Judge Andrea Beall ruled Tuesday that the prosecutors, Brian Wice and Kent Schaffer, are owed the $300-an-hour rate by the county that they were promised when they started on the case in 2015.
Brian Wice and Kent Schaffer, special prosecutors in the Ken Paxton security fraud case, talk to the media at the Harris County Courthouse in Houston on Aug. 3, 2023., The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
The prosecutors included Beall’s ruling — made under seal — in a new filing with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The prosecutors are asking the court to force Collin County to pay them — and to prohibit the county from"taking any further action calculated to thwart" payment. “Judge Beall’s well reasoned decision clearly falls within the zone of her inherent and virtually unlimited judicial discretion,” Wice and Schaffer said in a statement."We’re confident that the Court of Criminal Appeals will enforce her lawful order with all deliberate speed and finally put an end to Collin County’s incessant, transparent, and purely political ploy to derail Ken Paxton’s prosecution by defunding it.
Paxton has pleaded not guilty to two counts of securities fraud, a first-degree felony, and one count of failing to register with state securities regulators, a third-degree felony. He faces up to 99 years in prison if convicted. Over a year later, though, with the lawsuit still looming, commissioners voted against paying prosecutors for their next invoice, covering work done in 2016.
In her Tuesday order, Beall declined to find the state statute unconstitutional but said local rules in Collin County were unreasonable and illegal. She ordered the prosecutors to be paid for their 2016 work at the original rate of $300 an hour.
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