When I was in college at A&M, I worked as an intern at the Brazos County District Attorney's Office for two and a half years. It was my first real introduction to the world of criminal justice, and I learned a lot during that time. I worked under the supervision of Gil Schultz, the single investigator the office had at the time. I worked for the prosecutors, made crime scenes, and attended autopsies on cases.
One of the first crime scenes that I ever went to was a very tragic case involving domestic violence. I don't remember the names of the parties involved but I remember the details very vividly.
A man had threatened his wife with a knife and she had called the police on him. He was arrested for Aggravated Assault and he went to jail. A few days after his arrest, she decided that she didn't want to prosecute. She came to the D.A.'s office in person to tell the intake prosecutor that she wanted to drop charges. The intake prosecutor looked at the man's criminal history and saw a long list of arrests for domestic violence.
"He's going to kill you," he told the woman. "I'm not dismissing his case."
She kept coming back -- asking for meetings with the intake prosecutor, begging him to dismiss the case. He kept telling her no. The intake prosecutor was an older man who had a previous career in the military where he had seen combat. Like most decent human beings, he wasn't okay with men who hurt women. He knew exactly the type of person the defendant was and he knew what a danger he would always be to the woman.
But there was a big problem.
The woman was the only witness to the aggravated assault. Without her cooperation, there was no proving the case. There were no excited utterances that served as a hearsay exception that could prove it without her. She was the only one.
The intake prosecutor held out on signing the dismissal. He held out for months.
But ultimately, he knew he could not prove the case without her. Ethically, he had to dismiss the case.
So he did.
That afternoon, Gil and I got a call out to a crime scene. It was about half a mile away from the Brazos County Courthouse. It was the woman who had finally gotten her wish to get her husband out of jail. Upon release, he had come home immediately, and was in a rage over the months he had spent in custody because she had called the cops on him.
He began stabbing her inside the one-room row house they lived in. I remember it being so small and decrepit that the toilet was in the kitchen next to the stove. It was filthy. She had managed to get past him and out the front door. He chased after her and caught her outside the fence of a pre-school, where children were at recess. He jumped on top of her and took her to the ground. As he stabbed her repeatedly, he kept yelling, "Was it worth it? Was it worth it?"
Gil and I stayed at the crime scene with the investigators from the Bryan Police Department for a couple of hours and then we came back to the office. As we were getting off the elevators, the intake prosecutor was standing there. His eyes were red and and he had clearly been crying. He held out his pen and showed it to me.
"Here's your murder weapon," he told us. "I killed her as soon as I signed that dismissal."
I was in my mid-20s then and the intake prosecutor was probably in his sixties. I had neither wisdom nor words for him. It was way above my pay grade. Gil, as a 26 year veteran of the Houston Police Department with 16 years in Homicide, knew what to say. He was kind and he emphasized the obvious -- the intake prosecutor wasn't responsible for the actions of the horrible piece of shit who had spent his life abusing women. This was how the Criminal Justice System just turned out sometimes.
Gil's words were, of course, correct. But they did very little in the moment to console the intake prosecutor. He was devastated and he blamed himself for something that he ultimately had no control over. He was one of the most decent and honorable people I ever knew and also one of the toughest. I will never forget seeing that man in tears.
The truth of the matter is that when it comes to prosecuting domestic violence cases, it is often an insurmountable task for the prosecution. Domestic violence permeates all corners of the population. In the vast majority of the cases, it is the male in the relationship who is accused of doing the abusing. The abused (usually) female partner calls the police in the moment for help, and the male goes to jail.
But then reality sets in. Whether it be for emotional or financial reasons, the victim comes to regret the fact that the defendant is in jail. In many situations, the defendant being in jail can lead to a loss of income that puts the rest of the family at risk of losing their housing. If the defendant makes bond but is ordered not to return to the household, the family can find themselves having to pay for rent in two different places. The charges against the defendant can ultimately destroy the entire family.
It creates a very real situation where there is no good solution. The easiest solution in the mind of the victim, more often than not, is just to dismiss the charges and hope for the best.
Prosecutors around the country know this. Most offices have domestic violence units that are focused on prosecuting cases without the cooperation of the victim. There are ways to get it done sometimes. Maybe there are those excited utterances that are hearsay exceptions, where the victim tearfully telling the arresting officer what happened can be admitted into evidence. Maybe there were witnesses. Sometimes it happens like that.
But more often than not, it doesn't. Lots of domestic violence cases have to be dismissed because prosecutors simply don't have the tools to prove them. It is not unusual to see prosecutors in domestic violence divisions try to hold off on the dismissal for as long as they can. That can give rise to some ethical questions, but it isn't uncommon. Sometimes, the prosecutors will offer a time served offer on a reduction in the hopes of just getting a conviction. That's quite common, too.
All of it is usually a big mess. People on the outside of the criminal justice world don't understand the difficult dynamic that a prosecutor has when he or she is working against the wishes of the victim of a crime. It's not a good feeling for anyone involved.
I thought about that intake prosecutor and the crime scene where the man had yelled, "Was it worth it? Was it worth it?" when I was reading about the case of Kevin Faux, who is the suspect in the murder of Ashanti Allen, his 8 month pregnant girlfriend.
In addition to the horrible facts of the murder itself, the case is getting significant attention because Faux recently received a plea bargain deal on a felony Continuous Family Violence case where Ashanti Allen had been the victim. The plea bargain had reduced the charge to a misdemeanor and the sentence was 280 days in the Harris County Jail. Although I'm not certain of this, I suspect that the 280 days was a "time served" sentence that would have released Faux immediately after the plea.
I'm also not certain, but I highly suspect that the reason this reduction happened was because Ms. Allen didn't want to continue to pursue charges. I may be wrong about that, but I bet I'm not. I've seen it before so many times in the thirty years since that bad afternoon in Brazos County.
Ashanti Allen's family is understandably devastated by her murder. It is reasonable to expect them to believe that if the charges on the Continuous Family Violence case hadn't been reduced, the murder would have never happened. They are angry with Megan Long, the prosecutor who made the plea bargain agreement. They are angry with Judge Lori Chambers Gray, the judge who signed off on it.
That anger is misplaced though.
The reality is that prosecutors are far more likely to hold on to a domestic violence case that they can't prove than they are to ever dismiss (or reduce) one that they can.
Defense attorneys (such as myself) are constantly complaining about prosecutors who won't dismiss domestic violence cases that they know they can't prove in court. There are social workers and case workers and victim advocates at the District Attorney's Office who are there to offer resources and encouragement to victims of domestic violence so that they won't feel the pressure to try to drop charges against their abusers. It's not just in Harris County. Every D.A. Office in every county and state that I've ever dealt with has domestic violence divisions designed to make weak cases more prosecutable.
Those of us in the system know that. The judges know it. The prosecutors know it. The defense attorneys know it. The cops know it. The victim advocates know it.
It's tragic.
Sadly, there are some in the Criminal Justice System who are more than willing to use a tragedy to advance an untrue narrative to an angry public. That was very evident today as CrimeStoppers' Andy Kahan and Houston Police Officers' Union took to social media to bash both prosecutor Megan Long and Judge Lori Chambers Gray for the earlier plea bargain agreement. Both Andy and HPOU President Doug Griffith had a lot of intellectually dishonest things to say about it. I responded to both of them, for what it was worth.
