The Standard’s news roundup gives you a quick hit of interesting, sometimes irreverent, and breaking news stories from all over the state.
State Sen. John Whitmire introduced sweeping bipartisan legislation yesterday that would reform the bail system. Three–fourths of the people in Texas jails are being held pre-trial which means they haven’t been convicted of a crime.
Whitmire, a Houston Democrat, says many of them could be safely released. They’re just stuck behind bars because they can’t get together the money to bond out – that’s in contrast to potentially dangerous people who have the cash.
“Today if you’re a violent offender and you can afford a very expensive bond, you pay it and you go back to your, in my judgment, oftentimes criminal practice,” Whitmire says.
Republican Representative Andrew Murr introduced a companion bill in the Texas House. Whitmire and Murr’s legislation would require judges to use data to better assess the risk of a defendant not showing up to trial or committing a crime. It would also make judges consider releasing low-risk, non-violent defendants without an upfront free.
Federal authorities have linked a Victoria man arrested on unrelated charges to the fire that destroyed a mosque at the end of January. Marq Vincent Perez is currently charged with possession of fire-starting devices. But authorities told a Corpus Christi judge Thursday that he robbed the Victoria Islamic Center twice.
First on January 22, and then a second time on January 28 when they say he started the blaze.
Even though Perez has not been charged in the fire, the judge is holding him without bail for now because she says there’s evidence he was involved in a hate crime.
Legislation like the so-called bathroom bill and a measure regulating how fetal remains are disposed of got a lot of attention this week. So much attention, it seems a trio of bills in the Texas House that broaden women’s right to breastfeed in public might have flown under the radar. Marissa Evans with the Texas Tribune has been following the story:
“Currently Texas already has breastfeeding laws in place but the problem is that the laws don’t have any real protection for women so businesses can still force these women to leave their establishments and these women have no type of recourse,” she says.
So one bill would prevent businesses from forcing women to leave just because they’re breastfeeding – another would require Texas employers to have a place to breastfeed other than the bathroom.
“People are still pretty quick to say, well, they can just go use the bathroom if they want to breastfeed or if they need to do that,” Evans says. “It’s still not quite the safest place for a woman to pump or to actually feed her child because of the unsanitary nature of the bathroom and women having to be in there for however long and things not being quite as clean as they probably could be.”
The third would require state agencies to implement mother-friendly policies – like schedule flexibility to breastfeed and a refrigerator for breast milk. Evans describes one mother who testified at the bills’ hearing earlier this week:
“When she first moved to Texas about 6 months later, after moving, she was with her kids at a local YMCA and she was about to start breastfeeding her son on the steps of the pool and she was forced to leave – she was forced to either go to the deck or go to the bathroom because the attendant basically said we can’t have bodily fluids flowing in the pool. And this woman got into an argument and was basically like my breast milk is probably cleaner than anything that has been in this pool today.”
Eventually, that Austin YMCA changed its policies to allow women to breastfeed anywhere. Evans says the bills’ supporters are optimistic they’ll pass this session because they’re what lawmakers call “no-brainer bills.”
