This Isn’t Justice, and Texas Knows It

Start with the pen, because Texas always starts with the pen. August 14, 2012, Collin County courthouse: a lawyer leaves his $1,000 Montblanc — a gift from his wife — in the security bin, and State Representative Ken Paxton scoops it up on his way through the metal detector.

Took a sheriff’s deputy to get it back.

His campaign now calls that “a mix-up at security,” which is also, come to think of it, a fair description of his entire career.

The 2015 securities fraud indictment?

Paid restitution, admitted nothing.

The impeachment in 2023?

Acquitted by friends.

In Texas we don’t disqualify a man for that; we redistrict him toward the Senate.

But the pen is the joke, and the joke has stopped being funny.

Down in Waco, a defense attorney named Adam Dean Hoffman stood accused of raping a young boy, repeatedly, over years.

The boy — eight, nine, ten years old when it happened — sat in a room full of strangers, across from the man who did it, and told them the most horrible things that ever happened to him.

The jury hung, seven to five for guilt. And then the office of Ken Paxton, the loudest tough-on-crime voice this state has ever produced, offered the man two misdemeanors and one day in jail. Time served. No sex-offender registry.

The visiting judge, Roy Sparkman — a Republican, mind you — read the deal and asked, “Somebody want to explain this to me?”

Nobody could.

The boy’s mother stood up at sentencing and said the words that ought to be carved over the courthouse door: “It’s just not enough. He’s dangerous. This isn’t justice, and I can’t do it.” Sparkman pushed the sentence to sixty days.

Sixty. For that.

And here’s the part that curdles the blood: it’s a pattern, not an accident.

Sparkman himself said it wasn’t his first go-round with Paxton’s office.

There was the Waco lawyer charged with soliciting capital murder — hiring a hit man who turned out to be a cop — walked off with a misdemeanor and four days in jail.

There was Rakim Sharkey, charged with trafficking two girls and a woman, facing life; Paxton’s shop handed him probation after a former prosecutor says the office falsely told the court its witnesses were unavailable.

One had testified the week before.

Two years later Sharkey was rearrested for a string of felonies and is now serving twenty-two years — which tells you exactly what that probation was worth, and who paid for it. Three felony cases, three mistrials, three slaps on the wrist, three judges demanding more. Meanwhile his human-trafficking unit went a whole year without a single conviction, even as he thundered that local DAs were soft on crime and demanded power over them.

So when people ask how a man like this gets near the United States Senate, understand: Texans aren’t crazy or dumb or numb.

We’re being tested.

A mother in Waco told the truth in open court, and a Republican judge backed her up, which means the conscience of this state is alive and taking names.

The man who’d steal your pen has been caught stealing something bigger — justice itself, one plea deal at a time.

Election Day’s coming. Bring your own pen, and hold it tight.