Attorney hits home run in Molina trial

Watching Attorney Carlos A. Garcia try to pull a rabbit out of the hat, so to speak, during the recent voter-fraud trial of former Edinburg Mayor Richard Molina, while lead Prosecutor Mike Garza tried to put the rabbit back in, was like watching the best of Court TV.

Two seasoned attorneys going at it like professional fighters, weaving, bobbing, landing blows, laughing it off when their opponent appeared to land a solid blow.

At one point, Garza asked the visiting judge, Nueces-based Carlos Valdez, if he would tell Garcia to quit yelling. Can’t remember who was on the stand, but presumably it was a witness for the state.

“Please stop yelling,” Valdez said.

Garcia stood up slowly. Guy has to stand 6’ 2” with his shaved Kojak-style scalp making him appear taller.

“You haven’t really heard me yell yet,” Garcia said. Or words to that effect.

From the state’s side of the courtroom, you could hear Garza say, almost under his breath with obvious disdain, “Wow.”

For both men this trial seemed as much personal as it did professional.

Garcia thought his client, Molina, was the victim of a political witch hunt, and he did his best to remind the jury of that time and time again. Edinburg’s political elite were against his client, and it was the jury’s job to put an end to it.

Assistant DA Mike Garza told the jury that free and fair elections are what keep our republic whole because they represent the foundation upon which it is built. You could tell that he wasn’t just mouthing the words for show.

Garza appeared to be saying what he really believed. After all, he had spent the last four-plus years of his life, off and on, working this case, and he had to believe the jury would agree with him when it came time for deliberations — Molina is guilty of the voter-fraud crimes for which he had been charged.

Five years prior, in the very same state district courtroom (the 92nd), Mike Garza had successfully prosecuted former Catholic Priest John Feit for the 1960 murder of a young McAllen resident and teacher, Irene Garza (no relation). It was, and presumably still is, this nation’s oldest cold-case homicide to ever win a conviction.

Two weeks ago this Thursday, though, the look on Garza’s face was almost one of disbelief as the jury ended deliberations and acquitted Molina on the 10-plus felony counts filed against him dating back to his initial arrest in April 2019 when he was still Edinburg mayor. After winning his mayoral race in 2017 by a margin of 1,240 votes against a relatively popular and high-profile incumbent 11-year mayor, Richard Garcia, Molina ran smack dab into his 2021 reelection campaign with a grand jury indictment hanging over his head. Despite that, in a runoff election, he lost by only 400 votes.

During the trial that ended two weeks ago, Attorney Carlos Garcia asked Molina, while he was on the stand, if he thought that indictment had cost him the election.

“I do,” said the former mayor, looking at the jury to underscore his point.

Edinburg, the Sleeper

For years, Edinburg was a sleeper when it came to elections. Typically, even in a mayoral election, only about 7 percent of the city’s registered voters would show up at the polls. They would show up for the political pachangas, but not when it came time to actually vote.

That said, Molina told the jury that he did everything he could to get more people to the polls in 2017. Based on his interpretation of state election law and legal opinions he ran across online at the websites belonging to the Secretary of State and the Texas Attorney General, he was of the opinion, he said, that voters had a choice where to vote as long as they didn’t vote in more than one municipal election. If they had some vested interest in the city — they shopped in Edinburg a lot, or their children went to school in Edinburg, for example — they could vote for him in the upcoming city election he told friends and family.

Legally speaking, in part, this is defined as a “Mistake of Law” defense. Meaning, Molina didn’t intentionally break the law when he encouraged friends and family who lived outside Edinburg city limits to vote for him in 2017. Rather, he was mistaken in that belief based on his own research.

In most criminal trials, it’s highly unusual to see a criminal defendant take the stand and expose themself to cross-examination by prosecutors biting at the bit to question them under oath. Yet, in the case of Richard Molina, after the state had called multiple witnesses to testify, mostly former friends and family, who said that they had voted for him only after being told it was OK to do so, even though they didn’t live in the city, the only chance the former mayor had for full acquittal was to put himself in front of the jury so he could tell his side of the story.

For most court observers, after the state rested its case, it looked like Mike Garza would go home with another win under his belt. The testimony coming from multiple witnesses was just too damning. One after another, they took the stand and told the jury how Molina had coaxed them into voting for him in 2017. One witness, who is related to the former mayor, said that the voter deceit had almost led to a divorce from his wife who opposed the trip to the polls. She had told him it was wrong to vote, they didn’t live in Edinburg, but they went anyway.

Molina’s lead defense attorney, Carlos Garcia, began his examination by asking Molina about his early life, his time in the military and with the city’s PD, where he rose to the rank of sergeant. He asked him why he got into city politics in the first place.

“Because I saw that everyone wasn’t being treated the same (fairly).”

Molina never denied that he told state witnesses to vote for him, despite knowing they didn’t live in Edinburg. He simply said it was his understanding that he was working within the confines of state election law, and besides that, he told the jury on multiple occasions, the same thing had been going on for years.

“It only became a problem when I was elected mayor,” Molina said.

When it came time for Assistant DA Mike Garza to cross-examine the former mayor, it was time to sit back and watch the legal show unwind.

Time and again, Garza would point out to the judge that Molina was painting a narrative for the jury as opposed to answering his questions with a simple yes or no answer. Molina would say, yes, or no, and then try to qualify his answer.

“It’s a simple yes-or-no question, your honor.”

The judge would advise Molina to simply answer the question.

Then the narrative would start to build again.

At one point, after another objection from Garza, the judge admitted that he couldn’t control Molina. He had told him repeatedly to simply answer the questions coming from the prosecutor, yes or no, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t comply.

“I don’t know what else I can do,” said Judge Valdez looking perplexed.

Garcia, rising from the defense table, told the judge that some of the questions coming from Garza needed some clarification. They weren’t simple yes-or-no questions.

And so it went, back and forth between Molina and Garza, and Garza and Garcia. Meanwhile, the jury remained poker faced. Was this a political witch hunt or was the former mayor really guilty of voter fraud and conspiracy?

Two weeks ago, the afternoon of Aug. 25th, after approximately eight hours of deliberation, the jury returned its not-guilty verdict on all counts related to voter fraud. A stunner for sure for those who attended the trial, listed to the state witnesses.

Why did the jury vote to acquit? So far, it’s hard to find a juror who will speak on the record. Best guess is, they agreed with Molina: this voter-residency shuffle has been going on for decades in Hidalgo County, so why should Richard Molina be the only one held accountable for fraudulent elections? Garcia’s Take on the Case

With the winning trial behind him, Carlos Garcia spoke about the Molina case a day after it ended. With the help of co-counsel, Jaime Peña, he was able to pull the rabbit out of the hat, so to speak, and win one for his client when few thought it possible while the state was presenting its case.

From the beginning, Molina had argued that it was wrong for the Hidalgo County DA’s office to prosecute this case. After all, the DA, Ricardo Rodriguez, is the nephew of former JP Mary Alice Palacios, who Molina painted as his chief nemesis.

Shortly after winning the mayoral seat in 2017, Molina — who represented the city council majority at the time — ended an insurance contract the city had with Palacios who had campaigned against him that same year, working to reelect Richard Garcia mayor.

Molina said the city could get a better insurance contract with another agent.

Palacios said OK and got to work putting together a voter-fraud file against Molina, naming names, addresses, and sent them to the Texas Secretary of State. After a review, the “Mary Alice file” was sent to the Texas AG’s office, where it was handed off to the election fraud division. A former retired major with the DPS, now a sergeant with the AG’s office, began working the case, matching names to known addresses of the names cited by Palacios. He used things such as a driver’s license, utility bills, vehicle registration forms, property taxes, anything that might show where the people being named in the fraud charge actually lived full time.

Then the AG sergeant drove down to Hidalgo County and started interviewing the people named by Palacios as having voted in the 2017 election even though they resided outside the city. The AG’s office had already asked DA Rodriguez if his office would help in the investigation, to which he said, yes.

When Molina accused Rodriguez of bias, saying he should have recused himself and his office from the case because Mary Alice is his aunt, the DA said if this case involved one of his relatives being investigated, he would have recused. But since Molina isn’t related to him, there was no conflict.

That claim by Richard Molina — unfair bias, this is a political witch hunt, and this residency issue has been going on for years until I became mayor — carried over into his trial and was a major theme running through his defense.

Asked if he thinks that was the main reason the jury voted to acquit his client of voter fraud — they believed the trial to be a political witch hunt cloaked in prosecutorial bias — Attorney Garcia said he hadn’t spoken to the jurors, so he couldn’t speak for them.

But, he did say that he detected a change in the jury’s posture when he was cross-examining one of the state’s witnesses, pointing out that before Molina was elected mayor in 2017, no one seemed to care about residency, including the witness who had voted in prior Edinburg elections, yet lived in another city.

“That’s not a defense,” said Garcia, “but I think it puts the prosecution in its proper position and gives the jury its proper perspective of that particular facet of the prosecution, OK? In addition to that, we had a client (Molina) who was not and has never been someone to shy away from answering questions. And he was never given the opportunity to answer questions until he was in handcuffs.”

With regard to the state witnesses claiming Molina told them that they could vote in an Edinburg election even if they weren’t living in the city, Garcia said there was no way his client was going to explain his way out of that.

“There’s no way. Especially with a case such as this was. Think about all the manpower and all of the hours, the effort that went into this prosecution.”

However, that wasn’t the strategy used by Garcia and Peña when they got to work defending their client.

“We did not say that the other people (the state’s witnesses) were wrong. We agreed with them.”

However, pointing to one witness in particular during the trial, Garcia asked the jury why it was okay for the witness to think that voting in the election was okay, even if he didn’t live in Edinburg, but it wasn’t okay for Molina to think the same?

“Our theme was clear that we weren’t there to call the government witnesses liars. But when you’re talking about lay witnesses, he, like them, did things that they believed to be okay, or they believed to be legal. The facts were such that we not only accepted (what they said) but actually embraced the testimony of the witnesses up to a point. When I say up to a point, I think it’s natural for a witness, especially a witness that is under the prosecution’s thumb, to want to shade their testimony in a way that makes it that much better for the prosecution, because it’s natural for them to want to either satisfy or offer the prosecutor what it is the prosecutor needs or wants.”

During Garcia’s cross-examination of state witnesses, however, with very few exceptions, they all stuck to the same story: they were there to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. (The “So help me God” part is no longer part of the swearing- in process.)

At one point in the trial, Carlos Garcia did point out, however, that some of the people who hadn’t cooperated with the state were already under indictment for voter fraud, so the message was clear: cooperate with the prosecution or face the consequences.

Call it forced coercion or simply an attempt to hear the real story, neither Carlos Garcia or Mike Garza could ever agree on that one sticking point.

Made for Court TV, each attorney had his own style while standing or sitting before the jury.

Garza usually wore either a look of disbelief at what he was hearing from either Molina or his attorneys, or he was wearing a slight sarcastic smile, as in: Can you believe what you’re hearing out of this guy?

For his part, Garcia would often raise his right index finger to a middle spot just above his upper lip and tap it slightly during a question- and-answer phase, as if he was pondering something that made no sense. And if it made no sense to him, the jury shouldn’t buy it either.

When it came to a battle of words, both men were evenly matched.

In the end, though, it was lead defense attorney Carlos Garcia who smacked one out of the park, winning an acquittal for his client, with the help of Jaime Peña.