U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton, who currently serves as Texas Attorney General, is fighting accusations that his office extended a generous plea deal to Waco attorney Adam Hoffman, who was charged with repeatedly sexually abusing a young boy.
However, the Current’s examination of cases handled by the Texas Attorney General’s Office during Republican candidate’s time at the top shows that Hoffman’s case wasn’t the only time it offered light sentences to people accused of sexual abuse.
Indeed, there are at least three other instances over the past decade in which defendants accused of sexual assault or trafficking were offered plea deals by Paxton’s office that allowed them to avoid both jail time and placement on the state’s sex offender registry.
Paxton’s office opened an investigation into TikTok four years ago, citing concerns the platform could be used for human trafficking. However, records show his office offered at least one generous plea deal lacking any prison time to a suspect facing a human trafficking charge.
Paxton’s office didn’t immediately respond to the Current’s request for comment.
The emergence of the cases comes as Paxton’s campaign struggles to gain ground against his Democratic rival, State Rep. James Talarico, with only 33 days until Election Day.
Allie Susin, the vice president of program innovation and impact at SAFE Austin — a nonprofit organized to help survivors of violence and abuse, including sex crimes — told the Current she worries that plea deals, such as those the AG’s office offered, can skew statistics and defund programs, hurting the ability of survivors to seek justice and recover.
“When cities and states report numbers, then it looks like fewer sexual assaults or human trafficking are happening in Texas because they’re all pled down,” Susin said. “So then, less resources go to rape crisis centers, to healing centers, to SANE (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) nurses or getting police training on trauma-informed techniques, because on paper it doesn’t happen here.”
La Vernia High
Under Paxton, the Texas Attorney General’s Office offered plea deals to at least 10 high schoolers facing charges of sexual assault, including allegations of sexual assault of a minor, as part of a hazing case at La Vernia High School, some 30 miles east of San Antonio.
In 2017, police arrested 13 varsity athletes at La Vernia High, in a case in which at least 10 individuals were allegedly raped and sodomized. The arrests were connected to a hazing ritual in which varsity athletes across multiple sports were accused of sodomizing their younger teammates with instruments including baseball bats and carbon dioxide tanks, KSAT-TV reports.
The Texas Attorney General’s Office took charge of criminal prosecutions in the case to avoid conflicts of interest and to ensure absolute impartiality, according to media reports.
In one instance, three basketball players were accused of holding down a 15-year-old boy while one of the alleged perpetrators raped him with a flashlight. In another case, three upperclassmen allegedly forced a 15-year-old student onto a locker room floor and raped him using a Gatorade bottle, KSAT reports, citing court documents.
Paxton’s office offered plea deals to ten of the accused. Under those deals, all would avoid jail time and were eligible to have the charges expunged from their records, court records showed, according to records obtained by the Current.
Nine of the defendants accepted their plea deal and avoided jail time, court records obtained by the Current indicate.
SA sex trafficking case
That same year, police arrested Rakim Sharkey and Elijah Teel in San Antonio over allegations they forced three underage girls to sell their bodies.
Sharkey was charged with continuous trafficking of persons, trafficking children into forced labor, aggravated promotion of prostitution, aggravated promotion of prostitution under 18 years of age and trafficking children engaged in conduct, according to records obtained by the Current.
Teel was charged with aggravated promotion of prostitution under 18 years of age and trafficking children engaged in conduct, records indicate.
The case went to trial in 2022 in Bexar County court. However, the judge declared a mistrial after several jurors contracted COVID-19.
In 2023, now-former prosecutors from Paxton’s office offered Sharkey and Teel plea deals of five years of probation, according to public records. Both men pleaded guilty, and the judge sentenced them to seven years’ probation, documents show.
Neither had to register as sex offenders.
Irma Reyes, the mother of one of the victims, told Texas Public Radio the plea deal amounted to a “total fail” and a “betrayal.”
“I don’t even trust the system anymore,” she said. “Are you there for power? Or are you there to protect victims?”
Police in Corpus Christi arrested Sharkey last year on charges of assault with a deadly weapon, unlawful restraint and burglary, according to a separate Texas Public Radio report.
Falls County sheriff
A Falls County grand jury in 2020 indicted the Central Texas county’s then-sheriff, Ricky Scaman, a Republican, on felony charges accusing him of sexually abusing two women.
A City of Marlin employee alleged that Scaman groped her, pinned her to a car and penetrated her with his fingers. The other woman, a Falls County jail employee, accused Scaman of pushing her against a wall, groping her and targeting her with unwelcome sexual demands.
It wasn’t the first time Scaman had faced accusations of improper conduct.
In 2012, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission fired Scaman after a photo surfaced of him posing with a stripper while working as an agent for the department.
Six years later, Scaman’s assistant chief deputy filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in which she compared him to disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and alleged that he bombarded her with sexual texts and demanded nude photos.
That same year, 2018, former jailer and dispatcher Shirley Lynn Boger filed a Texas Workforce Commission complaint and subsequent lawsuit, in which she alleged Scaman sexually assaulted her in his office more than 20 times.
Despite the past allegations, Scaman also received a light plea deal from Paxton’s office, media reports indicate.
The AG’s office dismissed the two felony counts of sexual assault against Scaman in exchange for his no-contest plea to one misdemeanor count of official oppression. In accepting the deal, Scaman was sentenced to deferred probation, agreed to surrender his state peace officer license and paid a $1,000 fine.
He also avoided having to register as a sex offender under the plea.
Adam Hoffman
Those past plea deals come as Paxton continues to face attack ads from Democratic rival state Rep. James Talarico for his office’s handling of Waco attorney Hoffman’s case.
Hoffman was initially indicted for continuous sexual abuse of a child. However, following a mistrial, he struck a deal with Paxton’s office and pleaded this April to reduced charges of indecent assault and displaying harmful materials to a minor.
As part of the plea, Hoffman was also exempted from appearing in the state’s sex offender registry.
Although the judge in the case doubled the initial proposed sentence to 60 days, Hoffman ultimately served just 29 days in jail before he was released.
Even so, Paxton defended the deal in his remarks on Monday during a roundtable discussion with the U.S. Hispanic Business Council in Fort Worth, blaming the hung jury for a less-than-desirable outcome.
“The criticism has been that I let a child predator out after one day,” Paxton said. “Well, guess what? They served 60 days. It wasn’t what we wanted. We did not control that situation. We did our best to present the case. The jury decided what it was.”
Paxton said he was also hindered in pursuing stronger charges by the victim’s unwillingness to testify.
“We wanted to retry it, and we decided … we needed to protect this kid,” he added.
Sensitive time
The questions about how the Texas Attorney General’s Office under Paxton handled allegations of sexual abuse couldn’t come at a more critical time for his campaign. Polls show him in a tight contest with Talarico with a little more than a month until the election.
The scrutiny also comes as a headline-grabbing lawsuit accuses seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity at Cornell University of assaulting a female student in 2024. The controversy has sparked a national conversation about sexual assault and the legal system.
Susin of SAFE Austin said plea deals such as those handed down by the AG’s office can have dire consequences for survivors.
“There’s no support, so you’re forced to handle it on your own,” Susin said. “That leads to substance abuse, or believing that maybe they ‘deserved’ it. You get in your head and start to think, ‘Maybe they were right.’ That also leads to issues with their physical health. People with complex trauma have higher blood pressure, their cortisol levels are off the chain. They’re not eating. Not sleeping. And this leads to long-term impacts like diabetes, earlier death rates, all of those things.”
UT-San Antonio political scientist Jon Taylor said the Hoffman case was bad enough publicity for Paxton. Further scrutiny of his office’s track record on sexual abuse cases could further hinder his ability to close the deal with voters, he added — especially with the Cornell University case in the news cycle.
“Some would say it points to the hypocrisy of Paxton and his friends in Washington, who’ve been pushing this idea that we’re going to go after the pedophiles,” Taylor told the Current. “And yet here you are, giving sweetheart deals. It stinks.”
Taylor added that Hoffman’s plea deal backs up the distrust many voters have for Paxton, whose list of scandals includes a near-impeachment by the Texas Legislature, whistleblower complaints of abuse of office, agreeing to a settlement in state securities fraud case and allegations of extramarital affairs.
“It only contributes to a perception among a lot of voters, including Republicans, that he’s corrupt, not trustworthy, and is a highly flawed candidate that very well could bring down several other statewide Republicans,” Taylor said.
Paxton hasn’t led in the polls since late July, and his campaign has struggled to pull in money, in part because big-name Republicans, including former President George W. Bush, have declined to fundraise for him.
Other prominent Republicans, including longtime GOP strategist Karl Rove and former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, have also criticized Paxton’s laundry list of scandals, which they have warned harm his electability.
What’s more, Paxton’s campaign appears to be forgoing a chance for him explain away past scandals by participating in a debate with Talarico. To date, Paxton’s team has opted not to participate in debates with the Democrat.
Early voting runs Oct. 19-30, with polls reopening for Election Day on Tuesday, Nov. 3. Texans have until Oct. 5 to check on and update their voter registration status if they want to participate in the 2026 midterms.
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