Tom Delay's Legal Rights

It is always interesting to watch when a Republican legislator or administration official is charged with a crime. Obviously, right now we are watching the drama in Austin as Tom Delay and soon will be watching Scooter Libby deal with his indictment in Washington D.C. for outing an undercover CIA agent and then trying to cover it up.

When the same person who has devotes a large part of his or her career to limiting the rights of personal injury victims through "Tort Reform" and limiting the rights of criminal defendants, it is amazing to see how hard they fight and take advantage of those same rights when they are on the other end of the stick.

Tom Delay's high priced legal defense team is using every trick in the book to defend the charges against him and get him back in his position of power....

First, Tom Delay's high priced legal defense team fought to dismiss all of the charges. Well, they were partially successful as all but two charges have been dismissed. Unfortunately, the remaining charges appear to be the most serious. Now, that same high priced legal defense team is trying to convince the judge to split the charges and try the money laundering charge first (that is the most serious charge). If they are successful, a couple of things will happen. First, the conspiracy charge will not be heard at the same time. Presumably, they will try to exclude all the evidence relating to Tom Delay's conspiracy. Of course, this will have the "beneficial" (from their point of view) side effect of limiting the State's case against Delay. The second thing is that if Delay does happen to win the case, it will happen more quickly and he will be able to resume his post as Majority Leader of the House of Representatives.

Obviously, Tom Delay deserves to be able to take advantage of all of the rights afforded to him by the Constitution and under State and Federal law. But so do the common criminals who typically can't afford a high priced legal defense team like the one that Mr. Delay has put together. Legal rights should be available to everybody.