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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It may also be the case, as several locals told me, that residents in the 143rd District—and particularly those in Reeves County—have a different notion of justice than most Texans, and that many people here simply like the way Reynolds does his job. He is in many ways the polar opposite of the quintessential Texas DA, the self-righteous crusader personified for a generation by former Harris County prosecutor Johnny Holmes, who made a career out of nailing even small-time crooks to the wall. “That’s not how you get elected in Reeves County,” said Stickels, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and an advocate for criminal justice reform. Attitudes about law and order in Reeves County are informed by a blend of cowboy culture, with its disdain for authority and reverence for individual rights, and Mexican culture, in which a tradition of professional law enforcement is not well established. “It’s a border county that is not on the border,” said Jon Fulbright, the managing editor of the Pecos Enterprise. Though the chamber of commerce still clings to the town’s celebrated cowboy heritage, most residents of Pecos, which is 80 percent Hispanic, are second- or third-generation descendants of Mexican immigrant farmworkers, who have historically viewed law enforcement on both sides of the border with suspicion. It’s no secret that it’s hard to get a conviction, or even an indictment, from a Reeves County jury. This seems to be especially true for certain types of crimes: There has not been a single jury trial for sexual assault of an adult in the past ten years in Reeves County; in fact, only two rapes have been referred to Reynolds’s office for prosecution in that period. “I had a fourteen-year-old mentally retarded girl who said her brother-in-law held her down and raped her,” said Stickels. “I mean, he gave her chlamydia. It was an easy case to prove.” Not guilty.
Residents also tend to take a pragmatic view of drug trafficking in the 143rd District, where smuggling has been a fact of life since before Texas was a state. That goes for law enforcement as well. Reynolds’s office is funded in part by the Mexican drug cartels, whose couriers are regularly intercepted heading west along the interstate, bound for Mexico and loaded with cash. In the 143rd District, most of the seizures are made by a golden goose named Kevin Roberts, a Reeves County sheriff’s deputy who spends all day on the interstate and has never failed to find at least a couple hundred thousand dollars per year, which is split between the county sheriff’s office and Reynolds’s office. (Civil dockets in places like Pecos are always full of asset-forfeiture cases, styled with odd-sounding names like The State of Texas v. $153,200 and a green Chevy Tahoe. In many such busts, no criminal conviction is ever obtained.) If Roberts ever flew the coop, Reynolds said, he would have to lay off his investigators, at least until somebody else with his nose for dirty money could be found.
When I told Reynolds how one Pecos resident summed up his reelection—“He appealed to the good people in Monahans and the bad people over here”—he scoffed, though he did admit there were some unique challenges in Reeves County. “We are primarily a Democratic county, we have been a depressed county for a long time, and we have a lot of people on public assistance. So you’ve got a different makeup of a jury here. And it takes twelve to convict.” He paused. “I’d like to think they elected me to do my job rather than to not do it,” he said.
On more than one occasion during our interview, Reynolds suggested that much more damage had been done over the years by overzealous prosecutors than by unmotivated ones. He mentioned the recent string of DNA exonerations in Dallas and the challenge that new Dallas district attorney Craig Watkins faces in undoing the reputation for unfairness that his predecessors have built. “My job is not to get convictions but to seek justice—that’s in the code,” he said.
Still, there is something undeniably self-serving about Reynolds’s professed reverence for the prosecutor’s oath. Seeking justice for what happened to the young men at the youth prison in Pyote called not for discretion but for diligence—in the face of something most people would prefer to pretend didn’t exist. Reynolds, who declined to talk about the Pyote case until the prosecution of the two defendants (which is now being handled by the attorney general’s office) was complete, has said in the past that he intended to bring the cases before a grand jury eventually. But while Reynolds waited, one of the alleged perpetrators had already moved on to a position as a principal at a charter school, where he was surrounded every day by students the same age as his alleged victims at Pyote. And there have been other cases that failed to make headlines but were just as ugly. Prior to the sex-abuse scandal, a young man at Pyote claimed he was attacked by a group of fellow inmates and sodomized with a broom handle. After Reynolds failed to take action, Kevin Acker took up the case and succeeded in getting the accused certified to stand trial as adults. Reynolds failed to get the grand jury to indict. As Reeves County sheriff Arnulfo Gomez put it, “Harm has been done.”
The bottom line for voters in the 143rd District is that they may be stuck with Reynolds for a while. One-hundred-dollar-a-barrel oil has brought many things back to this region—new motels, fast-food chains, drilling rigs, roughnecks, landmen—but attorneys are not among them. The State Bar of Texas lists only seven lawyers in Monahans. One of them is dead, one is disbarred, one is the district judge, and one is the county judge. Of the eleven listed in Pecos, there are only four still practicing, leaving aside Reynolds, the county attorney, and the county court-at-law judge. There are simply not that many people around who are qualified, much less willing, to do Reynolds’s job.
One person who probably could have beaten Reynolds is a comely and engaging 27-year-old Pecos attorney named Alva Alvarez, who returned to her hometown in 2006 after four years at Harvard and three at the University of Texas School of Law. Alvarez, who interned with Ronnie Earle, the progressive Austin district attorney, and sports an “Obama, Si Se Puede” bumper sticker on her car, is the first person in her family to go to college. In her law school application essay, she wrote about her desire to do something for the hardworking people of her hometown—people like her father, who drives an oil-field services truck, and her mother, a teacher’s aide who emigrated from Mexico at the age of 12. She got the opportunity to serve sooner than she expected: Shortly after her return, Reeves County attorney Luis Carrasco was indicted for theft. A 91-year-old former state legislator who had never practiced law filled in until Alvarez could get up to speed and take over the position.
She has gotten great reviews as county attorney. “Alva won’t back down from anybody. She has been a tremendous help to us,” Sheriff Gomez said. But county attorney is a part-time job, which allows Alvarez to keep her newly minted law practice going. “In a small town you end up doing a variety of cases,” she said. “I enjoy helping people.” She would have to give all that up if she became district attorney, now that the Legislature has made the position a full-time job. Then there is the question of money—the best attorneys in Pecos and Monahans can earn more than the $125,000 Reynolds makes as DA, Alvarez said. In effect, the Legislature has actually made it less likely—not more likely—that the best and the brightest in the 143rd District will throw their hats in the ring someday to replace Reynolds.
Even when pressed, Alvarez wouldn’t say anything bad about Reynolds. “He’s our hometown boy, and ever since we were little kids,” she said, “we were taught to root for our hometown.” But she had taken the time to clip out the article with the governor’s quote about Reynolds. Pulling it out of her desk drawer, she looked at it and smiled at the irony of what the powers that be in Austin had done in their anger over the Pyote scandal. “They gave him the job for life,” she said.
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