Imagine my surprise tonight when a reporter from a local paper sent me an email asking to see a copy of my sentencing memorandum in the Jason Zullo case. I told them I had filed one today, too. They asked for a copy. Can't you get it on-line, I asked?
No, the reporter responded. The Government had emailed a copy to the paper at 6 p.m. So I emailed mine to the paper.
I've never seen the Government quite so desperate to win a case in the papers as this one. It indicted Zullo, an East Haven cop, and charged him with civil rights violations for preying upon Latinos. In the end, the...
January 3, 2013
Irving Pinsky’s phone has been ringing off the hook. Some callers are wishing him well. But 50 or so folks want him dead, or so they say.
Even his brother and sister lawyers in the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association have turned their backs on him. The New Haven lawyer has become a pariah because he tried to sue the state on behalf of a client’s minor child, a child who went to school one day and then endured the sounds of the slaughter of classmates and teachers over her school’s public address system.
I confess to surprise when I learned that Pinsky had filed a...
January 3, 2013
Discussion turned, in the wake of the Newtown killings, to better mental health services. If we could simply identify homicidal rage before it erupted, we could save lives. Don’t advances in biology and neurosciences permit us, finally, to say with some degree of certainty, just what we are and why we do the things we do?
Not by a long shot. Although we are on the cusp of a potentially transforming understanding of the relationship between minds and bodies, we’re hardly better off than we were in Plato’s day when...
December 27, 2012
I spent the other day reading a book my wife gave me for Christmas, Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun. It’s the report of one family’s ordeal in the wake of Katrina, the hurricane that devastated New Orleans in 2005. Although the book was written in 2009, and won awards, it escaped my radar.
There is so much to love about this book. The protagonist, Abdulrhman Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant, is my kind of guy. He’s stubborn. He doesn’t listen. He works perhaps too hard. When his wife catches wind of a major storm’s approach, he largely ignores her and goes...
December 27, 2012
December 20, 2012
Cigarettes don’t kill people, people do. That would be the tobacco lobby lying to the world. We’d recognize the claim at once as...
December 20, 2012
I am willing to bet that you’ll able to read this come Dec. 22, and thereafter, too, should you be so inclined. That’s because I...
December 17, 2012
Enough, finally, is enough. Your right to bear arms does not yield the right to kill at random. Doesn’t last week’s killing spree at...
December 13, 2012
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...
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...
December 6, 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...