Texas courts struggle to resolve criminal appeals that got lost in Harris County for decades

In 1998, a Harris County court was asked to overturn a young death row prisoner’s conviction, his attorney arguing the teen should never have been found competent to stand trial.

Tony Tyrone Dixon was 17 and living in a group home for intellectually disabled people when he killed Elizabeth Peavy in a 1994 carjacking. He was “incapable of saying a complete sentence,” let alone participating in his defense at trial, one of Dixon’s trial attorneys swore in an affidavit included in the legal filing.

For 24 years, Dixon waited in prison as his petition inexplicably went unresolved, lost in a system that churned through about 60,000 new felony cases last year.

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The trial court never took up the plea, and his court-appointed appellate attorney never nudged it along.

“This now-46-year-old intellectually disabled person was largely forgotten by the criminal legal system,” said Benjamin Wolff, director of the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs, the state’s public defender for death penalty appeals.

“Mr. Dixon deserved more,” he said. “We all did.”

Dixon’s is one of about 100 Houston-area criminal appeals recently discovered to have fallen through the cracks for a decade or more in the state’s most populous county. Judges and attorneys still don’t know how this happened, how many other cases may be lost or whether it is now even possible to resolve the legal challenges raised in the appeals.

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