If your child suffers a serious unexplained injury, the state just might seek to terminate your parental rights. It will do so in a closed courtroom, where the public never gets the right to know what passes for justice.
Termination of parental rights is the moral equivalent of the death penalty. A court can transform you into a stranger to your child, having no more right to raise her, or even see her, than you do a child one thousand miles away whose name you’ll never hear. Your children will be given to strangers to raise.
These cases are uniquely heartbreaking.
In...
April 29, 2016
Donald Trump walked away from the so-called "Acela primaries" in the Northeast a complete winner, sweeping the Republican contests in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island in convincing fashion. All eyes are now focused on Indiana, where Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has declared war: If Trump can defeat Cruz at the Hoosier Alamo, will Cruz yield?
That's about as likely as Bernie Sanders' folding his tent, despite the near impossibility of his securing the Democrat nomination: Hillary Clinton has it all but locked up. Yet there's little joy over the prospect of another...
April 29, 2016
On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza, a troubled young man, walked into an elementary school and killed or seriously wounded more than two-dozen people, most of them children. He used an AR-15 rifle, a killing machine manufactured by Bushmaster Firearms International LLC. Military and law enforcement officers use the weapon in their work.
Few civilians actually hunt for game with the weapon. It kills so savagely it would destroy the meat a hunter might want to eat.
Why did Adam Lanza have the gun?
The simple answer is that his mother bought it and either gave it to him as a...
April 22, 2016
State and federal law enforcement agencies make millions of dollars each year manipulating asset forfeiture laws. Generally, these laws permit seizure of items -- including houses, cash and cars -- that are the fruits or instrumentalities of a crime. If forfeited, the funds, whether cash or liquidated property, typically go to police departments.
Lawmen are plenty aggressive when it comes to seizing money, and prosecutors are often aggressive in perfecting these claims. By an odd twist of law, one needn’t be convicted of a crime to lose assets.
...
April 15, 2016
April 7, 2016
I was in court the other day when I erupted in a tone loud enough to be overheard by others: "You know, Aristotle once said that it is hard to be...
April 7, 2016
“Angel came down from heaven yesterday; she stayed with me just long enough to rescue me.” The words are Jimi Hendrix’s. I’ve...
March 31, 2016
I’m at a loss to explain to my client why she cannot have the book I sent her. But it is so. The warden will not permit her to accept a Daily...
March 24, 2016
Erin Andrews and Hulk Hogan have me wondering about St. Augustine’s pears. Is something like a meaningful sense of sin taking...
March 22, 2016
I’m thinking of sending David Brooks of The New York Times a scholarship. I’d like him to attend Gerry Spence’s Trial...
March 17, 2016
Merrick Garland, eh?
Throw that fish back. He’s just more of the same. We need a new kind of justice on the Supreme Court. We need...