Avalanche-Journal
June 14, 1987
Indicted DA claims harassment
AUSTIN (AP) – District Attorney Vic Feazell says he has been harassed by state and federal government law officials because he launched a grand jury probe into Henry Lee Lucas.
“There were so many forms of harassment going on from day to day,” Feazell said Tuesday on cross examination after five hours of direct testimony.
“I mad some very powerful people mad at me,” he said.
Feazell, 36, is charged in a 10-count federal indictment with accepting about $19,000 in payments from defense attorneys in exchange for leniency for their clients.
He has denied the charges and said they were initiated by the Texas Department of Public Safety, which he said was seeking revenge because of the grand jury probe into Lucas’ confessions to hundreds of murders.
Feazell testified on Tuesday that his home phone was tapped after the Lucas grand jury started in March 1985. He said it was still being tapped on July 4, 1986, when his wife heard a “click, click” on the telephone and ran outside to see a man climb down from a telephone pole and ran away.
“I’m not sure, even today while down here (in Austin), that they are still not tapping my phones,” said Feazell.
Feazell said the FBI and other federal officials on Nov. 17, 1986, seized a large quantity of records and papers from his Waco office on a search warrant. He said a number of papers taken from his safe were not in the list of documents furnished him by the U.S. attorney’s office.
“However, two weeks later when my office was burglarized, at least two of these documents that were taken from the safe by the FBI turned up in a desk drawer after the burglary,” Feazell said. “I don’t know if the law representatives did it, but all indications point to them.”
Feazell said he had hoped to initiate a program in the district attorney’s office where all misdemeanor cases would be screened by assistant district attorneys before formal charges were filed, but funding for the procedure was not provided.
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