Jc Hallman, Oklahoma Watch

“I intend to stay anonymous,” the source said.

Among the deluge of tips received by Oklahoma Watch in February after it exposed a Texas County DA-run drug task force ticketing scam targeting truckers passing through the panhandle, one stood out for the anonymous writer’s claim of having lately been employed as a patrol officer in the Guymon Police Department.

Many of the tips received over the past several months have described local residents’ fear of law enforcement and the judicial system in District One, a wide swath of land that includes Harper County and the panhandle and is home to 31,000 people.

In a slight twist, the tip from the former Guymon police officer cited potential dissent within the police force, particularly regarding the since-discontinued ticketing scheme.

The source recounted personal conversations with drug task force members who reported writing as many as 10 such citations per day. Numerous Guymon police officers had expressed concern that drug task force members making a salary of $50,000 per year could nevertheless afford to buy cars for their children and live in homes well beyond their means, the source said.

“Members of the Guymon Police Department, including myself, are suspicious of where seized cash is going,” the source said.

The source went on to describe two cases in detail that may be representative not only of abuses in the panhandle, but of the ad hoc justice that characterizes much of rural Oklahoma.

A Consistent Note of Fear and Frustration

Oklahoma Watch knows the identity of the anonymous source and independently verified that the person once worked as a Guymon patrol officer.

There are good reasons to scrutinize the use of anonymous sources in journalism.

Matt Carlson, a professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, warned in On the Condition of Anonymity: Unnamed Sources and the Battle for Journalism that unnamed sources ask readers to accept unseen news practices and may mask unacceptable biases on the part of journalists.

“The opacity of unnamed sources prevents audiences from gaining additional information from which to make judgments about unattributed information,” Carlson wrote.

Media executive Norman Pearlstein, veteran of the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine, largely agreed in Off the Record: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources but stipulated that the tarnished reputation of unnamed sources in recent years had been a function of leaks at the highest reaches of government.

“Anonymous sources have become embedded in journalism; they are a critical part of coverage in small towns and large cities,” Pearlstein said.

The numerous tips received by Oklahoma Watch — named and unnamed — varied in tone and topic, but sounded a consistent note of frustration and fear.

Notably, the former police officer's tip, which detailed two cases of police abuse that resulted in civil damages against the Guymon Police Department, included details drawn from careful sourcing and materials that were not in any way anonymous.

Intentionally and Purposefully Spit in Mr. Rodriguez’s Face

Both stories involved the same two lawyers, Guymon defense attorney Christopher Liebman and Edmond civil rights attorney Eric Cotton. Liebman handled the criminal defenses and Cotton sought civil damages when it became clear, in his opinion, that his clients’ rights had been violated.

Liebman has been a consistent presence in panhandle stories investigated by Oklahoma Watch. Both Liebman and Cotton denied any involvement in the tip.

“Guymon PD is corrupt in and of itself,” the source said, before offering specific details on two incidents involving Guymon officers Ronald Griffing and Seth Barby. Barby has also figured prominently in stories investigated by Oklahoma Watch.

On July 8, 2021, Griffing was dispatched to a domestic altercation and proceeded to arrest Sonny Rodriguez, 31, who was intoxicated. An altercation ensued in which Griffing and another officer delivered knee and elbow strikes to Rodriguez before pinning him to the ground.

That’s when Griffing violated Rodriguez’s rights, according to the notice of claim that Cotton filed eleven months later.

“Then Officer Griffing intentionally and purposefully spit in Mr. Rodriguez’s face, while he was being held down on the ground,” Cotton wrote.

The source included the damning proof of a link to a YouTube video that showed Griffing letting loose a thick gob of spittle onto the face of the fully apprehended Rodriguez.

Cotton requested compensation in the amount of $125,000; Rodriguez, who could not be reached for comment, accepted a settlement of $25,000.

Shocking Minors

On September 20, 2022, Barby was called to a school incident, the source said.

On arrival, Barby and other patrolmen were informed by school officers that their assistance was no longer needed; two students were being escorted to the office, the source said.

Barby persisted, going on the offensive when Alex Rubio, then a minor, did not immediately obey an instruction from a teacher. Barby grabbed Rubio, and when Rubio resisted, Barby shocked him with a stun gun, the source said.

Oklahoma law prohibits the shocking of minors with Tasers.

Seven months later, Cotton won compensation of $55,000 for Rubio and his mother, Erica Peace, who could not be reached for comment.

The Guymon Police Department refused to respond to questions about whether officers Griffing or Barby had been disciplined for their actions in the cases of Sonny Rodriguez and Alex Rubio.

“Guymon PD does not properly discipline its officers when actual harm is caused,” the tip said.

The Law is Stacked Against the Plaintiff

Cotton lamented that very few attorneys practiced civil rights law in Oklahoma; those who did tended to represent police accused of violating citizens’ rights.

“Civil rights cases are notoriously difficult,” Cotton said. “The law is stacked against the plaintiff, pretty much at every step of the path. Most of the firms that do civil rights in Oklahoma at any volume are defense firms.”

A lack of volume of cases as a function of population meant it was very unlikely that a civil rights plaintiffs’ attorney would set up shop in rural Oklahoma, Cotton said.

Cotton had been successful with Rodriguez and Rubio, but the proceedings were quietly settled by the insurance company that covered the Guymon Police Department. Cotton had no contact with officers Griffing or Barby.

Plaintiffs specifically seeking disciplinary action against officers is a non-starter, Cotton said.

“The only way that we can really compensate you in our system of justice is financial, some sort of monetary settlement,” Cotton said.

The difficulty of seeking true justice in remote parts of Oklahoma may explain why a former police officer would seek employment elsewhere and why, as a last resort, they would turn to submitting an anonymous tip to a news organization.

The Society of Professional Journalists hammered that point hard in a position paper on the ethics of tips.

“Anonymous sources are sometimes the only key to unlocking that big story, throwing back the curtain on corruption, fulfilling the journalistic missions of watchdog on the government and informant to the citizens,” the paper said.

Editor’s Note: After Oklahoma Watch published an exposé about a multi-million-dollar DA-run ticketing scheme in Texas County, we were flooded with tips from the panhandle. This story is the third in a series derived from those tips. The second story can be found here. Oklahoma Watch has a strict policy regarding the use of anonymous sources; the person described in this story met the criteria in that policy.

This article first appeared on Oklahoma Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

One Texas County family, two stories of justice denied.

In one story, a man pleaded no contest to carrying away by stealth, with intent and without consent, a controlled dangerous substance.

In the other, a young man pleaded guilty to several counts of possession of stolen property.

In the first case, Jake Strain, then 34, stole oxycodone from Linda Brown and her husband over a six-month period, replacing the pills with Tylenol. Justice was lenient for Strain, as it was a first offense. He was given seven years’ probation and a $1,000 fine. Strain lost his license to practice physical therapy, but he served no prison time.

In the second case, a stolen computer was kept at the home of Billy Green, then 18. Green was charged with burglary and threatened with a sentence of 40 years. Green pleaded guilty to possession of stolen property, also a first offense, and was sentenced to five years in prison, five years’ probation.

Linda Brown of the first story is the mother of Billy Green of the second story.

Beyond disparate outcomes, the difference between the two stories is that Green was represented by a Texas County contract lawyer for the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System, while Strain, the son of a county commissioner, was represented by the former district attorney of district one, James “Mike” Boring, who emerged from his 2021 retirement to take the case.

For most of its existence, Boring ran the ticketing scheme in Texas County.

The legal entanglements of a Texas County mother and son — stories separated by a quarter century — illustrate the bifurcated nature of justice in rural Oklahoma, where who you know can make all the difference in the kind of justice you receive.

If You Pay Me, I’ll Give You a Better Defense

In 1999, Billy Green was a ne’er-do-well in Hooker.

Green had run-ins with law enforcement as a minor, and after dropping out of high school and passing the GED, he started working as the handyman at the only apartment complex in town.

The home he lived in, owned by his mom, was a local hangout for Green’s friends; sometimes he came home and found ten kids sitting around watching a movie.

One day, a friend who was still a minor brought over a computer that had been stolen from a local school; Green was known to be something of a tech nerd.

He didn’t find out what happened next until years later, and even then, the details were murky.

Either a kid named John Bird hoping to get out of a marijuana possession charge, or someone from an organization called Panhandle Crimestoppers — maybe it was both — fingered the house.

Police raided. News reports claimed that 93 stolen items were recovered. Green and his girlfriend at the time were charged with eight counts of knowingly concealing stolen property, according to Hooker’s then-police chief, Larry Hinds.

Stolen items were said to have included a BB gun, a gallon cider jug filled with pennies, a dart board, half a pool cue, a Yosemite Sam candle, several Hot Wheels cars, a small animal skull, a Confederate flag and an American flag, two bandanas, and a bag of seashells.

Green was charged with burglary as well.

At first, it seemed like they wanted him to turn rat, Green said. Two weeks after he was arrested, held on $45,000 bond, an officer promised immediate release if Green would buy narcotics undercover.

“They thought I was into drugs,” Green said. “But when they found out I didn’t know anything about the drug world, they said, ‘Oh, that’s not going to work.’”

Next came his attorney, James Loepp, a contract lawyer for the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System.

Loepp’s representation was supposed to be free, but according to both Green and his mother, Loepp sat them down and explained straightaway that they would need to pay him if they wanted a good defense.

It was like they were all after him, Green said.

The prosecution made a plea offer: 40 years. In the months they let him stew on that, an attorney named Crieg Rittenhouse visited Green in jail. Green had never hired Rittenhouse.

“They’re screwing you over big time,” Green recalled Rittenhouse saying. “These charges are unlawful and need to be consolidated.”

That’s exactly what happened; the burglary charges were dropped and the prison time was reduced from 40 years to five. With decades of removal, Green now believes that neither Loepp nor Rittenhouse were on his side.

“The 40 years was just to scare me into thinking that five years in prison, five probation would be okay,” Green said. “They were there to help convict me. They scared me to the point where I thought ten years was good.”

Green took the deal and served two and a half years in prison; he was left with severe anxiety.

“I know things I shouldn’t even know, because I learned them in prison,” Green said. “I have a mistrust of people now, especially law enforcement. They manipulated me. I’m afraid they’re going to do that again.”

Eighteen years later, Texas County was still chasing Green down for thousands of dollars in fees of the sort that were recently eliminated because excessive fees increase recidivism rates, according to Gov. Kevin Stitt.

“They don’t care about the justice in it,” Green said. “They railroaded a lot more people than me. I was a $4,000 ticket for them.”

A Very Different Story

A quarter century later, Green’s mother, Linda Brown, had a very different experience of the Oklahoma justice system.

In June 2022, Brown’s husband, Jim Brown, had knee replacement surgery and began working at home with a man named Jake Strain, who held a doctor of physical therapy degree.

The couple liked Strain, so when Linda Brown noticed him futzing with the couples’ medications on an in-home security system a couple weeks later she didn’t think much of it: Strain likely needed to know what pills her husband was taking.

Strain didn’t stick to his scheduled appointments. Through the summer, he showed up at the Browns’ home unannounced, even on Sundays.

“He was super nice, super good at his job—and super good at lying,” Brown said.

In August, the Browns complained to their physician that their pain pills weren’t working anymore.

In September, insurance for the PT ran out, but Strain kept visiting.

“He said he thought he was really helping Jim,” Linda Brown said.

In late November, Linda Brown noticed that one of her husband’s pills looked different from the others. After some digging, she was able to verify that what she had found in a prescription bottle was over-the-counter Tylenol.

The pharmacy verified that everything had been done correctly on their end.

On December 1, Linda Brown visited Hooker Police Chief Scott Hedrick and told him that she believed Strain was stealing their pills. She would later learn that Strain stole 10 oxycodone pills on that same day from another victim in Kansas.

Linda Brown purchased additional security cameras; on December 2, she caught Strain red-handed and took her evidence to Hedrick.

From there, Strain’s movement through the justice system was quite different from Billy Green’s.

Brown believed that Hedrick had called Strain’s father, Texas County Commissioner Jack Strain, because the next thing she knew, Jake Strain was in a rehab facility in Colorado. He had not been arrested.

Hedrick and Strain did not respond to multiple queries for comment.

The next few days were difficult to track. Linda Brown spoke to Kevin McIntire, head of the District One Drug Task Force, which operated Texas County’s multi-million-dollar ticketing scheme.

On December 8, current District One DA George “Buddy” Leach, who ended the ticketing scheme during Oklahoma Watch’s investigation, wrote to the office of the attorney general to request that the prosecution of Jake Strain be moved to another district because Leach’s office represented Strain’s father.

After the case was passed to District Two DA Angela Marsee, the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control conducted an extensive investigation, said OBN public information officer Mark Woodward.

Details of the investigation were not publicly available.

In the months to come, Linda Brown learned that Strain had as many as six additional victims in Oklahoma, and more in Kansas.

Strain was finally arrested in August 2023, eight months after his crimes were exposed. He was charged — like Brown’s son, decades before — with two separate crimes: larceny and exploitation of a vulnerable adult.

His lawyer was a surprise: former DA Mike Boring.

Leach said that to his knowledge Strain’s case was the only time that Boring had come out of retirement to represent a client.

Boring did not respond to queries.

With Boring’s help, Strain’s bond was reduced from $50,000 to $20,000. He was immediately released on a personal recognizance bond for $2,000, and paid $50 for one day of jail costs.

He checked into Texas County Jail at 2:05 p.m., and checked out at 2:15 p.m.

From there, the case against Strain began to crumble.

Some of the victims, DA Marsee said, decided that they didn’t want to testify.

Boring and Leach figured heavily in the tips that Oklahoma Watch has received since its January investigation. Current or recent residents of Texas County have described a culture of intimidation that includes harassment, vague threats, and selective investigations.

Some tipsters requested anonymity for fear of retribution.

In 2024, the exploitation of a vulnerable adult charge against Jake Strain was dropped. He pleaded no contest to the remaining charge, which carried a potential penalty of 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine; he was given seven years’ probation and a $1,000 fine.

“I have a mistrust of people now, especially law enforcement. They manipulated me. I’m afraid they’re going to do that again.”
Billy Green

A separate investigation by the Oklahoma State Board of Medical Licensure and Supervision found that Jake Strain had participated in dishonorable or immoral conduct; Strain’s license to practice physical therapy was revoked.

DA Marsee believed the outcome was fair for the charges that stuck. She allowed that the result might have been different if all of Strain’s victims had been willing to testify.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Marsee said. “It’s hard to say. Potentially, the result could have been different.”

It’s All Small Towns

In an Oklahoma Bar Journal article titled “When Geography Determines Justice: Examining Legal Deserts in Oklahoma,” Oklahoma Access to Justice Foundation Executive Director Katie Dilks described the precarious legal predicament of Oklahomans who live far from cities.

“Oklahoma’s attorneys are increasingly concentrated in just a handful of counties, putting rural Oklahomans in the challenging situation of trying to navigate the legal system alone,” Dilks wrote.

Neither Dilks nor Colleen McCarty, the executive director of the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, believed that legal disparities like the outcomes in the cases of Strain and Green were a strictly rural phenomenon. Both, however, allowed that problems inherent to the system were exacerbated by rural settings.

“It’s not just Oklahoma small towns, it’s all small towns,” McCarty said. “I’ve never heard of a case from a rural county where there was not some element of this.”

McCarty laid blame on the unchecked discretion of prosecutors, who wielded near-supreme power in the practical application of criminal law.

Tulsa attorney James Wirth agreed that power could be abused in small towns but was inclined to attribute unjust outcomes to human nature, rather than malice.

“DAs overcharging and hanging the potential of 40 years over someone’s head in order to get them to take a deal is unfortunately not that unusual if they don’t like the defendant,” Wirth said, after examining documents in Green’s case. “If he was 18 in a small town and had prior law enforcement contact, they probably would not like him.”

Wirth’s colleague Keith Flinn agreed that awareness of crimes committed as a juvenile would be difficult to overlook even if a record was supposed to remain confidential.

“In a larger city, an accused might retain a level of anonymity that small-town Oklahoma simply cannot provide,” Flinn said.

Anecdotally, Dilks and McCarty were aware of abuses in the OIDS system in rural parts of the state, particularly when it came to private contract attorneys of the sort that had been assigned to Green.

Damion Shade, the executive director of Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform, said data showed that private contract attorneys have worse outcomes than dedicated public defenders. The problem was that OIDS did not have enough money.

“Private contractors make up 72% of all OIDS representations,” Shade said. “This creates a two-tiered system of justice for low-income families and small towns that depend on these lawyers.”

“Private contractors make up 72% of all OIDS representations. This creates a two-tiered system of justice for low-income families and small towns that depend on these lawyers.”
Damion Shade

No Man’s Land

Today, Strain frequently appears as “Dr. Jake Strain” in television news stories, in his capacity as director of a Cenikor Foundation substance abuse facility in Tyler, Texas.

By way of contrast, Green has struggled to get on disability for his crippling anxiety.

“I wanted to be normal,” Green said of 2001, when he was released from prison. “I rushed things too much.”

He married and had a child; today, Green is estranged from both his ex-wife and his daughter.

Green lives with his mother in Broken Arrow. They left Hooker in 2024.

DA Leach said that he had recused from Strain’s case as soon as Hooker police brought him their report. He had never met Jake Strain, he said.

Linda Brown had a hard time believing that. She emphasized that district one was geographically large but tiny in population, with 31,000 people in four counties. Not only did everyone know everyone, there was a small cabal of families that controlled everything in Texas County.

She feared for her son’s well-being.

“They would do anything they could to put him back in jail,” she said. “I needed to get him out of there. All those people, they’re all friends.”

Brown and her son have been left with sour feelings for the town and county that was their home for decades.

“I hope that Texas County burns,” Green said. “I hope that everybody learns that people out there think they can act any way they want. It’s called No Man’s Land for a reason.”

Editor’s Note: After Oklahoma Watch published an exposé about a multi-million-dollar DA-run ticketing scheme in Texas County, we were flooded with tips from the panhandle. This story is the first in a series derived from those tips called Justice in No Man's Land.

This article first appeared on Oklahoma Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.