Lisa Falkenberg's Alfred Brown Double Down

Lisa Falkenberg and I have always had a bit of an up and down friendship.

To be fair, I may have been a little bit antagonistic during the heated 2008 D.A. Election when I referred to her as Pippi Longstocking.  To her credit, when I actually met Lisa a year or so later, she was very gracious despite some of the potshots I took at her on the blog.  Although we didn't agree on many issues, we shared the common interest of the Harris County Criminal Courthouse.  Despite the opposing views, I like her and consider her a friend.

When she first began writing about the Alfred Dewayne Brown case, she asked me a couple of questions here and there about the Grand Jury process for background information.  I was more than happy to share my thoughts, and I thought she was on the right track.  I was happy for her when she won the Pulitzer.  Even though I didn't know enough about Brown's case back then to form an opinion on his guilt or innocence, I agreed with Lisa that the Grand Jury system had been abused and that needed to be brought to light.

I've never had a problem being friends with somebody that I disagreed with -- something that irks some of my friends in prosecution/law enforcement from time to time -- and I disagreed with Lisa on several issues over the years.  Unfortunately, we had a falling out over her coverage of the David Temple case.  She wrote an article singing the praises of John Denholm and Steve Clappart, and I responded with this post, pointing out that I felt they were dishonest morons.

Lisa sent me a tersely worded e-mail, blasting me for my response and telling me I had my facts wrong on Clappart and Denholm.  I disagreed.  I was (and am) pretty comfortable in my assessment of those two.  That exchange was pretty much the last time we spoke.

The reason I write all of that backstory is that I want to make it clear that I don't feel any animosity towards Lisa for what she writes.  Whether I think her point is correct or incorrect, I think she usually writes from a place of intellectual honesty.

But I think that she's gotten too close to the Alfred Dewayne Brown case and it is drastically coloring her perspective on it.

Just to clarify, I write from a completely biased perspective every time I write something for the blog.  I try to justify what I'm thinking with logic and I also acknowledge counter-views, but I'm biased as hell.  It would be silly to argue otherwise.

But I'm a blogger with small to medium readership --not a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for a newspaper in a major metropolitan area.

Earlier this month,  Lisa wrote a column demanding that Harris County hurry up and pay Brown for all the years he "wrongfully" spent on Death Row.   The column itself didn't surprise me.  It is natural for Lisa to feel tied to the Brown case -- it won her the Pulitzer, after all.  I thought it was a little strange that an investigative journalist was criticizing the idea of John Raley looking further into the case.  What really surprised me, however, was a pretty gross misstatement of the law and facts that Lisa made in that article.  She strongly insinuated that Brown had been found practically innocent by the Court of Criminal Appeals, which couldn't be further from the truth.  I called out the misstatement in this post.

Last week, the news broke that the Harris County Attorney's Office was in strong disagreement over Brown's innocence. Their argument was that a phone call that could have potentially exonerated Brown, actually proved his guilt.

Given Lisa's closeness to the case, I was curious as to what she would have to say about Mr. Brown now.  This morning, she answered that question quite clearly by doubling down on her belief in Brown's innocence.

In a column entitled "It's Harris County Attorneys, not Alfred Dewayne Brown, bluffing in federal court," Lisa assails the County Attorney's allegation of Brown being guilty as a "ridiculous claim."

If the records didn't help Brown's defense, then the county attorneys reason that they weren't exculpatory, and so Brown's prosecutors didn't violate his rights by withholding them.  Thus, they conclude Brown's conviction shouldn't have been reversed, and he lacks a civil rights claim as well.

See, I told you they got creative. 

Not exactly.  As one of my commenters in the last post noted:

Brown's lawsuit is demanding compensation because he was factually innocent.  The County Attorney's response is counter to that.  A person can be factually guilty and still have his rights violated.  If that happens, he deserves a new trial.  A new trial doesn't make one factually innocent and thus entitled to millions of dollars.  

And Lisa knows that.  

Lisa's article is attempting to equate the fact that Brown deserved a new trial to his factual innocence.  She's vilifying the County for not wanting to pay cash money to Brown and saying that they are arguing he should have never gotten his case reversed, either.  I haven't seen the entirety of the County Attorney's pleadings, so I don't know if they are arguing that exact point.  If they are arguing that he didn't deserve a new trial, they are wrong.  

There is no dispute in my mind (or the minds of prosecutors or defense attorneys) that Brown deserved the remedy of a reversal of his case due to the exculpatory evidence being hidden.  The dispute arises over whether he should receive a nice lump sum payment in addition to the reversal . . . or another trip back to Death Row.

Lisa concludes this morning's column with this:

A prosecutor has a duty not to convict, but to do justice.  The moment Rizzo realized he had evidence that had even the potential to help Brown, he was bound by law to turn it over.  He didn't.  He sat on it, and then claimed years later the phone record was lost inadvertently.

That's a violation of Brown's rights.  That comes across loud and clear.  The rest is just static. 

Now, who's being creative?

In essence, this is what has happened:

HARRIS COUNTY:  Mr. Brown did not receive a fair trial so his case should be reversed.
LISA:  Pay him millions, too.
HARRIS COUNTY:  Slow down, Lisa.  We are going to see if we have enough evidence to retry him.
LISA:  Pay him his millions.
HARRIS COUNTY:  Doesn't look like we are going to be able to try his case again, so . . .
LISA:  So, you're going to pay him his millions?
HARRIS COUNTY:  No.  For him to get his millions, we have to believe that he actually didn't commit this crime.
LISA:  That's ridiculous.  Pay him his millions.
HARRIS COUNTY: We don't think he deserves his millions.
LISA:  You're all idiots.  You violated his rights.  Pay him his millions.
HARRIS COUNTY:  After looking at these phone records, we actually think we may be able to prove he's guilty.  We may even take him back to trial.
LISA:  You're just being difficult.  That's impossible.  Pay him his millions.

The first blog post that I wrote about Lisa's coverage of the Alfred Dewayne Brown case was entitled "Tunnel Vision & The Falkenberg Articles."  In that post, I criticized people who have tunnel vision to the degree that they aren't willing to examine any other possibility than the theory they believe in.  In that post, I was talking about Rizzo's tunnel vision, but I could borrow that same title for this post.

Lisa's articles on Brown reflect an absolute inability to consider the possibility that he may actually have been responsible for murdering Houston Police Officer Charles Clark.  In the picture accompanying today's column, she is literally seen hugging Brown as he is released from custody.  This case is the one that won her the Pulitzer.

Maybe Lisa is the one suffering from a little bit of tunnel vision now.

Leave the Money and Run

Remember that time I pointed out that I thought Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg's words about the Alfred Dewayne Brown case seemed to be a little cagey for her?

I believe I said something to the effect of:

Ogg leaving the door open to the idea of re-prosecuting Brown is shocking to me. There's no chance in hell that Ogg doesn't know the facts of the case.  She may not have the time to delve into it as deeply as she feels necessary, but I guarantee you that she has more than a passing familiarity with it. I have no doubt that she has formed an opinion on what needs to be done.

Houston Chronicle reporter Keri Blakinger just published this bombshell of an article, which details that the notorious phone call that is the heart of Brown's alibi may actually not be quite as exculpatory as Brown's legal team would like the general public to believe.

To recap (extremely) briefly, Brown claimed he couldn't have committed the Capital Murder that he was sent to Death Row for because he was at his girlfriend Ericka Dockery's home at the time.  The phone records (withheld by Dan Rizzo, apparently) in question showed a landline phone call from Dockery's home to her place of work.  Dockery claimed that this phone call was Brown calling her from her home.  It was this piece of evidence that got Brown off of Death Row.

That same piece of evidence now may become the thing that puts him back there.

From Blakinger's article:

But now, the county is alleging the phone call doesn't prove Brown's innocence because it was actually a three-way call, showing he was at the scene of the slaying. The shifting interpretation of the old records stems from a new expert analysis that Brown's attorneys have already begun calling into question.

Hmm.  As I mentioned before, Brown's actual innocence may not be quite the well-settled issue his legal team would like the public to believe.

Brown's civil attorney, Cate Edwards had this to say:

"The county's '3-way call' theory is simply incorrect," [Edwards] said, "and is inconsistent with Ms. Ogg's recent actions referring Mr. Rizzo to the Texas State Bar and appointing of independent counsel to determine whether Mr. Brown is actually innocent."

This statement is the legal equivalent of Donald Trump yelling "Wrong!" every time he doesn't like what he's hearing.   In actuality, Ogg's recent actions are perfectly consistent with this information.  Whether the calls were three-way or not, they still should have been turned over to the defense.  Ogg referring Rizzo to the Bar is still the right move on that level.  Her referral of the case to John Raley is also perfectly consistent with having an outside set of eyes look at this situation from a neutral standpoint.

The bottom line is that Alfred Brown got his freedom from Death Row, but ultimately decided that wasn't enough for him.  He wanted compensation.  His highly publicized attempt to get that compensation is what brought this information to light.

In retrospect, he probably should have just left the money and enjoyed his freedom.

Actual Innocence and Alfred Brown

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced yesterday that she was asking attorney John Raley to lead an independent investigation into the "actual innocence" of former-Death Row prisoner Alfred Dewayne Brown.  It was a wise move for a couple of reasons.

For starters, Raley is a highly respected attorney who has dealt with claims of factual innocence on previous occasions, most notably, the case of Michael Morton, who was wrongfully convicted for the murder of his wife, Christine. As most of you know, Raley's work on that case led to the exoneration of Mr. Morton, which, in turn, brought Christine Morton's actual killer to justice.

More importantly, it keeps the Ogg Administration from potentially being boxed into a decision that would not be well received by the Harris County Defense Bar.  As I've noted before, Ogg is in a tight spot with this.  If Ogg declines to declare Brown factually innocent, it isn't going to sit well with the Defense Bar. Ogg would be put in the awkward position of acknowledging that Brown is legally not guilty but not deserving of the money paid out to those proven factually not guilty.

Chronicle columnist Lisa Falkenberg characterized the Raley investigation as an unnecessary delay to Brown's desired compensation, asserting her belief that Brown has already been proven factually innocent . . . more or less.

That standard [for a legal finding of actual innocence] is roughly similar to the one that led the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals to toss Brown’s conviction due to constitutional error. An inmate must show that the constitutional error at trial “probably” resulted in the conviction of one who is actually innocent and that no reasonable juror would have voted to convict in light of the new evidence.

Um, maybe in the same sense that Sesame Street is "roughly similar" to The Wire.  Both deal with life on the streets in an urban area, right?

Brown's case was overturned based on a Brady violation when the D.A.'s Office realized that the defense had not been provided with a copy of telephone records that supported Brown's alibi by his girlfriend, Ericka Dockery.  The D.A.'s Office agreed that Brown deserved a new trial and the Court of Criminal Appeals signed off on a Writ of Habeas Corpus.

I'm not sure why Lisa is insinuating that the Court of Criminal Appeals practically made a finding that there was a constitutional error at trial that "'probably' resulted in the conviction of one who is actually innocent."  That is not the case.

In fact, whether or not Alfred Dewayne Brown is factual guilty is very much up for debate.

I've spoken with a couple of the prosecutors who handled the Brown case after it came back from the Court of Criminal Appeals.  Without hesitation, they will gladly state unequivocally that he deserved a new trial.  There is no debate that the evidence withheld by Rizzo was exculpatory and should have been turned over to Brown's defense counsel during trial.

But they will also tell you that they fully believe that Brown is factually guilty.  So will every HPD Homicide investigator that worked on the case.  I don't know enough about the details of the case to form my own opinion on Brown's guilt or innocence, but I will say that there can be a tremendous difference between legal innocence and factual innocence.

There can also be a tremendous variance in the strength of alibi evidence.  Some alibis can unequivocally exonerate somebody.  Others are less definitive.  The people who I've spoken to about the phone records that supported Ericka Dockery's story acknowledge that they were evidence of an alibi, but they were far from definitive.  They say if Rizzo had just turned over the phone records, he could have easily explained them away at trial.

Despite Brown and Falkenberg's protestations to the contrary, Brown's factual innocence isn't quite the no-brainer they portray it to be.

I'm going to hazard a guess that D.A. Ogg was a little concerned about Brown's innocence herself.  Having watched how she has handled this case, as well as others, I believe that she would have loved nothing more than to declare Brown factually innocent while lambasting the "toxic culture" of previous administrations.  She certainly had no problem notifying the press of other shocking developments on the case.

But I found this paragraph in Falkenberg's column to be very interesting:

But if Raley does not find Brown “actually innocent,” Ogg said she may have decide whether to charge him again in Clark’s murder. She chose Raley, she said, not to pass the buck, but because she felt the case needed an independent, fair review by someone outside the DA’s office.

Ogg leaving the door open to the idea of re-prosecuting Brown is shocking to me. There's no chance in hell that Ogg doesn't know the facts of the case.  She may not have the time to delve into it as deeply as she feels necessary, but I guarantee you that she has more than a passing familiarity with it. I have no doubt that she has formed an opinion on what needs to be done.

I'm not accusing her of "passing the buck;"  to the contrary, my guess is that she wanted a credible voice such as Raley's to support whatever decision is ultimately made.

That's just smart politics.

Dan Rizzo and the Alfred Dewayne Brown Case

It's not easy being Dan Rizzo these days.

After retiring from the Harris County District Attorney's Office some time during the Pat Lykos Administration, he probably thought that he put all of the uncertainty and acrimony of being a prosecutor behind him.  While most prosecutors who leave the Office make some effort to keep in touch with one another, he kind of faded into oblivion.

He hadn't been gone all too long before he found himself in the crosshairs of the Houston Chronicle's Lisa Falkenberg, who was working on a story about the potential abuses of the Grand Jury system.  Initially, the story Falkenberg was working on dealt with how Rizzo and a member of the Grand Jury had used the Grand Jury's power to intimidate a potential alibi witness on a capital murder case.

It just so happened that the case where that occurred was the State of Texas vs. Alfred Dewayne Brown, which Rizzo not only presented to the Grand Jury, but also prosecuted at trial.

The case itself was a bad one, but it didn't grab as many headlines as some other capital murder cases in Harris County.  At least, it didn't until Falkenberg's Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation.

The allegations were that on April 3, 2003, three men robbed a check-cashing business where a woman named Alfredia Jones was working.  One of those men, Elijah Joubert, held a gun to Ms. Jones' head during the robbery, but Ms. Jones was able to notify her supervisors of a robbery in progress.  Because she alerted a supervisor of what was happening, the Houston Police Department dispatched patrol and Officer Charles Clark was the first to arrive on the scene.  When the police arrived, Joubert is believed to have executed Ms. Jones by shooting her in the head.  A second person (allegedly Alfred Dewayne Brown) shot and killed Officer Clark.

A third person, Dashon Glaspie, acted as a lookout and he named both Joubert and Brown as the principal shooters.

As noted in Falkenberg's original articles, Rizzo used the Grand Jury to bring in Alfred Dewayne Brown's girlfriend, Erika Dockery, as a witness.  Dockery had initially attempted to alibi Brown, but the transcripts from that Grand Jury meeting ultimately led her to recant the alibi testimony.  Before doing so, she was threatened with a multitude of things -- from charges of aggravated perjury to never being able to find employment.  Dockery not only recanted her alibi, but testified against Brown in trial, testifying that he admitted his presence at the check-cashing business at the time of the murder.

However, Dockery's original alibi of Brown actually had some corroborating evidence in the form of phone records.  Those records as (also) reported by Lisa Falkenberg were never admitted into evidence.  They were ultimately found in the garage of Homicide Detective Breck McDaniel.  Those records are what ultimately led the Harris County District Attorney's Office to agree that Brown was entitled to a new trial.  When the Court of Criminal Appeals granted that new trial, the D.A.'s Office decided that there was no longer sufficient credible evidence to retry him.

As I noted in a blog post last June, Alfred Brown decided to seek compensation for the time he spent on Death Row.  The trouble with that was that he had to be found "factually innocent" for the compensation to kick in.  Under Devon Anderson's Administration, that was going to be an uphill battle for Brown.  The Anderson Administration as well as the Homicide Investigators on the case believed that Brown was factually guilty, although they didn't feel they could prove it at trial.  What I wrote back then was that it put District Attorney Kim Ogg in a difficult position -- if the D.A.'s Office were to agree that Brown was factually innocent, it would be damaging to relations with HPD.  If she refused, it would be damaging to her relationship with a Defense Bar that looked to her to be a progressive and open-minded District Attorney.

A couple of things have changed since that blog post.  First off, D.A. Ogg has proven that she isn't really all that bothered about upsetting the Houston Police Department.  More importantly, however, was Ogg's revelation last week that an email had been discovered from HPD's Breck McDaniel to Dan Rizzo, notifying him of the corroborating phone calls.

"I was hoping that it would clearly refute Erica's claim that she received a call at work," McDaniel wrote, later continuing: "But, it looks like the call detail records from the apartment shows that the home phone dialed Erica's place of employment on Hartwick Street at about 8:30 a.m. and again at 10:08 a.m."

To put this into context, prior to the e-mail revelation, Rizzo had been able to maintain that he didn't know that there were phone records in existence that corroborated Erika Dockery's alibi of Alfred Brown.  It was a mistake. A miscommunication.   McDaniel's e-mail clearly shows that Rizzo was informed of it.  He just chose not to disclose it to the defense.  He also lied about it later.

And because of that e-mail, Rizzo is now joining the ranks of vilified ex-prosecutors at the levels of Charles Sebesta and Ken Anderson.

As well he should be.

I knew Dan when he and I were both at the Office.  He was a Division Chief and far senior to me.  Although I didn't have a personal problem with Dan, I didn't trust him.  I thought he was a dishonest guy.  I can think of at least two different scenarios where he lied to me personally.  The reason I knew that he was lying was because he contradicted himself.  They weren't on big issues.  They were pretty minor, but the guy couldn't keep his stories straight to save his life.  He just wasn't bright enough, quite frankly.

If you were to ask me if I thought Dan would downplay or neglect to mention some exculpatory evidence on a case, I would tell you that it wouldn't surprise me if he did.  It wasn't that he was evil.  He just suffered from tunnel vision.  He regarded the phone records in question to be an inconvenient piece of evidence that would distract from his firm belief that Alfred Dewayne Brown was one of the shooters.  He didn't think that it proved Brown's innocence, so therefore it wasn't exculpatory.

He was wrong about that.

Whether or not those phone records conclusively prove Brown's innocence or are something that could still be explained away is an argument that I will leave to someone more familiar with the case than I am.  But the records are most definitely exculpatory.

Exculpatory evidence is evidence favorable to the defendant in a criminal trial that exonerates or tends to exonerate the defendant of guilt. It is the opposite of inculpatory evidence, which tends to prove guilt.

The Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association today called for Rizzo to be prosecuted for Attempted Murder for seeking the death penalty on Brown.  That earned a big eye roll from me.  They know that is never going to happen and to pen a public letter to the D.A. advocating for it is just grandstanding.

But an investigation should be launched into whether or not Rizzo should hang on to his law license.  If proven to be true, his actions are no different than those of Sebesta or Anderson.

If his actions were no different, then the consequences for those actions should be no different, either.

Kim Ogg's Difficult Position

The Houston Chronicle is reporting today that former Death Row inmate, Alfred Dewayne Brown, is suing Houston and Harris County for damages regarding his reversed conviction in a Capital Murder case.  Brown's case, as you probably remember, was the subject of the Pulitzer Prize-winning articles written by the Chronicle's Lisa Falkenberg in 2014.  Although he was initially sentenced to death for the murders of police officer Charles Clark and clerk Alfredia Jones, his case was ultimately reversed.

The short version of why Brown's case was reversed is that exculpatory evidence (in the form of cell phone records that corroborated Brown's alibi) had not been turned over to the defense nor admitted in trial.  When the issue was raised, there was no dispute that Brown deserved a new trial.  If I recall correctly, the D.A.'s Office was not opposed to him being granted a new trial.

After the new trial was granted, however, the District Attorney's Office ultimately arrived at the conclusion that they no longer had the evidence or witnesses to retry Brown.  The case was ultimately dismissed.

The decision to dismiss the case was not an easy one.  The homicide detectives in the case were adamant that Brown was factually guilty, and many in the D.A.'s Office did not disagree.

They just lacked the proof to take it to trial again.

So, when Brown sought compensation from the State, which required him being declared "actually innocent" of the charges, then-District Attorney Devon Anderson refused to endorse such an agreement.  Obviously, that's not sitting very well with Mr. Brown.

Brown's lawsuit, targeting the county, most likely could be easily resolved if current District Attorney Kim Ogg agrees that Brown is innocent.  If I understand the procedure correctly, her agreement on actual innocence would clear many obstacles for Brown in his quest to receive compensation from the State.

All of this puts Kim Ogg in a difficult position.  Although Ogg ran as a Democrat with a significant amount of funding from George Soros, a vocal death penalty opponent, she has significant ties to the law enforcement community.  Her past history as a prosecutor and subsequently CrimeStoppers made her a familiar and popular figure with the police, back in the day.

Some of Ogg's policies have strained those old ties to her police friends, and I'm sure she has no desire to strain them further.  If she adopts the official position that Brown is actually innocent, she will be causing some irreparable damage to her relationship with the police -- specifically HPD Homicide.

But on the flip side, if she doesn't agree to declare that the D.A.'s Office believes Brown to be actually innocent, she is going to damage her relationship with the defense bar and with local Dems.  Nothing bolsters the argument against the Death Penalty like having a person wrongfully sent to Death Row.  Given Harris County's dubious distinction as the Death Penalty Capital of the State and Country, an actual innocence finding from here would be fantastic PR for Death Penalty opponents.

Ogg is not in an enviable position for a progressive District Attorney.

My guess is that Mr. Brown is ultimately going to get an actual innocence agreement from Ogg.  In the end, she'll ultimately concede to her true voting base.  She won't like being in the position, and I imagine she won't be the person on television announcing her decision.

I also doubt that there will be any detailed rationale for her decision -- at least not one based on the facts of the case.

Tunnel Vision & The Falkenberg Articles

If you pay attention to the goings on at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center with any regularity, you are probably already aware of Lisa Falkenberg's two outstanding articles on the Harris County Grand Jury that indicted Alfred Dewayne Brown for the Capital Murders of Houston Police Officer Charles R. Clark and store clerk Alfredia Jones.

Part One of the column ran on Thursday.  Part Two ran Friday.  As of this writing, we are still waiting on Part Three.   NOTE:  If the Chronicle's "premium content" website is blocking your access, the Washington Post did a pretty decent synopsis you can read by clicking here.  My friend, Scott Greenfield, has also weighed in on the columns here.  The attention these articles are garnering is just beginning, in my opinion.

The very condensed version of events are as follows:  Alfred Brown was suspected of being part of a group of males that robbed a check-cashing business and murdered the clerk and a police officer in the process.  Brown stated as his alibi that he was on the phone (landline, not cell) with his girlfriend, Ericka Jean Dockery, at the time of the offense and when Ms. Dockery tried to confirm that to a Grand Jury, they threatened her with financial, legal and even child custody repercussions.  She ultimately changed her story, but Harris County prosecutor Dan Rizzo filed Aggravated Perjury charges on her anyway.

Lisa's column is very much on point about the secrecy of the Grand Jury -- a fact that seems to have given several Pat Lykos/Rachel Palmer supporters new life in their never-ending war against the 185th Grand Jury Investigation of 2012.  Politics really do make strange bedfellows when you've got Lykos supporters rooting for a person accused of killing a police officer.

The bigger issue that Lisa's column covers is the extreme lengths that some people in the Criminal Justice System are willing to go to when they are suffering from Tunnel Vision.

As a former prosecutor, I can attest to the fact that Assistant District Attorneys are inclined to believe the version of events that are initially presented to them by police officers.  There is nothing wrong with that -- the System would come to a screeching halt otherwise.  Can you imagine if all calls from the police went like this:

OFFICER:  I stopped a vehicle for speeding and running a stop sign . . .

PROSECUTOR:  Oh really?  Are you really a police officer?  Was your radar calibrated?  Where was this stop sign?  Did anybody else see this?  Why don't you put this person that you are accusing on the phone and let me ask him what really happened.

 I can't fault prosecutors for believing the initial version of events presented to them by an investigating agency.  Where things become troubling is when they believe those events so strongly solely because they came from the police officer.

I think that if you ask any practicing criminal defense attorney if they know any prosecutors that suffer from Tunnel Vision, you will be in for a very lengthy conversation.  I'm not naming any names of prosecutors, but I was once told by a prosecutor that he was "insulted" that I would tell him I believed a client I was representing was factually innocent.

Insulted.  Not only were they not interested in examining my reasons for believing my client was not guilty, they were insulted that I would even dare approach them with it.

We used to joke about a prosecutor that was so determined to NOT dismiss a case that if you provided her with video footage of your client sitting behind the President during the State of the Union Address at the time of the alleged offense, she would only offer you a better plea offer on a lesser charge.

Of course, the prosecutorial counterpoint to my argument would be, "You have no idea how many B.S. stories we hear on a daily basis."  Yes, I do know.  I did that job for nine years.  I once had to call a very -- shall we say "country" -- gentleman and ask him if he had, in fact, "donated" his pride Dually pick-up truck to the very crack-addicted felon who was charged with stealing it.  My eardrum still twitches at the angry yelling I had to listen to in response.

But I made the call because that's what the defense attorney told me his client was claiming.  Sometimes you have to look down a lot of rabbit trails to avoid Tunnel Vision and unfortunately, that's part of the job of being a prosecutor.  You have to rule out Reasonable Doubt -- even if it doesn't seem that "reasonable" to you.

The prosecutor who believes an investigator's version of events so much that they shut down even the mere possibility of a contradiction becomes the most dangerous person in the courthouse.

Charles Sebesta shut down the possibility that Anthony Graves wasn't involved in the murder of six people in Somerville.  Ken Anderson shut down the possibility that Michael Morton didn't kill his wife.  Now, Dan Rizzo, with the backing of a Grand Jury, is on the hot seat.

To be fair, there are several people within the Harris County District Attorney's Office who have told me that although they agree Alfred Dewayne Brown deserves a new trial, they still believe he is factually guilty.  That was District Attorney Mike Anderson's position when the Office agreed that Brown deserved a new trial.

What is so frightening about Ericka Jean Dockery's case is that Rizzo filed Aggravated Perjury charges against her because he and the Grand Jury didn't believe her.  There wasn't a concrete piece of evidence that contradicted her.  There wasn't a change of story that had come from her own volition (change of stories based on extreme coercion doesn't count).  At the end of the day, the decision to file felony charges (of moral turpitude) against Ms. Dockery flowed from Rizzo and the Grand Jury's opinion that she wasn't being truthful.

Put yourself in the shoes of a person accused of something for a moment.  You have an alibi witness.  That witness is willing to testify and clear you.  However, that witness is told by prosecutors, in no uncertain terms, that not only do they not believe her testimony,  they will file felony charges against her for daring to back you up.

Take a moment and ponder how truly frightening that is.