Kim Ogg's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week
This was supposed to be a chill week for Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, as she puts the finishing touches on her birthday bash fundraising event next week at Houston’s ever-swanky The Post Oak Hotel. But instead of shopping for ball-gowns and balloons, the District Attorney is experiencing perhaps the most turbulent week of her tenure. Here are three things that Ogg and her team need to clean-up before popping the bubbly next week:
1. A judge was forced to “grant a $1 bond Wednesday [to a man] accused of sexually assaulting a teenager and getting her pregnant” because Ogg’s office took too long to secure an indictment.
“According to court records, the victim told police that [the defendant], now 25, gave her a drink of Smirnoff vodka. She said she passed out and woke up in the bed next to [the defendant], whom she said was naked. Three months after the encounter, the teenager found out she was pregnant, and court documents reveal a DNA test proved Sanchez was the father. He was arrested and charged with sexual assault of a child under 17 years of age in May 2023.
So, what led to the uncommonly low bond amount? [The defendant] had been locked up since he was arrested, but the Harris County District Attorney's Office never secured an indictment from a grand jury. By law, the office is required to indict [a defendant] within 90 days of his arrest.”
Watch the ABC News clip below:
Tragically, this is not an isolated case of justice slipping through the cracks for sexual assault victims in Ogg’s office. As Houston Watch recently reported, records obtained from the Harris County District Attorney’s Office revealed that over the one year period from January 2022 through January 2023, “Ogg’s office dismissed at least two dozen sexual assault prosecutions in just one year. These are all cases that prosecutors screened and formally filed as felony sexual assault cases. That does not include the cases where a jury returned a not-guilty verdict at trial.”
So far this year, it appears the situation is getting worse, not better. For example, in March, Houston Watch reported on the case of “Grandpa Jack” who spent five years in prison in the early 2000s for sexually assaulting two young children. Then, in 2018, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office secured a new indictment of Grandpa Jack, this time on charges of “super-aggravated sexual assault of a child under six years of age.” Ogg’s office took five years to take the case to trial, which finally started in March 2023. But days after jury selection began, Ogg’s office dismissed the case.
Moreover, Harris County District Court dockets reveal that Ogg’s office was forced to dismiss two serious sex cases over a one month period this summer—one involving continuous sexual abuse of a child and another involving the sexual assault of a child. And that’s not including the trial loss—a not guilty verdict in an indecency with a child case—that same month.
2. “‘Don't cross her’: How DA Kim Ogg has repeatedly aimed her power at Harris County officials.”
For the Houston Chronicle, Jen Rice and Neena Satija report that “Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg has launched criminal investigations against county officials she was publicly feuding with at least four times since she took office in 2017 …. Taxpayers have covered nearly $1 million in legal bills for public employees who were pulled into the investigations but never charged with crimes.”
One example of a probe “that resulted in no charges but led to hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills shouldered by taxpayers” is when Ogg “compelled four county staffers working on criminal justice reform measures to testify before a grand jury. The case, sparked by an accidental release of jail inmates’ health information, went nowhere.”
The full article is worth your time, but here are five quotes from county officials that capture a broader sentiment in Harris County that Kim Ogg wields her power to inspire fear and terror among those who disagree with her on political or policy positions:
“I would tell people, don’t cross her, plain and simple … If you piss her off, you’re going to a grand jury and you may or may not be indicted,” Judge Darrell Jordan
“We are seeing the use of prosecutorial powers for political, policy and financial gain, which is incredibly concerning. The targets are political adversaries and county staff the DA disagrees with,” Former County Administrator Dave Berry, who resigned this year, said that Ogg used “explicit and implicit threats” of a criminal inquiry if she didn’t get the funding outcome that she wanted.
Amanda Marzullo, the former director of the Justice Administration Department, said that her department couldn’t function appropriately because they “couldn’t figure out who was in the jail and why” because people throughout the county responsible for obtaining the data “would say things like, ‘I don’t even look at this information because I’m worried about being prosecuted.’ … It was hard to predict if you were complying with the law in the eyes of the DA.” Citing the “chilling effect” of Ogg’s behavior, Marzullo resigned.
Ana Correa, Marzullo’s predecessor at the Justice Administration Department, resigned, too, writing that Ogg’s behavior “negatively impacted morale among staff, resulting in fear of becoming legal targets for conducting county-related work and, ultimately, led to some staff resignations.”
“I know there are people up and down the bureaucracy who are scared or don’t want to start, or will end their tenure with the county sooner because they're facing this pattern of behavior … That’s very real. It costs people a lot of emotional anxiety. It costs money.” County Judge Lina Hidalgo
3. Yet another high profile resignation: Paul Fortenberry, chief of the felony trials bureau and a sixteen-year veteran of the office, resigned.
His resignation followed the resignation of Johna Stallings, Chief of the Human Trafficking and Adult Sex Crimes Division, earlier this year. On her way out the door, Stallings plead with the District Attorney to create an office where “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.”
Both of these resignations are part of an almost Biblical exodus—and an equal amount of rage at the office’s leadership. Indeed, Houston Watch recently reviewed over *190* resignation letters from Harris County District Attorney’s Office employees pursuant to a public records request. Themes that emerged from these resignation letters included complaints that office leadership was “condescending”, “not approachable”, engaged in “retaliation”, “nepotism”, “unprofessionalism”, “favoritism” and a “lack of communication.”
These resignation letters mirror themes from former prosecutors who worked under Kim Ogg’s leadership. For example, on GlassDoor, prosecutors referred to leadership as “bad”, “toxic,” “horrible”, “hostile”, “mismanaged beyond comprehension” and guilty of “staggering incompetence.” As one former employee wrote: “This place has the worst work environment ever, and caters to the incompetent and lazy.”
These themes are also echoed in an independent audit of the Harris County District Attorney’s Office commissioned by the Harris County Commissioners Court. The firm, PFM Consulting Group, concluded that Ogg’s system for prioritizing and processing cases is “inherently inefficient” to the point where prosecutors simply “do not feel responsible for working up the case, tracking down discovery, and ensuring that it moves forward.” Due to these chronic problems, the chiefs who run the various divisions within the office told the researchers that “attorneys burn out quickly and resign,” which leads to a staff composed of “inexperienced prosecutors [who] lack the knowledge and insight that comes from prosecuting cases.”