Austin DA's Office: A Cauldron of Malicious Prosecution #IStandWithRickPerry

Austin, unlike the rest of Texas, is a college town and a cesspool of far left ideology and activism.  The Office of the District Attorney there  (in Travis County) investigates and prosecutes crimes related to the operation of the Texas state government.  Apparently, one of the crimes the office prosecutes is being a Republican.

Governor Rick Perry of Texas is the latest victim of the hyper-partisan DA's office in Austin, being indicted by an Austin Grand Jury for abuse of power in vetoing an appropriations bill that would continue funding that very same DA Office.  Perry had warned that he would veto the bill unless the current DA there, one Rosemany Lehmberg, resigned.  Lehmberg had been convicted of drunk driving in April 2013, and Perry thought she had disgraced her office and should be replaced; however, Lehmberg refused to resign.

Hence, payback time:  the Democrats cooked up an indictment of Perry that is so transparent that even prominent liberals and Democrats are expressing dismay.  Perry was indicted for "abuse of office" and "attempting to coerce a public official."  Patterico describes the applicable state laws and why they do not apply to the Perry situation, here.

This latest abuse of the legal system by the Austin DA is nothing new.  The Austin DA Office, under former DA Ronnie Earle, falsely indicted prominent Republicans in the past, on trumped up charges.  A couple of examples are below.

Earle filed charges against Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, then Texas State Treasurer, for allegedly misusing state telephones and allegedly assaulting a staffer. Earle attempted to drop the charges on the first day in court — in fact, at the pre-trial hearing — after the judge in the case questioned the admissibility of his evidence. The judge refused to allow it, instructing the jury to return a "not guilty" verdict so the charge could not be brought against her again.

Tom Delay was prosecuted for "money laundering," for collecting corporate political donations that he turned over to the Republican National Committee, who in turn used the funds to support Texas Republicans.  Here is what I wrote about the prosecution of Tom Delay:

Tom Delay was undoubtedly the pinnacle of this cretin[Ronnie Earle]'s shameful career, in that he was able to obtain an indictment of Tom Delay, after shopping eight different Grand Juries, and then tried Delay in the leftist enclave of Austin, Texas, where Delay was wrongly convicted of "money laundering," for obtaining contributions for Texas Republican candidates. Delay was forced to resign from Congress, and was sentenced to three years in jail for the alleged crime. His attorneys immediately appealed the 2010 conviction, and the case slowly wound through the appeals process.

On September 19, 2013, Delay's nightmare was ended when the Texas Appeals Court reversed the conviction, stating that there was no evidence to convict, and that the indictment should never have been brought in the first place. Delay was therefore formerly acquitted of the charges.  Ronnie Earle's dishonorable and disgraceful abuse of the justice system had its intended effect: Delay's political career was ended, his reputation unfairly tainted by the false charges, and he was forced to spend great sums of money to avoid jail time from the absurd conviction.

Ronnie Earle is the personification of the...Democrat Party, where any behavior is judged merely by its success in defeating Republicans, no matter how ruthless, dishonest, dishonorable or corrupt the tactics. Destroying careers and lives of political opponents is par for the course, as is stealing elections through voter fraud and other schemes.

It is time for Texans to shut down the Austin DA Office as the prosecuting arm of corruption in Texas, and move that function elsewhere, to a saner location.  The hyper-partisan City of Austin is incapable of fairly and evenly applying the law to Republicans.

Tom Delay Exonerated: Appeals Court Reverses Politically Motivated Prosecution and Conviction #TomDelay

Disgraced Texas DA Ronnie Earle

Tom Delay was a prominent Republican and Leader of the House Majority in 2002.  Delay was effective in getting more Republicans elected in Texas, and for this he incurred the ire of a fanatical Democrat activist, one Ronnie Earle, a District Attorney for Travis County, Texas.  Earle abused his office in launching political indictments against Republicans, based merely on his own political biases.  He indicted Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison for highly dubious reasons, and at the pretrial hearing, the judge ordered a directed verdict of "not guilty" so the false charges could not be refiled.

Ronnie Earle's disgraceful career is summarized here.

Tom Delay was undoubtedly the pinnacle of this cretin's shameful career, in that he was able to obtain an indictment of Tom Delay, after shopping eight different Grand Juries, and then tried Delay in the leftist enclave of Austin, Texas, where Delay was wrongly convicted of "money laundering," for obtaining contributions for Texas Republican candidates.  Delay was forced to resign from Congress, and was sentenced to three years in jail for the alleged crime.  His attorneys immediately appealed the 2010 conviction, and the case slowly wound through the appeals process.

Today however, Delay's nightmare was ended when the Texas Appeals Court reversed the conviction, stating that there was no evidence to convict, and that the indictment should never have been brought in the first place.  Delay was therefore formerly acquitted of the charges.

Ronnie Earle is a POS, but his dishonorable and disgraceful abuse of the justice system had its intended effect:  Delay's political career was ended, his reputation unfairly tainted by the false charges, and he was forced to spend great sums of money to avoid jail time from the absurd conviction.

Ronnie Earle is the personification of the Party of Treason, the Democrat Party, where any behavior is judged merely by its success in defeating Republicans, no matter how ruthless, dishonest, dishonorable or corrupt the tactics.  Destroying careers and lives of political opponents is par for the course, as is stealing elections through voter fraud and other schemes.

Ronnie Earle is a complete disgrace and deserves only our deepest contempt.

Patrick Fitzgerald's Fraudulent Partisan Persecution of Libby

Prosecutors and District Attorneys have immense power to destroy innocent lives. They are immune from litigation or prosecution for the unethical misuses of their office. It is for that reason that they bear tremendous responsibility to support the law in an objective and even handed manner. But there are some who abuse their positions.

Years ago, in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy, a mentally deranged District Attorney named Jim Garrison cooked up a sham case against an innocent man, Clay Shaw. Garrison ruined Clay's life, claiming that Clay was a part of the big right-wing conspiracy that murdered the President. The jury in that trial quickly delivered a verdict of not guilty because the case had no merit. Clay died of cancer soon afterwards, penniless from the expenses of his unjust trial.

More recently, a Democrat activist District Attorney Ronnie Earle shopped several grand juries until he found the right bunch who would indict Republican Congressman Tom Delay on the preposterous charge of illegal campaign contributions. Earle had previously prosecuted another Texas Republican on criminal charges associated with her successful campaign against Democrats, and the case was thrown out on the day of trial. Earle has appeared at Democrat rallies and had publicly bragged that he was going to "get Delay." Earle is as unethical and unprincipled as Jim Garrison was in the misuse of his office to achieve purely personal goals. The Texas Bar should have removed his law license long ago.

A few years ago, I had a Chinese friend, Julian, who was the manager of a homeowners association in the Bay Area. One of the young men who worked for him in a maintenance capacity got into a dispute over drugs with another young man and shot him. The victim survived, but a rogue District Attorney from San Jose, California tried to pin it on my friend, Julian. The DA created a case out of thin air, claiming Julian was a member of the Chinese mafia and ordered the hit because the victim had tried to steal his wallet. Even the victim said the story was "bull shit." Julian was completely innocent and there was no evidence that the DA's fantasy had any merit whatsoever. Again, the jury quickly returned a verdict of "not guilty." Julian escaped a great injustice, but he had to spend his life savings for a defense lawyer, to the tune of $60,000, and undergo a very stressful and traumatic trial, literally for his life.

Why do unethical District Attorneys misuse the law and attempt to convict defendants they know darned well are innocent? The answer is simple: politics. DA's are elected based on their conviction rate, and if that takes cooking a few cases and convicting a few innocent people, well hell, what's more important, their lives or the District Attorney's career?

In Jim Garrison's case, however, insanity was the cause. Garrison was nuts. He had been discharged from the army years before after a psychiatric examination showed he was seriously reality-challenged.

Now we have Patrick Fitzgerald, the partisan Democrat in the Scooter Libby case, who got a good man convicted on three felony counts and who faces a fine of $100,000 and 25 years in jail, and who committed no crime. This Democrat Kangaroo Court had a Democrat judge who ruled that the jury could not be told that no crime had been committed, that Valerie Plame was not a covert CIA agent and not protected by the disclosure law. They also were not informed that Valerie Plame's identity had been disclosed by Richard Armitage, an employee of the State Department, who admitted it. Patrick Fitzgerald knew all of these facts from the outset of the trial. So why did he conduct an investigation of Bush Administration officials? Simply because he wanted to seek out mistakes of memory and call them "perjury" so he could create a case out of thin air where no crime existed. As Tom Delay's website describes it:

In the celebrated case of Mr. Lewis Libby, the prosecution pulled out one of its oldest and most shop-worn tricks. That is: setting up multiple perjury and obstruction of justice traps into which government officials, placed under extraordinary investigatory pressure, might fall.

In other words, Fitzgerald manufactured a crime by his own behavior by which he could "convict" an administration official.

Mark Steyn gives a lot of the facts in his recent column in the Chicago Sun-Times. He says what I have said in these pages - that Pat Fitzgerald, the darling of the Left, sought to bolster his career over the broken life of a decent, innocent man. Fitzgerald is the author of a fraud and an injustice.

Our system of justice is easily corrupted and amenable to the machinations of evil men in the guise of prosecutors. It is by no means perfect. Sometimes it produces results that are clearly unjust and unfair - look at the two border patrol agents who were recently sentenced to long prison terms for merely doing their jobs. Fitzgerald is one of these dishonorable prosecutors - abusing the system for their own selfish ends. But even he will face the final Judge, from whom there is no appeal. May he rot in Hell.