Indictment of Rick Perry uniting unlikely allies against prosecutorial abuse... Nice try, OZOMBIES... LMAO
http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/08...se/#more-96524
Posted by William A. Jacobson Sunday, August 17, 2014 at 12:02pm
This contrived indictment may be the best political thing that’s ever happened to Rick Perry.
The prosecutors in Austin, Texas thought they had one over on Texas Governor Rick Perry when they convinced a grand jury to issue an indictment accusing Perry of abusing his veto power. A copy of the indictment is here.
That alleged criminal abuse of power related to Perry’s threat to issue a budget veto regarding a unit of the prosecutor’s office if Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg did not resign after a DWI conviction.
Not just any conviction, Lehmberg was videotaped attempting to pull rank over the booking officers by mentioning they needed to make sure the Sheriff was aware of her predicament. It’s not hard to see what she was doing — hoping the Sheriff would intervene on her behalf.
Her field sobriety test is here, and she again kept mentioning her political career. She was abusive and violent in the police station:
Yet she got away with a mere 45-day sentence, of which she served about half.
For all that, Perry sought to protect the public from this prosecutor by demanding she step down, or risk a veto of part of her budget. Perry followed through on the threat and issued the veto.
Law Professor Jonathan Turley has a legal analysis of the indictment. Short version, it’s hard to understand how there is a crime here, unless one considers the “threat” of a veto to be the crime, since exercising the veto clearly was lawful. Turley writes:
From what I can see, these provisions are rarely used and prosecutors have waited for the strongest possible grounds for such charges. Indeed, such laws are written broadly in reliance on prosecutorial discretion. In this case, the special prosecutor seemed to pound hard to get these square facts into these round holes. A bit too hard for such a case.
Indeed, Governors in Texas have a long history of issuing vetoes, so it’s hard to see how telling people in advance you will issue the veto is a crime.
The concept that threatening a veto is a crime is novel. The law is vague on the issue, perhaps because no one ever thought that threatening to do something you lawfully could do would be a crime.
It’s also important that the criminal inquiry was initiated following a complaint from a liberal group, Texans for Public Justice, in what clearly was a political move.
The prosecutors, having the Grand Jury all to themselves without the benefit of a counterveiling argument, secured the indictment.
As Professor Glenn Reynolds has pointed out, the ease with which prosecutors can obtain indictments of just about anyone on just about anything, requires the cautious exercise of prosecutorial discretion.
In a politicized case involving a political battle, that discretion must be exercised even more cautiously.
Yet the interview given by the special prosecutor demonstrated that this was a reach, and how the indictment merely means there was “probable cause to believe [Perry] committed two felony crimes.” Very low bar. The prosecutor acts as if he’s a mere bystander to the indictment, insisting that since “the Grand Jury has spoken” he will follow up. But the only reason the “Grand Jury has spoken” is that the prosecutor, in complete control of the process, convinced the Grand Jury to so speak.
