SAMPLE: PETITION TO THE ATTORNEY GENERAL

SAMPLE: PETITION TO THE ATTORNEY GENERAL

ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE STATE OF

BEFORE THE ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE STATE OF ____

THE STATE OF _____ EX REL. RANDALL KELTON, Complainant

v.

THE PUBLIC OFFICIALS NAMED HEREIN AND IN THE COMPLAINTS FILED HEREWITH

MASTER PETITION _________ COMBINED

PETITION UNDER ______ GOVERNMENT CODE SECTION 552.3215(e), WITH NOTICE OF

CRIMINAL OFFENSES, OF A SYSTEM OF UNLAWFUL PRACTICES OPERATING UNDER

COLOR OF OFFICIAL TRAINING, AND OF THE ARMED ENFORCEMENT OF THOSE

PRACTICES AS FIRST DEGREE FELONY AGGRAVATED ASSAULT

CITATION VERIFICATION NOTICE AND QUOTATION RULE: This petition observes the rule that every cited authority appears through its own verbatim words: every statute relied upon is quoted from its text, and every judicial decision relied upon is quoted from the opinion itself — no case is paraphrased, and no case is cited whose actual language was not retrieved. VERIFIED THIS SESSION, retrieved and confirmed against primary and official source material: Texas Government Code Section 552.3215(e); Texas Penal Code Section 22.02 subsections (a) and (b)(2) including (b)(2)(C); the quotations from Attorney General v. Gonzalez, 683 S.W.3d 861 (Tex. App.—Austin 2024, pet. denied), retrieved from the full opinion; and the quotation from Plummer v. State, 410 S.W.3d 855 (Tex. Crim. App. 2013), retrieved from the full opinion. The quotation from Patterson v. State, 769 S.W.2d 938, 941 (Tex. Crim. App. 1989) was confirmed against reported reproductions of the opinion and against the Court of Criminal Appeals’ own quotation of it in Plummer; pull the original for pinpoint confirmation before swearing. CARRIED FORWARD from Complainant’s prior verified filings, to be re-confirmed before swearing: Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Articles 11.05, 14.06, 15.16, 16.17, 16.20, 17.30, 20A.051, 21.22, and 2A.106; Texas Penal Code Sections 15.02, 32.47, 32.48, 37.10, and 39.03. NOT VERIFIED, quoted from standing knowledge and requiring confirmation against the official Texas Statutes website before swearing: Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Articles 18.06 and 18.07; Texas Penal Code Sections 1.07(a)(17), 9.21, 22.01(a)(2), 71.01, and 71.02; Texas Government Code Sections 552.301, 552.351, and 552.353. The allegations of Part Four concerning official training and curriculum are made on information and belief; the insertion point in Part Four awaits the curriculum evidence pleaded in Complainant’s prior civil action, which must be inserted before filing.

Syllabus

This petition presents seven propositions. First, the Attorney General has exclusive statutory authority to receive this complaint, because the governmental body that violated the Public Information Act is a district attorney. Second, the individual offenses documented in the five complaints filed herewith are not independent events; each is an instance of an identifiable practice. Third, six such practices are identified, and each practice displaces a specific command of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure or the Texas Government Code. Fourth, the uniformity of these practices across counties, decades, and unacquainted officials is explained by a single mechanism: the practices are taught — transmitted through official training, office procedure, and professional curriculum — so that each new official inherits them as standard operating procedure and believes them lawful. Fifth, that mechanism is what converts individual misconduct into a combination under Texas Penal Code Section 71.02 and an inferred agreement under Section 15.02(b), and it is also what makes the problem invisible to every local remedy, because every local officeholder was trained in the same curriculum. Sixth, the practices are enforced by a common instrument — the prominent display of deadly weapons by public servants at the point of each refusal — and the verified text of Texas Penal Code Section 22.02 makes that instrument first degree felony aggravated assault by two independent statutory routes. Seventh, the Attorney General is the one officer in Texas with the jurisdiction, the investigative reach, and the independence from the curriculum to correct it — and the correction begins with the smallest violation in the record: one records refusal, documented in one email.

Part One — Jurisdiction

The Legislature ordinarily routes Public Information Act complaints to local prosecutors. It wrote one exception, for the case where the local prosecutor is the violator. Texas Government Code Section 552.3215(e) provides:

Sec. 552.3215. DECLARATORY JUDGMENT OR INJUNCTIVE RELIEF. (e) A complainant may file a complaint alleging a violation of this chapter. The complaint must be filed with the district or county attorney of the county in which the governmental body is located unless the governmental body is the district or county attorney, in which case the complaint must be filed with the attorney general.

The governmental body accused in Complaint One is the District Attorney of Montague County. This petition and its accompanying complaints are therefore filed with the Attorney General as the statute commands. The remaining offenses documented herein are presented for investigation, for referral, for grand jury presentation, and for prosecution in cooperation with local authority or through attorneys appointed for the purpose — Complainant does not ask the Attorney General to claim criminal jurisdiction the law does not grant, and has disclosed in the accompanying Work Product Report the authority limiting that jurisdiction.

Part Two — The Thesis of This Petition

When one official violates one statute, the explanation is a bad actor. When seven officials in two counties, most of whom have never met, violate the same statutes in the same way, in the same order, using the same formation — a supervising attorney to deliver the refusal, armed subordinates positioned to supply the threat, and a records practice that ensures the refusal leaves no trail — the explanation is not seven bad actors. The explanation is a procedure. And a procedure that reproduces itself across counties and across decades, surviving four successive administrations of a single office, is not folklore. It is taught.

This petition asks the Attorney General to see the five complaints filed herewith the way an epidemiologist sees case reports: not as five diseases, but as five presentations of one pathogen. The pathogen is a body of practice — trained, transmitted, and treated by its practitioners as lawful — that has quietly replaced six specific commands of Texas law. Part Three identifies each practice, quotes the law it displaces, and cites the instance of it documented in the accompanying complaints. Part Four states the basis for alleging that these practices are embedded in official training. Part Six identifies the instrument by which the practices are enforced, and the felony the Legislature wrote for that instrument.

Part Three — The Six Codified Practices and the Law Each Displaces

Practice One: Execution of Expired or Defective Warrants as Routine

The Legislature’s command is absolute. Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 18.07 provides:

Art. 18.07. DAYS ALLOWED FOR WARRANT TO RUN. (a) The period allowed for the execution of a search warrant, exclusive of the day of its issuance and of the day of its execution, is: … (3) three whole days if the warrant is issued for a purpose other than that described by Subdivision (1) or (2).

And Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 18.06 provides:

Art. 18.06. EXECUTION OF WARRANTS. (a) A peace officer to whom a search warrant is delivered shall execute the warrant without delay and forthwith return the warrant to the proper magistrate. It must be executed within the period permitted by Article 18.07.

The warrant in this record said so on its face. The practice, in the words of the Bedford officer at the scene when the expiration was pointed out, is otherwise: they did that all the time, and it was no big deal. An officer does not say “all the time” about his first time. The statement is a confession that the practice is institutional — that somewhere, officers learn that the warrant clock is a formality. The instance is documented in Complaint Two.

Practice Two: Direct-to-Jail Booking in Place of the Prompt Examining Magistrate

The Legislature commanded that a person arrested — with or without warrant — be taken without unnecessary delay before a magistrate. Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 14.06 provides in pertinent part:

Art. 14.06. MUST TAKE OFFENDER BEFORE MAGISTRATE. (a) Except as otherwise provided by this article, in each case enumerated in this Code, the person making the arrest or the person having custody of the person arrested shall take the person arrested or have him taken without unnecessary delay, but not later than 48 hours after the person is arrested, before the magistrate who may have ordered the arrest, before some magistrate of the county where the arrest was made without an order …

Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 15.16 imposes the same command on arrests under warrant. The practice, alleged in Complainant’s Statement of Facts to be advised and directed by prosecuting attorneys, is to take the arrested person directly to jail, book him, hold him overnight, and produce him the next morning at an abbreviated jailhouse proceeding for which no statute provides and which appears nowhere in Texas law under the name its practitioners use for it: “Magistration.” A search of the Texas statutes for that word returns nothing, because the Legislature never created it. A proceeding conducted under a name the law does not know, substituting for a proceeding the law commands, and causing the arrested person to submit to its putative authority, is the conduct the Legislature described in Texas Penal Code Section 32.48:

Sec. 32.48. SIMULATING LEGAL PROCESS. (a) A person commits an offense if the person recklessly causes to be delivered to another any document that simulates a summons, complaint, judgment, or other court process with the intent to: … (2) cause another to: (A) submit to the putative authority of the document; or (B) take any action or refrain from taking any action in response to the document, in compliance with the document, or on the basis of the document.

The instance is documented in Complaint Four: Joseph Diruzzo, arrested on process no officer would produce, was never taken without unnecessary delay before any magistrate, and surfaced days later at a video proceeding in the jail.

Practice Three: Diversion of the Magistrate’s Record Away From the Clerk

The Legislature commanded, in Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 17.30:

Art. 17.30. SHALL CERTIFY PROCEEDINGS. The magistrate, before whom an examination has taken place upon a criminal accusation, shall certify to all the proceedings had before him, as well as where he discharges, holds to bail or commits, and transmit them, sealed up, to the court before which the defendant may be tried, writing his name across the seals of the envelope. The voluntary statement of the defendant, the testimony, bail bonds, and every other proceeding in the case, shall be thus delivered to the clerk of the proper court, without delay.

Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 16.17 commands an order after examination, providing in pertinent part:

Art. 16.17. DECISION OF JUDGE. After the examining trial has been had, the judge shall make an order committing the defendant to the jail of the proper county, discharging him or admitting him to bail, as the law and facts of the case may require. …

And Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 16.20 prescribes the commitment order that alone authorizes a sheriff to receive a prisoner, providing in pertinent part:

Art. 16.20. “COMMITMENT”. A “commitment” is an order signed by the proper magistrate directing a sheriff to receive and place in jail the person so committed. …

The practice, alleged in the Statement of Facts, is that magistrates conducting the jailhouse proceeding are trained to hand the file to the jailer, and the records never reach the clerk. The instance is documented in Complaint Four: the public record of Mr. Diruzzo’s detention contains a jail intake form and nothing else — no warrant, no certified proceedings, no sealed envelope, no commitment order. This practice is what makes Practice Two invisible: the simulated proceeding leaves no record in the place the law requires records to be, which is why the concealment is separately chargeable under Texas Penal Code Section 32.47, providing in pertinent part:

Sec. 32.47. FRAUDULENT DESTRUCTION, REMOVAL, OR CONCEALMENT OF WRITING. (a) A person commits an offense if, with intent to defraud or harm another, he destroys, removes, conceals, alters, substitutes, or otherwise impairs the verity, legibility, or availability of a writing, other than a governmental record. …

and under Texas Penal Code Section 37.10, providing in pertinent part:

Sec. 37.10. TAMPERING WITH GOVERNMENTAL RECORD. (a) A person commits an offense if he: … (3) intentionally destroys, conceals, removes, or otherwise impairs the verity, legibility, or availability of a governmental record. …

Practice Four: Prosecutorial Screening and Disposal of Citizen Complaints

The Legislature commanded, in Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 2A.106, in pertinent part:

Art. 2A.106. NEGLECT OR FAILURE OF DUTY; VIOLATION OF LAW. … (b) An attorney representing the state shall notify the grand jury of any act that violated the law or any neglect or failure of duty by an officer if: (1) the attorney learns that the officer has in act violated a law or neglected or failed to perform a duty; and (2) the act that violated the law or the neglect or failure of duty cannot be presented by information.

And in Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 21.22, in pertinent part:

Art. 21.22. INFORMATION BASED UPON COMPLAINT. No information shall be presented until affidavit has been made by some credible person charging the defendant with an offense. The affidavit shall be filed with the information. …

The Code thus makes the prosecutor a conduit, not a gate. The practice is the gate: complaints against officers and officials are received, screened, and disposed of by the very offices they accuse, without ever reaching a court or a grand jury. The instances are documented across the record: four complaints against named Fort Worth officers delivered to District Attorney Sorrells and never presented; the complaint against Judge Allin, taken and verified by a sheriff’s officer under Offense Report 250060148, “terminated” by persons unknown on authority no statute grants; and complaints refused outright by officers in Southlake who would not take them at all.

Practice Five: Gatekeeping of the Grand Jury

The Legislature commanded, in Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 20A.051, that the grand jury inquire into all offenses of which it is informed by the attorney representing the state or by any other credible person:

Art. 20A.051. DUTIES OF GRAND JURY. The grand jury shall inquire into all offenses subject to indictment of which any grand juror may have knowledge or of which the grand jury is informed by the attorney representing the state or by any other credible person.

The words “any other credible person” are the Legislature’s deliberate provision of a channel that does not pass through the prosecutor — the one mechanism by which the body that supervises prosecutors can hear about prosecutors. The practice closes that channel. The instances are documented in the concurrent filings: Assistant District Attorney Cutrer intercepting documents addressed to the Tarrant County Grand Jury; Assistant District Attorney McCormic, flanked by armed investigators, turning Complainant away in Montague County; and District Attorney Boggeman taking the complaint into the courtroom herself and returning, flanked by armed officers, to announce a “vote” that no provision of Texas law empowers any grand jury to take. Three officials, two counties, one formation.

Practice Six: Unilateral Refusal of the Records That Would Document Practices One Through Five

The Legislature commanded, in Texas Government Code Section 552.301, in pertinent part:

Sec. 552.301. REQUEST FOR ATTORNEY GENERAL DECISION. (a) A governmental body that receives a written request for information that it wishes to withhold from public disclosure and that it considers to be within one of the exceptions under Subchapter C must ask for a decision from the attorney general about whether the information is within that exception if there has not been a previous determination about whether the information falls within one of the exceptions. (b) The governmental body must ask for the attorney general’s decision and state the exceptions that apply within a reasonable time but not later than the 10th business day after the date of receiving the written request.

The practice is unilateral refusal: District Attorney Boggeman, asked for the names of the grand jurors who cast the impossible vote, answered in one sentence that the list was “confidential under the law,” cited no law, and asked no one.

The refusal did not merely skip a procedure. It defied a holding — and the party who established that holding was the Attorney General himself. In Attorney General v. Gonzalez, the Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton, litigated the precise question of whether a district attorney’s office must disclose the names of impaneled grand jurors, and the Austin Court of Appeals, quoting its own words, held:

“we are compelled to agree with the Attorney General and conclude that Article 19A.104 does not make grand jurors’ names confidential and that, therefore, grand jurors’ names are not excepted from disclosure under PIA Section 552.101.” Attorney General v. Gonzalez, 683 S.W.3d 861 (Tex. App.—Austin 2024, pet. denied).

The court explained, in its own words, why a juror’s name is not among the protected categories:

“An individual’s name is not of the same class or kind of information as the specific examples provided of home address, home telephone number, Social Security number, and driver-license number—those types of personal information people universally safeguard. On the other hand, and in everyday life, people freely disclose their names to other individuals, businesses, and institutions.” Id.

And the court’s judgment was rendered for the Attorney General in these words: “we reverse and render judgment for the Attorney General that the DA Office must disclose the requested information.” Id. Two further facts from the opinion measure the distance between the Nueces County District Attorney in Gonzalez and the Montague County District Attorney here. First, even the district attorney who fought disclosure in Gonzalez obeyed Section 552.301 before withholding anything: in the opinion’s words, “The DA Office requested decisions from the Attorney General about whether it must disclose some of the requested information.” Id. District Attorney Boggeman requested nothing. Second, the position District Attorney Boggeman refused to honor is not merely the law of the Austin Court of Appeals; it is the litigated and vindicated position of the very office to which this petition is addressed.

The refusal is itself an offense. Texas Government Code Section 552.353 provides in pertinent part:

Sec. 552.353. FAILURE OR REFUSAL OF OFFICER FOR PUBLIC INFORMATION TO PROVIDE ACCESS TO OR COPYING OF PUBLIC INFORMATION. (a) An officer for public information, or the officer’s agent, commits an offense if, with criminal negligence, the officer or the officer’s agent fails or refuses to give access to, or to permit or provide copying of, public information to a requestor as provided by this chapter. … (e) An offense under this section is a misdemeanor punishable by: (1) a fine of not more than $1,000; (2) confinement in the county jail for not more than six months; or (3) both the fine and confinement.

And the “termination” of Offense Report 250060148, addressed in Practice Four, implicates Texas Government Code Section 552.351, providing in pertinent part:

Sec. 552.351. DESTRUCTION, REMOVAL, OR ALTERATION OF PUBLIC INFORMATION. (a) A person commits an offense if the person wilfully destroys, mutilates, removes without permission as provided by this chapter, or alters public information. …

The instance is Complaint One, and it is the keystone: it is the practice that conceals all the others, and it is the one practice whose enforcement the Legislature assigned exclusively to the Attorney General.

Part Four — The Practices Are Taught: The Curriculum Allegation

Complainant alleges, on information and belief, that the six practices identified in Part Three are not spontaneous local inventions but are transmitted through official channels — office procedure manuals, prosecutor and magistrate training programs, continuing education curricula, and supervisor-to-successor instruction — such that each incoming official inherits them as standard operating procedure and administers them in the good-faith belief that they are the law. The factual basis for the allegation is fourfold.

First, transmission across administrations. Complainant has raised the grand jury access practice with the Tarrant County District Attorney’s office since 1992, through District Attorneys Tim Curry, Joe Shannon, Sharen Wilson, and Phil Sorrells. The practice survived every change of administration unchanged. Practices do not survive four successions by accident; they survive because each administration trains the next.

Second, replication without contact. Officials of Montague County — a county with no institutional connection to Tarrant County — executed the identical maneuver in the identical formation. Independent invention of identical procedure by unacquainted officials is the signature of a common source, and the common source available to every district attorney’s office in Texas is shared training and shared professional curriculum.

Third, the scene admission. The Bedford officer’s statement that expired warrants were executed “all the time” is direct evidence that the practice is understood within his agency as normal and sanctioned — which is to say, trained.

Fourth, the naming. The jailhouse proceeding has an agreed name — “Magistration” — used uniformly by sheriffs, jailers, and prosecutors across counties, though the word appears in no statute. Uniform professional vocabulary for a non-statutory proceeding is curriculum in its most literal sense: the word had to be taught, because it could not have been read.

INSERTION POINT — CURRICULUM EVIDENCE: Complainant’s prior civil action against Texas public officials pleaded specific facts concerning the codification of these practices into actual training curriculum. That pleading was not available in the session that produced this petition. Insert here, before filing: (1) the identity of each training body, program, or publication alleged to teach each practice; (2) the specific curriculum content, quoted verbatim where available; (3) the procedural history of the civil action, including the court, cause number, and the grounds on which it was dismissed, presented candidly; and (4) the disposition’s significance — that the claims were struck without any court ever reaching the merits of the curriculum allegations, so that no court has yet examined the training materials themselves.

Complainant does not ask the Attorney General to accept the curriculum allegation on Complainant’s word. Complainant asks the Attorney General to test it, using the investigative powers no citizen has: obtain and examine the procedure manuals and training materials of the Tarrant County and Montague County District Attorneys’ offices; the magistrate and jailer training materials governing the jailhouse proceeding and the disposition of its records; and the relevant curricula of the professional associations and state-funded training entities that instruct Texas prosecutors, magistrates, and peace officers. If the practices are in the materials, the combination is proved out of the State’s own documents. If they are not, the Attorney General will have established that the uniformity has some other source, and the investigation will have found it.

Part Five — What the Practices Add Up To in Law

Each practice, in each instance, is chargeable against its individual actor, and the accompanying Comprehensive Violations Analysis catalogs every such charge, including aggravated perjury at the root of the warrant, kidnapping by secreting in the concealment of Joseph Diruzzo, abuse of official capacity as a cross-cutting count, and the tampering counts attached to every diverted, intercepted, or terminated record. But the Legislature also provided for the whole. Texas Penal Code Section 15.02 provides:

Sec. 15.02. CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY. (a) A person commits criminal conspiracy if, with intent that a felony be committed: (1) he agrees with one or more persons that they or one or more of them engage in conduct that would constitute the offense; and (2) he or one or more of them performs an overt act in pursuance of the agreement. (b) An agreement constituting a conspiracy may be inferred from acts of the parties.

Acts this uniform, this durable, and this widespread are the inference Subsection (b) describes. And Texas Penal Code Section 71.02 provides in pertinent part:

Sec. 71.02. ENGAGING IN ORGANIZED CRIMINAL ACTIVITY. (a) A person commits an offense if, with the intent to establish, maintain, or participate in a combination or in the profits of a combination or as a member of a criminal street gang, the person commits or conspires to commit one or more of the following: (1) murder, capital murder, arson, aggravated robbery, robbery, burglary, theft, aggravated kidnapping, kidnapping, aggravated assault …

The predicates present in this record are the burglary, theft, aggravated robbery, and aggravated assaults documented in Complaints Two, Three, and Five — and Part Six of this petition establishes that the aggravated assault predicate now rests on two independent first degree theories under the verified text of Section 22.02. Complainant states plainly, as the accompanying Work Product Report discloses, that official oppression is not an enumerated predicate of Section 71.02; the enumerated predicates are what the armed enforcement of these practices produced.

The training allegation, if proved, supplies what conspiracy prosecutions ordinarily lack: the mechanism of agreement. No juror need imagine seven officials meeting in a room. The curriculum is the room.

Part Six — The Instrument of Enforcement: Aggravated Assault by the Exhibition of Deadly Weapons

The six practices of Part Three share more than a common origin. They share a common instrument of enforcement. At every point in this record where a citizen stood on a statute and refused to yield, the refusing official’s answer was the same: an armed formation. This Part sets out the verified text of the statute the Legislature wrote for that instrument, builds the offense element by element, and applies it to each incident.

The Statute, Verified

Texas Penal Code Section 22.02 provides, in the portions relevant here, in text retrieved and confirmed this session:

Sec. 22.02. AGGRAVATED ASSAULT. (a) A person commits an offense if the person commits assault as defined in Sec. 22.01 and the person: (1) causes serious bodily injury to another, including the person’s spouse; or (2) uses or exhibits a deadly weapon during the commission of the assault. (b) An offense under this section is a felony of the second degree, except that the offense is a felony of the first degree if: … (2) regardless of whether the offense is committed under Subsection (a)(1) or (a)(2), the offense is committed: (A) by a public servant acting under color of the servant’s office or employment; (B) against a person the actor knows is a public servant while the public servant is lawfully discharging an official duty, or in retaliation or on account of an exercise of official power or performance of an official duty as a public servant; (C) in retaliation against or on account of the service of another as a witness, prospective witness, informant, or person who has reported the occurrence of a crime …

The base offense incorporated by Subsection (a) is assault by threat. Texas Penal Code Section 22.01(a)(2) provides:

Sec. 22.01. ASSAULT. (a) A person commits an offense if the person: … (2) intentionally or knowingly threatens another with imminent bodily injury, including the person’s spouse …

And a firearm is a deadly weapon as a matter of law. Texas Penal Code Section 1.07(a)(17) provides:

Sec. 1.07. DEFINITIONS. (a) In this code: … (17) “Deadly weapon” means: (A) a firearm or anything manifestly designed, made, or adapted for the purpose of inflicting death or serious bodily injury; or (B) anything that in the manner of its use or intended use is capable of causing death or serious bodily injury.

Layer One: Assault by Threat — The Threat May Be Conduct, and Its Imminence Is Supplied by the Condition

Section 22.01(a)(2) requires no touching, no injury, and no spoken words. A threat may be communicated by conduct — by positioning, by formation, by the deliberate presence of armed men arranged around a refusal. The question for the fact finder is whether the actor intentionally or knowingly communicated, by whatever means, that bodily injury would follow imminently from a particular course of action, and whether the person threatened perceived it. The threat in each incident in this record was conditional in form — persist, and force follows — but a conditional threat is still a threat of imminent harm where the condition is the victim’s continuation of lawful conduct he is entitled to continue: the harm stands ready, waiting only on the citizen doing what the law permits him to do. A citizen told by formation and firearm that walking through the courthouse door will be treated as an act of aggression has been threatened with imminent bodily injury in every sense the statute knows.

Layer Two: Exhibition of a Deadly Weapon — Display Is Enough

Section 22.02(a)(2) is written in the disjunctive: uses or exhibits. The Legislature thereby reached below the drawn and pointed weapon to the weapon consciously displayed in furtherance of the offense. The Court of Criminal Appeals distinguished the two terms in its own words, construing the statutory phrase “used or exhibited a deadly weapon”:

“‘used … a deadly weapon’ during the commission of the offense means that the deadly weapon was employed or utilized in order to achieve its purpose. Whereas ‘exhibited a deadly weapon’ means that the weapon was consciously shown or displayed during the commission of the offense.” Patterson v. State, 769 S.W.2d 938, 941 (Tex. Crim. App. 1989).

A quarter century later, the same court explained, again in its own words, exactly what conscious display accomplishes:

“In the context of violent offenses, the term ‘exhibit’ contains an implicit element of facilitation. If one exhibits a deadly weapon—or, in the words of Patterson, ‘consciously displays’ it—without overtly using it to harm or threaten while committing a felony, the deadly weapon still provides intimidation value that assists the commission of the felony.” Plummer v. State, 410 S.W.3d 855 (Tex. Crim. App. 2013).

Intimidation value that assists the commission of the offense is precisely the function every armed display in this record performed. A sidearm worn to the grand jury door by an investigator whose only function at that door is to stand behind the refusing attorney is not being carried; it is being shown. The firearm being a deadly weapon per se under Section 1.07(a)(17)(A), no proof of its capability is required.

The line between lawful carry and criminal exhibition. The defense in every incident will be one sentence: officers carry guns, and carrying is not assault. The answer is that the statute does not criminalize the carry — it criminalizes the threat, and asks whether a deadly weapon was exhibited during it. Four features of these facts move each display across the line. First, function: the armed actors had no law enforcement task at the scene — no arrest to make, no warrant to serve, no disturbance to quell; their entire assignment was to stand, visibly armed, at the point of refusal. Second, formation: the record describes flanking and positioning — the bailiff stationed behind Assistant District Attorney Cutrer as he refused delivery; Investigators Wallace and Lewis bracketing Assistant District Attorney McCormic; Investigator Lewis and a deputy flanking District Attorney Boggeman as she announced the vote. A formation is a message. Third, timing: the armed presence was produced at the moment of refusal — Boggeman entered the courtroom alone and returned with armed officers — which is the choreography of enforcement, not the accident of proximity. Fourth, comprehension: Complainant and Mr. Swain each understood, reasonably and as intended, that persistence would be met with force, and each yielded. The display accomplished exactly what a drawn weapon accomplishes, which is exactly why it was arranged.

Layer Three: Two Independent Elevations to the First Degree

Subsection (b)(2)(A) — by a public servant under color of office. Every actor — the executing officers, the bailiffs, the constable, the investigators, the deputy — was a public servant, in uniform or displaying a badge, performing what he purported to perform as official function. The color of office is not a defense to the assault; it is the element that raises it to the first degree. The Legislature’s judgment in Subsection (b)(2)(A) is precisely that the armed authority of the State, turned against a citizen as a threat, is the aggravated form of the offense.

Subsection (b)(2)(C) — on account of the victim’s service as witness, prospective witness, informant, or reporter of crime. This is the elevation the verification performed for this petition added to the package. In every courthouse and grand jury incident, Complainant stood before the armed formation in one and only one capacity: as a person reporting the occurrence of crime and presenting himself as a prospective witness to it — carrying a habeas petition documenting an unlawful imprisonment, carrying criminal complaints against named officers, carrying notice of crime addressed to a sitting grand jury. The armed displays were not incidental to that service; they were deployed on account of it and, in Bailiff Serrano’s case, in his own words in retaliation for it — his announced anger that Complainant had filed a criminal complaint against one of “his” judges, followed by his threat of arrest. Subsection (b)(2)(C) does not require that the actor be a public servant at all; it elevates the assault because of what the victim was doing. Pleading both (b)(2)(A) and (b)(2)(C) gives the grand jury two independent routes to the first degree, and the second route survives even if a court were somehow persuaded that an actor was not acting under color of office. This Part is also the bridge between the practices and the predicates: it is the armed enforcement of Practices One and Five that supplies the aggravated assault predicate on which the Section 71.02 count of Part Five rests.

Application, Incident by Incident

August 5, 2025 — the expired warrant occupation (victim: Darren Swain). After Mr. Swain pointed to the expiration on the face of the warrant, the officers’ authority argument was over and their weapons argument was all that remained: a massive armed presence occupying his home, roads blocked, his request to leave refused. The threat — resist the occupation or the taking, and force follows — was communicated by numbers, uniforms, and firearms, and understood, which is why he stayed and why he signed. The display is what converted sixty-seven firearms into carriable property without a struggle. Elevation: (b)(2)(A). Actors: each officer who maintained the armed occupation after the expiration was raised.

August 15, 2025 — the habeas blockade (victim: Complainant). Bailiff Timberman and a second armed bailiff physically blocked Complainant’s return to a courtroom where his corrected petition — reporting a man unlawfully imprisoned and effectively disappeared — awaited refusal. Complainant was a person reporting the occurrence of a crime and a prospective witness to it. Elevations: (b)(2)(A) and (b)(2)(C).

August 15, 2025 — the 371st District Court (victim: Complainant). Bailiff Serrano, having announced his anger at Complainant’s criminal complaint against one of “his” judges, threatened arrest if Complainant re-entered, joined by Officer Welborn, both armed. This is the cleanest Subsection (b)(2)(C) count in the record, because the retaliation branch is established by the actor’s own stated motive. Elevations: (b)(2)(A) and (b)(2)(C).

September 2, 2025 — the grand jury door (victim: Complainant). As Assistant District Attorney Cutrer refused delivery of documents addressed to the sitting grand jury, the armed bailiff positioned himself behind Cutrer. Complainant stood at that door as an informant and prospective witness in the most literal statutory sense — a credible person giving the grand jury notice of crime under Article 20A.051. Elevations: (b)(2)(A) and (b)(2)(C).

September 16, 2025 — Southlake (victim: Complainant). Constable Torez, armed, physically aggressive, advancing from behind the partition against a citizen attempting to file criminal complaints with a magistrate, then shouting over the 911 call. The physical aggression supplies the threat; the sidearm supplies the exhibition; the complaints in Complainant’s hand supply (b)(2)(C). Elevations: (b)(2)(A) and (b)(2)(C).

March 26, 2026 — Montague County, first attempt (victim: Complainant). Investigators Wallace and Lewis, prominently armed, bracketing Assistant District Attorney McCormic as she turned Complainant away from the grand jury. Elevations: (b)(2)(A) and (b)(2)(C): Complainant stood there solely on account of his service as an informant to the grand jury.

April 23, 2026 — Montague County, second attempt (victim: Complainant). District Attorney Boggeman entered the courtroom alone and returned flanked by Investigator Lewis and an armed deputy to announce the vote. The choreography — unarmed in, armed out — is itself evidence that the display was produced for its effect on the citizen waiting outside. Elevations: (b)(2)(A) and (b)(2)(C). The attorneys who directed or summoned the armed presence — Cutrer, McCormic, and Boggeman — are chargeable as parties to the assaults under the law of parties even though they carried no weapon themselves.

Anticipated Defenses and Their Answers

Routine carry. Answered above: the statute criminalizes the threat, not the holster, and the function, formation, timing, and effect of each display take it out of routine carry. The fact question belongs to a jury, which is all a criminal complaint need establish.

No spoken threat and no pointed weapon. Section 22.01(a)(2) requires neither; threats by conduct are threats. The Legislature’s choice of “exhibits” alongside “uses” in Section 22.02(a)(2) is the textual proof that display without pointing is within the statute.

Public duty justification. Texas Penal Code Section 9.21 provides in pertinent part: “(a) Except as qualified by Subsections (b) and (c), conduct is justified if the actor reasonably believes the conduct is required or authorized by law, by the judgment or order of a competent court or other governmental tribunal, or in the execution of legal process.” The justification therefore extends only to conduct required or authorized by law. No law authorizes the use or threat of force to prevent a credible person from informing a grand jury of crime, to prevent the presentation of a habeas petition, or to maintain an occupation under process known to be expired. The justification rises or falls with the lawfulness of the underlying act, and the underlying acts are the violations charged throughout this package. Where the warrant was dead and the officers knew it, the justification chapter is not a shield; it is a measure of how far outside their authority they stood.

Court security. Bailiffs perform lawful security functions, and nothing in this analysis reaches the bailiff who keeps order. It reaches the bailiff deployed as the enforcement arm of an unlawful refusal — identified as such by the same four features: no security function in progress, formation around the refusing official, timing keyed to the refusal, and effect on a citizen engaged in lawful conduct.

Part Seven — Why Every Local Remedy Failed, and Had to Fail

The record documents Complainant’s exhaustion of every local avenue: two district judges, three courts, two district attorneys, one assistant district attorney at the grand jury door, municipal police in two cities, a justice of the peace, a constable, and a sheriff’s deputy. Every avenue closed. This is not because every official is corrupt. It is because every official was trained in the same practices and therefore experiences the citizen invoking the statute as the anomaly and the practice as the law. A system cannot be corrected by officers whose training is the defect. The Legislature appears to have understood this when it wrote Section 552.3215(e): the one complaint that cannot be judged locally is the complaint against the local judge of complaints. That is the complaint now on the Attorney General’s desk.

Part Eight — The Cost of the Practices

The verified fiscal dimension is stated in the transmittal letter and is restated here in summary: on Texas Commission on Jail Standards reporting, approximately forty-one thousand presumed-innocent Texans are held before trial at a reported average of $59 per person per day — approximately $880 million per year at those reported rates, plausibly above $1.2 billion at the per-day costs major counties now report. Practices Two and Three are the machinery of that detention: the direct-to-jail practice fills the jails, and the diverted records ensure that no court file exists from which the detention’s lawfulness can be tested. Practice Five ensures the machinery is never examined by the one body with power to indict its operators. The counties pay in money. The State pays in the widening distance between Texans and the peace officers who serve them — officers, it should be said, who are themselves trained into these practices and who deserve training that matches the statutes they swore to enforce.

Part Nine — Relief Requested

Complainant respectfully requests that the Attorney General: (1) receive the complaint filed herewith as Complaint One under Texas Government Code Section 552.3215(e), determine that a violation of the Public Information Act occurred, and bring the action that section authorizes; (2) pursue the offense defined by Texas Government Code Section 552.353, and the offense defined by Section 552.351 as to the termination of Offense Report 250060148, by prosecution, referral, or attorney appointed for the purpose; (3) open an investigation into the six practices identified in Part Three, including the compulsory production and examination of the procedure manuals, training materials, and curricula identified in Part Four; (4) present the offenses cataloged in the Comprehensive Violations Analysis and charged in Complaints One through Five to a lawful grand jury, including the first degree felony aggravated assault counts under both Section 22.02(b)(2)(A) and Section 22.02(b)(2)(C) as set out in Part Six; (5) refer the conduct of the federal actors — including the warrant affidavit, the execution, and the federal-building detention — to the United States Attorney and the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General; (6) issue or obtain guidance to Texas governmental bodies confirming that Section 552.301 referral is mandatory and that grand jurors’ names are subject to the Gonzalez holding unless and until a higher court rules otherwise; and (7) report to the Legislature any practice found to be embedded in state-sanctioned training, so that the curriculum, and not merely its graduates, is corrected.

Part Ten — Preservation of Questions

Complainant explicitly raises and preserves, at every level of every proceeding arising from this petition, for ultimate resolution by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals: whether any officer, prosecutor, judge, bailiff, or grand jury possesses lawful authority to prevent a credible person from informing a grand jury of crime under Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 20A.051; whether a grand jury possesses any authority to vote to refuse to receive a complaint from a credible person; whether the jurisdiction of a Texas grand jury is confined to the county of its empanelment where no statute so confines it; and whether a proceeding conducted in a jail under a name unknown to Texas law can transfer jurisdiction to any trial court where the records commanded by Articles 16.17, 16.20, and 17.30 do not exist. It is Complainant’s ultimate purpose to secure a ruling of the courts of Texas that no one holds the power to block a citizen of this republic from performing the duty of preserving the governmental instruments the citizens have created, by giving notice of crime to a grand jury.

Complainant is prepared to testify to all the above under oath, to produce every document referenced, and to assist the Attorney General’s investigation in any manner requested.

Respectfully submitted this _______ day of ______________, 2026.

_______________________________

Your name:___________. Complainant

Address_____________

email:____________