The lawyers defending Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in his criminal securities fraud case said Thursday they were “gratified” by a Houston state judge’s decision to move the case back to Collin County, where the state’s top lawyer was indicted five years ago.
The decision, issued by Harris County District Judge Robert Johnson, followed a virtual hearing over Zoom on Thursday, where the judge agreed with Paxton’s lawyers that the original change of venue was invalid because the appointment of the original presiding judge, Tarrant County District Judge George Gallagher, had expired before he approved the move, a report from the Houston Chronicle said.
“Moving the case back to Collin County is important because Mr. Paxton deserves to be tried in the county that he calls home and the county in which the prosecution originally filed the criminal case,” Sheppard Mullin partner Bill Mateja, one of Paxton’s lawyers, told The Texas Lawbook. “With all due respect to Judge Gallagher, the State was never prejudiced by having to try the case where it filed the case. Think about it – how often do you hear of the prosecution asking to transfer venue from its home turf?”
Paxton is also being represented by Houston criminal defense lawyers Dan Cogdell and Philip Hilder, both of whom have their own firms.
Cogdell has been practicing criminal law for more than three decades and has led more than 300 jury trials. He has obtained acquittals in multiple high profile cases, including and the Enron trial, the Branch Davidian trial and the trial of controversial cancer physician Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski.
“We are gratified by the court’s ruling and look forward to getting Mr. Paxton’s case back on track,” Cogdell said in a statement. “This case has gone on for far too long.”
Hilder formerly headed the Houston Field Office of the U.S. Department of Justice Organized Crime Strike Force. He made the switch to the criminal defense bar 23 years ago, and has since defended whistleblowers from the Enron scandal, BP personnel in the Deepwater Horizon explosion litigation, a Major League Baseball player in the Congressional investigation into steroid use, and others.
Kent Schaffer, a special prosecutor in the Paxton case, told the Houston Chronicle that the prosecution would appeal Judge Johnson’s ruling.
“We sincerely hope that the special prosecutors will rethink their earlier, knee jerk statement that they plan to appeal Judge Johnson’s well-reasoned ruling,” Hilder said in a statement. “This has been in limbo for much of the five years it has gone on. It’s time for the prosecution to get it on.”
While the defense is pleased by Thursday’s ruling, Mateja emphasized the main priority for Paxton’s case from day one has been to get the case dismissed early or get it to trial as soon as possible. The defense has still made significant headway; in 2017, they successfully obtained a dismissal of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s civil securities fraud case against Paxton in an East Texas federal court.
But Mateja acknowledged there is still likely a long road ahead of a resolution on the criminal side with the prosecution’s anticipated attempt to “mandamus Judge Johnson’s well-reasoned decision.”
“When I was hired five years ago to coordinate both Mr. Paxton’s criminal defense and his defense of the SEC civil lawsuit, never in my wildest dreams did I think that that this case would be going five years later,” said Mateja, a former senior counsel to the U.S. Attorney General who oversaw all the DOJ’s white collar operations nationwide and the day-to-day workings of the department’s corporate fraud task force.
“Let alone that there would be two trips to the Court of Criminal Appeals, that we’d have the SEC case dismissed years before the criminal trial was even scheduled and that the case would be transferred to Harris County and back to Collin County,” he added.
“While the end is more clearly in sight, we’re still a long ways from it.”
For more information on the case, visit the Houston Chronicle’s report here.