I’ve updated the county commissioners page as much as I can. Jeff Travillion’s page still has staff and contact information “coming soon”.
As always with any of these pages, if you detect errors or omissions, please contact me.
Archive for February 2nd, 2017
Speaking of Travis County…
Thursday, February 2nd, 2017Half a million dollars.
Thursday, February 2nd, 2017This is slightly old news that I’ve been meaning to note for a couple of days now. I still think it’s worth mentioning, because it seems to me there’s something buried in the press coverage.
The Travis County Commissioners Court has voted to pay Judge Julie Kocurek $500,000.
“Does this have something to do with her being shot?” you might ask.
Indeed, it does.
“But why? The county didn’t shoot her. The cops didn’t shoot her. She was shot by a bad guy.”
Indeed, this is true. The money is being given as a settlement for “any claims against the county that Kocurek could have sought in a lawsuit”. Some of this is spelled out in the Statesman stories, and some of this is me reading between the lines, but it looks like the argument is:
- There was a credible tip that Chimene Onyeri was targeting a judge.
- The tip was investigated by the Travis County DA’s office.
- Apparently, the investigators thought that the judge being targeted was both a male judge and one that wasn’t in Travis County.
- It isn’t clear to me if the investigators knew that Onyeri had an appearance coming up in Judge Kocurek’s court (where he likely would have been sent back to prison) and ruled her out as a target because she wasn’t a male judge, or if they weren’t aware of his upcoming appearance.
- In any case, they decided there was no “credible threat to any Travis County district judge”.
- Judge Kocurek was shot three weeks later.
It’s hard for me to tell if anyone was wrong here. On the one hand, it seems like there was a credible threat: was it dismissed because the investigators screwed up and didn’t realize the subject of the threat might not have a been a male judge? And a big question is: why didn’t they warn all the judges? On the other hand, there’s an argument that the investigators did the best they could with limited information. And if they sent out warnings to all the judges every time some jackhole shot his mouth off, pretty soon it’d be “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” all over again.
No matter what, though, taxpayers are going to be out $500,000. I don’t begrudge Judge Kocurek the money: if you offered me $500,000 to let someone shoot at me, my response would be three words (two of those being “go” and “yourself”).
But it still bothers me.