I've never really thought of Dwight Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, as a prophet. The former general, politician and university president seemed more of a technocrat, a dry-as-dust sort of fellow fit for the 1950s, but not much more. He was Ozzie and Harriet's president; not mine.
Shane Harris has me reassessing my view. His book "@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex," also inspired me to re-read Eisenhower's farewell address from 1961, the speech which made famous the notion of a "military-industrial complex."
Eisenhower warned that the tools we...
January 11, 2015
The gods smiled on our clients in 2014, and for that reason alone, I will count the past year a success: On behalf of all five of the lawyers at the Pattis Law Firm, LLC, Happy New Year.
We represent people accused of serious crimes; we also represent folks in life-changing civil conflicts. We argue in state and federal appellate courts, try cases to courts and juries, and, as is the lot of criminal defense lawyers everywhere, engage in endless rounds of plea-bargaining. We’re not public defenders, we are a private firm, and we’re dedicated to high-quality representation at...
January 2, 2015
Criminal trials often demonstrate a truth the novelist George Eliot knew: “People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.” Consider the case of ex-New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez, who will stand trial accused of murdering Odin Lloyd on January 9 in Fall River, Massachusetts.
Bay State prosecutors think Hernandez is a bad man, a very bad man; his only hope is that jurors never learn what his neighbors know.
Hernandez is accused of murdering Lloyd in June of 2013 near Hernandez’s home in North Attleborough. That’s the case being...
December 31, 2014
The deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner offer a chance to reconsider the law on police use of deadly force. Under current Fourth Amendment law, police are forgiven the use of such force if it was objectively reasonable for them to believe that they faced an imminent risk of harm. The trouble with most deadly force cases is that dead men can't talk. No one speaks for the victim, thus leaving officers the chance to create the chance to testify unopposed by a competing narrative.
A better rule would be to create a rebuttable presumption that deadly force is unlawful, and to refuse...
December 31, 2014
December 24, 2014
German and British troops laid down their arms on Christmas Eve, 1914, in the bloody fields of the Western front during World War I. Ordered to...
December 24, 2014
Ferguson, Mo., state's attorney Robert McCulloch admits he presented evidence he knew to be false to the grand jury considering whether to charge...
December 23, 2014
I suspect before too long the list of police officers killed by those outraged over the deaths of Eric Garner and...
December 17, 2014
Ten years ago, it seemed like a good idea to pack up and leave New Haven. So I did, starting my own law firm and moving my office out to Bethany. I...
December 17, 2014
Word on the street is that Koskoff, Koskoff & Beider is so wealthy the law firm weighs, rather than counts, its money. I hope that's true,...
December 13, 2014
I've managed to offend my friends and delight my critics by asserting that the Staten Island grand jury was correct not to indict New York police...