SocraticGadfly: RIP Craig Watkins

December 13, 2023

RIP Craig Watkins

Saw the story on the front page of the Snooze earlier this week. Wow. Not even 60.

He was indeed a trailblazer, especially on the matter of exonerations of those wrongly convicted, one of the first urban area DAs in the nation to create a prosecutor's integrity division, or similar, to look at such cases.

Was he perfect? No. The end of the story notes him being sanctioned by the state bar just last month for failing to do the work to get a criminal expunction for a client of his. (That said, was health an issue? The family didn't say why he passed away.)

Was he as bad as Jim Schutze thought on his contempt case? No way, and also, the first time Schutze took a real black eye in my book, though not the last.

Did Schutze's knife help give Dallas County Susan Hawk, much more problematic? Probably.

And, given Schutze's clusterfuck bromance for Amber Guyger, I wonder if part of why he hated on Watkins was because he wasn't deferential enough to cops.

The big thing I've wondered on since his trials (the literal, not figurative) and him eventually getting the boot by Hawk is what would have happened had his political future not been aborted. Beyond the Dallas County Democratic Party, I know that I'm not alone.

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