Texas AG Ken Paxton is not a first-time offender who deserves a second chance | Grumet

The Texas criminal justice system has an off-ramp for people who deserve a second chance — people who messed up once, regret the lapse and agree to make amends and stay out of trouble.

Does that sound like Attorney General Ken Paxton to you?

Paxton’s nine-year legal odyssey over three felony securities fraud charges ended in a 3-minute hearing Tuesday morning, in which the state’s top law enforcement officer took the judicial system’s off-ramp for first-time offenders. It’s called a pretrial intervention.

Paxton will pay $271,000 in restitution, perform 100 hours of community service and attend 15 hours of legal ethics training — altogether no small commitment. But he bypasses any threat of jail time and avoids having any conviction on his record (indeed, Paxton steadfastly maintains he is not guilty).

In isolation, that might be a passable outcome. The victims in this case, investors in a Dallas-area tech startup, will be made whole. And at least in theory, all of that community service and ethics training should humble a person — although it’s hard to imagine Paxton, unbowed by impeachment and undaunted by federal investigation, being humbled by anything.

More: Texas AG Ken Paxton to pay $271,000 in restitution to resolve securities fraud charges

I think that’s why this outcome doesn’t sit right with so many Texans, including the folks who inundated special prosecutor Brian Wice with “a torrent” of calls and emails objecting to Paxton’s deal. It feels like the man who once outran a process server is now giving the entire judicial system the slip.

Pretrial interventions are supposed to be for people who made a mistake that shouldn’t derail their lives. Or, in the words of a Texas prosecutor who wrote about pretrial interventions in 2007, for “good people who’ve gotten themselves into stupid situations.”

That’s not Ken Paxton.

He wasn’t the victim of a lapse in judgment. He was a seasoned corporate attorney and then-lawmaker who should know the law.

Once he was charged, he played the system like the consummate insider. Fights over venue. A brazen effort to defund the special prosecutors. Multiple trips up and down the appellate ladder. This is not the journey of your typical first-time offender.

While 83% of state-level felony charges are resolved within a year, Paxton’s case ran just shy of a decade.

And while those criminal charges hung over his head, Paxton acted unfettered. He used the powers of the attorney general’s office to help friend and donor Nate Paul with his legal problems. He fired the whistleblowers who brought concerns about possible corruption to the FBI. He filed a lawsuit, filled with widely discredited claims of wrongdoing in four other states, in a failed attempt to get the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Those are some serious following acts for a first-time mistake.

Not that Paxton signaled any intention of reining himself in. To the contrary, Paxton exacted revenge on the campaign trail. Seven of the GOP House members who voted for his impeachment last year lost their primaries this month, and eight more are headed to runoffs. Meanwhile, Paxton-backed challengers ousted three judges on the Court of Criminal Appeals who had crossed the attorney general in 2021 by ruling he couldn’t unilaterally prosecute election crimes.

More: Texas AG Ken Paxton to strike a deal on securities fraud charges? Here's how we got here.

None of this is the behavior of someone taking responsibility for the error of their ways.

It was never reasonable to expect a trio of securities fraud charges to deliver the full reckoning Paxton deserves. But Texans hoped for something, and after nine long years, this case delivered too little.

Speaking to reporters after the lightning-quick hearing Tuesday morning, Wice suggested that “these people (who) have registered their monumental displeasure at what happened in these cases” should have registered their views “at the ballot box,” when Paxton was up for reelection in 2018 and 2022.

Fair enough. But the courts had a role to play, too. And nothing about Paxton signals he’s a first-time offender who deserves a second chance.

Grumet is the Statesman’s Metro columnist. Her column, ATX in Context, contains her opinions. Share yours via email at bgrumet@statesman.com or via Twitter at @bgrumet. Find her previous work at statesman.com/news/columns.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Ken Paxton is not first-time offender who deserves a second chance