The Aging Rebel 9/13/2017
Casie Gotro, the Houston attorney who had a contentious relationship with Ralph Strother, the previous judge in the case, got Strother involuntarily recused two days. She thought Strother and Assistant District Attorney Michael Jarrett were cooperating to withhold potentially exculpatory evidence from her and had conspired to rush her into what she repeatedly called an ambush trial. That was obviously true but it was not all.
Her biggest problem with Strother might have been that he tried to keep so much of the pretrial maneuvering off the record. She had to move to recuse Strother, not just to get rid of an obviously prejudiced judge but to get the accumulation of complaints she had been assembling since spring into the official record of the case.
Marking Her Spot
Yesterday, Gotro tried to recuse Johnson in a concatenation of hearings, motions and recesses that went from 9 a.m. until 7:30 p.m. She called a half dozen courthouse employees, including Judge Johnson and his court coordinator, to testify. Johnson tried to fight it. He ended up as Gotro’s last witness. She entered 14 exhibits into evidence. Half the time it all looked like a fishing expedition. Half the time it probably was.
Gotro is kind of interesting – which is not necessarily any more of a compliment than it is a curse. In a courtroom she is all fidgets, grimaces and snark. Somewhere hidden in all that smoke is a dangerous lawyer with the instincts of a grifter and a talent for getting what she wants. This week, it appears in retrospect, she wanted to pee all over the McLennan County courthouse so all the other lawyers would know the place belonged to her.
All week long Assistant District Attorney Michael Jarret smugly condescended to the defense. That was stupid.
Bobby Fischer, the American chess genius, once said that the moment he loved best in a game was the moment when he knew he had broken someone’s ego. Jarrett is probably still proud this morning. His pride probably won’t hurt until he realizes what just happened – sometime Saturday. Then, as the throbbing starts to subside on Sunday, his wounded ego will tell him he has finally figured her out. But he never will. If he was that good he would be in New York, Boston, DC or Philly. He isn’t. If he was that good Gotro and Carrizal would have still been in court this afternoon. They weren’t. Jarrett will always be about five moves behind Gotro.
Woof Woof
This morning Gotro made Johnson and District Attorney Abelino Reyna sit up and roll over.
Today was supposed to start with jury selection but it didn’t happen for the most obvious reason. The jury was too furious to be fair and any appeals court would have seen that. It was the fourth time the same pool of prospective jurors had been compelled to show up at the courthouse early, stand around and wait to be sent home. Yesterday the same prospective jurors heard Johnson threaten Gotro with jail.
Prospective jurors were cursing in the hallways yesterday. “I’m so sick of this damn crap,” one plump mommy remarked to another.
This morning on the sidewalk outside, one fleeing citizen thanked the Lord, that he was “out of this thing. I pity the next guy.”
Gotro not only got a new jury but promises of access to all the evidence. ‘We will cooperate fully,” Reyna promised Johnson, his former law partner, without winking once. Then Reyna promised Gotro would have access to the Waco Police Department whenever she wanted.
Overlapping Circles
Gotro also seems to be poking into the black intersection between, as logicians might say, the set of evidence in the federal racketeering case against the Bandidos, called U.S. v. Portillo et al., and the set of evidence against the Twin Peaks defendants. She wrote Eric Fuchs, the Assistant United States Attorney prosecuting the Bandidos case in San Antonio and later discovered that Fuchs was forwarding her emails to Reyna and Jarrett. It might be fun to know what else he has forwarded them.
Gotro is interested in the pole cam erected at the Twin Peaks at 7 a.m. on May 15, 2015. She wants to know who checked the camera out and who returned it and when. She wants to know all about that camera. She has, as Detective Columbo used to say, “a few questions.” That was the reason she subpoenaed Texas Department of Public Safety Agent Chris Frost. Strother refused her request because Frost will be a witness in Carrizal’s eventual trial. She tried to subpoena the Director of the DPS because she wants to know if Frost was the pole camera’s official custodian and she wants to know which camera was used. How many cameras does DPS have? Which one was this one? Where’s the paperwork?
She is convinced that evidence was removed from the cellphones seized after the Twin Peaks brawl and she wants to know if that was done by the Waco police or by the DPS Research Analysis Unit when the information on the phones was data mined at the Texas Joint Crime Information Center. That part gets tricky because the Research Analysis Unit is funded by the federal government and shares the information it collects with federal police agencies. Officially the unit calls this activity “Connect the Dots” and it is impossible that some of the dots in the Twin Peaks case and some of the dots in the federal case are not connected.
More:
http://www.agingrebel.com/15748
