SAENZ PICKING UP THE PIECES AFTER VILLALOBOS

By Juan Montoya
It's been just a little over a year since his predecessor Armando Villalobos was indicted on racketeering, bribery and extortion charges and two months after he was convicted and now current Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz – six months into the job – says he has nearly picked up all the pieces.
"Except for a few cases that involved (former 404th District Judge) Abel Limas, and a few that are left over from Villalobos, we are just about caught up," Saenz said in a wide-ranging interview. "Right now we're current in our 2013 misdemeanor cases."
One of the cases that has lingered on has been the one involving a case involving a lawsuit filed by several men who claimed that local attorney and Villalobos political opponent Peter Zavaletta violated their privacy when he ran an ad charging that the former DA was soft on child abusers.
During the trial of now-convicted Limas, it was revealed that the former judge had accepted payments for favorable rulings from the opposing side. The Brownsville Herald was a co-defendant in the case.
And even though that case no longer involves the DA's office, it started there and remains unfinished business that it must deal with if the courts so require.
Likewise, the appeal of former Mazz frontsman Joe Lopez and his quest for the DNA evidence used by Villalobos in convicting him of sexual abuse in of a minor in 2006 is still business Saenz's office must contend with.  
But as those cases are being rehashed through the appeals courts, Saenz said that there were more pressing matters facing his administration when he took over the office.
Foremost among those was the decentralized management style that Villalobos used to assign priority to cases.
"There was no centralized system on how to prioritize cases that came in the office,"he said. "A Asst. DA would decide whether to do this or that and another would decide whether to prosecute or not. There was no clear organization on how to deal with that."
As a result, Saenz said he and his chief prosecutor Rene Gonzalez have instituted a centralized process to "triage" cases which the different law-enforcement agencies bring to them for prosecution. Now, he said, there is no question on what will happen when an agency brings in a complaint. As a result, he said that the backlog on cases – some dating back for two years or more – is just about cleared and the docket is almost current.
Another improvement over the Villalobos administration has been a policy of requiring the different agencies which bring cases to the DA to supply the office with the investigation files they need to prosecute the cases within 10 days after they file the charges.
"We brought them all into a room," he said. "There were some 150 officers representing the different agencies and when I told them they had 10 days to bring us the files on the cases or that they would be dismissed, some of their faces turned white. But now they are all complying with the new rules."
That delay –between filing the charges and making the case files available to the Asst. DAs – often meant that some of the defendants who could not afford to make bail would sit in jail at taxpayers' expense while they awaited the prosecution of their cases. As a result, Saenz and Gonzalez said that the average number of prisoners has gone down markedly compared to the number under the former administration.
The less prisoners that are in county custody or shipped out to Brooks, Willacy or the Coastal Bend lockups, the less outlays the county has to pay, they said.
Among other changes that Saenz is making is the rehabilitation of the county's pretrial diversion pretrial diversion agreement made by first offenders with the DA’s office.
The program – known as the PTD – wass intended to provide young first-time nonviolent offenders with an opportunity to avoid a criminal record.
However, Saenz said that under Villalobos the intent of the program to give young defendants a chance to correct their mistakes by giving them a second chance was corrupted by the number of waivers given to defendants who did not qualify.
"There were waives being given to defendants caught with 150 pounds of pot or on their second or third DWI," he said. "That's not what the program was meant for. It was meant for a kid getting caught with a joint going to a party, not for possession of hundreds of pounds. Of course, when you give an attorney a waiver, others find out and want one, too. It never ends."
Still, both Gonzalez and Saenz say that they will honor the agreements reached with local attorneys and their clients by their predecessors. Once they get through those, it will be a new page, they say.
When Saenz who took office Jan. 1, he temporarily suspended PTD to assess the program and re-establish guidelines after finding that violent, criminal offenders had been included in the program.
But now, after instituting a number of reforms in the office – including a newly created Cameron County District Attorney’s Child Abuse Unit that became official July 1. Two prosecutors were assigned exclusively to such cases – Brandy Bailey and Stephanie Rollins – who got a guilty conviction in the case of a Harlingen man for sexually assaulting a young girl from the time she was 3 until 12.
“From the way I understand it, before this it was sort of a crap shoot as far as what case ended up where,” Rollins told a local newspaper. “An abuse case would be filed in one of the district courts and then whatever prosecutor was assigned to that court – and on duty – got that case.”
It's been only six full months since Saenz took over the helm as Cameron County's top law enforcement office, but he says that the bad old days under the former administration are now a thing of the past.
"We're all caught up and rolling now," he said.