A judge on Monday ordered former Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg to stop talking to the media about the men accused of killing 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray.
District Judge Josh Hill tightened a gag order issued to lawyers involved in the case to specifically muzzle Ogg, who last week appeared on Fox 26, where she revealed previously unreleased details about one of the suspects in the case. Ogg said that one of the men accused of Jocelyn’s rape and murder had previously been accused of sexual assault in Costa Rica.
Ogg did not respond to a request for comment.
Ogg’s statements roiled the criminal courthouse. A previous gag order issued by Hill prohibited lawyers from speaking about the details of anyone involved in the cases or opinions about their guilt.
Josh Reiss, general counsel for the Harris County District Attorney’s office, called Ogg’s statements “extraordinary, grossly inappropriate, [and an] abhorrent violation of the rules of professional conduct.”
The DA’s office is also filing a grievance about Ogg to the State Bar of Texas, Reiss said in court.
“We are as serious as a heart attack about this,” Reiss said.
Reiss said Ogg violated professional rules regarding confidential information and against potentially prejudicing a pending case, and engaged in conduct that “reflect adversely on the legal profession.”
Ogg became aware of the allegation about Franklin Peña while she was district attorney, according to a motion to revise the gag order filed by the DA’s office Monday morning.
Lawyers for Peña and Johan Jose Martinez Rangel, the men accused in Jocelyn’s killing, also asked Hill to hold Ogg in contempt of court and for DA Sean Teare office to appoint a special counsel to investigate Ogg.
Hill extended the gag order against Ogg specifically and said he would consider making other changes proposed by the DA’s office at a future hearing.
[…]
Hill issued his original order in September to tamp down on comments on the case being made in the media, which Peña and Martinez Rangel’s lawyers said could prejudice potential jurors in their future trials, and make it impossible for the men to get a fair trial.
The order applied to Ogg when she was the district attorney, and both prosecutors and defense attorneys said the order still applied to her since leaving office.
Ogg in the interview said she was revealing the details because she disagreed with decisions Teare’s office had been making, particularly when dropping cases. Ogg said she wanted the “public to get the final say.” Reiss called Ogg’s interview politically motivated.
“Who would have thought that the former district attorney of Harris County would just take it upon themselves to go on television and just leak confidential information because she disagreed with the current district attorney’s decision making and she believed the public had a right to know,” Reiss said.
I have said many times in this space that I Am Not A Lawyer. I say that because I will opine on various legal matters and I want to make it clear that I’m just a layman, with no training or special knowledge. That said, I am not completely ignorant on the law and related matters. It’s easy enough to look up state laws, and often a simple reading of them is clear enough. I have friends and relatives who are lawyers and judges, and I’ve talked to them about legal matters of interest. I’ve done a ton of reading – news, analysis, legal opinions, etc – in service of this blog and of my own interest. I’m very much not an expert, but I do know a few things.
And one of the things I know is that there are very often restrictions on what an insider can say in public about a criminal case, especially on the prosecution side. There are a variety of reasons for this, starting with and primarily because of the presumption of innocence. Just one loose statement about a piece of evidence that has been or could be ruled inadmissible, and you’ve got yourself a botched case at the least and possibly worse. If I know this – hell, if most people who have seen an episode or two of Law and Order know this – then surely any actual attorney knows this. And that’s before we take the previously existing gag order into consideration.
So yeah. I will not speculate on motives, or on what may happen in the event that a complaint is filed with the State Bar. We’ll see what happens next. In the meantime, silence is golden.
“Ogg in the interview said she was revealing the details because she disagreed with decisions Teare’s office had been making, particularly when dropping cases.”
She’s off the rails. The public wants this case especially to go by the book, with no screw ups. She can’t be ignorant of the risk of sabotaging the prosecution’s case. Glad that she got primaried.
I don’t know anything about this situation beyond what’s in the story, but if it’s at all close to accurate, that is spectacularly poor judgment by Ogg. Her actions may have violated Texas Disciplinary Rule of Professional Conduct 1.05 as well as the judge’s gag order. Her responsibilities as an attorney don’t disappear just because she lost an election. If there was any doubt in my mind why Sean Teare was the better choice for DA, this just removed it.