Crime & Justice

More low-level misdemeanor offenders will be sent to Harris County’s Judge Ed Emmett Mental Health Diversion Center instead of jail, local officials announced Wednesday.

An immigrant teenager from Guatemala died in Texas on Tuesday while in federal custody, according to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement.

President Donald Trump is proposing charging asylum seekers a fee to process their applications as he continues to try to crack down on the surge of Central American migrants seeking to cross into the U.S.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice will no longer share the last written words of death row inmates after criticism from a Houston lawmaker.

The former Dallas police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black man in his own home told a 911 dispatcher "I thought it was my apartment" nearly 20 times as she waited for emergency responders to arrive, according to a recording of the call obtained by a Dallas TV station.

Prosecutors on Friday said they plan to dismiss 27 pending court cases linked to two former Houston police officers who are being investigated following a deadly drug raid in January.

Prosecutors have dismissed at least nine cases that were investigated by the former white Dallas police officer charged with murder in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man in his own apartment, according to court records.

BOSTON — The former men's tennis coach at the University of Texas at Austin pleaded guilty Wednesday to accepting a $100,000 bribe in the widespread college admissions bribery scheme and will cooperate with authorities.

Twenty years ago, a pair of students killed a teacher and a dozen of their classmates at a high school in Littleton, Colo. The shooters at Columbine High School used semi-automatic weapons and sawed-off shotguns in the attack before turning the guns on themselves.

Just a few months before that shooting, the FBI launched the National Instant Criminal Background Check System to try to prevent dangerous individuals from purchasing guns.

Attorney General William Barr has released a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 election to Congress and the public.

The special counsel spent nearly two years investigating attacks on the 2016 presidential election and whether the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russians behind it.

Updated at 7:24 p.m. ET

When President Trump learned two years ago that a special counsel had been appointed to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, he was distraught.

Trump "slumped back in his chair and said, 'Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I'm f***ed,' " according to the report by special counsel Robert Mueller that was released Thursday in redacted form.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s policy of returning some asylum seekers to Mexico as they wait for their hearings in an American immigration court.

In two weeks, two Texas executions have been stopped by the courts.

On Monday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals halted the Thursday execution of Mark Robertson, who was convicted nearly 30 years ago in the Dallas shooting deaths and robbery of an elderly woman and her grandson.

The state of Texas has banned all prison chaplains from its execution chamber, days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state was violating an inmate's rights by not allowing a Buddhist chaplain into the death chamber with him.

No one will be convicted or otherwise held accountable for the 2015 shootout between rival biker gangs in a Waco restaurant parking lot that left nine people dead and at least 20 injured, prosecutors in Central Texas said Tuesday.

Seven out of 10 driver's license suspensions in Texas are due to drivers' inability to pay fees and surcharges from courts and the Texas Department of Public Safety, according to a new study from nonprofits Texas Appleseed and Texas Fair Defense Project.

Updated 6:10 p.m., March 5 

Lawyers for a woman who says she was sexually assaulted in Austin are asking a court to force Travis County prosecutors to answer questions and provide evidence after learning of a prosecutor’s phone call that they say defames the woman.

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo says his department will stop serving "no knock" search warrants, weeks after a raid on a house left two married suspects dead and five officers injured. Acevedo also reiterated that the officer who led that raid may face criminal charges.

"The no-knock warrant's going to go away, kind of like leaded gasoline in our city," Acevedo said. He added that raids that stem from those warrants would only be used in very limited cases — and that they would not be used to nab people suspected of dealing small amounts of drugs.

The U.S. Supreme Court has for the second time struck down the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals' way of determining if a death row inmate is intellectually disabled and eligible for execution.

Anyone who has outstanding warrants with Austin's municipal courts or downtown community court can get their fees waived and settle up with the city without risk of being arrested this month.

Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt and former state Sen. Wendy Davis announced the creation of a Sexual Assault Prevention and Healing Work Group today in response to concerns about how sexual assaults are handled in Travis County.

The group will focus on collecting data about sexual assaults to better advocate for survivors.

The trial of the Santa Fe School shooting suspect may be delayed for a year as federal investigators have yet to deliver key evidence, prosecutors said Monday.

City Council Member Alison Alter posted a resolution today that would direct the city manager to find a third-party investigator to look at how sexual assault cases are handled in Austin.

Keeping track of federal court cases can be confusing even for reporters whose job it is to follow this stuff, let alone the general public.

A commander with the Austin Police Department was indefinitely suspended Thursday – essentially fired – after an investigation into allegations that he assaulted a woman he met on Tinder.

The woman contacted police in August to report that Jason Dusterhoft had become increasingly violent during sex.