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Charges dropped: Court dismisses all charges against Crigger, five county district clerks
By Danny Gallagher, dgallagher@acnpapers.com
All criminal charges against the Collin County District Clerk and five county employees have been dropped.
The 401st District Court submitted an order on Tuesday to dismiss all felony charges of engaging in organized criminal activity against District Clerk Patricia Crigger, Civil/Family Manager Sherry Bell, Senior Administrator Rebecca Littrell, Deputy District Clerk Amy Mathis, Civil/Family Supervisor Lorrie Robertson and Deputy Minutes Clerk Marcia Simpson, according to Collin County court records.
Each received the charges in 2010 stemming from a Texas Rangers investigation into the office's accounting and record-keeping practices that prompted a search warrant raid on the Collin County District Clerk's office, located in the courthouse on Bloomdale Road.
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| Collin County District Clerk Patricia Crigger |
"My task or charge in this case was to look at the case and charges with a fresh set of eyes, and not to simply continue the case the way it had been going but to evaluate it from scratch," Helms said from his Dallas office.
Helms said the charges were dismissed without prejudice, which still gives him or other prosecutors the opportunity to reopen the case under different criminal charges.
"I made the decision not to pursue the original charges that the original prosecutors brought," he said. "That does not mean I won't pursue charges that I might want to bring instead, but right now, it's just one decision --- that I do not intend to pursue the original charges that the prosecutors were pursuing."
An unidentified source alleged to an investigator with the Texas Rangers' office that Crigger and Littrell recruited employees in the office to assist with Crigger's election campaign for the district clerk's seat in the wake of longtime District Clerk Hannah Kunkle's pending retirement. The source said that employees received time off for helping Crigger's campaign from Littrell, a "common practice" they described as "blue book time," according to an affidavit filed by the Texas Rangers.
The raid prompted further investigation and prosecution from the Collin County District Attorney's office, then led by former DA John Roach. Former First Assistant District Attorney Greg Davis later recused his office from prosecuting the case more than three months after the indictments, when revelations surfaced that the DA's office also had a similar paid-time-off program called "High Five," an incentive program in which two timekeepers under the office's employment kept an "off-the-record agreement" with the county's human resources department to change employees' time records to pay them for hours that they weren't actually working.
The court appointed an attorney pro tem to prosecute the case and sought an indictment against Davis for tampering with a government record. A visiting judge later dismissed the charge.
The purpose of the time-keeping systems became the central issue between both offices, Helms said.
"That was kind of the issue that was in common with the DA's office and the clerk's office," Helms said. "Both offices were entering time into a system in a way that was supposed to mean, at least in theory, how much time a person should get paid for, but arguably the system is designed to reflect how much time a person is in the office."
The investigation into the clerk's office has not ended with the most recent charges.
"The investigation is continuing," Helms said. "The motion to dismiss the current charges should not be taken as an indication that the other charges will or won't be pursued in the future."
Attempts were made to reach Crigger and her attorney, Robert Hinton, as well as Bell, Littrell, Robertson and Simpson, but messages left at their offices were not returned by Wednesday. Mathis declined to comment.
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