Siegler's career in court comes with controversy

Republican district attorney candidate Kelly Siegler.
Republican district attorney candidate Kelly Siegler.Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle

Kelly Siegler recently introduced herself as a candidate to a conservative Republican women's group by saying, "I'm known for the bed scene."

It was standard Siegler. Blunt, provocative, testing the limits. "A bulldog in a Chihuahua's body," her campaign ad says.

In the 2004 trial that cemented her national reputation for effective courtroom theatrics, Siegler obliterated the self-defense stance of Susan Wright in the stabbing death of her husband. Playing the accused, Siegler climbed onto a bed and straddled a male prosecutor colleague tethered to bedposts with neckties and cloth sashes. Jurors' eyes went wide.

Siegler's flair for folksy yet forceful expression comes with an explanation about her upbringing in small-town Blessing on the Texas coastal plain. She has said that she learned story-swapping and the common touch in her father's barbershop. He was a justice of the peace, elected as a Democrat. Her mother taught her humility to go with her moxie, she said.

Sometimes you can't take the country out of the spitfire woman, though. As a junior Harris County prosecutor, almost 20 years ago, Siegler made an anti-Semitic slur to a panel of prospective jurors. She used "Jew" as a verb to mean chisel or cheat.

"I didn't even know I'd said anything offensive, because going back to where I grew up there weren't a lot of Jewish people," she said. "It never even dawned on me. I probably would have even spelled it 'j-u-e,' that's how stupid I was. It was brought to my attention, I apologized, I went to the juror's house that was upset and personally apologized."

Defending herself last year against the allegation that race was the reason she tried to keep a black man off a capital murder jury, she instead cited his membership in the massive Lakewood Church. Its members are "screwballs and nuts," she said.

She recently apologized for that, too — but added that for a righteous cause, she had been struggling to bar people who might discount the death penalty.

"You don't think an aggressive prosecutor hasn't offended just a few people?" she asked.

In fact, Siegler's constant combat for victims and their families fits her campaign argument that she, as an insider, can best restore an agency besmirched by scandal. After supervising the special crimes bureau and the misdemeanor division, each with about 60 or 70 lawyers and support personnel, she knows promising workers from deadwood and which divisions need size adjustment, she said.

Boss Chuck Rosenthal — she was a volunteer for his campaigns, he has been a patient of her husband, Dr. Sam Siegler — should have allowed an independent agency to review the convictions tainted by suspect evidence from the Houston police crime lab's testing of DNA and other samples, Siegler said. She added that she counseled other employees to stop using the government computer system to circulate Rosenthal's campaign e-mails.

After Siegler's recent prosecution of David Mark Temple in the 1999 killing of his pregnant wife, defense lawyer Dick DeGuerin's unsuccessful request for a new trial noted that she told law students that she regularly made remarks to juries that she knew judges would find out of bounds.

Siegler said her advice in no way undermines her claim that she fights fair in the name of justice. If you don't try to make a point by saying something the judge will throw out, she said, "you're being lame."