Judge calls top prosecutors on the carpet

Oh, what tangled webs we weave...

As you already may know (if you read Murray Newman's blog), two top-ranking prosecutors and two court reporters have been called on the carpet by State District Judge Susan Brown to explain why she shouldn't hold them in contempt of court.

It would appear that transcripts of secret grand jury testimony found there way into the hands of Carl Hobbs and Steve Morris. Mr. Morris is the head of the grand jury division and Mr. Hobbs is, ironically enough, head of the government integrity bureau.

Left unsaid, interestingly enough, is how Judge Brown found out that the Harris County District Attorney's Office had obtained transcripts of grand jury testimony regarding HPD's batmobile fiasco.

Would it surprise anyone if Mr. Hobbs and Mr. Morris are sacrificed by Pat Lykos to the gods of public opinion in an attempt to hold on to her rapidly sinking ship? This is some serious shit Mr. Lykos has stepped in and there doesn't appear to be a tidy way to dispose of it.

13 Undercover first exposed maintenance problems with the BAT vans that could have led to bad test results. The DA now says the breath tests are sound. The grand jury is trying to figure out when did the DA First hear about the problems and did they speak up about it as the law requires.

But then there's the curve ball. According to this story from KTRK-13, the breath tests in question are suddenly valid again. But wait, you ask, wasn't it just last week that Ms. Lykos said she couldn't trust HPD when it came to breath tests conducted in the batmobiles?

What changed? Are we suddenly going to pretend that Amanda Culbertson made it all up? Has Ms. Lykos forgotten the e-mails outlining the problems with the batmobile program? Or is it just a case of her realizing that she opened her mouth without thinking in a desperate attempt to deflect blame for the situation?

Why do I get the impression that what's going to happen on the 6th floor at 1201 Franklin is going to resemble the closing scenes in Casino in which the the crime lords decided that Joe Pesci's character is just a little bit too dangerous to leave alive? Or maybe the sequence in Goodfellas when Robert DeNiro kills off everyone who participated in the airline heist? Or maybe...