Yesterday (May 7, 2025) IACLS had a victory in the Court of Criminal Appeals. In Alkayyali v. State, we helped the defendant’s lawyer (the fantastic Heather Morrow of Arlington, Texas) brief the case after the State’s petition for discretionary review was granted. On short notice, last April the Court of Criminal Appeals invited us to argue before them in Dallas. We did, and we won.

This was IACLS’s second CCA victory this year: In February the court reversed the Amarillo Court of Appeals in Cuarenta v. State, in which IACLS had volunteered to help the defendant’s lawyer (the great Shannon B. Flanigan of Bryan, Texas) brief his petition for discretionary review.

These cases were both part of IACLS’s Counterweight project, in which we aim to do for the criminal-defense bar what the State Prosecuting Attorney does for the prosecutorial bar: advise and assist with litigation in the Court of Criminal Appeals.

Right now Counterweight only has the resources to help on cases in which PDR has already been granted. We’re hoping to expand that to helping lawyers draft PDRs, and then to picking out issues from the courts of appeals that are PDR-worthy but that nobody else will file PDR on.

In Alkayyali we also advanced another IACLS project: correcting Texas courts’ misunderstanding of what are and are not elements of an offense in Texas. The issue hadn’t been preserved below, but we argued that it fit into the issue that had been. The court showed interest, and even though it wasn’t necessary to our win, the concurrence in Alkayyali has hints that the issue was well received.

Alkayyali also inspired another IACLS project: reinvigorating the Texas Constitution. At oral argument, Presiding Judge Keller pointed out that the Supreme Court’s standard for structural error was not met; we agreed, and Judge Yeary said “But we’re sovereign!” He’s right, of course, and IACLS is looking for ways to give effect to that sovereignty.

In March IACLS argued the Estevez case before the Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin. This was not part of the Counterweight project, but was the next step against the Harris County judge who was holding people in contempt for violating their bond conditions. The issues wound up being really interesting, and of much broader importance—for example, is a “void” judgment actually a nullity, or only subject to attack? (it’s only subject to attack). We could get a ruling on that any Wednesday now.

But appellate litigation not all IACLS is up to.

This week IACLS sponsored the “May the Sixth Be With You” CLE program. We are planning other CLEs, with speakers that the bar associations haven’t found and topics that they haven’t thought of.

We’re also refining a criminal-defense checklist that lawyers can use to keep track of the things they should be remembering in every case. As Racehorse Haynes said, “Brains are for thinking, pencils are for remembering.”

And we’re brainstorming, workshopping, and then sharing with the criminal-defense bar novel legal arguments with solid historical foundations. (One of our issues, preserved for the first time, is in the First Court in the capable hands of Assistand PD Doug Gladden.)

We are litigating public-information lawsuits in Travis County and Harris County.

We are litigating a § 1983 declaratory judgment action seeking to get Texas’s electronic- and web-harassment statute (section 42.07(a)(7) and (8) of the Texas Penal Code) held unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

We are collecting a library of PDFs of old books, because the key to reinvigorating the Texas Constitution is knowing what the common law was when it was written.