Casie Gotro
Posted on 09/14/2017 2:09:08 PM PDT by Elderberry
Christopher Jacob “Jake” Carrizal’s trial is off again.
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 goddamn 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.
Jax Teller
Weeks ago, Judge Strother didn’t “see a need” for an evidentiary hearing in the Carrizal case. Two days ago, neither did Jarrett. This morning Judge Johnson scheduled an evidentiary hearing for next Monday. The earliest Jake Carrizal can now be tried would be September 28, two weeks from tomorrow, when Scimitar Matthew Clendennen is currently scheduled to begin his trial.
It wouldn’t be a shock if nobody goes to trial on the 28th. The prosecution’s entire case is based on rhetoric and postmodern biker tropes: Which have a kind of artistic truth on television and in movies and in true crime books intended to give Walter Mitty the vicarious experience of being an outlaw, but are not objectively true in places like courtrooms where people’s lives are at stake. There really is no Jax Teller. There is only an actor named Charlie Hunnam.
Michael Jarrett’s entire case is based on the preposterous notion that the Twin Peaks Biker Brawl occurred because a “B Team,” by which the prosecutors mean the Sons of Anarchy, went to “war” with a “C Team,” by which really big brains like Assistant District Attorney Amanda Dillon mean the Mayans.
Stephen Sondheim
Or since they insist on describing these motor cycle clubs as “street gangs” maybe they mean the Sharks and the Jets.
“Mr. Carrizal said on CNN that he ‘is a Bandido through and through, 24 seven.’ Want to see the clip,” Jarrett said over and over through two days of hearings.
“When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dying day,” street gang authority Stephen Sondheim wrote for West Side Story in 1957.
What’s the difference? Jarrett intends to prove his Mayans – Sons of Anarchy theory to a jury by having a collection of “outlaw biker gang experts” tell the panel war stories: John Ciccone, Jeremy Sheetz, Jorge Gil-Blanco, Steve Cook, Yves Lavigne, Kerrie Droban, Julian Sher, Jay Dobyns, Billy Slow Brain, James F. Quinn…oh that’s right! Quinn is still locked up for possession of child pornography. Tom Barker has an outside shot because he lives in Texas now although he has been very critical of how the police handled the Twin Peaks Brawl. You get the general idea.
Bad things happen when late postmodern subcultural commodification intersects with the corrections industry.
Breaking Reyna
The fact is that neither Gotro, nor Clint Broden, Millie Thompson, Susan Criss nor Paul Looney, or a dozen other lawyers are going to let Reyna or his Pips get away with that. Prosecutors know that. That’s why they tried to ambush Carrizal’s lawyer. They have no case. Their best hope was and remains to hit Gotro with something she hasn’t seen before.
The prosecution broke this morning, a little or a lot but it broke. This morning, after trying to prejudice potential jurors with a real show of force against an imaginary danger the prosecutorial team of Reyna and Johnson gave up. With four uniformed deputies and plain clothes cops on the street outside the court, five deputies at the security check point and eight armed and armored deputies loitering in the courtroom, they gave in.
In return Gotro cooed her love and respect for the judge she had called prejudiced and unfair about twelve hours earlier, the same judge who had threatened her with jail 23 hours earlier. “I have to say,” she told Tommy Witherspoon, the Waco Tribune-Herald’s courthouse guy. “We got more accomplished in 10 minutes with Judge Johnson than in months with Judge Strother.”
Casie smiled. Tommy smiled. Johnson smiled.
Let the dismissals begin.
They really need to just move the venue far away.
Go hold the trials in the Dallas Metro area or something.
The gangsters shot up waco. The citizens of Waco deserve the chance to put them away!
Shot It up? They burned down a church complex.
Do you poke your own eye every single day and think it.doesn’t make you look like an idiot, or just today?
Gee, there you go again....lying and changing the facts. It was people that got shot at a single place. They didn’t go all around Waco and shoot it all up!
“. It was people that got shot at a single place. They didn’t go all around Waco and shoot it all up!”
It was a Sunday at a family plaza. Women and children within shouting distance. But gangsters really don’t care.
There you go again ... defending gangsters!
Shot It up? They burned down a church complex.
*****************
Are you referring to the Branch Dividian complex?
Gangsters Rule ..., NOT!
Hard to believe that on FR if you oppose murdering pedophile gangsters people call you a bootlicker ...
Hmmm. And some lizard keeps screaming about Reyna claiming porn was ON those same phones. Ain't that something though. And yet, we still see nothing.
BATF involved in both.
Far more dangerous gang then a bunch of middle aged people who ride around the country geting number stamps at different locations in order to earn a location patch to wear on their vests like they are in the cub scouts.
Thats all most of the clubs at this restaurant are, and the meeting wasn’t some gang meeting, or even a meeting for motorcycle club members only. This was a public meeting discussing proposed laws in the Texas legislature and outlining how those would affect Texas motorcycling.
I went to one of those years ago.
Go to hell, Troll.
LOL! I am not the one supporting gangsters ...
“I went to one of those years ago”
Wow! I stayed at a Holiday Inn!
“Thats all most of the clubs at this restaurant are, and the meeting wasn’t some gang meeting, or even a meeting for motorcycle club members only. This was a public meeting discussing proposed laws in the Texas legislature and outlining how those would affect Texas motorcycling.”
ROTFLMAO!
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