Is this the most ridiculous prosecution ever brought?
There have been some utterly daft prosecutions in the past on both sides of the Atlantic.
One of the "Twitmarsh" books about how to annoy bureaucrats published by the late Sir Patrick Moore under the pen-name "R. T. Fishall" gave a case where a British utility realised just in time that a badly programmed computer had initiated a prosecution to recover an unpaid bill for £0.00 and human lawyers dropped the case less than 24 hours before it would have come to court.
(If you want a laugh, the books are "Bureaucrats: how to annoy them" and "The Twitmarsh Files" and neither has dated all that much in the forty years since they were published.)
But, as the Economist reports this week here, the current prosecution of Texas governor Rick Perry has been condemned even by opponents who think him "one of the least thoughtful and most damaging state leaders in America” but that the charges against him appear to be "an overzealous prosecution."
The above quotes from from the New York Times - the prosecution was described as “Unbelievably ridiculous” by Jonathan Chait of New York magazine.
The row which led to the absurd charges against Governor Perry began whem the District Attorney General of Travis County was convicted of drunken-driving and sentenced to 45 days in prison. Rick Perry called for her resignation. I find it astonishing that any reasonable person could disagree and according to "The Economist" many democrats privately agreed with him.
However, the DA refused to go, and at this point Governor Perry apparently threatened to use his line-item veto to remove the funding of a department in her office unless she stepped down. A few days later he did use that line-item veto.
As "The Economist" says, the veto
"though unusual, was surely legal. The governor has a line-item veto and does not have to give reasons for using it. As for the veto threat, Mr Perry’s legal team insist that any such communication, if it occurred, was political speech protected by the First Amendment. The prosecutor seems to regard the normal cut-and-thrust of politics as a crime."
Quite.Or else this prosecution was, purely and simply, an act of revenge.
One of the "Twitmarsh" books about how to annoy bureaucrats published by the late Sir Patrick Moore under the pen-name "R. T. Fishall" gave a case where a British utility realised just in time that a badly programmed computer had initiated a prosecution to recover an unpaid bill for £0.00 and human lawyers dropped the case less than 24 hours before it would have come to court.
(If you want a laugh, the books are "Bureaucrats: how to annoy them" and "The Twitmarsh Files" and neither has dated all that much in the forty years since they were published.)
But, as the Economist reports this week here, the current prosecution of Texas governor Rick Perry has been condemned even by opponents who think him "one of the least thoughtful and most damaging state leaders in America” but that the charges against him appear to be "an overzealous prosecution."
The above quotes from from the New York Times - the prosecution was described as “Unbelievably ridiculous” by Jonathan Chait of New York magazine.
The row which led to the absurd charges against Governor Perry began whem the District Attorney General of Travis County was convicted of drunken-driving and sentenced to 45 days in prison. Rick Perry called for her resignation. I find it astonishing that any reasonable person could disagree and according to "The Economist" many democrats privately agreed with him.
However, the DA refused to go, and at this point Governor Perry apparently threatened to use his line-item veto to remove the funding of a department in her office unless she stepped down. A few days later he did use that line-item veto.
As "The Economist" says, the veto
"though unusual, was surely legal. The governor has a line-item veto and does not have to give reasons for using it. As for the veto threat, Mr Perry’s legal team insist that any such communication, if it occurred, was political speech protected by the First Amendment. The prosecutor seems to regard the normal cut-and-thrust of politics as a crime."
Quite.Or else this prosecution was, purely and simply, an act of revenge.
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