Opinion

Judicial shortcut: Bill to loosen rules of evidence for sex crime trials is a bad idea Bill to loosen rules of evidence for sex crime trials is a bad idea.

When former district court Judge Joan Huffman successfully ran for a Houston state Senate seat in 2008, she was slapped by a Republican primary opponent with the misleading charge that she had been soft on sexual offenders as a jurist. In fact, her approval of plea bargains for sex offenders in her court was based on recommendations of prosecutors.

She's not likely to face that line of attack again, after crafting legislation passed by the Senate that radically rewrites the criminal code to expand the evidence that can be used in trials against those charged with sexual crimes against children or adults.

Now her critics aren't political opponents; they are lawyers and other lawmakers charging that Senate Bill 152 undermines criminal procedure by allowing allegations of previous sexual violations to be aired even if they did not result in charges or convictions. Allowing unsubstantiated allegations unrelated to a criminal charge to be introduced in court proceedings as evidence undermines one of the basic premises for a fair trial.

As Houston lawyer Pat McCann told the Chronicle, bringing accusations too weak to result in criminal charges into a trial inevitably biases verdicts. "When you have an uncharged, extraneous offense that somehow comes in at that phase," said McCann, "you have just guaranteed a guilty verdict and thrown out the U.S. Constitution."

Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, was one of eight senators who voted against the bill. He pointed to the high number of exonerations of convicted defendants in sexual assault cases in Texas and predicted enactment of the new rules of evidence would encourage more wrongful convictions.

"All of us want to be law and order and the whole nine yards," said West. "But this is carving new ground in criminal jurisprudence. You ought to think long and hard, 'Is that fair?'"

Houston senators Rodney Ellis, Mario Gallegos and John Whitmire, all Democrats, were among the lawmakers voting against the bill. State Rep. Beverly Woolley, R-Houston, is sponsoring a companion piece of legislation in the House. It has not been moved out of committee.

In an attempt to meet critics' objections, Huffman successfully offered an amendment to the legislation mandating that before admitting the evidence, a trial judge would have to conduct a hearing outside the presence of a jury and would have to determine that it proved a similar offense beyond a reasonable doubt.

Allowing a jurist to make the finding that a person is guilty of a crime of which they haven't even been charged and then using the evidence to prosecute them for another offense hardly seems to us an improvement. If SB 152 becomes law, it will set a precedent that could be applied to other offenses as well.

Child molestation and rape are particularly heinous crimes. However, revising long established rules of evidence in pursuit of convictions is an unwise shortcut that invites future miscarriages of justice. We hope it quietly dies in committee in the House.