I got a letter from Leo C. Arnone the other day. He is the Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Correction. He was upset by a column I wrote complaining about how one of his employees treated me at the York Correctional Institution. He was offended by my comments. He stands by his employees. The senseless shakedown I enjoyed at the hands of a guard with the charm of lobotomized melon reflected routine practice.
I don’t normally write on these pages about those who poke at me. Life is short; the road is crooked; and events unfold at speeds making too much time spent...
May 3, 2012
I keep hearing about lawyers looking for work. Take note, then. Here is a help-wanted notice.
I am looking to hire a new associate.
My firm handles state and federal criminal defense at the trial and appellate levels. We also litigate post-conviction claims, employment discrimination and first amendment claims, and select police misconduct cases. In recent years, the cops we have cross-examined have started coming to us with their troubles: we represent a lot of public employees in their disputes with employers. From time to time, we also litigate high-conflict divorce cases. We...
April 30, 2012
Lock a man up. Put him in a tiny cell. Require him to live with others not his choosing. Regulate when and what he can eat. Limit the times he may leave his cell to exercise in another pen. Restrict his access to family, reading material, and all the signals that might reach him from the external world. Do all this to the man and call him an inmate. Your control over the man is almost absolute. He is stripped of almost all the power he possesses.
The law-and-order crowd thinks this is a fitting response to the commission of a crime. We must punish, punish, punish a transgression of...
April 29, 2012
I am having one of those burnt out kind of days in which the idea of writing a column about the practice of law seems about as appealing as spending another 12 hours in the office. Some days, lawyering is less intellectual feast than it is emotional marathon. Just how much can you take, counselor? Here’s another wallop. And another. And another.
The darkness of this life sometimes moves me to the verge of tears. We pretend that the world is composed of folks bargaining in the law’s shadows. Wrong. The shadows that are cast are often as not projected from within. Meet a...
April 26, 2012
April 23, 2012
Anna Gristina is, perhaps, the most powerful woman in the United States just now. And that explains why she is sitting in Rikers Island on a $2...
April 22, 2012
There is a moralistic tinge to the practice of criminal law that makes no sense. We shroud the misdeeds and allegations that land a person in...
April 19, 2012
I want to write a love letter, but every effort I make to do so seems wrong. My fingers hit keys and the keys fall flat. I can’t seem to find a...
April 17, 2012
I usually enjoy arguing in appellate courts, and one of my favorites is the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The federal...
April 16, 2012
There is no way of knowing what will happen in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Tuesday, April 17, 2012, when the motion...
April 15, 2012
I spent some of the unhappiest years of my life pretending to be something I was not: You see, I was a member of an editorial board. I earned my...