A judge charged in January after a domestic violence allegation by his girlfriend has been suspended from the bench with pay, officials said.
The State Commission on Judicial Conduct signed a suspension order Wednesday against 228th District Court Judge Frank Aguilar about two weeks after Galveston County prosecutors charged him with misdemeanor assault. He is accused of assaulting his girlfriend at his Galveston property.
Aguilar’s defense attorney, Mark Diaz, pointed to a recent affidavit that the girlfriend filed asking that prosecutors dismiss the charge, saying that the events of Dec. 31 were not as described. She wrote that she felt coerced.
“Frank Aguilar never touch me or hit me,” she wrote in a recent filing. “I fell from stairs inside house.”
She said she had taken sleep medication that had an adverse effect from alcohol and caused her to walk in her sleep and fall down the stairs.
In a separate affidavit, the woman said she would not testify in his case.Aguilar was acquitted of another domestic violence allegation years earlier. The 2010 incident involved a family member.
The judicial suspension could be lifted if prosecutors were to dismiss the charge against Aguilar or if a jury decided to acquit him of the offense.
In the wake of the charge, Harris County prosecutors filed several recusal requests asking that Aguilar step down from cases involving similar allegations. He declined and referred the matter to the Eleventh Administrative Judicial Region of Texas.
Judge Susan Brown, who oversees the region, had not ruled on the recusal requests but is now expected to tap a visiting jurist to replace Aguilar in the wake of his suspension.
See here for the background. We’ll have to see how this plays out. I know it’s not uncommon for victims of domestic assault to later recant and deny the allegations they had initially made. I also know that sometimes the police get this wrong. I don’t know what happened here, and all we’ll have to go by is the ultimate outcome of the case. Judge Aguilar will be on the ballot again in 2026, if he chooses to run.