Houston’s DA Rosenthal Takes Fire
January 2nd, 2008 at 7:08 am
Harris County District Attorney Charles A Rosenthal, Jr. has hit a rough patch. Even Houston Republicans want him to quit.
Just after Christmas, the country’s newspaper of record singled out Rosenthal as a lonely voice in a sea of change: Harris County is responsible for fully one-quarter of the executions in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976. And Texas is leaving the rest of the country behind in terms of the numbers of those put to death. Rosenthal has been Harris DA since 2001, and he has presided over a significant portion of Texas’ Death Boom. But that’s not why the local GOP wants to oust him.
Around the same time a federal court inadvertently released emails in which ‘Chuck’ alternately woos and declares his heart for his executive secretary (whom he has apparently been involved with before) — while his campaign site proudly touts his second marriage to a “former FBI Special Agent.” Death penalty, okay. Adultery, off with his head, ur, job!
In a front page piece on Dec. 26, the New York Times quoted Rosenthal’s defense of Texas’ outsized number of executions:
Charles A. Rosenthal, Jr., the district attorney of Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston and has accounted for 100 executions since 1976, said the Texas capital justice system was working properly. The pace of executions in Texas, he said, “has to do with how many people are in the pipeline when certain rulings come down.”
A separate article two days later most clearly described Rosenthal’s situation regarding the emails to his secretary:
The e-mail messages were attachments to a brief filed by Mr. Rosenthal’s lawyers seeking to keep the exchanges under seal. When Judge Kenneth Hoyt of Federal District Court in Houston ruled on a motion by KHOU-TV that Mr. Rosenthal’s pleading itself could be made public, the e-mail attachments were inadvertently unsealed briefly.
The filings grew out a civil lawsuit by two brothers, Erik Adam Ibarra and Sean Carlos Ibarra, who claimed that on Jan. 4, 2002, they were beaten after taking pictures of sheriff’s deputies abusing a family during execution of a search warrant. A lawyer for the brothers later claimed that Mr. Rosenthal and the sheriff’s office were looking out for each other, the filings said, as in ‘I’ll watch your back if you watch mine.’
In that brief filed on Dec. 19, the Ibarra brothers’ lawyer, Lloyd E. Kelley, claimed that Mr. Rosenthal had deleted at least 2,500 e-mail messages after they should have been turned over to the court in the process of legal discovery after Nov. 16.
In his court papers, Mr. Rosenthal has claimed that his e-mail messages came under ‘zones of privacy’ involving personal conduct recognized by the United States Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case in which the court overturned the state’s anti-sodomy law.
The irony here is that Rosenthal argued for Texas in Lawrence v. Texas, urging the Supreme Court not to recognize the very privacy he now claims. (For more on Lawrence v. Texas, see here.)
So it’s perhaps not a shock that the Harris County GOP has voted to ask him to step aside, and reports suggest, if he does decide to run again, Rosenthal will see a challenge from within his own party. If so, that means this mystery candidate must file today, because candidate filing closes at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 2.
In any case, Rosenthal or his GOP replacement will face former Houston Police Chief C.O. ‘Brad’ Bradford in the general election. Bradford is an eloquent speaker and he is just one example of a surge of Houston Democrats that will take the reins of city and county offices as demographics change in Harris County.
Bradford said in his announcement speech:
This community… need not fear crime as long as there is a strong, but fair, justice system… Fairness is something the district attorney’s office sorely needs…
Bradford also called for “a truly independent crime lab” — independent, that is, of both the police department and the district attorney’s office.
Rosenthal has won and kept his office, arguably, by being pro-death penalty. It’s just an extension of the issue that keeps on giving in Texas: being tough on crime. Harvey Kronberg, back in 1999, printed the following about Rosenthal after he was the first to announce for Johnny Holmes’ job:
He has served his entire 22 year professional career in the D.A.’s office. He currently serves as Chief of Felony Division B supervising prosecutors in six district courts. He has tried more than 200 jury trials and sent fourteen offenders to death row.
Rosenthal says on his campaign site, “Without safety, other rights and freedoms are meaningless.”
Come on… Meaningless? And can he point to any evidence that the death penalty increases safety?
I don’t think Ronald Taylor’s rights were meaningless, although they seemed as much in the pursuit of ‘justice’ when he was condemned to serve 14 years for a rape he didn’t commit (while the statute of limitations ran out on a suspect later identified by DNA). That’s just one instance where Houston’s notoriously faulty crime lab served up lab results that imprisoned the wrong person.
However, election results show that scandal or no scandal, a substantial majority of Harris County voters have backed Rosenthal again and again. In his initial primary run in 2000, he beat four GOP candidates, garnering 45.27 percent of the vote. The runoff thereafter was his last contested GOP fight. And, with George W. Bush at the top of the ticket in both general elections, Rosenthal beat his Democratic opponent handily — in 2000 by 54-46, and in 2004, by 55-45.
Even if Chuck Rosenthal is “damaged goods,” as the Harris County GOP County Judge Ed Emmett called him, he ought not to be counted out until he is down for the count. We’ll keep our eye on this one. That’s for sure.
January 2nd, 2008 at 8:58 am
Harris County has not been “responsible for fully one-quarter of the executions in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976″. Harris County has been responsible for about 1/4 of the Texas executions since 1976 - 102 out of 405.
Texas executed 405 since 1976. 1099 have been executed in the U.S.A. since 1976. Texas accounts for about 36% of all USA executions. Harris County accounts for just over 10% of all persons executed in the USA.
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:25 pm
blah no offense dude blah blah, the best thing about this Rosenthal story is how in The Great Muppet Caper Ms Piggie gets arrested and Kermit comes to tell her that he and the gang from the Happiness Hotel are going to break her out. Of course, to get in he has to say he’s her lawyer and give a fake name. He calls himself Rosenthal, and wears a fake mustache that sticks to Piggie’s face when they kiss between the bars.
January 10th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
[…] embattled district attorney (who has already taken his name off the ballot). The saga of Charles A Rosenthal Jr. is one long government email hemmorhage — complete with campaigning from a government perch, […]