No Jury Duty
I dodged a…not a bullet, more like a slow-lobbed softball…today. I was a standby juror for the Cook County courtroom in Skokie today, but when I called in, only people with last names beginning H...
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Once More With Feeling
To honor the passing of “Ed,” the anonymous editor of Blawg Review, several blawgers have banded together to assemble one last Blawg Review. The chain starts at Blawg Review and continues around...
View ArticleNon-Lawyers Talking About the Law
Scott Greenfield has a post up at Simple Justice talking about how often people get legal advice from sources other than lawyers. I’ll skip to the ending: The law is hard to understand, hard to...
View ArticleMaverick Ray At Large
I write a lot about laws and lawyers, but I normally avoid commenting on issues of client representation. I feel comfortable opining on civil liberties or the justice system in general because while I...
View ArticleWe Talk to Cops All the Time…
Over at Popehat, Ken White has another of his posts explaining that the most important thing you can do when talking with cops is to stop: One of the most consistent messages I offer here is about...
View ArticleA Challenge for Prosecutors
Over at Crime and Consequences, Kent Scheidegger writes about one of the philosophical problems with the exclusionary rule: For many years, the U.S. Supreme Court has been pruning back one of the most...
View ArticleA Modest Solution for Handling Multi-Format Legal Briefs
After reading Daniel Sockwell’s article about writing legal briefs that you expect a judge to read on an iPad, Scott Greenfield is a little bummed out over the suggestion to eliminate footnotes:...
View ArticlePaying For Prosecutions in Virginia?
Over at Crimlaw, Virginia prosecutor Ken Lammers writes about the state’s law allowing private prosecutions. It’s a fascinating concept, and Ken goes into a bit of detail, but it comes down to this:...
View ArticleA Few Ways to Look Criminal Lawyers
(This post started with a few ideas, and then got all long and rambling, but I don’t have time to make it shorter. Sorry.) A few years ago I had a toothache, and I made an emergency appointment with my...
View ArticleKeep Talkin’ Judge
One of the most amazing developments in the legal blogosphere last year was the emergence of the Hercules and the Umpire blog, because it was written by an actual sitting federal judge. It wasn’t just...
View ArticleIs The Legal Field Ready for CSO?
A couple of days ago, Scott Greenfield was writing about some of the complexities of federal sentencing, when a commenter named Jake proposed a crazy solution: Was there ever a task in the courtroom...
View ArticleBargaining Power 101
Scott Greenfield posted a story a while back about a conversation he had with a biglaw lawyer who was trying to refer a client on a criminal matter. The biglaw guy apparently wanted Scott to commit to...
View ArticleDUI Lawyers and Faith In Websites
Matt Brown, a criminal defense lawyer in Tempe, Arizona, has noticed that a lot of local lawyers have websites that get the law on concealed weapons wrong. Every single lawyer website I visited had...
View ArticleJe Suis Bronx Defenders
The Bronx Defenders, a non-profit law firm in New York, are taking some heat because two of their lawyers, Kumar Rao and Ryan Napoli, acted in a few scenes of a rap video which were filmed in the...
View ArticleWhy Are Grand Juries So Secret?
I’ve been trying to understand why grand jury secrecy works the way it does, and there are parts of it that just don’t make sense to me. At a fundamental level, the idea of the government telling...
View ArticleReviewing the Charges Against the Bronx Defenders
Professor Jonathan Oberman from the Cardozo School of Law has a great opinion piece in the New York Law Journal about the two lawyers who were forced to resign as a result of the Bronx Defenders’...
View ArticleReturn to the Planet of Reasonable Doubt
Over at a public defender, Gideon has posted his second attempt to create a jury instruction for the meaning of “reasonable doubt,” based on feedback he got from his first attempt, which has a lot of...
View ArticleA Rule Made To Be Broken
There’s an interesting bit of detail in this post about legal tech from Brian Tannebaum, talking about the policies governing electronic devices brought into the courtroom: In the Southern District of...
View ArticleBetter Data Seizure in the Digital World
Scott Greenfield has an interesting post about how much computerized data the government is allowed to seize when serving a warrant. Current practice is to seize it all and do whatever they want with...
View ArticleAn Attempt to Explain High Sensitivity Analysis in Collins
Both Jeff Gamso and Scott Greenfield have written about Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Mark Dwyer’s opinion in People v. Collins discussing the admissibility of a certain type of DNA analysis in a...
View ArticleJennifer Connell Is Not Really a Monster For Suing Her 8-Year Old Nephew
Folks on the internet have been a bit outraged at a woman who sued her 8-year nephew: Jennifer Connell claims the boy, Sean Tarala of Westport, acted unreasonable when he leaped into her arms, causing...
View ArticleHaiduk Steps Up On Possession
Kane County criminal defense lawyer Matt Haiduk has posted a response to my earlier post about the strangeness of the crime of possession, in which he address both of my scenarios and makes a few...
View ArticlePretrial Detention and Why It’s Like That
I’ve been blogging about criminal justice issues for a long time now, and I like to think I know a few things (for an amateur observer) but every once in a while I am amazed to discover that some...
View ArticleA Brief Response to Cy Vance About Apple and the FBI
I was going to write an overview of the technical issues involved in the FBI’s demand that Apple help them break into the iPhone 5C that was being used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook, but it...
View ArticleA Verdict of Innocence?
Over at Fault Lines, Andrew Fleischman has a post about the idea of letting a jury determine actual innocence. It’s an interesting post — worth a read — but when I read the headline I thought of...
View ArticleFree the Squawk!
Oh my God! They’re going after Squawk! It all started back in May, when Appellate Squawk (who somewhat disappointingly turns out not to be a bird with legal superpowers but a human female working for...
View ArticleJust Consequences
There was an interesting criminal case out of Fairfax, Virginia the other day, involving a young lady named Sandra Mendez Ortega who stole some jewelry from Lisa Copeland while cleaning her house. The...
View ArticleThe Revealed Meaning of Guilt
A few days ago, Gabriel Malor pointed out this story: LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — A judge has dismissed charges against two men who were convicted in the death of a woman as part of a “Satanic ritual”...
View ArticleA Few Thoughts On the Kavanaugh Confirmation Process
I hate the Kavanaugh confirmation process. Supreme Court Justices are some of the most influential people in the country, and a relatively young guy like Brett Kavanaugh will affect the course of...
View ArticleThe FACES of Justice
The ACLU and several other public interest groups have filed a brief with the Florida Supreme Court urging them to look into the use of automated facial recognition in criminal proceedings. In 2015,...
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