At year's end news organizations like to mark time by doing such things as selecting, and commenting upon, the year's top stories. Some, like Time magazine, vote for a person of the year, as it did in selecting Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, as ther 2010 Person of the Year. The New Haven Register, by contrast, selected a crime victim as this year's most notable person: It is an odd and troubling choice.
The 2007 slaying of a mother and her two children in Cheshire, Connecticut, has become a part of the national psychic landscape, and last year's trial of one of the...
December 29, 2010
Someone tell me: Just how did it happen that I need to defend my right to die? Death is part of life, the tail end of a bargain none of us struck. Asserting that I have a right to die is gibberish. Would that I had a right to remain alive; that would be a right worth any fight. Death is a necessity, not a right.
But we must assert the right to die against government. Somehow, the state has become a guarantor of life, a gift it did not give. We must assert the right to die and to remain autonomous against the power of strangers who would seek to keep us alive against our will, but not...
December 27, 2010
I read this year's Best Crime Reporting with a guilty sort of pleasure. It was a gift, so reading it over the holidays was appropriate enough. But wasn't I taking a few weeks off? Why the appeal of crime stories in a season devoted to time away from the grind of a criminal law practice?
The series has been published for a number of years now by an imprint of Harper Collins. The series' editors, Otto Penzler of Manhattan's Mysterious Bookshop, and Edgar Allen Poe Award winning author Thomas Cook, select an editor for each year's edition. That editor reads through nominations, and selects...
December 27, 2010
Last year's end-of-the-year essay provoked a chain of events that turned into something strangely liberating. I wrote of the great emotional travail that comes of representing those facing imprisonment. Bearing others' sorrow oppresses, and I felt the weight of it especially keenly in 2009. I wrote, and some appreciated the candor, others scorned what they saw as too much emotion. By mid-year, lines were drawn. I received snarky comments about whether my mental health had improved. I seized the opportunity to separate the wheat from the chaff, and have cut loose from old associations that...
December 26, 2010
December 24, 2010
The criminal justice system stumbles along on the road mumbling lip service to complete transparency, but we still lie to jurors. When jurors find...
December 22, 2010
It is now official: Mickey Sherman will be heading to federal prison this spring. He was sentenced today by United States District Court Judge Janet...
December 22, 2010
When there is a vacancy on the United States Supreme Court, legal academics, interest groups, and journalists go into overdrive speculating about who...
December 20, 2010
No one wants children exposed to men and women who might do them harm. This instinct to protect the innocent is at the very core of the sex offender...
December 18, 2010
Experienced criminal defense lawyers and even judges know a simple truth: Ask the wrong questions, and the truth will slip through your fingers....
December 16, 2010
If I were a betting man, I'd wager a few dollars, but not the mortgage money, on the possibility of indictments arising from federal probe of the...