The flood of resignations and rumblings inside the chaotic Harris County District Attorney’s Office continues: This time it’s the Chief of the Human Trafficking and Adult Sex Crimes Division.
Houston Watch obtained Johna Stallings’ resignation letter, addressed to District Attorney Kim Ogg, which describes an office plagued by mismanagement and hampered in its basic ability to obtain convictions for the most serious sex crimes.
Stallings offered as a parting hope for the future of the office that “supervisors at the highest level will begin to work with, not contrive against, other supervisors to create a happy, healthy environment for HCDAO employees” and not “marginalize or degrade investigators, support staff and others who allow us to do our best in the courtroom.”
Stallings also noted that in order for the office to effectively prosecute sex crimes, “supervisors at the highest level will [need to] recognize that trafficking and child exploitation are complex, serious investigations that require extensive time to understand and prepare.” Stallings even sent Ogg a “two page protocol”, which, if followed, could “result in successful prosecutions of traffickers and child exploiters…”
Finally, Stallings left Ogg with a biting reminder that those at the top face accountability eventually. Here’s Stallings:
“One of my favorite quotes I like to use in closing arguments is from Robert Louis Stevenson, who said, ‘Sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.’ It's a pretty good idiom to repeat to ourselves on occasion, regardless of how high in an organization we have found ourselves.”
This shakeup at the top of the sex crimes divisions comes on the heels of a pattern of sexually inappropriate behavior at HCDAO. There’s Ogg’s media relations officer who “liked” a variety of pornographic posts on Twitter. Then, there is Ogg’s now-former communications director who created a social media pseudonym called “DudeGoggles” which he used to make sex and prison rape jokes. There’s also Waymond Wesley, a former prosecutor in Ogg’s office who resigned after he trended on Twitter for “colorist, misogynist, and anti-fat tweets”, as BuzzFeed reported.