Tuesday, October 04, 2005

A law professor says this about DeLay

Here's what blogger and law professor Glenn Reynolds says about the latest DeLay indictment:

A NEW TOM DELAY INDICTMENT: Conspiracy and money laundering are vague crimes, easy to allege, hard to prove, and often used by overreaching prosecutors who want to put heat on someone. One would hope that Delay's legal problems would encourage other legislators to tighten up statutes and reduce prosecutorial discretion on such matters, but I suspect that such hopes would be in vain.
Attorneys often say you can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.

1 comments:

El Jefe Maximo said...

Especially a Travis County, Texas grand jury, with THIS prosecutor. (I'm from Texas, and went to school in Austin). Ronnie Earle is an extremely partisan Democratic politician, who is absolutely driven by his belief that corporate money in politics is just wrong.

In my own opinion, Mr. Earle is very likely to let his opinions as to what is right, just and good drive his official decision-making. When he seeks an indictment, he's supposed to be asking himself the question "is the action in question legal ?" For him, this seems to matter far less than whether he thinks the matter at issue is "wrong" as he sees it.

I think the whole business is completely political. But Travis County, because of its large student population (among other reasons), is VERY liberal. The Travis County DA has tremendous power, because virtually all matters touching the operation of the State government, and political issues like the election code, fall within his purlieu. I wish that the legislature would remove these sorts of matters from Travis County.