More for the CCA to deal with.
Corndogs are never wrong
Lawyers for former Gov. Rick Perry are urging the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to finish off the remaining charge in his indictment, ratcheting up their push to end the case against the presidential candidate.
The request comes a few weeks after a state appeals court dismissed one of the two counts in the case, delivering Perry’s team its first major victory in the yearlong legal saga. The remaining charge accuses Perry of abusing his power when he threatened to veto state funding for a unit of the Travis County district attorney’s office .
In a filing Tuesday, Perry’s lawyers argued that the state’s highest criminal court should toss out the rest of the indictment as a way of preventing the “judicial system from being complicit in undermining the very structure of Texas government.” Perry’s team sharply criticized how the Austin-based 3rd Court of Appeals arrived at its July decision letting the charge stand, accusing it of “drawing a wholly incorrect lesson” from previous cases and using an “erroneous framework” for assessing the charge.
Perry had one of his indictments tossed by the Third Court of Appeals, though that decision has been appealed to the CCA as well, by the Office of the State Prosecuting Attorney on the grounds that it invalidated a state law, and that’s not something a lower court should do. You can see a copy of Perry’s latest appeal in the Chron story. Both Judge Richardson – who of course now sits on the CCA and would presumably recuse himself from this hearing – and the Third Court of Appeals have rejected Perry’s claims not on their merits but on the grounds that it’s too early in the process for them to be properly evaluated. Speaking as a non-lawyer with no expertise at all in these matters, I kind of think the CCA will see it that way as well. But who knows? As they say in another context, this is why they play the game on the field. Trail Blazers has more.