There’s a new security regime in the Connecticut federal courts, so let me gripe about it a bit: You see, lawyers are now required not just to pass through metal detectors, place their briefcases on conveyor belts scanning for bombs and some such, remove their computers from briefcases, and empty their pockets. All that was standard fare. Now lawyers are required to take off their belts as well.
“What’s up with the new security requirements?” I asked a court security officer as I pulled the belt from pants.
“New orders from up top.”
I...
December 13, 2012
When I have an African-American defendant in a criminal trial, I like to ask potential jurors the following question: What do you think of race relations in the United States — are they good; bad; is there room for improvement?
Almost everyone answers that there is room for improvement. What would you improve if you could do so, I then ask. Answers vary.
Don’t bother asking the Judicial Branch in Connecticut. Jury administrators — the folks responsible for assuring that a fair cross-section of the community reports for jury duty — just don’t care about...
December 13, 2012
I suppose I should be relieved that the nation’s top cop came waltzing into New Haven the other day talking tough about gun violence, and promising safer streets. But I’m not.
As it turns out, Attorney General Eric Holder was selling the same flawed premises of the war on drugs, a never-ending crusade that has done little to stem drug use, but plenty to fill prisons with non-violent offenders.
Operation Longevity is the name of this new initiative. It’s a tawdry form of guilt by association. At a press conference attended by Holder, Mayor John DeStefano Jr., New...
December 6, 2012
When I wrote last week about seeing a jury panel in Norwich from which black males were entirely absent, I assumed there must be some reasonable explanation. So this week, when I subpoenaed state officials to an evidentiary hearing, I was stunned by what I learned. No one, apparently, has a clue about how and whether the state is doing more than playing lip-service to producing juries that represent a fair cross-section of the community.
How, I asked senior jury administrators from the Judicial Branch, am I to explain to my client, a young black man accused of murder, the fact that not...
December 6, 2012
November 29, 2012
Call me a racist, but Connecticut does not do enough to assure that criminal defendants face a jury of their peers.
I’ve just finished...
November 29, 2012
FEW THINGS TERRIFY ME AS MUCH as the thought of being kept alive, indefinitely — hooked to machines, monitored, maintained and held in the land...
November 21, 2012
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., might be one of those understated legal geniuses who see things in life’s tawdry fact patterns...
November 15, 2012
Secession anyone? The last time there was a groundswell of support for the states to secede from the union, we ended up fighting a bloody civil war....
November 14, 2012
I’ll be starting trial this week in Norwich. My client is accused of murder. The victim was shot to death, point blank, with a hand gun. The...
November 12, 2012
So we’re to have four more years of Barack Obama in the White House. Good, I say. Better him than a throwback to a 1960s sitcom. Once the...