HB 166, Rep. McClendon's Innocence Commission bill, passed the Texas House today.

The Texas House has passed HB 166 creating a commission to study causes of wrongful conviction and sent the bill onto the Senate.

The vote was 115-28.

HB 166 would create a commission with a panel of 9 experts to study these cases, go back and examine what went wrong, and to provide recommendations to improve our accuracy and prevent this loss of liberty from happening again.

Humans are imperfect.  We create boards and commissions to study mistakes with regard to air travel, emergency rooms and hospitals.  The same should be true for criminal justice.

We congratulate Rep. McClendon who has long championed this legislation.  We thank the bipartisan ensemble of joint and co-authors for their commitment to improving our justice system.

Texas Impact and the Center for Public Policy Priorities support payday lending regulation. We wrote an op-ed for the Quorum Report explaining why we think SB 1247 is so crucial for Texas:

Numbers matter in public policy. More often than not, public policy goals are expressed as magnitudes: we hope for less of a bad thing, or more of a good thing.

Numbers are especially important when the policy is about money. Is your policy goal to save people money? The policy results that matter are: how much money got saved and how many people saved it.

In recent years, there has been a well-funded effort to push state legislatures around the country to prohibit the application of "sharia law" in American courts. In 2010, Oklahoma passed a referendum that expressly prohibited "sharia law," but it was later struck down by U.S. courts because it discriminated against a particular religion, thus violating the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In response to this court defeat, proponents of anti-sharia measures have substituted "foreign law" in place of "sharia law" in recent legislative attempts.

Texas Impact members and board members testified about criminal justice this week. Watch the videos below!

Helen Harkreader, Texas Impact member, testifies about her experiences as a nurse and in recent visits to juvenile justice facilities, in support of Sen. Van De Putte's SB 1356, requiring trauma-informed care training for certain staff of county and state juvenile facilities. She testified during a meeting of the Senate Criminal Justice committee, April 9, 2013.

Texas’ Sunset Advisory Commission was established as a way to ensure our state agencies are functioning effectively and are continuously moving towards improving their operations.  Today, we were able to observe first hand what can happen when a legislator’s commitment to better government meets with  advocates determination for better and more humane conditions for individuals in Texas’ prisons.

Senators Ellis, Williams and Lucio addressed Medicaid extension and reform during a discussion of the 2014-2015 Texas budget on the Senate floor, March 20, 2013.

Click "read more" to see the videos!