Last August, ThinkProgress highlighted a Texas Watch report showing that the Texas Supreme Court “sided with consumers in 27 percent of cases involving an individual against a corporation or government agency — and it reversed jury verdicts in 72 percent of cases.” A new report by that same organization shows that the court’s favoritism towards corporations is now even worse:

Over the course of the decade, we have reviewed 624 consumer cases, carefully categorizing and compiling win-loss rates, with the scope of these consumer cases encompassing instances where individuals, patients, policyholders, and small business owners were pitted against corporate or governmental entities. . . . On average, defendants have won an overwhelming 74% of their cases and plaintiffs have won just 22% of the time over the last decade. Furthermore, since 2005, consumers have lost an astonishing 79% of their cases before the Texas Supreme Court.

The report also notes that a major factor driving this trend is Gov. Rick Perry (R), whose appointees to the court consistently sided with corporations over people. Indeed, the “win rate” for corporate and other defendants skyrocketed shortly after Perry took over as governor:

As ThinkProgress previously explained, the state of Texas currently does not have any legally valid congressional maps. Because it gained four new congressional seats, it could not use its existing maps even if the Constitution would permit it to do so. The map drawn by the state legislature has not been “pre-cleared” as is required under the Voting Rights Act because of concerns that it discriminates on the basis of race, and an interim map drawn by federal judges in Texas was blocked by the Supreme Court late last year pending a more complete review of that interim map by the justices.

Many voting rights advocates feared that the conservative Supreme Court would use this case to make sweeping changes to the laws protecting voters, either by eliminating the judiciary’s authority to draw interim maps such as the ones at issue here or potentially even by striking down key parts of the Voting Rights Act. Fortunately, those fears proved unfounded this time around. The crux of their holding is that the lower court erred in drawing these particular maps because they did not treat the state legislature’s preferred maps as a baseline and depart from that baseline only when necessary to rescue the map from illegality:

In [the challenger's] view, this Court’s precedents require district courts to ignore any state plan that has not received §5 preclearance. But the cases upon which appellees rely hold only that a district court may not adopt an unprecleared plan as its own. They say nothing about whether a district court may take guidance from the lawful policies incorporated insuch a plan for aid in drawing an interim map. Indeed, in Upham this Court ordered a District Court to defer to the unobjectionable aspects of a State’s plan even though that plan had already been denied preclearance.

In this case, the District Court stated that it had “giv[en] effect to as much of the policy judgments in the Legislature’s enacted map as possible.” At the same time, however, the court said that it was required to draw an “independent map” following “neutral principles that advance the interest of the collective public good.” In the court’s view, it “was not required to give any deference to the Legislature’s enacted plan,” and it instead applied principles that it determined “place the interests of the citizens of Texas first.” To the extent the District Court exceeded its mission to draw interim maps that do not violate the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act, and substituted its own concept of “the collective public good” for the Texas Legislature’s determination of which policies serve “the interests of the citizens of Texas,” the court erred.

The partisan upshot of this decision is that it is probably good news for Republicans. In an earlier case called Vieth v. Jubelirer, the Supreme Court largely abdicated oversight over politically motivated gerrymanders, thus enabling political parties to be as aggressive as they want in drawing maps that achieve their partisan goals. Because the Texas legislature is overwhelming dominated by Republicans, today’s decision requiring the lower court to use their map as the baseline in drawing an interim map will increase the likelihood that partisan gerrymandering intended to favor the GOP will remain present in the interim map the lower court eventually produces.

Two weeks ago, the Justice Department refused to “preclear” South Carolina’s new voter ID law, ruling that it would discriminate against minorities and therefore violated the Voting Rights Act.

Texas, another state covered under the Voting Rights Act, could soon meet the same fate if it is unable to provide sufficient evidence that its law does not also discriminate against minorities. The Justice Department is currently reviewing Texas’ move and has requested the state for more information about the law’s effect on minorities. Once that information is received, the DOJ will rule within 60 days.

ThinkProgress spoke with Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (R), a key proponent of the new law, about the upcoming ruling earlier this week. Dewhurst, who is running for his state’s open Senate seat this year, warned that if the Justice Department rules that Texas’ voter ID law violates the Voting Rights Act, such a move would be “unconstitutional.”

KEYES: Do you worry that that same fate (regarding the Justice Department ruling against South Carolina’s voter ID law) is going to happen to Texas as well?

DEWHURST: In Texas we passed what I believe to be a very good and constitutional bill that requires some photo identification to vote. That is a simple procedure for protecting the integrity of our voting system. It’s a principle in America: one person, one vote. For the Justice Department to interfere with that process would be wrong and I believe unconstitutional.

KEYES: You think it’d be unconstitutional if they ruled against the voter ID law in Texas?

DEWHURST: If the Justice Department were to come down on our Texas law, they would be wrong under the Constitution because I believe we’ve had our law looked at over and over again and I feel comfortable it is constitutional.

Listen to it:

Dewhurst’s view that enforcing the Voting Rights Act would be unconstitutional is unfortunately becoming more commonplace among modern conservative cognoscenti. Former senator and current Mitt Romney advisor Norm Coleman told ThinkProgress last year that we should “absolutely” consider gutting the Voting Rights Act, and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli argued that his state should be exempted because it has “outgrown” racism. Earlier this year, Arizona filed a lawsuit claiming that the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, and there is a very real risk that the Supreme Court’s conservatives will agree with them. If this view should prevail, a pillar of the civil rights movement that has successfully protected the rights of minorities for nearly 50 years could become a relic of history.

Jakadrien Turner was wrongfully deported in April 2011.

Dallas resident Lorene Turner had been searching for her granddaughter Jakadrien Turner since she ran away from home at the age of 14 in fall 2010. She searched for months until Dallas police helped her locate her granddaughter — in the South American country of Colombia, it turns out. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had deported Jakadrien in April 2011, even though the African American teenager spoke no Spanish:

News 8 learned that Jakadrien somehow ended up in Houston, where she was arrested by Houston police for theft. She gave Houston police a fake name. When police in Houston ran that name, it belonged to a 22-year-old illegal immigrant from Columbia, who had warrants for her arrest.

So ICE officials stepped in.

News 8 has learned ICE took the girl’s fingerprints, but somehow didn’t confirm her identity and deported her to Colombia, where the Colombian government gave her a work card and released her.

“She talked about how they had her working in this big house cleaning all day, and how tired she was,” Turner said.

Through her granddaughter’s Facebook messages, Turner says she tracked Jakadrian down.

U.S. Federal authorities got an address. U.S. Embassy officials in Colombia asked police to pick her up.

But that was a month ago, and the Colombian government now has her in a detention facility and won’t release her, despite her family’s request.

It is unclear how the teenager was mistaken for a foreign national, and ICE officials told Dallas TV station News 8 that ICE has seen cases where people provide inaccurate information about who they are. “ICE takes these allegations very seriously,” ICE Director of Public Affairs Brian Hale told News 8. “At the direction of [the Department of Homeland Security], ICE is fully and immediately investigating this matter in order to expeditiously determine the facts of this case.”

Judge Teresa Hawthorne

Teresa Hawthorne, the Dallas County judge who ruled that the state’s death penalty statute was unconstitutional, must recuse herself from a capital murder case, a judge ruled today. [...]

In his closing arguments, Doug Parks, another of Harris’s attorneys, argued that the state simply didn’t like Hawthorne’s ruling in the defense’s favor on some of the pre-trial motions. If she had ruled in the state’s favor, he argued, “Her personal beliefs about the death penalty wouldn’t matter one iota. … She made rulings the state didn’t like, and now they’re attacking the trial judge based on her personal beliefs and feelings.”

Ultimately, though, [Judge John] Ovard still ruled that a “reasonable person” would have to conclude that Judge Hawthorne is too biased to preside over the case.

This is not law. Indeed, this is barely a mockery of law. If the state disagrees with Hawthorne’s decision, then it is free to appeal it. But when judges can be disqualified from hearing cases if they reach an unpopular decision than the justice system truly is rigged.

And this isn’t even the first time Texas’ court system used the threat of forced recusal against a judge who disagreed with the state’s execution policies. In 2010, Judge Kevin Fine declared the state’s death penalty statute unconstitutional because it was too likely to execute an innocent person. Fine eventually withdrew the opinion, however, after he was threatened with a forced recusal hearing of his own.

Lest there be any doubt, Texas accords far different treatment to judges who demonstrate potential bias in favor of killing criminal defendants. In 2007, Judge Sharon Keller, presiding judge on the highest criminal court in Texas, likely manipulated her court’s procedures to prevent a death row inmate from receiving a stay of execution from the United States Supreme Court. Although a state ethics panel initially gave Keller a “public warning” for her actions, an appeals panel later wiped away even this slap on the wrist.

Likewise, in 1994 Texas elected an unqualified attorney named Stephen Mansfield to its highest criminal court. Judge Mansfield had been disciplined for practicing law without a license in Florida and he was arrested for scalping tickets to the Texas-Texas A&M game on university property. He also was elected on a platform of promising harsher decisions in death penalty cases. Mansfield left the court after he decided not to run for re-election, but he never faced one sanction for his macabre election strategy.

But if one little trial judge dares to suggest that the state’s death penalty procedures are unconstitutional, she will be forced off capital trials because this view could only stem from unreasonable bias.