ERNIE HERNANDEZ'S ASSISTANT SALAZAR APPEALS THE APPEAL

"Be careful not to make treaties with those that live in the land; for when they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice to them, they will invite you and you will eat their sacrifices." Exodus 34:15

By Juan Montoya
It will be two years come this December 18 that Raul Salazar, the administrative assistant to former Cameron County Precinct 2 commissioner Ernie Hernandez, was sentenced to 10 months in jail for his conviction on two counts of abuse of official capacity and one count of tampering with a government record.
The case revolved around Salazar's actions in the employment of Roberto Cadriel, Hernandez's brother-in-law with Cameron County.
During his trial, it was revealed that he had been involved in getting a Human Resources employee to take the civil service exam for Cadriel after the man had failed to pass twice on his own. After that job failed to materialize, Cadriel testified on the stand that Salazar had provided Cadriel with the answers to a security guard test for employment with the county's international bridge system.
Cadriel, however, forgot Salazar's instructions to miss a few answers and only got the last three wrong.
However, a few days after he started working as a non-commissioned security guard without a weapon, news reports of possible wrongdoing in the way he got hired prompted him to resign.
Human Resource director Robert Lopez also resigned the same week, citing personal reasons.
During the trial, Cadriel said he had been told by Hernandez to go see Salazar in his Pct. 2 office. He also said that when he got the application for county employment he could not fill it out since he didn't know how to read nor write and that his sister Norma, Ernie's wife, filled it out for him.
He was, in fact, ineligible to work for the county since he had a felony conviction. Interestingly, so did Salazar.
At the time of the trial, Hernandez said he had not idea that his brother-in-law was working for the county or that he had resigned.
Hernandez was also hauled before a county grand jury investigating the incident. At the time of the Salazar trial, Hernandez refused to take the stand citing hi Fifth Amendment rights not to self incriminate or to contradict his grand jury testimony.
Hernandez was never charged in the hiring incident. He, however, resigned in a negotiated plea for deferred adjudication where District Attorney Luis V. Saenz dropped seven counts of official misconduct and had him plead on one count of coercion of a public servant. He has since completed his year of probation under the agreement. Since the deferred adjudication period has been completed, Hernandez is now able to run for office without the stigma of a felony conviction.
There are even rumors that Hernandez might seek to run for his old office if current commissioner Alex Dominguez decides to run for county judge in the March 1, 2016 primaries.
However, Salazar has not been so lucky.
And even though most people believe that Salazar was acting under Hernandez's orders in the illegal hiring, Salazar did not testify in court and has never said he was acting on his former boss' directions.
Visiting Judge Federico Hinojosa allowed Salazar to remain free on a $30,000 bond while attorneys file an appeal.
Om July 16, 2015, the 13th Court of Appeals denied Salazar's appeal of his conviction and ordered that the trial court's sentence be imposed. In it's order and memorandum, the appeals court said Salazar's petition did not include a copy of the cited trial record. Earlier, that same court had denied Salazar's request that a copy of the trial transcript be furnished to him claiming he we indigent.
Apparently, neither Warner, Salazar nor Hernandez wanted to put up the cash to buy the trial transcript.
At that time, his attorney Larry Warner told the media that he would appeal to the state’s highest court if necessary to exonerate former Salazar.
“I don’t want people to think it’s over because it’s not. I will fight to get my client a new trial,” Warner said.“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing fields, we shall fight in the streets. We shall not surrender,” he said, quoting from Winston Churchill’s World War II speech.
On August 6, the 13th Court of Appeals denied Salazar's motion for a rehearing.
About a month later, on Sept. 10, Warner submitted a motion for an extension to file for a discretionary review to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.Later than same month, on Sept. 30, Warner filed a petition for the discretionary review with that court.
Since there was never any transcript record of the trial, it will probably just be a matter of time before the review is denied and the trial court's sentence is imposed on Salazar. Will he still remain the loyal servant to Hernandez then?
"Be careful not to make sacrifices..."