Texas Laws

Seventeen years ago, third-grader Laura Alvarez was kicked out of elementary school. The Mexico City-born daughter of illegal immigrants, Laura was one of tens of thousands of youngsters to feel the consequences of a 1975 Texas law that--like California's controversial Proposition 187--said undocumented children no longer qualified for a free public education.

It was a warm August evening in 1888 when distillery owner John Laws shot dead a man he caught stealing two bottles of whiskey. Laws was convicted of murder. But a Texas appeals court overturned the verdict under a state law that allows residents to kill to protect their property at night. A Houston grand jury, relying on the century-old law, refused last month to indict a homeowner who fatally shot a man who appeared to be stealing his truck in the middle of the night.

Mayor Bob Lanier said Wednesday that a homeowner who shot a Scottish businessman to death after mistaking him for a burglar had a right to protect his property. Lanier said he was "very, very sorry" that Andrew De Vries, 28, of Aberdeen had died after the homeowner, Jeffrey Agee, shot him last week in Agee's back yard. But Lanier told reporters that Texas law allows people to protect their property. "I think a person has a right to protect his home given the way things are these days," he said.

Rickey Dale Thomas walked out of the Hopkins County jail Wednesday morning to freedom and a new life. All that prodding from the outside had finally worked. All the effort had finally paid off. And then, of course, there was the matter of luck. The life sentence that had hung over his head for so long was wiped out in a few minutes as Dist. Atty. Frank Long requested that the theft conviction be overturned.

Past a long fence dotted by clumps of cactus and beyond a couple of turns in a dusty farm road, Ronnie Pucek hit a big gusher and a bigger controversy. It wasn't oil he found, but water. Lots of it. When drillers made the strike in the spring, it was something of huge proportions, a fountain that spurted some 50 feet high and nearly washed away the drilling rig. It is believed to be one of the world's largest man-made artesian wells, producing about 30,000 gallons of water a minute.

A federal court jury in Dallas has convicted a California distributor of X-rated videos and five other defendants of shipping obscene cassettes to Dallas in 1989. The 12 jurors acquitted one defendant and could not reach a verdict on four of the seven counts against each of the others. The jury must still decide whether the distributor, California Publishers Liquidating Corp.

Kid Akeem Anifowoshe regained consciousness Sunday after surgery to relieve pressure on his brain following a loss to International Boxing Federation junior bantamweight champion Robert Quiroga at San Antonio. Quiroga, 20, also was bloody and bruised but retained his crown by unanimous decision. Anifowoshe had fallen into a coma after the 12-round decision was announced. Trainers said the boxers' use of six-ounce gloves, which provide high punch impact, contributed to their injuries.

An increasing number of states are adopting an unusual weapon in the war on drugs: They are starting to establish taxes on the sale of illegal narcotics, then using drug dealers' failure to pay the taxes as additional grounds for prosecuting them. The idea is a variation on the technique the federal government used against Mafia mobster Al Capone and others during the Prohibition days of the 1920s.

A Texas judge unexpectedly dismissed obscenity charges on Monday against a San Antonio record store owner and chastised prosecutors in the case over an album by rappers 2 Live Crew. "It's beyond me that it would take six months to determine this is not a prosecutable case," Bexar County Court-at-Law Judge Tony Jimenez told assistant district attorneys, who requested that the charges against retailer Dave Risher, 36, be dropped. The dismissal came only hours before jury selection was to begin.

The pop music obscenity battle moves from Florida to Texas today with jury selection scheduled to begin in the Bexar County trial of Hogwild Records store owner Dave Risher. Risher was charged with violating Texas obscenity penal codes on June 28 after he sold a copy of 2 Live Crew's raunchy rap record "As Nasty as They Wanna Be" to the 20-year-old son of San Antonio's leading anti-pornography crusader.