{"id":136135,"date":"2011-10-25T13:58:06","date_gmt":"2011-10-25T18:58:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ktbb.com\/post\/?p=136135"},"modified":"2011-10-26T14:51:01","modified_gmt":"2011-10-26T19:51:01","slug":"ap-east-texas-da-offered-leniency-for-cash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/?p=136135","title":{"rendered":"AP: East Texas DA Offered Leniency for Cash"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nCENTER (AP) – The district attorney in an East Texas county with a well-known drug-trafficking route repeatedly allowed suspected drug runners and money launderers to receive light sentences – or escape criminal charges altogether – if they forfeited their cash to prosecutors. That’s according to an Associated Press investigation. As a result, the AP reports, authorities collected more than $800,000 in less than a year using a practice that essentially let suspects buy their way out of allegations that, if proven, would probably have resulted in prison sentences. “They were looking out for the treasury of their county instead of doing the job of protecting society,” said R. Christopher Goldsmith, a Houston attorney who represented one of the defendants.<\/p>\n

The system reportedly engineered by Shelby County District Attorney Lynda Kaye Russell is now one focus of a federal criminal investigation that is also reviewing whether Russell and other law enforcement officials targeted black motorists for traffic stops. Interviews, court records and other documents reviewed by The Associated Press show numerous examples of suspects who went unpunished or got unusually light sentences after turning over tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. The money from those and other defendants increased the DA’s forfeiture account by more than two hundredfold and helped ease a tight budget. The county’s former auditor has testified that at least a portion of it was spent on campaign materials, parades, holiday decorations, food, flowers, gifts and charitable contributions.<\/p>\n

Russell, who has been district attorney in the county on the Texas-Louisiana border since 1999, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. She announced in June that she was resigning, effective at the end of the year, to care for her sick mother. The Shelby County cases arose from traffic stops on U.S. Highway 59, which runs from the U.S.-Mexico border to Canada and is one of the nation’s most notorious drug corridors. <\/p>\n

Russell and other county law enforcement officials have been under investigation by the Department of Justice’s civil-rights division since 2008, when they were named defendants in a class-action lawsuit stemming from traffic stops in the small town of Tenaha. The lawsuit contends that a drug-enforcement program established by the town in 2006 was actually a scheme to threaten innocent motorists, most of them black, with money laundering charges if they didn’t forfeit their cash. FBI agents have interviewed many of the motorists who were stopped in Tenaha, including some who were given leniency. And several Shelby County officials have testified before a grand jury in Tyler.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CENTER (AP) – The district attorney in an East Texas county with a well-known drug-trafficking route repeatedly allowed suspected drug runners and money launderers to receive light sentences – or escape criminal charges altogether – if they forfeited their cash to prosecutors. That’s according to an Associated Press investigation. As a result, the AP reports, … Continue reading AP: East Texas DA Offered Leniency for Cash<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news-archive-archives"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-29 03:49:47","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=136135"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":136444,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136135\/revisions\/136444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=136135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=136135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=136135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}