Esparza Wants $638, 305 of Your Tax Dollars for DIMS

On Monday, August 20, 2007, DA Jaime Esparza will appear before El Paso County Commissioner's Court asking for hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to run his controversial, unconstitutional and illegal program called DIMS. DIMS was started by DA Esparza in 1995 and stands for the District Attorney's Information Management System. The program requires two things in order to survive: a) an uninformed or dishonest taxing entity willing to fund it and b) millions of your tax dollars. There is no provision for DIMS in the US Constitution or in the Texas Penal Code or Texas Code of Criminal Procedure. In other words, there is no basis for DIMS in law. DIMS is purely a creature of Jaime Esparza's brain.

I have blogged on DIMS earlier in my campaign and encourage my readers to go back and read these blogs. In a nutshell, DIMS is a program whereby the District Attorney has vested in himself the power to decide who gets arrested and who does not. Esparza even trumps the police because he has duped them into agreeing to a program where they have to go to Esparza for permission to arrest someone. This is why former Mayor Joe Wardy, Esparza's ally, did not get arrested for possessing a handgun at the airport in clear violation of state law. Keep in mind that if you had been caught at the airport with a loaded handgun, Esparza would have ordered your arrest and the police would have obeyed and you would have been in court facing felony charges. Amongst many things, DIMS has produced a lopsided, legal system that favors the well positioned and the powerful while it simultaneously disenfranchises the average person by stripping him of his longstanding constitutional rights of having a police department that is independent of the DA and having a magistrate act as a check and balance to the arrest process. What happened?

For ten years, 12,000 to 15,000 individuals were arrested by EPPD a year under DIMS. Instead of the police taking the person to a magistrate for review of the arrest, as dictated by the law, the police went straight to the DA who then made the decision. If the DA said "Go to Jail," the arrestee was booked into jail with a bond given by who? Not by a neutral and detached magistrate as outlined by black letter law, but by the DA himself. DIMS is so bad that in the DA's handbook, Esparza actually specifically exempted himself, his employees and public officials from the DIMS process.

There have been multiple civil rights lawsuits attacking this illegal system. The lawsuits were dismissed a few months ago with the Federal judges citing that the issue of the constitutionality of DIMS had not been properly raised by the pleadings and that they were therefore not ruling on its constitutionality one way or the other. Contrary to these clear opinions, Esparza stated publicly that the judges had delcared DIMS legal. Bob Harp at Channel 7 did a wonderful job exposing Esparza's lie on this issue.

Now Esparza is asking the overburdened taxpayers of this county to pony up over half a million dollars to pay for this law defying program which does nothing, absolutely nothing, but take the arrest decision out of the hands of the police and place it into the hands of Esparza and cost you more money in taxes. For over a hundred years, El Pasoans lived without the DIMS program, and you should know that despite Esparza's exhaustive efforts to peddle it to other counties, there is nothing like DIMS in its original form anywhere else, in the state of Texas. Call your commissioner and tell her that you want her to vote against DIMS and you want our tax dollars to go toward mandated functions like repairing our decrepid roads and bridges, running the courts, funding indigent defense, etc. I will do away with this program my first day in office, saving you over a million dollars a year. Send Esparza packing.