Notable Cases

Asel Abdygapparova v. State, 243 S.W.3d 191 (Tex. App.-San Antonio 2006, pet. ref'd)

Asel was convicted by jury in the 175th Judicial District Court, Bexar County, Mary D. Román, J., of capital murder, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Asel appealed.

 Asel, a college student from Kazakhstan, was attending college in San Antonio. She was involved with the wrong man, became pregnant, and was made to be present during a murder he committed. A few days later, she went to the FBI and debriefed everything she knew, assisting in finding the body of the victim, the apprehension and conviction of the killer and his cohort. Then San Antonio District Attorney Susan Reed still prosecuted Asel for capital murder.  We handled her appeal successfully.

 The Court of Appeals held that:

1 trial court's denial of requests of defendant, a college student from Kazakhstan, for an interpreter was not an abuse of discretion;

2 defendant's statements made during plea negotiations were not admissible to negate a false impression;

3 trial court's actions in engaging in ex parte communications with state precluded defendant from receiving fair and impartial trial; and

4 violation of defendant's due process right to an impartial judge was structural error, such that reversal of conviction was warranted without conducting harm analysis.

Reversed and remanded.

Capital Murder Conviction Set Aside — The Prosecutor Was the Judge’s Own Law Clerk

Ex parte Michael David Lewis, No. WR-94,237-01 (Tex. Crim. App. May 8, 2024) (published)

Our client was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life without parole — a conviction affirmed on direct appeal and seemingly final for nearly two decades. What no one outside the Midland County courthouse knew was that the trial itself was rigged at its foundation: the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case, Ralph Petty, was simultaneously employed — and paid by the county — as a law clerk for the very judge presiding over the trial, Judge John Hyde. For roughly seventeen years, Petty had quietly moonlighted as a clerk for the same Midland County judges before whom he appeared as a prosecutor, drafting rulings and advising on criminal matters, including habeas cases, while the district attorney’s office pressed for convictions in those same courtrooms. None of it was ever disclosed to our client or his trial lawyers. As we told the Court, he was playing with a deck that was unethically stacked in the State’s favor.



The arrangement finally surfaced in Ex parte Young, the Midland death-row case that made national headlines and ended with Petty surrendering his law license. Reading that decision, we recognized the same two names — the same prosecutor, the same judge — at the center of our client’s trial. We then went through every volume of the decades-old record, matched the timeline of Petty’s secret judicial employment to every phase of the case from indictment through sentencing, and built the Article 11.07 habeas application showing that the same corrupted arrangement infected this trial too. Confronted with that record, the State itself agreed our client was entitled to relief.

The Court of Criminal Appeals granted the writ in a published opinion, holding that the undisclosed, paid employment relationship between the trial judge and the prosecutor “tainted” the trial and denied our client due process of law — because “a fair trial in a fair tribunal is a basic requirement of due process,” and justice “must satisfy the appearance of justice.” No showing of specific harm was required: a trial in which the prosecutor secretly works for the judge is structurally unfair, full stop. The life-without-parole capital murder judgment was set aside in its entirety. This case shows what a determined post-conviction investigation can uncover — even in a case the system had long treated as closed.

Illegal Seven-Year Sentence on a Two-Year Offense — Both Convictions Vacated

Garretson v. State, Nos. 14-18-00918-CR & 14-18-00919-CR (Tex. App.—Houston [14th Dist.] Sept. 1, 2020) (mem. op.)

Our client pleaded guilty in a package deal to burglary of a building and drug possession, and was later sentenced to prison when his probation was revoked. But there was a fundamental problem no one had caught at the plea: burglary of a building is a state jail felony with a two-year maximum, and he had been sentenced to seven years — an illegal sentence, agreed to on advice of prior counsel. When the error surfaced, a visiting judge tried to paper over it with a “nunc pro tunc” order quietly reducing the sentence, after consulting the District Attorney’s Office off the record.



On appeal, we defeated the State’s argument that the courthouse doors were closed, persuading the court of appeals to reach the illegal sentence through the void-judgment exception. The court held the sentence illegal, held the nunc pro tunc order improper because it rewrote a plea bargain rather than fixing a clerical slip, and held the entire plea involuntary because it was the product of ineffective assistance of counsel. The court reversed and vacated the judgments in both cases, returning our client to the position he was in before the plea — a complete undoing of an unlawful deal.

Capital Murder Conviction Reversed — Secret Notes Between the Judge and the Prosecutor

Abdygapparova v. State, 243 S.W.3d 191 (Tex. App.—San Antonio 2007, pet. ref’d)

Our client, a young college student from Kazakhstan, was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison. On appeal, we exposed something extraordinary in the record: during trial, the judge and the prosecutor had been exchanging ex parte communications — private notes passed between them while the trial was underway — conduct fundamentally at odds with the neutrality our system demands of a judge.



The San Antonio Court of Appeals held that the trial court’s ex parte communications with the State deprived our client of a fair and impartial trial, and that the violation of her due process right to an impartial judge was structural error — so serious that reversal was required without any harm analysis. The conviction was reversed and the case remanded for a new trial. The case remains one of the signal Texas decisions on judicial impartiality.