Texas Tribune
Law enforcement may not face criminal charges in Uvalde
by Pooja Salhotra, The Texas Tribune – 2024-02-07 06:00:00
SUMMARY: A grand jury assembled by prosecutor Christina Mitchell in Texas is investigating law enforcement officers' delayed response to the Robb Elementary School shooting. Despite the inquiry, experts suggest that charges are unlikely due to the rarity of prosecuting officers for inaction. Officers waited 77 minutes before breaching the classrooms where the shooter killed 19 students and two teachers. The Texas Rangers' request for a study on whether quicker medical care could have saved victims was halted without explanation, causing concern for accountability. A federal report criticized the police response, and while officers may face charges like manslaughter or endangering a child, legal experts remain skeptical of successful prosecution.
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After more than a year of pressure to file criminal charges against some of the Texas law enforcement officers responsible for the botched response to the Robb Elementary School shooting, local prosecutor Christina Mitchell last month convened a grand jury to investigate.
But even after that monthslong review is complete, law enforcement officers may not face criminal charges, legal experts say. That's because police officers are almost never criminally prosecuted — and charges for failing to act are even more rare.
Grand jury proceedings in Texas are kept secret and it's not typically known how cases are presented to jurors who decide whether there's enough evidence to formally charge someone with a crime or proceed to a trial.
It's unclear whether Uvalde's District Attorney plans to present evidence to grand jurors that some victims would have survived had medical responders started treatment earlier. Hundreds of officers who responded to the shooting waited 77 minutes to breach the classrooms, where a gunman used an AR-15 rifle to indiscriminately shoot students and teachers in two adjoining fourth-grade classrooms. Nineteen students and two teachers died in the May 24, 2022 shooting.
The Texas Rangers in August 2022 asked Dr. Mark Escott, medical director for Texas Department of Public Safety and chief medical officer for the city of Austin, to look into the injuries of the victims and determine whether any victims could have survived. Four of the victims are known to have had heartbeats when they were rescued from the classrooms.
But one year later, Mitchell's office told Escott it was “moving in a different direction” and no longer wanted the analysis to be performed.
“It's unclear to me why they would not want an analysis such as this done,” Escott said.
Escott said he was never given access to the autopsy reports or hospital and EMS records. Based on the limited records he did review, he believes at least one individual may have survived had police officers intervened earlier.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland visited Uvalde last month to present findings from a scathing 575-page federal report. He said lives could have been saved if officers had confronted the shooter earlier, instead of ignoring established mass shooting protocols.
The DOJ report also noted that at least one deceased victim was alive at 11:56 a.m., 20 minutes after officers entered the school.
Mitchell has not responded to The Tribune's multiple requests for comment. It therefore remains unclear why she halted the survivability study, which could have provided critical information to the grand jury.
State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio, said the Uvalde families deserve accountability and clarity on victims' survivability.
“That they halted the study is very disturbing to me,” Gutierrez said. “It seems to me that there is some unwillingness to tell the truth.”
Gutierrez called the shooting response “the worst law enforcement response in the history of the United States” and said he believes victims could have survived had police acted more quickly.
A DUTY TO PROTECT
Even though police training instructs officers to confront a shooter, hundreds of officers responding to Robb Elementary waited over an hour to confront the gunman
The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently held that officers do not have a constitutional “duty to protect,” even if they have been trained to do so. And even if the Uvalde grand jury decides to indict officers, prosecutors would then have the difficult burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the officers were under a specific legal duty to act and that in failing to act they caused a specific harm.
“There's a big difference between what is morally right and what the law actually requires,” said Seth Stoughton, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and former police officer. “I'd be very surprised if there was a straightforward path to criminal prosecution.”
The U.S. Justice Department's report found failures in leadership, command and coordination at the scene of the shooting. The biggest error, the report stated, was that officers wrongly treated the situation as a barricaded subject incident instead of an active shooter, despite evidence to the contrary.
Several officers resigned or were fired in the months following the shooting. Pete Arredondo, former chief of the school district's police department, was fired by the school board in August 2022. He was one of a handful of officers named in the DOJ report.
Kirk Burkhalter, a professor of law at New York Law School, said he suspects that law enforcement officers could face three possible criminal charges: manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, and abandoning or endangering a child.
Those first two charges would require the prosecution to prove that the officers “caused the death of” an individual. Evidence that any victims may have survived the attack had officers intervened more quickly could support the charge. It's not clear if Mitchell's office had someone pursue such evidence after scrapping the survivability report.”
Similar studies have been done following other mass shootings, such as the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. In that study, researchers reported that 16 of the 49 victims had potentially survivable wounds had they received faster medical care and made it to a hospital within an hour. Still, the officers who responded to the Pulse shooting in 2016 weren't criminally charged.
Even if the prosecution could prove victims would have survived with a faster police response, they will also have to demonstrate that the officers acted either “recklessly” or “negligently” through their inaction.
Lawyers said they are not aware of previous cases where police officers have been successfully prosecuted for failing to act.
Last year, a jury acquitted a former school resource officer who stayed outside during the February 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The officer faced seven counts of felony child neglect, three counts of culpable negligence and one count of perjury. The state's argument that the officer had a duty to protect students failed to win favor among the jury.
Some legal experts speculated that community pressure played a role in the convening of a grand jury in Uvalde.
“I think the DA may be trying to create some goodwill in the community and maybe address her political concerns for her future,” said G.M. Cox, a former chief of police and lecturer at Sam Houston State University. “The reality is that it's going to be tough to file a criminal case.”
Disclosure: Sam Houston State University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
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Texas Tribune
Anti-abortion deposition requests generate fear, not results
by By Eleanor Klibanoff, The Texas Tribune – 2024-05-10 05:00:00
SUMMARY: Anti-abortion activist Jonathan Mitchell has filed several legal petitions in Texas, aiming to investigate those involved with facilitating abortions, including abortion funds and women who seek out-of-state procedures. Although judges have not approved these petitions, they have spurred fear and confusion. Mitchell was granted one petition to depose a woman who had an abortion out-of-state, but that ruling is on hold pending appeal. Legal experts argue that Texas abortion laws and federal protections for interstate travel make it unlikely for Mitchell's tactics to succeed. However, his method of incremental legal challenges aims to create uncertainty and exploit legal gray areas, using the fear of litigation to deter people from supporting or accessing abortion services.
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Anti-abortion legal crusader Jonathan Mitchell has filed at least seven legal petitions in Texas in recent years asking to depose abortion funds, providers and researchers. While these filings have created fear and confusion, none have yet to be approved by a judge.
Now, Mitchell has moved on to targeting individual women. He has filed at least two petitions seeking to depose women he claims traveled out-of-state to terminate their pregnancies, one of which a judge granted; that ruling is on hold while an appeal proceeds.
Under state law, the person who terminates a pregnancy cannot face criminal or civil penalties. Texas abortion laws govern in-state conduct, and there is broad constitutional protection for interstate travel. A federal judge has previously ruled abortion funds are likely safe from prosecution, and just this week, a federal judge in Alabama upheld the right to leave the state to seek medical care that is legal in another state.
All of this would make it difficult, if not impossible, to take action against someone who assisted a Texan in getting an out-of-state abortion, legal experts say. But Mitchell has made his name turning long-shot legal theories into the law of the land through exactly this strategy of incremental, often losing, legal battles that exploit confusion about the law.
“These … proceedings are just about scaring people into thinking they can't help somebody going out of state to have an abortion, or they're going to go after them with a lawsuit,” said Charles “Rocky” Rhodes, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. “It's not about a lawsuit, it's about using fear to induce compliance.”
Rule 202 petitions
Most states, and the federal judiciary, allow a lawyer to depose someone before a lawsuit is filed to preserve their testimony. It's most commonly invoked when someone may die before the lawsuit is filed.
Texas, however, goes much further, also allowing lawyers to depose someone for the purpose of investigating a potential claim before filing a lawsuit. This provision went largely unnoticed and unused before the judiciary revised its rules in 2000 and combined it with the more typical pre-suit deposition rule, said Lonny Hoffman, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center.
“This is a very unusual animal,” Hoffman said. “We're allowing people to use the court system, the coercive power of the state, to compel someone to give testimony before a lawsuit has been brought against them.”
Conservative Texas courts, typically not so friendly to plaintiffs, have slowly imposed stricter restrictions on when they agree to grant Rule 202 petitions, Hoffman said. In 2011, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the “intrusion into otherwise private matters authorized by Rule 202 outside a lawsuit is not to be taken lightly,” and “is not a license for forced interrogations.”
When used correctly, Rule 202 petitions can diminish frivolous lawsuits and save time, Rhodes said.
“There are strong policy reasons for the rule. I think it's a good rule,” he said. “It's just being abused here. This is harassment, and contrary to the very purposes of the rule.”
Petitions filed against women
The two petitions Mitchell has filed against women who allegedly traveled out-of-state are similar. Both were filed by ex-boyfriends who say they disagreed with their former partner's decision to get an abortion. The petitions assert each woman's mother influenced her to have an abortion.
One petition, first reported by The Washington Post, was filed last month and is sealed. The woman is represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights, which declined to make her available for an interview.
“I think anyone would agree that it's pretty terrifying to be told that you might be sued for doing something that is entirely legal,” said senior staff attorney Molly Duane. “The petition uses the word murder 23 times. This is just not a normal document for anyone to receive and I think the inflammatory nature of it is by design.”
Duane reiterated that it is legal to travel to a state where abortion remains available to terminate a pregnancy.
“This is part of a yearslong campaign by Jonathan Mitchell and other abortion extremists to intimidate people into chilling their own constitutional activity,” Duane said.
The other petition, which has not been previously reported, was granted by a judge earlier this year. The Texas Tribune is not naming either party, or the jurisdiction in which it was filed, since no lawsuit has been filed and the woman named in the filing has not been accused of a crime. Her lawyer declined to comment.
The deposition in that case is on hold while an appeal proceeds.
In a brief, the woman's lawyers argued that granting the petition would be “repugnant to the liberty interests that Texas fiercely protects,” by validating the petitioner's “scheme to harass an ex-girlfriend who has moved on from her relationship with him.”
Both petitions claim to want to investigate potential violations of Senate Bill 8, also known as the “Texas Heartbeat Act,” which prohibits anyone from “aiding or abetting” an abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. But that law, which Mitchell helped design, only applies to abortions performed by Texas-licensed physicians. While the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the law to remain in effect, a state judge found it unconstitutional, a case that is still moving through the courts.
“It is helpful for them to just have this [Rule 202] threat rather than actually litigate,” Rhodes said. “Because if an actual challenge arises and it's determined that somebody cannot actually sue under SB 8, that would make the law entirely toothless.”
The petitions also hint at future wrongful death lawsuits, which cannot be brought against the person who terminated their pregnancy. Mitchell previously filed a wrongful death lawsuit against women who allegedly helped their friend obtain medication to terminate a pregnancy in Texas. That case is still pending in Galveston.
In a filing, the lawyers in the case now on appeal noted the risk to women across the state if judges began green-lighting Mitchell's strategy.
“A Rule 202 petitioner would be entitled to depose and seek documents from any woman who is not now pregnant, but was rumored to be at some time. Any woman who has a miscarriage could be subject to a forced interrogation. Any scorned lover could harass or intimidate their ex … for simply receiving a false-positive pregnancy test,” the lawyers wrote in their brief.
“Someone who has sex and then gains and loses weight may be forced to produce documents proving that she did not violate a wrongful death statute or SB 8,” they wrote. “The implications of a grant of this petition on the personal freedom and liberty of women to simply exist in Texas without being forced to answer to any ideologue anywhere in the world … are staggering.”
Other petitions
None of Mitchell's previous Rule 202 petitions have resulted in anything other than extended legal battles. He has filed at least nine, including three against abortion funds that help people travel out-of-state.
Two of those cases — one against the Lilith Fund, filed in Jack County, and another in Denton County against the Texas Equal Access Fund — were nearly identical. In each case, the funds countersued and Mitchell moved to dismiss their suits.
The judge on each case ruled differently — one granted the dismissal, the other denied it — and, complicating matters further, two three-judge panels from the same appeals court also disagreed. Both cases will likely go to the Texas Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, in Hood County, Mitchell filed a Rule 202 petition against the San Antonio-based Buckle Bunnies Fund. A judge denied the fund's motion to dismiss. That case is on appeal at the 2nd Court of Appeals in Fort Worth, which issued the dueling opinions in the Jack and Denton county cases.
In a rare move likely intended to address the discrepancies between the rulings, the appeals court voluntarily said it would hear this case en banc, before all seven judges, on May 22.
Mitchell filed two Rule 202 petitions against abortion providers that left Texas after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, which are still pending. He has also filed petitions against Sidley Austin, a law firm that said it would pay for Texas-based employees to travel out of state to get an abortion, and an abortion researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.
None of these petitions have resulted in any depositions, let alone any lawsuits. But they have generated a lot of fear and confusion, which legal experts say is largely the point.
“What's so clever about [Rule 202 petitions] is that they never have to sue,” said Hoffman. “They just have to threaten to get the woman in front of a court reporter and force her to answer questions, and it has exactly the chilling effect that they want.”
In a statement, Mitchell reiterated his claim that abortion funds and employers that pay for out-of-state abortions are potentially vulnerable to criminal prosecution and civil liability.
“Conduct taken inside Texas that procures an abortion is a criminal act under the state's pre-Roe abortion ban, even if the abortion occurs out of state,” he said, referring to 19th century laws that were on the books before the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade in 1973.
The question of whether those laws remain in effect has not yet been fully resolved by the courts. But a federal judge has preliminarily ruled that abortion funds are likely safe from prosecution.
But Mitchell has made his career working the margins of the law, pushing on weak spots until he finds a way in. He successfully circumvented the constitutional protection for abortion with SB 8, and has been a leading voice in getting the U.S. Supreme Court to consider reviving the Comstock Act, a zombie law restricting the mailing of abortion drugs, which hasn't been enforced for over 100 years. He's been advising towns and cities that want to pass so-called “travel bans” that prohibit the use of municipal roads to transport someone leaving the state for an abortion.
“He's been harassing the funds and abortion support networks for years, so it's not a new tactic,” said Elizabeth Myers, a Dallas attorney who represents the funds. “But now that target has expanded to actually include pregnant women, which they've said they would never target. This was always where they were going to go, and now we're here.”
Disclosure: University of Texas at Austin and University of Houston have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
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Texas Tribune
We the Texans: Local news and democracy
SUMMARY: The content discusses the importance of digital marketing for businesses in the modern age. It highlights the need for a strong online presence, the use of social media platforms, and the importance of SEO to drive traffic to websites. The article also emphasizes the role of content marketing in engaging with customers and building brand awareness. It concludes with the recommendation for businesses to invest in digital marketing strategies to stay competitive in today's market and reach a wider audience. Overall, the message is clear: digital marketing is crucial for businesses looking to succeed and grow in the digital world.
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Texas Tribune
Two political advisers plead guilty in Cuellar bribery case
by By Jasper Scherer, The Texas Tribune – 2024-05-09 12:33:09
SUMMARY: Two political consultants are set to plead guilty to laundering over $200,000 in bribes with U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar. Court documents reveal their agreement to assist the Justice Department's case against Cuellar, who, along with his wife Imelda, was indicted for accepting nearly $600,000 from Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank. Cuellar supposedly influenced U.S. Treasury policies to benefit the bank. The consultants, who may face 20 years in prison and heavy fines, were reportedly involved in a project that was a front for channeling money to Cuellar, bypassing financial disclosures. Cuellar maintains his innocence.
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Two political consultants agreed to plead guilty to charges that they conspired with U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar to launder more than $200,000 in bribes from a Mexican bank, according to recently unsealed court documents that show the consultants are cooperating with the Justice Department in its case against the Laredo Democrat.
Cuellar, a powerful South Texas Democrat, was indicted with his wife Imelda on charges of accepting almost $600,000 in bribes from Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank. The indictment, unsealed last week, accuses Cuellar of taking money from the commercial bank in exchange for influencing the Treasury Department to work around an anti-money laundering policy that threatened the bank's interests. Cuellar allegedly recruited his former campaign manager, Colin Strother, and another consultant, Florencio “Lencho” Rendon, to facilitate the payments, according to court records.
Rendon and Strother both struck plea deals with the Justice Department in March, in which they agreed to cooperate in the agency's investigation of the Cuellars. They each face up to 20 years in prison and six-figure fines for charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The plea deals, which were first reported by the San Antonio Express-News, allege that Cuellar first asked Strother to meet with Rendon in February 2016 to “participate in a project to test and certify a fuel additive made by a Mexican company … so that it could be sold in the United States.” Rendon told Strother he would pay him $11,000 a month for the project, $10,000 of which Strother would pass on to Imelda Cuellar, according to the plea agreements.
Rendon paid Strother a total of $242,000 from March 2016 to December 2017, nearly $215,000 of which Strother then paid to Imelda Cuellar, the documents allege. Strother concluded the project was “a sham,” according to his plea deal, because neither Rendon nor Imelda Cuellar “did any legitimate work.” Strother “understood that the true purpose of the payments” was to “funnel money” to Henry Cuellar without the Laredo Democrat having to reveal it in his annual financial disclosures.
Cuellar has asserted his innocence, releasing a statement Friday in which he said his actions were “consistent with the actions of many of my colleagues and in the interest of the American people.”
This story is being updated.
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