F. Lee Bailey appears this week before the State of Maine Board of Bar Examiners to request permission to once again practice law. I am rooting for Bailey. He’s been disbarred now for more than a decade. If he wants to return to the trenches, we should welcome him back. At 79, he’s still sharp as a tack.
Francis Lee Bailey, Jr., is a name known to all lawyers, and to most of the American public. He hit the ground running after his admission to the bar in 1960. He served as a jet fighter pilot in the United States Marine Corp., and, endearingly enough, walking out of Harvard...
November 1, 2012
I tried, I really did, to write about something other than Hurricane Sandy, the Frankenstorm, the Storm of the Century, that was to drive us to our knees. But after this near miss with yet another apocalypse, I could think of little else. The end was nigh, and we’re still here. Isn’t that worth a giggle or two?
Generally, I avoid media reports about storms. The breathless yammering about all that could go wrong is wearying. Whatever good such crisis-mongering may do for television ratings, it does nothing but distract: try running a law office when your employees are worried...
October 30, 2012
Here’s a not-so-modest proposal that will reduce the prison population, improve the performance of the criminal justice system, and yield greater confidence in the administration of what we call, with no apparent sense of irony, "justice." Ready? Eliminate plea bargaining.
If you’re still reading – I could almost hear the "pshaw" of jurists such as New Haven’s Patrick Clifford, who, of course, doesn’t read this column, but yet becomes aware of its contents by a form of judicial osmosis – here’s why plea bargaining is really a form of social...
October 25, 2012
In the end, the choice of whether to take a criminal case to trial or to enter into a plea agreement with the government belongs to the client, and to the client alone. There are times in which a client rejects his lawyer’s advice, goes to trial, and is badly hurt. Then there are times in which a client decides to avoid the risk of trying a case his lawyer thinks he should have tried, and could have won. Counseling a client on whether to enter a plea is bitter work, call it the devil’s work. I do the devil’s work.
A client of mine entered a guilty plea in federal court...
October 24, 2012
October 19, 2012
What’s it going to take to correct an injustice committed 400 years ago? Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy says he is powerless to act....
October 18, 2012
Several years ago, I was approached about the prospect of becoming a federal judge. I confess, it appealed to me, at least for a couple of months....
October 13, 2012
Offer to pay a man cold hard cash to kill someone and you’ve struck a deal. But is it a contract? Suppose you pay your killer but he never...
October 12, 2012
Oh, me. Oh, my. Heads are spinning in Kennebunk, Maine. Townspeople are sniggering about just who is on the list of clients snagged when police...
October 11, 2012
One editorialist at least had the courage to put it bluntly: Jerry Sandusky deserves 400 years in prison. The writer was outraged that the...
October 11, 2012
“That’s just hearsay.”
You hear that remark all the time. It conveys a sense of unreliability. The statement, so dismissed,...