Austin District Judge Backs Out of Upcoming Eighth Street Trials
District Judge Julie Kocurek has asked to be recused from four upcoming trials of Austin police officers charged with felony assault. The charges were filed after the officers fired upon Black Lives Matter protesters in May 2020.
Kocurek, a criminal court judge in Travis County since 1999, made the request after a sworn affidavit was filed April 25 by Dexter Gilford, head of the Civil Rights Unit in the Travis County District Attorney’s Office, which is prosecuting the cases stemming from the shootings (with “less lethal” lead-pellet munitions) near the Austin Police Department headquarters on Eighth Street. In his affidavit, Gilford wrote that Kocurek told him in a Feb. 17 phone call she “felt betrayed” by “so many indictments against police officers,” because she “enjoyed a good relationship with Travis County law enforcement” and believed the cases were the consequences of a politically motivated campaign on the part of [District Attorney] José Garza.”
Gilford wrote he had reached out to Kocurek and her staff to inform her of the 20 indictments against 19 APD officers stemming from 11 incidents, and give her adequate time to prepare before responding to the officers’ attorneys as they sought to bond out their clients. When they finally connected by phone, Gilford assured her apologetically that nothing unusual or improper had happened before the “fairly diverse grand jury,” as he described it in the affidavit - which she had herself empaneled in October 2021.
Kocurek, who was first appointed to the newly created 390th District Court by then-Gov. George W. Bush, has stood for re-election six times, running as a Republican in 2000 and 2004 and then as a Democrat since. She’s almost never faced any opposition in either the primary or general election; her “good relationship” with law enforcement has not included the need for either the Austin Police Association or Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas to donate to her campaigns. She’s best known locally for surviving an assassination attempt in 2015, in the driveway of her Rollingwood home, for which Chimene Onyeri, at the time a defendant awaiting sentencing in her court, is now serving a life sentence.
Read more: https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2022-05-02/district-judge-backs-out-of-upcoming-eighth-street-trials/