Critics Shred Paxton’s Head-Scratching Defense of Child Predator’s Short Sentence: ‘It’s Like He Does Oppo on Himself’

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) drew a flood of shocked and critical responses when he attempted to defend a child predator’s short jail sentence at a candidate forum on Monday.

The scandal-plagued Paxton defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in the primary with President Donald Trump’s endorsement, but it required a runoff, burned through campaign funds, and put a spotlight on the series of scandals, lawsuits, a bitter divorce from his state senator wife, and other controversies that have dogged the AG for years.

Cornyn’s warnings about Paxton’s weaknesses have thus far proved fairly prescient, with Paxton lagging badly behind his Democratic opponent, Texas State Rep. James Talarico (D), in both polling and fundraising.

On Monday, Paxton sat down with Javier Palomarez from the United States Hispanic Business Council for the organization’s “In Dialogue: TEXAS” Q&A series. (Talarico’s turn will come on Sept. 30.)

In a clip that quickly went viral on social media, Paxton brought up a controversial plea deal offered by his office to Adam Hoffman, a Waco-based attorney with connections to a key Paxton donor, that would have allowed him to serve only one day in jail after the first trial for felony child sex abuse charges ended with a hung jury.

While answering a question from Palomarez about child sex trafficking, Paxton brought up the case — again, he raised the subject all on his own — complaining about an ad Talarico has been running hitting him over the lenient plea deal; it’s a subject that is landing with at least some voters, based on polling and a recent New York Times focus group.

Said Paxton (relevant section starts around the 53:49 mark in the full video):

I’ve had to deal with this crazy ad that’s been running against me, saying that I let this predator out of jail. It’s not quite as it’s presented. It’s actually very misrepresentative of what actually happened. We try these cases. We don’t always control how the jury determines them.

So we were in a case with an underage person who was — we got a 7-5 jury split on, you have to have unanimous, we had seven in our favor, five — so our child witness, who was our best evidence, didn’t want to testify again. We could’ve forced it, we could have subpoenaed that person, that kid, and made them testify. They already knew that we lost the first case — it ‘wasn’t lost, but we didn’t get it unanimous, so five jurors weren’t confident of that testimony for some reason.

In some ways, I don’t blame that kid for not wanting to go through that one more time. And yet, the criticism has been that I let a child predator out, having one day. Well, guess what? They served 60 days. It wasn’t what we wanted, but we did not control that situation. We did our best to present the case. The jury decided what it was. We wanted to re-try it, and then we decided, “You know what? We need to protect this kid. It’s more important to make sure that this kid is protected than to get the verdict that we actually want.

And so it’s so dishonest to present it any other way, because that’s actually what happened.

Here’s “actually what happened.”

Hoffman was accused of sexually abusing and raping a young boy for years while the victim was between the ages of 8 and 10 years old. Paxton and his supporters have argued that the victim did not want to testify at a second trial. However, as The Texas Tribune reported, the boy’s mother “agreed to an early version of the plea deal in court, but said in an interview that she now disagrees with the outcome”:

“We were put in an impossible situation,” said the mother, who The Texas Tribune and The Texas Newsroom are not naming to protect the identity of the victim. “How do you trust the prosecution to go back to a case that they want to plead out when they’re the ones that are supposed to fight for it, and they don’t want to do it?”

The plea deal Hoffman was offered by Paxton’s office dropped the felony charge of “continuous sexual abuse of a young child,” allowed him to plead to two misdemeanors: “indecent assault” and “display of harmful materials to a minor,” did not require him to register as a sex offender, and — the most controversial element of the deal — would have had him serve only one day in jail.

The judge assigned to the case balked at the deal and ended up imposing a 60-day jail sentence and requiring Hoffman to surrender his Texas law license. As the Tribune reported, Hoffman did agree “to make a statement that he ‘did then and there, with the intent to arouse or gratify my sexual desire, touch genitals of [the victim, identified by initials] … and I acted without the complainant’s consent,'” but the victim’s age was “not specified in the plea documents” and he did not have to register as a sex offender.

Hoffman was released after serving only 29 days, less than half the 60 days he was sentenced to, and was released in late May. He surrendered his Texas bar license in July and is still licensed to practice law in Nebraska, although his license is inactive.

The shorter clip of Paxton attempting to defend Hoffman’s sentence was met with immediate derision and fury on social media, with numerous people pointing out the inaccuracies in Paxton’s claims (especially the 60 days coming from the judge, not Paxton’s office, and only 29 days actually served), arguing that even 60 days would have been too short of a sentence, and others just plain perplexed why a candidate in a tough election would bring this up at all.

A selection of reactions is below.

Watch the video above via YouTube.

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