(C) El Paso Matters.org
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388th District Court candidates trade claims about judicial fitness [1]
['Daniel Perez', 'More Daniel Perez', 'El Paso Matters']
Date: 2024-02-20
The race for presiding judge of the 388th District Court pits a first-time candidate who claims that her opponent overuses visiting judges and is biased in court, against a first-term incumbent who said the accusations probably are due to her challenger’s lack of overall experience.
Voters will decide March 5 between Judge Marlene Gonzalez, who was elected to office in 2020, and Joy Degenhart, an El Paso attorney with seven years’ experience in family law. The winner will lead one of the county’s family courts, which hears cases that involve divorce, child custody matters and protective orders. Early voting is from Feb. 20 through March 1.
The winner of this Democratic primary will take office Jan. 1, 2025, because there are no Republican challengers. The post is a four-year term. The current annual salary for this position is $158,000.
Each candidate recently spoke about themselves and the reasons that they want this job, which includes the hiring of an associate judge who will work at the discretion of the presiding judge.
‘Gonzalez needs to be held accountable’
By the age of 13, Degenhart knew she wanted to be a lawyer. Twenty years later, she wants to be a judge.
Joy Degenhart, a family law attorney, grew up in El Paso and spent a lot of time as a child and as a mother at Madeline Park. The first-time candidate said she would be a fair and impartial as judge of the 388th District Court. (Daniel Perez / El Paso Matters)
Degenhart, 33, grew up in Northeast El Paso as part of a large family that included many aunts, uncles, four siblings and 31 cousins. Early on, Degenhart was considered a mediator who could manage conflict and resolve issues among the children. She brokered apologies among friends and cousins as a pre-teen.
Homeschooled until college, she was part of a successful mock-trial team that reached the state competition in Dallas each year of high school.
“I absolutely loved it,” Degenhart said. “I never thought about anything else for my career.”
She attended El Paso Community College and the University of Texas at El Paso before she transferred to Texas Tech University in Lubbock. She majored in speech communication and rhetoric to prepare for law school.
Degenhart applied to several law schools, but the best scholarship offer came from Regent University School of Law in Virginia. At this point, she was a young single mom and wanted a smaller academic experience. Juggling motherhood with academics meant a lot of discipline and structure.
She returned to El Paso for a summer internship with Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid where she was introduced to family law. She liked how it was fast paced and involved a lot of litigation. She left her hometown with a job offer from the Rosales Law Firm subject to her graduation.
Degenhart earned her law degree in 2016. After a brief time with the Rosales firm, she joined James Rey Law in May 2017.
The candidate said that her personal experience with her son’s absentee father made her appreciate those men who do want to be part of their children’s lives. She works with a lot of men who rely on the family courts to help them get access to their children.
Because of her experiences with the 388th family court – and those of some of her peers – the attorney decided to offer herself as a fair and impartial alternative to El Paso voters.
“I think Judge Gonzalez needs to be held accountable for her actions and the way she is running her court,” Degenhart said.
She requested some public records to learn more about the number of visiting judges who worked cases for the 388th from 2021 through 2023 and found that they worked 31 weeks and cost taxpayers an additional $95,000.
“People should really care about that,” Degenhart said.
Degenhart also has voiced her concerns about the biased and unprofessional behavior of Gonzalez and members of her staff that has led to at least five attorneys to ask Gonzalez to recuse herself from their cases. The attorney said that Gonzalez investigated and filed grievances against attorneys who supported her opponent in the 2020 election, and then allowed them to continue to practice in her court without telling them about the complaints.
“That creates an adversarial position,” Degenhart said. “A judge should not be adversarial to an attorney. It’s unfair to the litigant.”
Degenhart’s latest campaign finance report of Feb. 5 showed that she had received political contributions of $1,300. Her previous filing showed that she raised $9,300 to include $2,500 contributions from her law partner James Rey and from retiree Phyllis Strathmann.
Marlene Gonzalez, presiding judge of the 388th District Court, said that she bases her decisions on the law, the facts and common sense. She is outside her law office, 912 Magoffin Ave. (Daniel Perez / El Paso Matters)
‘Think out of the box’
Marlene Gonzalez, 69, thanked her parents for making her the person, and jurist, that she is.
Gonzalez, a native of Puerto Rico, is the oldest of four siblings. As a result, her parents expected her to help lead the family. Her homemaker mother was involved in real estate and would flip houses. Her father was an actor/musician/handyman before he became an educator. Both of them taught her through example to be humble, self-sufficient and socially conscious.
Growing up, she witnessed how her mother tried to help people but lacked the legal background to be more successful. Gonzalez decided, with her father’s encouragement, to become a lawyer to serve her community better.
Gonzalez earned her bachelor’s degrees in art and political science from the University of Puerto Rico, and her master’s in labor relations and law degree from the Inter American University of Puerto Rico.
After starting her legal career on the island, she moved to El Paso in the late 1980s to join her husband, a U.S. Border Patrol agent she met in Puerto Rico. She worked as a substitute teacher as she studied to pass the bar exam.
Gonzalez initially worked for the County Attorney’s Office where she saw the kinds of issues that families faced. She sought out professional development opportunities to enhance her knowledge of family law. After a few years, she started her own practice and by the mid-2000s, she was appointed as a part-time assistant municipal court judge.
After volunteering with other campaigns, she decided to run for judge of the 388th in 2008, but lost to incumbent Patricia Macias. She ran again for the same office in 2020 because she was concerned about the court’s inefficiencies. She won that election against incumbent Laura Strathmann.
The married mother of two adult sons said that she bases her judicial decisions on the law, the facts and common sense.
“I blend all that,” she said. “We have to apply the heart and the common sense, and think out of the box. I think that makes us different.”
Gonzalez dismissed her opponent’s accusations as the result of inexperience and a lack of knowledge of the inner workings of the local judicial system.
She said visiting judges help courts reduce active pending caseloads. She said that the money used to pay for the visiting judges in 2022 came from a grant. Additionally, she said that the majority of visiting judges cases in 2021 were assigned by her predecessor. As for the charge of bias, she could only recall one adversarial situation and it involved an attorney who possibly was involved in misconduct.
“I will say that, despite her negative campaigning, (Degenhart) shows potential to become, with time and maturity, an effective attorney and maybe eventually a judge, but now is not that time,” Gonzalez said.
From the contributions filed by Jan. 15, she had a total of $32,710. The candidate received 10 donations of more than $1,000 – mostly from attorneys or people in the legal field – to include $2,250 from James Lucas, her associate judge in the 388th District Court and $2,000 in donations from attorneys Ismael Pease and Luis Yañez. During the last contribution filing period that ended Feb. 5, she received $4,200 including another $1,000 from Lucas.
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https://elpasomatters.org/2024/02/20/388th-district-court-family-court-marlene-gonzalez-joy-degenhart/
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