That Good, Huh?
WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS BLATANT SELF-CONGRATULATION. COMMON SIDE-EFFECTS INCLUDE NAUSEA, EYE-ROLLING, INVOLUNTARY VOCALIZATIONS, AND ENNUI.
September 29, 2010
Uncategorized
Instead of coming up with an original idea, we prefer to tell you why yours is wrong.
Everyone knows that the indigent defense system in this country is broken. The courts have mandated that every jurisdiction has to pay for indigent criminal defendants to get a lawyer. It is required. The vast majority of criminal defendants are indigent (or have no legitimate source of income, and...
September 28, 2010
Sad
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...
September 28, 2010
Uncategorized
Tape Away – Maryland judge rules that cops have no expectation of privacy during traffic stops
You’ve probably all seen the video by now of the motorcyclist recording himself speeding down a Maryland road, only to get pulled over by a plainclothes cop who leaps out brandishing a gun and otherwise behaving inappropriately. And you’ve probably heard how the motorcyclist is now facing trial on charges...
September 28, 2010
Uncategorized
A Pattern of Misconduct by Federal Prosecutors?
When we left the Manhattan DA’s office some years ago, we firmly believed that prosecutorial misconduct was as rare as it was despicable. We can’t think of a single one of our colleagues for whom it would have even occurred to cut corners, and it certainly would not have been...
September 23, 2010
On Government
One of our all-time favorite writers, P.J. O’Rourke, has an intriguing little article in World Affairs Journal today, called “Innocence Abroad: The Tea Party’s Search for Foreign Policy.” Go ahead and check it out, we’ll wait. As the title suggests, he finds a seeming contradiction between the movement for limited...
September 21, 2010
The Rules of the Game
Note to incoming first-year law students: The law itself is not terribly difficult. We lecture to schoolkids from time to time, and they seem to get the concept pretty easily when we explain that the law is nothing more than the rulebook for how to play the game of...
September 17, 2010
Why Innocent People Confess
It should come as no surprise to anyone with any experience in criminal law that perfectly innocent people will sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit. Perhaps they were in a suggestible state, and the police led them to believe they’d done it. Maybe they were broken by the...
September 14, 2010
By the way…
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...
September 13, 2010
Innocence Not Proven
A year and eight days ago, the Supreme Court took the unusual step of granting an “original writ,” and handed down a novel decision directing a federal court to revisit the murder conviction of Troy Anthony Davis by allowing Davis to put on evidence of actual innocence. (See our...
August 25, 2010
Terrorism and the Courts: Kennedy Misses the Point
The 9th Circuit judicial conference wrapped up yesterday. Hundreds of lawyers spent the last several days discussing this and that in Maui, and finished up with a speech and some Q&A from Justice Kennedy. He had a lot of different things to say, most of which are unremarkable (such as the Court will be...
August 20, 2010
The Holdout
The news is full of reports today about the hung jury in the Blagojevich trial — they found the governor guilty of a single count of lying to federal agents something like five years ago, and hung 11-1 in favor of conviction on the remaining counts. All kinds of pontificators...
August 18, 2010
All the Wrong Reasons
So we’ve been hearing about this new blog, “UnemployedJD.com,” where some guy named Ethan is documenting his hunger strike “to bring awareness to the concerns of [his] classmates. Their primary concerns are inaccurate employment statistics, ineffective career counseling, and rising tuition costs. [His] intention is to have these concerns...
August 8, 2010
Uncategorized
What Nobody’s Mentioning about the New Crack Sentencing Law
Yesterday, President Obama signed S.1789, the long-awaited sentencing fairness act that reduced the appalling 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. It still doesn’t go all the way to undo the hysteria of the crack epidemic, however. For powder cocaine there’s a 10-year minimum for selling or...
August 4, 2010
Uncategorized
Taking DNA Samples at Arrest? Not a Problem.
On May 8, 2005, we were having a party. It was our birthday, and our firstborn had just turned 1 a few days before, so it called for a big celebration with friends and family. For us, it was a time of new beginnings. But for Jerry Hobbs, May 8...
August 4, 2010
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