An appellate court has requested a response to District Attorney Brett Ligon’s third petition for mandamus relief from orders of District Judge Kelly Case in the last year. On Friday, Ligon complained to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth District of Texas in Beaumont that Case had ordered him to permit a court reporter hired by a criminal defense attorney to transcribe a recording of a forensic interview of a fourteen-year-old girl at the Safe Harbor child advocacy center in Conroe. The order was obtained by defendant Juan Rodriguez, who is charged in Case’s court with the continuous sexual abuse of a child under fourteen.
Ligon’s petition for writ of mandamus states that Case’s order violates provisions of the Family Code which protect the confidentiality of forensic interviews of children at child advocacy centers like Safe Harbor. Those provisions do not allow for any copying or reproduction of recordings of the interviews, and they restrict access to the recordings to just the defendant’s attorney and his expert witnesses, Ligon said in the petition.
Ligon argued in the petition that Case’s order would “obliterate” the privacy protections enacted by the Texas Legislature in 2011, when it acted quickly to overrule a decision of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals which would have permitted a judge to provide a defendant with a copy of a recording of a child’s forensic interview in a sexual assault case. Recordings of forensic interviews of children must now be treated with the same level of confidentiality as seized child pornography, Ligon said.
“This office is committed to protecting the privacy of the victims who are dragged into the criminal justice system through no fault of their own,” Ligon said in a statement issued Friday. “The Legislature has spoken, and a Safe Harbor interview of a sexually abused child is not something we are going to hand over to a criminal defendant and his friends.”
The Beaumont appellate court previously granted a writ of mandamus directing Case to vacate an order which would have required the district clerk to provide hundreds of juror questionnaires to a criminal defendant. A few months later, it ordered Case to stop his practice of waiving all of the court costs which are supposed to be assessed against criminal defendants sentenced to terms of confinement. Ligon also successfully appealed a 2010 order in which Case directed additional DNA testing in the Larry Ray Swearingen capital murder case, after the Court of Criminal Appeals previously held that no additional testing was permitted under Texas statutes.
“We cannot comply with court orders that are manifestly illegal,” stated Ligon. “Unfortunately, we continue to expend considerable resources requesting the Court of Appeals remind Judge Case that as a State District Judge he cannot issue orders that are contrary to the law.”
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