New Claim: Justice Hecht Fee Discount
A new ethics complaint has been made about Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht.
He allegedly was given a discount on the legal fees he paid in a successful defense of an earlier ethics complaint, and a Travis County prosecutor is investigating this new complaint, reports the KWTX television station.
Law firms and attorneys donated $447,000 to help pay Hecht’s defense fees in the earlier case, which concerned his support of Harriet Miers’ short-lived effort to win an appointment from President George W. Bush to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005. The Texas Ethics Commission says such fund-raising by a judge to pay legal fees is appropriate, as discussed in an earlier ABAJournal.com post.
However, an ethics watchdog now contends that Hecht received a $100,000 discount on his legal fees, paying only about $330,000, reports the Associated Press.
