Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will work in a food bank to help fulfill his deal to avoid being tried for fraud, according to the Houston Chronicle.
On Thursday, Paxton’s lawyer confirmed the type of community service his client will be serving but didn’t offer more details on when or where it would be completed.
“I'm not going to get into the weeds of it because I don't think it's anybody's business,” Dan Cogdell told the Chronicle. “I don’t want protestors showing up.”
Cogdell did not immediately return a call and email from The Texas Newsroom.
Brian Wice, the lead prosecutor on the case, declined to comment on Cogdell’s statements and would not offer additional details about the community service.
Paxton was indicted in 2015 on two counts of securities fraud and one count of acting as an investment adviser representative without being registered with the state, both felonies. The case dragged on for years, prolonged by the recusal of the district attorney and appointment of special prosecutors, the removal of judges and venue shifts between Collin and Harris County.
Then, in March, just weeks before Paxton was scheduled to go before a jury, his defense team and the special prosecutors pursuing the case announced they had reached a deal to forgo the trial.
Under their agreement, Paxton’s charges will be dropped if he takes legal ethics classes, pays around $270,000 in restitution to the men he allegedly defrauded and does 100 hours of community service.
When the deal was first announced, the parties said that Paxton would perform his community service in Collin County, where he’s had a family home for decades.
This month, however, an official with the community supervision department in Collin County said Paxton’s case had not been transferred there. Even if he had information about Paxton’s case, he would not provide it, he said.
“We would decline to release information about an individual’s performance of community service,” Robbin Gilbert, the department’s deputy director, said on Aug. 9.
The Houston court handling the case appears to have signed off on the deal struck between Paxton and the prosecutors, called a PTI or pretrial intervention contract, on July 12. But the contract itself is not in the public case file.
Prosecutors and Paxtons’ lawyers have declined to release a copy of the contract, which would likely provide more details about the deal they struck.
The Texas Newsroom also tried to get more information about the deal from Harris County, including the court assigned to the case, the district attorney and local community supervision officials. No one had details.
Reached again by phone this week, Wice said he believes the document can be kept secret.
Court precedent might back him up, as reported by the Austin American-Statesman.
In 2016 and 2017, the Travis County attorney was asked to turn over agreements that its lawyers made with defendants in domestic violence cases. The initial request came from a woman who wanted a copy of the deal her ex-husband cut after she accused him of abuse.
The county attorney declined to release the documents and asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose agency interprets state records laws, to back them up. Instead, Paxton’s agency decided that still-active agreements, in which the defendant had not completed the terms of the deal, should be released.
In response, the county attorney sued Paxton.
His office argued state law allows law enforcement records to be withheld if the investigation did not result in a conviction or deferred adjudication, and if the release of the records would interfere with the “detection, investigation or prosecution of crime.”
The state district court sided with the county attorney. Paxton kept fighting, but eventually lost after the Texas Supreme Court declined to reverse lower courts’ decisions.
A spokesman with the Attorney General’s Office did not answer questions about whether Paxton still agrees these kinds of agreements should be released to the public.
Bill Aleshire, who represented the woman in the Travis County case, said keeping these records secret hurts victims and public trust in the criminal justice system.
“I don’t believe in any case the prosecutor ought to be making deals with criminal defendants that they keep secret from the public, and especially not when there are victims of the crime,” Aleshire told The Texas Newsroom.
The Texas Newsroom has filed a public records request for a copy of the agreement between the prosecutors and Paxton’s defense team.
