As Ogg’s Office Stumbles, Six Accused Killers Go Free in Two Weeks
No three-year-old boy deserves to die that way.
An autopsy report revealed that “multiple blunt force injuries” caused the boy’s death, including blows to the head and torso. The coroner also detailed “100 scars of the head, neck, chest, abdomen, back and all extremities” indicating “chronic abuse.”
Pasadena police officers arrested the boy’s stepfather; the Harris County District Attorney’s Office launched a homicide prosecution; and the grand jury returned an indictment, which read: [the stepfather] “caused the death of” [the child] by “striking [him] with a blunt object” and “applying pressure to [the child’s] throat and neck.”
Pasadena police reports also reveal that the stepfather faced accusations of “causing bodily injury” to the victim’s then 5-year-brother—and two women with whom “he had a dating relationship.” Prosecutors also alleged in pleadings that the defendant on various dates beat the kids with “his hand”, “a belt,” “a cord and / or coat hanger”, “put a belt around [one of the children’s] neck and tighten[ed] the belt,” and called the boys “ugly.”
In other pleadings filed in the trial court, the prosecution accused the stepfather of: “Locking [the kids] in a room in their residence and turning the heat up inside of the residence,”; making the young kids “hold bottles of liquid, including water and antifreeze, in front of and over their bodies, including while squatting”; and “causing them to stand for extended lengths of time without rest [until one of the children] urinate[d] on himself and f[e]ll to the floor.”
The child died from blunt force trauma in 2018. Kim Ogg’s prosecutors took five years to bring his stepfather to trial. Then, last month, when prosecutors finally managed to bring the slam-dunk case before a jury, they failed to secure a conviction.
How do you lose a case like this at trial?
Days before trial, again over five years after the boy died, the prosecution asked the judge to delay the proceedings. In its motion opposing the delay, the defense shed light on what appears to be deep incompetence on behalf of Ogg’s prosecutors. Specifically, the defense accused Ogg’s prosecutors of a “lack of diligence” that stretches “all the way back to the inception of the charge [5 years prior]”. To give a few examples of the “lack of diligence” from Ogg’s prosecutors, the defense noted:
“The State violated this court’s discovery order … by failing to file a subpoena with the District Clerk at least 14 days or more prior to trial. The State’s subpoena was not filed with the clerk until June 12 [, three days before the trial was slated to begin]”
“This lack of diligence is further compounded by the fact that the State and Defense agreed to the June 15, 2023, trial setting on January 25, 2023. The State cannot show this court that it did anything to communicate this agreed reset to its witnesses. [Moreover,] more than 120 days have elapsed where alternative dates could have been procured before schedules in later 2023 solidified. Again, there is no showing that any of this was done.”
“The State now contends that specific pediatric testimony is now needed … [but] this too fails under a diligence analysis. Since its decision to charge and indict [the defendant] back in 2019 (a full year after the alleged incident), never once has the State produced any information regarding the opinion of a forensic pediatrician. [The prosecution’s filing] does nothing more than further magnify the lack of diligence by the State rather than absolve them.”
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Tragically, this case isn’t an outlier.
Over a two week period in June, Ogg’s office suffered four not-guilty verdicts in homicide cases—and was forced to dismiss two additional murder cases at trial. That’s an astonishing half-dozen losses in the very most serious cases that come across Kim Ogg’s desk.
And the fact patterns of these cases are so straight-forward that it leaves little doubt that leadership simply does not prioritize the prosecution of serious violent felonies in Harris County.
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Consider that five years ago, police officers arrested two men for shooting a man in the head in a parking garage following a verbal dispute. As the Fort-Worth Star Telegram reported at the time, “surveillance camera footage had caught” the perpetrators “driving out of the parking garage … shortly after the murder, and the two men “admitted to committing the crime.”
A Harris County Grand Jury indicted both men.
That’s what prosecutors call a slam dunk case.
And yet, last month, after five years of preparation, Harris County prosecutors snatched defeat from the jaws of victory when a jury returned a “not guilty” verdict against one of the two men even though both defendants—and a third person who was in their car at the time of the shooting—admitted that the co-defendant on trial instructed the other co-defendant to “bring a firearm with them” in case they needed to use it.
What happened?
Based on the questions that the jury asked the judge during deliberations, it appears to be that Ogg’s prosecutors were unable to clearly communicate basic legal concepts to the jurors:
These are concepts that prosecutors introduce in opening statements; set the stage to answer with evidence and witnesses at trial; repeat in closing arguments; and work hard to consolidate into the instructions that the jury receives before deliberation. If a prosecutor can’t get these simple concepts across, then jurors do not have the basic information that’s needed to find the defendant guilty. And so they didn’t.
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Then there’s the third not guilty verdict in June, which dates back to 2021 when a Harris County grand jury indicted a man for allegedly picking up a gun and firing multiple rounds into another man, ultimately killing him.
The prosecution filed pleadings in the case alleging that the defendant had threatened the victim before—“next time he comes I’m gonna shoot him”—and told the victim’s child, “next time we have a fight, you’re not going to have a dad.” Moreover, one month before the victim was shot and killed, the prosecution stated in pleadings that the defendant pointed a gun at two different people on the same day, and then drove to the house [of the man he would later be accused of killing] and “confronted [him] punched [him], and pulled a loaded gun on [him], placing [him] in fear for his life.”
This wasn’t the defendant’s first brush with law enforcement. He had been previously convicted of crimes including assaulting a family member, drunk driving, and drug possession. Prosecutors also gave notice to the court that they had discovered that the defendant was in possession of a lot of weapons:
Another slam-dunk case, right?
Yet, when the prosecution finally managed to take the case to trial some three years after the murder took place, Ogg’s prosecutors again could not secure a conviction.
The same basic story emerges from the other three cases in which Ogg’s prosecutors failed to secure a guilty verdict last month:
A man shoots another man in the chest. Police arrest him, prosecutors charge him with murder, and a grand jury returns an indictment. Seven years after the shooting, Ogg’s prosecutors manage to take the case to trial (it seems no one told Ogg’s crew about the maxim that as time passes witnesses forget information, lose interest, or even die). In the meantime, since no judge is going to let a defendant sit in jail awaiting trial for the better part of a decade, the defendant was out on bond, the conditions of which he violated on at least three different occasions. In the end, the jury returned a not guilty verdict.
Police officers make an arrest in connection with the shooting death of a man, Ogg’s office charges the defendant with murder, and the grand jury returns an indictment. The defendant also has previous convictions for a buffet of serious crimes over the span of two decades including arson, robbery with bodily injury, assaulting a family member, and drunk driving. Pleadings reveal that Ogg’s prosecutors believed that this man was so dangerous that he needed to be held without bail. But then, in November 2022, a month before the trial was set to begin—and more than eighteen months after the grand jury returned an indictment—, the state asked the court to delay the proceedings because they weren’t ready for trial. In June 2023, as the rescheduled trial was set to begin, Ogg’s prosecutors filed a motion dismissing the case.
Police officers arrest a man for fatally shooting two people, Ogg’s office charges him with capital murder, and the grand jury returns an indictment. The prosecution insists that the man is so dangerous that he should not be eligible for bail—and the man ultimately remains in jail for over eighteen months until, as trial is set to begin, the prosecution simply filed a motion dismissing the case for “insufficient evidence.”