Three years after Starr County prosecutors charged 26-year-old Lizelle Gonzalez with murder for inducing her own abortion, District Attorney Gocha Ramirez swore under oath that when his office brought the case in early 2022 he didn’t know about the section of state law that forbids charging a woman with homicide for ending her own pregnancy.
It wasn’t until another local attorney sent him a screenshot of that snippet of penal code that Ramirez spotted the problem and moved to dismiss the case.
But new court filings in Gonzalez’s lawsuit against the county officials who prosecuted her argue that Ramirez must have known much earlier that Gonzalez inducing her own abortion was not a crime — in part because he allegedly paid for one in the mid-1990s while having extramarital affairs with a pair of sisters, before he became the D.A.
“It was Gocha’s child,” one of the women said in a sworn deposition reviewed by the Houston Chronicle, adding that Ramirez asked her sister “not to have the child” and allegedly paid for the abortion, then took them both out to eat at Red Lobster.
The startling deposition was one of several Gonzalez’s legal team filed in federal court on Tuesday, along with a 70-page brief arguing that Ramirez, another prosecutor in his office and the county sheriff should all be held personally liable for “maliciously abusing their power to concoct charges” against the South Texas mother of two.
It’s tough to sue police and prosecutors for bad behavior because they’re usually shielded by controversial doctrines known as qualified immunity and prosecutorial immunity, legal rules that protect them from personal liability. Lawyers for the three county officials have repeatedly argued that those rules apply, so the case should be tossed out.
But immunity has its limits. Prosecutors aren’t immune when they take on certain roles outside the courtroom, such as giving legal advice to police or acting as investigators. And police don’t get qualified immunity if their conduct is so egregious it violates a constitutional right that’s been “clearly established,” usually by a past court decision.
In this week’s court filings, attorneys for Gonzalez said evidence showed that Ramirez and his first assistant prosecutor, Alexandria Barrera, had been involved in the investigation more deeply than they’d previously admitted. At times, Barrera allegedly gave specific direction to sheriff’s office investigators about what evidence to collect and offered legal advice on how to move forward.
And Ramirez, they alleged, received updates on the case and ultimately made the decision to send it to a grand jury – one of the actions the State Bar of Texas took the rare step of disciplining him for last year, saying he “failed to refrain from prosecuting a charge that was known not to be supported by probable cause.”
And all three county officials — Ramirez, Barrera and Sheriff Rene Fuentes — violated “clearly established” constitutional rights when they pushed forward a murder charge and arrest for something the law explicitly said wasn’t murder, this week’s filing alleges.
“This was intentional,” Cecilia Garza, a South Texas attorney representing Gonzalez, told the Houston Chronicle. “It was brazen. They really do feel that they are above the law.”
See here, here, and here for some background. It’s a long story and that’s a gift link, so read the whole thing. All I can say is that I hope very much that Lizelle Herrera wins her lawsuit. She deserves it, and so do all the people she has sued. Texas Public Radio has more.