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In November 2011, it had been one month since the wrongfully-convicted Michael Morton had been released from prison after 25 years, and we were finally beginning to find out about how a corrupt prosecutor's office can destroy lives. One year later, Texas Monthly revealed all the jaw-dropping details in a two part series by Pamela Colloff which I've been begging you to read ever since. Former DA Ken Anderson would later become the only prosecutor ever jailed for spearheading a wrongful conviction and hiding evidence. He would serve nine days.
- There was a double murder "of a man and a teenage boy" right in the middle of yesterday afternoon at a park at 820 and 377 in Haltom City. It happened on a basketball court. And that's about all we know.
- If I'm arrested, I want to be as excited as Steve Bannon being arrested. He loves this.
- The jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse case is deliberating, but the preparation of the jury charge in the case, and its reading to the jury, made my head explode yesterday.
- It is 36 pages long. It might as well be 1,000 because now the jury won't care about it. They are just going to do what they think is right.
- Before every instruction on self-defense, the charge began the paragraph with "Self defense is an issue in this case." Good lord! I know what they are trying to say ("There has been some evidence admitted regarding self-defense and you need to judge its credibility and give it the weight you choose") but it reads like the judge is saying, "That self defense evidence you heard sounds pretty good to me! It's a real issue!"
- In a bizarre moment, the judge stopped the reading of the charge mid-sentence, and then sent the jury out so he could talk to the lawyers about the wording. You guys had all weekend to work this out. And once it was finalized, there should be no more questions.
- As to the time given the lawyers for closing argument, the judge gave them two hours but said, "I really don't enforce it." I've never hard that before. (Also, you ain't getting two hours in Texas. You probably aren't getting one hour.)
- The judge telling one of the attorneys that he wasn't timing the closing argument so he could have "gotten away with murder" might have been a poor choice of words to be uttered in a murder trial. Video.
- Meanwhile, in Georgia in the Ahmaud Arbery trial, they showed the critical video stabilized and at half-speed. I'm not sure it is much better than the original video. (And I can't believe I'm saying this, but that could be a self-defense acquittal as well.)
- The Tarrant County District Clerk is running for re-election again. He needs to be booted out because . . .
- . . . his office policy of never closing, even when an "historic winter storm" (his words) is coming, probably led to the death of one of his employees in that horrible I-35 pileup in February.
- Southlake Carroll is trying to avoid another "present both sides" of the Holocaust incident.
- It was big news yesterday that a Connecticut judge found crazy-man Alex Jones liable in a lawsuit brought by Sandy Hook victims as a sanction for discovery abuse. I thought that sounded familiar and it was: The same thing happened in Texas by a judge in Austin just a month and a half ago.
- America's most watched news channel:
- WFAA had a feature on the crazy number of Brazilian bull riders in Decatur.
- Virginia Tech got added to this list at 6:45 a.m. this morning.
- The lede reads, "The Denton Public Library on Monday canceled a children’s story time . . . citing safety concerns for library patrons and staff. The library said it had received complaints from people who mistakenly believed the event included books about transgender children." From it's website, I can kind of see where people got that impression.
- Did they ever catch the Grand Prairie cobra?
