pointed out that the punishment in most cases would be two years, max, and then they’d get out and come back. And what about the families of the small-time drug dealers who were arrested? Their children were victims, too. Read More…

Dig deeper for solutions, ideas to safeguard Austin’s qualities

By Ronnie Earle, Austin American-Statesman August 19, 1997

Each of you and I share a commitment to the quality of life in our community.

Quality of life takes many forms: the environment, traffic and development density, to mention only a few.

But perhaps the most basic element of quality of life is safety.

If people don’t feel safe, they will retreat behind locked doors and high walls and cede the streets and parks to those who can survive there. Read More…

Reweaving tapestry of ethics infrastructure

By Ronnie Earle, Austin American-Statesman April 7, 1997

The crime rate all across the country is down - for now - and Austin’s crime rate has for years been consistently below that in other cities and the nation as a whole.

But indicators abound that our future will see more blood in the streets unless we do something now. We can catch some offenders, and we can prosecute and punish all we catch, but unless we stop making more of them, we’ll never be safe.

The crime rate of the future is in the hands of our children, and they are in our hands now. Read More…

Texas needs a ‘new posse’ to tackle crime

By Ronnie Earle, Austin American-Statesman, April 10, 1993

Crime stalks the days and haunts the nights of Texans.

Our anxieties have sharpened lately. The Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council has released data that provide hard evidence of the increasingly violent future that we have all known intuitively was coming but didn’t want to believe.

Our criminal justice system has for years lurched from crisis to crisis like a homeless drunk looking for shelter. But there is no shelter from crime, and like a drunk looking to start down the road to recovery, we are beginning to understand that if we are going to get better we have to change. Read More…

House bill endangers integrity, independence of grand juries

By Ronnie Earle, Austin American-Statesman, March 13, 1991

There is a bill on the calendar of the Texas House of Representatives for today that seriously threatens the integrity of the Texas grand jury process and with it the ability of the public to protect itself from organized crime and political corruption. Read More…

New Texas needs an ethics agenda

By Ronnie Earle, Dallas Morning News, December 16, 1990

The stage is set for change in the way folks do business at the State Capitol. It’s time for ethics reform. No action in the area of ethics means a continuation of scandals that turn into rolling balls of butcher knives that cut the ties of trust that bind us.

The “New Texas” will see the end of the idea that election as a representative of the people entitles a powerful public official to an artificial millionaire’s lifestyle financed by the lobby. Read More…

It’s time to confront the rising price of punishment

By Ronnie Earle, Austin American-Statesman, January 22, 1989

People used to say that crime doesn’t pay. You don’t hear that much anymore, maybe because the way things are these days we’re not sure that it doesn’t.

But whether or not crime pays, it sure does cost, and the price keeps going up. It costs $30,000 to build one bed in a maximum-security prison, and it costs $37.49 a day to keep an inmate in that prison. These figures make 2,000 person units and 10-year sentences look a little different to the taxpayer. Prison space is becoming, like any other scarce commodity, increasingly precious. As it dwindles, our attention is increasingly focused on how we use this resource.

We put a lot of people in prison because we don’t have anything else to do with them. We customarily deal with those convicted for the first time of a felony either by putting them on probation or by sending them to prison. Both are supposed to make the offender change his behavior. Too often, neither works. Read More…