HOUSTON (AP)- Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal resigned Friday under the weight of a scandal involving the release of dozens of pornographic, racist and political e-mails on his office computer.
Rosenthal, considered Texas’s most powerful prosecutor, blamed the bizarre inbox contents, which included love notes to his secretary and campaign strategizing, on a combination of drugs he had been prescribed that affected his judgment, the Houston Chronicle reported.
Alan Curry, chief of the district attorney’s appellate division, confirmed the resignation to The Associated Press.
Rosenthal has endured a public outcry for his head, including a street demonstration by hundreds of people as well as his own Republican Party officials, since a federal judge mistakenly released the e-mails as part of a lawsuit against the Harris County Sheriff’s Department.
On Friday, the lawyer who brought the suit against the Sheriff’s Department, Lloyd Kelley, filed a lawsuit to have Rosenthal removed from office on grounds of misconduct, incompetence and drinking on the job.
Rosenthal was forced off the March 4 GOP primary ballot by the scandal but steadfastly refused to resign, saying “stupidity” was not grounds for quitting.
Rosenthal also was under the threat of a federal contempt of court citation for the deletion of 2,500 other e-mails demanded as part of the civil rights lawsuit against the Sheriff’s Department.
Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said he appreciated Rosenthal’s service to the county as a prosecutor and district attorney, but he was grateful Rosenthal had chosen “to put the interests of Harris County above his own.”
“With the recent distractions surrounding Mr. Rosenthal now removed, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office can return to its mission of seeking impartial justice on behalf of all our residents,” Emmett said in a statement.
Rosenthal, 62, spent his entire career in the district attorney’s office after attending night law school. The scandal brought out allegations of racist judgment within the district attorney’s office black jurors were struck because, some defense attorneys and former prosecutors said, they were seen as soft on crime; code names for blacks were bandied about in e-mails, and black leaders believed that prosecutors under Rosenthal worked to punish blacks more harshly than whites.
Rosenthal was caught up in an unrelated but simultaneous scandal when he successfully asked a judge to dismiss a grand jury’s indictment of a state Supreme Court justice and his wife on charges they torched their house because of financial problems. Grand jurors took the unusual step of suing to get a judge to allow them to reveal the evidence that they believe implicated Justice David Medina.
Medina and his wife have denied the charges.