Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Remember that bloody mess in Waco where all the bikers were arrested,

some killed, and none of the crap from the authorities would add up?

If it wasn't sure before, a bunch of officials belong behind bars for their part in this.
This week the whole case continued its painfully slow unraveling, as three more bikers, the last still facing that first set of indictments, saw their cases dismissed. A team of special prosecutors eventually assigned to the case declared that the initial mass arrests seemed, in the words of one of them, Brian Roberts, "simply a shoot-first-ask-questions-later mentality....I can't imagine what (former McLennan County DA) Abel Reyna was thinking other than this was a big case and it was somehow going to be beneficial for him or his office," the Waco Tribune reports.

Roberts went on to echo the critiques against the Waco prosecution heard by many lawyers and media watchers over the years: Namely, that the bogus arrests hung over so many people's heads for far too long. "I do have a very serious problem as a lawyer with the wholesale charging of people without an investigation....It is just patently offensive to me. Justice is the sword and the shield. You had a number of folks who never should have been charged and whose lives have been turned upside down unnecessarily, and that is something you can't change. You can't take back what has happened over the last four years."
If there was ever a case for dumping qualified immunity, this is it.  Make the bastards pay damages out of their own pockets.  And, if at all possible, put the bastards behind bars for what they did.


4 comments:

Phelps said...

I can't comment in detail because I worked on part of the case (not the criminal side) but...

yeah.

Anonymous said...

What I understood from that case was that a pair of criminal bikers decided to square off at a motorcycle rally restaurant, and that the all bikers were investigated and charged with being involved in the fight. A lot of time and $$$ has been spent weeding the innocent from the guilty.

That the authorities had prior knowledge of this and actually fired shots into the crowd, adding to mayhem does not help matters. Did the authorities assign any responsibility for their bullets hitting innocents ? I don't recall any details on that.

Phelps said...

@3:36 Every part of your understanding is wrong, except for the lack of accounting for who fired which shots.

One of the bike clubs was criminal. The other was not. Not all of the bikers were charged, and not all of the charged were bikers. Virtually no money was spent by the state weeding out the innocent -- all were pursued until forced to stop by the defense and the judges.

Firehand said...

From the original reports on this, it was a bloody mess, both literally and metaphorically.

Found a couple of the earlier pieces on it:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/waco-is-suppressing-evidence-that-could-clear-innocent-bikers/399047/

http://blog.simplejustice.us/2015/08/28/whatever-waco/

https://www.breitbart.com/border/2015/06/14/four-weeks-later-waco-police-narrative-unravels/