It's enough to make you feel sorry for Ronnie Earle, the corrupt, partisan, rogue prostitute prosecutor in Travis County. The Texas courts have AGAIN ruled that you there has to be a law on the books before you can charge someone with violating it.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals today refused to reinstate criminal conspiracy charges against former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and two co-defendants.

DeLay, R-Sugar Land, and political consultants Jim Ellis and John Colyandro were accused of conspiring to violate state election laws in the 2002 elections for the Texas House. But lower courts threw out the indictment on grounds that conspiracy to violate the election code was not a crime until 2003,

A majority of the Court of Criminal Appeals agreed.

DeLay, Ellis and Colyandro were charged with plotting to funnel illegal corporate campaign contributions to several Republican House candidates in 2002, when the GOP gained its first House majority of modern times.

According to his spokesman, Ronnie Earle and his staff are "reviewing" the decision. I don't know what there is to review -- the Court of Criminal Appeals is the highest court in the state when it comes to criminal law (Texas has, effectively, two supreme courts -- one for criminal cases and the other for civil cases). There is no federal issue at work here. The bogus charge is dead -- and with it, I suspect, any chance of getting a conviction on the other charges has disappeared, given that Earle's case against Delay depended first proving that he violated the conspiracy law.

It's no wonder, given his history of unsuccessful prosecutions of political opponents and prosecutorial overreaching, that Earle is regarded as the Texas equivalent of Mike Nifong.

Posted by: Greg at 04:57 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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