As first reported by The Dallas Morning News, 53-year-old Lutishia Williams, the chief clerk for Justice of the Peace Margaret O’Brien, is accused of faking a June 2022 hearing notice used to evict Chantel Hardaway. Hardaway said in a lawsuit that she never received the hearing notice. Local eviction attorney Mark Melton, Hardaway’s lawyer, declined to comment on the indictment.
Williams, who was indicted on Dec. 22, did not respond to a request for comment. O’Brien said she couldn’t comment on an active investigation. Williams and O’Brien previously denied any wrongdoing in statements and at a meeting with the Observer last year.
According to the indictment, Williams allegedly issued, passed and published “a forged writing, knowing such writing to be forged” with intent to defraud or harm another. Williams allegedly made, executed and authenticated a document that “purported to have been executed at a time other than was in fact the case,” the indictment said.
The alleged forgery is a Class A misdemeanor charge. According to the News, the Dallas County District Attorney’s public integrity unit started an investigation into the matter in September 2022, seizing items from the courthouse a year later. The DA’s office said it does not comment on cases that may or may not be under ongoing investigation.
This all started in August 2022 when a tipster told Melton that a clerk forged a hearing notice in Hardaway’s eviction case. When Melton asked the court to turn over the notice, he realized it didn’t look like others he had seen before. It looked like the notice had been produced as a Microsoft Word document, whereas these notices are usually generated by a court system called Forvus. The court now operates on a system called Odyssey.
Shortly thereafter, Melton filed a lawsuit against Hardaway’s landlord to stop her eviction, raising the question about the hearing notice. As part of the suit, Melton deposed four people with O’Brien’s court who said people often claim they didn’t receive hearing notices. Clerks can usually pull the documents from defendants’ files to show that the notice was indeed sent.“We would not intentionally deprive someone of their right." – Judge Margaret O'Brien
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But when civil clerk Wendy Lopez went to check Hardaway’s file, the notice wasn’t there, according to her deposition. Lopez didn’t think much of it at the time but the other clerks started talking about Hardaway and how adamant she was that she never received a hearing notice for her eviction.
It wasn’t until Melton came asking questions about the case that Lopez first saw the notice in Hardaway’s file. “I’m adamant that that letter was not there when Ms. Hardaway filed that motion,” Lopez said during her deposition. “And there’s no way I could not have seen that letter.”
During a September 2022 interview with the Observer at the courthouse, both Williams and O’Brien denied any wrongdoing. Williams showed us a document covering Hardaway’s eviction history, which dates back to 2018. That same year, Hardaway no-showed for another eviction hearing, Williams said. Williams pointed out that Hardaway didn’t appear for other eviction hearings as well. In all of these cases, Hardaway was sent hearing notices through the court software Forvus, Williams said.
She said Hardaway’s apartment complex eventually came under new management and wanted to reset her eviction hearing. On June 14 last year, the day before Hardaway’s original court date, Williams typed up the notice in question, she said. According to the court, it was mailed the following day, but Hardaway maintains she never received it.
Williams told the Observer at the time that sending this type of notice, instead of a Forvus-generated one, was strategic. “I did something strategic in this on the notification, given the past history of the defendant not showing up to court, not really paying very much attention to the citation or any notification,” she explained.
The court never got word from Hardaway, and the notice was never sent back, Williams said. Since Hardaway didn’t show up for her new hearing date, a default judgment was entered in favor of the landlord. That’s when Melton took the case and heard from the tipster.
Williams and O’Brien claimed there was nothing out of the ordinary about the hearing notice. They suggested that the clerks who spoke to Melton didn’t recognize the hearing notice because they don’t usually work eviction cases and there were so many other documents in Hardaway’s file.
“We would not intentionally deprive someone of their right,” O’Brien said. “Nobody wants anyone to be evicted, OK? If they want to actually do something, they should change the legislation. I can’t rewrite the rules. I just have to enforce them.”
