Blog Posts

The Roman orator Cicero defined a commonwealth, or a republic, as a group of people drawn together by common interests and a common conception of right, or justice. In other words, not just any group of folks constitutes a stable political entity.
By this standard, we are no longer a...

Editor's Note: John Rowland was convicted today after scarcely any deliberations at all.
Why don’t jurors get a pause button, or some other instrument, so that they can stop the government mid-sentence when a prosecutor says something so craven, so stupid, so misguided and even...

One of the occupational hazards of the legal profession is a close acquaintance with chaos. The darkness leads some into the wasteland of depression, and they fall prey to alcoholism, to drug use or to despair. Others yield to a haughty sense that they are above it all, that they are mere...

A reader wrote the other day to ask whether I ever get upset with a client for lying to me. What would I do, she inquired, if a client told me he was not guilty of murder, and I later learned that he had done the crime?
The answer is simple: Nothing.
This struck her as a revelation. All...

I will never understand why police officers don’t embrace video recording of their work. But they don’t. Whether in the interrogation room, or on the street, lawmen fight for the right to keep the public they serve from seeing them in action.

Lawmakers are now...

St. Augustine reports the following conversation between Alexander the Great, who struggled to drive pirates from the Mediterranean Sea, and a hapless pirate who had fallen into the emperor’s custody.
“How dare you molest the sea,” Alexander said.
“How dare you...

Who killed EugenioVega DeLeon? He was shot dead in his store on Grand Avenue in New Haven on July 4, 1993. One eyewitness claimed to have seen two men leave the store right after the shooting. She testified at a trial in 1995. Then she recanted her testimony at another trial in 2009. She then...

George Zimmerman was acquitted of both the crimes of murder and manslaughter in Florida last week. Today, plenty of folks are angry about that. They believe he got away with murder. There are calls for federal prosecution of Zimmerman.





What...

Six women -- five white, and one Hispanic -- acquitted George Zimmerman Saturday night for the killing of Trayvon Martin. The jurors rejected both a charge of murder, which, under Florida law, required showing of hatred or animus, and manslaughter, which required a lesser showing of a lack of...

No good deed goes unpunished. Ask Charla Nash. When she helped her friend and employer, Sandra Herold, try to recapture Herold’s pet, Travis, and get him back into Herold’s home, Travis turned surly. He attacked Nash, nearly killing her in a frenzy in which Nash was blinded, her face...