On Sunday, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a lengthy article on that city’s abysmal conviction rate for violent crimes. For every three violent-crime arrests in Philadelphia, only one results in a conviction. There are a lot of worse-sounding statistics in that article, but they’re completely meaningless, as they refer only to...
Our friends at the Cato Institute forwarded this to us, and it looks like it even might be halfway decent. The folks at Flex Your Rights are about to release a new DVD, “10 Rules for Dealing with Police.” It looks like a primer on how the police can lie...
The Chief was at it again. Everyone had their theories. J.P. said the Chief had lost it, gone soft in the head. Nino thought he was just having fun. Sam didn’t say anything, so he was probably in on it. None of us thought it made any sense, though. Except...
In a seemingly ho-hum decision today, the Supreme Court made the shocking pronouncement that the states cannot afford their citizens more rights than the bare minimum allowed federally. A complete reversal of 200 years of American jurisprudence. And though it’s buried at the end of the opinion, it’s at...
Last week, we argued that capital punishment as practiced in America does not work, because it takes too long. The appellate process can take decades, during which time the convict remains on death row, the victims get no closure, and any deterrent effect gets completely washed out. In fact, the...
The AP’s Sam Hananel has a nifty piece on Law.com today, called “Drug Courts Successful for Few Who Get In.” He sums up the situation fairly well. The short version is “drug court works, and with more funding it would work even more.” A lot of crime is the...
The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates By John Temple 2009 University Press of Mississippi, 234 pages, $25.95 Amazon.com :: Barnes & Noble The world is loaded with books about criminal lawyers. They fill the shelves in the mystery and thriller aisles, dominate true crime and related...
Without much media fanfare, the Supreme Court has already decided two capital-punishment cases this month. The first, Bobby v. Van Hook, came down on the 9th, and dealt with a case from early 1985. Nearly 25 years ago, Van Hook went looking for someone to rob, trolled a Cincinnati gay...
Finally, the trial that would. not. end. is over. Three weeks to try a case that should have taken no more than five days. In the case that just would not end, either. The arrest was more than three years ago — that’s plenty long to have a felony case...
We apologize to our loyal readers for the unusual delay between posts. We’ve been on trial, and you know how that goes. Trial is all-consuming. And then there’s all the work that piles up in the meantime. And the wife and kids need a token appearance from us once in...
While the boys were still alive, they were chained to the engine block of an old Jeep, and to pieces of railroad track. Then the Klansmen dumped the boys in the river, where they drowned. One of the Klansmen later reported that Seale “would have shot them first, but didn’t want to get blood all over the boat.”
The boys were killed because they were black, and because Seale thought they might have been civil-rights workers.
On Wednesday, President Barack Obama signed into law the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act. As usual, the Act included provisions that had nothing whatsoever to do with National Defense Authorization. And one of the tacked-on provisions was the much-debated Hate Crimes Prevention Act. We wrote about this back on May...
From where we sit, this case is anything but a slam dunk. Despite being based on wiretaps, we think the feds could easily lose this case, if the defense attorneys do their job well…
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,...
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