Tacheira running for DA position
The current assistant DA is running for the office held by his boss, who is barred from running again

By Doug Russell, News Editor

STIGLER, Sept. 24 — Better background checks on people accused of committing crimes, grant money to fund an experienced separate investigator for the district attorney’s office, decreased jurisdictional tensions on cases that involve more than one police agency — these are just a few of the things Russell Tacheira would like to see. And they’re some of the things he hopes he will see if he is able to win the district attorney’s seat for District 16 when the next election is held in 2010.

Tacheira is currently the assistant district attorney for Haskell County. His boss, District Attorney Jim Bob Miller, has been forbidden to run for the office again, due to a deferred prosecution agreement with the Oklahoma Attorney General’s office.

Miller is accused — but not convicted — of filing a frivolous legal action against a Web site owner because the site has been critical of him. He’s also been the subject of a nationwide outcry because of a plea bargain that allowed a child molester to be sentenced to just one year in prison, to be followed by a 19-year suspended sentence.

Tacheira declined to address the issues facing Miller, or even the case of the child molester.

“I can’t discuss those things. I don’t have enough familiarity with them to discuss them even if I felt they were pertinent to my running for office. Beyond the fact that my boss won’t be able to run again, they’re not.”

A graduate of the University of Oklahoma School of Law, Tacheira was born in California to a mother who had been raised on Beaver Mountain. Through the years, his family moved several times from California to Oklahoma and back and, after graduating high school, Tacheira earned a bachelor’s degree from East Central University in Ada before going on to OU.

After getting his law degree, Tacheira became a state’s attorney for the child support office in Durant, worked for a while as a defense attorney and became a prosecutor in 2002.

“My mother is from Beaver Mountain, so when I had the chance to work near where she grew up, I jumped at it,” he said.

For more on this story, pick up this week's Stigler News Sentinel. To subscribe to the newspaper, call 918-967-4655.

This website and the contents therein copyright ©2009 News Sentinel Inc. Downloading or reproduction of any material in whole or in part is prohibited without expressed permission from News Sentinel Inc.