Suzanne Wooten did the impossible and became the first candidate to defeat a sitting judge in Collin County, the reddest of counties in a very red state. Then she was accused of a crime she didn’t commit, involving two people she’d never met. But it was more complicated than that — way more complicated. Kathy Wise, a lawyer and the executive editor of D Magazine, digs into one of the most bizarre legal cases imaginable:
Wooten tries another tack.
“One way I’ve tried to just explain it to people who don’t get it—lawyers don’t get it either—it’s like I was charged with walking my dog to my mailbox to get the mail when they knew for a fact that not only did I not walk to the mailbox, but it would not have been a crime. It was my mailbox, but I didn’t even own a dog.”
I’m a lawyer. And I still don’t get it.
I will spend the next six months and countless hours conducting interviews and reviewing hundreds of pages of court pleadings, testimony transcripts, and FBI investigation notes. I will lose myself in the crazy, corrupt, centuries-old history of the Collin County court system. But in the end, I will discover that no matter how hard people try to distort it, the truth tends to be clear at its core.
It just takes one jilted man and a few loyal henchmen to put a woman back in her permitted place. Everyone else is just collateral damage.
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