The general counsel of Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyers College has some explaining to do. As general counsel and board member of the college, R. Rex Parris professes a dedication to the college’s mission statement. That statement pledges a commitment to seeking justice for “the poor, the injured, the forgotten, the voiceless, the defenseless and the damned.”
It is hard to find a class of people who better fit that classification than the 700,000-plus souls on the nation’s sex offender registries. While some registrants are no doubt dangerous, the overwhelming...
September 9, 2012
Friends and colleagues warned me against agreeing to appear on the Dr. Phil show. But my client wanted to go. The client asked me to come along, to make sure things did not go horribly wrong. So I put on a good suit, brushed my hair and drove to the site of the interview.
It’s quite a production, actually. The client’s home was transformed. There were wires and technicians everywhere. All must be made ready for the appearance of a man even his closest staffers refer to as "Dr. Phil." Soon enough, the great man arrived. We were all whisked out of sight and out of mind so he could...
September 6, 2012
The best stories we keep to ourselves. It’s the law’s way. You hang a shingle asking people to come to tell you their troubles. Good lawyers often lose a taste for fiction as a form of entertainment. We don’t need to make things up. Just be alert. Pay attention. Try not to be overwhelmed by it all. And remember, always, the attorney-client privilege. We lawyers are, after all, the low-priests of chaos.
But still, the stories; they need to be told. Herewith this week’s gems, sanitized to protect confidences, but all true. Call them dispatches from the lawyer’s...
August 30, 2012
Does anyone doubt that if Anders Behring Breivik were prosecuted for the murder of 77 people in the United States we’d either seek to kill him or to imprison him for as many consecutive life terms as the judge could impose? We administer justice with a sledgehammer, shattering the lives of defendants and forgetting that in almost every case no person is the sum of their worst moments. There is a better way.
Breivik all but goose-stepped into an Oslo courtroom last week to be sentenced for last year’s bloody rampage, offering a clenched right fist in a fascist salute. He...
August 26, 2012
August 24, 2012
I just don’t get Lance Armstrong’s decision to throw in the towel. If he wasn’t blood-doping, he ought to stand his ground and...
August 23, 2012
Oxcodone is the new "gateway drug," or so federal prosecutors are reporting in their sentencing memoranda. Take some oxy, and you’re on the...
August 20, 2012
One of the reasons I refuse to have anything to do with the American Bar Association is the group’s patent sense of unreality. It belts outs...
August 19, 2012
Times change, and so do the means of challenging those holding power. At the time of the founding in the United States, the individual right to bear...
August 16, 2012
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office took a gentle swat at me the other day. It believes I came dangerously close to violating the rules of...
August 12, 2012
Mitt Romney’s decision to pick a budget-slashing bad bay zealot from Wisconsin as a running mate didn’t surprise me. That’s the...