DeLay Walks

With one dissenting opinion (albeit a sharp one) the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals issued an opinion today that upholds an appeals court ruling setting aside a district court jury’s decision in 2010 to convict Tom DeLay on two felony counts of violating state campaign finance laws.

Having written extensively about this case in four earlier posts, I want to (very briefly) close the loop on it (which I think today’s ruling does, in both the legal and the political context).

Further litigation seems unlikely because there is no logical or likely route of appeal for prosecutors to pursue if they were so inclined, which they likely are not. Had the CCA upheld the conviction, DeLay would probably have begun serving a three-year sentence in state prison before the end of this year; so he is, no doubt, relieved and pleased with today’s ruling.

To recap the case very briefly; in 2010 DeLay was indicted and convicted by a Travis County district court jury of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering for actions he took related to campaign contributions for a political action committee that sought – successfully as it turns out – to increase the number of Republicans in the Texas Legislature in the 2002 elections.

From the very beginning DeLay and his attorneys have argued that the charges against him were not crimes. In other words there was little or no dispute about what he did and why he did it, rather the dispute was about whether or not what he did was a crime.

A Travis County Grand Jury, the trial judge, the trial jury and one of the three justices on the Third Court of Appeals panel that heard DeLay’s appeal of the conviction agreed with prosecutors that his actions did constitute a crime. Also, the two other men that were indicted along with DeLay pled guilty and received probated sentences.

However, two justices on the appeals court panel agreed with DeLay that what he did was not a crime and, now, eight of the nine judges on the CCA have upheld the appeals court’s opinion.

The CCA’s ruling does not surprise me even though it is very unusual for the notoriously pro-prosecution CCA to overturn any conviction, much less a jury conviction. I anticipated this outcome because the reports that I read about the oral arguments last summer suggested that at least a majority of the members of the court seemed hostile to the arguments put forth by the lawyers for the district attorney, and receptive to those offered by DeLay’s side.

Today’s CCA ruling is almost certain to be cast in political terms. Larry Meyers, the lone dissenter, recently switched from a being a Republican to running as a Democrat for a seat on the Texas Supreme Court in the November election (the CCA is, essentially, the “supreme” court in Texas for criminal matters while the Texas Supreme Court fulfills that role for civil matters only).

Meyers’ dissenting opinion begins with these words: “You can always tell when an opinion is written with the outcome decided before any legal analysis is done because it reads like a medical report written by a doctor who has never conducted a physical examination of the patient. This is precisely how the court of appeals’opinion in this case comes across.”

In a separate opinion concurring with the majority ruling in DeLay's favor Judge Cheryl Johnson offered a pithy summary of the matter, describing DeLay’s actions as; “a tad shady, but legal.”