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“Unlike the rest of us, judges accused of wrongdoing are held to a higher standard than simple guilt or innocence.”

As I begin to type pre-dawn, Mississippi’s Judge Bobby DeLaughter hasn’t been formally accused, via indictment, of wrongdoing. But that could change as day breaks over PACER — and if there’s substance behind all this sudden “chatter,” not just as to Bobby DeLaughter. So we wonder: Is this the day Mississippi comes storming back to meet Texas’s challenge in the Great Wusser’n Your State Grudge Rodeo?

It may be, but friends, I gotta warn you that we’re looking at some serious ketchup after that dang ornery lovely and talented Juanita exhorted her troops, “Guys, we gotta win this one. I mean, we just gotta.”

Boy howdy, did they respond — put on a compelled valor, God rot ‘em, and now they got not one, not two, but THREE (out of nine) state Supreme Court Justices a-bubblin’ away in hot water. (And that doesn’t even count the chief justice of their Court of Criminal Appeals — their Supreme Court for criminal cases only — who last year “stirred up a fire-storm of criticism … when she refused to keep the court open past 5 p.m. to take the death row appeal of an inmate who was executed later that evening. Even [Sharon] Keller’s colleagues sharply criticized the action, which violated established court procedure,” according to the Houston Chronicle.) That’s right: these quotes aren’t from a Mississippi paper but from the Chronicle.

You see, in addition to Justice David Medina’s problem in that curious arson case we heard about yesterday, now Justices Paul Green and Nathan Hecht have scooted their boots into opprobrious view too (Nathan Hecht’s name ring a bell? Uh-huh, had his 15 minutes of fame awhile back as Harriet Miers’s BFF). Seems Green and Hecht been real busy putting themselves into prime position to be accused of doing precisely what the Texas Ethics Commission has said appellate judges cannot do: use campaign funds to commute from their hometowns to the city where their court sits.

However, since Nathan Hecht’s been known to play the organ for his church (which I guess ain’t Greater Hope and Utopia Baptist — we hear that’s down Fort Bend way, and this one’s in Dallas), it may be he’s entirely too clean and upright for such carryings-on. But according to reports filed with the TEC, he spent nearly $10,000 from his campaign funds on in-state flights last year, more than anyone else on the supreme court. Hay-ell no, he wasn’t just commuting home to Dallas from Austin, he says.

“If you sit here in Austin and don’t move, you’re going to have trouble in the next election,” said Hecht, who isn’t up for re-election until 2012, having easily won in 2006 against a Libertarian opponent.

And after all, isn’t that just what you want your judges to be doing instead of staying in their chambers and courtrooms, getting all pallid over their law books and weighty decisions? As Juanita would say, heckfire yeah, you want ‘em out amongst the people, exchanging fleas and ideas with their donors, like everybody else!

Doncha?

Except . . . a spoil-sport group called Texas Watch doesn’t think such-a-much of the practice, and they’ve filed complaints about Hecht’s $10,000 in campaign-funded in-state gadabouts last year, as well as Green’s nearly $17,000 in campaign-funded trips between Austin and San Antonio (where he and an ex-wife still own a house) over the past three. Nor is good ol’ David Medina any slouch at this boogie:

Justice David Medina has paid himself nearly $57,000 since 2005 for mileage reimbursement. His lawyer, Terry Yates, said Medina received bad advice from an accountant that he could charge his campaign for commuting costs between Houston and Austin.

As you’ll appreciate, Medina’s woes with the arson case aren’t quite over yet, either, despite DA Chuck Rosenthal’s dismissing the indictments against him and his wife and District Judge Jim Wallace’s disbanding the grand jury and invalidating its 30-odd fresh indictments for bad paperwork on the DA office’s part. Noooo, those grand jurors have QUITE the head-of-steam on and ain’t about to hush now. Here you can see them on video, explaining why they’re determined to go talk to the next grand jury (which started up yesterday) if they can, just as “ordinary citizens” with personal opinions to impart.

They won’t be allowed, however, to talk about what they heard during most of their time behind closed doors.

“Credible people have been giving information (to us) about who should be subpoenaed to testify and we would tell them about other witnesses that our grand jury asked to be subpoenaed but who were not called,” said Bob Ryan, the former grand jury’s foreman.

The Chronicle‘s Rick Casey, musing on the Medina mess, reports, “Tuesday, the prosecutor who actually took the case to the grand jury, Victor Jay Wisner, issued his own lengthy plaintive plea defending the dismissal of the indictments handed down by the grand jury and lamenting ‘the world I now work in.’” The AP now steps up helpfully to explain Wisner’s glumness about working for Chuck Rosenthal:

Rosenthal’s troubles started last month when affectionate e-mails between him and his secretary, with whom he acknowledged having an affair in the 1980s, emerged as part of a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Harris County Sheriff’s Department.

Then earlier this month, pornographic and racist e-mails on Rosenthal’s government computer were also made public. Included in the e-mails were some in which he was planning his now-aborted re-election campaign, a possible violation of state law.

The Texas Attorney General’s office is investigating whether Rosenthal should lose his job for sending and receiving inappropriate messages through his county e-mail account.

Next week, a federal judge will hold a hearing to probe why Rosenthal deleted more than 2,500 other e-mails that had been ordered released as part of the civil rights lawsuit.

Prosecutors in Rosenthal’s office have complained that the e-mail scandal has caused the public to question the integrity of the district attorney’s office.

On Tuesday, the Houston Lawyers Association, a black attorneys’ group, demanded Rosenthal’s resignation, joining a chorus that includes black ministers and the county Republican hierarchy.

Rosenthal has said that “stupidity” is not grounds for resignation.

How’s that for an argument to keep your job?

At any rate, I do bleeve I see some figures in crokersack aprons tied with wire over their overalls whetting knives and moving about the pigpens again . . . just can’t quite make out whether that’s Stetsons or John Deere ballcaps on their heads. Or both.

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