SHERMAN — A lawyer for former Quitman police captain Terry Bevill asked a federal jury Wednesday to award her client at least $33 million — and then some — for his firing and arrest after he signed an affidavit in 2017 saying he didn’t think a friend could get a fair trial in Wood County in East Texas.
In her closing argument on the eighth day of trial of a wrongful-termination suit filed by Bevill, Laura Benitez Geisler said her client had done nothing but exercise his constitutional right to free speech. “And he paid for it. He paid dearly for it. … How could this possibly happen in the United States?”
The jury in the court of U.S. District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III of Sherman deliberated for about four hours Wednesday afternoon without reaching a verdict. Deliberations are to resume at 9 a.m. Thursday.
Bevill sued David Dobbs, who was Quitman’s mayor in 2017; Tom Castloo, the Wood County sheriff at the time; Jim Wheeler, then the Wood County district attorney; and Jeff Fletcher, then the state district judge assigned to the county, of which Quitman is the seat.
At the heart of the case is a June 2, 2017, affidavit by Bevill, attached to a motion for a change of venue filed on behalf of his friend, in which the police captain said a fair trial in Wood County was impossible in part because of the improperly close relationships between the sheriff, the DA and the judge — a “dangerous combination” of “influential persons.”
Bevill claims he was fired by Dobbs because of pressure from Castloo, Wheeler and Fletcher — the “trilogy of power,” as Geisler called them, in the largely rural county north of Tyler.
The defendants, she said, “trampled on Terry Bevill’s First Amendment rights. And why? Because they could. Because they could.”
That assertion was emphatically denied by Dobbs, Castloo, Wheeler and Fletcher, all of whom testified during the trial of Bevill’s suit, and by their lawyers in closing arguments.
The attorney for Dobbs and the city of Quitman, Lance Vincent of Ritcheson, Laufer & Vincent in Tyler, said Bevill based his affidavit — and his lawsuit — on “innuendo and insinuation.”
The attorney for Castloo and Wood County, Robert Scott Davis of Flowers Davis in Tyler, said “there is no evidence — no evidence at all — to even suggest” that the former sheriff colluded with the other defendants to punish Bevill.
Will Wassdorf of the Texas attorney general’s office, one of the lawyers for Fletcher, said of the plaintiff’s counsel, “They are grasping at straws.”
On June 27, 2017, six days after Bevill was fired, Fletcher issued a bench warrant for Bevill’s arrest, accusing the 19-year law enforcement veteran of aggravated perjury. “He made a false statement of fact during a criminal proceeding,” the ex-judge testified Monday.
In pages from his private journal from the summer of 2017, admitted into evidence in the trial, Fletcher called Bevill’s assertion of a cozy relationship between himself, the sheriff and the DA “completely baseless and a total pile of crap.”
Bevill was eventually no-billed by a Wood County grand jury, not but until 16 months after his arrest. By then, he testified, his law enforcement career, his prospects for other meaningful employment and his standing in the community were destroyed.
The $33 million in compensatory damages suggested to the jury by Geisler was for what she called past and future impairment of his reputation, past and future personal humiliation, and past and future mental anguish and suffering.
In addition, Bevill, who turns 65 next week, is seeking unspecified punitive damages.
All four individual defendants denied they were in cahoots to retaliate against Bevill for signing an affidavit that essentially called three of them corrupt.
Dobbs, the ex-mayor, testified that the decision to fire Bevil was his alone, and that it was based on Bevill’s violation of a city policy against officers involving themselves in criminal proceedings to help their buddies, and that he told none of his co-defendants what he was going to do ahead of time.
Fletcher, the ex-judge, said the decision to have Bevill arrested was his alone, and that he told none of his co-defendants he was going to do it ahead of time.
Wheeler, the ex-DA, and Castloo, the ex-sheriff, said they had nothing to do with either action and didn’t learn about them until after the fact.
Wheeler added that he wasn’t responsible for the 16-month delay in bringing the case against Bevill before a grand jury, having appointed a special prosecutor to handle the matter because he knew that as the district attorney he was a potential witness. “I couldn’t touch it,” he said.
Castloo said that for similar reasons he recused himself and the sheriff’s office from the criminal investigation of Bevill’s friend, Wood County jail administrator David McGee, who was charged with and later convicted of tampering with government records to secure the release of a jail inmate with whom he was sexually involved. Immediately upon learning of the allegation against his jailer, Castloo said, he called the Texas Rangers and turned the investigation over to them — so any relationship he had with the judge and DA, close or otherwise, couldn’t possibly have affected the fairness of McGee’s trial.
Before he was elected Wood County sheriff in 2016, Castloo spent 23 years with the U.S. Border Patrol, retiring as a supervising officer. In that role, Castloo’s lawyer, Davis, said, his client worked with numerous local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, and learned not to stick his snout in the business of those other agencies.
In the Bevill matter, Davis said, “he stayed in his lane, and that is what he has done his entire life.”
Sean McCaffity, Geisler’s co-counsel and partner in Sommerman, McCaffity, Quesada & Geisler of Dallas, said in his closing argument that a finding for Bevill would reverberate far beyond a courtroom in Sherman or a little-known East Texas county.
The message to all Americans, he said, should be, “Speak. You’re protected. Your voice matters.”
“The eyes of history are upon you,” McCaffity said. “It’s a cliché, but it’s true.”