Unwieldy charges, evidence problems and a likable defendant complicated Twin Peaks trial
For months, District Attorney Abel Reyna and his staff made clear they were champing at the bit to try strapping, 35-year-old Dallas Bandidos chieftain and locomotive engineer Jake Carrizal before any of the other bikers rounded up after the deadly 2015 shootout at Waco’s Twin Peaks restaurant and watering hole. Consequently, many of us in the peanut gallery leaned closer to better understand, perchance appreciate, Reyna’s strategy of legally pursuing 154 bikers on identical organized crime charges, as opposed to the more discriminating capital murder charges Waco police originally contemplated.
So much for that idea. The Nov. 10 mistrial only confirmed the whispered doubts of legal eagles in and out of the McLennan County Courthouse. Instead of prosecutorial genius and skill, the public witnessed a strange element of disorganization astonishing for a team that had many months to prepare for a high-profile trial of national significance. The fireworks mainly involved eruptions by diminutive, peppery defense counsel Casie Gotro over one piece of evidence after another that prosecutors by law should have provided her long before but didn’t.
But for those expressing amazement a mistrial wasn’t declared earlier because of repeated failures by prosecutors to furnish discovery evidence promptly, they got one anyway courtesy of a deadlocked jury. Jurors were unconvinced of Reyna’s organized crime scheme, rendered more convoluted and more bewildering in a superseding indictment of Carrizal in June. And afterward as Carrizal walked to the courthouse parking lot glowing and still a free man, disturbing new questions arose about Reyna, including his allegedly dropping criminal cases to benefit moneyed political donors and friends. The sworn claim of cronyism and corruption came the very same day from one of Reyna’s former prosecutors, who bolstered suggestions that political ambition guided Reyna’s actions immediately after the Twin Peaks incident, confounding police carefully sorting through an already chaotic, blood-splattered, weapon-strewn crime scene.
If ever Reyna needed to pull a rabbit out of the hat, the Carrizal trial involving no less than the president of the Dallas Bandidos was it. It was supposed to be a slam dunk. At least three factors likely contributed to the DA’s expensive failure:
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