Re-Elect Judge

Judge, Dallas County Criminal Court No. 9

Judge, PRIDE Court - Drug Divert Court for Defendants charged with prostitution

Administrative Presiding Judge of the County Criminal Courts

Board Certified in Criminal Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization

Former New York City Homicide Prosecutor; Former Dallas County Felony Prosecutor; Former Criminal Defense Attorney

Bishop Lynch High School Graduate ‘86

S.M.U. School of Law Graduate ‘93

Former Bishop Lynch High School Board Member

Bishop Lynch High School Mock Trial Team Attorney Advisor

Graduated Southern Methodist University Law School – 1972

Certified Specialist Criminal Law – 1977

President Dallas Criminal Defense Bar – 1981

Appointed Judge on the Fifth District Court of Appeals – 1986

Elected Judge for 292nd District Court – 2006

85% Overall Approval Rating – 2009 National Resource Judge – ASTAR (Advance Science and Technology Adjudication

Center) – 2011

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RaceDayRegistrationbeginsat5:00pmattheschool to bring their own alcoholic beverages, TABC communications director Carolyn Beck says. If Lake Highlands went “wet”, it wouldn’t necessarily change anything, but since it would make it easier for businesses to legally sell booze, they might start doing so.

For now, Brothers is BYOB. Vraniqi hasn’t decided whether he would obtain a license to sell again if it became easier, but he says it would make it a viable option.

“I would sure look at things differently. Some people like to be able to bring their own, but it is nice for people, if they crave a drink, for us to have it there for them. It changes the whole mood of a place — I think that’s more satisfying for the customer.”

Either way, he hopes the local option passes, because the hodgepodge of regulations annoys him.

“My neighbor a mile down the street can do something I am not allowed to do?That just magnifies the frustration.”

If Dallas votes “wet” will our neighborhood attract better restaurants and grocery stores?

Possibly.

A change in the existing liquorlawswouldmake thingseasierandless costly for restaurant owners such as Luan Vraniqi ofBrothersPizza,who says that selling alcoholic beverages in a dry area requires a ridiculous amountofpaperworkandfeesto Unicardor a similarmembershipmanagement company.

Newdevelopments Prescott Realty’sLakeHighlandsTown Center, for example — might attract more restaurants and grocery stores if the area becomes wet. To date, no tenants for the 70-acre property have been announced, but Scott Wynne, LakeHighlandsAreaImprovement Association vice president of support and ING Clarion real estate investmentmanager,saysthingsmight change if this election passes.

“If it passes, and I think it will, we’re not living in the 1800s anymore. That is kind of the wild card,” Wynne says of the wet-dry election, adding that if our neighborhood becomes wet, “that will change a lot of things. When a grocery store can sell beer and wine, that makes all the difference to the bottom line, and for restaurants, too. There are all these sorts of hurdles that restaurants have to go through.

“I stopped short of ‘open the floodgates’, but I think there will be a big reaction, and that may be what Prescott is facing right now — I’ll call you in [a few] months.”

Vance Detwiler, president of Prescott Realty, declined to comment on the “wet-dry issues” and how the election might affect the Town Center.

Though it’s just one of many factors determining successful development, the ability to sell alcohol in a retail or restaurant location makes a difference, says David Wilson, president ofConnected Development Services atTheRetailConnection, a retail real estate firm with properties around Dallas. Some grocers will not move to dry areas.

Dallas resident Monte Anderson of OptionsRealEstate seconds that opinion.

“Most of them want to sell beer and wine, and that’s been an obstacle on the grocery store front,” Anderson says. A location being wet is “probably not the only thing, no, but it’s a big thing for companies like Whole Foods. What I hear from them is they are not coming without it.” >>

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What’s all this about “Class B retailers”?

Texas’ClassB system dates to 1971, as a companion to a law allowing restaurants and bars to sell liquor by the drink. Before that, no restaurant in Texas was allowed to sell liquor — even in wet areas (although they could sell beer and wine). Customers brought their booze with them from home, and the restaurant sold them setups — mixers, juices and the like.

The reason for the law? Retailers who thought liquor by the drink would cost them sales successfully lobbied state legislators, who gave them monopoly on selling liquor to restaurants, bars and private clubs (restaurants that serve liquor in the state’s dry areas). Retailers said they would lose business because consumers would stop buying liquor at their stores to bring to restaurants. So the legislature agreed to give them the monopoly to make up for the lost sales.

Retailers who sell liquor to restaurants and private clubs are called Class B retailers, after the name of the license they obtain. They include some of the state’s best-known retailers, including Sigel’s and Goody Goody in the Dallas area. Texas is one of three states — Kansas and South Carolina are the others — with four tiers of distribution: manufacturer, distributor, retailer and restaurant. The other 47 just have three — manufacturer, distributor and restaurant.

According to this 1971 state law, every restaurant in Texas, whether it’s in a wet or dry area, must purchase liquor from a Class B retailer. The November election would not change this law; it would simply eliminate private clubs in Dallas and make every restaurant a restaurant, in terms of how it can purchase and sell alcohol.

The difference between private clubs and restaurants is that liquor can be delivered to restaurants in wet areas, whereas private club restaurants in dry areas must travel to a Class B retailer’s warehouse to pick up liquor — Sigel’s is near Harry Hines and Preston, and Goody Goody’s is in Addison, for example. Private clubs must also buy their beer and wine, but not liquor, from ClassB retailers, while restaurants in wet areas can buy beer and wine directly from the distributors. Class B r etailers also buy their beer and wine from distributors, which translates to a markup when the retailers sell it to private clubs.

What does this mean for consumers? Typically, but not always, they’ll pay more for alcohol in a private club. The extra tier adds cost to the product, and restaurants usually pass that onto their customers. >> will be paddling the river of life together after their wedding on October 10, 2010 in Eureka Springs, AK

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How do Texans outside of Dallas like their liquor?

Alcohol has never been especially popular with Texans. When Prohibition began in 1919, 199 of the 254 counties were dry; 43 were practically dry, including Dallas County. Even today, according to the Texas AlcoholicBeverageCommission, 29 of the 254 counties are still dry, and only 43 are completely wet.

It could be worse … what if the state owned our liquor stores?

Abc

In 18 states (and one county)intheU.S., thestateownsthe liquorstores.These arecalledcontrol states,andthough therearedifferences in how eachstate defines control (some statesallowprivate retailers to sell wine or beer, for example), the result is that what is for sale is controlled by the state.

ThisisalegacyofProhibition;the political compromise that made repeal possible allowed each state to pass its own liquor laws.

Pennsylvaniahastakencontrolone step further. Currently, grocery stores in Pennsylvania can’t sell wine. Instead, the state liquor authorities have installed wine vending machines, from which the customer can buy wine, similar to buying a soft drink or a candy bar from a vendingmachine.Similar,butwitha couple of exceptions.

The consumer puts his or her driver’slicenseintothemachine,where ageinformationonthebarcodeis processed. The photo on the driver’s license is matched with a video image of the buyer at the kiosk, and a state liquor board employee monitors each transaction to confirm that the video of the buyer matches the driver’s license.

How is it that Dallas County is dry yet parts of Dallas are wet?

WET, 47,343 TO 23,540.

The basis for Texas’ wet-dry laws is local option, which does what it says: Local voters can decide whether to sell alcohol in their locality. It’s one of the cornerstones of the Texas liquor system, says Lou Bright, former general counsel for the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission.

“The priority is that local voters always have the final say, and can’t be forced to change their local preference by someone from outside their locality,” Bright says. “This doesn’t mean that it’s not confusing or can’t be ambiguous, but that’s always the principle.”

How confusing? Consider what happened in 2006, when a group of North Dallas and Lake Highlands residents tried to schedule a wet-dry election for their respective sections of the city. The Texas Supreme Court ruled that the wet-dry election couldn’t be held because the election was designated for the current Justice of the Peace precinct boundaries, when it should have been designated for the boundaries established in 1877, when the area went dry.

State law defines localities three ways and uses the principle that the larger locality, such as a city, can’t force a smaller locality, such as a JP precinct, to change its behavior: administrative divisions within a county. One JP precinct can be dry, while the one next to it in the same city or county can be wet. Interestingly, Dallas’ wet-dry boundaries don’t follow the current JP lines, but older, less-well-defined JP boundaries. turned wet in a citywide election unless all of the precinct is within the city. This was one of the issues in the run-up to the November election, when there was some doubt as to whether the JP precinct in Oak Cliff that went dry in 1956 was contained within the city of Dallas. Turns out it was.

When Lubbock voted wet in 2009, the drys claimed that part of the county was dry from previous elections, and that a city-wide election couldn’t affect those areas — which included part of Lubbock. Their argument failed in court.>>

Is most of Dallas still dry for religious reasons?

Religious groups have traditionally taken the lead in fighting wet-dry elections in Texas, and they played a key role 50 years ago when Oak Cliff went dry. But there doesn’t seem to be much organized religious opposition to November’s two wet-dry ballot issues.

Does this mean that neighborhood churches don’t care about the issue any more? Or that Dallas is less religious than it used to be?

No on both counts, several religious leaders say. It’s not so much that alcohol isn’t important; rather, it’s that other issues have become more important, and abstinence isn’t the issue it once was. In addition, Dallas has changed significantly from the smaller, predominantly mainstream Protestant city of the 1960s and 1970s to a million-plus population urban center that includes more Catholics, Jews and non-denominational Protestants — all of whom are less concerned about alcohol.

“We’re just getting to this point later than other cities,” says George Mason, pastor at the moderate Wilshire BaptistChurch. “The city is more diverse, and we have more people who have different attitudes about this subject.”

Also, says Rev. Tim McLemore of SMU, alcohol is no longer the good vs. evil issue that it has traditionally been among the mainline Protestant groups that have been in the forefront of the U.S. temperance movement. Mason says this is even true for some conservative Baptists.

“We have knowledge about the benefits of the limited use of alcohol that we didn’t have 100 years ago,” says McLemore, who notes that the United Methodists have changed their views to allow “judicious use” of alcohol. “So we’re less inclined to take a black and white view.”

Finally, churches have less influence over their members than they did two and three decades ago. Times were, Mason says, if the church said not to drink, believers didn’t drink. These days, that veto power is largely gone.

What am I actually voting on?

Dallas voters will decide two issues in November’s wet-dry election:

2. Whether to allow the sale of beer and wine, but not spirits, at retailers throughout the entirecity.Currently,only one-third of Dallas — roughly WhiteRock Lake to Irving and downtown to Walnut Hill — is wet for retail sales.

Neither issue is dependent on the other. Voters can elect to allow retail sales but keep the private club restrictions, or vice versa. FOR INFORMATION VISITDALCOELECTIONS.ORG. If the Texas Supreme Court decides there are enough signatures to hold the referendum, the election will be held

1. Whether to eliminate the private club regulation for restaurants that sell alcohol in dry areas. The private club rule, in place since 1971, requires restaurants to admit customers into the restaurant’s club so they can buy alcohol. It also requires the restaurant to keep a paper trail of club members.

Colby Vokey won’t keep his mouth shut.The defense attorney built a national reputation by demanding fair representation for U.S. soldiers accused of war crimes, and the world took notice when he spoke out against the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

“Colby Vokey is a guy who always did the right thing, even if it upset everybody,” says retired Col. Jane Siegel says.

For his efforts, Vokey lost his job in the military (he was later reinstated), and he has been profiled by national media outlets, including National Public Radio and the Dallas Morning News

Today, as a civilian lawyer, Vokey handles cases involving soldiers with legal troubles. Among Vokey’s high-profile clients is Frank

A Lake Highlands native has been at the center of some of the military’s most controversial cases

BY CHRISTINA HUGHES BABB

PHOTO BY CAN TÜRKYILMAZ

Wuterich, a staff sergeant accused in 2005 of leading Marines in a deadly attack on civilians in Haditha, Iraq, an incident widely referred to as the “Haditha Massacre”.

Vokeyisaccustomedtothespotlight. A Marineformorethan20years,the 1983 Lake Highlands High School graduate served for several years as chief of the MarineCorps’ defense lawyers in the western United States, where he supervised or tried hundreds of military cases.

Around the same time he originally was appointed to the Haditha case — he continues to represent Wuterich as a civilian

Vokey garnered national media attentionforspeakingoutagainstthetreatmentofaccusedenemycombatantsat GuantanamoBay prison.

St. John’s Episcopal School

Some say this outspokenness was at odds with his loyalty to the military and administration. Vokey says he just did his job.

“I am going to speak out when I see aninjustice.MyloyaltyistotheU.S. Constitution,” he says. “Guantanamo is like nothing I had ever seen — there was serious injustice, and I couldn’t simply sit on the sidelines and let it happen.”

Vokey became familiar with Guantanamo Bayin2005,whenhewasappointed defense lawyer to Omar Ahmed Khadr, a 15-year-oldaccusedofwarcrimesand terrorism. He says he was unprepared for what came next.

“My primary job was defending servicemen; now I am appointed to defend this young man in Guantanamo. It is a lot different from any other assignment — they are in many ways at opposite ends of the spectrum.”

When Vokey arrived in Guantanamo, he says, he concluded he had been set up for failure by the military.

“The court process [at Guantanamo] was designed for conviction. It was one of the most offensive legal processes I’ve ever been connected with. Rules of evidence [were] biased and unfair. Due process was an American concept that did not apply there officials invented crimes, changed rules as they went along and lied. They ordered me to defend the guy but took action to make sure I couldn’t defend him.”

WhatbotheredVokeymostaboutthe treatmentofGuantanamodetainees,he says, was the effect those actions will have on the future safety of American soldiers.

“Other countries will follow our lead. No, Al-Qaeda doesn’t follow rules, but countries that imprison Americans we can expect Americans to get the same kind of treatment [that the military has given prisoners at Guantanamo].”

For the record, the government always denied Vokey’s claims about Guantanamo and has declined comment to the media.

Vokey also saw injustice in the military’s prosecution of servicemen accused of crimes. For example, he says he was angrythemilitaryassembled a large team to prosecute the Marines accused in Haditha, but allowed for only a small defense of the soldiers.

“In cases of military defense, we are talking about men who have volunteered to lay down their lives for others. We hold them up as heroes, but once they are charged with a crime, it can feel like we throw them under the bus. But they deserve the highest quality defense military justice can be harsh, unfair and infuriating.”

Vokey’s actions and words weren’t popular with the administration, Siegel says.

“In the military, everyone is expected to be told what to do, to do it and ask no questions about it,” she says. “But Colby put his heart and soul into his job, defending clients zealously, and that caused conflict betweenthemilitaryhierarchyandthe defense counsel.”

Once Vokey decided the Gitmo system was unfair, he “went nuts,” she says.

“And I mean that in the best possible way. He went out of his way to change things, and he never gave up.

“He has been physically booted off Gitmo; he was passed over for promotions; he had to retire, essentially in order to avoid punishment. He was a lieutenant colonel, which is a high rank, but those above him were so angry that he would not go with the flow.”

A veteran of Desert Storm, Vokey says he always wanted to serve his country, and later the law, but he didn’t seek and doesn’t particularly enjoy the limelight his career has generated.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I expect that perfect storm of high-visibility military cases. I picked a job where I could teach others and spend time in the courtroom — I wasn’t expecting it.

“The question seemed to be: How can I defend our militarymen and defend accused terrorists? The bottom line is that I support the U.S. Constitution, and justice is not for certain people but everyone.”

Today as a partner at Fitzpatrick Hagood and Smith, Vokey defends military personnel accused of murder, manslaughter or major offenses, but he also fights for the rights of those whose crimes, such as drug possession, might have been a result of mental trauma of war.

“If they are dishonorably discharged, they can lose their [military] benefits. We owe it to them to get them a good defense.”

Thoughhe’sstill a hardworkingand sometimes polarizing figure, Vokey says his life has been less stressful since he resigned from the Marines in 2007.

Also grateful that he works at a private firm, he says, are his wife Cindy Arrington Vokey, also an LHHS graduate, and sons Connor, 16, Camden, 11, and daughter Christina, 21.

“I love the Marine Corps,” he says, “but today I can defend clients zealously without the threat of gag orders, job loss and loss of my retirement [funds]. For that, we are all a little happier.”