Thread: Fort Worth, Tx paper: interview with johnny sutton

http://www.star-telegram.com/388/story/48117.html

Exclusive: An Interview with U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton
By DAVE MONTGOMERY
Star-Telegram Washington Bureau

* Straight-shooting federal prosecutor drawing heat

U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton, whose office has come under fire for the prosecutions of two Border Patrol agents and a former Texas deputy sheriff, defended his handling of the cases in an hourlong interview with Dave Montgomery of the Star-Telegram last week. He also looked back on his career as a prosecutor, his association with President Bush, his love of foreign languages, his religious faith and his days as a college baseball teammate of Roger Clemens. Here are excerpts.

Star-Telegram: Trace the start of your career.

Johnny Sutton: I started out in the Harris County District Attorney’s office in 1987 and was a prosecutor there till 1995. Loved every minute of it. And was very happy to stay. Then (George) Bush became governor and they asked me to become the criminal justice policy director which I did.

S-Tid you know him (Bush) previously?

JS: No, I knew Cathy Hermasimchuk (now Cathy Cochran, currently a judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals) who was his original criminal justice policy director. I took over from her … from December of 1995 until he became president.

S-T: How did they learn about you?

JS: I knew people, I knew Cathy, I knew folks who worked for him (Bush). I was helping trying to replace Cathy. Recommended a few folks who didn’t work out. Then they said, 'Well, how about you?’ And I hadn’t really thought about it. I was a Houston boy, and loved Houston, and loved my job, everything was going perfectly. ... But it’s one of those times in life you just have to … make a leap of fait. I had been with the DA’s office for eight years, and even though I loved it, maybe it was a sign to try something different, so I made the jump. And worked for him for five years, and when he became president, I came up and did the Department of Justice transition for him, for the Bush-Cheney transition team.

S-T: Had you gotten to know (current U.S. Attorney General) Al Gonzales?

JS: I did. He was the general counsel (in the governor’s office) while I was criminal justice. I was the crime guy and he was the general counsel so I worked very closely with him and his team.

S-T: How was this different from what you had been doing?

JS: I did my five years as a policy guy for then-Gov. Bush but I always considered myself a career prosecutor. My formative years were spent in the DA’s office. At that time, Johnny Holmes was the DA and I always considered him sort of the Michael Jordan of DA’s. He was a great trial lawyer, a great boss. Called it like he saw `em and represented what an honorable prosecutor was. So I really had the greatest training that you could ever have both as a trial lawyer and just from good leadership who just did it right.

S-T: In this job you’ve gotten a lot of criticism for the border patrol cases and the (former Edwards County Deputy Sheriff) Guillermo Hernandez case. Do you feel like you have to have a thick skin to do this. Do you feel like a punching bag sometime?

JS: The first thing you realize as a prosecutor is that you’re a very unusual lawyer…Prosecutors are duty-bound to do justice. One of the uncomfortable things about being a prosecutor is sometimes the facts lead to unhappy places where you have to prosecute police officers, and politicians, ministers and schoolteachers and people where we respect the position but the person in the position has done something wrong and often times committed a crime.

S-T: Have you ever had second thoughts about the Ramos-Compean case? (Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean were found guilty of wounding Mexican drug courier Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila in far West Texas near El Paso and attempting to covering it up.)

JS: I really have not. That is a case where once the public knows the real facts. ... I think most reasonable people would say, 'Of course, that behavior is unacceptable. We have to prosecute it.' In my mind, there’s been unfortunately inaccurate narrative out there in the public as to what the facts are.

S-T: You’re familiar with DEA reports that Aldrete was involved in another drug-smuggling case. Is he still a live target for the federal government?

JS: There’s a reason why we don’t talk about investigations. We don’t like to talk publicly about investigations until we know all the facts, until we’re ready to proceed. What I can tell you is that issue was litigated in front of the court. The court made a ruling as to whether that evidence was going to come in and it did not come in and there’s an ongoing investigation. And I don’t want to say any more about it because if I do it hurts our ability to arrest and prosecute the bad guys.

S-T: The case of Mr. Hernandez is also controversial. Again, any second thoughts on that? (Hernandez was convicted of wounding a woman when he fired on a vehicle filled with illegal immigrants. His sister, Jessica H. Chavez of Fort Worth, is petitioning for a presidential pardon. Hernandez said he feared for his life and was just doing his job when he shot at the tires of the vehicle after, he said, the driver tried to run him down.)

JS: No. There have been a lot of misrepresentations on that case as well. That’s a situation that’s much different than the facts in El Paso, but the bottom line is you have a deputy that pulls over a Suburban filled with illegal aliens in the middle of the night, (because of a) traffic violation. He walks up to the side of the Suburban to see what he describes as nine people laid out in the back of the Suburban, then he asks the driver to stop and get out of the car or to at least get his license. Instead of doing that, the driver puts it in gear and takes off. Deputy Hernandez shoots twice into the back left tire, shoots one time with a bullet going down the side of the Suburban as it takes off. But the real problem is as the Suburban is taking off down the road and is at least 20 feet past him and heading on to 377 going away from him, he shoots three more times into the back of the truck that he knows is loaded with people.

We give these officers and these agents the benefit of the doubt. They have dangerous jobs. We allow them to carry firearms and we want them to protect themselves and defend themselves when someone threatens them with bodily injury or death. We don’t expect them to wait before somebody shoots them before they shoot. But we don’t allow police officers or federal agents to become judge, jury and executioner, meaning that (if) they’re not in fear, they’re not allowed to use deadly force because they’re angry or someone ran away.

S-T: Were you ever uncomfortable about having to offer immunity to Aldrete to testify against the two agents? JS: No prosecutor ever likes to give immunity. We try to resist it. The prosecutor doesn’t get to choose the witnesses. The witnesses are chosen at the time of the crime. And a lot of time your witnesses are criminals. I remember the first murder case I tried. It was a murder that occurred inside a crack house where everybody in sight was either a prostitute or smoking crack or both. But a guy killed another guy and the witnesses were those people. That’s just the facts. The jury just has to hear the facts and weigh them.

Aldrete had agreed to come forward (but only) with an agreement to testify that what he said would not be used against him. I would much prefer to be sitting here saying, 'Yeah, we put Aldrete in prison where he belongs. And these two agents made the right decision.' But they didn’t. And it wasn’t just an administrative failure. It was a very serious crime.

S-T: There’s been some talk about pressure by the Mexican government in these cases. To what degree did that factor in?

JS: With regard to the Compean-Ramos case, I don’t think there was any contact at all. There may have been some kind of letters exchanged between Homeland Security and the Mexican consulate. (It’s) routine procedure for the Mexican consulate, when they find out a Mexican has been injured or hurt and there’s possible criminal activity, they routinely send letters to the police to say 'We’ve heard this person’s been hurt or a victim of a crime. Please investigate.' That is routine. They send these letters in every case when they know about it. In the Compean-Ramos case, I’m not aware of any contact with our office at all. If there was, it was minimal, and there certainly wasn’t any pressure.

S-T: These are unhappy times at the Justice Department with the firings of attorneys. Were you ever involved in those discussions?

JS: Because I’m chairman of the AGAC (the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee), I was given a heads-up that this had occurred. Other than that, not at all. And, obviously, that is an issue that is being dealt with in Washington, and all questions regarding that need to be referred to the Department of Justice.

S-T: How did you feel (about the firings)?

JS: That is something that I’m going to refer those questions to the Department of Justice. All I can tell you is -- I can speak for me and my district -- is that prosecutors have to make the decisions based on the facts. And that politics should not and cannot play a role and does not in my decisions. ... I can assure you that we don’t consider politics and if someone did try to pressure us, which I can’t recall a time when anybody ever did, but if they did, obviously, that is something we would resist.

S-T: Do you feel secure in your job?

JS: Every U.S. attorney knows they serve at the pleasure of the president. My experience in my professional life is ... if you’re always looking over the hill, it’s a mistake because you need to concentrate on what you’re doing now and do a good job in what you’re doing now. Be honorable, be honest, work hard, and good things will happen.

S-T: Rep. John Culberson (R-Houston) says he is troubled by a report he saw in The Houston Chronicle that your office declined to prosecute sexual abuse allegations at the Texas Youth Commission. Culberson speaks well of you on a personal level but says you should resign if those reports are true.

JS: (Since) that’s an ongoing investigation, I’m a little hesitant to get too much into details. I can tell you we did look at it, and there’s some time when cases should go federally, and sometimes when cases should go to the state level. A lot of times it depends on where the most punishment is. And I can tell you on the federal side punishment is minimal. And on the state side, the punishment is significantly greater. Those are decisions (about) what is the best thing in the interest of justice, and our determination ... was that it’s best done as a state case.

What do you do when you’re not prosecuting cases?

JS: Family and work take up most of my time. I like to fish. I like to hunt. (Sutton also traveled with his parents when he was young and is a student of languages. He considers himself fluent in Spanish and "decent" in Portuguese.)

S-T: You were a teammate of (pitching great) Roger Clemens? (Sutton was a starting left-fielder on the University of Texas team that won the national championship in 1983.)

JS: I was sort of a Cinderella story. Even though I was a two-year letterman, my senior year I hardly got to play, and then got a chance to get in the lineup late in the season, got hot, and ended up being a contributor during the central regional tournament and then ended up being the starting left-fielder on the national championship team. So I got my chance late. ... Clemens was our No. 2 on that team so that gives you an example of how good the pitching was.

S-T: Where did you grow up?

JS: I grew up in Houston. My dad’s a doctor, retired, and my mom was a full-time mom.

S-T: (Sutton repeatedly prosecuted high-profile and often brutal cases in Houston, including the murders and gang rape of two teenage girls who stumbled into a gang initiation.) Do you carry those cases home with you?

JS: I remember coming in as an intern, starting out as an intern at the complaint desk, going to lunch with some of the older DAs and having them joke about cases that to me were very serious. And I realized that’s a coping mechanism for prosecutors. You see so much violence and so much tragedy. ... And if you swallow that all up, it can really tear you apart. You just have to be professional ... and try to find justice for the victims.

S-T: You’ve mentioned your faith. Are you a church-goer?

JS: I’m Catholic, although I kind of consider myself an evangelical Catholic. Born and raised Catholic, took some detours to find Jesus and find God, and that brought me back to the Catholic Church.

S-T: Do you consider yourself a Republican?

JS: I’m certainly a Republican. I got into politics late in life. You kind of figure out what you are down the road. On issues, I found myself agreeing with Republicans a lot more than I did with Democrats.

S-T: What kind of **** from the public have you gotten about your prosecutions of the law-enforcement officers?

JS: Mostly it’s just irate people who’ve gotten a version of the facts that’s something along the lines of, 'Two American heroes are in prison for doing their job and a drug dealer is set free,' and they’re angry about that. There (are) some very angry threats that come in. ... I don’t listen to that stuff much but obviously I want to protect my prosecutors and we take any threat seriously.

S-T: What kind response have you gotten from within the Justice Department (about the controversial cases)?

JS: I’ve gotten nothing but support. They’ve been very supportive of me even to the point of allowing me to talk publicly (about the cases). Normally prosecutors don’t talk too much about a pending case. It’s important to get out there and do a service to people and say here’s what the real facts are.

S-T: What do you see as your future? Do you want to spend your life as a prosecutor?

JS: I’ve sort of looked at my life as eating dessert first, meaning I’ve had a very fulfilling, exciting, fun career -- a big chunk of it has been in the courtroom early in Harris County. I got tested by fire in the courtroom there, had unique opportunities to work for a governor who then became president, so I’ve been very lucky up to this point. But I don’t worry too much about the future. I have a lot of faith in God and a lot of faith that if you do a good job and work hard at what you’re doing that if you're honest and honorable good things will happen to you. And I don’t know what the next step is for me, but I’m focused on what I’m doing now.

Straight-shooting federal prosecutor drawing heat
By DAVE MONTGOMERY
Star-Telegram Washington Bureau
U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton answers questions during an interview at the Justice Department.


WASHINGTON — Throughout his rise from a rookie “baby prosecutor” in Houston to a U.S. attorney pursuing federal criminals across much of Texas, says Johnny Sutton, he has been bound by an unwavering ethic: Do the right thing and follow the facts, even when they lead to “unhappy places” like errant public servants and law enforcement officers.

Sutton’s rigid adherence to that credo has transformed him from a relatively low-profile federal prosecutor into a punching bag on conservative talk shows and Internet Web sites, where he has been vilified for weeks for the prosecution of two border patrol agents now imprisoned for the shooting of a Mexican drug courier.

Another prosecution, involving a Texas deputy sheriff who fired at a vehicle loaded with illegal immigrants, has heightened the outcry. T. J. Bonner, head of the national Border Patrol agents’ union, calls him “public enemy No. 1.” And Houston Congressman Ted Poe, a former Harris County judge who remembers Sutton as an able young prosecutor, now accuses him of choosing “the wrong side in the border war."

In an hourlong interview in the Justice Department during a trip to Washington last week, Sutton again defended the cases as what he called fact-based prosecutions against lawmen who had abused their authority. And, he said, he has no misgivings about his decisions to go to court against Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean and former Edwards County Deputy Sheriff Guillermo “Gilmer” Hernandez.

“Thanks to a few voices in the media, the narrative in the public is that these are two American heroes doing their job and they’re going to prison while drug dealers are going free,” he said of Ramos and Compean. “And, of course if those were the facts, I’d be outraged as well. But those aren’t the facts.”

The assault by critics runs counter to a largely favorable reputation Sutton has forged after two decades in state and federal courtrooms in Texas — that of a straight-shooting legal tactician who appears equally respected by defense attorneys and fellow prosecutors. And, at a time when the Justice Department is in turmoil over the dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys, Sutton seems to be fire-proof and may be insulated by his ties to the man who gave him his current job, President George W. Bush.

Sutton left the Harris County district attorney’s office in 1995 to become Bush’s criminal justice policy director in Austin when Bush was governor. After Bush won the presidential election in 2000, Sutton followed him to Washington as part of the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Justice Department.

He remained in Washington as an associate deputy under then-Attorney General John Ashcroft until October 2001, when Bush named him U.S Attorney for the Western District of Texas. The district, one of the largest in the country, sprawls across 93,000 square miles and encompasses 68 counties and three metropolitan areas — San Antonio, Austin and El Paso.

Even from his San Antonio-based domain in Texas, the 46-year-old prosecutor helps shape policy at Justice Department headquarters in Washington as chairman of an advisory committee for current Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who has known Sutton since their days together in the Texas governor’s office.

Sutton’s name has never surfaced as one of the potentially endangered attorneys in what Bush critics say is a politically tainted ouster of selected U.S. attorneys. Conversely, Kyle Sampson, who resigned recently as Gonzales’ chief of staff, said in an e-mail discussing “the replacement plan” that it was important to keep Sutton “in the loop” about potential changes because of his role as head of the advisory committee.

The e-mail was among thousands released by the House Judiciary Committee last week. Sutton acknowledged that he was “given a heads-up” about the changes but was not involved in the discussions. He said he could not discuss the case further because it is an internal matter being dealt with at the top levels of the Justice Department.

Under attack

There have been no outward indications that superiors have attempted to second-guess Sutton’s handling of the law-enforcement prosecutions, despite critics’ demands for his dismissal and protests among conservative lawmakers. Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston, says he may press for Sutton’s resignation if media reports are correct that Sutton’s office declined to prosecute sexual abuse allegations at the Texas Youth Commission.

In last week’s interview, Sutton acknowledged that his office concluded that it would be better for the state to prosecute the allegations because federal punishment would be “minimal.” Potential punishment under state statutes, he said, is “significantly greater.”

While the criticism continues, Sutton’s supporters back home — particularly within the legal arena — are rallying to his defense.

“He’s getting a raw deal and every one of these congressmen ought to be ashamed,” says Rusty Hardin, a former Harris County prosecutor who has been a high-profile Houston trial attorney since 1990. “No prosecutor worth his salt would have done anything different than Johnny did.”

Sutton was an intern at the Harris County district attorney’s office and later joined the office full-time, eventually becoming one of 22 chief prosecutors handling capital murder cases and other major felonies.

One of his most sensational cases was the prosecution of a group of gang members who raped and killed two teenage girls who stumbled into a gang initiation on their way home from a party.

He was assigned to Poe’s court and used his legal skills and “boyish personality” to regularly win favorable verdicts for the prosecution, recalls Poe, now a Republican congressman. “Juries liked him,” Poe said.

In his current federal post, Sutton oversees 260 employees, including 118 assistant U.S. attorneys, whose workload ranges from urban white-collar crimes to drug smuggling and immigration cases in a district that includes 660 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border. The Western district led the nation in drug prosecutions in 2006 — 1,729 cases involving 2,615 defendants.

One of his office’s best-known prosecutions was against former Texas Attorney Gen. Dan Morales, who pleaded guilty in 2003 to mail fraud and filing a false income tax return. In a statement afterward, Sutton said Morales “violated” the public trust.

Under the radar

Sutton lives in Austin, usually spends two days a week at the San Antonio headquarters and routinely tries to visit other division offices. “He’s overseeing probably one of the most difficult U.S. districts in the country,” said Austin defense attorney David Sheppard.

Sutton generally stayed below the radar outside of his district until the backlash over the prosecutions against Ramos and Compean, both of whom were sentenced to at least a decade in prison for shooting Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila after he abandoned a van loaded with marijuana and was running back toward Mexico.

“He has done more to demoralize the Border Patrol than any one person in the history of the United States, in our view,” said Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council.

The two agents said they thought Aldrete-Davila had a gun but an El Paso jury accepted the prosecution case that Ramos and Compean fired at an unarmed man 15 times, striking him once in the buttocks, then tried to cover up the shooting. The public backlash has prompted Sutton, in a move unusual for federal attorneys, to post a lengthy defense of the prosecution on his office’ Web site.

Seated in the executive offices of the Justice Department last week, Sutton said he is sympathetic to law enforcement officers who have “dangerous jobs” and put their lives on the line each day. But, he added, “we don’t allow police officers or federal agents to become judge, jury and executioner.”

Fort Worth Star-Telegram researcher Marcia Melton contributed to this rep

I wish I had something positive to say about Johnny Sutton but nothing comes to mind!!

another side note. sutton will be on KRLD 1080 in the dallas area wednesday morning between 10 and 1030.

listen live at www.krld.com

dont forget Lou Dobbs special tuesday, (today) at 7.
interviews with joe loya, one of the agents boss, and the
prosecuting attorney