Sarah Stogner Elected Prosecutor in Texas Oil Country

The pickings are slim in the wind-whipped West Texas oil towns of Monahans and Pecos when it comes to people who know their way around a courtroom.

An assistant district attorney who used to shoulder some of the load for the elected prosecutor is now the area’s only judge. A court reporter was fired for passing out drunk at the courthouse after a lunch break — and then was snapped up by a neighboring district.

So when Republicans needed a candidate to take on the Democratic district attorney in a deeply conservative stretch of the Permian Basin that’s more than half the size of New Jersey, they had to settle on Sarah Stogner. She disliked President Trump, made a name for herself by once posing nearly naked on an oil pumpjack for a campaign ad and had never tried a criminal case in her life, but at least she had an active law license.

Then, in November, she won.

“I didn’t really have time to process,” she said of her victory. “I had to go into that office and walk into a whole bunch of pending felony criminal cases, and I had zero experience.”

It hasn’t been easy. Locals may enjoy the storied tales of the Wild West justice west of the Pecos River (and, for Ms. Stogner’s district, a little east of the Pecos as well) and profess strict beliefs in law and order. But they frequently give the benefit of the doubt to the accused, who might be a friend, or a cousin, or the friend of a cousin.

Ms. Stogner, 40, lost the first three cases she tried, including a seemingly slam-dunk drunk-driving trial where jurors improbably decided that the avuncular older defendant, who was drunk when officers found him in his car on a roadside, may not have driven there.