Evers' judges: Jorge R. Fragoso

​"Evers' judges" is our effort to present information about Gov. Tony Evers' appointees to the bench. The information is taken from the appointees' own judgeship applications.
 
Italics indicate direct quotes from the application.​ Typos, including punctuation errors, come from the original application even though we have not inserted “(sic)” after each one. WJI has left them as is.

​Name: Jorge R. Fragoso
 
Appointed to: Milwaukee County Circuit Court
 
Appointment date: Sept. 18, 2023, effective Nov. 4, 2023 (term ending July 31, 2024) (running unopposed in April 2024 election)
 
Education:
Law School – University of Wisconsin-Madison
Undergraduate – University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana
High School – Homer Hanna High, Brownsville, Texas
 
Recent legal employment:
April 2021-present – Defense attorney, Gimbel, Reilly, Guerin & Brown, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
September 2016-March 2021 – Appellate attorney, defense, Wisconsin State Public Defender, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
January 2012-September 2016 – Trial attorney, defense, Wisconsin State Public Defender, Waukesha, Wisconsin
 
Bar and administrative memberships:
State Bar of Wisconsin
Illinois State Bar
 
General character of practice:
I am an attorney in a well-regarded, mid-sized law firm founded over fifty years ago. I predominantly practice criminal law. My practice is evenly divided between trial and appellate cases, though I sometimes practice in other fields as well, including white collar defense, investigations by the Wisc. Dept. of Children and Families, Title IX, restraining orders, etc. Before joining GRGB, I spent almost five years as an appellate attorney for the Public Defender's Office, where I handled criminal appeals, as well as juvenile cases, CHIPS cases, protective placements, and termination of parental rights cases. I began my career as a trial attorney with the SPD in Waukesha County, where I worked for four years. I represented adults in criminal prosecutions, and I was a member of the drug and alcohol courts.
 
Describe typical clients:
I represent people who work hard to pay my legal fees. These people are often blue collar workers who are looking for the best defense they can afford. Before that, I defended indigent clients for nearly a decade. About 20-25% of my clients have been native Spanish speakers with little to no English language skills. I have specialized in cases involving research, writing, and litigation, including at the trial and appellate level.
 
Number of cases tried to verdict: One as lead counsel, four total
 
List up to three significant trials, appeals, or other legal matters in which you participated as a judge or lawyer in the past seven years:
My first argument before the Supreme Court happened on November 5, 2018, mere weeks after my first daughter was born. It was a challenging case that had been assigned to an experienced attorney shortly after I transferred to the appellate division of SPD. I was appointed as co-counsel so I could observe him and learn about juvenile cases, but he moved out of state shortly after I joined the case and I took on the case myself. The case—a state’s appeal from a decision by Judge T. Christopher Dee—was complicated. It involved the reinstatement of a juvenile delinquency proceeding after a juvenile had been found not competent and his JIPS case had lapsed. . . . (T)he decision, written by Justice Rebecca Dallet, was handed down on March 7, 2019. The decision was unanimous and was not in our favor. This case taught me a lot about a narrow area of the law, but more importantly, it made me realize that I could take on a difficult case, figure it out on my own, and become so familiar with the material that I could represent my client in front of the state’s highest court, even though it was the first juvenile case I had ever worked on.
 
In February 2021, I was on the verge of winning a postconviction motion hearing in the courtroom of Judge Janet Protasiewicz. The case was almost 10 years old at that point, and my client had been in custody for its entirety. He was due to be released three years later. By then, this case had gone up to the court of appeals and back two times. We won the appeal the second time it went up, and Judge Brash remanded the case for a Machner hearing. The hearing went well, and it seemed clear the defense was headed for victory. At the conclusion of the hearing, Judge Protasiewicz brought us into chambers to let us know that she would be granting the defendant’s motion for a new trial unless we were willing to come to an agreement on the case. The state’s prosecutor . . . refused to make an offer that did not involve a 25-year mandatory minimum sentence, so my client was left to choose between risking a trial that could result in adding at least 13 years to his current sentence or waiting out the remainder of his sentence. He chose the latter, and after fighting the case consistently for ten years, he withdrew his postconviction motion. This case stands out to me as an example of the power of the prosecution. My client probably had a good chance of winning a trial, but when faced with the possibility of spending an additional ten years in prison, he chose not to take that chance.
 
In February of 2022, I argued a motion to dismiss before Commissioner Daniel Rieck in Waukesha County. The state’s prosecutor . . .  filed a long complaint on behalf of a wealthy family claiming that the house my client was gifted by the family’s deceased patriarch was obtained fraudulently. They claimed that she had tricked him into buying her a house and that he was too old to make that kind of decision with his own money. What stood out to me about that case was the way in which my client talked about the deceased man. She seemed to be the only one that saw him as a full and flawed person rather than just a benefactor with a high net worth. She had spent a lot of time with him before he passed away, and even though he was difficult at times and she was made to suffer by his family, she was very fond of him. She was also someone who had struggled with money her entire life. She was eccentric and did not live in the county. The man’s family was wealthy and well-established in the county. The commissioner really went out on a limb finding that the state had not borne its burden and dismissing the case. In May of 2022, Judge Bohren agreed and affirmed the judgment of dismissal on de novo review. The case was officially dismissed, and the dismissals were not appealed.
 
Experience in adversary proceedings before administrative bodies:
For the most part, my experience in adversary proceedings before an administrative agency involves the revocation of supervision for clients convicted of criminal offenses. I have represented a client before the Dep't. of Children and Families, and I appealed a pro bono case in which a couple of prisoners challenged the restitution garnishment policies Dep't. of Corrections.
 
Describe your non-litigation experience (e.g., arbitration, mediation).
Most of my non-litigation legal experience involves negotiating with prosecutors. I have also appeared at medical licensing hearings and represented clients during an SEC investigation, a Title IX investigation, and an investigation by the Dep't. of Children and Families. I've worked on drug and alcohol courts and volunteered with the Marquette Volunteer Legal Clinic. In law school, I helped interview inmates at an ICE immigration detention center.
 
Position or involvement in judicial, non-partisan, or partisan political campaign, committee, or organization: n/a
 
Previous runs for public office: n/a
 
All judicial or non-partisan candidates endorsed in the last ten years: n/a
 
Professional or civic and charitable organizations:
Milwaukee Young Lawyers Association, member, 2021-present
Milwaukee County Bar Association, member, 2020-present
Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, member, 2019-2022
Marquette Volunteer Legal Clinic, volunteer, 2017-2022
Big Brothers, Big Sisters, volunteer, 2015-2016, 2021-2023
Waukesha County Bar, member, 2015-2016,2021-2023
Wisconsin Hispanic Lawyers Association, member, 2012-present
 
Significant pro bono legal work or volunteer service:
I wrote the Respondent's Brief in Victor Ortiz, Jr. v. Kevin A. Carr, 2020AP1394 and Jacquese Harrell, Sr. v. Kevin A. Carr, 2020AP1601. Ortiz and Harrell were granted relief in the circuit court, and the state, by the Department of Corrections, appealed. The court of appeals reached out to Attorney Jason Luczak to brief the issue on behalf of the respondents, and he accepted the pro bono appointment. I was the lead writer of the briefs. We won in the court of appeals, and the state did not seek review by the Supreme Court.
 
Quotes:
 
Why I want to be a judge:
I want to serve the people of Milwaukee County because I know that I can do an excellent job. I have over ten years of experience at the trial and appellate level, which has uniquely prepared to serve as judge. I want to be part of a court that treats people with dignity and works on behalf of the people it serves. Because of my formative experiences, I am well-positioned to do this.
 
I have always been motivated to stand up for marginalized people. I was raised in Matamoros, Mexico, a mid-sized city on the border with South Texas where extreme poverty is ever-present. I spent the first five years of my school-aged life crossing the border every day to attend a Catholic school in Brownsville, Texas. I was raised in a Catholicism molded by the precepts of liberation theology and Catholic Social Teaching that had spread throughout Latin America. During the pandemic, a retired teacher from my former school regularly carted books across the border to hold classes for asylum-seeking children. That is the type of role model I had growing up. I moved to Brownsville at age 8 and enrolled in public school. The freshman class of my public high school had over 1,100 students, but only 500 of us graduated. I left Brownsville to attend the University of Notre Dame, but I did not lose sight of how privileged I was to graduate and be able to attend a good school. At Notre Dame, I became involved with the Center for Social Concerns, and through them, the Center for the Homeless, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and the Catholic Worker House. These experiences involved close contact with marginalized groups, and they informed my views.
 
Working as a public defender was the culmination of these experiences. Every day presented an opportunity to show people respect and dignity where they may not expect it. I loved going to the courthouse every day and interacting with people from all socio-economic backgrounds, from clerks and bailiffs to prosecutors and judges and jurors and indigent clients. Leaving my job in Waukesha was difficult, but I knew I wanted to sharpen my legal skills.
 
I learned to write and think through cases at the Milwaukee Appellate office. It was a tremendous opportunity. When I went to Gimbel, Reilly, Guerin & Brown in 2021, I was a much better writer and a much more confident attorney than when I arrived in 2016. In my years at GRGB, I’ve learned a lot about providing a thorough defense that leaves no stones unturned. I have worked on a variety of cases beyond criminal, and I have been given the opportunity to spend meaningful time on each case. I have also had the assistance of a fantastic support staff and the counsel of several attorneys with decades of experience. I’ve learned a lot from all of them.
 
I want to be proud of the work that I do. I want the court to maintain its legitimacy and to protect the values I hold dear—e.g., voting rights, fair maps, strong public schools, people’s right to health care and privacy, a less vindictive criminal justice system—from encroachment by a legislature that seems determined to demean the state’s urban areas. I want my work to serve the people of Milwaukee County, and I know I can do a great job.
 
Describe which case in the past 25 years by the Wisconsin Supreme Court or U.S. Supreme Court you believe had a significant positive or negative impact on the people of Wisconsin.
Before June 24, 2022, I would have said that Shelby County v. Holder and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee were the U.S. Supreme Court cases that most severely impacted the people of Wisconsin in a negative manner. They gutted the two most powerful weapons of the Voting Rights Act: preclearance for new voting changes in jurisdictions that have historically suppressed the vote of minority groups (Shelby County) and the results test targeting voting legislation that produces discriminatory results (Brnovich). In between these two, SCOTUS passed on a great opportunity to fix Wisconsin’s gerrymandered maps in Gill v. Whitford, but it refused to consider UW Law School professor Bill Whitford’s strong argument that the map was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. Instead, it decided the case on the issue of standing.
 
After June 24, 2022, the clear answer is Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade, thereby allowing states to outlaw abortion. In Wisconsin, Dobbs may have activated Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban. For context, Zachary Taylor was president, and women were not permanently allowed to vote in Wisconsin until seventy years later. The questions and uncertainty around this issue led to a nearly 100% decrease in the number of legal abortions performed in the state following Dobbs. By all indications, people seeking abortions in Wisconsin have had to visit a surrounding state for abortions. Minnesota, which was not even admitted into the Union at the time Wisconsin legislators passed the abortion ban, has seen a 35% increase in abortions since Dobbs.
 
As if that weren’t bad enough, Dobbs has called into question the entirety of the Court’s substantive due process jurisprudence. Justice Thomas, in his concurrence, called for a reexamination of the right to birth control and same-sex marriage. He even suggested the ban on criminalizing same-sex sexual relations should be reconsidered. Such drastic measures would likely worsen the Court’s crisis of legitimacy and weaken its standing with the American people. It’s no surprise the dissenting opinion, jointly written by Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor, ended with a lamentation: “With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent.”
 
Two or three judges whom I admire and why:
Republican presidents have appointed 19 of the last 25 SCOTUS justices. All but two have been staunchly conservative. Thus, the SCOTUS writing I have admired over the course of the past 50 years is in dissent. Justices Stevens and Ginsburg bore the burden most often in the nineties and early 2000’s. Justice Ginsburg described this responsibility as follows:
 
Dissents speak to a future age. It’s not simply to say, “My colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way.” But the greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Interview with Nina Totenberg (May 2, 2002).
 
Justice Sotomayor has taken the role of the dissenter to heart, and I deeply admire her for that. She is a very persuasive writer, and she knows how to frame issues and highlight facts that are overlooked by the majority opinion. Through her dissents, she has been chronicling the right-ward slide of the court in a manner that will hopefully provide breadcrumbs for future societies looking for their way back.
 
In Mullenix v. Luna, she called out an officer’s “rogue conduct” after he “fired six rounds in the dark at a car traveling 85 miles per hour … without any training in that tactic, against the wait order of his superior officer, and less than a second before the car hit spike strips deployed to stop it.” In Glossip v. Gross, which upheld the use of the sedative midazolam for lethal injections, she chastised the majority for “deferring to the District Court's decision to credit the scientifically unsupported and implausible testimony of a single expert witness; and second, by faulting petitioners for failing to satisfy the wholly novel requirement of proving the availability of an alternative means for their own executions.” In Utah v. Strieff, she recognized a reality that is often overlooked in police encounters, saying that “[a]lthough many Americans have been stopped for speeding or jaywalking, few may realize how degrading a stop can be when the officer is looking for more.” Justice Sotomayor is writing directly to our moment, and I admire her for that.
 
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has had a number of justices whom I deeply admire and respect, among them Justices Shirley Abrahamson, A.W. Bradley, and Louis Butler. However, it is Justice Rebecca Dallet that has started writing the kind of dissents that Justice Ginsburg advocated and Justice Sotomayor writes so well. In a recent dissent, she took apart a concurring opinion by Justice Hagedorn in which he argued in favor of originalism. She argued that the originalism proposed by Justice Hagedorn would undermine significant rights that most people take for granted, including the right to unsegregated education, same-sex marriage, and virtually all rights of women and racial minorities, as these rights would be difficult, if not impossible, to justify on originalist grounds. I admire these jurists for remaining singularly focused on justice, even when in the minority.
 
The proper role of a judge:
On a day-to-day basis, the proper role of the judge is to treat people with dignity and respect, to make orders in accordance with the law, and to explain his decisions on the record. In the aggregate, the proper role of a judge is to uphold the constitution, to enforce the normative values of his constituents, and to ensure the people’s liberties are protected from the impulsive whims of a counter- majoritarian and unrepresentative legislature. People need to know that large, powerful, civic institutions like the court are working on their behalf and are not held captive by dark money interest groups.
 
To that end, the proper role of the judge who is confronted with a hastily written law that limits the rights and invades the privacy of the people of Wisconsin is to approach the law with skepticism. Whether the law limits the rights of pregnant people to have medical care or of LGBTQ+ people to live their lives without unnecessary interference by the state, a judge should be open to hearing challenges to any new law that severely restricts people’s rights and, when faced with a close call, should err on the side of protecting the liberty interest of those he presides over.
 
I believe a judge should have an overarching goal when it comes to incarceration and the protection of the public. When the legislature abolished the parole board and instituted truth in sentencing, the courts were infused with a mandate to exercise additional control over the amount of time defendants spend in prison. I believe we need to send fewer people to prison, and we need their prison sentences to be shorter. Sending one person to prison disrupts multiple lives in the community, and we should be more careful about how we cause those disruptions. I believe that the certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than severe punishment, and I believe we will not heal the ills of society by incarcerating more people. There are competing interests at hand and no easy solutions. However, the proper role of the judge involves taking a position on these issues and being mindful of the court’s responsibility to exercise additional control over the amount of time defendants spend in prison.
 
Finally, the proper role of the judge involves recognizing the inherent advantage that repeat players have and listening with empathy and humility. Many of the people who access the court are indigent and unrepresented. They are novices within the system, and they lack the communication skills and social signifiers to show the court that they are doing the best with what they have got. They deserve a judge who will listen to what they have to say.

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