On the same charges, with slightly different wording.
Best mugshot ever
After re-filing indictments against Attorney General Ken Paxton in his securities fraud case, two special prosecutors are pushing back against criticism from Paxton’s attorney, who says the recent action shows that they “botched” the proceedings.
“It is not unusual in any felony case, particularly fraud cases, for prosecutors to ask the grand jury to re-indict so as to provide sufficient notice to the accused as to the nature of the criminal conduct with which he is charged,” Kent Schaffer and Brian Wice, the special prosecutors said in a prepared statement Tuesday evening.
On Tuesday afternoon, the prosecutors re-filed two of the three charges Paxton faces — two counts of first-degree felony securities fraud. The third charge — accusing Paxton of acting as an investment adviser or representative without registering – remained untouched.
[…]
In the charge naming Cook, for instance, prosecutors originally stated Paxton “had not, in fact, personally invested in Servergy.” The new charge states Paxton “had not, and was not investing his own funds” in the company.
Joe Kendall, Paxton’s attorney, criticized the re-indictment, saying it illustrated a process fraught with “troubling issues.”
“They had months to investigate and then rushed to indict,” Kendall said in a statement. “Now, the special prosecutors are back to clean up the botched indictments. It should make every fair-minded person question the process in this case.”
Not so, the prosecutors replied.
“Contrary to the assertion of Mr. Paxton’s criminal defense lawyer that the indictments charging his client with two counts of first-degree felony securities fraud were ‘botched,’ we obtained re-indictments to defuse the boilerplate arguments predictably advanced by the defense that the original indictments lacked specificity or were otherwise ambiguous,” Schaffer and Wice said in their statement.
Philip Hilder, a Houston-based criminal lawyer, said that while re-indictments don’t happen all the time in such cases, they are not rare.
“In this particular case, it’s clear that the prosecutors were trying to get out front and clean up the indictment before the defense had the opportunity to attack the pleadings,” he said after reviewing one of the re-filed charges.
You can see a copy of the indictments – there are two, one for each of the complainants in the first-degree cases, which are the ones from the expanded investigation – in the Chron story. I don’t know how often this kind of “cleanup” happens, but I can say that it happened in the Tom DeLay case. The fact that he was ultimately let off the hook by the Court of Criminal Appeals didn’t have anything to do with that. I’d be interested in hearing what any attorneys have to say about this, but beyond that it seems like a fairly mundane update to this story.
I’m not a prosecutor or criminal defense lawyer, but my sense is this happens with some regularity. Criminal indictments are strictly construed, so the precise wording matters. If the wording isn’t quite right, it’s better to clean it up on the front end rather than having the case dismissed later. So I don’t think this is important news with respect to Paxton’s indictment.
Mr. Fair, Charles can correct me if I’m wrong but I get the impression he runs these kind of update pieces in part to keep us informed and otherwise to provide a counterpoint to the Paxton (or Perry) cheerleaders that very loudly proclaim any twist or turn in a case as a “major victory”. Otherwise, it really is big news when a major office holder is indicted even if Charles admits this piece was “a fairly mundane update”.