The document that serves as the charging instrument for former state Rep. Lon Burnam in connection with his conduct last month at a lectern during a Tarrant County Commissioners Court meeting is improperly vague and includes an erroneous date for the alleged offenses, the retired politician’s defense attorney argues in a motion seeking the case’s dismissal.
The arguments in the motion to quash are similar for each of two offenses, hindering proceedings by disorderly conduct and disrupting a meeting or procession. The charging instrument, known as an information, omits references to the specific acts that the state alleges are the basis for the disruption offense, the attorney, Tiffany Burks, wrote in the motion that was filed on Wednesday.
Charging instruments for offenses in which recklessness is the alleged culpability, as it is in the hindering crime, require specificity, Burks argues. The motion helpfully offers an example of how a hindering information document could have been properly written.
The offense date in the information document is off by a year. It alleges Burnam committed the crimes on Aug. 4, 2025.
The Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office has not yet filed a motion in response.
Sheriff’s deputies carried Burnam out of the Aug. 4, 2026, meeting after he picked up a microphone during his public comment slot.
“The government cannot simply accuse someone of committing a crime and leave the defense to guess what specific conduct supposedly made that person a criminal,” Burks wrote in a statement distributed on Thursday to the press. “Mr. Burnam is entitled to know precisely what the State alleges he did, particularly in a case arising from speech and conduct at a public government meeting.”
In a rematch of the 2022 race, Burks, a Democrat, is running against incumbent District Attorney Phil Sorrells, a Republican, in the Nov. 3 election.
EJ Carrion, who was also ejected from the Aug. 4 meeting, has been charged with the same offenses. Seventy people spoke at the meeting about a proposed cut of 140 Election Day voting sites. Commissioners rejected the initial proposal, and at a later meeting voted along party lines to approve 29% fewer Election Day and 6% fewer early voting centers compared to the November 2022 lists.
County Judge Tim O’Hare explained at a February commissioners court meeting his thinking on a reconsidered decorum policy.
“Free speech does not mean anyone can cause whatever chaos, say whatever foul-mouth thing, do whatever agitation, do whatever disrupting or campaign at a government business meeting,” O’Hare said. “It has never meant that, nor does it mean you can speak at a business meeting an unlimited amount of time on every issue you choose to do.”
Burks has said O’Hare has abused the decorum policy and silences public commenters’ First Amendment rights.
By Emerson Clarridge, Fort Worth Star-Telegram