Jury finds no fraud in Houston petition drive

HOUSTON—Both sides declared victory Friday when jurors handed down their verdict in the lawsuit against the City of Houston over an anti-bias ordinance that makes sexual orientation and gender identity a protected class. After the city council passed the ordinance in May, opponents launched a petition drive to put it on the November ballot. Mayor Annise Parker’s administration threw out a majority of the petition signatures, and the opponents sued.

Friday’s ruling won’t be finalized until District Court Judge Robert Schaffer makes a judgment in the case.

Without a definitive winner, observers, mostly plaintiffs’ supporters, were left trying to calculate how many once-disqualified voter signatures were validated by the 10-2 verdict. The jury’s answers to six questions with 154 sub-sets indicated no apparent winner. Schaffer will consider the jury’s findings as he applies the legal standards to the same questions. His final judgment could countermand some of the jury’s findings. Schaffer scheduled another hearing in the case for Feb. 19.

Both sides have said they plan to appeal if the final ruling doesn’t go in their favor.

The year-long debate over the civil rights ordinance united a racially and politically diverse band of pastors and civic leaders in opposition to it. Their referendum attempt was stymied when the city attorney’s office invalidated a substantial majority of the almost 54,000 petition signatures in August. The coalition sued, arguing then-City Attorney David Feldman acted outside his authority and used subjective standards in evaluating the 5,199 petition pages.

After the verdict, juror Patsy Jenkins told me the panel was left with an answer to a question they were never asked: What was at stake in Woodfill v. Parker?

“We felt the people were not heard … the true and genuine were not heard,” she said, referring to the thousands of voters who “honestly” signed the petition with the expectation of having a referendum.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Andy Taylor is confident legal precedent will qualify all of the signatures in question. He also noted the jury found no fraud on the part of the petitioners, something Parker’s attorneys claimed.

“The city’s entire case was predicated on wrong-doing,” he told reporters following the verdict. “This mayor has been claiming for over six months that these hardworking citizens—54,104 innocent individuals—committed fraud and this jury found they did not.”

But Geoffrey Harrison, lead attorney for the defense, also proclaimed the verdict a huge success, noting the jury was not monolithic in its findings toward either party. Jurors also confirmed defense allegations of about 2,355 incidences of forgery.

Jenkins said it was apparent on some petitions that family members signed for one another. Although not a crime, it does invalidate the signatures in question.

The court required at least 10 jurors—the same 10—to agree on all the questions in order to reach a verdict. Jenkins was one of two who disagreed with the panel’s conclusion that validating each petition page required two signature lines in the affidavit portion of the petition, as the defense claimed. While laying the blame for the faulty petition format squarely at the feet of petition creator Dave Welch, executive director of the Houston Area Pastors Council, the jury agreed the city was responsible for publishing vague information about the proper petition page format.

“We thought if the city wanted it to be a signature line, they should have included that,” Jenkins said.

Although the jury was explicitly told the case was not about the merits of the ordinance and witnesses were forbidden from discussing it, Harrison gave a nod to the law’s protection of the LGBT community, calling the verdict “a great day for equal rights.”

But the plaintiffs’ supporters, especially older African-Americans who pastored churches during the Civil Rights Movement, saw in the case the specter of voter suppression.

“The Master said we would have sin with us at all times,” said Pastor F.M. Williams, one of the plaintiffs. “And I’m a fighter of sin wherever I find it. I’m a crime fighter. … And this was a crime to deny the people the right to vote on the issue that affects the entire city. Blood was shed for the right to vote.”

Other African-American pastors began gathering at the Harris County courtroom as word of a pending verdict spread. As he waited, Louis Sidney, pastor of St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church, told me the ordinance’s equation of race with LGBT identity is wrong. Sidney said he has counseled people about their sexuality and witnessed people come and go from the homosexual lifestyle. His race is not a choice, he said, but acting on sexual urges is—and should not be the foundation for civil liberties.

The jurors were tasked with answering six questions. The first, vital to the plaintiffs’ case, addressed the issue of a second signature line on the sworn affidavit portion of the oath. Jurors declared only 33 of the 98 circulator pages “signed and subscribed.”

Question two asked whether the printed name of one circulator whose cursive signature was illegible could be found in the petition with a “reasonable” effort. They said yes.

Questions three through five asked if the same list of 13 circulators’ petition pages showed evidence of forgery, fraud, and “non-accidental defects.” The jury found no fraud but found some “non-accidental defects” and forgery, defined as “signing of another’s name or fictitious name to a petition.”

There was no immediate comment from the defendants in the case—the City of Houston, Parker, Feldman, and City Secretary Anna Russell.