Long-serving judge leaves a polarizing legacy
Michael McSpadden, an outspoken, hard-nosed and oftencontroversial former judge who served for more than three decades on the Harris County bench, died Tuesday at his home in Houston. He was 77, according to public records.
Longtime friends said he had been diagnosed with lung cancer.
A Republican and former prosecutor, McSpadden presided in the 209th Criminal District Court for 36 years, from the Reagan era through the early Trump years. He was the longest-serving criminal judge in Harris County’s criminal division, according to the district court administrator. And in his final years on the bench, he garnered attention for speaking his mind — some say to the detriment of his own judicial legacy.
Among the judge’s many moves that drew public notice, McSpadden was known to require defendants who could afford to post cash bail hire lawyers, rather than request appointed counsel. If they did not, he ordered them to show up in court every day until they hired someone. He felt if they could make bail, they could find
a job and pay for an attorney, rather than burden taxpayers.
Lawyers who appeared before him, including Dick Deguerin, appreciated that he knew them by name and greeted them at docket call. Deguerin said the judge was respectful, welcoming and played it “just straight down the middle.” He recalled McSpadden as a “gentleman and a fine judge.” He felt the jurist’s image was unjustly sullied in his last few years, based on remarks he made.
“That’s not who he was,” Deguerin said. “He was neither a racist nor a misogynist.”
Friend and defense attorney Dan Cogdell said while McSpadden was a “lovely” man off the bench, he “did not suffer a fool” while ushering cases through the system. He wouldn’t hesitate to criticize attorneys when they were ill-prepared.
“Mike spoke his mind,” Cogdell said. “His lack of being politically correct hurt him, among the people who didn’t know him. I never saw him treat anyone unfairly because of race or bias of any sort.”
His cases included the sexual abuse trial of former Houston Rockets star Calvin Murphy, whom a jury found innocent in 2004 on charges of sexually assaulting five of his daughters. McSpadden presided over the 2011 trial of Houston Police Officers’ Union treasurer Matthew Calley, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for stealing more than $656,000 from the organization over seven years.
And in the 1990s, McSpadden approved 10 years probation for a repeat sex offender who volunteered to undergo castration. The procedure never occurred because a doctor could not be found to perform the operation. However, McSpadden drew public ire as a proponent of statewide efforts at the time to legalize the voluntary surgical castration of repeat perpetrators of child sexual assault.
The former judge was not easy to categorize. He advocated for years to decriminalize cases against low-level drug users. He urged state legislators to reduce low-level drug possession felonies to misdemeanors, saying drug addicts needed treatment, not rap sheets.
Shortly before the 2018 election, he openly discussed his disdain for the Black Lives Matter movement. The context was his policy of prohibiting magistrates — who handle probable-cause cases on nights and weekends — from offering personal bonds. McSpadden said he didn’t trust the lower-level jurists to avoid errors.
Speaking of the defendants in his court, he told a Houston Chronicle reporter during a conversation in chambers, “Almost everybody we see here has been tainted in some way before we see them. … They’re not good risks.”
He said suspects released on bond were often re-arrested on additional offenses. He particularly disliked what he viewed as the casual attitude of some defendants about showing up for court, he said.
“The young Black men — and it’s primarily young Black men rather than young Black women — charged with felony offenses, they’re not getting good advice from their parents,” he said. “Who do they get advice from? Rag-tag organizations like Black Lives Matter, which tell you, ‘Resist police,’ which is the worst thing in the world you could tell a young Black man. … They teach contempt for the police, for the whole justice system.”
Civil rights groups, including the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the ACLU of Texas, called for his immediate ouster due to what it called his “outrageous” statements to the Chronicle.
Shortly after the comments were reported, defense lawyers asked McSpadden to recuse himself from the case of a Black death row inmate convicted of killing a teen during a restaurant robbery. The judge refused. Prosecutors did not oppose the request to take the judge off the case. A spokesman for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office said at the time, “Race has no place in the courtroom.”
The judge was ultimately removed from the case by a colleague.
McSpadden later received a formal reprimand from a state watchdog commission over those comments. The judge was also disciplined over questionable bail policies by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, which found in August 2019 that McSpadden was among 11 longtime Harris County judges who had issued blanket instructions to deny all requests for personal recognizance bonds between Nov. 20, 2009, and Feb. 1, 2017.
Democrat Brian Warren defeated McSpadden in the midterm elections of 2018, the year of a “blue wave” that also swept out his Republican colleagues in Harris County.
“McSpadden was a fine judge back in the day, with a reputation for fairness, integrity and an evenkeeled judicial temperament,” the Houston Chronicle editorial board wrote in 2018. “He has a history of working with lawmakers to reduce the sentences for defendants arrested with trace amounts of illegal drugs. It’s a shame that the county’s longest serving felony court district judge didn’t retire before now, leaving his legacy intact.”
McSpadden was born in Bartlesville, Okla., said Janet Durham, his former court reporter, who became a close friend.
He joined the U.S. Marine Corps at the height of the Vietnam War and was recruited to play for the Corps’ tennis team. He attended the University of Oklahoma for undergraduate and law school and became a licensed attorney in 1977, according to the Texas Bar Association.
Through his father’s lineage, he became a cardcarrying member of the Cherokee Nation, Durham said.
“He was very proud of that,” Durham said.
Former District Attorney Carol Vance is said to have recruited him to his office because he was an avid tennis player and McSpadden had played at OU, Cogdell said.
McSpadden worked as a prosecutor in the county’s felony division for a few years. He was appointed by Gov. Bill Clements in 1982. At first, he was pro-prosecution, Cogdell said, but “the longer he sat on the bench, those life experiences led him to think differently.”
The jurist was one of the first in a wave of new Republican judges across the state, defense attorney Rusty Hardin recalled.
“The ’80s, in the state and nationally, is when law-enforcement-, law-andorder-type issues were back in swing,” Hardin said. “But as time went on, he was also able to recognize excesses. He was one of the earliest, most sensitive people to the rights of victims in the criminal justice victims.”
He is survived by a sister Judith Houston, in Oklahoma, and a niece. He will be buried in Oklahoma, near his parents, she said.
Several people who knew the judge said they received a message following his death that, in keeping with his life, indicated he was bucking against the norm.
He did not want a memorial and he did not want an obituary.