Category: Features

Investigation into the Wood County justice system

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Buried within a 26-page lawsuit, which I covered as a daily story, was one sentence about a Texas district attorney resigning because he was being investigated for official oppression. Curious, I asked the plaintiff’s lawyer if she knew why the prosecutor was under investigation. The investigation report that she emailed me prompted me to start …

Mass shootings prompt bar associations to offer pro bono services to survivors and victims’ families

By Angela Morris (ABA Journal, March 2019) A wide array of legal issues arise for survivors and victims’ family members in the wake of mass shootings. Probate matters are common—easier when the victim had a will, and harder with young or low-income adults who commonly don’t have them. When parents are killed or debilitated by …

Women Ascend to Leadership Ranks at the Biggest Metro Bar Associations in Texas

By Angela Morris (Texas Lawyer, March 2019) Although the female attorneys of Texas, just like their nationwide peers, are still limited in their ascent to the upper echelon in law firms and corporations, their counterparts within local bar associations are finding better leadership opportunities. All five of the Lone Star State’s biggest metropolitan area bar associations …

Going Nameless and Faceless

By Angela Morris (Editor & Publisher, January 2019) There’s mounting evidence of a contagion effect in media coverage of mass shootings and school shootings, but experts say that most journalists know nothing about the research. Victims’ advocates and academic scholars who urge media reform have said the media is doing better at reporting more about …

Tort Reform Turns 10

By Angela Morris (Texas Lawyer, September 2, 2013) There’s no doubt that 2003’s major medical-malpractice reforms dramatically cut both the numbers of med-mal suits in Texas and doctors’ med-mal insurance rates. But there’s disagreement about its affect on the state’s physician population. In 2003, when the Texas Legislature debated House Bill 4, supporters and opponents …

Lawyers Contribute Pro Bono Hours After Sutherland Springs Shooting

by Angela Morris (Texas Lawyer, November 2018) “I was processing the totality of it. I saw right then and there we were going to have family law issues, probate issues,” Wilson County Attorney Tom Caldwell recalled. “When I came home that night, I was so shook up by it, I told my wife I would …

Do journalists deserve some blame for America’s mass shootings?

By Angela Morris (published in Quill, Summer 2018)  The reporter who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for feature writing initially thought she was in Charleston, South Carolina, to chronicle the lives of nine church-goers who died in 2015 when a stranger with a Glock murdered them while they were praying. The names, mug shots and …

How the Justice System Severely Failed One of its Own

Part of the horror of what happened to Suzanne Wooten is the realization that if the justice system failed so miserably for her, it could happen to anyone. Wooten lived a nightmare: Winning an election by a landslide to unseat an incumbent judge, only to be allegedly targeted by political rivals, wrongfully convicted of nine …

Handling Hurricane Harvey

Hurricane Harvey didn’t significantly impact most law students and law professors of Houston’s three law schools—South Texas, the University of Houston Law Center, and Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall School of Law. But students and professors who lost everything have struggled to get back on track, and they could face long-term impacts as they slowly …

Call Her the Constable of Cryptocurrency

Once upon a time there was a hero who took down the corrupt French Maid, who had manipulated and stolen from the Dread Pirate Roberts on The Silk Road. It sounds like the plot line of a swashbuckler movie, but actually, it’s part of the tale of Kathryn Haun’s rise as a federal prosecutor who …