One morning, she woke up and realized she was surrounded by elderly farmers. This one was a plea to prison officials to let his wife bring his wedding ring to prison and to let him wear it. But, as the pragmatic daughter of a career Air Force officer puts it, I am really not a kill yourself kind of gal. So she started looking for ways to make something out of the situation. Thats when we discovered I won in the early voting 60 to 40 [percent], she says. I spent six months conducting interviews and reviewing hundreds of pages of records trying to understand what happened to Suzanne Wooten. Sandoval won 9,884 to 9,420. Nearly a year later, while a fourth grand jury was investigating Wooten, Schulte, her lawyer, was finally able to arrange a meeting with Milner to try to find out what was going on. Just come on out and tell us you did it. I mean, its just mind blowing., Over the course of his career, he had numerous encounters with Milner and Roach in Collin County, and, even though he didnt know her, he had even donated a small amount to Wootens campaign. In December 2008, a few weeks before Wooten was to take the bench, Milner reached out to Attorney General Greg Abbotts office. According to a Dallas Morning News article published at the time, the judge also found that Jennifer had alienated the girls with false accusations against their father. In addition to discussing the issue of parental rights, Stacy mentioned that her father, who was getting on in years, had recently transferred his oil company to his four children. Consulting on other legislative issues for pay was his job. Spencer and Wooten had achieved the impossible. A big part of his job is to help the police department implement a consent decree issued by the Colorado Attorney Generals Office after it found a history of racial bias in the department. They have original jurisdiction over matters such as felony criminal cases, divorce and child custody disputes, and civil claims of $200 or more. She gets convicted. Beginning in 2005, he started going to Austin to try to amend laws regarding parental rights that he felt were unconstitutional. His wife, Judge Jill Willis, still sits on the 429th. He didnt want anything to jeopardize Wooten (who knew nothing about his dealings with the Carys). But he was able to articulate every single committee in the Senate, in the House, who the personalities were, who they would respond to, and he was always right., One of the grand jurors, still fuzzy on Spencers role, asked, But would you sayif I wasif I was looking forif Mr. Spencer was looking for a client, what would he be doing for that client?, He would be doing something very, very creative, Dave replied. Two widely publicized cases in 2013 involved a former Hidalgo County sheriff and his son, a former police officer. Henderson. There were also ads run on the most popular morning and evening shows. There were thousands and thousands of dollars of charges at Best Buy, Nordstrom, the Polo Factory Store, Steinway Piano Gallery, Cowgirls and Lace, Crunchless Abs, Neiman Marcusthe list goes on. Wood County District Attorney Angela Albers-A woman whose physical ugliness is only surpassed by Brandons, and only got her job by going along with her best friend Brandon Baades unscrupulous plan to take over the Wood County DAs office by making false accusations of sexual harassment against her former boss Jim Wheeler. Even by Texas standards, Williamson County is known for its rampant political corruption. She lived under a bridge for days before finally hitchhiking to Louisiana. And even if it had, it wasnt a crime. But in the end, I will discover that no matter how hard people try to distort it, the truth tends to be clear at its core. (The prison time was stayed pending her appeal.). But during the trial, when the jury stopped making eye contact with her, Wooten knew she was in trouble. With respect to legal corruption, Kentucky is the most corrupt state followed by Illinois and Nevada while Massachusetts is the least corrupt state followed Michigan, Oregon, and Vermont. Milner indicted the attorney and had him arrested, but he was acquitted at trial. Texas Crime Statistics. Spencer, after all, was the fulcrum between Wooten and the Carys. Even though Caton was disparaged as a divorce, the race ended up being relatively close. If she didnt, he threatened, she was going to face indictment and would lose her house, law license, family, and reputation, and he would put her in prison for a long time. He would later testify that he offered the plea because his sole goal was to get Wooten off the bench and keep her from running again. Harris County Democrats (Houston) have been using the same ballot corruption playbook George Soros owned Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs is. In addition to Collin County, the complaint named Assistant District Attorney Christopher Milner and his boss, District Attorney John Roach Sr., and Assistant Attorney General Harry White and his boss, Attorney General Greg Abbott. New York does come up in No. She says she used Spencers services before and long after the dates at issue. And he was actually out of jail on parole when he did it. At first, while Dave was in the gang tank in the Billy Moore Correctional Center outside of Tyler, shed visit every week. As I said, Im a lawyer. The only saving grace was that the jury had spared her a first-degree felony conviction, so now the worst-case scenario was 20 years. He says sometimes C-level executives fail to see the forest for the trees, and you need to give them the top-down view so they can finally see the bear traps and the clear path through them. Im like, Bribery? So it didnt matter if you were a victim of domestic violence diving out a window and running for your life, or if you were a gay attorney doing your job, or if you were a woman campaigning to be judge, or even if you were a wealthy, White, Republican man proclaiming your innocence. He was a young lawyer when he met Wooten in the summer of 2008, only a few years out of law school. The laws regarding selecting grand juries have changed. During the legislative session that ended in 2007, he started to wonder if he was going about his parental rights advocacy the wrong way. That grand jury would end up being the first of sixover the course of nearly three yearsto investigate her for alleged election code violations. On the appellate and district courts alone, the Texas Judiciary in the last election lost seven centuries of judicial experience at a single stroke.. I could be at a judges fundraiser Saturday night writing him up to a $2,500 check and then appear in his courtroom on Monday arguing a motion. I felt like that was the right thing to do, she says, not to put him in jail so that when he gets out he reoffends because he has nothing, hes getting no tools, hes not getting any help., The whispers about Wootens sentences made their way back to her. Dave was the last man standing. Youre supposed to be raising your children. Plus, they warned, getting lawyers to donate to a judicial campaign against a Republican incumbent in a blood-red county, when their donations are a matter of public record, would be tough. Prior to Daves trial, in 2010, a new judgewho had been assigned to his custody case after Wooten recused herselfdetermined that the sanctions Sandoval had awarded Jennifer were improper. After Wooten was elected, a hearing in the case was scheduled in her courtroom, but she recused herself as soon as she realized that several of the lawyers involved were from her old firm or had helped on her campaign. In 07, we had sold our oil company, kept some royalty, and everybody was flush, she says. Civil penalties can be assessed for violations of up to three times the amount of the political contributions accepted in violation of the section. There she met Dave Cary, a Northern Californian who had grown up in an old mining town and started his education in a one-room schoolhouse. Should she say she was sick and had to go away to the hospital? He still sounds like a cop, deep-voiced and authoritative, and he peppers his conversation with the easy profanity of someone used to making small talk with felons and fellow officers. She also refused to sign off on routine asset forfeiture requests from the DAs office until after a conviction. He still has an active consulting practice, although he has not worked on another judicial campaign. It was followed by Los Angeles with 1,547 and New York's Southern Judicial District with 1,360. To be eligible to run for a district court judge seat, you must be a citizen of the United States and Texas, be aged 25 to 74, be a resident of the district for two years, and be a practicing lawyer or judge for a total of at least four years. On March 25, 2015, a different trio of judges on the Court of Appeals for the Fifth District of Texas came to a different result in Daves case. At the time, Bob Dole and Pat Buchanan were on the presidential ballot. Sandoval lost his bench by a larger margin than he initially won it. District courts are the general jurisdiction trial courts in Texas. Here is the cast of characters that you will be reading the most about: First Assistant District Attorney Brandon Baade-A man whose physical unattractiveness is only surpassed by his lack of intelligence and moral bankruptcy, but has somehow tricked the people in the courthouse that he is brilliant and that they have to heed every bit of horrible advice that he gives, even though it took him 3 years to pass the bar exam after graduating law school from the LESS THAN PRESTIGIOUS Regent University Law School. Here are the 15 most corrupt states in America. Spencer arrives for our meeting at the coffee shop in the Hilton Anatole dressed in a black zip-up polo, jeans, and gray loafers. Collin County District Attorney | 2011 present, Greg Abbott (Although you cant run after you turn 75.). For 162 years, district court judges had gotten their benches either by gubernatorial appointment when a court opened up due to retirement or death, or by election (often uncontested) when a new court was created. He and Roach were concerned that if Greg Willis became the new DA, hed drop the charges against Wooten. One of the grand jurors for the Wooten and Willis cases was the treasurer for the Collin County Republican Party. The controversial course of treatment, which a study in the scientific journal Addiction determined doesnt work better than a placebo, could cost up to $15,000 per person and didnt have FDA approval. Milner wasnt the only one talking that way. He tried reaching out to people he knew in the Collin County DAs office, but they were tight-lipped about the secret grand jury proceedings. Then someone anonymously placed a copy of an email from First Assistant DA Greg Davis to Roach in her mailbox. This time, Sandoval named Jennifer the sole managing conservator of the girls, sanctioned Dave $50,000 for filing numerous frivolous pleadings, and ordered him to pay Jennifers attorneys fees in the amount of $417,000. After the fourth grand jury declined to indict and a fifth was convened, Wooten and Schulte took matters into their own hands and went to the FBI. Her bangs are now tinged with gray, but her diamond stud earrings match the intensity of her bright blue eyes. It was a great struggle. When Stacy met Dave, he had joint custody of his twin toddlers and an acrimonious relationship with his ex-wife, Jennifer. The usual process is for the police to do their investigation and make an arrest, and then they turn the case over to the DAs office. His clients run the gamut: crypto, natural gas, medical device inventions, nutritional supplements, vertical farming, cybersecurity, edge computing, bottled water. She wasnt allowed to leave Collin or its touching counties without a travel permit, which had to be arranged well in advance, so when her mother-in-law was dying in the hospital, she couldnt be with her in College Station, and when her mother had a heart attack, she couldnt care for her in Austin. This is the introduction to this website, which will be all about how a small urban Texas county (Wood County) allowed smalltime corruption among its public servants to go unchecked for decades, until it has finally ended up with UNBRIDLED CORRUPTION from the top (402nd District Judge Brad McCampbell, District Attorney Angela Albers and Texas Ranger John Vance) to the bottom (Wood County Sheriff Kelly Cole and his deputies, local police chiefs, county constables, CPS caseworkers, CPS Judge Deane Loughmiller, and the defense attorneys that are supposed to be fighting for the people that they are sworn to defend), and what the CITIZENS OF WOOD COUNTY are doing, and need to do be doing, to take back the power and control of the county that rightly belongs to them. Direct evidence proving that a payment to a judge is a bribe and not a campaign contribution is, understandably, difficult to establish. Then there was the older man whod stolen a bottle of $20 shampoo but was charged by prosecutors with felony theft because it was his third offense. Spencer, who had heard from the chairman of the Collin County Democratic Party that Wooten was running, knew his first order of business was to talk her into switching teams. 2 Constable Kelly Smith-A man (and I use that term very loosely here) who has been in law enforcement for almost 25 years and has managed to climb ALL THE WAY DOWN the law enforcement ladder from county cop to police chief to now being just one rung above a WalMart security guard as a constable. He made his fortune when the Irving-based business went public in the late 1990s, going from a $1 million operation to a $5 billion behemoth with Dave as CFO. As they headed out of the courtroom, Schulte, a young, tough-talking former cop with a buzz cut, angrily told White, This is not over. Stacy says she hasnt seen them since. Any claim that they came on as independent prosecutors late in the game was pure fiction. And I was told that their plan was to have me arrested at the airport with the media present. How could he decide to go to trial and leave his freedom up to a jury after seeing what had happened to the three whod gone before him? 217 likes. Shed need at least $50,000 of her own money to have a shot. Wooten sentenced him to treatment. In fact, he asked us to hire a lobbyist, but therewe do have a lobbyist. He awarded Dave primary custody, the thing he had wanted all along. After analyzing federal corruption convictions, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review bestowed a new title on Edinburg: the dirtiest town, in the most crooked county, in the most bribable state. This case, like so many others brought by Roachs office, had nothing to do with truth. New York drops to No. It was my mailbox, but I didnt even own a dog.. He and his wife are divorced but, he says, amicably so. She says Spencer provided the services that she paid him for, and the dates of the checks produced in court are misleading. She had been accused of taking bribes from a couple, whom she swore she had never personally met, to fund campaign expenses, which she had checks to show she had paid for, in return for favorable decisions in a custody dispute, which she had recused herself from and never heard. I was at a judicial conference in San Francisco when they indicted me, Wooten says. He knew the prosecutors were acting like cops, and there was Supreme Court case law that said if you act like a cop, you get qualified immunity like a cop. McKinney attorney Deric Walpole says that after accusing the DAs office of prosecutorial misconduct in a case on a Friday, he received a grand jury summons the following Monday. They saw only a small piece of it, the rest obscured by evidence withheld by the judge or by the vagaries of criminal trials, where defendants often dont testify in each others cases, and maybe not even their own. It was weird.. I thought we had checks and balances. In order to determine the best states in which to pursue a law-enforcement career, WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 30 key indicators of police-friendliness. Two were in Fort Worth, but they werent up for reelection. If it wasnt a political contribution, then there was no crime because there was no actual bribe. Wooten couldnt appeal. The data also highlights the extent of the problem across all 50 states and the District of Columbia . I didnt know anybody that thought she committed bribery., Another lawyer made a similar clerical mistake in the use of a partially filled out form that still contained facts related to a different case. Since the first district court was established in Collin County in 1846, no one had challenged an incumbent judge, whether in a primary or general election. And then you have a split decision. She didnt do anything wrong, Palmer says. Learn from it.. Known as Hang Them All Sandoval, he had an abysmal approval rating among members of the local bar. Texas Ranger John Vance-A CORRUPT Texas Ranger, who in 30 years or so of investigating public corruption has never found a law enforcement officer guilty of wrongdoing (a statistical impossibility), but was instrumental in the FAKE sexual harassment investigation that led to Brandon Baade taking over the Wood County DAs office under the name of Angela Albers. I sat there and I thought, OK, you have to have intent when you steal. Meanwhile, Spencer, her media manager, enlisted the help of Hank Clements, an Austin-based lawyer and lobbyist with judicial campaign experience. Otherwise, virtually every campaign donation would be criminally suspect. He was convicted by a jury and sentenced to concurrent sentences of 14 years in prison for each count. Who bribed who what? Doesnt bribery involve you getting money or someone paying money or something? One way Ive tried to just explain it to people who dont get itlawyers dont get it eitherits like I was charged with walking my dog to my mailbox to get the mail when they knew for a fact that not only did I not walk to the mailbox, but it would not have been a crime. It had been that way for more than 160 years. It has been said that Montgomery County, Texas is the most corrupt county in the state. Judge Charles Sandoval resembled John Lithgow playing Winston Churchill in The Crown, only with more hair. We dug a lot of dry holes, Stacy says of the research. And I still find it difficult to fathom. Hes brilliant. Once they were in, they were in. Yet the witch hunt continued for years.. He kept copious journals in faint, prison-approved pencil. His next stop was the Collin County Democratic Party, which told him that Wooten was talking about running for Sandovals seat. It isnt a crime to walk your dog to the mailbox. So I took a flight a day early and came back, because I have children and a family. Sometimes Im the guy, he says. Wootens criminaldefense attorney. Wooten subsequently filed for a Writ of Habeas Corpus Declaring Actual Innocence as a Matter of Law. With that in mind, Best Life set out to determine the most corrupt state in America. Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Trevio talks to reporters Oct. 31, 2011, at the Hidalgo County sheriff's office in Edinburg, Texas. Then he approached one of Puhls former law partners. They just chose not to accept it. It isnt a crimealthough its not smartto use money earned from one client to pay bills for another before they pay you back because you dont want to admit to anyone that youre broke. EDINBURG, Texas - When it comes to corrupt public officials aiding the smugglers of drugs and illegal immigrants, this is the dirtiest town, in the most crooked county, in the most bribable state along the U.S.-Mexico border, court records show. As a result, the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General announced charges against the former. Dallas County has 32; Collin County has 13. He says his checks bounced as a result of bad checks from clients, and he pled no contest to the insurance fraud claim because he couldnt afford to fight it. Texas Commission on Judicial Selection Final Report, 2020. Two days after his wedding anniversary, he came home. How dare she, prosecutors were heard saying. He estimated the overall cost would be $100,000 to $150,000. Everyone else is just collateral damage. Stacy disagrees. First, as Schulte noted, it is entirely legal for a law firm to write a check for $30,000 to a sitting judge at a cocktail fundraiser for his or her reelection campaign on Friday night and then have one or more of its lawyers appear before said judge for a hearing on Monday morning. She was facing not only the loss of her career but also the loss of her family. With the help of James Roberts, the head of the firms civil rights section, they turned the whole thing around in a month and filed the lawsuit on May 18, 2018, with less than a week to spare. I kept saying, I dont wanna look. When the restaurant next door closed down at 10 pm, the owners came over with bottles of wine. 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