The first trial resulting from the 2015 Waco biker shootout, previously scheduled to start May 22, has been delayed:
The trial for Christopher Jacob Carrizal, a member of the Bandidos motorcycle group, had been set for May 22. But state District Court Judge Ralph Strother on Friday postponed the trial after a new attorney brought onto the case indicated she couldn’t be ready in time, the Waco Tribune-Herald reported. A new trial date wasn’t set.
Snip.
The delay means the first trial related to the confrontation between the Bandidos and Cossacks motorcycle clubs and police outside of a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco is set to begin June 5 before a different judge. It involves 50-year-old Kyle Smith, a member of the Cossacks motorcycle club..
Also, the Feds have information on the Waco shootout…but have declined to share it with McLennan County prosecutors until after a federal trial of major Bandido leaders. That trial is set for August but could well be delayed.
If you’ve been following the story here, you probably know most of what’s in this Texas Monthly piece on the shootout:
Enter [McLennan County District Attorney Abel Reyna. A member of a well-regarded Waco family—his father was the McLennan County district attorney in the late eighties and later a judge on the Tenth Court of Appeals—the 44-year-old Republican was elected district attorney in 2010, beating a longtime Democratic incumbent. Burly and affable, he’s known for his ability to connect with jurors. One reporter who covers the courthouse told me that he recently watched Reyna spend less than twenty minutes at a trial studying a list of sixty or so potential jurors. Then, during the voir dire examination, he called every person on that list by name, chatting pleasantly with them about their lives without once looking at his notes.
At the same time, Reyna is also known to be unyielding at trial, demanding harsh sentences even for first-time offenders. And in the aftermath of the Twin Peaks shooting, he made it clear he had little sympathy for any of the bikers who happened to be at the restaurant. In fact, Reyna had an opportunity to do something no other district attorney in Texas had ever done: seriously cripple the Bandidos and Cossacks in one fell swoop.
Reyna turned to the state’s organized-criminal-activity statute, which had originally been passed by the Legislature to make it easier for police and prosecutors to go after what the statute described as a “criminal street gang,” like the Crips or the Bloods. (The statute defines a criminal street gang as “three or more persons having a common identifying sign or symbol or an identifiable leadership who continuously or regularly associate in the commission of criminal activities.”) Reyna claimed that both the Bandidos and Cossacks were criminal street gangs and that they had come to Twin Peaks to commit or to conspire to commit organized criminal activity, namely murder and assault. According to Reyna, even those Bandidos and Cossacks (and their respective supporters) who didn’t directly participate in the fight were in violation of the statute because they were there to support their gang. As Michael Jarrett, Reyna’s first assistant district attorney, explained in one court hearing: “The act of engaging in organized crime was committed when these people showed up in our fair county with the intent to show themselves as a show of force, both the Cossacks and their ilk and the Bandidos and their ilk.”
Reyna isn’t talking to the news media. But defense attorneys—nearly one hundred have been retained or appointed by the court—are in an uproar. They claim Reyna is going after their clients with no evidence whatsoever that they did anything wrong. “The district attorney seems to have an egomaniacal need to do something big so he can get his fifteen minutes of fame,” said Paul Looney, a well-regarded Houston attorney who represents one of the indicted bikers. “He wants to do something no one has ever done on a scale that has not been accomplished, and in the process, he’s tortured the law and he’s tortured the facts. The only thing he has accomplished is chaos.”
Reyna seems to have lost sight of the fact that America’s system of justice does not allow “collective guilt” for people that have committed no criminal acts who just happen to belong to an organization whose other members have committed such acts. Nine people died in Waco, and the people responsible for killing them (either through criminal activity or police overreaction) should be held accountable. Those nine deaths are the crimes that need to be investigated, and criminal conspiracy charges are only appropriate if one or both gangs openly plotted to kill members of the other gang before arriving at Twin Peaks. Showing up at the same place at the same time wearing the same clothes is not a criminal offense, it’s American citizens exercising their rights of free assembly and free association.
If Reyna can’t plausibly charge individual defendants with homicide, then the McLennan County District Attorney’s office has failed to do it’s job.
Tags: Abel Reyna, Bandidos Motorcycle Gang, Cossacks Motorcycle Gang, Crime, Texas, Waco
The nine deaths were all caused by rifle bullets. None of the gangs had rifles, only the police did. Are they going to face prosecution?
The last time I checked, only four of the fatal bullets were from the type of .223 law enforcement officers were using in Waco that day. I have not seen ballistics reports on the bullets the other five.