It was reported today that the Office of the Inspector General of the United States of America Department of Justice is auditing the County of El Paso. Why? According to the news, County Attorney Jose Rodriguez and District Attorney Jaime Esparza have submitted bills to the federal government for prosecutions and the Feds say the bills are not warranted. The news said that the Department of Justice is asking the County (which would be Jaime Esparza and Jose Rodriguez) to justify, explain, and document $3.9 milllion extra paid to them in remibursements.

The Office of the Inspector General is, in my opinion, one of the last honest government offices left. It is the office that opened the investigation against former head of the El Paso FBI, Hardrick Crawford, who was ultimately indicted and convicted and sent to prison.

Esparza is now going to have to spend tax payer time trying to provide documentation to back up his bills to the feds. This is yet another scandal the community of El Paso is going to have to pay for because Esparza has a hard time doing things right the first time.

Also remarkable about the story is that County Attorney Jose Rodriguez, who is being questioned as to his bills to the feds, is also acting as the attorney for Jaime Esparza. Mr. Rodriguez was quoted in the news lauding Esparza for "'forcing the federal government...'" to pay the county for prosecutions, in an attempt to make Esparza look like the hero in this mess. In this case, Mr. Rodriguez is acting like a good defense attorney for his client and trying to put the best face on an embrassing and politically costly matter. The question is, how are you a lawyer for someone and a co-auditee of the same someone at the same time? Let's see if Esparza (who teaches ethics classes for CLE credit) and Mr. Rodriguez can figure out what they should do about this conflict of interest.

The article on this latest scandal was written by El Paso Times reporter David Crowder. Despite the gravity of the matter, the article was a soft ball one. Keep in mind that David Crowder was arrested over a year ago for DWI by the EPPD. The EPPD immediately called Esparza's office after apprehending Crowder. Esparza declined Crowder's charges ON THE SPOT. Crowder never saw the inside of the County Jail (it was a DIMS case). Does Dionicio Flores, who runs the paper, really think that we have forgotten that Esparza let his star reporter go? Does Flores also not recognize conflicts of interest? Given what Esparza did for Crowder, Crowder should not be covering this story. Will Dionicio Flores' blindness to Crowder's conflict of interest regarding this huge story not also convert into a blnd eye when it comes to the conflict of interest Esparza and Rodriguez have regarding the audit?

Money and women are usually what bring down a corrupt politician. Let's see what the Feds find and how Esparza (mis)handles yet anther scandal. Esparza is already doing his usual dodge the ball. The reporter could not find him for comment on the small matter of a Federal Audit of his Accounts. Where was he? Was he in Mexico City campaigning (remember the $350.00 lunch at the Maria Isabella Sheraton in Mexico City he wrote off as a campaign expense)? Was his secretary Amy Lujan in Mexico City again with him working on International extraditions? Or was he at the golf course? Could he have been busy dismissing cases for the powerful and the connected, i.e. Dick Poe's DWI dismissed (reference El Paso Times yesterday 10-12-07) or David Crowder's DWI? Or was Esparza at the City asking for money from them to do a job he is already paid to do?

Elect someone who can be reached for comment and will answer directly to the press and not hide out or worse yet hide behind the skirts of a tax paid female PR person who is not a lawyer to boot. Elect someone who will prosecute cases right the first time. Elect someone who is not going to be taking her tax paid secretary on the taxpayer dime to Mexico City to work on "legal matters." Elect someone who is not going to be in the news every three months for some allegation of dishonesty. Elect me, Theresa Caballero.

The Campaign season has revved up and as a result I have had less time to devote to my blog. I want to give you some updates:

-I have received several campaign contributions in the mail recently from people I have never met. To me, this means that the word is getting out that I am running and there are those in the community who desperately want a change and believe in me and my message. Thank you everyone for spreading the word.

-The message I am getting from the voter on the street is that Esparza has been in office too long. When you are passing the word around that I am running you may want to mention that Esparza has, to date, been in office 15 years. Now he wants to be in office for at least twenty years.--Also mention that when he first ran 16 years ago, his campaign platform was "No more than Two Terms." What happened?

-In the last two weeks, I have had three attorneys tell me that they have gotten some heat for contributing to my campaign. Two of them said they will now be giving me yet another contribution because they do not appreciate the strong arm tactics. Good for them! And very telling about the other camp.

-One week ago, the El Paso Bar Association put out their October journal. In it is a feature on me. Attorney Stephanie Townsend-Allala wrote the article. It is a positive piece and I want to thank Ms. Allala for calling me and asking for an interview and for recognizing the importance of my candidacy for District Attorney. I encourage you to read it if you can get a hold of a copy. If you call my office I will fax/mail you a copy (565-3550).

-Also last week, NewspaperTree reporter Sito Negron called and asked for an interview. Despite my long standing policy of not interviewing with Mr. Negron, I did grant him an interview this time. Mr. Negron's questions seemed focused on trying to draw some nefarious connection between me and members of the Builder's Association who have been active in politics and have long taken the position that taxes are out of control and the Government should not seize private property and turn it over to PRIVATE interests. Two premises I strongly believe in and have advocated for by the way. Mr. Negron also wanted to focus on the FBI Probe and my father.

I asked Mr. Negron to consider redirecting his questions to the actual issues of the race which is why I am running and what I have been bringing to the fore for years now: police corruption, police rape of female citizens, police killings of citizens, police and District Attorney abuse of the mentally ill, District Attorney collusion with Police and Covering Up of the corruption, not following the law, disregarding the constitution, arrests without warrants, searches without warrants, wrongful convictions and prison sentences, abuse of the Grand Jury, hiding and destruction of evidence, perjury, destruction of the courts, obliterating checks and balances crucial to our democracy... I did not make these issues up. You the People brought them to me and into the public light.--Although Mr. Negron did acknowledge that I had brought up the above and did allude in passing to the Nancy Hollebeke case, he did not appear interested in any of it. He seemed more focused on my father, my position on city politics and the FBI probe. Let's hope Negron grilled Esparza, who is and has been the sitting DA for 15 years while all of the corruption I have just noted and know about has been going on and while the corruption the FBI is focused on has been going on? Remember Esparza sits one entire floor below commissioner's court and not one peep out of Esparza on the FBI probe.

Mr. Negron did ask me if I thought, "the press should be as hard on me as I thought it should be on my opponent?" I told Mr. Negron in so many words that the press should always act as a watchdog on those in government and should scrutinize those who seek power. I also told him that in the 15 years Esparza has been in office I had not seen one single article written by him on my opponent or on any of the numerous scandals associated with him.---So my question is, who is Mr. Negron going to scrutinize now and why?

To Mr. Negron's credit, after I explained to him the seriousness of Esparza's abuse of the Grand Jury, he offered to meet me so that I could take him for a little tour of the County and Federal Court Houses and point some things out to him. We did meet the next day but I am not sure in the end if Mr. Negron understood the import of having the grand jury separated from the prosecutor's office (Esparza keeps the grand jury tightly tucked up inside of his offices. The Feds keep the grand jury a building away from the prosecutor). Mr. Negron's response/question was, don't other prosecutors in Texas do the same thing? It is very difficult to try and bring out the issues with this kind of mindset. Texas is also known for lynching blacks, having bad law enforcement labs that either make up evidence or don't properly test it and sending innocents to prison and to their deaths. (There is, as I write, an entire national focus on Texas and the outrageous behavior of Texas Court of Appeal Justice Sharon Keller, Esparza's ally- but that is another issue. Look it up.) So what do you say to this kind of question? Well I guess since other jurisdictions do bad things we should too? I mean isn't everyone doing it? What do you tell your children when they come home with, "well everyone at school is doing it?" Oh well, ok since, everyone else is doing it go ahead?--My platform is about making things better for the People and not maintaining a corrupt status quo.

Mr. Negron told me that his deadline was last Friday, but to date there has been no article. There have been articles on candidates seeking the Sheriff's Office but 8 months after I announced my candidacy for DA, put up a huge billboard on the side of the freeway, written dozens of blogs, appeared on radio shows, been interviewed by NPR in Austin, TX, been written up in the Spanish language newspaper El Diario, still no word in the El Paso Times and the NewspaperTree on me, my platform and the historical importance of this race. Why? What don't they want you to know?

I hope that Mr. Negron is able to set aside his biases regarding me and runs an informative article on the many pressing issues in this race and properly informs the public as to what has gone on and what is going on in the District Attorney's office. Although Mr. Negron has never, to my knowledge, covered even one time the blatant corruption in the El Paso District Attorney's Office, despite the fact that there has been a widespread community outcry against it, despite the fact that it is right under his nose and despite the fact that it has garnered national attention, it is never too late to hold out hope. Let's see what Mr. Negron does.

Within the last five years an individual who was detained by El Paso police officers was subsequently hospitalized and operated on for injuries he sustained to his rectum. This individual reported that El Paso police officers had penetrated his rectum with a collapsible police baton. In fact, his trousers and underwear had holes bored right through them aligned with his rectal orifice. The individual received treatment at Thomason General Hospital and then sued the City of El Paso and three El Paso Police Officers for what had happened. After depositions had been taken and the evidence collected, the City quickly settled for the maximum allowed which was $250,000. This would be $250,000 of tax payer money in addition to the $70,000 or so dollars in medical bills that the tax payer also paid for, and rightfully so.

The most compelling evidence in the case, according to the attorney, the evidence that the City could not rebut, was the medical evidence. The rectal surgeon who treated the victim testified that although he tried to view the case giving the benefit of the doubt to the law enforcement, he simply in the end was led to the conclusion that the victim had been penetrated by a sphere 7-8 inches in length with a width consistent with a collapsible police baton. He also ruled out homosexual activity. The city knew they were sunk and they paid up.

What was even more remarkable to the attorneys who were involved, more than the shock of the above medical findings which alone are proof conclusive that some members of the El Paso Police department are savages, was the fact that El Paso District Attorney, Jaime Esparza, NEVER indicted the police officers involved. In fact, the attorneys were able to procure the material that they said assistant district attorney Marcos Lizarraga presented to the grand jury. According to one attorney, no where in the box the city gave him, did he find any of the doctor’s medical conclusions, the medical conclusions which inculpated the officers and which led to the City giving in. What did Mr. Lizarraga, Esparza’s right hand man, NOT show the grand jury? Is this another example of Esparza playing footsies with the grand jury to whitewash some bad cops and his participation in the whitewash? How convenient for Esparza and Lizarraga to be able to emerge from the bowels of the grand jury and say the grand jury found “no wrong doing” on the part of the police. And voila. -- How in the world did the grand jury not indict? Could the DIMS money coming in from the police department and going into the pockets of assistant da's be influencing anyone down there?

Keep in mind that Marcos Lizarraga is the same person who tried and convicted Brandon Moon and sent him to prison for 17 years for a rape he did not commit. Lizarraga is also the same person who has the distinction of getting 19 "non-guilty" verdicts in one trial in the only case he has tried in anyone's memory in years (the Betti Flores case).

There was the exact same fact pattern in New York a few years ago. Some NYC police sodomized a man in the bathroom of a precinct with a night stick. What happened to those cops? Well first of all the press was all over it which in turn led to the community rising up in arms. The cops were then prosecuted and at least one of them got life in prison. What happened here in El Paso? Not one of the police in question was prosecuted or even fired. This was so eventhough city council voted to give the maximum settlement because obviously they believed the allegations. In fact, one of the officers even a got promotion to police trainer.

In plain English, the cops in NYC got life and the cops here in El Paso got a pension bail-out and a promotion, all on our dime. How do you like them apples? Nice elected officials we have here.

The story here was buried. But it was covered by the Mexican press “Primer Impacto,” the 60 Minutes of the Spanish speaking community. Not one member of the press here ever asked Mr. Lizarraga or better yet, Jaime Esparza, why the cops were never indicted. What happened? What happened is that Esparza is the gatekeeper to what the grand jury hears and we have a lousy press that doesn't tell you about what is happening and therefore you don't know who to vote for or against. Ask Dionicio Flores, editor of the El Paso Times, why he hasn't informed you about this? Could the answer be that his newspaper receives millions of dollars in advertising revenues from the City and the County? See how this works?

Tell everyone this story. End abuse and corruption now and elect an honest District Attorney. Elect me, THERESA CABALLERO FOR DISTRICT ATTORNEY!

Jaime Esparza has washed his hands of two murder cases in two weeks. (See my blogs from last week). What are we paying Esparza for if not to properly handle murder cases? And why is it that both cases involved my representation? Is Esparza dumping murder cases for political reasons?

Two weeks ago, the El Paso Diario reported that my client, Francisco Arceo, had been stabbed to death by his girlfriend, Elizabeth Munoz. The police arrested and charged Ms. Munoz with Mr. Arceo's death. The police then presented the case to the District Attorney's Office for disposition. Keep in mind that one of the duties of a district attorney is to review a case and decide if the case should be prosecuted or not. So this means that even if the police have made an arrest and charged a person, the prosecutor is still obligated to review the case and decide if in fact he should indict the person, if there is enough evidence to indict, and if it is right to indict, etc. If the prosecutor decides that there was no crime or that there was a legitimate issue of self-defense, etc., then he "declines" to prosecute and the person is free. If the prosecutor believes that the individual has committed a crime, then in the case of a felony, like murder, he takes the case forward to the next step and he goes to the grand jury. The decision to indict or not to indict an individual can be difficult and sometimes controversial because doing the right thing is not always the popular thing to do or the thing that will get you re-elected.

Jaime Esparza, for unknown reasons, has dumped Elizabeth Munoz' case on the County Attorney's office for them to handle. The County Attorney, to my knowledge, has never handled a murder case involving an adult, not a juvenile who has been certified as an adult, but an adult. The District Attorney's office is supposed to be the office with the murder case expertise. We don't know why Esparza has dumped this case. Since it is a murder case, and therefore by its very nature a major case, one would think Esparza would have been careful and would have prepared a written document stating why he cannot do his mandated duties in this most important of cases. But when I went to the District Clerk's office seeking any paperwork explaining his self-disqualification, I found that mysteriously but not unexpectedly, there was none. There is no record that I could find stating the reasons for Esparza's extreme actions.

I suspect that if the press ever gets off its duff and presses Esparza for answers as to why he has time to go down to City Council and squeeze money out of the tax payers for his unconstitutional DIMS system but he can't do his mandated job and properly handle a murder case, Esparza might give the following spin. Would he say that Ms. Munoz had been a complainant in another case involving the deceased and that therefore he has a conflict of interest? If so, then the press should ask him to commit that reasoning to paper which he will be loathe to do since he hasn't taken that approach on thousands upon thousands of other cases similar or the same in nature. In fact, he regularly prosecutes cross-complainants and cross-defendants simultaneously, i.e. two guys get into a bar fight and they both press charges against each other and Esparza prosecutes both at the same time.

Or would Esparza claim that members of his staff were too invloved in the earlier case and therefore there was a conflict of interest? Ask him to write that down and sign his name to it. Well that reasoning fails as well when you consider that he took the EXACT opposite position in the Nancy Hollebeke case. Remember, in that case Ms. Hollebeke had accused two cops of raping her. One of them is named Alberto Machorro, Jr. His father, Alberto Machorro, Sr., works and worked for Esparza when ESPARZA had Ms. Hollebeke thrown in jail and when ESPARZA accused her of lying about his own employee's son. Esparza saw absolutely no conflict there, put his reasons why he thought he had no conflict it in writing and even testfied to those reasons under oath saying that what one employee of his was involved in could be blocked off from another employee who was not related to the case by prior involvement.

Since we know that he isn't too concerned with telling the truth, or with employing good ethics or with recognizing real conflicts of interest, could the real problem for Mr. Esparza be that the deceased was my client, and I am the first opponent he has ever had since taking office 15 years ago, and he knows I will be watching him like a hawk on how he handles this case? Could the real answer be that being the coward that he is, he bolted and threw the case like a hot potato to his next door neighbor the County Attorney for political expediency?

Esparza has time to run so many organizations out of his office, DIMS, Asset forfeiture (all the money making programs), but when it comes to performing his real job, which is to protect the community and prosecute murder cases in the 34th Judicial District of Texas, he skirts out of it and runs off to his next game at the golf course or his next fundraiser and thinks nobody is going to know and if they do find out, they won't care or understand. And why should anybody care since it is campaign season and it's only a murder case?

If you don't like the smell of any of this, if this seems wrong to you, then please remember me, Theresa Caballero, in March at the polls. I will change all of this. Please also get me five more votes.

On September 11, 2007 there was an eight O'clock rally organized by parents in front of the Jane Hambrick elementary school which is off of Joe Battle and Edgemere. The parents had asked me to attend the rally. There were about 30-40 upset parents protesting the school's employment of Alberto Ocegueda who is now a coach there. They were, amongst other things, angry at Jaime Esparza because of how he had handled Mr. Ocegueda's prior charges of molestation of a child, charges that had been lodged against him by the parents of a six year old student at another school. Please see April 23, 2007 blog and the blog before this one. They said that because Mr. Ocegueda is the brother of Jaime Esparza's much beloved personal secretary, Amy Lujan, and because the case was sent to a special prosecutor late in the day, the case was mishandled and now we will never know the truth behind the allegations. They pointed out that if they had been arrested for child molestation, the outcome would have been very different.

Channel 26 was on site and interviewed some people. The reporter was very enthusiastic about the story. For some reason, however, the story never made it to the evening news. I wonder what happened. Did Esparza call in some chits?

While Stuart Leeds and I were at the eastside rally, attorney Sam Snoddy was appearing before City Council to speak to them about their decision to fund DIMS another year to the tune of $200,000. Mr. Snoddy delivered a concise, precise accounting of what DIMS is about, how bad it is and how it results in corruption like the Alberto Ocegueda case and others. Mr. Snoddy also mentioned how Esparza has money to pay his beloved Amy Lujan a $40,000 bonus on top of her county salary with tax payer money. He discussed how Esparza had lied to council when he told them that there was an AG opinion and a court opinion ruling that DIMS is "constitutional" which is NOT the case. He also pointed out how universally respected Sheriff Leo Samaniego had also called Esparza a "liar" over misrepresentations Esparza had made of the same DIMS program. Mr. Snoddy's speech was powerful and hardhitting. In the end, Mayor John Cook disgraced himself and the city by telling Mr. Snoddy to "Shut up! Or I will have you removed. Officers, remove this man." (Representatives Melina Castro and Rachel Quintana saved the day and opened a vote to give Mr. Snoddy more time). Mayor Cook has never been El Paso's best example of class (remember when he came out and said that he borrows his suits from the Union Fashion) but he usually keeps his cool. Cook's low-class outburst against a citizen in good standing and his bullying tactic of using the police against Mr. Snoddy (who is over 70 years old) left many wondering what Cook owed Esparza and what he had to hide?

Yesterday I was out working the jury pool, shaking hands and passing out my card. Here are some of the comments people had to say about Esparza: One woman said she was getting her bachelor's in Criminal Justice and she had done a paper on Esparza about six months ago. Her comment was "I didn't like what I found out about about him. He makes up his own rules. He doesn't follow the law. He's been there too long." One man said, "He covers for bad cops all of the time. He does favors for his friends." There were many, many other comments but those two captured the essence of what I was hearing.

As much as Esparza has tried to hide the facts, it appears that the old cat is out of the bag. The People have indeed figured out that he makes up his own rules and that he doesn't follow the law. Therein lies the entire problem.