It’s nice to know that people are reading the blog.

I was approached in a conference room in the Guadalupe County Courthouse this morning by Heather Hollub, the District Attorney-elect for Guadalupe County.  As you may recall, a couple of posts ago, I related an article from the Seguin Gazette Enterprise which had to do with the local commissioner’s court approving a new lease agreement for the DA’s office that involved paying Hollub’s husband a nice chunk of rent.

Heather Hollub first stated to me how much she loved the blog.  Then she mentioned that she intended to post a comment to the blog in order to “clarify” some issues.  Namely, she mentioned that she and her husband were not present in Commissioner’s Court for the meeting at which the lease agreement was approved in order to push for the agreement.

If my post left the impression that Heather Hollub was personally at the Commissioner’s Court meeting, that’s only because that’s the impression I got from the Seguin Gazette article.  A thousand apologies if that, in fact, was not the case.  Apparently, the lease agreement was promoting itself at Commissioner’s Court and the people who are to benefit from it had nothing to do with its existence.  Incidentally, in my brief encounter with Ms. Hollub, she did not mention that her husband would be turning down the money.  Nevertheless, I look forward to the clarifying comments.  We can always use some additional traffic here at the blog.

In a related matter, check out Guadalupe County Attorney Elizabeth Murray-Kolb’s guest column in the Sunday, December 14th edition of the Seguin Gazette Enterprise, in which she spells out her reasons for opposing the deal.

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Another reason to request an ALR hearing after your Driving While Intoxicated arrest.  I recently had a client get a DWI case dismissed by a prosecutor’s office.  However, when he originally got arrested, he decided not to contest the automatic driver’s license suspension for refusing to take a breath test, and the Department of Public Safety suspended his license for six months as a result.  So, of course, he assumes that, since his DWI case was dismissed in criminal court, that he gets his driver’s license back, right?  Unfortunately, the answer is “no.”  Under the Texas Transportation Code, you can only get a driver’s license suspension rescinded if you are “acquitted” of your DWI in criminal court.  However, DPS conveniently interprets “acquitted” as meaning you actually went to trial and were found not guilty.  The mere act of a prosecutor deciding to dismiss a case on his own because he believes the evidence is insufficient is not considered to be an “acquittal” by DPS because no judge or jury actually rendered a verdict in the case.  So even though the client walked on the DWI case, he still gets to live with the license suspension for months to come.  If you are trying to keep your license, always have your lawyer request a license suspension hearing.  Don’t pin your hopes on the outcome of the DWI in criminal court.

Cat scratch fever.  Looks like there is civil war brewing in the Guadalupe County Courthouse (a.k.a.: The Giant Eyesore with the Tacky Landscaping and  Big Concrete Pecan Out Front).  Guadalupe County employs a throwback criminal justice setup known as “bifurcated prosecution”, where there are two separate prosecutor’s offices — a District Attorney which prosecutes felonies and a County Attorney which prosecutes misdemeanors.  The idea of dividing up responsibility this way is that it keeps a single elected prosecutor from getting too much power over the local criminal justice system.  In practice, it is often a bureaucratic nightmare, especially when you have a client who might be charged with both a felony and a misdemeanor out of the same incident.   But the system lumbers along if both offices try to work in concert.

It’s a lot harder when one elected prosecutor publicly says that the other prosecutor-elect has an office-space arrangement that “smells” because it unethically enriches the prosecutor’s-elect’s husband.   Local attorney Heather Hollub is slated to become Guadalupe County’s new D.A. on January 1st.  As it turns out, the local D.A. has rented office space from Hollub’s husband for several years and the lease will be up when the new D.A. term starts.  So, Hollub and her husband recently appeared at County Commissioner’s Court pushing for a new lease agreement  between her D.A. office and her husband, which would net her husband $38,000, according to the Seguin Gazette Enterprise.  This prompted the County Attorney, Elizabeth Murray-Kolb (Hollub’s former boss), to say that the deal was a conflict-of-interest and “smelled”, though she stopped short of calling the deal illegal.  Hollub says she checked out the deal with numerous lawyers, and it’s Kosher.

As a local criminal defense lawyer, it will be interesting to watch how these two offices get along now that there appears to be public bad blood between the two electeds even before the new DA has her swearing-in ceremony.  Hopefully, the wrongfully accused don’t get caught in the prosecutorial cross-fire.  On a more positive note, the local bar association may have record attendance at its annual Christmas party this week if both Heather and Elizabeth promise to show up at the same time. Keep you posted.

The Texas Legislature meets for its bienniel session starting in January, but legislators have already begun prefiling bills.  One of the bills I will have an eye on is HB 293, filed by State Representative Harold Dutton of Houston, which pertains to expunctions of records following criminal cases.  As of the summer of 2007, the Texas Supreme Court issued a decision which effectively imposed a waiting period to get an expunction following a dismissal or acquittal in a misdemeanor case of two years from the date of the offense.  In other words, if you were arrested for a misdemeanor on say January 1, 2008, and a prosecutor decided on January 10, 2008 to dismiss your case due to insufficient evidence, you would still have to wait until January 1, 2010 to be eligible to expunge the arrest from your record.  And in the meantime, while you are trying to job-hunt and otherwise get on with your life, the arrest would keep popping up on a criminal background check.  As I understand Representative Dutton’s bill, the expunction provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure would be amended to eliminate the waiting periods.  We currently have many clients whose cases have been dismissed who are hanging in limbo waiting to get their records expunged.  The Dutton bill would sure make life a lot easier for some very deserving people.  Stay tuned.