The Criminal Lawyer celebrated its second birthday this week. It’s not the biggest milestone in the world — nor is it particularly remarkable — but even so, we’re quietly proud. We get a kick out of writing this stuff. Whether it’s something silly like reporting that a new TV series...
WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS BLATANT SELF-CONGRATULATION. COMMON SIDE-EFFECTS INCLUDE NAUSEA, EYE-ROLLING, INVOLUNTARY VOCALIZATIONS, AND ENNUI.
Nicholas Marsh (pictured) committed suicide over the weekend. He and the other prosecutors in the Ted Stevens fiasco were being investigated for their handling of the case, after the judge found them to have withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense. (See our previous posts on this here.) After dismissing the...
We just checked our stats, and during the past week-plus that we took off, we got more hits than ever, and links from quality sites shot up 20%. So, basically, the less we write, the more you like us? Well, too damn bad. We like writing. (If you like, you...
Over on the Volokh Conspiracy, Prof. Jonathan Adler posted another critique on Sunday of the New York Times’s silly article claiming the Roberts Court to be the “most conservative in living memory.” Adler makes some of the same points we did last week, finding fault with the Times’s definitions of...
Dang, the whole week has gone by already? It’s been a week of long days and late nights here in the trenches, so please excuse the lack of posting here. (Our bloodstream must be 70% coffee by now. As we found ourselves saying out loud on the record yesterday,...
Re: Interrogation Branch Treatment of Rebel Combatant
You have commanded this Office to examine the legal standards governing interrogations of terrorist “rebel” combatants in Imperial custody. You have specifically directed that we examine both current Imperial law and former Republic law that might apply.
An earlier draft of this memorandum, recommending the humane treatment of prisoners for the combined purposes of propaganda and more reliable intelligence, was rejected before submission. (See incident report, D. Vader, anoxic demise of Cpt. Jorad 2/5/03.)
It is the conclusion of this Office that the Emperor’s protections generously extended to his adoring subjects do not extend to rebel combatants, who have rejected those protections. This may at first seem contrary to the principle of general applicability, that the Emperor’s laws apply to all within the galaxy, whether they consent to such laws or not. However, that would be a misconstruction when applied to the interrogation of enemy combatants during an ongoing armed conflict. Detaining and interrogating enemy combatants is an important element of the Emperor’s authority to defend the Empire, its institutions and its subjects.
The Emperor enjoys complete discretion over the conduct of war, and so no law can infringe on …
Holy crap, our last post was more than three weeks ago? We knew we were busy out here in the trenches, but didn’t realize we were that busy! We don’t mind going a week without posting something. This isn’t the kind of blog where each post is a brief observation...
We’ve never liked how most lawyers write. They overload their motions with a dozen words where two would do the trick. They use words incorrectly all the time (New York lawyers take note: “wherefore” means “why” — it is not a synonym for “therefore”). They employ all kinds of pointless...
So the Criminal Lawyer turned 1 year old, and we didn’t even notice. Our first post was on October 6, 2008. We promised… …to give you thoughtful observations on the jurisprudence of crime. We will cover notable cases and events, offer analysis of deeper trends, and even throw in some...
We apologize for not posting something last week, but an unending stream of urgent matters kept us in court or otherwise engaged the whole time. Clients obviously take priority, you know how it is. You’ll hear from us more this week, we promise. For those of you who can’t wait,...
We were surfing the net just now, and came across an excellent blog by Jonathan Kirshbaum, called “Habeas Corpus Blog: Keeping Track of the Great Writ for New York State Prisoners.” You can check it out here. What particularly caught our eye was yesterday’s post on Davis, which started off...
No time to post on this yesterday or today, but it’s pretty clear we were 100% wrong with our prediction for the Osborne case. It wasn’t unanimous or a big majority — it was 5-4. It wasn’t in favor of the defense — got that wrong, too. And the Supremes...
There’s probably some really juicy legal stories out there today, but we haven’t bothered to look yet. Instead, we’re spending our free time preparing for our upcoming CLE webcast at 11 a.m. Eastern this Friday at West LegalEd Center. This will be the second in our “Hope for Hopeless Cases”...
Your humble author has a new title in print. Strategies for Defending Internet Pornography Cases: Leading Lawyers on Analyzing Electronic Documents, Utilizing Expert Witnesses and Explaining Technological Evidence can be purchased for the modest sum of $90.00 at Amazon.com. This title is sure to be snapped up by insomniacs everywhere,...
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