PRESIDIO COUNTY — A recent review of misdemeanor cases — for charges like driving while intoxicated (DWI), invalid driver’s license, pot possession and family violence — by The Big Bend Sentinel showed only six cases filed for prosecution by former County Attorney Rod Ponton in 2024, while he filed 110 the previous year. Of those six cases, county records show most were dismissed or never had any court settings. One resulted in a guilty plea.
Ponton said the decision not to pursue additional misdemeanor cases was deliberate. “My office reviewed all of the cases that were prosecutable for 2024 but deliberately didn’t file all of them because a decision on whether to prosecute or not to prosecute is up to the prosecutor’s discretion,” Ponton said. “And every prosecutor has a different philosophy on what they should or shouldn’t do regarding charging. So, I left what I consider to be the good cases or the prosecutable cases, in order for them to be reviewed by the incoming county attorney, for her to make the decision.” Ponton said the cases he left were in good order and ready for review.
Current County Attorney Blair Park, who beat Ponton in the Democratic Primary in March of 2024, disputes Ponton’s assessment and reasoning about the misdemeanors. “Most of the 2024 cases were dismissed or Ponton ‘declined to prosecute,’” Park said. The Sentinel previously reported on Ponton releasing 309 cases under those categories before he left office in December.
Park said the files that did remain were not in good order for her to make any prosecutorial decisions. “Most were missing investigative reports from the referring law enforcement agencies,” she said. She questioned why Ponton didn’t consider “other options.” “We could have had a transition period where I came in and assisted pro bono,” Park said. “We also had $100,000 in SB 22 grant money that could have paid me to be an assistant.” SB 22 grants are state funded and intended to support law enforcement and courts, primarily with additional staff.
The six misdemeanor cases filed by Ponton — all on February 9, 2024 — were all from 2022 arrests and included: terroristic threat, failure to identify, obstructing a highway, assault with bodily injury and a second DWI.
Ponton repeated a previous assertion that many misdemeanor cases hinge on lab results that take months to get back from the Department of Public Safety, which creates a delay in the system as well.
Park countered that you should still be able to move cases through the system. For defendants who plead guilty to charges like DWI and drug possession, prosecutors and defense attorneys can often get them into a substance abuse program. Having a disposition to the cases also allows defendants to move on without outstanding charges hanging over them.
Park has not yet scheduled a county criminal court setting, but she said she will be working with Portillo on a date soon. Ponton said Park should have had plenty of time since her start on January 1 to get cases moving. “I left them all there, ready for her to go,” he said. “She’s had enough time now to go through every one of those cases and file them if she wanted to. Is 75 days not enough time to organize some files?”
Ponton also claimed County Judge Joe Portillo did not schedule county criminal court settings on a regular basis and told him in August that he wasn’t going to have any more settings. Park said Portillo told her the opposite occurred, that Ponton told Portillo there would be no more settings because he wasn’t filing any cases. Portillo did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
With regard to missing investigative reports, Park said she has had to contact the arresting law enforcement agency to get the offense, investigative reports, bond and evidence, sometimes including video.
For cases brought by the Marfa Police Department, Park said the department tried to supply Ponton’s office with records for each case but phone calls went unanswered and no one was physically present to accept and sign off on receiving the documents. The department is now putting together a “packet” of case documents to deliver to her, she said.
Marfa Police Chief Gilberto Carrillo confirmed Park’s account and said he is working with her to supply missing documents and that getting a response from Ponton’s office was difficult. “Usually, we would go there and the office door was [locked], so we had to call someone and say, ‘Hey, we got cases to turn in,’ and then give them a second call, ‘Hey, we still got some cases’ … We didn’t want to slide them under the door, of course, because we still needed to get some type of confirmation they received the files,” Carrillo said.
Carrillo said his department has a system for tracking everyone arrested on a misdemeanor. “We do what we call a checklist. The first thing you’ll see is the intake from the jail, you’ll see the arrest report, the [probable cause] affidavit, the offense report, and then evidence, including pictures and video,” Carrillo said. “We give them everything on paper, and then we’ll give them a thumb drive with the same paperwork they got, plus our photos and videos for them to review.”
Carrillo said he often encounters repeat offenders whose cases have never made it to a disposition. “They know their case is not going to go anywhere because of X, Y, and Z reasons,” he said. “So, we get them, and they think, ‘Meh, nothing’s going to happen to me.’ And that’s what makes us look bad because we’re doing all these things behind the scenes, and they then get a slap on the hand and an, ‘Okay, don’t do it again.’ And then next week they’re going back in jail for the same thing.”