About 27.9 miles north of the state capitol building in Austin, where the goddess Athena stands watch at the top of the rotunda, another powerhouse of Greek mythology, the Titaness Themis, stands her post atop the Williamson County courthouse in Georgetown.  Hesiod, writing during the Greek literary era around 700 B.C., described her as "Justice" in the presence of a divine being.  

Based on events which have occurred in Williamson County over the past several years, it appears as if Themis hasn't been doing her job.  Or, perhaps, the challenges she faces are so overwhelming a mere goddess can't do anything to resolve the problems.

Over the past eleven years, things have just gone from bad to worse.  And the bigger problem is that the county's public-relations spin machine, coupled with a super-conservative voting majority among registered voters, has combined to swallow and overwhelm any interest which local media might have to break the most serious stories of moral outrage.  It's not that media don't "report" the stories, but the details are glossed over to the extent that momentum has waned in making changes at the ballot box.

There are enough examples of these problems in Williamson County for someone to write a thick book with all the details, and someday that might happen.  But for now, especially because of the urgency involving important legal issues, there isn't sufficient time available to wait for that book.  

We pick up the trail of these problems beginning in the year 2000, a year not necessarily unrelated to the fact that George W. Bush was elected president and Rick Perry was sworn in for his first term as governor in 2001.  One of Perry's appointments, a district attorney in Williamson County, ended up helping him win the governor's race in 2010.

Beginning in the year 2000, Williamson County commissioners court laid plans for a road-building binge and saw to the passage of a major bond issue to do that.  The only problem was that members of commissioners court used public funds to promote passage of the bond issue, and they ended up getting sanctioned by the Texas Ethics Commission and had to pay a fine.  But thanks to that initiative, along with the paid-for efforts of a convicted felon named Amos "Pete" Peters, the bond issue passed, making available hundreds of millions of dollars for the county to pay consultants, engineers, and contractors to build those roads, and the recipients of those contracts haven't been ungrateful (even to the present day), because they responded with huge campaign contributions to these elected officials, insuring their abilities to get re-elected, thus perpetuating the cozy arrangement.

Peters, who had set up fund-raising mechanisms to help pass that road bond issue, also served as campaign manager for several elected officials, including District Attorney John Bradley.  But then, Peters either became greedy or sustained a major lapse in keeping records.  He turned in invoices and expense reports, claiming that he should be paid for meetings that never happened.  Peters claimed that one of those people, Rich Oppel with the Austin American-Statesman, was his guest at a Round Rock Express baseball game, a liaison which, according to Oppel, never happened.  And there were several other instances of Peters making erroneous claims about his billable hours.  It all came to a head when enough evidence was assembled from various sources to present all of the charges to a Williamson County grand jury.  DA John Bradley announced that he had cut Peters loose from being his own campaign consultant, and then, somehow miraculously, Peters was no-billed by the grand jury.

Watching all of this happen from the top of the courthouse, Themis had to be upset, but she showed no emotion.  The Peters fiasco was a minor occurrence in the career of Bradley, however, who would be thrust to center stage in two subsequent cases, both of which involved murder, and neither of which has been fixed by the criminal justice system, in large part because of the influence by Bradley.  Those events will be described as we move through this "moral vacuum" events chronology, but keeping things in time-sensitive order, first things first.

By January of 2007, members of Williamson County commissioners court were (or so they claimed) a completely different group than the so-called "good old boys" who had orchestrated the road bond issue with the help of the Pete Peters shenanigans.  As they slid into their posh leather chairs behind the dais, all five new court members were consistent in claiming that they would do things right and that the good-old-boy era was over.  

Precinct 1 Commissioner Lisa Birkman of Round Rock made her political debut as a member of the Brushy Creek MUD, was appointed to the court to replace Mike Heligenstein (who had been fined for the road-bond campaign, along with others), and then won re-elections in a special election and in the regular election cycle in 2008.  

Precinct 2 Commissioner Cynthia Long of Cedar Park was elected in 2006 to replace Greg Boatright, who suffered a serious, behind-the-scenes political setback because of some alleged hanky-panky with a county employee which is reported to have ended in a private settlement agreement.  Long ran for the open seat.

Precinct 3 Commissioner Valerie Covey of Georgetown, who had been an unsuccessful candidate for district clerk, took another shot at elected office after the untimely death of Tom McDaniel, who actually was functioning as a reform commissioner.  After winning the Republican primary, and after some delay, Covey was finally appointed to fill McDaniel's unexpired term in late 2006 before being sworn in on her own election credentials in January of 2007.

Precinct 4 Commissioner Ron Morrison of Round Rock, a tote-note used car dealer and salesman, succeeded in the 2006 Republican primary after a runoff, and then won in the general election. Morrison ran in a wide-open primary when Frankie Limmer, the consummate and self-admitted "good old boy" in county government, didn't run for re-election.

County Judge Dan Gattis, the former head of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, where Waste Management had enjoyed the exclusive concession as the solid-waste-disposal service provider under his leadership,  ran in the 2006 Republican primary after the sitting county judge, John Doerfler, announced his intention not to run for re-election.  However, after Gattis won the primary in March of 2006, and because he had no Democrat opponent in the general election, he was invited to sit in executive session proceedings of commissioners court during the last half of 2006 before he was sworn into office in January of 2007. Citizens complained that admitting a private citizen to those sessions was a violation of the Texas Open Meetings Act, but the practice continued for the rest of the year.

Despite the "reform" promises of these candidates who then were elected, the super-aggressive road-building efforts continued, and the campaign contributions from the road and highway lobby continued as well--even to the present day.

The Williamson County landfill, owned by Williamson County and located five miles north of Hutto, was opened in 1978 and, since the early 1980s, had been run by Waste Management, which purchased the landfill contract from Wolf Enterprises, which was experiencing financial difficulties.  When the contract with Waste Management was renewed by the county in 2003, it contained provisions which essentially put the contractor in charge of the county landfill with extremely preferential financial arrangements for Waste Management.  A citizens initiative effectively forced the county to reconsider the contract, but instead of bidding it out, the county simply tightened up the language, increased the payments to the county slightly, and then locked in the agreement for 40 years.  By any analysis, the contract is tilted heavily in favor of Waste Management.  

So, for the 31 years that Waste Management has been running the landfill, it never has been subject to a competitive bid for the contractor.  During that 2009 renegotiation of the landfill contract, Gattis staunchly refused to consider bidding it out and insisted that Waste Management was the only company he would consider to run the landfill, his prior relationship to the company while he worked in Houston notwithstanding. Gattis didn't rec use himself from the process by which the contract with Waste Management was renewed without a competitive bid.

One provision of that new, 2009 landfill contract, adopted at the insistence of citizens living around the landfill, was that Waste Management would develop and commit to a "site development plan", including time lines, for landscaping and sight-screening the facility, along with preserving a historic house on the property which the county had acquired through condemning the landfill when expanding its acreage in 1998.  A one-percent surcharge on landfill revenues was set up in the contract to fund implementation of the plan.  When the deadline for filing that plan occurred in March of 2010, Waste Management filed a weak, provisional, plan under an arrangement in which the county would "accept" the plan so that the contractor wouldn't be in default, yet the county didn't "approve" it as required by the contract.  And now, 30 months after an acceptable plan was due to be filed "with time lines", it still hasn't been done, and no one at the county or at Waste Management will respond to inquiries about it.

Another provision of the landfill contract, again at the insistence of citizens, is that the county would hire an "oversight inspector" to monitor Waste Management's operation of the landfill, with Waste Management contributing $50,000 per year to pay that expense.  To date, the inspector has never been hired.

In March of 2010, when that "site development plan" was supposed to be approved, Gattis and Morrison sought to appease citizens by promising to see to the preservation of the historic house as a center for area history, public meetings, and educational programs.  But, in mid-2011, Morrison orchestrated a report from a consultant saying that the house should be torn down, and a subsequent consultant's report about asbestos removal acknowledged that the purpose of the asbestos abatement was to meet requirements prior to the house's demolition.  In August of 2011, the Williamson County Public Policy Coalition (a private citizens group) submitted a comprehensive plan to save the house using revenues in the one-percent master site development fund, but neither Morrison nor Gattis nor Waste Management has responded to the proposal, and no one will return calls asking about it.

In July of 2011, as part of an ongoing two-year, open records lawsuit involving landfill records, documents filed by Waste Management with the Texas 11th Court of Appeals revealed that the Williamson County auditor has not been inspecting or auditing the landfill gatehouse tickets for individual landfill loads, thus relying on aggregated numbers in reports generated by Waste Management to determine whether payments to the county are appropriate.  Without inspecting those tickets, the county has no way of knowing whether or not those aggregated reports created by Waste Management accurately reflect the volumes accepted and collections made at the landfill gatehouse.  The county auditor's office, despite requests for answers, has never explained why it has never audited those tickets.

And now, returning to the matter of District Attorney John Bradley and the greater issue of the Williamson County criminal justice system, in mid-2010 a county court-at-law judge, Don Higginbotham, faced sexual harassment complaints from employees.  He appealed to his friend, County Judge Dan Gattis for help, and Gattis then met with Higginbotham and Mike Davis, a private-practice attorney in Round Rock, to get that help for Higginbotham.  Davis then billed the county for almost $8,000 for Higginbotham's legal fees, and Gattis' office approved payment, even though Williamson County commissioners court had never approved hiring Davis to represent Higginbotham.  When it all came to light, Gattis claimed that it was an inadvertent misunderstanding.  And Davis didn't have to pay the money back.  He was given the opportunity to work it off in his future contracts with the county.

County Attorney Jana Duty, however, didn't see the actions as "inadvertent".  In mid-2011 she filed a lawsuit to remove Gattis as county judge.  A visiting judge ruled that Gattis' action didn't subject him to removal because it happened in 2010, prior to his being sworn in for his current term, a function of the "forgiveness doctrine".  So, Gattis' defense was not that he didn't do it--only that he legally should be forgiven for doing it.

In response to Duty's troublemaking, Williamson County commissioners court filed 24 grievances against her with the Texas Bar Association.  Duty has succeeded in getting all but four of those grievances dismissed, and she has insisted on a public hearing or trial rather than a private session as is her right, even though members of commissioners have urged that the session be private.  Gattis in particular (but all other commissioners court members as well) now face the prospect of depositions and cross-examination, all of which would be public.  It's clear why they want a closed session and why Duty wants a public one.

Bradley claims that he investigated the Higginbotham-Gattis-Davis matter and found no wrongdoing, and he also claims that he had the Texas Rangers, Travis County Public Integrity Unit and Attorney General conduct their own investigations, with the same "done no wrong" conclusion.  However, Ken Martin, an Austin journalist and publisher of The Austin Bulldog, called those other "investigators" and verified that, contrary to what Bradley said, they conducted no investigations.

Another albatross for Bradley is the Todd Willingham matter.  Willingham was executed after having been convicted of murdering his family by arson, but evidence turned up by the Texas Commission on Forensic Science pointed toward Willingham's innocence.  Just when the commission was getting down to brass tacks, Governor Rick Perry cleaned house and appointed John Bradley as commission chairman, just as his primary campaign contest with Kay Bailey Hutchison was heating up.  Bradley succeeded in pouring sand in the gears, staving off a commission determination before the Perry-Hutchison primary vote occurred, but then Bradley was not confirmed by the Texas Senate to his commission appointment.  By that time, Perry, who had vehemently insisted on Willingham's guilt and refused to stop his execution, had defeated Hutchison in the primary.  Presently, there are indications that Bradley may face complaints that he violated the Texas Open Meetings Act as a result of the way that he handled the meetings of the science commission.

And then an even heavier albatross arrived for Perry--the Michael Morton murder case.  Morton had been convicted and sentenced to prison in 1987 for killing his wife in 1986.  The two lead prosecutors in the case were Ken Anderson, now a Williamson County district judge, and (surprise) Mike Davis, a key player in the Higginbotham case with his problematical invoices to the county.  After the trial, according to a Motion for a new trial filed by Morton's attorney, Davis told the jury that reasonable doubt could have been raised in the case if the jury had been allowed to see all the evidence.

Thanks to The Innocence Project, based in New York, some of that exculpatory evidence has been retrieved through the Texas Public Information Act, despite serious and almost desperate resistance by Perry.  But Perry lost his court fight to suppress the evidence, and one item dramatically appears to have exonerated Morton.  A bandanna found behind the house was tested for DNA and found to contain the hair and blood of Morton's murdered wife, Christine, along with the DNA of a man (not Morton), whose DNA match led to his specific identity as a three-time felon convicted for assault with intent to murder, burglary, and drug possession.  

Despite this hard-core evidence, Bradley still staunchly resists turning over all of the Morton file, and the court battle continues.  Bradley has not issued an arrest warrant for the man whose DNA was found on the bandanna. The Williamson County district judge in the evidence-review case, Billy Ray Stubblefield, recused himself, but not before ruling that Bradley does not have to recuse himself from the case, as sought by The Innocence Project.  (It's a tight circle there in Georgetown:  Bradley, Davis, Anderson, Higginbotham, Gattis, and others.)  Morton is still in jail as the case proceeds under a visiting judge from San Antonio.

In an interview with The Williamson County Sun after that August 23 hearing when Stubblefield would not order Bradley's recusal, Davis was quoted as saying, “Then or now, the evidence still isn't relevant to the case."

The tone expressed by Davis was defiant. “This is a battle between New York fruit-of-the-looms and Mr. Bradley. They're just a bunch of nuts in my opinion.” He was referring to attorneys for The Innocence Project who were instrumental in getting DNA evidence which appears to exonerate Morton.

The failure of any public official in Williamson County, especially members of commissioners court, to address and try to fix the problems with Davis and Bradley is appalling.  Based on his comments about Morton's lawyers and his apparent role in secreting away exculpatory evidence, Davis should be blackballed from doing any legal work for the county until this entire matter is resolved.  And public officials should openly tell Bradley that he should recuse himself from the Morton case in light of how hard he has found to keep important evidence under wraps.  But none of them--Birkman, Long, Gattis, Covey, nor Morrison, will do that.  They just sit and watch, taking no action to sustain their oaths to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and of this State."

Meanwhile, despite revelations acquired through open records requests leading to the conclusion that Williamson County commissioners court has violated the Texas County Purchasing Act by the way in which it has hired lawyers and lobbyists to work on faster road-building and punch up its case involving the Duty grievances, business as usual proceeds, with at least a dozen right-of-way acquisitions on each week's commissioners court agenda, and some smoke-and-mirrors problems with the county budget.  Even though commissioners court, in passing the 2011-2012 budget on August 30, added several spending items, court members slightly lowered the tax rate.  Citizens have complained that the shell game being used is that of under-estimating real costs to create the illusion of cost-cutting, thus allowing the tax rate to be lowered, then subsequently inserting the needed money into the needed places as the budget year evolves by issuing budget amendments and then tapping the $61 million reserve fund, which should have been used to balance the budget in the first place.

Additional details about these budget games are provided at www.wilcowatchdog.org .

While the hard-core Christian right in Williamson County, which dominates the county's politics, ignores the fact that Themis at the top of the courthouse is truly a graven image, even more ominous is this political culture ignoring the moral principle for which Themis stands, namely Justice.

It seems only reasonable that at least a few of these elected officials should be standing up and shouting from the rooftops (or at least issuing press releases) saying that these various skullduggeries are not right.  But none of them is doing that.  The task is left to citizens not in their coterie and media which can't seem to publish the real facts with enough momentum to alert the public to the problems which are debilitating to constitutional rights and freedom.

These players seem to have little inclination to change.  As the Morton case and some of these other legal scenarios play out, maybe Themis, at long last, will have some satisfaction.