Editor’s note: This article is republished on BrownwoodNews.com with expressed permission from The Texas Observer. The article, written by Patrick Michels, was published on TheTexasObserver.org on November 28th, at 12:31 p.m.
A little after 1 a.m. on a Sunday in March 2012, Charley Salas was driving some friends home after a night out in Brownwood, a rural town midway between Austin and Abilene. Five months pregnant, Salas was the designated driver. Earlier that night, a friend had spilled beer in the backseat, so when a cop pulled her over for making a wide right turn, the smell made him immediately suspicious. He checked her ID and discovered Salas was driving with an invalid license. Though Salas pleaded that she didn’t know, she was handcuffed and taken to jail, where she spent the night.
At her court date in June, she faced either more jail time or a $2,000 penalty. As a 26-year-old single mother, Salas couldn’t afford either. But Brown County Attorney Shane Britton made her an offer: Salas could avoid the charge and go home that day if she took a “pretrial diversion,” a deal similar to probation except that the terms are dictated by a prosecutor, not a judge. Salas would have to avoid alcohol, drugs and “persons or places of disreputable or harmful character” for the next year, and pay monthly fees to the Brown County Court at Law, the Texas Department of Public Safety and to Britton’s office. Those fees added up to nearly $1,400, or about $116 a month. Salas had no idea how she’d pay, but she took the deal rather than risk a conviction, which would come with more state surcharges.
“It seemed a lot cheaper to do so,” she said recently. “I didn’t have the money. I had to hurry up and go to work. I was like, ‘OK, probation period. Sign me up, let’s do it.’”
Salas says she made her first payment, then began asking for extensions. She paid when she could, but then she lost her job and missed a lot more payments. She’d get letters reminding her to pay, and when she could, she’d drive to the courthouse with separate money orders for each of her fees. When she missed more than three months in a row, Salas says a woman in Britton’s office added late fees that weren’t mentioned in her agreement. At one point, Salas says, she took out a payday loan so she could afford her payments to the court. Around Christmas 2014, Britton’s office sent a letter demanding $1,000, and Salas asked for one last extension. In February 2015 — almost three years after her fateful right turn — she stood at the counter at his office and handed over two money orders, one for $600 and one for $400.
About a year later, Salas got a call from a man named Joe Cooksey, who explained that he was investigating suspicious payments to Britton’s office. Her case had caught his eye. Salas didn’t know how much she’d paid over the years, but Cooksey found records showing at least her last $1,000 were deposited in two accounts designated for donations to Britton’s office. What’s more, Salas had made the payment nine months after her case had been dismissed. And there were others who had apparently been pressured into “donating” money to Britton’s office. Salas was stunned.
Most prosecutors in Texas are barred by state law from taking gifts from people in their jurisdiction. Among the ethical questions such arrangements could raise, the most basic is that a defendant could simply buy his way out of punishment for a crime. Yet for nearly a decade, the Brown County Attorney’s Office has arguably done something similar. Britton has made “donations” from defendants the foundation of a pretrial diversion program that lets people avoid prosecution for drunk driving, driving without a license, shoplifting and other misdemeanors. In this way, hundreds of defendants have paid a combined $250,000 since 2008 to cover travel to conferences, cellphones for Britton and his staff, and advertisements in the Brownwood High School cheer calendar, according to county records. By covering other office costs with donations, Britton was even able to convince county leaders to boost salaries for himself and his staff.
