The WaPo On Ronnie Earle
Pretty fair piece today in the Washington Post on my local District Attorney Ronnie Earle. Yes, it repeats the obligatory, myth-making story of Earle fining himself for filing campaign documents a day late (man, if I had a dime for every time I’ve read that since this started), but it also notes that his record of prosecuting Democrats came at a time when no Republicans were in power, and contains this quite damning passage:
One of the low points of his career took place in 1993 when he pursued Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison for allegedly misusing state telephones for political purposes. When the judge questioned whether some of Earle’s evidence was admissible, Earle asked that the case be dismissed. The judge refused and instructed jurors to acquit Hutchison.
The case embarrassed Earle, who rarely tries cases himself, and led many to question his motives — specifically that he had no intention of bringing the case against Hutchison to trial and filed it only to embarrass her.
The episode distills a tension that has run through Earle’s career between his abundant sense of outrage and the actual merits of certain cases.
In “The Big Buy,” [a new documentary on Earle], an assistant district attorney in Earle’s office, Rosemary Lehmberg, says that Earle has pursued the DeLay case despite objections within the office. “Ronnie was the only person in maybe a group of six or seven lawyers in a room who thought we ought to go ahead and investigate,” she says.
No doubt those six or seven other lawyers missed some legal nicety that only a mind like Earle’s could spot…
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