This Ain't Your Daddy's D.A.'s Office

Pretty interesting piece on the new Dallas County D.A. in the Washington Post today:

By his own estimate, Watkins should not be occupying what he calls a "ten-gallon-hat, cowboy-boot-wearing, dip-chewin', lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key" post in the ninth-largest city in the country.

He's black, he's a Democrat, he's young, he was a defense lawyer with an office in a southside neighborhood, and he has no prosecutorial experience -- unless he counts a year-long internship handling misdemeanors in the city prosecutor's office. His two previous applications to work as an assistant district attorney in Dallas County were rejected, in fact, by an office in which a prosecutor once produced a manual on how to exclude minorities from Texas juries.