Gov. Abbott, investigate Texas ankle monitor program

When state officers launched Jose Gilberto Rodriguez on parole, they put the registered sex offender on an ankle monitor. He’d been out on supervision for lower than a 12 months when authorities say he lower off his monitor and went on a killing spree that left a 28-year-old girl and 57-year-old man useless and that critically wounded a public transit driver.

That occurred across the identical time that one other parolee with a monitor violated his curfew and stabbed his mom to dying, in response to police.

That was all 4 years in the past within the Houston space. Now it’s Dallas County that has been clobbered by back-to-back tragedies involving suspects who had been parolees out on ankle screens. Weeks after a gunman whom police recognized as a parolee fatally shot two hospital staff in Oak Cliff, another parolee with a violent rap sheet allegedly killed a man in Lake Highlands, our colleague Kelli Smith studies.

Any of those circumstances alone shatters illusions that an ankle monitor goes to guard the general public from a violent prison. But mixed, they level to a critical public security hole. How are violent offenders screened for conditional launch earlier than a sentence is over, and why ought to Texans belief the parole course of after these killings?

Decisions to grant parole and to place an offender on an ankle monitor as a situation of launch are made by parole panels beneath the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, a physique whose presiding officer studies on to Gov. Greg Abbott. We urge Abbott to launch an investigation into the state’s protocols for releasing folks on digital screens and GPS screens — two totally different applied sciences employed by Texas to maintain observe of parolees.

It’s early within the investigation of the Dallas killings, however what we all know to this point is bone-chilling. The suspect within the hospital slayings, Nestor Oswaldo Hernandez, was paroled final fall after serving 75% of a sentence for aggravated theft in 2015. He was one way or the other out amongst us in late October although this 12 months he had already been arrested twice for violating situations of his parole, together with reducing off his ankle monitor, in response to police.

State officers didn’t revoke his parole. Instead Hernandez was reincarcerated for 100 days in county jail and a state remedy facility earlier than being launched once more on an ankle monitor, Smith reported.

The suspect within the Lake Highlands slaying, Zeric Jackson, was convicted of aggravated theft in 2005. He had had different run-ins with the regulation earlier than that, together with an incident during which he injured two different college students throughout a college battle and pushed a instructor shielding the scholars, police data present.

Jackson, who had been denied parole 4 occasions, was eventually released under the state’s Super-Intensive Supervision Program, our newspaper reported. According to a state doc, the program was created to “provide the level of supervision and monitoring for potentially dangerous offenders that will best protect public safety.”

Texans have cause to query that monitoring.

Parolees shouldn’t be painted with a broad brush, and we acknowledge that the majority observe the foundations. But one thing is clearly damaged about how parole choices are made concerning probably the most violent offenders. The governor should act.

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