Juan Quixote Behind Bars
March 23rd, 2007 at 7:55 pm
Willacy County prosecutor Juan Angel Guerra - aka Juan Quixote - can’t seem to stay out of jail. He was back in the county slammer on Thursday on corruption charges, following a February visit to county for blocking police from searching his office.
For those of you - all of you? - not keeping up with the politics in Raymondville, the situation within the county justice system is uglier than a knife fight in a phone booth. The county’s sole district judge, Migdalia Lopez, has appointed a special prosecutor, Gustavo Garza, to investigate Guerra. Garza is not only the county’s public defender but also a long-time opponent of Guerra’s. Garza has donated to Lopez’s re-election campaign. Guerra maintains that state Sen. Eddie Lucio, Jr. is out to get him and is using Lopez and Garza as proxies in a political witch-hunt.
Guerra, a populist D.A. rumored to allegedly trade votes for case dismissals, has faced two rounds of indictments this year. The first set of charges were dismissed by a municipal judge (not sure how a municipal judge dismisses felonies, but that’s another discussion) on February 21. Then a state appeals court in Corpus Christi granted Guerra’s request to halt the Garza-led grand jury investigation until April 4th. Despite that more charges were handed down this week. Color me confused.
Back in February, after his first trip to jail, Guerra parked an RV in front of the county jail, brought a menagerie of farm animals to add to the circus-like atmosphere, and dared the county sheriff to arrest him after he violated a court order not to leave town by heading down to Mexico for margaritas and mariachis. At one point Daniel Zacapa, a Hollywood actor who has appeared in “The West Wing” and “Nip/Tuck,” showed up to hunger-strike in protest of Guerra’s alleged persecution.
Will he send in the clowns again? I dunno, but this is all playing out like some bad made-for-TV drama. In fact, some anonymous wiseacre posting on the Valley’s Channel 4 website ruminates on who should play the Willacy folks in a movie. For Sheriff Spence, they propose Tommy Lee Jones; for Judge Lopez, J-Lo; Gus Garza, “anybody that looks like Hitler.” And the title of the movie? “Nightmare in Raymondville.”
March 24th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
You were not off-base to question how a municipal court dismisses a felony-level case.But charges by either police or prosecutors that someone has committed a felony do not become a formal accusation vesting the district courts with exclusive jurisdiction until a grand jury has voted to issue a felony indictment.Up to that point, municipal court judges and justices of the peace, in their capacity as magistrates, have authority to act on such preliminary matters as issuing arrest warrants and search warrants and setting the amount of preliminary bail bond. They do so in ex parte hearings, listening to only the law enforcement side and using the very low standard of proof allowed in these early steps of the process, not the tougher standards used at later hearings or the reasonable doubt standard required at trial.
Frequently, the news media and the general public use shorthand phrases like “dismissed a felony” when that doesn’t fully convey the precise nature of what happened and isn’t entirely in sync with the language used in the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure. My hunch as to what happened here is that the municipal court judge decided, after considering the the evidence and arguments at the hearing, that the previously-issued warrant to arrest Juan Guerra(when there had been no hearing)had been improvidently granted and withdrew his approval of that warrant. It would have been perfectly normal for the reporter covering the event to have summarized what happened as the dismissal of a felony.
March 26th, 2007 at 11:31 am
here’s a quote from the link you provided:
“Guerra’s case was in municipal court because of an additional charge of interfering with the public duties of a peace officer for blocking his office door when Raymondville police tried to serve a search warrant.”
so, you can stop wondering. but i’m still wondering how you happened to use the term “knife fight” to describe a south texas political alteration.
August 27th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
[…] is an economic backwater in South Texas with a near-comically dysfunctional local government. For over a decade area leaders have been trying to dig their way out of the […]