Espinoza ruling possible by March 1

Testimony in the Civil Service hearing of former Kyle Police Sgt. Jesse Espinoza ended today with Kyle’s police chief being the final witness and arbitrator Dr. Paula Ann Hughes informing the parties in the case she expects to hand down her decision by March 1.

Espinoza was dismissed from the force in May 2015 on charges of insubordination. This six-day hearing (four days in August and two this week) that ended today is Espinoza’s appeal of that dismissal. A similar hearing last year also reached this point, but the arbitrator of that one died of a heart attack before he could file a decision on the case. This hearing was much shorter than the first one because both sides were allowed to simply enter testimony on the record from the previous hearing instead of having to call many of the witnesses that testified in the earlier one.

Dr. Hughes said the deadline for the delivery of the official transcripts of this hearing will be Dec. 22. After that, both Grant Goodwin, the attorney representing Espinoza, and Bettye Lynn, the city’s attorney, will have until Jan. 22 to submit their closing arguments in the form of written briefs to Dr. Hughes, with the arbitrator promising to deliver her opinion to both sides some 38 days later.

Kyle Police Chief Jeff Barnett, summoned to the stand by Goodwin, was the only witness to testify today, Barnett testified he truthfully answered questions posed to him during a meeting with Assistant City Manager James Earp on Feb. 27, 2012. Earp was apparently following up on a complaint that had been filed against Barnett, who had only become the Kyle chief nine months earlier. Barnett also testified he never saw the complaint and was never told who filed the complaint or its allegations prior to that meeting with Earp. The specifics of the complaint were not made public during today's testimony either.

Goodwin tried unsuccessfully to pose questions of Barnett that seemed to be designed to show Barnett was not truthful during that meeting, but Lynne formally objected to most of Goodwin’s questions and Dr. Hughes sustained most of those objections.

"We’re here today to hash things out with the chief which would be very simple if he just put the answers on the record truthfully," Goodwin said at one point. "But we’re not getting there and we’re hiding behind a smokescreen of objections that are becoming simply argumentative."

But Dr. Hughes ruled "The reality is that this is a hearing for Mr. Espinoza, not a hearing for Chief Barnett."

Goodwin, however, was successful in entering into the record a letter Barnett authored suspending another Kyle police officer for five days for "untruthfulness." Goodwin’s motives appeared to be to show the disparity between a five-day suspension and an indefinite one for similar offenses. Goodwin managed to get that document into the record over the strenuous objections of Lynne, who argued such a comparison was invalid because the punishments were administered by two different police chiefs.