St. Augustine reports the following conversation between Alexander the Great, who struggled to drive pirates from the Mediterranean Sea, and a hapless pirate who had fallen into the emperor’s custody.
“How dare you molest the sea,” Alexander said.
“How dare you molest the whole world,” the pirate said to a stunned Alexander. “Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor.”
Thus the riddle of legitimacy: How is it that the same behavior can take on radically...
November 6, 2013
Expert testimony, we are taught, is intended to assist juries in deciding difficult factual issues. We permit the opinion testimony of folks who know things the rest of us don’t because of their education, skill, training or experience, thus, a doctor on disease, or an electrician on circuitry. We let trial judges separate the reliable from the unreliable forms of expert testimony.
At least that’s the mantra.
But when in applying these general principals our courts seem less committed to reliability than they do to outcomes. This is especially so in sex assault...
November 1, 2013
Word of a new trial for Michael Skakel, a distant member of the Kennedy clan, spread quickly through the Connecticut bar. Some folks gloated over the fact that Mickey Sherman, his lawyer, had been so thoroughly laid to waste by Judge Thomas Bishop’s 136-page decision ordering the trial, a devastating critique that found Sherman’s representation of Skakel so throughly incompetent that it called into question the reliability of the conviction. “Icky Mickey,” some muttered.
Other lawyers, especially those on the criminal defense side of the aisle, those foxhole...
November 1, 2013
Those skeptical about the efficacy of habeas corpus petitions in the State of Connecticut will be watching the Michael Skakel case carefully. Judge Thomas Bishop just granted the writ, a rare enough event, finding that the trial performance of Skakel’s lawyer, Mickey Sherman, was deficient as a matter of law. A new trial has been ordered for Skakel.
The decision is a devastating indictment of Sherman.
“The defense of a serious felony prosecution,” Judge Bishop wrote, “requires attention to detail, an energetic investigation and a coherent plan of...
October 24, 2013
October 17, 2013
It’s hard to understand why some folks are outraged by the decision of the Connecticut Board of Pardon and Parole to grant clemency to Bonnie...
October 17, 2013
Who killed EugenioVega DeLeon? He was shot dead in his store on Grand Avenue in New Haven on July 4, 1993. One eyewitness claimed to have seen two...
October 4, 2013
Should juries know about plea bargains rejected by those accused of crimes? We currently shield jurors from such knowledge. In most jurisdictions,...
September 25, 2013
We call trials a search for the truth, but the fact remains that what juries see at trial is often only the tip of the iceberg. Just beneath the...
September 20, 2013
Against my better judgment, I’ve once again wandered into the family courts in yet another post-judgment war about who gets to raise a...
September 19, 2013
First a note of warning: This is a column that will make you happy never to have attended law school, and it might very well make your head hurt, an...