District Attorney Case Study

District Attorney Race Spotlight: Kim Ogg

Marialuisa Rincon

Kim Ogg wants to be district attorney to fix the broken justice system. Unless you are in real trouble with the law, you’re unlikely to be familiar with the role of DA. Ogg says that, “running for Harris County district attorney is applying to be CEO of the largest public law firm in Texas.”

As of Feb. 7, current District Attorney Devon Anderson has not responded to an interview request.

Ogg says her past led her down a path she says is no coincidence. When Ogg was 4 years old, her mother was kidnapped at knife-point at a bank in Downtown Houston—in broad daylight. Her kidnapper forced her to drive her own car to a secluded spot—the whole time describing how he would rape and kill her. Rather than be a victim to someone’s

“The power of a criminal charge and its impact on the person accused are life changing,” she says, “the same is true when a crime happens to a victim.”

Ogg says that as district attorney, it would be important to hear both sides of the story before making up your mind, “that’s something that needs to be improved a lot in Harris County—it’s a failure of training and leadership, there’s definitely room for improvement.”

As an LGBT Houstonian, Ogg credits the community with helping crime victim’s rights get on the radar. “Certain victims are just more vulnerable—elderly people, disabled people, children,” she says that, “there’s an increased harm when the motive for a violent crime is hate.”

In a time where distrust of law enforcement is at an all time high, Ogg says hate crimes add to people’s apprehensions about the social structure in a time when the world is trying to become more inclusive.

She says that her role as DA is to “make Houstonians safer without compromising their constitutional rights...I just want people to feel secure—this can’t happen to anybody