Hunt Cnty. Cmty. Supervision & Corr. Dep't v. Gaston
| Citation | 451 S.W.3d 410 |
| Decision Date | 19 September 2014 |
| Docket Number | No. 03–13–00189–CV.,03–13–00189–CV. |
| Parties | HUNT COUNTY COMMUNITY SUPERVISION AND CORRECTIONS DEPARTMENT, Appellant v. Christina GASTON, Appellee. |
| Court | Court of Appeals of Texas |
Robert J. Wiley, Colin Walsh, Law Office of Rob Wiley, P.C., Austin, Stacey Cho, Dallas, for Appellee.
Eric L. Vinson, Office of the Attorney General, General Litigation Division, Austin, for Appellant.
Before Chief Justice JONES, Justices PEMBERTON and ROSE.
We withdraw our opinion, dissenting opinion, and judgment dated August 6, 2014, and substitute the following in their place. We overrule the motion for rehearing filed by appellee, Christina Gaston.
This is an appeal of a trial court order denying a plea to the jurisdiction in a Whistleblower suit. The key issue presented is whether, for purposes of the Whistleblower Act's waiver of sovereign and governmental immunity, a state district judge was an “appropriate law enforcement authority” to whom alleged “violations of law” could be “reported.” We conclude that the district judge was not, at least under the circumstances presented here. This holding requires us to reverse the order challenged on appeal and dismiss the suit for want of subject-matter jurisdiction.
The Whistleblower claimant and appellee, Gaston, was formerly employed as a “community supervision officer” with the defendant and appellant, the Hunt County Community Supervision and Corrections Department (HCCSCD)—in common parlance, a probation officer with Hunt County's local adult probation department.1 As their names and titles suggest, officers like Gaston and departments like HCCSCD assist trial courts in the administration of “community supervision”—a/k/a “probation”—the familiar corrective and rehabilitative regime that trial judges may impose on criminal defendants as an alternative to incarceration.2 Primary duties of such officers include day-to-day implementation, enforcement, and monitoring of probationers' compliance with the court-ordered “terms and conditions” that are a defining feature of community supervision—e.g., obeying the law, holding a steady job, submitting to alcohol or drug testing, and reporting regularly to an assigned probation officer—and providing information to the sentencing courts to whom the probationers ultimately must give account.3 In the case of Gaston, whose tenure with HCCSCD lasted approximately thirteen years, she worked initially in the day-to-day supervision of probationers. However, beginning in roughly 2006, Gaston was assigned to serve as the department's designated “court officer” in Hunt County felony cases, essentially a representative or spokesperson for the department in court proceedings involving probationers who were being supervised by other officers. In this role, Gaston's work was primarily at the district court level.
Community supervision and corrections departments (CSCDs) serve the district courts and county courts at law handling criminal cases within a designated judicial district or combination of districts.4 CSCDs are established by, and operate under the oversight of, a committee or board comprised of the presiding judges of the courts served by the district.5 That oversight includes approving the CSCD's annual budget and a “community justice plan” (essentially a policy or strategic planning document to help guide the department's programming and other operations), as well as appointing “a department director,” who is charged with the department's day-to-day administration.6 Among other duties, the director “shall employ a sufficient number of officers and other employees to conduct presentence investigations, supervise and rehabilitate defendants placed on community supervision, enforce the conditions of community supervision, and staff community corrections facilities.”7 Although these subordinates are integral to judicial administration of community supervision regimes, the Legislature has prescribed that CSCDs are entities distinct from the courts they serve, albeit still within the Judicial Branch,8 and that each subordinate “is an employee of the department and not of the judges or judicial districts.”9 It has similarly provided that the CSCD director possesses the sole direct authority over hiring subordinates and that the overseeing judges' “responsibility ... for personnel decisions” in this regard “is limited to the appointment of [the] department director” only.10
In the case of the HCCSCD, it is overseen by the presiding judges of four Hunt County trial courts that handle criminal cases—the 354th District Court, which serves a multi-county district that includes Hunt County; the 196th District Court, which serves Hunt County only; plus two county courts at law. At all relevant times, HCCSCD's director—and, thus, Gaston's boss—was Jim McKenzie.
In January 2011, a new judge assumed the 196th District Court bench—the Hon. Stephen Tittle, a former local prosecutor who had unseated a longtime incumbent in the 2010 General Election. Although the record hints at a more intricate web of personality differences and local political tensions fueling the disputes that would give rise to this proceeding, both parties' theories of the case center on the undisputed facts that Gaston and Tittle had formed a personal friendship during Tittle's days as a prosecutor11 and that this relationship or alliance had continued as Gaston served as HCCSCD's chief representative in the courtroom over which the newly minted Judge Tittle now presided.
According to HCCSCD, Gaston somewhat egotistically fancied herself as wielding influence over Judge Tittle's official actions by virtue of her friendship and access to him, touted that perception to department colleagues and others, and sought to wield her self-perceived powers to achieve her personal ends. After McKenzie allegedly received internal complaints of such conduct from some of Gaston's HCCSCD colleagues, he initiated an internal investigation that purportedly revealed, among other misconduct, that Gaston had threatened to punish a criminal defense attorney who had angered her by influencing Judge Tittle to cease giving the attorney court appointments. Citing these alleged acts and various other complaints about Gaston's professional conduct,12 McKenzie terminated Gaston on October 6, 2011.
Gaston contends that she was actually terminated because she had divulged to Judge Tittle that McKenzie and other HCCSCD personnel had engaged in what she viewed as illegal conduct in their administration and enforcement of community service requirements that probationers had been ordered to complete as part of the terms and conditions of their community supervision. When imposing community supervision, judges are authorized (and, prior to 2007, were obligated) to “require as a condition of community supervision that the defendant work a specified number of hours at a community service project or projects for an organization or organizations approved by the judge and designated by the [community supervision] department.”13 Accordingly, the Hunt County criminal trial courts, including the 196th District Court, had imposed such conditions (also known as “community service restitution” or “CSR”) on a number of probationers. The nature and potential significance of Gaston's purported revelations to Judge Tittle concerning CSR practices are best understood in the context of a series of related issues that Tittle himself had raised with the other judges who oversaw HCCSCD and McKenzie during the summer of 2011.
By July 2011, Judge Tittle had ascertained that several of the local nonprofit “contract agencies” that provided community-service opportunities for Hunt County probationers had been accepting monetary donations from probationers in exchange for credited hours the probationers would receive against their court-ordered CSR requirements. At least in some instances, the judges of the sentencing courts, including Judge Tittle, had been unaware of the substitution because they had been informed only that the probationers had satisfied the requisite number of hours without revealing that the hours had been “bought” from the contract agencies rather than actually worked. Tittle also learned that contract agencies even had a specified “price” per hour of CSR credit and that the most prolific recipient of these donations from probationers—the local YMCA—had been “charging” less per hour of CSR credit than other nonprofits. It is also of some significance to Gaston's theory of the case that the YMCA's board members included another Hunt County criminal-court judge who, according to Gaston, was a friend or ally of McKenzie.
Judge Tittle expressed concern to McKenzie and to the other judges who supervised HCCSCD that the awarding of CSR credit to probationers in exchange for monetary donations violated article 42.12 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the chief statute governing the imposition and enforcement of community supervision.14 Although article 42.12 generally vests broad discretion in trial judges to impose or modify “terms and conditions” of community supervision, permitting any “reasonable condition that is designed to protect or restore the community [or] victim, or punish, rehabilitate, or reform the defendant,”15 the statute prohibits judges from “order[ing] a defendant to make any payments as a term or condition of community supervision, except for fines, court costs, restitution to the victim, and other conditions related personally to the rehabilitation of the defendant or otherwise expressly authorized by law.”16 In a 2008 opinion, GA–0593, the Attorney General had concluded that these features of article 42.12 generally limit the discretion of trial judges to require or permit a probationer to satisfy community-service requirements through donations of money or goods in lieu of actual work solely to instances where the donation would independently be permissible as a “fine, court...
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