Robert Burns has the kind of résumé you don’t normally see among felony district court judges. After graduating from Southern Methodist University School of Law in 1990, he worked as a criminal-defense attorney, then joined the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office in September 1991, and returned to a criminal-defense solo practice in 1998 — that’s normal enough. But in the late 1990s, Burns also moonlighted as a commercial airline pilot for American Eagle — a job he kept until 2001 when the airline industry started laying off pilots after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
Burns has another interesting claim to fame. A couple of years before he left the Dallas County DA’s office, a criminal-defense attorney — in an effort to have his client’s drug charge reduced — tried to bribe Burns. He went “deep cover,” as he describes it, and the Texas Rangers had Burns wear a wire. The Rangers arrested the lawyer, who was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison.
