‘He’s Walking Away!’: Texas Judge Explodes on Prosecutor, Calls Out Blatant ‘Abuse’ In Bogus Arrest of Black Man In Viral Court Showdown
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A Texas criminal court judge, notorious for his anti-prosecutor rulings when Black defendants are railroaded with bogus charges, delivered another striking victory last month when he ruled in favor of a man arrested for “interference” after he walked away from a disturbance that involved him moments earlier.
Harris County Judge David Fleischer, a soft-spoken yet resolute jurist known for his no-nonsense approach on the bench, swiftly tossed the case of Michael Jones during a probable cause hearing after the man’s defense attorney systematically tore apart the prosecution’s push for jail time.
Video of the court appearance has since gone viral on YouTube, showing the moment Fleischer cut off the prosecutor’s opening statement to politely inform him the state had no case. Fleischer then proceeded to ridicule the merits being argued — leaving no ground for the charges to stand.
Meanwhile, Jones — a Black man — was brought to court in an orange jumpsuit, suggesting he was already incarcerated following his unlawful arrest. Charged with interference with the duties of a public servant, Jones was facing up to six months in jail and a $2,000 fine.
The judge told Jones that the proceeding was intended to determine the probable cause in his case and whether the police had enough of it to arrest him in the first place.
As prosecutors began stating the facts of the case, another Black man was led into the courtroom, cuffed behind his back and, like Jones, was wearing orange jail scrubs. The guards instructed the inmate to have a seat, and it appeared his case would be read next.
Meanwhile, Jones stood to his feet as the lawyering began.
The incident involving Jones took place Jan. 10 in Harris County. Officers in a patrol vehicle observed Jones on foot as they made their way to a disturbance call at a nearby residence, prosecutors revealed during the proceeding.
Supposedly, Jones was right outside the location, according to cops who approached him. Prosecutors claimed that Jones had an encounter with a resident in the area who asked him to leave. Jones initially refused to go, then became loud and aggressive, and the other party called police to force Jones off the property, prosecutors said.
Moments later, officers arrived to find Jones simply walking away, the situation no longer volatile. But instead of letting it be, the officers were now ready to twist the screws on Jones, telling him to halt and ordering his hands behind his back.
Jones resisted and held his arms to his chest as the officers jumped on him. A leg sweep was used to get Jones on the ground, where officers wrestled him into submission. However, Jones didn’t make it easy for them, yelling angrily, disobeying commands, and twisting and contorting his body, prosecutors claimed.
Fleischer sat with his arms folded on the bench the whole time, appearing unimpressed with the long-winded explanations. At some points, the judge looked irritated, his eyes rolling behind his horn-rimmed glasses as if none of this mattered. And to him, it really didn’t.
“The abuse, I get it, but what’s he doing?” the judge pressed the prosecutor, doubling down on the fact that officers had not witnessed Jones committing a crime and had no probable cause to detain him in the first place. “I mean, he’s walking away, that’s what they wanted, right?” he asked, referring to the person who called authorities to the scene.
From there, the prosecutor defended the actions of the officers to take down Jones, arguing that he should have complied with commands for him to stop walking away from the scene, suggesting that officers still needed to investigate him “to determine if a trespass even occurred.”
At this point, Judge Fleischer grew more annoyed and cut off the prosecutor in mid-phrase. Outraged, the judge exclaimed, “He’s walking!”— his emphasis alone made the point that walking was not a crime. He also pointed out that by the time officers reached the scene, Jones was already leaving the scene and that no persons or property had been harmed.
This left the prosecutor scrambling to justify the arrest, arguing that police had the right to “investigate” anyone nearby — even though the disturbance had already ended on its own.
But the judge wasn’t having any of it. He summed up the issue from the perspective of overzealous cops. “It’s like, lemme come and mess with you more,” Fleischer said emphatically, mocking the police while defending Jones. “So, it’s like adding fuel to a fire,” he added.
The courtroom went dead silent — jail deputies stood imposingly around Jones with hands clasped, but their full attention sat on Fleischer’s words as if taking mental notes.
Next, Jones’ defense counsel seized the moment, exposing the fatal flaw in the prosecution’s case by making it clear that simply walking away from the police is not a crime in Texas.
“There’s some sort of disturbance, somebody’s asking him to leave, they’re yelling and screaming at each other, police coming up and saying, ‘Hey, I’m the police!’ You can walk away from that all day long,” she argued. “My client did walk away from that. My client’s loud and emotional as you can tell here today, you’re allowed to walk away emotional, yelling, screaming, even using profanity in this state if you want to.”
The attorney then revealed that officers, when they initially approached, had attempted to falsely accuse Jones of appearing as if he had just smoked marijuana, a baseless claim meant to justify the unlawful arrest.
“Then the cops come up to him and suddenly there’s some kind of unfounded allegation of intoxication, there’s absolutely no facts of other than that statement, ‘I smell marijuana. You look intoxicated,’ because it looks like he walked away, and the cops didn’t want him to walk away, so now they need a reason to arrest him,” she told the judge.
The defense attorney argued that the arrest itself had to be lawful from the start for an interference charge to be held. Since Jones was neither lawfully detained nor arrested before the charge was tacked on, the entire case fell apart before Fleischer, who has become a social media celebrity for his rulings in favor of Black defendants.
Late last year, he delivered a stunning victory for a Black defendant facing charges of marijuana possession by swiftly dismissing the case due to lack of probable cause and then chiding prosecutors for bringing the case in the first place, suggesting the man’s arrest had clearly stemmed from “walking while Black.”
Jones’s defense closed with a sharp rebuke, “Everything that happens after that is the fruit of the poisonous tree,” she said, condemning the officers’ attempts to entrap Jones with false charges.
Following the arguments from both sides, Judge Fleischer dismissed the case, ruling there was no probable cause to send Jones to trial. He then admonished Jones to watch his step in a world where Black men often become targets of the police.
“Jones, be careful, man, we have enough drama in this life, don’t we?” the judge asked.
Jones nodded a yes. “You don’t like to wear orange, do you?” Fleischer asked. Jones shook his head no. “Be careful where you go, be careful what you do; everyone’s always out to get you, man. Don’t let them, all right?” Jones agreed.
At that point, his lawyer put her hand on his shoulder. Jones was going home.
The Fourth Amendment safeguards individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures, ensuring that law enforcement cannot detain or arrest someone without probable cause. Simply being in the vicinity of an incident does not justify detention, and walking away is not a crime.
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