Appeals Court tosses one count against Perry

San Antonio Express-News:
An appeals court on Friday rejected one of the criminal counts against former Gov. Rick Perry but said he must face the other one in the abuse-of-power case against him.

Perry was indicted by a grand jury in 2014 after being accused of abusing his veto power to try to force out the Democratic Travis County district attorney in the wake of her messy drunken-driving arrest.

The former governor, who is running for the GOP nomination for president, repeatedly failed in efforts get the indictment dismissed by state Judge Bert Richardson. He took his case to the 3rdCourt of Appeals in Austin.

The 3rd Court agreed with Richardson that it was too early in the case to decide whether the first count against Perry, charging abuse of official capacity, was unconstitutional as applied to the former governor. It is a first-degree felony.

But the appeals court rejected the second count, coercion of a public servant, saying that the law on which it is based violates the First Amendment.

A decision by the 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin can be appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
...
It would not surprise me if the Court of Criminal Appeals throws out the rest of the case.  This case was a travesty from Travis County from the very beginning.  It was an attempt to criminalize political differences.  What remains of it deserves to be tossed, too.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more