The lawyers for impeached Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked Lt. Governor Dan Patrick to remove three Democratic senators from the jury pool for his trial because they had made statements critical of Paxton and were therefore too biased to judge fairly.
The Texas Tribune reports the lawyers are attempting to apply criminal jury standards to the administrative issue of impeachment. “Like numerous courts around the country, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has held for almost a century that potential jurors with a bias or prejudice against the accused are disqualified from serving on his jury as a matter of law,” the motion said. “Jurors José Menendez [of San Antonio], Roland Gutierrez [of San Antonio], and Nathan Johnson [of Dallas] have such a bias and have proclaimed it loudly, time and again.”
Included in the evidence they cite to remove the senators is a clip from Gutierrez on MSNBC in which he says the evidence gathered “could not be refuted.” “No one who has publicly declared the charges against a defendant irrefutable can even play at impartiality, let alone serve in an impartial manner,” they claim. Paxton is accused of various corrupt acts including bribery and abuse of office; he has been suspended from office since his May 27th impeachment.