Nov. 24, Pamela Metzger, director of Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center and a law professor at SMU, for a piece illustrating the inequities in the dispensation of justice in rural vs. urban areas of Texas. Published in the Dallas Morning News: http://bit.ly/2OmsIM5
Drive from Amarillo, one of the biggest cities in West Texas, to Armstrong County, Texas, and you will enter a different world. Armstrong County, with fewer than than 2,000 people, is largely agricultural and, like many rural counties, substantially poorer than its urban neighbor, with a small local budget to match.
And, a report from the Sixth Amendment Center issued this month points out that the very sparseness of Armstrong County means that people arrested for crimes tend to have a very different experience with the criminal justice system than their urban Amarillo neighbors.
Of the three judges in Armstrong County that hear misdemeanor cases, only one is a lawyer. The felony court judge comes for three weeks each year, with his own court clerk, bailiff and transcriber in tow. There is no prosecutor in Armstrong County. All of the attorneys work in Amarillo. Just a handful of law enforcement officers patrol the highways. Only two lawyers are registered in the county. One is dead. . .
Continue reading “Why rural Americans struggle for equal justice”