Challenger focuses on morale, integrity
Teare is neither an activist nor a ‘soft on crime’ reformer
It took nearly three years for Alfred Washington to finally walk free after sitting in a Harris County Jail cell awaiting trial for a murder he insisted he didn’t commit. It took only one day of trial for a judge to conclude prosecutors didn’t have the evidence to bring the case in the first place.
Few in the media took notice. But the dismissal of Washington’s case wasn’t the only failure for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in December 2021. In a seven-day span, prosecutors lost five total cases, including three involving murder and two involving sexual assault charges. It wasn’t simply a bad week. It appears to be part of a troubling pattern of poor judgment.
When we endorsed Harris County’s top prosecutor, District Attorney Kim Ogg, for a second term in 2020, we credited the Democrat with prioritizing a fair criminal justice process “that engenders trust in the system.” We have applauded her bold reforms and brave calls, such as diverting low-level marijuana cases, ending prosecutions of people found with trace amounts of drugs, tossing wrongful convictions, supporting unpopular exonerations of innocent men, and instituting a cultural sea change that prioritizes justice above winning.
“The exoneration of innocent individuals is as important as the conviction of guilty ones,” Ogg said after the exoneration of Lydell Grant in 2021, flipping the script of some of her predecessors. “The highest responsibility of a prosecutor is to see that justice is done.”
Nearly four years later, with a string of high-profile case losses on her record, a stubbornly high backlog of criminal cases dating back to Hurricane Harvey, a reputation for mercurial management, frayed relationships with the commissioners who fund her office, and a perception that she lets personal grudges and politics cloud her judgment, she has lost some of that trust. Even among once-ardent supporters.
That includes Sean Teare, the former prosecutor now vying for her job in the Democratic primary. He says he returned in 2017 to the DA’s office from private practice specifically to work for Ogg, who immediately promoted him to lead the vehicular crimes division. Over time, he says he observed how Ogg’s decisions and shortcomings as a manager affected the agency’s mission to protect public safety: “I’m running to restore the integrity, to restore the competence in that office,” Teare told this editorial board in a side-by-side interview with Ogg. He added: “What you haven’t heard in seven and a half years is the elected DA admit that she’s part of the problem and in some cases, the problem.”
To be clear, the DA’s office isn’t an island. It’s part of an intricate system in which stakeholders such as prosecutors, police, judges, forensic lab staff and politicians weighing budget requests must depend on each other to keep the gears of justice turning. No matter what. No matter if a hurricane floods the courthouse, as happened in 2017, or a global pandemic sends crime surging, as happened from 2020 through 2022. In her own office, which processes tens of thousands of criminal cases each year, Ogg, 64, often must delegate life-altering decisions to her subordinates.
“We can’t micromanage every case,” Ogg told us. “So, we rely upon the training we’ve provided them and the supervision that we try to provide them to make the best deci
sion based on their judgment at the time.”
Even so, Ogg is responsible for overarching decisions that influence everything from employee morale to public trust in the criminal justice system to outcomes in the courtroom. Incidentally, our concerns with endorsing her for a third term are not necessarily the same that led county Democratic precinct chairs to vote 129-61 to admonish Ogg for not adequately representing Democratic values. Their complaints included Ogg's investigation of fellow Democratic officeholders. In our view, Ogg was justified if not duty-bound to investigate elected officials regardless of party. We make no bones about Ogg doing her job; we're concerned she's not doing it effectively enough.
Alfred Washington's charge in the 2017 murder of Angelique Stafford, a mother of five shot to death in a Houston supermarket parking lot, is an example of poor judgment by Ogg's prosecutors: a case with dubious evidence built off shoddy police work that should have been flagged well before trial and was ultimately dismissed in embarrassing fashion.
An eyewitness identified Washington as a suspect. His attorney, Beth Exley, said he had a solid alibi that Houston police didn't investigate, and that police were also aware of a possible alternate suspect, Washington's son, who bore a striking resemblance to his father. At trial, the state's eyewitness took the stand and confidently pointed to Washington as the shooter. But the case fell apart when Exley showed the witness a photo of Washington's son and asked him who it was. The witness again pointed at the elder Washington. The case was dismissed due to “identification issues.”
Exley previously worked for the DA's office and was one of 37 veteran prosecutors Ogg fired as part of a changing of the guard when she took office in January 2017, an exodus that Ogg critics believe robbed the office of crucial institutional knowledge. She acknowledged that Ogg likely knew little of the details in the Washington case, considering her office's massive volume of cases. Still, Exley was baffled that nobody in the chain of command questioned whether prosecutors had the goods to even try the murder case, let alone get a conviction.
“You've got prosecutors and division chiefs underneath (Ogg) who are not bringing it to her attention,” Exley told us. “Whether it's because they don't know what they're doing or they're so afraid to go up and say, ‘Hey, we've got this bad guy that's been sitting in jail for 18 months and now we think maybe he's not guilty, can we dismiss it? ' But I know that I made them aware of all these issues in relation to this case.”
A DA spokesman said prosecutors knew the case would be tough, but they believed they could poke a hole in Washington's alibi and prove that he was the shooter.
The number of times judges have found that a prosecutor's case didn't meet the lowest burden of proof have doubled since Ogg took office. In 2022, the period examined in a Houston Chronicle investigation, more than 4,500 criminal cases were found to have “no probable cause.”
That issue may stem in part from oft-criticized changes Ogg made early on to the intake division, a team of prosecutors who take calls from police in the field to assess whether evidence is strong enough to accept criminal charges. It's an extra level of screening that doesn't exist in many counties, where law enforcement officers can file charges without consulting with a DA gatekeeper. Before Ogg, intake was a rotating shift open only to experienced prosecutors with felony or misdemeanor trial experience. They earned overtime pay by working nights and weekend shifts. Ogg got rid of overtime pay, citing budget constraints, and assigned more than two dozen prosecutors on a permanent basis. Ogg has also asked senior prosecutors to oversee intake shifts on weekends without overtime pay.
Ogg said she made the change to “bring consistency” to the process but more than a dozen people we spoke to in the legal and law enforcement communities argue it's done the opposite, weakening a critical safeguard against dubious prosecutions that waste time and resources and alter the lives of those wrongly accused. Ogg showed us a list of intake prosecutors, indicating some have decades of experience, but critics say longevity doesn't always mean relevant experience or quality. An outside consulting firm hired by county commissioners seemed to agree, concluding in 2022 that intake was staffed by too many unseasoned or unqualified attorneys, many lacking trial experience.
“It's not just a political attack,” Teare told us. “Intake is broken.” He said he'd promptly reverse Ogg's changes.
Teare says Washington's case isn't an outlier and that his opponent's administration has been rife with mismanagement, leading to low morale and a culture of fear among rank-and-file prosecutors wary of running afoul of her and her leadership team.
“We had these cases that should have never been indicted, but you had people terrified of even going to the administration and asking for murders to be dismissed,” Teare told us. “A real DA's office does not lose three murders in a week, period, full stop.”
Teare, 44, worked as a Harris County prosecutor for 11 years, trying both misdemeanor and felony cases. He's tried two capital murders to verdict and personally handled 10 others. He also served on the DA's Capital Committee for six years, a group of senior prosecutors who sign off on every capital plea bargain and decide whether to pursue the death penalty. He resigned last year to run for her job.
Teare has a reputation as a diligent prosecutor, and he notes that losing his mother to heroin overdose exposed him to flaws in the criminal justice system and the need for holistic
approaches to crimes related to drug addiction and mental health. Those we talked to who have worked with Teare describe him as bright, affable and fair-minded, albeit with a knack for self-promotion, especially when TV cameras are present. Some suspect that he jumped at the vehicular crimes post because it comes with relatively high visibility. Teare often made crime scene coverage on the nightly news, but at least one law enforcement source insisted he made lowerprofile scenes, too.
We see bright potential in Teare as a leader. One exchange that stood out in our screening came after Teare described an example of leadership he'd like to emulate to build morale and employee loyalty. He said former U.S. Attorney Ken Magidson, who was appointed to oversee the DA's office for a time after Chuck Rosenthal's resignation, would stop by for brief, casual visits with junior prosecutors just to check how they were doing. Ogg seemed oddly dismissive, arguing that pay raises are the key motivator. Both, of course, would be ideal.
Teare seems to be running as the more progressive Democrat in the race, but rejects any notion that he might be lenient on those who threaten public safety; he says he'd be “smart” on crime instead. We hope he'd be just as diligent in rooting out corruption, regardless of party affiliation.
Frankly, we don't see much ideological daylight in their policy views, with one exception: bail practices. While both candidates maintain that they don't believe in jailing nonviolent, low-level defendants merely because they're too poor to afford bail, Ogg has waffled on the issue. After initially expressing support for misdemeanor bail reform as a candidate in 2016, she ended up opposing a settlement to end Harris County's unconstitutional system of poverty jailing. Ogg says her opposition was specific to the settlement and not its overall goal. But later, as crime surged during the pandemic, Ogg claimed that the implementation of bail reform was a “driving factor in the crime crisis gripping our community.”
In an October 2021 editorial, we took Ogg to task for seemingly scapegoating misdemeanor bail reform, in part with a flawed report that didn't account for a long-festering courthouse backlog and mischaracterized data to skew how many defendants were
re-offending or missing court dates. Her rhetoric seemed to mirror that of partisan Republican objections to bail reform and even those of bondsmen, who have a financial incentive to oppose bail reform. Incidentally, we're troubled by Ogg's financial support from the bail bond industry, including more than $56,000 in a recent reporting period.
Teare, who vowed to refuse contributions from the bail bond industry, supports misdemeanor bail reform, and actually said he would push the Legislature to phase out cash bail. He wants, as we do, to see Texas move closer to the federal system in which judges' decisions on whether to detain someone without bond are based on assessments of flight risk or danger to the community.
“My only vehicle right now, in the vast majority of cases, is a cash number to hold people that I can prove to a magistrate are a danger, so I will use that,” Teare said. “But I don't believe we should be tying it to money.”
This position, we should note, is one shared by many Republican criminal justice experts, including Nathan Hecht, the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court.
Teare says his transition from an Ogg supporter to a rival was spurred, in part, by her actions after county commissioners in 2019 rebuffed her request for a 31 percent budget increase to hire 102 additional assistant DAs and more than 40 support staff, a request we supported in part because it would help her clear the growing case backlog. Commissioners increased her budget by only 7 percent.
What followed was a succession of investigations against county politicians — namely County Commissioner Rodney Ellis and aides for County Judge Lina Hidalgo, both fellow Democrats — and public statements critical of bail reform and accused commissioners of “defunding” her office by not giving her the exact dollar figure she asked for in budget requests.
In Ellis' case, Ogg investigated whether he was illegally storing hundreds of pieces of African art in a government warehouse on the taxpayers' dime. While a grand jury declined to charge Ellis, Ogg issued a statement saying that while Ellis' actions were not illegal, taxpayers deserved to have their dollars “spent wisely and in a transparent manner.”
In Hidalgo's case, Ogg has already indicted three of her former aides on felony charges, accusing them of giving inside information to a political consulting firm with Democratic ties to help them win an $11 million COVID-19 vaccine outreach contract in June 2021.
What's troubling about that case, however, is Ogg's decision to hire an outside lawyer, Rachel Palmer Hooper, a former Harris County prosecutor who is now general counsel to the Texas Republican Party, to investigate Hidalgo's aides. As the Houston Landing reported, Hooper's husband is a conservative blogger who has blasted Hidalgo, Ellis and other local Democrats as “Marxists.”
Meanwhile, Ogg has been criticized for closing a case against Houston attorney and GOP activist Jared Woodfill, who was accused of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from his clients' trust accounts. Earlier this month, a former client of Woodfill's asked state and federal investigators to re-examine the case, alleging that Ogg mishandled it and that she was improperly influenced by Rachel Hooper.
Ogg disputed any improper influence and said she allowed the time clock to run out on the case because she wasn't convinced of its merit and remained concerned about the ham-fisted way DA investigators had raided Woodfill's office. Even if that's true, there's no excuse for Ogg appointing Hooper, a highly partisan Republican to probe Hidalgo, a liberal lightning rod. Ogg, a savvy politician, should have known bad optics don't inspire trust.
Ogg contends that Teare's acceptance of Hidalgo's endorsement in the primary qualifies as a conflict of interest. Teare currently works for the law firm of defense attorney Dan Cogdell, who is representing Hidalgo's aides in their criminal case. Teare says that he has been walled off from any involvement. The case files, he said, are password protected and he claimed he has never seen a shred of evidence uncovered in the investigation, either as a prosecutor or as a defense attorney. Even so, Teare vowed if elected to recuse himself from the Hidalgo investigation “on day one” — a move that would seem to signal his commitment to integrity and awareness of optics.
“It's the way it should be, you have to remove politics from the actual job of the DA,” Teare said.
Teare is neither an activist nor a “soft on crime” reformer. His critiques of Ogg's leadership are not gratuitous, but substantive and specific. Even Ogg acknowledged his reputation for being an “aggressive” prosecutor whom she took an interest in promoting to lead an important division. We believe he is sincere in his desire to boost morale through effective leadership and restore integrity among the rank-andfile prosecutors, to recruit and retain qualified staff, and ensure that defendants have honest brokers evaluating their cases.
We urge Democratic primary voters to give him a chance to be the county's next DA in November.