Saturday, October 08, 2005

The Miller Lite/Club 400 MVP of the week

This weeks MVP is Democratic District Attorney
Ronnie Earle
You browbeat and coerce grand jurors into filing criminal charges against a political opponent.
You and your staff engaged in an extraordinarily irregular and desperate attempt to contrive a viable charge and get a substitute indictment of Tom DeLay before the expiration of the statute of limitations
You loaded up the grand jury with registered Democrats, and even while doing all that you still took multiple times to get something to stick.
Earle has a demonstrated track record of political prosecutions, including some notable cases against high-ranking Republicans.

More than a year ago, Earle made it clear that his mission was to prosecute criminals and politicians.
But recent press reports seem to ignore the fact that Earle, as part of the DeLay case, also has criminally indicted eight U.S. corporations, including Sears and Cracker Barrel, Bacardi USA, Westar Energy, Williams Companies, and several other companies.
But Earle later cleared the companies after demanding they make donations to charities he backed. Reportedly he sought as much as $1 million from Sears. In the end, Earle was said to have "persuaded" these companies to fork over six-figure donations in exchange for clearing them of wrongdoing.
So here's to you Mr. I hate Republicans and evil corporations, why don't you go to dinner with Eliot Spitzer and see how many time you can sue each other before they bring out the soup and salad.

1 comments:

Jim said...

How do you know that the jurors were brow-beaten?

In Travis County, where this grand jury was convened, based on voting in the 2004 primaries, Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1, so one would expect that more Democrats would be on the jury. The District Attorney does not pick the jurors.

Earle has prosecuted 12 Democrats and 3 Republicans so I don't see how you can say he's out to get Republicans.

Which charities did Earle back? Red Cross, United Way, Habitat for Humanity? Maybe Earle got the best deal he could get against the corporations instead of having to litigate against them for years and wasting taxpayer money because the corporations have the money to pay lawyers for 20 years to keep from being convicted. I can't find anything about this on the Internet except from Drudge, NewsMax and other right-wing sources.

Where can one read about this in a Texas newspaper?