I‘m always amused when I see my name attached to the label of "Frequent Ogg Critic" in articles where I comment on Kim Ogg's job performance as Harris County District Attorney. I am quick to point out that I didn't start out as a critic of hers -- quite the opposite, actually. I voted for her in 2016 and I was public about my support for her, much to the disapproval of a lot of my friends.
My criticisms of Kim have been earned over the years and they've all been based on what I've seen her do in her professional capacity. It isn't personal. It's not like she ran over my dog or prosecuted a beloved family member.
Dane "Dudegoggles" Schiller, Anna "She Persisted" Carpenter, Joe "How Dare You?" Stinebaker and the other assorted members of her campaign team who receive taxpayer salaries to spin for Kim like to tell reporters that they should remember that I'm a "twice-fired, disgruntled Republican ex-prosecutor" any time I'm quoted in the news. But that description is dishonest. I was fired by Ken Magidson at the behest of incoming D.A. Pat Lykos for some things written in the comments on my blog disparaging Lykos. It had nothing to do with my job performance, and my beef was with Ken and Lykos. Kim Ogg had nothing to do with my departure from my office.
I was certainly disgruntled towards Pat Lykos for a great many years and I wasn't shy about expressing that on this blog. That being said, the way Kim Ogg has dismantled the Harris County District Attorney's Office has made Pat Lykos look like Atticus Finch by comparison.
And that's saying something. I never thought I'd miss the stability and integrity of the Lykos regime.
As far as me being a Republican, I will admit that prior to the arrival of Donald Trump, I voted mostly for Republican candidates and in Republican primaries. But, I think the Right Wing crazies on Twitter will more than attest that I don't align with today's Republican values by any stretch of the imagination.
Kim's credentials as a Republican are far stronger than mine ever were.
So, where exactly did Kim Ogg lose my support? It wasn't one single thing. Here are the highlights of the things that Kim Ogg has done to prove that she's the worst District Attorney that Harris County has ever elected.
1. The firing of 40 experienced prosecutors (see Bloody Friday - December 17, 2016)
Some people start off on the wrong foot, but Kim Ogg took that to new extremes before she even took Office. Prior to taking over, she let approximately 40 senior, experienced and skilled trial-proven prosecutors know that their contracts would not be renewed when she took office on January 1, 2017.
There had been rumors swirling that Pat Lykos had passed on advice to Kim that her biggest mistake when she was D.A. was not firing more people who might be disloyal to her. Lykos had made the foolish decision to keep prosecutors who knew what they were doing despite their political allegiances and that had cost her the election in 2012. Kim took that advice to heart and then some when she chose fealty over public safety by getting rid of the vast majority of senior prosecutors.
Quite frankly, her first misstep was the one that was most detrimental to the Office. In the 8 years since, the Office has lost case after case and made poor decision after poor decision because there was very little experience there to guide it. Ogg has spent the entirety of that time blaming everyone but herself for those failures -- from the jurors, to the Defense Bar, or, most prominently, the Judges.
This would be akin to a new owner taking over the Houston Texans and firing Demeco Ryans, C.J. Stroud, Tank Dell, Will Anderson, and the entire starting line ups on both sides of the ball . . . and then blaming the referees for a not winning games.
2. Using the Media to Make Allegations She Couldn't Back up in the Courtroom (see Victims, Phone Calls and Press Conferences -- December 20, 2016)
Ogg was still over a week away from taking office when she gave the public a very strong preview of how she planned to handle her administration when she called a press conference to denounce some of those same prosecutors she had decided to let go and threaten them with legal prosecution for what she perceived as them disparaging her.
In the wake of their impending termination, many of the senior prosecutors let the families of victims on their cases know that they would be leaving the Office. This is, without question, the professional and caring thing for a prosecutor to do. Victims and victims' families can become very reliant on prosecutors over the months (and sometimes years) that a case pends through the court system and good prosecutors actually care a lot of about those people too. I haven't been a prosecutor for over fifteen years now and I still stay in touch with many victims and victims' families from my time in the Office.
The departing prosecutors let these families know that new people were taking over their cases, which was 100% the classy and right thing to do. And Kim Ogg was so offended by it that she held a press conference, threatening those prosecutors with investigation and possible prosecution, which was as absurd as it was paranoid.
Sadly, Ogg's paranoia and penchant for press conferences have not decreased over the years.
3. Playing Games with the David Temple Case (see Kim Ogg and the David Temple Decision -- January 3, 2017 & The One Woman Review Team -- January 6, 2017)
Kim Ogg hadn't even unpacked in her new office when she made it clear that one of her new top priorities would be personally reviewing the David Temple case and deciding whether or not the D.A.'s Office would retry it. As you may recall, Temple had been granted a new trial after having been convicted of murdering his pregnant wife, Belinda, with a shotgun. Temple attorneys Dick DeGuerin and Paul Looney hosted fundraisers from Kim Ogg and two of her new employees, Steve Clappart and John Denholm had been actively involved in trying to pin Belinda's murder on a group of teens in the Katy area. She had multiple conflicts of interest in making a decision on the future of that case.
Rather than recuse herself and her office, she held onto it -- first announcing that she would head a review team on the case, and subsequently announcing that she would be the sole decider on it. Community pressure in the press and from a certain blog eventually led her to recuse herself, fortunately, but not before a lot of sleepless nights from Belinda Lucas' family. This case alone should make any critical thinker laugh out loud whenever Ogg announces she does her jobs for the victims of violent crime. She was looking for any possible way to dismiss the case as a favor to her political backers.
David Temple would go on to be tried again by the Attorney General's Office with prosecutors Lisa Tanner and Bill Turner. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison -- again -- for the murder of his pregnant wife. Coincidentally, Kim Ogg ultimately fired every prosecutor who worked for the District Attorney's Office that ever handled the Temple case through the appellate process.
4. County Kickbacks for Friends and Supporters
Some of those prosecutors who did not have their contracts renewed chose to file unemployment claims against the county. That's not really an unusual thing and it has never been anything that I've been aware of the County pushing back on . . . until Kim Ogg came along. Ogg made the executive decision to fight the claims.
Rather than use the District Attorney's Office General Counsel or perhaps the County Attorney's Office to handle such a non-criminal matter, Ogg retained her close personal friend, Katherine Mize, an employment lawyer and Ogg Campaign Donor to fight it. In doing so, she used Asset Forfeiture funds from the District Attorney's Office to pay Mize $425 an hour to fight the claims. That's a hell of a lot more money per hour than any county employee gets, and I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Mize's bill probably ended up costing more than just paying out the unemployment claim. In this case, we got the worst of both worlds -- not only did Mize get paid a ridiculous amount to fight the unemployment claim, she lost the case. So the unemployment claim got paid out anyway.
It still pays to be friends with Kim Ogg. Mize repaid that generosity by being a significant donor to Ogg's campaign and even appeared in one of her commercials. She is still routinely used to "consult" on Ogg's Human Resource matters and to date has billed the county over six figures.
Just this week, the Houston Chronicle revealed that Ogg diverted over $175,000 to her friend (and Texas GOP General Counsel Rachel Palmer Hooper to investigate Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo's Office. That's a pretty sweet gig if you are Palmer-Hooper, the former-5th Amendment-taking-prosecutor and partner at Baker Hostetler. Not only is she bringing in six figures for her law firm, she's also been handed the prosecutorial power to go after a controversial Democratic figure head that all of the Republicans love to hate -- all paid for with public funds! Palmer-Hooper probably hadn't been that excited since she launched a criminal investigation into a black man trying to vote!
5. Her Personal Battle with the Houston Police Department (see Kim Ogg's War with HPD -- February 27, 2018)
Despite Kim Ogg's recent unauthorized use of Houston Police Department Chief Troy Finner's picture in one of her campaign ads, the relationship between Ogg and HPD has been a complicated one over the years.
The highlight of her volatile relationship with Houston's Finest hit a low point in February of 2018 when Ogg decided to temporarily revoke HPD's access to the Consolidated Criminal History Database after getting into a spat with the HPD Union.
It's always good to see your elected District Attorney put her petty grievance contributing to a lack of information shared amongst law enforcement. If anybody thinks that Ogg is a friend of law enforcement, they should refresh their memory.
6. The Firing of Tom Berg & Andrew Smith (see The Mad Queen -- May 14, 2019 & A Tale of Two Firings -- November 14, 2019)
One of the reasons I didn't write off Kim Ogg completely after she fired so many prosecutors before taking office was that there were some very good people that she brought in at the same time.
Sadly, they didn’t seem to last very long. Tom Berg was (and remains) a highly respected lawyer in the criminal law world although he largely seemed to be in the Federal arena prior to coming to the D.A.'s Office as 1st Assistant under Ogg when she first took office. Additionally, Berg was a combat veteran who was known to be extremely intelligent and fair-minded. His position as 1st Assistant was a promising sign that Ogg was going to run a well-managed ship. As those prosecutors that had escaped Ogg's initial round of firings began quitting due to low morale, Berg tried to rally the troops and get them to stay.
He then made the fatal mistake of disagreeing with Ogg on an issue and she fired him on the spot. It was yet another example of Kim Ogg's legendary temper self-sabotaging her own Administration.
A few months later, Ogg would also fire Andrew Smith, a longtime prosecutor who was very well-liked and respected by both prosecutors and the defense bar. Smith had relayed to a defense attorney that Ogg had stated to him that a different prosecutor's firing had been based on who that prosecutor was married to. When Ogg found out this information had been shared, she demanded that Smith put on the record that he had been lying when he conveyed that information to the defense attorney. Smith refused because, you know, that would be perjury. So Ogg fired him as well.
7. The Death Chart Inquisition (see Kim Ogg's Pandemic Witch Hunt -- April 17, 2020 & Texas Monthly's The Hunt for a Leaker at the Harris County District Attorney's Office -- May 15, 2020)
Lots of craziness was going on in the early stages of the Corona Epidemic and the Harris County Criminal Justice World was absolutely struggling to stay on top of everything as courts were closing, trials were stopping, arrests kept coming in, and the jails were trying to balance public safety against further spreading a deadly disease. The word "chaos" would be a massive understatement.
In the middle of it all, those experienced and dedicated line prosecutors who had thus far survived Kim Ogg's firing wrath were trying to keep the System afloat in the individual courts that they were in charge of. As all of this was going on, an upper administration employee created an attendance chart to document how the employees of HCDA were fairing against the virus. One of the options on the chart encouraged supervisors to notify the Office if anyone had called in dead. Since most people in the Criminal Justice World tend to have a strong sense of Gallows' Humor, most people found this to be hilarious.
A poorly made screenshot of the "death chart" began making the rounds of prosecutors' text messages and it soon leaked outside of the Office. People had a good laugh over how dumb of an idea of having a "death chart" was, but it wasn't anything too damaging to the Office's reputation. Everyone thought it was funny.
Everyone except for Kim Ogg, that is. With prosecutors and investigators working via laptop and cell phone while quarantining and trying to manage an unprecedented crisis, Kim Ogg had one priority and that was to identify whoever had initiated this innocuous joke. She diverted resources away from managing that Covid crisis to hunt down her senior prosecutors -- demanding their office computers and attempting to strong-arm them into turning over their personal cell phones. Ultimately, she would lose around eight or nine more senior Felony District Court chiefs from the already hemorrhaging Office, right at the time when the CJC needed their leadership the most.
Once again, Ogg hurt her own office in the name of her ego. Funny side story: the author of the Texas Monthly article later told me that he figured I must have been embellishing when he first read my blog post about the Death Chart Inquisition and that he couldn't believe it when he found out it was all true.
Full Disclosure: I got a pretty awesome new law partner out of the deal, so it wasn't all bad.
8. The Scapegoating of the Judges (see Scapegoating the Judges -- August 14, 2021 & Kim Ogg blames the Judges . . . yet again -- August 6, 2022)
I'll be the first to admit that being a prosecutor was an easier job when I was there for a lot of reasons. We had better leadership. We had better training. We also had a field of judges who were almost exclusively ex-prosecutors. Prior to around 2008, most judges had taken the bench straight from the D.A.'s Office. Rulings went our way on pretty much any debatable issue and the punishments were high. Being a prosecutor in Harris County during those years definitely meant having the home-field advantage. That's just a fact.
Now most judges on the bench have both prosecutorial and defense experience and generally, the judges are more open-minded on issues that previously would have been no-brainers to rule for the State. That's how it is supposed to be if we actually care about our Constitutional principles.
But a neutral judiciary is not as conducive to convictions as it used to be, especially not when the District Attorney has run off the most experienced trial prosecutors. The Office's win/loss ratio plummeted and politician Ogg had to find something to blame that wasn't herself. The Code of Judicial Conduct prohibits judges from commenting on cases or responding to the vast majority of Ogg's criticism, so she knew that she could safely punch at them without them being able to punch back.
And punch away, she did.
Kim Ogg made it very clear that a fair judge was a bad judge, and she attacked them at every turn. Whether she was having her "community outreach team" post under pseudonyms on social media to privately attack them, or giving CrimeStoppers hundreds of thousands of dollars so that her old friend Andy Kahan could attack them on Fox 26's Breaking Bond, Kim urged her Republican allies to hold the judges accountable for her Office's failings.
Under Kim Ogg's leadership, the Office has made it very clear that it has no interest in a fair trial and they blast the judges that hold them accountable to the high Burden of Proof that they are supposed to meet in each and every case. It's no wonder why Ogg is so well known for trying her cases in the media rather than in the courtroom.
9. Political Prosecuting for Publicity (see Raps, Rides, and Kim Ogg's Campaign by Indictment Policy - September 15, 2020)
The most frightening thing about Kim Ogg as District Attorney, without question, has been her use of prosecutorial power to file charges against people to court public approval. She has done it since the beginning of her tenure as District Attorney and she continues to do it to this day. Whether it being filing ridiculously over-inflated criminal charges against the Arkema corporation, trying to indict as many police officers as humanly possible that could be even tangentially related to the notorious Harding Street, a respected doctor who gave a Covid vaccination to his family when no one else wanted one, or anyone who works for County Judge Lina Hidalgo, Kim Ogg has shown time and again that if an indictment will get her some positive press, she's going to seek it -- regardless of whether or not the evidence is there to support it.
Sadly, that plan seems to work for her in the public relations realm and nowhere has that been more evident than in her investigation into Hidalgo. Hidalgo is definitely a controversial figure in Harris County politics and is the lightning rod target of the displaced Republican community. As noted above, Ogg employed hardcore Republican operative Rachel Palmer-Hooper to investigate Hidalgo's office (although she Ogg kept Palmer-Hooper's involvement shrouded in secrecy for years). Between leaking search warrants to the Republican State Senator Paul Bettencourt and the media, Ogg is milking the good vibes of going after Hidalgo for all they are worth.
But if one were to take a closer look at these highly publicized charges that Ogg's District Attorney's Office has obtained, they might notice something missing from them all -- final convictions.
Dan Cogdell and Rusty Hardin and company handed the District Attorney's Office its proverbial ass in the Arkema case with directed verdicts (which, for the layman means that the cases were so weak that the judge directed the jury to find the accused not guilty). The Gokal case was no billed by a Grand Jury. The other cases, Ogg has steadfastly avoided trial on, so as not to suffer the same humiliation that she received during Arkema. Even the notorious case of Gerald Goines and the Harding Street Raid has now pended over five years without a trial and the cases against the Hidalgo staffers has no trial date set.
Ogg's Office has played to the lynch mob mentality of making accusations that they can't prove. That may work in the comments section of the internet, but that's not how we do things in a court of law -- especially not when people's lives hang in the balance.
10. The Destruction of the Harris County District Attorney's Office
For better or worse, the Harris County District Attorney's Office used to have the reputation of being one of the most formidable offices in the State and the Country. It was an office staffed from bottom to top with prosecutors that knew what they were doing in trial and were trusted by their supervisors to do the right thing in how they handled their cases. Prosecutors knew their cases and took the righteous ones to trial and dismissed the ones that they knew they couldn't prove. As long as you made your decisions for the right reasons, you didn't have to worry about your job.
Kim Ogg has turned that idea on its head and the Office has cratered because of that. From starting her tenure by firing forty experienced prosecutors to running off countless more over the past eight years, she's run off scores of talented trial lawyers and leaders from that Office. She's also created a culture of fear that those prosecutors who remain are afraid that dismissing a case (no matter how weak it is) could get them fired. As a result, plenty of non-trialworthy cases are going to trial and the District Attorney's Office is suffering Not Guilty verdict after Not Guilty verdict.
Not to sound like too much of an Old Timer, but when I worked for the District Attorney's Office in the late-90s/early 2000s, the conviction rate at trial was well over 90%. Now it is barely over 50%.
Regardless of your views of the Criminal Justice System, that statistic should worry you. A Not Guilty verdict means one of two things in the vast majority of cases: Either 1) the prosecution failed to prove a case that they should have been able to; or 2) the prosecution took a case to trial that they shouldn't have. Neither one of those scenarios is a good one.
Contrary to popular belief, defense attorneys such as myself don't relish the idea of inexperienced prosecutors who don't make good decisions. Sure, it might make a trial easier, but overall it makes our jobs harder. Prosecutors who don't understand the law and procedure, or (worse) are too scared of the repercussions for dismissing a crappy case end up prolonging cases unnecessarily for our clients. The same principle applies to negotiating cases with prosecutors that don’t have enough trial experience when assessing a plea bargain offer.
In short, anyone involved in the realm of Criminal Justice will tell you that there is nothing more beneficial to the system than a good, smart, experienced, and ethical prosecutor. The line prosecutor who goes to court to represent the State of Texas on a daily basis has the power to truly to promote Justice. Kim Ogg has eroded that for Harris County and she has done so in a shockingly short amount of time.
Her time needs to be over and it needs to be over now.
All in all, my thoughts on Kim Ogg are quite simple: she's out of control and she has been since day one. She isn't there to serve justice. She's there to make sure that justice serves her. She is unethical. She is a fool. She is corrupt. She has destroyed the Harris County District Attorney's Office from within.
And it is long past time for her to go.
