The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog carried a piece last week about the vanishing trial. I don’t know what the author is talking about. I try ten to twelve jury trials a year, year in and year out. And I do it in a state in which the manner of picking juries is time-consuming and wasteful, with each juror questioned outside the presence of all others, a process known as individual sequestered voir dire. Indeed, I begin jury selection in a child molestation case this morning. We expect jury selection to take five days, and the evidence itself to take two days.
But talk about...
February 14, 2011
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
February 10, 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...
February 10, 2011
Hell froze over one day last year and two men skated to freedom, set free by a judge of the Superior Court, who found that they were convicted in...
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...