Operation Lone Star: An Opinion From The Only Paralegal Who Was A Part Of The First And Only Jury Trial In Texas

Anyone who lives in Texas knows about Operation Lone Star (OLS). For those of you who don’t this is Governor Gregg Abbott’s response to the increased number of migrants crossing the border along with other crimes that happen at the border. I am not going to get into all the details, but you can read the Governor’s response here. Most people are arrested for human smuggling, drug trafficking, or trespassing.

Why Does What I Say Matter?

I have seen many things go wrong in OLS. Not only that but I was the paralegal who was on the defense team for the first and only OLS trial to date. I am a part of the team for the second jury trial, that case is still pending.

I worked with the Lubbock Private Defenders Office (LPDO). I also worked with private practice and court appointed attorneys who handled OLS cases. To this day I still work on these cases.

I also helped negotiate the current plea bargin still being used today. That plea bargin included time served, no fines, no court costs, a plea of no contest, a reduction from Class A Trespassing to Class B Trespassing.

I was also part of the defense team that got the first and only case dismissed based upon Speedy Trial violations.

An Honest Paralegal’s Perspective

Prior to OLS I was working in criminal defense and handled everything from traffic tickets all the way up to capital murder, appeals, and federal appeals. Most of my work is in Houston. Houston is a big city with a lot of resources. This means that the Harris County District Clerk and District Attorney have a really good system set up for public records and receiving evidence and discovery. The same cannot be said about the counties at the border, namely Kinney County.

At first me and my supervising attorney worked for LPDO, but it quickly became clear that LPDO did not have the best interests of the people they got paid to defend in court. I will address this later in another article because there are a lot of details in there. Long story short after the Defendant was found guilty at trial, we were let go from LPDO. In my opinion LPDO is a horrible nonprofit organization that is no better than the prosecutors. If I’m being honest, I trust the prosecutors more than I do the “defense attorneys” at LPDO.

An Overwhelmed Criminal Justice System

The counties along the border are not strangers to crime. However, they are used to maybe having ten felony cases a month. They went from ten to 200 cases in a day. Unfortunately, the District Attorney’s Office only has a staff of about six people.

Unlike in Houston, where the prosecutors move quickly, Kinney County does not. Obviously, they are understaffed but at the same time the prosecutors are moving a lot slower than they should, as the judge found when he dismissed the case I worked on.

At this point OLS has been around for three years and there should be no excuse for the prosecutor to continue to move as slow as they do. It feels as if the prosecutor is using the excuse of being “overworked” as an excuse to move slower on purpose. There have been many documented cases of people waiting in jail with no attorney appointed to them, no formal charges being filed against them, and in many cases questionable arrests have been made.

Inexperienced Prosecutors and Judges

Adding to the overwhelmed criminal justice system is that these same prosecutors do not have the experience as “big city” prosecutors do. In Houston I was used to working on murder, drug, and organized crime cases. To me human smuggling and trespassing were easy cases to work on, or so I thought.

In Harris County from the day the Defendant is arrested, a case number is made, and the court filings are ready to be viewed within a few hours. Attorneys are then able to file motions and get the case started. Prosecutors typically are very quick to hand over discovery and they do it without being told or asked.

In Kinney County people get arrested and if we’re lucky they get indicted at around 140 days. This is not a common practice for the areas I’ve worked in. As stated before, prosecutors out of professional courtesy send over discovery within two weeks. However, we’re also talking about prosecutors who have large caseloads and are used to working on a lot of different types of cases.

In Kinney County the District Attorney seems to be very inexperienced. For one they only release discovery after they get an indictment. However, to get to that point, they claim that the arresting agency has to send them the evidence. This is where most of the delay is at.

The District Attorney claims that the arresting agencies are not sending them evidence fast enough. I personally don’t believe that. The prosecutor has the power to demand these agencies hand over discovery within a reasonable amount of time. Even after someone has been indicted it still takes awhile to get discovery.

An experienced prosecutor would never let someone be in jail for so long without having any evidence to show for it. This opens the door for Speedy Trial violations and sanctions against the State.

While the State waits for an indictment, an attorney can review the evidence and negotiate on behalf of the Defendant and get a case resolved within weeks. Kinney County is closing cases within nine to ten months.

To put it into perspective, last week Judge Andrade dismissed a case against a Defendant who spent 254 days in jail, who was unindicted and had no discovery to show for it. The Texas Department of Public Safety was the arresting agency. The Defendant sat in jail for 254 days just so their arrest could be dismissed by a prosecutor who claims that DPS did not send them discovery. Just imagine the countless resources that went into just that arrest alone.

Someone is lying here. Either DPS is withholding evidence from prosecutors, or the State is not requesting discovery, in order to justify lengthy incarcerations.

Unfortunately, most judges are former prosecutors, who see nothing wrong with keeping people in jail for prolonged periods of time. In my opinion most prosecutors don’t know the law as much as they should. Which means when they become judges, they still haven’t really practiced the law at all. You must ask yourself, when a prosecutor was only used to seeing ten cases a month, how much experience did they have in actually practicing the law, let alone actually knowing it?

When a big city defense attorney, who is used to fighting capital murder charges, meets a very inexperienced District Attorney, who is lucky to see any major felony, it is bound to only have negative implications for one side.

Kinney County moves very slowly and up until OLS had no reason to move quickly. A defense attorney does have reason to want to close cases quickly. There is no reason for either side to want to delay proceedings any more than necessary.

Depending on who the judge is that day, it could mean the State “suffers the dismissal of charges” or that the Defendant remains in oppressive pretrial incarceration. Unfortunately, in most cases, it means that the Defendant remains in jail.

If there is one thing, I would like people to take from this, is that at the end of the day, whether you agree with OLS or not, people are being arrested for prolonged periods of time, but lately more cases are getting dismissed because of prosecutors inactions, which means yes Texas is arresting people, only to have there charges dismissed. And if you see nothing wrong with that, you are no better than the Kinney County District Attorney.

“...arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness." George Washington "Circular to The States" Sunday, June 08, 1783

What do you think? Is OLS doing what it was intended for? Could it operate better? Is DPS really withholding evidence? Let me know in the comments.

Do you have an OLS case that seems to not move? Contact me, the only paralegal who helped get a case dismissed for Speedy Trial violations and let me lead you to success.

Email me at [email protected] if you’re looking for an amazing criminal defense paralegal.