Get your act together, y’all.
Best mugshot ever
A leading organization of criminal defense lawyers on Tuesday withdrew its legal brief in support of prosecutors who are fighting to get paid for work on the criminal case against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
The friend-of-the-court brief, which argued that the payment fight could endanger the system for ensuring that indigent defendants are properly represented at trial, was withdrawn because it did not follow proper procedures by the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, the organization said.
David Moore, president of the association, said the brief to the Court of Criminal Appeals was pulled because it had not been approved by the group’s executive committee, which unanimously voted Monday to withdraw the document.
That committee will now examine the issue to determine if the brief should be approved or if the matter should be decided by the full board of directors, said Moore, a lawyer in Longview.
“I fear,” said Brian Wice, one of the prosecutors, “there may be other issues in play driving its decision to withdraw its brief other than a purported ‘failure to follow proper procedures and policies.’”
“The larger question is why Mr. Paxton’s defense team does not want the Court of Criminal Appeals to consider” the brief, Wice said, adding that it raised compelling points about the payment fight’s impact on public policy and proper legal representation for indigent defendants.
Dan Cogdell, one of Paxton’s defense lawyers, said he expected further action to be taken against “the parties responsible for its filing.”
“I will not have any further comment on the matter now except to express my grave disappointment in the impropriety of the filing of such a pleading in a case of this magnitude and am gratified that the proper steps to correct the situation have begun,” Cogdell said.
Austin lawyer David Schulman, one of the brief’s authors, said he and others involved believed they had followed the organization’s bylaws, but he declined to discuss specifics.
“This wasn’t any kind of guerrilla action. We thought we were authorized, but we were wrong,” he said.
See here for the background. It’s clear that the arguments made in the TCDLA brief would be good for the defense bar as a whole, but not good for Team Paxton, as they would greatly benefit from having the courts screw the special prosecutors in their case. As Mr. Spock famously said, the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many. I hope there are enough people with a larger view of things at the TCDLA who can override these objections.