BILL HABERN RECOGNIZED WITH LIFE TIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
BY
HARRIS COUNTY CRIMINAL LAWYERS ASSOCIATION
Attorney Bill Habern was honored by the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association at their annual banquet with their 2011 Life Time Achievement Award.
Of his life’s work, Habern says, “If 40 years ago when I got my law license, someone had told me that I’d spend my career representing prison inmates and their families for a living, I’d have told them there were crazy. What our law firm does is a very important area of law that is rapidly expanding while at the same time getting more and more complicated. Despite that expansion, Texas is without a meaningful, full time organization that is active in its pursuit of prisoner’s civil rights. This is not the case in many other states. I am also concerned that I do not know of a single law school in Texas that offers a course directed at representing clients facing the collateral consequences of a felony conviction. This area of law deals with a lot more that just parole or a prisoner’s civil rights. It has to do with a whole new world of issues that must be faced by legislatures, the courts, the family, and the offender. Law schools today seldom prepare young lawyers to deal with the collateral circumstances of a felony conviction. It is mostly lessons of law that is learned on the job and in the streets.”
