The Grand Inquisitor Of Waco

 Via The Aging Rebel

Abelino “Abel” Reyna, the McLennan County District Attorney who has transformed the investigation of the Twin Peaks massacre in Waco last May 17 into the Spanish Inquisition, has a long official history of stupidity, ignorance of the law and demagoguery. When Waco’s inevitable $10 billion legal bill comes due sometime in the next four or five years people will probably point to Reyna as the reason why.
Reyna defeated Democrat John Segrest as District Attorney in November 2010 and was sworn in on January 3, 2011. His father is Felipe Reyna who also served as McLennan County District Attorney and as an Appeals Court Judge.
Abel Reyna formed a natural alliance with the Waco Police Department, a political force in and of itself in Waco, which objected to Segrest’s 50 percent prosecution rate. Some criminologists see a prosecution rate of about 50 percent as an indication of efficiency. Reyna claimed county residents were “skeptical of the judicial system” and he promised his office would “be aggressive…and we will be efficient.”
Reyna is not a criminologist. He is a politician and his first official act was to hire an additional crimes against children prosecutor. The new prosecutor’s name was Greg Davis and he quickly became embroiled in a corruption scandal at his old job.

Tougher Plea Deals

Reyna immediately and fatuously began sabotaging the plea deal system with much tougher proffers. Some of his critics pointed out that his “tough-on-crime policies have contributed to a rise in the jail population and the associated costs of feeding and housing inmates. Those policies prevent cases from being resolved quickly, increasing the time defendants stay in jail awaiting trial.” The net effect of Reyna’s “toughness” was overflowing jails and trial dockets. Defendants had no incentive to take bad plea deals. The resulting drain on the county budget may explain some of the baffling actions Waco took after the massacre, including the seizure of vehicles.
He was nominated by one satirist as the “stupidest politician in America” after he refused to obey a Texas law called Chapter 64 that would require DNA testing to exonerate prisoners who claimed they had been wrongly convicted.
“Technically you have any and every defendant who ever pled to a crime or was convicted of a crime potentially could file a post-conviction DNA motion,” Reyna said. “What concerns me most as District Attorney is that there is absolutely nothing in Chapter 64 with regard to victims and their families.”

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