Prosecutors: Aguilar shouldn’t handle domestic violence cases
Harris County prosecutors asked Judge Frank Aguilar to step down from domestic violence cases involving seven defendants, citing his New Year’s Eve arrest involving similar accusations at his Galveston property, records show.
The recusal requests were filed last Jan. 22, about three weeks after Aguilar’s arrest in connection with the alleged assault of his girlfriend of more than a year and before Galveston County prosecutors accepted the misdemeanor assault charge against him. By the week’s end, Aguilar, the elected judge in the 228th District Court, declined to recuse himself in each of the cases and has since referred the matter to the 11th Administrative Judicial Region of Texas to decide whether he should continue to preside over them.
No decision has been made as of Monday, and more recusal motions are anticipated, officials said.
Aguilar remained on the bench Monday, handling the court’s docket. His defense attorney, Mark Diaz, did not respond to a request for comment.
“One could infer from these circumstances that Judge Aguilar’s alleged criminal conduct could cause a reasonable person to harbor a reasonable doubt as to his impartiality,” wrote Meagan Scott, a general litigation prosecutor for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. “Under these circumstances, Judge Aguilar should recuse himself.”
The felony cases with denied recusal requests that the Chronicle reviewed were filed before Aguilar’s arrest and involve choking allegations similar to what Galveston law enforcement accused him of. In one case, a man with a history of domestic violence choked his girlfriend until she was unconscious, according to court records. When she woke up, her hands were tied behind her back.
A man put his hands around his girlfriend’s neck and pointed a gun at her days earlier in another case in which prosecutors have sought a recusal.
Barbie Brashear, executive director of the Harris County Domestic Violence Coordinating Council, has called on Aguilar to be removed from handling cases similar to the one against him in his court. She cited a 2010 domestic violence charge against Aguilar, which prompted a jury’s acquittal, as a possible pattern of behavior.
She warned that choking starts causing a range of problems, such as seizures and loss of consciousness, within seconds.
“This is not the first case for him,” Brashear said. “It leads me to question how someone can practice from a place from judicial unbias and judicial unfairness when they themselves had their own pattern in their history.”
Court records do not indicate when Aguilar will be required to appear in a Galveston court.
The judge’s Dec. 31 arrest happened around 3:30 a.m. as the couple celebrated her birthday with others in the 9600 block of Teichman Road, where Aguilar owns a property, according to a search warrant affidavit. When police officers arrived, they suspected that Aguilar was intoxicated and that he had attacked her. The officers saw blood coming from the woman’s nose and marks on her neck from a possible assault.
The woman told police that Aguilar punched her repeatedly and held his foot to her neck in their kitchen, according to the court document. She was unable to breathe for about a minute, but at some point, managed to say she couldn’t breathe, the search warrant continued.
The judge, in his own account, said the woman was “highly intoxicated” and throwing beer cans throughout the home and at him, court records show. He declined to tell the officer how the woman was injured.
The judge was absent from the bench for several days after his arrest.
Officials with the State Commission of Judicial Conduct, a governor-appointed judicial oversight group, declined to comment Thursday when asked whether they will consider suspending Aguilar following the filing of the misdemeanor charge. The group can suspend a jurist following an indictment or when misdemeanor charges are filed for offenses involving official misconduct or crimes involving moral turpitude.