Live By The Sword...
(Texas • Crime)
Consider the poor Texas county district attorney. When your main task is trying and convicting the criminal element, surely the job is rife with potential for ruffling feathers and angering the constituency. In fact, one has only to pay a quick Google visit to appreciate the frequency with which the office holder is sued.
Texas sheriffs, by virtue of the nature of their offices, also get sued all the time. When they do, their respective county governments foot the bill. Otherwise, who could afford the job?
But, by way of a ruling that seems to have garnered no media attention whatsoever, Attorney General Greg Abbott officially opined last week that, in the event of lawsuit, Texas district attorneys should expect no government help with their legal bills at all.
Perhaps the reader would find it difficult to dredge up pity for the object of Abbott’s opinion. After all, (as reported in some detail here) Shelby County District Attorney Lynda Russell stands accused of helping police confiscate $1 million or more – $2,000 to $5,000 at a time – from hapless dark-skinned motorists driving through the tiny town of Tenaha with too much cash at the wrong time.
OK, this is America, where all accused are presumed innocent until proven otherwise, and Russell has not been proven guilty of anything. But the plaintiffs say it went something like this: Police would see someone with dark skin driving a nice car. They’d be pulled over. Either the inside of their vehicle smelled like marijuana or police said it did, and they would be searched. If it turned out they possessed a significant amount of cash, they’d generally be taken somewhere and told that unless they forked over the money, they’d be jailed on charges of money laundering.
Then, the confiscated money would be put into a “seizure fund” that Russell maintained in her office.
One of the lawyers for the nine current plaintiffs in the case, now being prepped for class-action status, told me it appears Russell “was just using that for her personal money.” Russell herself never returned my calls, but said concisely in court records that none of the accusations against her are true.
Abbott’s office already had informed Russell once that she should expect no legal defense help from the state in her case. But she enlisted one of her assistants to seek another AG’s opinion after Shelby County commissioners decided they didn’t want to spend any local taxpayers’ money whatsoever in Russell’s defense.
So it is that Assistant Shelby County DA Kenneth Florence argued that some government entity surely should pay for Russell’s defense but, if not, then she really ought to be able to use some of the money she is alleged to have helped confiscate from motorists in order to defend herself from their charges that she helped confiscate their money.
Abbott was unimpressed with the argument:
“A county commissioners court has no duty to provide for the defense of a district attorney pursuant to Local Government Code section 157.901. The state is not obligated to indemnify a district attorney under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code sections 104.001 and 104.0035. A district attorney is not authorized to utilize forfeiture funds under Code of Criminal Procedure article 59.06©(1) to pay for the district attorney’s legal defense,” he said. “Very truly yours, Greg Abbott.”
Now, while this turn of events might seem somewhat karmic if applied merely to Russell while simultaneously ignoring the American presumption that she walks into court innocent, it brings to mind whatever that phrase is about using an ax instead of a scalpel when applied to all the rest of the district attorneys in the state of Texas.
Texas district attorneys, it would now seem, have been left hanging out to dry. If you’re rich and you want to mess with a DA for whom you have no love, all you have to do is concoct a lawsuit, file a cause of action and a few pleadings and motions and such, and watch as your opponent’s personal fortune erodes away.
Because, lawsuits are costly. For instance, Russell and the Tenaha mayor and police defendants in the case not only have to pay several attorneys, they hired former somewhat famous Travis County Sheriff Margo Frasier as an expert witness, in an apparent attempt to dissuade the judge in the case from declaring that it could go class-action.
Frasier said it should not.
“Given the facts of the various plaintiffs’ stops, searches and seizures, it does not appear that they will fairly and adequately protect the interests of the class,” she said in a report to the court. “For instance, in some of the cases, there was the presence of the smell of burnt marijuana detected by the officer upon initial approach of the vehicle; in some of the cases, marijuana was found in the vehicle; and in some of the cases, the occupants admitted to possession of marijuana.”
You’ll laugh when I say this, because it’s probably pretty obvious, but I am not a lawyer. So I don’t quite grasp all the complexities of the former sheriff’s contention that people can’t join together in a class-action effort if some of them drove cars that contained the odor of marijuana, while others drove cars that actually contained the stuff. Perhaps coming into close proximity of the illegal substance prohibits one de facto from participating in a class-action suit, although I hasten to add that, as one of the plaintiff’s attorneys noted, none of his clients ever were charged with possession of marijuana in the first place.
Anyway, the point of bringing up former Sheriff Frasier was to illustrate the potential cost of litigation, by way of noting that she charged the defendants in the case $4,050 for an 18-page report that contained about 15 pages of resume.
My only immediate conclusion from all of this is, even if I were in possession of a law degree and a severe lack of clients, I don’t think I’d be contemplating a run for district attorney any time soon.
There are 8 million stories in the Texas Outback; this has been one of them.
→ B.Dunn, Jan 23, 2010, 08 56 am
