WIGHTMAN TO DE COSS: "I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU NOT.." THE RANTINGS OF A HYPOCHONDRIAC AND A PURLOINED FILING

By Juan Montoya
Just as predicted, as soon as local blogger Robert Wightman doesn't get his way with local jurists, elected officials, or their employees don't do as this misanthrope disbarred lawyer would want them to do, they become pariahs in his blog.
And so it came to be in what is rapidly being known at the Cameron County Courthouse as "The Case of the Purloined Filing."


As Arthur Conan Doyle would say, "this singular event started, curiously enough" at the bar of the 445th District Court which was hearing the case of the State of Texas vs. Marisa Govea Hernandez who is charged with an accident involving death in the case of the late Mary Tipton.

The details surrounding the case are convoluted but basically, the prosecution charges that she left the scene of the accident and the victim was found three days later along the side of FM 803.

The case has been tried in the blogs even before it reached the 445th court where Rene De Coss is presiding.
A cursory review of the court docket indicates that Hernandez's attorney, Ernesto Gamez made a motion to exclude certain video, audio and other evidence which was granted by the judge.

The case moved forward until the victim's husband, Ralph Tipton, tried to file a motion in the case to include not only what had already been excepted by the court, but also depositions and other "evidence" which he said had been deliberately withheld by the prosecutors.

Tipton – with someone's advice (?) – filed the materials with Cameron County District Clerk Eric Garza, whose office then forwarded them to court coordinator a Blanca Hinojsa who was in possession of the file.
Upon learning of the filing, De Coss send Garza a memorandum (not a judicial order, as some claim) to discuss the intervention of third parties in a criminal case, which is a no-no.

Enter Wightman, who admits he is in communication with Tipton and knows about what was in the filing that Tipron tried to include ex-parte into the court record.
(Wightman, by the way, is a disbarred lawyer from Dallas who considers himself a legal maven and is surreptitiously practicing law and giving legal advice to anyone and everyone who will heed his rantings. All will go well until he is ignored and, like a woman scorned, hell knows no fury when his views are shunted aside as irrelevant.)

"I asked Mr. Tipton about the claims and he said the DA never asked for the depositions and that he filed them with the court because he was concerned the DA was not doing his job in collecting the evidence."

De Coss cited the prohibition against this type of activity from third parties in his letter to Garza and asked for a meeting with the district clerk to lay down the guidelines of the criminal legal process.

Wightman, who said "De Coss gets an A+ for how he is handling this case," then turned on the judge and pilloried the jurist and said that – unlike himself – he lacked legal acumen.

"My brain may be fading fast from atrophy, but I am still sharper than most attorneys and judges..."

Tipton is not interfering, he said, but merely " creating a record of the evidence so (DA Luis V.) Saenz cannot claim ignorance of same at the end of the trial..."

Now, how would Wightman know this? And when he was talking about De Coss, was he talking about the same judge everyone knows?

So like Riki-tiki-Ravi, El Rrun-Rrun had to run and find out.
We were expecting to find voluminous proof of the wild claims of judicial incompetence backing up such convoluted arguments that as a judge he shouldn't follow the law regarding ex-parte filings because

Wightman's didn't like it (yes, he said that). What we were showed was....one thing.
That was the only one "document" that he posted on the official docket , and it was a very good thing it wasn't a memo to housekeeping to check the trash cans. Under Wightman's keen legal theory, the janitors could have been jailed for contempt over a gum wrapper.

This begs the question: what clairvoyant crystal ball was he using to list the file contents (that weren't there) unless he wrote them or directly coached and advised on their creation and filing? Could he simply be throwing a hissy fit that his fine legal work was destined for the circular file? For someone forbidden to practice law, he seems to practice an awful lot of law.

Notably missing on his jaunt through legal fantasy land were the usual threats to post the damning documents as soon as a source (who may or may not even exist) "gets back in contact with him".
Or perhaps he could reconstruct them from hand written notes he took while coaching Tipton on how to enter the "evidence" into the court proceedings.

Anyway, we wish the local bar would take a gander at how this disbarred lawyer is interfering into the legal process with his subterfuges using third parties as proxies.
He should stick to advising Capt. Bob Sanchez in his pro se representation in the divorce case against his ex. We hear both Bobs are burning up the telephone lines now that Sanchez has run out of money to pay Gamez in the case.

Sanchez should know better. After all, Wightman filed a defamation lawsuit against him. He should follow the 11th Commandment of Cameron County that states: "Nothing good will ever come from engaging Wightman."