Scratch the Aryan Brotherhood from the list. It appears that someone from within the law enforcement community may be about to be arrested for the murders of Assistant District Attorney Mark Haase and District Attorney Mike McClelland and his wife.

CBSDFW reports:

Sources tell CBS 11 that Former Justice of the Peace Eric Williams will be charged with capital murder in the deaths of Mike and Cynthia McLelland, and Mark Hasse.

Williams was booked into Kaufman County Jail early Saturday morning for making terroristic threats and “insufficient bond.” He’s being held on a $3 million bond.

Raw Story has more:

A search warrant executed on Friday uncovered weapons similar to those used to kill former Kaufman County District Attorney, police added. They followed up with searches of his home, his in-laws’ home, and Williams’ personal storage unit. Williams was ultimately booked into jail just after midnight on Sunday morning.

Official sources would not comment on other details of the investigation, other than to say Williams was arrested on a charge of making a terroristic threat and insufficient bond. He has not yet been charged with murder.

If Williams is in fact connected to the murders, it’s possible that he did not act alone. Witnesses to the Haase murder said that two men seemingly wearing body armor shot the Hasse in broad daylight and left the scene in a silver Ford Taurus. No shell casings were found. The second attack, against DA McClelland and his wife, was just as brazen but executed under the cover of darkness, leaving a scene littered with shell casings.

[...]

Police sources told Dallas-based CBS 11that Williams is likely to be charged with all three murders. He was previously interviewed by investigators, during which time he’s said to have willingly submitted to ballistics testing for gunpowder residue on his skin, and allegedly turned his phone records over to police. Williams was prosecuted by Hasse and McClelland in 2012 after he was caught stealing computer equipment. He was subsequently removed from office and disbarred.

This story just gets more bizarre with each new installment. A Justice of the Peace is successfully prosecuted for stealing computer equipment, convicted and disbarred. His lust for revenge over justice being served drives him to assassinate two public officials and one civilian? Because he was nailed for stealing computer equipment?

Mind-boggling.

Via Houston Chronicle:

A Houston judge who declared the death penalty unconstitutional Thursday clarified his ruling in an impromptu hearing Friday, saying he ruled the procedures surrounding the process in Texas are illegal. ...Fine maintained at the hearing that he believes innocent people have been executed.

Fine's clarification came in the wake of a firestorm of criticism from District Attorney Pat Lykos, the Texas Attorney General's Office and Gov. Rick Perry protesting that Fine ignored well-settled law.

When asked direct questions Thursday about his ruling, Fine said he was declaring the death penalty unconstitutional because he believes innocent people have been executed.

Read more....

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KCTV5 exposed Phil Kline for being a typical conservative crook in a the above video clip, and C&L had a hand in exposing it to the media in KS.

Logan Murphy wrote this back on 11/28/07:

Kansas City CBS affiliate KCTV5 conducted a 6 month investigation of Phil Kline, the religious zealot and rabid anti-abortion District Attorney of Johnson County, Kansas that has now caught fire on blogs nationwide, earning C&L a nod for our coverage. The investigation uncovered some dirty secrets about Kline's true residency and his apparent lack of work ethics -- and now he's running for cover...read on

cjonline:

Thousands of Kansans opened their mailboxes Thursday to find a solicitation letter from former Attorney General Phill Kline that invokes physician George Tiller and Planned Parenthood while seeking contributions for a campaign against abortion rights.

The five-page mailing from Kline was placed into circulation by an Ohio company May 27, a spokesman for Kline said, which would have been four days before Tiller was shot and killed at a church in Wichita.

“There was no way to foresee what was going to happen,” said spokesman Brian Burgess. “I think it’s fair to say the timing is unfortunate.”

Kline, who filed criminal charges against Tiller while serving as attorney general, targeted the solicitation at former political supporters. He is trying to eliminate $200,000 in personal legal debt that piled up during the past six years. The letter also says cash was needed by Life Issues Institute, an anti-abortion organization in Cincinnati affiliated with Kline, to “launch more aggressive battles on the national front.”

“I need your support,” Kline says in the piece. “Your contributions will help us continue this fight and defray our legal expenses.”

---

Monnat said Kline’s pursuit of Tiller wasted millions of dollars in public resources. It would be improper for the public to pay an additional price for Kline’s failed campaign against the late doctor, he said.

“Phill Kline now wants to con taxpayers into paying him the attorney fees generated by the investigation of his bamboozlement,” Monnat said. “This solicitation is a tasteless piece of propaganda that ought to make Kansas citizens glad the voters of Johnson County ridded this state of Phill Kline.”

He's the lowest of the low, and that's not only coming from me. The people of Johnson County booted him out on his head as he lost his re-election bid. It couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Like Randall Terry, Kline is looking for the anti-choice movement to bail him out. He's another component of the assassination equation here as well.

"They make you feel like a criminal. They try scare tactics, harassment and everything. And you take a look and ask, 'Seriously, is the attorney general of Florida after me for a $14 bounced check?' "

- Michael O'Neil, who wrote two bad checks while living in Florida.

Amazing story. Basically, these District Attorney offices are renting out their name to deceptive bill collectors for bounced checks under $100. Think about it: You're so tight for money that you bounce a check under $100, you still have to pay all the bank fees AND you get slammed for $200+ in charges from this rent-a-cop collection agency? Nice, huh.

I always question the legal premise of anything like this I get in the mail, and you should, too:

DETROIT, Michigan (CNN) -- Michelle O'Neil and her husband Michael are young, scrambling to stay afloat financially and, by their own admission, not the best money managers.

Both acknowledge they wrote two bad checks, totaling about $200, as they were moving from Florida to Michigan in late 2007. The bad checks, they say, were mistakes. But nearly a year after they settled in a Detroit suburb, letters and phone calls followed from Florida.

"They told me they were part of the attorney general's office," Michelle O'Neil told CNN. "And that was scary in the sense that I've never had any legal problems. I'm a teacher."

But the calls weren't coming from a state agency. They were coming from a company hired by a Florida county prosecutor's office to collect on bounced checks.

The firm -- American Corrective Counseling Services, or ACCS -- splits the money it collects with the prosecutor's office. But it also makes money from financial management courses that people who wrote the checks are required by law to attend at their own expense. And the company's contract with the prosecutor's office states those classes are its "principal business activity."

The $14 check Michael O'Neil wrote to a Florida drugstore ended up costing him $285, including the $160 class fee.

O'Neil said he and his wife tried to make good on the checks with the merchants involved and pay any fees required. But he said the companies told him it was too late -- they had turned the matter over to ACCS.

The couple had been in Michigan for 10 months before they got their first notice from the company, which warned that "the State Attorney will not discharge the report(s) of criminal activity against you until all program requirements, including attending class, have been met."

"They make you feel like a criminal," Michael O'Neil told CNN. "They try scare tactics, harassment and everything. And you take a look and ask, 'Seriously, is the attorney general of Florida after me for a $14 bounced check?' "

The short answer is yes. Prosecutors are outsourcing some of their bad-check collections to companies like ACCS.

But Jennifer Osborn, a California student who bounced a $92 check to her college bookstore, said the company's money-management class was useless to her.

Continue reading »

KAKE.com: (h/t J)

No criminal charges will be filed in the death of a Goodyear worker, who passed away after being tased by Shawnee County Sheriff's deputies.

Shawnee County District Attorney Robert Hecht released his report Tuesday on the March 29th death of 59-year old Walter Haake. The report says Haake had suffered a head injury in a fall at his home the night before his death. It says Haake had been incoherent at work and fellow workers tried to deter him from driving when he left the plant. Shawnee County Sheriff's Deputies were called in when Haake refused to get out of his vehicle.

"Mre Haake physcially resisted removal, leaving the officers in the position of simply leaving him in the vehicle and letting the medical condition play out or using such force as may be required to remove him," Hecht wrote in the report.

The deputies chose to remove Haake by tazing him, then restraining him. The coroner ruled that an existing heart condition, combined with the compression to his chest when he was placed on the ground to be handcuffed, led to his death. Read on...

We posted this story back in April, and it appears the tragedy has gotten even worse. Haake was guilty of being injured and refusing treatment -- nothing more. That no charges will be filed against these officers is a travesty of justice and its a slap in the face of his poor family. This man's civil liberties were obliterated and I hope his family files a civil lawsuit. This case deserves national attention, as it sets a very dangerous example.

Via Newsweek:

In his 30-plus-year legal career in Harris County, Texas, Chuck Rosenthal has been no stranger to controversy. As a prosecutor he lit firecrackers in the stairwell of the district attorney's offices soon after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings. (It was a prank, he said.) After he was elected DA in 2000 he called the death penalty a "biblical proposition" and lobbied unsuccessfully to maintain Texas's sodomy law...

Rosenthal is back in the headlines again. Last December, as part of a federal civil rights lawsuit into how justice is meted out in the county, he turned over the (partial) contents of his government e-mail account. And what a batch of e-mails it was. Black ministers called for the Republican to resign because of racist material, including a cartoon depicting an African-American suffering from a "fatal overdose" of watermelon and fried chicken. There were adult video clips and love notes from Rosenthal to his secretary, his mistress during a previous marriage.

Now it appears that Rosenthal's on-the-job antics have done him in. In the wake of the e-mail revelations, local GOP leaders forced him to abort his re-election bid. Then, on Feb. 15, after Lloyd Kelley, the attorney in the civil rights case, brought a lawsuit accusing him of drinking on the job and "incompetence, or official misconduct," Rosenthal resigned. Read on...

The article also states that Rosenthal isn't out of the woods yet. Following in the footsteps of the Bush administration and the GOP, it appears he deleted e-mails he was supposed to have saved and could be in some hot water.

As Rick Perlstein noted, "The 'racism isn't a problem any more' trope is a perennial in America. Next time you hear it, send them the news from Jena, Louisiana."

In September 2006, a group of African American high school students in Jena, Louisiana, asked the school for permission to sit beneath a "whites only" shade tree. There was an unwritten rule that blacks couldn't sit beneath the tree. The school said they didn't care where students sat. The next day, students arrived at school to see three nooses (in school colors) hanging from the tree....

The boys who hung the nooses were suspended from school for a few days. The school administration chalked it up as a harmless prank, but Jena's black population didn't take it so lightly. Fights and unrest started breaking out at school. The District Attorney, Reed Walters, was called in to directly address black students at the school and told them all he could "end their life with a stroke of the pen."

Black students were assaulted at white parties. A white man drew a loaded rifle on three black teens at a local convenience store. (They wrestled it from him and ran away.) Someone tried to burn down the school, and on December 4th, a fight broke out that led to six black students being charged with attempted murder. To his word, the D.A. pushed for maximum charges, which carry sentences of eighty years. Four of the six are being tried as adults (ages 17 & 18) and two are juveniles....

The mind reels.

from the Pirro For Attorney General campaign

It turns out that Jeanine Pirro does have some very interesting crime-related experience:

The saga of Jeanine Pirro is about to take a dramatic new turn, with the disclosure that while serving as district attorney of Westchester, Ms. Pirro was in the habit of secretly recording work-related telephone conversations, and a federal grand jury wants to hear them.[..]

One of the reasons this is of interest is that that Ms. Pirro's successor now is in possession of a tape suggesting Ms. Pirro failed to disclose evidence that could have helped a man whom Ms. Pirro subsequently charged with murder. But the existence of any tapes immediately raises the question of whom Ms. Pirro was talking to over her years in office and what conversations, whether of a political or legal nature, might be recorded in the surviving tapes.

Do you think her buddy, Sean Hannity, will defend this too?

NY Times :

Former Senator Fred Thompson, who now plays a district attorney on "Law & Order," told Fox News today that he'll make a decision in the coming months about whether to jump into the field of Republican candidates vying for the 2008 presidential nomination.

"I'm going to wait and see what happens," Mr. Thompson said. "I want to see my colleagues on the campaign trial, what they say, what they emphasize, whether they can carry the ball next November." [..]

Mr. Thompson, who served as a senator from Tennessee from 1994 until 2003, said he was leaving the door open for a return to the political stage.

Thompson has had a very colorful career in Washington. From Wikipedia:

He was the campaign manager for Senator Howard Baker's successful re-election campaign in 1972, which led to a close personal friendship with Baker, and he served as co-chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee in its investigation of the Watergate scandal, (1973-1974). He was responsible for Baker's asking one of the questions that is said to have led directly to the downfall of President Richard Nixon-"What did the President know, and when did he know it?" Also, Thompson's voice has become immortalized in recordings of the Watergate proceedings, asking the key question, "Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?"

In 1977, Thompson took on a Tennessee Parole Board case that ultimately toppled Tennessee Governor Ray Blanton from power on charges of selling pardons. The scandal became the subject of a book and a movie titled Marie (1985) in which Thompson played himself, supposedly because the producers were unable to find a professional actor who could play him plausibly.