Strong Convictions

Clinton lets out a belly laugh. "Oh, that's funny," he says.

It wasn't so humorous to University of Texas police, who arrested Mansfield for attempting to scalp two tickets before last fall's Texas-Texas A&M football game. The cops took his picture and cited him for criminal trespass, a misdemeanor. UT had given Mansfield the tickets as gifts.

Just as he falls short of dropping to his knees about his lies during the campaign, he makes disingenuous excuses related to the ticket-scalping affair. He emphasizes that the crime is, in his eyes, victimless. He says there are no signs banning ticket selling, and the tickets themselves don't mention scalping.

"So I reasonably felt this was perfectly okay to do. Little did I know there was this unknown rule about it."

But he did know, which makes his justification for his conduct that much more insidious. The reprimand by the Commission on Judicial Conduct states a UT police officer told Mansfield that selling UT football tickets on campus property was prohibited and issued him a written criminal trespass warning. The judge was arrested only after a second officer discovered Mansfield doing exactly what he had been warned not to do a few minutes earlier.

"Looking back at it," Mansfield says, "even though from all appearances it was okay, as a judge I suppose I still shouldn't have done it. I can see how it kind of looks tacky."

Is it also tacky that the tickets he sold at more than triple the $38 face value were given to him compliments of UT?

"I don't think that has anything to do with it," he says.

Even something as simple as Mansfield announcing whether to run for re-election has been full of quirks.

On July 19 he told the Texas Lawyer he was running for re-election in part to answer threats in an anonymous letter sent to his Houston home. The letter, dated June 30, warned Mansfield to "go away quietly and start a solo practice as an ambulance chaser" rather than further embarrass the Republican Party and the legal community, according to a copy Mansfield provided the Houston Press.

The letter also posed the question: "Do you really believe your marrying a Black woman will provide a positive thing?" Mansfield, who is white, married a Houston pharmacist, who is African-American, on November 6. They had planned to be married in May 2000 but decided in late October not to wait, Mansfield says.

One day after telling the Texas Lawyer he was running, Mansfield announced he wasn't because he didn't want his past failings rehashed in a negative campaign. He cited the same letter as a factor in the decision.

Two months later Mansfield changed his mind yet again. "My [wife] feels I should go for it," he says. "Besides, what more mud could they really drag me through?"

He also worries that giving up his seat could shift the prosecutor-friendly majority that, in his own weird way, he helped forge.

"Well," Presiding Judge Michael McCormick says about the whining of criminal-defense attorneys, "sounds to me like it's a matter of whose ox is getting gored."

It must be quite satisfying these days for McCormick to be the one applying the wounds. The longest-serving member of the current court by a dozen years, McCormick plans to end a 20-year tenure by retiring next year. Although he has presided over the court since 1989, it had long been McCormick's ox getting gored. He played dissenter for years. Although McCormick would never characterize it this way, he is now exacting his revenge.

Instead of heretic, the former Democrat who switched parties in October 1997 now leads the majority of conformist judges that routinely sides with the state. Like his most loyal peons, Mansfield and Keller, he says the current majority has simply shifted a left-leaning court to the moderate center.

"Before, a lot of convictions were being reversed on fundamental grounds without even looking at the facts of the case," McCormick says. "What this court is saying is, look, we are not going to engage in a hypertechnical game of pleadings like they did back in the 13th and 14th centuries in England, where if a word was out of place then you lost. We are going to look at what is being attacked in light of what transpired in the trial and what harm it caused the accused."

McCormick has gone from outcast to bell cow because of the court's unprecedented turnover. He is the only holdover from the 1992 court. Former judge Charles Campbell, who lost to Mansfield in 1994, says the problem with the Court of Criminal Appeals -- and the court system in general -- isn't philosophy, but inexperience.

"Philosophy has never brought down a court," says Campbell, who had a reputation as a scholarly judge. "But one of the things that does erode confidence in a system is a lack of institutional memory and a lack of experience."