The Robed Rebel: Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez

Jen Hardy [00:00:00]:
Come here. Come here. Okay. What do the following have in common? Tattoo sleeves, corporate boards, justice for women and children, and fried shrimp have in common? You’re gonna find out during this amazing interview with the honorable judge Rosie Spiedlin Gonzales. So this is a conversation that I keep having. When I was a kid, my parents I one of them was a Democrat, one was a Republican. And they were their friends were running for elective office and doing these things, and we would support. It didn’t matter what side they were on.

Jen Hardy [00:00:28]:
We would go because they were friends. And at the con at the table, we would have conversations about politics and religion, and they were civil. What is it do you think that has changed that makes us unable to do that in most situations now?

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:00:45]:
Honestly, I think it’s the world wide web and the Internet. You and I grew up in a time where that commercial came on at 10 o’clock. Do you know where your kids are? Right? You and I knew that at midnight, we saw that little on the screen. Right? All the stations went off the air, and none of them came back on till 6 in the morning until Linda Ellerbee came on with Turner Broadcasting. And I remember Linda Ellerby because that’s when I saved my money from working at the skating rink to buy myself a little TV set that I could have in my bedroom, and I could watch all night long. And I just followed Linda Ellerbee. And, so you go Linda Ellerbee and beyond, and now you get into the nineties and and and the World Wide Web. And when we were kids, it took a week, maybe 2 to find out there had been a tsunami in Bali.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:01:38]:
Right? We didn’t know the the the the the magnitude of devastation across the world. Right? Now you get a live feed of what’s happening. The world has literally shrunk before our eyes. You and I had to go to the library and go through the catalog index to find information we needed for our research papers that we had to type. Right? Now what’s a library? Right? Unless you wanna go in and get air conditioning and access Wi Fi. Now all you do is you pick up your phone, and there’s your World Book Encyclopedia, which our parents provided for me and my brother, and we were cool kids on the block because we had we had the black and brown one with the gold edging, then we had the fancy one. And the, of course, the most used book was the s because that had sex in it, and it showed you all the, you know, anatomically correct parts and everything. Anyway, I think that’s what’s wrong.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:02:35]:
I think, people it’s easier for someone to get spoon fed something than to do the hard work to educate yourself and to look at all angles. It’s just too much work and too much time when you can just get on TikTok or get on a social media app and read incessantly nonstop, you know, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 3 minutes, and it’s nonstop information coming this way. And that’s all of a sudden you’re an expert on what? You’re you’re opining because you’re behind a screen and you’re safe. And we’re we are watching our youth, our kids come into our fold of living as adults with that an inability to socialize, an inability to have a conversation with an individual or make eye contact, and high levels of anxiety, high levels of maladaptive behaviors and depression because they haven’t left their house or their room in weeks and don’t know how to interact with other people in the world, whether it’s their family, their neighbors at school. And I think we’re doing a huge disservice to our children. And I tell people, your your kid and I learned this from a therapist. Your kid doesn’t need a phone unless you’re unless they’re 16, and now you’re having to figure out where they’re at in the car you let them drive. Because before that, you should know where they’re at and who they’re with.

Jen Hardy [00:04:02]:
Yeah. And they should never have unrestricted Internet. I just

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:04:06]:
I agree. People talk about sex trafficking, and I warn them. This is the portal to hell. I said, you want your kid to be tapped into by a a a a pedophile, a sex offender? You give them a phone. An unfeathered access to whatever they want, and there will be a sex offender, a pedophile reaching out to them within hours, posing as a child, enticing them to meet them down the street at the 711 to get an ice cream or a slurpee, and there goes your child.

Jen Hardy [00:04:37]:
Oh my gosh. Something else that makes you unique is, as a judge, is, the tattoos. So, and, you know, I think if I was in your courtroom as a defendant, it may make me relax a little bit and think, okay. Wait a minute. She’s, you know, clearly, you know, it it thinks a little bit differently than other judges do because a lot of judges don’t have that. So tell me the story behind how that started.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:05:04]:
It started with my desire to connect with my dad. My dad had a cross, a very rudimentary, crude. You knew it was like Indian ink kind of cross on his forearm. And, it it the desire to have a tattoo stemmed from there. And my first tattoo I got when I was in law school, I was already 33. And I did a lot of things after I kinda felt like I was under out from under the control of my parents. And so, law school was the first one, and it just it just grew from there. And it’s they’re not all over my body.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:05:43]:
They’re just on my arms, and there’s one on my chest and and a couple on my back, and that’s you know, I lie. I’ve got one on each of the on my calves now, and I think I’m done. And, it just kind of all the tattoos I have are original art. They’re not something out of a book or a stencil. And, it just kinda I I highlight women and, like, I have an Aztec warrior princess on one arm. I have a painting, by a woman, Adriana Garcia, of a woman, and she named it standing tall because it’s a 7 foot painting that I got transferred onto my my arm. And, I I, you know, I like to prove people wrong, and so that was another comment I got early on. You’re never gonna get elected with tattoos.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:06:35]:
Who who you know, what kind of judge would that be? And I’m like, why does that affect my ability to think and reason and, you know, critically analyze things and make have good judgment just because I choose to have artwork on my body. So, you know, I I prove the naysayers wrong, and I make people uncomfortable. And I see it as that’s their issue, not mine. And, you know, and and at in the end, they’re covered up at the bench. My my sleeves on my robe come up. It’s they see, like, out here in the public, and they’re like, oh, wow. You got tattoos. I’m like, yeah.

Jen Hardy [00:07:06]:
That’s so as a woman of a certain age, because, you know, we’re in our fifties, and, I don’t have tattoos. My kids my older kids all do, and they’re like, mom, you better get one. But I’m looking at my skin, and I’m like

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:07:18]:
You’ve got beautiful skin. Let me tell you. The lighter your skin, the more the color pops on those tattoos. So if you were to consider it, I’d say to you get something as colorful as you can get it because it’s gonna look beautiful.

Jen Hardy [00:07:31]:
Well, thank you. Yeah. But, you know, I don’t I don’t know. So we’ll see.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:07:37]:
You wanna choose an area that’s got a little bit more cushion on it, if you know what I mean, because that’s where it won’t be as sore. If you get into your wrist area or bony areas, that is very, very painful to endure.

Jen Hardy [00:07:50]:
That’s that is really good to know. See, and I think, you know, I love that you’re a little bit of a rebel. I think that it’s really cool, because I’ve always you know, I I wanna push just a little and do follow the rules. Yes. I like rules. I like to be on the right side of them. But I also question people that tell me rules that don’t make any sense.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:08:10]:
Sure. Right? So so I my I really started enjoying life once I let go of this this concept, caring what other people think. Once I stopped caring what other people think, life became grand.

Jen Hardy [00:08:28]:
Yeah. I think that’s and I think that is a blessing of coming of being older is that the I I feel like for me and a lot of the women I talk to, the older we are, the more we’re like, you know what? There’s something about that came with turning 50. When we finally got to say, you know what? The things I did care that you thought about, I don’t care anymore. I’m going to be myself and I’m going to be so much more secure, which I never thought possible. Cause I always looked at older people and I was like, oh, they’re all like wrinkly, whatever. You know? And, but for some reason I’m more secure in my own body and in what I’m thinking than I ever was. And I don’t know. I like it.

Jen Hardy [00:09:03]:
So it’s it’s nice to see you out there, you know, fighting the good fight and yeah.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:09:08]:
And I I have fun doing it. You know? And, yeah, I don’t skip a beat. And if someone makes a face or makes a comment, I just keep on rolling.

Jen Hardy [00:09:16]:
Yeah. Because yeah.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:09:18]:
What else? How miss how miserable do you have to be to make that face or to make that comment?

Jen Hardy [00:09:22]:
Oh my gosh. And people are so rude. Oh, which is oh, and YouTube, which is so I do this weird thing. I don’t know if you know it’s called shower thoughts. Oh my goodness. 150,000 views in a month. People like it. It’s bizarre.

Jen Hardy [00:09:34]:
10 seconds. You know, you’re saying like the 10 second scroll. So I thought, well, at least I’ll add something. I’ll make them think in their scroll. So so we’re doing this thing. But it’s along the lines of YouTube. You’re a lot of people take your court things, and they put them on their own court channels. How do you feel about that?

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:09:51]:
Well, you know, I started out on the bench, wanting to wait because there was so much chatter in the community about, you know, the secrecy in courts and not knowing what goes on in courts and misconceptions about what happens in a courtroom. And I was trying to find a way to, you know, have a broadcast, a live feed of what was happening in the courtroom so that people knew what was happening in a family violence court in Bexar County in Texas, the county with the highest number of family violence cases in the whole state. And, you know, we kinda gave up on any idea of being able to do that. You know? And then COVID hit. And I was like, oh my god. What a gift. Right? So we had to pivot and use technology to keep the courts open and to make the public aware that we were continuing to work, and that is what we now know as Zoom. And we’ve kept it up, and the whole goal was to educate the public, to lift the shroud of mystery away from the judicial branch and for the public to come into the courtroom and watch.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:11:01]:
And that is the the You know what I do. You know the the the the protocols. You know how it operates, and you can watch on any given day. So I feel fine about it.

Jen Hardy [00:11:21]:
See, I I love it. I had no idea. And when I tell people I watch court, they’re like, oh, judge Judy. No. No. No. No. Nothing like that.

Jen Hardy [00:11:27]:
It’s it’s actual Alright. So one thing that, you’ve you’ve put a lot of time into and it took you a couple of years to do it is the pride flag in your courtroom. And there’s a lot written about that. And so I wanted to ask, and I know this seems like an obvious question, but what was it about that that made you want to fight until it happened?

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:11:51]:
Well, I think what folks need to understand is that in the heart of Texas, in Bexar County, I was in 9th in 2018, the first and only openly gay countywide candidate to win their election as a countywide elected official. That was huge for our community. Now I will have to say this. There were in the past LGBT judges, but they were not out. They were not out for political reasons. They were not out for safety reasons. I had good friends on the bench, and they were afraid to come out for fear of retribution, of harm being threatened to them. And so we had to keep that tapped down and secret, not public.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:12:39]:
Now I was told when I ran the first time in 2010, the second time in 2014, I would never ever win as an out candidate. I was told by my own party, and and I’m a democrat. And then lo and behold, I win in 2018. And it was a huge accomplishment for the LGBT community in San Antonio. Why is that important? Because San Antonio is home to the largest number per capita of same sex families in the whole country. And it’s that because we value family, and we don’t care what family looks like as long as children are loved and taken care of. And they look to me as this is a community of over 60% Latinos. So I’m Latina.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:13:28]:
I’m LGBT, and, that impacts into many areas of our community. And so when I was sworn in as judge, a local LULAC chapter, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Orgullo Council of LULAC. Orgullo translates into pride in Spanish. The pride council of LULAC locally gifted me at my swearing in this pride flag. And I was also gifted an American flag that was brought in. She marched in the colors to my swearing in by a combat vet who was also LGBT. So I have the American flag and the rainbow flag, the pride flag, right outside my chambers. I felt compelled.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:14:17]:
I felt I had a duty to post that flag in the courtroom, off to the side, not not next to the American or state flag, but a few feet to the side because the pride flag is a symbol of equality. Equality. It’s not a a symbol of gayness. It’s a it’s a symbol of equality. And where what better place to hang and display a symbol of equality, equal justice than in a courtroom? Of course. Some people didn’t agree with that, and they filed their complaints. And I was, at that time, disciplined by the judicial commission and was instructed to not only take my flag down, I had to remove all rainbows from the courtroom, whether that was my mouse pad, a pen I was using, my glasses, or my robe, which had a little strip of, not a rainbow, but, multicolored right across this way. I could not wear that robe on the bench, I was told.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:15:20]:
And what was the clincher for me on that on that order from the commission was that they were go they had they barred me from being a visiting judge after I retired from the bench. It didn’t matter if I retired after 4 years or after 20 years. They said I could not be a visiting judge anywhere. And that’s why I truly appealed the decision by the commission. And, I got a great attorney, Deanna Whitley, and we fought it and fought it. And, we appealed it, and they wanted to hear us on Zoom during COVID, and we said no. We wanna be heard in person in Austin at the Supreme Court of Texas, and we waited. And when so they they appoint 3 judges to hear your case.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:16:06]:
When COVID started, the breakdown was 22 conservative judges, 1 progressive judge. By the time COVID was over, it was 2 progressive judges and 1 conservative judge, and that helped us, I think. And because they’re elected as well, and they have to answer to their constituents. In in addition to, we they believed it was an infringement of my rights. So, people ask me why it’s not in the courtroom again, and I said, we’ve made our point, and it doesn’t need to be in the courtroom for me to continue to make my point. The whole world knows how I was treated by the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct. And it sits outside my chambers, and, I back you know, from time to time, I’ll wear the robe that they said I couldn’t wear in the courtroom. I have my mouse pad back up there, and it’s no secret who I am and what communities I represent on that bench just as who I am inherently.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:17:07]:
And so we’ve we’ve done what we set out to do. 1 of my one of my good friends is a man by the name of of Michael Quintanilla, and he was just the grand marshal of our local, Fiesta Flambeau parade, but he used to be a fashion editor. He’s a local guy, went to school in South San Antonio at Burbank High School, but he ended up going into journalism. And he was a fashion editor and fashion, journalist for, the in Dallas and then for the LA Times and then came back to San Antonio. And he traveled all over the world attending fashion shows. And so he and I talk a lot, and every year, we talk about what’s the color of the year, what what’s the latest fashion trends. And we love a lot of color, and we bounce stuff things off each other. So I follow his lead when it comes to fashion.

Jen Hardy [00:17:54]:
Oh, that’s so cool. I wish I had someone to help me with fashion. Alright. So today I’ve got I am so excited to have the honorable Rosie Gonzalez with me. Thank you so much, Rosie, for taking time out of your day to join me.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:18:09]:
It’s always an honor for me to share experiences and share knowledge. And if any of our stories and conversation helps anyone, even one individual tonight, then we’ve done more than I think, most people do in a day.

Jen Hardy [00:18:23]:
Right. And and that’s honestly exactly why you’re here because, you know, I’ve been watching court on YouTube, and it’s interesting. Every judge has a personality. But the thing that just really draws me to you is your passion for helping women and children and the way when something comes up about a child, you’re like, no, No. We’re I’m going to protect this child. So what is it about you particularly that makes you stand out as the protector of women and children?

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:18:55]:
You know, I think I think I fell into it, Jen. And what I mean by that is in the eighties, I was the product of that me generation. I graduated from college in the mid eighties and went straight into graduate school only to flub it up because I was more interested at the age of 21 on in, being out at the clubs and enjoying the eighties lifestyle and with everything that it came with. And I dropped out of graduate school. And I I I had to come up with a plan to tell my parents I dropped out of graduate school. And so I walked down the school, walked down the road from my the school I was attending, Saint Mary’s University. And there was, at the time, a place called the Southwest Neuropsychiatric Institute a place called the Southwest Neuropsychiatric Institute for Children. And it was a lockdown residential facility for kids with psychiatric issues.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:19:49]:
And we had a padded room. They each were locked into their room at night. The children’s ages range from 12 to 18. I was on the admissions unit. So I saw these kids as raw as you could see them coming in untreated. And we stabilized them so that they can move on to other cottages on the property that gave them more appropriate treatment after they stabilized. That job cat was the cat catalyst and catapult into an 11 year career in the social services fields, adolescent correction fields, and education. So from there, I worked on the admissions unit as staff, went on to work as an investigator for child protective services.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:20:38]:
I worked for communities and schools with gang members in South San Antonio. I worked, for Catholic Charities as a community emergency assistance program coordinator, helping folks in the most destitute times needing money. I went on to work as a program director for the Mexican American Unity Council developing the resiliency curriculum for adolescents, first time juvenile offenders, went on to work as a as a juvenile probation officer in Travis County and had 3 specialized caseloads, sex offenders, juvenile offenders, and Spanish speaking offenders. Towards my 3rd year in Travis County, my dad got ill. I went back home to Brownsville and taught special ed at my old high school. And it was in the midst of all that that my mom asked me to revisit higher education for myself, specifically law school. And I said, mom, I don’t know. She goes, we’ll do whatever it and we need to do.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:21:36]:
I had to retake some classes. I took the prep course for the LSAT. Lo and behold, my alma mater admitted me into law school. And the rest you know, I the same populations that I helped as in the social work fields that I did. I can’t call myself a social worker because I didn’t have a social work degree, but I did social work. Work. And, the same populations I helped in that capacity, I ended up helping as a lawyer. And so I always told people all I was was a glorified social worker.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:22:06]:
I was just making more money because I was still helping the same populations, women and children, disenfranchised populations, at risk kids. And I did that for this 16 years I was a lawyer. And, I had a very strong desire to help people who could not afford the big time lawyers. And the way I accommodated them was I gave them a payment plan. I didn’t charge them by the hour. I gave them a flat fee, and they appreciated that. And they could come in as long as they were on a payment plan. I didn’t care if they paid me $5 a week, $50 a week, $100 a week, as long as they kept coming in to pay off.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:22:47]:
They could be paying me for 5 years for something I did for them in a year’s time. But it meant a lot to them, and it meant a lot to me that I could help them. And so it that’s what I mean by I fell into it. And, that passion just grew. And I saw a lot of abuse. I saw a lot of misfortune, a lot of bad luck, a lot of, being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I also saw a lot of evil. And I always you know, people ask me why’d you do it? I said, if it wasn’t me, who was gonna do it? And, I I took a lot of pride in being able to help those populations.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:23:28]:
By the time I got elected to the bench in in, late 2018, I was the only board certified child welfare law specialist in South Texas. This is before Texas started a board certification for the same type of area of practice. I was certified by the National Association of Council for Children. And so, that’s what I came on to the bench with, that type of background with that certification. And I knew what I had experienced was family violence. Child abuse is just another name for family violence and the victims are children. And so I saw a pattern of trauma, and I saw a pattern of addiction and mental health issues. And with Stacy’s help and the encouragement of a retired judge, judge Al Alonso, we put our heads together, and we came up with an avenue, not for victims, but for the perpetrators of family violence.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:24:34]:
And because that’s where it starts with the act of violence, and that’s where we can stop it, with curing or addressing the trauma in that Well, that

Jen Hardy [00:24:54]:
Well, that was literally going to be my next question because I read your article that just came out in March of this year. And, you know, trauma informed care is a thing that is a buzzword right now. Can you explain what that is, though, if people are listening and they have no idea?

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:25:11]:
So, good timing on this question because I just attended a meeting of the trauma consortium with the city of San Antonio on Thursday or Wednesday. And, that was a question, and they wanted everyone in attendance to to talk about what trauma informed care meant to them. In the end, we all agreed that it was a way in which we bring in the people that come in for services. How do they get greeted? How are we sensitive to their lived experience? How do we keep them focused on improving their lot and improving their ability to cope from our end and not creating a hostile environment for them that makes them afraid or embarrassed to address the issues that got them to where they’re at in that moment. And so trauma informed care is being sensitive to their trauma because we know that everyone has some level of trauma, but their trauma has brought them into the social services or criminal justice fold. And we want them to get better. We don’t want to send them off worse than how they came in. That’s trauma informed care.

Jen Hardy [00:26:26]:
I like that. And, you know, and I had talked to, you know, I had talked to, judge Boyd. And judge Boyd is another person that that wants to help people because, you know, some judges, you know, you give them their sentence, let them move on. But you seem to take it a a whole level further, in actually creating these new things that are amazing like that. And also you created a special drug court, did you, for your for

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:26:52]:
That is that is a court, and it is, it was the newest court, specialty court in Bexar County until last year. And judge Melissa Vadas started a community court, also a specialty court that focuses on individuals who are without housing, who have a substance abuse issue. All specialty courts have a common denominator. They must have a specialty, they mess they must have a drug court treatment or a drug treatment component, an addiction treatment component. So judge Vada addresses the drug issue with with folks without housing. We address it with a very narrow population. Our program was developed on the model that is provided by who used to be the National Association of Drug Court Professionals. They are now known as All Rise, and they provide the outline of best practices and ten key components that every specialty court must adhere to.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:27:55]:
And we have thousands of these courts across the country. Texas has 3 metropolitan areas that all have within their jurisdiction 15 specialty courts. That’s Tarrant County, and Dallas Fort Worth area, Bexar County, and Harris County. And ours was the 14th court to be established. We got the help from Al Alonzo who established the very first specialty court in Bexar County back in 2001, and his was only for misdemeanor, cases, general general jurisdiction, and that grew. And in Bexar County, we have that court still exists, adult drug court. We have veterans court at the misdemeanor level. We have veterans court at the felony level.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:28:44]:
We have the, the felony drug court. We CPS has a drug court for children removed from parents with the substance abuse issue. They also have a court for for children removed due to domestic violence and substance abuse issues. Juvenile court has several specialty courts. And, so the list and we have a Esperanza court for individuals arrested for adult sex crimes. And, then we have court. Court focuses on only first time offenders of family violence with a substance abuse issue. It’s all science based.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:29:26]:
Okay? So follow me on this. When I took the bench, Al Alonzo, judge Alonzo, said to me, did you know that 85 to 90% of your defendants in your court come in having been arrested either under the influence of a drug or have a substance abuse issue. And out of that universe of defendants, almost 100% of them will self disclose that they themselves are adult survivors of childhood trauma, neglect, or abuse. K? So we took that population. We did research. We find out that first time offenders are the most vulnerable offenders. This is when an individual who’s been arrested for family violence doesn’t want anybody to know they’ve been arrested for family violence. They don’t want their children to know if the children didn’t find out.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:30:17]:
They don’t want their in laws to know. They don’t want their parents to know. They don’t want their siblings, neighbors. They don’t want their employer to know. All for fear that they will be rejected, they will be ostracized, or fired. So they will do anything to get this case taken care of, dismissed. And what we do with reflejo court, we also expunge it from their record once they complete our program successfully. The program can take as little as 10 months to complete, but they get up to 2 years max to complete a 5 phase program.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:30:53]:
That’s what this program is. It’s an intensive outpatient substance abuse program that is trauma centered. So what does that mean? The 5 phases, I tell the participants are, like, 5 of your grades. 1st grade, you learn your alphabet. 2nd grade, you learn how to make words with those letters. 3rd grade, you know how to make sentences with those words. 4th grade, you’re gonna write paragraphs with those sentences. And by 5th grade, you are writing your story.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:31:23]:
So So that’s how it progresses, and we give them the skills and knowledge, to be self reflective and understand their own trauma, understand their triggers, and learn ways in which to respond to triggers as opposed to react to triggers. They must maintain long term sobriety because it was during the time that they were using drugs that for whatever reason, their inhibitions were lowered, and they acted violently toward a loved one. And so we monitor that. We get their trauma addressed. We get them sober. If they don’t have housing, we provide housing for them. And if they don’t have employment, we find employment for them. So when they graduate, they graduate with a toolbox of everything they could possibly need to not reoffend and not reenter the criminal justice system.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:32:16]:
We’ve had up until now 28 graduates, 27 have not reoffended. That’s important because every offender of family violence, if left to their own devices, can create anywhere between 10 to 15 victims of their violence throughout their lifetime. And if they have children, that becomes a generational problem. So if they have children, part of their, therapeutic milieu is to complete a parenting class that works with parents who are involved with domestic violence to minimize the exposure to the children and minimize the chances of those children repeating the sins of their fathers and mothers.

Jen Hardy [00:33:01]:
Yeah. And the the first question I was gonna say is, yeah, what is your success rate? And that is an incredible, incredible success rate. And so another question I have, so someone’s listening and they think, well, but they’ve been to you in court. Why would they need another court? So what how would you explain drug court?

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:33:16]:
So with regular probation, you have different avenues. You have deferred adjudication probation. That means if they complete their probation, usually, it’s not less than a 10 month offer, and it can be up to 2 years. Once they complete their probation, their case is dismissed. Their arrest will stay on their record unless they pay an attorney to get that expunged. Okay? So what does that mean for someone that takes a deferred adjudication probation? That means that if they go and apply for a job or for housing, wanna rent or lease an apartment or a house, those individuals can do a criminal background check on them, and they don’t see that the case is dismissed. They see the arrest that’s still on their record for a violent offense. And guess what? They won’t get the job, and they won’t get the house or the apartment.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:34:02]:
They’ll be denied. For a regular a person on regular probation, that’s not expungible because it’s not dismissed. They’ll have a conviction. And so it’s for us, it’s different because I’ve created relationships with folks who can control that, and they allow for the case to be dismissed, our district attorney, and our district clerk foots the bill for the expungement expense. And the district attorney has agreed to allow that case to be expunged as soon as possible as opposed to having to wait a a number of years before you can ask for it to be expunged. So that’s the difference between court and other probation avenues. We truly are a second chance, pure as you can get program that gets the case dismissed and expunged at no cost to the defendant. And so we truly give them a second chance to start over and start in a healthy manner, not hurting the people they love the most in their life.

Jen Hardy [00:35:04]:
And that makes so much sense because instead of putting them in prison where they’re going to see more violence, you’re actually teaching them how to not keep doing and saving the kids and their grandkids and their grandchildren.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:35:15]:
So we like to say we like to make tax burdens into taxpayers.

Jen Hardy [00:35:21]:
I like that. I like that a lot. So if you could have one law, if you could write one law, what does, to help women and children, what would that one lobby? If you could write it and pass it all by yourself?

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:35:36]:
Well, you know, let me just say we did write the bill for this court, Stacy and I did for court. It was house bill 3529. And then we wrote the the, the, research bill, which was house bill 4333, which allowed us to keep going. You know, there’s so much need and so much area. And I think, if if I could write a house bill, it would be a house bill that would create a fund accessible by any family member in need of transition services either as an offender who often gets excluded from the home with a no contact order, and they have nowhere to go. Right? Because, often, they they’re the primary provider for the family, and they they they make most of this of the the the of the salary that that pays for the home expenses, but they’re kicked out. And and they have no savings, and they have nowhere to go. They end up on the street or in a shelter.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:36:37]:
Or the victim and the children who end up at a children’s I’m sorry, at a battered women’s shelter, have no savings, have no way to get into an apartment that’s safe for them, have no way to, you know, pay for groceries or anything else. So I would create a fund that provides that kind of of of accessibility to financial resources to help them get past this hump, whether it’s just a hump or it’s a life changing experience. For many victims, they have to not look back. They have to not reengage with this person who may not be willing or not have the access to court to fix their issues, right, to address their issues, and to make them safe for people to be around. And so I think that’s what I would do. And I’ve Stacy and I have always talked about, we we we like to pine away and think about what we would do if we won the, you know, the megabillion, 1,000,000 lottery. And we both have always said, we’d give all these 1,000,000 of dollars to this particular fund to help families that are just caught up in this family violence cycle. And when we say families, we mean everyone.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:37:50]:
We mean the offender. We mean the victim, and we mean the children.

Jen Hardy [00:37:55]:
That is that is a beautiful thing. I like that a lot. You know, guys, I think people don’t realize that, yes, somebody’s committed a crime, but they still have a life to live. Right? And we want to change.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:38:07]:
And you know what, Jen? I don’t believe that a single person wakes up in the morning and says, let me find a way to go to jail today. I’m gonna find a way to end up in jail tonight. Not a single person does that. People end up in jail due to poor decisions many times and other times because they’re triggered. And if you talk to a lot of our participants, they’ll tell you, I don’t remember what I did. Now it could have been a combination of doing the drugs or drinking, but it’s also when you hear people say, I saw red. I was so upset. I saw red.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:38:41]:
We’re talking about blackouts. We’re talking about disassociation due to their own past trauma, and they don’t remember what they did. And much of much of that is is a coping mechanism where the brain shuts down to protect the individual from further trauma that damages their psyche. And there’s a whole set of research, avenues that you can go down that verify that. And people don’t wanna spend the time learning about this dynamic because they we’re in a hang them high state. We’re in Texas, and it’s you know, lock them up and throw away the key. But for a fraction of the cost that it takes to house an individual in a prison or a jail, you could help a family recover and heal.

Jen Hardy [00:39:29]:
And why would you not wanna do that? That’s that just helps everybody.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:39:34]:
I agree.

Jen Hardy [00:39:35]:
So who do you who do you look up to at this point? Is there someone that you admire or look up to?

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:39:43]:
Well, you know, there was my mom, but she passed. She passed on my 1st day of judge’s school, and she always pushed me to do my best and do was what’s right by people. And then I have, you know, a tribe of local women leaders, and people that come to mind are people like, former councilwoman, Marie Antonietta Berriosaba, former commissioner, Trish Deberry, women like, my friend Gloria Uribe, or women like Maria Elena Torralba, who’s married to judge Al Alonso, women like Martha Tijerina, who raises 1,000,000 of dollars for, GED services for folks who need a GED. All these women that give selflessly the community to improve our lot as individuals, but also collectively as a community. And I follow their lead, and I’m looking at how hard they work and how much they volunteer and what what what they do. And so that kinda has just created an extension of the child my mother created out of necessity. And so my mom worked for a Jewish family, Ben and Reuben Edelstein, and they owned a chain of furniture stores in the Rio Grande Valley, and she was their lead bookkeeper. And she worked for them for 27 years, and they were big on education.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:41:15]:
And she was big on education. And the last 4 or 5 years that she worked there, they would let her leave early from work. Instead of 5, they let her leave at 4 or 4:30 so she could go to night school. And I was, like, 2nd grade through high school when she was doing this, and, I saw her if I did late at night when she got home from school. And because she could not be with us, she found things for my brother and I to get involved in. Boy scouts, girl scouts, sports, piano lessons, art lessons, Kiwanis Club, just things to do where we had adult supervision. But that those experiences led us to wanna always help. Where can we volunteer? Where can we do this? There’s this project.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:41:59]:
There’s a 5 k. There’s a bikeathon. And so that carried with me into adulthood. And so early on in my twenties, I started sitting as a board member in several nonprofits, and it has just stayed with me throughout my life. As I sit here now, I sit on the board of a cultural nonprofit called Conjunto Heritage Tier. They offer free lessons for conjunto accordion and a guitar with 6 strings called bajo sexto, and they promote conjunto music. I sit on a national board of the sleeping in heavenly peace group, and they build bunk beds for children without beds, and their motto is no child sleeps on the floor in our town. And we have a local chapter in San Antonio, but I, I sit on the national board.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:42:50]:
And I sit on the board of the San Antonio AIDS Foundation. That’s another board I sit on. And I sit on another board for an educational nonprofit. And it’s all about trying to find ways to improve the quality of life for different sections of our community. And so I continue to do it. I was just at a board meeting last night. I have a board meeting next week, and so I space them out. Different weeks is different boards.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:43:16]:
And I work here all day, and then I go and do my volunteer work. And people ask me, how do you have so much energy? And it’s like, I like what I do. When you like what I do, it’s fun. You know?

Jen Hardy [00:43:27]:
Yeah. It doesn’t feel like work at all.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:43:29]:
It doesn’t. Not not at all.

Jen Hardy [00:43:30]:
So along that line, what’s your favorite meal? Just random question.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:43:35]:
There was a there was a restaurant. There still is in Brownsville, Texas, and it’s it’s owned by Diane and her family. And they have the best breaded jumbo shrimp off the Gulf Coast. And when I was a kid and all through until my mom stopped, all through school on my birthday, My mom would leave work to come and pick me up and take me to lunch at the oyster bar and order me my dozen fried shrimp. And on the way there, she would sing, instead of happy birthday, Doris Day’s to me. So I have to be careful now at my 59 plus, years of age, and I’ve developed some issues that come with age, fatty liver, pancreatic tumors, hiatal hernia, carpal tunnel. And, in that process over the last 3 years, I learned that I was at high risk of developing diabetes. I had to watch my blood pressure.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:44:44]:
So, my my eating, it’s been a lifestyle change. I don’t have fried food anymore, so the shrimp I have has to be boiled shrimp or maybe some seafood salad, and I don’t eat after 6. I can’t have alcohol. People may be wondering if they see a video from me from last year to today. I have. I’ve lost £45, and it’s all to try and stave off medical issues as I’ve got as I get older. Stacy is 12 years younger than me, and this thought of her taking care of me is just not one that I want to entertain. And I don’t think anybody wants to entertain a thought of people changing your diapers or leading you, you know, around because you don’t have the wherewithal to do it anymore.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:45:31]:
So it’s all an effort to stave off the inevitable, but, I’m trying to get ahead of it. And, but that is my favorite food, fried shrimp, from the Oyster Bar in Brownsville, Texas.

Jen Hardy [00:45:43]:
Alright. And then another okay. Just random questions because we’ve covered some serious stuff. We’re just gonna talk about a couple other things. Superpowers. If you could have any superpower, what would it be?

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:45:54]:
Oh, be invisible.

Jen Hardy [00:45:56]:
See, that’s mine. I like that. Well and flying because I’m a little bit afraid if I was invisible, what I might hear people say.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:46:03]:
Oh, that’s the reason why I would love to be invisible, just to get to know the true nature of people.

Jen Hardy [00:46:11]:
Oh my gosh. Well, that was my final, question that I had on paper. Is there anything you know, I do these shower thoughts, and and I try to come up with these brilliant things to say. So most of them are not brilliant. Do you have anything that I could say on there, or do you have anything for the audience that’s longer than that to leave them with? So just so that they can leave with something.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:46:37]:
Yes. I’m gonna I’m I’m gonna send you a YouTube link to a 15 minute doc documentary mini documentary on.

Jen Hardy [00:46:47]:
Okay.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:46:47]:
And, in there, I talk about my good friend, Michael Quintanilla, who is that fashion guy, but is also a volunteer on, in a on a nonprofit here in town known as the Therapeutic Justice Foundation. It was started by judge Al Alonzo, and they provide, support services for all the specialty courts, and Michael’s one of their board members. And one of the things he does as a board member for the Therapeutic Justice Foundation is he is the master of ceremonies for all of the specialty court graduations. Whoever wants them, he’ll do it for free. And, we often talk about in our circle of professionals that hurt people hurt people. Well, he flipped it, and he says, well, what if we started looking at it as healed people heal people? And I love it. So when you heal somebody, they’re able to heal others through their lived experience. And so that’s that shifts your paradigm of thinking.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:47:51]:
Right? It goes from a paradigm of victims to a paradigm of survivors. And so if the world could just shift to supporting that paradigm of thinking, of supporting survivors, of looking at it from a standpoint where we want to heal people as part of our daily mantra, our daily paradigm, then I think we would live in a much better world.

Jen Hardy [00:48:23]:
Alright. We’re gonna end on that, Rosie. Judge Rosie. Thank you so much. I am going to put links for that and all the things we’ve talked about in the show notes and on the blog post. Thank you again for joining me.

Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez [00:48:33]:
Oh, I had a great time. And if you ever want me back, let’s get back together. And who knows what we could do with 3 or 4 guests?

Jen Hardy [00:48:41]:
I like that. Alright. Wow. Is she amazing or what? I don’t know how one person gets that many things done. She is a rock star, and I knew you would love her. And not only that, but I’ve listened to her. And there is a incredible group of diverse women coming to do a panel. So subscribe, follow, do all the things so that you don’t miss out on that because you are going to love it.

Jen Hardy [00:49:09]:
Thank you so much for listening today. Your time is the most valuable thing you have, and I am so thankful that you chose to share it with us. Stay tuned and stay fabulous.

Thank you again for listening to the Robed Rebel episode! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!