Law enforcement agencies from more than 250 agencies across Texas will begin making arrests Saturday, March 6, as part of the Great Texas Warrant Roundup. This major, multi-jurisdictional push kicked off Feb. 19 with the mailing of thousands of notices warning people with outstanding warrants of the impending arrest effort. The last day to clear warrants is Friday, March 5, before the concentrated effort to make arrests begins.
For more information, including online payment instructions, see this Statesman article.
Also worthy of note is that Austin Municipal Court's policy is to not arrest people with active warrants who go there to take care of business.
• Be as specific as possible so there are no grounds for seeking clarification. Don't ask for "all documents" or "all records" unless it's for a narrow, well-defined category.
• Make specific, narrow and numbered requests so that it's more difficult for the agency to claim that the requests are vague.
• If you know what you are asking for, identify that document specifically as one of the numbered list.
• When a government agency seeks clarification, reply as quickly as possible with a narrowing or clarifying explanation.
So I was perusing an internet comment board this afternoon. (I know, I know. Stay away, those internet message boards are filled with crazies. Nothing good comes from reading, etc. I know. Meryl's staging an intervention, but in the meantime, I learn interesting things about the general populace.)Here's that link again from Preaching to the Choir, in case you think this is as "awesome" as I do.
Anyway, I found this comment on an article about a capital murder case:
The Constitution does a lot to protect fools, the undeserving, and pieces of human trash.
Reading that made me grin. I felt all warm and fuzzy inside. And I said with pride, "Hell, yeah, it does!"
I'm willing to wager that's not the reaction the writer was expecting. Based on context, I'm fairly confident the writer wrote those words with a rueful shake of the head and a sense of outrage that the Constitution does protect those folks. I suspect the writer would think it not such a bad thing if we added an asterisk to the Bill of Rights indicating these rights do not apply to fools, the undeserving, and pieces of human trash.
But, me, I think it's awesome. (Yes, I'm a lawyer with an extensive vocabulary and that is the word I choose.) It's easy to respect the rights of the pretty people, the popular ones, the charming folk, the nice guys. No one's going to run roughshod over Mr. Rogers' rights. We probably don't need a Constitution to protect the Prom Queen. It's the assholes we need to write the rules for. It's harder to treat them well, to be fair to them, to refrain from punching them. So 200-some years ago, we wrote a contract with ourselves to make sure we would always respect the rights of the worst among us.
It's easy to treat the good people well. But the true measure of our character is how we treat the bad ones. We choose to treat them fairly and with respect. And I think it's awesome.