Justice For All: Part II

Everybody loves a good story about hypocritical politicians but the Chuck Rosenthal scandal may be the best one yet. Rosenthal is the District Attorney of Harris County, Texas, the county with the highest number of executions of any county in the land. His office even sought the death penalty for Andrea Yates, the clearly emotionally troubled woman who drowned her five children. Rosenthal, a self-proclaimed evangelical conservative, believes capital punishment is part of God’s plan.

            Apparently, Rosenthal has some plans of his own. Some 860 of his emails recently surfaced in a civil rights suit against his office. Rosenthal had argued the emails were protected by his constitutional right to privacy established in cases like the one he lost in the United States Supreme Court in which he argued that Texas should be allowed to outlaw homosexual practices.

            In one email, the married Rosenthal tells his legal assistant who he now claims was only a former paramour: “The very next time I see you I want to kiss you behind your right ear.” In others, Rosenthal forwards rather lame racist and sexist jokes and videos. Now the state’s attorney has opened up an investigation into whether Rosenthal also illegally used his office email for campaign activities. As far as we know, such indiscretions do not yet carry the death penalty in Texas.

Alan Milstein