From the Houston Chronicle:

Former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s attorney stopped short of calling on prosecutors to give up after the state’s highest criminal court Wednesday upheld the dismissal of a criminal conspiracy indictment against DeLay.

But Houston attorney Dick DeGuerin predicted DeLay will be acquitted of the other charges against him if the long-running case over political contributions in Texas legislative races ever goes to trial.

“We’re ready for trial now, and we have been ready for trial for a long time. If we ever have to try the case, I think a fair jury will find that Tom DeLay didn’t do anything illegal,” DeGuerin said.

Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle said the court had reached a “tortured result” and that he would seek a rehearing because of “the important policy considerations involved in protecting the public from felony criminal conspiracies of all kinds.”

DeLay said the ruling brought him “thankfully closer” to an end to the prosecution.

“Ronnie Earle’s politically motivated indictments cost Republicans the leader of their choice and my family hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees,” he said. Earle is a Democrat.

“The damage he has done to my family and my career cannot be rectified, but the courts have recognized a significant portion of the injustice and ruled accordingly,” DeLay said in a statement. The former congressman from Sugar Land now lives in Virginia.

Earle has been prosecuting DeLay and political consultants Jim Ellis and John Colyandro over donations made to Republican legislative candidates in 2002, when the GOP captured its first majority of the House in modern times. The defendants are accused of plotting to funnel illegal corporate campaign contributions to the candidates.

They still face charges of money laundering and conspiracy to launder money, which they also are fighting. An effort to dismiss those charges is pending before the Third Court of Appeals in Austin.

In a 5-4 decision Wednesday, the all-Republican Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the decisions of lower courts, which had thrown out a separate charge that the three men had conspired to violate state election laws.

The high court majority, in an opinion by Judge Mike Keasler, held that the indictment was invalid because conspiracy to violate the election code, which it charged, wasn’t made a crime until 2003.

Earle said that, under the rationale of the majority opinion, the law allows criminal conspiracies by people “as long as the felony they agree to commit is not in the Penal Code.” He said many felonies are contained in parts of the law other than the Penal Code.

For his part, Delay is playing up the victory as a vindication of his assertion that the charges were politically motivated:

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals today ruled that I was wrongfully indicted by Ronnie Earle, the Mike Nifong of Texas, on laws that didn’t even exist. The court affirmed the decision to throw out the conspiracy indictments because they were based on laws that weren’t even on the books. What Ronnie Earle accomplished is no rookie error – it’s a political attack using our legal system as the primary weapon.

Ronnie Earle’s politically motivated indictments cost Republicans the leader of their choice, and my family hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. The damage he has done to my family and my career cannot be rectified, but the courts have recognized a significant portion of the injustice and ruled accordingly. For nearly two years I have been willing and eager to go to trial and with this ruling, we are thankfully closer to that day.

Ronnie Earle may think this case is about campaign finance, but in the end it will be a case about his own prosecutorial misconduct.

The “prosecutorial misconduct charge — which DeLay’s attorneys are using in the other two as yet unresolved indictments — might be harder to prove. If DeLay and his two alleged co-conspirators broke the law, they broke the law.

Still, this latest ruling will force Earle to decide if he wishes to pursue the other charges. The narrow 5-4 ruling might give him hope — especially considering that an ex post facto argument is rather clearly a loser on its face, something not represented in the closeness of the vote.

Earle’s motives remain, in my mind, suspect. And this is coming from someone who was no big fan of DeLay’s — though I do recognize him as very effective House Majority Whip.

Meaning that, regardless of the outcome, Earle succeeded in aiding his Democrats by removing a power player from Congress.

That he may have done so for reasons of pure politics makes him a sleaze, but one that Texas law makes it difficult to punish for such transgressions, should they prove true.

Earle’s supporters like to point out that he has prosecuted more Democrats than Republicans; but others have countered that, while this may be true, at a Democrat fundraising event, Earle took shots a DeLay, which was neither wise nor proper given that Earle was investigating him; moreover, Earle’s prosecution of mostly Democrats took place at a time when power was held almost exclusively by Democrats, some rumored to be at odds with Earle’s own political positions.

Then, of course, there’s his indictment of Kay Bailey Hutchinson, about which the Austin Review opined:

Earle’s politically-motivated indictment of Senator Hutchinson on charges that she used state funds to run her senatorial campaign made even his own supporters cringe. The charges were dismissed when Earle refused to present evidence at trial.

Then there’s this:

On Earle’s methods, the Dallas Morning News wrote “the impression of partisan unfairness has certainly been reinforced by the leaks and public comment about Hutchison’s case from the District Attorney’s office throughout the summer. That the Grand Jury investigation has been conducted with so much fanfare — such as the tip-offs to the new media when key records were seized from the former treasurer’s office — has added a darker tone to the cloudy proceedings.”

Grist for the mill, and perhaps enough (given Mike Nifong’s recent disbarment and the public’s newfound mistrust of what appear to be politically-motivated prosecutions) to force Earle to drop the remaining charges.

After all, Earle would still be a hero to partisan Democrats; and the rule of law is only a construct meant to preserve the status quo, anyway — so it’s actually a good thing that it is sometimes pressured by those who believe that larger truths (of their asserting) should trump minor procedural inconveniences.

(h/t BMoe, who notes the rather cautious coverage the story is receiving in the main stream press.