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Sheriff candidate brings focus to sexual assault cases in second Travis race

Austin American-Statesman - 11/3/2019

The way sexual assault cases are investigated and prosecuted could become a key issue in the Travis County sheriff's Democratic primary in March, just as the topic has taken center stage in the district attorney's race.

Democrat Liz Donegan launched her campaign this fall to challenge Sheriff Sally Hernandez. A retired Austin police sergeant who used to work for the sex crimes unit, Donegan raised concerns last year about how Austin police classify their sex crimes data, which sparked an audit and an independent review.

"I feel that -- with my experience at APD and being transparent at the sex crimes unit -- I have unfinished business. ... I want to get back and finish what I started," Donegan said of her work for sexual assault victims during an interview with the American-Statesman.

Donegan, who was a corrections officer at the Travis County Correctional Complex for two years in the early 1990s before joining the Austin Police Department, said that, if elected, she would improve deputies' sexual assault investigation training, increase the size of the victim services office and make sure the Travis County sheriff's office has a presence on the Austin/Travis County Sexual Assault Response and Resource Team, also known as SARRT.

Hernandez took office in January 2017, succeeding Greg Hamilton, who retired after 12 years. She had served one term as the constable for Precinct 3. Before that, she was an investigator at the Travis County district attorney's office for about 20 years, including several years as the office's chief investigator.

Republican Jason Salazar has also announced that he will run for sheriff. Matt Mackowiak, chairman of the Travis County Republican Party, said other Republicans have expressed interest in running.

Hernandez, who has been in office since 2017, created a sexual assault unit for the sheriff's office that year and said she is proud of how well her office investigates those types of cases.

She added that she has worked to address sexual assault reports within Travis County's jails.

"There are 10 counties in Texas that are PREA (Prison Rape Elimination Act) compliant, and we are among them, achieving our certification in 2017," Hernandez said. "We have a full-time employee dedicated to our compliance efforts. We conduct staff training that equips us to respond to incidents in a coordinated manner and thoroughly investigate.

"We offer mental health support, command staff incident reviews, retaliation monitoring and safety planning. We also have an inmate screening process that identifies inmates who have a higher risk of sexual victimization or abusiveness."

In 2018, the Travis County sheriff's office received 13 reports of inmate-against-inmate abusive sexual contact, five of which were substantiated; 34 reports of inmate-against-inmate sexual harassment, four of which were substantiated; and six instances of staff sexual harassment, one of which was substantiated, according to a PREA report.

"In comparison to previous years, the numbers have decreased in every category, and the number of substantiated cases remained low," the report says.

None of the substantiated cases led to an arrest because the conduct did not rise to the level of criminal behavior, said sheriff's spokeswoman Kristen Dark. The person accused of staff sexual harassment, who was a contract employee and didn't work directly for the sheriff's office, was terminated.

Hernandez declined to answer questions about those reported incidents.

Officials with the SAFE Alliance, which serves and advocates for Austin survivors of a variety of crimes including sexual assault and domestic abuse, said they could not comment on individual candidates. However, they said they were glad to see candidates making this issue a priority.

"Sexual assault is a horrific and all-too-common crime that the #MeToo movement has helped to bring to the forefront across the nation and in our community," SAFE CEO Kelly White said in an email. "We are always pleased to see more focus on the concerns of victims and survivors."

Conflicts and cases

Donegan spent a large portion of her career investigating sexual assaults, which is why it's a major part of her platform.

She retired from the Austin Police Department in 2017. She had been with the Sex Crimes Unit since 2002, though she was transferred to a different unit before she left the department.

After she retired, Donegan said she was pressured by two lieutenants under one commander to reclassify sexual assault cases to boost clearance rates, though she never made the changes as requested. The investigative news site ProPublica found that the number of rapes cleared by exceptional means jumped more than 50% in the year after she was transferred.

A Department of Public Safety audit, sparked by the ProPublica report, confirmed that Austin police had misclassified many sexual assault cases. The DPS audit did not look into Donegan's complaints of being pressured to reclassify the cases, and an internal Austin police audit did not examine that issue.

Austin police said no one will be disciplined for the errors.

Donegan also serves on the SARRT executive board. The team is a coalition of law enforcement, victim services advocates and other groups that seek to improve sexual assault investigations and prosecutions in Travis County.

Several leaders in the country's criminal justice system, including Hernandez and District Attorney Margaret Moore, left that group and joined a newly formed group early last year. Donegan said Hernandez's decision to leave, which she called "unfortunate," was one of the reasons she decided to run.

"You cannot surround yourself with people who are just going to 'yes' you to death and tell you you're doing a great job," Donegan said. "That's why SARRT is so strong and has such a significant presence in this community."

In Hernandez's resignation letter, which she provided to the American-Statesman, she said that "conflicts within SARRT have halted productivity and crippled our ability to effectively communicate. More time is spent in contentious conversation than in purposeful assistance."

Hernandez pointed out that the sheriff's office still works with the SAFE Alliance on a regular basis to come up with ways to more effectively investigate cases.

"The fact that we're not part of SARRT doesn't affect our direct relationships with survivor advocacy groups at all," Hernandez said.

Moore, for her part, said in a Public Safety Commission meeting earlier this year that she decided to leave SARRT partly because of a pending lawsuit as well as other concerns she had with the group.

"The collaboration at the SARRT -- it crumbled. It wasn't taking place," Moore said. "It was a hostile environment, and my people came back saying they didn't feel safe there."

Donegan said some survivors and advocates who serve on SARRT would sometimes get frustrated with authorities because "they continued to hear excuses about why cases couldn't move forward."

This criticism echoes complaints from candidates challenging Moore and from sexual assault survivors who have accused the DA of not doing enough to help victims.

Moore and Hernandez were two of several officials sued in a 2018 class action that accused Austin and Travis County leaders of failing to pursue justice in many sexual assault cases.

Hernandez was removed from that lawsuit within a couple of months after its filing. The plaintiffs -- eight women who said they had been sexually assaulted in Travis County -- later removed any mention of the Travis County sheriff's office in an amended complaint because the agency wasn't connected to any of the plaintiffs' cases.

In response to her critics, Moore has pointed out that she has obtained a guilty plea or verdict in 111 sexual assault cases since she took office.

In 2017, 625 cases of sexual assault were reported in Travis County.

Donegan said the key to a good relationship between a law enforcement agency's sex crimes unit and the district attorney's office is "training prosecutors to understand the complexity and the nuances and overcoming the consent defense and taking these cases into court."

However, she acknowledged that accomplishing this goal would be difficult if Moore doesn't want to proceed with the cases Donegan thinks should be prosecuted.

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