Putting Chuck Rosenthal’s troubles aside for a moment, does anyone else think it’s time to clean house at the Harris County District Attorneys’ Office?:
Republican district attorney candidate Kelly Siegler told a judge last year that members of Houston’s Lakewood Church are “screwballs and nuts” and that she works to keep them off of juries.
Siegler made the comment while defending herself from a defense attorney’s suggestion that she struck a man from the jury pool in a capital murder case because he is black. It wasn’t the man’s race that prompted Siegler to eliminate the man from the jury pool, she said. It was the fact that he attends Joel Osteen’s megachurch.
“To start with, he’s a member of Lakewood Church. And we have had a running agreement, my partner Luci Davidson and I have, since we started, that people who go to Lakewood are screwballs and nuts,” Siegler said, according to the court transcript. “I’m very familiar with that church. We try our hardest not to put anybody who goes to Lakewood regularly on any jury, he’s a pretty devout member of Lakewood Church. That’s one reason that scared me about the man.”
Siegler went on to give other reasons why she didn’t want him to be on the jury including his membership in the NAACP, a group that opposes the death penalty.
Siegler confirmed today that she complained about Lakewood attendees on the record, but said the comment was taken out of context.
“I was talking to a juror who, in my opinion, was very weak on the death penalty,” Siegler said. She said she was obligated to give her reasons for striking the juror, “weak or strong, good or bad,” which indicated that he would be weak on the death penalty.
Siegler also said she had never been to Lakewood, and was talking about things she heard about the church. [. . .]
Siegler attends Chapelwood Methodist church. [. . .]
The jury eventually sentenced [the defendant that Siegler was prosecuting] to death.
And that comes from one of this DA’s office’s “best” prosecutors. Summing up the absurdity of what has been going on in Houston over the past couple of weeks, Slampo provides a multiple choice test to determine how well you have been keeping up on developments.
