Full House to weigh firing Kent, stopping $174,000 salary Panel votes to recommend Kent impeachment

Lawmakers voted 28-0 to lodge four charges against Kent, all related to his repeated sexual molestation of two former female employees at the Galveston courthouse. The House is expected to approve impeachment proceedings before it recesses for the July 4th break.

The matter would then be heard by the Senate.

In an eleventh-hour letter to the Judiciary Committee, Kent’s lawyer lashed out at the credibility of one of two women who testified about the jurist’s predatory sexual assaults. Attorney Dick DeGuerin accused Donna Wilkerson of exaggerating and lying about the extent of Kent’s contact with her and said the “lurid testimony” to the panel by Wilkerson and Cathy McBroom was not needed.

“Judge Kent’s guilty plea to the felony of obstruction of justice presents sufficient grounds for impeachment,” DeGuerin wrote.

Kent pleaded guilty to obstruction for lying to judicial investigators about his sexual misconduct against McBroom and Wilkerson. He is scheduled to begin a 33-month prison sentence on June 15, though he has refused to resign his post until June 1 or relinquish his $174,000 annual salary.

Kent is preparing to surrender to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to begin his incarceration “through and beyond June 2010, the date he offered to effectively resign,” Dick DeGuerin told the Houston Chronicle.

DeGuerin urged the panel “to seek the complete truth and not allow to go unchallenged the gratuitous, exaggerated false claims” by Wilkerson and McBroom.

Wilkerson, in nine pages of graphic testimony submitted to the panel last week, recounted that Kent had “groped me outside my clothes, then inside my clothes (top and bottom), then attempting to and gaining penetration ... with his hand.”

Wilkerson’s lawyer said her client stands behind everything she has said.

Texas lawmakers who voted in favor of the articles of impeachment included: Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston; Ted Poe, R-Humble; Louie Gohmert, R-Tyler; Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, and Charles Gonzalez, D-San Antonio.

stewart.powell@chron.com