John Messinger

John Messinger is a career prosecutor who earned his J.D. from Baylor Law School. He began his legal career as an Assistant District Attorney in McLennan County, where he handled direct appeals, Adult Protective Services matters, protective orders, and occasionally some Child Protective Services matters. For the last 15 years, he has represented the State before the Court of Criminal Appeals as one of two Assistant State Prosecuting Attorneys. John has filed over 125 petitions for discretionary review in the Court of Criminal Appeals and has represented the State in over 90 cases granted review by that court. He has also represented the State in over 150 cases in the intermediate courts of appeals. John has presented oral argument in over 45 cases, including 26 in the Court of Criminal Appeals....

I've represented the State in the Court of Criminal Appeals for 15 years and it is clear our all-Republican court is not what it used to be. In short, it is failing Texans on multiple fronts that correspond with my goals....

I'm a career prosecutor who has been with the Office of the State Prosecuting Attorney for 15 years. We are tasked by statute with representing the State before the Court of Criminal Appeals. Few people practicing law today have anything like my experience before the court I'm running for, which includes 125...

The judicial branch is supposed to be the weakest of the co-equal branches. Judges don't make law. At best, they interpret law when a conflict arises and do so in a way that properly reflects the will of the people as expressed through their elected representatives or directly as with an amendment. And their...

As stated above, the main problems with the CCA are the substance of the opinions and the volume and speed of work. Most voters don't know either are a problem. I'm over 16,000 miles into my travels across the State to change that. And I make sure they understand that, because we've had an all-Republican...

I don't have a problem with asset forfeiture being one of the consequences of criminal activity. When it is a separate civil proceeding, however, it allows for loss of property under a lower standard than that for conviction. In principle, this isn't any different from when an accused murderer is acquitted but found...

A good test for when courts should be able to interfere with parental decisions is when a parent's failure to do something is worthy of criminal punishment. Physical violence, criminal neglect, etc. Those laws should be sufficient to motivate parents to do the basic things we all agree kids need. Nothing that...

I disagree with the CCA. To begin, the issue never should have been reached because I don't think a defendant has standing to complain about who presented a case to the grand jury. On the merits, I don't read the provision outlining the AG's authority to be as limiting as the CCA did. Decentralized prosecution...

No. Like anything written, they were intended to mean what the words meant when they were written. That's Originalism. The idea that a document ratified in 1791 should be construed according to what its words mean today is absurd. Worse is the idea that a constitutional provision should be boiled down to...

No. Business regulation should be reserved for those areas where public safety is not sufficiently served by market forces and criminal penalties. I don't see the risk of injury or disease transmission from lack of sanitation being so acute as to require preemptive government involvement. In the age of social media,...

It's hard for voters to sort judicial candidates because most adhere to ethics rules that violate the First Amendment, i.e., they refuse to answer questions about any area of law that might come before them. So asking direct questions won't work (unless you ask me). Where possible, look at a judicial candidate's...

So-called police powers are one of the things that is supposed to fall to the States. That division of authority should result in federal courts having nothing to say about how the States exercise them. Thanks to the prevailing interpretation of the 14th Amendment, including the creation of the oxymoron...

Quicker processing of evidence testing would facilitate a lot of pleas and trials, which would help with the backlog our larger jurisdictions have. But the biggest problem is the lack of leadership from the CCA. Although it handles, in better days, only 100 reviews a year, those decisions impact the practice of law...

Lack of humility is a big problem in our courts. Our preamble should serve as a constant reminder that judges are neither omniscient nor inherently good and therefore are unworthy of taking the law into their own hands. Government comes from God and, imperfect as our laws are, they must be followed in order...

It's important for judges to serve not only in their official capacity but also for the good of the profession. Choosing the right amount of time is hardest for trial judges, whose work on the bench happens during regular work hours. (I can research and write whenever I want). Ten working days is probably sufficient to...

Justice Thomas has been consistently vocal about the need to get things right regardless of how long a bad "controlling" decision has been on the books. (I sometimes joke that stare decisis is Latin for "We screwed it up first!") He is the most faithful to the truth that no court, not even SCOTUS, makes law....