Former Democratic Attorney General Dan Morales was released last week from federal prison in Texarkana to a San Antonio halfway house.
The 50-year-old Morales served as attorney general from 1991 through 1998. During his tenure, the state reached an individual $17.3 billion settlement agreement with tobacco companies similar to the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement signed by 46 states and six territories.
While 17 of the states that signed on to the MSA have issued debt secureditized by annual payments from tobacco companies, Texas has not opted to follow. Instead, the annual revenue is used to fund an insurance program for indigent children.
Morales, once considered the wunderkind of Texas politics, imploded in the late 1990s. In October 2003, Morales was sentenced to four years in prison for falsifying documents that gave a colleague of his a chunk of the state’s tobacco settlement.
The colleague, attorney Marc Murr of Houston, had said he should receive $560 million from the fee pool for lawyers who had worked on the settlement. Other attorneys who participated in the settlement work said Murr had done almost no work on the case, objecting to his demand for payment.
After a four-and-a-half-year federal investigation, evidence showed that Morales and Murr used a backdated contract to make it appear that Murr’s claim was valid. Murr was given a six-month prison system for his role in the fraudulent claim.
In the 2003 plea agreement, which became the basis for his prison sentence, Morales confessed to the fraud and to another charge that he had used campaign contributions for personal use.
At the time of his sentencing following a plea deal, Morales was ordered by U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks to get mental-health counseling and pay more than $330,000 in penalties and restitution.
Before the deal, Morales had faced trial on 12 counts that included conspiracy and using political money for private purposes.
