Flames fanned in race for DA
Ogg uses headlines to skewer Anderson as poll shows a tie
Two years ago, Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson bested Democratic challenger Kim Ogg in a tussle focusing on substantive policy reform. Both touted impressive criminal justice résumés and spoke optimistically about improving the community by making changes at the state’s largest district attorney’s office.
This year is different.
Anderson finds herself at the center of a raft of problems, many over which she had little direct control. And Ogg has fanned the political flames of every new revelation.
Nove mber ’s election comes in the middle of a turbulent year for an office that generally sees change during times of upheaval. In 2008, voters unseated former District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal after racist and sexist emails were uncovered. That led to the election of Pat Lykos, who served for four years before being ousted in the GOP primary after losing the support of law enforcement and most of her prosecutors.
While Anderson has the support of her troops and Houston’s largest police union, 2016 has not been kind to the district attorney’s office.
“I think Houston has become the laughingstock of the United States when it comes to prosecutorial integrity, and we need to establish a level playing field for everyone — the accused and crime victims,” Ogg said. “I want to give voters an option to elect a top
prosecutor who will make them safer and ensure that their basic constitutional rights aren’t violated.”
Anderson has denied any wrongdoing by her office in each instance and insists Ogg is “desperate” to make political points at every turn, accusing the challenger of repeatedly grandstanding.
Anderson declined an interview request from the Houston Chronicle to talk about the race and her campaign. Ogg, on the other hand, has continued to hammer away at several cases that have made headlines since Anderson took office, including:
• A mentally unstable rape victim who was jailed in general population over the Christmas holidays to ensure that she would testify against her attacker.
• The destruction of evidence in the Harris County Precinct 4 constable’s office that likely compromised more than 1,000 criminal cases, a debacle that Anderson’s prosecutors were not told about as they pursued convictions in someof those cases.
• A prosecutor who paid witnesses in a murder case involving several defendants and did not disclose those payments to the defense.
• Two prosecutors who intentionally forced a mistrial because a doctor they had accused of fondling a juvenile patient was going to be found not guilty.
While she was not personally involved in those decisions, Anderson has defended them. She also has come under criticism for echoing Sheriff Ron Hickman when he appeared to blame the Black Lives Matter movement for the shooting of Deputy Darren Goforth. The veteran officer allegedly was ambushed by a man later found to be mentally ill. Voters still unsure
Those issues and more, Ogg said, make it seem like the office has an ethics problem under Anderson.
“We need to establish clear boundaries for prosecutors about what is and is not ethical prosecution, and that must comefrom the top down,” she said. “And that is clearly lacking in this administration.”
In a University of Houston poll in September, the two are in a statistical dead heat, with Anderson edging Ogg 30 percent to 29 percent. However, the poll showed that nearly half — 47 percent — of respondents, were unsure about their choice for district attorney.
Political observers are watching the race closely, not just because it is at the top of the local ticket but because there are implications on national issues such as the death penalty, mental health issues, bail reform and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said he would not be surprised if the numbers in November flip from the election results two years ago, giving 55 percent to Ogg and 45 percent to Anderson.
“For partisans in both parties, there is significant distrust of Anderson,” Rottinghaus said. “This probably makes her a solid pros- ecutor — both sides dislike her equally — but it puts her in a tough spot politically.”
He said the list of problems Ogg continues to publicize could give her the race.
“There’s a lot of fodder for Kim Ogg to use.” he said. “She has a lots of room to target specific issues and constituencies to peel off support from Anderson’s winning coalition from two years ago.”
He noted that while Ogg has been vocal with her attacks, Anderson also may not get much support from the deeply religious wing of Houston’s Republicans because of the indictments of two activists who took undercover video of officials at Planned Parenthood.
The activists made national headlines by splicing together video to inaccurately portray officials at the women’s health nonprofit as selling fetal tissue or “baby body parts.” As the outrage grew, state and national Republicans called for investigations and criminal charges. Different paths
A Harris County grand jury cleared Planned Parenthood of the Gulf Coast of any wrongdoing but indicted the videographers for using fake identifications. The charges against the activists were dismissed through legal maneuvering by their lawyers, but the sting apparently remains.
In an open letter to Anderson in September, anti-abortion conservative firebrand Steven Hotze criticized her and threatened to pull his support because of the incident.
“You can redeem yourself by calling another grand jury that will indict Planned Parenthood,” Hotze wrote.
At the time of the indictments and since, Anderson has said she supported the grand jury for going where the evidence led.
Other Republicans have come forward to stand with Anderson.
“While our Republican volunteer army fights to elect conservatives everywhere in this battleground county, Dr. Hotze again attacks Republicans instead of fighting to end the legal loopholes that let Planned Parenthood get away with its barbaric practices,” said Paul Simpson, Harris County Republican Party chairman.
Ogg, 56, began her legal career in 1987 as a prosecutor in the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. She left in 1994 to become the city’s first gang task force coordinator for five years. She later ran CrimeStoppers of Houston for seven years. Since 2006, she has been a defense lawyer.
Anderson, 50, went to the district attorney’s office out of law school, prosecuting cases for a dozen years before running for district court judge. She was elected to a felony bench in 2004 and was ousted with most of the other Republican judges in 2008 on the coattails of Barack Obama’s election as president.
She spent five years as a defense lawyer before being appointed to fill the seat after her husband, District Attorney Mike Anderson, died in 2013.
In the party room of an Italian restaurant in Kingwood earlier this month, Anderson told about 40 Republicans about several new initiatives by her office, including two that focus on disadvantaged neighborhoods and a renewed focus on money laundering cases.
Money laundering, she said, is an avenue to take down the criminals behind drug trafficking, illegal game rooms and brothels.
“These are very intricate investigations,” she said. “You have to take the money. If you don’t take the money and close the business, they’re right back in business again.” Reforms criticized
Twoother initiatives Anderson outlined included Safe Community Strategies, a neighborhood policing initiative championed in New York City, and“Make it Right,” a program to resolve open warrants.
The thinking behind Safe Community Strategies is to embed a senior prosecutor in a neighborhood or community to learn who the real “crime drivers” are and focus on prosecuting them.
The Make it Right program puts prosecutors in churches in different precincts to resolve open warrants for a host of misdemeanors, such as public intoxication or bad checks. The program gives low-level offenders the opportunity to resolve most warrants by watching a 30-minute video on responsibility.
Those initiatives dovetail with her other efforts at systemic change, including increasing diversion programs for low-level non-violent offenders, especially first-time offenders, and those with mental health issues. She is chair of the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, a county board tasked with improving the local criminal justice system and lowering the jail population, and was instrumental in securing a $4 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation to help make bigger changes, like bail reform.
Ogg has criticized those reforms as half-measures of the changes she proposed during her 2014 campaign. She also said they are overshadowed by Anderson’s bad decisions.
“The public has gotten three full years of a Devon Anderson administration complete with the unethical decisions and actions being defended by her,” she said. “I just want the public to know they are going to get a fair shake with me. There will be no favoritism, no cronyism.”
Ogg has spent the past year renewing her campaign promises from 2014, including the pursuit of burglars and white-collar criminals, transparency in police shootings and ending the jailing of suspects in misdemeanor marijuana cases by implementing what is essentially a “cite and release” program which would see police officers ticket people caught with small amounts of marijuana.