Best mugshot ever
As you know, Ken Paxton really really wants to get his securities fraud case moved back to what he assumes are the warm and friendly confines of Collin County. The case was originally moved out of Collin County on the grounds that it would be hard to get a sufficiently impartial jury there, and so it has been in Harris County for the last million years, give or take a century. Then it looked like Paxton had scored a win, when Harris County Criminal Court Judge Robert Johnson ruled in favor of a Paxton motion to send the case back to Collin County, while also recusing himself from the case due to a potential conflict of interest, as the Attorney General’s office is representing the Harris County Criminal District Court judges in the bail practices lawsuit, for which they are named defendants. Johnson stepped down and fellow jurist Jason Luong was put on the case while Johnson’s ruling to move the case back to Collin County was appealed by prosecutors.
This presented a problem for Paxton, because prosecutors could ask Judge Luong to reconsider Judge Johnson’s ruling, and thus possibly rule instead to keep the case in Harris County. So, Team Paxton moved to have Judge Luong recused from the case (he declined to recuse himself) on the grounds that the same potential conflict of interest that Judge Johnson cited in his own recusal would apply to Judge Luong as well. The prosecutors objected, on the grounds that there really isn’t a conflict of interest here, in part because the AG’s office is representing the Criminal District Court judges as an entity not as individuals – they are being sued in their official capacity, not as private citizens – and also because Paxton himself is not involved in the bail litigation. Last Friday, Administrative Judge Susan Brown ruled for the prosecutors, denying Paxton’s motion to remove Judge Luong from the case, and thus allowing Luong to revisit Johnson’s ruling to move it.
I assume this ruling can and will be appealed, but in the meantime, Team Paxton has filed a motion asking Judge Brown to reconsider her ruling. This is the legal strategy of saying “Are you sure you meant to rule that way? Here, let me give you the same set of facts and arguments as before but maybe emphasize them a little differently, and you’ll see it my way this time, right?” This means that the prosecutors have to respond to this motion, and so they did, with the tone of voice and general tenor one might expect in such a circumstance. When you start with a quote from the movie Dumb and Dumber and conclude with the canonical definition of the word “chutzpah”, it’s safe to say you feel confident in your position. In between, the prosecutors remind everyone that both Paxton and his lawyer have stated that 1) the AG’s office has been “working to remove [Paxton] from ‘active participation in matters in which a conflict may exist’” and 2) “[Judge Johnson] did not need to recuse himself on the matter since it had been ordered back to Collin County and the allegations against Mr. Paxton do not involve his official capacity but rather his individual capacity that predates his election to that office.”
Now, assuming that Judge Luong does stay on the case so that he can rule on the motion to reconsider Judge Johnson’s ruling to send the case back to Collin County (*), and assuming that he rules that Judge Johnson erred in his ruling and that the case should stay here, will the question of Judge Luong needing to be recused come up again? Probably, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. In the meantime, enjoy this little exercise in the fine legal art of saying “You’ve got to be kidding me” as only lawyers can.
(*) It’s quite standard for a new judge to revisit consequential rulings made by a previous judge on a case. That’s why having Judge Luong reconsider Judge Johnson’s ruling is not in the same category as asking Judge Brown to reconsider her own ruling.