Republican lawmakers want the Texas District Attorneys to stop not prosecuting abortion
The Mueller investigation of the lawsuits filed against the Biden administration in the Lone Star State: “Judge-shopping” is not the right strategy for the DOJ
The Justice Department is tripling down on its allegations that Texas is “judge-shopping” in the lawsuits the state has brought against the Biden administration.
But the department is running into headwinds as it tries to push back against the Lone Star State’s pattern of filing cases in a way that allows it to effectively choose the judges that hear them.
Reuveni, the DOJ attorney, meanwhile, stressed that their motion wasn’t targeted at Tipton, whom the department thought was a fair judge, but rather it was aimed at Texas’ tactics. Reuveni said that the department would have no issue if the case was randomly assigned to Tipton, having been transferred to a court division where Tipton shares case assignment with other judges.
With its tactics, Texas can “circumvent the random assignment system by never filing in Divisions where they have a non-trivial chance of not knowing what judge they are likely to be assigned,” the DOJ said in brief submitted to Tipton this week.
There are cases where private litigants take advantage of the system, with the most high-profile being a lawsuit by anti- abortion activists who want to block the approval of a drug used in abortions. Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed judge who has issued controversial rulings against the Biden administration in the past, is the one who is going to hear the medication abortion case.
“There are numerous compelling reasons for these cases to be heard where they are filed,” Paige Wiley, a Paxton spokesperson, told CNN in an email. She said that the Biden administration was portraying a baseless statement of judge-shopping that risked compromising the public’s trust in the legal system.
Forum shopping is a strategy embraced by litigants on the right and left. In their cases against the Trump administration, progressives were strategic. But legal experts say there’s a distinction between the practice then and the current trends, because with the Trump-era cases, those lawsuits were filed in courthouses where one of several Democratic-appointed judges could be assigned the case.
DOJ was suggested to be to blame for any perception of unfairness by the judge, as he commented on his tendency to grant pauses of his orders so they can be appealed.
The DOJ could help with the perception of fairness by saying on the public record that it believed that judge Tipton would give them a fair shake.
Tipton presides over virtually all civil litigation filed in Victoria, Texas, including at least seven lawsuits brought by Paxton against the administration in that division. The administration had a policy to prioritize deportations in one case, but in 2021 Tipton halted it and ordered regular updates from the administration on how it was doing.
Hendrix, another Trump appointee, hears two-thirds of the civil lawsuits filed in the Lubbock division, which is located in northwest Texas and is several hours’ drive from the state’s biggest cities. The DOJ requested the judge to move the lawsuit to either DC or Austin. The department argued that Texas’ “sole allegation related to an event in Texas is the National Board’s award of a grant to a non-profit organization in Houston.”
Kacsmaryk, meanwhile, is assigned every civil case filed in Amarillo, another division in northern Texas. The judge has ruled in favor of Texas in disputes over Biden administration’s LGBT protections and the president’s attempts to end Trump-era migration restrictions. There is a pending ruling on the medication abortion case which could be issued any day now.
The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine has been incorporated in Amarillo a few months before the lawsuit was filed. The lawyer pushed back on the allegation that the filing location was chosen specifically to get the case before Kacsmaryk.
The American public has the authority to file a lawsuit against federal agencies that have hurt them, Baptist said. Dr. Jester did that here. He filed this lawsuit with the other plaintiffs in this case because he is based in the Amarillo area, and therefore, we filed this lawsuit where he resides.”
At last week’s hearing, an attorney for the office told the judge that they did not know why they chose to file in seven divisions over and over.
The long and short of it, Your Honor, is that the public interest is served if the case is decided quickly. It is available in the Victoria Division.
Is it possible that if the public heard that the Department of Justice said that it would go a long way to address your public perception concern? the judge said.
State-Local Power: A Fighting Case Against Robust Prosecutor Practices in Texas, and Louisiana, in the Early 2000s
Texas has been at the center of an ongoing struggle between state and local authorities. It’s an escalating dispute over who has what power — and when.
Democrats have the majority of criminal district attorneys in Texas’ big cities. Some of these chief prosecutors have told their communities they will use their inherent discretion and not zealously pursue criminal cases against women who seek abortions or families who obtain gender-affirming health care for their children. (Several later said they would make decisions on a case-by-case basis.)
According to Ann Bowman, a professor at Texas A&M’s Bush school of government, there is an interesting debate about where power should rest. “How much the state should have, how much local government should have.”
The clash is an example of state-local power struggles. The Mississippi Legislature has proposed that judges be appointed to the City of Jackson, as well as giving the capitol police force control over the entire state. Jackson is 80% Black and controlled by the Democrats.
If county sheriffs don’t enforce a new requirement that semi-automatic rifles be registered with the state, they won’t be in their jobs, warned Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
David Cook is a Republican from the Fort Worth area. His bill would ban district attorneys from having a policy of not enforcing any particular offense. Financial penalties would be set by the bill.
“As a district attorney, you have a job which entails looking at all the cases that are brought in and judging each case on a case-by-case basis,” Cook says. “And so, if you’re making blanket statements and giving blanket immunity, then you’re not doing your job.”
Similar legislation is moving in Georgia. There, the state would create a commission to oversee prosecutors and allow for discipline or removal if they refused to charge a particular crime.
Several of the progressive prosecutors in Texas that made statements after the Dobbs v. Jackson decision are not doing interviews on the proposed bills. The state association of district and county attorneys told them that there was a lot of prosecutor-related bills.
District Attorney Mark Gonzalez of Nueces County in Texas is facing an effort to remove him from office and he says that the group’s announcement to not pursue abortion cases may have been too hasty.
“The statement may have been the straw that perhaps broke the camel’s back,” says Gonzalez, a Democrat. “I think it’d be smarter for us to move in silence, and I think that may have been something we didn’t accomplish.”
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/03/1160475174/these-texas-das-refused-to-prosecute-abortion-republican-lawmakers-want-them-sto
The Case for a More Progressive Approach to Coping with Crime: A Brief Analysis of a GOP-Obsessed Sheriff’s Office
There are bills to curb local prosecutors that he sees as part of a larger backlash against a more progressive approach to law enforcement.
Gonzalez says there is a different approach they are taking to making some changes that can impact people of color and lower economic status. I don’t know what makes that a big deal.
Some local officials get blowback for bucking the state. There was no proposal to get a group of Texas sheriffs to enforce the Governor’s mask mandate during the COvid-19 swine flu epidemic. Some experts say that’s because sheriffs align more with the conservative leadership of the state.
Gonzalez doesn’t have a policy on pursuing certain crimes, but he just tells his office to do the right thing. He’s not running for reelection and said he will be happy to watch from the sidelines should any new law get litigated in court.
