You can go home again, apparently.
Best mugshot ever
A panel of three justices ruled Thursday that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s felony fraud charges should be held in Collin County — where he lives — instead of Harris County, after a yearslong back-and-forth over where his criminal case should be heard.
The lawsuit, now nearly six years old, has been shackled by procedural delays and has not yet gone to trial because of a number of appeals related to where the case should be heard and how much the prosecutors should be paid. The suit has loomed over Paxton for nearly his entire time as attorney general, including during his narrow reelection in 2018. If convicted, Paxton could face up to 99 years in prison.
Prosecutors in the suit claim Paxton persuaded investors to buy stock in a technology firm without disclosing he would be compensated for it back when he was a member of the Texas House. Paxton denies any wrongdoing and says the accusations are politically motivated.
A panel of three all-Democratic justices in the 1st Court Of Appeals in Houston on Thursday allowed the case to return to Paxton’s home county on a 2-1 vote because of a technicality, affirming a lower court’s decision after nearly seven months of deliberation.
The case was originally to be held in Collin County but prosecutors argued that having the trial there would be unfair because of his political ties in that region. Paxton represented Collin County in the Texas Legislature for years, and now his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, represents the region.
The dissenting justice, Gordon Goodman, said no matter where the case is held, it is time it goes to trial.
“At this point almost six years has elapsed since Paxton was indicted. Whichever district court ultimately receives these cases should move them to trial as expeditiously as possible,” Goodman wrote in his dissent. “Further delay is anything but expedient.”
See here for the last update, which was in October. I don’t think there is anything in nature that moves more slowly than the court proceedings for this case. The prosecutors are seeking an en banc ruling, which I can understand given the split among the three-judge panel, but honestly I’m with Justice Goodman. Let’s get this show on the road, if we finally can.
And on that note, a word about this.
“If it gets moved back to Collin County, that certainly is advantageous for Paxton for two reasons: One, it’s more likely to go to a Republican judge as opposed to a Democratic judge in Harris County,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University who has studied the case, in an interview in 2019. “And any jury pool is going to be much more sympathetic to Paxton in Collin versus Harris.”
Yes, he’ll get a Republican judge in Collin County, though one would like to hope that the judge would be impartial regardless of where the trial was held. As for the jury, I think Professor Jones is overstating things a bit. Look at the numbers:
2016: Trump 55.6%, Clinton 38.9%
2020: Trump 51.4%, Biden 47.0%
2014: Paxton 66.0%, Houston 30.4%
2018: Paxton 52.7%, Nelson 44.7%
Paxton did worse than every other statewide Republican in Collin County in 2018 except for Ted Cruz, and he only beat Cruz by a tenth of a percentage point. It’s not crazy to think that Collin County could go for his opponent next year. It’s true that Collin County is considerably less Democratic than Harris County, and as such the jury pool will likely be Republican-leaning. It’s just nowhere near as Republican as it was when Paxton was first indicted in 2015. Maybe he should have gone for the speedy trial in the first place.