Blog Posts

There is so much to like about Chris Hedges's and Joe Sacco's, Days of Destruction Days of Revolt (Nation Books, New York, 2012), I hardly know where to begin.
What's not to like when a book that speaks the unvarnished truth? Corporations flourish, ordinary people languish; the super rich get...

There aren’t enough prison cells in the federal Bureau of Prisons for all the police officers who have pushed a detainee, and then lied about it in a police report. So it's hard for me to fathom why federal officials singled out Meriden’s Evan Cossette for prosecution. But there he was,...

I’m not sure why the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association turned on Irving Pinsky the other day. Pinsky filed a claim before the state’s Claim Commissioner seeking permission to sue the state for $100 million on behalf of a survivor of the Newtown shooting. After the world erupted...

Irving Pinsky’s phone has been ringing off the hook. Some callers are wishing him well. But 50 or so folks want him dead, or so they say.
Even his brother and sister lawyers in the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association have turned their backs on him. The New Haven lawyer has become a...

FEW THINGS TERRIFY ME AS MUCH as the thought of being kept alive, indefinitely — hooked to machines, monitored, maintained and held in the land of the living long past the point at which the joy of living has ceased.
I worry less about death than I do about pain. It may be appointed unto...

I did not feel like much a sovereign when I walked out of the polling place this morning. No, I felt as though I’d just been tossed from a fast-moving car after a six billion dollar – the sum spent on political advertisements this year – joy ride. Oh, yes, I cast a ballot in favor...

There really ought not to be two standards for what is fair, just and reasonable, one for the ordinary, run of the mill case, the other for cases in which the world is watching, struck dumb with pity. But lawyers for Charla Nash think otherwise. Ms. Nash is an entirely sympathetic figure. She is...

"The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation," wrote Albert Jay Nock in Our Enemy, The State. His words haunted me as I researched just who owns New Haven’s Green today. The records of New Haven Colony and Plantation in the...

Everyone, it seems, wants to be a pundit. That includes J. Harvie Wilkinson, III, a federal appellate judge and one-time contender for a seat on the United States Supreme Court. Judge Wilkinson decries the fact that we debate endlessly in this country the scope and meaning of the federal...

UPDATE: Death it is for Joshua Komisarjevsky. The jury completed its work and reported its verdict at about 3:15 p.m. today. Let the world marvel at how we will kill the killer for killing and call it just.
Today will be the day, I say. The jurors will check their notes, and, perhaps, head...