There is a hearing this week before the United States House of Representatives Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security. On the agenda, reauthorization of the Adam Walsh Act. The witness list includes spokespersons from the Department of Justice, the United States Marshals, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and a state representative from Kansas. Absent from the witness list is any voice representing those designated a sex offender under our law, and thereby consigned to an increasingly onerous, punitive and dangerous second-class citizenship. I would have...
February 13, 2011
I love John Brown. I have for a long, long time. Indeed, one of the best books I have read in the past decade is about the abolitionist. Russell Banks’s fictional biography, Cloudsplitter, is what fire would be like if it could be compressed into two dimensions. My mind burned as I read that book.
Brian McGinty’s recent book, John Brown’s Trial, gave me another reason to love the man. It is a reconstruction of Brown’s trial for the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. (Note to the trivia collectors out there: The correct contemporary spelling of the town...
February 13, 2011
If you want to see an independent judiciary in action, look West, to France. The nation’s judges went on strike last week. Jurists laid down their gavels and refused to attend to all but the most serious cases. Why? France President Nicolas Sarkozy played the Willie Horton card. Go ahead and sneer all you want about "Freedom Fries." In France, the judiciary appears able to do something other than bend and spread, a distinctly American judicial pastime, when a politician grandstands about crime.
French authorities have arrested a 31-year-old man, Tony Meilhorn, and accused him...
February 13, 2011
Shame on Christopher Lee. The New York Congressmen took his libidinal dog out for a walk, got caught, and promptly resigned from the House of Representatives, thus raising the inevitable question: what is wrong with this country?
I say shame on Mr. Lee not because he is a cad. Sure, he looks like a fool, posing shirtless on Craigslist and pretending to be single in the great search for a cheap seat in some floozy’s lap. Folks have been scratching the dark side of one another’s desire forever. Alexander Pope perhaps put it best: "When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was...
February 10, 2011
February 9, 2011
It is not at all clear why President Barack Obama has abandoned the federal courts, but he has. One of nine judgeships is vacant. There are 17...
February 9, 2011
It is not at all clear why President Barack Obama has abandoned the federal courts, but he has. One of nine judgeships is vacant. There are 17...
February 8, 2011
Among the many things a lawyer learns is where to sit in a courtroom. In Connecticut, there is an unwritten custom that parties with the burden of...
February 7, 2011
Scores of folks have sent me emails generated by a group called Citizens for Change, America. They want me to hear their cries for justice, and to...
February 6, 2011
One of the most terrifying cases I ever handled involved the state’s decision to seize a child upon birth and to place it in the care of...
February 5, 2011
"I am confused," a client told me a long, long time ago. "You are telling me I should take the deal, but you are also telling me you are prepared to...