“We should be tough on crime,” said State Representative Jeff Leach (’05). “But we should also be smart on crime.”
Since 2012, Leach, who majored in political science while at Baylor and served as student body president, has represented a district in Collin County that includes parts of the cities of Plano, Allen, Richardson, and Dallas. He was named a Best of Dallas-area’s Freshman Lawmakers in 2013 and one of the Best Legislators by Texas Monthly in 2021. His reelection campaign in 2020 was the costliest State House race in the history of Texas. He was also one of the five Baylor graduates involved in the impeachment trial of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (’85, MBA ’86) in 2023. Leach served on the team of house impeachment managers in the Senate trial.
Leach spoke on a panel Friday morning at Texas Tribune Festival titled “Criminal Justice and the 89th Legislature” with his colleague State Representative Joe Moody, a Democrat from Texas’ West-most district in El Paso. The pair discussed their efforts to initiate further criminal justice reform in the State of Texas.
Though Leach and Moody caucus in opposite parties, Leach said, “In the Texas House, we don’t have to hate each other. . . . There are a lot of things we can work together on.”
Both affirmed that criminal justice reform is for them – and should be for all – a bipartisan issue.
Moderator Phil Jankowski, the Austin Bureau Correspondent for the Dallas Morning News, began the conversation by asking about the Melissa Lucio case, which both state representatives have worked with. Lucio, the first woman of Latino descent to be sentenced to death in Texas, was convicted of murdering her two-year-old daughter in 2008. However, in 2022, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals issued a stay of execution for Lucio, instructing the district court to consider new evidence of her innocence in the death of her daughter, Mariah. Earlier this year, the judge in her trial recommended overturning Lucio’s death sentence, a decision which was supported by both the district attorney and the defense.
Leach and Moody have paid special attention to this case and advocated on Lucio’s behalf publicly, even traveling to meet with Lucio on death row.
“I’m so glad that we did what we did two years ago to step up and — let’s not mince words — to stop the state from murdering Melissa Lucio,” Leach told the Texas Tribune in April.
Leach used similar language Friday morning and further explained why the case was so important to him, calling the efforts to support Lucio “one of the most troubling – but one of the most rewarding – initiatives.”
“It’s always the right thing to do the right thing,” Leach concluded.
As the discussion turned to death penalty reform more broadly, the moderator described Moody as an “abolitionist” against the death penalty, a label he did not push back on.
Leach said he was “quickly becoming an abolitionist” himself and indicated he would “easily” support a moratorium on the death penalty in Texas so that the legislature could have time to figure out a responsible approach. The State has, at times, executed innocent people – the “wrong people,” Leach called them. “That’s on all of us,” he said.
Though many of the bills Leach, Moody, and their colleagues have worked to pass – in many cases with supermajority votes in the Texas House – ultimately “disappear” once arriving in the Senate. When asked why this is, Leach smirked as Moody suggested that the values of the House and the Senate don’t always line up and that the politicization in the Senate causes much frustration and hinders good work from being enacted for Texans.
“The Senate is a challenge when it comes to this issue . . . and hell with many other issues,” Leach said.
Moody said middle-ground needs to be found on this and other initiatives.
“There is accountability and there is also mercy. Those two things can exist in the same space,” he said.
Further efforts Leach discussed included his work on sexual abuse. He plans to continue efforts on a bill that would extend the statute of limitations for sexual abuse – if not in criminal cases, then for survivors to pursue civil cases. Legislators should work to ensure we “throw the court house doors open” for the voices of survivors, he added. Additionally, Leach said he intends to work on increasing requirements for mandatory reporting and doing away with NDAs in criminal cases.
He said these were priorities for him both personally and because this is what the people in his district want to see.
“The Texas House is one of the last great places where the people’s voice is heard on the floor,” Leach said.
