Towards a Definition of Reasonable Doubt: A Modest Proposal
I’m not sure, but I think I may have just taken a huge step toward solving one of the toughest problems in criminal law: The meaning of reasonable doubt. It is famously difficult to define this...
View ArticleTOS OMG
Remember Lori Drew? She’s the woman who used MySpace to play a very unkind trick on a teenage girl named Megan Meier, who killed herself. Prosecutors in Missouri, where Drew and Meier both lived,...
View ArticleDangers of Searching for a DUI Lawyer Online
If you’ve ever tried to use Google to find a lawyer for a DUI or traffic offense, you’ve probably stumbled across one of those relentlessly SEO optimized sites that isn’t actually a law firm but...
View ArticleAn Urgent Legal Question About Ladies’ Undergarments
Lawyers in the blogosphere are always complaining that having a presence on the internet doesn’t bring them more business, just more people asking for free legal advice. Today, while cleaning out a...
View ArticleScott Andringa Won’t Be a Judge After All
So here’s a bit of good news: In the race to succeed longtime Pinellas County Judge Henry Andringa, Cathy McKyton defeated Scott Andringa. Scott Andringa is Henry Andringa’s son. I don’t know anything...
View ArticleChristopher Darden is Apparently Still a Little Bitter
Seventeen years after O.J. Simpson got away with murder, prosecutor Christopher Darden announces he’s figured out why he lost: Former Los Angeles deputy district attorney Christopher Darden on Thursday...
View ArticleWhat the Death Penalty Deters
Jeff Gamso has an interesting post today about what may be the most common use of the death penalty: And there’s Jared Lee Loughner who might have been found insane rather than guilty of murder and...
View ArticleThe Outrageous Park Doctrine
For some reason, the folks at Public Citizen sent me a hardcopy of their Health Letter, and at the back they have a feature titled “Outrage of the Month!” This month’s example titled “More About Drug...
View Article1-800-LAW-REP-4
Here’s a phone number worth memorizing if you live in Chicago: 1-800-LAW-REP-4 It sounds like marketing for some kind of cheesy lawyer, but it’s actually an 18-year old program that is supporting our...
View ArticleFitzgerald’s Law
Over at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield has been smacking around former federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, because Scott’s not happy with the advice Fitzgerald is giving to some corporate clients....
View ArticleMore About Talking To a Lawyer When Arrested
A few weeks ago, I wrote about an organization called First Defense Legal Aid that provides legal advice to people arrested or detained by the Chicago Police, just by calling 1-800-LAW-REP-4. Criminal...
View ArticleYou No Longer Have the Right To Remain Silent
I’ve seen a number of distressing decisions come out of the Supreme Court, but this may be the most gut-wrenching I’ve seen in a long time. Here’s how criminal defense lawyer Bobby G. Frederick sums it...
View ArticleThere Goes the Chicago Criminal Law Blogosphere…
It looks like the Chicago criminal law blogging scene is going to be a barren wasteland again. Marcus Schantz is hanging it up. And I’m not just talking about his blog. I first noticed Marcus Schantz’s...
View ArticleA Modest Proposal for Preventing Prosecutors From Overcharging
Scott Greenfield and Gideon have been kicking Glenn Reynolds around the schoolyard because of his ideas for combating overcharging by prosecutors who pile on charges they know they can’t prove. Broadly...
View ArticleHorrors of the Zimmerman Jury
Nathaniel Downes at the highly liberal Addicting Info thinks he’s found shocking evidence of jury tampering in the Zimmerman trial: The image of a murder trial jury often times gives the image from 12...
View ArticleNew PD Blog: Defending Dandelions
So yesterday, just because I thought it was interesting, I wrote a post about some of the science behind DUI breath testing. That’s such a competitive area of law that I was pretty sure I’d attract a...
View ArticleSophisticated Jurors Or Vigilantes
So I’m working through my feeds (I’m getting used to Feedly now that Google Reader is gone), and I see an article at In These Times titled “The Illusion of Juror Sophistication,” and I know — just...
View ArticleSomeday They’ll Get It
Today’s fun Supreme Court fact (it was today’s when I started writing this) is that according to Justice Elena Kagen, most of the justices don’t know shit about computers and the internet. That makes...
View ArticleJust Ignore Those Silly Blue Lights (Updated)
Consider the case of Jonathon Dryer, arrested in Georgia in 2010 for possession of marijuana after a police officer pulled him over as he drove out of a country club parking lot. But during this...
View ArticlePhysical Reality and the Federal Rules of Evidence
Jamison Koehler has a short post quoting from the Federal Rules of Evidence: According to Federal Rule of Evidence 401, the test for relevance is whether the evidence has a “tendency to make the...
View Article