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 27 in the Court of Criminal Appeals....

I've represented the State in the Court of Criminal Appeals for almost 16 years. Having a front-row seat has made it clear that the court has failed Texans on multiple fronts. I'm running to fix that. 1) Too many rulings, especially during the last five years, have unjustifiably reversed convictions and...

I'm a career prosecutor who has been with the Office of the State Prosecuting Attorney for almost 16 years. We are tasked by statute with representing the State before the Court of Criminal Appeals. It is a specialized practice. Few people practicing law today have anything like my experience before the court I'm running for. My opponent is not one of them.

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...

Like it or not, there is a real divide between the parties in their approach to the proper role of the judiciary. We see it every time there is a United States Supreme Court confirmation hearing, and it trickles down to courts in Texas. People who claim judges should be compassionate are inviting them to consider race, socioeconomic status, and other details about the defendant (the victims are given short shrift) when making the legal decisions we all have to live with. That is not justice. I have a record of making legal arguments based on the law, not on the identity of the people involved or what I wished the law would be.

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...

Other than local involvement in our club (see below), I was not actively engaged with the GOP until I ran for the Third Court of Appeals last cycle. I have done my best as the nominee this cycle to support the grassroots through my appearances around the state. Judicial candidates cannot endorse, so my support of the Party has to be generic. CCA candidates raise relatively little money, so it is difficult to contribute that way.

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 or 1876 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 comb 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...

I was honored by the primary endorsements of many prominent figures in Republican politics. Almost all of them are people I met on the trail. Texas Alliance for Life also endorsed me for November. Dr. Steve Hotze ...

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....