Tim Harris Wins Despite Sophistry by Opponents

Incumbent Tulsa County District Attorney Tim Harris handily won re-election last week despite a well-organized and frequently troubling campaign by challenger Brett Swab. Harris, an Oral Roberts University College of Law graduate, is well known for his Christian faith and conservative values. The race was decided in the Republican primary since no Democrat chose to run. This fact makes the details of the campaign even more troubling.

In the past, Democratic challengers described Harris as a wild-eyed religious zealot who could not be trusted to administer his office according to established legal precedent. The gist of the current campaign against Harris by a challenger from within his own party was that he was not tough enough on crime and followed precedent too carefully. One of the more scurrilous charges in this vein appeared on a local blog, blaming Harris for refusing to charge a pair of accused Sand Springs, Oklahoma child molesters found in possession of alleged child pornography in the form of nudist/naturist magazines portraying children.

The facts were that similar material had been reviewed by the Federal courts in the past and found to be legal. The decisions had been appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The decisions were final and there was nothing Harris could do about it. The material was legal, though disgusting to many, and there were no legal grounds to file charges for possessing it. Harris did the only thing possible under the circumstances and took a lot of heat for it during the political campaign of his life.

Harris’ situation during the last campaign is a classic example of a troubling conflict that now faces many officers of the court. Local and state judges and District Attorneys are subject to a referendum measuring their perceived performance in relation to community values every election cycle. But, every day on the job, they are subject to another referendum by the appellate courts measuring their literal adherence to existing legal precedent.

The problem is that there is a huge gap between the moral and ethical values of the appellate courts and the values of the average community. The United States Supreme Court recently codified this gap in Lawrence v. Texas, declaring that traditional morality and community values as expressed through the political process were insufficient grounds to uphold a state statute proscribing certain sexual behavior. Adopting the language of Justice Stevens’ dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick, the Supreme Court declared that “the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice.” In his stinging dissent, Justice Antonine Scalia declared that Lawrence, “effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation.”

Average citizens pay little attention to Appellate and Supreme Court jurisprudence. They don’t understand that the political process is in effect governed by these courts and that no amount of political action on their part at the local and state level is going to change their decisions. The frustration the average citizen feels with the legal system can be easily re-directed for political gain by unscrupulous politicians. In the situation described, no District Attorney in the United States could have done anything different but had the accusations gotten traction in the electorate, a good man, probably one of the best Christian public servants in the United States, could have lost his job over a cynically crafted political sophistry.

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