Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
The Reluctant Prosecutor
Is Randy Reynolds the worst district attorney in Texas? Or is he just giving the people of Reeves, Ward, and Loving counties the kind of justice they want?
M & R Acker says: It is about time someone shed a little light on the ill-fated laws of Reeves, Loving & Ward counties. And the paople and families that RUN these areas.I lived there for a year and could not wait to get out. they make their own laws and seldom abide by the ones the rest of us live by. (January 29th, 2009 at 12:18am)
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This particular morning he was on his way to the Pecos Police Department to discuss a double-murder case, a stabbing of a bar owner and his wife, for which Reynolds planned to file a capital murder charge, the first in recent memory in the area. He wore loose-fitting blue jeans and a short-sleeved button-down with two pens and a pair of reading glasses in the breast pocket. Rural prosecutors rarely seek the death penalty, in part because such cases are so costly for the county, especially if the defendant cannot afford his or her own attorney. But Reynolds, who carried a paperback copy of Criminal Laws of Texas and a bundle of folders and legal pads under his arm, seemed grateful for the opportunity to demonstrate his abilities. “Wouldn’t want you to think we just sat around all day doing nothing,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh.
Reynolds has no assistant prosecutors; he personally handles every case, aided by three investigators and two secretaries, one in Pecos and the other at a satellite office in Monahans, which is open only half-time. (There is little demand for Reynolds’ services in Loving County, which has a population of less than one hundred.) Jury trials in the 143rd are uncommon—only a few defendants per year decide to take their chances—but when cases do go to trial, Reynolds has not fared well. In a state where acquittals are rare, over the past ten years Reynolds has lost one third of his cases that went to jury trial, including his last murder case, in November 2006.
At the police station, while we waited at a conference table for the meeting to begin, Reynolds showed me some figures, hastily scrawled on the back of what looked like a jury instruction form, that he had put together to refute the AP story on his dismissal rate. Some of the dismissals, he noted, occurred after perpetrators were convicted in other cases. Still, there is no question that Reynolds obtains far fewer convictions than the average Texas prosecutor. Reynolds admitted that he was partial to deferred adjudication, a punishment that is similar to probation but is generally considered a more lenient option, since it does not result in a conviction on a defendant’s record. “I’m always telling my staff, ‘Can we prove it beyond a reasonable doubt?’ And if we can’t, we have to dismiss,” he said.
As we talked, the table was filling up with cops, none of whom said a word as Reynolds defended his record. Reynolds has a good relationship with Pecos police chief Clay McKinney, an old family friend, but he rarely visits the county sheriff’s offices in Pecos or Monahans, where the mention of his name elicits a rueful shake of the head. Later that day, I asked Reeves County sheriff’s deputy Reno Lewis what Reynolds’s penchant for dismissals did for the morale of his officers. “They look at it as, ‘Why do we do this job for nothing?’” he said.
Reynolds’s most vocal critic in the district has been Kevin Acker, the Ward County attorney who tried to have Reynolds removed from office and, when that failed, ran against him last spring. Acker, a short, excitable man in his late forties, talks in the nonstop patter of a used-car dealer and gives the impression of always being on the make. When I first contacted him about Reynolds, he replied, “Bring me a book deal, and we’ll talk,” an offer he repeated at least half a dozen times when we met at his office. He was more than a little bitter about the election, in which he lost not only in Reynolds’s hometown of Pecos but also in Monahans, where he was raised and where, he said, people had encouraged him to run against Reynolds. “It was all blue sky and bullshit,” he said.
In fact, most people I talked to in Monahans and Pecos assumed that Acker would never be elected district attorney, despite Reynolds’s recent troubles. “In politics, you’re only good or bad by comparison,” said Bill Weinacht, a personal-injury attorney in Pecos. “There’s a lot to be said for being a nice guy who gets along with people.” Acker is not a popular person in Monahans, and he seems to know it. “When I moved back, they were all, ‘Oh, Kevin, you’re so wonderful—nobody ever moves back. You should get in Rotary, you should run for office,’” Acker said. “But after a while, it was like, ‘You shouldn’t have bought that brick house. You shouldn’t have bought that Bonneville. Why didn’t you get a truck?’” His pretensions notwithstanding, misconduct in his private practice has hurt Acker’s reputation more than anything else. He was placed on a probated suspension by the State Bar of Texas in 1998 for mismanaging a trust fund for a client in Monahans.
Reynolds, by contrast, comes from a well-loved and respected family in Pecos and is considered an all-around nice guy. Weinacht repeated a story that I heard many times and that almost everybody in Pecos knows, which is that Reynolds has spent a good deal of his time in recent years taking care of his wife, who had a debilitating stroke in 2003. “He loves his wife, he goes to church, he was a good football player,” Weinacht said. “In a small town you base your vote more on your personal knowledge of a candidate than on somebody else’s objective analysis of his competence.”
Reynolds is also widely thought to be honest and aboveboard, unusually refreshing qualities in a district that has seen a series of prosecutors skip town over the years under hazy circumstances. Acker, who has been county attorney since 1994, inherited the job after the resignation of an even less popular attorney named Ted Painter, whose serial abuse of his private-practice clients resulted in his being disbarred. The man widely regarded as the best defense attorney in either county is Hal Upchurch, who served as district attorney for a few years in the early nineties until he was forced to resign after being indicted in connection with a corruption investigation of the local drug task force. Upchurch wound up with a six-month sentence for a misdemeanor conviction. When he came home to Monahans, he promptly reopened his private practice and, after waiting a decent interval, attempted to get his old job back from Reynolds. He lost narrowly in an election that split along hometown lines. The tenure of Reynolds’s immediate predecessor, John Stickels, was marked by controversy as well. His career went south after he tussled with the commander of the drug task force, whom he later sued for libel and won, but not before defense attorneys subpoenaed his medical records in a scurrilous attempt to portray him as a suicidal alcoholic who could not do his job. Whatever else might be said about Reynolds, in a district where voters have learned not to expect too much from their public officials, he has at least brought some stability to the office.
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