Texas Tribune
Criminal appeals court judges targeted by Ken Paxton head to defeat
by William Melhado, The Texas Tribune – 2024-03-06 01:23:03
SUMMARY: Sign up for the “We the Texans” newsletter for updates on boosting civic engagement in Texas. Two Texas judges, Sharon Keller and Barbara Hervey, were ousted from the state's highest criminal court after Attorney General Ken Paxton criticized their 2021 ruling limiting his voter fraud prosecution powers. Judge Michelle Slaughter is also expected to lose her reelection bid. The appeals court judges voted that prosecuting election cases without local prosecutor permission was unconstitutional. Paxton portrayed the judges as undermining his efforts against voter fraud. Despite the shakeup, the court remains all-Republican. David Schenck and Gina Parker, who won primary challenges, campaigned on judicial integrity and election security.
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Two incumbent judges on Texas' highest criminal court have been ousted and a third is expected to fail in her bid for reelection on Tuesday after Attorney General Ken Paxton targeted the Republicans over a 2021 ruling that struck down the attorney general's ability to unilaterally prosecute voter fraud.
The Associated Press declared David Schenck and Gina Parker won their races over Judges Sharon Keller and Barbara Hervey respectively. Presiding Judge Keller was first elected to the bench in 1994.
Incumbent judge Michelle Slaughter was expected to lose to challenger Lee Finley.
Paxton targeted the judges as part of a larger political revenge tour in which he attempted to oust Texas House members who voted to impeach him in May.
In 2021, Keller, Hervey and Slaughter voted with five of the other Republican judges on the Court of Criminal Appeals in a voter fraud case. The 8-1 decision ruled that the Office of the Attorney General violated the separation of powers in the Texas Constitution by trying to prosecute election cases without the permission of a local prosecutor.
But in media appearances and primary advertisements, Paxton painted the three incumbents as rogue Republicans who stripped the attorney general's power to go after voter fraud — a political topic dear to the modern GOP in light of former President Donald Trump's false claims of election interference.
Together, the three incumbents had nearly a century of experience practicing criminal law, as prosecutors and jurists. Nine judges sit on the Court of Criminal Appeals which is the state's highest criminal court. The Texas Supreme Court hears civil cases.
The Texas attorney general is the state's chief lawyer, but leaves the prosecution of crimes — including voter fraud — to locally elected county attorneys and district attorneys.
With Keller, Hervey and Slaughter off the bench, there are still four judges on the court that Paxton has previously said should be ousted for voting against him in 2021. Two of those judges, David Newell and Bert Richardson, will be up for reelection in 2026 should they choose to run. Kevin Patrick Yeary, the sole pro-Paxton vote, will also be up for reelection that same year.
In a statement released by Paxton late Tuesday evening, the attorney general said the incumbent losses were a victory for democratic principles.
“To those who would seek to obstruct justice or undermine our laws, know this: The people of Texas will not tolerate it,” Paxton said in his statement. “Your days of judicial activism are numbered, and Texans are ready to hold you accountable.”
The all-Republican court is likely to remain entirely in GOP hands as the three elections are open to statewide voters. It's been three decades since a Democrat won a statewide election.
Presiding Judge
Schenck, who will now face Democratic nominee Holly Taylor this November, was gratified by Tuesday's results, which he attributed in part to Trump's recent endorsement. He said the issue of election integrity was important in all three races, even if he did not make it central to his campaign. Schenck has been hesitant to opine on the court's voter fraud opinion.
Taylor, an assistant director in the civil rights division of the Travis County District Attorney's office, ran unopposed in the Democratic Primary on Tuesday.
Looking forward, Schenck said he was eager to improve judicial integrity as part of the new generation of leadership.
“The public doesn't believe courts are working fairly and they want impartial, competent and efficient judges,” he said Tuesday evening.
Schenck, a former judge for the state's Fifth District Court of Appeals in Dallas, ran on campaign criticizing the pace at which the court moved. He argued the appeals court had lost the confidence from some in the legal community for the rate at which it delivered opinions. He previously ran for the Texas Supreme Court in 2022; he lost by 10 points.
Keller was elected to the criminal appellate court in 1994 as the first female judge. Prior to her decades-long tenure, Keller worked as an assistant district attorney for Dallas County.
Prior to this year's election, Keller was the subject of several ethics complaints, which included a failure to disclose millions in personal holdings and an incident in which she closed the clerk's office for the court as attorneys for a death row inmate attempted to file a last-minute appeal.
Place 7
Parker is a Waco attorney who has practiced both civil and criminal law. She disagreed with the current court's decision in the 2021 voter fraud case, arguing it was an attack on the attorney general's power and the Legislature's ability to make laws that empower Paxton's office. This is Parker's second attempt to challenge a Republican incumbent on the criminal appeals court bench. In 2020, she lost to Judge Bert Richardson in that year's Republican primary and he was eventually re-elected to his Place 3 seat.
When Hervey, who has been on the bench since 2001, was reached by phone Tuesday evening, she said, “Darth Vader is not supposed to win the war in those movies.”
Soon after AP called her race for Parker, Hervey said she was worried about the future of the court. She plans to work through the year to ensure someone would pick up the mantle of the programs she's pioneered over the last two decades.
In addition to her judicial duties, Hervey co-chairs the Judicial Commission on Mental Health. She also runs an education program that provides legal courses and assistance to judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and court personnel.
Had Hervey and Keller won reelection, they both would have had to retire before the end of their six-year terms given a Texas law requiring judges to leave the bench at 75. The governor would appoint someone to finish their terms.
Parker will face Democratic nominee Nancy Mulder, who presides over Texas Criminal District Court 6 in Dallas County, in the November general election.
Place 8
Finley, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, has practiced criminal law for over 20 years, according to his campaign biography.
He came under scrutiny during the Republican primary over reports that he and his wife are facing a civil judgment after defaulting on a home mortgage payment in 2016. The couple appealed a district court decision ordering them to repay lenders, pausing the seizure of their home.
In November, Finley will face Chika Anyiam, the Texas Criminal District Court 7 judge in Dallas County, who already secured the Democratic nomination.
Slaughter, a former district judge in Galveston County, was in her first term on the criminal appeals bench after winning her election in 2018.
During the primary season, Slaughter pushed back against Paxton's characterization of the 2021 opinion. She said the attorney general and her critics were pushing misinformation about her and the court.
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Texas Tribune
These Texans aren’t taking buyouts despite repeated floods
by By Emily Foxhall, The Texas Tribune – 2024-05-20 05:00:00
SUMMARY: Recent floods in Harris County, Texas, have devastated homes along the San Jacinto River. Tom Madigan, who owns multiple properties, quickly started repairs without knowing the Harris County Flood Control District aims to buy out such flood-prone properties. The region has a longstanding buyout program to remove homes from high-risk flood areas, with about 800 out of 2,400 targeted properties purchased. However, buyouts are voluntary and often insufficient for low-income residents. Despite the program, many choose to stay due to affordability and community ties, while others like Madigan remain skeptical of receiving a fair offer.
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HARRIS COUNTY — After the floodwaters earlier this month just about swallowed two of the six homes that 60-year-old Tom Madigan owns on the San Jacinto River, he didn't think twice about whether to fix them. He hired people to help, and they got to work stripping the walls, pulling up flooring and throwing out water-logged furniture.
What Madigan didn't know: The Harris County Flood Control District wants to buy his properties as part of an effort to get people out of dangerously flood-prone areas.
Back-to-back storms drenched southeast Texas in late April and early May, causing flash flooding and pushing rivers out of their banks and into low-lying neighborhoods. Officials across the region urged people in vulnerable areas to evacuate.
Like Madigan's, some places that were inundated along the San Jacinto in Harris County have flooded repeatedly. And for nearly 30 years, the flood control district has been trying to clear out homes around the river by paying property owners to move, then returning the lots to nature.
The recent floods show why buyout programs can be important. These spots typically flood first and worse. Gov. Greg Abbott reported that hundreds of rescues took place in the state while the floods destroyed homes. A man drowned and a child was swept away into the floods. One Harris County resident described climbing on top of his motor home as the water rose before first responders rescued him.
But the disaster and its aftermath also illustrate why buyouts are complicated to carry out even in Harris County, home to Houston, which has one of the most robust buyout programs in the country. The flood control district has identified roughly 2,400 properties as current buyout candidates around the San Jacinto; the district and county have bought about 800 of them.
Nearly all of the district's buyouts are voluntary. If an owner doesn't want to sell, the district can't force them out.
Buyouts make sense for some people who can't be protected from floods, said Alessandra Jerolleman, director of research for the Center on Environment, Land and Law at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.
But buyouts might not provide lower-income people enough money to get somewhere safer, she said, and they could lose important support like child care from nearby family or neighbors.
“It's not as though it's a guarantee of reducing risks to that family,” Jerolleman said.
People who live near the river and who have endured repeated floods explained that they've stayed because it's affordable and, most of the time, peaceful. Where else would they be able to buy anything like it? Some said they didn't think the government would offer them what they consider a fair price to sell their land. Some didn't know the buyout program existed.
Madigan started buying homes more than 15 years ago in the unincorporated River Terrace neighborhood because they were cheap. On Tuesday, the Houston firefighter drank a Heineken and grilled hamburgers for his work crew outside his most damaged house, which he rents to his brother. Sodden rugs baked in the sun on the driveway.
Madigan said he might have taken a buyout if it was a reasonable offer — but he doubted it would be. He said he needed to get the properties ready again for his renters. “I can't wait,” he said.
Two blocks away, water had swept through a yellow house Madigan rents to a family with a teenage son. One of the workers fixing the property, 21-year-old Omar Reyna, watched the family throw out pretty much everything they had. Piecing together new laminate flooring with his dad, Reyna kept thinking about a trash bag of Teddy bears and stuffed toys he tossed out for them.
He wondered if the parents had been saving the toys for another kid they might have in the future.
“The faster we get it done, the faster they can come back in here,” Reyna said.
Some people choose to live with the risk of flooding
The San Jacinto is the largest river in the state's most populous county. For years before Harris County's first floodplain maps were drawn up in the mid-1980s, people built homes near its banks. Even today, people can still build in the vast floodplain if the houses are high enough and have enough stormwater detention.
The flood control district tries to buy out homes in pockets of the floodplain that are deepest, said James Wade, manager for the district's property acquisition department. Those are places where engineers can't easily fix flooding problems.
Buyouts are meant to get people out of flood zones before their property floods again, not to help in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. The process is slow: In some cases, it can take 18 months or longer to approve a buyout application, Wade said. The district pays owners the market value or pre-flood value for their house, determined by a third-party appraiser, plus moving expenses and a supplement to help them get into a house out of the floodplain, Wade said.
“It's a very equitable, fair program,” Wade said — but still some people don't want to leave.
Those who stay learn to adapt. They build homes on stilts. They monitor the river level and watch for releases of water from the Lake Conroe dam upstream. Some know intimately the routine of rebuilding: gut the house, clean it, put it back together.
The floor of 49-year-old Sean Vincent's house in the Forest Cove neighborhood in northeast Houston is 15 feet above the ground. Three feet of water flooded it when Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017. This month, the floods reached five feet high on Vincent's property. He cleaned out his waterlogged ground-level shed with help from church members. On Tuesday, he was building new shelves for it.
But most of the time Vincent, who works in railroad traffic control, said he enjoys the space surrounded by tall trees with room for his three kids.
“It's just really not a major part of our life,” Vincent said of the flooding. “Yes, it's inconvenient. Yes, it's now happened to us twice in seven years … It's sort of a trade-off for us. And it is lovely out here.”
“Where are you going to go?”
Then there are those who stay because they don't see anywhere else to go.
Jack St. John, 67, a retired long-haul truck driver, moved to Northshore 43 years ago and has had to clean up after two floods. He worries any time flooding threatens, but the neighborhood's advantages keep him there: He has no water bill because he has a well. His taxes are reasonable. The neighborhood has a fish fry in the spring and a barbecue in the fall.
“You know, when you leave, where are you going to go?” he said. “What's it going to cost to buy into another place?”
Farther northeast, in the Idle Wild and Idle Glen neighborhoods, the floods forced some residents to sleep under tarps. On one largely forested street, boats were turned sideways or flipped upside down. A small building was lodged in the trees. A car was in the ditch.
For several years, Elvia Bethea, 68, has driven from her home in Humble to check on people and pets here, and pick up stray animals. On Tuesday, she and other volunteers gave John Gray, 50, bamboo yard torches to fight the many mosquitoes, plus two trays of chocolate-covered strawberries.
Gray said he couldn't afford to fix up his destroyed house. He earns a living printing labor law posters for businesses. His printers at home were destroyed.
Gray said he had never heard of the buyout program but would consider taking one.
“Who do I call?” Gray asked. “I don't have a clue.”
From the back of a white SUV, Bethea handed some hot dogs to Jose Tabores, 68, who lives on Gray's land in a trailer now filled with mud.
“I'm coming for dinner, remember!” Bethea teased him.
Nearby, 51-year-old Veronika Scheid had been sleeping in a wet tent. The flood washed the shipping crate she lived in down the road and into the trees — along with her and her neighbors' belongings.
At a low point, when Scheid was crying over all she lost, she found a pink-and-white beaded necklace with stitching in the shape of a “V,” like her name. At the end was a charm shaped like a house.
She was grateful the person who owned the land where she stayed hadn't taken a buyout. Otherwise she would have nowhere to go.
“At least we have this,” Scheid said.
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The post These Texans aren't taking buyouts despite repeated floods appeared first on TexasTribune.org.
The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Texas Tribune
Trump, Abbott speak at Dallas NRA convention
by By Annie Xia, The Texas Tribune – 2024-05-18 19:24:41
SUMMARY:
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DALLAS— At the National Rifle Association's annual convention on Saturday, Donald Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott encouraged the thousands gathered to vote for Trump in the 2024 presidential election as a way to ensure their Second Amendment rights.
“The NRA has stood with me from the very beginning, and with your vote, I will stand strong for your rights and liberties,” Trump said. “I heard it a few weeks ago that if gun owners voted, we would swamp them at levels that nobody's ever seen before. I think you're a rebellious bunch, but let's be rebellious and vote this time.”
Trump and Abbott spoke to a room packed with NRA members, some of which sported supportive attire from the standard-fare red caps to a dress covered with photos of the former president.
During the convention, the NRA released its endorsement for the 45th president, and the Trump political campaign announced the launch for the “Gun Owners for Trump” coalition.
Abbott touted his track record on gun rights by pointing to Texas laws passed last year, such as House Bill 3137 which prohibits local governments from requiring firearm owners to buy liability insurance. To energetic applause, he said the law ensured people would not be forced to pay to exercise their Second Amendment rights.
Abbott also described the state's successful crackdown on the recent pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses, in which protesters are demanding the schools divest from from companies tied to Israel or weapons manufacturing amid the Israel-Hamas War.
“When they tried to pull that stunt in Texas, our Department of Public Safety cleared the area, arrested the protesters and put them in jail,” Abbott said. “Unlike some of these radical leftist universities like Columbia, UCLA and far too many others, in Texas we don't tolerate paid protesters who tried to hijack our college campuses.”
Almost to the day, the NRA convention takes place two years after the Uvalde school shooting, where an 18-year-old gunned down an elementary school with a legally purchased assault rifle. The shooter killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers with an AR-15 style rifle.
During the 2023 legislative session, Uvalde families unsuccessfully pressed Texas policymakers to pass a raise-the-age law, which would have upped the minimum age for buying semi-automatic weapons from 18 to 21.
“Donald Trump and Texas Republicans made the gun violence epidemic worse, especially in our state, where we have seen nine mass shootings just in the last 15 years,” said a statement by Gilberto Hinojosa, the Texas Democratic Party Chair, on Friday. “Even after Uvalde parents pleaded with Greg Abbott and Ted Cruz for commonsense gun safety laws, they decided, like Trump “ that the NRA and gun lobby was more important.”
Instead the legislature approved a school safety bill that established preventative measures toward school shootings. The law included a mandate that every school must hire an armed security officer and the creation of a department within the Texas Education Agency that can compel districts to adhere to active-shooter protocols.
During his speech, Trump endorsed four Republican candidates who are fighting in late May runoffs to be their party's nominee: Alan Schoolcraft, David Covey, Helen Kerwin and Brett Hagenbuch. Each of them has already received endorsements by Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton or both. Schoolcraft, Covey and Kerwin are running against Republican incumbents in the Texas House who impeded Abbott's signature school voucher bill or voted for Paxton's impeachment based on accusations of corruption.
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The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Texas Tribune
Photos: Texas storms cause widespread damage in Houston area
by By Marie D. De Jesús and Antranik Tavitian, Houston Landing, The Texas Tribune – 2024-05-17 14:45:42
SUMMARY: Severe storms hit the Houston area on Thursday evening, resulting in widespread damage, four fatalities, and power outages affecting nearly 900,000 homes and businesses. The Houston Office of Emergency Management is beginning recovery efforts, while officials discourage unnecessary travel. Reports from Houston Landing detail the extent of the destruction, which includes knocked-down power lines and damaged buildings, such as the Wells Fargo Plaza and the CenterPoint Energy Plaza. Photos provided by Antranik Tavitian and Marie D. De Jesús illustrate the damage seen across the region.
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Severe storms tore through the Houston area Thursday evening, causing widespread damage, killing at least four people and leaving hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses without power.
Gale force winds up to 100 mph knocked over power lines, blew out windows and toppled trees throughout the region. Houston Office of Emergency Management spokesperson Brent Taylor said officials will begin the recovery process once debris and damage are cleared. In the meantime, Houston Mayor John Whitmire and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo urged residents to avoid all unnecessary travel.
The storm ravaged Harris County — from transmission towers crushed in suburban Cypress to stricken oak trees blockading traffic to high-rise windows shattered throughout downtown Houston.
Here's a look at some of the damage wrought, reported by Houston Landing:
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