Bad Judgment

"I was told that if I did what he wanted, I would not get any opposition in the primary," Montgomery says, adding that she did not revisit the case in question. "Do you know the courage that took?"

Driegart says that he called Montgomery's husband on an entirely separate matter and laughed when asked about the judge's theory on how he helped manipulate the 1999 judicial poll results.

"She earned that rating on her own," he says.

Another critic Montgomery has battled has been the Texas Observer. The judge's advisors contend that the paper's calculation of Montgomery's high rate of overturned cases is flawed, contending that only a handful of them have been reversed on the merits. Even still, Montgomery has been overturned on a few embarrassing cases. In 2000, the 5th Court of Appeals ruled that she "clearly abused her discretion" by granting a new trial in a case where an attorney had asked her to recuse herself after he helped support her opponent in the Republican primary. "We do not condone such conduct and we expect it to stop," the court opined.

Last month the 5th Court of Appeals ruled that Montgomery again overreached when she overturned a decision by the Texas Workforce Commission to deny employment benefits to the paralegal of Dallas attorney Scott Palmer. The court ruled that Montgomery had no authority to substitute her judgment for that of the agency.

"This case is a perfect example of a judge who doesn't understand the law," Palmer says on Montgomery's handling of his case.

Montgomery cites her gender frequently in an effort to portray herself as an underdog gamely fighting against a conservative establishment. "What they didn't anticipate with me, at 5-foot-2 with blond hair, is that I would work as hard as I do," she says.

The judge also claims that the Morning News declined to endorse her in the Democratic primary because they're not used to a woman answering all their questions. The paper had no problem, however, endorsing Angela King in the Democratic primary for County Criminal Court No. 6, citing her "special brand of tough love."

Baltasar Cruz, an attorney in private practice, also failed to get the endorsement of the Morning News as the paper concluded that "both candidates seem driven largely by personal spite." A Harvard graduate who can recite arcane passages of Texas civil codes off the top of his head, Cruz is running an unusually nasty campaign against his fellow Democrat. "I've met only one or two lawyers in my entire career who are as incompetent as her," he says. Even the two Republican candidates are easily more qualified to serve as judge, he adds.

Cruz cites his experience in her court as the reason he decided to run against her. A litigator who has both represented and opposed insurance companies, Cruz had a bizarre run-in with attorney Charles Hayworth during a court hearing. Cruz says he had been talking to Judge Montgomery when Hayworth sidled up to him and squeezed his upper arm with all his might.

"I pulled away from him and said, 'Don't touch me, get your hands off me,'" Cruz recalls. He quickly filed a police report against Hayworth, who later died of a heart attack. No charges were ever filed.

"I don't know if he grabbed a tendon, but my arm was really hurting; I still occasionally hurt in my upper arm," Cruz says.

Montgomery sanctioned Cruz and defends her order compelling him to pay Hayworth's attorney's fees even if he were convicted. Montgomery says she never saw the man squeeze Cruz's arm and that any judge who came to a different decision would have been flat-out wrong.

"This was a clear, clear, easy decision to make," she says. "It was one of the easiest decisions to make."

If only all of them were that easy.