Former state official gets six-day sentence in DWI.

Former state health official resigned in ’14 after 21CT scandal.

Jack Stick, a former state official at the center of a contracting scandal at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, on Friday received a sentence of six days in jail and 90 days without a driver’s license for a DWI case that predated his troubles at the state agency.

Stick, who was convicted by a jury Monday night after pleading not guilty, will receive credit for time he served when he was booked for the 2012 incident and could return to jail for as few as two days.

Stick’s attorney, Brian Roark, said he was happy with the sentence handed down by county court at law Judge Nancy Hohengarten.

“We think the jury made an incorrect decision, of course, but we’re very pleased with the judge’s decision,” he said.

The prosecutor, Assistant County Attorney Greg Burton, requested that Stick be sentenced to either 10 days in jail or 18 months of probation.

Roark, however, argued that his client, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease and is a first-time offender, deserved lenience, and Hohengarten agreed.

“A number of people receive less than that, and a number of people receive more,” she said in court.

Stick, a former Republican state representative, resigned from the health department in late 2014 following an American-Statesman investigation

into contracts between the agency and the technology firm 21CT.

He was arrested on Sept. 11, 2012, after being pulled over near West Sixth and West Lynn streets for speeding, drifting across lanes and failing to signal, according to court records.

He refused to take breath alcohol and field sobriety tests, but a subsequent blood test showed his blood alcohol content to be 0.096.

The legal threshold is 0.08. Stick told police he had up to four drinks that night.

Roark contested the reliability of the blood test during the trial.

He also argued that the arresting officer exaggerated Stick’s drunkenness in his report, noting that his client appeared calm in a dashboard camera video of part of their exchange.