A GREAT CRIME DETERRENT

Poe shames Texas perps - Harris County State District Judge Ted Poe punishes criminals with sentences involving shame - Brief Article
Insight on the News, Oct 19, 1998 by Julia Duin


A Lone Star State judge punishes criminals with sentences of shame -- a nineties version of the scarlet letter that has aggravated the ACLU.

It's 100 degrees at high noon in Houston, and Mike Hubacek's day of reckoning has arrived. Striding back and forth on a blistering-hot sidewalk outside the offices of the Department of Public Safety, the teenager tries to ignore a cluster of reporters and two TV cameras thrust in his face. He clutches a sign: "I killed 2 people while I was driving drunk on Westheimer."

Westheimer Road is one of the city's main thoroughfares where, in the early morning hours of Nov. 28, 1996, Hubacek was speeding with no headlights at 100 mph. He crashed into a van carrying a married couple and their nanny, scattering wreckage over hundreds of feet. The husband and nanny were killed; the wife survived with a broken collarbone and sternum, crushed thighs and wounds requiring 100 stitches.

Hubacek was instructed to carry the sign as part of the lengthy, detailed punishment ordered by Harris County State District Judge Ted Poe. "Most of us care what people think of us" Poe says. "If we're held up to public embarrassment, we don't like it. It does serve as a deterrent."

Poe, 49, is preeminent among a new breed of judge who believes in shaming, a form of justice common in colonial America that seems to be making a comeback. Poe has:
* Jailed a man convicted of domestic abuse and sentenced him to apologize publicly to his wife on the courthouse steps at noon. The audience of 450 people included newspaper and TV reporters and photographers, women from shelters and other defendants accused of wife beating.

* Sentenced a shoplifter to carry a sign for a week in front of Kmart pro claiming his theft. The store manager reported no thefts during that week. "I had seven days, eight hours a day to reflect on my life," the shoplifter told the judge. "I didn't want to continue this mode of self-destruction any more."

* Required a teenage graffiti tagger to apologize to the students at all 13 schools he vandalized. "The school officials liked that" Poe says.

The probation conditions Poe ordered for Hubacek received as much publicity as the case itself. After serving six months in jail for intoxicated manslaughter, Hubacek was ordered to attend 110 days of boot camp, erect a cross and a star of David at the scene of the wreck, maintain the crash site and carry a sign once a month for the next 10 years in front of high schools, bars and driver's-license offices proclaiming, "I killed two people while driving drunk."

The teenager also must keep photographs of the victims in his wallet for 10 years, refrain from driving for 10 years, stay inside Houston city limits, observe an autopsy of a person killed in a drunken-driving accident and send $10 every week for 10 years to a memorial fund in the names of the victims.

Every time Hubacek shows up to carry a sign, Barbara Davis, the wife of the man Hubacek killed, arrives with grim posters of the accident. Passersby cringe when they see them, but some people hug her. "God bless Ted Poe for being considered the renegade judge he is" says Davis."

But the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, looks askance at Poe's methods. "This is the scarlet-letter syndrome" says Joseph Jacobson, director of the ACLU's Austin affiliate. "It's a form of public humiliation. It's like putting people in stocks like in the old days. The central problem is it makes it that much more difficult for someone to integrate back into normal society.

The ACLU's Houston office has taken no complaints against the judge, however. In a state that spends about $2 billion a year on its prison system, Poe's methods are popular, admits Paul Maciekowich, Houston's ACLU chapter president. "Ted Poe is just the tip of the iceberg as to what the mentality is down here" he says. "Last year, more people were imprisoned for parole violations than for first-time offenses"

Poe, who wears black cowboy boots under his robe, is part of the local color in a state in which Wild West instincts endure. While serving as a Harris County prosecutor during the trial of a man who killed a police officer, he read the jury a Christmas card that the officer might have written to his daughter. In his eight years in that job, he never lost a case.

Elected to the bench in 1981, Poe, a Republican, has run without opposition since 1986. He ranked second of 22 judges in a 1993 Houston Bar Association poll rating their effectiveness.

"If we know history, we understand why people do what they do," Poe says. "I think the public punishment is what changes the conduct. It is a public service to the community that knows we won't stand for that conduct."

The judge, whose office includes a poster of Alcatraz, a painting of a scene from the battle of Gettysburg and a sign proclaiming, "I really don't care how you did it up north," has been known to make unrepentant offenders shovel manure at the police stables in west Houston for "attitude adjustment."