The Texas Supreme Court has decided that the State Bar can use expunged court records in a disciplinary proceeding against a former prosecutor accused of suppressing exculpatory evidence— records the former Galveston County assistant district attorney had argued couldn’t be used against him because they’d been destroyed.
In the unusual mandamus decision, a majority on the high court balanced the interests of Texas’ expunction statute—which allows wrongfully accused people to eradicate their arrest records—against the bar’s interest to use expunged records to discipline a former prosecutor.
