Carrizal’s Defense Won Today

Houston lawyer Casie Gotro shook a lime tree last Friday. Today she made margaritas.

She was late to court as she often is. Her client, Dallas Bandido Jake Carrizal, sat at the lawyer’s table all alone. One of the prosecutors, Michael Jarrett, glanced at his watch and smirked. The judge, Matt Johnson, glared at an invisible spot over the courtroom door. When she arrived six minutes late she was admonished by Johnson. She promised not to do it again.

Five prosecutors are trying the case. The other side is just Casie and her entourage. Throughout the trial the bailiff, an authoritarian little man named Jack Campbell, has been threatening to hang people who have phones in their pockets in suspended cages so the locals can throw cow pies at them. The other day he actually made Tommy Witherspoon, the Waco Tribune-Herald reporter who tweets live from court (@TSpoonFeed) turn off his tablet because his key strokes made barely audible clicks. Not a single cell phone has gone off since then until today when one played a concert in the brief case of one of Gotro’s legal assistants. The phone was buried deep in the satchel. It went on forever. The bailiff just glared. Johnson glared. Everybody else just smirked.

Then all sins were forgiven as Gotro exposed the entire case against her client, Dallas Bandido Jake Carrizal as the house of cards it has always been. Her victim was Doug Pearson, the Aurora, Colorado “motorcycle gang expert.” She invited him to describe the evidence against her client last Friday. It looked like a blunder then. It looked like a stroke of genius today.

“The fact that she asked the witness a question to which she didn’t know the answer is on her.” Jarrett gloated. So Gotro stuck with that line of questioning and the fact that poor, evasive, laconic, dogmatic Pearson presented the prosecution’s case and had to defend it – not Jarrett, not Reyna, not Amanda Dillon but poor, stupid Pearson, was on Casie Gotro, too.

The prosecution’s case will be largely based on information gathered from three cell phones belonging to Bandidos Marshall Mitchell, Ray Allen and Carrizal. The defense, which includes not just Gotro but other friends of Carrizal, has extensively prepared for this trial for months. Part of the strategy in this case will be to make sure the jury hears Carrizal’s defense as many times as possible. Pearson, the prosecution’s third witness, unwittingly became a means to that end.

By about 11 a.m. Gotro was dismembering the state’s case in chief in front of the jury and there wasn’t a thing the prosecutors could do about it.

As stated by the government’s own witness, The Bandidos and the Cossacks Motorcycle Clubs agreed to work out there differences in July 2014. The Cossacks vice-president announced on his Facebook page that the Bandits did not object to the Cossacks putting on a Texas bottom rocker. But, Pearson still insisted that the Twin Peaks Ambush was a mutually agreed upon affray over that Texas bottom rocker.

In December 2014, the same Cossack vice-president sent Bandido Marshall Mitchell a text message saying, “So the truce is over.”

Pearson insisted that meant that Mitchell was telling the Cossacks they could no longer wear a Texas bottom rocker.

In the months that followed, the Cossacks agreed to smash the Bandidos on sight, to “fold teeth” and that all Bandidos “must go to the hospital.” The Cossacks put a $500 bounty on Bandidos patches.

In May 2015, the Texas Highway Patrol thought that the threat of assaults by Cossacks of other motorcyclists on Interstate 35 had become so dangerous that Increased highways patrols. The Bandidos were self reliant. They warned members traveling along that highway to the meeting in Waco warned one another to bring guns and leave their women at home. The prosecution will argue that these messages will prove the Bandidos were to blame for the violence at the Twin Peaks.

The Cossacks and the members of their support clubs arrived en masse about 11 a.m. They took all the parking spaces, parked at the front of each space and took all the seats reserved for the Confederation Of Clubs & Independents meeting. When a woman named Sandra Lynch, who had reserved the Twin Peaks for the, tried to put out orange cones, 15 Cossacks surrounded her and called her a “fucking cunt.” Law enforcement witnessed the encounter and did nothing.

One of the first Bandidos to arrive was Marshall Mitchell. He parked his motorcycle, walked straight into a pack of Cossacks including Cossack Nomad Owen Reeves, stuck out his hand to shake with Reeves, then went inside the restaurant without incident.

There were more police cameras at the scene than has been previously reported. One camera captured the license plate numbers and the faces of the small pack of Dallas Bandidos as they exited the interstate into the Texas Marketplace shopping center.

Before the pack of Bandidos, led by Carrizal, arrived at the Twin Peaks, one Cossack sent out a text message with a picture of a bear trap and the message “trap being set.”

Pearson, who has been a consulting expert on the case for two years still doesn’t know who threw the first punch.

Gotro’s courtroom style is eccentric, She throws her body and her soul into her work like an abstract expressionist. She flicks her hair, cocks her hips, starts and stops and surveys the courtroom like a meerkat sentry on guard against cobras and eagles. Her style of cross examination is unique. She asks open-ended questions. Sometimes, like last Friday, she obviously doesn’t know what the witness will reply. But she is stubborn and brave. And today she was very shrewd.

That said it seems difficult to find some honest reporting on these “biker” trials so I wind up reading three or four sources and try to translate what is really going on. I imagine that the jury is spinning about now.

I hear that.

I also find the style off putting.

Speaking of styles that can be off putting (other than my own, of course, ain't nobody got time for talking' too much 'bout 'dat) and a somewhat differing, less Bandido-centric take on things, to borrow from Radio Legendary, a biker radio/writer kind of guy (who's obviously enough rather smitten with the petite presence of attorney Gotro), from the last half or so of a last week, published last Saturday column,

http://radiolegendary.com/2017/10/trial-by-profiling-halted/

spelling error typo's included, beginning here in excerpt speaking of one of the "expert" biker witnesses, ATF Agent Darrin Kozlowski;

"...There are published reports in the crime blog press that allow his involvement in murderous gang fights very much resembling the Twin Peaks operation, as well as the placement of embezzlers in businesses and organizations targeted by the Government for investigations.
When asked if he’d ever committed any illegal acts at the behest of club leaders, he quickly said he had not. It occurs to me that we are witnessing a show trial in which government-trained experts are able to engage in what Orwell described as doublethink and Islamic operatives see as their duty to Allah to lie to the infidels and believe the lie while they’re telling it.
Kozlowski and two other gang experts continue to sit in the courtroom despite defense counsel’s invocation of the witness exclusionary rule. State prosecutors successfully argued for an exemption from the rule because their testimony is to consist of opinion based upon experience only.
The court drama came to a quick and abortive conclusion on Friday about lunch time when Pearson mentioned a phone text message from Bandido Marshall Mitchell in which he allegedly described his withdrawal of the privilege previously extended to Cossacks Motorcycle Club members to wear the Texas bottom rocker on their cuts.
At that point, Ms. Gotro informed the Court that it is not anything that she has been able to obtain from her discovery items the Judge ordered the Waco police to release.
Angry, his face reddened, Judge Matt Johnson said, “Well, now, I signed an order for the Waco police to turn over those records!” She explained that due to time constraints and strict security protocol imposed by the evidence techs at the department, she has been unable to get access to the material.
In some cases, she has been ushered into a computer room, given a CD of the material, and a comptuer with no speakers. In others, she has been shooed out of the area and sent to the lobby whenever there is no one available to surveil her whilst in her labors.
He abruptly recessed the jurors, and then terminated a hearing about the matter, telling everyone to return on Monday, October 16, at 9 am.

A couple of years ago I'd given Elderberry a hard time over posting from this particular source, but here I am, doing what I'd tore into the picked-upon, honorable Elder Berry over having himself done. He may have even predicted that I would, iirc. My apologies to him, and thanks also to Legendary (whom I've been borrowing from) for himself taking the time to attend the trial, and waxing forth 'So Mote It Be' concerning the proceedings.

I think I'd included 'mad_as_he$$' (and Elderberry, of course) in previous ping to another thread, updating Tommy Witherspoon's from-the- courthouse Tweets, fwiw. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3593982/posts?page=72#72 with the next comment #73 there being continuation.

One strange thing I encountered while copying the Tweets was there would be a small window-like thing pop up whenever I scrolled over the "minutes ago" portion of the Tweets. In that small pop up window there was a time signature that was about two hours earlier than the time indicated, when that time was referenced against Central Time Zone actual time.

Witherspoon, after the last break in the trial, is back to live Tweeting, https://twitter.com/TSpoonFeed 49 minutes ago as of this writing...

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