Here’s a shout out to the students in Introduction to Criminal Justice, CJUS 1111, Western New Mexico University. Andy Warren, the professor, informs me that this blog is required reading for the class. Send him a note thanking him for me.
In general, I post twice a week, and the pieces here are generally reprints of columns I write. One column appears in American Lawyer Media publications, and has its home in the Connecticut Law Tribune. The other is a syndicated column through the Journal Register newspapers in Connecticut.
I don’t...
September 12, 2015
I am sure that in the rarefied atmosphere federal judges call home, gargantuan restitution orders look fair, just and reasonable. After all, what can be more just than requiring a defendant to pay back what he has stolen? The problem is the law's unreasoning way of calculating loss amounts.
Consider the not-at-all-uncommon problem of co-conspirators.
The law on conspiracy is devilishly simply. If two or more people agree to undertake some unlawful end, and any one of them then goes out and commits what the law calls an "overt act" in furtherance of the conspiracy, it's as if all...
September 11, 2015
Those of you of a certain age will well recall being admonished to eat your vegetables, to clean your dinner plate, by being told of the starving children in Africa. The moral was simple: You should be thankful to live amid influence; think of those who only wish they had what you take for granted.
The logic of such reasoning always escaped me. Looking at a picture of a starving child on another continent did nothing to improve my appetite. Neither did it move me to action.
Candidly, the plight of distant strangers always seemed somewhat abstract. There were more pressing issues...
September 9, 2015
During the past 30 days, an average of three people were shot to death by police officers each day in the United States. It was a particularly bloody month. For all of 2015, the average number of people shot to death by police officer was 2.7 per day.
As if that were not bad enough, as of the end of August, more than 80 police officers were killed in the line of duty, 23 by non-accidental gunfire. In the past several days, at least two officers were shot to death, one in Houston for no obvious reason other than he wore the uniform and badge of a law enforcement officer, the other...
September 3, 2015
September 2, 2015
I’m all for civility at the bar, don’t get me wrong. Fighting with words doesn’t bring out the best in people. Lawyers ought...
August 26, 2015
Every defendant has a mother, of this much I am certain. If there were justice, I am nearly as certain, many of these mothers, rather than the...
August 26, 2015
I'm not sure how much money was spent on the renovations to the Elm Street courthouse in New Haven, but it wasn't enough. Sure, the courthouse...
August 20, 2015
My first instinct was to shrug the call off, to regard it as unnecessary alarmism. But the caller was a lawyer I respect, and would turn to in a...
August 20, 2015
I’ve heard lawyers say that trials are won or lost during jury selection. To that end, the well-heeled spend tens of thousands of dollars on...
August 13, 2015
I doubt there was much celebrating on Connecticut’s death row today, where 11 condemned men sat, some for decades, awaiting execution. Not one...