Governor Perry is no ham sandwich

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Sol Wachtler, a lawyer and a former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, once said (and I’m paraphrasing) that prosecutors, with whom he had much day-to-day interaction, have so much control over juries that they could “indict a ham sandwich.” This pronouncement became famous, and is still often quoted.

Wachtler was referring to the fact that district attorneys have so much influence on grand juries that they could get them to indict anyone or anything. He later went on to call for scrapping grand juries in bringing criminal indictments.

Wachtler was not entirely off the mark. Let’s look at what happened in Texas, to Gov. Rick Perry.

I read an interesting piece in The New York Times in which reporter David Montgomery, who has been following government in Texas for years, summed up how Governor Perry was indicted quite well. He wrote, “The trail to Rick Perry’s indictment began with way too many drinks and a drunken-driving arrest for Rosemary Lehmberg, the Travis County district attorney, that was captured in embarrassing detail on videotape.”

Lehmberg then managed to turn her own arrest around. After Texans for Public Justice, a liberal watchdog group, filed a complaint against the governor, she appointed a special prosecutor, and had Perry indicted.

But Perry is no ham sandwich. The incident is no more than political posturing and grandstanding by a district attorney who, instead of prosecuting criminals and protecting taxpayers, is looking to make a name for herself. And Michael McCrum, the special prosecutor, is a disgrace. This is a new low for prosecutors, and this indictment doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Texas’s Public Integrity Unit was formed in the 1980s, in Travis County, to prosecute corruption by state officials. The unit has prosecuted former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, both Republicans.

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