By Juan Montoya
A little over three months into her four-year term as County Court at Law #4 Judge, Sheila Garcia-Bence is already raising eyebrows among the judiciary and legal community at the county courthouse.
Bence won the Democratic Party runoff over former county court-at-law judge Daniel Robles 9,387 to 7,109 in 2016 and assumed the bench in January 2017.
County Court-at-Law #4 serves the residents of Cameron County mainly as a Probate, Mental Health and Guardianship Court. In most cases, an attorney from the Cameron County Bar is assigned co-guardian with a relative to oversee the estate of incapacitated persons.![]()
As courts go, probate courts are below the pecking order of federal court and district courts and even the other county courts at-law. Only Justice of the Peace courts are below them.
But what has people talking at the courthouse is the way that Garcia-Bence has started out her tenure to get lawyers to take notice of her court. She has had two of them arrested at the courts where they may have been on other cases and brought in by bailiffs who have nee instructed to handcuff them if necessary.
The last time an attorney was arrested and brought to her court was on Wednesday when he was assisting a court-appointed defendant in custody and the bailiff in the district court was told that he was wanted in Garcia-Bence's court pronto.
"The bailiff told them that the attorney would be done with his client and that it would not take less than half an hour before he was free to attend to the probate court's business.
"That happens all the time at the courthouse," said a staffer with the county clerk. "Usually, the lawyers a re paged and told they are wanted in a certain court. "In the 20 years that I've been here, I don;t think that I've ever seen a judge have an attorney arrested in court and hauled off to his for a case. This is a first."
When the bailiffs arrived, they told the lawyer that they had been sent to arrest him and take him to Garcia-Bence's court, and to handcuff him if necessary. The lawyer said his secretary had told the court's secretary which court he was in and that he would be in her court as soon as he was done assisting the defendant in custody.
Garcia-Bence would have none of that and she scolded the attorney for not being present in her court as scheduled. When the attorney tried to respond, she reminded him of a custody case where they had been adversaries about 10 years ago and he had withdrawn when he found out his court-appointed client was uncooperative.
"I was floored," said the lawyer. "The custody case was closed years ago and she still remembered. Here she was bringing up a case from years ago."
To make matters worse, the client for whom he had been appointed co-guardian had died more than two years ago. Garcia-Bence wanted him to produce an inventory for the case for the year 2008, almost 10 years before."The guy had been dead for almost three years," he said. "After three years, the case closes automatically. What were six more months going to matter? The guy was dead. On the other hand, the defendant in custody was alive and needed my help. What if the co-guardian – who lives in Houston – was stopped for some traffic infraction and the cops found out that she was wanted for not attending probate court in Brownsville? Would she be arrested, too."
Then, after the attorney was arrested in district court by the bailiffs and hauled off before Garcia-Bence, he returned to district court only to find out that someone – no one knows who – had made off with his laptop. On Thursday, after he had inquired in all the courts on Wednesday, he south the help of Constable Abel Gomez, in charge of courthouse security, to see if the courthouse surveillance tapes could detect the thief.
"As Abel's people were going over the tapes, someone called them and told them that the laptop had reappeared and was found where I had left it," he said. "My computer guy said someone had been trying to open it but didn't have the password. They probably got wind that people were searching for it and panicked and returned it."
Gacia-Bence got widespread support from the legal community when she ran against Robles, rightly or wrongly associated with convicted Harlingen attorney Jim Solis who was caught up in the judicial corruption scandal. If she continues her practice of arresting lawyers for being late to her court, that support might start to wither away in the three and a half years she has left in her term.