Still a crook any way you look
A pair of lawyers who prosecuted Attorney General Ken Paxton on securities fraud charges won’t be paid more than a couple thousand dollars for their work on the case since 2016, a Houston-based appeals court ruled Thursday.
The decision is a major blow to the special prosecutors, who have been fighting for years to be paid a higher rate.
They cut a deal with Paxton in March just weeks before the case was set to go to trial. In exchange for having his charges dismissed, Paxton agreed to do 100 hours of community service, complete 15 hours of legal ethics classes and pay about $300,000 in restitution to the alleged victims.
The fight over pay is the only unfinished argument in the nine-year-long case, one of the longest-running in Texas history.
Harris County District Court Judge Andrea Beall in October ruled that the special prosecutors should be paid $300 an hour. On Thursday, a three-judge panel of the 1st Court of Appeals overruled the decision.
It’s unclear if the prosecutors, Houston attorneys Brian Wice and Kent Schaffer, will appeal. Neither immediately responded to a request for comment. In October, Schaffer estimated that he alone is owed about $150,000 for about 500 hours of work.
[…]
The county says the prosecutors must be paid according to a fee schedule that sets a cap of $2,000 for pretrial work in noncapital cases.
The Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, in 2018 had ruled that the $300-an-hour rate was outside the legal limit. That might have been the end of the issue, but when the case was assigned to Beall last year, she ruled the county fee was “not reasonable” for a case of this complexity.
Collin County appealed. The Houston appeals court on Thursday said that judges do not get to decide what is a reasonable fee and must abide by fee schedules set by local judges.
Chris Kratovil, an attorney for Collin County, said he was pleased with the ruling.
“This is a win for the taxpayers of Collin County, Texas, and I’m happy to have and honored to have been part of the team to deliver that win,” Kratovil said.
Kratovil said this case should serve as an example of why private sector attorneys should not be appointed as special prosecutors when local district attorneys recuse themselves.
“If the state district judge in question had done that rather than appointing private sector lawyers from 250 miles away, none of this litigation would have been necessary,” he said. “A couple assistant district attorneys in Dallas County or Tarrant County or Denton County or Kaufman County could have handled this at no additional expense to the taxpayers.”
See here and here for the previous updates. I’ve lost any interest in this cursed case, but I’ll offer a few thoughts.
– Whatever the law says, this is ridiculous. The fee schedule in Collin County is unreasonable, and was weaponized by its County Judge and other Paxton cronies in an ugly attempt to derail the prosecution. That should not be rewarded, and lawyers should be paid fair value for their time.
– That said, if we had to do this all over again, I would agree that asking another District Attorney’s office to take the case would have made sense and almost certainly would have led to a faster resolution. (Though one should not underestimate the ratfucking capabilities of Paxton and his enablers.) Handing it off to another DA would invite allegations of unfair politics, regardless of how that was handled. I don’t think there’s any way to avoid that, but maybe there’s a better way to minimize it. I fear that requires a broader level of trust in the system as a whole, and in the age of Trump we’re not doing well or getting better on that score. I’m open to ideas here.
– We also could have avoided the lengthy pay battle if we still had and used the Public Integrity Unit in the Travis County DA’s office, for the purpose of handling criminal charges against elected officials. The reason that’s no longer a thing is because of the huge political hissy fit thrown over the Tom DeLay campaign finance saga of the Aughts; you can search my archives for the relevant links if you want. I’ll stipulate that this would be at least as controversial if the Lege hadn’t kneecapped the PIU after the DeLay situation. Again, I’m open to other ideas here.
We’ll see if they keep pursuing this despite their differences. (UPDATE: According to the Press, they will appeal.) In the meantime, there’s the matter of Paxton serving his sentence.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will work at a food bank as part of a deal he struck with prosecutors earlier this year in his recently closed fraud case, his attorney Dan Cogdell said Thursday.
Cogdell declined to provide more information about where or when it’s taking place, citing privacy and security concerns.
“I’m not going to get into the weeds of it because I don’t think it’s anybody’s business,” Cogdell said. “I don’t want protestors showing up.”
Paxton reached a deal in March just weeks before his criminal case on securities fraud charges was set to go to trial. In exchange for having his charges dismissed, Paxton agreed to do 100 hours of community service, complete 15 hours of legal ethics classes and pay about $300,000 in restitution to the victims. He did not admit any wrongdoing.
That’s fine, I’m sure the food bank that gets saddled with him won’t want to deal with that either, but if someone tweets it out while he’s there, well, what are you going to do? I hope that someone has to sign off on Paxton actually doing real work while he’s there and that this part of his sentence is not completed until he does all 100 of those hours in a satisfactory fashion. I also hope someone is checking up on the other parts of the agreement. If this is all we’re going to get out of this madness, let’s make sure we actually get it.