Ex-judge pleads to illegal use of funds
The ex-judge in an orange jail uniform stood before a judge in black robes, swore to tell the truth and tried to make sense of her predicament.
“My world truly turned upside down,” Alexandra Smoots-Thomas, a former Harris County civil judge, told federal Judge Lynn N. Hughes on Thursday, enumerating the heartbreaks amid tears. Her husband’s unemployment. A house in foreclosure. Her cancer treatments. Her father’s cancer diagnosis. Two divorces. A child’s suicide attempt.
“I regret wholeheartedly leaving such a terrible stain at what is the end of a wonderful and rewarding 18-year legal career,” she said. “I truly apologize for my actions. I apologize for the stain that this has placed on my family and even my former colleagues on the bench.”
The 44-year-old pleaded guilty to using campaign funds to pay personal expenses, capping off a turbulent year that included chemotherapy, remission, a failed bid to reclaim her former bench and criminal charges last month alleging she fired a shotgun at her husband’s girlfriend. The government dropped six remaining counts of wire fraud.
Her plea agreement details how she siphoned off campaign money to purchase a Zales engagement ring and two Prada handbags, and to make two mortgage payments and cover private school tuition for her two sons. As a convicted felon, she will no longer be permit
ted to practice law, the only career she’s ever known, according to her lawyer in the assault case.
Hughes took into consideration her admission of guilt, her hardships and her likelihood of re-offending, and sentenced her to the 36 days she’d just spent in jail for a bond violation connected to the shooting charges, as well as three years of supervised release.
He ordered her released from federal lockup in Conroe, and made off-handed remark to a deputy U.S. marshal to make sure she got a ride back into Houston.
Prosecutor Ted Imperato, of the U.S. Attorney’s public corruption unit, challenged the “unreasonableness” of the sentence. The judge responded, in his trademark snarky bluster, that the sentence was “pure wisdom.”
The prosecutor had requested a sentence within the guideline range of 18 to 24 months in prison, saying the defendant abused her power and authority as a sitting judge.
Imperato noted that rather than agree to a deal where she would leave the bench, “She thumbed her nose at us, and, with these charges pending, ran for re-election.”
The federal case against Smoots-Thomas grew out of an FBI investigation of another matter, said defense lawyer Kent Schaffer. When federal agents began to scour her campaign expense account, they turned up anomalies — a series of odd purchases from 2013 to 2018 from her campaign coffers that Smoots-Thomas later said she’d intended to pay back.
Schaffer said the fallout for his client far outweighed the harm. The so-called “victims” in the case, he said, were lawyers who said they were glad Smoots-Thomas had won re-election and did not care what she did with their donations. The federal judge said he would assess restitution involving $28,618 in embezzled campaign funds at a hearing on Oct. 26.
Smoots-Thomas was first elected in 2008. She said her troubles began after her first divorce, when she tried to shore up funds for her family home and tuition to provide stability for her two sons, ages 15 and 11.
“At the time, I made a couple of careless and mistaken charges,” she said, which she intended to repay. Next came “a grueling and expensive” re-election campaign and “an intense romantic relationship” with her second husband who promptly lost his job.
She struggled with the mortgage on her Rice Military home and with medical insurance, car payments and tuition.
“I made a very poor choice of paying my delinquent mortgage from my campaign account, she told the court. “At the time, I let shame and pride and fear of ridicule rule my misguided actions. Once again I acknowledged to myself that I would repay.”
In November 2018, she learned the government was scrutinizing her campaign account. Shortly thereafter, she was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer and her chemotherapy necessitated a leave of absence from the bench.
Her youngest child suffered “a true emotional breakdown” because his father cut off communications and the thought that he’d lose contact with both parents was too much for him. Then, came home schooling, cancer treatment, infidelity, a re-election campaign and an October 2019 indictment and suspension without pay from her judgeship. Her father was diagnosed with two forms of cancer, she said.
In July she lost in the Democratic primary runoff for her bench in the 164th Civil Court. She then resigned from the remainder of her term.
In August, she was arrested in connection to the discharge of a shotgun involving her estranged husband’s girlfriend and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon at the woman’s home.
Juanita Jackson, the ex-judge’s friend and her attorney in the assault case, said the last few years have been unbearable for Smoots-Thomas, and that she remarried in an effort to “grasp onto hope.”
“Most people could not survive what she has gone through,” Jackson said. “Most people couldn’t wake up in the morning and fight another day, but she has to do it for her sons whose father is really not minimally in their life.”
Jackson said Smoots-Thomas does not deny she used the shotgun at the girlfriend’s home on Aug. 10, but says her client discharged the gun accidentally and only had the weapon in self defense against her romantic rival, Twyla Joseph, an administrator at Paul Revere Middle School.
“As a jurist, she was well loved and was always by all sides considered very fair very reasonable and very kind,” Jackson said.
She grew up in the Hiram Clarke area, where her working class parents sent her to private school, Jackson said. She graduated from University of St. Thomas and then South Texas College of Law.