Richard Lapointe looked dazed, even confused, when he walked out of Superior Court in Hartford last week. It was the first time in 26 years his feet hit civilian pavement. He was supposed to die behind bars.
apointe’s long walk to freedom illustrates the complexity of the criminal justice system.
Bernice Martin was murdered in March 1987. She was raped, then stabbed, then suffocated, and her Manchester apartment set afire to hide the killer’s tracks. She was 88 years old at the time of her death. She lived a short walk from the home Lapointe and her granddaughter,...
April 22, 2015
The Supreme Court's decision to overturn Richard Lapointe's 1992 murder conviction has me rethinking the Stations of the Cross. I'm not referring to Jesus' journey on the day he was crucified. I'm thinking of the more mundane trail of tears the families of those convicted of crimes walk.
Before Lapointe, it went something like this:
"I'm sorry to hear your husband/son/lover was convicted at trial. It will be very hard to undo that, if it can be undone at all.
"First, you can take a direct appeal. All of the words spoken at trial and the various pieces of paper, whether...
April 11, 2015
Criminal defense lawyers console themselves about the self-destructive course some clients take by saying such things as: “You can lead a client to the courthouse, but you can’t make him think.” Courthouses are dark places; a courtroom rarely brings out the best in people.
Consider the case of Dr. Lishan Wang. He stands accused in New Haven of the murder of Dr. Vajinder Toor in Branford in 2010. The two men worked together in Brooklyn until Wang was fired in 2008. Suspicions abound that the shooting was in retaliation for some workplace grudge.
By all accounts,...
April 10, 2015
Now that the show trial is over, the real trial begins.
Now the United States of America will seek to convince a jury of 12 that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two Boston Marathonbombers, must, in the name of justice, be killed. This next trial, the penalty phase, is the real drama. Will we look deeply into what made this young emigre into a killer, or will we simply lash out in anger and rage to kill him?
A capital proceeding is a two-step trial. In the first phase, the guilt phase, jurors decide whether a defendant has committed a death-eligible offense. Tsarnaev was found guilty...
April 9, 2015
April 1, 2015
Do black lives matter? Do cops’s lives matter? The answer to both questions is obvious: yes. That’s what makes the arrest of a fifteen...
March 31, 2015
Looking for a realistic portrayal of the practice of law in a small firm? Then you had better call Saul, as in Saul Goodman, the fictional creation...
March 26, 2015
I just lost a tough case and, as in any loss, I am bitter about it. My client faces 60 years for the shooting of a rival gang member in...
March 25, 2015
What if just about everything we think we know about the war on drugs is wrong?
Start, for example, with the oft-repeated proposition that the...
March 23, 2015
Only rarely have I been able to use the Judas Iscariot sentencing argument. I did so today. My client was found guilty of murder, and faces a maximum...
March 23, 2015
I came home after dark last night to a report from my wife that our emu had died. She spotted him lifeless in the back of an outbuilding in which he...