(Update: On Tuesday, June 16, James Green won election to the district attorney seat for Pittsburg and Haskell counties.)
McALESTER — In a race that has become more heated as time ticks toward the June 16 primary election, Republicans in Pittsburg and Haskell counties will select between acting District Attorney James Green and former DA Jim Bob Miller to prosecute crimes for the next four years.
Miller previously served three stints as District 18’s District Attorney. Former Gov. Frank Keating first appointed Miller to the post in January 2002 after then-DA Kalyn Free resigned to run for the state’s 2nd Congressional District, a race she later withdrew from.
Former Gov. Brad Henry appointed Miller for a second time in April 2006 after then-DA Christopher Wilson resigned to join the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Oklahoma, where he currently serves as the appointed U.S. attorney. Miller later ran unopposed in the 2006 election for the District 18 seat.
In 2009, Miller agreed not to run for reelection in the 2010 election as part of a deferred prosecution agreement on a charge of barratry — the practice of exciting groundless judicial proceedings — brought against him by former Attorney General Drew Edmondson.
Miller received his law degree from Oklahoma City University’s School of Law in 1989 and has practiced as an attorney in Pittsburg County and surrounding areas since.
Green became the acting DA for District 18 after Chuck Sullivan resigned April 3 to join Wilson at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Oklahoma. Green had served Sullivan’s first assistant DA in Haskell County since May 2022, and since there was less than a year in Sullivan’s term, Green became acting DA without gubernatorial appointment.
Green served a total of 20 years in the U.S. Marine Corps, including nine as an enlisted Marine before leaving the Corps to earn his law degree from Cooley Law School in 2006. He reenlisted in the Corps as a commissioned officer and served his remaining time as a Marine Corps judge advocate. After retiring from the Corps, Green practiced law in Virginia before moving back to Oklahoma and opening a private practice in Stigler in 2020. He joined the District 18 DA’s office in 2022 as the sole prosecutor for Haskell County.
Green agreed to an interview with NonDoc prior to the June 16 primary election. Despite multiple requests, Miller did not agree to schedule an interview for this article. As a result, Miller’s statements come from a June 2 forum hosted by the McAlester News-Capital and public posts on social media.
Early voting will be available at the Pittsburg County Election Board and the Haskell County Election Board from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on June 11 and June 12, along with 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, June 13. Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Election Day — Tuesday, June 16.
Justice is here, justice is coming
With competing campaign slogans, both Miller and Green are pitching voters on how the DA’s office would be run under their leadership following the departure of Sullivan, whose tenure generated several negative public comments after his appointment by Gov. Mary Fallin in 2016 and his subsequent electoral victories in 2018 and 2022.
Miller’s campaign material states that “justice is coming.” During the June 2 forum, Miller said his six years as DA saw the office prosecute more than 4,700 felony cases and thousands of misdemeanors.
“My assistant DAs and I successfully tried cases to jury, and we were [successful]. We won 98 percent of the time, and yet with all that, we had no backlog ever, all while managing a budget of over $1 million per year, with which was only partially funded by state appropriations,” Miller said. “As DA, we never had delays of trials from two to three years before between arrest and trial.”
In a campaign post on Facebook, Miller said he is running for DA to restore faith in the office.
“My administration will bring justice back to our district. Justice for victims. Justice for law enforcement. Justice for all. Justice is coming,” the post states.
Underscoring the currency of the present, Green’s campaign mailers feature the slogan “justice is here.” Asked about the origin, Green credited the wife of Sen. Warren Hamilton (R-McCurtain) following Hamilton’s endorsement of Green as “a Christian man of action.” The same mailer also features an endorsement from Rep. Tim Turner (R-Kinta), who previously served as Haskell County sheriff.
In his interview, Green distanced himself from Sullivan’s tenure.
“Chuck Sullivan did not teach me how to be an attorney,” Green said. “I’ve been an attorney for 19-plus years. I learned how to be a prosecutor from the U.S. Marine Corps, which is a federal court. I run my office structurally and systematically from a military mindset, and so because of that, I’m going to be distinguishably different from how he ran the office.”
After coming to Pittsburg County — which has about four times the voting populace of Haskell County — Green said he learned there had been a breakdown in communication between law enforcement and the DA’s office, which he says has been mended.
“I have been doing the job and serving justice, and now I’m here in Pittsburg County,” Green said. “And so for somebody out there to say, ‘justice isn’t here, it needs to come,’ what is here? Because now, I’m here. If it wasn’t here before, I understand. I get it. But it is here now and every single day.”
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Candidates talk tribal sovereignty, case backlog
More than six years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma and the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals’ 2021 decision in Sizemore v. Oklahoma that applied the landmark decision to the Choctaw Nation, both District 18 DA candidates say the decision remains a problem for prosecutors.
“What it does to the DA’s office is it creates a problem that is almost impossible to handle, and yet protect the citizens of Pittsburg County and Haskell County, and every other county in the state that has a tribal court,” Miller said during the June 2 forum.
Miller said he wants District 18 to enter into a dual prosecution compact with the Choctaw Nation. A similar proposal was made by Attorney General Gentner Drummond during a May 28 gubernatorial debate.
Green, who started with the DA’s office in 2022 and claimed he has a great relationship with tribal and federal officials, said prosecuting crimes post-McGirt is all he knows and that having his hands tied on those cases has been “frustrating.”
“I’m not saying these people aren’t held accountable in a different jurisdiction, I’m just saying it takes control away from the state, which is my job to hold them accountable,” Green said.
With an acknowledged backlog of several hundred cases currently in Pittsburg County, Miller said that, during his tenure as DA, there was never a backlog of cases beyond a handful from previous administrations, such as cold cases.
“The backlog that is there now should never have happened, and my opponent has said, and recently, that he’s filed over 200 backlog felony cases in Pittsburg County in the last eight weeks,” Miller said. “There’s a real problem there, because now you have 200 defendants, 200 cases, 200 defense lawyers that are going to be demanding speedy trials, or a continuance, or a dismissal, or something, and there is no way, there is absolutely no way that you can fulfill all the constitutional rights of those 200 cases, while you were also filing the rest of the cases that come in routinely every day. So, how do we handle it? One day at a time. But we have to express importance with the violent crimes, for sure. And I have never had an issue with victims of crime, witnesses, law enforcement, or anyone lacking in communication with my office. That’s a problem that I don’t have to fix. It’s already there.”
Green said he has been working on the backlog of cases since taking over April 6, and he said it will take time to get through it. He also clarified that processing 200 cases does not mean 200 criminal cases have been filed.
“How I am clearing it is just that I’m going through and systematically reviewing the cases and charging cases where the evidence exists of a crime and requesting more investigation in cases that need to be investigated. Or if I determine that the evidence isn’t there, declining the case,” Green said. “And in most of those, I am speaking with the officer who did the case, getting their input and asking questions about what they saw at the scene, and anything to help me understand the case better. But that takes a lot of time to do it and do it right.”
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Race renews interest in Miller’s 2009 DPA
The deferred prosecution agreement signed by Miller in 2009 has become a hot topic in the race for DA about 17 years later.
Miller has addressed the issue several times, with Green making it a point of contention on campaign mailers and during the June 2 forum. That conversation grew tense as Green read from a binder to outline the specifics of the agreement.
On Facebook, Miller said in 2008 he filed a police report for libel against a now-defunct online forum site known as the McAlester Watercooler.
Miller told the late McAlester News-Capital writer and editor James Beaty at the time he was alleging a person or persons had been slandering him as DA.
“Accusing me of various things, but mostly that I’m a drug dealer, that I have killed an entire family in a car wreck while high on drugs and that I take bribes and pay bribes,” Miller told Beaty, according to a May 13, 2009, article. “I defy anybody, anywhere, to say that is protected by the First Amendment.”
Archived images from the website do not show the alleged slander, but they do show people commenting that they hoped posting was not down owing to “our idiot DA” and asking Miller to charge them with a felony for talking about him on the website.
After the report was made, the operator of the site, Harold King, was served a subpoena by detectives with the McAlester Police Department.
The subpoena requested the names, addresses and social security numbers for 35 usernames on the site and stated the information was requested “in reference to an ongoing criminal investigation.”
On Facebook, Miller said May 25 that police obtained the blank subpoena and that it was never used. But the subpoena, on file at the Pittsburg County Courthouse, shows the document was executed Aug. 12, 2008.
Further contradicting Miller’s statement, records show King filed an objection to the subpoena Aug 14, 2008, arguing it was invalid because, in a criminal investigation, only a judge or a prosecutor can issue a subpoena duces tecum.
“No issuing authority has been identified,” the reply states. “Information requested is refused.”
King later divulged information on himself and a number of other bloggers, according to the MNC archives. No charges were ever filed.
“The officers interviewed the blogger who voluntarily confessed to making up malicious lies about me and others,” Miller said on Facebook. “The police report and tape-recorded confession were sent to the attorney general (AG) as the proper procedure since I was a victim and the DA office had recused from anything involving this blogger.”
Miller testified before a state grand jury in May 2009 that was investigating whether he had improperly subpoenaed records into the comments made on the McAlester Watercooler site.
Miller made no comment on his testimony at the time owing to the secrecy of grand juries, but Miller wrote in his May 25 Facebook post that the grand jury found he did nothing wrong.
“I was NOT indicted. I DID NOT attempt to charge people improperly. I DID NOT issue a subpoena improperly,” Miller wrote. “I DID NOT issue a subpoena to the blogger at all. The subpoena was not served by law enforcement. The blogger confessed to publishing the false statements about me and consensually provided the names of two or three people who were using pseudonyms on his blog. Again, the grand jury found I had done nothing wrong. I was not charged or indicted.”
During the same time, Miller had disagreements with then-Attorney General Drew Edmondson over the sentencing and recharging of a child predator that garnered national attention and criticism from Bill O’Reilly and Geraldo Rivera.
The Oklahoman reported in September 2009 that the grand jury inquiry ended with Miller signing the deferred prosecution agreement, which stated he would not run for reelection in 2010 along with waiving the statute of limitations for the alleged crime.
Miller entered into the DPA on the charge of barratry, which can be tried as a misdemeanor offense in the state of Oklahoma.
“There’s a real problem when you’re the victim issuing a subpoena in a criminal case,” Edmondson told The Oklahoman following the agreement. “That’s what gave rise to the complaint.”
Miller told The Oklahoman he signed the DPA because his family and friends were receiving threats of harm and vandalism. On Facebook, Miller contends he did not instigate groundless litigation, and during the June 2 forum he criticized the situation as a “smear campaign” between a DA and an AG of a different political party who was running for governor back then.
“I did not instigate groundless litigation. I filed a police report as a citizen/victim and the suspect confessed,” Miller said. “The contractual document the AG chose to secure our agreement, was a deferred prosecution agreement. DPA’s are used routinely by the AG and DA’s to secure agreements both in criminal and civil matters. It is normally confidential but, in my case, the report was published to the media. A DPA very clearly states that the respondent is not admitting to any wrongdoing, and the petitioner is agreeing not to proceed with any other legal procedures.
“I was not forced out of office, I was not disgraced.”
At the June 2 forum, Green said, “Let’s talk about trustworthiness.”
“My opponent has posted online in writing. He said (in) September 2009, the AG contacted my attorney (and) advised they will file a civil suit against me. A civil suit, folks,” Green said. “My opponent took a deferred prosecution agreement. In that deferred prosecution agreement, the state said the attorney general states that he has sufficient evidence to charge Jim Bob Miller with common barratry. OK, that’s a crime. It’s not civil, it’s a crime under Title 21 of the Oklahoma state statute. Trustworthiness, that’s what this race is about.”
