In a 19-page court filing peppered with disdain — one footnote likens Paxton’s defense to an exchange from the 1978 film Animal House — the prosecutors called the attorney general’s legal arguments this week that the judge overseeing his case abused his discretion a “pre-trial shell game” based on a “quicksand-like foundation.”
“Paxton’s motion is a tale of sound and fury calculated to cast himself as a victim, and not a criminal defendant, in the court of public opinion,” they write. “That Paxton’s motion is not only desperate, but utterly without merit is predictable; that it recklessly and unnecessarily tars both a respected jurist and his spouse without a legal or factual basis to do so is unconscionable.”
[…]
Asking the court to reject what they at one point refer to as a “Grassy Knoll-like conspiracy … far more appropriate as a plot point in an Oliver Stone motion picture,” prosecutors Brian Wice, Kent Schaffer and Nicole DeBorde noted that the three charges against Paxton are the result of a “comprehensive investigation spearheaded by the Texas Rangers.”
His legal arguments, they write, are based on “a stunning lack of any controlling legal authority to support his unsupported and unsupportable claims … [he] wants this Court to quash these indictments based on the cumulation of non-errors, in the face of long-standing authority to the contrary.”
See here for the background. My first thought (actually, my second thought after “How can you allude to an Animal House reference without specifying it?”) was that they must be comparing Paxton’s defense to the Otter Defense, which made me wonder if the prosecutors had inadvertently cast themselves into the roles of Greg Marmalard and Dean Wormer. Thankfully, The Scoop Blog has the goods:
The prosecutors’ motion also takes a clever whack at the defense’s arguments by citing the 1978 film Animal House:
Paxton’s insistence at crafting an alternative narrative, one that avoides any mention of his own criminality, while it re-writes, distorts, or simply ignores the historical facts that inform his claim, calls to mind the following cinematic exchange. OTTER: “We’ll tell Fred you were doing a great job taking care of his car, but you parked it out back last night and this morning… it was gone. We report it stolen to the police. D-Day takes care of the wreck. Your brother’s insurance company buys him a new car.” FLOUNDER: “Will that work?” OTTER: “It’s gotta work better than the truth.”
Tarrant County Judge George Gallagher is presiding over Paxton’s criminal case.
Ouch. They have a copy of the prosecution’s response, and it’s worth a read. Again I’d love to know what the lawyers think. No word as to when the judge may take action. I can’t wait. The Press has more.