Ogg Burns Resources Prosecuting A 64-Year-Old Black Man For Voting While Her Office Struggles To Secure Convictions In Murder, Sexual Assault, And Drunk Driving Cases.
Hervis Rogers, a 64-year-old Black man, worked two different jobs on the day of the 2020 Harris County primary election. But that didn’t stop him from waiting in line for over six hours to cast his ballot, leaving the polling station at just after 1:00 AM.
This devotion to participating in local democracy earned Mr. Rogers immediate attention from news stations, who heralded him as a hero. Unfortunately, though, that attention also put him on the radar screen of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, an ultra-conservative figure who has led the choir on claims of widespread voter fraud despite a complete lack of evidence to support those claims.
As it turns out, Mr. Rogers was on parole for a crime that he committed back in 1995. Even though he had left prison over fifteen years prior, Rogers was still on parole in March 2020, which left him ineligible to vote in Texas. Rogers, whose parole ended just four months after he cast his ballot—in July 2020—said that he believed that he was eligible to vote.
This fact-pattern doesn’t occur frequently, but when it arises, it happens both to people who vote for Democrats and Republicans—and it almost always involves a person who seems to genuinely not have known that he or she was ineligible to vote. Indeed, one of the reasons why it is so easy for someone in Mr. Roger’s shoes to assume that you have the right to vote is because they “get correspondence from the government, they get a voter registration card … [and] assume if the state is providing you this material that it has been approved by someone,” Houston lawyer Nicole DeBorde Hochglaube told KERA.
That’s why prosecutors almost never prosecute these cases. To secure a conviction in a case involving these facts, a prosecutor must prove that the person knew that they could not legally cast a vote but did so anyway. Yet, it's just so obvious to everyone involved, including prospective jurors, that someone’s grandpa didn’t stand in line for six hours to take part in a widespread effort to fraudulently elect anyone. It was just a mistake.
Yet, in recent years, a narrative has spread among a subsection of ultra-conservative Republicans that widespread election fraud is undermining Republican victories at the ballot box. This narrative skyrocketed in volume and importance in the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential election, as President Trump and his allies warned the country of the “Blue Steal” that could cost him his re-election bid.
No one loves this narrative more than Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican. And he decided to make an example out of Hervis Rogers. As KERA reported, the Attorney General had “Rogers arrested and charged with a felony [arguing that] Rogers was prohibited from casting a ballot because he was on parole.” But “the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton cannot unilaterally prosecute alleged election crimes,” and the case was dismissed.
So now, to prosecute Rogers and elevate the baseless election fraud narrative, Paxton had to find a friend in a local prosecutor who had the authority to prosecute the case.
In theory, that’s a possible outcome. For example, in Tarrant County, Republican (now former) District Attorney Sharon Wilson made national news—not in a good way—when she prosecuted Crystal Mason, for casting a provisional ballot (which was not counted) during the 2016 Presidential election. At the time, Mason was ineligible to vote following a previous federal conviction, but said she believed that she was eligible. More recently, in Memphis, Tennessee, (now former) Shelby County prosecutor Amy Weirich, a Republican, made national news—again, not in the good way—when she prosecuted Pamela Moses, a Black woman who voted in a haze of confusion created by public officials over whether she was eligible to vote given her felony record. Ultimately, even Weirich decided to drop the charges “in the interest of judicial economy.”
Yet, unlike Paxton, Wilson, and Weirich, the local prosecutor in Harris County, where Rogers voted, didn’t win election as a Republican promoting an election fraud narrative. Instead, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg was elected as a Democrat. And it’s easier to find a Republican prosecutor who vows not to prosecute abortion cases than to find a Democrat to prosecute an elderly Black man for voting.
And yet, the Harris County Grand Jury had to reject Kim Ogg’s effort to prosecute Rogers on “at least one count of illegal voting,” The Houston Chronicle reported. Apparently, the judicial economy gospel didn’t make it all the way down to Houston from Memphis.
But that’s the problem with Ogg’s office right now. As the Hervis Rogers case illustrates, Ogg simply cannot prioritize cases, and the result is that prosecutors do not have the ability to focus their time and energy on the prosecution of the most serious and dangerous crimes. Take, for example:
Ogg’s office has dismissed over 2,000 drunk driving cases in the past eighteen months. The office “dismissed more than *thirty* drunk driving cases at trial in the past two months alone.” And,“*in 2022 alone*, Ogg’s prosecutors suffered not guilty verdicts in at least thirteen additional driving while intoxicated cases.”
From January 2022 through June 2023—a period of eighteen months—Harris County has endured nearly 700 murders. Over the same time period, the District Attorney’s Office only managed to secure murder convictions in ten of those cases. In four additional cases, the D.A.’s office originally filed a murder prosecution, but ultimately were forced to plead, or chose to plead, the case down to manslaughter (three cases) or injury to a child (one case). And, over a two week period spanning the end of June through early July of this year, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office failed to secure a conviction at trial in six different murder cases. Then, a week later, prosecutors lost another four murder cases—two not guilty verdicts and two dismissals at trial.
Ogg’s office dismissed at least two dozen sexual assault prosecutions in just the one year period between 1/1/22 and 1/1/23. That does not include the cases where a jury returned a not-guilty verdict at trial. Then, last month, Ogg’s office was forced to dismiss two serious sex cases—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.
Ogg’s inability to prioritize cases has not only cost victims in the community an opportunity to obtain justice, but has also wreaked havoc on the morale of prosecutors in the office. Houston Watch recently reviewed *190* resignation letters from Harris County District Attorney’s Office employees submitted since January 1st, 2022, representing an almost Biblical exodus—and an equal amount of rage at the office’s leadership, including D.A. Ogg.
Perhaps no resignation letter communicated this sentiment better than that of the former Chief of the Human Trafficking and Adult Sex Crimes Division, Johna Stallings, who submitted her resignation to D.A. Ogg earlier this year, pleading 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.”
Prosecutors have also referred to leadership as “bad”, “toxic,” “horrible”, “hostile” and “mismanaged beyond comprehension” and guilty of “staggering incompetence.” As one former employee wrote on a public forum: “This place has the worst work environment ever, and caters to the incompetent and lazy.”
An independent research firm called PFM Consulting Group came to similar conclusions in a study that the Harris County Commissioners Court commissioned. The researchers concluded that Ogg’s system for case management—in short, how Ogg prioritizes and processes cases—as “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.”