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News Article
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Appeals court rules against Caballero, Leeds
By Timothy Roberts
A state appeals court says that attorneys Theresa Caballero and Stuart Leeds had no business intervening in the case of an elementary school coach who had been accused – but never prosecuted – for sexually abusing a student.
Caballero, a candidate for county attorney, and Leeds, who now chairs the County Ethics Commission, say they got involved in the case to end a cover-up at the county courthouse that was allowing the man to have his record cleared decades before it should have been.
The man seeking to clear his record was the brother of the district attorney’s secretary.
But current County Attorney Jo Anne Bernal, who is running against Caballero in the March 2 Democratic primary, says the man was treated no differently than another person asking to have an accusation expunged from his record.
It is the second time that Caballero has raised the issue. The first time was two years ago when she was running for District Attorney. Now the Eighth District Court of Appeals has weighed in.
In a ruling Jan. 13, the court doesn’t say a word about the propriety of the County Attorney’s Office approving the expungement of the record of Alberto Ocegueda, an elementary school coach, who was accused by a six-year-old girl of abusing her.
Instead the ruling says that neither Caballero nor Leeds had the legal standing to intervene in the case and that a judge who sided with them lacked jurisdiction in the case.
The case began on Nov. 6, 2006, when Alberto Ocegueda, a coach at an El Paso Independent School District elementary school, was charged with aggravated sexual assault of the six-year-old female student.
Because of his connection to the office, the D.A. turned the case over to a special prosecutor. In April 2007, the special prosecutor declined to prosecute the case. It isn’t clear from the record why the case was dropped. But Ocegueda asked the county attorney to expunge the charge from the record.
The record was expunged in short order and that would have been that, but for Caballero and Leeds, who, after reading about the charges in the newspaper, tried to follow up on the case months later. They were surprised to learn that the charges had been expunged.
Caballero and Leeds intervened, asking a judge to reconsider the decision to allow the charges to be expunged. The case was turned over to an out-of-town judge, Carl Pendergrass of Fort Stockton, who ruled that the county attorney had been wrong to expunge the record and ordered it reinstated. But when Leeds and Caballero asked for the records in the case, the county sought the opinion of the Texas attorney general, saying it didn’t think it could release personal information.
The attorney general agreed, in two separate opinions in June and July 2007. The county then asked Judge Pendergrass to clarify his order. In response the judge held a hearing in El Paso that produced numerous heated exchanges, according to the transcript.
At the conclusion of the hearing, Judge Pendergrass said, “The order of expungement should never have gotten through the County Attorney’s office.”
Ocegueda couldn’t even ask to clean his record until the statute of limitations had run out on the charge, more than 20 years later, the judge said.
And because District Clerk Gilbert Sanchez had failed to release the records, Pendergrass found him in contempt of court and sentenced him to 90 days in the county jail.
Sanchez quickly released the records and was spared the jail sentence. He faces unrelated charges in an FBI corruption investigation to which he has pleaded innocent.
But the story doesn’t end there. Ocegueda appealed the Pendergrass ruling, and last month the state appeals court found that Judge Pendergrass did not have authority to rule in the case and that Leeds and Caballero should not have intervened.
Caballero says she plans to appeal that decision to the Texas Supreme Court.
She says the county attorney’s office where Bernal was the first assistant county attorney failed the public.
“They were protecting their friends and they were throwing Gilbert Sanchez to the dogs,” Caballero said in an interview. “Everybody did the wrong thing. The county attorney should never have agreed to expunge the record in the first place.”
Bernal said that as part of the process of expunging a record, her office notified more than a dozen law enforcement agencies from the sheriff to the FBI, and no one raised any objections.
“This was absolutely not favoritism,” Bernal said. “No one knew the subject was related to anyone in the courthouse.”
And she added, “We gave good and prudent advice, and we are pleased the Court of Appeals agreed with us.”
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| anotherobserver - posted: 2/13/2010 3:03:03 PM
What I find amazing is that the statute doesn't even allow a person (who was never even prosecuted!) to have the record of his arrest expunged! Why should someone who was never prosecuted for a crime have wait DECADES to have his record cleared? The law needs to be changed. | | keenobserver - posted: 2/9/2010 10:48:13 AM
Caballero wants to be County Attorney. But, she takes actions that are clearly not consistent with the law. Meanwhile, all she was doing was wasting taxpayer money on a frivolous lawsuit that she had no business filing in the first place.
She had time to intervene in a case that did not involve her or any client of hers while she was failing to take care of the fundamentals of an appeal for one of her actual criminal defendant clients so now the 5th Circuit is threatening to bar her from federal practice. She said it was a "mistake" but the 5th Circuit terminated her representation and got the guy a new lawyer. Maybe the mistake would not have been made if she wasn't so busy attacking people who are actually doing their jobs.
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