The pickings are slim in the wind-whipped West Texas oil towns of Monahans and Pecos when it comes to people who know their way around a courtroom.
An assistant district attorney who used to shoulder some of the load for the elected prosecutor is now the area’s only judge. A court reporter was fired for passing out drunk at the courthouse after a lunch break — and then was snapped up by a neighboring district.
So when Republicans needed a candidate to take on the Democratic district attorney in a deeply conservative stretch of the Permian Basin that’s more than half the size of New Jersey, they had to settle on Sarah Stogner. She disliked President Trump, made a name for herself by once posing nearly naked on an oil pumpjack for a campaign ad and had never tried a criminal case in her life, but at least she had an active law license.
Then, in November, she won.
“I didn’t really have time to process,” she said of her victory. “I had to go into that office and walk into a whole bunch of pending felony criminal cases, and I had zero experience.”
It hasn’t been easy. Locals may enjoy the storied tales of the Wild West justice west of the Pecos River (and, for Ms. Stogner’s district, a little east of the Pecos as well) and profess strict beliefs in law and order. But they frequently give the benefit of the doubt to the accused, who might be a friend, or a cousin, or the friend of a cousin.
Ms. Stogner, 40, lost the first three cases she tried, including a seemingly slam-dunk drunk-driving trial where jurors improbably decided that the avuncular older defendant, who was drunk when officers found him in his car on a roadside, may not have driven there.
“I was like, really? I give up,” she confessed after that one.
Ms. Stogner’s Texas judicial district, the 143rd, is one of countless legal deserts around the United States. The State Bar of Texas counts only 17 practicing lawyers in the three counties of Ms. Stogner’s district, and many are already overextended. In Dallas, there are more than 17,000.
“No one else was coming out here, frankly,” said Justin Till, a native of Monahans who serves as the city’s attorney and the Ward County attorney, and is also helping Ms. Stogner as an assistant district attorney.
The lack of lawyers was a key reason Ms. Stogner was asked to run. At first she said no. She had, after all, gained her political notoriety in a quixotic run for the Texas Railroad Commission with that racy campaign video.
Then she said she prayed on it, and determined it was the right thing to do.
“It was shocking that she won,” said Kent McDaniel, a retired trucking company owner who had been to one of her campaign events. He guessed that voters had been frustrated at how few cases seemed to go to trial under her predecessor.
Since taking office, the newcomer’s struggles have stemmed from both unfavorable juries and her own mistakes. One case against a man caught with a big rock of methamphetamine in his pickup ended in a mistrial the first time around, because of her own procedural flub.
Ms. Stogner never wanted to be a prosecutor. An oil-and-gas lawyer in Louisiana, she moved to a friend’s sprawling 22,000-acre ranch about 30-minutes outside of Monahans during the pandemic, as she was separating from her husband.
Soon Ms. Stogner discovered that old oil wells on the property had sprung leaks and were spewing contaminated water. Getting companies to plug them became her cause. She posted regularly on TikTok, amassing a following that helped her mount a primary challenge to a Republican member of the railroad commission in 2022.
Though she lost, the race put her on the political radar.
She has remained involved in stopping leaks on the ranch where she lives, swapping business attire for a custom trucker’s hat and zigzagging in an all-terrain vehicle to inspect the nearby wells.
But time is precious because, despite the rural setting, there is plenty of crime.
Oil field workers in austere “man camps” bring occasional prostitution arrests and drunken fights. Ms. Stogner, who has a daughter, has been alarmed to discover the number of familial sex crimes among her district’s permanent population of 23,000 residents.
“I just realize how privileged and sheltered I’ve been,” she said. “It makes me a whole lot more paranoid.”
On a recent Sunday she received her first late-night call from a Texas Ranger about a murder: A man in an R.V. Park had been shot in the head and killed.
She has also been the victim of a crime since taking office: In April, thieves drove off with her Airstream trailer. She has yet to get it back.
The sheer volume of cases has made it difficult to keep her campaign promise not to let justice be delayed. A 79-year-old retired prosecutor, who is the father of a law school friend, has been helping out, flying in each month from Louisiana.
“She just works her butt off, but sometimes the judge is asking us to prepare six to seven cases” for each week that trials are heard, said the Louisiana lawyer, Don Richard. “And it’s just her.”
She has been learning on the job, honing her technique by talking to jurors after each loss, and seeking advice from other rural prosecutors. But it’s been tough.
“There’s just always been a kind of an innate distrust of law enforcement here,” said Trent Graham, a lawyer from Pecos who represents many local defendants.
On a recent Monday, at the start of her second trial on the meth case, Ms. Stogner stood before a cross-section of the close-knit Monahans community: a longtime elementary school music teacher, a few police officers, many oil field workers, a handful of men in faded cowboy boots, hats in hand.
The jury pool was large — 104 people — because the judge, Alan Nicholas, had threatened to impose fines on anyone who failed to show.
Ms. Stogner asked the potential jurors to describe themselves with three words, an approach she’d recently learned. She offered herself as an example: “I’m a mom. I’m a lawyer. I’m a Christian.”
“Christian, father, hard worker,” said a prospective juror.
“Mom, business owner, Christian.”
“I just stick to myself,” said one man.
“Same,” another chimed in.
“My husband is the sheriff,” a woman said.
“There’s a lot of cops in here,” the custodian for the high school football team, John Rawling, 59, said loudly, before pointing to the defendant. “I wouldn’t want to be him!” He was not chosen for the jury.
The trial was pretty simple. Ms. Stogner showed police body camera footage of sheriff’s deputies pulling over the defendant, Abraham Navarette, in 2023, looking through his pickup and eventually finding enough meth to qualify for a felony charge.
“Wow, it’s huge,” one deputy could be heard saying in the video.
At times, she read from a piece of paper — a script of questions from a guidebook for properly getting witnesses to talk about evidence in court.
Mr. Navarette’s lawyer, Mr. Graham, argued that the case was not simple, that the truck belonged to his client’s brother, a welder, and had also been used by his workers.
The case adjourned for closing arguments the next day. Ms. Stogner slept poorly, worried not about her closing but about making some legal mistake that would tank the case — again.
She left before dawn to work in her office, a few rooms in what was once a large grocery store.
Ms. Stogner wanted to use the visual of a puzzle for her closing, and asked ChatGPT to generate one. “But it made too many puzzle pieces,” she said.
Instead, she marched into the courtroom and, in a few short minutes, stressed that the police found the drugs, along with many small bags and multiple cellphones, which she said could be used for drug sales. “We caught him before he sold it into the community,” she said.
It took the jury less than an hour to convict. Judge Nicholas sentenced the 47-year-old Mr. Navarette to 15 years in prison.
Katelyn Ozuna, Ms. Stogner’s investigator, approached the jury to get their feedback. She reported back.
“They said you did really good. Just be more confident,” said Ms. Ozuna, whose husband is a deputy sheriff and whose children’s babysitter is the judge’s wife. The jurors also said of Ms. Stogner, “you talk very intelligent,” Ms. Ozuna said. “Dumb it down.”
The victory was a relief to Ms. Stogner. But her mood turned as she thought about Mr. Navarette, who sat around the courtroom with a bailiff after, waiting for his brother to bring him a sandwich before he went off to begin his long sentence.
“Winning sucks,” she said, walking from the courtroom. “It’s just sad.”
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
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