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Trial is a hot potato for judges
The Texas Supreme Court chief justice was drawn into the partisan wrangling in Rep. Tom DeLay's conspiracy and money laundering case Thursday in what has begun to resemble a tit-for-tat fight over who will handle the trial. A judge who has given money to Republican candidates withdrew from involvement and handed the case off to Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson, whose former campaign treasurer has ties to DeLay's indicted political committee. District Attorney Ronnie Earle sought the recusal of Jefferson late Thursday, but not before Jefferson, a Republican, assigned the case to semiretired Senior Judge Pat Priest of San Antonio. The validity of Priest's assignment by Jefferson was unclear. Two days after DeLay won a fight to get a new judge in his case, prosecutors succeeded in getting administrative Judge B.B. Schraub to remove himself from the case. Schraub was charged with selecting a new judge for DeLay's conspiracy and money laundering trial. Schraub referred the matter to Jefferson, a Republican whose campaign treasurer in 2002 was Bill Ceverha, also the treasurer of DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee. … The judicial wrangling is "a great shame," said Charles Silver, a legal ethics professor at the University of Texas Law School. "It says that the judges who we elect can't be trusted to apply the law neutrally in cases that in some way bear on their political beliefs," Silver said. "If that's true, we really need to revamp the whole system."
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