Like most events inside the old courthouse in Livingston, Texas, population 5,238, the felony child abuse proceedings on August 8, 2012, involved a cast of legal professionals who knew each other well. State District Judge Elizabeth Coker, a third generation jurist with deep roots in the rolling farmland of East Texas, presided. David Wells, an investigator in the district attorney’s office shared a yellow legal pad with the prosecutor, Beverly Armstrong. Another prosecutor, Kaycee Jones, was there just to observe. But at one point, her phone buzzed and she reached over to scribble a note on her colleagues’ paper. “Judge says…,” it started. And so began the trouble. Criminal defense attorneys often grumble that judges favor the prosecution. Substantiating such suspicions is usually impossible. But in Coker’s case, it apparently wasn’t all that hard. After a 14-month investigation by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, Coker stepped down from the bench last week, rebaptized in the local headlines as the “Texting Judge” and making news far beyond the hushed hallways of the three small town courthouses where she served. (MORE: Texas Wants to Reverse Ruling That Blocked Abortion Law) Jones, the prosecutor who transcribed the text, is also under fire. In January, Coker welcomed the newly elected Republican to the bench—the three counties are served by just two district judges—swearing her in and helping her don her black robes. In a letter sent to the Office of the Chief Disciplinary Counsel for the State Bar of Texas, Jones later said she “deeply regretted her actions in passing on the judge’s text message and added: It was wrong and I knew better.” The State Bar has a March hearing scheduled to look at complaints about her actions. The pleasant countryside around the small towns where the tale of the texting Texas judge began belies the turbulent political climate surrounding the whole affair. Newcomers, many of them retirees from nearby Houston, have changed the political map from yellow dog Democrat to deep red Republican. In 2006, San Jacinto County was embroiled in a McCoy-Hatfield political feud between what the Texas Observer called the old guard versus the new. It was a fight less about ideology than … Continue reading The Tale of the Texting Judge