Mathis the better choice for district judge
Allison Mathis had no plans to run for district court judge in Harris County. One hearing she observed last spring as a spectator in Judge Ramona Franklin’s courtroom changed everything.
Mathis watched as Franklin rejected Eric Cano’s request to die at home with his family. Cano, who was charged with murder in 2020 after being accused of shooting a man after a drunken fight, was terminally ill from cirrhosis in his liver. He could not walk or bathe himself and was in a declining mental state with weeks left to live at a county jail ill-equipped to provide hospice care. Unmoved, Franklin denied Cano’s request to release him on a lower bond. Cano died in custody weeks later.
“The defendant was dying on a gurney in a hallway in a dirty diaper, and then she refused to reduce his bond,” Mathis said. “And so I decided if no one else was going to primary (Franklin), that I would.”
We’re glad someone did. Franklin, first elected to the 338th District Court in 2016, has had a tumultuous second term that raises serious questions about her fitness for the bench.
She has barred defense attorneys and journalists from her courtroom and didn’t allow the public to view her court proceedings in person or online, even after the courthouse reopened during the COVID-19 pandemic. She didn’t preside over a single trial for more than a year from March 2020 through June 2021, according to an ABC13 investigation. She has the sixth-highest number among 26 district courts of active cases that are more than a year old. She frequently appeared at the top of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalitions’ monthly pretrial detention reports for jailing more defendants than any other judge based simply on their inability to afford bail.
Yet what’s most troubling about Franklin is that she’s been accused at times of not even following the law. She has been the subject of judicial complaints from defense attorneys who argue she revokes defendant bonds without notice or cause, sometimes without a lawyer present. She was also rebuked by an appellate court that found she abused her discretion for revoking bond and raising bail on a defendant for no apparent reason.
If Franklin has a reasonable explanation for any of these red flags, we’ll never know. She didn’t respond to multiple requests to meet with the editorial board.
Mathis, 40, is a native Houstonian yet her first job as an attorney sent her across the Pacific Ocean as a public defender in the Republic of Palau, a small island nation, where she says she litigated a case that ended their practice of solitary confinement. She returned to the U.S. and began a somewhat nomadic career as a public defender, first in Fort Bend County, then in Aztec, N.M., then for the Swinomish Indian Tribal Reservation in Washington state.
Mathis returned to Harris County in 2019 and joined the public defender’s office, first as a felony trial attorney and then as the lead attorney in the office’s post-conviction writs division. After leaving to start her own defense practice, she represented migrant defendants who were ensnared for trespassing under Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star program.
Mathis’ experience is exclusively as a defense attorney, which isn't ideal. But Mathis pushed back on the idea that she'd be lenient toward criminal defendants. She told us she would make better use of pretrial services and diversion courts to keep low-level offenders from being locked up in the county jail but would not hesitate to revoke bail for repeat offenders who violate their bond conditions. She maintains that Texas’ cash bail system has merit, particularly for felony defendants, because the financial stakes force them to return to court.
“There’s this misconception about Democrats or about liberal judges that that we want child molesters on the streets, but we have families, we have no interest in making the community less safe,” Mathis said.
Crucially, for a court where the sitting judge seems inclined to keep proceedings opaque, Mathis is steadfastly committed to transparency and public access, reasoning that “the law doesn’t need to be this obscure thing that only people who go to law school understand.”
We are confident that just about any qualified candidate would be a better choice than Franklin. Mathis’ life experience and fascinating professional journey persuade us that she could restore competence, transparency and fairness to the 338th. We urge Democratic voters to pick her in the primary.
Defense attorney has broad experience